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From June 24 through July 6, the Ukranian section of the International Socialist League (ISL) published an eight-page document on its Facebook page in the name of its head and the leader of the Zakhyst Pratsi (Labor Defense) trade union, Oleg Vernyk. The post, which has now been published in English, Spanish, French and Ukrainian, was a response to exposures by the WSWS of the integration of the ISL into the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and the promotion by its Ukrainian leader, Oleg Vernyk, of figures and documents of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

The post fully confirms the WSWS warnings of the pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist and extreme right-wing orientation of this petty-bourgeois nationalist tendency. At the beginning of its statement, the ISL openly states that it is guided by the basic principle of the defense of Ukraine as a political subject and the struggle for the preservation of the integrity of the State. These are the words not of a left-wing, much less revolutionary or socialist tendency, but of an organization that is consciously dedicated to defending the capitalist Ukrainian statefirst and foremost, against the working class.

In a Letter to a young Trotskyist in Russia, David North, the chairman of the World Socialist Web Site, exposed the reactionary nature of the political line of the ISL and elaborated on the principles of revolutionary internationalism and the historical continuity of Marxism, upon which the Trotskyist movement bases its opposition to the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the Putin regime.

The politics of the ISL are directly opposed to these Marxist and internationalist principles. In an extraordinary amalgam of historical lies, omissions and distortions, the ISL and Vernyk effectively seek to whitewash the crimes of Ukrainian fascism and justify their present-day alliance with the far-rightthe principal shock troops for the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

The fraud of the 1943 democratization of the OUN and the role of Petro Poltava

In the post, the ISL defends Vernyks promotion of materials by OUN-B and UPA members, writing:

He (Oleg Vernyk) never made propaganda in favor of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. On the contrary, he always proposed to make a deep analysis of the liberation and nationalist movement in Ukraine and the dynamics of its evolution, considering its branches both on the right and on the left, and advised against ignoring the complexities and problems that characterized these movements. In addition, Oleg Vernyk has always been very critical of the figure of Stepn Bandera, who had precisely been the leader of the ultra-radical right-wing branch of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), also expressing himself strongly against the democratization of the political figure of Bandera and against his conversion into leftist leader.

The entire post belies these claims. In fact, what the ISL presents is a revival of the same historical lies and myths that the OUN-B and UPA and their apologists have propagated for decades. Most strikingly, in the entire post, the terms fascism, Nazism, genocide, pogrom, anti-Semitism and racism are not used once in relation to the OUN or UPA. There is no discussion of the origins or ideology of the OUN, which was founded in 1929 as a fascist, terrorist organization with the explicit goal of destroying the social conquests of the October Revolution and founding an ethnically pure Ukrainian state.

Nor is there any mention of the fact that the OUN helped the German Wehrmacht prepare its invasion of the Soviet Union, and then helped instigate and perpetrate pogroms against Jews that resulted in an estimated 13,000 to 35,000 victims. While the OUN had split in 1940 into a wing headed by Andrei Melnyk (OUN-M) and one headed by Stepan Bandera (OUN-B), both collaborated with the Nazis. Even as leaders of the OUN-B were arrested by the Nazis, who had opposed the OUN-Bs proclamation of an independent Ukrainian state, the membership of the OUN as a whole was integrated into the Nazi occupation machinery and auxiliary police, which played a major role in the Nazi-led genocide of the Jews.

Completely ignoring the role of the OUN in the Second World War, the ISL and Vernyk seek to create the impression that there was a political and ideological separation between Bandera and the OUN from 1943 onward.

Defending Vernyks post of the pamphlet What are the Banderites and what are they fighting for by Petro Poltava (Fedun), a leading ideologist of the UPA and OUN-B, the post claims:

Mr. Petr Poltava narrates in that work how he had begun to propagate ideas that were absolutely opposed to the ideology of Stepn Bandera. Precisely those ideas that were proclaimed during the 3rd Regional Congress of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1943 were described by Stepn Bandera as Bolshevik ideas, that the Congress had been organized by some Bolsheviks and that he (S. Bandera ) would never accept the resolutions approved by that Congress. S. Bandera, who at that time was imprisoned in a German concentration camp called Sachsenhausen, had perfectly understood that a tendency towards democratization was beginning to appear within the ranks of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), towards the ideas of the left and the incitement to a simultaneous war against German national socialism and against Stalinism. Obviously, this position was firmly rejected by Bandera and by the other members of the right-wing branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

These are blatant lies. Despite Banderas imprisonment in Sachsenhausenwhere he lived under highly privileged conditions and was able to stay informed about the OUNs workhe remained the acknowledged leader (providnik, the Ukrainian translation of Fhrer) of the OUN-B.

And far from propagating ideas that were absolutely opposed to the ideology of Stepn Bandera, the pamphlet by Poltava proudly proclaimed that the Banderites derived their name from the glorious son of the Ukrainian people, the long-term revolutionary fighter for the freedom and state independence of Ukraine, the leader of the revolutionary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)Stepan Bandera. [1]

Indeed, historians have frequently cited this well-known pamphlet as an example of the propaganda efforts of the OUN-B and UPA to whitewash their own crimes during and after World War II, as it explicitly denied any genocidal massacres by the OUN and its collaboration with the Nazis. Its fraudulent socialist demagogy was the result of the OUNs attempts to appeal to layers of the East Ukrainian peasantry, who were overwhelmingly hostile to the very idea of the restoration of capitalism, despite the immense crimes of Stalinism.

The ISL post stands in the tradition of this far-right propaganda. It presents the national socialist demagogy of Poltava as left-wing, even Bolshevik. In reality, the political and ideological origins of the OUN-Bs national socialism and its fascist violence lay in the reaction against the internationalist and Marxist program of the October Revolution. In a 1946 essay entitled, The revolutionary elements of Ukrainian nationalism, Poltava himself made this very clear, writing:

Ukrainian nationalism is also fighting against all those epigones of socialism of 1917-20 on Ukrainian soil, who stand on the position of internationalism, who fight for a class liberation that is elevated above the struggle for national liberation, without understanding that the destruction of social oppression in Ukraine can only come as a result of national liberation. [2]

It is this nationalist opposition to the October Revolution and Marxism that petty-bourgeois nationalist forces like the ISL and Oleg Vernyk share with Poltava and the OUN-B. Their insistence on 1943 as a turning point in the OUN-Bs supposed evolution toward democracy and left-wing views is not only based on historical lies. It reveals, above all, their own political orientation toward an alliance with imperialism and readiness to tolerate and deny the crimes of fascism for the sake of the defense of the Ukrainian state.

The democratization of the OUN-B in 1943 was a political fraud, designed to lay the foundations for what has become a decades-long alliance of the Ukrainian far right with US and British imperialism.It was also the beginning of an ongoing cover-up and whitewash of the genocidal crimes of Ukrainian fascism.

Following the defeat of the German Wehrmacht at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43, the Ukrainian fascists realized that their only hope for the establishment of a Ukrainian capitalist nation-state lay in an alliance with the US and Great Britain. The OUN-B undertook certain changes to its program, but these were, as historian John-Paul Himka noted, programmatic window dressing, aimed at ensuring American and British aid for their cause. [3]

Thus, at its Congress in August 1943, the OUN publicly announced the recognition of equal rights for minorities and began to tone down its anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric. But just days before the Congress, the members of the SB (security organization) of the OUN-B received orders to annihilate all enemies of UPA, which was to be understood as all Poles, Czechs, Jews, Komsomol members, Red Army officers, workers of the militia, and all Ukrainians who have even the slightest sympathy for Soviet power. [4]

Most importantly, in the spring of 1943, the OUN-UPA had embarked on a genocidal campaign against the Polish population of Volhynia and Galicia, which claimed between 70,000 and 100,000 lives in 1943-44, the majority of them in 1943.

Entire villages were wiped off the map; their residents burned alive, shot or tortured to death. The UPA also frequently forced Ukrainians who had married Poles to murder their Polish spouses or children. The bodies of the dead were often mutilated horribly. Historian Gregorz Rossoliski-Liebe writes:

The UPA was the army that the OUN-B leaders expected to cleanse the Ukrainian race. Perhaps as a result of this conviction, acts of pathological sadism occurred frequently. In May 1943 in the village Kolonia Grada, for example, UPA partisans killed two families who could not escape as all the others had, after they realized that the UPA was attacking the neighboring village of Kolonia amane. The partisans killed all the members of these two families, cut open the belly of a pregnant woman, took the fetus and her innards from her, and hung them on a bush, probably to leave a message for other Poles who had escaped the attack and might come back to the village. [5]

The UPA was also systematically hunting down and murdering the few Jews who had so far managed to survive the Holocaust. There was even an order to kill anyone who had hidden Jews. By the end of the war, a shocking 98.5 percent of the Jews of Volhynia, the center of the OUN-Bs activities, had been murdered, one of the highest death rates in all of Europe.

There is not a single note in the ISLs eight-page document even mentioning, let alone condemning, any of these horrific crimes. Instead, the ISL alleges that in 1943, that is, at the height of its genocidal massacres, the UPA had turned towards the ideas of the left and the incitement to [of] a simultaneous war against German national socialism and against Stalinism. This too is a lie.

While the UPA, which had been founded in 1942 independently from the OUN, had engaged in some partisan warfare against the Wehrmacht, in 1943, the UPA was violently taken over by the OUN-B. The organizations leadership now consisted, in the words of historian Per Anders Rudling, of ruthless OUN(b) activists, most of whom were trained by Nazi Germany, and many were deeply involved in the Holocaust. [6] Moreover, in spring 1943, an estimated 5,000 members of the 12,000 men of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, which had played a central role in the Holocaust, joined the UPA.

Throughout 1943, even as the formal alliance with the Nazis by the OUN was put on hold, agreements made between the two sides preempted attacks by the UPA on German forces, reducing them to a minimum. In 1944, the alliance with Nazi Germany was revived at the initiative of Bandera, and when the Nazis withdrew from Ukraine, they left the OUN-UPA tons of arms and ammunition. The German army regarded this cooperation as a good investment in the war against the Soviet Union. [7]

Following the end of World War II and the incorporation of West Ukraine into the Soviet Union, the OUN-UPA continued an insurrection against Soviet rule into the early 1950s, killing an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian civilians, most of them collective farmers and workers. In this civil war, the UPA and OUN relied on logistical support and weapons from the US and UK, whose secret services had established close relations with Bandera and other OUN leaders.

The Soviet bureaucracys response to this insurgency was both bankrupt and politically criminal: Fearing nothing more than a mobilization of the working class which would have also threatened its own rule and could have formed the basis for an international extension of the October Revolution, the bureaucracy resorted to violent bureaucratic measures of repression to thwart the insurgency. Hundreds of thousands of people were deported from Western Ukraine, and an estimated 150,000 people were killed by the NKVD.

This violent repression proved to be water on the propaganda mills of the Ukrainian right. Above all, it served to divide and confuse the working class. Over three decades later, when the Stalinist bureaucracy under Mikhail Gorbachev moved to restore capitalism and destroy the Soviet Union in 1985, the latent Ukrainian far-right forces, both in the diaspora and within the Soviet Union, violently broke to the fore, becoming, yet again, a central prop for the intervention of imperialism in the region.

Using the crimes of Stalinism to whitewash fascism: The role of Danylo Shumuk and the 1953 Norilsk uprising

In the founding document of the International Committee of the Fourth International, James P. Cannon insisted that Trotskyists had to know how to fight imperialism and all its petty-bourgeois agencies (such as nationalist formations or trade union bureaucracies) without capitulation to Stalinism; and, conversely, know how to fight Stalinism (which in the final analysis is a petty-bourgeois agency of imperialism) without capitulating to imperialism. [8]

The ISL turns this principle on its head. It cynically exploits the crimes of Stalinism to justify its alliance with the far right and imperialism. Central to this effort is the figure of Danylo Shumuk, a veteran of the UPA and leader of the 1953 Norilsk Gulag uprising.

As a youth, Shumuk had been a member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (CPWU), which then functioned as an autonomous organization under the control of the Polish Communist Party (CPP). In 1938, as part of the Great Terror in the USSR, in which tens of thousands of revolutionaries from across Europe were murdered, Stalin dissolved the CPP and the Communist Parties of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine along with it.

Using the crimes of Stalinism to justify Shumuks turn to fascism, the ISL writes:

Danylo Shumuk waited until 1943, when the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) had begun its war on two fronts, that is, against German National Socialism and against Stalinism. That is when he enlisted in the ranks of the UPA. Unfortunately, Stalins executioners had taken Trotskys life by 1943. Therefore, it is very difficult for us to predict what tactics and strategy Leon Davydovich might have proposed to the communists of western Ukraine, considering the complex context of that time. He left that question to future discussions among comrades.

It is difficult to think of a more brazen lie. Leon Trotsky not only led the Red Armys struggle against counter-revolutionary nationalist forces, not least of all in Ukraine, in a civil war from 1918 to 1921 to defend and extend the conquests of the October Revolution. The Trotskyist movement has historically always insisted on rooting the opposition to Stalinism in the defense of the internationalist principles of Marxism against the bureaucracys counter-revolutionary and nationalist program of socialism in one country. And far from promoting alliances with nationalist, let alone fascist forces, Trotskyists have fought to build an independent revolutionary leadership for the international working class.

Whatever the tragic elements of Shumuks life and the crimes of Stalinism, it must be stated clearly that he never had anything to do with Trotsky and his struggle for internationalism and the political independence of the working class. His memoirs, which were published in English in 1984, have long formed an important part of the historical myth-making about the OUN and UPA by the far-right Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the US.

In his memoir, Shumuk fails to mention, let alone condemn, the Nazi-led genocide of over 1 million Ukrainian Jews, in which the OUN-UPA was deeply implicated. Instead, he justifies the (unspecified) crimes of the OUN-B as a response to the crimes by the NKVD, the typical argument of the Eastern European far right. [9] Shumuks glorification of the rank and file of the UPA and his insistence that he himself had always been motivated by nothing but truth, kindness and love squarely fall in the category of propaganda and myth-making. [10] By his own acknowledgement, he worked as a political instructor for the OUN-Bs most elite and most violent unit, the SB, and led a large UPA unit with many OUN-B and SB members in a period when the UPA was engaged in genocidal massacres.

Despite Shumuks sinister record, the ISL doubles down on Vernyk, posting about the memoirs of this unrepentant right-wing nationalist and his involvement in the 1953 Norilsk Gulag uprising. Trying to both defend Shumuk and create the impression that he worked closely with the left, they write that Trotskyist prisoners played a key role in the organization and execution of the plan for the 1953 Norilsk Gulag uprising, which Shumuk co-led.

Again, the ISL resorts to historical distortions and amalgams for definite political purposes. Out of the two individuals it mentions to prove its claim about the alleged involvement of Trotskyists, historical records indicate that one, Maria Shimanskaya, was not involved in the Norilsk but in another Gulag uprising a year later. [11] The other reference, to a certain Klichenko, is also misleading. The historical documents published about this uprising do not contain this name, but rather mention a certain Ivan Pavlovich Kliachenko. And the only existing reference to a political conversation with Kliachenko by another prisoner indicates that his group was in a minority and limited itself to the status of opposition to the plans of the Ukrainian nationalists who dominated the strike committee. [12] In both cases, it is unclear whether either of them ever were members of Trotskys Left Opposition, whose membership was murdered almost entirely during the Great Terror of the 1930s.

With these misleading references and statements, the ISL seeks to sow confusion about the character of the political forces involved in the uprising and blur the lines between left-wing and right-wing opposition to Stalinism.

The 1953 Norilsk uprising was the first in a series of Gulag uprisings that took place amidst a staggering crisis of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which was accelerated by the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. After years of renewed repression in the Soviet Union, including openly anti-Semitic purges and a bloody crackdown on left-wing youth groups, a series of strikes and uprisingsmost notably in East Germany in June 1953now shook the Stalinist bureaucracies. The overwhelming majority of the Soviet working class and youth felt a powerful allegiance to the ideals and conquests of the October Revolution which they had just defended against fascism in World War II, and the dominant sentiment was to seek a return to the real Lenin.

Fearing the development of a broader left-wing movement in the working class, the bureaucracy responded with extraordinary violence to these developments, including to the Gulag uprisings.

However, while the political forces involved in these uprisings were extremely heterogenous, ranging from genuinely left-wing and anarchist groups, as well as religious sects, to the far right, historical documents indicate that, tragically, it was right-wing and nationalist forces that managed to dominate and direct many of these uprisings, especially the one in Norilsk. By 1953, the Ukrainian far right, in particular, had established a sophisticated underground network in many camps. This included a revival of the feared Banderite secret organization (SB), a general staff, as well as combat groups and groups for the execution of terrorist acts, political education and material provisions. [13]

In Norilsk, where the prison population included a particularly large contingent of both Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists, Shumuk created aself-help organization composed of former UPA members years before the uprising. Along with other right-wing nationalist forces, among them Russian and Baltic Nazi collaborators, they managed to dominate the strike committeeoften by thoroughly anti-democratic meansand picked a former official of the Nazi propaganda ministry to fulfill the role of propaganda minister. The hymn of the uprising was composed by a Belarusian nationalist to the tune of a UPA song and directed against the tyranny of Bolshevism. [14]

Principal responsibility for allowing the far-right to play such a major role, which by far outstripped its actual popular support, lies with Stalinism. Stalins Great Terror of the 1930s had resulted in the massacre of entire generations of socialists and revolutionaries, including the Trotskyist opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy. This mass murder, culminating in the assassination of Leon Trotsky in 1940, politically beheaded the working class not just in the Soviet Union but in Europe as a whole and created immense damage to the socialist and historical consciousness of generations of workers.

Anyone committed to the fight for socialism today would see it as his or her primary task to establish the true historical record of these events and the crimes of Stalinism in order to politically arm the working class. The ISL does the opposite: It employs the Stalinist methods of historical lies and amalgams in order to sow historical confusion and cover up the crimes of the far right.

As always, the historical lie serves the purpose of political reactionin this case, it is the ideological cement for the ISLs line-up behind imperialism and the Ukrainian far right.

Indeed, just days after this document was published on the ISLs Facebook page, on June 29, Vernyk took part in a Ukrainian program for a 45-minute discussion with Oles Vakhnyi, one of Ukraines most notorious neo-Nazi skinheads. Vakhnyi has publicly endorsed the fascist attacks by the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who killed over 77 people, and made the Heil Hitler greeting in front of French TV cameras. In his discussion with this fascist thug in front of a Ukrainian flag, Vernyk expressed his support for the Ukrainian governments ban on opposition parties and strikes.

The rapid shift to the extreme right of the ISL contains important lessons for workers everywhere. Its open promotion of Ukrainian fascist forces is only the most extreme expression of the rapid rightward lurch of the petty-bourgeois ex-left internationally, which the ICFI has been documenting for many years. The ISL and Vernyks trade union are connected to various organizations in Latin America, Turkey and Europe, as well as the Progressive International, which was co-founded by the Sanders Institute of Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders, who has voted in support of tens of billions of dollars for the arming of the Ukrainian army and fascists in the war against Russia.

But there is also another side to this class development: While the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left is being sucked into the capitalist war machine and is rallying to the defense of the bourgeois nation-state, the working class is being driven into an open struggle against imperialist war and capitalism on a world scale. This struggle will be waged in direct opposition to these nationalist forces on the basis of socialist and internationalist principles. The critical task now is to prepare the revolutionary leadership necessary for this struggle by building the sections of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International, the world party of socialist revolution, including in Russia and Ukraine.

End Notes

[1] Petro Fedun (Poltava), Khto taki banderivtsi ta za shho vony boriutssia, in: Petro FedunPoltava, Kontseptsiia Samostiinoi Ukrainy, Tom 1: Tvory, Lviv 2008, p. 323.

[2] Petro Fedun (Poltava),Elementy revoliutsiinosti ukrayinskogo natsionalizmy, in: Petro FedunPoltava, Kontseptsiia Samostiinoi Ukrayiny, Tom 1: Tvory, Lviv 2008, p. 122.

[3] John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry, 1941-1944, Stuttgart: Ibidem 2021, p. 368.

[4] Ibid., p. 372.

[5] Grzegorz Rossoliski-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult. Stuttgart: Ibidem 2014, pp. 268-269.

[6] Per Anders Rudling, The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths, Carl Beck Papers No. 2107, November 2011, p. 10. The paper is available online.

[7] Rossoliski-Liebe, Stepan Bandera, p. 284.

[8] James P. Cannon, A Letter to Trotskyists throughout the World. Available on the WSWS: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/open-o21.html

[9] Danylo Shumuk, Life Sentence. Memoirs of a Ukrainian Prisoner, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies: University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1984, p. 346.

[10] Ibid., p. 100.

[11] Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga. Konets 1920-khpervaia polovina 1950-kh godov. Tom 6. Vosstaniia, bunty i zabostvki zakliuchennykh, ed. by V. A. Kozlov, Moscow: ROSSPEN 2004,pp. 611, 626, 628. The volume is available online: https://statearchive.ru/474

[12] The reference by a camp official to Kliachenko as a Trotskyist involved in the Norilsk uprising can be found in a document published in: Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, tom 6, p. 325. The discussion with him is recounted by Hrycyak, a former member of the OUNs youth branch, who co-led the Norilsk uprising, in his memoirs, which were published by a OUN-affiliated publishing house. Yevhen Hyrcyak, The Norilsk Uprising. Short Memoirs, Institut fr Bildungspolitik in Mnchen, Munich 1984, p. 23.

[13] Istoriia stalinskogo Gulaga, p. 81.

[14] Shumuk, Life Sentence, p. 213; Gimn norilskikh povstantsev. Available online under: https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=page&num=7564

WSWS Review

What is the pseudo-left?

This review examines the response of pseudo-left political tendencies internationally to the major world political events of the past decade.

Read more here:
The ISL whitewashes the crimes of Ukrainian fascism to justify its alliance with the far right - WSWS

Im Warren Smith, and today youll be listening in on my conversation with Jefrey Breshears. He is the author of a new book called American Crisis: Cultural Marxism and The Culture War: A Christian Response.

SOUNDBITE: The early church, if you want to describe it, or characterize it as moderately socialistic, to use modern terminology, the early church really practiced voluntary socialism, or voluntary communalism out of a sincere love for others. So, which is totally different, of course from secular political socialism, which is government mandated. It's always invariably coercive and involuntary.

Jefrey Breshears took an interesting path to become one of the most quietly influential thinkers in evangelicalism today. He was raised in the church, a conservative Baptist church, and he never completely left the faith of his youth, but he did have sojourns in what today we sometimes call the religious left or progressive Christianity. Well talk about that in our conversation today.

Jefrey also spent time in the music industry, working for both secular and Christian record labels in the early days of the Jesus Music era. His experiences there have informed his approach to apologetics, and his strategy at the Aeropagus Forum, which is a study center that combines apologetics with history and contemporary cultural issues.

Jefrey Breshears new book is American Crisis: Cultural Marxism and the Culture War: A Christian Response. He spoke to me from his office in Atlanta.

WS: Well, Jefrey, welcome to the program. It is really great to see you and to have this chance to talk. You and I have known each other for a very long time.

JB: Absolutely. Almost in a prior life, I'd say.

WS: Well, in fact, in some ways it was a prior life. And that's partly, the reason I said that is partly because that's why I, that's where I want to start our conversation. You were raised in a Christian home. And you, in your book, devote a couple of chapters to your own personal upbringing in Odyssey. And I think that because your book is so rich with, and so big, nearly 500 pages, 450 pages, that maybe telling your personal story might be the best and easiest way for us to get into that. Talk about your upbringing. Talk about your Christian home, and what that taught you and what the limitations of it were.

JB: Well, thank you, I certainly appreciate the opportunity. I rarely, obviously, I rarely ever get to speak about personal things. And it is a relatively small portion of the book. But I'm always pleased to be able to do that. I appreciate that very much. I grew up in a very devout, very sincere and committed Christian family. My father was a very dominant and expressive personality. He was absolutely one of the most principled and disciplined people I think I've ever known. And when he set his mind to something he absolutely would not be deterred. He was, I would say, a dogmatic moralist. He was rarely puzzled by the kind of vagarities and ambiguities that confound most people. In fact, as one biographer once wrote about Theodore Roosevelt, Dad seemed to be born with his mind already made up. Now what he did possess, among other qualities, was what C.S. Lewis oftentimes referred to in his writings, as the most rare of all the virtues. And that is courage. And so I very much admired that in my father as well. He had three passions really in life: his Christian faith, of course, his wife and family, and also he very much loved America. And so I grew up with those kind of values. In fact, he would oftentimes use our supper time as a teaching opportunity. Now, like most families back then, we would usually eat supper together. And we oftentimes, of course, would chat about what went on at school or work that day, and so on. But he also would use that dinner time to talk about current events and politics and church and the Bible. And one of his great passions was Biblical prophecy. He would also use the time oftentimes on Sunday afternoons to critique the pastor's sermon from that, from that morning.

WS: Well, Jefrey, let me jump in here and interrupt you because as I read in your book, and as you've just described, I mean, there's much admirable, much honorable about what you just said about your dad and about your upbringing. And clearly you share a lot of those values today. I mean, you your passion for Scripture, and the family, and for America are pretty clear in your book. However, there was another side to that upbringing in the 1950s and 60s. You you mentioned for example, the fascination of many conservatives, including your father, with the John Birch Society and with conspiracy theories, and the Trilateral Commission and the Illuminati and all of that kind of stuff. Can you, can you say a little bit more about that and how that how those ideas influenced your dad, and how they influenced you, either in the acceptance or the rejection of them?

JB: Yes, very good question. I grew up from the time I was about 10 or so he would take me to various conservative meetings. We were living in Orange County, California. Anaheim, California at the time. And so I would accompany him. We would see some of the latest films, produced by conservatives. He was very involved in the John Birch Society. So all of that was very much familiar to me as I was growing up. When I went off to junior high school in seventh grade, I joined the Young Americans for Freedom local chapter. So that was very familiar, a very familiar subculture to me. I heard in person at various churches some of the prominent Christian, conservative, right wing evangelists of the day. So yes, I, I was pretty well indoctrinated in that whole orientation by the time I got to high school.

WS: So what then changed in you? And when did it change? Because at some point, you observed that while there were, there was some truth wrapped up in these conspiracy theories, that there was also some significant deficiencies in that worldview. That it was not a truly Christian worldview, and not a full orbed Christian worldview. In fact, one of the things that you said in your book that really captured my imagination and attention was that often your dad and some of these, you know, right wing conservatives of the 1950s, and 60s, got the good, and the true, pretty well. They, you know, they kind of understood that, but they didn't get the beautiful. That, that there was a very limited aesthetic, and that the beautiful, really depend upon each other, that you can't sort of separate them and pull them apart, that it over time really started eroding your confidence in their vision of the good and the true as well as the beautiful.

JB: Well, from my perspective, as a teenager, and then in college, there was so much about conservative evangelicalism that was so out of sync with the times. Now that's not, of course, necessarily negative. Not at all. Because our times are usually very out of sync with Biblical principles. But yes, in in the churches I grew up in there was a lot of emphasis on, on theology, on Biblical history, and so on, what is true and what is good. But as you've pointed out, the element of the beautiful was oftentimes missing. And I've thought about that over the years. And, you know, when you think about the origins of what we would call modern art, it really begins with the Renaissance. And the Renaissance, of course, is oftentimes described as a very humanistic movement. Now, that's not to be confused with secular humanism that's so prevalent today. But the humanism of the Renaissance, of course, was a celebration of human creativity and ingenuity. And there was much about it that, frankly, was very, very inspiring and very compatible with a, with a Christian worldview. Now, centuries later, of course, as the Reformation came about, Protestants, most Protestants, regarded anything that was associated with Catholicism or Catholic tradition, to be tainted and suspicious, due to, for instance, all the very garish and ostentatious art and icons that decorated Catholic churches and cathedrals.

So in general, and I am speaking in broad generalizations here, Protestantism and of course, also Anabaptism, which very much influenced my Christian faith and development, both of those forces Protestantism and Anabaptist sought to return to what they regarded as the simple expressions of the of the Christian faith that they felt characterized the early church. We know, for example, that Martin Luther wanted icons removed from churches and so on. So to update it to my father's time and my younger years, by the turn of the 20th century, of course, a lot of the popular art, the visual arts, the music, the performing arts, and so on, a lot of it was created and performed, of course, by non Christians. And increasingly much of the music, and later, of course, the movies, expressed very secular themes. Now, I wouldn't want to exaggerate the issue, but I think that there was a general tendency on the part of conservative Christians to ignore music and movies and other art forms that, in fact, have certainly been tainted, maybe even outright corrupted by non-Christians, oftentimes propagating a very anti-Christian value system. Popular culture in general, and certainly popular music, as we know is overwhelmingly mediocre at best. But there was always some that's wholesome. There's always some that's inspiring. There's always some that is credible. It may be a very tiny percentage of all the music and the movies and the TV that's produced, but that 2% or 3% can certainly enrich our lives, but we have to be proactive in terms of finding it. And I think there was a tendency on the part of many Christians, adult Christians, not to bother with it at all, because again, they found it overwhelmingly negative.

WS: And your love of music is where you got to be out of step I guess a bit with your upbringing because you love music, right? And ultimately, you ended up working for one of the record labels.

JB: Well, yes. Other than baseball, I'd say music was probably my passion growing up.

WS: By the way, Jefrey, just for the record. As you and I are watching this, the Braves you're playing an afternoon game with the Cubs and I've got them on the television behind us. But that's that's a subject for another day.

JB: Well and life is not fair. Because I understand up there in Chicago today, the weather is nearly perfect. Whereas here in Georgia, it is nearly as hot as hell or Texas, whichever you want to use for the proper analogy.

WS: Right. But anyway, so other than baseball, our shared passion for baseball and our shared passion for music, you know, it was this more music. Music is more relevant to our conversation right now. The that, you know, kind of caused a turning, shall we say in your life?

JB: Well, it was quite influential. Again, I was very much enraptured with a lot of popular music of the 60s and early to mid 70s. A lot of it was just incredibly creative. A lot of the music of Bob Dylan and The Beatles and of course, many others that we could cite. Now, I felt like I had a fairly good grounding, in terms of what is true and good. Evangelical churches were very, very adept at clearly addressing critical moral issues and so on. But there was something that I felt at the time was seriously lacking. And also, when I looked at the total dysfunctionality of American society and culture in the late 60s and into the 70s, I think music became more than anything else, an escape. I did not see a whole lot in America at the time that I would have felt was in sync with the truth and the goodness that we encounter in Scripture. So I think with that being the case, I gravitated toward music, looking for some meaning, some purpose, some beauty and fulfillment in music. So my first job out of college actually was with Capitol Records. Capitol Records had a large distribution center here in Atlanta at the time, as there were five or six of these scattered around the country. And of course, that was the company that had produced some of the most popular recording artists of the previous 10 or 15 years, going all the way back to the Kingston Trio, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and so on. When I was at Capitol, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was released - one of the most popular records of course of the 1970s. So for me, music was, as I said, a therapeutic escape from the realities, the ugly realities of what was so prevalent in American society and culture at the time.

WS: Well as you got more deeply into music and started seeing some of the limitations of your upbringing, your fundamentalist or evangelical upbringing, you didn't renounce your faith, but you did branch out a bit - you tested other waters. Jefrey, from where you and I sit today, I think you and I are both pretty familiar with the narrative of progressive Christianity or exvangelicals or the movement that some people call the deconstructing of faith. Some of them still want to hold on to the label of Christian, they want to still say they're Christians, while they reject core Christian doctrines. You didn't exactly reject core Christian doctrines during this era, but you were questioning the evangelical subculture and some of the conservative American political climate as well, especially those elements that seemed to go hand in glove with the evangelical subculture. Can you say a little about that, that flirtation with progressive Christianity and the deconstructing of your faith?

JB: Well, I worked for Capitol Records for a couple of years. I, it was a very hedonistic environment, of course. So during that period of time, I I really recommitted my life to Christ. And I wanted to go to work for the company that produced most of the popular Jesus music of the early to mid 1970s. And that was Word Incorporated. They had a large book division, as well as a music division. And they had some of the most talented Christian artists of the day. Artists such as Larry Norman, distributed his music through them, Phil Keaggy, Second Chapter of Acts, Barry McGuire, and others as well. So I, I worked with Word in the music division for four years. And I found that to be satisfying in some respects, but in others not so much.

Now, I was traveling all over the south at the time interacting with a very, very wide range of Christians, professing Christians, some of whom were very impressive. Others, not so much. But it did very much expand my horizons, as far as the Christian demographics, you might say, in America. So I never, of course, became an ex, exvangelical, to use the term that you used a minute or so ago. But I did spend several years searching for what I thought were more credible expressions of true Christianity. I certainly was never a liberal, or a progressive, either in my faith or in my politics. I always knew that what we call liberalism today, in other words, modern liberalism, was really just the political ideology of a secular humanistic philosophy. And that was, that was totally unappealing to me. But for several years, I was involved in several groups that had a left wing orientation. Many would have described themselves probably as Christian socialists. Now, I probably would have characterized myself at the time as a socialist Christian, keeping the proper noun being Christian and socialist only as an adjective. But only because I believe that the early church, at least the Jerusalem church, that we read about in the book of Acts, practiced communitarian values. But the early church if you want to describe it, or characterize it as moderately socialistic, to use modern terminology, the early church really practiced voluntary socialism, or voluntary communalism out of a sincere love for others, which is totally different, of course from secular political socialism, which is government mandated. It's always invariably coercive and involuntary. So, political socialism inevitably leads to authoritarianism, in which the government attempts to control virtually every aspect of our lives. It also limits our free expression, including the free expression of our Christian faith. And socialism is certainly antithetical to religious liberty. So I felt at the time that I did need to broaden my perspective on Christian discipleship. And more liberal, or left wing, Christian groups, and enterprises, I felt like was something that I seriously needed to check out.

WS: So you started reading and communicating with people like Ron Sider, who wrote a very influential book called Rich Christians In An Age of Hunger, who, by the way, I've had on this podcast, by the way. An also, the Sojourners movement, which was fairly new at that point. They published a magazine, Sojourners Magazine, and you had your own Christian publication in Atlanta for a while.

JB: Yes, it was in the early 1980s. Actually, I had just returned to graduate school to study history at Georgia State University. But I founded a publication called Crossroads: an Atlanta Christian Forum. And we took a position that might be described as perhaps mildly Christian left wing in that regard. And I did have the opportunity during those years to interact with a lot of the, a lot of the more public faces and leaders in the Christian left. I was offered a job actually with Ron Siders organization, Evangelicalism for Social Action, they were based in Germantown, Pennsylvania, just a little north of downtown Philadelphia. And I admired Ron and believed that he was sincere and a credible Christian. There were others, however, in the Christian left that very quickly I had suspicions about. So many of these people seem to me to be considerably more socialistic than they were Christianistic, if I can use that term.

WS: Sure.

JB: And so I felt like over the years, I came to see a lot of the fallacies in that whole movement. And eventually, I was drawn back into a more conservative orientation in most every regards. As I thought about these things, over time thought about them more deeply and also taught on political science as well as history in my career as a, as a history professor.

WS: Hold on a second. Jefrey, I'm have a something happened here to my recorder. And I just don't know what happened. But it stopped recording. Fortunately, this is a backup that and not the main thing. So okay. Let me

JB: Now, should I also mention that I would have totally lost my faith if had I not met you in Sunday school?

WS: Yeah, no, yeah. Do not say that. No, I do. Do I do want to. Okay, but by the way, Johnny, we're off. We're off the record now that you can cut all this out. But I'm about to go back on. Are you ready? Jeffrey, can I go back on this?

WS: Well, Jeffrey, I do want to sort of close our conversation with what you are doing now. But before we do that, there are a couple of little anecdotes that I'd like to hit you with. One is, you describe in your book, and I may have heard you describe this in person at some point, I don't remember now. An encounter you had with Keith Green that while you were working for, I think it was while you're working for Sparrow Records. It may have been while you were still at Capitol, where you when you left Capitol to go to work for Sparrow. You were kind of hoping that you were, you know, leaving Egypt for the promised land. And you found out.

JB: Oh, when I left Capital, I actually went to work for Word. Okay. And then, two years later with Sparrow Okay, here we go, sorry to interrupt.

WS: Yeah, no, that's good. Okay, Johnny, we're here we go. We're starting all over again.

WS: Jeffrey, I do want to sort of land this plane and bring our conversation to a conclusion by, you know, talking about what you're doing now. But before we leave this era of your life, I want to, I can't resist asking you about a couple of anecdotes that are alluded to in your book. I may have heard you talk about them face to face at some point. With Capitol Records, you were kind of hoping to go into a Christian label, first Word and then Sparrow, might kind of give you the best of both worlds. It would give you, you know, kind of what you loved about the music business, and, you know, the creativity and all of that, but doing it in a Christian environment. Over time, my understanding from reading you and from talking to you is that you became, I guess, a little bit disillusioned with the, you know, the commercialism of even Christian music. And that may have led to your, some of your forays into Christian socialism, just kind of testing out what else might be an option. But you had an encounter with Keith Green, who I think a lot of our listeners are going to know. And a lot of listeners are going to know that he also had some really serious concerns about the Christian music industry. Can you say a little more about that?

JB: Well, I interacted with Keith on on just a few occasions. I didn't know him real well, but we corresponded. Keith, as you said, was very concerned about the commercialization of Christian music and going back to the early 1970s, when Larry Norman and Randy Stonehill, and people like that emerged, singing folk rock style music that had Christian lyrics, biblical lyrics. That was quite unusual at the time. Now later, that Jesus music, of course, will morph into what became known as contemporary Christian music. It became an industry unto itself. This was troublesome to Keith. He didn't believe that the gospel should be so aggressively marketed. Nor did I, for that matter. So I was always a little out of sync even with the company that I was representing. But when I finally resigned from Sparrow Records to return to graduate school and study history, I remember sharing my thoughts with Keith and he sent me a very nice letter, encouraging me to do just that. He was very concerned about some of those tendencies in the Christian book and music industry itself.

WS: Yeah. Well, of course, that's been a concern of mine as well. I remember, I wrote I wrote a book back in 2009, called The Lover's Quarrel With The Evangelical Church that you read and were generous enough to invite me to Atlanta to speak to the Areopagus Forum at that time, and I guess that would be nearly 15 years ago now. By the way, I'm working on a revised version of that book. So that sort of segues me though, Jeffrey, a bit into what you're doing now. I mentioned the Areopagus Forum. Many of our listeners who are Christians will know of course that the Areopagus was also known as Mars Hill. It was where Paul made his famous Acts 17 speech, from which you derive the name of the Areopagus Form, of course. What are you trying to accomplish with the Areopagus Forum? What are your kind of day to day activities and by what are you trying to accomplish? I mean, sort of the big picture, what's your vision or mission? And then what do you do? How do you accomplish that vision on a sort of day to day boots on the ground kind of way?

JB: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that question in particular. Yeah, for 20 years, I was a history professor mostly at Georgia State University. My, by the way, my doctoral studies concentrated on two areas of history. One was modern U.S. history, so as to try and make sense of the 60s. And the other area was actually ancient history, philosophy, and religion due to my interest in early church history. And I also, of course, taught church history at Atlanta Christian College and Reformed Theological Seminary. But I left the university and began the Areopagus in 2003. And, as you mentioned, the Areopagus is a term that's pretty familiar to most people who are familiar with the book of Acts. Acts chapter 17, in particular. And of course, the apostle Paul visited the Areopagus, where he testified his faith in Christ and really planted the seed of Christianity there in Athens. Now, throughout Christian history that name Areopagus has oftentimes represented the intersection of Christian faith and culture. And that's why I chose that particular name for our particular ministry. Ours is basically a forum for the exchange of ideas. Now, today in America, of course, we realize that we are in the midst of a culture, of a culture that's increasingly skeptical, if not outright hostile toward Christian faith and values. And the erosion of Christian influence in our society is apparent in in virtually every area of of life today, from law and politics to business, education, the media, certainly the arts and entertainment, certainly in public and private morality, as well. So the Areopagus is essentially a Christian education ministry. We're based in the Greater Atlanta area. We offer seminars and forums on issues relevant to contemporary Christian life. We always say that our mission fundamentally is this - and that's to help Christians effectively engage our society and culture with the life transforming truth and love of Jesus Christ. And so, to that end, we offer substantive seminar courses and topical forums that would challenge Christians to live in accord with the principles and the practices of a holistic, comprehensive, Biblical worldview. So we, we have a website at http://www.theareopagus.org. We also have a Facebook page. And by the way, we also have a newsletter that we send out periodically that's devoted to significant issues and events. We call it The Watchman. And oftentimes, we will reference some of the articles that you featured in MinistryWatch.

WS: Wo you can't you can't get out of the publication business can you?

JB: Well, it's, it's not only a passion, it's, it's truly a calling. Yeah. And I, I've written several books. Probably...

WS: Well, you know, it's interesting to me, and I'm sure you know, this, Jefrey, that the Areopagus figures prominently in Acts 17. And, obviously, the word from which you derive your name. But the, also John Milton wrote a famous essay, I think I'm gonna pronounce it right, the Areopagittica, I think, I think that's the way it's pronounced. It was a kind of a Reformation era document. And it was a defense of free speech. It was really one of the first modern documents defending free speech. It's interesting to me that he called it the Areopagittica, because he made the observation in that document that Paul was not only preaching the gospel, but he was also appealing to the authorities for religious liberty and freedom of speech. He was basically, you know, saying, I have the right to stand here and proclaim this God in whom I believe, this unnamed God. So it's kind of interesting how the confluence of these, religious liberty and freedom of speech, and the proclamation of the gospel are so closely intertwined in that one word, Areopagus kind of, encapsulates all of that.

JB: Yes, it's been a very useful term, basically taking the gospel message in the public, dealing with serious issues, be they religious, spiritual issues, moral, cultural issues, and basically just the fulfilling our mission to to adopt a comprehensive understanding of Christian discipleship. This fall, I'll be doing a course that will be focused on the life and works of Francis Schaeffer. And of course, Francis Schaeffer was one of those who kept calling us back to a comprehensive understanding of Christian discipleship in contrast of what he called pietism, which is this very narrow, limited understanding or view of Christian discipleship. And so we try to incorporate those kinds of themes and that kind of a broad based approach in our ministry.

WS: Yeah. Well, Jeffrey, we've got to bring our time to a close. And we've we really haven't talked specifically much about your book, even though your story is in chapter seven and eight of your book. And the ideas that we talked about are what energize your book, what innervate, your book, you might say. But what do you want people to get out of the book? Why should people read this book?

JB: Well, I think it's an extremely relevant book for our time. It's an analysis basically, of the origins and the manifestations and the consequences of America's culture war that's raging today, and what Christians can and what Christians should be doing in response. So I'd say that basically, the purpose of the book is to reveal and analyze the great spiritual, moral, and cultural challenges that we face today as American Christians. It also explores the historical and philosophical origins for our culture war, exposes the the consequences of the erosion of Christian influences in our society. And in addition to that, we also challenge Christians to become better informed, more actively engaged in these great issues of our time, so that we can truly fulfill our mission to be a source of light and love and hope and truth in the midst of a society and a culture that's rapidly disintegrating and descending into more and more spiritual darkness.

Youve been listening in on my conversation with Dr. Jefrey Breshears. His new book is American Crisis: Cultural Marxism and the Culture War: A Christian Response. He spoke to me from his office in Atlanta.

Listening In comes to you from WORLD News Group, and this program is just one of the many benefits that comes with a WORLD subscription. To find out more visit WNG.org/subscribe.

Tune in next week to hear my conversation with Roland Warren. Hes the president of CareNet, one of the largest networks of pregnancy resource centers in the nation, with more than 1,200 affiliates. When the Dobbs decision was announced, the decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Roland Warren was one of the first calls I made. His insights about the future of the prolife movement will both encourage and challenge you. I hope youll tune in.

The producer for todays program is Leigh Jones. Johnny Franklin is the technical producer. And Paul Butler is executive producer for WORLD Radio. Im your host, Warren Smith. And youve been Listening In.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.

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Listening In - A conversation with Jefrey Breshears - WORLD News Group

ensitivity to the claims of the people is in fact the only way we have of contributing to the solution of the great human problems - for no universal value is worth the name if it cannot be applied on a national or regional scale and to the local living conditions of each family. Allende

Patrice Lumumba made history in Congo by confronting the colonial regime with its brutalities and paid for the audacity with his life. That saga was repeated in South America. This time the victim was Salvador Allende, Chiles first socialist president.

His full name was Salvador Allende Gossens. He was born on June 26, 1908, in Valparaso. After leading an eventful life, he died on September 11, 1973 in Santiago.

Like several other South American countries, Chile had been a colony of Spain for nearly 300 years until Napoleon Bonapartes conquest of Spain weakened the countrys imperial grip on its South American colonial possessions.

Under the Spanish colonial rule, northern and central Chile were part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Allende was born into an upper-middle-class family when Chiles destiny was in doldrums. In a situation of extreme uncertainty, Allende took a degree in medicine but instead of practising medicine opted for a career in politics. In 1933, he helped found Chiles Socialist Party, which had a Marxist ideology.

Success didnt come to Allende instantaneously. He had to strive long and he strived assiduously. America was already finding it hard to contend with Fidel Castro in Cuba after he came to power in 1959. Another socialist-led polity could not be countenanced.

Plots hatched from within and from outside to bring the government down had started surfacing immediately after Allende assumed power. After election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1937, he served (193942) as minister of health in the liberal leftist coalition of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda. Allende won the first of his four elections to the Senate in 1945. He ran for the presidency for the first time in 1952 but was temporarily expelled from the Socialist Party for accepting the support of the outlawed Communists; he placed last in a four-man race.

He ran again in 1958with Socialist backing as well as the support of the then-legal Communistsand was a close second to the Conservative-Liberal candidate, Jorge Alessandri. With the same support, he was decisively defeated in 1964 by the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei.

For his successful 1970 campaign, Allende ran as the candidate of Popular Unity, a bloc of socialists, communists, radicals and some dissident Christian Democrats, leading in a three-sided race with 36.3 percent of the vote.

Thus, he ran for president unsuccessfully three times before winning narrowly in 1970. Despite the slim margin to sustain him in power he attempted to restructure the Chilean society along socialist lines while retaining democracy, civil liberties and due process of law. He reformed the education system and provided free milk for children. He also arranged distribution of land among landless farmers. Allende was opposed to foreign companies that were taking away natural resources, like copper, from the country.

Despite his good intentions and well-meaning efforts to create an egalitarian society by redistributing wealth, he had to contend with stagnant production, food shortages, rising inflation and widespread strikes. The American media and Chicago school of economists under the tutelage of Milton Friedman highlighted the rising inflation and labour strikes with extraordinary zeal.

Some of his problems can be put down to his coalition partners, who didnt allow Allende to carry out reforms the way he wanted. In neo-colonial states, the colonial structures and the forces lending them support trenchantly resist any measure taken to reform society or the state. In some cases, the leaders vying to undertake reforms are summarily deposed. Some are physically obliterated like Lumumba and Allende and demonised through false narratives.

The US government believed with a great deal of consternation that Allende would move closer to socialist countries like Cuba and the Soviet Union. They feared that he would push Chile into socialism and that all American investments in the copper-rich Chile would be lost.

A document released by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2000, titled, CIA Activities in Chile, revealed that the CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende and that it recruited many of Pinochets officers as paid contacts of the CIA or US military.

Having said that, one must not lose sight of the fact that Allendes coalition, Unidad Popular, faced the problem of being a minority in the congress and was beset with factionalism. On September 11, 1973, a successful coup led by Gen Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government. It is argued that Allende too had a part in the process having himself appointed Augusto Pinochet to replace Gen Carlos Prats, although the appointment of Pinochet was strictly in compliance with the rules, procedures and according to military ranks. Pinochet had been, until then, a constitutionalist and a defender of the Allende government. Allende was an unfortunate victim of the circumstances. He fought, failed and died.

During a concerted attack on the presidential palace, Allende died, and the manner of his death became a subject of controversy. Military officials claimed that he had committed suicide. Others believed that he had been killed and that the evidence of an apparent suicide had been planted.

Long years of atrocious rule by Gen Pinochet followed.

Allende had the support of many workers and peasants; his electoral coalition had won 44 percent of the vote in the March 1973 congressional elections.

The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore

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Salvador Allende, who fought and failed - The News International

In the weeks after six unelected Supreme Court justices abolished the right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade, a nightmarish reality is coming into focus.

In state after state, Republican states are enacting extreme measures, rolling back the clock by many decades. State legislatures are restricting residents from traveling to obtain abortions or pills like Plan B, including by penalizing doctors who prescribe such pills to patients who live across state lines. Several states are introducing legislation that will jail individuals who travel to other states for necessary medical procedures. Texas Republicans have introduced a bill that financially incentivizes private citizens to bring lawsuits against individuals who drive family and friends to seek abortions out of state, essentially setting a bounty on them.

On Wednesday, a large section of the Republican Party in Congress endorsed the Heartbeat Protection Act, which would ban abortion in states where it remains legal. Arkansas Republican State Senator Jason Rapert, who is president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, said, Many of us have supported legislation to stop human trafficking. So why is there a pass on people trafficking women in order to make money off of aborting their babies?

The most chilling indication of the new reality is the vicious and reactionary campaign against Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indiana University obstetrician-gynecologist who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old girl who was impregnated after being raped. This case is a sign of what is to come.

On June 27, just three days after the Supreme Courts ruling, a child abuse doctor in neighboring Ohio contacted Dr. Bernard to notify her that a 10-year-old patient was six weeks and three days pregnant and could not receive necessary medical treatment in Ohio. In 2019, Ohios Republican state legislature and Republican governor, Mike DeWine, signed a law banning abortions after six weeks. The law does not include an exception for rape or child rape. It could not be enforced so long as Roe v. Wade was good law, but the restrictions went into effect hours after the Supreme Court overturned it.

As a result, the 10-year-old was forced to drive several hours to Indiana, where she received treatment from Dr. Bernard, who reported the incident to police and Indiana authorities. Dr. Bernard informed the Indianapolis Star about the 10-year-olds abortion in a manner that did not violate any patient privacy laws. The newspaper published a story on July 1, and after Biden mentioned it at a press conference on July 8, the far right launched an offensive. At this point, no arrest had been made, but on July 14, a 27-year-old man was arrested in Columbus, Ohio and police claim he confessed to having raped the girl at least twice.

The Republican Party, however, has claimed that the incident was made up. Fox News declared that the story was B.S. Former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway appeared on the network to declare that the story was false and too rich to verify.

Worst of all, the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial board statement on July 13 titled, An Abortion Story Too Good to Confirm, which attacked Biden for promoting fanciful tales, stating: The tale is a potent post-Roe tale of woe for those who want to make abortion a voting issue this fall. One problem: Theres no evidence the girl exists. The Journal then attacked Dr. Bernard by name, saying she lied for personal political gain: You may not be surprised to learn that Dr. Bernard has a long history of abortion activism in the media.

The Democratic Party-aligned press accommodated this far-right campaign and cast doubt on Dr. Bernard before the alleged perpetrators arrest was known. On July 9, the Washington Post published an article by reporter Glenn Kessler attacking the Indianapolis Star for publishing the story on the grounds that it relied on only one source, Dr. Bernard. The Post implied that Dr. Bernard was less than forthright, stating that she declined to identify to the [Washington Post] Fact Checker her colleague or the city where the child was located. The Post wrote, The story has acquired the status of a fact no matter its provenance.

Indiana State Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican Trump supporter, says he is investigating Dr. Bernard and may criminally prosecute her. Rokita called her this abortion activist acting as a doctor and falsely claimed she failed to report the incident as required under Indiana law. When it became clear that she did report the incident, Rokita continued to demonize Dr. Bernard and said he was looking into revoking her medical license, even though he has no basis for doing so.

As a result of this campaign, Dr. Bernard has faced threats of physical violence from the far right. The New York Times published an op-ed by a colleague of Dr. Bernard that asserts, This saga has had real-world repercussions for Dr. Bernard. The local police have been alerted to concerns for her physical safety.

Dr. Bernards life is in danger as a result of this reactionary and violent climate. In May 2009, Dr. George Tiller, a physician who performed abortions, was murdered by a far-right anti-abortion extremist at Dr. Tillers church in Wichita, Kansas.

The methods of right-wing terrorists have more and more become the official strategy of the Republican Party. This was expressed most clearly on January 6, 2021, when the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, carried out a coup and attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election by physical violence. Trump personally voiced support for protesters who intended to assassinate Vice President Mike Pence and demanded that metal detectors be removed from the rally on the Ellipse so that his supporters would be armed when they assaulted the Capitol.

The Democratic Party has refused to take action to stop the ongoing assault on democratic rights. On January 6, its congressional leaders made no appeal to the population to stop the coup from taking place, while Biden spoke and asked Trump to address the nation on television. The Democratic Party has not lifted a finger to defend the right to abortion, with Biden and Vice President Harris repeatedly telling the population that the only solution is to vote to elect Democrats in the midterm elections, even though Democrats already control both houses of Congress.

In recent days, the Democratic Party has begun to attack proponents of abortion rights for being too critical of the Biden administrations unwillingness to defend abortion. Biden Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told the Washington Post last week that Joe Bidens goal in responding to Dobbs [the name of the decision overturning Roe] is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Other leading Democrats in Congress have made similar comments attacking left-wing defenders of abortion while defending the Biden administration and demanding that voters support the Democrats in November. Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) praised Bidens superficial assertion that Democrats should pass legislation defending the right to abortion regardless of the filibuster, a proposal which was dead on arrival due to opposition from within the Democratic Party itself. Now were talking, Ocasio-Cortez declared, lending political legitimacy to the right-wing Biden administration.

The decrepit state of American democracy is such that a tiny right-wing minority of religious zealots is dictating social policy in a country where 70 percent of the population supports the right to abortion. No progressive change will come from working within this rotten system. The defense of all basic democratic rights, including the defense of Dr. Bernard, requires the political mobilization of the working class against the entire capitalist political establishment. Such a movement must be bound up with the fight against the rising cost-of-living and the devastating impact of inflation, and must be developed outside of and in opposition to both parties of capitalist reaction.

Join the Socialist Equality Party!

The Socialist Equality Party is organizing the working class in the fight for socialism: the reorganization of all of economic life to serve social needs, not private profit.

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The nightmarish reality of post-Roe America - WSWS

In 1994, after 40 years in the wilderness, a Republican party led by Newt Gingrich recaptured the House of Representatives. Eventually, scandals of his own making, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and a drubbing in the 1998 midterms forced Gingrich to step down. But he did not leave public life.

The former Georgia congressman ran for the presidential nomination in 2012, seamlessly adapted to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, and kept on publishing all the while. His latest book, the catchily titled Defeating Big Government Socialism, comes as his party anticipates another congressional takeover in November.

Tim Miller is another long-term Republican operative, if not a frontline politician. He served in a number of GOP campaigns, demonstrating media savvy and a knack for opposition research. After Jeb Bush left the presidential race in 2016, Miller emerged as vocal Trump critic. Now, in the footsteps of Never Trumpers Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens, he has penned a political memoir. His subtitle A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell refers to a route many would say was partly paved by Gingrich.

The former speakers new book is heavy on familiar bombast and predictably short on introspection. Its opening pages deliver a familiar beat-down of China and its financial allies.

Many of our elites refuse to even recognize the threat from Beijing, Gingrich writes. For many, it is because they make so much money from China.

He would have done better to check his own financial disclosures.

By 2018, Newt and Callista Gingrich ambassador to the Vatican under Trump had invested at least $100,000 and possibly as much as $250,000 in certificates of deposit issued by the Bank of China.

For what its worth, Trump maintained a bank account in China. Further, in such spirit of US-Sino amity, the late Sheldon Adelson funded Gingrichs 2012 presidential run with $20m, courtesy of the blackjack tables and roulette wheels of his casino in Macau.

In other words, Gingrich was cool with China until he wasnt. Government records also show a $368,334 advance for a book with a simple working title: Trump vs China.

Gingrich has long known that reality need not be a constraint. He has compared himself to William Pitt the Younger, the British prime minister who was in office for nearly 19 years, rather than Gingrichs four as speaker. Gingrich has also suggested Brad Pitt should play him onscreen.

A little more substantively, Gingrich uses his new book to demand fiscal responsibility, hammering Joe Biden and the Democrats for budgetary profligacy. The first chapter is titled Big Government Socialism Isnt Working and Cant. Once again, Gingrich should have thought twice.

Gingrichs presidential run to nowhere doubled as a poor mans Trump University the scheme by which Trump pulled in money for a product somewhere between shoddy and non-existent. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the Gingrich 2012 campaign remains more than $4.6m in debt. As Business Insider put it, No presidential campaign from any election cycle owes creditors more money.

As for extravagance, in 2011 Gingrich maintained a credit line of between $250,001 and $500,000 at Tiffanys, the Fifth Avenue jeweler.

On the page, Gingrich also blames the left for Americas high Covid death rate despite significantly lower post-vaccine mortality in Democratic states. So it goes: at a recent rally in Alaska, Trump declined to use the word vaccine, lest he anger the crowd.

In Congress, Gingrich wrapped himself in gun rights, opposing the assault weapons ban in Clintons 1994 anti-crime bill and subsequently sending a written promise to the National Rifle Association that no gun control legislation would be considered as long as he was speaker.

The assault weapons ban expired almost 20 years ago. As Gingrichs latest book comes out, mass shootings fill the headlines. To the author, no matter: The Founding Fathers insisted on the second amendment so that armed citizens would make a dictatorship impossible.

Amid all this, Gingrich calls for civility. In case folks forgot, he was the speaker who shut down the government in a snit after he was seated in the back of Air Force One en route to the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, and also called Hillary Clinton a bitch. How will his speakership be remembered? The late Robert Teeter, pollster to George HW Bush, accurately observed: Gingrich makes a great backbencher.

So to Tim Miller. Like Lots wife, he cannot resist looking back. At the same time, he is overly repentant. But his attempt to explain why he stuck with the Republican party for as long as he did is revealing.

Miller lets us know that he is gay, married and a dad. His rationales for rejecting his party are understandable but not necessarily satisfying. For him and other Republican operatives, the game was fun until it wasnt. The metamorphosis of the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump occurred in broad daylight, a train wreck a long time coming. The Never Trumpers could have spoken out sooner.

As long ago as 1968, clashes between demonstrators and Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic convention offered a glimpse of simmering cultural tensions. At the same time, the discontent and racism voiced by the Alabama governor George Wallace found a home with a Republican party following Richard Nixons southern strategy. Fast forward three decades and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Pat Buchanans quests for the presidency revealed the darker impulses of the pre-Trump right.

Working-class resentment and pitchfork populism appeared long before the Iraq war and the great recession. The rise of Trumpism seems entirely predictable.

Miller does deliver a searing indictment of officials and appointees who became Trumps enablers, listing no less than 11 categories. His portraits of Lindsey Graham, South Carolinas senior senator, and Sean Spicer, Trumps first press secretary, are devastating.

More than anything, he writes, Graham just wanted to be on the golf cart next to Trump. To be on the right hand of the father. Whether or not Trump did as Graham asked was merely icing on the cake.

As reward for doubling as a human doormat, Graham now battles a subpoena from prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, concerning his part in Trumps attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The senator cloaks himself in congressional immunity and invokes the constitution. It turns out he was fine with attempting to subvert an election but doesnt like the idea of appearing before a grand jury. Funny, that.

As Miller puts it, the same obsequious spirit made Spicer a peddler of lies for the ages, happy to put up with Trumps lunacy as long as he became a star. He didnt see anything wrong with shining a poison apple And youd better believe hed do it all over again.

Both Gingrich and Spicer may get another chance to ride the Trump rodeo. The 45th president is gearing up for 2024. By then, Biden and Gingrich will be octogenarians, Trump 78. Who says America is no country for old men?

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Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican party - The Guardian