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Originally published in Historical Materialism.

On February 18, 2022,threeStolpersteinewere placedat Andreasberger Strae 9 in Britz, in Berlins Neuklln district. The brass cobblestones commemorate anyone who was persecuted or killed under the Nazis. These three mark the former home of Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow, and as well as Fischers son Friedrich Gerhart Friedlnder, until they fled the country in March 1933.

When I announced that I was applying for these Stolpersteine, a comrade responded: Ruth Fischer is a terrible human being. Dont do it. And yes, more than 60 years after her death, Fischer remains one of the most controversial figures from communist history, in Germany or anywhere else. I certainly would not claim her legacy. But it is not as if we were putting up a statue a Stolperstein merely draws attention to the crimes of the Nazis.

One sign of the ongoing interest in Ruth Fischer is the massive biography by Mario Keler, published in German in 2013 and weighing in at over a kilogramme. Against the authors friendly advice, I read it from cover to cover.

Fischer and Maslow are best remembered as the ultraleft leaders of the Communist Party of Germany for a brief period in the mid-1920s.

What makes Fischer so fascinating is her inconsistency. She gained international fame as both a communist and an anticommunist, without lasting success in either role, thus alienating absolutely everyone. As an obituary by the journalist Sebastian Haffner put it, her fate was to unintentionally damage the side she was temporarily aligned with more than the side she was fighting (quoted on p. 614; all translations from the work are mine).

Born in Leipzig, Fischer grew up in Vienna as Elfriede Eisler. The Eislers, including her younger brothers Gerhart and Hanns, made up, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, almost the quintessential Comintern family (quoted on pp. 89). Subject to myriad forms of antisemitism in the decaying Habsburg monarchy, the three siblings all dedicated themselves to revolutionary modernism, although in very different forms. Elfriede was a firebrand speaker who soon fell out with Stalinism; Gerhart was a party-apparatus man who remained loyal to really existing socialism; Hanns, a composer, became the most famous of the three.

While she cannot be called the founder of the Communist Party of German-Austria, Fischer did receive membership card #1 of this very small and putschist organisation. One of her earliest works was a pamphlet on theSexual Ethics of Communism, published in 1920 in Vienna, in which she called for a radical break with the monogamous forced union: the majority of people live polyamorously, she wrote, and homosexuality is natural (quoted on p. 53). It goes without saying that older and more prudish figures like Lenin and Zetkin were not impressed by this young comrade from Vienna.

Consistent with these views, Fischer subordinated her family responsibilities to her political duties, and set off for Berlin in 1919, which many saw as the centre of world revolution (the reddest of all cities on earth outside the Soviet Union, in the words of Georg Glaser). While Fischer worked in the Comintern and KPD apparatuses, her son Friedrich Gerhart Friedlnder remained in Vienna with both sets of grandparents, and only reunited with his mother a decade later. Berlin is where she met Arkadi Maslow (love at first sight; p. 80), who would remain her personal and political companion until his death two decades later. Within two years, Fischer was the leader of the KPDs Berlin-Brandenburg district, a bastion of the partys ultraleft wing that openly defied the leadership. If Lenin described a revolutionary party as anorchestra, then Fischers specialty was a one-string banjo: her only theme was rejecting any kind of collaboration with the Social Democrats. Socialist revolution was to be achieved with permanent offensives and revolutionary purity.

Zetkin despised this upstart opposition, whereas Lenin could only shake his head. While many of the leading figures of the ultra-left came from middle-class Jewish families, Fischer was not wrong when she said her faction was not onlymeshugastudents.3Ultra-leftism had a real base in Berlins working class, after numerous bloody betrayals by Social Democratic governments. Fischer and Maslow gave a voice to this tendency, and their team included many proletarians like the metalworker Anton Grylewicz. As they had both been politicised by the maelstrom of the World War and the chaotic revolutionary wave that followed, they had no sense of the patient work necessary to win the majority of the working class hence their principled rejection of the united-front tactic.

Fischer must have been a uniquely enthralling speaker, since her political profile was not impressive a lifetime of communist activism left behind only a handful of books. In the words of one contemporary, Ernst Meyer, Fischers predecessor as KPD chair, was sometimes quite put out by her political ignorance, claiming that she never even read the Communist Manifesto!4

When the German October collapsed in 1923, dashing hopes for a decisive leap in the world revolution, many rank-and-file KPD members wanted to rid themselves of a leadership that appeared overcautious. The fact that the ultraleft opposition, who had spent years calling for insurrections, had been totally passive during the revolutionary crisis, does not seem to have lessened their appeal. At the party congress of 1924, Fischer and Maslow were swept into the KPD leadership even against the will of the Comintern Executive, who were aiming for a balance between the partys different wings.

Thus, at just 28, Fischer became the first woman leader of a mass party anywhere in the world (p. 178; Keler acknowledges that Luxemburg was also the leader of the KPD between its founding and her assassination two weeks later, but he says that this was not yet a mass party). Technically she was the Chairperson of the Political Secretariat of the KPD, called Politleiter in Comintern-speak. Party chair was a separate, more symbolic post that was held at the time by the worker Ernst Thlmann. But Fischer was thede factoleader of the KPD from 1924 to 1925 more so because Maslow spent much of this time in prison on trumped-up charges (after the police accused him of stealing a handbag in the park!).

As a party leader, Fischer was able to take her principled refusal to collaborate with Social Democrats to absurd lengths. KPD representatives in parliament were told to avoid shaking hands with their SPD counterparts or if protocol required it, they were first to put on red gloves. As an ally of Comintern chair Grigory Zinoviev, Fischer led the Bolshevisation campaign in Germany, quashing the KPDs democratic traditions. Fischer argued for ideological monolithism, while Scholem cleared the apparatus of anyone suspected of disloyalty towards the new ultraleft leadership. In just over a year, however, the triumvirate themselves fell victim to the very regime they had created.

If one quote from Fischer is remembered today, it is surely from a speech she gave to far-right university students: Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class strugglers, even if they dont know it. You are against Jewish capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stamp on them. But, gentlemen, what about the big capitalists, the Stinnes and Klckner? (quoted on p. 315).

This is an example of the idiotic attempts of certain Comintern leaders, such as Karl Radek, to appeal to Germanys Far Right with their hatred of Versailles (the so-called Schlageter Course). Today, this is often quoted as an example of Communist antisemitism. That is a downright bizarre accusation against a party with a largely Jewish leadership. As Hoffrogge has shown, while there were certainly examples of antisemitic prejudice within the KPD, of all the parties in Weimar Germany the KPD was the most committed to the struggle against antisemitism. Under the Stalinist leadership of Ernst Thlmann, there were even more idiotic attempts to appeal to rank-and-file Nazis, especially with the so-called red referendum in Prussia in 1932. Yet bourgeois talk of collaboration between the KPD and the NSDAP iswildly exaggerated.

By 1926, Fischer and Maslow were expelled from the KPD. They were active in a new organisation of the Left Opposition, theLeninbund(Lenin League). But when the KPDs Central Committee offered an amnesty to anyone willing to renounce their views, the two jumped at the chance to get back into Stalins good graces. It did not work: Fischer and Maslow never did get back into the Comintern but they also never seriously built up a competing organisation. Fischer got a job as a child social worker in the working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg. This is the time the couple lived in Britz, where they were joined in 1929 by Fischers son Friedrich Gerhart Friedlnder, who attended the Karl Marx School in Neuklln.

In early March 1933, after the Reichstag fire and the Nazis rigged elections, Fischer and Maslow fled by motorbike to Czechoslovakia, and eventually made it to Paris. Friedlnder was arrested by the SA and detained in an improvised concentration camp for two days before eventually making it to Vienna. (His unpublished autobiography is available indifferent archives, and contains numerous personal letters from Maslow.) In Paris, Fischer got a job as a social worker in St Denis. The pair met Leon Trotsky several times during his French exile. Trotsky recruited them to the nascent Fourth International, despite the objections of its German section in exile, and they were members for several years under the namesDubois and Parabellum.

After the fall of France, Fischer and Maslow escaped to Portugal. She was able to secure a visa for the US and sailed for New York City; he, with Soviet citizenship, could only make it to Cuba. After half a year, Fischer was able to secure a US visa for Maslow as well. When she called Havana to give him the news, she learned that he had been found dead on the street likely the victim of a Stalinist assassination, but definitive proof has not been found to this day.

At this point, Fischer made a radical shift. After years as an unaffiliated communist, from one day to the next she transformed herself into a rabid anticommunist. The shock of Maslows death was certainly the cause but equally important was Fischers new milieu, in which New York intellectuals were moving rapidly to the right. The former KPD chairwoman famously appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee to denounce her brothers Gerhart and Hanns Eisler, who were both in US exile at that time. She accused them of helping to assassinate Maslow which, besides going against family loyalty, was also totally preposterous. Gerhart was a communist agent at the time, but was far from the key figure of the American Communist Party that his sister made him out to be (p. 424). She received a scholarship from Harvard University to write a book aboutStalin and German Communism.Keler agrees with most other commentators that it is an unreliable and self-serving portrayal of Fischers time at the top of the KPD, systematically avoiding any reflection on her role in Bolshevisation.

This is where the popular understanding of Fischers life ends. Yet Keler shows that she went through another radical shift that opened up a final chapter. He explains this with a single shocking letter. After the war, Fischer was courted by both bourgeois media and secret services as an expert on Stalinism. She received a letter full of praise and an offer for collaboration from Eberhard Taubert, the leader of an anticommunist association in West Germany. She would not have forgotten that Taubert had been a leader of the Nazi stormtroopers (SA) in Berlin, who had detained her son in 1933. This seems to have been a wakeup call: by the early 1950s, Fischer scaled back her collaboration with the FBI and moved to Paris, where she worked as an independent journalist. She was cautiously optimistic about de-Stalinisation in the Soviet Union, and reported favourably on the Bandung Conference to end colonialism. She re-established links with critical communists such as Heinrich Brandler and Isaac Deutscher. After years of wrangling, she was also able to receive a West German pension for her stolen career as a social worker. Fischer died of a heart attack in 1961. She was survived by herson, who had studied mathematics in England and went on to be a university professor.

After 2,000 words reviewing Fischers life, we must now ask about the political meaning of all this. No one, as far as I am aware, would consider themselves a Fischerite. As a Communist leader, she was feckless, even before becoming a turncoat.

Why, instead of being relegated to a footnote in communist history, have Fischer, Maslow, and Scholem each been the subject of biographies in the past decade? How do we explain the ongoing fascination of the ultra-left? Every history book is a contribution, even if unintentional, to debates about socialist strategy today. Kelers biography calls for a democratic communism (p. 245) that would reject insurrections and remain on the parliamentary road. There is a kind of Eurocommunism that exists among historians. This tendency is pronounced in Alexander Rabinowitchs unparalleled scholarship concerning the October Revolution. Rabinowitch defends the Bolshevik Partys right wing, wishing that the Bolsheviks had renounced the spoils of a victorious uprising in order to form a coalition government with all socialist parties.5It goes without saying that such arguments, even from diligently apolitical scholars, have consequences for socialists today.

In Kelers study of Fischer, we see this problem in his discussion of the tactics of the united front and especially the workers government. In a sense, Trotsky istoopopular today. His passionate calls for a united front of communists and social democrats to stop the Nazis make him seem like a Marxist Cassandra. But praise for this tactical proposal is divorced from its strategic context. The antifascist united front is presented as a purely defensive measure but in defence of what? Bourgeois democracy? For Trotsky, the united front was a tool for a communist party to gather forces for the proletarian revolution (an active defence, with the perspective of passing over to the offensive, as heput it). It was not intended to save bourgeois democracy, but rather to destroy it. A purely defensive conception of the united front has more to do with Kthe Kollwitz, Albert Einstein, or perhaps the SAP than with the Bolshevik-Leninists. Yet this is precisely the vision advocated by many modern historians who are sympathetic to Trotsky.

The workers government, as discussed among the Communist International throughout the first half of the 1920s, can only be understood as the culminating moment of the united front. The discussions were contradictory see Zinovievs confusing remarks about thefour kinds of workers government yet the slogan was always conceived as some kind of step along the road to proletarian dictatorship.Clara Zetkin, for example, who was on the right wing of this debate, said that such a government could only be formed as the crowning effect of a tremendous mass movement, backed by the political organs of proletarian power outside of parliament, by the workers councils and by their congress, and above all, by an armed working class.

Keler, in contrast, presents such a workers government as a parliamentary coalition in contradistinction to proletarian revolution. For him, the only left-wing project that promised success at this time was an SPDKPD government that could have more thoroughly democratised Germany (p. 245). For this, the KPD would have needed to develop in the direction of a democratic communism and break with every kind of vanguard theory. In this, he follows Sebastian Haffner in speculating that a democratic but not socialist revolution could have saved Germany from fascism. It is undeniable that the half-revolution of 1918, drowned in blood by the SPD, prepared the ground for Hitler. Yet Keler and Haffner wonder about a three-quarters revolution which would have left capitalism in place while nonetheless seriously reforming the state apparatus. Rosa Luxemburg once posited that society faced a choice between socialism and barbarism but these historians claim to have found some kind of golden mean between the two.

In response, it is worthquoting Trotskyat some length, who summed up the binary choice posed by the class struggle in Germany in the early 1930s:

That is the situation approaching with every hour in Germany today. There are forces which would like the ball to roll down towards the right and break the back of the working class. There are forces which would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the left and break the back of capitalism.6

The climate catastrophe, alongside growing inter-imperialist tensions, are once again presenting us with this binary choice. We need a revolutionary strategy that can break the power of the bourgeoisie. Such a strategy can only be developed on the basis of the historical experience of the workers movement the case of the ultra-lefts can, among many other examples, be instructive.

The recent biographies, however, tend to present a dichotomy, as if the only alternative to childish ultra-leftism would be a coalition government alongside reformists. This is completely false. The problem with Fischer was not that she tried to win a majority of the working class for proletarian revolution. The problem was that she did not understand how to accomplish her goal. A study of Fischers failures does not, in any way, justify a return to social democracy under the banner of democratic communism. Quite the opposite: it means doing a better job of fighting against reformism to win the masses for a revolutionary perspective.

Despite my disagreements with Keler, this excellent work of scholarship offers a rich historical account from which to draw such conclusions.

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Ruth Fischer: The Ongoing Fascination of the Ultra-left - Left Voice

KABUL, Afghanistan The Afghan policeman opened fire on us with his AK-47, emptying 26 bullets into the back of the car. Seven slammed into me, and at least as many into my colleague, Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus. She died at my side.

Anja weighed heavy against my shoulder. I tried to look at her but I couldn't move. I looked down; all I could see was what looked like a stump where my left hand had been. I could barely whisper, "Please help us."

Our driver raced us to a small local hospital in Khost, siren on. I tried to stay calm, thinking over and over: "Don't be afraid. Don't die afraid. Just breathe."

At the hospital, Dr. Abdul Majid Mangal said he would have to operate and tried to reassure me. His words are forever etched in my heart: "Please know your life is as important to me as it is to you."

Much later, as I recovered in New York during a process that would turn out to eventually require 18 operations, an Afghan friend called from Kabul. He wanted to apologize for the shooting on behalf of all Afghans.

I said the shooter didn't represent a nation, a people. My mind returned to Dr. Mangal for me, it was him who represented Afghanistan and Afghans.

I have reported on Afghanistan for the AP for the past 35 years, during an extraordinary series of events and regime changes that have rocked the world. Through it all, the kindness and resilience of ordinary Afghans have shone through which is also what has made it so painful to watch the slow erosion of their hope.

I have always been amazed at how Afghans stubbornly hung on to hope against all odds, greeting each of several new regimes with optimism. But by 2018, a Gallup poll showed that the fraction of people in Afghanistan with hope in the future was the lowest ever recorded anywhere.

It didn't have to be this way.

___

I arrived in Afghanistan in 1986, in the middle of the Cold War. It seems a lifetime ago. It is.

Then, the enemy attacking Afghanistan was the communist former Soviet Union, dubbed godless by United States President Ronald Reagan. The defenders were the U.S.-backed religious mujahedeen, defined as those who engage in holy war, championed by Reagan as freedom fighters.

Reagan even welcomed some mujahedeen leaders to the White House. Among his guests was Jalaluddin Haqqani, the father of the current leader of the Haqqani network, who in today's world is a declared terrorist.

At that time, the God versus communism message was strong. The University of Nebraska even crafted an anti-communist curriculum to teach English to the millions of Afghan refugees living in camps in neighboring Pakistan. The university made the alphabet simple: J was for Jihad or holy war against the communists; K was for the Kalashnikov guns used in jihad, and I was for Infidel, which described the communists themselves.

There was even a math program. The questions went something like: If there were 10 communists and you killed five, how many would you have left?

When I covered the mujahedeen, I spent a lot of time and effort on being stronger, walking longer, climbing harder and faster. At one point, I ran out of a dirty mud hut with them and hid under a nearby cluster of trees. Just minutes later, Russian helicopter gunships flew low, strafed the trees and all but destroyed the hut.

The Russians withdrew in 1989 without a win. In 1992, the mujahedeen took power.

Ordinary Afghans hoped fervently that the victory of the mujahedeen would mean the end of war. They also to some degree welcomed a religious ideology that was more in line with their largely conservative country than communism.

But it wasn't long before the mujahedeen turned their guns on each other.

The fighting was brutal, with the mujahedeen pounding the capital, Kabul, from the hills. Thrice the AP lost its equipment to thieving warlords, only to be returned after negotiations with the top warlord. One day I counted as many as 200 incoming and outgoing rockets inside of minutes.

The bloodletting of the mujahedeen-cum government ministers-cum warlords killed upward of 50,000 people. I saw a 5-year-old girl killed by a rocket as she stepped out of her house. Children by the scores lost limbs to booby traps placed by mujahedeen as they departed neighborhoods.

I stayed on the front line with a woman and her two small children in the Macroyan housing complex during the heaviest rocketing. Her husband, a former communist government employee, had fled, and she lived by making and selling bread each day with her children.

She opened her home to me even though she had so little. All night we stayed in the one room without windows. She asked me if I would take her son to Pakistan the next day, but in the end could not bear to see him go.

Only months after my visit, they were killed by warlords who wanted their apartment.

___

Despite the chaos of the time, Afghans still had hope.

In the waning days of the warring mujahedeen's rule, I attended a wedding in Kabul where both the wedding party and guests were coiffed and downright glamorous. When asked how she managed to look so good with so little amid the relentless rocketing, one young woman replied brightly, "We're not dead yet!"

The wedding was delayed twice because of rockets.

The Taliban had by then emerged. They were former mujahedeen and often Islamic clerics who had returned to their villages and their religious schools after 1992. They came together in response to the relentless killing and thieving of their former comrades-in-arms.

By mid-1996, the Taliban were on Kabul's doorstep, with their promise of burqas for women and beards for men. Yet Afghans welcomed them. They hoped the Taliban would at least bring peace.

When asked about the repressive restrictions of the Taliban, one woman who had worked for an international charity said: "If I know there is peace and my child will be alive, I will wear the burqa."

Peace did indeed come to Afghanistan, at least of sorts. Afghans could leave their doors unlocked without fear of being robbed. The country was disarmed, and travel anywhere in Afghanistan at any time of the day or night was safe.

But Afghans soon began to see their peace as a prison. The Taliban's rule was repressive. Public punishments such as chopping off hands and rules that denied girls school and women work brought global sanctions and isolation. Afghans got poorer.

The Taliban leader at the time was the reclusive Mullah Mohammad Omar, rumored to have removed his own eye after being wounded in a battle against invading Soviet soldiers. As international sanctions crippled Afghanistan, Omar got closer to al-Qaida, until eventually the terrorist group became the Taliban's only source of income.

By 2001, al-Qaida's influence was complete. Despite a pledge from Omar to safeguard them, Afghanistan's ancient statues of Buddha were destroyed, in an order reportedly from Osama bin Laden himself.

Then came the seismic shock of 9/11.

Many Afghans mourned the American deaths so far away. Few even knew who bin Laden was. But the country was now squarely a target in the eyes of the United States. Amir Shah, AP's longtime correspondent, summed up what most Afghans were thinking at the time: "America will set Afghanistan on fire."

And it did.

After 9/11, the Taliban threw all foreigners out of Afghanistan, including me. The U.S.-led coalition assault began on Oct. 7, 2001.

By Oct. 23, I was back in Kabul, the only Western journalist to see the last weeks of Taliban rule. The powerful B-52 bombers of the U.S. pounded the hills and even landed in the city.

On Nov. 12 that year, a 2,000-pound bomb landed on a house near the AP office. It threw me across the room and blew out window and door frames. Glass shattered and sprayed everywhere.

By sunrise the next day, the Taliban were gone from Kabul.

___

Afghanistan's next set of rulers marched into the city, brought by the powerful military might of the U.S.-led coalition.

The mujahedeen were back.

The U.S. and U.N. returned them to power even though some among them had brought bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, promising him a safe haven. The hope of Afghans went through the roof, because they believed the powerful U.S. would help them keep the mujahedeen in check.

With more than 40 countries involved in their homeland, they believed peace and prosperity this time was most certainly theirs. Foreigners were welcome everywhere.

Some Afghans worried about the returning mujahedeen, remembering the corruption and fighting when they last were in power. But America's representative at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, told me that the mujahedeen had been warned against returning to their old ways.

Yet worrying signs began to emerge. The revenge killings began, and the U.S.-led coalition sometimes participated without knowing the details. The mujahedeen would falsely identify enemies even those who had worked with the U.S. before as belonging to al-Qaida or to the Taliban.

One such mistake happened early in December 2001 when a convoy was on its way to meet the new President Hamid Karzai. The U.S.-led coalition bombed it because they were told the convoy bore fighters from the Taliban and al-Qaida. They turned out to be tribal elders.

Secret prisons emerged. Hundreds of Afghan men disappeared. Families became desperate.

Resentment soared especially among the ethnic Pashtuns, who had been the backbone of the Taliban. One former Taliban member proudly displayed his new Afghan identity card and wanted to start a water project in his village. But corrupt government officials extorted him for his money, and he returned to the Taliban.

A deputy police chief in southern Zabul province told me of 2,000 young Pashtun men, some former Taliban, who wanted to join the new government's Afghan National Army. But they were mocked for their ethnicity, and eventually all but four went to the mountains and joined the Taliban.

In the meantime, corruption seemed to reach epic proportions, with suitcases of money, often from the CIA, handed off to Washington's Afghan allies. Yet schools were built, roads were reconstructed and a new generation of Afghans, at least in the cities, grew up with freedoms their parents had not known and in many cases looked on with suspicion.

Then came the shooting in 2014 that would change my life.

It began as most days do in Afghanistan: Up before 6 a.m. This day we were waiting for a convoy of Afghan police and military to leave the eastern city of Khost for a remote region to distribute the last of the ballot boxes for Afghanistan's 2014 presidential elections.

After 30 minutes navigating past blown-out bridges and craters that pockmarked the road, we arrived at a large police compound. For more than an hour, Anja and I talked with and photographed about a dozen police officials.

We finished our work just as a light drizzle began. We got into the car and waited to leave for a nearby village. That's when the shooting happened.

It was two years before I was able to return to work and to Afghanistan.

___

By that point, the disappointment and disenchantment with America's longest war had already set in. Despite the U.S. spending over $148 billion on development alone over 20 years, the percentage of Afghans barely surviving at the poverty level was increasing yearly.

In 2019, Pakistan began accepting visa applications at its consulate in eastern Afghanistan. People were so desperate to leave that nine died in a stampede.

In 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a deal for troops to withdraw within 18 months. The U.S. and NATO began to evacuate their staff, closing down embassies and offering those who worked for them asylum.

The mass closure of embassies was baffling to me because the Taliban had made no threats, and it sparked panic in Kabul. It was the sudden and secret departure of President Ashraf Ghani that finally brought the Taliban back into the city on Aug. 15, 2021.

Their swift entry came as a surprise, along with the thorough collapse of the neglected Afghan army, beset by deep corruption. The Taliban's rapid march toward Kabul fed a rush toward the airport.

For many in the Afghan capital, the only hope left lay in getting out.

Fida Mohammad, a 24-year-old dentist, was desperate to leave for the U.S. so he could earn enough money to repay his father's debt of $13,000 for his elaborate marriage. He clung to the wheels of the departing US C-17 aircraft on Aug. 16 and died.

Zaki Anwari, a 17-year-old footballer, ran to get on the plane. He dreamed only of football, and believed his dream could not come true in Afghanistan. He was run over by the C-17.

Now the future in Afghanistan is even more uncertain. Scores of people line up outside the banks to try to get their money out. Hospitals are short of medicine. The Taliban hardliners seem to have the upper hand, at least in the short term.

Afghans are left to face the fact that the entire world came to their country in 2001 and spent billions, and still couldn't bring them prosperity or even the beginnings of prosperity. That alone has deeply eroded hope for the future.

I leave Afghanistan with mixed feelings, sad to see how its hope has been destroyed but still deeply moved by its 38 million people. The Afghans I met sincerely loved their country, even if it is now led by elderly men driven by tribal traditions offensive to a world that I am not sure ever really understood Afghanistan.

Most certainly, though, I will be back.

Excerpt from:
Hope and despair: Kathy Gannon on 35 years in Afghanistan - Star Tribune

Under the slogan The new generation with KKE for the big, the beautiful, the sensational (N. Beloyannis)- Socialism, the answer in the 21st century, the central events of the 48th festival of the Communist Youth of Greece, commonly known as KNE-Odigitis Festival, will take place on 22-24 September in Athens. This year's slogan is inspired by Greek communist hero, Nikos Beloyannis, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of his execution.

The festival, which is traveling in many Greek cities and towns throughout July and August, includes numerous political as well as cultural events.

More than 70 popular artists, including legendary singers Maria Farantouri and George Dalaras, are going to participate in the Festival.

Being one of the country's most significant annual cultural events, the KNE-Odigitis festival, organized by the Communist Youth of Greece, spans a history of 48 years. The 1st festival of KNE and her newspaper "Odigitis" took place on September 1975, just months after the collapse of the 7-year old military dictatorship.

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM

Read more from the original source:
The 48th KNE Festival to be held on 22-24 September in Athens - In Defense of Communism

A century has passed since William Butler Yeats sensed the stirrings of a rough beast with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. That beasts apocalyptic hour has come around again, its rebirth announced by the galloping horsemen of war and pestilence, with what looks to be famine trailing in the dusty distance. It calls itself Legion, but is today better known as Ideology.

The word ideology is often used as a synonym for political ideas, a corruption of language that conceals its fundamentally anti-political character. In the ancient republics of Greece and Rome, primary models for English republicanism and the American Founders, politics was understood to be the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate. As Aristotle taught, politics consists in the citizenly exercise of logos, the uniquely human power of intelligent speech. While voice registers private feelings think of animal purrs and yelps speech reveals what is good and bad, just and unjust, binding us together in the imperfect apprehension of realities greater than our individual selves.

But ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them, it sees them only as groups to be acted upon. The term idologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idologie as a social science of ideas that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

The political philosopher Raymond Aron defined ideology quite precisely as the synthesis of an interpretation of history and of a programme of action toward a future predicted or hoped for. In this synthesis, a theory about the historical origins of real or alleged social ills is pressed into the service of an imagined future in which those ills will be cured. The theory is not to be judged solely, or even primarily, by its adequacy in describing the historical record as it presents itself to an informed and inquiring mind. Rather, it is to be judged by the promised consequences of the programme of action it underwrites. Of course, ideological prophecy, appearing in times of organic or manufactured crisis when everything assumes an air of urgency, must be taken on faith.

It follows that the ideological synthesis remains incomplete until the programme of action is implemented. Marx famously claimed that Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. But Marx, whose broad classical education informed his great critique of capitalism, remained at the level of philosophy. His interpretation of history achieved its stated end only when it was put into practice, however crudely, by Communist revolutionaries, starting with Lenin. By his own standards, Marxs philosophy cannot be cleanly separated from the historical depredations of Marxism.

Although ideological regimes were not unheard of in antiquity, ideologys focus on efficacy rather than truth, its assumption that history is a problem awaiting a rational solution, and its elevation of the possibilities of a deliberately constructed future over the present constraints of the actual world, are characteristically modern. Its closest analogue is the phenomenon of technology, the harnessing of significant social resources to achieve mastery over nature through mathematical and experimental science. Formulated by the early modern philosophers Francis Bacon and Ren Descartes, the programme of technology rejected inherited intellectual foundations, including the guidance of God or nature.

Descartes, a professed believer whose pencil-thin moustache gave him an unmistakable air of duplicity, reduced the natural or created world to the mathematical abstraction of spatial extension, which is perfectly accessible to algebraic geometry but bears no trace of implicit order or divine goodness. And he divided his profoundly skeptical Meditations and Discourse on Method into six parts, in rivalrous imitation, scholars tell us, of the first six days of Gods creation. Liberated by technology from dependence on God and history, man and world could be fashioned in the image of human desires.

Descartes prophesied a future in which the common good of all men would be secured by an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth, and by the elimination of an infinity of maladies, both of body and mind. Should biological science ever eliminate death due to the infirmities of old age, as he dared to hope, what would likely be a fresh earthly hell would render the question of the afterlife largely moot. Here, too, an ill-formed utopian vision licenses fundamental social transformation.

But there is a deeper and more important connection between ideology and technology. Ideology is in fact a social technology. The implementation of an ideological programme is an experiment testing the hypothesis that a radiant future can be achieved if only political, social, and economic relations are radically restructured, a process that always involves the preliminary destruction of existing realities. That future, like Descartess infinity of satisfactions, is never concretely described and never actually arrives. (Marx imagined a leisurely existence spent fishing, hunting, and philosophising, although philosophising would presumably be pointless when the world no longer needs changing.) This unscientific hypothesis is then tested on actual human subjects.

In the United States, we are currently engaged in many such experiments simultaneously, all undertaken in the name of social justice. What happens when violent protestors are encouraged to riot in our cities, crimes go unprosecuted, and bails are waived? Or biological males are permitted to use womens restrooms and live in their cellblocks? Or schoolchildren are indoctrinated with identity politics, while professors are required to pledge support for diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas as a condition of employment? Or borders are thrown open to illegal immigrants who enjoy privileges and benefits not extended to citizens? No sensible person would want to find out. But ideology is always and everywhere opposed to the moderate middle ground, not only of politics, but of the general opinion and sentiment that goes by the name of common sense.

History is littered with examples of malicious ideological experiments, which in good Baconian form observe nature in this case, human nature not free and large, but under constraint and vexed forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded. What is to my knowledge the first such experiment occurred after the Athenians were starved into submission at the end the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, when the Spartans installed an oligarchy known as the Thirty. The regime was led by Platos aristocratic cousin Critias, who flattered himself with the thought that he was a greater philosopher, statesman, and poet than his illustrious ancestor Solon. In Platos dialogue Charmides, Critias advances a vacuous conception of rule by a science of sciences an ancient prototype of idologie, which Tracy considered to be a theory of theories. According to Lysias, an eyewitness, the Thirty proposed to purge the city of unjust men, and to turn the rest of the citizens toward virtue and justice by restoring what they claimed was the ancestral Athenian constitution. The oligarchs proceeded to disenfranchise, disarm, and expel large segments of the population and finally to rob and murder their political opponents, putting to death roughly 1,500 Athenians perhaps 3% of the citizen body.

The ideological tyranny of the Thirty left no lasting mark outside of Athens. This was not the case with Communism and Nazism, which also disenfranchised, robbed, deported, and murdered large numbers of people, but did so with modern managerial and industrial efficiency. As Alain Besanon observes in his short but indispensable book A Century of Horrors, these ideologies had much in common. They both aimed to achieve a perfect society by eliminating the evil that hindered its creation. They claimed to seek the good, either of the German people or of all mankind. They used pseudo-sciences like dialectical materialism and race-based eugenics to justify and wield their power. Most important, they claimed the right to kill, and did so on an unprecedented scale.

The Nazis murdered roughly 17 million unarmed civilians, not including those who died in aerial bombings and other ordinary acts of war. After almost 80 years, historians are still compiling a list of ghettoes and camps in Germany and Nazi-occupied territory. As of March 2013, the total number identified by researchers stood at 42,500. But here as elsewhere, the National Socialists were students of the Marxist ones. It was the Soviets who invented and systematised the use of combination slave-labour and death camps, and the concentrationary universe of the Gulag covered an even greater geographical area than the Nazi Lagers. Lenin and Stalin also anticipated Hitler in the use of poison gas (including mobile gas vans), mass deportation, and, in the great famines of 1921-22 and 1930-33, targeted starvation to liquidate what Lenin called harmful insects.

The Black Book of Communism estimates that Communist regimes murdered between 85 and 100 million of their own people during the 20th century, fulfilling the eerie prophecy in Dostoevskys Demons that socialisms cure for the worlds ills would involve lopping off a hundred million heads. And while Besanon regards the Holocaust as the absolute zero of murderous intensity, he rightly observes that communism brought about a more widespread and deeper moral destruction than Nazism. Thoroughly discredited by the Holocaust, Nazism exited the world stage in 1945, but Communism officially endures today in China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. Marxism furthermore remains a respectable alternative to capitalism in the eyes of many Westerners, even including some who acknowledge the aforementioned facts. This is itself due, in large measure, to the ideological distortion and suppression of history.

Ideologys most horrific social experiments illustrate several points that apply also to the Totalitarianism Lite of contemporary American life. First, while human beings naturally form social groups for common purposes, ideology assumes that organic associations cannot support a good society, which must be engineered from the top down. This assumption, which no ideological experimentation has ever sustained, makes up in arrogance what it lacks in humility.

Second, ideology abjures persuasion, preferring what Hannah Arendt called mute coercion. We see this today in the insistence that certain widely-shared opinions that were uncontroversial only a few years ago are so morally illegitimate that they do not deserve a hearing. We see it in the fact that those who publicly voice such opinions are commonly smeared, hounded, denied financial services, investigated, and fired, even by institutions that are publicly committed to diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Third, ideology always involves the scapegoating and purging of opponents. Today these primitive religious rituals, enacted within the framework of a secularised and apocalyptic Christianity, include the sanctification of victims and the (for now metaphorical) public crucifixion of oppressors. Those who are targeted by, or resist, the ideological programme denounced variously as kulaks, capitalist roadsters, vermin, or white supremacists must, with the exception of a few penitents who are mercifully spared, be decisively defeated in battle with the forces of good. For only then will the earthy salvation of a just and harmonious society be achievable.

In modern times, the template for the use of violence in the name of the highest political and moral ideals was established in the French Revolution. Marching under the banner of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the Revolution took less than five years to move from the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to the Terror of Robespierre and the genocidal destruction of the Vende, a French Department where the Revolutionaries responded to a peasant rebellion by slaughtering roughly 15% of the population. The trajectory from utopian fervour to nihilistic bloodshed, traversed over the past century in countries scattered across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, is unsurprising. One could hardly expect a programme of radical social transformation that demonises its opponents to be free of bloodshed.

Anyone who thinks that the United States could not descend into similarly horrifying violence is deluded. Ideology is a highly communicable social contagion that infects people who are morally immunocompromised, and today it poses a far greater threat to human beings than any merely biological virus. It always attracts thugs, sadists, and those who lust for power, groups that, once revolutionary fervour gives way to dictatorship, always outnumber true believers. But it also exploits the universal human longing for social validation and fear of being cast out. These risk factors are exponentially amplified by the tribalising social and news-media feedback loops that now fill the vacuum left by a permanent moral order, inherent in nature or revealed by God notions that, owing to the seductions of technology, were arguably doomed at modernitys inception.

The inevitable consequence of ideological infection is brain rot. Besanon justly remarks that it is not possible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology. Intelligence, after all, is an ongoing attentiveness to reality that is inconsistent with wilfulness and fantasy. Nor can it take root in the sterile soil of widespread cultural repudiation. This is why all ideological regimes are without exception plagued by sheer ineptitude.

Just consider: the anti-Jewish decrees of April 1933 stripped a quarter of Germanys physicists of their livelihood, including 11 who had earned or would earn Nobel prizes, and left German research in atomic physics in shambles a lucky break for the Allies. Trofim Lysenko, a barely literate agronomist who won Stalins ear, vilified the work of the geneticist Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, as fascist, bourgeois-capitalistic, and inspired by clerics. Thousands of biologists were fired, imprisoned, or executed for opposing Lysenkos crackpot theories, which exacerbated famines that killed many millions of people in the U.S.S.R. and China (where Mao adopted his methods in the Fifties). Up to 70% of the U.S.S.R.s active engineers were arrested and sentenced without trial in 1930, while Stalins first Five-Year Plan to build heavy industry was in full swing. Not to be outdone, China has now painted itself into a corner with its brutally tyrannical zero-Covid lockdowns, which immiserated its population and destroyed the economy but cannot be fully lifted without destroying the credibility of the Communist Party.

And then there is the gross incompetence of the Biden administration. While ideologically-induced stupidity may not fully explain this phenomenon, its a huge contributing factor. The administrations ineptitude is already provoking what looks to be a strong political backlash, and if we are very, very lucky, we may be able to avoid major disasters before the 2024 elections. But a new government will make little difference. The rot has penetrated every essential institution in the United States, and the long-term picture is bleak. Nor is there solace in the fact that we Americans are by no means alone. Whoever said misery loves company wasnt thinking about the ideological endgame of liberal democracy.

More here:
Ideology has poisoned the West - UnHerd

The NATO Summit, which is taking place on 2930 June in Madrid, is a step towards the further escalation of NATO aggression against the peoples, but also the intensification of imperialist competition, which is currently manifested in the imperialist military conflict in Ukraine.

The NATO Summit seeks to update the NATO doctrine that is dangerous to the people and to strengthen the aggressive strategy NATO 2030. In the context of this strategy, NATOs Rapid Reaction Force is being legitimized and increased tenfold to over 300,000 troops, focusing on the war zone in Eastern Europe.

The conflict between imperialists forecasts dangerous and unpredictable sharpening of their confrontation over wealth-producing resources and spheres of influence, for which the peoples will pay in a multifaceted way.

The peoples of Europe can chart their own course of disentanglement from imperialist plans; for peace, cooperation, the joint struggle for their rights, and the disengagement from NATO and the EU, in conflict with capitalist barbarism.

initiative-cwpe.org

Read more from the original source:
The European Communist Initiative on NATO summit - In Defense of Communism