Hey Comrades,
A little later than usual but here’s the link to the five new pieces of radical-Leftist propaganda has been posted. See you on Sunday!
Tag: Soviet
Visual Propaganda Day at STL!
Just added five more images over at the STL Image gallery. Use them well!
Putin and The Destruction of A Worker’s State
Below is an exclusive video from Russia, with English subtitles, exposing the existence of a palace owned by Russian premiere Vladimir Putin on the coast of the Black Sea. According to the New York Times, this opulent, crime-as-substance cost somewhere around $1 billion dollars. What does this all include?
The ground floor includes a spa, a movie theater, a wine cellar and an outdoor area with fountains described as an “aqua disco.” The next floor up, according to the report, has a larger theater, a casino hall and a windowless hookah lounge with a pole-dancing stage. The report also describes an underground hockey rink, a church, a tunnel to the seaside and a 260-foot-long bridge leading to a teahouse.
And in the text version of the investigation, which you can translate from Russian, you can take a virtual look-around Putin’s classy hookah lounge/private strip club which is beyond sleazy.
This ostentatious temple built to one mans avarice and megalomania is maybe one of the sickest shows that can be conceived by the radical left.
This work of investigative journalism is hosted, and produced by top Russian dissident Alexei Navalny and his associates. The AP describes Mr. Nalvany as…
Navalny, 44, is an anti-corruption campaigner and the Kremlin’s fiercest critic. He has outlasted many opposition figures and is undeterred by incessant attempts to stop his work.
He has released scores of damning reports exposing corruption in Putin’s Russia. He has been a galvanizing figure in mass protests, including unprecedented 2011-12 demonstrations sparked by reports of widespread rigging of a parliamentary election.
And there is another great profile of Mr. Navalny here in the NYT here.
Today, as further reported by the AP, an estimated 15,000 demonstrators gathered in and around Pushkin Square in Moscow to protest the unjust incarceration of Mr. Navalny. They were joined by other protesters across the country standing outside in sometimes -58 F weather. Navalny’s being held on trumped up charges of financial crimes clearly levelled against him as a political hit and and an excuse to imprison him. (The charges brought against him and his brother the European Court of Human Rights have declared unwarranted.) Further, these protests have led to the arrests of more than 3,000 peaceful protesters, many more beaten, by the Russian authorities.
Watch the beatings here:
The breadth and depth of the above investigation is unbelievably expansive. Just scroll through the text, as I did, if you can stomach it, and observe the images , 3-D models, and linked .pdf files of floor plans. Remarkable. This video/text also shows one of the many cases of theft (by the “believed” richest man in the world, according to a Fortune report) from the Russian people by Putin, his cronies, and fellow oligarchs.
Why do I find this so upsetting? Because from the momentous days of the October Revolution of 1917, to the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1989-1991, there was so much work, sacrifice, and eventual loss of dreams for the creation of a true workers’ state. Now look what it has turned into. A plutocracy where the man with more money than Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates has the people beaten in the streets when peacefully protesting. And just over false charges against a rival who wants the best for everyone.
If I were not Kentucky White Trash, I would like to have the money to visit Russia some day and see all of the great sites: St. Basil’s Cathedral, the Winter Palace, Lenin’s Mausoleum. But I swear to you now and to the day of my death, I would never spend a single kopek in the Russian state because, more than likely, it would end up in one of the chests belonging to Vladimir Putin.
How to Change: Restraint, and Issues of Equality
In previous posts I have advocated for some rather radical societal changes: smashing capitalism, fighting off cultural hegemony, etc. But let me explain how the essence of a new, better society also needs some restraint.
First, I have advocated for a vanguard party to lead us at first, or a small group of revolutionaries who will rule in the interests of the working class, what’s called the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as Lenin proposed. But we must learn from history that we must put some legal/constitutional regulations on this group of leaders. What can happen is, like what happened with Stalin in the old USSR, a single leader may wrestle from the people far too much power and enact a totalitarian government serving only their interests. We must hold their feet to the fire as the people.
Second, we must not make any change too fast for the people will rebel against the new society, as happened during the French Revolution. We must not have economic “Five Year Plans,” or “Great Leaps Forward,” or how Khmer Rouge emptied the cities of Cambodia and shipped all the citizens to the countryside to work in collective farms. That would be insane. We can’t make such mistakes as these as far leftists have done in the past. Revolutionaries have not always known how to run a country. We must read the people and act accordingly maybe even welcoming a period of Thermidor.
What will be enacted right away, though, in the interest of a new, better, revolutionary society is enacting far leftist social changes. We must remove all wage discrimination between women and men. We must remove all hindrances for LGBTQ citizens from gaining equal rights. We must address the issue of reparations for both the Native American and African American communities. These must be addressed immediately. Capitalist WASP’s want to divide us through these differences. If we can make these changes we will realize that the only thing that separates us is class. Than all will become apparent.
5 More Pieces of Propaganda
Comrades, here’s another set of five graphics added to the album over at Google. I’ll just add to it now and then since the blog is active again.
5 More Graphic Pieces of Propaganda!
I know, I know, it’s a day late and I apologize. But here are 5 graphics!
Tell your friends!
5 New STL Propaganda Images!
Wow, I know it’s been a long time since I posted anything and I must apologize. But here’s five new images for Sunday 12/15/2019!
Tell your friends!
5 More STL Graphics for Revolutionary Propaganda!
Comrades,
So sorry again for posting these so late in the day but life under capitalism can keep you occupied.
In Solidarity
6 New STL Images!
SIX new image posts this week for the STL image gallery over at Google Photos. Follow the link below to get all six of the new ones plus all previous uploads. For your propaganda use of your choice. See ya next week!
Nemtsov’s Murder
According to the Times, Boris Nemtsov, a prominent Russian opposition leader and former first deputy prime minister, was shot dead while crossing a Moscow bridge Friday night near the shadows of the Kremlin and the onion domes St. Basil’s Cathedral. This was the most high-profile “assassination” (the word used by France’s President Francois Hollande) since before the Putin years.
A well-known leader of the anti-Putin opposition, he was supposed to lead a rally tomorrow against the Russian involvement in the Ukraine and was even wanting to publish research on Kremlin corruption regarding the conflict in a pamphlet to be called “Putin and the War.” He was a direct threat to the Russian power-structure.
So who is behind the murder of Nemtsov? Well, here’s the possible theories from the Russian authorities:
1) Fellow members of the opposition had killed Mr. Nemtsov to create a martyr, a “sacrificial victim” to rally new and existing supporters to the opposition’s side.
2) Islamic extremists had killed Mr. Nemtsov over his position on the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris.
3) Life News, a television station with close ties to the Russian security services, quoted a source as suggesting that Mr. Nemtsov was murdered in revenge for having caused a woman to have an abortion.
4) Ramzan Kadyrov, the Putin-backed leader of Chechnya said on Instagram,“There’s no doubt that Nemtsov’s killing was organized by Western special services, trying by any means to create internal conflict in Russia.”
All four are interesting but they either blame the opposition, smear Nemtsov’s reputation, are absurd, or cover all three. Either way, it is all just Soviet-era smoke-screening (Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said the president would personally lead the investigation.)
With the facts I have it seems that this is a job by someone with strong ties, either monetary or power-related, to Putin’s government. I think the four different motives for the crime investigating bodies are ridiculous. And we must remember, too, that there have been more than a few murders of opposition leaders under Putin’s reign. Here is a large list and quotes from an AP article just on this subject to wrap this post up:
ANNA POLITKOVSKAYA
Renowned journalist Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was fatally shot in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in October 2006. Her work in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper was sharply critical of Kremlin policies in Chechnya and of human rights violations there.
Last year, a court convicted five men, most of them Chechens, of involvement in the murder. However, Russia’s Investigative Committee has said it is still trying to determine who ordered the killing.
—
ALEXANDER LITVINENKO
Former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, 44, became sick after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 at a London hotel in November 2006 and died three weeks later. Litvinenko had fallen out with the Russian government and became a strong critic of the Kremlin, obtaining political asylum after coming to Britain in 2000.
Two weeks before he was poisoned, Litvinenko blamed Putin for the murder of Politkovskaya. Before he died, he signed a statement blaming Putin for his poisoning.
British police have named two Russian men, former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, as prime suspects. They deny involvement, and Russia refused to extradite them. An inquiry in Britain is now examining the circumstances of Litvinenko’s death.
—
STANISLAV MARKELOV
Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer, was shot after leaving a news conference less than half a mile from the Kremlin in January 2009. Markelov, 34, was appealing the early release of Yuri Budanov, a Russian military officer convicted of killing a young Chechen woman. A journalist walking with Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, also died in the attack. A Russian nationalist extremist was sentenced to life in prison for the killings.
—
NATALYA ESTEMIROVA
Human rights activist Natalya Estemirova, 50, was abducted in Chechnya in July 2009 and found shot dead the same day. One of Chechnya’s best known rights activists, Estemirova headed the Memorial group’s Chechen branch and exposed alleged abuses by the forces of Kremlin-backed Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.
Russian investigators said in 2010 that two brothers who were members of an Islamic militant group killed Estemirova, who had implicated them in kidnappings of Chechen civilians. Memorial said DNA evidence showed that the two men – one of whom was killed in 2009 and the other granted asylum in France – didn’t commit the crime.
—
BORIS NEMTSOV
Boris Nemtsov, 55, who served as a deputy prime minister in the 1990s and became a prominent opposition figure under Putin, was gunned down in Moscow on Friday night. The killing came a few hours after he denounced Putin’s “mad, aggressive” policies and the day before he was to help lead a rally protesting Russia’s actions in the Ukraine crisis and the economic crisis at home.
Russia’s top investigative body said it is looking into several possible motives including an attempt to destabilize the state, Islamic extremism, the conflict in Ukraine and his personal life.
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Sparking The Left 