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The trial of Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich began in the Solomensky District Court of Kyiv on July 1st, without the physical presence of the defenders but via teleconference.

Under the pretext of false and groundless accusations, the two brothers, members of the Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine were arrested on March 7th, 2022 and tortured in a Kiev detention center.

Since then, numerous Communist Parties and Youth organizations from all over the world, including the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) have demanded their immediate release. The EU Parliament Group of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) has already submitted two written questions (first and second) to the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs concerning the case of Kononovich brothers.

In their first speech to the courtroom, Mikhail and Aleksander talked about the fabricated nature of the accusations, expressed appreciation for the international solidarity and called EU Parliament's deputies and the media throughout Europe to attend the trial.

More specifically, Kononovich brothers proceeded to the following statement:

Our case is completely fabricated from start to finish. What are we charged with? Pro-Belarussian views are being charged. We are being tried for our views. What kind of democracy can we talk about?

I want to appeal to the European left, to the Federation of Democratic Youth. Thank you, comrades. You are holding actions in Europe near the Ukrainian embassies in support of us so that they let us go, thank you very much. Together we will win!

Continue solidarity and protest in our support around the world, on all continents - in Europe, in Latin America, in other countries, because if the international community does not put pressure on the regime, we will rot in this prison.

And one more thing, I want to appeal to the European left. Comrades, we appeal to you and we want the deputies of the European Parliament to visit Ukraine and be present at our court session. So that they see with their own eyes and tell the whole world how the court is arranged.

We also call on the European media to also participate so that the whole world can see the face of the regime".

Sign here the Petition to demand the release of Kononovich brothers

Protest! Send letters and emails to your local Embassy or Consulate of Ukraine:

EU officials on Twitter:

UN: uno_us@mfa.gov.ua EU: pm_eu@mfa.gov.ua UK: emb_gb@mfa.gov.ua USA: emb_us@mfa.gov.ua gc_usn@mfa.gov.ua gc_uss@mfa.gov.ua Australia: emb_au@mfa.gov.ua Austria: emb_at@mfa.gov.ua Brazil: emb_br@mfa.gov.ua Italy: emb_it@mfa.gov.ua gc_itm@mfa.gov.ua Ireland: emb_ie@mfa.gov.ua Germany: emb_de@mfa.gov.ua France: emb_fr@mfa.gov.ua Greece: emb_gr@mfa.gov.ua Spain: emb_es@mfa.gov.ua Sweden: emb_se@mfa.gov.uaNetherlands: emb_nl@mfa.gov.ua Turkey: emb_tr@mfa.gov.ua ukremb@turksatkablo.net Portugal: emb_pt@mfa.gov.ua Romania: emb_ro@mfa.gov.ua India: emb_in@mfa.gov.ua Serbia: emb_rs@mfa.gov.ua Switzerland: emb_ch@mfa.gov.ua

Continued here:
Kononovich brothers courtroom appeal: Our case is completely fabricated from start to finish" - In Defense of Communism

In 2011, when far-right terrorist Anders Breivik murdered 77 peoplethe majority of whom were young Norwegian Labor Party membersin the massacre on Norways Utoya island, he justified his actions as part of the fight against Muslim and Marxist attacks on the West. His thought (if one wants to call it that) subscribed to the theory of cultural Marxism, according to which feminism, the LGTBI movement, environmentalism, atheism, multiculturalism, etc. are working together to destroy the free world. These elements have managed to inject the fatal virus of political correctness into society, corroding it and leading us toward a totalitarian future. Marxism continues to be a specter that haunts the world, now hidden in new forms. Breivik claimed to be fighting against it.

Popular with the extreme right and alternative right, cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory that contends that the left, incapable of winning in the political and economic realms, has inserted itself into everything else to triumph in the cultural domain (here, the term refers to culture in the broad sense, not just cultural products). Progressive ideas would permeate society as a whole, and it would fall victim to mass brainwashing. We are not going to back down from this cultural and Jewish Marxist brainwashing weve been indoctrinated with to become useful idiots for international finance, capitalism, and war We simply want to defend working-class whites, our rights, and our nation, US alt-right agitator Mike Enoch declared at a rally.

As with all stories of this type, there are different variations, but the following one is quite descriptive: it all began after the Russian Revolution when the Soviet model failed to spread to other countries. Philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that it was necessary to achieve cultural hegemony, that is, to dominate the landscape of thought, art, education, media, common sense, beliefs, and morals. If Marx had established how important it was to transform the economic base and that the superstructurewhere societys cultural aspects are locateddepended on it, the Italian theorist turned that theory upside down by including culture as another equally important battlefield.

The Frankfurt School philosophers (Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, who synthesized Freud and Marx), the New Left, and the countercultural movements of the 1960s followed in Gramscis footsteps. As a consequence, believers say, minorities and identities have come to conspire against capitalism, Christianity, the traditional family, and the free market; they have managed to silence dissent through the so-called muzzle of political correctness. All of this would be a successful translation of Marxs thesis to the cultural field: the aforementioned minorities would replace the working class as agents of revolution, and indoctrination would occur largely through universities infiltrated by these ideas. Large companies, governments, and political parties of almost every stripe would have accepted cultural Marxism in their environmentalist, LGTBI, and feminist elements.

This theory frames the ideological rearmament of the extreme right, which, since the late 1990sfirst in the United States and then in Europehas decided to stake everything on the culture wars. In their absurd simplicity, conspiracy theories offer an interpretation of the world where everything seems to fit. Thats why theyre successful, says Italian historian Steven Forti, the author of Extreme Right 2.0 (Siglo XXI). A suggestive story is an effective way to make far-right ideas go viral against a spectral and fearsome enemy. Voxs leaders have referred directly to these ideas. For example, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the party, has occasionally pointed out the urgent need to curb cultural Marxism. Similarly, though not quite as explicitly, PP politician Isabel Daz Ayuso has proclaimed her resonant slogan, communism or freedom. In his book, The Return of Communism (Espasa), journalist Federico Jimnez Losantos warns of this threat and associates queer theory-allied feminism with the alleged return of communism. They tend to see crypto-communists ready to destroy their freedom everywhere.

Some see traces of similar logic in earlier currents. As in Judeo-Bolshevism, cultural Marxism homogenizes large groups of shadowy enemies and attributes a secret plan to disrupt society to them, Yale University Professor Samuel Moyn writes in the New York Times. The Hollywood Red Scare, provoked by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the subsequent witch hunts followed a similar pattern.

These days, in certain quarters (most notably, on social media), even climate change is seen as a hoax to justify installing a green dictatorship. Of course, conspiracy theorists favorite businessman, George Soros, is usually in the mix. When Santiago Abascal talks about a progressive dictatorship or Donald Trump mentions a dictatorship of political correctness, they are largely talking about the same thing, Forti points out. Curiously, on the left, rather than feeling that they have surreptitiously dominated the world, the opposite sensation prevails: the sense of constant defeat and an uncertain future amidst capitalism thats stronger and more deregulated than ever.

Actually, the theory of cultural Marxism contains a grain of truth, which is why many people find it credible. Indeed, since Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, through counterculture and the New Left, the left has increasingly emphasized cultural and identity issues. Nevertheless, were dealing with a conspiracy theory because it takes some real trendsthe fact that the left lost influence in a changing working classto create a story about the coordinated infiltration of institutions. It is the idea that theres an army of moles undermining Western culture, says Argentine historian Pablo Stefanoni, the author of Has Rebellion Become Right-Wing? (Clave Intelectual/Siglo XXI). As Stefanoni notes, many of the dynamics attributed to cultural Marxism (the de-structuring of the family, the waning influence of religion, the mixing of cultures, etc.) stem from the dynamics of post-industrial capitalism itself.

Other far-right conspiracy theories also take small grains of truth to create an absurd story. For example, the great replacement theory, advanced by Frenchman Renaud Camus, uses the challenge of migration to invent a worldwide conspiracy of globalist elites who intend to replace Western civilization with Islamic civilization in just one generation. Generally, this type of thought attributes bad intentions to certain political and social trends in order to delegitimize them. The critics of so-called cultural Marxism are trying to revive the Cold Wars anti-Communist fervor at a time when communism practically no longer exists. Its a sort of zombie anti-Communism that fosters a sense of existential threat and combines ideological proposals, demographic and cultural changes, and socioeconomic processes with distinct and heterogeneous sources under the same demonizing label, Stefanoni concludes.

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Marxists are brainwashing us: The conspiracy theory taking hold among some on the right - EL PAS USA

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