convoluted wrote: Sun Jan 01, 2023 5:59 pm
_Os_ wrote: Sat Dec 31, 2022 10:31 pm
derriz wrote: Mon Dec 26, 2022 4:42 pm
Regarding those “righty” cunts in the US defending Russia - it’s kinda expected no? ... I’m more disgusted by the likes of Chomsky, Pilger and other “lefties” also defending Russia ...
It's not surprising there's a section of the left that sort of defends Russia. Their outlook is about being anti-Western, they don't have anything else in their locker beyond that ...
Throughout the Vietnam conflict and into its aftermath, John Pilger was never more than a Soviet propaganda-mouthpiece.
Back when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17 1975, Pilger had exulted at 'the liberation' of Cambodia.
Then through the 3 years 8 months plus of subsequent Red horror inside that country, Pilger made not a solitary squeak.
But in 1978-9 a now-communist Vietnam invades Cambodia with Soviet weaponry and finance to seize that land and its resources (as had been their intent for decades). Needing to justify this blatant invasion of an independent country, Hanoi and Moscow call in their old friend Johnny.
Pilger's subsequent television documentary on Cambodia exposes to the world the full horrors of what Pol Pot had unleashed on his people.
That part of the narration was correct, though the bulk of the documentary functioned as arrant anti-American pro-Hanoi nonsense to deceive the ignorant as to why everything had happened as it did.
And for evermore since, Pilger has posed as the man who uncovered the carnage when in fact for nearly four years he knew what all of us involved in one way or another had known except that he chose at the time to turn his head and look away. Pilger was in fact just about dead-last in screaming about the atrocities.
Perhaps, remembering his earlier pay-for-play services-rendered, Putin has given Pilger another substantial payday to defend his intervention inside Ukraine. Who knows?
Meanwhile, throughout the entire appalling Khmer Rouge regime, Chomsky had actively and loudly defended Pol Pot and his cohorts against all allegations of barbarity.
But when everything was finally out in the open and could no longer be hidden, Chomsky chose to defend his earlier position with a dismissive air-headed "We (who supported them) were right to be wrong."
Way outside anything I have any knowledge on, but it sounds about right, it fits the trend. I went thin on details in my posts to make them shorter and easier to follow.
In SA there wasn't just the ANC opposing apartheid. The ANC was in an alliance with the SACP (SA Communist Party) which was/is one of the most dogmatic followers of Moscow, they even sided with the Nazis during WW2 when the Soviets did and switched to the Allies when the Soviets did. The ANC and SACP top leadership are almost always dual members of both organisations. Their support inside SA was limited for a long time, the strongest ANC branches were in London and Lusaka not in SA, they were however heavily backed by the Soviets and some Western countries, which gave them huge resources. Sharpeville (1960) was a PAC protest, and the Soweto Uprising (1976) was BCM inspired/influenced. PAC had black nationalist and Maoist factions, it was backed at various times by Libya/North Korea/China, but never really had much resources. BCM was black nationalist and not backed by any external power (the ANC always claimed Biko who led the group was CIA backed though), they never had any resources. Both Sharpeville and the Soweto Uprising are seminal events in the anti-apartheid struggle, which the ANC has appropriated, but which actually have nothing to do with the ANC. The other group was the IFP, that were/are Zulu traditionalists who support the Zulu monarchy and capitalism and oppose socialism, they're more or less Zulu Tories, they had the backing of the vast majority of Zulus since their formation until well after apartheid ended (Zulus are also the largest ethnic group). The PAC and IFP were both direct splits from the ANC (the leadership of both had once been in the ANC), which also shows how weak the ANC was inside SA. Then there were about a third of whites who had always opposed apartheid and backed liberal parties, they had no external power supporting them but had considerable resources (and if you have resources, it can be converted into support later).
All these groups, and not just the NP government, had to be defeated for the ANC to gain power. The whites could be discredited by calling them racist, it wasn't so easy with the others. After the ANC was unbanned fighters trained in the Soviet Union (mostly East Germany) as well as in camps in Africa moved back into SA and established cells armed with Soviet supplied weapons from their caches. They then waged a war against the IFP in which circa 25k were killed. The IFP having no external backers could only turn to the NP government for support which they did, and this was played up hugely by the ANC (when in reality many of the "battles" were hundreds/thousands of Zulus armed with spears/sticks going up against small groups of ANC gunmen armed with AKs/RPGs, eg the Shell House Massacre). The role of the Western useful idiots was to back the Soviet supported side in all this, whilst blaming everyone else for the chaos and creating propaganda claiming some huge historic backstory of inevitable ANC rule (which didn't actually exist, eg the actual not bullshit history of Sharpeville and the Soweto Uprising). The period of transition from apartheid to democracy was extremely critical, whatever narrative took hold then would always dominate and last until the country started failing, something more grounded in reality could've easily lasted generations.
The thing about someone like Pilger, was that he was a true believer. He actually believed the SACP line that apartheid and capitalism were the same. When poverty or bad working conditions were conflated with apartheid in reporting from that time, the unstated assumption in the reporting was that without apartheid there's no poverty and everyone has high quality employment. When that didn't in fact happen the likes of Pilger run the same analysis they did during apartheid, find there's still poverty and all the rest, then conclude there's still apartheid. Meanwhile none of the ANC or SACP men he helped put into power believed any of that bullshit and are all millionaires or billionaires.
The same old heads are popping up again now on Ukraine, same old support for the Russian side, same old bullshit about anyone opposing them being evil. As you say, fuck knows what's in it for them now.
Lafayette 
