Haitian theory from the man himself.

Embrace Marxism-Leninism-Maoism Babekyu Thought.

This is a basic preliminary post to something that I'm hoping to actually make into something more professional.

To preface: This is a thought I've been meaning to share after BE's "don't join a union" post over on Twitter. I generally just ignore his stuff for the purpose of left unity, especially in these trying times, but his sentiment is something ive seen a lot and something I don't particularly agree with.

Post in question:

To define accelerationism on the left, it's

The belief that in order for a revolution to happen, material conditions must worsen and, ergo, the goal of socialists should be to make those material conditions worse.

This is my definition but it's not a new one or esoteric, at least I don't think it is. And it makes sense from the first go around, and generally confers to marxist theory*

*except that it doesn't.

The problem with this idea is a few things.

1. Yes, standards of living decreasing generally makes people more agitated, and even more class conscious. But this is not a guarantee. Just look at Nazi Germany. Weren't living standards horrible? During the Weimar era, shouldn't have there been (another) communist uprising? How did capitalism keep going when living standards were so bad. This basically applies most places.

2.This leads to the second, and main, point. This is economism, pure and simple.

When I first heard Antonio Gramsci being described as a "marxist humanist," I was skeptical of his work. Is this some form of "left nietzchein" or "left hegelian?" (I.e Zizek?) No, Gramsci is extremely important reading for any modern leftist. They must understand they are a part of the human social system, the same as everyone else, and must work to break down the Bourgeois hegemony that exists. The key to this thought is how people develop consciousness. They develop it by being given a way out, and hand to help them out of a pit of despair.

To get more specific, the four main points are

A.No reasonable offline person believes this.

No really, imagine trying to convince some person, no matter their race or geographic origin, and your argument is "we should sit on our asses, not join a union, not agitate, let fascism get worse to own the libs, and fight for welfare getting dismantled." Yeah, I'm sure whoever you're trying to convince is going to follow marxism if that's the goal.

B. This is the same logic economism-ites used to say "there is nothing we can do."

This happens a lot unfortunately, but it's especially annoying seeing it repeated in the other direction. Economists in communist parties essentially believe they hold an outside role on the changes in social order and production. That they are simply to sit there and wait for economic crisis to hit and then to spring into action. This happened in Norway (I actually reccomend a YouTuber named Fredda if you're more interested in this period) and of course it happened in many other places. Accelerationism is just the opposite side of this, that there is no point in agitation or trying to foment consciousness if the economic conditions aren't bad enough yet. It only took me a minute to realize that what the accelerationists were saying was very familiar. Maybe they're still better than economism-ists, but only by a small margin. The idea is that you, and every other soldier for the working class, is part of the great historical movements, and these great historical movements only gain momentum by the exposing of contradictions and the proposing of alternatives to the masses.

C.You...just need something eith organizational capacity dumbass.

This is more specific to BE, but in order to have a revolution, nay, even just to fight against the imperialist actions of the nation you live in, then you need organizational capacity.

Yes, there are bad and reactionary unions. But there are also bad and reactionary "left" parties. That doesn't mean people shouldn't be joining parties. How do you get people to strike against delivering Israeli cargo? How do you get boycotts and work stoppages and wildcat strikes? How do you do these things without an organization like a union? The simple answer is that you can't.

And how do you deliver results to the people without fighting for them? This isn't to say we should stop of social democratic reforms, obviously, but who is to take credit for successful policies or increases in wages and such? Without organizational capabilities then employers can just choose to give concessions occasionally and get worker love for pennies, because they don't know they can have it all.

D. A great way to make conflict occur is protecting welfare.

To oversimplify a lot, let's say the state and Bourgeoisie has a combined leftover budget of 1 million dollars. If they have no resistance to policies and such that make things worse, they can use that 1 million dollars on weapons of war or militarized police forces or other things to engender imperialism and such, while dismantling social security or safety laws to make up the difference. But, let's say hypothetically, the state and Bourgeoisie has to fight to get rid of these institutions, or let's say employers have to fight tooth and nail with Unions to cut pay and workers and safety measures. That's certainly going to make the entire world genocide thing a lot harder isn't it? And of course, what's going to radicalize someone more? Life just getting worse, or the mask of humanity falling from the Bourgeoisie's face as they unite to take away their maternity leave or work breaks?

Again, this is preliminary. I'd prefer to write a full polemic on this at better times, but knowing BE and the world, he'll probably say something else stupid before the world gets better. Also sorry for any mistakes and such, I'm writing this late and i don't feel like proof checking againt.

And also, I want to repeat that I know this is mainly said by people online, but I've seen it enough that I'm starting to get concerned how many people don't engage with the world because they think everything beings worse will make things better automatically.

And lastly, this is not an argument against anti-imperialism. I know if I was brainded enough to be on Twitter then people would definitely accuse me of making an argument for social imperialism. These are not separate things, but accelerationism is a different argument. Anti imperialism does argue for restricting the potential super profits that are used to bribe labor aristocracy, but that's not exclusive to accerationist ideas. And after all, shouldn't an accelerationist want more wars? After all, more war means worse conditions and worse conditions means revolution. Just look at Russian and Germany in world War one obviously.

https://xcancel.com/chenweihua/status/1961962635060302240

For those Who Need Context what is Going on :

My Country Indonesia is in Deep shit, The Neoliberal Clown Government lead by Prabowo Subianto, A Former Military General and the Son in-Law of the US Backed Dictator Suharto. And right Now Clowns at DPR (Parliement) Has Recently introduce getting Their Members salary Up to 50 Million Rupiah (Around 3.000 USD) which is Clownish and Amazingly Shit (For Comparison, Average Indonesian Minimum Wage is 3 to 12 Million Rupiah which is 182 to 730 USD). And yeah That me and pretty Much everyone here is pretty fucking Pissed

And we protested, Mostly In Jakarta, But One incident on the night of 28 August One Innocent Online Taxi Bike Rider was Not involved In the protest But was delivering food, Got Rammed Over By Indonesian Police Truck, he Didn't Make it (RIP). This Incident spark The Fire That Activated the Bomb, Heavier Protests All Over Different cities In My country.

As for the Protestors and Activists.., i am Supportive, However some... Oppositions are As Shit as The Neo-Lib Government, I Mean Really Shit, (Like Majority of the Oppositions Online are Anti-China Rhetoric, Anti-Communists, and fill with Liberals, Unfortunatly). As for Communists/Socialists Movement..., Pretty Much Non-Existance since Suharto Pretty Much wiped Out all Communist/Socialists During His Reign.

Yeah I am in Deep Shit. Ugh.. we were so close to become a Red State in the 60s. And now Here we are, 1965 Happened. Boom Gone

I want to be wrong about this, but I've been watching things, and this is where i see the path theyre on going.

America has various "problems" i quote it because these are problems of Empire. Fabricated things, or things that wouldnt be an issue were they not an empire.

The one's I'll be addressing are as follows:

1. A lack of cheap domestic labor.
2. Supply chains reliant on political enemies.
3. A lack of cheap natural resources.
4. an overextended military

The US elites are struggling to fix these "problems", and I think I know their plan to do so.

Recently the US deployed troops to the caribbean. This was seen by latin american leaders as a very dangerous and provacative move. I think it's preperations for an invasion of Venezuela.

Why invade Venezuela? Well they have a lot of oil, are close to the US, and their oil is mostly on the coast. So i think the US wants to occupy the oil infrastucture, and then bomb the rest of the country to keep it in chaos while they extract the oil. Not a full occupation. Just a targetted one to get resources. The strategy for doing this is something they've perfected over the years. This solves their cheap oil problem. They can flood the market with this oil, and plunge energy prices. Something they've been asking OPEC+ to do, but they've refused.

US Oil companies go along with it because they get free oil to sell. It's free money the bill is footed by the US govt.

This though will just be the first step of the plan. The United states has been flying recon drones over Mexico, and authorized it's military to take action "against the cartels" there too.

They've been doing this for months.

This implies they are creating a map of the country. Especially the northern parts. Which they'd be able to use for any operations there.

I think they are planning an occupation of the northern parts of Mexico. They will surge across the border Blitz style, and use political pressure to get the Mexican govt to capitulate, or just claim it's cartel controlled, and destroy it themselves.

The goal of this will be twofold. Create a highly militarized buffer zone between the US, and latin america. This means that as climate change worsens, and their military operations in latin america get more extreme they don't have a european style refugee crisis. This buffer zone also works as one giant concentration camp. They deport anyone they want into it, and since it isn't US soil legally they can do anything they want. They'll use this to create their cheap labor pool. Companies can build factories here, and have plenty of cheap labor. Essentially slave labor. They will likely start programs for migrants to "work for residency". Where they will be told if they spend 10 years working in the buffer zone they'll be allowed into the US proper. This will rarely actually happen of course.

Now they're in a position where they can move industry back near the US, and without losing their cheap labor. They can scale down military actions in the middle east because they have access to Venezuelan oil, and they can focus fully on maintaining control of the America's and the Pacific. While using Europe as a buffer against Russia, and a captive market for US weapons.

So to go back to their "problems"

1. A lack of cheap domestic labor. Slave labor in northern mexico. "Solved."
2. Supply chains reliant on political enemies. Northern Mexico as new industrial hub. "Solved."
3. A lack of cheap natural resources. Extract resources for free from occupied regions. "Solved."
4. an overextended military Get's to focus on China, and on a very nearby war which makes supply lines easier while delegating many duties to the EU, and abandoning the middle east. Likely delegating it to Israel. "Solved."

It is a horrific, and evil plan so i think it's exactly what they intend to do. From the perspective of a souless blood sucking American leech it puts them in a much better position. The EU can't do anything to protest since theyd be reliant on US weapons. Israel would love to be let loose on the middle east. Major potential enemies are kept busy. Russia has to stay on alert against a newly militarized EU, China has to worry about a growing US presence in the pacific, and Iran is busy fighting Israel. There's nobody in the Americas who can stop them. Brazil is the only one who might be able to do something, but theyre far enough away, and would likely be paid off in cheap oil so they arent likely to do anything. Then domestically the AmeriKKKans will be eating up the anti-immigrant, and "anti-Cartel military operation" line. Plus they'll be seeing lower gas prices, and new imported treats from the slave labor zone. So they'll be content.

I hope I'm wrong, and if anyone disagrees i would love to hear why. I really do see this as atleast what they will attempt. Will they succeed? I hope not.

In 1922 George Blake was born George Behar in the Netherlands, moved to Egypt when his Egyptian dad died when he was 13, where he met his Marxist cousin, (Blake later said that this encounter shaped his views in later life)

Behar was back in the Netherlands when WWII started, during the German occupation he joined the Dutch resistance as a courier (he was 17 at the time).

In 1942 George Behar escapes the Netherlands, in 1943 arrived to UK via Spain and Gibraltar, changed his last name to Blake.

Joined the Royal Navy, but because he couldn't serve, but was still useful, was recruited by MI6 and worked under the disguise of a marine.

After WWII ended Blake got sent to Korea, got captured by the communists and became a lifetime communist himself after seeing US bombing of DPRK and reading Marx, deciding to work for USSR's MGB. Upon returning to the United Kingdom, Blake resumed work with MI6 while secretly passing classified information to the Soviets.

Blake was discovered in 1961 and got 45 years in prison, BUT he was such a gigachad that he and his inmates (Sean Bourke, tried to bomb a costable; Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, anti-war activists) ESCAPED from prison, smuggled Blake across the English Channel in a camper van, then drove across northern Europe and through West Germany to the Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing. Having safely crossed the border without incident, Blake met his handlers in East Germany and completed his escape to Moscow, where he was welcomed as a hero and lived for his entire life. Blake received multiple awards, one from Putin himself on his 85th birthday (Blake was still working for the Russian state security at the time) and wrote two books. He died in 2020, aged 98, virtually blind but still a firm Marxist-Leninist. He was buried as Georgy Ivanovich Bekhter, the name he used from 1965, in Alley of Heroes at Troyekurovskoye Cemetery, Moscow.

But what happened to his inmates?

Pat Pottle and Michael Randle were not prosecuted until 1991. Their defence was that they considered Blake's 42-year sentence to be excessively long and "inhuman". The jury, despite being directed that they must find the men guilty, acquitted them both. (Ura to Jury Nullification!) Sean Bourke was not prosecuted for his role since Ireland refused to extradite him to the UK to face charges that were political in nature.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/35235455

“I wasn’t like this before the war,” Mohammed says, almost to himself. “I don’t laugh the way I used to. Even my face, when I smile… it’s not the same.”

He speaks without calculation, as though trying to name an ailment no textbook can diagnose. It’s as if he’s mourning someone he lost along the way, only that someone is himself. Mohammed didn’t just lose a home. Like so many, he lost the gentle layers that once made him whole. The spark behind the eyes, the ease of laughter, the unspoken rhythms of personality that war has since unraveled.

This is a war that takes place in silence, inward, invisible, brutal. It is the undoing of children who no longer know how to play, of women whose grief has no way of being processed, of men who tremble without sound. It is a generation swallowing its screams, walking through days with faces that no longer feel like their own. How does war do this? How does an external storm become an internal quake, redrawing the contours of who we are?

In Gaza today, many live estranged from themselves. “It’s like I’ve become someone else” is a sentence heard everywhere; in midnight conversations, text messages, side glances, and the language of eyes too tired to speak. But the transformation is etched deeply: in hollowed-out stares, laughter too heavy for the face it rises from.

At a displacement center in western Gaza, I sit on an overturned paint bucket beside Saleh. His face is buried in his hands. Without lifting his head, the man in his thirties confesses that he’s been searching for his old, jubilant self. Before the war, he was the group’s jester, quick-witted and effortless with jokes, turning daily life into comedy. On summer nights, he’d perform impromptu stand-up under the stars.

His mother, overhearing us, joins in with a tray of bitter tea. “You see him now?” she says, her voice thin. “This boy used to be like a flower. He’d make you laugh from the heart. Now he’s like a shadow.” He rarely leaves the tent. The man who once loved debate no longer listens to the news. He avoids conversation. He is shrinking.

Mental health reports reveal the descent: a sharp rise in depression, breakdowns, and acute psychological stress. A 2025 EMHJ study found that 99.5% of displaced Gazans live with depression, 99.7% with anxiety, and 93.7% with trauma symptoms so intense they disturb daily life. Even those who escaped are not untouched. Out of 383 adults who fled to Egypt between October 2023 and May 2024, nearly all were diagnosed with depression, half in its severest form. Women bear the heavier weight.

But at the heart of this rupture are the children. UNICEF and WHO warned early that nearly one million Gazan children would need urgent psychological support. Hospital data shows 90% of them display signs of accute anxiety, while 82% believe they could die at any moment. A recent New Yorker piece put it starkly: PTSD doesn’t apply here, because there is no post. This is trauma without an end.

Writer and blogger Fidaa Ziyad has spent the war collecting women’s stories of grief. In small circles of trust, women begin to slowly open up. One mother told her she was grateful it was her younger son who died and not the eldest, because without him, no one would feed her.

In one session, a mirror was passed around with a question: Who were you before the loss? Who are you now? Some refused to look. Others stared and whispered: “Who is this woman? I don’t know her.”

Of twenty women who lost their husbands, five said they felt shattered, weak, adrift. Another five said they’d grown stronger and fiercer. But the mothers who lost children spoke with a different kind of silence. One said: “His soul was like a feather. It was snatched before I could even hold it.”

The war has not allowed these women to pause. They are forced to carry on because they can’t afford to process what happened to them. And still, the changes show in the tension of their jaws, in voices that harden or break, in the pitch-dark circles around their eyes.

Mohammed Hajji, who leads a psychosocial support initiative, says the trauma is no longer acute; it is chronic. The damage is deep, threading through children and caregivers alike. “We see nightmares, panic at the sound of aircraft, stunted emotional and psychological development,” he says. “Even in the food lines, aggression or withdrawal are now survival instincts.” Learning, memory, and focus wither. But the greatest wound is harder to name: “Children who no longer feel wonder,” he says. “As if life itself has been emptied of meaning.”

This collapse unfolds while Gaza’s only psychiatric hospital lies in ruins, leaving over 450,000 people without inpatient care, including 100,000 in critical mental conditions.

Behind those numbers are lives quietly breaking: A mother who forgets she was cooking and burns the food. A father who hasn’t left his tent in weeks. A child afraid to sleep because “the planes come back in my dreams.”

Civil society groups have stepped up to fill the void, building fragile spaces of healing: mobile therapy teams, group sessions, storytelling workshops, play therapy for children. But these efforts take place in tents, under crumbling ceilings, and often from those wounded themselves. “The facilitator is broken too,” someone told me. “But we try to be a pillar.”

International organizations like UNICEF, Save the Children, MSF, CRS offer help, but most of these programs are short-term and operate as emotional triage. Some displacement camps get a therapist visit twice a week. Others, not even once in months.

The reasons vary: closed crossings, bombed infrastructure, vanishing funds, and a global preference for what is fast and visible over what is slow and internal.

But those working on the ground are warning: psychological wounds this deep cannot be bandaged with seasonal fixes. A mental earthquake of this scale demands long-term commitment, not just slogans.

People sift through rubble, not only for belongings or remains of loved ones, but for fragments of the people they used to be. When and if the war ends, will the healing begin? Will therapy and aid be enough to restore these faces, these selves? Or must we all learn to live as strangers in our own skin

Thousands lined up in Plaza Bolívar in Caracas to enlist in the Bolivarian militia to defend Venezuela’s national sovereignty in the face of threats from the United States regime.

The scene was replicated in Bolívar squares across the country.

Kawasachun News

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Written by a brother in south Lebanon:

To everyone living outside Gaza who says they feel powerless to change the reality:

The truth is, you are not powerless, you are simply not prepared to make the sacrifices required to change it. Sacrifices like giving up your job, leaving life in a foreign country, parting from your family, giving up your wealth, or even risking your life.

This, at its core, is why the US holds dominance over the world: there are few who are truly willing to sacrifice in order to change the course of events.

After all, Imam Hussein needed only 72 loyal companions to change history and instill in his followers the spirit of sacrifice.

History is not changed by those who feel powerless. It is changed by those who refuse to be.

August 1st marked the 50th anniversary of the Helsinki Accords’ inking. The event’s golden jubilee passed without much in the way of mainstream comment, or recognition. Yet, the date is absolutely seismic, its destructive consequences reverberating today throughout Europe and beyond. The Accords not only signed the death warrants of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia years later, but created a new world, in which “human rights” - specifically, a Western-centric and enforced conception thereof - became a redoubtable weapon in the Empire’s arsenal.

The Accords were formally concerned with concretising détente between the US and the Soviet Union. Under their terms, in return for recognition of the latter’s political influence over Central and Eastern Europe, Moscow and its Warsaw Pact satellites agreed to uphold a definition of “human rights” concerned exclusively with political freedoms, such as freedom of assembly, expression, information, and movement. Protections universally enjoyed by the Eastern Bloc’s inhabitants - such as guarantees of free education, employment, housing, and more - were wholly absent from this taxonomy.

There was another catch. The Accords led to the creation of several Western organisations charged with monitoring the Eastern Bloc’s adherence to their terms - including Helsinki Watch, forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Subsequently, these entities frequently visited the region and forged intimate bonds with local political dissident factions, assisting them in their anti-government agitation. There was no question of representatives from the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, or Yugoslavia being invited to assess “human rights” compliance at home or abroad by the US or its vassals.

As legal scholar Samuel Moyn has extensively documented, the Accords played a pivotal role in decisively shifting mainstream rights discourse away from any and all economic or social considerations. More gravely, per Moyn, “the idea of human rights” was converted “into a warrant for shaming state oppressors.” Resultantly, Western imperialist brutality against purported foreign rights abusers - including sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention - could be justified, frequently assisted by the ostensibly neutral findings of organisations such as Amnesty International, and HRW.

Almost instantly after the Helsinki Accords were signed, a welter of organisations sprouted throughout the Eastern Bloc to document purported violations by authorities. Their findings were then fed - often surreptitiously - to overseas embassies and rights groups, for international amplification. This contributed significantly to both internal and external pressure on the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia. Mainstream accounts assert the conception of these dissident groups was entirely spontaneous and organic, in turn compelling Western support for their pioneering efforts.

US lawmaker Dante Fascell has claimed the “demands” of “intrepid” Soviet citizens “made us respond.” However, there are unambiguous indications that meddling in the Eastern Bloc was hardwired into Helsinki before inception. In late June 1975, on the eve of US President Gerald Ford signing the Accords, exiled Soviet dissident [anti-semite, fascist sympathizer and anti-communist propagandist] Alexander Solzhenitsyn addressed senior politicians in Washington, DC. He appeared at the express invitation of hardcore anti-Communist George Meany, chief of the CIA-connected American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Solzhenitsyn declared:

“We, the dissidents of the USSR don’t have any tanks, we don’t have any weapons, we have no organization. We don’t have anything...You are the allies of our liberation movement in the Communist countries…Communist leaders say, ‘Don’t interfere in our internal affairs’...But I tell you: interfere more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere.”

In 1980, mass strikes in Gdansk, Poland, spread throughout the country, leading to the founding of Solidarity, an independent trade union and social movement. Key among its demands was that the Soviet-supported Polish government distribute 50,000 copies of Helsinki’s “human rights” protocols to the wider public. Solidarity founder-and-chief Lech Walesa subsequently referred to the Accords as a “turning point”, enabling and encouraging the union’s nationwide disruption, and growth into a serious political force. Within just a year, Solidarity’s membership exceeded over 10 million.

The movement’s inexorable rise sent shockwaves throughout the Warsaw Pact. It was the first time an independent mass organisation had formed in a Soviet-aligned state, and others would soon follow. Undisclosed at the time, and largely unknown today, Solidarity’s activities were bankrolled to the tune of millions by the US government. The same was true of most prominent Eastern Bloc dissident groups, such as Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77. In many cases, these factions not only ousted their rulers by the decade’s end, but formed governments thereafter.

Washington’s financing for these efforts became codified in a secret September 1982 National Security Directive. It stated “the primary long-term US goal in Eastern Europe” was “to loosen the Soviet hold over the region and thereby facilitate its eventual reintegration into the European community of nations.” This was to be achieved by “encouraging more liberal trends in the region…reinforcing the pro-Western orientation of their peoples…lessening their economic and political dependence on the USSR…facilitating their association with the free nations of Western Europe.”

In August 1989, mere days after Solidarity took power in Poland, marking the first post-World War II formation of a non-Communist government in the Eastern Bloc, a remarkable op-ed appeared in the Washington Post. Senior AFL-CIO figure Adrian Karatnycky wrote about his “unrestrained joy and admiration” over Solidarity’s “stunning” success in purging Soviet influence in the country throughout the 1980s. The movement was the “centerpiece” of a wider US “strategy”, and had been funded and supported by Washington with the utmost “discretion and secrecy.”

Vast sums funnelled to Solidarity via AFL-CIO and CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy “underwrote shipments of scores of printing presses, dozens of computers, hundreds of mimeograph machines, thousands of gallons of printer’s ink, hundreds of thousands of stencils, video cameras and radio broadcasting equipment.” The wellspring promoted Solidarity’s activities locally and internationally. In Poland itself, 400 “underground periodicals” - including comic books featuring “Communism as the red dragon” and Lech Walesa “as the heroic knight” - were published, read by tens of thousands of people.

Karatnycky boasted of how the Empire was intimately “drawn into the daily drama of Poland’s struggle” over the past decade, and “much of the story of that struggle and our role in it will have to be told another day.” Still, the results were extraordinary. Writers for Warsaw’s NED-funded “clandestine press” had suddenly been transformed into “editors and reporters for Poland’s new independent newspapers.” Former “radio pirates” and Solidarity activists previously “hounded” by Communist authorities were now elected lawmakers.

Signing off, Karatnycky hailed how Poland proved to be a “successful laboratory in democracy-building,” warning “democratic change” in Warsaw could not be a “a political aberration” or “lone example” in the region. Karatnycky looked ahead to further neighbourhood insurrection, noting AFL-CIO was engaged in outreach with trade unions elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc, including the Soviet Union itself. So it was, one by one, every Warsaw Pact government collapsed in the final months of 1989, often in enigmatic circumstances.

The “revolutions” of 1989 remain venerated in the mainstream today, hailed as examples of peaceful transitions from dictatorship to democracy. They have also served as a template and justification for US imperialism of every variety in the name of “human rights” in all corners of the globe since. Yet, for many at the forefront of Western-funded, Helsinki Accords-inspired Warsaw Pact dissident groups, there was an extremely bitter twist in the tale of the overthrow of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe.

In 1981, Czechoslovak playwright and Charter 77 spokesperson Zdena Tominová conducted a tour of the West. In a speech in Dublin, Ireland, she spoke of how she’d witnessed first-hand how her country’s population had benefited enormously from the state’s Communist policies. Tominová made clear she sought to fully maintain all its public-wide economic and social benefits, while adopting Western-style political freedoms only. It was a shocking statement to make for a woman who’d risked imprisonment to oppose her government with foreign help so publicly:

“All of a sudden, I was not underprivileged and could do everything…I think that, if this world has a future, it is as a socialist society, which I understand to mean a society where nobody has priorities just because he happens to come from a rich family,” Tominová declared. She moreover made clear her vision was global in nature - “the world of social justice for all people has to come about.” But this was not to be.

Instead, Eastern Bloc countries suffered deeply ravaging transitions to capitalism via “shock therapy”, eradicating much of what citizens held dear about the systems under which they’d previously lived. They were thrust into a wholly new world, where hitherto unknown homelessness, hunger, inequality, unemployment, and other societal ills became commonplace, rather than prevented by basic state guarantee. After all, as decreed by the Helsinki Accords, such phenomena didn’t constitute egregious breaches of “human rights”, but instead were the unavoidable product of the very political “freedom” for which they had fought.