Tag: communism

UN ‘Pact For The Future’ Draws Concerns Over CCP Backing

The United Nations and its member governments, with strong support from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), adopted a landmark agreement last week to bestow the U.N. with more power and influence in global affairs.

The controversial agreement, known as the Pact for the Future, outlines 56 actions for governments and international institutions to take over the coming years.

Among the key provisions is “transforming global governance” and further empowering international institutions across a range of issues, including “sustainable development and financing for development,” as well as “science, technology and innovation, and digital cooperation.”

The pact includes a Global Digital Compact to restrict “misinformation” and “disinformation” and a Declaration on Future Generations that encompasses the 2030 Agenda climate goals that include the phase-out of fossil fuels.

It is also part of transforming the U.N. into what the organization is touting in promotional materials as “U.N. 2.0.”

U.N. leaders and top officials from the CCP celebrated the pact as a historic effort to create a better future for humanity and increase global cooperation on international problems.

“We can’t create a future fit for our grandchildren with systems built for our grandparents,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said.

Despite opposition from various quarters, the 193-member body adopted the pact by consensus on Sept. 22 at the Summit of the Future during the U.N. General Assembly after about nine months of negotiations.

In the days before the pact was adopted, a coalition of U.S. lawmakers and grassroots leaders held a press conference on Capitol Hill criticizing the agreement as an effort to undermine national sovereignty and freedom.

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The “October Revolution” was a coup, not a revolution

A key function of propaganda has always been to demoralize the opposition. From the perspective of the propagandists, it is important to always give the impression that their side is the side of the majority, and the most popular. We have witnessed this in action in recent years with the rise of censorship designed to “combat misinformation.” By suppressing dissident viewpoints, the regime lessens access to “unorthodox” ideas, but there is an important secondary function: suppressing dissenting speech also gives the impression that the dissidents are less numerous and more isolated than they really are. By ensuring that certain voices dominate the public square, propagandists help to create a sense of inevitability of the regime’s program. This facilitates greater public acceptance of the propagandists’ inescapable victory. After all, why bother resisting if the other side is so popular, and your side is but a small minority? 

Socialists and their allies have long been very adept at using these methods, and few had a greater mastery of it than V.I. Lenin. For most of the twentieth century, Lenin’s successors employed his methods, successfully portraying the spread of socialist regimes as the inevitable outcome of enormous communist mass movements. The modern post-Soviet Left still employs similar tactics, portraying itself as being on “the right side of history” and as the legitimate majority position. 

Nonetheless, the extent to which many of these twentieth-century “revolutions” were truly revolutions has always been in question. Many of these socialist regime changes could far more accurately be described as a coup d’état in which a small minority seized control of the state without majority support or any bottom-up revolutionary mass movements.

For example, the so-called “October Revolution” in Russia was not a revolution, but was a coup carried out by a small minority. In the socialist version of history, the October Revolution was a bottom up “people’s movement” devoted to helping Lenin and the Bolsheviks topple the provisional social-democratic government. This narrative has been key in establishing the legitimacy of the Lenin regime. In this view, Lenin was merely giving “the people” what they wanted. The portrayal of the October coup as a revolution of the masses also gives the impression that the turn to communism was the inevitable and desired result of unfolding and intractable historical trends. Naturally, this view of history encourages socialists while demoralizing their opponents. 

Yet, the historical facts tell us that socialism’s greatest political victory—the creation of the Soviet Union—was neither inevitable nor a response to the demands of a revolutionary majority. 

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A Strategy of Disruption: The Dark Consequences of Cloward-Piven

Have you ever wondered why some systems or organizations seem to fail under pressure? Sometimes, this is not by accident but by design. One such design is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy. In the 1960s, two sociology professors, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, came up with a plan that they believed would lead to a major change in the way society works. The plan aimed directly at creating a situation where the government would have to step in and provide a solution to the chaos created. Their target was the American welfare system, with the hope of bringing about a more Marxist society.

The Goals of Cloward-Piven

The Cloward-Piven Strategy had a simple, yet profound goal: to overwhelm the welfare system to the point of breaking. Cloward and Piven argued that if enough people were to demand their benefits all at once, it would create a crisis. This crisis would force the government to adopt changes, leading to a system where wealth and resources were distributed more equally among the population. In their view, this crisis would push the United States towards a system that was more in line with Marxist principles, where the government plays a major role in ensuring everyone’s needs are met.

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Google AI Says Calling Communism “Evil” is “Harmful and Misleading”

Google’s Gemini AI program was caught in another example of egregious bias when it said that calling communism “evil” was “harmful and misleading”.

The company’s multimodal large language model program allows users to generate AI images using text command prompts, but people began to notice that the program almost completely erased white people from history and has a ludicrously far-left prejudice.

When a user asked the program to “generate an image about (the) evils of communism,” it point blank refused.

Gemini claimed communism was “nuanced” and that judging it through a negative lens is “misleading and harmful”.

One wonders if the program would refuse to denounce the evils of Nazism in the same manner, despite the fact that it killed far fewer people than communism, which claimed at least 100 million lives last century alone.

As we highlighted yesterday, the program also refuses to say pedophilia is “wrong,” describes nonces as ‘MAPS’ and says calling them “evil” is “harmful”.

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How Rage Against the Machine Used Capitalism To Sell Communism

This November, rock’s most successful and pugnacious communists will be inducted, six years after they became eligible, to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Rage Against the Machine, a band that kicked the doors down on the 1990s with a then-novel mix of brutally heavy guitars and hip-hop vocals, also blended in unlikely tandem two other disparate traditions of American life.

The first, obviously, is rock music: the rhythmically buoyant and harmonically uncomplicated sound of post–World War II popular song that, however corny it might sound to 2023 ears, signaled an explosive liberation for succeeding generations of youth. This quintessentially American mongrel mashup of demotic musics, from country to rhythm ‘n’ blues to gospel, vibrated with a rebellious, life-affirming energy that helped make a variety of old restrictions—racial, sexual, behavioral—seem ridiculously out of touch.

The second tradition Rage Against the Machine both emanated from and actively promoted is violent revolutionary communism: the forcible equality of output and outcome at the expense of independent choice and action. Whole mosh pits’ worth of young men received their first real introduction to the Cuban revolutionary murderer Che Guevara and the Peruvian Maoist rebel army Shining Path through the advocacy of Rage singer Zach de la Rocha and guitarist Tom Morello.

Rock music in its many permutations since Chuck Berry has been wildly capacious in the ways it can feel and mean. This year’s other Hall of Fame inductees range from the bubbly soul singers the Spinners to the dreamy/arty British songstress Kate Bush to the country songbook lifer Willie Nelson. But killing people in the name of equality was a relatively new emphasis within the decidedly individualistic art form of rock.

Rage’s enthusiasm for bloody revolution was expressed mostly in their extra-musical statements and iconography. (An early band T-shirt included instructions for making a Molotov cocktail.) Asked by the Chicago Tribune in 2001 about the atrocities committed by their favorite Peruvian insurgents, Morello defended the Shining Path as people “standing up against the U.S. corporations dominating their economy and directing the vast resources of Peru not toward the Peruvian people but toward U.S. pocketbooks.” This “context,” he added, explained the media’s “demonization of the Shining Path.”

RATM’s actual lyrics tend more toward domestic denunciations—against racism, cops, public education, mass media, misogyny, American exceptionalism, and the oppression of non-elite classes. Most of all, the group proclaimed itself from the rooftops as being devoutly anti-capitalist.

But therein lies a paradox deeper than the familiar charges of hypocrisy that greet millionaire Marxists the world over. Immediately prior to their meteoric rise, and one decade before technology toppled the music industry decisively in the direction of the consuming proletariat, Rage Against the Machine signed a deal for the release and, most importantly, ownership of their music with one of the world’s largest corporate entertainment conglomerates, Sony, via their subsidiary label Epic.

When asked about the possible hypocrisy of their Epic deal—and boy, were they asked—Morello liked to insist that they squeezed concessions out of the big bad corporation that most baby bands never get, maintaining total artistic control over music and packaging and promotions, plus a guarantee that the label would release each record as promised or face stiff financial penalties. But otherwise by all accounts it had the same crummy aspects that nearly every major label deal has always had, at least at the start of a career: The label, while charging nearly all the expenses in making and marketing the record against the band’s royalties, took and kept actual legal ownership of the recordings themselves.

Rage signed over ownership of their music to Epic by choice because they saw no other way to achieve what they wanted to achieve: not just a chance to make a living touring the country in a van like such rugged punk forefathers as Black Flag, but a chance to have the financial and promotional juice to get to the top of the charts, and eventually into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame itself, while serving as an unintended advertisement for the very economic system the band so loathed. Capitalism in the form of the huge agglomeration of financial power in Sony gave them something they wanted, and they had no compunctions—like most human beings, artists or not—about taking advantage of it when they thought it might benefit them.

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Victims of Communism Day—2023

NOTE: This post largely reprints last year’s Victims of Communism Day post, with some modifications.

Today is May Day. Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject:

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so….

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had comparably horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.

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Brazil Military Kills “Red Command” Cartel Leaders, Prepares Take Over

In an unusual step for the military, the Army has invaded favelas of Rio de Janeiro and killed top leaders of the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) drug cartel, which supports the Communist criminal Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Observers take this to indicate the beginning of a federal military intervention. The drug gangs were the only ones to celebrate the alleged election victory by criminal Lula Oct. 30, firing automatic weapons in the air in the favelas. President Bolsonaro cracked down hard on the Brazilian drug gangs.

“The heads of drug trafficking of Morro do Juramento and Juramentinho, identified as Rodrigo Barbosa Marinho, known as Rolinha or Titio Rolinha, and Hevelton Nascimento Júnior, the “Bad Boy”, respectively, were killed during a Military Police operation in Vicente de Carvalho on Thursday (1st). Three other suspects died in the action and one, who was also injured, is imprisoned in custody in the hospital” O Dia reports.

The drug cartels are the armed wing of the Communists. Comando Vermelho controls parts of Rio de Janeiro and was formed 1979 as an alliance between cartels and Communists. If they are eliminated, the risk 0f a civil war will be significantly reduced.

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