#keep supporting Russian independent Artists

[levikra]

I have Acute Lymphoblastic Leukosis aka Blood Cancer

buckle up :D

This post should've been here for sometime now cuz I prefer keeping everyone updated across all the platforms that I use as an artist.

So - Hi! My name is Evein, on 1st of May 2023 I turned 21 and since then, from 5th of May my health decided to pull a quick one on me, propelling the events that currently make me reside at the hospital with an oncology.

It all started with a tonsillitis-like fever, accompanied by furunclosis in three places on my body, a high fever that lasted for 5 days in the first half of May itself and other unpleasant symptoms. It felt weird, I've never had such an intense streak of sicknesses kick my ass like that, but of course - I went to doctors to get checked, the classic blood testings and general examinations and stuff.

That's when on 10th of May my blood test was checked by a dermatologist regarding my furuncle problem and - after some brief moments of her talking with the main doctor at the clinic - I was rushed to the governmential hospital due to the fact that my blood results had... no white blood cells. Literally 1.83 at the accepted range being much higher than that.

Needless to say I was fucking shocked, I've never dealt with the severity of the situation and let alone while being completely on my own as a human person (working, living, providing for myself, you call it).

At the hospital, after several examinations and another blood test came the recommendation paper that doctors signed with urgency, first and foremost I needed to get to an appointment at the hematologist's. That I did on 14th of May and since that point of time, till 19th, I'd been monitored, given antibiotics for my tonsillitis-like symptoms, along with my furunclosis and after 19th we ruled out the condition to be leukosis, became my white blood cells started coming back to normal with the antibiotics aiding my immunity, but despite that - thr condition still seemed as something more reminiscent of mononucleosis (which, however, in another blood test was disproven).

After exactly a week of feeling better, albeit dealing with leftover anemia, I started developing the same symptoms back and even worse, to the point of losing consciousness and thrwoing up in an elevator on 29th of May after going out for the second pack of antibiotics my hematologist had then already approved of to use to help out.

That's when I was rushed to the hospital again and - the next day - my hematologist arranged an appointment at the big clinic that has an oncology ward specifically for my situation. On 1st of June I was officially admitted with Acute Leukosis (the diagnosis doc attached is in Russian).

Since 1st of June the treatment has been ongoing, I've received three rounds of chemo along with supporting hormonal abd antibiotic therapy. Me is balding too, ofc. :D

And thus, this story leads to a logical question - what's now?

It's day 24 of my treatment, out of 4-6 weeks of inital induction period of leukosis' treatment (the overall chemotherapy to destroy tumor cells down to <5% in my bone marrow). After the induction period, if it's proven to lead to remissions - I'm then admitted out to certain periods of time in between infusions + need to take supporting medicine by myself (hence buying it too).

As an independent freelance artist who's existence is tied to being able to do creative work out of, well, any circumstances, I was sadly forced into situation of asking for monetary support, simply because it's stupid to expect to break your own back trying to work harder when you're body is collapsing on itself.

I have a goal on Boosty open for donations and I deeply appreciate ANY and I mean ANY traction of this post. I made a similar thread on Twitter covering the situation and have recieved a lotnof incredible support that has helped me a LOT so far, but my treatment is ongoing, or to be precise - will last in its entirety for 2-3 years. With the momentary help I was able to secure my living situation and get my pet cat to live for the current time period at my friend's, but you understand how that is just a temporary measure and, of course, I don't plan on stall myself - I simply just can't afford that even while hospitalised.

BOOSTY is very sus when it comes to singular donations higher than 120$ but if you happen to donate below that or in several different ones to bypass their antifraud system (only if you wish to) - the link to a goal is here -

[creacherkeeper]

8, 13, 23, 69 and 83 <333

8. Who's your biggest inspiration?

this is literally such a tough question. this has changed multiple times over my life but i think my answer right now would be jane mcgonigal. im just so interested in gamification and how to make games that can help and heal and improve peoples lives and shes out there Doing That and is doing it from such a well educated science background AND from lived experience and thats just so cool to me (check out superbetter!!)

13. Name a list of shows that have changed your life.

avatar, psych, gilmore girls, agents of shield (highly derogatory), the good place, fantasy high (highly affectionate)

23. What would you name your children?

ough. well im planning on adopting so i wouldnt be naming them unless theyre trans and want me to pick. fem names i really like anya, natalia, elizabeth, tzipporah, mari, harper, and nora; masc names dima, mishka, nikolai, yakov, ari, elijah, levi, malachai, cooper, sawyer, and dawson; and androgynous names i like sasha, illya, ori, shiloh, tovi, dakota, forest, and harley. can you tell im a russian jew who lives in the deep south.

69. If you received enough money to never need to work again, what would you spend your time doing?

trying out different hobbies that were inaccessible before like metalworking or furniture building. taking classes on things im interested in. write more books. have a big enough property to have a few big dogs that has close access to nature and spending a lot of time there. visiting national parks. hosting friends. adopting and raising children and hopefully homeschooling all of them. i think i would still be working toward the larger projects im currently working towards because i genuinely enjoy working on those things it just wouldnt be as big of a deal if i needed to take longer or couldnt get funding. i might even just work at a little bookstore or something for fun, i genuinely enjoy customer service and cleaning. or maybe i would still end up teaching. i want to get better at identifying plants and birds too i think i would become a birder i can just see myself going down that path

83. How would you spend a billion dollars?

i would split it into as many portions as would still make a difference to give to the charities that would best utilize that money probably focused in minority justice, nature preservation, and animal conservation (with the last two going to as many indigenous organizations as i could), keep enough left over to live comfortably on, and then use the rest to support independent artists and tip like 500% on commissions and indie games

[coshechka]

one of the biggest russian independent/anti-state newspapers keeps referring to the israel palestine war as "the war in israel" then in the same breath announces that the musicians that had been in danger of prosecution in thailand managed to escape and safely landed in israel. the artist i followed last year who was posting his drawings in memory of ukrainians killed in the war recently started drawing those killed by hamas as well and this transition was accompanied by a post in support of israel. a punk friend of mine from way back apparently turned up for a gig wearing a shirt with pro russian art on it and his bandmates' solution to having a nazi sympathizer in the band was to put a sweatshirt on him before going on stage. i'm so fucking tired man.

[findinginga]

Okay, you have my attention…

Testing the waters...

The first few messages Inga and I exchanged were hosted on the dating site. I was keen to abandon the use of the site as a go-between largely because I was suspicious about with whom I may actually be communicating. There were certainly no lack of anecdotes regarding men who believed that they were communicating with the girl of their dreams only to discover the objects of their affection were actually apparitions conjured by the site hosts to continue the "pay for play" paradigm. One could fairly argue that my desire to continue communicating with Inga through another method starkly betrayed my ignorance as to how some scams actually operate.

(As a reader, you may want to hold onto that concept of a scam as it reemerges as a theme.)

Still, I made the suggestion that we communicate directly, via email. Inga was receptive to the idea and addresses were subsequently exchanged.

After writing my first email to Inga I was eager for a reply. I was definitely drawn to her in a way I could not fully explain at the time. Yes, she was young and attractive and portrayed herself as having a bohemian spirit. From the few thoughts she shared to that point, she described herself as a reader with liberal views and an artistic flair. She longed for travel and the stimulation of places and cultures apart from her day to day in the cold and dark corner of northwest Russia. It seems that as I describe these aspects of Inga, you are owed a more formal introduction. Keep in mind as you view this sketch I now draw, revisions will most decidedly be offered. Within a previous post I provided a brief description of Inga. Here are some additional details for you to consider as we move through the arc of the story.

Is this Inga?

Inga was fond of describing herself as a "dwarf". In fact, she stands about 152 cm in height. She was preoccupied with her weight and struggled with her body image as a consequence of her pregnancy. If she was not actively dieting, she was planning a diet. Not unlike many Russian women, appearance was very important, even when managing the most mundane of tasks which took her out of her home. Make-up and stylish dress were the utmost of importance.

More personally, she described herself as being fiercely independent from the age of 18, when she took a job in a casino. Apparently these were legal in Russia, at the time, but have since fallen from government favor. Inga described her efforts to complete school, where she was studying art and design. Inga was from a family which includes two sisters and a brother, all her senior.

Her parents separated and her mother was her primary caregiver as she grew up. She described her father as an alcoholic and a burden to her mother. According to her memories, her father was often verbally abusive to everyone in the household before his resulting departure.

At some point after finishing university, she moved to Sochi and enjoyed her time in the warmer climate of the south of Russia. It was in Sochi where she described a relationship which led to her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, Eva. It was on this topic that Inga refused to provide much detail other than to reject the idea that marriage was ever a consideration. She talked about Eva's father as being only involved in the life of his daughter from a distance. Inga talked about her eventual move back to Pskov as a necessity born out for the need for familial support.

Boarding the slow moving train to Crazy Town

With both Inga and I embracing the idea of email communication, we eventually began writing to one another with more and more frequency. I should digress just a bit here and add that I was not actually enthusiastic about emailing. I had hoped for text messaging coupled with an occasional telephone call. However, it may become evident why email was the medium.

What started with a message or two a day quickly gained momentum until easily 20 email were exchanged in the course of a single day. From my perspective, this had the feeling of a blossoming relationship. Inga could be witty and comically acerbic. I became more interested in the welfare of both Inga and Eva and began looking for little ways to be helpful. Initially this took the form of helping with a birthday gift for Eva who was to be a 5-year-old. Inga wrote about the difficulties putting a party together because of her work demands and the relatively low salary she was earning at the time. From this seemingly innocent gesture I eagerly offered to send all manner of gifts from the USA to Russia.

It was these efforts which raised my first suspicions that there was more beneath the surface.

[uniquesmalltreasures]

In the light of recent posts criticising canceling Russian culture, I wanted to share a rough translation of a majority of a Polish article by Jakub Majmurek: "Should we cancel Dostoyevsky because of the war?"

First of all, it should be noted that even though Russia nowadays has exposed itself as a bandit state, destroying its soft power and any claims to having international respect, for the last 20 years, Russian culture has been an important part of Putin's strategy of creating global image of the state. Putin's Russia wished to present itself not only as a powerful imperial state, but also as a state strong with its culture, or - to be more precise - its cultural heritage: great works, the value of which has long been confirmed in the canon.

True to this vision, Kremlin's Russia is faithful to the canon of great culture - understood in the 19th-century way - which is supposed to positively distinguish it from the shallow, consumerist West, destroyed by counterculture.

To illustrate how Putin's Russia sees its role as the guardian of great European culture and the exporter of its own cultural heritage, its best to remember how it was witnessed during a concert in the ancient Roman theater in Palmyra in May 2016. Palmyra, a Syrian city with an archaeological complex listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has been the subject of battles between the Russian-backed forces of Assad and ISIS. In the aforementioned theater, the Islamic State carried out executions of its prisoners of war.

After the city was seized, the Russians brought classical musicians from Moscow to Palmyra and the conductor Valery Gergiyev - associated with Putin's court. Works by Bach, Prokofiev and Shchedrin were performed under his baton. Artists who have been dead for a long time, safely embedded in the canon, rather friendly to the reluctant ear of the avant-garde. Before the concert from his residence in Sochi, Vladimir Putin himself joined in with Palmyra, expressing his hope that thanks to Russia's help it will again become a "cultural resource" of Syria and the world. At the same time, a coalition of Russia and Assad was waging a brutal offensive against Aleppo.

It is obvious that the current wave of sanctions against Russia should also target the claims of the Russian state to the role of the custodian and exporter of cultural heritage. Does this mean that we are now to cancel Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Malevich, Tarkowski, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Not to play, exhibit, show in cinemas, read the works of Russian artists?

Of course not. Such Dostoevsky is worth reading right now, although against the author's intentions: as a warning against the depth of Russia's toxic, anti-Western resentment, in opposition to the penetrating hatred of the enlightenment and bourgeois civilization of the West, to its reactionary policy. Because it is also worth remembering, especially now, how monstrously chauvinistic, in love with the empire, and often with authoritarian power, quite a large part of the Russian classics are. A free Russia, if it ever gets a chance again, will someday face the great task of reevaluating its own cultural heritage.

Returning to here and now dilemmas: the polemical, privately conducted reading of Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy is one thing, the public celebration of Russian cultural heritage is another thing: concerts, theater performances and operas. There is not much room for the latter today. The decisions of cultural institutions canceling invitations to Russian conductors and musicians or the Polish National Opera are understandable. The great masterpieces of Russian culture will remain, they can wait for better times, they will not be hurt, because they will lie on the shelves for a while. We will come back to them once we have rethought how to reread them in the context of the last war. Because staging a great Russian play or opera today as if there was no war can easily turn into a display of artistic and moral deafness.

Today we owe solidarity above all to the Ukrainian culture, which Putin's Russia wants - just like Ukrainian statehood - to be simply destroyed. In the new "Ruthenian measure" designed by the Kremlin, Ukrainian culture can only be a local, mainly folklore variant of Russian culture. It is better to use the visibility our cultural institutions have today to support the culture of a fighting Ukraine, than to once again display the works of Russian classics that the Kremlin is so eager to showcase.

However, the question arises whether contemporary Russian artists who create non-ferrous Russian culture deserve sanctions? The one who for years stood in opposition to Putin's orders, showed the Russians a different reality, ridiculed the imperial and authoritarian claims of the authorities? In Putin's Russia, independent artists fell victim to repression - and not only protest art activists like the War Group, consciously going to open confrontation with the Russian state and law.

At first, imposing sanctions on such artists and blocking their access to Western cultural institutions and markets seems deeply unfair. A boycott of contemporary Russian culture would undoubtedly also impoverish the Western world of art, literature and film. Because without contact with living Russian culture, we are poorer, without access to its culture, it is more difficult for us to understand contemporary Russia and what is happening to it right now.

Russian culture was able to sense Putinism and understand its essence much earlier than the Western political elite. Alexei Balabanov's Brother (1997) heralded the end of the Russian 1990s with their relative liberalism, but also chaos, violence, lawlessness, and the pauperization of entire groups of the population. In the film about a young Chechnya veteran, who cannot find a place for himself in Russia and enters into an open confrontation with the mafia in St. Petersburg, you can see a longing for a strong man who will finally restore order in the country. The same emotion a moment later will help consolidate Putin's support in the early years of his rule.

No one has managed to capture the moral emptiness and abomination at the heart of Putin's system better than Andrei Zvyagintsev in Leviathan (2014). The film shows contemporary Russia as a state colonized by the elite, behaving towards its own population as an organized criminal group, linked by a (un)holy alliance with the Church, which, instead of the gospel, deals with the cult of power and the naturalization of extremely unfair social relations that it creates.

If such films - but also theatrical performances, novels, works of visual arts - will not be on Western TV, VOD platforms, in theaters, museums and film festivals, we will all lose. Both the Russian artists cut off from the world audience, and audiences all over the world.

On the other hand, Russia is pursuing now a policy which places it outside the borders of the civilized community of nations. The purpose of the sanctions is to make Russia's citizens feel this as well, in order to undermine the legitimacy and stability of Putin's regime as much as possible. The more breaches of sanctions we make in this wall - for culture, art, science and other areas that are hard to accuse of supporting Putin's imperialism - the less effective they will be.

What to do?

How do you translate this into concrete actions? Certainly, the West should do everything possible to create the conditions for Russian artists who want to create a free, independent culture, for which there is no place in Putin's Russia - in Europe and other Western countries. But again, priority should be given to Ukrainian artists who are bombed and who, in the worst case scenario - in Putin's Ukraine - will not be able to create any Ukrainian culture. There is also no point in keeping in touch with the official Russian cultural bureaucracy today, unfortunately all Russian cultural organizations should be cut off from Western partners.

The biggest problem is with specific works and movies. Should they be published today, shown in theaters, cinemas, at film and theater festivals? Here I would leave the responsibility to each institution separately. On the one hand, we should probably not completely close our way to contact with the independent, critical culture of Russia - although until the war is over, its presence in the West should be the exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, it is understandable that today the space for the reception of Russian culture - especially community culture in cinema or theater - is smaller than ever. As a fan of Russian cinema, I feel deeply sad about it - but you can only blame Putin and his gang for that.

- Jakub Majmurek, Krytyka polityczna

source of the article in Polish

[staminaoverlook]

✨Welcome to my blog!

Hello! My name is Anastasia, but I'm mostly known as Stamina Overlook. I'm an avid PotO fan, and I mainly post about that, but my interests are broad and you may find me posting about everything from astronomy to Team Fortress 2 or Duskwood :)

The Opera Ghost's Love Story

"The Opera Ghost's Love Story" is a passion project of mine that I am working on in my free time. It is a video game, with all of the assets being created by me, including all the art, the animations, the music, and the code. I also do the research and the writing, although people help me with it sometimes :)

In this game, the story focuses on Erik, a 50-something-year-old disfigured genius who pretends to be a ghost and "haunts" a Paris Opera House. You are his conscience. Your control over him directly depends on how often he uses his rational thinking. He becomes infatuated with a young Swedish opera singer, Christine Daaé. When he is assaulted with strong, unknown feelings, his already brittle sanity begins to crumble, which means that it becomes more and more difficult for you to retain control. Help Erik get through these most difficult five months of his life and witness first-hand what obsession can do to a human being, and how one act of kindness can bring one back from the brink of insanity.

\\ Visit the game's page on Gamejolt! \\

\\ Join the official Discord community! \\

If you enjoy what I'm doing, consider:

- Ordering a commission

I am a professional freelance illustrator, and I accept commissions. You can find my prices and the best of my art pieces on:

\\ My portfolio website \\

- Buying my prints

I have a few prints published on my Redbubble store (cute masks, a few notebooks and stickers), and I promise there are more coming!

\\ My Redbubble shop page \\

- Supporting me on

\\ Patreon \\ Paypal \\ or \\ Ko-fi \\

I'd like to point out I am grateful for any type of support. Even a simple message or a like is more than enough for me. Money will only bring me a bit closer to achieving my ambitious goals. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'll have more time/opportunity to create more art, but it will definitely help me in a way that kind words cannot.

- Or just sending me a message.

No matter how you express your support, I will keep you in my mind when I pour my soul onto a canvas.

Additionally, if you have anything you want to tell me, if you want to offer criticism, please message me. I will always listen to you, consider your words and make appropriate conclusions / take appropriate action. If you have any grievances, no matter what it is, you are always welcome to message me, I will always lend you an ear.

My other social platforms:

\\ VK group (Russian) \\ Instagram \\ Twitter \\

Join my streams!

I host Development Streams on Youtube. They usually last for four or five hours, and during that time I either dissociate slowly while working on an animation, or yell at my laptop in hopes that the code fixes itself (sometimes it gets intimidated and does just that).

\\ My Youtube channel \\

Stream schedule: \\ (almost) every Friday and Sunday at 5 PM GMT \\

[rthstewart]

More Narnia Spare Oom AUs

So I’ve like actually written a lot of this.  But....  based on this lovely post by @athoughtfox and then @edmundjustking made the serious mistake of asking for me to elaborate and so I did , a little bit here .  But... I have opinions about this, OK?  And A LOT OF WORDS.   REALLY A LOT OF WORDS.

Digory – Professor at Oxford, professor of philosophy and theology, renowned expert on the Oxford Franciscans, the Blessed Duns Scotus, and Gerard Manly Hopkins.  Professor Kirke is trying to construct an elaborate theory of environmental stewardship and haecceity based upon his Narnia experience. An excellent theologian and a very bad Christian – he’s not been to church in over 30 years.  Ace.

Polly – Amateur zoologist and naturalist --- “maiden” aunt HA! Always accompanied by a dog, a cat, an umbrella and a carpet bag.  Drove an ambulance in France for the Red Cross in WW1 in France.  Drives an MG. World traveler.   Bisexual. Works at the Whipsnade Zoo and has a bad habit of always trying to curtsy in front of Peter.

Peter: Private, youngest member of Ox & Bucks 2d Battalion, D Company, Glider Corps (whose insignia is Bellerophon aboard Pegasus) and sees the first action on D-Day when his Horsa Glider crashes into the Caen Canal bridge (Normandy) (which becomes known as Pegasus Bridge). He’s wounded in hedgerow battles on the march to Paris, sent home to recover and (probably) never sees more action.  (Unless he joins Captain America’s Howling Commandos and cleans up Hydra nests in former occupied Europe).  Maybe ends up with T-Force, Ox & Bucks 1st Battalion, who are rounding up German scientists and high value targets and “persuading” them to come to England or America.  

After he’s demobbed, he enrolls at Oxford and starts an affair with a married woman.  He then drops out of Oxford as a dismal failure at the classics curriculum.  He comes into some money and finally gets Aslan’s message and begins rebuilding a country for a 3rd time -- he ends up working in construction and literally becomes a rock on which England is rebuilt, as a carpenter and bricklayer.  Ultimately he’s elected to Commons as the rep for Oxford-Cowley where his battles with Margaret Thatcher become legendary.  Bisexual, married, two children, 6 grandchildren. Knighted in 1992.  

 Susan:  Lying about her age and armed with forged identify papers, Susan begins running a spy through the British Embassy in Washington DC in the summer of 1942 to build support in the American Congress for the British war effort.  She leaves school in 1943 and enters SOE training.  She is deployed to Bénouville at a woman’s hospital to spy on the Nazi fortification of the Caen Canal which Peter’s Horsa glider crashed into on D-Day. Sometime thereafter, she is eventually able to return to England (and maybe hangs out with/has sex with Peggy Carter for a while in France on the road to Paris).  Eventually, she is recruited to MI6/SIS with her partner from Washington and they eventually marry where they built networks of spies throughout the Balkans that are blown and murdered by the Cambridge 5.  Her husband may die in Berlin in or around 1950 and/or she remarries.  One daughter; one grandchild.  COE Deaconess, international election observer, advocate for women’s pentathlon in the Olympics, always keeps wolfhounds and a really large handbag that she keeps a Little Joe crossbow in that she got during the War.  Becomes Dame Commander in or around 1980.  

 Edmund:  With forged papers, Edmund passes off as a British army private in Washington DC in 1943, becomes fluent in German and Russian, and is involved in espionage efforts in Greece and the Balkans that preceded Allied operations in the Mediterranean in 1943.   He narrowly avoids a honey trap and seduction by a man with the aim of  compromising him into becoming a Soviet agent – the Soviets are seeking information on the Venona project.  After flirting with the SIS, he decides to not join his sister in espionage.  He reads law at Oxford and works the Judges’ Trial at Nuremberg.  He becomes a successful barrister and renowned human rights activist, with a particular focus on war crimes (with Lucy) and tirelessly advocates for the Chagoss Islands.  Edmund refuses a knighthood for years because he wants Peter to get his first.  He finally relents and becomes the Right Honourable Sir Edmund Pevensie but hates being called Sir.  Sits on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.  Bisexual, married, three children, five grandchildren, married to a Holocaust survivor. Always keeps cats.

 Lucy:  Leaves school in 1943 with forged identity papers to begin agitating for Greek famine relief and more aggressive action to stop the Holocaust and allow more Jews into England.  Joins the Red Cross.  Eventually becomes involved in smuggling food to the Channel Islands which are under Nazi occupation. After the war, Lucy advocates for families of Chinese men in the Liverpool area after the Chinese merchant sailors are secretly kidnapped and forcibly repatriated back to China.  She eventually goes back to school and becomes a doctor.  She and Edmund are involved war crimes investigations all over the world.  Through NGOs, she operates clinics and advocates for security of the whole person (income, education, home, political stability, healthcare) as universal human rights.  Short listed for a Nobel Peace prize twice.  Has arrest records in 5 countries for civil disobedience.  Bisexual. Marries an American, has three children and four grandchildren.  

 Eustace:  Becomes a world-renowned paleontologist, with a focus on trying to find fossil records that can explain the worldwide mythology of dragons. Discovers a species of flying lizard, Draco Scrubb.  Marries Jill, two children.

 Jill:  A respected artist and cook.  She sells art to sporting magazines her mother and father run in the U.S. and Caribbean and also to paleontological and naturalist publications.  Also active with her family, in the cause of Jamaican independence and politics thereafter.  She purchases a cottage on the Isle of Wright that has portals to a magical place with pink water and blue sand.  

[greatworldwar2]

• Nazi Book Burnings

The Nazi book burnings were a campaign conducted by the German Student Union (the "DSt") to ceremonially burn books in Nazi Germany and Austria in the 1930s. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism.

On April 8th, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", which was to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" by fire. Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. On the same day the Student Union published the "Twelve Theses", a title chosen to be evocative of two events in German history, Martin Luther's burning of a papal bull when he posted his ninety-five theses in 1520, and the burning of a handful of items including 11 books at the 1817 Wartburg Festival on the 300th anniversary of Luther's burning of the bull. This was, however, a false comparison, as the "book burnings" at those historic events were not acts of censorship, nor destructive of other people's property, but purely symbolic protests, destroying only one individual document of each title, for a grand total of 12 individual documents, without any attempt to suppress their content, whereas the Student Union burned tens of thousands of volumes, all they could find from a list comprising around 4000 titles. The "Twelve Theses" called for a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicized the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centres of German nationalism. The students described the action as a “response to a worldwide Jewish smear campaign against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.”

On May 6th, 1933, the German Student Union made an organised attack on Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research. Its library and archives of around 20,000 books and journals were publicly hauled out. On May 10th, 1933, the students burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books in the square at the State Opera, Berlin, thereby presaging an era of uncompromising state censorship. In many other university towns, nationalist students marched in torch lit parades against the "un-German" spirit. The scripted rituals of this night called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged, banned books into the bonfires with a great joyous ceremony that included live music, singing, "fire oaths," and incantations. In Berlin, some 40,000 people heard Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: "No to decadence and moral corruption!" Goebbels enjoined the crowd. "Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner." Not all book burnings took place on 10 May as the German Student Union had planned. Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place in June, during the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the "Action against the Un-German Spirit" was a success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners.

All of the following types of literature, as described by the Nazis, were to be banned; The works of traitors, emigrants and authors from foreign countries who believe they can attack and denigrate the new Germany (H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland); The literature of Marxism, Communism and Bolshevism; Pacifist literature; Literature with liberal, democratic tendencies and attitudes, and writings supporting the Weimar Republic (Walther Rathenau, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann); All historical writings whose purpose is to denigrate the origin, the spirit and the culture of the German Volk, or to dissolve the racial and structural order of the Volk, or that denies the force and importance of leading historical figures in favor of egalitarianism and the masses, and which seeks to drag them through the mud (Emil Ludwig); Books that advocate "art" which is decadent, bloodless, or purely constructivist (George Grosz, Otto Dix, Bauhaus, Felix Mendelssohn); Writings on sexuality and sexual education which serve the egocentric pleasure of the individual and thus, completely destroy the principles of race and Volk (Magnus Hirschfeld); The decadent, destructive and Volk-damaging writings of "Asphalt and Civilization" literati: (Oskar Maria Graf, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Blei); Literature by Jewish authors, regardless of the field; Popular entertainment literature that depicts life and life's goals in a superficial, unrealistic and sickly sweet manner, based on a bourgeois or upper class view of life; All books degrading German purity.

Many German students were complicit in the Nazi book burning campaign. They were known as Deutsche Studentenschaft, and when they ran out of books in their own libraries they turned to independent bookstores. Libraries were also asked to stock their shelves with material that stood up to Hitler's standards, and destroy anything that did not. The Nazis also seized many books from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. They did intend to keep and display a few rare and ancient books in a museum on Judaism after the Final Solution was successfully completed. The blind writer Helen Keller published an Open Letter to German Students: 'You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on." On May 10th, 1934, one year after the book burnings, the Germany Library of Burnt Books founded by Alfred Kantorowicz was opened to assemble copies of the books that had been destroyed. Because of the shift in political power and the blatant control and censorship demonstrated by the Nazi party, 1933 saw a “mass exodus of German writers, artists, and intellectuals…”.

Among the German-speaking authors whose books student leaders burned that night were such figures as; Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Ludwig Renn, and Karl Marx. Not only German-speaking authors were burned, but also French authors like Henri Barbusse, André Gide, Victor Hugo and Romain Rolland; American writers such as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Jack London and Upton Sinclair; as well as English authors Joseph Conrad, Radclyffe Hall, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells; Irish writers James Joyce and Oscar Wilde; and Russian authors including Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Maxim Gorki, Vladimir Lenin, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, and Leon Trotsky. The burning of the books represents a culmination of the persecution of those authors whose oral or written opinions were opposed to Nazi ideology. Many artists, writers and scientists were banned from working and publication. Their works could no longer be found in libraries or in the curricula of schools or universities.

In 1946, the Allied occupation authorities drew up a list of over 30,000 titles, ranging from school books to poetry and including works by such authors as von Clausewitz. Millions of copies of these books were confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings. Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings is a traveling exhibition produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Through historical photographs, documents, and films, it explores how the book burnings became a potent symbol in America's battle against Nazism and why they continue to resonate with the public in film, literature, and political discourse to this day.

[douglashonorscollege]

Burn the House Down

essay by Olivia McDougall ⌂

IT WAS 2006 in the heart of New York City. The New York Knicks failed to make the play-offs for the third consecutive year. President George W. Bush’s approval rating had hit at an all-time low. Panic! at the Disco released “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” and Justin Timberlake performed “SexyBack” on the MTV Video Music Awards—hosted by Jack Black—at Radio City Music Hall. For the American people, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times… and three young kids were out pursuing their dream in the streets of Manhattan.

Adam, Ryan, and Jack Metzger were trying their hand at busking in Central Park and Washington Square. The youngest at nine years old, Jack led vocals while his older brothers backed him with instrumentals. The boys played covers of songs old and new, anything to get enough money for new instruments with which to experiment. The brothers spent many years on street corners serenading strangers, earning their 10,000 hours. In the following years, when YouTube started gaining traction, the boys put up videos of their covers: more and more inventive spins on pop songs. Jack and Ryan also started trying their hand at writing, directing, and acting in their own little sketches for video content. At that time, the boys had very few followers, but nonetheless continued to play, to save up, to buy more equipment, to make more music.

As they grew, the boys were exposed to their parents’ old records and the sounds of a very different generation influenced their style. The Beach Boys; the Beatles; Peter, Paul, and Mary among many others inspired them, but more contemporary artists like Kanye West also came into play. Later, while eldest brother Adam pursued his degree at Columbia University, the younger two brothers took note of sampling—the music trend of artists taking sound clips and reusing them in their songs. Jack mentioned to his brotherhow cool it would be if someone sampled Spongebob Squarepants on a track.

“Well, why don’t we do it?” was Ryan’s reply.

In spring of 2013, the brothers, naming themselves AJR after their own initials, released a video of their first single “I’m Ready.” The song sampled the popular Spongebob catchphrase, and became a classic, upbeat, dance-floor pop song. The brothers sent the link to their video to several celebrities over Twitter, until famous singer-songwriter Sia noticed them and passed it along to her manager. The song was then commercially released that summer and began to see regular radio play, and the band was labeled as the next up and comers in the music scene.

After “I’m Ready,” AJR released a five song EP of the same name. Their first song continued to grow, receiving millions of views on YouTube and going platinum in Canada and Australia. The brothers continued to create music (and go to school; the eldest was only in his early twenties at this time), releasing another single and EP titled Infinity in 2014. The majority of the band’s music was pop songs, easy to listen to with familiar rhythms and lyrics of love and youth. Remarkably, the boys chose to mix and record all their own music in their NYC apartment living room, instead of paying for studio time. Paying homage to their workspace and independence, the band released their first album Living Room in 2015. Except for some bouncier, odd-duck tracks like “Big Idea” and “Thirsty,” most of the songs fit the same earlier patterns of the pop genre. However, in 2016, the band experienced the shift that would change their music career forever.

Before the What Everyone’s Thinking EP came out, AJR had little recognition beyond their break-out hit. However, the tracks on the latest EP sounded entirely evolved from the brother’s previous style. The lyrics were brimmed with honesty, abandoning the emptiness of many other pop tunes. The boys sang about missing out on their friends while pursuing their dreams, about being unsure about what love means, about not trying so hard to be cool, about being human. Their style of composition had also matured. The band would release videos on how they made their songs, revealing that they took whatever strange sound they could make and mix it however they could to make it new and interesting. They had people who were not musicians or artists, such as their ever supportive father, come in and sing to add a new dimension to their songs. They used something they called “spokestep,” a technique of recording a someone singing, then cutting it up over a beat in editing. They continued to utilize sampling, taking bits of anything from Fountains of Wayne to yodeling competitions. The EP was well-received with hundreds of messages from fans who deeply related to the music. This was all the push the brothers needed to keep writing freely, and not what they thought would sell.

On June 9th, 2017, the three brothers dropped the album that would unknowingly launch their music career to a unimaginable level. Several songs on the album made it to regular radio play, giving the band more recognition and growing their dedicated fan base. The Click clearly communicated AJR’s desire to get real in their music, with songs about the detached feelings of growing up or distaste toward the typical party scene. One of their most successful songs, “Sober Up,” featured Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and paved the way for more collaborations with artists such as Steve Aoki and Lil Yachty. The band had been on tours before, playing small venues where the opener drew more fans than they, but now they began to sell out everywhere. The kids who had been playing to no one on street corners now began to sing for thousands.

Shortly after their album The Click debuted, AJR announced that they had been asked to create the theme for Supersize Me 2: Holy Chicken, a documentary attempting to expose the fast food industry’s lax safety regulations. The band had been asked to write for other people before, but never for a movie. The theme song, “Burn the House Down,” would live to surpass its original purpose and become the honest encapsulation of the political attitudes of its time. “Burn the House Down” expresses the band’s indecision to either “keep things light” or to get involved in important issues. The song, with compelling lyrics such as “Or should I march with every stranger from Twitter to get shit done? / Used to hang my head low / Now I hear it loud / Every stranger from Twitter is gonna burn this down” further cemented the band’s dedication to revolution and their abandonment of passivity. The song called out deception plaguing the media cycle and public affairs, and the need to burn it all down in order to expose the truth.

*   *   *

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 acted as a catalyst for various protest movements around the country. Marches have occurred on the White House doorstep since the signing of the Constitution, but the Trump administration triggered a marked influx. Beyond Washington, protests like the Women’s March and National Pride March were seen nation-wide. People from all over rallied together to advocate for science and evidenced-based policies, for immigrant’s rights and racial justice, for transparency over Russian involvement in elections, and even for the publication of Trump’s tax returns. People, especially those liberal-leaning, felt that their voices weren’t being heard and that the President was not reflective of their values. Change in politics is gradual and incremental, but it felt like everyday a new injustice was being thrown at the American people. Families were being separated at the border, more evidence that Russia swayed the 2016 election came to light, allegations of sexual abuse from the President were revealed, racism, sexism, and hate seem to run rampant and unchecked, and overall many people felt disheartened and disgusted with the state of the nation. So, with the power of social media, users of popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter planned protests. The marches drew thousands of people together, uniting many for a common cause. Today’s youth, often labeled as lazy and entitled, came together in the March for Our Lives, an empowering result from one of many tragic school shootings. High-schoolers fed up with feeling unsafe on their campuses advocated for stricter gun control laws and led the biggest youth rally since the Vietnam War, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people. Americans refused to take anything sitting down and demonstrated their needs loudly to those in charge.

The effectiveness of these protests is a tricky one to determine, as many perceived different goals for the marches. Some believe getting people out on the streets and building a community of like-minded people is a strong start, but others think success is nothing less than immediate change and tangible evidence that they have been heard. Further, some argue that current protests lack the solid political backing that are required to enact true change, and that the marches will never be as powerful as they mean to be without that factor. However, even though many of the things modern protests have demanded have yet to come to fruition, it does not necessarily mean the marches have been for naught. Many of the marches throughout history that today are viewed as world-shattering did not see the change they were fighting for immediately. Politics take time, and the justice and change in policies the people demand to see might still be a long time coming. However, it is necessary to take up the fight, for the people to demonstrate that enough is enough.

Protest songs in the past like “Fortunate Son” by Credence Clearwater Revival or “The Times They are A-Changin” by Bob Dylan rallied people for their cause, stoking the flames of change in hearts across the nation. Music was a way for artists to contribute to the fight, giving a voice to those silenced and reflecting the opinions of the oppressed or wronged. Protest songs today have the same effect, uniting thousands to sing in one voice and empowering movements. “Burn the House Down” provides a battlecry for a whole new generation of people. It is a warning of accountability for those in the corrupt establishment; the harbingers will burn it down.

Works Cited “Burn the House Down” Music Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnyLfqpyi94 AJR Zach Sang Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQnXGsKwaIU&t=1725 Recent Marches Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rallies_and_protest_marches_in_Washington,_D.C.#2018 Supersize Me 2 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken! Article on political protests, bustle.com: https://www.bustle.com/p/do-political-protests-actually-change-anything-29952 2006 NYC Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2006_in_New_York_City AJR Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJR_(band) One of AJR’s “How We Made THE CLICK” Vidoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YWj3DAo6xM  ∎

More on Olivia ~ Minerva’s Owl Homepage

[maswartz]

IN THE PROGRESSIVE COLLEGE TOWN where I live, one sees a lot of “Bernie” bumper stickers on a lot of Subarus. Probably these are remnants of 2016, when the Independent from Vermont masqueraded as a Democrat, dividing the party and hobbling Hillary Clinton’s campaign just enough to fuck up the final tally. Although I held with HRC then as now, I don’t begrudge anyone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primaries four years ago, when we first became acquainted with the ugly font and awful shade of blue on his campaign merch. But to support him today, after Trump, after Mueller, is akin to insisting, on Christmas 2019, that despite ample evidence to the contrary, Michael Jackson is innocent, because you really dig Off the Wall.

“Don’t they know?” I scream when I see these Bernie stickers. “Don’t they realize who he really is?” Apparently not. But then, to them, and to most on what Sean Hannity might call the “radical left,” Bernie is not a person as much as an ideal: A sort of liberal Santa Claus who will come down our collective chimney to deliver free healthcare and free college, and, with the aid of his ineffable North Pole magic, break up the banks, slay the patriarchy, eliminate racism, end income inequality, and tax corporations into insolvency—all while raising the minimum wage for his workshop elves. How he plans to actually accomplish any of this he only hints at—Bernie rarely deigns to answer process questions and usually gets grouchy when pressed for details—but it all sounds so wonderful we want to believe, just as we every year insist that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Unfortunately, the flesh-and-blood Bernie Sanders, if elected, would not have the requisite power to fulfill his lofty promises—any more than the tipsy Macy’s Santa will leave the mall on a sleigh driven by flying reindeer. Bernie is a real person, and he is deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed. He would be a horrible candidate in the general election—like, McGovern-in-’72-level bad—and, more urgently, his nomination would ensure that, whoever won, the White House remained in Russian hands.

The Bernie extolled by the bros is a myth, just like the Trump that MAGA adores—just like Neverland, and just like Santa Claus. We need to face some cold, hard truths, before Sanders scolds and finger-wags his way to a second term for Donald Trump. We cannot permit this egomaniacal fraud to spoil yet another election.

Bernie is a socialist—but of the Union of Soviet Socialists variety.

Hey, there’s a reason Santa Claus wears red!

Bernie is a self-styled “socialist” who has bought, hook line and sinker, the Stalinist propaganda about Marxism and the glories of the Soviet Union. This was understandable if you were Dalton Trumbo in 1947. After all, the governing philosophy of communism is “let’s share everything so there is no want,” which is kind of appealing, especially next to the “fuck you, pay me” mantra of unvarnished Trump-variety capitalism. Seven-plus decades later, alas, the naïveté borders on delusional.

From the Young Peoples Socialist League to his membership in the Liberty Union Party, which sought to nationalize (and not just “break up”) the banks, to his time at the Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, which extolled Stalin—who slaughtered more people than Hitler—as “Sun of the Nations,” to his hanging a Soviet flag in his Burlington mayoral office, Soviet boosterism is the thruline of Bernie's career.

Bernie took his wife to the Soviet Union for their honeymoon, as one does. For years, he extolled the virtues of the USSR. Rather than grok that it’s all KGB-fed propaganda and lies, he’s been a staunch Bolshevik apologist for his entire adult life.

I mean, the guy has a dacha, ffs.

Look, our healthcare system is flawed. I’d love some sort of universal coverage like they have in every other developed country. But the best person to promote the de facto nationalization of the healthcare system is not a Soviet apologist who once wanted to nationalize the banks, too.

Bernie is unpopular with Black voters.

To be fair, Sanders (likely) really does want equality and all those nice things he talks about. Good for him. The problem is that his vision of “socialist” utopia is absolutist and focuses too much on the (white, male) working class that he, like his beloved Marx, idolizes and idealizes.

Despite some high-profile Black supporters, Bernie remains unpopular with Black voters, particularly Black women. This, and not “the rigged DNC,” is why HRC kicked his ass in the primaries. Could it be that Black voters have made Bernie as a BS artist? Those are his initials, after all.

The failure of the United States to properly examine and make amends for slavery contributes mightily to the country’s enduring racism, on which MAGA feeds. Not to even discuss reparations is madness. Unsurprisingly, Bernie does not understand this:

Marcus H. Johnson@marcushjohnson

Bernie Sanders thinks reparations is "just writing a check" instead of a redress for state sanctioned terrorism, violence, and being shut out of the economic, political, and legal systems for 250+ years. How is reparations "just writing a check," and free college not?

Aaron Rupar@atrupar

Bernie Sanders on reparations on The View: "I think that right now our job is to address the crises facing the American people in our communities, and I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check." https://t.co/FXso34iSbs

March 1st 2019

470 Retweets1,065 Likes

To win the resounding victory necessary to defeat Trump and the Russian hackers threatening to sabotage yet another election, overwhelming African-American voter turnout is essential. Black voters are more likely to turn out in big numbers for Joe Biden—especially if he runs with Kamala Harris, as we K-Hivers hope—than yet another elderly New Yorker who makes pie-in-the-sky promises he can’t possibly keep.

Bernie is lazy.

Sanders spent the early part of his career flitting between low-paying odd jobs:

He bounced around for a few years, working stints in New York as an aide at a psychiatric hospital and teaching preschoolers for Head Start, and in Vermont researching property taxation for the Vermont Department of Taxes and registering people for food stamps for a nonprofit called the Bread and Law Task Force.

Then as now, he was more given to talking the talk than walking the walk. In 1970, the 30-year-old Liberty Union Party socialist was kicked out of a Vermont commune for not doing his share of the work. His days there were instead spent in “endless political discussion.”

Sanders’ idle chatter did not endear him with some of the commune’s residents, who did the backbreaking labor of running the place. [Kate] Daloz writes [in her history of the commune] that one resident, Craig, “resented feeling like he had to pull others out of Bernie’s orbit if any work was going to get accomplished that day.” Sanders was eventually asked to leave. 

Eventually, Bernie found a career that would allow him to talk a big game but accomplish precious little: politics. For the decades he’s been in Congress, his record is pretty scant. Seven bills in 28 years, including two that name post offices, is nothing to write home about (unless you’re writing home to one of those post offices)—although Sanders has been a quiet champion of gun rights for most of his Congressional career, as well as a dependable “nay” vote on Russian sanctions, so I guess there’s that.

But hey, I’m sure a guy who has avoided labor as assiduously as possible for 78 years will magically turn into a workaholic as an octogenarian. That heart attack no doubt jump-started his engines. Speaking of which…

Bernie is old, and he just had a heart attack.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually a heart attack. Maybe it was just a life-threatening cardiac issue that required emergency surgery. We don’t know, because Sanders has not yet released his medical report. But he has promised to do so, just as he promised to release his taxes and then waited a million years to make good. Will he bring the receipts before next week, as he said he would?

The Speaker's Basilisk⚖️@PelosiLegatus

Why hasn’t @BernieSanders released his medical records yet? He just has a heart attack three months ago, which he lied about. What is he hiding from the American people? Why is the press so afraid to dig into his dishonesty?

December 23rd 2019

173 Retweets444 Likes

Even if his medical report checks out, I mean…there’s ageism, and then there are actuarial tables. A President Sanders would turn eighty in 2021, his first year in office. That would make him the oldest first-term president by a significant margin. He can’t live forever; in that way, he’s not like Santa Claus.

Bernie is a misogynist.

That Bernie Sanders is some sort of radical feminist, a paradigm for how men should be in the post-Third-Wave world, is almost as ridiculous as his stubborn refusal to comb his hair.

Before he launched his political career, he was a deadbeat dad. Remember, Bernie was a graduate of the prestigious University of Chicago, in an era when college degrees were relatively rare. Instead of putting food on the table, he was running quixotic political campaigns as the standard-bearer of a barely functional party. As Spandan Chakrabarti writes:

In 1971, Vermont was debating a tenant’s rights bill. One of the testimonials to Vermont’s State Senate Judiciary Committee came from one Susan Mott of Burlington, who said the legislation did not go far enough in prohibiting discrimination against single mothers and recipients of welfare benefits. Mott had one child and was on welfare. That one child…was Levi Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ son. Which begs the question, why did Bernie Sanders’ (former?) girlfriend and his son have to be on welfare? Where was the University of Chicago graduate’s considerable marketable skills? What was 5-year-old Levi’s father doing that he couldn't afford to support his own child? It turns out he was too busy coming in third with single digit votes.

To be fair, Bernie did bring home a little bit of bacon writing stuff like this:

A man goes home and masturbates [to] his typical fantasy. A woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused.

A woman enjoys intercourse with her man—as she fantasizes [about] being raped by 3 men simultaneously.

Even if those lines were intended as a provocative rhetorical flourish to be shot down later in the essay, I mean…what feminist ally would write something like that?

And then there’s the more recent sexual harassment issues that seem to be pervasive in his campaign offices. He missed one of the Russian sanction votes because he was busy dealing with it:

The only one to miss the vote was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. He was meeting with women who had accused his 2016 presidential campaign of sexual misconduct, his spokesman, Josh Miller-Lewis, told CNBC.

As if to confirm his misogynist bona fides, Sanders this month endorsed the candidacy of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, no feminist ally—before the bad optics forced him to reverse course:

“As I said yesterday, Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics and he’s inspired people all across the country,” the Vermont senator said. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns. Cenk today said he is rejecting all endorsements for his campaign, and I retract my endorsement.”

That Cenk is running for the California seat vacated by rising star Katie Hill, a victim of criminal revenge porn who was shamed into stepping down, makes the gaffe even worse.

Bernie is not a Democrat.

Of all the idiotic narratives spewed by the “Bernie bros” about 2016, the most asinine was that the process had to be rigged because the DNC clearly preferred Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. Um…why would it not? Just as a New York Yankees fan club would want its leader to be a ride-or-die Yankee fan rather than a waffler who rooted for either the Bronx Bombers or the Red Sox depending on which was doing better that year, so the Democratic National Committee wants an actual Democrat to be its nominee. Duh.

And this was not any nominee. HRC was practically funding the operation herself, to help with the down-ballot races Bernie could give a shit about. Anyone can scold the country about big banks and wage inequality, but to actually, you know, govern requires working well with other people, a skill that seems to have eluded Sanders for the last 30 years.

Alas, the incorrigible Senator has learned nothing from 2016. He’s still playing the hackneyed “rabble-rousing outsider” card:

The Hill@thehill

Sen. @BernieSanders: "We are going to take on the Democratic establishment."

December 22nd 2019

426 Retweets1,930 Likes

The election of 2020 is, or should be, a referendum on Trump. It’s not about taking on the Democrats. That sort of internecine divisiveness is exactly what Putin wants. Which makes perfect sense when we consider that…

Bernie is (at a minimum) a Useful Idiot for Putin.

The bots go on the offensive whenever I tweet that Bernie is a Useful Idiot for Russia. But he is Useful, in that he operates as a divisive force in the Democratic Party, which aids Putin. And he’s certainly an Idiot, in that he doesn't realize the damage he’s done. But does he really not know?

The Mueller Report makes it clear that Russian IC was helping the Sanders campaign. Either Bernie didn’t realize this, and is an idiot, or he did realize it and played along, and is a traitor. Either way, the guy who hired former Paul Manafort chum Tad Devine to run his campaign cannot be trusted with standing up to Putin and the powerful forces of transnational organized crime, no matter how passionate his anti-Wall Street screeds.

(Sidenote: Tad Devine is now peddling his Kremlin-y wares for Andrew Yang, which perhaps explains Yang’s recent remark that he is open to granting Donald Trump a pardon. This, needless to say, is disqualifying).

Put it this way: Are we sure that a Nominee Sanders—an almost-eighty-year-old who just had a heart attack—would not pick the Russophile cult member Tulsi Gabbard as his running mate? The “anti-anti-Trump Left,” as Jonathan Chait calls it, is alive and well, sharing, “in addition to enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders, [a] deep skepticism of the Democratic Party’s mobilization against the president.” So: traitors, basically. Would not Sanders, if given the chance, throw meat to this rabid fan base, if only to generate more adulation? Do we really trust the judgment of the guy who can’t ensure that his own campaign headquarters is not a hostile work environment?

Bernie still, years after the fact, cannot understand that he contributed to HRC’s defeat—just as he can’t see that his ideas about the Soviet Union and communism have been debunked. He doesn’t have it in him to realize, much less admit, he was wrong. And why should he? As long as well-meaning people—especially young people; especially young women; especially pretty young women—keep “feeling the Bern,” he will continue to happily soak up the attention, like the insufferable narcissist he is. Why Millennials support the guy instead of OK-Boomering him to oblivion is a head-scratcher. Maybe it’s because he was born two months before Pearl Harbor and is therefore older than the Boomers?

Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. Repeat: Bernie Sanders is the Trump of the Left. He’s an egomaniac who believes his own hype, like Trump. And like Trump, Bernie is selling snake oil; we just happen to like his brand of snake oil. He’s a bad mall Santa, promising everyone a pony, when all he can deliver is a lump of coal. And make no mistake: far from assuring a worker’s paradise, his nomination would bring about the end of the republic.

It’s not a “revolution.” It’s a con job. And it’s got the full support of the Russians.

[vldanya]

Name: currently goes by Anya Katz; full family name is Eunhye “Anya” Natalia Chou-Katzayev

Stage name: Anya

Birthday: August 26, 1995 

Gender + pronouns: she/her

Hometown: Paris, France

Company: Summit Media

Group / Soloist:  Lark

Position: Leader, main vocalist (1)

Variety interest?: Yes

Faceclaim: (g)i-dle’s Jeon Soyeon

Skills

Acting: 5/10

Singing: 10/10

Dancing: 10/10

Rapping: 3/10

Variety: 3/10

divorce tw, alcoholism mention.

anya knows how to love. to love the sugar-snow beneath her skis on the canadian rockies. to love the romantic atmosphere as she walks a lonely parisian night. to love the neon markets in downtown seoul. to love the furious scottish seaside, or the tender californian cliffs.

to love the promise of adventure.

her mother, you see, was a showstopper— a monster, if you will, in the world of actors as well as in the basest sense of the word.

as a woman who grew up poor in the rural areas of busan, all that kim dahee wanted was that she would never again want for a thing. she did care for anya, at least a little. it was her father she didn’t care for: chou dongwoo, a humble chicken-store owner with the kindest eyes of any man on the planet and a stout, welcoming build. dahee loved him— really, she did. but they say she was a white bird in a blizzard, or a blue dolphin in the sea: someone like dongwoo never had a chance to catch her. when dahee drops week-old anya on dongwoo’s porch, it’s carelessly, with a warning to allow visits at least once a week.

in the end, though, it was dongwoo who named her.

“my sweet, sweet eunhye,” he whispers as he kisses her small head each night.

age 4.

andrei katzayev comes into their lives on a simple business trip to propose an advertising gig for dahee. they want to expand their fine liquor empire’s reach into south korea, you see, and anya’s mother is the clearest choice for her notoriety. she  is obviously obsessed with the sheer power that andrei bleeds from every pore. anya, on the other hand, falls in love with his presence.

he is handsome, with blond hair and a fine-boned jawline. he is the heir to the katzayev group, who are affluent and well-spoken and practically russian royalty. but, above all, he is patient and kind: his laugh is a deep, rich baritone, and he has no shortage of it.

one small business trip turns into him staying in seoul out of concern for the way dahee treats anya. he becomes close with both her and dongwoo, and winds up buying a high-rise in seoul to split his time between in order to keep an eye on dahee. to keep her in check when it comes to her daughter and ex.

andrei is the one who practically raises anya for her formative years. it’s interesting, the way anya was named by two fathers; he always had a difficult time saying “eunhye.” it’s how the name anya came to be.

it’s through andrei’s intervention that monthly visits with dahee go from four, to three, to two. and before she knows it, anya is on a private jet to moscow once every other week to visit andrei, the generous man who has taken in this girl and her father as his own.

one day, she thinks, she might become a pilot.

age 5.

if the affair between an actress and a nobody was the talk of south korea, then the custody battle between an actress and that same nobody is even bigger news.

this time, though, it’s different. this time, andrei is there to protect the child.

the trial hardly lasts a week; andrei’s brought in the best lawyers money could buy, and the best bodyguards who keep the camera’s from anya’s face. kim dahee is labelled a cheater, a liar, a minx— but there’s only one label that anyone really cares about.

she is unfit to keep custody.

age 6.

moscow probably isn’t the best place to raise a child, but cameras aren’t good companions. both andrei and dongwoo agree that anya needs some time away from seoul until the media circus dies down.

when anya and andrei move their belongings into a ridiculously large mansion on the outskirts of paris, it’s with a scream of glee that she leaps into dongwoo’s arms, for andrei had spent the past year applying for a working visa for the younger man. it’s important, he believes, that anya grows up with as many positive influences and support systems as she can. so in come the katzayev aunts and uncles, the grandmothers and grandfathers, the cousins and nieces and nephews, to greet the newest addition to their family. andrei isn’t set to take over the company until the current matriarch passes, so much of his time he devotes to his adopted daughter.

dongwoo earns his keep as the personal chef to the katzayev family and eventually remarries a lovely french artist, cecilia beaulieu, and within a year they introduce anya to her newest half-sister anne-marie. they stay in the katzayev guest house for a few years before purchasing their own townhome in the city. 

the chou and katzayev families begin an alliance and friendship that, unbeknownst to them, will last for many more generations to come.

age 10.

but the story isn’t over yet. what proper adventure ends just when things are getting good?

it’s at andrei’s insistence that his daughter grows up to be a clever, well-adjusted, independent young woman. her dream of pilotry is not yet forgotten, so he buys her a plane that he promises she will be able to fly as soon as she is licensed.

as for anya herself . . .

anya is bored. she’s not technically allowed to start practicing pilotry till she’s fourteen, nor is she really supposed to lift a finger. clean? the maids do that. cook? the chefs do that. if there was a way for andrei to spoil her into not having to go the restroom herself, he would.

with that, a permanent nest is set up in the corner of the estate library with strict orders by her-ten-year-oldness herself not to touch it. not even her beloved cousins are allowed in, for anya loves to learn. andrei has hired a tutor for her to learn latin, french, brush up on her korean and russian and english. the nest is complete with soft blankets, overstuffed pillows, and books— admittedly— dog-eared, it’s anya’s second home.

her third home is parisian streets. anya looks often mismatched when she slips on her well-loved tennis shoes, muddy with adventure, with a light sundress. and over that comes her favorite woolly cardigan, too large but satisfyingly fuzzy. then over that, a purse: one that her stepmother cecilia crocheted herself, and in it anya religiously stuffs a frozen apple, some cheese crackers, jam, and an orangina bottle with a couple scoops of sugar. the gps tracker goes on and attaches to her stockings. the navy blue baseball cap is painstakingly adjusted over a lovely low bun. jingling with coins, young anya sets out everyday in search of a new story to tell.

age 13.

her frozen apple for the day has thawed out enough to eat when anya decides to settle down next to a trash can by the mona lisa and eat her meal. she’s used enough to the routine that she’s good at sneaking food behind security guards’ backs. andrei is out for the next week, and it happens to be one of the weeks that dongwoo is working on opening his own restaurant and cecilia is going to be at her art house. so for tonight, anya’s got paris.

the venus de milo is stupid, and the seine smells a little bit gross, and anya’s hair is down as she walks the same streets with a sense of romantic languidness.

but that— that’s new. curiosity piqued, anya steps closer to a little glass door. the light refracts off it in a vibrant rainbow. she hasn’t seen this building before; and what she hasn’t seen in paris is that with which she is in love.

it’s the voice of an angel. resonant, clear, in an octave where anya cannot tell if it is a man or a woman. she peeks through the door, colors falling upon her face, and listens for hours. the old masters catch her eventually, of course. they chase her away with a broom, because who cares if she’s the heiress to the katzayev empire? she laughs with glee as she hikes up her skirts and teases them over her shoulder, the wind catching her hair as she makes her grand escape.

she knows now.

she has to sing.

age 18.

to give up one dream for another is a dangerous game. her flying lessons have been going spectacularly, and the door is open for her to inherit the katzayev liquor business. she’s everything to make her father proud, and an outspoken, opinionated, fierce young lady.

even more dangerous is the return to korea, where the face of her younger self was plastered across tabloids. but five years of being a singer aren’t enough to cut it, not for anya; she’s made up her mind to return to korea, where she’ll work with performance groups, then return to france or russia or america, and bring the culture there. she sings until her voice gives out, dances until her ankles are sprained, then dances after they’re snug in a compress. 

eventually, she hears about an audition opportunity, and to her, it’s her next big chronicle-in-the-making. she becomes a main vocalist for summit media on hard work alone.

age 24; present-day.

anya katzayev, which she shortens in korea to anya katz for the sake of pronunciation, fancies herself a well-rounded person. educated, skilled, protective, commandingly charismatic. . .

. . . and a bit of a spitfire. maybe it’s the environment in which she grew up, but it’s a bit of a tough role to chew as she performs on joy tv. She’s talented enough that she manages to land a spot in the group, but her family always told her to speak her mind. in conservative korea, that’s a bit of a vice. it’s obvious how much she tries to bite her tongue. but when she can’t . . .

“why are you feeding her so little?” she says critically to a staff member who buys only a salad for one of her future group members. “don’t starve my sister.”

“it’s not fair that those pip girls have to conform to what the public thinks their concept should be,” she mentions offhandedly with a resolute nod as the group walks through the airport. “let strong women be strong women.”

“someone should give particle a break,” she announces, the bold words at odds with the delicate way she eats her kimbap. “they have to deal with sasaeng fans— who, by the way, hardly pass as fans— and strict schedules? it shouldn’t be allowed.”

“my mother is nobody to me, no matter how famous she may have been,” she declares, because by the time people realize that anya katz is kim dahee’s daughter, the girls’ names have been revealed. “my father raised me to understand that family doesn’t treat each other the way that woman treated me.”

all on camera, too. “she’s a handful,” is what the staff members say about her. “that anya is a handful.” but she is a fighter. she so obviously cares for her group members in that way that her russian family raised her to. it’s that which sings to the public.

anya katz: the fiery leader who can take on the force of the world.

[crimethinc]

1919: When the Bolsheviks Turned on the Workers—Looking Back on the Putilov and Astrakhan Strikes, One Hundred Years Later

One hundred years ago in Russia, thousands of workers were on strike in the city of Astrakhan and at the Putilov factory in Petrograd, the capital of the revolution. Strikes at the Putilov factory had been one of the principal sparks that set off the February Revolution in 1917, ending the tsarist regime. Now, the bosses were party bureaucrats, and the workers were striking against a socialist government. How would [the dictatorship of the proletariat respond?

Following up on our book about the Bolshevik seizure of power, The Russian Counterrevolution, we look back a hundred years to observe the anniversary of the Bolshevik slaughter of the Putilov factory workers who had helped to bring them to power. Today, when many people who did not live through actually existing socialism are propagating a sanitized version of events, it is essential to understand that the Bolsheviks meted out some of their bloodiest repression not to capitalist counterrevolutionaries, but to striking workers, anarchists, and fellow socialists. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

If you find any of this difficult to believe, please, by all means, check our citations, consult the bibliography at the end, and investigate for yourself.

A note on the artwork: the artist, Ivan Vladimirov, was a realist painter who participated in the Russian Revolution, joining the Petrograd militia after the toppling of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a style of documentary realism to portray scenes from the Revolution and Civil War. Afterwards, he continued to work as an artist in good standing with the Soviet Union—such good standing that he lived into the 1940s and died of natural causes!—although he was compelled to shift to making fluff pieces lauding Soviet military triumphs and social harmony.

Bolshevik Realism

In March 1919, the Bolsheviks had uncontested power over the Russian state, but the revolution was slipping from their grasp. As self-styled pragmatists and realists, they believed that revolution had to be dictated from above by experts. Who can better understand the needs of the peasants and the proper means for communalizing the land and sharing the harvest than a revolutionary bureaucrat in an office in the city? And who knows more about the plight of the factory workers than a party official who worked in a factory once and now spends all his time going to committee meetings and interpreting the dictates of the Fathers of the Proletariat, men like Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, and Zinoviev who never worked in a factory or toiled in the fields in their lives?1 And who better to protect the interests of the soldiers than the political commissar who stands at the back of the line during an offensive, pistol in hand, ready to shoot anyone who does not charge into enemy fire?2

Bolshevik realism made it clear that the only way to execute a real revolution was to take over the state, make it even stronger, and use it to stamp out all their enemies—who were, by definition, counterrevolutionaries. But the counterrevolutionaries must have had secret schools in every town and village, because by 1919 more and more people were joining their ranks, especially peasants, workers, and soldiers.

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” would have to kill a whole lot of proletarians. Not everyone could make it to the Promised Land.

1919: Russians searching for food in the garbage during the lean times of the Civil War.

Enemies, Enemies Everywhere

The dastardly anarchists had corrupted the age-old revolutionary slogan, the liberation of the workers is the task of the political commissars—get back to work, it’s under control. They had replaced it with a dangerous revisionist lie—“the liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves”—and more and more people had come to believe this lie. In April 1918, the Bolsheviks unleashed a terror against the anarchists, who were becoming especially strong in Moscow. In September, they instituted a general Red Terror against all their former allies, killing over 10,000 in the first two months and implementing the gulag system.

They also had to turn their guns against the peasants, who were in open rebellion against the policy of “war communism” by which the Red Army and party bureaucrats could steal whatever food, livestock, and supplies from the peasants they saw fit.3 Evidently, the uneducated peasants didn’t have the vocabulary to understand that this theft was a “requisitioning,” that their starvation was a form of “communism,” and that it was being supervised by incorruptible men who had their best interests at heart. In August 1918, Lenin directed the Cheka and the Red Army to carry out mass executions in Penza and Nizhniy Novgorod to put an end to the protests. But dissent only spread, and the peasants gave up on protesting in order to arm themselves and fight back. Many formed “Green Armies,” localized peasant detachments that often fought against both the White and the Red Armies.

There was also a shortage of realism in the Red Army. Arguably, the most effective fighting units in the war against the tsarists and the capitalists of the White Army were the localized, volunteer detachments that elected and recalled their own officers; granted no special privileges to officers; defined their goals, general strategies, and organizational principles in assemblies; relied on the goodwill of local soviets to supply them; and were intimately familiar with the terrain they operated on. Such detachments included Marusya’s Free Combat Druzhina, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army, the Dvinsk Regiment, and the Anarchist Federation of the Altai. Few other detachments were able to inflict critical defeats on tsarist forces even when they were overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned.4 The fact that the combatants fought for a cause they believed in, were led by strategists elected on account of their abilities, and were wholeheartedly supported by the local peasants and workers enabled them to use the terrain to their advantage, fight more bravely than their opponents, innovate creative and intelligent strategies in response to developing circumstances, and transition between guerrilla and conventional warfare in a way that confounded the enemy. Such groups were instrumental in defeating General Denikin, Admiral Kolchak, and Baron Wrangel, ending the three major White offensives—not to mention capturing Moscow at the beginning of the October Revolution.

But all of these groups suffered a fatal defect. These fighters often prioritized listening to local peasants and workers and their own common soldiers over the wise dictates of the Fathers of the Proletariat emanating from the capital. Even worse, sometimes they did hear those dictates, yet still disobeyed them. And when the Party leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it was necessary to massacre peasants or workers for the sake of the revolution, the detachments led by those very peasants and workers simply weren’t up to the task.

1917: Eating a dead horse.

In order to increase the efficiency of the Red Army, the wise masters of the Bolshevik Party decided to take lessons from the great militarists of history, starting with the Tsarist army. By June 1918, they had abolished all the anti-realist policies that revolutionaries had wrongheadedly introduced into the Red Army: they discontinued the election of officers by the soldiers who would serve under them, reinstituted aristocratic privileges and pay grades for officers, recruited former Tsarist officers accustomed to those privileges, and brought in political commissars to spy on the soldiers and root out any incorrect thinking. After all, rebellious idealist soldiers had toppled one regime in 1917—and without a sufficient dose of realism, they might well topple another.

The Bolsheviks had also learned from imperialist armies throughout history that sent soldiers from one end of the empire to fight rebels at the other end of the empire. This was a sentimental kindness on the part of the Bolsheviks. Psychologically, it was much easier for Korean-speaking soldiers to avoid fraternizing with Ukrainian peasants and workers near Kharkiv—and on occasion to massacre them—and for Ukrainian-speaking soldiers to avoid fraternizing with Korean peasants and workers near Vladivostok (and occasionally to massacre them, too). This strategic practice also helped keep soldiers from getting lost. A Red Army soldier from Ukraine, fighting counterrevolutionaries in Irkutsk, would be hard-pressed to obtain support from locals or find his way home without leave. That ensured that he would know to stay with his regiment rather than deserting in a fit of anti-realism. And if he did get lost, a blond, round-eyed Ukrainian would be easy to find among the locals, who could return him to the proper authorities. Good organization: this is how a successful revolution is waged!

Yet the soldiers of the Red Army weren’t educated enough to understand. A million desertions took place in a single year. Many Red Army detachments took their weapons and joined the peasants who were forming independent Green Armies. Later, huge groups would join Makhno, who was naïvely defeating the Whites without installing a dictatorship of his own. So the Bolsheviks had to be cleverer than their tsarist and imperialist mentors. They shot tens of thousands of deserters, but this age-old tactic wasn’t enough. In a burst of inspired realism, they improvised a new tactic: taking the family members of soldiers hostage, and executing the family members if deserters did not turn themselves in to be shot.5

Propaganda poster: “Deserter, I extend my hand to you. You are as much a destroyer of the Worker-Peasant State as I, a Capitalist!”

While so many of the Red Army’s bullets were ending up in the bodies of Red Army soldiers or in the uneducated brains of anti-realist peasants, too few were being fired at the White Army—and the White Army was growing, threatening the revolution on every side. The Red Army was slowly pushing back the Northern Russian Expedition of British and US troops on the Northern Dvina front, but intense fighting over the winter had failed to dislodge General Denikin from the Donbass area of eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, a French expeditionary force had landed in Odessa, the White Army had cemented its hold on the Caucasus, and at the beginning of March, Admiral Kolchak had begun a general offensive on the eastern front, quickly capturing Ufa and continuing to gain ground.

The anarchist Black Army held the line in southern Ukraine, but their clever Bolshevik allies were starving them of weapons and ammunition, hoping the White Army would finish them off. This was an effective economization of resources on the part of the Fathers of the Proletariat. They would not have to spend time debating anarchists or making propaganda against them if the anarchists were all dead, and it was much easier to present themselves as the alternative to the confused tsarists and liberals of the White Army than it was to debate the anarchists, with their insidious lies about people being capable of liberating themselves.

The stratagem of denying resources to the Black Army was to backfire in summer 1919. After Denikin broke through the lines, he advanced so far against a helpless Trotsky that he threatened Moscow, and only a resounding success by anarchists at the Battle of Peregenovka in September 1919 cut off White supply lines, ultimately forcing Denikin to retreat. But after all, that was why the Bolsheviks had allies: it was easier not to put all the people they wanted to kill on their “enemies” list all at once, in hopes that they would first kill each other in ways that would be advantageous to the Bolsheviks.

1920: Bolshevik propaganda in the village.

Worker Resistance to the Soviet State

Let’s rewind to early 1919, when, facing so much resistance, the Bolsheviks needed more allies. They had legalized the Mensheviks after a few months of the Terror, and gotten the various anarchist detachments to focus their energies on fighting the Whites, but they still needed more support. After half a year of killing and imprisoning members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs), the Bolsheviks legalized the SRs; to be fair, the previous year, the SRs had tried killing and imprisoning the Bolsheviks, after the Bolsheviks had tried to monopolize all the instruments that would allow them to kill and imprison people. The Bolsheviks had won those monopolies now, but a revolution can’t defend itself if too many of the participants are dead or in prison. They still needed help getting the common people in line working for and fighting for the Bolsheviks. The SRs had been good propagandists and considerably more popular than the Bolsheviks. Besides, it was easier to keep the SRs under their thumb when they were out in the open, with public offices in Moscow, than when they were operating underground.

The SRs decided to trust the Bolsheviks, hoping that they could regain control of the soviets or win over other revolutionary forces. But once they came out of hiding, the Cheka began periodically arresting the SR leadership, accusing them of conspiracy, and hustling them off to the gulags. The organization never regained the strength to oppose the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the legalization of the SRs and Mensheviks had reduced the number of enemies the Communists had to fight, and set more forces to work putting out propaganda in favor of the revolution.

The Bolsheviks still had plenty of problems. If it wasn’t bad enough that so many peasants and soldiers were rebelling, the factory workers also began to rebel. In the city of Astrakhan, the workers went on strike. Even worse, many Red Army soldiers joined them, and similar strikes began to spread in the cities of Orel, Tver, Tula, and Ivanovo. Then strikes broke out at the giant Putilov factory in Petrograd, the capital of the revolution.

The Putilov factory had built rolling stock and other products for the railways, before branching out into artillery and armaments for the military. Later, they would also manufacture the tractors that would become essential to the industrialization of Russian agriculture, after Lenin ordained the transition from war communism to the “state capitalism” of the New Economic Policy. A strike at this factory was especially embarrassing for the Bolsheviks, because the Putilov factory had been one of the origin points of the revolution. The revolution of February 1917 had sprung from four groups: rebellious military units at the front, women protesting government food rationing, sailors stationed at Kronstadt and Petrograd, and striking workers at the Putilov factory. Strikes at the Putilov factory had also been one of the sparks that caused the 1905 Revolution.

The Bolsheviks had already dealt with the Dvinsk Regiment—heroes of the revolution and a symbol of the refusal of soldiers to fight in an imperialist war—by assassinating their commander, Grachov, and disbanding the regiment. They had managed to do this quietly and out of the public eye. Later, in 1921, they would explain that in the course of the revolution, the Kronstadt sailors had somehow gone from being the staunchest defenders of revolution to become petty bourgeois individualists infiltrated by White agents. No one really believed Trotsky when he said this, but it didn’t matter.6 What was really at stake was not truth, but power; the Bolsheviks had already crushed all their other enemies, and they resolved questions about the politics of the Kronstadt sailors not by presenting facts, but by slaughtering them, as well.

But the crushing of Kronstadt was still two years in the future. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks still had plenty of enemies, and everyone was watching. The Putilov workers had some simple demands: increased food rations, as they were starving to death; freedom of the press; an end to the Red Terror; and the elimination of privileges for Communist Party members.7 What would the Bolsheviks do? Was it possible to have a revolution without starving the workers, shutting down critical newspapers, disappearing revolutionaries of other tendencies, and elevating Party members as a new aristocracy?

1920: Seeking an escaped kulak.

The Bolshevik Response

What a silly question! The Bolsheviks were realists, and their strategy relied on making the revolution by gaining control of the State. The State was the Revolution, as long as it was a Bolshevik State. They couldn’t make the State stronger without eliminating their rivals, squeezing the workers and peasants for every last drop of sweat and blood, and divvying up the wealth among themselves. Who in their right mind would become a Bolshevik unless that meant obtaining a bigger paycheck, guaranteed food rations, and a chance to move up in the world? The Communist Party needed realists. The idealists would starve. Those who were willing to say that the State was Revolution and obedience was freedom earned a chance to contribute their talents to building the new apparatus.

As for the suckers who remained workers rather than becoming Party officials, the Bolsheviks knew that the role of workers was to work. Workers who did not work were like broken machines. As any realist can tell you, when a machine breaks the only thing to do is take it out back and put a bullet in its brain.

Between March 12 and March 14, the Cheka cracked down in Astrakhan. They executed between 2000 and 4000 striking workers and Red Army deserters. Some they killed by firing squad, others by drowning them—tying stones around their necks and throwing them in the river. They had learned the latter technique from Lenin’s heroes, the Jacobins—enlightened bourgeois revolutionaries who massacred tens of thousands of peasants who weren’t educated enough to know that the commons were a thing of the past and land privatization was the way of the future.8

The Bolsheviks also killed a smaller number of members of the bourgeoisie, between 600 and 1000. The smartest of the bourgeoisie had already joined the Communist Party, recognizing it as the best way to profit in the new situation. But the stuffier bourgeois conservatives were staunchly opposed to the Bolsheviks, the anarchists, and the aristocrats, as well, though they weren’t against allying with the aristocrats. Any political system in which they could not do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, they called “tyranny.”

The bourgeois conservatives would also have crushed the striking workers, perhaps with hunger instead of bullets, if they had been in charge. Despite this, the Bolsheviks claimed that the striking workers had to be agents of the bourgeois order. Curiously, when anarchists had expropriated the bourgeoisie in Moscow in April, 1918, the Bolsheviks had called the anarchists “bandits” and returned the property to the bourgeois. Now, they killed bourgeois dissidents as well as striking workers—but they reserved the vast majority of the bullets for the workers.

Two days later, on March 16, the Cheka stormed the Putilov factory. They arrested 900 workers and executed 200 of them without a trial. These were pedagogical killings meant to “teach them a lesson,” educating the workers by executing their peers. The workers did not understand yet, but they would have to learn: workers were meant to work. If they had to starve, it was for the good of the proletariat.

The workers did not learn this lesson right away. At first, state repression only intensified worker opposition. According to intercepted Bolshevik cables, 60,000 workers were on strike in Petrograd alone in June 1919, three months after all the executions at the Putilov factory.9 The poor Bolsheviks had no choice but to kill even more workers and expand their gulag system to the point that it could reeducate not just thousands, but millions.

Many later Marxists unfairly blamed Josef Stalin for the USSR turning into a massive machinery of murder, but we can see the origins of that macabre evolution right here in the need of the Bolshevik authorities to kill workers in the name of workers. The entirety of the Party apparatus, from Lenin all the way down, dedicated itself to liquidating all opposition; and the entirety of this monstrous venture was ordained from the moment that the Communists decided that they were the conscious vanguard of the proletariat, that economic egalitarianism could be achieved through political elitism, and that liberatory ends justified authoritarian means.

1921: Requisitioning.

The Economic Policy of the Communist Party

Other revolutionary currents had conflicting ideas regarding the demands of workers and their instruments of self-organization. Some favored the factory councils that spontaneously arose around the February Revolution. Others favored the workers’ unions that had grown immensely in the course of 1917. Only the Bolsheviks had a realist position, changing their relationship with these structures according to which way the wind blew. As documented by Carlos Taibo,10 the Bolsheviks alternated between promoting the soviets and unions, attempting to capture them within larger bureaucratic structures controlled by the Party, eroding their powers, and suppressing them outright. Their approach varied wildly according to whether they believed that they could use these organizations to prop up their own power or feared, instead, that these organizations threatened Bolshevik supremacy. All power to the Party was their only consistent principle.

Throughout 1917, the Bolsheviks gained immense popularity by making all the right propaganda. They promised to redistribute the land directly to the peasants, to end the war without allowing imperialist Germany to annex territory, and to give the workers control of their workplaces. We have already seen how they broke the first two promises. As for their promise to the workers, they pitted different workers’ organizations against each another as they steadily strengthened their bureaucratic control.

In 1917, factory councils had sprung up in hundreds of factories throughout Russia, while membership in trade unions grew from tens of thousands to 1.5 million. At first, the Mensheviks dominated the unions and used their influence to get the unions to support the pre-October Kerensky government. According to a Trotskyist account, “As they were preparing for the seizure of power, Lenin and his followers tried to approach the trade unions from a new angle and to define their role in the Soviet system.” Promising them greater power, the Bolsheviks hoped to win union support for their project of seizing control of the State—or at least acquiescence to it.

According to two other pro-Leninist scholars, Lenin “essentially abandoned the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’” when he “convinced the party that the time was right to seize state power.”11 This is a fairly literal admission of fact. If the soviets were to have all the power, the Party could have none.

In November 1917, immediately after taking power, the Bolsheviks decreed that the factory committees must not participate in the direction of the companies, nor take on any responsibility in their functioning; instead, each committee was subordinated to a “Regional Council of Workers’ Control” which answered to the “All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control. The composition of these higher bodies was decided by the Party, with the trade unions receiving the majority of the seats.12

“The Revolution has been victorious. All power has passed to the Soviets… Strikes and demonstrations are harmful in Petrograd. We ask you to put an end to all strikes on economic and political issues, to resume work and to carry it out in a perfectly ordinary manner… Every man in his place. The best way to support the Soviet Government these days is to carry on with one’s job.”

-Bolshevik spokesmen at the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, October 26 [Old Style calendar], 1917 (quoted in Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921)

“It is absolutely essential that all the authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management… Under these circumstances any direct intervention by the trade unions in the management of enterprises must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible.”

-Lenin speaking at the Eleventh Congress in 1922

Referring again to the Trotskyist account, “The Bolsheviks now called upon the trade unions to render a special service to the nascent Soviet state and to discipline the factory committees. The unions came out firmly against the attempt of the factory committees to form a national organization of their own. They prevented the convocation of a planned all-Russian congress of factory committees and demanded total subordination on the part of the committees.” At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks forced the factory committees to incorporate themselves within the trade unions, in an attempt to curtail their autonomy.

1918: A shooting.

From the moment they were in power, the Bolsheviks treated workers’ councils as a threat. Why? Many Leninists, as well as the aforementioned Trotskyist, claimed that the councils were only conscious of their interests at the level of individual factories; they could not take into account the interests of the entire economy or the entire working class. This is contradicted, though, by the many examples of solidarity between soviets and workers’ councils across the country beginning already in 1917, and the fact of material support by peasants and urban workers for the anarchist detachments fighting against the White Army in the anarchist zones of Ukraine and Siberia, where idealist revolutionaries allowed workers and peasants to organize themselves. The simple fact that the factory councils were trying to coordinate at a countrywide level at the end of 1917 shows that they were in the process of developing what one might reasonably call a universal, proletarian, revolutionary consciousness; it was the Bolsheviks themselves who cut that process short.

From the Bolshevik perspective, what was most dangerous about factory council consciousness was that it might not lead to the particular kind of working-class consciousness that the Bolsheviks desperately needed to stay in power. Self-organized factories would support revolutionary armies of workers and peasants, but they probably would not support the Red Army in suppressing workers and peasants, nor would they support Lenin’s highly unpopular cession of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics to imperial Germany.

The councils were dangerous for another reason as well. Not only were they an organ of workers’ autonomy and self-organization that rendered any political party obsolete, they also tended to erode party discipline. Workers within the councils who were affiliated to the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, or any other party tended to act in accord with their common interests as factory workers rather than maintaining party interests.13

As Paul Avrich pointed out,14 the Bolsheviks made use of a nuanced distinction between two very different versions of workers’ control. Upravleniye meant direct control and self-organization by the workers themselves, but the Communist authorities refused to grant this demand. Their preferred slogan, rabochi control, did not denote anything beyond a nominal supervision of factory organization by workers. Under the system implemented by the Bolsheviks, workers participated in workplace decision-making together with the bosses, who could be the pre-Revolution capitalist owners or agents of the Party and the State, depending on Soviet policy at the moment.

All final decisions were made by the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (the Vesenkha), an unelected, bureaucratic body established in December 1917 by decree of the Sovnarkom and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. All of these bureaucratic bodies were controlled at all times by the Bolsheviks, meaning that no worker could have a final say in workplace decisions without becoming a full-time party operative and climbing to the very highest ranks of the bureaucracy.

Already in March 1918, an assembly of factory councils in Petrograd denounced the autocratic nature of Bolshevik rule and the Bolshevik attempt to dissolve those factory councils not under Party control.15 Such autocracy only increased when the Bolsheviks finally went ahead with the nationalization of the economy in the summer of 1918, increasing Party control and running the factories with the help of “experts” recruited from the old regime.

Though there was initially an ambiguous continuum between the economically oriented factory councils and the politically oriented town or village councils, the Communist Party quickly homogenized and bureaucratized the territorial soviets, starting with codes governing elections to the soviets in March 1918 and finishing by the time of the Soviet Constitution of 1922. Even more quickly, they got rid of the councils comprising all workers in a factory or other workplace, replacing them with symbolic worker representatives completely subordinate to a director appointed by the Party.

The Communists did all of this while paying lip service to their slogan and key campaign promise of 1917, “All Power to the Soviets.” They eventually got around the contradiction of simultaneously promoting and suppressing the soviets by declaring that councils of representatives of representatives, and even those of representatives of representatives of representatives, were also “soviets.” In fact, the committee furthest removed from any actual soviet of real-life peasants, workers, and soldiers was the “Supreme Soviet.” Since the Bolsheviks tightly controlled all these higher, more bureaucratic organs of government, which they had decided should also be called “soviets,” they could say “All Power to the Soviets” with a straight face—because now all they were saying was, “All Power to Us!”

This ingenious trick was very similar to the one used by the Founding Fathers of the United States, when an assortment of wealthy merchants and slave-owners established a government “of the People, by the People, and for the People.” Slave-owners qualified as people; slaves did not.

The Bolsheviks crushed the factory councils first, though they did not wait long to sink their teeth into the unions and drain them of their independence. It is noteworthy that they moved against the unions preemptively, preventing a possible threat to totalitarian rule even before the unions had offered any sign of resistance. At the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918, the Bolsheviks successfully defended their position that the trade unions should be subordinated to the Soviet government, in the face of opposition by Mensheviks and anarchists, who argued that the unions should remain independent.

The Bolsheviks were able to dominate the unions using the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. By 1919, under the pretext of the extraordinary measures required by the Civil War, the Central Council had been fully incorporated into the bureaucracy that was now completely controlled by Party leadership.

Of course, as we have already shown, the Communist Party’s “extraordinary measures” preceded the Russian Civil War; they may have been the primary cause of the opposition and outrage that fueled the multiple and conflicting factions that fought in the Civil War.

In 1921, with the Civil War all but over and Bolshevik dominance indisputable, Lenin and his followers could do away with “war communism.” There followed more excuses about exceptional circumstances, delaying yet again the repartition of the pie in the sky that supposedly awaited the workers in paradise. The result was the New Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin himself described as “a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control” together with state enterprises operating “on a profit basis.”16 Anarchists may have been among the first to level the accusation of “state capitalism,” but Lenin accepted the label as an objective fact.

In conclusion, the Bolsheviks seesawed from November 1917 to the NEP in 1921, changing their economic policy multiple times. Throughout these changes, they entrusted control over the workplace to capitalist bosses with symbolic worker oversight, to Party lackeys, to bureaucratic supreme committees, and to nepmen, the economic opportunists of the NEP era. It seems the only people the Bolsheviks were not willing to trust were the workers themselves.

Anti-colonial Marxist Walter Rodney, who was sympathetic to Stalin and wholly supportive of Lenin, nonetheless acknowledged that “The state, not the workers, effectively controlled the means of production.”17 He also showed how the Soviet Union inherited and furthered the Russian imperialism of the earlier tsarist regime—though that’s a topic for a future essay.

A realist knows that the best counterargument to all these sentimental complaints is the indisputable fact that, in the end, the Bolshevik strategy triumphed. They eliminated all their enemies. The idealists were dead—and therefore wrong. What better positive evidence can we find for the correctness of the Bolshevik position?

1919: in the basements of the Cheka.

The End of Resistance to Bolshevik Realism

Things immediately got better. The workers no longer had to toil for the enrichment of the capitalist class. Now they reaped the fruit of their own labors. (Except, of course, for all the workers in the free-market enterprises permitted under the NEP, and the millions of peasants who quite literally had to give away the fruits and the grains they grew.) To make things simpler, all the social wealth they reaped was kept in a trust managed by the intellectual workers. The intellectual workers worked a lot harder and required more compensation, better food, and bigger houses—but they also made sure that most of that wealth went to fielding an army of 11 million (shy by just a million of being the largest army in world history). And a damn fine opera. And one of the most extensive secret police apparatuses ever seen, too, to make sure the people stayed safe.

During Stalin’s Five Year Plans, the Soviet economy grew faster than the contemporary democratic economies and steered clear of the Depression that was ravishing much of the rest of the world. Idealistic anarchist critiques of “state capitalism” have long pointed out that the Communists were able to bring capitalism to the countries where the capitalist class had largely failed—they did capitalism better than the capitalists. But this naïve complaint misses out on the fact that a strong State, and thus a strong Revolution, requires a robust economy producing huge amounts of surplus value that can be reinvested as the Fathers of the Proletariat see fit.

Alongside all these exciting developments, the workers eventually got housing and healthcare, if they worked hard and kept their mouths shut. Provided, of course, that they weren’t among the millions of victims of the systematic famines designed to break the peasantry.

And that’s why these are such important days to remember.

On this, the one-hundred-year anniversary of the massacres of striking workers in Astrakhan and Petrograd, workers would do well to remember who has their best interests at heart, and keep in mind that obedience is freedom. To celebrate the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, which continues to shine as a beacon to oppressed people everywhere, workers should obey their elected union representatives, prisoners should heed their guards, soldiers should obey the command to fire, and the people should await the directives of the government. Anything else would be anarchy.

1922: A lesson on communism for the Russian peasants.

Bibliography

Paul Avrich, “Russian Anarchism and the Civil War,” The Russian Review. Vol.27 No.3: 296–306. July 1968.

Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists. Oakland: AK Press, 2006.

Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921. 1970.

Vladimir Brovkin, , “Workers’ Unrest and the Bolsheviks’ Response in 1919”, Slavic Review, 49 (3): 350–73. (Autumn 1990)

Isaac Deutscher, *Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy. 1950. https://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1950/soviet-trade-unions/ch02.htm

Nick Heath, “Bolshevik Repression against Anarchists in Vologda,” libcom.org October 15, 2017.

Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018.

Piotr Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989.

Nadezhda Krupskaya, “Illyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow” Reminiscences of Lenin. International Publishers, 1970.

George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

V.I. Lenin, “Telegram to the Penza Gubernia Executive Committee of the Soviets” in J. Brooks and G. Chernyavskiy, Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State: A Brief History with Documents (2007). Bedford/St Martin’s: Boston and New York, p.77.

V.I. Lenin, “The Role and Functions of the Trade Unions under the New Economic Policy”, LCW, 33, p. 184., Decision Of The C.C., R.C.P.(B.), January 12, 1922. Published in Pravda No. 12, January 17, 1922. Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, first printed 1965, Volume 33, pp. 186–196. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-33.pdf

Mário Machaquiero, A revolução soviética, hoje. Ensaio de releitura da revolução de 1917. Oporto: Afrontamento, 2008.

Igor Podshuvalov, Siberian Makhnovschina: Siberian Anarchists in the Russian Civil War (1918-1924). Edmonton: Black Cat Press, 2011.

James Ryan. Lenin’s Terror: The Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence. London: Routledge, 2012.

Alexandre Skirda, trans. Paul Sharkey, Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack. Oakland: AK Press, 2003.

Carlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017.

Various, A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia. London: HMSO, 1919.

Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921. New York: Free Life Editions, 1974.

Dmitri Volkogonov, Shukman, Harold, ed., Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, London: HarperCollins, p.180. 1996.

Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Beryl Williams, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 1987.

Additional Reading

1921-1953: A Chronology of Russian Anarchism

Ilyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow, from Krupskaya’s “Reminiscences of Lenin”

Bolshevik repression against anarchists in Vologda

April 2018: One Hundred Year Anniversary of the Beginning of Bolshevik Terror

Lenin Orders the Massacre of Sex Workers, 1918

A Century since the Bolshevik Crackdown of August 1918

Manual for Revolutionary Leaders, Michael Velli

Of the seven members of the first Politburo—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Bubnov—all but Zinoviev had received elite educations and become professional activists immediately after their education. Stalin was the only one of the seven who came from a less-than-middle class background. His father was a well-to-do shoemaker who owned his own workshop, though he lost his fortunes and became an abusive alcoholic. Young Stalin was able to receive an elite religious education thanks to his mother’s social connections. His first job was as a meteorologist; he later worked briefly at a storehouse in order to organize strike actions there.

Lenin and Sokolnikov were from families of professional white-collar workers; Bubnov was from a mercantile family; Kamenev was the son of a relatively well-paid worker in the railroad industry. Trotsky and Zinoviev were the children of landowning peasants, or kulaks—the very people they identified as the class enemy in the countryside in order to justify the murder of millions, both actual kulaks and poor peasants who opposed Bolshevik policies.

Most anarchists do not believe that a person’s class background determines their beliefs and attitudes, nor that it grants or denies them legitimacy as a human being. We recognize that how we grow up affects our perspective, but we tend to place more importance on how someone chooses to live their life. A few anarchists, like Kropotkin, came from elite backgrounds, whereas many more, such as Emma Goldman and Nestor Makhno, came from working-class or peasant backgrounds.

It is nonetheless significant that practically every single anarchist who was influential in the course of the Russian Revolution or who was chosen to lead a major detachment in the Civil War was a worker or a peasant. This exemplifies the slogan of the First International, “the liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves.” (The only exception was Volin, who came from a white-collar background.) It is also significant that, while the Bolsheviks recruited heavily among industrial workers, their entire Politburo was 0% working class.

Given both Marx and Lenin’s systematic use of their adversaries’ class identity—real or perceived—to delegitimize them or even justify murdering them, the fact that neither Marx nor Lenin nor the rest of the Communist leadership were working class is hypocritical to say the least. ↩

On the “blocking units” that did this, see Volkogonov, Dmitri (1996), Shukman, Harold, ed., Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, London: HarperCollins, p.180. ↩

Brovkin, Vladimir (Autumn 1990), “Workers’ Unrest and the Bolsheviks’ Response in 1919”, Slavic Review, 49 (3): 350–73 ↩

Alexandre Skirda, trans. Paul Sharkey, Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack. Oakland: AK Press, 2003 ↩

Beryl Williams, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 1987. ↩

Even before Stalin, the Bolsheviks spread lies not so much to convince people of them as to force them to repeat the lies. This was an effective loyalty test: anyone who insisted on speaking the truth was clearly a dangerous counterrevolutionary, whereas those who called starving peasants “kulaks” or denounced principled revolutionary sailors as “White agents” had accepted Communist realism. ↩

“We, the workmen of the Putilov works and the wharf, declare before the laboring classes of Russia and the world, that the Bolshevik government has betrayed the high ideals of the October revolution, and thus betrayed and deceived the workmen and peasants of Russia; that the Bolshevik government, acting in our name, is not the authority of the proletariat and peasantry, but the authority of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, self-governing with the aid of the Extraordinary Commissions [Chekas], Communists, and police.

“We protest against the compulsion of workmen to remain at factories and works, and attempts to deprive them of all elementary rights: freedom of the press, speech, meetings, and inviolability of person.

“We demand:

Immediate transfer of authority to freely elected Workers’ and Peasants’ soviets. Immediate re-establishment of freedom of elections at factories and plants, barracks, ships, railways, everywhere.

Transfer of entire management to the released workers of the trade unions.

Transfer of food supply to workers’ and peasants’ cooperative societies.

General arming of workers and peasants.

Immediate release of members of the original revolutionary peasants’ party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

Immediate release of Maria Spiridonova [a Left SR leader].”

↩

Piotr Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989. p.454-458 ↩

Document no. 54, “Summary of a Report on the Internal Situation in Russia,” in A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia, abridged ed. Parliamentary Paper: Russia no. 1 [London: HMSO, 1919], p.60 ↩

Carlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017 ↩

Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018. ↩

Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921. 1970. p.65

“Once power had passed into the hands of the proletariat, the practice of the Factory Committees of acting as if they owned the factories became anti-proletarian.” -A.M. Pankratova, Fabzavkomy Rossil v borbe za sotsialisticheskuyu fabriku (Russian Factory Committees in the struggle for the socialist factory). Moscow, 1923 ↩

Mário Machaquiero, A revolução soviética, hoje. Ensaio de releitura da revolução de 1917. Oporto: Afrontamento, 2008. p.144. ↩

Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists. Oakland: AK Press, 2006. p.147 ↩

Carlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017. p.58 ↩

V.I. Lenin, “The Role and Functions of the Trade Unions under the New Economic Policy”, LCW, 33, p. 184., Decision Of The C.C., R.C.P.(B.), January 12, 1922. Published in Pravda No. 12, January 17, 1922. Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, first printed 1965, Volume 33, pp.186–196. ↩

Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018. p.lvi ↩

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On #QAnon: The full text of our Buzzfeed Interview

Ryan Broderick of Buzzfeed just published an article on this #QAnon conspiracy bullshit titled It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters. The piece features quotes from an interview we gave via email. Here’s the full email exchange.

--

Can you tell me a bit about when and how your book Q was written?

We started writing Q  in the last months of 1995, when we were part of the Luther Blissett Project, a network of  activists, artists and cultural agitators who all shared the name «Luther Blissett». Luther Blissett was and still is a British public figure, a former footballer, a philanthropist. The LBP spread many mythical tales about why we chose to borrow his name, but the truth is that nobody knows.

Initially, Blissett the footballer was bemused, but then he decided to play along with us and even publicly endorsed the project. Last year, during an interview on the Italian TV, he stated that having his name adopted for the LBP was «a honour». The purpose of signing all our statements, political actions and works of art with the same moniker was to build the reputation of one open character, a sort of collective "bandit", like Ned Ludd, or Captain Swing. It was live action role playing. The LBP was huge: hundreds of people in Italy alone, dozens more in other countries. In the UK, one of the theorists and propagandists of the LBP was the novelist Stewart Home.

The LBP lasted from 1994 to 1999. The best English-language account of those five years is in Marco Deseriis' book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. One of our main activities consisted of playing extremely elaborate pranks on the mainstream media. Some of them were big stunts which made us quite famous in Italy. The most complex one was played by dozens of people in the backwoods around Viterbo, a town near Rome. It lasted a year, involving Satanism, black masses, Christian anti-satanist vigilantes and so on. It was all made up: there were neither Satanists nor vigilantes, only fake pictures, strategically spread rumours and crazy communiqués, but the local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia, we even managed to get footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual broadcast in the national TV news, then we claimed responsibility for the whole thing and produced a huge mass of evidence. The Luther Blissett Project was also responsible for a huge grassroots counter-inquiry on cases of false child abuse allegations. We deconstructed the paedophilia scare that swiped Europe in the second half of the 1990s, and wrote a book about it. A magistrate whom we targeted in the book filed a lawsuit, as a consequence the book was impounded and disappeared from bookshops, but not from the web.

This is the context in which we wrote Q. We finished it in June 1998. It came out in March 1999 and was our final contribution to the LBP.

I've been reading up about it, and it's largely believed that it's underneath the book's narrative it works as handbook for European leftists? Is that a fair assessment? I've read that many believe the book's plot is an allegory for 70s and 80s European activists?

Although it keeps triggering many possible allegorical interpretations, we meant it as a disguised, oblique autobiography of the LBP. We often described it as Blissett's «playbook», an «operations manual» for cultural disruption.

The four authors I'm speaking to now are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo correct? The four authors of Q?

You are speaking with three of the four authors of Q, and you're speaking with a band of writers called Wu Ming, which means «Anonymous» in Chinese. In December 1999 the Luther Blissett Project committed a symbolic suicide - we called it The Seppuku - and in January 2000 we launched another project, the Wu Ming Foundation, centred around our writing and our blog, Giap. The WMF is now an even bigger network than the LBP was, and includes many collectives, projects and laboratories. Luca aka Wu Ming 3 is not a member of the band anymore, although he still collaborates with us on specific side projects. Each member of the band has a nom de plume composed of the band's name and a numeral, following the alphabetical order of our surnames, thus you're speaking to Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1, Giovanni Cattabriga aka Wu Ming 2 and Federico Guglielmi aka Wu Ming 4.

Can you tell me a bit about your background before the Luther Blissett project?

Before the LBP we were part of a national scene that was – and still is – called simply «il movimento», a galaxy of occupied social centres, squats, independent radio stations, small record labels, alternative bookshops, student collectives, radical trade unions, etc. In the Italian radical tradition, at least after the Sixties, there was never any clearcut separation between the counterculture and more political milieux. Most of us came from left-wing family backgrounds, had roots in the working class. Punk rock opened our minds during our teenage years, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s Cyberpunk opened them even more, and inspired new practices.

When did you start noticing similarities between Q and QAnon? I know you've tweeted a bit about this, but I'd love to get as many details as I can. I feel like the details around QAnon are so sketchy that it's important to lock in as much as I can here.

We read a lot about the US alt-right, books such as Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction a Basilisk or Angela Nagle's – flawed but still useful – Kill All Normies, and yet we didn't see the QAnon thing coming. We didn't know it was growing on 4chan and some specific subReddits. About six weeks ago, on June 12th, our old pal Florian Cramer – a fellow veteran of the LBP who now teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam – sent us a short email. Here's the text:

«It seems as if somebody took Luther Blissett's playbook and turned it into an Alt-Right conspiracy lore. Maybe Wu Ming should write a new article: "How Luther Blissett brought down Roseanne Barr"!»,

After those sentences there was a link to a piece by Justin Caffier on Vice. We read it, and briefly commented on Twitter, then in the following weeks more and more people got in touch with us, many of them Europeans living in the US. They all wanted to draw our attention on the QAnon phenomenon. To anyone who had read our novel, the similarities were obvious, to the extent that all these people were puzzled seeing that no US pundit or scholar was citing the book.

Have there been key moments for you that made you feel like QAnon is an homage to Q? What has lined up the best?

Coincidences are hard to ignore: dispatches signed Q allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book. This Q is frequently described as a Blissett-like collective character, «an entity of about ten people that have high security clearance», and at the same time – like we did for the LBP – weird "origin myths" are put into circulation, like the one about John Kennedy Jr. faking his own death in 1999 – the year Q was first published, by the way! – and becoming Q. QAnon's psy-op reminds very much of our old «playbook», and the metaconspiracy seems to draw from the LBP's set of references, as it involves the Church, satanic rituals, paedophilia...

We can't say for sure that it's an homage, but one thing is almost certain: our book has something to do with it. It may have started as some sort of, er, "fan fiction" inspired by our novel, and then quickly became something else.

There will be a lot of skepticism I think that an American political movement like QAnon could have been influenced by an Italian novel, how do you think it may have happened?

It's an Italian novel in the sense that it was originally written in Italian by Italian authors, but in the past (nearly) 20 years it has become a global novel. It was translated into fifteen languages – including Korean, Japanese, Russian, Turkish – and published in about thirty countries. It was successful all across Europe and in the English speaking world with the exception of the US, where it got bad reviews, sold poorly and circulated almost exclusively in activist circles.

Q was published in Italian a few months before the so-called "Battle of Seattle", and published in several other languages in the 2000-2001 period. It became a sort of night-table book for that generation of activists, the one that would be savagely beaten up by an army of cops during the G8 summit in Genoa, July 2001. In 2008 we wrote a short essay, almost a memoir, on our participation to those struggles and Q's influence in those years, titled Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise. A copy of Q's Spanish edition even ended up in the hands of subcomandante Marcos. It isn't at all unrealistic to imagine that it may have inspired the people who started QAnon.

Have you seen anything in the QAnon posts that leads you to suspect any activist group in particular is behind it?

No, we haven't.

You think QAnon is a prank? Without some kind of reveal it's obviously hard to see it as that. If you think it was revealed that QAnon was actually some kind of anarchist prank, would it even matter? Would its believers abandon it or would they just see it as a smear campaign?

Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There's no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank, but who's pulling it on whom? Was the QAnon narrative hijacked and reappropriated by right-wing "counter-pranksters"? Counter-pranksters who operated with the usual alt-right "post-ironic" cynicism, and made the narrative more and more absurd in order to astonish media pundits while spreading reactionary content in a captivating way?

Again: are the original pranksters still involved? Is there some detectable conflict of narratives within the QAnon universe? Why are some alt-right types taking the distance from the whole thing and showing contempt for what they describe as «a larp for boomers»?

A larp it is, for sure. To be more precise, it's a fascist Alternate Reality Game. Plausibly the most active players – ie the main influencers – don't believe in all the conspiracies and metaconspiracies, but many people are so gullible that they'll gulp down any piece of crap – or lump of menstrual blood, for that matter. Moreover, there's danger of gun violence related to the larp, the precedent of Pizzagate is eloquent enough. What if QAnon inspires a wave of hate crimes?

Therefore, to us the important question is: triggering nazis like that, what is it good for? That camp is divided between those who would believe anything and those who would be "ironic" on anything and exploit anything in order to advance their reactionary, racist agenda. Can you really troll or ridicule people like those?

It's hard to foresee what would happen if QAnon were exposed as an anarchist/leftist prank on the right. If its perpetrators claimed responsibility for it and showed some evidence (for example, unmistakeable references to our book and the LBP), would the explanation itself become yet another part of the narrative, or would it generate a new narrative encompassing and defusing the previous one? In plain words: which narrative would prevail? «QAnon sucking anything into its vortex» or «Luther Blissett's ultimate prank»?

In any case, we'd never have started anything like that ourselves. Way too dangerous.

[acrosstheboardmusic]

“WILD ONES” ALBUM REVIEW & INTERVIEW: Jackie from Across The Board shares her insights on being the lone wolf who still needs her pack

by Carmen Toth, special to ListenUpIndie!

March 23, 2019

On March 15, 2019, I and 400 other fans had the pleasure of seeing Across the Board do a live debut of their new album “Wild Ones” at The Opera House in Toronto. I was so encapsulated by their stellar performance that I didn’t take a single video or photo the whole time! Luckily, there were a handful of pro photographers there who got some great shots, like this one by Joanna Glezakos:

If you’re a fan of 80s era inspired pop-rock like me, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll enjoy “Wild Ones,” the latest offering and fifth album from Across the Board. I find their sound to be like a unique fusion of 70s/80s rock like Stevie Nicks, Journey and Heart, mixed with energetic modern alternative pop like Paramore and Walk Off The Earth. And this makes perfect sense, considering that they list all of those artists as influences, and have at some point covered them all within their extensive collection of over 600 videos on YouTube/Facebook/Instagram.

One of the most tightly themed albums I’ve ever heard (from one of the hardest working bands I’ve ever met), “Wild Ones” in the band’s own words: “explores the concept of the lone wolf who lives for the independence of running beneath the moon and the stars but understands the need for a pack.”

The album opens with a dramatic spoken prologue from lead singer Jacqueline “Jackie” Auguste, before launching into the super riff-y, upbeat and harmony-rich title track, where we are introduced to “the wolf,” the musical embodiment of Jackie herself. The danceability continues on “Monster,” which “celebrates the beauty in the ugly.” Next up is what just might be my favourite track on the album – “Eye of The Storm” – an epic and beautifully vulnerable power ballad which Jackie and co-producer Matt Makarenko wrote during the early days of her breast cancer diagnosis in July 2018. The following track “Calling,” according to the band, is meant to be a “cry of support in turbulent times,” but for me, it just gives me a serious “slow dance” romantic vibe. Then the pace picks up again on the uplifting rock anthem “All Gone,” which is co-written by the band’s keys player Martin “Marty” Heller and is his first ever contribution to the ATB catalogue. I call the next track “Graffiti,” ATB’s “ode to graffiti,” – a very poetic explanation of why graffiti exists and the “funkiest” track on the album. The album finishes up with another gorgeous ballad “Alpha Wolf,” which has a very ear-worm-y line; “howl at the moon,” which sounds almost like an actual howl, but prettier. All in all, a very strong, well-written and produced album that just gets better with every listen.

You can listen to WILD ONES on SOUNDCLOUD.

You can find your favourite streaming service HERE.

Album credits: Co-written and produced by MC2 Music Media’s Darnell Toth & Matt Makarenko with ATB’s Jacqueline Auguste, Andy Ramjattan and Martin Heller. Published by MC2 Music Media.

Lead singer: Jacqueline Auguste Backing vocals: Shezelle Weekes, Tasha Lorayne Keys: Marty Heller Guitars: Ben Healey, Matt Makarenko Bass: Andy Ramjattan Drums: Darnell Toth, Ryan Sousa

I had a chance to talk with the band’s frontwoman Jackie about the making of the album, and here’s what she had to tell me:

C: You’re releasing “Wild Ones” less than a year after “Sonic Boom,” which you released May 2018. Any particular reason for releasing them so close together? 

 J: Because it was ready! We were in a full-on writing mode after “Sonic Boom” and we just kept going to maintain our momentum. In this day and age of the music industry, you have to keep moving forward, creating music from your heart and sharing it with your audience. One of the best things about being signed by an indie label as opposed to a major label is that we have so much creative control. There was a really powerful creative force moving through everyone after Sonic Boom and we decided to hold a writing workshop last summer – we basically cloistered ourselves away at the ATB cottage up at Lake Simcoe one weekend and wrote 18 songs – 8 of which we chose for the album, and 7 that are being released currently. We had to hold back one song as we did a little mash up of a song that was already written and are waiting for the lawyers to do their thing.

C: This is your fifth album. What has become easier having done it so many times? Has anything become harder? 

J: What’s easier is the time it takes – in the sense that it takes fewer takes to get what we want, and less explaining to one another where we are coming from because we know our sound now and we know what we want – we are all on the same page and it becomes rather intuitive now – fewer question marks! There is nothing harder per se about it. Possibly making sure we have fresh chord progressions and don’t get stuck writing the same song every time. That certainly hasn’t happened yet and I think it’s because we’ve moved to a more collaborative inclusive model of writing as opposed to the songs all being mine.

C: Have you used the same producer and studio for all five albums?

J: Four of the five, yes. Our first album was actually produced by my brother, Tom Smith, who’s a kick ass engineer, musician and producer. He also produced all our early covers that you can find on Spotify and iTunes pre-‘Jane On Fire’ – which was our debut album in 2016. Our second album, which was actually an EP, was the first project we did with our current producers MC2 Music Media.

C: What is your usual writing process and how was the process for this album? Were there some songs that were harder to complete than others?

J: My writing process starts with a chord progression and a hook. Then lyrics and a melody emerge, the lyrics get filled in and the song goes off to our producers Darnell Toth & Matt Makarenko at MC2. They rearrange it, give it a beat, genre and cadence, then send it back for me to create a demo. I usually create a demo in the same way we record our YouTube cover videos and those demos become the basis for starting to record the individual parts.

For this album we did it slightly differently – although there were several of the 18 songs that we wrote for the album that we do with the usual process I just described, there were three that were musically driven. Matt and Darnell had banked some jam sessions and experimental instrumentals and I went through them and chose some that I thought I could write melody and lyrics to – that was the process for “Monster,” “Graffiti” and “Eye Of The Storm.”

The song “Alpha Wolf” was a little different – I had written some poetry about the wolf theme of the album – and his relationship to the circadian rhythm of the earth. I wanted to write a song in 6/8 time for a change – a rock ballad – I love the triplet feel to a solid 6/8 structure and this song basically ended up writing itself: “Alpha Wolf” and “Calling” –two of the slow songs on the album were written this way – and they seemed to write themselves.

C: You have been pretty open about your recent diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer. How did making this album help get you through it? Do you believe in the healing power of music? 

J: I find that music boosts my serotonin! I feel calmer and happier and less down about things. Music can also excite me and make me want to move and dance or jump around. The album theme – ‘the independent lone wolf who recognizes the need for a pack’ – represents my struggle with breast cancer. I had to be able to ask for help, to accept it, and give up control to those who knew what was best for me. “Eye Of The Storm” represents my attempt to find the peace within the chaos – to find a place of comfort amidst all of the stress and turmoil that is chemo and surgery and tests and needles. Each song on the album really was born during the time of my diagnosis and early treatment. It’s like an Ode to the struggle with mortality.

C: Who have been your biggest musical influences? 

 J: I would say my biggest musical influences are Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Steven Tyler and bands like Journey, Paramore and Walk Off The Earth.

C: What advice would you give to aspiring independent musicians?

J: Don’t wait to create content until you think it’s flawless or perfect – let your fans progress and develop with you. Put out content every day! The more you do, the better you will get at doing it! The more you create, the more people can consume and it makes for a nice deep rabbit hole where folks can dive in!

C: Do you have a favourite song on the album?

J: “Eye Of The Storm” – it’s fun to play, fun to sing, and speaks the most to me about my personal struggle with breast cancer.

C: As a fan, I can hear a real evolution in your singing on this album. What kind of vocal training/exercises did you do in preparation for the recording sessions? 

J: I would love to tell you I have a defined set of exercises and techniques, but I don’t. I sing along with the radio in the car on the way to studio – belt a few lines, sing some high notes and some low notes and flex my vocal chords a bit – like stretching before a run. I was trained by Russian opera star Helena Holl, one of my favourite people on the planet. She’s just lovely and had taught me to control my diaphragm, breathing, mouth and throat shape and vocal chords. Although I have very little time any more for training sessions, I do think of all her teaching when I’m singing a challenging song, like if it’s something I have to belt or a high note.

C: Is there anything else that you want to say to all your new and old fans? 

J: I would just love to hear from people what they think of the new songs – what do you like, dislike, what caught your ear, or bored you. And then tune in and follow us on YouTube, FB and the Gram! Introduce yourself! Let’s connect – check out all things ATB at http://acrosstheboardmusic.ca

Carmen Toth is a freelance writer, singer songwriter, senior copywriter and voiceover artist- visit Carmen’s website here.

[mariacallous]

Grain means port, port means city. This sentence encapsulates the role of grain flows in Odesa’s history, starting from the times when the city was still named Khadjibey. It is much harder to describe the conditions in which Ukraine finds itself while breaking through the naval blockade in Odesa and going back to exporting grain.

The air raid warning goes off while I’m sitting in a coffee shop, under an umbrella. It wails piercingly. A strict male voice reminds citizens: “Civilians, the audio signal ending does not mean that the danger has passed! Stay hidden!” A pause follows, and then the silence is filled with normal noises once again: spoon clicking against a teacup on the table nearby, tires screeching, someone playing the violin, a toddler crying. A well-groomed pug starts racing towards an independent cat. There is a couple kissing under a black banner with the writing on it that says Freedom Not Death (a campaign of local artists in support of captured Azovstal steelworks fighters).

The entrance to the Duke of Richelieu Monument and the Potemkin Stairs is closed: restricted area. The beaches are officially closed: there is danger of mines. Storefronts and windows of historic buildings located in the centre of the city have been boarded up to protect from attacks or, in some cases, in the aftermath of the attacks. There are flags hanging on buildings, balconies, flagpoles near shops, restaurants, and banks. Blue-yellow rectangles are drawn on walls and gates. There is a flag of Ukraine placed even near the bronze François Sainte de Wollant that stands near the pedestal of the monument to Catherine the Great.

There are similarities to my time in Tel Aviv in summer 2006, during the war with the Lebanese Hezbollah. Back then, the northern cities, Haifa and Nahariya, were damaged more than any other. Tel Aviv was not under attack, life continued there as normal: the offices were open, families with kids were walking down the embankment, the music was playing. The only reminders of war were the big number of both flags and military patrols. When I tried to complain to my Israeli colleague, — how are they relaxing when, at this moment, their compatriots could be dying? — he reacted calmly and said: “We are always ready.” And translated the Hebrew phrase that was featured on graffiti around the city which I had seen just as often as the flags: “Alive with Israel.”

It is obvious: Odesa feels out of place this summer holiday season. But at least during the day, it keeps up appearances — more likely, for its own equilibrium than for tourists. There are not many of them, but they are present.

The fears of the recent past awaken once again: the deadly strikes by the Russians came from the sea, which has historically always fed the city.