Michael > Recent Status Updates

Experiencing a terminal case of whiplash from the authors sequencing an interview about a would-be liberated Palestine and the methods of self-emancipation amidst international political and economic collapse, followed by an interview with a recreational drug maker and DJ who repurposed augmented reality implants for soldiers for flotilla (barge?) dance parties in SE Asia. Gratuitous and excessively utopian by half.

"...The power differential between women and men in capitalist societry... should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity, and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, while profiting from the wageless condition of the labor involved."

"We won't need to kill a million like in Indonesia," López Rega reportedly said. "We can get it done with ten thousand," He guessed low. Anticommunists killed far more than that in Argentina.

In 1983, D'Aubuisson summed up the actually existing anticommunist ideology very well "You can be a Communist," he told reporter Laurie Beck- lund, even if you personally don't believe you are a Communist""

"On Bali, one group of prisoners would carefully collect and own feces to fertilize tiny bits of soil and row vegetables. They would pass the time by singing songs, either those from the days of Sukarno or based on their own experiences. The refrain to one of them, sung in Spanish, came from the title of Fidel Castro's 1953 speech-"La historia me absolverá"- history will absolve me."

"You're all indoctrinated!" he screamed. "And it's because of this indoctrination that were going to put into effect Operation Jakarta, and neutralize two thousand communists right here in São Paulo."
The general had gone off script. This was a dictatorship, however, and he had an easy way to make sure it stayed off the record. "If you publish a single line of what I just said, it will be 2,001!"

But when his superiors started talking about El Plan Yakarta in 1973, they were being very specific, and very serious. The plan was to kill around 10,000 people, the left and its core supporters, as a way of ensuring a transition to a right-wing government. "If we just put the Jakarta plan into place, kill ten or twenty thousand, then that's it," one officer said. "Then that's all the resistance and we win."

"[Medici] did not believe that the Soviets or the Chinese were interested in giving any assistance to these countries' communist movements..." The problem for both men, in other words, was not an international communist conspiracy. The problem was that they thought the Soviets and Chinese might be right. The impoverished people might choose "communism" all by themselves, and they had to be stopped."

"The chaos and violence in Chile was not caused by President Salvador Allende. US-backed right- wing terrorism began before he even took office.
Nixon ordered the head the CIA to find to stop Allende from taking over. Richard Helms emerged from the meeting with Nixon's orders written on a notepad:

1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!
$10000000 available, more if necessary
best men we have
make the economy scream"

"By the end of the 1960s, it was safe to say that the Third World movement were in disarray, if not destroyed. The "Bandung Spirit" had become a ghost. The leaders of the progressive wing of the postcolonial movement were gone: Nehru had died in 1964; Sukarno was languishing in Indonesia as his allies bled out, waiting to die soon himself; Ghana's Nkrumah and Burma's U Nu had been deposed in military coups."

"At least one million Indonesians were still in concentration camps, prising one of the largest populations of political detainees anywhere in the world. They were subject to starvation, forced labor, physical and psychological torture, and attempts at anticommunist re-education. The families of up to another million victims were reeling from the disappearance of their loved ones without explanation"

"Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation.
The US economic elite heard a very different message. Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto's fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available them in Indonesia...Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too."

"In December, when Mao learned of D. N. Aidit's death, he composed a poem:

Sparse branches stood in front of my windows in winter, smiling before hundreds of flowers
Regretfully those smiles withered when spring came
There is no need to grieve over the withered
To each flower there is a season to wither, as well a season to blossom
There will be more flowers in the coming year"

"In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Sarwo Edhie once bragged the military had killed 3 million people.
Around 15 percent of the prisoners taken were women. They were subjected to especially cruel, gendered violence, which sprung directly from the propaganda spread by Suharto with Western help.

"Someone shouted, "This is Mr. Raka!"
But no, that skull didn't look right. Maybe the hair was wrong. Maybe that one? They kept sorting through decomposing bodies, desperately, for minutes, before someone realized it was impossible, crazy. There were just "too many skulls, too many skeletons."

In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed-that is eighty thousand people..."

"They were bringing people from the city to the east to kill them on the sand. The bodies were abandoned there...A few years after the violence ended, Agung went with his family to find his father's body and give him an honorable funeral and cremation. They walked 4 kilometers to the site of the mass grave. They found a field of bodies. They began looking through bones, picking up skulls."

"The machetes arrived around the same time that military anticommunist propaganda campaigns, nationally coordinated, arrived in Bali. One rumor declared that [Womens Movement members]had plans to sell their bodies in order to buy weapons for a communist revolt, and to castrate the soldiers they seduced. Propaganda teams toured rural areas, spreading stories like this..."There is no such thing as a neutral decision."

"this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The 1st was in Guatemala in 1954, the 2nd was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965. "It really was a big help to the army... I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad," said Martens."

"You also don't need very advanced weaponry to arrest civilians who provide almost no resistance...What officials in the embassy and CIA decided the Army needed names. Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and "checked off" the list."

"When anyone offers aid that comes with political demands, he said that his message to them was: "Go to hell with your aid!"
...
Whatever goodwill there was for Sukarno in Washington began to dissipate. Over the next few months all direct aid to the national government dried up completely. Crucially, one program continued. The US continued to pour money directly into the [Indonesian] Armed Forces... "

SukarNOOOOOO!

"Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it
changed the temperature of the planet."

…Comrade Marshal, how does it make you feel to know that you received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for Afghanistan? Academician Sakharov gave a number: there were one million Afghan casualties…

Do you think I'm happy? I followed orders, but all I found was blood… We feared that the whole Islamic world would rise up against the USSR. We were told firmly, "Since when do our generals interfere in politics?"

… They could kill you for anything… If you hadn't been born in the right place, if you didn't speak the right language. If someone with a machine gun simply didn't like the looks of you… How had we lived before then? On holidays, our first toast had always been, "to friendship," and "es kes sirum em" ("I love you" in Armenian). Or "Man sani seviram" ("I love you" in Azerbaijani). We'd lived happily side by side…

For two days, I deliberated: I'm a Young Pioneer, so it's my duty to go to the NKVD and tell them about what Vanya said. I have to file a report. This was a very serious matter -- it really was! ...Really, I was ready! Then, home from school one day, I found Vanya lying on the ground, drunk in the building entrance. He'd tumbled off his wheelchair and couldn't get up. I took pity on him.

I was proud of our neighbour Vanya, he was a real hero! He returned from the war without any legs. He pushed himself around in a homemade wooden wheelchair.

A few days after Stalin died, I saw him, and he went, 'What do you know, Margaritka, that you-know-what finally croaked…' That's what he said -- about my Stalin! I tore my felt boots out of his hands: 'How dare you? You're a hero! With a medal.'

Our neighbour hid two little Jewish boys in her barn -- adorable kids... Three Germans showed up on a black motorcycle with their big black dog. Someone had informed on them… There are always people willing to do things like this, people whose souls are black. They're alive, but it's like they are soulless… Their hearts are medical, not human hearts. They have no pity for anyone.

One day, parliamentarians showed up at the district Party committee headquarters demanding, 'Show us your special stores! You always have plenty of food to eat while our children are fainting from hunger at school.' They found neither mink coats nor black caviar in our cafeteria, but they still wouldn't believe us: 'You're deceiving the simple people!' The ground started shaking. Gorbachev was weak.

"What is our national idea now besides salami?"

Salami is the focal point for selling collective wealth for aimless consumerism, it has been brought up about a dozen times.

A lot of things about the system were stupid, I don't deny it, but who will even listen to the man in the street today? Who needs him? Remember the Soviet place names -- Metallurgists' Avenue, Enthusiasts' Avenue, Factory Street, Proletariat Street… They're renaming the streets: Merchant, Middle Class, Nobleman Street… I've even seen 'Prince's salami' and 'General's wine'. A cult of money and success.

"I remember seeing Gaidar on TV saying 'Learn how to sell… The market will save us…' You buy a bottle of mineral water on one corner and sell it on another - that's business. The people listened, bewildered. I would come home, lock the door, and weep. All of it scared my mother so much, she ended up having a stroke."