March 21, 1933, and what followed

Twenty-seven years before the Sharpeville massacre, on March 21, 1933, the first German concentration camp was set up for the purpose of interning Communists, because “the moment they were released, they started their agitation again.” See the link below from the archives of the Guardian newspaper. Sandile Memela is a journalist but the linked item of his below is a letter to a newspaper for which he is not working. He is fed up with the plague of wishful-thinking “independent analysts” who fill the papers full of nonsense, especially before, during and after elections. Paul Craig Roberts is on fire as a writer. In the linked article he lambastes G W Bush and the whole neocon gang. The sting of his words is all the sharper for the fact that he is not of the “left”. Chalmers Johnson is known to us as a developmental theorist but he was also, on his own admission, a “Cold Warrior”. Now in his old age, he has become a merciless critic of the US Empire as he sees it, and it is very interesting to read him, even if the linked interview with Tom Engelhardt is long. This is an insider speaking. Here is a short excerpt: “… there are many people who believe that the thrust of the Cold War even as it began, especially in the National Security Council's grand strategy document, NSC68, rested on the clear understanding of late middle-aged Americans who had lived through the Great Depression that the American economy could not sustain itself on the basis of capitalist free enterprise.” In other words the people who rule the USA are conscious Imperialists, in Lenin’s sense if the word. In private they had fully abandoned “free enterprise” even while, for anti-communist propaganda purposes, they increased their verbal allegiance to it. Not for the first time, one gets the impression that our enemies are reading exactly the same books as we are. The difference is that their intentions are not good. Their intentions are as bad and as disastrous as can be. Links: 1933, Communists to be interned in Dachau, Guardian archive (448 words) Tell us the truth or shut up, Sandile Memela, Letters, The Star (613 words) Bush Delusional, US not God, Paul Craig Roberts, Counterpunch (992 words) Tom Engelhardt interview with Chalmers Johnson, Part 1 (4806 words)