Here is the radio program on WHIV with Drs. Valia Rodriguez and Helen Yaffe:
Jan. 27, 2021 at 3:37 p.m. CST
Month: January, 2021
It’s Now Biden’s Cold War
– from Greg Godels is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
It is not alleged Chinese human rights violations, Chinese income inequality, Chinese belligerency or aggressiveness that drives US hostility, but the PRC’s challenge to US economic and political hegemony... To read more, please go to: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/2021/01/its-now-bidens-cold-war.html
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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s endorsement of conspiracy theories, violence sparks calls for her resignation — again
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/26/marjorie-taylor-greene-facebook-violence/
The latest revelations include: videos in which Greene, a Republican, parrots bogus claims by suggesting the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Parkland, Fla., were staged; a Facebook post that expresses support for a dangerous conspiracy theory about child abuse; and a pattern of online activity approving of the execution of Democratic leaders and federal agents.
Several prominent Democrats and activist groups are arguing Greene should resign or be removed from elected office, and a small number of GOP lawmakers have also criticized her after her posts and comments resurfaced. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), according to Axios, “plans to have a conversation” with Greene, who has dismissed the denunciations as attempts to “cancel” her.
Greene had a record of boosting conspiracy theories and making racist statements well before the firestorm of the past few days. She was elected to the House in November, becoming the first public backer of QAnon, an extremist ideology based on false claims, to win a seat.
Since then, Greene has relentlessly boosted the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was rigged against President Donald Trump, even though dozens of courts have dismissed his claims and state officials across the country, including Republicans, have rejected the baseless allegations.
Fellow lawmakers first called for her expulsion after the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection, accusing her of being an “accomplice” to what happened at the Capitol because of her embrace of conspiracy theories. Her statements have also resulted in her temporary ban from Twitter.
On Tuesday, CNN’s KFile published the findings of its review of hundreds of posts and comments on Greene’s Facebook page. In one January 2019 post, Greene “liked” a comment advocating “a bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), according to a screenshot KFile captured.
In another, from April 2018, a commenter asked, “Now do we get to hang them ??” referring to former president Barack Obama and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, KFile reported. In response, Greene did not denounce the suggestion of assassination and instead wrote, “Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off.”
The offices of Pelosi and McCarthy did not respond to requests for comment about Greene’s Facebook activity or the campaign for her removal. But McCarthy spokesman Mark Bednar told Axios that Greene’s comments are “deeply disturbing” and that the GOP leader “plans to have a conversation with the Congresswoman about them.”
On Twitter, Greene characterized the KFile report as a “hit piece on me focused on my time before running for political office” but did not dispute the authenticity of the posts it highlighted. Instead, Greene wrote that she has had “teams of people manage my pages.”
“Many posts have been liked,” she said. “Many posts have been shared. Some did not represent my views. Especially the ones that CNN is about to spread across the Internet. They are taking old Facebook posts from random users to try to cancel me and silence my voice.”
Greene’s office did not respond to questions from The Washington Post about why the posts and “likes” remained on her page if she did not agree with them. Many of the posts included in the CNN article are no longer visible. It’s unclear whether Greene changed her privacy settings or Facebook removed the posts. The social media company did not respond to a request for comment.
The calls for Greene to step down grew louder Wednesday. Clinton, in a tweet, said that Greene “should be on a watch list. Not in Congress.”
Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) called Greene’s behavior “dangerous and unacceptable.”
“This extreme and violent rhetoric only fans the flames of division,” he said, “and we’ve just seen how deadly those flames can be.”
And Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said Greene’s actions disqualify her from their party.
“She is not a Republican,” Kinzinger said on Twitter. “There are many who claim the title of Republican and have nothing in common with our core values. They are RINOS. She is a RINO.”
As scrutiny of Greene’s digital record intensified, Fred Guttenberg, the father of slain Parkland student Jaime Guttenberg, recirculated a video from Greene’s YouTube account showing her trailing school shooting survivor David Hogg, then a teenager, for nearly two minutes. Repeating conspiracy theories, she accused him of using “George Soros funding” to “take away my Second Amendment rights.”
“He’s paid to do this,” she said of Hogg, who had to hide in a classroom closet to avoid the gunman who stormed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Greene, looking at the camera, added, “He’s a coward.”
“I will answer all of your questions in person,” Guttenberg tweeted at Greene. “Get ready to record again.”
Shortly after, another video of Greene questioning a mass shooting resurfaced, this one about the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead.
In it, Greene implies that gun-control activists staged the shooting to “terrorize our mind-set and change our minds on the Second Amendment.” It’s unclear when Greene first recorded the post, but she said she was working on behalf of American Truth Seekers, a now-defunct blog devoted to conspiracy theories.
Greene has a history of singling out Democrats — especially Pelosi — with threatening and ominous rhetoric. Before she ran for office, Greene circulated a petition to have Pelosi impeached. In February 2019, she led a group of Trump supporters into the speaker’s office, where she accused Pelosi of “treason” and suggested she “shall suffer death or shall be imprisoned.”
In now-deleted posts, Greene “liked” one comment encouraging her to “beat Pelosi’s a–” and another that advocated Pelosi’s ouster “through removal or death, doesn’t matter, as long as she goes.”
In others, she criticized FBI agents not being sufficiently loyal to Trump. She “liked” one comment that proposed capital punishment for those law enforcement officials, reading: “Trump already said there were some great ones working with FBI but some have fallen and quite frankly need to be hung for TREASON!”
And in another Facebook post, surfaced by the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America and also published Tuesday, Greene endorsed the gruesome conspiracy theory dubbed “Frazzledrip,” which involves Clinton, her aide Huma Abedin, satanic ritual and child murder. A commenter called it “another hillary hit.”
Greene replied: “I post things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t.
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Cuban anti-inflammatory drug Itolizumab deemed effective against COVID-19
HAVANA, Cuba, Jan 26 (ACN) The Cuban drug Itolizumab, created by the Center for Molecular Immunology, was recently used as an anti-inflammatory therapy treatment for three COVID-19 positive patients, with encouraging results.
According to the Cuban Ministry of Public Health’s Infomed website, two of the three cases studied, who were in critical and serious condition, showed respiratory and radiological improvement and completely recovered from this disease.
These advances were presented by Cuban researchers from the Center of Molecular Immunology, the “Victoria de Girón” Institute of Basic and Preclinical Sciences and the “Manuel Piti Fajardo” and “Arnaldo Milián Castro” hospitals in the city of Santa Clara, in the journal Inmunotherapy.
This anti-inflammatory therapy, together with antiviral and anticoagulant treatments, could reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with severe clinical forms of COVID-19.
Itolizumab is an anti-CD6 monoclonal antibody, which has demonstrated safety and efficacy in the treatment of moderate to severe psoriasis.
Abel González Alayón
Chief-Editor Language Department
Cuban News Agency
Were the Capitol riots really a new milestone in ‘fascism?’
MARYAM PASHALI analyses the historic trends behind the storming of the US Capitol and argues that labels of ‘fascism’ provide an easy scapegoat for the leading capitalist ‘democracy’ and its centuries of fostering white supremacy
To dismiss the Capitol rioters as indefinable, fanatical fascists is to erase their uncontested place in the history of the US’s capitalist, liberal and democratic racism. This racism has expressed itself historically through the displacement and murder of native peoples and the Manifest Destiny, through Jim Crow, through the collective Confederate memory, through the corporate funding of ICE and a brutal interventionist foreign policy from Vietnam to Iraq
FASCISM is back — or is it? “The threat of fascism persists,” “This is what fascism looks like,” “Fascism has made a comeback.” These are the emotive soundbites we have been hearing since the 2016 US presidential election and these voices have been amplified by the recent riots at the Capitol.
The trauma of the second world war has ensured that in many ways, there is no word scarier to us than “fascism.” But the US is not a fascist country — it is a capitalist liberal democracy with a strong history of white supremacy.
The events at Capitol represent a culmination of the divisions inherent in this concoction of bourgeois ideologies, rather than full-scale fascism.
Fascism is an undemanding snarl word, but applied to the Capitol riots, it becomes a scapegoating term, divorcing them from their genuine political ideology into an easily dismissible enemy, which is also implied to be foreign, alien, unnatural to the society wherein it has managed to flourish.
It becomes someone else’s individual problem — and a choice; to quote Nancy Pelosi: “The protesters chose their whiteness over democracy.” As if one’s race is inevitably tied to their ideology and political actions, as if the white observer is individually responsible for continuously choosing one constructed, ephemeral identity over another.
It is an obvious truth that when political and social issues pile up unsolved and produce an anxious crisis, people find themselves drawn to political extremism of varying colours. The right wing in the US has successfully tapped into the current anxieties to produce a quasi-religious and apocalyptic vision of a new Manifest Destiny — the idea dating back to 1845 that the US is destined by God to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism.
It has promised its adherents a meaningful life and place in history, a new idea and memory of an “American” nation — and it has invented a millenarian lore best observable in the cultish QAnon movement.
Perhaps this can be traced back to what historian Jeffrey Roche calls “cowboy conservatism,” a post-war movement focused on individual freedom from both state and federal governments, belief in capitalist enterprise and celebration of what was seen as the racial tradition of the US.
The myth of the Wild West, dominated by violence and free of government interference, as the birthplace of the “American spirit” has provided a basis for right-wing extremism. The Old Frontier was defined by gunslingers and settlers who forcibly removed the Native and Hispanic population and who answered to no government.
This fantasy of freedom and capitalist prosperity is precisely of what the modern right-wing extremists dream. The right to encroach and dominate the land and to protect the traditional communal politics is God-given. And Trump has successfully tapped into this very familiar and beloved evangelical belief by abundantly using religious terms in his speeches — far more than any US president in the last 100 years.
The tradition of “taming” the West through the force of a white male hero has been successfully translated into modern terms by Trump’s following, who imagine the world — including the US — as a sort of Panopticon dominated by the evil cabal (Jews, immigrants, the Democratic Party, leftists, etc).
The evil cabal can only be held accountable and ultimately defeated by the arrival of a new type of frontier hero: a religious, economically prosperous, white and conservative man.
His mission — the new Manifest Destiny — is to take the country over the apocalyptic edge and eventually to remake and redeem the nation by ridding it of all the undesirables. While this may sound fascist to those who have not spent any considerable time studying fascism, this tradition in fact has existed well before Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Giovanni Gentile’s Manifesto brought the word “fascism” into everyday speech.
White supremacists — which the right-wing in the US tends to be — view themselves as the messiahs of this new Manifest Destiny who can protect and assert what they articulate as their inalienable right to hold the government accountable and to “drain the swamp.” And that is precisely what they did, fed by the white supremacist tradition and bolstered by their energetic political leadership.
To dismiss the Capitol rioters as indefinable, fanatical fascists is to erase their uncontested place in the history of the US’s capitalist, liberal and democratic racism. This racism has expressed itself historically through the displacement and murder of native peoples and the Manifest Destiny, through Jim Crow, through the collective Confederate memory, through the corporate funding of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), among other examples of the racist legacy — not least their brutal interventionist foreign policy, from Vietnam to Iraq.
Isolated groups of white supremacists could not have caused all this. Instead, they have successfully exploited the inequities and crises already at the very heart of the US political and social systems — and offered easy solutions to complex issues.
Fascism was not the driving rhetoric or ideology for the Capitol riots and the protesters surely did not do what they did simply because they were white and therefore “hated democracy.” Rather the action sprung from a longing for a new frame of reference, which the Trump leadership readily offered, from a sense of excitation and effectiveness of becoming the new frontier hero.
This tradition at the heart of US democracy since the civil war cannot be dismissed as ephemeral fascism. The rapture at the call for protest gave the rioters a psychological respite from the increasing feelings of isolation, chaos and the perceived decline of tradition. These are the endemic issues of bourgeois democracies built upon racist fantasies with which US citizens must reckon, instead of dreaming of the easy solution of “rooting out fascism.”
Maryam Pashali is a London-based Marxist historian — www.mphistorian.wordpress.com
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