RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/25/standi

The Russian- and Cuban-supported Maduro regime is getting bolder in attempts to crush the people of Venezuela — now working blocking aid coming across the border to the starving citizens and shooting at the truck drivers.Some of that aid is American, to the irritation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t believe in revolution to remove a socialist. Agreeing that Nicolas Maduro is not a nice man, Mr. Sanders called for a “free and fair election” instead. “That is a decision of the Venezuelan people.”Actually, revolution appears to be the decision of the people — and support for the revolution is the appropriate American position.

The Monroe Doctrine defined America’s interests in the hemisphere, including recognizing and not interfering with existing colonies in the Western Hemisphere but closing the hemisphere to future colonization. And laying down the marker that any attempt to oppress or control any nation in the hemisphere would be viewed as a hostile act against the United States. The doctrine lived 190 years, mostly for better and sometimes for worse, until 2013 when Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.”But power permits no vacuum. Venezuela is what happens when the United States withdraws and others — in this case Russia, Cuba and Iran — enter to stake their claims.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/february-2019-features-giles-udy-jeremy-corbyn-britain-road-to-socialism

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 it seemed that communism, as a force in politics, was finally dead. The ideas that had inspired radicals around the world had lost their shine. As Marxism seemed discredited, market economies prospered. Only an older generation of greying revolutionaries remained to tend the faltering flame of world revolution. While they continued to squabble over minutiae of revolutionary history, the world moved on. By the turn of the millennium British students, once the vanguard of radicalism, were decried for their political apathy. The 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks ended that.

Fear took over from complacency. As the 2003 Iraq war loomed, the fractious British Left, in a rare moment of unity, formed the Stop the War Coalition and brought a million people out on the streets. Few of the unwitting participants knew that the march’s organisers’ ultimate goal was the overthrow of parliamentary democracy; none could have guessed that, 15 years later, the movement’s first two leaders, the British Communist Party member Andrew Murray and left-wing activist Jeremy Corbyn, would be within reach of forming the first communist government in British history, Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party, Murray appointed as his “Special Adviser”.

The crash of 2007 shook Western confidence still further. Left-wing commentators such as Guardian journalist Seumas Milne, an old communist comrade of Murray’s, openly voiced nostalgia for the “huge social benefits” enjoyed under Soviet communism in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. Milne is now Corbyn’s Director of Strategy and Communications.In 1920 Lenin urged British communists to enter the Labour Party to subvert it from within. In 1936, Trotsky told his followers to do the same, but successive generations of Labour leaders resisted this “entryism”, most famously in Neil Kinnock’s 1980s campaign against the Trotskyite group Militant. Two young members of a group which tried to thwart Kinnock’s campaign were Corbyn and Jon Lansman, later the founder of Momentum. That failure, reinforced by Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms, convinced many leftists that the only option left was bring the government down by extra-parliamentary action. This was the context when John McDonnell, now Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor, made his call for “insurrection”, a general strike and street protests in 2013.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-young-woman-from-libya/

I’ve done a podcast, a Q&A, with Asma Khalifa: here. She is in Mexico City, participating in a meeting of the Oslo Freedom Forum. Asma is an extraordinary person. She is a young woman from Libya, a Berber. She is a democracy leader and human-rights activist.

Last year, I heard her tell a very moving story. I asked her to tell it again, on this podcast. During the Libyan Civil War, she sided with the rebels against the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. After a close friend of hers was killed — executed, along with many others — she decided to join up: as a field nurse. She witnessed many terrible things.

She did not like what was happening to her. She was engulfed in hatred. “That’s not me,” she said. So she asked a doctor to assign her to a particular ward of a military hospital: a ward where enemy soldiers — Gaddafi’s forces — were kept. Almost no one went there.