ComradeEd

410bdf didn't post yesterday, this was once too many times, so I decided to take down Hexbear in anger.

(This post is testing federation, I seemingly cannot comment)

In Anna Louise Strongs wikipedia article, they write:

In 1936, she returned once again to the United States. Quietly and privately distressed with developments in the USSR (The "Great Purges"), she continued to write for leading periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation and Asia

This has three footnotes, 4, 9, and 24.

4 is a link to Peoples World, it writes:

In 1936 she returned home to the U.S., quietly and privately distressed with political developments in the USSR after Joseph Stalin launched the Great Purge

Sounds like Wikipedia copied them doesn't it? One may be inclined to try and figure out where Peoples World got this from, that's the point of checking out the sources in the first place. Unfortunately PW doesn't footnote it, but maybe they write at the bottom where they got it from... Let's check it out!

Adapted from Wikipedia.

LMAO! Wikipedia cites Wikipedia as a source.

24 Is about the trials of the "Zinoviev-Trotskist Center", but nothing in it (at least to me) seems to back up their claim of being distressed with the developments. Rather, it seems to me like she writes in the opposite direction, in favor of the trials.

I have made what I believe to be the first reflowable version of "This Soviet World" by Anna Louise Strong.

This book is incredibly fucking good. READ IT. (please)

Download my EPUB version: https://comlib.encryptionin.space (or https://archive.org/details/this-soviet-world-anna-louise-strong)

The heads of government in America are not the real rulers. I have talked with many of them from the President down. Some of them would really like to use power for the people. They feel baffled by their inability to do so; they blame other branches of government, legislatures, courts. But they haven’t analyzed the real reason. The difficulty is that they haven’t power to use. Neither the President nor Congress nor the common people, under any form of organization whatever, can legally dispose of the oil of Rockefeller or the gold in the vaults of Morgan. If they try, they will be checked by other branches of government, which was designed as a system of checks and balances precisely to prevent such “usurpation of power.” Private capitalists own the means of production and thus rule the lives of millions. Government, however chosen, is limited to the function of making regulations which will help capitalism run more easily by adjusting relations between property and protecting it against the “lawless” demands of non-owners. This constitutes what Marxists call the dictatorship of property. “The talk about pure democracy is but a bourgeois screen,” says Stalin, “to conceal the fact that equality between exploiters and exploited is impossible. . . . It was invented to hide the sores of capitalism . . . and lend it moral strength.” [Stalin, Leninism, I, 46]

CW: Mentions of rape, death and blood

Quoting from "Book of the Hopi" (page 268-9):

It happened in 1832, when preparations were being made for Soyál.
Seaknoya's uncle, a young boy then, and Tuvengyamsi's grandmother, Naquamuysee [Prayer Feathers Flown Bright], who was a small girl, both remembered that it was about four or five days before Soyál when he Castillas made camp near the earth dam, where they could water their horses, and were given food by the Hopis.
Then, on that terrible morning, the Castillas rode into the Snake plaza. They blew their brass horn. Then they began to run through the streets after children, firing their eamunkinpi [guns] at the men who ran out of the kivas. Seaknoya's uncle saw Hoyentewa [One Who Inspects Traps] shot while he was trying to protect his son, and watched a Tewa or Taos warrior with the Castillas scalp Wuhwuhpa [Long Ear of Corn]. Naquamuysee watched a Castilla soldier grab a little boy named Lomaesva. At the same time his father rushed out of a kiva and threw a blanket around the boy to protect him. While the two men were fighting for possession of the boy, a second Spaniard came up and shot his gun. The boy and his father fell to the ground and blood began to ran out. But in a little while Lomaesva crawled out from under the blanket alive. His father lay there; he was dead.
A little girl named Kaeuhamana [Corn Girl] was sitting on a housetop with her sister Neseehongneum [One Who Carries a Flower on the Day of the Ceremony], both wrapped in a blue blanket, when a soldier captured her. She was about seven years old. A little boy about the same age, Masavehma [Butterfly Wings Painted], was captured too. Altogether there were fourteen children captured, and with them was the young wife of Wickvaya [One Who Brings]. Two Castillas were killed during the fight. The Hopis later buried them in a dry wash east of Oraibi and drove stock over the graves.
The Castillas then drove off the Hopi sheep and with the fourteen captured children marched back to Santa Fe. All during the trip the soldiers raped the young wife of Wickvaya. Masavhejma remembered that Corn Girl, being so little, was tied on a horse so she wouldn't fall off. But the horse ran away. The rope came loose. And Corn Girl fell and was kicked so hard that the horse's hoof left its print under her chin.
In Santa Fe all the children were sold as slaves to different families. Masavehma was bought by a Spanish couple, loaded in that thing with two wheels, and carried to their home far away at La Junta [Colorado?]. He was lucky. The Spanish couple had no children. They gave him the name of Tomás, dressed him in warm clothes, fed him good food, and treated him like their own son. The work he liked to do was to gather the eggs laid by their many kowakas [chickens], and to drive the molas [mules] to pasture. In a little while he forgot his homesickness and liked it all right.
Meanwhile, in Oraibi^1^, Wickvaya was wild with anger and determined to git his young wife back. So he packed piki and tosi in a bag which he made out of her wedding dress, and started out on foot alone. He went to Ceohhe [Zuñi], and from there to Cheyawepa [Isleta], where he met a man who spoke Spanish. This man went with him to see the Spanish captain in the governor's palace in Santa Fe. There it was explained to him that the children captured by his soldiers were Hopis, not enemy Navajos. The captain was sick in bed, but this made him so angry that he jumped out of bed, called all his soldiers, and sent them for all the captured children and the people who had bought them. Wickvaya waited and waited until his young wife was brought into the crowded room. Seeing hi, his wife was so ashamed at that which had been done to her that she covered her head with her blanket, and it was more shame and sadness for Wickvaya to see her shame.
Masavehma was finally brought in by his new parents. All were closely questioned by the captain. Finding that the boy had not been mistreated, he released the Spanish couple. They hugged Masavehma and went home weeping without him. Then he, with all the other captured children, was taken to witness the punishment meted out to their captors. Some were stood up in front of a grave they had dug, and shot. Others were dragged to death by wild horses. Still others had iron balls with sharp spikes tied to their feet, so that as they waled the spikes dug into their feet. At the same time each was forced to keep throwing another spiked iron ball secured to a chain over his shoulder, the spikes digging into his back at every throw. All this was witnessed by the Hopi children so that they could tell their people how the wicked soldiers had been punished for mistaking peaceful Hopis for marauding Navajos.

^1^ Village of the Hopi

Although, as much as I would extremely like this to be true, I personally am not quite certain the Spanish would actually do something like that?

Nevertheless, the history of the Natives, is filled with gruesome, sad things (page 253):

The hated mission at Oraibi is still referred to as the "slave church." The huge logs used as its roof beams had to be dragged by Hopis from the hills around Kísiwu, forty miles northeast, or from the San Francisco mountains, nearly a hundred miles south. Still today the Hopis point out the great ruts scraped into the soft sandstone of the mesa top by the ends of the heavy logs as they were dragged into place. Enforced labor not only built the church but supplied all the needs of the priests. Tradition recalls that one padre would not drink water from any of the springs around Oraibi; he demanded that a runner bring his water from White Sand Spring near Moencopi, fifty miles away. The pardes' illicit relations with young Hopi girls were common in all villages, and the punishment for Hopis sacrilege and insubordination added to the growing resentment. It is recorded that at Oraibi in 1655, when Friar Salvador de Guerra caught a Hopi in "an act of idolatry," he trashed the Hopi in the presence of the whole village till he was bathed in blood, and the poured over him burning turpentine.

Also: "a change in the ownership of the vast wilderness was indicated‒a change to be effected not by the sword and cross, but by the dollar, the greatest weapon for conquest and colonization ever known"

I am reading the meeting notes for the 1976th meeting of the UN General Assembly. And I found this funny/based part I wanted to share.

395. The question we have before us is China's place. The majority of us recognize that China is represented by the People's Republic of China. If the United States delegation wishes not to have the representative of Chiang Kai-shek expelled, it is very welcome to take him and seat him in the place of the American delegation