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As you while away the hours during your COVID-19 house arrest, you're probably wondering who's to blame for your sorry fate. Fortunately, the team of Columbos at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has discovered the real killers of everything we once enjoyed, like jobs and fresh air, and it's GASP! the communists.

From the moment the coronavirus emerged in central China, Beijing has acted in a way that made a pandemic possible and then inevitable. It covered up what was happening in Wuhan. It silenced whistleblowers who sought to warn the world. It stole medical supplies from other countries, even while claiming the sickness was no big deal.

That's all very crappy of China. However, America's favorite capitalist, Donald Trump, fell for Beijing's reassuring bananas in his tailpipe because he was too lazy to take a global pandemic seriously. He downplayed what was happening when COVID-19 hit the US. He silenced whistleblowers who tried to warn us. He's even stolen medical supplies from his own country and distributed them to his most loyal cronies. Trump's capitalist zeal is also why Trump is desperate to reopen" the country prematurely. It isn't very communist of communism to own COVID-19's means of production. It should at least share some of the blame with capitalism.

Clue - Communism is just a red herring.www.youtube.com

VOC not only blames communism for this crisis but has now added the coronavirus's ongoing death toll to "the historical victims of communism." VOC doesn't bother distinguishing which COVID-19 victims died with communism or from communism. No one ever pins all the deaths from slavery and homelessness on capitalism. It's like that happened when capitalism was still a minor.

From the Daily Caller:

"Any cursory look at the facts show that the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, and WHO Director Tedros are continued threats to global public health. We call on all western media to verify any claims from these discredited organizations before parroting them."

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu has received racist death threats because he's just trying to do his job. It's unclear why VOC considers him an active threat to global public health." Arizona Sen. (for now) Martha McSally called on Dr. Tedros to resign because she believes he's part of the Chinese coverup. She's making political whoopie with Trump, who's desperate to blame anyone but himself for the impact COVID-19 has had on the US.

COVID-19 is a natural disaster that Trump bungled, but he'd prefer if the virus is viewed instead as a biological WMD that China unleashed on us. Republicans and conservatives in general are hopping on the xenophobic bandwagon. Bill Maher who's constantly torn between disliking Trump and believing white men should say whatever they want without consequence defended the president's attempt to rename COVID-19 the Chinese virus." It's apparently too politically correct" to reject Trump's obvious and shameless propaganda. He wants to demonize and scapegoat an entire country and group of people, even if means actual, unrelated Americans are targeted because of their appearance. Don't let him.

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Communism Is Just A Red Herring. Trumps Why Youre Hiding In The House From COVID. - Wonkette

The coronavirus is spreading around the world, and a world-wide effort is underway to contain it. In the second half of the Twentieth Century containment was also a major theme. Its useful to compare the two.

The dominanttheme in international relations in the second half of the Twentieth Century was the struggle between Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism, and the leading Western approach to defeating communism was the "containment" strategy, articulated by the American diplomat George F. Kennan. The theory, in short, was the liberal capitalist West needed to contain the Soviet-style communism from spreading around the world, notably in places like Korea and Vietnam. If the West could defeat the Soviets in these small battlegrounds, then the politico-economic disease of communism could be contained.

A dominant theme of domestic policy in the United States and many Western democracies during this same period concerned the struggle between the people and organizations that had the power and wealth and those who sought liberation and equality. Those in control, to grossly oversimplify, were white males who controlled industry and politics, while those who sought liberation and equality were led by women and African-Americans in the Women's Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, but as the Twentieth Century evolved they came to include the LGBTQ community and citizens, generally, who fought to save the planet.

The economically well-off and politically powerful white males were accused of containing women and blacks in the United States, even as they were credited by many with containing the Soviet Union many, but certainly not all, since there were dissenters in the United States, especially the most liberal, even radical, segments of America's youth. Indeed, the youth who marched and protested against the war in Vietnam were against the "System," which was seen as suppressing women and blacks even as it promoted a morally depraved form of capitalism abroad via a brutal and useless war in Vietnam.

There is an obvious parallel today with the capitalist Kennan-style effort to contain the spread of communism, which was regarded as a political-economic disease, one which was harmful to human beings and needed to be eradicated from the earth. COVID-19 has to date infected more than 600,000 Americans, although that figure is confirmed cases, and experts say the number infected could be five or ten times higher. It has killed over 25,000. COVID-19 is an actual physical illness, is definitely harmful and in some cases, anywhere from 1 to 15 percent depending on your age and health can kill you.

An animating theme of the liberal West's effort to terminate communism, an effort that took 45 years, was international cooperation and coordination. No one country could contain communism on its own, although the United States led the way. Still, we needed the support and cooperation of England, France, then West Germany, the rest of free Europe, Canada and Japan to achieve victory. A go-it-alone mentality would not have worked, and the Cold War ultimately ended when the teamwork put together by the United States and our allies won the war against the Soviets, who were imploding on their own and were being guided toward dissolving their empire by Premier Gorbachev.

As the Berlin Wall fell, women and blacks in the United States, and environmentalists and the advocates for the LGBTQ movement were breaking down the walls of containment at home. Tens of millions of women had walked beyond the walls of their kitchens and laundry rooms into American industry and politics and American economic life in general; and American blacks, with less success but still notable achievements, had thrown off the economic chains that constrained them and entered mainstream American political and social life.

The power held by economically and politically powerful white males, according to those they subjugated, was similar to a disease that, from their point of view, needed to be contained and ultimately eliminated. Thus those being contained fought back and tried to contain their oppressors.

The great liberation movements remind us that the struggle for human freedom is a struggle often between those who see their adversaries as sources of evil. This evil is what philosophers have called moral evil, by which they mean evil based on free will. Philosophers use the term natural evil to refer to pain, hardship and death brought about by natural forces, like tornadoes, hurricanes, and pandemic viruses.Some argue that natural disasters like hurricanes and pandemic viruses can be made more serious if human beings leaders and citizens alike do not act in a morally responsible way. Thus the distinction between natural and moral evil is not clear cut.

The extent of the coronavirus pandemic, though it has its roots in natural as opposed to human causes, does rest in many ways in the hands of political leaders, industry and technology, the medical profession, and citizens ourselves. It will probably be with us for at least several years, certainly until a vaccine is obtained and widely distributed. Brutal as it is, we do well to try to understand the challenges in the context of American and world history.

It is not necessary or desirable to separate this crisis from all previous crises and massive problems and declare it unique. Now is a time to integrate this phenomenon and the challenges it gives us into our national self-consciousness with previous crises and the challenges they gave us, even those which are not rooted in natural causes.

In the end, we will be stronger to the extent that we understand the crises and problems we have faced, the mistakes we have made, the successes weve had and the opportunities we have before usto change the world for the better.

Dave Anderson is the editor of Leveraging: A Political, Economic, and Societal Framework (Springer, 2014). He is also the author of "Youth04: Young Voters, the Internet, and Political Power"(W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) and co-editor of "The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). He has taught at George Washington University, the University of Cincinnati, and Johns Hopkins University. He was a candidate in the 2016 Democratic Primary in Marylands 8thCongressional District. Contact him atdmamaryland@gmail.com.

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'Containment' again emerges as a dominant theme | TheHill - The Hill

The men and women who marched to their posts on the front line of defense against U.S. aggression, were not surprised by the concept Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro expressed April 16, 1961, during the farewell to victims of the air attack the previous day.

His exact words defining the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution were: "... What they cannot forgive us for, is that we are right here under their noses and have made a socialist revolution right under the United States' very nose... And that we are defending a socialist revolution with these guns, and that we are defending this socialist revolution with the courage of our anti-aircraft gunners, shooting at the aggressors planes yesterday!

A stigma was left behind and a new reality was emerging. Socialism had been, until recently, a bad word. Synonymous with repression, suppression of freedom, brainwashing, invalidation of the individual, frustration of human beings. Communism was much worse, portrayed in horror stories in Readers Digest and Blackhawk comics. The darkness behind the Iron Curtain made the international Communist movement public enemy number one, according to the Organization of American States Caracas Declaration of 1954, and Peruvian Eudocio Ravines slanderous work The Great Swindle, published in certain intellectual media of the time - who better than repenter to discredit ideas he once held.

Everyday people were inculcated with the harsh narrative that communism and socialism were equivalent to having your children stolen from you, to dying of hunger. If you were poor, you would be poorer. When a communist activist stood out on the basis on individual merits, people said to themselves: so-and-so is intelligent, it's too bad he's a Communist. If the person was decent too bad, he doesn't look like a Communist.

Cubans of that defining hour, in 1961, had not read Marx, Engels or Lenin. They had never heard of Gramsci or Rosa Luxembourg, but did not need to decipher Maritegui to understand, in practice, that socialism meant heroic creation. The common sense of the struggle demonstrated then, and much more with the passage of time, that the link between socialist ideas and those of Mart's was possible and necessary.

Revolutionary praxis dictated the course of events. The people understood what Fidel meant when he said imperialism was irritated by "the dignity, the integrity, the courage, the ideological firmness, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people.

Cuban soldiers defended socialism at Playa Girn, as they would do later in the battle against counter-revolutionaries and during the October missile crisis. They and their successors have defended socialism from distortions and dogmatism, from reductionism and opportunism, from lies and betrayal. In the name of socialism they share the spirit of solidarity within and beyond the island.

"We chose socialism because it is a just system, a much more humane system," Fidel said in 1991. Cubans of today are committed to using these words to guide all our actions.

Continued here:
Socialism: Never again a foreign word Cuba Granma - Official voice of the PCC - Granma English

You cannot get hold of a copy of Albert Camuss The Plague. Not surprising, of course. It could hardly be more topical.But even before the arrival of this pestilence, we were going through a Camus revival here and in the US. When Sartre died in 1980, the streets of Paris were lined with mourners. Camus, his great rival, was out of fashion. What has changed?

2o13 was Camuss centenary. Penguin marked it with a much-acclaimed new translation of The Outsider and there was a new biography, Robert Zaretskys A life worth living: Albert Camus and the quest for meaning.

Since then, books have been, pouring out. Camus at Combat: Writing 19441947, his 1950s notebooks, his Algerian Chronicles and this year alone, Camus: A Very Short Introduction, and, later this Summer, new Penguin editions of The Plague, The Fall, The Outsider and a book of essays, Committed Writing.

The last title is the clue. Camus was a great writer and philosopher, but, above all, he was a public intellectual, revered in the English-speaking world as a kind of French Orwell, or perhaps for younger readers, a French Hitchens. One American admirer wrote, He was one of the fiercest, most partisan polemicists in the history of French journalism.

Camus played an honourable role in the war, the Resistance and debates about Communism in post-war France. Unlike the once-famous Structuralists and post-Structuralists he was readable and took on the big issues of his day. You didnt have to read Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger to understand his writing.

The point is that Camus not only took on the big issues of the day. He was right about the big issues of post-war France. He was right about Vichy, right about punishing collaborators, right about French anti-Semitism and racism against Algerian Arabs and, above all, he was right about French Communism.

In his book, Past Imperfect, about the importance of Communism in French intellectual life in the decade after the war, Tony Judt wrote that these years were unique in the near-monopoly exercised by the appeal of Soviet Communism within the Left. When French Communists attacked East European emigres like Czeslaw Milosz for telling the truth about Stalinism in east Europe and when Communists denied the show-trials in Eastern Europe, Camus spoke out.

The one big issue where he was wrong, his critics argued then and now, was Algeria. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Algeria for understanding French political life in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Camus was born there. The Algerian crisis and eventual independence was one of the key moments in the anti-colonialist movement. But was Camus wrong? Look whats happened to post-colonial Algeria and the post-colonial Middle East. Who would you rather side with: Camus, or Fanon and Sartre?

The Left said Camus was wrong about Algeria. But the French Left wasnt right about anything. They were wrong about the Show Trials in eastern Europe (1947-53) and about Stalinism, about Maos Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, and then Foucault was wrong about Iran in the 1980s. In a superb profile in The Nation, Thomas Meaney writes, His [Camuss] books outsell Fanons at the Librairie Tiers Monde on Abdel Kader Square. Thats in Algiers.

In his book, Culture & Imperialism (1993), Edward W. Said passionately attacked Camus for his stand on Algeria. Said was then at the height of his fame, as Sartre and de Beauvoir had been in the Fifties. He attacked Camus as a representative of French colonialism, whereas he was a poor and fatherless outsider. But it was Said, not Camus, who went to one of the most prestigious schools in Egypt and then Harvard. Camus, in contrast, was the son of a cellarman and an illiterate mother. Camus, Said wrote, is a novelist from whose work the facts of imperial actuality, so clearly there to be noted, have dropped away. Camus, he wrote, is a very late imperial figure.

The years have been kinder to Camus than to Said or Sartre. Said fought over Palestinian statehood from a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side. Sensibly, because in all probability he wouldnt have survived for long in Gaza. Camuss passionate attacks on terrorist violence and nationalism in Algeria read well today.

This is why Tony Judt had a photo of Camus on his desk. Judt championed Camus for more than twenty years, from an essay in The New York Review of Books in 1994, Albert Camus: The Best Man in France. A group of interesting critics Judt and Claire Messud, at The New York Review, Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, Thomas Meaney in The Nation have admired Camus not just for his prose or his philosophical ideas, but for his political decency and moderation.

After the demise of Sartre and de Beauvoir, politically extreme and fashionable for thirty years, and French Theory, fashionable but impossibly abstract and opaque, Camuss moment has come.

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The return of Camus - TheArticle

Citation From the March 31, 2020, edition of Premiere NetworksThe Rush Limbaugh Show

CALLER: I have to take umbrage with you calling this a Chinese virus it is a communist virus. Understand that communism is all about moving wealth out of private hands, into public control. And that social progress has advanced so far in China that these poor people dont have enough wealth to get the basic subsistence of life. They gotta go out and invent new food sources theyre eating bats, for Gods sakes. And that virus is now bringing the same social progress to America. Its descending on us faster than the headlines can keep up with it.

And Im not mad at the American left. Theyve been out there for decades, clear about what their mission is. Im mad about our side, for not recognizing this communist revolution taking place from the highest offices of government, media, and education. If were not willing to admit the enemy among us if were not willing to prosecute treason, where treason is found then we should stop complaining about it, just accept it.

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): Okay, well, Ill let that stand, as I know Im being inundated with people who have that point of view. That its not the Chi-Com virus, its the communist virus, that were being overtaken, the Chinese communists are doing it.

Youre the only person I know who thinks its happening without the cooperation of the Democrat Party, however. Most people tell me they think the American left is the worldwide Communist Party now, and that they are willingly subverting this economy and destroying it, for the purposes of eliminating and wiping out capitalism.

And whether thats happening of whether that's the design or not, that is happening. This economy is being shut down. Thats why this is not sustainable. Im sorry, Im sounding like a broken record on this, but it is not sustainable.

Are we just going to sit by and watch $22 trillion thats the value, thats the sum total of the GDP, thats the U.S. economy are we just going to sit by here and watch it evaporate? Because thats what were doing, under the guise of not losing any unnecessary life meaning we want to try to save as many lives as we can.

At any rate, I appreciate the call.

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Rush Limbaugh: Are we just going to sit by and watch $22 trillion economy be destroyed under the guise of not losing any unnecessary life? - Media...