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Vietnam.

The name carries with it a revulsion because of the calamity that struck the people who lived there, and the 58,000 American soldiers who died there.

Now, a book has been created by DK Publishing in association with the Smithsonian that provides timelines with a pictorial and text overview of Vietnams tortured existence from colonial days to its final fall into communism.

The elaborate, coffee table-size book titled, The Vietnam War: the Definitive Illustrated History, recently became available at Barnes and Noble Book Sellers.

It deals in a general way with American soldiers, though without individual names, such as Jim Allison of Lubbock who died fighting for what once was the possible liberty of South Vietnam.

And with men like Robert Bernero of Lubbock, who survived while serving faithfully in the military, but came home to no parades.

The United States had been in Vietnam in an attempt to keep communism from engulfing the world in the 1960s and 1970s. The ideology already had Russia and China firmly in its grip. Communism found propaganda more effective than nuclear weapons with which to defeat liberty.

Vietnam conquered

France had conquered Vietnam in the 19th century and continued its colonial rule until World War II, when Japan occupied the country.

Then, at the end of World War II, France became active in the country again, while communists became intent on seizing it. When Vietnam was divided into north and south by the Geneva Accords of 1954, war and suffering ensued for a quarter of a century.

The South had been proclaimed to be the Republic of Vietnam in 1955, and the last French soldier left a year later.

Vietnamese people who were Catholics and living in North Vietnam began fleeing communism by moving in massive numbers into South Vietnam, where they were housed in huge tent cities.

According to The Vietnam War, Catholics in the tent cities survived on emergency aid from the United States.

And the stage was set:

American military advisers began providing assistance and training for the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam.

The Vietnam War includes a quote by Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader of North Vietnam, that must be one of the most ironic statements of all time: Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty.

Conventional weapons

North Vietnam also used conventional weapons, those suggested by Chinas Mao Zedong in his Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun philosophy, and began working through guerrillas inside South Vietnam.

The first American soldier was killed near Saigon on July 8, 1959, by guerrillas.

Nine years later, 495,000 American troops were in-country, and in a single year nearly 17,000 had been killed.

Although enemy forces lost 45,000 men in its Tet offensive in 1968, it was considered a military defeat. At the time, national media coverage in the United States was keeping up a barrage of opposition to the war.

The Vietnam War, in a section on the media and the war, noted that Vietnam was the first war covered extensively on television: The conversion of (Walter) Cronkite and other media gatekeepers from ambivalent onlookers to antiwar advocates was a major blow to the American effort in Vietnam, the book states.

Eventually, a buildup of American troops over the years was reversed in the wake of changed public opinion, and by March 1973, the last combat troops had been removed. By April 30, 1975, the communists tanks rolled into the center of Saigon, and the war was lost.

Suffering continued

Suffering didnt end, though. Vietnam was formally united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam under hard-line communist rule.

Hundreds of thousands of Boat People left their country over the following two years, with an estimated 50 to 70 percent dying at sea.

According to The Vietnam War, more than two million South Vietnamese that included former military officers, civil servants, capitalists, priests, teachers, intellectuals and others identified with the former regime were sent to re-education or thought reform camps:

An estimated 165,000 people died in the camps from starvation, disease, exhaustion, suicide, and by execution.

Also, the research found, Religious people, especially Christians, were persecuted, as were ethnic minorities, including the significant Chinese population. Many of the Montagnards, the mountain people who resisted the communists, were slaughtered.

Peace now reigns in Vietnam, but not liberty. President Bill Clinton reached out to the new Vietnam for a normalization of relations.

Lubbock soldiers

Jim Allison wasnt able to visit the new Vietnam:

At age five, he would wear a cowboy hat and strap on a holstered toy six-gun. He was a replica of a genuine West Texas cowboy. As an adult, he graduated from Monterey High School and attended Texas Tech before entering the Army as an infantry soldier.

According to a report in the Avalanche-Journal on Sunday, Nov. 3, 1968, he had been killed at age 21, on Oct. 31, 1968, in Vietnam. Genealogical research shows he was the son of Douglas and Marie Allison. Army records indicate he died by small arms fire while serving as a private first class.

He was a member of a Church of Christ congregation.

It was a lifetime that might have been. Still, he did his part in his moment to keep liberty alive in the United States and for the world.

Bob Bernero, who came to Lubbock in 1984 to work at Texas Tech and get a degree in social studies by attending classes at night, calls himself what the 17- and 18-year-olds in Vietnam called him when he was an old man of 22:

A lifer. It referred to his intention to make the Air Force a career.

He has shared his experiences in Vietnam and a bit of measured success with the protesters for next weeks A-J Remembers.

Original post:
AJ Remembers: Vietnam was a war too far - LubbockOnline.com

IsPope Francis a Catholic? Or is the Pontiff a communist?

Jacksonville City CouncilmanBill Gullifordhas a take.

I am a Catholic and he is a Communist, Gulliford said of Pope Francis on Facebook Thursday, reacting toan online publication (M2 Voice) that said the Pope asserted that world government must rule the United States for their own good.

Notable: the quote was not in the original interview the website claimed to cite, which was conducted in Italian and translated by Agence France Presse before the M2 Voice aggregation.

Gullifords comments drew sharp criticism online Thursday, and on Friday, we reached out to him for further clarification and many of his comments came back to schisms in the Church between the conservative American Catholic wing and the liberation theology school from which Pope Francis hails.

Liberation theology, said Gulliford, is a form of Christian communism, and one that Francis narratives and pronouncements still echo.

All he talks about is social justice, Gulliford added.

If he is the head of the Catholic Church, he should put salvation over social justice, Gulliford continued, adding that any friend of the United Nations is no friend of mine.

Gulliford also believes that, even if the quote he reacted to was not in the interview, there is plenty of evidence of Francis anti-American animus, reflected in his comments against the United States, which reflect a definite anti-American bent.

Gulliford alsonoted that Pope Benedict XVI condemned liberation theology as being in conflict with Catholic doctrine.

Meanwhile, several Catholics with a different take weighed in Friday also.

When right-wing politicians and conservative media pundits dont want to hear what Pope Francis has to say about inequality or the failure of trickle-down economics, they hurl the communist epithet at him, said John Gehring, Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life, and author of The Francis Effect.

But the popes economic message is rooted in traditional Catholic teaching. The catechism of the church talks about inequality as sinful. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI strongly challenged free-market fundamentalism. Conservative Catholics have a history of conveniently wishing that part of their own church tradition away.

A local Priest offered a similar sentiment.

Pope Francis stands solidly in line with his predecessors. William F. Buckley, Jr. rejected Pope John XXIIIs Mater et Magistra, and admirers of Pope John Paul II cherry picked from his teaching on communism and capitalism, passing over his critiques of the latter while trumpeting his critiques of the former, said Jacksonville local Pastor Tim Lozier of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church.

I absolutely agree that Pope Francis is simply preaching the Gospel and we all are often more aligned with the worldly values of success and prosperity than we are with the values Jesus taught and lived.

See the article here:
Jacksonville Councilman doubles down on describing Pope Francis as a 'communist' - Florida Politics (blog)

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, with his Google Glass. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

It seems like only a few years ago that we began making wry jokes about the doofus minority of people who walked down the street while texting or otherwise manipulating their phone, bumping into lamp-posts and so forth. Now that has become the predominant mode of locomotion in the city, to the frustration of those of us who like to get anywhere fast and in a straight line. Pedestrian accidents are on the rise, and some urban authorities are even thinking of installing smart kerbside sensors that alert the phone-obsessed who are about to step into oncoming traffic. New technologies, asAdam Greenfields tremendously intelligent and stylish book repeatedly emphasises, can change social habits inunforeseen and often counterproductive ways.

The technological fixes to such technology-induced problems rarely succeed as predicted either. It was, after all, to address the issue of people staring at handheld screens all day that Google marketed its augmented-reality spectacles, Google Glass. It rapidly turned out, however, that most people didnt much like being surveilled and video-recorded by folk wearing hipster tech specs. Early adopters became known as Glassholes; the gizmo was banned in cool US bars, and it was eventually abandoned.

Early adopters became known as 'Glassholes'; the gizmo was banned in cool American bars, and it was eventually abandoned

It is a story, as Greenfield shows, repeated in many different contexts: our visionary tech masters suppose that things can be disrupted by a single new device or service, only to learn belatedly that unexpected things happen when technical novelty rubs up against established social mores, embedded structures of power and money, and sometimes even the laws of physics. There is an excellent discussion here, for example, of how the verification of bitcoin transactions works through the enormous expenditure of energy on computing deliberately useless problems: it is probably doomed asa currency, Greenfield suggests, by simple thermodynamics. Meanwhile, the emancipatory dream of 3D printers enabling everyone to make anything they want is currently economically unlikely, and besides the one thing that is very popular in 3D printing is untraceable parts for assault rifles.

Greenfield calls all these things radical technologies because they could usher in vast changes that lead to very different potential futures: either what is known sexily as fully automated luxury communism, or a dystopia of total surveillance and submission to the networks of autonomous computerised agents that might replace human governments altogether.

Greenfield, indeed, believes that some kind of machine sentience is coming down the pipeline sooner rather than later: in this, he implicitly agrees with the Singularity theorists who yearn for the coming of true artificial intelligence something that historically, like nuclear fusion, has always been 30years away. (Greenfield, though, is rightly perturbed by those thinkers haste to become post-human and shuck off the flesh.) At the end of the book he offers some detailed sci-fi sketches of such possible futures. The bad ones are dismayingly plausible, but there is also a delightful one he names Green Plenty, where material scarcity is a thing of the past, and sweet-natured machines do all the work. (I for one welcome our new robot underlords.) Its very reminiscent, in fact, of the fully automated luxury communism portrayed in Iain M Bankss classic Culture novels. But howcan we get there from here?

By paying intense and critical attention, Greenfield suggests. His book melds close readings of the small experiences of normal life as mediated by new technologies (how, for example, time has been diced into the segments between notifications) with techno-political-economic philosophical analyses of the global clash between Silicon Valley culture and the way the world currently works. Its about what Greenfield calls the colonisation of everyday life by information processing, and this new colonialism, in the authors view, is so far no better than past versions. He gives excellently sceptical accounts of wearable technologies, augmented reality like Pokmon Go (now an inbuilt feature of the iPhones operating system), the human biases that are always baked into the ostensibly neutral operation of algorithms; or theworld of increasingly networked objects, about which he waxes humanistically poetic: The overriding emotion of the internet of things is a melancholy that rolls off of it in waves and sheets. The entire pretext on which it depends is a milieu of continuously shattered attention.

What seem to be potentially anarchic, liberating technologies are highly vulnerable to capture and recuperation by existing power structures just as were dissident pop-culture movements such as punk. Greenfield makes this point with particular force when discussing automated smart contracts and the technology of the blockchain, a kind of distributed ledger that underlies the bitcoin currency but could be used for many more things besides. Despite the insurgent glamour that clings to it still, he points out, blockchain technology enables the realisation of some very long-standing desires on thepart of very powerful institutions. Much as he scorns the authoritarian uses of new technology, he also wants to warnprogressives against technological utopianism. Activists on the participatory left are just as easily captivated by technological hype as anyone else, especially when that hypeis couched in superficially appealing language.

Critical resistance to all these different colonial battalions is based on Greenfields observation, nicely repurposing the enemys terminology, that reality is the one platform we all share. If we want to avoid the pitiless libertarianism towards which all these developments seem to lean unsurprisingly, because it is the predominant political ideology among the pathetically undereducated tech elite then we need to insist on public critique andstrategies of refusal. Radical Technologies itself is a landmark primerand spur to more informed andeffective opposition.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Lifeis published by Verso. To order a copy for 16.14 (RRP 18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

Originally posted here:
Radical Technologies by Adam Greenfield review luxury communism, anyone? - The Guardian

"All I know is if I don't pay, these people disappear."

Miguel Cabrera loves his homeland, and there is much to love about it. Venezuela is a wonderful nation filled with wonderful people.

But right now, its being held hostage by a dictatorial, communist regime. And while he is not the type to spout about politics, today the Detroit Tigers superstar first baseman decided hed had enough. The video is in Spanish, but were going to embed it anyway along with key passages translated below:

Cabrera splits most off his time between Detroit during the season and his home in Miami in the offseason. He only gets to Venezuela a few weeks out of every year, but he has many family members who still live there, including his mother, and apparently he is forced to pay protection money to keep his mother from being kidnapped:

I am tired of hearing that they are going to kidnap my mother, and I dont know whether it is a policeman or a bad guy, I dont know who they are. All I know is if I dont pay, those people disappear.

Cabrera also called for free elections, and while he didnt mention Nicolas Maduro by name or necessarily side with anyone, its clear from this passage what he knows needs to happen:

I am Venezuelan and I protest for the truth. Communism in Venezuela has to come to an end. I cant speak any plainer. I am not with a dictatorship, I am not with anybody. We have to fight for our country. We have to find a solution.

And: Hello to the people of the resistance. You are not alone. We continue to support you.

Cabrera apparently catches some heat for having made millions in America. There is no reason he should apologize for that. Hes in the midst of a 10-year contract with the Tigers that pays him about $29 million a year. Despite the fact that hes having an off year this year (for him), hes earned every penny of that money as one of the best players in baseball and probably the best hitter in Tigers history. If Al Kaline says so (and he does), that pretty much settles it.

But while Cabrera doesnt often set foot in Venezuela these days - and its hard to blame him for that - he has sent considerable aid there in the form of food, medicine and other supplies. Now, he says, people are asking him to send weapons.

That requests comes as the death toll from the anti-government protests has reached 92, with more than 1,500 injured. This was all entirely avoidable, of course, but the Maduro regime choose to consolidate its power and oppress dissidents rather than reverse the socialist policies that have led to widespread deprivation and misery.

And I cant remind you often enough: If the Democratic Party was able to impose whatever policies it preferred in America, it would impose the exact same socialist policies that have devastated Venezuela. Miguel Cabrera is right. Communism in Venezuela has to come to an end. And the notion that socialism or communisim would be in anyones best interests needs to come to an end throughout the world.

But especially in the United States.

Dan Calabreses column is distributed by CainTV, which can be found at caintv.com

A new edition of Dans book Powers and Principalities is now available in hard copy and e-book editions. Follow all of Dans work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.

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Excerpt from:
Miguel Cabrera in Instagram video: 'Communism in Venezuela has ... - Canada Free Press

Capitalism is an empire rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, chattel slavery and genocide of Black and brown people.

Capitalism is a system in which the means of production are privatized and held by corporations and other powerful groups of people, is founded on the idea of the free market (laissez-faire), privatized personal gain and is reliant on imperialism to exist. The Taino of Hispaniola were among the first to feel the wrath of Spanish imperialism and exploitation for the construction of the white supremacist empire founded on stolen commodities from the Taino and their forced labor along with the enslavement of Africans who were forced to the region.

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Capitalism, imperialism and colonialism resulted in the development of capitalism itself as a system, the shift from precolonial communism to capitalism, the mass genocide of the Taino people, the exploitation of Taino resources for the socio-economic gain of European imperialist nations, the establishment of white supremacist racial hierarchies on the island, and the shift from precolonial matriarchy to capitalist patriarchy.

Primitive communism is a Marxist term referring to precolonial societies in which the inhabitants lived communally through hunting and gathering, there was no private property, no currency, no state, no class system, and people lived with and for the rest of their communities.In"The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," Gayle Rubin states that inThe Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,Friedrich Engels discusses the existence of matriarchal, primitive communist societies particularly in non-Western regions; Friedrich Engels'The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State documents the existence of matriarchal societies for thousands of years.Thoroughly researching what he calls 'primitive communist societies,' Engels shows that for the bulk of the human timeline, women were in positions of power in the family and community.

Primitive communism upheld matriarchy and woman dominance in sociopolitical aspects of the respective society.Moreover, an essential instance of primitive communism was the Taino society of Quisqueya/Ayiti, also known as Hispaniola, which is the contemporary Dominican Republic and Haiti. Furthermore, the Taino did not use currencya crucial aspect of communismand one of the most notable characteristics of their society was the prevalence of social solidarity, particularly among clan members, and the social structure perpetuated tribal unity.Ties between clans, groups and tribes strengthened as families grew and marriages increased-all due in part to the matrilineal order.

In regards to Taino political organization, they all spoke a common language and shared a common religion and there were intertribal marriages between caciques of at least two of the five confederate Taino tribes.The five confederate Taino tribes on Hispaniola were led by caciques Guarionex, Caonabo, Behechio, Goacanagarix, and Cayoa.The flatlands and over seventy leagues in the center of the island were controlled by Guarionex meanwhile Behechio governed the western region. Former Carib cacique Caonabo governed the kingdom in the mountains and he also married Behechio's sister Anacaona.

According to historian Frank Moya Pons in his bookThe Dominican Republic: A National History,Caciques were the heads of the government and their assistants were called nitainoswho were the noblemen within Taino social structure.Nitainos were usually the closest maternal relatives of the caciques or notable clan chiefs who formed the vital link between the caciques and the people.Cacique power was exercised through assistance by nitaino chiefs from confederate tribes who would then legitimize the cacique and their decision. A servant class called the naborias served the caciques and nitaino class and their existence helped explain testimonies of early chroniclers who stated that all land was communally owned through primitive communism.The naborias were dedicated to supporting the caciques and their families and permitted the majority of the population to share goods and services publicly as opposed to working for wages in order to support the caciques.

Prior to European invasion, Hispaniola had a relatively low density in population and a favorable person-to-land ratio, which enabled the Taino to obtain abundant food from their environment with ease; however, forced labor at the hands of the colonizers, along with exposure to European diseases, abortions and mass suicides with the purpose of escaping slavery, resulted in a rapid decline of the population to near extinction.

With European invasion came a counterrevolution to Taino primitive communismwhich came in the form of the birth of capitalism, the enforcement of private property, the development and incorporation of chattel slavery, and the construction of a white supremacist empire fueled by colonialism and stolen Taino and African goods; Eric Wolf makes this case inEurope and the People Without History,Wallerstein's explicitly historical account of capitalist origins and the development of the 'European world economy.'This world-economy, originating in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, constitutes a global market, characterized by a global division of labor.The search for profit guides both production in general and specialization in production. Profits are generated by primary producers, whom Wallerstein calls proletarians, no matter how their labor is mobilized.Those profits are appropriated through legal sanctions by capitalists, whom Wallerstein classifies as bourgeois, no matter what the source of their capital.

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Dominican Republic Deportations and the Global Economy

The free and cheap forced labor of Taino people and enslaved Africans are what were used to fuel the private means of production of capitalism, through which the Spanish bourgeois colonialists would appropriate the profits of the oppressed nationalities' labor as well as forcefully import their goods such as gold to Spainwhich is also evidence of how capitalism and imperialism go hand in hand, capitalism is an empire rooted in white supremacy, patriarchy, chattel slavery and genocide of Black and brown people.

Here is the original post:
How Capitalism and Spanish Imperialism Served as a Counterrevolution to Taino Primitive Communism - teleSUR English