[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 21 April 2018 12:40.
Scooter Libby with Paul Wolfowitz in 2008
- Observes Majorityrights correspondent, Kumiko.
It waves a giant red flag as to how much Trump is down with the Zionist agenda.
Who even needed 9-11 when you had Scooter Libby!
When you have insiders like that to manipulate the evidence to create false warrant on behalf of Zionist Operation Clean Break, you don’t need massive false flag events.
In fact, if you look at the PBS piece titled “A Secret History of ISIS”, they actually reveal the precise moment at which Israel injected itself into the decision-making process in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, and thus shaped the outcome to their advantage.
From 11min 40sec onward in that video, the transcript:
COLIN POWELL: The speech, supposedly, had been prepared in the White House and in the NSC. But when we were given what had been prepared, it was totally inadequate and we couldn’t track anything in it. And when I asked Condi Rice, the National Security Advisor, “Where did this come from?”, it turns out the Vice-President’s office had written it.
NARRATOR: Powell would turn to the CIA to vet the speech.
NADA BAKOS: We [the CIA] had a copy of the speech that was sent over from the White House that Powell was preparing, and one of our senior analysts was working on it, editing, working on the language to ensure that it reflected our analysis.
NARRATOR: Just days later, Powell arrived at the United Nations.
POWELL: Walking into that room is always a daunting experience, but I had been there before. And we had projectors and all sorts of technology to help us make the case.
KAREN DEYOUNG: Powell was very nervous. Powell doesn’t like to read speeches; he likes to have a few note cards and then do his Powell thing. But this one he read from the text, every word.
NARRATOR: At the Counterterrorism Centre, Bakos was watching carefully to see what Powell would say about Zarqawi, bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein.
BAKOS: We’re sitting in our room at CTC watching the television with a copy of the speech in our hand. When he got to our portion, it went off our script fairly quickly. And we were looking around at each other saying, “Where’s he at, where’s he at?” We’re flipping through pages. And so, you know, right away, we could tell that this wasn’t reflecting the language that we had used.
NARRATOR: Powell used Zarqawi to make the connection between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
BAKOS: It drew conclusions in language that we would not use. So we were very, very, very careful about describing the relationship as we saw it, and it seemed to overinflate and not reflect our analysis.
INTERVIEWER: How did that happen, Nada?
BAKOS: Within the process of how it went, you know, where it went back to the White House and who worked on it after that, I don’t know how it was changed, or by who.
If anyone should want to know what happened at that crucial point, and how, the place to look would be at the office of the Chief of the Staff to the Vice President of the United States, who at the time was Scooter Libby.
If you understand that Scooter Libby was to Dick Cheney as Dick Cheney was to George W. Bush, then suddenly you become capable of seeing how it could be possible for the changes that Bakos is referring to, to have been made in the Vice-President’s office by Scooter Libby and his network of very Zionist associates.
In summary
There is no need for any kind of 9/11 conspiracy theory to explain what happened in Iraq.
The explanation has been right in front of everyone’s face from day one. The office of the Chief of the Staff to the Vice President of the United States was compromised by Israel, and as such, all decision-making processes that flowed through there were subject to having Israeli policy preferences injected into them.
It is not the only node that was compromised, but it is the most pivotal and significant one in this situation. I hope that clears up all possible questions and that everyone can draw a line under that issue and call it a closed case now.
Now for the BBC article:
BBC, “Scooter Libby: Trump pardons Cheney aide who leaked”, 13 April 2018:
US President Donald Trump has pardoned former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, who was convicted of lying about leaks to the media.
Lewis Libby, known as Scooter, was found guilty in 2007 following an investigation into the unauthorised disclosure of a CIA agent’s identity.
The White House said Libby was “fully worthy of this pardon”.
“I don’t know Mr Libby,” said Mr Trump, “but for years I have heard that he has been treated unfairly.
“Hopefully, this full pardon will help rectify a very sad portion of his life.”
What’s the background to the case?
Libby was found guilty of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements following an investigation into a leak that revealed the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame.
His trial heard that Bush administration officials wanted to get back at Ms Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Mr Wilson had written a 2003 New York Times op-ed accusing Mr Cheney of doctoring pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
Libby was charged with lying to investigators about his contacts with reporters, but he maintained he simply misremembered the sequence of events.
He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000 (£175,000).
But his sentence was commuted by then-President George W Bush.
What’s the reaction?
In an interview on Friday with MSNBC, Ms Plame condemned Mr Trump’s decision to pardon Libby.
“My personal sense is that I didn’t think my contempt for Donald Trump could go lower, but he surprises me each and every day,” she said.
“It’s very clear that this is a message he is sending, that you can commit crimes against national security and you will be pardoned,” she added.
Ms Plame has previously said her career as a CIA agent was finished “in an instant” once her identity was leaked.
She told the BBC in 2007 that “treason” had been committed in pursuit of political retribution.
Mr Cheney told the New York Times Mr Libby is “one of the most capable, principled and honourable men I have ever known.
“He is innocent and he and his family have suffered for years because of his wrongful conviction. I am gratedful that President Trump righted this wrong…”
On Friday, Democrats charged Mr Trump with hypocrisy for pardoning a man who leaked to the media, despite the president’s condemnation of such disclosures in his White House.
Mr Trump’s decision came on the same day that he savaged former FBI Director James Comey as a “proven LEAKER & LIAR”.
Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff tweeted: “This is the President’s way of sending a message to those implicated in the Russia investigation: You have my back and I’ll have yours.”
What was Libby case’s political fallout?
Mr Cheney had pressured Mr Bush to pardon Libby in the final days of his presidency.
But Mr Cheney’s badgering reached the point where Mr Bush reportedly told his aides his vice-president was beginning to annoy him.
After consulting White House lawyers, Mr Bush decided it was best not to issue a pardon.
When he finally told Mr Cheney about his decision, Mr Cheney snapped at him, saying: “You are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”
“The comment stung,” Mr Bush would write in his memoirs.
“In eight years, I had never seen Dick like this, or even close to this.
“I worried that the friendship we had built was about to be severely strained, at best.”
Key players in the 2007 CIA leak probe
What is a presidential pardon?
Libby’s pardon amounts to official forgiveness for his crime, but does not equate to exoneration or finding that he was innocent.
Presidential pardons can overturn consequences of a conviction such as being denied the right to carry out jury service, vote or run for political office.
Since the conviction, Libby has already had his law license reinstated.
And former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell restored his voting rights in 2013.
This is the third time Mr Trump has issued a pardon.
In August last year, he did so for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt over his crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Last month he pardoned Kristian Saucier, a Navy sailor who took photos of classified areas inside a US submarine and served a year in federal prison.
Kumiko adds: Last night’s strike was not what they wanted.
John Bolton and some middle eastern leaders are laying the metapolitical backdrop for that - they wanted a broad and longer engagement. .
Instead, they got a limited strike because the US Defence Dept prevented anything bigger.
As Kumiko predicted, anti-Iranian war monger John Bolton has been appointed National Security Advisor - an integral position to the implementation of US wars - consummating the Trump administration’s raison d’être for an Alt-Lite/Right/Trump admin coalition with Israel, aimed first of all to undo the Iran deal and to prepare for war against Iran in a new generation of operation of “clean break” ...the ultimate goal of this Alt-Right/Jewish alliance/coordination (against left ethno-nationalism) is an imperial feudalistic (exploitative) relationship with as much of Asia and the third world as possible.
It’s time to return the National Security Council to where its been..
A lot of people have said to me, they’ve said, Jack, if you go back and look at my tweets….
Folks, it’s time for America first, it’s time for an America first foreign policy…
I’ve been on the Bolton train, ‘guilty as charged’
I have been on the Bolton train for almost a year and a half now.
And during the transition period I was saying I want Bolton.
And I was saying we need Bolton, get Bolton in there.
Related: These Are White Nationalists? What Is Behind TRS And The Alt-Right’s Gushing Effusion For Trump? Trump’s campaign was initiated in his agreement to dismantle the Iran Deal on Israel’s behalf. David Duke used to sternly caution against candidates who threatened to take Israel’s side against Iran.
And they were saying Jack, ‘I don’t know, he’s kind of neocon, he’s kind of this, he’s kind of that’...
He’s got associations with Bush and you know what? You’re right. We do need to be careful with that.
But let me tell you something. Let me tell you something about John Bolton: John Bolton is someone who once said that we should get rid of the top ten floors of The United Nations building. We’re also getting rid of the Obama hold-overs on the national security council - gone.
Ambassador Bolton is a hawk, alright?
Let’s make no aspersions about this.
He’s a hawk, he’s definitely a hawk. OK?
But that being the case, we know where he’s coming from. He’s straight forward, he’s not a snake in the grass. He’s pro Trump. He’s 100% pro-Trump.
And, he was out there every single day for the President.
He is not for these international, global organizations - no. He is pro-Trump, he is pro-America.
Remember, John Bolton has said that he is against the Iran Deal, John Bolton has said that he’s against TPP, John Bolton is against so many of these international deals.
He’s advocated for a more aggressive stance with North Korea, with China, with Iran with all of these countries, alright?
Tech Crunch, “John Bolton is Trump’s new National Security Advisor”, 22 Mar 2018:
With one fell swoop, President Trump just swapped out the “warrior scholar” for the warmonger.
Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump Tweet:
I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.
1:26 PM - Mar 22, 2018
Today Trump tweeted that General H.R. McMaster will step down as John Bolton, a deeply controversial former U.S. ambassador, steps into the role of national security advisor. Bolton will move into the high-ranking foreign policy advisor position just as the U.S. is approaching talks with North Korea, an extremely delicate diplomatic maneuver between two volatile leaders.
Last month, Bolton argued the legal case for a pre-emptive strike on North Korea — an extreme position in which even the best case scenario could result in broad carnage for the U.S. and its allies.
Bolton established his extreme and hawkish reputation during his tenure as the undersecretary of state for arms control during the Bush administration. In that advisory position, Bolton argued strongly in favor of the Iraq war, tying his justification to the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction.
If most people could agree that McMaster was a respectable choice for national security advisor, just as many seem to oppose Bolton becoming a prominent figure in shaping Trump’s foreign policy. When Bolton’s name was floated just after the election, Republican Senator Rand Paul penned an op-ed denouncing Bolton as “hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the US has made in the last 15 years.”
While McMaster was sometimes characterized as a cautious futurist, Bolton’s record on tech is less clear. We’re sure to learn more about the new advisor’s various postures quickly, as Bolton stirs up bipartisan anxiety around U.S. foreign policy, particularly in Iran and North Korea.
After the swift fall of Michael Flynn in early 2017 and the quick appointment of McMaster, Bolton will become Trump’s third national security advisor in less than two years.
Posted by DanielS on Saturday, 17 March 2018 08:00.
Gary Cohn invited to leave and be replaced by dumber paleocon.
Unite the Right to Wedge-out Paleo-Cohn
Unite the Right Charlottesville was a successful neo-con, neo-liberal operation forcing a wedge against Gary Cohn’s clever paleoconservative positioning - Trump’s tariffs on Asian raw materials was the last straw.
While I have been able to see a trap for White Nationalism in forced identity with the right generally, I could also see clearly and specifically that “Unite the Right” was a trap maneuvered by YKW and neoliberal lackey’s to force vocal and visible stigmatic association.
It was unbelievable to me that “Alt-Righters” would agree to participate in such a tactlessly forecast high profile event with some of the more traditional stigmatic right wing groupings, and thereby undo a few of the things that the Alt-Right actually had going for it - to distance itself from association with historical stigma and to be only loosely affiliated, un-united enough so as to be too hard to pin down - thus, not allowing the enemies of White Nationalism to easily categorize them negatively in association with anti-social positions; to allow populist audiences to dismiss them offhand in one fall swoop with a singular negative category - and beyond casual dismissal as non-serious, to frighten populist audiences into outright opposition for observable potential in nefarious, unaccountable religious, scientistic and neo-Nazi association and intent.
However, Kumiko has penetrated this to a more perspicuous theoretical overview.
Behind “Unite The Right” and its confrontation by “Anti-Fa” was an orchestrated wedge issue, encouragement of Trump to take a neutral stance toward “the Nazis” and “The Alt-Left, who were ‘to blame, too’, blame and good people on all sides.”
Kudlow was born and raised in New Jersey, the son of Ruth (née Grodnick) and Irving Howard Kudlow. His family is Jewish. He once served as chief economist at the investment firm Bear Sterns before he was fired in 1995 when he entered rehab to treat a hundred thousand dollar a month cocaine habit. Kudlow has repeatedly failed to forecast economic trends. In December of 2007 as the sub prime mortgage market began to unravel, leading to the deepest recession since the 30’s, Kudlow wrote, there’s no recession coming, the ‘pessimistas” were wrong… it’s not going to happen. The Bush boom is alive and well. It’s finishing up it’s sixth consecutive year with more to come.
Neocons and their Neo Liberal corporatist sellout allies would have been opposed to Gary Cohn and any efforts to hold their businesses in The U.S. against their profits, and to prevent a more thorough YKW and corporatist, feudalist exploitation of Asia; as opposed to sovereign industrial development by Asian corporations in Asia.
Trump’s conciliatory stance toward “Nazis” was encouraged by Mnuchin to drive a wedge against Cohn, who’d find that intolerable; with that be driven off by the internationalist left, recognizing a paleocon U.S. protectionist all too competent to run a neo feudalist operation against Asian labor.
Cohn hung-on in the Trump administration in hopes of being appointed Federal Reserve Chairman. That didn’t happen and the final nail in the coffin of his strategy happened when Trump proposed tariffs on raw materials of steel and iron from Asia - if you’re looking to exploit Asian labor as a feudalist, you don’t want to force them to grapple into lateral transmission (sovereignty), forcing them to develop industry and capacity to machinate their own raw materials.
Cohn was “too competent” in his capacity to run a feudalist international operation; and had to make way for a less competent and more compliant paleocon bracket, viz. Larry Kudlow - having cut his teeth under President Reagan, a protege of Frank Meyer’s paleocon movement.
”Tillerson’s Sacking Will Shock America and the World - but Delight Israel.” ...“Mike Pompeo’s impending move to secretary of state is sure to result in a much more hawkish and confrontational U.S. policy towards Iran.”
To complete the Zionist, neo-fuedalist enterprise, Trump also needed to get Tillerson’s obstruction out of the way, defensive as Tillerson was of the Iran deal (which liberalizes Iran as opposed to yielding to Islamic reactionary/ Abrahamic comprador control); he had to make way for the administration’s more ardent Zionist imperialist agenda - to undo the Iran deal is far more ably pursued with anti-Iranian hawk, Pompeo.
Finally toward that end, look to the possibility of the partly Jewish John Bolton to be placed in charge of the National Security Council - a historically instrumental position for those looking to initiate wars from The U.S. platform. Bolton is notoriously war mongering toward Iran and he is among the few people to be interviewed and seriously considered by Trump to a position to wield decisions over the matter.
In addition to having a good grasp of the ancient and pre-historical genetic paths and influences, and surprising findings from his National Geographic Gen.2.0 DNA analysis, this Polish guy expresses good will toward the sovereignty and survival of European peoples:
Old maternal and paternal lines, not archetypically Polish -
Surprisingly, maternal line is shared with Amerindians
Paternal line connects Dinarian (pre-Croats) mammoth hunters, Basques, first Europeans in after ice age, ice shelf retreat…
BMan: We know he isn’t on “our” side because if he isn’t outright jewish, he serves them. Putin is the foil in the Kabuki. One side says he never stops his evil attacks on American values, while the other side worships him as if he is George Washington. Syria is just the latest act. Ukraine was first when the “other side” was represented by a Mulatto.
For most of a century, the partisans of the Soviet Union would make great bales of propaganda hay out of the treatment of blacks in the USA and other capitalist countries. Communism, contrarily, favored the black man’s liberation from his white colonialist oppressors – or so the story went. Many blacks around the world would find themselves seduced by various Marxist philosophies. W.E.B. DuBois, while wary of perceived racism within the Communist Party USA, looked to Russia as “the most promising modern country”1. Paul Robeson, too, professed “warm feelings of friendship for the peoples of that land”2. The Soviet Union provided military aid to multiple African nationalist movements during the Cold War, seeming to bolster its image as the ideological alternative to American racism – but had prejudice really been eradicated from the heart of the New Soviet Man of the Bright, Shining Socialist Future? Andrew Young, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under President Carter, averred, “The worst racists in the world are the Russians.”3 Soviet support of black nationalists fighting the Apartheid government of South Africa, for example, would seem to support the sincerity of the Communist Party’s public abhorrence for racism – but how did the Russians react when Africans were actually in their midst?
In 1959, at the urging of DuBois, Khrushchev established the Soviet Union’s Africa Institute to promote academic fellowship, and during the 1960s the number of Africans studying in the U.S.S.R. would swell. “As these institutional initiatives were being finalized African students began to trickle into the U.S.S.R.,” writes Maxim Matusevich:
As of January 1, 1959, there were only seven students from sub-Saharan Africa officially enrolled in Soviet institutions of higher learning. However, between 1960 and 61 the number of African students in the USSR increased almost ten-fold, from 72 to over 500, eventually reaching some 5,000 by the end of the decade. […]
Despite the prevailing climate of complacency and the general timidity of their Soviet peers, Africans protested vociferously against poor living conditions, racist incidents, restrictions on travel within the U.S.S.R., restrictions on dating Russian girls, and restrictions on forming national and ethnic student associations. As early as March 1960, African students in Moscow petitioned the Soviet government to curb the expressions of crude racism by Soviet citizens. On another occasion, two African students refused to be part of a long established Soviet practice – an annual dispatch of thousands of Soviet students to work in the countryside during the harvest. The objectors from Chad and Morocco argued (unconvincingly and probably mockingly) that in their cultures men under 25 years old were not allowed to work in the fields but rather had a special obligation “to engage in leisure activities.” At about the same time four African students […] were expelled from Moscow State University for defying an administrative ban on the Black African Students’ Union. Their expulsion and subsequent departure from the country received wide coverage in the Western press. The students publicly accused university officials of suppressing the union as well as of imposing severe restrictions on the circulation of “books and jazz records.” […]
Darned if the Russian in the lower right corner doesn’t look like a young Putin.
The death of a Ghanaian student in Moscow, in December 1963, which his friends suspected to have been a homicide, occasioned an exceptionally angry reaction among African students in the U.S.S.R. They staged a protest march on the Kremlin [and appear to have set fire to at least one car in the process, judging by Associated Press archival footage] demanding a Bill of Rights for African students in the country […] More trouble brewed in 1964 and 1965, with African students in the U.S.S.R. frequently reporting racist attacks, fights with Soviet youngsters, and even feeling compelled to carry knives for protection. Komsomol officials at Moscow State University (MGU) grudgingly acknowledged several instances of scandalous behavior exhibited by Soviet students but also argued that Africans and other foreigners at MGU had a limited understanding of the selfless and romantic nature of Soviet young men, many of whom preferred the hardship of toil in remote Siberia to the pleasures of Moscow high life. One wonders if it was the “romantic nature of Soviet young men” that fueled the passions of one youthful geography major who threatened to “lynch” an African student married to his Russian fellow student. Or was it a disagreement over their respective work ethics that led another MGU freshman to call upon his African roommate to “pack up his stuff and go back to Mali”?
In May 1965, the Soviet authorities tacitly linked the African student community in the country with the idea of political subversion when they expelled a black American diplomat, Norris Garnett, for “conducting anti-Soviet work among students from African countries.” Garnett’s departure from the scene hardly had the desired long-term effect. Just a few years later, 800 African students went on a week-long strike, this time – in Kiev, in protest against the expulsion of a 23-year-old Czechoslovakian woman for marrying a Nigerian fellow-student. That same year a Nigerian student sleeping in his dorm room in the city of Lvov (L’viv) was attacked by “a drunken Russian with a chisel.” The attacker was reportedly incensed by the Nigerian’s successes with Russian and Ukrainian girls. The incident quickly turned into a major fight involving other Nigerian students who had come to the rescue of their compatriot, and as a result three of them were expelled “for attacking and beating up a Soviet citizen.” Discrimination or alleged discrimination aside, the students’ resentment, it was noted, stemmed from “the sole fact of their living in a communist country.” Once in the Soviet Union, Africans, “even self-proclaimed leftists,” had to reconcile “the obvious discrepancies between what is said and what actually exists.” And what “actually existed” in the Moscow of 1960s and 70s were “the crowded living conditions, lack of privacy, monotonous diet, inadequate sanitary facilities, and the overall drabness of life.” A former African student at Moscow State University, writing about his experiences there, maintained that of all foreign students in the Soviet Union, Africans were most upset by Russia’s depressed style of living […]
There was “no splash of color to relieve Moscow’s damp gray”4, and the Russian cultural diet of the time was famously lacking in the urban flava to which blacks are known to be partial. Kidding aside, Soviets’ blacks appear to have quickly fallen into a pattern of obnoxious behavior that will be immediately familiar to American readers: lazing, complaining, chasing white girls, getting into fights – constituting a demographic liability and a constant threat to public order – all while blaming crazed, irrationally hateful whites for their problems.
This story, which appeared in The Milwaukee Sentinel on Feb 19 1963, indicates that anti-black sentiment in the communist bloc was not limited to Russia.
“What I learned in six months in the Soviet Union is what some Africans will never learn,” Kenyan bellyacher Nicholas Nyangira moaned in an article syndicated by the Associated Press in 1965. “They are taken to Russia’s showplaces and never experience the race hatred that I experienced at the University of Baku.” Nyangira claims, furthermore, to have always gone in fear for his life. “We were referred to scathingly as ‘the blacks’,” he continues, his tears positively seeping through the newsprint. “Many local people had never seen an African before and because we were black they hated us.”
Several Kenya students got beaten up. Usually it would begin with abuse, then lead to violence. It was advisable to walk in pairs because if there was trouble you could expect no help from police. I don’t remember a week that went by without an African student being robbed or attacked.5
DinduNuffin? Check. Racist police? Check. Chimpout? Check. Sympathetic US press coverage? Check. Tracking the entitled black through the ages, can any of the preceding – or any of the following – possibly come as any surprise? Matusevich picks up with Russian attitudes toward Africans at the close of the Soviet era:
Glasnost lifted the floodgates to prejudice and crude racism and let loose the virtual anti-black hysteria. And many Africans blamed Gorbachev’s “revolution” for not feeling safe in the streets and public places of the Soviet cities. A Nigerian journalism student at Kazan University wrote to a Moscow newspaper: “One day I decided to have my lunch in nearby café. As soon as I opened the door, I was met with jeers and cat-calls by young girls sitting around a table, laughing and cracking unfriendly jokes about me…” The enterprising Nigerians soon learned to play curious mind games to save their skin during the growing number of unfriendly encounters. One of them, for example, when approached by a group of hoodlums, pretended to be an American black. The trick worked as the toughs abandoned their original belligerent intentions and “immediately simulated keen interest and began to ask questions about Steve Wonder, Michael Jackson, etc.” The ploy, however, was not 100% fail proof and between May and August of 1990 at least four Nigerian students were severely beaten up and one allegedly killed in Moscow on grounds raging from “being a monkey” to dating Russian girls. Considering the growing public paranoia about HIV-AIDS, for any African to approach a Russian girl was increasingly becoming a risky proposition. […]
USSR April 6 1990: the Deep State calls in its premier spook for a briefing.
“As a result of a deliberate racist campaign, we are now being called SPID (SPID is a Russian abbreviation for AIDS) on the streets by Soviet youngsters.” Soviet street folklore, with its characteristic sexual undertone, tied together the much professed (and mocked) “love” of the Soviet officialdom for the developing world and the appearance of the disease in Russia. A popular joke provided “alternative” transliterations for the original Russian SPID (AIDS) wherein the term was variously interpreted either as Sotsialnoe Posledstvie Internatsionalnoj Druzby (Social Consequence of International Friendship) or Spetsialny Podarok Inostrannyh Druzej (Special Gift from Foreign Friends). Africans residing in the Soviet Union were far from amused though; the joke encapsulated growing popular dissatisfaction with the regime, which “wasted precious resources” on people who (in the words of one populist politician) “have just descended from the palm tree.”
[…]
While the Soviet-style paternalism, that permeated the pre-perestroika publications on Africa, was being gradually toned down, so was the concern for the continent. Africans residing in Russia on the eve of the Soviet collapse noted on many occasions that coverage of Africa was reduced to simplistic and highly stereotypical catalogues of its bane and woes. In the media, the very word “Africa” was often supplanted by cherny kontinent (black continent), the place of danger and wasted opportunities, and a proverbial black hole devouring scant Soviet resources. The stage was being set for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Africa as it was for the debilitating wave of racism and xenophobia soon to sweep across the post-Soviet spaces.6
But, seriously, Russia – why import blacks in the first place? Everybody knows the Russians invented breakdancing:
Not sure that these dancers doing an early form of break-dancing, viz., “the labor wave”, are exactly Russian and can therefore be attributed as the inventors; however, it is Soviet era and they are wearing Russian style hats.
Endnotes:
Carew, Joy Gleason. Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, p. 52.
Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988, p. 38.
Mitchell, Nancy. Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2016, p. 243.
Matusevich, Maxim. “Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual”. Anthropology of East Europe Review (Fall 2009), pp. 21-24.
Nyangira, Nicholas. “Student: Russians Hate Negroes”. Sumter Daily Item (April 16, 1965), p. 3.
Matusevich, Maxim. “Probing the Limits of Internationalism: African Students Confront Soviet Ritual”. Anthropology of East Europe Review (Fall 2009), pp. 30-31.
Comments:
icareviews, March 8, 2018:
I’ve read that Russia hosts a lot of North Korean guest workers, as well.
I’ve also heard before that Russian nationalists anti-immigration activists hate Putin. Who is the alternative in Russia for voters of populist-nativist inclination? The Communist Party? One sometimes hears of stirring “red-brown” tendencies in Russian politics – commies allying with hardline nationalists – and I think that was a particular fear of the internationalists during Yeltsin’s early years in office – but they just don’t seem to have any opposition parties with sufficient support to dislodge the Putin machine. For decades now, their most famous nationalist politician has been a Jewish clown named Vladimir Zhirinovsky. His whole shtick seems to be to make nationalism into an Archie Bunker type side show.