"Terrorism Has a Return Address" Topic

"In the space of one week, the Trump administration put three documents on the table, and the argument about them went straight to the wrong question. On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened diplomats from sixty-six countries for a summit on far-left political terrorism. On July 20, the State Department released a hundred-page report on Cuba. Together with the Counterterrorism Strategy the president signed in May, they make one claim. Critics answered a different one.

The fight everyone is having is domestic and rhetorical: Is antifa really terrorism, or is this a president criminalizing people he does not like? That is a fair fight, and it is the wrong one. The three documents do not rest their case on whether you find a protester sympathetic. They make a national-security claim — that a hostile foreign network has spent decades building an apparatus inside the United States. That claim is either true or it is not, and it should be judged on the evidence for it, not on the politics around it.

Sixty-six countries did not send delegations over an American culture-war argument. They came because of a pattern on their own soil. Two weeks before the summit, coordinated firebombings struck the homes of governing-party officials in Thessaloniki, Greece, and killed a woman in her seventies. This past winter, an attack on Berlin's power grid left tens of thousands of households dark in the cold and an elderly woman dead. German officials reported far-left violence up more than forty percent in a year; in Greece, officials put the far-left and anarchist share of political violence above eighty percent. Whatever one makes of the American framing, the events abroad are not in doubt…"

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Armand

The documents are true.

It is a world being torn apart by far left and far right viewpoints. Most people are somewhere in the middle, but their views don't seem to matter anymore.

Time for Bay of Pigs II – Electric Boogaloo

(smile)

Armand

Grattan54 +1. Plus the various religious fundies as well, who further twist the issues. Though I read somewhere that "Politics are religions writ small" (or words to that effect). I didn't believe it then, but I do now.

Yemeni gov't troops suffer heavy losses as coordinated Houthi strikes kill at least 30

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Armand

Yes extremist events are not in doubt. But who carries them out? Spend some time reading Marx and then explain to me where international Marxism has been anything but a cover for authoritarian rule and political disruption. Always. Because…it make no practical sense and never works. Cuba? What a mess it has been. Impoverished and broken. This is a threat to the USA?

The author seems to have omitted his credentials for this piece. But with the Iran still not finished, I have no interest in this distraction action. Red Menace…meet Project 25. Go ahead, have it out. Americans in the middle are not likely to board either train anymore, IMO.

Tort,

I don't think that is Marxism. Marxism is essentially where capitalism collapses as workers become aware of exploitation and rise up to take control.

Leninism is I think more applicable to your description. That is were workers on their own would not overthrow capitalism, but need to be led by a Vanguard of professional revolutionaries.

I am working on a Spanish Civil War project for Barcelona in 1936 and 1937 where Marxists were in direct conflict with Leninists and I had to do some reading on the differences in the ideologies.

I am sure you are correct Martyn, good point. I know I generalize too much on this topic.