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Mark Ames
@MarkAmesExiled
, 9 tweets, 5 min read Read on Twitter
In 1975, Jesse Helms & the US far-right attacked President Ford for refusing to meet with Solzhenitsyn. Ford considered Solzhenitsyn to be a "horse's ass" & far-right crank.
Today, Buzzfeed is channeling old Jesse Helms to attack Sanders. Demented.
Somehow buzzfeed cites Solzhenitsyn's AFL-CIO speeches & Harvard speech—without describing the batshit contents: Solzhenitsyn denounced the US withdrawal from Vietnam War, detente, Hollywood movies, liberal media, even Angela Davis. Somehow Sanders is supposed to honor this.
(two screenshots above taken from Rick Perlstein's great book "The Invisible Bridge")
"Jesse Helms and Alexander Solzhenitsyn: United Through Friendship"
jessehelmscenter.org/jesse-helms-an…
Back to Solzhenitsyn's batshit Bircher speech to AFL-CIO's reactionary leadership—after denouncing America's withdrawal from Vietnam War, Solzhenitsyn falsely claims North Vietnam's victory means "1 million will be exterminated...4-5 million will be in concentration camps"
Are there any other sources besides Solzhenitsyn to his alleged quote of Angela Davis saying imprisoned Czech dissidents "deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison." I've only seen Alan Dershowitz back up Solzhenitsyn on this, which seems grimly appropriate
Solzhenitsyn is also completely wrong about Portugal, whose transition from fascist dictatorship to social democracy he sees—like your typical far-right Bircher of that time—as proof that Portugal has already gone Red.
The real Solzhenitsyn question is: Why did we ever take this pompous mediocrity seriously? The Gulag/Denisovich books aren't worth a paragraph of Shalamov's prose. Cancer Ward is mawkish Tolstoy pulp. His US speeches read like the scribblings of an undergrad Spengler fanboy
Bernie's quote screencapped by Miriam Elder accurately reflects what Soviet citizens told Gallup in July 1991: most wanted reformed democratic socialism; only tiny minority wanted free-market capitalism.
Bernie was right; Miriam is peddling fake history. nytimes.com/1991/07/28/wor…
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Mark Ames
@MarkAmesExiled
In the 1950s, Britain herded Kenya's entire Kikuyu population — nearly 1.5 million people — into concentration camps & subjected them to savage torture, rape & terror.
"There was 'forced sodomy with broken bottles and vermin and snakes and just horrific, horrific things'"—Caroline Elkins, one of the rare brave US academics. Her book Imperial Reckoning broke 50 yrs silence about Britain's Gulag archipelago in Kenya
npr.org/2013/06/09/189…
"we have plenty of evidence that the systematized violence that happened in Kenya was honed and brought throughout the empire, from Palestine to Malaya to Kenya to Cyprus to Aden to Northern Ireland."
Read 5 tweets
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Mark Ames
@MarkAmesExiled
The three leading DC advocates for Venezuela regime-change happen to be Koch Cartel's three stooges: Rubio, Pence, Pompeo.
Related: Koch Cartel wants to wet its beak again on Venezuelan oil, fertilizers & petrochemical products courthousenews.com/koch-brothers-…
As @yashalevine wrote, for many years chavismo socialism fattened up Koch Cartel profits. A portion of those profits were invested in the careers of anti-socialist hacks like Rubio, Pence, Pompeo + their anti-socialist libertarian think-tank toadies exiledonline.com/bond-markets-p…
As for Koch Cartel's 3 stooges pushing Venezuela regime change:
1. "The Koch Brothers’ Top Political Operative Just Went to Work for Marco Rubio"
motherjones.com/politics/2016/…
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Mark Ames
@MarkAmesExiled
The sick joke behind all this western outrage over "Russian oligarchs" is that Clinton White House literally created & celebrated Russia's oligarchy in the 1990s. Difference is Yeltsin oligarchs had real political power; today, they're billionaires without political control
A big reason why the US/UK turned against Putin was because he started jailing Russian oligarchs who challenged his power. By definition Russia's billionaires aren't really oligarchs anymore—and that violates our neoliberal order
This doesn’t make Putin a leftist anti-neoliberalism ally. His economic system is still largely Yeltsin’s system, with neoliberalism’s key feature: inequality. But Putin’s version has worked much better for Russians & worse for westerners than Yeltsin’s—so we have to crush it
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