Confederate Monuments, Like Nazi Flags, Don’t Belong in Public Spaces

I was long undecided whether Confederate monuments in the South should be preserved or not. I mean, any decent person would agree that the Confederates were scum… but still, monuments are history, and I don’t support the destruction of art or statues no matter how much of a scumbag the subject of the piece was.

We know Nero was a tyrant, we known Henry VIII was voted as the worst monarch in British history for a good reason, we know Genghis Khan was infamous for a reign of terror… but despite all of those personas being absolute degenerates, I doubt anyone would suggest demolishing their monuments, right? I mean, the presence of their monuments does not in any way represent that anyone would like to resurrect them into power today.

However, here is why I’ve come to the conclusion that Confederate monuments should be demolished. Not only that, but I think the Confederate flag (or flags) should be banned from official use… just like the Nazi flag is not waved around Germany.

See, while the historical figures I’ve mentioned are well in the past and have no modern ideological claim… the Confederate ideology is still out there. I mean, it started not long after the end of the Civil War, and lasts to this day, the neo-Confederate ideology and the “Lost Cause” nonsense.

I’ve done my research in various political Facebook groups, and I was horrified to see how much there is an attempt to justify what the Confederacy did. Neo-Confederates attempt to push the “Lost Cause” narrative, claiming the Civil War was not about slavery but about “state rights”… they just omit the part how the “right” they were talking about was mainly the “right” to hold other beings as slaves.

All of the slave women raped, all of the men whipped, all of the abuse, the chains, the humiliation… nope, neo-Confederates conveniently cut it out.

And that ideology never stopped! The lynching continued well into the 20th century. In the 1920, the KKK peaked 6,000,000 members, that was Confederate ideology right there. The horrific segregation laws continued into the 1960s, and same was with the anti-miscegenation laws that literally had humans sent to prison for having interracial relationships.

But that didn’t stop in the 1960s! In 2017, a violent rally took part in Charlottsville, Virginia, called “United the Right Rally” against the removal of Confederate monument. In the rally, Confederate and Nazi flags were waved.

The reason I support the removal of Confederate monuments is because that ideology, the horrific and vile ideology of slavery and the subjugating of other human beings, is still there! The dehumanisation of black people is still there. Those monuments are part of that ideology and are used to preserve it.

And you know what? I honestly understand where neo-Confederates are coming from… it’s not easy to admit your ancestors were lowlife scum who fought to preserve slavery, so you create a new narrative. Will the descendants of Nazi soldiers try the same in the future? Who knows.

And yes, I know not all Confederate soldiers were for slavery, some were drafted against their will… and? So were many soldiers serving in the German Army in WWII. Your point is…? The ones with a moral compass deserted, and the ones with a moral compass and courage did what the great Newton Knight and the Free State of Jones did, and resisted the Confederate regime.

Those monuments need to be demolished, pretty much as we don’t have Nazi monuments around today.

No black child should have to walk past a monument which was the gathering point of those who violently lynched his great uncle, and which still serves as a gathering point for those who lament the loss of the Confederacy and lament the abolition of slavery.

Despite Donald Trump, America is Still Great

There’s a trend these days to insult America, burn the American flag, portray America as Trump, as racism, as discrimination, and so on… but I don’t agree wit that view.

I’m a social democrat, I’m a Sanders supporter, I’m as progressive as it gets… and I love America. I despise Trump, and I hated Obama, Clinton, and now Biden, because they have a proven record of being warmongers.

However, this is not “America” – America is an idea. We can find evil things in the history of every country, however, what makes America special is that individuals can get up and do something about it.

I was born in the USSR where the government committed a genocide against the Ukrainian population (the Holodomor), sent millions into concentration camps for f***ing political jokes, and imprisoned rock musicians… and the USSR never properly apologised for this!

Yes, the American Government was responsible for war crimes in Vietnam, but wasn’t it the American people who demonstrated against it? In the USSR, people who demonstrated against the Afghanistan War… oh wait, they didn’t, because in the USSR opposing the war would have you sent into a mental asylum.

The most American idea is an individual standing against the system, rebellion… the individual working against the system. The “cowboy,” the outlaw.

When I think of America, in my head there are pictures of John F. Kennedy talking about civil rights in 1963; it’s the hippies in front of the White House during Vietnam; it’s blues, jazz musicians, and rock ‘n’ roll musicians revolutionising culture; it’s Bill Gates and Steve Jobs competing on who creates the cooler product from their garages (not forgetting to change the world); it’s NASA and its brilliant missions to space; it’s arcade centres and Back to the Future; it’s Michael Jackson and Guns N’ Roses; it’s The Doors and Lana Del Rey; it’s Hank Greenberg approaching Jackie Robinson; it’s the distinct sound of the acoustic guitar, and the scream of a Fender; it’s Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley;… this is America to me.

As someone who was born in the USSR, I feel like those who generalise America as “evil,” instead of understanding that “America” is, in fact, many things, including those who fight against “evil,” don’t know what it’s like to really live in an “evil” country.

See, in America, when a racist cop kills an innocent black man… it’s Americans who go the next day to demonstrate against it, it’s American patriots within the Senate who talk about the need to promote legislature against racism. It’s Americans who speak against it!

Haven’t you noticed how many of those who represent the worst in America tend to wave or defend the Confederate flag? I mean, the Confederate flag is the most anti-American thing there is… the United States literally defeated the Confederacy!

In the USSR, you didn’t have a right to protest. You had a government committing some of the worst crimes ever against its people, you had sadistic politicians fuelled by envy who enjoyed imprisoning intellectuals and free thinkers… and I think it’s important to understand that when you decide to call America “evil” or whatever.

America isn’t evil, it’s great! You can see how great America is when you play your acoustic or electric guitar while looking up songs on your computer. The evil elements in America are more Confederate than they are American.

Israel is not “the only democracy in the Middle East,” and no, Israel and Palestine don’t “fight for the same piece of land”

Mostly as a result of the pro-Israel lobby propaganda (and I will later explain why this lobby isn’t really “pro-” Israel), many people believe two myths about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The first myth is that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East,” and the second myth is that “Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for the same piece of land,” which leads many to the false conclusion that one must prefer Israel in this conflict, because “it’s the only democracy…” and so on. As someone who lived in Israel for many years, I can tell you both of these statements are false.

First of all, Israel and Palestine are not fighting for the same piece of land. It’s not like they’re both contesting Tel Aviv, Netanya, Petah Tiqwa, and so on. There is a very clear line between the areas known as Palestine, which are the territories of the Palestinian Autonomy (or Palestinian Authority), which constitute the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the State of Israel.

In fact, the line is so “clear,” that Israel has never actually annexed the Palestinian territories, because that would require Israel to give citizenship to the Palestinian living there, and citizens get human rights, which is something the Israeli far-right government can’t have.

Saying that “Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for the same piece of land” is like letting the US conquer Canada (or vice versa), and then to say, “Well, they’re both fighting for the same piece of land, so it’s very complicated” – it really isn’t.

What happens in practice is that the Israeli army controls the West Bank, and on a daily basis, a Palestinian is required to go through checkpoints (not only to cross to Israel, but within the West Bank itself), long queues, and humiliation on a daily basis.

At the same time, part of the ruling coalition in Israel are parties promoting religious nationalism. Those parties actually believe in a schizophrenic idea that settling the whole area known as “Greater Israel” – a Biblical myth about a “promised land” which includes parts of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan – will bring the Messiah. So what does the Israeli government do, to appease those political parties? It creates illegal settlements in the West Bank, settlers of those who openly wish to dispossess Palestinians and fulfil their “Greater Israel plan.”

Think of the reality under which a Palestinian has to live. Seeing parts of your family’s lands confiscated by Israel for new settlements, getting abused by soldiers, and having your freedom of movement limited. What kind of reality is that? It breeds anger, and anger breeds irrationality, extremism, and violence. That is literally how after WWI the financial penalties against Germany led to poverty and frustration that gave popularity to such extreme and vile ideologies as Nazism and communism.

As for the “only democracy…” argument, is it though? Is it a democracy? According to Western standards, I really don’t think it is. I mean, in order to appease the fundamentalist parties in Israel, i.e. the religious nationalists and the Orthodox, gay people are not allowed to get married, a Jewish couple can’t get married outside the Rabbinate, there is no public transport on Saturday – despite popular demand – due to the Orthodox parties preventing it.

I mean, does that actually count as a democracy? For an average Westerner, hearing such things leaves them in shock, and surprise, surprise, there’s a reason the pro-Israel lobby doesn’t mention it in its donation campaigns.

Even if that “only democracy…” argument were true, does that justify a country dispossessing and depriving another nation of their human rights? I mean, surely that is a ridiculous argument.

Also, I’m not sure the so-called pro-Israel lobby actually does any good to Israel. When someone shows harmful behaviour, the last thing you should do is enable it. Oh, so you’re a drug addict? Here, take unlimited funds to buy drugs! Or oh, you have anger issues? There you go, unlimited access to guns.

The best thing you can do in such a case is take drastic actions to stop that behaviour. In my view, the best thing the West can do is actually stop financing and supplying Israel with weapons unless it negotiates peace with Palestine. As for now, Israel gets huge funds from the West, and sees no need to work towards changing the situation.

Corporate Media Firing Up Their Smear Campaign Against Sanders

Just like with the corporate media in England running a long and tedious smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the corporate media in the US is clearly stepping it up against Bernie Sanders. According to Elizabeth Warren, Sanders told her, a few years back, that a woman couldn’t become a US President.

How do we know he didn’t make that misogynistic comment? Easy! It absolutely contradicts everything Sanders has been standing for his entire career. I mean, he was arrested for demonstrating in favour of the human rights movement while she was, well, a Republican.

The pharmaceutical companies, the insurance industry, and Wall Street are petrified of Sanders, and Warren is happy to dive into a dodgy relationship with the corporate elite against Sanders, to slander him.

Warren is a dodgy character! She was a Republican for most of her life – a “die-hard conservative” according to some of her colleagues (look it up) – and now she’s trying to set Bernie Sanders up.

For a long time, they had been allies. Her attacks against him clearly threw him off guard, as he didn’t expect her to stoop so low. I mean, Sanders was trying to convince her to run for President a few years back, and decided to run for himself only after Warren had refused.

The CNN, probably the second most unreliable network after the Fox “News” sham, are happy to peddle that lie, by presenting headlines such as “Elizabeth Warren fires back at Bernie Sanders’ denial about women candidates” (headlines that are intentionally formulated in such a way as to make it look like there isn’t any doubt that he had said it). With their corporate ownership, just like when Sanders was competing against Hilary support-every-war Clinton, they’re doing everything in their power to smear the most progressive candidate America’s ever known.

I really hope Bernie Sanders picks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his running colleague for this election, i.e. candidate for Vice President. In the long run, I can’t see anyone better than her to run for President.

It’s time for Democrats to run a truly progressive team. I mean, running Hillary support-every-war Clinton a few years ago, really?! Why would any progressive person want to vote for her, with her pro-war and pro-corporate record?

As for Obama, he won an election using progressive slogans, but ended up bombing more countries than Bush, continued representing corporate interests, and did nothing about racism and brutality within the police force against black people. But fact is, he won his election using progressive rhetoric, which proves there’s demand for it.

Instead of suggesting pro-war de-facto Republicans like Biden, or sleazy Warren who was a Republican until the mid 90s, it’s time to run a truly progressive team. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are the best thing that could happen for the American people!

The Right Does Tend to Be More “Snowflake” than the Left

On the whole, the right does tend to be more “snowflake” than the left – which is hilarious, considering how much rightists like to apply that words to leftists.

I don’t think many can accuse me of being far left… I’ve often criticised the behaviour of Antifa and have made it clear I equally despise the far right and the far left. In all seriousness, both communist and fascists promote dangerous ideologies that are contradictory to the idea of individual rights.

History has shown how extremists can ruin any honourable idea. The French Revolution started as a positive idea, to bring freedom to men and women, but ended up being taken over by bloodthirsty, paranoid extremists, and deteriorated to the Reign of Terror.

Same goes for the Russian Revolution, which started as an attempt to make Russia a democracy, and ended with the October Revolution, communism coming to power, and the rise of one of the most vile regimes in human history.

Now, back to my initial point, the one about rightists being snowflakes.

I mean, look at how aggressively the right in the US reacted to female transsexuals asking to use the female toilets in the US, only because they were born male, biologically. I mean, really? How exactly does that threaten you? What a bunch of petulant morons.

A few weeks ago, Mr Tantrum, also known as Donald Trump, obviously couldn’t face the criticism coming from four brave congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who I’m growing to like more and more, after initially being critical of some aspects of her views), Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley – so he said about them, “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”

I mean, really? The lovely Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born in New York; Rashida Tlaib was born in Detroit; and Ayanna Pressley was born in Cincinnati. That is, the “broken and crime infested places from which they came”… are all in the US, and they are trying to “help fix” the US and make that great country better for its citizens.

As for Ilhan Omar, she might not have been born in the US, but she’s been in the US from a young age, and came legally, as an asylum seeker.

So… telling those four women to “go back…” is the same as telling Donald Trump to go back to Scotland, where his mother was born, even though I highly doubt the majority of people in beautiful Scotland would take him.

And I’d like to add, I’ll always blame the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party for Donald Trump. I mean, I’m not surprised to see Republicans elect a moron, but the Democratic Party choosing to rally pro-war conservative Hilary Clinton against him? Really?

And now many Democrats are pushing for Biden, another politician like Clinton with a warmongering record, to run for President. I mean, are the Democrats trying to lose on purpose?

There’s one decent politician who really could make America a better place and has a record of being honest, and it’s Bernie Sanders. Here’s an idea, why not just rally someone decent to run against Trump? Someone who, unlike Clinton or Biden, doesn’t invoke nausea from so many voters. So there we go, truly hope to see Sanders take the lead.

Warning: The Ideological Disarmament of the Left

“Our No. 1 enemy is ignorance. And I believe that is the No. 1 enemy for everyone — it’s not understanding what actually is going on in the world.” – Julian Assange, 2014.

As a left-winger, I would like to raise a possible scenario that concerns me.

It’s known that by definition the Right represents the interests of the ruling elite, and wishes to preserve the order that serves it. Hence the term – “conservative”; it’s also known that by definition the Left is meant to resist that order and seek to change it into one that is more socially fair. Hence the term – “socialism.”

But what if the corporate forces, in theory, learnt how to disguise right-wing causes as left-wing causes? What if the corporate elite learnt to manipulate the left electorate to serve greed?

If you are reading this now, you probably think it has nothing to do with you. After all, you’re not daft. You oppose the ruling elite, you’re critical of the government, and you don’t take the word of the corporate media for granted – or do you?

On 21 January 2017, we witnessed an event called the Women’s March of Washington. And estimated number of 500,000 protesters marched to express dissent to the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States; a few days later, an estimated number of 5,000,000 marched worldwide in solidarity.

I, personally, believe the marches to be just. At the end of the day, we’re all protesting the election of someone who has made numerous misogynistic remarks, and is now the head of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.

But here is when the questions start to arise, for me at least. Why only against Trump? Such protests wouldn’t arise had Republican Ted Cruz won the election, even though Ted Cruz is considered to be more conservative than Trump.

During his tenure as President, Barack Obama dropped more bombs than George W. Bush, overthrew a secular ruler in Libya, plunged Syria into turmoil, failed to put any sanctions against Netanyahu’s government, and added fuel to the fire in Ukraine by funding right-wing groups – and yet none of these protests took place in any of Obama’s two terms – as if the sole fact Obama was a Democrat absolved him of any responsibility.

In the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Hilary Clinton won the delegate count and the popular vote against Bernie Sanders. Hilary Clinton had supported every war in the decade and a half of her tenure in the US Senate, she was known to have strong Wall Street connections, and yet she managed to win the Democratic nomination against Bernie Sanders – an individual who had dedicated his whole career to opposing war and corruption. No one took to the streets in protest back then.

The natural question to arise is how is it possible that a President thrusts whole areas into chaos, and still remains popular with the majority of the Democratic electorate? How is it possible that Clinton, whose record on supporting war is even worse than that of George W. Bush, wins the nomination against someone like Bernie Sanders?

How is it possible that the politicians who are meant to represent the left end up fulfilling right-wing policies, and get away scotch-free with their electorate?

The subsequent question is, who gets these politicians elected, and who affects the public opinion of the electorate?

To find that one does not have to go far. Both Obama and Clinton had Wall Street magnates backing them, and in particular, one called George Soros. In 1999, in his book The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science, the economist Paul Krugman commented on Soros’ role in the financial events of the last decades: “Nobody who has read a business magazine in the last few years can be unaware that these days there really are investors who not only move money in anticipation of a currency crisis, but actually do their best to trigger that crisis for fun and profit. These new actors on the scene do not yet have a standard name; my proposed term is ‘Soroi’.”

It order to get leftists to support candidates that were beneficial to the interests of the magnates that had been funding them, the corporate bosses found a way to present those candidates as “progressive” to the electorate.

It wasn’t too hard. Obama is black, and Clinton is a woman. That alone should’ve been enough to present the sole election of these candidates as a massive leap forward for society. At the end of the day, only a deplorable being would object a candidate solely on the basis of their colour or sex.

As for their policies – the policies were secondary. As long as the catchy jingle “Yes, we can!” was in place, it was about enough to soil seeds of optimism and hope.

The problem is, such diversions can only last for so long. And here we are, in 2017, with Trump as President – a president that refuses to publish his Tax Return history, a former Hilary Clinton donor, and the pivot of innumerable sexist remarks.

The anti-Trump marches treat Trump as the cause of the problem; as if Clinton would somehow be better for the American people; as if everything wrong with the American political system and society is down to one man. But is it? Is Trump really the cause of the problem, or simply the symptom of an ill system?

The problem is much bigger than the average Democratic voter seems to comprehend.

When Democratic voters elect someone who has supported every war in the last two decades and affiliates with Wall Street, it’s a problem; when Democrats repeatedly refer to a man who has plunged whole areas into chaos in the name of corporate financial expansionism, it’s a problem; when Democratic voters blame one person for everything but insist on not cleansing the Augean stables within the Democratic Party, it’s a problem. That’s how the likes of Trump end up winning elections.

The left electorate is being manipulated by the corporate elite into supporting right-wing policies and politicians – and the only way to bring real change is by putting our own house in order, for a start.