We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, November 16, 2017

A People’s History of the Russian Revolution pits new scholarship vs. Mainstream Media [part 1 of 5]

Click here to access article by the Iranian-American Ramin Mazaheri posted on The Greanville Post. (This is part 1 of 5 articles that will be posted. It is likely that I will re-post all of them by this excellent political analyst who tells it like it really is--no euphemisms like "market economy" or "Wall Street" for the real thing (capitalism).

It occurred to me this morning that there is another war going on that you may not be aware of. It is a war for your mind, that is, for the control of your mind about all things political. The capitalist US-led Empire is under siege by the new technologies of the Information Age, and the war is being fought over your allegiance to both the Empire and capitalism, the ideological foundation of the Empire. Being aware of this war should encourage you to take much greater care on what to believe about the world you live in. I hope this website and this post contributes to that process.

This series of posts, which is based on new book entitled A People’s History of the Russian Revolution by Neil Faulkner, promises to offer you a much better understanding of the realities and the significance of the 1917 Russian Revolution which has had such a profound impact on subsequent world events. The book, and I think this series, presents a very different view of the revolution that you may be getting from mainstream media or what you were taught in schools.
... on the book’s very first page the author describes the formula of any successful popular revolution, just like the Iranian Revolution of 1979: “In essence, the Russian Revolution was an explosion of democracy and activity from below.”

Mainstream media and all bourgeois (US/West European) democracies have no interest in such explosions, and it is for this reason that they purposely distort not just the 1917 Russian Revolution but all anti-capitalist, pro-socialist, and anti-imperialist cultures. And they always will, because that is the only way they can try to preserve their status quo dominance.