Chaos and the Anti-Thread

[Chuckie]

Yes, phone scammers are a plague these days. I've had several such calls myself already, but as soon as they get even the slightest hint that I don't trust them or that I know what game they are playing, they just bluntly hang up. And reporting the number to the authorities is futile, because it'll be a spoofed number.

Who knows how many decent people the fucking scumbags have already conned...

Amen to that: they have no shame at all...One has to fall pretty low to be able to face a mirror under those circumstances.

[Aragorn]

Amen to that: they have no shame at all...One has to fall pretty low to be able to face a mirror under those circumstances.

And no conscience. I often wonder how these people can live with themselves.

[Chuckie]

CNN headline: Trump left classified documents open on his desk!

My reaction is omigod that deserves the death penalty. I'm serious a headline?

I once wrote on a security log that the reason I was there was to lie, cheat, and steal. I was reprimanded for not taking things 'seriously'.

[Diabolical Boids]

What were they classified as?

Don't bother to answer, you don't know. No one knows.

It's a hoax. Just the spread of a media generated hoax.

That's the spread of propaganda and the more it is spread the stupider the population grows. And while the simple minded may think I'm mounting a defense of Trump (because they are SO Predictable) I'm summing up an indictment of the rampant gleeful ignorance in America. Our rate of illiteracy is appalling and seemingly people revel in it. The National Inquirer Folks. T

Literally every document and piece of paper in the District has a classification. Everything is a classified document. A gum wrapper could be a classified document. I have a pile of classified documents on my desk. They are receipts from lunches with some information scribbled on the back. Anyone who has worked for a governmental agency knows this and to state otherwise makes them a liar.

These people like to pretend they know what top secret documents are, but doesn't that rather defeat the purpose of classifying them as top secret if everyone knows their importance?

From menus to temporary direction placards to daily staff memos and inhouse itineraries. That doesn't mean they are secret, top secret, matters of national, economic, or martial importance, or even remotely important or even interesting. Any place else 90 percent of them would be disposable like junk mail.

Legally and governmentally speaking classification refers to a filing and accounting system. It's how the mass of paper generated daily is filed--everything is given a classification from not important to the highest secret security. All classified. The term classified document means nothing because it never reveals the actual classification. Most of the classified documents are known to the public and pose no threat.

The system is set up that way because every scrap of paper may potentially end up in an archive or a judicial proceeding. Not because they are potentially dangerous. There's very little danger in the Russians seizing a White House lunch menu. Which is classified as "slated for the National Archive' or library of Congress.

Classification does not mean importance or security. It means 'where to look for a document.' Or 'Where the document is going.'

Importance like secret or top secret are the GRADE of the documents. How much of a danger they pose is graded.

Matters of national security are curated by different agencies depending on grade. A president really cannot walk off with really important documents that put the nation at risk. Not Trump nor Biden. That is why nothing has ever come from this 'classified document' nonsense. The media and its hapless brainwashed audience keeps the classified document hoax in play.

Leaving a classified document on a desk could mean they left the minutes of a daily staff meeting out. Because the media twists things and people in America are willing to be THAT ignorant. But boy do we have a lot of Karma rebounding back at us. Or cause and effect if you prefer.

One of the closely kept REAL classified top secret artifacts is the US Nuclear codes. Yet the woke and the ignorant seem to know all about them!!! Who has them, who shouldn't have them, and how easily they can be deployed. Isn't that amazing?

Nuclear Codes. No one knows them. No one is an actual possession of them. They are like a bank account. You can have the means to access the account but the bank can cut off access anytime.

It doesn't matter who has them. The Ignorant have a favorite bed time story they are some numbers typed out with an old fashioned type writer and the president carries them around in his pocket, carelessly leaves them on his desk, ready to be stolen by a spy. Like a combination to a locker or a safe. Seriously you cannot be any dumber than the media who spreads this stuff and people who pick it up and run with it.

This is the only thing we know about Nuclear Codes and its twice as much as what they think they know about classified documents:

They exist. Maybe.

The Codes change, daily, perhaps every 12 hours or randomly.

They are codes randomly generated by a computer, then imbedded on something called the Gold card. No one ever knows what they are in that way.

The nuclear codes are less important than the security number of the card. Which also changes.

The card is only read by a digital reader. No one knows the codes on the card. Losing it means nothing. No one knows what the card looks like or the precise technology associated to it.

It isn't a document, or classified, no matter how much they'd like to convince you other wise. Its's a key and falls under military jurisdiction.

Anything else is just disinformation pushed by people who want anyone who disagrees with them to be jailed and suffer the death penalty because someone hurt their feelings. Why don't they just put their brown shirt on and have at it?

I don't know if we can return to Nazi Germany as fast as the current war mongers in America would like but it's not for lack of trying.

[Chuckie]

From publication Responsible Statecraft:

Could the war in Ukraine spoil US-South Africa ties?
The conflict has been tough for bilateral relations, but some experts see opportunities for cooperation amid the tensions.


by Connor Echols

In the early days of December, 2022, a Russian ship docked at South Africa’s largest naval base. The Lady R had turned off its transponders as it neared the port, where it arrived under the cover of darkness.

Despite the Cold War-esque precautions, word of the ship’s arrival in Simon’s Town quickly got out, provoking a backlash from Western states eager to isolate Russia. South Africa, as it often has in the past year, defended its right to maintain ties with all superpowers as part of its policy of neutrality, and the controversy seemed to blow over as quickly as it had begun.

But then a new allegation emerged: The United States started to say behind closed doors that South Africa had loaded weapons onto the Lady R during its three-day port call. Knowing that such an allegation could prove disastrous, Pretoria dispatched a high-level delegation to Washington in early May.

The goal of the trip was to show that South Africa was taking the allegations seriously and wanted to avoid damaging its ties with the United States, according to Stanley Makgohlo, the counsellor political at South Africa’s embassy in Washington.

“As a supporter of peace [in Ukraine], we cannot leave something like this unattended,” Makgohlo argued, noting that the envoys told U.S. officials that President Cyril Ramaphosa planned to open an investigation into the incident.

But, just as the delegation returned home, the U.S. ambassador to Pretoria called a press conference and took the allegation public.

“We are confident that weapons were loaded onto that vessel, and I would bet my life on the accuracy of that assertion,” said Amb. Reuben Brigety, adding that he would like to see Pretoria start “practicing its non-alignment policy.”

The allegation had an immediate effect on the South African rand, driving the currency’s value down by nearly five percent against the U.S. dollar — a record low. According to South African officials, Brigety later “apologized unreservedly” for the accusation, but his regret appeared to be more about the public venue in which he announced his claim rather than its substance.

After the press conference, Ramaphosa, who leads the National African Congress (ANC), publicly announced an official inquiry into the allegation and appointed a retired judge to lead it. Experts have expressed doubts about the accusation, noting that Pretoria has an onerous and transparent process for arms transfers and that the country’s biggest weapons maker is largely owned by Rheinmetall, a European company. But the possibility remains that a clandestine arms transfer may have taken place.

Regardless of the truth behind Brigety’s claims, the episode highlights the extent to which the war in Ukraine has strained U.S.-South African relations. Pretoria has particularly frustrated Washington with its consistent abstentions during UN votes that condemn Russia’s invasion. (Makgohlo argues that his country’s decisions were more of a “yes, but” than a no, adding that the resolutions put too little emphasis on diplomacy and peace talks.)

“American sentiment that has been expressed behind closed doors has now been made public, to the surprise and perhaps shock of South African government officials, ANC officials, and so on,” said Priyal Singh, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Pretoria. “I would say it was a long time coming.”

The split, experts say, comes down to a fundamental difference in worldviews. While the United States considers the war an unprovoked act of aggression by a revanchist power, South African leaders believe that its roots go much deeper. For the ANC, which has led the country since the 1990s, the conflict is little more than the latest proxy battle between East and West, and it is in Pretoria’s best interest to avoid picking a side.

Given the level of trade between the two countries, this seemingly academic split could have major implications, according to South African journalist John Matisson.

“It seems to me that, in all sorts of areas, we’re losing clout, we’re losing influence,” Matisson argued. “Our defense of our position is just weak.”

The battle over how to approach the war in Ukraine is far from the first touchy topic in U.S.-South Africa relations. Many in the ANC, which first took power under President Nelson Mandela in 1994, view the U.S. as a key facilitator of the former apartheid regime.

“There has always been an inherent tension in the sense that South Africa has viewed the U.S. as having been on the wrong side of history when it came to the liberation movement,” said Philani Mthembu of the Pretoria-based Institute for Global Dialogue.

This perception only grew as the U.S. “War on Terror” became a globe-spanning crusade. When South African officials told their U.S. counterparts in 2003 that they had conclusive evidence that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, Washington ignored their warnings and went forward with the invasion anyway. By the late 2000s, officials in Pretoria had grown more certain than ever that the U.S. was no better than the superpowers that had come before it.

Despite these political problems, economic ties between the two countries have flourished. This is largely thanks to South Africa’s inclusion in the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, which allows certain African countries to export a range of products to the U.S. without tariffs. (Notably, AGOA is set for a renewal in 2025, and U.S. lawmakers will get to decide if Pretoria gets to stay in the program.)

When it comes to Russia, the story is largely flipped. Economic ties between the two countries have always been weak, but the Soviet Union actively opposed apartheid and often allowed ANC officials to live and study in exile in Moscow, meaning that many of the party’s top figures have decades-old connections with the country. This is particularly true of military officials, as Gustavo de Carvalho of the South African Institute of International Affairs explained.

“Colleagues at the Department of Defense tend to have a very pro-Russia approach,” said de Carvalho, whose work focuses on Russia-South Africa relations. “The Ministry of Foreign Relations tends to be, in principle, more committed to the idea of non-alignment.”

This may help to explain why Pretoria made the particularly controversial decision to hold military exercises with Russia on the anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine. Notably, Makgohlo argued that these exercises were planned “way in advance” and noted that his country had also held exercises with the U.S. in recent years. But such explanations have largely rung hollow in Washington.

Some see a more sinister reason for Pretoria’s insistence on maintaining close ties with Moscow. Earlier this year, reports emerged that a firm owned in part by a prominent Russian oligarch had given the ANC a donation of more than $800,000. A spokesperson for the Democratic Alliance, the main opposition party, said at the time that the money “flies in the face of South Africa’s quest for and respect for human rights.”

The response to the revelation was a stark reminder that not everyone in the country is so eager to maintain ties with Russia. As Matisson noted, business leaders and many regular South Africans fear that taking a stand against the United States at this moment risks doing more harm than good, especially when it comes to trade. And a poll from last year showed that 74 percent of ANC supporters viewed the invasion as “an act of aggression that must be condemned” — a far cry from the ANC’s position.

These controversies could become sharper as South Africa gears up for elections next year. Experts say the race is shaping up to be the closest one ever, with the ANC facing the possibility of losing power for the first time since the end of apartheid.

Foreign policy appears likely to play a larger role in these elections than it has in previous years. But the pressure is not only coming from those who want more condemnation of Russia, as Mthembu noted. If the ANC ends up having to form a coalition government, its most likely partner would be the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) — a party with an explicitly pro-Russia, anti-U.S. platform.

In other words, South Africa’s position on the war in Ukraine is unlikely to shift in ways the United States would approve of. But that doesn’t have to mean a break in relations if each side can learn to live with the other’s views on the conflict.

From a U.S. perspective, this means avoiding drastic steps like cutting South Africa out of AGOA, which would only push ANC officials further toward Russia, according to de Carvalho.

“The more one pushes South Africa to do something, the more South Africa pushes back,” he argued. “South Africa tends to be very reactive when it feels that an external power is imposing a position on the country or forcing South Africa to make choices.”

On the other hand, experts say South Africa would do well to avoid incendiary moves like its poorly timed military exercises with Russia. Some argue that Pretoria should also step up its contacts with officials in Kyiv in order to underscore the country’s neutral stance.

Improved relations could have major upsides for both countries when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine. South Africa recently joined five other African states in sending a peace mission to eastern Europe, a move that has been in the making for months, according to Mthembu.

Despite their bitter conflict, Moscow and Kyiv have reacted to the delegation with cautious optimism, a potentially promising development for Washington given recent reports that the Biden administration is considering a push for peace negotiations later this year.

As Mthembu notes, South Africa is also hosting a BRICS summit later this year that Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely try to attend, though Pretoria would no doubt face pressure to arrest Putin given the case against him for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. The BRICS grouping — a counterweight to the Western-led Group of 7 made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — will bring together many of the most powerful leaders from the Global South.

If the U.S. can avoid overly harsh condemnation of the talks and quietly influence their substance, the meetings could provide an opportunity for nations friendly to Russia to push Putin to drop some of his most ambitious demands and come to the negotiating table with Ukraine.

“All of those avenues give an opportunity to [have] a serious discussion with Russian counterparts about the potential to bring this conflict to an end,” Mthembu said.

[Chuckie]

Are we careful about how we align our philosophy and worldview?

South Africa Has Not Been Immune to Right-Wing Populism
BY
NIALL REDDY

Since the end of apartheid, South Africa's ANC has held a firm grip on power. In recent years, the party, plagued by accusations of clientelism and corruption, has been met with opposition from populist forces seeking to advance an ethno-nationalist agenda.


Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) supporters at the Siyabonga Rally in Tembisa, South Africa, 2021. (Papi Morake / Gallo Images via Getty Images)

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BRIC Nationalism Is No Alternative
GRACE BLAKELEY

Twenty-eight years in, South Africa’s democratic order is in a bad place. Warning signs are to be found everywhere one looks. Several years after Jacob Zuma’s kleptocratic presidency, the state remains mired in corruption and mismanagement and is failing to reverse a catastrophic decline in basic services and infrastructure. Its security apparatus, deeply penetrated by criminal and seditious elements, seems powerless in the face of growing political violence and gangsterism. Populist parties are gaining ground, while demagogic, anti-constitutional voices increasingly dominate social media and fuel a new wave of xenophobic violence. Polls show collapsing support for democracy and growing receptiveness to authoritarian forms of government.

All of these morbid symptoms are well chronicled in a now daily stream of commentary issuing earnest warnings and dire prognostications about the fate of our democracy. These concerns are made far more acute by the gloomy international backdrop against which they are set. According to a growing consensus among political scientists, the world is in the midst of a “third wave of autocratization” ushered in by the 2008 financial crisis. That crisis definitively concluded the long expansive phase of democratization that had begun in the 1970s. Since then, fewer and fewer countries have seen any improvement in the health of their democratic institutions, while the number of places experiencing democratic “backsliding” has shot up.


Democracy’s retreat is conterminous with the globe-spanning rise of right-wing populism. Populists now control the government in numerous countries of the Global South, including major economies such as Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Turkey. In most cases, they assumed power through free and fair elections. But they’ve wasted little time in turning on and undermining those democratic freedoms once in office. Coups and full-blown dictatorships have been rare in the current authoritarian wave — its modal form has been the hollowing out of democratic institutions from the inside by incumbent governments. Populists have also claimed power in a handful of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, and have become a major electoral force in most others, often ending decades of duopolistic control by centrist parties.

The scope of these trends suggests that they are being propelled by deep structural forces. On the Left it is common to see populism as an expression of the intractable crises of the current, neoliberal stage of global capitalism. Neoliberalism’s most salient hallmarks have been soaring inequality and petering growth. It has given rise to both an unprecedented, decades-long stagnation in living standards at the bottom of the class ladder and a historically novel scale of wealth accumulation at the top. In this reading, populism is at root a reaction to the iniquities of our current Gilded Age, one that has assumed nativist forms due to the Left’s inability to offer meaningful alternatives to market-led globalization.

If it’s true that hard-edged economic forces are driving forward the populist tide then there is every reason to fear deeply for the fate of South African democracy. Even when measured against the subpar averages of the neoliberal era, post-Apartheid South Africa’s economic record has been exceedingly dire. Growth over the last decade has been negative in per capita terms. Inequality still registers higher than any other large economy. So does unemployment, by extraordinary margins. A jobless rate hovering for decades at levels normally only seen in the most severe recessions is the grimmest and most distinctive feature of South Africa’s economic malaise.

According to most analysts, the populist turn is already well underway here. Its main incarnation until now has been the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) led by Julius Malema. When the EFF launched in 2013, its “Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian” program combined appeals to class and ethnicity in roughly equal measure. Since then, class issues have gradually fallen off in its agenda, while the racial identities it invokes have grown narrower and more chauvinistic, bounded by anti-Indian and now anti-foreign vitriol. It increasingly converges with the populist movement that gestated within the African National Congress (ANC) during Zuma’s tenure, now organized under the banner of “Radical Economic Transformation” (RET).

The “Radical Economic Transformation” faction also garbs itself in the symbolism of the Left, but its true nature is plain to see: it represents the most voraciously corrupt elements of the ANC, intent on reviving the Zuma model of statecraft in which the fiscus is treated as a giant slush fund for the accumulation of “tenderpreneurs.” In the course of the last year, the RET faction lost several key battles in its fight with the group aligned to the ANC’s current president, Cyril Ramaphosa. But its continued vitality, and capacity for disruption, were demonstrated last July when it unleashed several days of chaos on the country following Zuma’s arrest for contempt of court.

Last November’s local government elections, in which support for the ANC sunk to its lowest levels yet, saw the sprouting of smaller new populist formations and ethnic parties. Notable among them is ActionSA, led by former Johannesburg mayor Herman Mashaba. Mashaba is a self-made businessman and an open admirer of Donald Trump. He first took office in 2016 as a member of the center-right Democratic Alliance (DA), the dominant white party, but split from it three years later, after it veered into culture-war politics and began purging most of its black leadership. In 2020 he formed ActionSA around a more conventional right-populist platform of anti-corruption and strident xenophobia. That message proved popular in November, winning the party an average of 16.1 percent in the wards that it contested in Johannesburg.

With South Africa’s economic and social crises magnifying each year, and with the populist tide sweeping forward unabated around the world, even in places of far less economic distress, it’s not hard to see why so many analysts feel that it’s only a matter of time before South Africa succumbs to an authoritarian movement promising order amidst the chaos.

Populism There and Here
But as Adam Przeworski reminds us in a recent book on the global crisis of democracy, structural pressures emanating from the world system are always refracted through national political contexts. The populist wave has not been monolithic but has comprised distinct variants of populism, rooted in different social bases and developing along distinct political trajectories. It’s not clear that any of these provide a clear signposting of where South Africa is headed.

Take Northern Atlantic countries for example. Populist successes there have plainly been connected to economic polarization. Plenty of micro-level evidence links growing populist support to trade shocks and deindustrialization. But these forces have been at work for decades. We could not understand why the response to them took the form it did, when it did, without looking at the transformation of political institutions, in particular the declining vitality of party democracy and the crisis of representation to which it has given rise.

Plenty of micro-level evidence links growing populist support to trade shocks and deindustrialization.
The last several decades have seen the decline and hollowing out of mass-based political parties, on both sides of the spectrum but particularly the Left. Membership rolls have shrunk, participation has grown more fleeting and electoral turnout has diminished. Affiliated civic organizations, such as social clubs, newspapers, mutual aid societies, and, crucially, trade unions, have withered — part of a broader decline in associational life that extends down to the neighborhood and community level, leaving Western societies far more atomized. This has produced a deep “void” where once a dense thicket of institutions mediated the relationship between states and individuals.

These trends are themselves closely linked to the way that neoliberal globalization attenuated democratic life by cordoning off large areas of economic policy behind technocratic control. Social democratic parties collaborated fully in this process, which lent momentum to “Brahminization” — their parting of ways with the working class and reorientation to highly educated urban professionals. It’s no surprise that populists, who’ve harnessed the anger stoked by a detached and unrepresentative political elite, have made their largest gains in blue-collar towns and rural areas, particularly those most devastated by globalization.

It’s striking to consider how different the dynamics of mass politics have been in post-Apartheid South Africa. If one measures it from the high-water mark of popular mobilization following the downfall of Apartheid, one would of course detect clear signs of decline in the vibrancy of civil and political organizations. But no “void” has ever yawned at the center of our political space. Where one might have been, the ANC has continued to loom large.

Indeed, even as its own electoral support has slowly declined, the ANC’s membership rolls have ballooned. Between 2002 and 2007 total membership climbed from four hundred thousand to 1.2 million and has since crept higher. Some fraction of these are ghost members or passive clients, added to the rolls to inflate the delegate power of one or another faction. But even accounting for these distortions the numbers suggest a vast expansion of the ANC’s reach. And that reach doesn’t end at the boundaries of the party. The trade unions and civil society bodies in its orbit may have ceased to be organs of grassroots democracy, but many continue to operate at some kind of mass scale, with fairly deep penetration into workplaces and communities.

While mass parties were disappearing from the scene in Europe, the ANC was fusing itself with the state and using its control over public employment and procurement to become a giant engine of class formation among the historically disadvantaged. It facilitated a vast lateral flow of rents through tenders and state contracts, creating a client business class. But it also ensured a steady flow of patronage downward in the form of public jobs, smaller-scale tenders, and service delivery.

Local ANC branches, often supported by civil society groups like South African National Civic Organization (SANCO), have assumed a key brokerage role in this — interfacing with communities and managing the exchange of resources for the political support that undergirds the ANC’s hold on power. To some extent they also allow grievances to be conveyed upward, facilitating some responsiveness of the state to local needs. So rather than the citizenry being entirely cut off from political life through the loss of mediating organizations, in South Africa there has been a proliferation of local points of (indirect) contact with the state, affording representation through clientelist arrangements.

The situation is changing — fiscal constraints and factionalization are throwing the party-state into crisis and eroding the ANC’s support, but these are still nascent trends. It’s thus no surprise that the dominant expressions of populism that we’ve so far seen have emerged not in the vacuum of an emptied political space, but from within the dominant party. The EFF and RET are often likened to right-wing populisms abroad because of their authoritarian, nationalistic and increasingly xenophobic tendencies. But beyond identifying a few common traits these analogies tend not to be especially helpful. The EFF and RET are distinctive beasts occupying a very unique political niche.

Populism has not generally been the preferred choice for most large-scale capitalists, but neither has it been viewed as any kind of first-order threat.
If we’re concerned primarily with assessing their prospects, then two key points of distinction are worth highlighting. The first is that the two are offshoots of the governing party, the latter still formally a part of it. After Malema’s split from the ANC, he managed initially to maneuver his new party into a very strategic position: able to claim a provenance in the Congress movement with all the symbolic benefits that entail, but independent enough to avoid association with its dismal record in power.

The EFF sought to cast itself in the traditional role of the ANC Youth League, which Malema once led, as the radical conscience of its mother body. That position has now been lost. Driven by the sheer venality of its leadership, the EFF has re-enmeshed itself into the patronage networks of the party-state and started to openly align with the RET faction. The two are increasingly seen by commentators, and likely by the electorate, as manifestations of the same social essence.

The ties of both of these formations to the party-state will naturally limit the extent to which they are able to capitalize on anti-political and anti-elite sentiment. Outsidership has been an essential ingredient of the success of populist movements abroad, even when led by bona fide elites like Donald Trump or career politicians like Narendra Modi. They’ve almost universally put anti-corruption and demands to “drain the swamp” at the center of their platforms. Neither the EFF nor RET will have successful recourse to the same tactics. Indeed, both are already themselves tainted — quite accurately — with a stigma of corruption and this probably goes far in explaining their inability, so far, to muster broad public support beyond a militant core.


The EFF’s growth in 2021 was largely due to the post-July fallout in KwaZulu-Natal.
The EFF grew extremely rapidly in its early days, and has shown a consistent capacity for impressive street-level mobilization, but has been stagnating at the polls for the last several years. The 10.5 percent it netted in local government elections last year, a 2 percent bump from five years prior, is a poor result given a context favorable to populist messaging.

Its growth in 2021 came overwhelmingly from KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, where it benefitted — along with all other opposition parties — from the ANC’s hemorrhaging support in the wake of the July unrest (Table 1). In Gauteng and other provinces, it proved as susceptible as other major parties to collapsing turnout, which reflects poorly on its ability to capture anti-political sentiments.

Leaders of the RET faction, for their part, appear to be broadly disliked by the general public. Zuma’s approval rating when he left office was 25 percent (net -48 percent). Suspended ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule, the second most high profile RET figure, has an approval rating of around 11 percent while Malema’s is 26 percent. Compare this with Ramaphosa, whose approval rating has fluctuated between 60 and 80 percent.

The second thing that distinguishes these groups from populist authoritarians abroad is the enmity they face from dominant sections of capital. Populism has not generally been the preferred choice for most large-scale capitalists, but neither has it been viewed as any kind of first-order threat. As typified in Trump’s tax breaks, populists in government have generally shown a willingness to offset potentially harmful protectionist policies with other kinds of giveaways to big business. In some cases, like Modi’s India, the relationship between the two has been deeply congenial from the start.

Parties that don’t kowtow to ‘business confidence’ risk being branded as economic wreckers.
That won’t be the case for the EFF or RET. Both have made opposition to so-called “white monopoly capital” a defining part of their agenda. Whether it’s one they would actually stick to in power is a different question. They are in the end oligarchic movements, dominated by elites whose ability to extract rents from the state will ultimately depend on there being some measure of economic stability, which will deter any inclination to tamper with property rights. Still, a return to the untrammeled looting of state resources is not an agenda they are likely to divert from, and that means there will be no easy accommodation between them and large-scale capital.

In this sense, the EFF and RET are radical movements, even if there’s nothing progressive about them. They are a threat to dominant economic interests. Unfortunately, for them, this means they will confront the same challenges as other radical movements. In addition to facing powerful counter-mobilization from big business, they will have to contend with the latter’s structural power, stemming from its control over investment and unemployment. Parties that don’t kowtow to “business confidence” risk being branded as economic wreckers, which makes it far harder for them to appeal to middle-ground voters. In this way, capitalist opposition will not only constrain what RET populists are able to do with power, but their ability to lay hold of it in the first place.

The Limits of Middle-Class Populism
Perhaps a better place to look for precedents in trying to gauge populism’s local prospects is South Africa’s BRICS partners, Brazil and India. The populist turn in those countries has taken a very different form than that of the West. Neoliberalism shaped the broader context in which it unfolded. However, the sociologist Patrick Heller argues that the proximate causes of the realignments that brought Jair Bolsanaro and Modi to power have more to do with the ways that previous governments deviated from orthodox neoliberalism.

The Workers Party (PT) government in Brazil (2002–2018) and Indian National Congress (INC) (2004–2014) both blended neoliberal macroeconomic fundamentals with elements of welfarism and efforts to expand citizenship rights to marginalized constituencies. In India, this took the shape of a series of rights-based laws enshrining access to information, basic education, and, most important from a redistributive standpoint, the right to a hundred days of paid public employment for every rural household.

The PT’s flagship piece of welfare legislation was the famous Bolsa Familia program of conditional cash transfers. But, in fact, its most effective weapon against inequality was the progressive increases in the minimum wage, which rose by 75 percent between 2003 and 2013. Coupled with a favorable global environment, these demand-boosting policies helped to unleash rapid growth and elevate a large section of the poor into the lower rungs of the middle classes.

According to Heller, the eventual result of this was a furious political backlash from elites and the more established middle classes. This was animated by fear of intensified competition for traditionally hoarded jobs and opportunities and also by resentment at the breakdown of status hierarchies. Elites for their part resisted social policies for conventional reasons — their tendency to drain fiscal resources and weaken market dependence. The joining of these reactionary impulses produced what Heller calls “retrenchment populism” characterized by attacks on welfare and right-based legislation, but also by efforts to repress civil society and confine marginalized groups.

Recent data on voting patterns from Piketty’s World Inequality Lab seems to bear out this argument. It shows that the poor in Brazil largely remained loyal to the PT, while the party’s electoral decline was driven by the rapid desertion of voters in the top half and the top 10 percent of the income distribution. In India, the data reflect Modi’s success at consolidating the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s bases among the wealthy and upper castes ahead of his 2014 victory. But it also reflects a sudden swing toward the BJP of a significant segment of the lower castes, won largely on the basis of appeals to religious conservatism charged with anti-Muslim bigotry. Bolsonaro achieved a similar result at a smaller scale in Brazil, garnering a beachhead of poorer voters through an alliance with conservative evangelical churches.

There are tempting comparisons to be made between ANC policy and welfare-neoliberalism (ME: this explains the definition of neoliberalism) of the PT and INC. The ANC also combined extensive liberalization and macroeconomic conservatism with social policies that, in comparative terms, have been generous and highly redistributive. However, the ANC never succeeded in unlocking the kind of rapid growth that Brazil and India achieved. Its social policies have had a more palliative quality — they’ve worked to temper the extremes of South African inequality without providing a strong springboard for middle class advancement. Consequently, resentment toward social entitlements for the poor has not been a lightning rod of middle-class politicization in the ways it has in other “emerging economies.”

Nevertheless, there are signs of fairly deep middle-class discontent coalescing around other issues that are potential pressure points for populist agitation. Corruption is a key one, extreme crime rates are another. And although usually associated with working class communities, anti-immigrant sentiment appears to have gained a good deal of cross-class resonance. These are all core issues around which Mashaba’s ActionSA mounted its highly successful first campaign last November. Ward-level data suggests that Mashaba managed to appeal to an impressively diverse constituency, with ActionSA voters fairly evenly spread across suburbs and townships (Table 2).


ActionSA’s populist message drew diverse support in Johannesburg.
Despite these early successes, Mashaba and other aspiring populists will face major challenges in assembling the same kind of coalition that has powered authoritarian populisms elsewhere in the Global South. The first hurdle they face is that their potential middle-class base, which is small to begin with, is heavily segmented by racial divisions which were only deepened in these latest elections. Notwithstanding Mashaba’s small inroads, the DA’s pivot to color-blind, culture-war liberalism allowed it to recoup earlier losses and maintain its dominance of the white vote. Colored voters defected in large numbers from the party, but largely to their own race-based parties.

It’s not really clear what strategy a party like ActionSA might muster for surmounting the deep racial loyalties of the middle-class electorate. It was virulent Hindu nationalism that yoked together Modi’s middle-class coalition across regional and caste lines, providing him not only voting fodder, but also disciplined cadres. Bolsonaro similarly draws his most fanatical, street-fighting battalions from chauvinistic, military-worshiping currents of nationalism with deep purchase in the middle class. There’s no equivalent force that could play the same role in South Africa — a pan-racial nationalism has never existed here.

Yet, when we subtract white, Indian and colored voters, the South African middle class starts to look like a far flimsier foundation on which to try and build mass-based populism. What remains — the black middle class — is itself heavily divided. It comprises large parvenu layers that owe their class position to the party-state, to which they will have strong residual loyalties. Anti-corruptionism will have little traction among them. They’re likely to give far greater salience to continued opportunity hoarding by whites, but any pandering to those concerns will only alienate Mashaba from high-turnout suburbs.

Anti-immigration and tough-on-crime stances will be powerful tools for making inroads into poor constituencies.
What this means is that, for aspiring populists, plebeian votes will have to be a far larger part of their electoral math from the start. Anti-immigration and tough-on-crime stances will be powerful tools for making inroads into poor constituencies, and Mashaba has shown an ability to wield them effectively. Yet, while there is plenty of room for populist expansion among the poor, there will be strong limits to achieving the kind of majoritarian support that could subtend a full-blown “populist turn.”

In urban areas, Mashaba’s more conservative brand of populism will be contesting for space with the ethno-nationalist, class-inflected messaging of the EFF. Its growth potential will be closely governed by the pace of decomposition in ANC support. While clearly in decline, the latter remains overwhelmingly the dominant force within poor communities. Party realignment within the working class looks set to be a protracted process.

In the countryside, the dilemmas for new parties are magnified. The vast majority of the rural population lives under traditional authorities, which were originally the colonial state’s instruments of indirect rule. Today they’re a somewhat mixed bag: some abide by certain principles of consultative democracy while others, perhaps most, remain firmly in the colonial mold of concentrated patriarchal authority. For whatever reason, they’ve retained far greater legitimacy than other spheres of government (Table 3).

Because they facilitate access to mining rights and influence the voting behavior of their “subjects,” they’ve become important cogs in the ANC’s patronage machinery, helping to secure its hold over the rural population in exchange for a share of the mineral rents and supportive legislation. Excluding KZN, where the party lost considerable ground to another ethnic formation, ANC support in 2021 held up far better in traditional areas than other parts of the country, declining at half the rate it did in large metros (Table 4).


Traditional authorities have retained far greater legitimacy than other spheres of government.
Bypassing chiefly influence and re-tooling a populist message to directly appeal to rural constituents will be a significant challenge for new parties. It’s one that already seems to have deterred the EFF. Consistent with their open reversion to a politics of the belly, the party resorted to bribing a notoriously violent and corrupt Xhosa chief ahead of last year’s elections, and bragging about it on their social media.

A Parcelized Polity
In short, the dilemma facing populists, and indeed all political newcomers, is that the South African polity is parcelized by deep, cross-cutting cleavages. These have been to some extent obscured by the ANC’s expansive coalition, but will come to the fore again as that coalition fragments.

Three cleavages in particular have been highlighted in this analysis. The first and most primordial are racial and ethnic divisions. Two and a half decades of formal equality has sadly done little to erode their salience. They present the most immediate challenge to parties trying to establish a base in the more diverse urban middle classes, but may come to assume wider relevance as the bonds of the ANC’s encompassing nationalism start to wither.

Second, are the deep divides created by the party-state. The ANC’s “cadre deployment” and procurement policies have created huge supporting constituencies and undergirded the construction of sophisticated political machines with extensive reach into poorer communities. But, inevitably, they’ve also fomented intense opposition. The corruption associated with the party-state is a source of profound outrage spanning all socioeconomic fault lines and even cutting through the elite sphere. Large-scale capital views the “tenderpreneurial” business class as a pronounced threat to the integrity and partiality of the state.

Finally, there are the cleavages created by South Africa’s “bifurcated state.” These are cleavages of conscious design, originating in the colonial era but maintained and reinforced by the democratic state. The ANC’s efforts to shore up traditional authorities as little archipelagos of despotism are continuing today through two major pieces of legislation on the traditional court system, one recently passed, the other nearing enactment. Whether conscious or not, this has proven an effective electoral strategy, helping the party to secure its bases in the hinterlands as it loses its grip on the cities.

Of course these cleavages are not immutable. Political parties don’t simply reflect divisions in the society but help to shape and remake them. In the longer term it’s not at all impossible that some new populist formation will manage to cobble together a majoritarian coalition that cuts across and starts to erode these various fault lines. But for now the populist turn in South Africa looks to be a splintered one.

A takeover of the ANC by RET or some other faction remains by far the most likely near-term route to populist government. Patrimonial groups have the structural dynamics on their side — the ruralization of the party increases its relative clout at national congresses, which may well allow it to reverse the setbacks recently experienced. An RET victory, however, would immediately send the ANC’s electoral support further south and could even occasion splits in the Tripartite Alliance. The party would have to assume power in coalition (perhaps with the EFF) or with a wafer-thin majority. Unlike Modi or Bolsonaro it would have no green light from big business for undermining democratic institutions, so any movement in that direction would trigger capital flight and economic collapse.

That would create a dangerous dynamic. It could radicalize RET, forcing them to try and rapidly subvert the constitutional order rather than chipping away at it as other populists have done. But they’d likely be doing so from a position of weakness, heading a divided movement and with low levels of public support. Their success is far from guaranteed.

Ending the ANC’s unassailable electoral advantage might bring some welcome changes but it won’t deliver the structural reforms needed to seriously address poverty and unemployment.
On the other hand, fragmentation may mean stasis. The same deep political cleavages make it harder for parties to find common ground and form functioning coalitions — as we’ve already seen at the local level. Even if they could do so, none of them have a serious vision of how to lead South Africa out of the intersecting, mutually reinforcing crises in which it’s become embroiled. Ending the ANC’s unassailable electoral advantage might bring some welcome changes — like a roll back of the party-state — but it won’t in and of itself deliver the structural reforms needed to seriously address poverty and unemployment.

Those crises have the potential to force South Africa down a path toward democratic breakdown very different from the ones that other countries have followed. The most acute danger is that the country gets trapped in a downward spiral of cumulative causation, in which mounting social disorder and disinvestment feed off each other. StatsSA’s recent announcement of a 1.5 percent retraction in GDP following weeks of unrest in July already gives us a foretaste of that frightening scenario. Self-reinforcing dynamics of this kind call for bold public action to break the cycle and set the country on a new path. But it’s not clear where the agency for such action would come from.

As ever there is an alternative. The wider processes of realignment underway also create the potential for realignment on the Left. For the whole democratic period the socialist movement has been weakened by its own cleavages, which have divided an “independent left” rooted in social movements and small radical parties, from an ANC-aligned “official left” with a base in the unions and the Communist Party. The fracturing of the ANC’s coalition is making it possible for these two halves of the Left to find each other once again and instill new life into class struggle politics.

For the marriage to work, both partners will have to be prepared to make major changes. The independent left will have to move quickly past the sectarianism and movementism that have plagued it in its years of marginalization. It will have to learn to think in bold political terms. As William Shoki argues it will have to take a large leaf out of the populist book, eschewing old doctrines and crafting a message capable of relating to people’s immediate demands for political inclusion and material redress.

But, unlike other left populists, it cannot afford to confuse the message with the movement. If it is to keep its sights on the big structural changes we need, then it has to also remain committed to reviving and scaling up mass organizations, particularly those rooted in the structural power of labor. For that to happen, the organizations of the “official left” not only have to be reclaimed from the ANC, but also fundamentally reformed. Historic traditions of shop-floor democracy and social movement unionism provide models for how this might be done.

The Left may only have a very limited window in which to put class politics back onto a mass footing. As we should know all too well in this country, parties have ways of institutionalizing themselves and establishing durable bonds of loyalty within their support base. If the Left fails to secure a seat at the table as the ANC coalition gets carved up it may find itself excluded for a generation or more.

Republished from Africa Is a Country.

[Chuckie]

Reports have surfaced that say the Wagner group is in the Sudanese conflict? What should the U.S. do? Or any vested European country, or China?

The Wagner Group (Russian: Группа Вагнера, tr. Gruppa Vagnera), also known as PMC Wagner[6] (Russian: ЧВК[a] «Вагнер», tr. ChVK «Vagner»[55]; lit. 'Wagner Private Military Company'), is a Russian paramilitary organization.[6] It is variously described as a private military company (PMC), a network of mercenaries, or a de facto private army of Russian President Vladimir Putin.[6][56] The group operates beyond the law in Russia, where private military companies are officially forbidden.[57][58][56] Because it operates in support of Russian interests, receives equipment from the Russian Ministry of Defence (MoD) and uses MoD installations for training, the Wagner Group is said to be a de facto unit of the MoD or Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU.[59] While the Wagner Group itself is not ideologically driven,[60][61] various elements of Wagner have been linked to neo-Nazism and far-right extremism.[6][62][63]

[Chuckie]

Ethnocentrism is alive and well:

Damn, this year's winner of the National Spelling Bee speaks the usual native language with an average word having 35 characters in it. He's going to be on TV and I can't even bring myself to watch it.

[Chuckie]

It seems Putin is using the Hitler approach...as one leaves destroy everything?

[Wind]

Scorched-earth tactics in Stalin's footsteps.

"The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is playing out the war in Ukraine according to Stalin’s rules and may blow up the Kakhovka HPP, as Stalin blew up the Dnipro HPP, which was the most powerful hydroelectric plant in the USSR, 82 years ago. In a recent televised address, Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces had planted explosives inside the enormous Nova Kakhovka dam, which holds back the giant reservoir, and were planning to blow it up. Russia accused Kyiv of missile strikes on the dam and planned to destroy it. Ukrainian officials called this a sign that Moscow could undermine it and blame Kyiv for that. Volodymyr Zelensky called on the West to warn Russia against blowing up the Kakhovska dam, which could cause flooding of a large area of southern Ukraine.

The Stalinist crime was committed on August 18, 1941, at 8:00 p.m. to stop the advance of German troops — to make it impossible for them to cross the Dnipro and to paralyze the work of the largest hydroelectric power plant before the invaders entered Zaporizhzhia. On August 13, the engineering department of the Southern Front received a cypher message from Joseph Stalin and Borys Shaposhnikov, the Chief of the Red Army General Staff: “In case of extreme necessity, allow destruction.” Three days before the event, the engineer colonel of the Red Army, Borys Epov, who led this operation, arrived in the city. Under instructions from above, he ordered an NKVD engineer battalion to plant approximately 20 tons of explosives on the dam and blow it up and the railroad bridge across the river. Oleksiy Petrovsky, the head of the military engineering department of the headquarters of the Southern Front, carried out this criminal order.

The specific cynicism of the incident consisted of the spontaneity of its implementation and ignoring the need to inform residents about it. Moreover, even the party leadership of the city and even its military units, which arrived under pressure from the front, were not informed of Stalin’s intentions. “We were in Zaporizhzhia, when suddenly the ground shook under our feet, the air shuddered from an explosion of enormous force,” the commander of the Southern Front, Ivan Tiuleniev, remembered.

Due to the massive wave that formed after the explosion and the flood, which lasted for 2-3 days, many Red Army soldiers who were crossing to the left bank of the Dnipro at that time, as well as residents of the Dnipro villages and towns that were flooded in a few hours, died. As the residents of Zaporizhzhia, who lived along the Mokra Moskovka river, which flows into the Dnipro from the left bank, recall that after the explosion, the water did not flow into the Dnipro channel, but in the other direction. We will never know the exact number of victims because, at that time, no one counted the number of victims. According to contemporaries, from three to 100 thousand people died as a result of the destruction of the dam. Data on several thousand victims are considered more likely.

Fragmentary memories of the tragedy are preserved. A woman who lived not far from Dniprovsky Plavni recalled that the residents of this area “heard terrible screams and wails. Then everyone got boats, and almost everyone had boats there, and started rescuing the soldiers who were clinging to the tops of the trees. Many people were saved.” In this area (15 km from the dam down the Dnipro) the force of the water was almost not felt anymore because of the huge number of different lakes and small rivers, and islets that existed in this low-lying part before the constructing the Kakhovsky reservoir, took over the flood, which was formed due to undermining the dam. As it usually happened during the melting of snow in the spring.

It is a certain irony of fate that this explosion did not hinder the German troops and did not cause them any significant losses. In fact, it was not the Germans but the Soviet crossings demolished. The German military observed the consequences of the explosion through binoculars. However, the dam destruction made it difficult for the Wehrmacht to advance further in the Zaporizhzhia region.

For some time, they concealed information about the circumstances of the dam’s destruction. Even they spread false rumours about sabotage and the Wehrmacht’s responsibility for what had happened. However, later it became known who were the real executors of the DniproHPP explosion. Borys Epov and Oleksiy Petrovskyi were arrested by the counter-intelligence as saboteurs. However, after the military leadership intervention, they were released because Stalin had given the order to blow up the dam personally.

The undermining of the DniproHPP was not just the liquidation of an industrial facility but also the destruction of the major electricity supplier to the regional centre. However, after the power plant was blown up, the dam was rebuilt by the Germans less than two months later, and the power plant was operational a year later. In 1943, when the German troops were retreating, they blew up the power plant again, but only its technical part. The dam was not destroyed. Later, at the Nuremberg trials, the Soviet side tried to insidiously shift the blame for undermining the dam to the Germans, but no convincing evidence was provided.

The destruction of the DniproHPP in the summer of 1941 is one of the most tragic incidents of the “scorched earth” policy, carried out during the retreat of the Red Army to the East. The number of tragedy victims is impressive, as well as the scale of the campaign to destroy everything of value in cities and villages without the slightest need to worry about the fate of the civilian population, which was left without food supplies (fields with crops were also burned) and with destroyed infrastructure before the approach of the cold season."

Olha Movchan,

leading researcher

Holodomor Research Institute

[Chuckie]

Scorched-earth tactics in Stalin's footsteps.

exactly...weird people, man, weird.

[Wind]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbPiIwFOQtU

[Fred Steeves]

Has the Western jury reached a verdict on the morning after? No investigation required we have all we need, just like Nord Stream...

Book 'em Danno.

[modwiz]

Has the Western jury reached a verdict on the morning after? No investigation required we have all we need, just like Nord Stream...

Book 'em Danno.

More sober minds comment on the dam situation.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-5f2LKY_y0

[modwiz]

Scorched-earth tactics in Stalin's footsteps.

"The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is playing out the war in Ukraine according to Stalin’s rules and may blow up the Kakhovka HPP, as Stalin blew up the Dnipro HPP, which was the most powerful hydroelectric plant in the USSR, 82 years ago. In a recent televised address, Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russian forces had planted explosives inside the enormous Nova Kakhovka dam, which holds back the giant reservoir, and were planning to blow it up. Russia accused Kyiv of missile strikes on the dam and planned to destroy it. Ukrainian officials called this a sign that Moscow could undermine it and blame Kyiv for that. Volodymyr Zelensky called on the West to warn Russia against blowing up the Kakhovska dam, which could cause flooding of a large area of southern Ukraine.

The Stalinist crime was committed on August 18, 1941, at 8:00 p.m. to stop the advance of German troops — to make it impossible for them to cross the Dnipro and to paralyze the work of the largest hydroelectric power plant before the invaders entered Zaporizhzhia. On August 13, the engineering department of the Southern Front received a cypher message from Joseph Stalin and Borys Shaposhnikov, the Chief of the Red Army General Staff: “In case of extreme necessity, allow destruction.” Three days before the event, the engineer colonel of the Red Army, Borys Epov, who led this operation, arrived in the city. Under instructions from above, he ordered an NKVD engineer battalion to plant approximately 20 tons of explosives on the dam and blow it up and the railroad bridge across the river. Oleksiy Petrovsky, the head of the military engineering department of the headquarters of the Southern Front, carried out this criminal order.

The specific cynicism of the incident consisted of the spontaneity of its implementation and ignoring the need to inform residents about it. Moreover, even the party leadership of the city and even its military units, which arrived under pressure from the front, were not informed of Stalin’s intentions. “We were in Zaporizhzhia, when suddenly the ground shook under our feet, the air shuddered from an explosion of enormous force,” the commander of the Southern Front, Ivan Tiuleniev, remembered.

Due to the massive wave that formed after the explosion and the flood, which lasted for 2-3 days, many Red Army soldiers who were crossing to the left bank of the Dnipro at that time, as well as residents of the Dnipro villages and towns that were flooded in a few hours, died. As the residents of Zaporizhzhia, who lived along the Mokra Moskovka river, which flows into the Dnipro from the left bank, recall that after the explosion, the water did not flow into the Dnipro channel, but in the other direction. We will never know the exact number of victims because, at that time, no one counted the number of victims. According to contemporaries, from three to 100 thousand people died as a result of the destruction of the dam. Data on several thousand victims are considered more likely.

Fragmentary memories of the tragedy are preserved. A woman who lived not far from Dniprovsky Plavni recalled that the residents of this area “heard terrible screams and wails. Then everyone got boats, and almost everyone had boats there, and started rescuing the soldiers who were clinging to the tops of the trees. Many people were saved.” In this area (15 km from the dam down the Dnipro) the force of the water was almost not felt anymore because of the huge number of different lakes and small rivers, and islets that existed in this low-lying part before the constructing the Kakhovsky reservoir, took over the flood, which was formed due to undermining the dam. As it usually happened during the melting of snow in the spring.

It is a certain irony of fate that this explosion did not hinder the German troops and did not cause them any significant losses. In fact, it was not the Germans but the Soviet crossings demolished. The German military observed the consequences of the explosion through binoculars. However, the dam destruction made it difficult for the Wehrmacht to advance further in the Zaporizhzhia region.

For some time, they concealed information about the circumstances of the dam’s destruction. Even they spread false rumours about sabotage and the Wehrmacht’s responsibility for what had happened. However, later it became known who were the real executors of the DniproHPP explosion. Borys Epov and Oleksiy Petrovskyi were arrested by the counter-intelligence as saboteurs. However, after the military leadership intervention, they were released because Stalin had given the order to blow up the dam personally.

The undermining of the DniproHPP was not just the liquidation of an industrial facility but also the destruction of the major electricity supplier to the regional centre. However, after the power plant was blown up, the dam was rebuilt by the Germans less than two months later, and the power plant was operational a year later. In 1943, when the German troops were retreating, they blew up the power plant again, but only its technical part. The dam was not destroyed. Later, at the Nuremberg trials, the Soviet side tried to insidiously shift the blame for undermining the dam to the Germans, but no convincing evidence was provided.

The destruction of the DniproHPP in the summer of 1941 is one of the most tragic incidents of the “scorched earth” policy, carried out during the retreat of the Red Army to the East. The number of tragedy victims is impressive, as well as the scale of the campaign to destroy everything of value in cities and villages without the slightest need to worry about the fate of the civilian population, which was left without food supplies (fields with crops were also burned) and with destroyed infrastructure before the approach of the cold season."

Olha Movchan,

leading researcher

Holodomor Research Institute

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCGD9dT12C0