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The the editor:

What is democratic socialism? The part of the phrase most people focus on is "socialism." And while democratic socialists do borrow some ideas from socialism, they are not what you think of when you think of traditional socialists. They are not calling for communal ownership of property. Democratic socialism is definitely not communism. A lot of people use communism and socialism interchangeably, but theyre wrong. Communism is a political ideology, while socialism is centered more on economics. Sure, they are related, but neither ideology has much to do with Democratic Socialism.

Democratic Socialists call for government to enact some socialist ideas through the Democratic process. That means everybody can vote on whether the policies are a good idea or not. In many countries, Democratic Socialists work alongside other parties in broad coalitions. The goal of Democratic Socialism is to control prices on certain essential services, like medicine and education, but not everything. Its all in an effort to reduce economic inequality. And allow everyone in society not just to survive, but to have the ability to enjoy life. A concept being called "bread and roses."

The term "democratic socialism" has only come to the forefront in recent years, but if you think Democratic Socialism is too far off from America culture, you need to think again. Social Security is a pension system run by the government. Medicaid and Medicare are government-run medical services. Even Amtrak is government-owned. All of these are examples of democratic socialism already in action here in the United States of America.

So, when you hear people shouting about us becoming a socialist country, put that in a corner, and start defining what is democratic socialism. Because theres a chance things youre already having in your daily life and you really like are part of democratic socialism.

Adam Jones

Greenfield

Read more here:
Letter to the editor: Democratic socialism: It's not what you think - Greenfield Daily Reporter

U.S. Department Of StateOffice of the SpokespersonFor Immediate ReleaseSpeechJuly 23, 2020

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and MuseumYorba Linda, California

GOVERNOR WILSON: Well, thank you very much, Chris. Most generous. Im not sure your grandfather would have recognized me.

I have the great pleasure in addition to welcoming all of you to the Nixon birthplace and library, I have the great pleasure of introducing to you an extraordinary American who is here at an extraordinary time. But the fun of it is in introducing our honored guest, I also am welcoming him not just to the Nixon Library, but Im welcoming him back home to Orange County. (Applause.) Thats right. Mike Pompeo was born in Orange. (Applause.)

He attended Los Amigos High School in Fountain Valley, where he was an outstanding student and athlete. In fact, I have it on good authority that among the fans of glory days of Lobo basketball, a reverent hush descends upon the crowd whenever the name Pompeo is mentioned. (Laughter.)

The Secretary was first in his class at West Point. He won the award as the most distinguished cadet. He won another award for the highest achievement in engineering management. He spent his active duty years, his Army years, in West Germany, and as he put it, patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1988 excuse me retiring with a rank of captain, he went on to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review. In 1988, he returned to his mothers home state of Kansas and began a stunningly successful business career. He was elected to the House of Representatives from Kansas in 2011, where he soon gained great respect for a reputation as one of the most diligent and astute members of the House Arms excuse me, the House Intelligence Committee.

In 2017, President Trump nominated him to be the director of Central Intelligence. And in 2018, he was confirmed as our 70th Secretary of State.

You have to admit, thats quite an impressive resume. So its sad theres only one thing missing, prevents it from being perfect. If only Mike had been a Marine. (Laughter.) Dont worry, hell get even.

Mike Pompeo is a man devoted to his family. He is a man of faith, of the greatest patriotism and the highest principle. One of his most important initiatives at the State Department has been the creation of a Commission on Unalienable Rights where academicians, philosophers, and ethicists advise him on human rights grounded in Americas founding principles and the principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Rights.

He is here today for a very special reason. The epitaph on President Nixons gravestone is a sentence from his first inaugural address. It says, quote, The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. Richard Nixon received that title. He won that honor not only because he was acknowledged even by his critics to be a brilliant foreign policy strategist, but it was far more because he earned it. He learned as congressman, senator, president, and every day thereafter as a private citizen ambassador that peace is not achieved by signing documents and declaring the job done. To the contrary, he knew that peace is always a work in progress. He knew that peace must be fought for and won anew in every generation.

It was President Nixons vision, determination, and courage that opened China to America and to the Western world. As president and for the rest of his life, Richard Nixon worked to build a relationship with China based upon mutual benefits and obligations that respected Americas bedrock national interests.

Today, we in America are obliged to assess whether or not President Nixons labors and his hopes for such a relationship have been met or whether they are being undermined.

That is why it is of such great significance that our honored guest, Secretary Pompeo, has chosen the Nixon Library from which to deliver a major China policy statement. It will, I promise you, be a statement of complete clarity delivered with force and with belief because it is of critical importance.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honor and pleasure to welcome to this podium and to this audience our honored guest, the Secretary of State of the United States of America, the honorable and really quite remarkable honorable Michael R. Pompeo. (Applause.)

SECRETARY POMPEO: Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, Governor, for that very, very generous introduction. It is true: When you walk in that gym and you say the name Pompeo, there is a whisper. I had a brother, Mark, who was really good a really good basketball player.

And how about another round of applause for the Blue Eagles Honor Guard and Senior Airman Kayla Highsmith, and her wonderful rendition of the national anthem? (Applause.)

Thank you, too, to Pastor Laurie for that moving prayer, and I want to thank Hugh Hewitt and the Nixon Foundation for your invitation to speak at this important American institution. It was great to be sung to by an Air Force person, introduced by a Marine, and they let the Army guy in in front of the Navy guys house. (Laughter.) Its all good.

Its an honor to be here in Yorba Linda, where Nixons father built the house in which he was born and raised.

To all the Nixon Center board and staff who made today possible its difficult in these times thanks for making this day possible for me and for my team.

We are blessed to have some incredibly special people in the audience, including Chris, who Ive gotten to know Chris Nixon. I also want to thank Tricia Nixon and Julie Nixon Eisenhower for their support of this visit as well.

I want to recognize several courageous Chinese dissidents who have joined us here today and made a long trip.

And to all the other distinguished guests (applause) to all the other distinguished guests, thank you for being here. For those of you who got under the tent, you must have paid extra.

And those of you watching live, thank you for tuning in.

And finally, as the governor mentioned, I was born here in Santa Ana, not very far from here. Ive got my sister and her husband in the audience today. Thank you all for coming out. I bet you never thought that Id be standing up here.

My remarks today are the fourth set of remarks in a series of China speeches that I asked National Security Advisor Robert OBrien, FBI Director Chris Wray, and the Attorney General Barr to deliver alongside me.

We had a very clear purpose, a real mission. It was to explain the different facets of Americas relationship with China, the massive imbalances in that relationship that have built up over decades, and the Chinese Communist Partys designs for hegemony.

Our goal was to make clear that the threats to Americans that President Trumps China policy aims to address are clear and our strategy for securing those freedoms established.

Ambassador OBrien spoke about ideology. FBI Director Wray talked about espionage. Attorney General Barr spoke about economics. And now my goal today is to put it all together for the American people and detail what the China threat means for our economy, for our liberty, and indeed for the future of free democracies around the world.

Next year marks half a century since Dr. Kissingers secret mission to China, and the 50th anniversary of President Nixons trip isnt too far away in 2022.

The world was much different then.

We imagined engagement with China would produce a future with bright promise of comity and cooperation.

But today today were all still wearing masks and watching the pandemics body count rise because the CCP failed in its promises to the world. Were reading every morning new headlines of repression in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang.

Were seeing staggering statistics of Chinese trade abuses that cost American jobs and strike enormous blows to the economies all across America, including here in southern California. And were watching a Chinese military that grows stronger and stronger, and indeed more menacing.

Ill echo the questions ringing in the hearts and minds of Americans from here in California to my home state of Kansas and beyond:

What do the American people have to show now 50 years on from engagement with China?

Did the theories of our leaders that proposed a Chinese evolution towards freedom and democracy prove to be true?

Is this Chinas definition of a win-win situation?

And indeed, centrally, from the Secretary of States perspective, is America safer? Do we have a greater likelihood of peace for ourselves and peace for the generations which will follow us?

Look, we have to admit a hard truth. We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply wont get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.

As President Trump has made very clear, we need a strategy that protects the American economy, and indeed our way of life. The free world must triumph over this new tyranny.

Now, before I seem too eager to tear down President Nixons legacy, I want to be clear that he did what he believed was best for the American people at the time, and he may well have been right.

He was a brilliant student of China, a fierce cold warrior, and a tremendous admirer of the Chinese people, just as I think we all are.

He deserves enormous credit for realizing that China was too important to be ignored, even when the nation was weakened because of its own self-inflicted communist brutality.

In 1967, in a very famousForeign Affairsarticle, Nixon explained his future strategy. Heres what he said:

He said, Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside of the family of nationsThe world cannot be safe until China changes. Thus, our aim to the extent we can, we must influence events. Our goal should be to induce change.

And I think thats the key phrase from the entire article: to induce change.

So, with that historic trip to Beijing, President Nixon kicked off our engagement strategy. He nobly sought a freer and safer world, and he hoped that the Chinese Communist Party would return that commitment.

As time went on, American policymakers increasingly presumed that as China became more prosperous, it would open up, it would become freer at home, and indeed present less of a threat abroad, itd be friendlier. It all seemed, I am sure, so inevitable.

But that age of inevitability is over. The kind of engagement we have been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce.

The truth is that our policies and those of other free nations resurrected Chinas failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it.

We opened our arms to Chinese citizens, only to see the Chinese Communist Party exploit our free and open society. China sent propagandists into our press conferences, our research centers, our high-schools, our colleges, and even into our PTA meetings.

We marginalized our friends in Taiwan, which later blossomed into a vigorous democracy.

We gave the Chinese Communist Party and the regime itself special economic treatment, only to see the CCP insist on silence over its human rights abuses as the price of admission for Western companies entering China.

Ambassador OBrien ticked off a few examples just the other day: Marriott, American Airlines, Delta, United all removed references to Taiwan from their corporate websites, so as not to anger Beijing.

In Hollywood, not too far from here the epicenter of American creative freedom, and self-appointed arbiters of social justice self-censors even the most mildly unfavorable reference to China.

This corporate acquiescence to the CCP happens all over the world, too.

And how has this corporate fealty worked? Is its flattery rewarded? Ill give you a quote from the speech that General Barr gave, Attorney General Barr. In a speech last week, he said that The ultimate ambition of Chinas rulers isnt to trade with the United States. It is to raid the United States.

China ripped off our prized intellectual property and trade secrets, causing millions of jobs[1]all across America.

It sucked supply chains away from America, and then added a widget made of slave labor.

It made the worlds key waterways less safe for international commerce.

President Nixon once said he feared he had created a Frankenstein by opening the world to the CCP, and here we are.

Now, people of good faith can debate why free nations allowed these bad things to happen for all these years. Perhaps we were naive about Chinas virulent strain of communism, or triumphalist after our victory in the Cold War, or cravenly capitalist, or hoodwinked by Beijings talk of a peaceful rise.

Whatever the reason whatever the reason, today China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else.

And President Trump has said: enough.

I dont think many people on either side of the aisle dispute the facts that I have laid out today. But even now, some are insisting that we preserve the model of dialogue for dialogues sake.

Now, to be clear, well keep on talking. But the conversations are different these days. I traveled to Honolulu now just a few weeks back to meet with Yang Jiechi.

It was the same old story plenty of words, but literally no offer to change any of the behaviors.

Yangs promises, like so many the CCP made before him, were empty. His expectations, I surmise, were that Id cave to their demands, because frankly this is what too many prior administrations have done. I didnt, and President Trump will not either.

As Ambassador OBrien explained so well, we have to keep in mind that the CCP regime is a Marxist-Leninist regime. General Secretary Xi Jinping is a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology.

Its this ideology, its this ideology that informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism. America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries, just as the CCP has never ignored them.

My experience in the House Intelligence Committee, and then as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and my now two-plus years as Americas Secretary of State have led me to this central understanding:

That the only way the only way to truly change communist China is to act not on the basis of what Chinese leaders say, but how they behave. And you can see American policy responding to this conclusion. President Reagan said that he dealt with the Soviet Union on the basis of trust but verify. When it comes to the CCP, I say we must distrust and verify. (Applause.)

We, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change, just as President Nixon wanted. We must induce China to change in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijings actions threaten our people and our prosperity.

We must start by changing how our people and our partners perceive the Chinese Communist Party. We have to tell the truth. We cant treat this incarnation of China as a normal country, just like any other.

We know that trading with China is not like trading with a normal, law-abiding nation. Beijing threatens international agreements as treats international suggestions as or agreements as suggestions, as conduits for global dominance.

But by insisting on fair terms, as our trade representative did when he secured our phase one trade deal, we can force China to reckon with its intellectual property theft and policies that harmed American workers.

We know too that doing business with a CCP-backed company is not the same as doing business with, say, a Canadian company. They dont answer to independent boards, and many of them are state-sponsored and so have no need to pursue profits.

A good example is Huawei. We stopped pretending Huawei is an innocent telecommunications company thats just showing up to make sure you can talk to your friends. Weve called it what it is a true national security threat and weve taken action accordingly.

We know too that if our companies invest in China, they may wittingly or unwittingly support the Communist Partys gross human rights violations.

Our Departments of Treasury and Commerce have thus sanctioned and blacklisted Chinese leaders and entities that are harming and abusing the most basic rights for people all across the world. Several agencies have worked together on a business advisory to make certain our CEOs are informed of how their supply chains are behaving inside of China.

We know too, we know too that not all Chinese students and employees are just normal students and workers that are coming here to make a little bit of money and to garner themselves some knowledge. Too many of them come here to steal our intellectual property and to take this back to their country.

The Department of Justice and other agencies have vigorously pursued punishment for these crimes.

We know that the Peoples Liberation Army is not a normal army, too. Its purpose is to uphold the absolute rule of the Chinese Communist Party elites and expand a Chinese empire, not to protect the Chinese people.

And so our Department of Defense has ramped up its efforts, freedom of navigation operations out and throughout the East and South China Seas, and in the Taiwan Strait as well. And weve created a Space Force to help deter China from aggression on that final frontier.

And so too, frankly, weve built out a new set of policies at the State Department dealing with China, pushing President Trumps goals for fairness and reciprocity, to rewrite the imbalances that have grown over decades.

Just this week, we announced the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston because it was a hub of spying and intellectual property theft. (Applause.)

We reversed, two weeks ago, eight years of cheek-turning with respect to international law in the South China Sea.

Weve called on China to conform its nuclear capabilities to the strategic realities of our time.

And the State Department at every level, all across the world has engaged with our Chinese counterparts simply to demand fairness and reciprocity.

But our approach cant just be about getting tough. Thats unlikely to achieve the outcome that we desire. We must also engage and empower the Chinese people a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.

That begins with in-person diplomacy. (Applause.) Ive met Chinese men and women of great talent and diligence wherever I go.

Ive met with Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs who escaped Xinjiangs concentration camps. Ive talked with Hong Kongs democracy leaders, from Cardinal Zen to Jimmy Lai. Two days ago in London, I met with Hong Kong freedom fighter Nathan Law.

And last month in my office, I heard the stories of Tiananmen Square survivors. One of them is here today.

Wang Dan was a key student who has never stopped fighting for freedom for the Chinese people. Mr. Wang, will you please stand so that we may recognize you? (Applause.)

Also with us today is the father of the Chinese democracy movement, Wei Jingsheng. He spent decades in Chinese labor camps for his advocacy. Mr. Wei, will you please stand? (Applause.)

I grew up and served my time in the Army during the Cold War. And if there is one thing I learned, communists almost always lie. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.

Quite the contrary. The CCP fears the Chinese peoples honest opinions more than any foe, and save for losing their own grip on power, they have reason no reason to.

Just think how much better off the world would be not to mention the people inside of China if we had been able to hear from the doctors in Wuhan and theyd been allowed to raise the alarm about the outbreak of a new and novel virus.

For too many decades, our leaders have ignored, downplayed the words of brave Chinese dissidents who warned us about the nature of the regime were facing.

See the article here:
Secretary Michael R. Pompeo Remarks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum: Communist China and the Free World's Future - USEmbassy.gov

Had any other partys chief ministers office been embroiled in a scandal connected to the smuggling of gold in times of pandemic in the manner in which CPIMs chief minister Pinarayi Vijayans office is, the Indian commentariat would have made it daily breaking news and would have gone around telling the world on how the people of India have been let down. Had the Chief Minister belonged to the BJP, the heavens would have fallen, apocalypse would have been foretold and the BJP and its leadership would have been daily assailed and battered. But since it is a CPI(M) chief minister, the noise is muted, the Congress and members of its first family are silent, the intelligentsia is star-gazing and a deliberate attempt is being made to allow the story to either sink away or keep floating on the margins. Since it is a secular dispensation that is involved, these acts are interpreted, by a section of opinion makers and gate-keepers, as mere aberrations in the otherwise uninterrupted peoples revolution.

The Kerala gold smuggling episode with its links deep into the entrails of the Kerala Chief Ministers Office is indeed an extremely disconcerting and dangerous development in terms of Indians national security. It has also exposed the manner in which cronyism has entangled the CPI(M) and its leadership in the state. That an element like Swapna Suresh, with a record of criminality and dubious dealings could have access to the inner circles of the CPI(M) Chief Minister is in itself cause for extreme concern. That no less a person like the Chief Ministers principal secretary, M Sivasankar, a powerful senior bureaucrat who practically controlled the Chief Minister and his office, had such a close liaison with Suresh is also extremely disconcerting. Sivasankar, also the IT Secretary of the State and the Chairman of the Kerala State Information Technology Infrastructure Limited (KSTIL) went out of his way to ensure that Swapna Suresh was recruited as manager at KSTIL. It has now come to light that Sivasankar used his office and standing to put forth Swapna Sureshs name for the post through the international consultant PricewaterHouseCoopers. Why was Sivasankar so desperate in trying to ensure that Swapna Suresh got a job in KSTIL, was her links and network in power circles of the ruling CPI(M) an important reason for her to get this job? Why was Chief Minister Vijayan silent on this? How is it that adverse intelligence reports on Swapna Sureshs past record, a crime branch case against her for forgeries done in 2013 were ignored when she was being recruited? It is said that phone calls were made from Chief Minister Vijayans office to the Customs trying to stall the investigations. This is the level of cronyism that the CPI(M) in Kerala has descended to. The links as they are unravelling does not end here. K.T.Jaleel, the CPIMs minister for Higher Education, Wakf, Minority Welfare, and once a firebrand leader of the banned outfit SIMI, has been in close touch with Swapna Suresh as well.

But since it is Jaleel, an erstwhile SIMI and Muslim League leader, the protest against his misusing of public office is muted. The Left-Liberal intelligentsia in the country, which has a quick and biased opinion on the Delhi riots, which is fast in always demonising and castigating the majority community in India, have been silent on this. The CPI(M), for them, is always above reproach, since it is alone the standard-bearer of secularism in India!

The CPI(M), on its part, has always used Jaleel, who by his own admission is a hard core religious man, as a poster boy for its politics of Muslim appeasement. That Jaleel, who cut his political teeth in separatist politics of SIMI has been in touch with Suresh, the kingpin of the gold smuggling racket speaks volumes of the kind of degenerative and subversive politics that the CPI(M) has come to pursue and represent.

Yet Communists leaders across the country are tight lipped about these dangerous developments. Dangerous, if one examines the National Investigation Agencys statements on the case. While taking over the case, the NIA, clearly stated, that as the case pertains to smuggling of large quantity of gold into India from offshore locations threatening the economic stability and national security of the country, it amounts to a terrorist act and after initial investigation the NIA has come to the conclusion that the proceeds of smuggled gold could be used for financing of terrorism in India. It has also emerged that smuggled gold could also have been used, among other things, to foment anti-CAA agitations. The CPI(M) politburo is silent on these developments, their Delhi based leaders with no popular base, are concerned about Kashmir and the CAA but have nothing to say, no action to take on these highly disturbing developments within the ranks of their party.

One is reminded of the last days of the Left Front in West Bengal, when its constituent parties led by the CPI(M) had begun resorting to the most violent and desperate kind of cronyism and syndicatism leading to its rout. The CPI(M) and its leaders had got themselves intertwined and enmeshed into such a miasmic web of petty bourgeois interests that the revolution and its ideal failed to sustain them anymore. It led them to fire on farmers in Nandigram, to try and suddenly jerk an industrial plan after having destroyed industry for over three decades and to terrorise the ordinary voter into voting them back. These expressions of hyper-cronyism destroyed the Left Fronts base in West Bengal. In the Kerala CPI(M )and left front, the trend is similar, only that its extra-territorial, dimension, connections and ramifications makes this brand of cronyism particularly dangerous for India.

The Kerala communists have always been a type apart. Basing themselves on hyperbole and hype, they have in fact, perpetrated a most dangerously intolerant politics. It has been their trait since the early years. In his foreword to a masterly treatise by Dr E. Balakrishnan, on the History of the Communist Movement in Kerala, one of the greatest thinkers to have emerged from among the nationalists in Kerala and in the Malayalam cultural, intellectual, philosophical discourse, late P. Parameshwaran, sometime also a front-ranking leader of the Jana Sangh, writes on how, the Kerala communists and for that matter communists across India, claiming to follow Gandhiji, denounced him in the most uncharitable terms. While eulogising revolution, they betrayed the greatest revolutionary, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and showered him with the choicest abuses without decency or decorum. In Kerala the Communists, P. Parameshwaran reminds us, left no stone unturned to denigrate the most honest politician and sincere-most friend of the poor, Sri K Kelappan. Verbally unleashing volumes of propaganda against communalism, they made the worst compromises with it, thereby pushing Kerala into the mire of fundamentalism. While the Kerala communists under the leadership of the likes of EMS Namboodiripad, tried to sabotage the freedom movement and abused leaders like Kelappan, revered by the people as Kerala Gandhi, they paid unabashed obeisance to the Islamists. In 1993, EMS, for example, publicly equated Abdul Nasser Madani, Islamic fundamentalist leader, accused in the Coimbatore serial blasts and Bangalore serial blasts with Mahatma Gandhi!

Veteran historian MGS Narayanan, for instances, describes the Communist faade best when he says, communists are capable of creating a good image when they are in opposition, so long as they have no chance of wielding powerA romantic and utopian view of Communism is often found among intellectuals and social activists in areas which never had a taste of Communist rule with its hidden agenda of destroying national self-respect and communal harmony in order to impose the partys hegemony. In Kerala that hidden agenda is now being exposed. It has now gone a step ahead, tango with anti-India elements in order to pander and satiate politics of cronyism. For the Left-Liberal cartels, it is look-the-other-way, since these are comrades, who are involved.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Excerpt from:
Gold smuggling in pandemic & politics of cronyism the Kerala communist model - The Times of India Blog

Today, August 1, 2020, marks the 47th anniversary of the death of Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1931 to 1956, one of the most significant figures of the european and international communist movement in the 20th century.He was born to ethnic Greek parents in Ottoman Empire's Edirne (Andrianoupolis) in 1903.At the age of 16, Nikos moved to Istanbul where he worked in various jobs, including as a dockworker and sailor. It was there when he started having his first organised relationship with the working-class movement.In 1919-1922 he travelled extensively to the Soviet Union. In 1923 he became a member of the Communist Party of Turkey. He studied in the newly-founded "KUTV" (Communist University of the Toilers of the East), also known as "Stalin School", in the Soviet Union. After the Greco-Turkish War and the exchange of populations, the Zachariadis family moved permanently to Greece, during a period of severe political and economic crisis.

On summer 1924, after finishing his studies in the Soviet Union, Nikos Zachariadis travelled secretly to Greece where he undertook duties at the Young Communist League of Greece (OKNE). In 1926, during the dictatorship of General Pangalos, he was arrested and imprisoned in Thessaloniki. He managed to escape and worked secretly in various party positions. He was re-arrested and re-imprisoned in 1929, but once again he escaped and fled to the Soviet Union. During his stay in the Soviet Union he became a member of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks).

The death of Joseph Stalin and the right, opportunist turn of the CPSU had a serious impact in the Greek communist movement. In May 1956, the 6th Plenum of the Central Committee of KKE- significantly influenced by Khrushchev's revisionist leadership- (wrongfully) condemned Zachariadis for "serious mistakes" and "sectarian policy". On February 1957 he was expelled from the Party. Nikos Zachariadis passed the rest of his life in exile in Siberia, particularly in Yahuta and Surgut. On August 1st, 1973, at the age of 70, he was found dead in his home in Surgut. According to the official account of his death, Zachariadis committed suicide.

In December 1991, his remains were repatriated in Greece where he was given a funeral at Athens' First Cemetery.

In July 2011, taking a historically and politically significant decision, the National Conference of the Communist Party of Greece fully rehabilitated Nikos Zachariadis as General Secretary and Party member, reversing the unjust decisions of the 6th Plenum.

KKE: EVENT IN HONOR OF NIKOS ZACHARIADIS

Members of the Attica Organisations of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and its youth wing KNE, gathered today at the First Cemetery of Athens in order to pay tribute to Nikos Zachariadis, on the 47th anniversary of his death.

Flowers were deposed to the grave of Zachariadis on behalf of the CC of the KKE, the Central Council of KNE and Zachariadis' son, Sifis.

The event was addressed by Giannis Manousogiannakis, member of the CC of the KKE, who, among other things, pointed out: "Like every year, the KKE and KNE are here, in his grave, as a minimum sign of respect for the selfless and heroic contribution of cde Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the CC of the KKE from 1931 to 1956 [...] Comrade Nikos Zachariadis was dedicated, fully committed to the case of the working class, to proletarian internationalism, to the struggle for social liberation, for socialism-communism".

Read the original post:
Nikos Zachariadis: 47 years since the death of the Greek communist leader - In Defense of Communism

A specter is haunting Italys highways: the specter of Chavismo. Highways: the Venezuelan model has won, claimed journalist Nicola Porro in a video addressed to his 700,000 Facebook and 400,000 Twitter followers. Porro is a famous face on Silvio Berlusconis Mediaset TV stations and deputy editor of the tycoons newspaper Il Giornale; and within just hours, his talk of Venezuela had been adopted by dozens of right-wing commentators, but also a large part of the liberal establishment.

Such fury was not exactly well-grounded. Earlier in July, Giuseppe Contes government decided to take back a 33 percent public share in the company that manages Italys highways, twenty years after it was privatized. This was perhaps a rather tepid move, given the appalling in recent years, deadly neglect of the highways under private management. Yet comparisons with Hugo Chvez and Nicols Maduro abounded in national media, presenting Contes move as extreme and illegitimate.

His attackers drew on tropes already well-established in European and US public discourse, resorting to Cold War anti-communism even three decades since the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Faced with the slightest deviation from neoliberal orthodoxy, defenders of the status quo wheel out the classic rhetoric of economic failure, foreign ideology, and associations with uncivilized non-European countries deploying anti-communism against even forces that stand far from any kind of Marxist politics.

The Italian governments decision has its origins back in 2018, when the Ponte Morandi a cement road bridge in the outskirts of Genoa collapsed, killing forty-three people. This tragedy sparked sharp debates on the apparent lack of maintenance of this bridge and of Italys road infrastructure in general. Especially targeted was the Benetton family, owners of the clothes firm and over the last two decades the majority stake in highway-management firm Autostrade per lItalia (ASPI).

Back then, Conte led a coalition uniting the populist Five Star Movement with the hard-right Lega, and the call to revoke the Benetton familys concession began to make headway. This was a major about-turn in a public debate dominated for over a quarter-century by talk of how the efficient private sector should replace all direct state management, driving a wave of privatizations unrivaled outside the old Eastern Bloc.

ASPI was created in 1950 as part of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI, the then-vast public industrial holding company) and was a key force in the economic boom of the 1960s. Its building of one of the worlds densest highway networks fully suited a development model based on steel (public, at the time), oil (also in public hands) and cars (then, like now, under FIATs private quasi-monopoly).

The privatization of ASPI, along with IRI and many other public firms, came in the 1990s: the now-triumphant neoliberal ideology demanded this, but so, too, the binds established by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the founding act of the European Union, which among other things compelled Italy to slash its public debt through sell-offs of public assets. ASPI was privatized in 1999, and by 2002 the Benetton family had majority control. Since then, shareholders have drawn enormous profits, as road tolls have continually risen while investment in maintenance has been close to zero.

The highways themselves remained public property: what was privatized was their management, and the Ponte Morandi tragedy raised the possibility that the concession would be withdrawn. Yet it was unclear whether it would be entrusted to some other private owner, or if the state would directly take back control.

As this was still being debated, there came an unusual change of government. In summer 2019, Matteo Salvinis hard-right Lega split from its alliance with the Five Star Movement, which in turn formed a new coalition together with the center-left Democrats; despite this upheaval, the independent lawyer Giuseppe Conte remainedprime minister.

The Democrats had particular problems in countenancing nationalization. This party is, in fact, the heir to the political forces that led the privatizations of the 1990s, fully embodying the paradigm of progressive neoliberalism; it also has very close links with financial groups like the Benettons, considered leading lights of the enlightened, progressive-minded bourgeoisie notwithstanding their environmental and social violations in Latin America.

But the Democrats new leader Nicola Zingaretti was elected in 2019 on a platform, if not of Corbyn-style rupture, at least of partly walking back the Blairite infatuation of previous years. It would, indeed, have been odd for the theoretically most social-democratic of Italys main parties to be the only one opposed to revoking the concession.

Faced with a popular demand to do something to punish the Benettons considered indirectly responsible for the forty-three deaths if not nationalize the highways outright, the government was also trapped by its need not to appear overly anti-business, in an international context where it could imagine no economic strategy other than attracting private investment. Added complication came from the jungle of norms governing these outsourcing agreements.

Whatever the myth of the state-as-regulator of private business, these rules consistently favor the concession-owner stipulating billions of euros in fines for the state itself should it take the highways back from the privateer management.

The story came to a head on July 15 when the government and ASPI announced an agreement. State-owned financial holding company Cassa Depositi e Prestiti is to buy up 33 percent of the shares in ASPI (at a cost lower than any possible penalties) while another 22 percent will be ceded to institutional investors enjoying government confidence.

Then, the firm will be floated on the stock exchange and the Benettonss share will fall under 10 percent. This is far from a forced nationalization something the Italian constitution does, in fact, allow for but a market operation, contracted with the current owners, which will see the state intervene as a simple shareholder (if a major one) in a private firm.

But there is a clear shift: the state is to return as an economic actor, taking back part of what was privatized twenty years ago. If in 2018 the economist Mariana Mazzucato, theorist of a new state interventionism, wrote an article for leading daily La Repubblica (together with our comrade Simone Gasperin) entitled Highways: Nationalization Is No Taboo, today she is herself economic advisor to Prime Minister Conte.

The operation also bears the typical traits of this government and Contes own leadership, a balancing act between the progressive neoliberalism of the Italian center-left of the last twenty-five years and the need to give a different kind of response to a socio-economic situation in which such recipes have become unsustainable.

Contes government is not socialist and does not have any program of nationalizations. The agreement over the highways is fully internal to the mechanisms of a market economy. But the fact that, for the first time in decades, the Italian states role in a sector of the economy is growing rather than falling, certainly does point to a window of opportunity. This is a crack in the monolithic neoliberal consensus and the Left would do well to try and widen this crack further.

The day after the agreement, the specter of Bolivarianism made its terrifying appearance on the frontpages. Autostrade per lItalia a statization reminiscent of Venezuela claimed Lucio Malan of Berlusconis Forza Italia party in the Senate. Center-right MP Maurizio Lupi agreed, The expropriation of the Benettons is shocking, we arent Venezuela. The popular ultra-free-marketeer YouTuber Rick DuFer complained that Venezuela is near.

Such rhetoric also spread to the liberal press. If Italy becomes Venezuela, who will invest? asked former economy minister Giovanni Tria on Huffington Post Italia. Its editor Mattia Feltri added, this isnt the way a government resolves matters with private business except in Venezuela. One La Repubblica columnist found the comparison with Venezuela a little over-the-top but agreed with stigmatizing a certain drift toward neo-statism allitaliana. On July 20, Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri was asked by a Corriere della Sera journalist, The government is displaying a dirigiste face, a little Venezuelan. Why would a foreign investor risk their capital in Italy?

There is another immediate reason for this sudden interest in Venezuela. In June, a few weeks before the ASPI agreement, the conservative Spanish daily newspaper ABC reported on alleged Venezuelan financing of the Five Star Movement (M5S), which backs Contes government.

The accusation was groundless but gained traction in the right-wing opposition, which habitually (and falsely) presents M5S as a radical-left force in a bid to erode its support among conservative parts of the electorate. Lega leader Salvini, himself in coalition with M5S just twelve months ago, claimed in June that the government now is a mix of the CGIL [trade union federation] and Venezuela.

Lets repeat: this was a part-nationalization, on market terms, carried out by a very moderate center-left government with both liberal and populist traits. The rhetorical move to associate this kind of policy with Venezuela is new to Italy, given how little there is in its politics of even vaguely socialist coloration.

Elsewhere this comparison is well-established, not least in the United States, where for years Venezuela has been presented as the archetype of the authoritarianism and economic collapse supposedly bound to result from socialist policies.

Even more so in Spain, whose media are much more assiduous in following Venezuelan events, and where Chavismo has often been at the center of public debate. Indeed, right-winger Jos Mara Aznars government was accused of supporting the 2002 coup attempt in Caracas by both the subsequent Socialist prime minister Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero and by Chvez himself.

Still legendary in Spanish politics is a 2007 incident where, faced with Chvezs continual interruptions of a speech by Zapatero at a summit in Chile (aiming precisely to launch attacks on Aznar), the then king of Spain Juan Carlos yelled at the Venezuelan president: Why dont you shut up?

The rise of Podemos in the 2010s then fueled the Spanish rights obsession with Venezuela, not least as party founders Pablo Iglesias and igo Errejn had experience as political consultants working for Latin American left-populist governments. For years, the Right has accused Podemos of being funded by Venezuelan petrodollars, albeit without finding any evidence.

But why Venezuela? If a good part of the radical left internationally condemned Juan Guaids coup attempt and imperialist interference in that country, Bolivarianism hardly enjoys the appeal it did fifteen years ago, when Chvez could boast of opening the way to the pink tide across Latin America. The impression is that this comparison with Venezuela is so successful because it responds to a well-established canon: Cold War anti-communism.

We speak of anti-communism all too little in the West, despite the formidable role of anti-Red propaganda across much of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. It was one of the weapons that devastated the US left, from McCarthyism onward: it has decided elections and deeply molded public debate in multiple countries. The presence, in Italy, of the Wests biggest Communist Party from 1943 to 1991 made it a rather different context compared with countries like Britain and (West) Germany, where anti-communism has devastated anything to the left of social democracy. But it made its mark in Italy, too.

Beyond the folklore of Don Camillo and Peppone (the village priest and the local communist, at the heart of a famous set of conservative films and books after 1945) Christian Democracys anti-communist rhetoric across its forty-year postwar hegemony has left deep traces. It is no accident that even after the Italian Communist Party dissolved in 1991 soon rallying behind moderate Catholic center-left leaders like Romano Prodi in the 1990s and 2000s, Berlusconi continually labeled all his adversaries communists, including the likes of Prodi.

This was a theme right from the moment the billionaire tycoon spectacularly announced that he was entering politics in 1994: the second line of his televised address declared that he had decided to enter the field and concern myself with public affairs, because I do not want to live in an illiberal country governed by immature forces and men double-bound to a politically and economically failed past.

In the attempt to delegitimize any vaguely progressive proposal any deviation from free-market orthodoxy the invocation of communist economic failure is a powerful weapon. So, not by accident, Venezuela comes into play. The point is not that Maduro really does represent a beacon for socialists internationally, but rather that the economic crisis that has struck that country will remind many Westerners of the stereotypes about scarcity in former Eastern Bloc countries. State intervention means communism, communism means poverty.

But the rhetoric about Venezuela doesnt only draw on the economic element of Cold War anti-communism. Also fundamental is the idea of foreign ties and even funding. The Moscow rubles that funded the Italian Communist Party and other Western parties are omnipresent in anti-communist stereotypes, and, behind this, the deeper idea of the communist as a traitor.

This draws on many antisemitic tropes, with which it is, indeed, often associated: communists, like Jews, are held to be more loyal to their international ties than their own country, to be at odds with the fatherland and thus a potential traitor. This guy isnt really one of us: hes paid from abroad, and the point of his radical ideas is to damage us.

In its Venezuelan versions, this rhetoric also draws on the anti-communist idea that communism is something unEuropean and essentially foreign often meaning, typical of non-white, uncivilized, colonized peoples, from the Chinese to the Vietnamese and Cubans, all so many Cossack barbarians readying to invade our civilized Europe. And its easy to identify the deep link between the pink tide in Latin America and the continents indigenous movements, even just looking at the personal biographies of many leading figures on the Left.

Not by chance, on February 28 at the peak of his primary run Bernie Sanders was himself attacked on similar grounds, as a violent column in the New York Times accused him of having been on the wrong side in the Cold War. This article had many disturbing traits, not least where it attacked Sanders on the grounds that The guy who was angry about the downfall of Salvador Allendes Marxist regime in Chile in 1973 is still angry about it today. The writer forgot to mention that this Marxist regime was a democratically elected government; its downfall, a fascist military coup.

In the Italian case, the sudden interest in Venezuelan matters thus seems to have very little to do with Maduros policies which, indeed, no one is indicating as a model to follow or as the leadership of an international socialist movement. Rather, it seems connected to deeper traits of the dominant culture in the liberal West. An established repertoire of anti-communist attacks can be called on to smear anyone who tries to question free-market orthodoxy, even as in the case of the Italian highways in the most ambiguous and timid forms.

The Cold War ended in 1989, but its cultural legacy is much more overbearing than we often imagine. And its clear that no one on the Left can hope to win broad support, without being prepared to confront this kind of rhetoric.

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How Partially Nationalizing the Highways Turned Italy Into Another Venezuela - Jacobin magazine