Tag Archives: Counter-revolutionaries

Dear Minority Studies INACTIVISTS, quit trying to make the Ferguson protests about you

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Unless you are throwing down like Ferguson or their brave comrades in NYC, Oakland, Berkley and other race riot battlegrounds, I’m not interested in your “Dear White People” and “Things White Allies Need to Stop Saying” rants. Your not being White or CIS-gendered may give you insight for schooling your traditional tormentors on privilege, but it hardly qualifies you to wrestle protest actions from their organizers. The inclination to divide and insult with pedantic specious arguments suggests to me you put preening above solidarity. As a white male agitator in the wake of Ferguson, I welcome leadership from communities of color. I’m happy to follow and applaud fresh voices. But they have to be in solidarity with the Ferguson insurgency not its couchsitters. Being African American doesn’t automatically mean you speak for Mike Brown or Eric Garner. Does President Obama speak for African America? Your minority studies parlance may hold sway in academic jousts but has fuck all to do with movement building or hastening their momentum.

Morons at AFL-CIO say AT&T/T-Mobile merger will benefit union workers

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That’s the problem with unions. Collective bargaining is key to making capitalists heed the people, but the big unions are co-opted by back- peddling idiots. Aka, counter-revolutionaries. The AFL-CIO praised this merger because the unionized AT&T will absorb the non-union T-Mobile workforce? Yeah, what’s left of the jobs. Increased monopolization means streamlined payrolls, more pressure to force concessions, and less leverage. In offering this endorsement of a proposed antitrust offense, the AFL-CIO takes its members for chumps. Remember the UFCW betraying the P-9 meatpackers, or the SEIU taking out the nurses’ union? Of course the Democratic Party is chiming in, claiming a merger will help gays, by the same tortured moron math. Americans need their unions, their own political party, and advocacy groups, but they have to start with taking a guillotine to the top. Finding his pro-corporate support uncharacteristic GLAAD members unmasked their leader. This can be a one-strike litmus test. Favor AT&T, mistaken or not, you’re out.

Think Iran is coming down too hard on inciters of protest? Remember Neda!

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Angel of Freedom of Green RevolutionYou might not have expected me to invoke the name of Neda Agha Soltan(i), the Green Revolution bystander “whose name in Farsi means ‘voice'” and whose angelic face adorned every subsequent Iranian reform movement ephemera. Remember the video where pretty Neda was shot by an unseen gunman, left to die on camera, the footage used to rally indignation against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s evident barbarity? Curiously our media chose to break from its usual sensibilities about snuff films. Remember your own blood lust? What fate were you wishing then for poor Neda’s killers? No doubt Iran would like to see justice for Neda too. They’ve conducted inquiries about who killed the unsuspecting martyr. Have you?

The Iranian government blames US operatives for instigating the reformist uprising, prompting Tehran’s secular class to take their grievances to the streets. They point to Iranian student groups organized by nonprofits funded by the West. They hold capitalist rabble-rousers accountable for inciting impressionable consumer wannabes to push against the riot police. They know the US is spending beaucoup black budget bucks to destabilize Iranian society. “Promoting Democracy” in Farsi means subverting leadership, and where there’s been a revolutionary movement against the established order, the USA habitually sets about to breed counter-revolutionaries. But that doesn’t explain Neda.

Political movements have infinitely more potential when there’s a martyr, and it’s a strategy no US adviser leaves to nuance. Movements have succeeded without them, but no psych-ops crafted scenario has done without. You wonder who volunteers for the role? We’ve seen recent examples, I can think of an incident in Honduras, were protesters pretended one of their number had been felled. But such is the weakness of the good guys, they’re not about to kill someone as a means to an end. Can we say the same about the good guys of the CIA?

When the saintly Neda was killed onscreen, the Iranian government immediately suspected a plot. Was it one of their soldiers who killed her, standing at an isolated corner, part of no confrontation? By whose orders would he have fired?

Who said the reelection of Ahmadinejad was rigged? None but the Americans. Who egged on the crowds to overturn a democratically elected government? America. Who branded the reform movement, and levitated it via social media?

Who else but America color-codes its exported “revolutions?”

“Remember Neda” has become the rallying cry of Iranian expats and Shah loyalists in exile. They’ll change their tune when authorities in Iran finger her murderers.

When Iran executes those responsible for the covert machinations meant to provoke an uprising to satisfy the US call for regime change, it’s not for crying out “freedom” but for yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, pointing at Neda.

Counterfeiting Iran’s Green Movement

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Iranian banknotes
Here’s an interesting twist on currency counterfeiting: the forged defacement of Iranian banknotes. Sure it’s a real bill, with real doodles, but did it circulate beyond anyone’s kitchen table? Hmm.

At this moment, Iranian students are protesting a video aired by the government purporting to depict demonstrators defiling a poster of the Ayatollah. They assert the footage was fabricated to accuse them of being counter-revolutionaries. In such a climate, how likely is it students are defacing his image on currency and then passing it on?

It appears to me, this “Banknote Uprising” meme is a shameless and unimaginative contrivance, devised in some expat’s Parisian apartment, to pretend Tehran is being flooded with green-marked bills, hoping to prompt real Iranians to take real risks for such a scheme.

A French account quotes a “Alireza, an artist and journalist in Tehran.”

“Mirhossein Mousavi asked young people to use their imagination. And that’s what they’ve done. These banknotes, marked with images and slogans, are everywhere. I have some myself. The central bank tried to take them out of circulation, but there are so many, they had to give up on the idea. For the young people it’s a way of saying ‘We’re here. The green movement is still going on.'”

You can trace the “Banknote Uprising” story from here to here. A closer source being perhaps here. None offer a hint about from where the bills emerged, or even why we should conclude they have been penned by students.

Customizing currency is an easy thing to do in the privacy of your own home, you can even mount and frame your work, or immortalize it on the internet. But is it fair to pretend it passed through the hands of accomplices and ordinary citizens, merchants and bankers, and back again?

Even in America, imagine writing something unpopular on a bill, and trying to convince a local business owner to accept it, knowing he has to exchange it with others, make the same pitch, and ultimately someone has to cough it up to a bank teller. In America the only penalty you face is the proverbial admonishment that it’s a federal crime to deface US currency, yada yada. But what if the person on the other side of the transaction is really offended? Can you do it anonymously? Money passing hands is the very definition of paper trail.

The gist of this meme is to suggest that disenfranchisement with the government is so prevalent that dissenting slogans are circulating freely as citizens pass money from one to another. Is that true? It supports the theory that the last elections in Iran were stolen. But no evidence of fraud has emerged except as made by the US-backed reform parties. The usual international election watchdogs do not report the wrongdoings they observed in abundance in Afghanistan for example.

Writing slogans on currency is not uncommon. Before the last election, I know people who wrote pro-Obama on every bill that passed their hands. Before that there was always something cute to pass along on dollar bills. Kilroy was here, maybe? But I don’t recall any examples of those marked bills or others, coming back.

The Green Movement protesters of Tehran deserve our admiration for their heroism. Not because they represent a democratic uprising, but for being caught between a repressive system, and Western agitators bent on contriving dissent to serve their own goals of regime change.

I think the forgers give themselves away with their choice of slogans. Have a gander at: Khamenei the non-believer is servant of Putin. OR They stole oil money and give it to Chavez. Best of all are the photos of half-dozen bills marked with a rubber stamp, arrayed before the stamp and ink pad. That’s a how-to illustration, not evidence of currency floating through the market.

Shah of Iran on banknoteThe reporting references Iran’s cultural heritage of marking banknotes with dissenting messages. An example is provided of a banknote with the image of the Shah of Iran, defaced by a rubber stamp on the occasion of the Islamic Revolution. But that’s quite another case, where Iran’s currency couldn’t be pulled immediately upon the Shah’s downfall. The existing bills had to be laundered with an official stamp until new bills could be printed to replace them.

Banknote Uprising we can wish. Do it yourself, but don’t con others into acts you’re not foolhardy enough to try yourself.

The Beatles were counter-revolutionary

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It sounds sexy, like “counter-culture.” But counter-revolutionaries were the Tsarist forces, or Loyalists in our hemisphere, who countered the revolutionary surges of the masses. The Beatles expressed themselves as being against the war, and Lennon ultimately gave the peace movement its anthem. But in 1968, when the Beatles were preaching peace and non-violence, Mick Jaggar was marching at the front of the student riots in London. Which actions ultimately closed down the Vietnam War? Was it Haight-Ashbury or the Left Bank? Was it Woodstock or American GIs finally fragging their officers? If you wonder why today’s pop icons say only what’s approved . . .
FLIP YOUR WIG game pieces George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr

Lebanon and Mexico- Iraq and Afghanistan

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It was a coincidence of sorts, but last Friday both Lebanon and Mexico found themselves engulfed in 2 huge demonstrations for basically the same reasons. Both demonstrations had as their goals getting rid of their undemocratically minded, US propped up governments.

Both demonstrations were demanding that the governments they have forced upon them at present, stop doing the bidding of the Bush Adminstration in D.C. As a result, it has been difficult in the US getting news about these huge rallies, and what commentaries I have seen in the US press border on the absurd.

As example, on Lebanon’s demonstration of approximately 1 million in the streets of Beirut, The CS Gazette carried a conservative Chicago tribune editorial that it passed off as reportage (Sat A3), that began… “After last year’s Cedar Revolution, the counter-revolution began Friday.” Pure bullshit, and typical of the Right Wing nuts at The Gazette to print this nonsense. The demands of this demonstration were for a non-representative Lebanese government that is cooperating with a foreign power, the US, to resign. Nothing counter-revolutionary about that demonstration at all, and the crowd was huge.

They were demonstrating against a government that is seen as cooperating with the US and another power, Israel, that invaded Lebanese territory and left unexploded cluster bombs everywhere. Plus, they don’t want a UN sent in by the US providing defense for another Israeli-US attack on fellow Muslim countries, Syria and Iran. Plus, they just plain want the US out of Iraq. This is a revolutionary group of people, not countrer-revolutionary as the Chicago Tribune article asserts. It always gets me when Right Wingers call their opposites ‘counter-revolutionaries’! I imagine Hitler did quite the same.

Now, let’s turn to Mexico, and see the exact same situation, and the exact same idiotic commentary inside The Gazette. Several hundred thousand demonstrated against this new, and fraudulently installed, president Fecal (FElipe CALderon). He had to be snuck in at a secret ceremony at midnight, and the national chambers of government had already been engulfed in fistfights and chaos because of the reality that a recount was denied the Mexican people, in a dubious presidential electoral processs full of illegalities. The outgoing president refused to publicly give his departure speech and instead handed it in on paper! So what does our local whigs have to say about all this, despite they hardly being able to locate Mexico on a map?

Metro section Page 6, Gazette editorial- “Mexico made progress in Fox’s six years, but now Calderon must move the country further toward a free market system and confront the increasing violoence that plagues the country.” Oh brother. The country is plagued by violence because of the government that The Gazette is supporting. In fact, to twist this reality around as this editorial does, is simply to call for Calderon to move in a manner even more repressively, to crush by yet more state terrorism, the resistance to this US puppet government. Shame on these idiots at The Gazette!

And just how damn dumb are these assholes on the editorial board there? Mexico has ‘a free market system’ already. What did they think Mexico was, the Soviet Union? What a bunch of overly miseducated twits The Gazette has stacking their editorial pages with this juvenile nonsense. They see socialism when the reality has been completely the opposite. Mexico has always been a capitalist country, and it’s been staring The Gazette in the face for decades now.

Free Lebanon and Mexico of US government stooges. These 2 puppet governments currently in power are causing thier respective peoples untold harm. Stop the US from waging yet more war in both Latin America, and the Middle East. US out of Mexico and Lebanon. US out of Iraq and Afghanistan!