Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Friday, December 16, 2016

Kemal Okuyan- Bringing back the 20th century

Bringing back the 20th century…
By Kemal Okuyan* / Source: soL International.
December 14, 2016.

‘The 20th century is over now’ was the headline of Hurriyet after the death of Fidel Castro. This journal had stirred in me a particular feeling of disgust since my early youth; it is a kind of official journal, the strong voice of the dominant ideology, always great and wealthy, and steadyingly the flagship of the fight against communism.

Hurriyet, independent from its owner, is the representative of the intelligence, for whatever remains in the idiocratic system to be called so, of the capitalist class.

The headline of ‘the 20th century is over now’, without doubt, should be considered as a hideous ideological assault, including the intimidation of ‘now you’re screwed’, against those who cannot accept today’s world. However, this inferiority, this respectlessnes does not annihilate the intelligence inherent in the headline.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Thank You Compañero Fidel Castro!

THANK YOU COMPAÑERO FIDEL CASTRO!
By Nikos Mottas*.

"Rights are to be taken, 
not requested; seized, 
not begged for"
- Jose Marti.

After 25th November 2016 humanity is poorer. The international working class, the people who fiught for a better world, those who believe in a society without exploitation of man by man, are poorer. Along with the proud people of Cuba, the international communist movement mourns the biological death of one of the greatest, the most emblematic revolutionaries of contemporary History. The heart of the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Comandante Fidel Castro stopped beating, marking the biological end of a life of 90 years full of struggles and sacrifices for the ideals of Socialism-Communism, for a Cuba where the people will be the masters of their destiny.

The death of Fidel, as well as the biological deaths of other extraordinary revolutionaries and communists like Lenin, Stalin, Che, Ho Chi Minch, consists a motive for the evaluation of their revolutionary work and legacy. A work and a legacy which are key factors in the formation of the class conciousness of the working class.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

John Reed- Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) Chapter II "The Coming Storm"

Ten Days That Shook the World.
By John Reed.

CHAPTER II: THE COMING STORM.
In September General Kornilov marched on Petrograd to make himself military dictator of Russia. Behind him was suddenly revealed the mailed fist of the bourgeoisie, boldly attempting to crush the Revolution. Some of the Socialist Ministers were implicated; even Kerensky was under suspicion. (See App. II, Sect. 1) Savinkov, summoned to explain to the Central Committee of his party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, refused and was expelled. Kornilov was arrested by the Soldiers' Committees. Generals were dismissed, Ministers suspended from their functions, and the Cabinet fell.
Kerensky tried to form a new Government, including the Cadets, party of the bourgeoisie. His party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, ordered him to exclude the Cadets. Kerensky declined to obey, and threatened to resign from the Cabinet if the Socialists insisted. However, popular feeling ran so high that for the moment he did not dare oppose it, and a temporary Directorate of Five of the old Ministers, with Kerensky at the head, assumed the power until the question should be settled.

Monday, November 21, 2016

John Reed- Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) Preface & Chapter I "The Background"

Ten Days That Shook the World.
By John Reed.
PREFACE.
This book is a slice of intensified history—history as I saw it. It does not pretend to be anything but a detailed account of the November Revolution, when the Bolsheviki, at the head of the workers and soldiers, seized the state power of Russia and placed it in the hands of the Soviets.
Naturally most of it deals with “Red Petrograd,” the capital and heart of the insurrection. But the reader must realize that what took place in Petrograd was almost exactly duplicated, with greater or lesser intensity, at different intervals of time, all over Russia.
In this book, the first of several which I am writing, I must confine myself to a chronicle of those events which I myself observed and experienced, and those supported by reliable evidence; preceded by two chapters briefly outlining the background and causes of the November Revolution. I am aware that these two chapters make difficult reading, but they are essential to an understanding of what follows.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

43 years since the 1973 Athens Polytechnic Uprising against the military Junta

Mass rallies have been scheduled for today in many Greek cities in order to commemorate and honour the 43rd anniversary of the students and workers uprising in Athens, which is historically known as the Polytechnic Uprising. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Communist Youth (KNE) have organised a large demonstration-march to the U.S. embassy in downtown Athens, as well as other rallies in major cities, including Thessaloniki, Patra, Larisa, Iraklio etc. This year's anniversary of the 1973 Polytechnic Uprising against the military Junta coincides with the visit of U.S. President Obama (15-16 November) in Greece and the SYRIZA-ANEL policy which involves the country deeper in the imperialist plans. 

What follows is a brief historical review of the 1973 Polytechnic Uprising. 

On the night of the 20th to the 21st of April 1967, the reactionary military circles of the country, which were closely connected to the secret services of the USA and NATO, conducted a military coup. The operation of the surrender of power to the army had been developed at the staff of NATO, under the code name "Prometheus". Colonels G. Papadopoulos and N. Makarezos, who were actively involved in the preparation of the coup, became known as "the black colonels". 

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Olga Benário Prestes (1908-1942)

Olga Benário Prestes is an extraordinary- but not broadly known- case of a Brazilian communist hero. Olga was born in Munich, Germany as Olga Gutmann Benário, to a Jewish family. At the age of 15, In 1923, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 she helped her husband and comrade Otto Braun's escape from Moabit prison. She went to Czechoslovakia and from there, reunited with Braun, to Moscow. As an active figure of the Communist Youth International, Olga undertakes several missions; in one of these she was briefly arrested in Britain accussed as a spy. 

In 1934 she was tasked with helping the return to Brazil of Luís Carlos Prestes, the leader of the Communist Party of Brazil, to whom she was assigned as a bodyguard. In order to accomplish this mission, false papers were created stating that they were a Portuguese married couple. After a failed insurrection in November 1935, Benário and her husband went into hiding, and after barely escaping a police raid at Ipanema, they were both eventually arrested in January 1936, during the harsh anti-communist campaign declared after dictator Getúlio Vargas had proclaimed martial law and was already plotting the 1937 coup that would eventually lead to the institution of the fascist-like Estado Novo régime.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Truth and Lies about Socialism: On the 60th anniversary of the counterrevolutionary events in Hungary 1956


Below you can find extracts from the publication of the CC of KNE “Truth and Lies about Socialism” (Synchroni Epohi 2012) in relation to the counterrevolutionary events that took place in Hungary in 1956.

THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY EVENTS IN EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.

"In autumn 1956, Hungary announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, but Soviet troops invaded the country and suppressed the uprising."

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Greece: Communist mayor slams SYRIZA government, boycotts Tsipras' fiesta

KKE-backed mayor of Kesariani,
Ilias Stamelos.
ATHENS- In a symbolic gesture which carries a great message, the communist (KKE-backed) mayor of Kesariani, Ilias Stamelos, officially denied to participate in a governmental fiesta for the 75th anniversary of the country's most significant WW2 resistance movement, EAM (National Liberation Front). The government, along with the state television, ERT, are organising an event at the Kesariani Shooting Range (Skopeftirio)* on Sunday 2 October. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is scheduled to attend the event. 

In a letter addressed to the SYRIZA-ANEL government, mayor Stamelos points out the the city council's decision to deny any participation in October 2nd governmental event. Ilias Stamelos mentions that the heroic legacy of Kesariani's Shooting Range is in contrast with the governmental policy which attacks the rights of the working people. In his letter, among other things, the communist mayor writes:

"The policy exercised by the government is in total dissociation with the struggles and the claims of Kesariani's people and is directed against the Greek people in general. The SYRIZA-ANEL government has unleashed an attack against the rights and achievements of the people. It votes and applies memorandums of austerity, thus implementing a policy which crashes the people with taxes and reductions in wages and pensions, while on the same time it offers exemptions to the big capital". [...]

Friday, September 30, 2016

KKE: Statement regarding Turkish President Erdogan’s remarks on the Treaty of Lausanne

The Press Office of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) issued the following statement regarding the remarks of the President of Turkey Tayip Erdogan on the Treaty of Lausanne:

"Erdogan’s statements are dangerous and provocative and are part of the systematic efforts of the Turkish leadership to dispute the Aegean islands and the borders and sovereign rights of Greece more generally, to raise the issue of “grey zones”.
The period when these statements were made was no accident, as the negotiations are intensifying around the “closure” of the Cyprus question, on the basis of two component states, while the bargaining over the refugee issue between Turkey and the EU is underway. With these specific statements, Turkey is objectively exerting pressure in order to settle these matters in an even more negative direction for the peoples.
Once again, the government and the other political forces have been exposed, which for many years have been reassuring the Greek people that the alliance between Greece and Turkey, in the framework of NATO, is an agent for the “peace and security in the region”, the moment when NATO not only does not subdue the aggressive designs of Turkey, but on the contrary foments and reinforces them.” 

Monday, September 5, 2016

Why Socialism is superior to Capitalism- The achievements of Socialist construction in the Soviet Union

Why Socialism is far superior than Capitalism: The achievements of Socialist construction in the Soviet Union 


During the last 25 years, after the victory of the counterrevolutionary forces in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the public political discussion has been dominated by the concept of the “end of history, end of ideologies”. This is certainly a very convenient concept for the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, in her effort to convince the world that: 1) Socialism has irreversibly failed, 2) Capitalism is the final winner in the succession of History's socio-economic transformations, 3) Every argument for a non-capitalist society, where the means of productions will be socialized in a centrally-planned economy, is “unrealistic” and a “utopian fantasy”.

Anticommunism, of course, consists a core part of the above bourgeois principle. For more than two decades, the bourgeois forces and their mechanisms (historiography, media, etc.) in all over the world have unleashed an anticommunist crusade, mainly through demonizing and slundering the Soviet Union and the socialist construction of the 20th century in general.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

"Viva Hellas! Viva KKE!"- The execution of Nikos Ploumbidis

It was in the dawn of August 14, 1954, in the area of Dafni in Athens, when the bourgeois Greek state murdered a courageous communist: He was Nikos Ploumbidis, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (KKE). 

The following day, the newspapers were writing: "He was executed while cheering for KKE, facing with absolute composure the bullets of the firing squad" while "he denied to have his eyes tied over" during the execution. Just a few seconds before gunfire he shouted: "Viva Hellas! Viva KKE!". It was another murder by the reactionary, post-war bourgeois Greek government and its imperialist allies. Two years earlier, Nikos Beloyannis and his comrades had been executed. 

Ploumbidis was born in 1902 in Langadia, Arcadia in Peloponnese. He was a teacher by profession. From a very young age he developed his activity within the working class movement, thus becoming a KKE member in 1926. In 1938 he became a member of the Central Committee and later member of the Political Bureau. 

Monday, August 15, 2016

Declaration of the CC of the KKE: On the 70th anniversary of the Democratic Army of Greece 1946-1949

Athens, February 2016

We are inspired and learn from the 100-year history of the KKE, from the 3-year epic of the DSE.

The CC of the KKE, the entire party and KNE, honours the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the democratic Army of Greece (DSE).

1946 was a year of important developments directly connected to the creation of the DSE, such as:

The 2nd Plenum of the CC of the KKE (12-15 February 1946), which began exactly a year after of the signing of the Varkiza Agreement (12th of February 1945).The 2nd Plenum, even if in a contradictory way, was the one that decided to conduct the armed struggle.

The attack of a group of partisans on the gendarmerie station of Litohoro, on the night of the 30th and early in the morning of the 31st of March 1946, took place on the eve of the parliamentary elections.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Olympic Games and Fascism- The Olympic Deceit of the ‘Divine Baron’ Pierre de Coubertin

Olympism and Fascism.
By Ljubodrag Simonović.
Source: Excerpt from the book “The Olympic Deceit of the ‘Divine Baron’ – Pierre de Coubertin”
Posters: Vanja Zakanji.

As early as 1929, at the time of the great recession, “father” of the modern Olympic Games Pierre de Coubertin expressed his inclination towards authoritarian regimes, namely his discontent with the inefficiency of the capitalist system in its dealing with the working class :

"First of all, it was necessary to establish the International Olympic Committee with its basic rights, that should have been acknowledged by all the nations. This was not easy, because the Constitution of the Committee was opposed to the ideas of the time. It discarded the principle of delegation, so dear to our parliamentary democracies - the principle which, having done some great good, seems to be less efficient every day". (1)

It should also be noted that Coubertin was cordially accepted and his works published in fascist Germany, in spite of being "a great French patriot", a fact important at the time of German revanchism. Theodor Lewald, the president of the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympics, wrote of Coubertin at the end of his Introduction to "Olympische Erinnerungen", published in Berlin in 1938:

"He understood and enthusiastically saluted the development of the
new Germany under her Great Führer". (2)

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Hiroshima - Nagasaki 1945: The real reasons behind the 20th century's most horrific war crime

"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us [...] We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force--to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes".

The above words are the words of an imperialist war criminal. It was August 9, 1945 when U.S. President Harry Truman was delivering a radio address to the American people. Three days ago, the bomber Enola Gay had dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb in Hiroshima and another bomb was spreading death and destruction in Nagasaki. Truman actually lied to the American people. The reason behind the use of the atomic bomb wasn't to end WW2 or save lives. It was a warning against the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of the "Cold War"

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Solzhenitsyn — The rotten legacy of a Fascist

By Nikos Mottas.



It was August 3, 2008 when the “Patriarch” of anti-communism, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, died. The writings of Solzhenitsyn became a major source of anti-Soviet hysteria and blatant slanders against the first socialist state. Even today, Solzhenitsyn's major work “The Gulag Archipelago” is, more or less, regarded as the anti-communist “bible” of the world's apologists of capitalism and anti-soviet propaganda. 

The supposed “honest” testimonies of Solzhenitsyn- which he was never able to prove- were used in the building of an anti-stalinist, anti-communist obsession which the West had so much need to base upon, especially after the end of WW2.

However, who was really this nobel prize-winning Russian and how much credibility do his anti-soviet fairy tales contain?

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Nikos Zachariadis (1903-1973)

The 1st of August marks the 43rd anniversary of the death of Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the CC of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) from 1931 to 1956. He was born to ethnic Greek parents in Ottoman Empire's Edirne (Andrianoupolis) in 1903. At the age of 16, Nikos moved to Istanbul where he worked in various jobs, including as a dockworker and sailor. It was there when he started having his first organised relationship with the working-class movement. 

In 1919-1922 he travelled extensively to the Soviet Union. In 1923 he became a member of the Communist Party of Turkey. He studied in the newly-founded "KUTV" (Communist University of the Toilers of the East), also known as "Stalin School", in the Soviet Union. After the Greco-Turkish War and the exchange of populations, the Zachariadis family moved permanently to Greece, during a period of severe political and economic crisis. 

On summer 1924, after finishing his studies in the Soviet Union, Nikos Zachariadis travelled secretly to Greece where he undertook duties at the Young Communist League of Greece (OKNE). In 1926, during the dictatorship of General Pangalos, he was arrested and imprisoned in Thessaloniki. He managed to escape and worked secretly in various party positions. He was re-arrested and re-imprisoned in 1929, but once again he escaped and fled to the Soviet Union. During his stay in the Soviet Union he became a member of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). 

Thursday, July 21, 2016

The Truth about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Imperialist Propaganda

By Nikos Mottas.

"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible...”
Harry Truman, 1941.

Since the end of the Second World War, the bourgeois historiography has tried to distort various incidents in order to vilify Socialism and the USSR. One of these incidents- which has been a "banner" of imperialism's apologists and other anticommunists- is the so-called “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”* which was signed in 1939. In it's unscientific, unhistorical effort to equate Communism with Nazism, the bourgeois propaganda presents the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a medium of expansive policy by the USSR and Hitler's Germany. The distortion of historical events, the amalgamation of lies and the half-truths by the Imperialists and their collaborators aim in defaming the huge role of the Soviet Union in the anti-fascist struggle of WW2.

However, the reality is different than the one presented by the bourgeois historiography. Here, we will examine the circumstances and the events which led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, in an effort to debunk the anti-communist propaganda on this matter.

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part II)

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part II). Continue from Part I.
Source: Cultural Logic, 2009.

Objectivity And Persuasion.

Political prejudice still predominates in the study of Soviet history. Conclusions that contradict the dominant paradigm are routinely dismissed as the result of bias or incompetence. Conclusions that cast doubt upon accusations against Stalin or whose implications tend to make him look either “good” or even less “evil” than the predominant paradigm holds him to have been, are called “Stalinist.” Any objective study of the evidence now available is bound to be called “Stalinist” simply because it reaches conclusions that are politically unacceptable to those who have a strong political bias, be it anticommunist generally or Trotskyist specifically. The aim of the present study is to examine the allegations made in the USSR during the 1930s that Leon Trotsky collaborated with Germany and Japan against the USSR in the light of the evidence now available. 

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part I)

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan.
Source: Cultural Logic, 2009.

“If an objective research project on the events of those years were to be done, free of ideological dogmas, then a great deal could change in our attitude towards those years and towards the personalities of that epoch. And so it would be a “bomb” that would cause some problems. . . .”
Col. Viktor Alksnis, 2000.

“. . . it is essential for historians to defend the foundation of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their texts are fictions, as in some sense they are, being literary compositions, the raw material of these fictions is verifiable fact. Whether the Nazi gas ovens existed or not can be established by evidence. Because it has been so established, those who deny their existence are not writing history, whatever their narrative techniques.” – Eric Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 57.

“. . . we can demolish a myth only insofar as it rests on propositions which can be shown to be mistaken.” – ibid., p. 60.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

Honoring Greek guerrilla leader and communist revolutionary Aris Velouchiotis

Today is the 71st anniversary of the death of the First Captain of the People's Army (ELAS) Aris Velouchiotis (1905-1945). Velouchiotis was a partisan, member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and guerrilla leader during the Axis occupation in WW2. 

Aris, who was born in Lamia, central Greece in 1905, was a cadre of the Communist Party of Greece and at the decision of the party he undertook the formation of the People’s Army (ELAS) during the fascist occupation, the armed wing of the National Liberation Front (EAM).

Aris opposed the Varkiza Agreement, which disarmed ELAS, and returned to the mountains. In June 1945, his small armed group was surrounded in Mesounda (Arta) and killed by the bourgeois army, which desecrated their corpses, cutting off the heads of Aris and his comrades, which were hung in the central square in the town of Trikala. The then leadership of the party disowned him. 

However, after 1957, the KKE in essence gradually rehabilitated him, something that was confirmed by the decision to politically rehabilitate him during the discussion on the 2nd Volume of the History of the Party, 1949-1968, at the Nationwide Conference in 2011. On 9 October 2011, an event was held by the CC of the KKE for the presentation of the Decision of the Nationwide Conference concerning the official political rehabilitation of the first captain of ELAS, Aris Velouchiotis. A large delegation of the CC of the KKE headed by the then GS of the CC, Aleka Papariga, was present. Speaking at the rally, Telemachus Dimoulas, member of the PB of the CC of the KKE, made extensive reference to the essay on the history of the KKE approved by the National Conference of the KKE and the special decision concerning Aris Velouchiotis. "In the consciousness of the people, Aris Velouchiotis is identified with the heroic history of the KKE, the struggle for the overthrow of imperialist barbarity”.