2020: the year in U.S. Hypocrisy

After being on hiatus for the vast majority of 2019, U.S. Hypocrisy blog returned with a vengeance during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. From the Democratic establishment’s attempt to push ‘Stop & Frisk’ architect Michael Bloomberg as an alternative to Bernie Sanders, to the Trump administration’s attempt to scapegoat the People’s Republic of China for the U.S.’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve been there every step of the way. Before we enter into a new year full of unpredictability, we’re counting down the 10 best blog posts of the year 2020.

10. Congratulations America. You’re #1!

Congratulations are in order for the United States of America for managing to be #1 in all the areas that count. The rest of the world could only dream of reaching such levels of accomplishment. The United States is the world’s #1 exporter of death, the world’s #1 incarcerator, and the world’s #1 home of mass shootings.

9. The Cuban Revolution and its Achievements in the Face of Heinous Aggression

A 1985 interview has resurfaced of Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders saying that “not everything about the Cuban Revolution was bad”, and rival candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg are pouncing on these comments, citing them as evidence of Sanders having an “affinity for a dictator.” They have condemned even the slightest praise of any of the programs Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro put into place, even his literacy program for the sizable portion of the population, many of them Afro-Cubans, who could not read. In reality, the literacy campaign and its success were but one of many aspects of the Cuban Revolution that should not only be applauded, but openly celebrated.

8. The Ongoing Nakba: 72 Years since the expulsion of the Palestinians

May 15 marks the 72nd anniversary of the Nakba, when Jewish immigrants from Europe conquered 78% of the British mandate of Palestine, forcibly expelled the vast majority of its Arab inhabitants, and created what is today known as the state of Israel. For the Palestinian Arabs – who are today either locked away in an open air prison camp in Gaza, living under occupation in the West Bank, or living in exile in another country – the events of the years 1947-1949 were the culmination of a process that began in the 1880s when the first immigrants from Europe began to call Ottoman-controlled Palestine their home. The Balfour Declaration issued in 1917 upon Great Britain’s seizure of Palestine in the aftermath of World War I designated Palestine the national homeland of the world’s Jews. It disregarded entirely the will of the vast majority of the people who at that time resided in this newly declared homeland.

7. Death Squad Supporter Ana Navarro Blames ‘Socialism’ for Poor Democratic Showing

Former GOP strategist and The View host Ana Navarro, though a Republican, has been a fervent supporter of Joe Biden since before he even announced his run for the presidency last year. This year she was chosen to serve as director of Latino outreach for the Biden campaign. Since Election Day, Navarro has been going on seemingly every corporate news network helping to push the narrative that Democrats didn’t do as well as previous nominees with Latino voters do to fear of “socialism”. (This, in spite of the fact that Joe Biden is an arch anti-socialist who lost the Latino vote in the Democratic primaries earlier this year to a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist”). Not one of these networks have disclosed that Navarro may have ulterior motives for pushing this narrative. An investigation by The Gray Zone earlier this year revealed that Navarro and her husband Al Cárdenas, a GOP lobbyist, have worked hand-in-hand with some of the most corrupt right-wing governments in Latin America.

6. UNESCO’s General History of Africa [documentary series]

The BBC recently uploaded the first 15 episodes of it documentary series, The History of Africa with Zeinab Badawi, to stream on YouTube in their entirety free of charge. The series is based on the 8-volume General History of Africa originally published by UNESCO from 1981-1993. Despite being produced by a Western network, the documentary never strays too far from the books on which the series is based. Zenaib Badawi, a Sudanese-British radio and television journalist, covers the earliest origins of all humanity in east and southern Africa some 200,000 years ago. She discusses the African origins of civilization in the Nile Valley and the conclusions of those who compiled the second volume of the General History of Africa in 1974 (such as Cheikh Anta Diop) that those who created the ancient civilization of Kemet were in fact Black people. Other civilizations chronicled throughout the series include the extraordinary kingdoms of Kush, Meroe, Axum and Great Zimbabwe, along with the West African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai.

5. Celebrating the Life of Ida B. Wells

For Women’s History Month, we celebrate the life and legacy of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose life’s work documenting the horrors of lynching of African Americans in the United States undoubtedly helped pave the way for the American Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. Wells was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) in 1909, and she became an ardent opponent of Jim Crow segregation in the American South from the earliest days of the implementation of the wicked separate but equal false doctrine.

4. U.S. Presidents Have Killed 30 Million People in Dozens of Countries Since the End of WWII

Americans of all political stripes and ideologies are today celebrating unconfirmed reports of the death of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea leader Kim Jong Un. His death, they claim, is a cause for celebration because he was “cruel to his own people.” Never mind for a moment the 2.2 million people languishing in U.S. prison camps subject to manual unpaid labor and solitary confinement recognized by psychologists as a form of torture, or the fact that the only news most Americans read about North Korea is from pro-war media outlets like CNN. Most of the people celebrating the reports of death were completely silent in 2015 when their own country bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital, killing and maiming dozens of innocent civilians, or when the U.S. invasion of Iraq was estimated to have killed some 2.4 million people. Instead these same people choose to focus on the fact that the DPRK is not a paradise for all those who dwell in it. One wonders, how would the United States have fared if it had been subjected to 60+ years of the most brutal economic sanctions, the elimination of 30% of its population and the destruction of its entire infrastructure in one of the bloodiest wars in human history? When a U.S. President dies, the corporate media fawns over them and looks back at their legacies through a rose-colored lens, all the while the trail of bodies left in their wake are completely ignored.

3. What Black Lives Matter Has Accomplished in 3 Weeks

Make no mistake about it. The charges against Derek Chauvin and the other 3 Minneapolis police officers who killed George Floyd would not have been brought had hundreds of thousands of people not taken to the streets to demand it. The ruling class, particularly in the United States, has never moved in the direction of justice without being forced by a mass movement of working class people.

2. Michael Bloomberg and Donald Trump are One and the Same

For the past 3 years, as US President Donald Trump has instituted travel bans on Muslim-majority countries, instructed US police to brutalize people they arrest, waged war on the nation’s working poor, assaulted the rights of women and LGBT people, and locked immigrant children in cages while separating them from their families, Democrats have rightly decried him as a racist, a tyrant and a bigot. As the Democratic primaries heat up and voters decide who they will choose to take on Donald Trump and send him into the dustbin of history, Democratic Party leaders are in danger of exposing their “resistance” as the charade that it is by nominating someone who is everything they so forcefully denounce in Trump: former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

1. 75 Years Ago, the Soviet Union Saved the World from Hitler’s Nazi Regime

According to the widely propagated American narrative, World War II was won by the brave and heroic sacrifice of US soldiers who selflessly signed up or were drafted to fight against fascism in Europe. Americans got involved in this war for altruistic reasons and, had it not been for their entrance into the war, Europe would have been ruled in perpetuity by the murderous Nazi regime. Had the U.S. (with a little bit of help from its European allies) not come to the rescue, the narrative goes, the Third Reich would have succeeded in ruling Europe from Britain in the west to Russia in the east. This is a fabrication of history. Fascism fell not at the hands of the Americans, but as a consequence of the immense man-power and determination of the Russians and the Red Army of the Soviet Union. An astounding 90% of all Nazis who met their end in WWII were killed by the Soviets. The much-hyped “D-day” in which the Americans and the British opened up a second-front against Hitler in the west in June, 1944 was of overall little significance to the outcome of the war, as the German army by that time was retreating to Berlin with the Soviets hot on their trail. In Russia the vicious invasion of the Nazis and their defeat by the brave men and women who took up arms is known as the Great Patriotic War, and May 7^th will mark the 75^thanniversary of the end of the war in Europe.