Antisystemic

  What is going on in Afghanistan is the playing out of a story 40 years in the making; a story of declining US power. The "Hawks" of United States politics have argued that the United States can do and get away with whatever it wants, and the left largely bought that argument. However, US power is spiraling downward with no end in site and the unfolding situation in Afghanistan proves this. This is a story of lost hegemony.  After WW2 the United States was the only nation who's industrial structure hadn't been destroyed by the war. This allowed it to gain an industrial foothold in it's home markets as well as the home markets of western Europe and Japan. The big three; Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, met at Yalta to decide the political landscape of the post-war world. The unspoken agreement, acknowledged by historians, was that the United States would control two thirds of the world and the USSR the other third, with the world being divided along the Oder-Neis...

  Cuba is one of the few remaining communist states. Most of these states collapsed either with the fall of the Soviet Union, or breakup of Yugoslavia. The strongest of the remaining is easily China, but unlike China Cuba is hanging on by a thread. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the Island nation has been sputtering along economically, trying it's hardest to hold itself together. For generations the left has idealized the Cuban regime just as steadily as the US and the right have demonized it.  For the left the nation is a shinning pillar of anti-imperialist resistance, for the right and US authorities it is a dismal example of communist totalitarianism. Are either of these positions justified? In the past week the most significant protests since the special period (the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse) have taken place, so the question of the nature of Cuba and it's current crises has again occupied the world-stage. So, is it communist totalitaria...

The internet left is a strange place. All kinds of strange arguments are advanced by strange adherents of tendencies morphed by internet culture. This includes internet "Marxist-Leninists" (read Stalinists) arguing that only "they" have had something called a "successful revolution". What are "successful revolutions"? Well, according to internet Marxist-Leninists, the communist party controlled states of the 20th century are indications of the success of the tendency they subscribe to in fomenting social revolution, be it in the Russian, Chinese, or Cuban Revolutions. They are successful because they created long-lasting regimes out of the overthrow of the old authorities which provided for their populations through social programs and carried out development.  Since no other tendency of left radicalism has produced the kind of results produced by "Marxist-Leninists" in the 20th century along these lines, Marxism-Leninism is clearly obj...

  On the Wednesday preceding the publication of this article hundreds of Trump supporters attacked the US capital building during a ceremonial recognition of president elect Joe Biden's 2020 election victory. The immediate spur of the siege was a speech by president Donald Trump given at a rally urging his supporters to march on the capital. The President made this speech as a last ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election results after his legal team's attempts to do so by claiming mass election fraud have been completely stamped out in the courts.  The event seemed spontaneous, but the news media has reported far-right groups and even the president himself produced rather clear signs that something of this nature was going to take place. This has lead to talk of a "crises of security" where the local police have been scrutinized for seemingly putting up no opposition to the attempted sacking of a major political ceremony.  The crises of security presented a stark c...