The Bond Delusion

Posted on by Red Youth Britain, History, USSR

With a new instalment of the 007 franchise having finally been released after a lengthy covid imposed delay, the fictional spy character became the subject of headlines when it was announced that actor Daniel Craig would be stepping down from the role.

As fans agonised over whether the so called ‘woke’ trend in popular culture would result in the character being recast with a female or black actor in the role, a host of journalists were spurred to pen their own personal affirmations of affection for writer Ian Fleming’s suave, unflappable MI6 agent.

One such article, published in the Times on the 13th November and titled ‘How James Bond beat the Soviet Union’, loosely reviews a recent book by Fleming’s nephew James Fleming, Bond behind the Iron Curtain, which hones in on the role perceived to have been played by the 007 films and books in the ‘culture war’ between the imperialist and socialist camps during the cold war. Continue reading “The Bond Delusion” →

Bob Seeley, nato propagandist and MP

A frenzy of NATO propaganda

Posted on by Red Youth Nato, Russia

We are at present being subjected to what can only be described as a campaign of intense anti-Russia activity and propaganda by the British government. War rhetoric is escalating at a frightening pace. On instruction from its US master Britain has announced the deployment of some 600 troops to the Ukraine-Russian border using the narrative of a likely imminent invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces.

Further north, British troops have joined the 15,000 Polish troops stationed along the Poland-Belarus border, where they are stopping refugees from crossing into Poland. NATO allies claim Belarus is trafficking in refugees and giving them access to Europe via the Polish border. This coordinated manoeuvring around Russia by NATO allies follows the provocation by Britain earlier in the year when it sent a British warship into Russian territorial waters in the Black Sea. Continue reading “A frenzy of NATO propaganda” →

Sergei Gerasimov. Kolkhoz Holiday. 1937 Photo by E. Kogan / RIA Novosti; State Tretyakov Gallery

Cool or cold? – Pop Art vs Socialist Realism

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, USA, USSR

An exhibition of art in the Berlin Gropius Bau Museum has led to two reviews in the Western media. One in the New York Times (NYT) and the other in the Forbes Magazine (FM). The exhibition is based on the theme ‘cool and cold’ and includes artworks from the cold war period both western and Soviet. We are sure that the reader has already worked out where the organisers are going with this, Western art = cool and Soviet art = cold.

The narrative of the exhibition is fairly easy to read as is that of the two reviews; that Western artforms are bold and colourful, inspiring and challenging while drab and dreary Soviet art in the officially dictated style of Socialist realism has nothing to say because the artists were not free to express themselves, at least not until the latter days of the Soviet Union when brave underground artists dared to paint in the Western styles of Pop art, abstract expressionism, etc! Continue reading “Cool or cold? – Pop Art vs Socialist Realism” →

Guardian dusts off Mr Jones for another round of anti-Soviet lies

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, History, USSR

In scandalised tones the Guardian claims on the 15th October 2021 that “a group of masked men stormed the offices of a renowned human rights organisation in Moscow on Thursday to disrupt the screening of Mr Jones, a British co-produced film about the Holodomor, the Stalin-era famine that killed millions of peasants in Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s.” This disruption, real or imagined, is seized upon by the Guardian to give another box-office puff to this film’s dreary lies.

Never one to spoil a good anti-communist yarn by such tedious journalistic virtues as sticking to facts or checking sources, the Guardian naturally swallows whole the version of Soviet history touted by the flim’s Polish director Agnieszka Holland. After all, what could be more beguiling than the tale of a plucky Welsh reporter risking his life in order to deliver an eye-witness account of a “genocide” engineered by Stalin in Ukraine? Unfortunately for the Guardian, however, the known facts tell a very different story. Continue reading “Guardian dusts off Mr Jones for another round of anti-Soviet lies” →

Koreans who fled Japan for the DPRK branded ‘kidnapped’

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, DPRK

The BBC ran an article ‘North Korea’s Kim Jong-un faces ‘paradise on Earth’ lawsuit’ focusing on a currently ongoing legal case in Japan regarding migration of Koreans from Japan to the DPRK between 1959-84.
The Japanese were able to scrape together 5 people for the lawsuit, out of the 90,000 ethnic Koreans who had left Japan to settle in the DPRK during this period. These 5 essentially represent the sum total of imperialist efforts to find defectors willing to go on record as anti-socialist and anti-DPRK dupes and as fodder for imperialist propaganda.

The Western capitalist class hates ‘North’ Korea. The Mainstream Media we get in the West therefore reflects the views of its owners. Continue reading “Koreans who fled Japan for the DPRK branded ‘kidnapped’” →

BBC’s flawed understanding of China’s history leads to confusion

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, Britain, China

In the first of a three-part look at ‘China’s changing role in the world’, the BBC’s China correspondent Stephen McDonnell looks at the CPC’s recent moves to tackle income disparity and intervene in social and cultural behaviour. But approaching these with the shallow misunderstandings of pre- and post-reform China typical of Western mainstream commentators, he is unable to answer the questions he sets himself.

The notion that the Cultural Revolution was a ‘disastrous quagmire’ out of which China needed to be dragged is one of these misunderstandings.

It is not hard to look at the data – none other than the Financial Times has laid out in no uncertain terms the progress that took place in Mao’s China: life expectancy nearly doubling, adult illiteracy falling from 80% to just 23%, and the achievement of gender equality in elementary education. Contrary to being a quagmire that China needed dragged from kicking and screaming, the FT states that “Without these, the rapid growth after the 1979 opening and reforms would not have been possible.” (Lessons from the first 70 years of the People’s Republic of China by David Daokui Li) Continue reading “BBC’s flawed understanding of China’s history leads to confusion” →

Slander against Stalin Pointed at Putin – Nato’s Goebbelsian propaganda

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, Russia, USSR

A recent article in the Independent, by Ella Glover, titled “Remains of thousands of people believed to be victims of Stalin’s terror discovered in Ukraine“, reveals that a new mass grave has been discovered with “the bones of around 5,000 to 8,000 people” during exploratory works as part of an airport extension. Even though our dear author admits that the victims’ “crimes and identities remain unknown” she expresses no doubt whatsoever as to who was responsible.

Since the Nazis and their fascist counterparts are well known to have committed countless mass executions, especially in Eastern Europe, we should question who these victims were and what lead to their burial before reaching any conclusion about who did it, but this is not how Goebbelsian propaganda works; instead, given the discovery of some bones, the opportunity is jumped upon to make up a story slandering Stalin and Russia with the same brush. According to our author the bones are “thought by historians to belong to victims of Stalin’s Great Terror from 1937 to 1939” but alas, the identities of these historians as well as the depth of their thought remain as unknown to us as the identities and crimes of the victims. Continue reading “Slander against Stalin Pointed at Putin – Nato’s Goebbelsian propaganda” →

Anti-communist stocking filler

Bookshops of the Bourgeoisie

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, Britain

A theme which often surfaces in contemporary depictions of socialism in literature and popular culture is the use of restrictive controls on the sort of books people in socialist countries had access to, encouraging a notion that bookshops only sold volumes of Marx and Lenin.

Accompanying this is the notion that western literature was totally forbidden to readers of the socialist world, with only state approved propaganda available to slake people’s appetite for entertainment. Continue reading “Bookshops of the Bourgeoisie” →

Reclaiming history is a flawed fight without Marxism

Posted on by Red Youth Britain, Education, Protest

Articles in the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Express on the 29th August introduce their readers to ‘History Reclaimed’, a group consisting of academic scholars who have set themselves the task of counteracting the current trend for removing references to, or revising drastically the way historical figures associated with slavery, colonialism and racism are presented in society.

The academics behind the organisation are attempting to push back at what they view as ideologically motivated, over zealous gestures that seek to blacken the names of important historical figures without regard to the context of the time they lived in. Continue reading “Reclaiming history is a flawed fight without Marxism” →

BBC praises a grand rewilding to hide how capitalism sparked environmental degradation in Kazakhstan

Posted on by Red Youth Anti Communism, USSR

The BBC’s science and technology journalist, Chris Baraniuk, wrote back in January a distinctly ecohippie article celebrating the decline of human presence in the Eurasian steppes of Kazakhstan.

With the title “How the Soviet Union’s end sparked a grand rewilding”, the author appears to echo extinction rebellion’s rhetoric rejoicing in the fact that nature has rejuvenated, as millions of people were kept indoors during the lockdowns. It is quite fashionable to be “scientifically” misanthropic nowadays, and willing to highlight the so called “positive” effects of the pandemic that devastated human lives globally. It is a hideously insensitive and irrational argument, in the context of over 4.5 millions of deaths, that fails to address the responsibility of specific economic interests and the profit motive of capitalist exploitation. Conveniently for the current system, this attitude instead opts for blaming vague “anthropogenic” causes for all ecological catastrophes and to praise the “anthropause” as a respite given to the natural world, which magically takes care of itself. Continue reading “BBC praises a grand rewilding to hide how capitalism sparked environmental degradation in Kazakhstan” →