We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, March 20, 2016

History as Propaganda: Why the USSR Did Not ‘Win’ World War II (both parts 1 and 2)

Click here to access part 1 and and part 2 here, both by Michael Jabara Carley from Strategic Culture Foundation.

This Canadian professor tries to correct how history is taught in Western countries. I wish him well in his own Sisyphean task because the teaching of history for ordinary people has become little more than propaganda to insure the new generations manning the imperial armies do so with conviction. Now that Russia is once again appearing in the scopes of the Empire's many weapons, this anti-Russian propaganda campaign is going into high gear.
The title of this article is intended to be ironic because of course the Red Army did play the predominant role in destroying Nazi Germany during World War II. You would not know it, however, reading the western Mainstream Media (MSM), or watching television, or going to the cinema in the west where the Soviet role in the war has almost entirely disappeared.

If in the West the Red Army is largely absent from World War II, the Soviet Union’s responsibility for igniting the war is omnipresent.
In both parts he uses mostly the shorthand expression of naming countries in place of specifying capitalist ruling classes of those countries. This omission also allows him to make the most egregious omission of all. The prime reason why Western capitalist countries engaged in so much perfidy with regard to the Soviet Union and were so sympathetic toward the growing fascist menace in Europe was the crime of rejecting capitalism in the Soviet Revolution of 1917--the 800 pound gorilla in the room of the 20th century! This is as close as the professor comes to this most important fact:
During the interwar years, the Russophobia was mixed with Sovietophobia: it was a clash of two worlds between the West and the USSR, the Silent Conflict, Litvinov called it. 
A "clash of two worlds"? Such obfuscation of history results in a gross distortion of history! Gone are any references to the indisputable fact that around 13 capitalist nations invaded Russia immediately following their revolution and many of these nations also funded the White armies opposing the Bolsheviks. The viscerally hostile reaction by leading capitalist classes to the Soviet revolution colored so much of the history of the 20th century.

The actual WWII Soviet contribution to the defeat of fascism as described by the professor is accurate, but this glaring omission results in this distortion of history--this time apparently in service to the new capitalist ruling class in Russia which refuses to submit to the rule of the Empire capitalists. Or maybe in service to what has become fashionable among "leftists" in the West: promotion of a "multi-polar" capitalist world.