Tragic news. Legendary Argentine football/soccer player Diego Maradona has died at age 60.

Maradona was a revolutionary and committed anti-imperialist.

He was a friend of Castro and Hugo Chávez (with tattoos of Fidel and Che), and a champion of the poor and oppressed.
To protest US imperialism, Diego Maradona wore a shirt reading "Stop Bush" with the S as a Nazi Swastika, when he attended the Summit of the Americas in Argentina in 2005.

President George W. Bush was attending, trying to push through a "free trade zone" to exploit Latin America
Diego Maradona also joined revolutionary Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in protesting US imperialism, wearing a t-shirt of George W. Bush covered in blood and reading "war criminal"
Maradona strongly supported the wave of leftist govts in Latin America—the "Pink Tide"

Here he is in 2010 at funeral of Argentina's left-wing President Néstor Kirchner, with his wife (future president) Cristina and Bolivia's Evo Morales

Portrait of Chile's Allende in background
Even after the US empire and right-wing oligarchs in Latin America launched several coups and hybrid warfare, making it very difficult for the remaining leftist gov'ts, Diego Maradona remained a committed supporter of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution.

He never lost hope. RIP
Diego Maradona visited Nicaragua in 2014 and showed his deep support for the revolutionary Sandinista movement.

"I carry in my heart poor people, working people," he said.

"I am a soldier of (Daniel) Ortega" and "a friend in the Nicaraguan struggle"
This January, Maradona visited Venezuela again.

He met with President Maduro, challenging the US coup attempt.

Then he thanked the Venezuelan people: "We are facing the largest (empire) in the world, and they don't have a heart. But onward to victory!"
Although he was one of the world's most famous football/soccer players, Diego Maradona always remained a man of the people.

When he visited Nicaragua, he went to the central park in Managua and met with young athletes.

He never forgot his humble origins

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More from @BenjaminNorton

24 Nov
This clip of Joe Biden's secretary of state nominee, Antony Blinken, summarizes the neoconservative stance they're going to take:

The US empire is the "leader of the free world," and bogeymen Russia and China are the enemies of "freedom"

The new cold war moves on to a new phase
Biden's secretary of state nominee Antony Blinken called for strengthening the US-led imperial military cartel NATO, which destroyed Yugoslavia and Libya, insisting that "revaluing these alliances starting with NATO is going to be very, very important to a Biden administration"
Antony Blinken is a hardcore new cold warrior

In this interview Blinken quotes infamous cold warrior George Kennan, the architect of the US "containment" policy," condescendingly portraying Russia as backward, "neurotic," and expansionist (all projection)
Read 5 tweets
23 Nov
Biden's secretary of state nominee is now official: liberal war hawk Tony Blinken.

He:
-supported the 2011 war that destroyed Libya and unleashed slave markets
-defended Israel's massacres in Gaza
-started the catastrophic war on Yemen
-is a neoliberal at a private equity firm
Wall Street's Journal praised Biden's hawkish secretary of state nominee Antony Blinken, stating "Team Biden's optimism reflects a faith in the classic pillars of Cold War-era Democratic policy" backed "by the American military and a willingness to use it"
archive.is/GfGn3
This puff piece in Wall Street's Journal declares a Biden administration and Antony Blinken State Department will be "a return to Cold War liberal orthodoxies"

"Democrats haven't been this hawkish on Russia since the Kennedy administration," it boasts
archive.is/GfGn3
Read 4 tweets
22 Nov
US spy agencies and corporate media outlets are already setting the stage for the Biden administration to mainstream the conspiracy that any criticism of its hawkish neoconservative foreign policy, and of US imperialism in general, is all just "Russian/Chinese disinformation"
The CIA and its loyal PR flacks in the corporate media have already been pushing the absurd conspiracy that, if you don't like right-wing neoliberal Joe Biden and his team of neoconservative war hawks, then you are being played by Vladimir Putin
thedailybeast.com/putin-probably…
Neoconservative unironically named "disinformation fellows" in the Biden camp are calling for making a "counter-disinformation czar within the National Security Council and setting up a corresponding directorate"

This is the next phase of the new cold war
foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…
Read 4 tweets
18 Nov
Hilariously misleading wishful thinking. Joe Biden has been a right-wing war hawk for his entire career, and his transition team is full of hardline warmongers.

It was the Obama-Biden admin which started the Yemen war, and offered $115 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia
Biden has appointed an eye-popping array of corporate consultants, war profiteers, and national security hawks to agency review teams that will set the agenda for his administration

They're a rude awakening to anyone who believe Biden can be "pushed left"
thegrayzone.com/2020/11/14/bid…
Trump removed the fig leaf on longtime, steadfast US imperial support for the Saudi dictatorship (by sword dancing), but liberal historical revisionism has erased how the Obama-Biden admin offered the Saudi regime more than $115 billion in military sales
reuters.com/article/us-usa…
Read 4 tweets
17 Nov
Biden's so-called "national security" team is a collection of war hawks and "humanitarian" imperialists, many of whom helped oversee catastrophic wars under Obama and work with weapons corporations.

More on these shameless warmongers here: thegrayzone.com/2020/11/14/bid…
Among the members of the "national security" team Biden is briefing is Stanley McChrystal, a former commander of the infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which committed war crimes in its brutal counterinsurgency ops in Iraq and Afghanistan
thegrayzone.com/2020/11/14/bid…
Another member of Biden's "national security" team is liberal imperialist Samantha Power, who pushes the kind of "humanitarian" interventionism that led to NATO's destruction of Libya in 2011.

As Obama's UN ambassador, Power defended war crimes in Yemen
thegrayzone.com/2016/08/01/sam…
Read 4 tweets
14 Nov
You have no idea what you're talking about. Evo Morales is a revolutionary socialist and staunch anti-imperialist who honored the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution right before he was overthrown in a US-backed military coup that milquetoast socdem AOC did nothing to oppose.
This is so misleading, patronizing, and false. You can't build socialism in a poor formerly/partially colonized country that wasn't able to develop itself through industrialization. That's why Bolivia's party calls itself the Movement *Toward* Socialism.
Being a revolutionary socialist head of state in the Global South like Evo Morales is nothing like being a mild social democratic lawmaker in the murderous imperial core, especially one who doesn't in any way actually materially oppose imperialism like AOC
Read 5 tweets

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