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Gerald Smith, Special to the Press & Sun-Bulletin Published 8:00 p.m. ET June 19, 2020

Danielle Claudia, also known as the Underground Baker, has been doing special COVID Cake Deliveries since mid-April. Wochit

It was the end of World War II, and thousands upon thousands of American troops were returning to their homes across the country.During the United States efforts from 1941 to 1945, millions of service men and women participated in the conflict.

In Broome County, more than 18,000 residents fought as part of the war.

As those returning veterans came back to their communities, they found a world greatly changed from the one that they had left to defend.Jobs had changed, societys mores had changed, and to these veterans, many found solace as members of their communitys American Legion posts.These posts offered a place to gather, to find camaraderie a place where the members of the group, and the members of the community valued the veterans' service to our country.

One of the recruiting posters for the Community Party in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.(Photo: Provided)

Immediately after the end of World War II, the membership of the American Legion went up.At that same time, the alliance that had pushed Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to work with Joseph Stalin had fallen apart.The rise of the communist influence over the war-ridden portions of Europe, the purges of Stalin against his own people, and the climb to power of Mao Zedong in China, gave fear to that beliefs hold over this country.By the arrival of John Foster Dulles and the creation of the Domino Theory, the fear of communism was codified.That fear permeated many aspects of society culminating in the fear-mongering of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950's.

Prior to that, though, there was a conflict within our own community.At the end of May 1947, four men were arrested on misdemeanor charges in the village of Johnson City for handing out pamphlets without a permit. Those pamphlets encouraged people to join the Community Party in the country.One of those men was Robert C. Johnston a member of the First Ward American Legion Post 1254, located at 1 Grace St. in Binghamton.

The result of that arrest set in motion a series of events.Members of the American Legion post in the city were upset over a number of issues most of which revolved around both Johnstons arrest and his membership in the Community Party.On June 19, 1947, the post held a trial over the possible expulsion of Johnston as a member.The posts prosecutor was member Frederick Vavra, but Johnston did not acknowledge the legality of the proceeding.

Robert C. Johnston, left, and Irving Weisman, director of the Southern Tier Community Party in 1947.(Photo: Press archives)

While Johnston did not have his own attorney, he did bring one to the proceeding.That attorney was Alfred L. Tanz a New York City attorney who was representing Sidney Reiter, who was a member of a New York City American Legion post who had been expelled due to his membership in the Community Party. While Tanz was not recognized as having any legal authority over the issue in Binghamton, the post recognized that the New York Citys court suit would reflect on the decision over Johnston.

The decision of the posts trial was to expel Johnston, who immediately wanted to appeal the decision to the State Department of the American Legion.Tanz reiterated to the group that he was not a member of the Communist Party, but there to defend the right of Americans to join the party if they so choose.In addition to this drama, the local branch of the Community Party was also in the First Ward, and the Legion post began a secondary group to protect Americanism.That group wanted the Community Party to move away from the First Ward.

The final answer to this dilemma arrived on July 2 of that same year.In New York City, Supreme Court Justice Benjamin F. Schreiber refused to order an injunction against the ouster of Reiter.In his statement, Schreiber denied Reiters assertion that communism was a political party.He stated that it was a subversive philosophy having for its objective the overthrow of entire constitutional structure.

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The ouster of Reiter and the courts decision also sealed the ouster of Robert Johnston in Binghamton.

Whether that same decision would be made in todays world is difficult to determine.Sixty years later, the world is a far different place.

But it is a fascinating thought to ponder.

Gerald Smith is a former Broome County historian. Email him at historysmiths@stny.rr.com.

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Spanning Time: How a controversy over communism in 1947 rocked Broome County - Pressconnects

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleThe Genius of Karl Marx

Karl Marx, was of average height and powerful build, with his fiery eyes with which one could tell at the first glance that, he was a man of genius and energy. His intellectual superiority exercised an irresistible force on his surroundings. Marx was a cynical, disorderly, often idle, but capable of great bursts of sustained work. The outsized personality of Marx would win people over.

Along with his close comrade, Friedrich Engels, in one of the most famous intellectual partnerships in history, Marx brought different skills to bear on a project, very much grounded in its time and place, the development of the ideas of those men, and how they responded to and synthesized many contemporary concerns, including progress, science, evolution, materialism, and history.

Learn more about the most influential economic thinkers in history.

The context, out of which communism arose as a system of ideas, involved three different elements; French political revolution, British industrial revolution, and German philosophical evolution.

From 1789, the French Revolution ushered in a new age in politics, the era of ideological mass politics. That revolution, its radicalism radiating from Paris, haunted socialist and communist thinkers afterward because they were headed in the right direction and then went wrong. It was a model for how to make a revolution and a cautionary tale. Its legacies were the quest for political utopia and political mass murder, then, turning into a dictatorship.

The French Revolution got steadily more radical after it erupted in Paris in 1789. First, revolutionaries broke with feudal privileges, to enshrine liberty, equality, and fraternity. Then radicals deposed the king, executed him, and suspecting treason against the revolution, they identified socalled enemies of the people and sent them to their deaths, in the Reign of Terror, from 17931794.

Learn more about why Marx never envisioned communism taking root in an agrarian society.

A new society was under construction, with Christianity abolished and a new calendar created. Appeals to defend the Fatherland and patriotism showed the growth of nationalism. The revolutionary regime became so radical to arrest revolutionaries as insufficiently devoted. One of them declared, The Revolution is a mother that eats her children.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

The radical leaders were arrested and replaced by a more conservative leadership, which was soon deposed by a young military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1799, Napoleon made himself dictator then emperor and presided over years of constant war in his bid to control Europe.

Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. Many were still attached to utopian hopes of making a new society, sought peaceful, cooperative, voluntary means of association rather than force.

Turning away from revolutionary violence, such socialists, as they called themselves, hoped that their utopias could be realized without killing, but by demonstrating new forms of association. Those ideas enjoyed popularity and by 1835, the word socialism had become current in Britain and France.

Further experiments followed in creating an intentional community. Those included the model factories of Robert Owen, the Welsh manufacturer, and his settlement in the United States, New Harmony in Indiana, which only lasted for two years. The followers of the French thinker Henri de SaintSimon also dreamed of a cooperative society owning all wealth, tools, and land in common.

Learn more about the major questions that shape economic systems.

Another French thinker, Charles Fourier, a clerk in Lyon, spent much time, dreaming up new principles of organizing people, who were essentially motivated by 12 main passions, announcing a plan for a new unit of society called the Phalanstery, a blend of the phalanx, a classical Greek military formation, and monastery, to be set in an agricultural setting. The inhabitants would cycle through jobs, romantic partners, and in general, experience work as charming variety. Fourier was convinced that setting up even one of those phalansteries would be world-changing. He also believed that the oceans would turn to lemonade and lions and whales would be tamed and put to work, so as to spare human labor.

In France, some followers of Fourier tried to establish communities along the lines he envisioned, but in the New World, his experiment proliferated. In the 1840s and 1850s, nearly 30 Fourierist colonies were established in the United States. Among those who found Fouriers ideas attractive was PierreJoseph Proudhon, who denounced central control and organization and instead called for free communes that would be loosely associated, called mutualist anarchism. He declared that property was theft.

An age of many communal experiments, where some preached and practiced, free love, breaking with traditional structures of marriage and family. Such communities proliferated in the United States, which earlier had religious communities, like the Shakers and Amish. In the 19th century, an estimated 178 socialist communities existed in the United States. Those experiments were usually shortlived, but many sprang up and continued to do so. One famous hippie commune was The Farm, founded in 1971 in Summertown, in southern middle Tennessee, still going today with 200 members.

In describing their communism, Marx and Engels, later poured scorn on the ineffectiveness of the earlier socialists, deriding them as merely utopian, definitely not a compliment, although sometimes Marx and Engels were generous and admitted that it was at an early stage of the development of the truly revolutionary ideas.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels shared similar ideas about socialism and communism and theirs was one of the most famous intellectual partnerships in history. Both brought different skills to bear on a project, very much grounded in its time and place, the development of the ideas including progress, science, evolution, materialism, and history.

French thinker, Charles Fourier, is known for dreaming up new principles of organizing people, announcing a plan for a new unit of society called the Phalanstery, a blend of the phalanx, a classical Greek military formation, and monastery, to be set in an agricultural setting. He also believed that the oceans would turn to lemonade and lions and whales would be tamed and put to work, so as to spare human labor.

Charles Fourier, a French thinker, is from Lyon, France.

More here:
Marx, Engels, and the Rise of Communism - The Great Courses Daily News

By Vejas Liulevicius, Ph.D., University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleMarxs Understanding of the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution first roared to life in Great Britain. The world was being visibly and dramatically changed by science and technology, and this made Marx and Engels eager for a theory which would not just describe the human society in a static way, but instead would describe it as it changed, and predict where the future was headed. In a way, to understand the history that was not random and contingent, but rather had a larger meaning and a logic of its own.

From the 18th through the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had consequences as profound as political revolutions. The process involved not only the growing industry and technology but also new ways of organizing work and disciplines, useful to the new factory environment. Its effects were uneven, beginning first in northwestern Europe, i.e., Britain, Belgium, France, then spreading through the European continent and to the United States, and then on to the rest of the world. As the socalled workshop of the world, Britain was the first to take off industrially.

Industrialization had important consequences for society and politics, remaking physical landscapes in Europe and other parts of the globe, and disrupting traditional ways of life. Engineers were the new heroes of the age, and their triumphs were seen everywhere; the Crystal Palace in London, the Suez Canal, the American Transcontinental Railroad.

Learn more about the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Industrialization also changed the social order. The aristocracy and peasants were still around but less important. The new middle class, the bourgeoisie, arose in the cities and towns and also an industrial working class. At the extreme edge of survival, lived a class of miserable poor and unemployed, denounced as dangerous or criminal classes. The first stages of industrialization were wrenching, with intense exploitation of workers being forced into the new disciplines of factory work and its relentless pace of productivity.

In search of markets and resources, Europes powers engaged in overseas imperialism, which brought industrialization to other lands, wiping out Indian textiles, and forcing China to accept the trade-in opium so that Britain could buy tea. That was the second element of the Industrial Revolution.

The third element was a German philosophical revolution. While France revolted and Britain industrialized, Germany was already famed for its profound scholarship, thought, and Romantic literature. Especially, the impact of the philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was huge who proposed history with a direction and transcendent meaning. Hegel constructed a philosophy of idealism, saw ideas as primary causes in history, struggling to come into existence, with the ultimate aim of realizing human freedom.

Learn more about the revolutionary messages in the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

In Hegels scheme, a dialectical process as a dynamic series of clashes moved history forward. An existing social state called the thesis encountered opposing forces, the antithesis. The result of their collision was a new state, synthesis, a higher resolution of this earlier conflict. In that age of growing nationalism, Hegel tended to identify the Prussian state and Prussian bureaucracy with the realization of the ultimate principle of freedom. But some of his followers set off in other directions, which were radical rather than conservative. Other disciples of Hegel, called the Young Hegelians or Left Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach, moved on to demolish Christianity with this argument of historical change.

The ideas of two thinkers addressed elements of political revolution, industrialization, and philosophical transformation. The revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels rocked society and affected the lives of millions. Their intellectual partnership had been one of the most important relationships ever. In their partnership, Marx was the dominant personality.

There was a psychological key to understanding what Marx was about, who saw himself as a heroic martyr. Above all, Marx was a member of a new group that had appeared in society as intellectuals, proclaiming their devotion to ideas and humanity.

This is a transcript from the video series The Rise of Communism: From Marx to Lenin. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Karl Marx was born in 1818 in western Germany in a Jewish family in Trier, a part of the kingdom of Prussia. His father was a successful lawyer and had converted to Christianity to escape the discrimination against Jews.

Marx fell in love with Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of a baron, and was engaged. First attending the University of Bonn, on the Rhine River, he did a lot of drinking there, had some brawls, and even fought a duel. Then, pulling himself together, he transferred to Berlin University, where he breathed in deeply the great impact of Hegels philosophy.

Marx earned his doctorate in 1842, with a dissertation on ancient Greek philosophy, married Jenny von Westphalen, and was to become a professor. But because of his radicalism and atheism, Marx was unable to get a job. Also playing a role was his careless personal appearance, his sloppy writing, his inability to meet deadlines, his love of quarrels, and his personality that focused on dominating others around him. Marx turned to journalism, and by 1842 was editor of the radical Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. Only months later, the paper was shut down at the insistence of the conservative Prussian government. In 1843, Marx and his family moved to Paris, the refuge of exiles and expatriates.

Learn more about the violent upheaval of the Paris Commune in 1871.

Marxs future partner, Friedrich Engels, was a total contrast. Born in 1820 in Barmen in the Rhineland, he came from a wealthy German commercial family of factory owners. He was an odd candidate to be a socialist, as his father was a fundamentalist, Christian.

But as he deepened his socialist beliefs, his father supported him. Engels was handsome, a people person, generous, productive, and lucid in his writing. He had a personality that drew others to him, very different from Marxs abrasive qualities. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor said Engels had talent where Marx had genius.

Like Marx, Engels attended the University of Berlin, and there converted to socialism. When Engels first came to see Marx while passing through Cologne in 1842, he met with a chilly reception. Engels moved to England, where he worked at the family factory in Manchester, observing the condition of the workers. In 1845, he published his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels did not marry but had a secret longterm relationship with a workingclass Irishwoman, Mary Burns. When Engels met Marx for the second time in 1844 in Paris, they really hit it off and the two wrote out their ideas in The Communist Manifesto, which they had finished drafting by 1847.

Marx-Engels theory, based on human society which is static, describes it as it changes, and predicts where the future was headed. The two wrote out their ideas in The Communist Manifesto, which they had finished drafting by 1847.

In Hegels scheme, a dialectical process as a dynamic series of clashes moved history forward. A given existing social state called the thesis encountered opposing forces, the antithesis. The result of their collision was a new state, synthesis, a higher resolution of this earlier conflict. In that age of growing nationalism, Hegel tended to identify the Prussian state and Prussian bureaucracy with the realization of the ultimate principle of freedom.

The ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels addressed all the elements of political revolution, industrialization, and philosophical transformation. The revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels rocked society and affected the lives of millions. Their intellectual partnership had been one of the most important relationships ever.

View post:
Marx and Engels: Creating a Partnership for the Rise of Communism - The Great Courses Daily News

Yellow Star, Red Star By Clara Weiss 20 June 2020

Jelena Subotic, Yellow Star, Red Star. Holocaust Remembrance after Communism, Cornell University Press 2019.

All over the world, the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the drive by the bourgeoisie toward authoritarian forms of rule and far-right policies. Under these conditions, the struggle against the resurgence of fascism that the ICFI has taken up in the past six years is assuming ever greater political significance.

A new book by political scientist Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University) examines the relation between the criminalization of communism in Croatia, Serbia and Lithuania and the legitimization of fascism after the fall of the Stalinist regimes in 1989. Though fatally flawed by its equation of Stalinism with communism, and the authors reluctance to discuss the social character of the restoration of capitalism, the book provides valuable material that demonstrates the close relationship between capitalist counterrevolution and the rise of fascist forces.

Subotic focuses her account on developments in the former Yugoslavia and Lithuania, which was formerly part of the Soviet Union. In both the former Yugoslavia and the Eastern Europe, the Nazis were able to mobilize and count on the support of local fascist forces above all in their war on the Soviet Union and the communist partisan movement, as well as their persecution of Jews, Roma and other minorities. In Croatia and Serbia, the establishment of nation states on the basis of the restoration of capitalism and the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, was accompanied by a systematic promotion of the very fascist forces that had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

The Nazis invaded Yugoslavia on April 1, 1941, a few months before the beginning of the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, on June 21, 1941. In Serbia, the nationalist Chetnik army (Yugoslav Army), though formally aligned with the Allies until 1943, began collaborating with the Wehrmacht already in the fall of 1941. It played a critical role in the fight against the partisan movement against the fascist occupation, and helped run the Semlin camp, where thousands of Jews were murdered in gas vans. Serbia thus became the second country in Europe, after Estonia, to be declared judenfrei and free of gypsies by August 1942. Less than 5,000 Serbian Jews survived the war.

The collaborating Serbian government of Milan Nedi endorsed the genocide of the Jewish population. In 1942, Nedi stated: Owing to the occupier, we have freed ourselves of Jews, and it is now up to us to rid ourselves of other immoral elements standing in the way of Serbias spiritual and national unity. (quoted pp. 523)

After 1989, the Serbian state criminalized the communist resistance movement against the Nazis and the Chetniks while rehabilitating Nedi. History textbooks now describe the Chetniks as national patriots and an antifascist movement from the right.

In Croatia, the promotion of the fascist Ustaa has assumed even more staggering dimensions. The Ustaa movement set up the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in 1941 and established an expansive camp system which included 26 concentration and death camps. Among these was the Sisak camp, the only camp for unaccompanied children in Europe during World War II, where an estimated 1,600 children died. The most notorious Ustaa-run camp was Jasenovac, also called the Auschwitz of the Balkans.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Ustaa regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people at Jasenovac, among them between 45,000 and 52,000 Serbs, up to 20,000 Jews, 20,000 Roma and up to 12,000 political and religious opponents of the NDH. The Ustaa and the Nazis were defeated by the partisan movement that was headed by Tito.

Almost immediately after the break-up of Yugoslavia, the newly created Croatian state moved toward criminalizing the partisan movement against the Ustaa. Streets, schools and public buildings were renamed almost overnight to carry the names of famous Croatian figures of the NDH, instead of those of famous partisans and communist leaders. Monuments for Jewish victims and the partisan movement were destroyed and vandalized. This included a bombing attack on the monument at Jadovno in 1991. History textbooks in schools are openly glorifying the Ustaa.

Subotic acknowledges that the accession of these states to the EU served above all to further these practices and provided the basis for their expansion. In particular, she draws attention to the equation of the crimes of communism and fascism in the 2008 EU Prague Declaration, which catered to and encouraged far-right tendencies.

In southeastern Europe, the Jasenovac death camp has been at the center of this revisionism. In a state-backed campaign, Jasenovac has been depicted as a camp which was entirely harmless under the Ustaa but then allegedly turned into a death factory under Tito. The former Croatian prime minister Zlatko Hasanbegovi, himself a former member of the pro-Ustaa Croatian Pure Party of Rights, has denied that it was a death camp and called the partisan antifascist victory in WWII the biggest loss in Croatias history. (137)

Similar developments occurred in Lithuania, which had earlier formed part of the Soviet Union. During World War II, 95 percent of Lithuanian Jewish community was murdered, the highest rate in all of Europe. This was not least of all due to the mass participation of Lithuanian nationalists and fascists who were virulently anti-Semitic. For them, the Nazi occupation was a welcome opportunity to murder both the Jewish population and fight against the threat of social revolution. In a pre-war manifesto, the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) stated that by restoring the new Lithuania, [the LAF] is determined to carry out an immediate and fundamental purging of the Lithuanian nation and its land of Jews, parasites and monsters. (quoted p. 155)

Much like the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) in Ukraine, the LAF began massacres of the Jews before the German Wehrmacht arrived. Later, many of its units were reorganized by the Germans into police battalions which were tasked with the extermination of Lithuanian Jews. SS Einsatzgruppen, which perpetrated mass shootings of Jews and communists, also worked with the Lithuanian Security Police. At the Ponary forest, at least 72,000 Jews were murdered. Already in December 1941, the commander of the Einsatzkommando 3, Karl Jger, reported that, the objective of clearing Lithuania of Jews was virtually completed thanks to the cooperation of the Lithuanian Partisans and Civil Authority. (158)

Immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new Lithuanian ruling class that had emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy made the rehabilitation and glorification of these forces a priority of state policy. One of the very first actions of the new parliament consisted in rehabilitating Lithuanians convicted of collaborating with the Nazis by the Soviets. Jonas Noreika, who had signed deportation orders for Jews, was declared a national hero. The Lithuanian government championed the double genocide narrative, which justifies Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust as an understandable response to the alleged genocide perpetrated against Lithuanians by communist Jews in 194041.

This anti-Semitic trope of Judeo-Communism, which was also central to Nazi ideology, is now dominating official commemorations of the war in Lithuania. The Lithuanian government has also initiated several trials against survivors of the Holocaust who joined the Soviet partisan movement. In 2007, the Lithuanian state prosecutor initiated an investigation against the famous historian of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Yitzhak Arad for war crimes that he allegedly perpetrated as a member of the Soviet partisans against Lithuanian nationalist troops. Leading Lithuanian newspapers slandered him as an NKVD storm trooper. Similar proceedings were initiated against Rachel Margolis and Fania Brantsovskaya who had likewise fled the Nazi genocide by joining the Soviet partisans.

The material that Subotic provides is a damning indictment of the outcome of the restoration of capitalism after 19891991 and the state of European politics more generally. However, she herself clearly does not want this conclusion to be drawn and avoids, throughout the entire book, to even use terms like capitalism and imperialism.

There is no attempt at any coherent reckoning with the social and political character of both the Stalinist regimes and the restoration of capitalism in 19891991. Although Subotic correctly emphasizes the right-wing implications of the criminalization of communism, she herself makes no distinction between Stalinism and communism. This renders her vulnerable to the very right-wing narratives that she takes issue with as they, too, rest above all upon the false equation of Stalinism and communism. Indeed, her discussion of Lithuania includes multiple formulations that can hardly be described other than apologetic. Thus, she writes that the double genocide narrative was for Lithuanians the only way to make sense of their twentieth-century experience. This both relativizes and obscures what has taken place.

What happened in the USSR and the deformed workers states in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s was not, as Subotic suggests, a flawed development toward democracy, but rather the completion of the Stalinist counterrevolution against October 1917. Historical revisionism and the rehabilitation of the fascist traditions of the Eastern European bourgeoisie have been an intrinsic component of this process.

The restoration of capitalism had its origins in the nationalist betrayal of the October revolution on the basis of socialism in one country, a direct repudiation of the internationalist and Marxist program of world socialist revolution that had formed the basis of 1917. In the inter-war period, the Stalinist betrayals of the workers movement and promotion of national opportunism had devastating consequences for the socialist revolution in Europe, facilitating the rise of Hitler to power and the outbreak of the Second World War.

In the 1930s, the Great Terror under Stalin saw the most far-reaching mass murder of revolutionaries and socialists that history has ever seen. Among its victims were thousands of Soviet Trotskyists, almost the entire leadership and cadre of the Bolshevik Party of October 1917, as well as much of the leadership and rank-and-file of the Communist parties of Yugoslavia, Poland, Lithuania and other countries in Eastern Europe. Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Marxist opposition to Stalinism and founder of the Fourth International, was assassinated in 1940. These crimes created enormous confusion within the international working class and played a central role in beheading the working class in the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1940s.

The Red Army and the partisans in Yugoslavia were able to drive out the Nazis and local fascists by 194344 not because of the Stalinist regime, but in spite of it. Mass struggles of the working class in opposition to fascism and capitalism erupted starting in 1942, with mass factory occupations taking place in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. All of Greece was engulfed in a bitter civil war. However, the lack of a revolutionary leadership allowed the Stalinists to stifle these movements, creating the conditions for the re-stabilization of capitalism on a world scale.

The Stalinist bureaucracy moved to nationalize private property in Eastern Europe only by 19471948, facing enormous pressure from imperialism. However, its main priority remained the strangling of an independent revolutionary mass movement of the working class against capitalism that would also threaten a political revolution against the bureaucracys rule in the USSR by the Soviet working class. The regimes that were set up on this basis were deformed workers states. In Yugoslavia, Titos Communist Party, which had come to power as a result of a mass social revolutionary movement, established a deformed workers state. Like the bureaucracy in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it remained dedicated to the program of socialism in one country while trying to balance between the Soviet bureaucracy and imperialism.

By the late 1980s, these regimes were facing collapse, and the bureaucracies, fearing a political revolution from the working class, moved toward fully integrating themselves into the world capitalist system. As Trotsky had predicted in his Revolution Betrayed, this process entailed the transformation of the bureaucracies into a new ruling class and the destruction of all social conquests that had been bound up with the 1917 revolution. Politically and ideologically, the restoration involved a return of the bourgeoisies in South Eastern and Eastern Europe to their historical traditions of extreme nationalism and fascism, and a close collaboration with imperialism.

Yugoslavia was a particularly stark example of this process. In its drive toward restoration, the bureaucracy systematically promoted ethnic nationalism and appealed to imperialism. The result was a decade of ethnic massacres, civil wars, and NATO bombings that cost the lives of tens of thousands of people. It is in on this historical and social basis that the falsification of history and promotion of fascist ideology became central to the politics of these new bourgeois states.

None of this is mentioned in the book. Moreover, Subotic leaves out the massive involvement of the German state and bourgeoisie in this process of the rehabilitation of fascism and historical revisionism. However, German right-wing intellectuals and politicians have anticipated, encouraged and then used the far-right developments in Eastern Europe to further the rehabilitation of Nazism.

It was the German historian Ernst Nolte, who in the 1980s, before 19891991, advanced the argument that the crimes of the Nazis were a legitimate response to the processes of violence of the Russian revolution. Noltes argument that Auschwitz was nothing but a response to the violence allegedly unleashed by the Russian Revolution was but a variation of the fascist argument, analyzed at length by Subotic, that Nazism and fascism more broadly were legitimate and necessary responses to communism.

Although Noltes falsifications were rejected by historians at the time, the destruction of the GDR and reunification of Germany in 1990 provided a major impetus for the return of German militarism. The break-up of Yugoslavia provided the pretext for the first German military intervention since the end of World War II, first in Croatia and then in Kosovo. In 1998, the well-known German writer Martin Walser declared in a widely publicized speech that there should be an end to using Auschwitz as a moral cudgel against Germany and opposed the erection of a Holocaust monument in Berlin. Shortly thereafter, a major exhibition on the crimes of the Wehrmacht during World War in the late 1990s was shut down. In 2000, Nolte was awarded the Adenauer Price of the Deutschland-Stiftung (Germany Foundation), which had close ties to the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

The Prague Declaration of 2008, which called for Europe-wide condemnation of, and education about, the crimes of communism was a major step toward officially legitimizing the views of Nolte. Subotic mentions it as a legitimization of the far-right policies of the governments in Lithuania, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia. However, she does not discuss its contents or the fact that its co-initiator was the former head of the Stasi Records Agency Joachim Gauck who would soon thereafter become the president of Germany and play a major role in the resurgence of German militarism.

The Declaration called for a recognition that many crimes committed in the name of Communism should be assessed as crimes against humanity serving as a warning for future generations, in the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal, and proposed adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes. Statements of support for this declaration were issued by Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, the former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and the then US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Since 2014, the German bourgeoisie has ever more aggressively pursued a policy of remilitarization. This has gone hand in hand with systematic historical revisionism of the crimes of the Nazi regime. At the Munich Security Conference in January 2014, Joachim Gauck declared that there had to be an end to German military restraint. Just a few weeks later, a pro-Western government was installed in Kiev through a fascist-led coup that was supported by both Germany and the US. At the same time, the right-wing extremist professor Jrg Baberowski from Berlins Humboldt University declared in Der Spiegel that Nolte had been done an injustice, that he had been historically right, and that Hitler was not vicious.

These developments have been accompanied by a combination of complicity, silence and complacency by academics in the US and Germany, moods and tendencies to which Subotic ultimately adapts. There is no other way to explain why Subotic avoids acknowledging the extent to which the same far-right historical revisionism she criticizes in Eastern Europe have been legitimized and accepted in American and German academia. At several points in her book, she favorably quotes the American Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University), who was one of the most prominent academic supporters of the 2014 coup in Ukraine. His book Bloodlands (2010) resurrected and legitimized the very narrative equating communism and fascism that Subotic criticizes in Croatia or Lithuaniaa fact that can hardly have been lost on her.

Thus, although Yellow Star, Red Star provides valuable material on the resurgence of fascist forces, those interested in truly understanding and fighting these developments will have to turn to studying the extensive record of the ICFIs struggle against the Stalinist counterrevolution and historical revisionism.

Read Christoph Vandreier, Why Are They Back, Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany, available from Mehring Books.

The author also recommends:

Marxism, Opportunism and the Balkan Crisis [7 May 1994]

How the revival of German militarism was prepared [10 May 2014]

Jrg Baberowskis falsification of history [5 December 2016]

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Capitalist counterrevolution and the rise of fascism in southeastern Europe since 1989 - World Socialist Web Site

In an interview with G. Edward Griffin in 1984, former KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov had exposed the insidious operations of the Soviet Union and how the Communist apparatus viciously overtakes the conscience of a country.

He began his interview by revealing that people who towed the Soviet foreign policy, in their home country, were elevated to positions of power through media and manipulation of public opinion. However, those who refused to do so were either subjected to character assassination or killed. Bezmenov cited the example of the city of Hue in Vietnam where 1000s of people were executed in one night for being sympathetic to the United States. The city was under the seize of a mass political organization named Viet Cong for about 2 days when the mass killings took place. Even though the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) could never understand how the operation was carried out, Bezmenov pointed out the extensive network of local informants set up by the Soviet Union to execute those who didnt tow its line.

Recounting his time in India, the KGB informant revealed how he was shocked to discover the list of known pro-soviet journalists in India who were doomed to die. He said that even though those journalists were idealistically leftists, yet the KGB wanted them dead as they knew too much. Benzmenov emphasised, Once the useful idiots (leftists), who idealistically believe in the beauty of Soviet socialism or Communism, get disillusioned, they become the worst enemies.

The former KGB informant reiterated there are no grassroots revolutions but one engineered by a professional, organised group. He revealed that the Awami League party leaders were trained in Moscow, Crimea, and Tashkent. He also added that the Indian Government chose to unsee the movement of 1000s of students from India to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). His colleague at the Soviet Consulate in Kolkata had discovered guns and ammunition in his basement in a box titled Printed material scheduled for Dhaka University. It indicated the role of the Soviet Union in arming the Mukti Bahini during the war.

He was instructed by the KGB to not bother the political prostitutes but instead surround himself with large conservative media persons, rich filmmakers, academicians, and cynical egocentric people. According to Benzmenov, the potential recruits and reputable people in the eyes of the KGB were narcissistic, greedy, morally devoid individuals who can help destabilise their country of origin. Citing the example of the United States, he stated that the KGB recruited professors and civil rights defenders to subvert and destabilise the country. When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They know too much. Some (recruits) get offended when Marxists-Leninists come to power because they hoped they would come to power. That will never happen. They will be lined up against the wall and shot, he remarked.

The KGB informant reiterated that when the useful idiots serve their purpose, they are either executed or exiled or held up in prisons. We are a bunch of murders. There is nothing to do with friendship and understanding between the nations We behave like a bunch of thugs in a country that is hospitable to us. I did not defect but I tried to get my message across. Nobody wanted even to listen, least of all to believe me, he sighed recounting the inner turmoil he faced on learning about the scheduled execution of pro-Soviet Indian journalists known to him.

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His decision to defect and switch sides came during the Bangladesh Liberation War which was described by an American correspondent as the Islamic grassroots revolution. Under the patronage of the KGB, Yuri Bezmenov lived a lavish lifestyle. He was, however, in love with India so much so that he did not want the country to be irreparably damaged under the Soviet influence. Despite an affluent career and labels of treason against the nation, he finally defected from the KGB.

And he disappeared as many had done in the past. The only possible difference was that he lived to tell the story. Interestingly, Indian newspapers carried ads citing a reward of 2000 for information on him. But, the informant had by then impersonated an American hippie and flew from Mumbai airport to Greece where he met with CIA officials. All of this happened under the nose of the KGB.

Yuri Bezmenov explained that KGB was more concerned about the psychological warfare against the American government through ideological subversion rather than espionage activities, which constituted only 15% of their work. He highlighted how brainwashing techniques were used on the American population to infuse an ideology, distinct from Americanism. He further emphasised how manipulation of public opinion can make people reject obvious facts to cater to the existing perceptions and interests.

The former KGB informant stated that the Soviet Intelligence Agency used four methods to alter the mindset and behaviour of people in foreign countries. The first step is that of demoralisation which according to him took 15-20 years. During the phase, young people are influenced to question the integrity of a country and raise suspicions through media propaganda and academia. Perception takes the centre stage and facts become meaningless. He attributes it to the lack of moral standards in society.

For a population self-absorbed in a world of propaganda, and theories of Marxism and Leninism, truth loses its grip on the society. The older generation also loses control over the population due to consistent attacks on their moral fabric. Yuri Bezmenov revealed that the demoralisation phase was completed before the interview and the Soviet Union was surprised at the ease of its execution. He also explained how those from the 60s were occupying high positions in the government, mass media, and civil services at the time of the interview. Yuri Bezmenov further claimed that another 20 years would take to create a new generation of patriotic American citizens.

As per the former KGB informant, destabilisation of a country also referred to as the second step, meant altering the nations foreign relations, economy, defence systems. He said that the process takes 2-5 years to execute. He stated that the Marxist-Leninist hold over the American defence and economic sector was fantastic. Bezmenov said that he never thought that the process would be so easy to execute in the US when he landed there in 1971. He highlighted that a country could be brought to a state of crisis, the third step, in a short time as six weeks and cited the example of Central America to make his point.

Coupled with a violent change in power structure and economy, the fourth phase of normalisation is kicked in that can last indefinitely. The word normalisation is derived from Soviet propaganda that seeks to downplay a drastic change in a country as a normal phenomenon. This will happen in America if you allow the Schumuks to bring the country to crisis, promise people all kinds of goodies and paradise on Earth, destabilise your economy, eliminate the principle of free-market competition, put a Big Brother government in Washington DC with benevolent things, he remarked.

Yuri Bezmenov reiterated that the US was in a state of undeclared war, against the principles on which it was founded, under the Communist conspiracy. You dont have to be paranoid Unless the United States wakes up! The time bomb is ticking every second and the disaster is coming closer and closer. Unlike myself, you will have nowhere to defect, he emphasised.

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Former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov exposes the four stages of a Communist takeover of a country in rare 1984 interview - OpIndia