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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

29 Nov 20

@BarackObama

Either @BarackObama is totally ignorant of the history of the Iraqi-Gulf Arab war on Iran (1980-88), or he is lying about what he knows. Either way, it is one appalling section of his new book, where he writes (p. 452): 'Soviets supplied Khomeini's military with arms.'

I interviewed Chuck Cogan who was chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the CIA's Directorate of Operations from 1979 to 1984; Chuck told me many times that there was no evidence of this when I asked him about it directly.

@BarackObama

I met Chuck many times to talk about the murder of US Ambassador Adolph Dubs (1979). It was in this context, and in the context of the Soviet entry into Afghanistan that I asked Chuck about Soviet arms to Iran. None, he said. And yet, @BarackObama has this in his book.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

11 Sep 20

If you think that today is the day of the coup against Salvador Allende's government in Chile in 1973, you are mistaken. The coup does not begin or even take place on 11 September 1973. The coup begins the day Allende wins the election; it was a coup that lasted three years.

The imperialists tried to prevent him from taking office, even killing a general to help foment a coup before Allende was sworn in. During his time in office, they tried to overthrow him every single day. The military - under Pinochet - was given authority to take him out.

After the overthrow of Allende's government, the violence against the Left in Chile was monumental, a scale that is matched by what happened in Indonesia in 1965. Murder of the Left-wing activists went on and on and on, chased as they were through Operation Condor even in exile.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

17 Aug 20

As part of my studies on national liberation and Marxism, I went back to reread some of the Frankfurt school. Interested in how their main thinkers slipped into a reactionary politics. The turn against politics and towards philosophy was part of the problem. The other part.......

.....was their reluctance to engage with the developments in the communist state system, the sniff of disapprobation at the Easterness of the entire Soviet project, a disavowal of the realm of necessity....and then, even more so......

.....was their absolute horror of socialism in the Third World, from China to Cuba. Horkheimer, in 1963, wrote of the ‘exaggerated natiobalisms’ of the ‘backward countries’, meaning the Bandung-NAM bloc. Hard to ignore this in any assessment of their turn away from the world.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

12 Aug 20

Kamala Harris is the Vice Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in the United States of America. The most important part of the previous sentence is "Democratic Party", which should alert the reader to a history of vacillation and surrender to the bourgeoisie.

There is no doubt that the Republican Party in the USA is a repellent hive of bigotry, with its political orientation oscillating between fascism and near-fascism, the teeth marks of an odious history on the surface. Trump is merely symptom of the rot.

The less odious faction of the US ruling class prefers the Democratic Party. It is less embarrassingly arcane in its politics, marginally less horrid in its treatment of the precious poor, but then to many people these margins are important.

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Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

19 Jul 20

(Thread) The capitalist states (USA, UK, Brazil, India) are not going to get out of the pandemic soon. Their problem is that they gutted their public health systems and have no public sector facility to run testing, tracing, and isolation.

@rajshah

This not my opinion. @rajshah - president of @RockefellerFdn - says that the problem for the US is that it relies upon 'monopoly companies' that 'don't have enough capacity in their central processing systems for the volumes that are necessary right now'. He means Quest & LabCorp

These are indeed 'monopoly companies' & they are run on the profit motive, which means that they are just-in-time processing labs that do not have any 'capacity' ever to do more than normal lab work; anything more than that is inefficient for them.

Read 11 tweets

Vijay Prashad

@vijayprashad

3 Mar 20

@SenSanders

[Thread on Socialism] I've been reading some of the debates around the candidacy of @SenSanders for the US presidency. Bernie is a Democratic Socialist. This is a powerful tradition within the United States that begins with the Workingmen's Party of the United States (1876).

@SenSanders

@SenSanders The Workingmen's Party - which becomes the Socialist Party - is only twenty years younger than the Republican Party. It has its roots firmly in the soil of US politics, and emerged into the mainstream as the principle defender of the railroad workers in the strike of 1877.

@SenSanders

@SenSanders Quite importantly, in 1878, the Workingmen's Party - an openly Marxist party - won 5 of the 7 seats in the Kentucky state legislature, the state now represented by the execrable @senatemajldr.

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