CounterVortex Podcast

The bellicose and authoritarian Russian state's propaganda exploitation of the anarcho-pacifist novelist Leo Tolstoy is an obvious and perverse irony. But a less obvious irony also presents itself. Like all fascist regimes, that of Vladimir Putin is stigmatizing and even criminalizing homosexuality and other sexual "deviance." Following alarming reports of "concentration camps" for gay men in the Russian republic of Chechnya, Moscow began to impose an anti-gay agenda nationwide. A 2020 constitutional reform officially enshrined "traditional marriage," while a "gay propaganda law" imposes penalties on any outward expression of gay identity, resulting in police raids on Moscow gay bars. The "LGBT movement" has been designated a "terrorist organization"; media depictions of same-sex love are banned as "deviant content." Yet the venerable littérateur now glorified as a symbol of Russian nationalism may have himself been gay. In Episode 249 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg interviews Javier Sethness Castro, author of Queer Tolstoy: A Psychobiography (Routledge 2023).

In one sickening propaganda display, Tolstoy's photo was dramatically plastered by Putin's regime onto a barrier fence erected around the Mariupol Drama Theater—a civilian refuge that was bombed during the initial invasion of the Ukrainian port city in March 2022, leading to hundreds of deaths (including many children). By contrast, Marta Albertini, Tolstoy's great-grand daughter, hosts Ukrainian refugees in Switzerland.

Sethness Castro notes that some contemporary Ukrainian ant-war writers are in the actual tradition of Tolstoy. Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian poet and war-crimes investigator who was killed in a missile attack on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk in 2023, wrote the book Dom's Dream Kingdom, narrated from the perspective of a dog who watches his human family struggle over Ukrainian history. This is reminiscent of Tolstoy's short story "Strider," an early harbinger of the animal rights movement, which is written from the perspective of a horse.

Another link to Tolstoy in the news is the British Columbia government's recent apology to the Doukhobors, a Russian dissident religious sect, for forcibly assimilating their children in the 1950's. Tolstoy supported the Doukhobors, who were persecuted by the Tsars for their pacifism, and even wrote Resurrection (1899) to finance their migration from the Russian Empire to Canada. His son Sergei Tolstoy and biographer Aylmer Maude led the resettlement, and Peter Kropotkin (another paradoxical anarchist aristocrat) also encouraged it.

A reassessment of Tolstoy's sexuality is apropos at this moment in light of recent challenges raised against millennia of Christian homophobia. In any case, Tolstoy's anti-militarism provides important perspectives for our current moment, with multiple genocides ongoing, and humanity on the knife's edge due to the risk of escalating regional wars in both Europe and the Middle East.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

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With Lebanon under bombardment and the world awaiting Israel's response to the Iranian missile attacks on its territory, fears mount that Iran's nuclear facilities could be targeted—which, in addition to being an environmental disaster in its own right, could represent the crossing of a moral threshold toward the use of nuclear weapons. So two theaters of the world conflict—the Middle East and Ukraine—now constitute a looming nuclear threat. Meanwhile, the other horsemen of the apocalypse continue their relentless advance—climate change, cyber-based disinformation and the ultimate replacement of humanity by artificial intelligence. In Episode 246 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg looks for glimmers of hope in emerging signs of human resistance—such as the East Coast dockworkers' strike, which is demanding a ban on all automation at the ports.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

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In the first CounterVortex meta-podcast of February 2018, we noted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' decision to advance the minute hand of its Doomsday Clock to two minutes of midnight, citing the threats of nuclear weapons, climate change and "cyber-based disinformation." The clock was most recenty moved to 90 seconds to midnight in January 2023, in light of the Ukraine war—the closest it has ever been. The clock did not move forward in 2024, despite Israel crossing the genocidal threshold in Gaza—a conflict now spreading to Lebanon, with potential to ignite the entire Middle East and even the world. The threat of Iran being drawn into the conflict could bring its patron Russia nose-to-nose with Israel's patron, the United States. This comes just as Vadimir Putin has announced a revision to Russia's nuclear weapons doctrine, allowing a first strike if its territory is atacked even by a non-nuclear state that is backed by a state with nuclear weapons. This appears to add frightening credibiity to the mounting nuclear threats from Moscow. All this as the "normal" functioning of the capitalist system conintues to compel the apocalypse. The some 50 left dead by Hurricane Helene in the US South are among hundreds killed in extreme weather events around the world in recent days—obvious signals of global climate destabilization. The multi-facetated systemic crisis portends imminent human extinction.

Amid all this, small efforts at Jewish-Arab co-existence by the besieged peace camp within Israel point to the potential for the ongoing protests against Netanyahu to take on an explicit anti-war character. Similarly, small steps by cities around the world to expand space for the human organism and human-powered transport begin to callenge the hegemony of the fossil-fuel economy. In Episode 245 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg makes the case that such measures, however seemingly modest, constitute a countervortex to humanity's general doward spiral toward devastating war, ecological collapse and fascism.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

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Once-time peacenik icon Tulsi Gabbard has joined Robert F. Kennedy Jr in defecting to the now openly fascist and even Nazi-embracing MAGA camp—actually becomng members of the Trump transition team. Meanwhile, the Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, likewise enamoured of Vladimir Putin and the dictators in his orbit (including mass murderer Bashar Assad), is being represented by a former Trump attorney in her bid to get on the ballot in swing state Nevada. Beyond the threat that she could serve as a spoiler and throw the election to Trump, this raises questions about the cooptation of segments of the American left by MAGA-fascism. It is no longer just the old-school sectarian "tankie" left that's in danger of taking the fascist lure in a Red-Brown alliance, but the pacifist, cannabis-friendly "green" left as well. In Episode 244 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg raises the alarm.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

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Four Black nationalists affiiated with the Uhuru Movement, an arm of the African People's Socialist Party (APSP), are on trial for acting as agents of a Russian propaganda network, in what they are calling "the free speech trial of the century." Regardless of whether their activities were protected by the First Amendment, the case reveals the very strangest of political bedfelows. Tucker Carlson, who similarly serves as a conduit for Russian propaganda, is also mentioned (although not charged) in a new federal indictment. Carlson is scheduled to appear onstage with JD Vance later this month, and recently hosted an uncloseted Nazi-nostalgist on his Twitter program. The absurd irony of the APSP platforming Kremlin demonization of Ukraine as a "Nazi" state is heightened by Russia's serial massacres of Black Africans in its new military adventures on the continent. The Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), which seemingly cultivated Uhuru/APSP, is similarly cultivating white supremacists, who are overtly Trump-aligned and marched at the Charlottesville hate-fest in 2017. The ultimate stateside beneficiary of this Kremlin-orchestrated propaganda effort is of course Donald Trump—who as president in 2020 sought to unleash the military against that year's Black Lives Matter uprising. Yet while too many "radicals" take the Kremlin bait, once-reviled "liberals" like the National Urban League actually take a more progressive position on Russia and Ukraine. In Episode 243 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg explores how the American radical left went through the proverbial looking glass, including with analogies from the (last) Cold War.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

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Amid global protests over the genocide in Gaza, the hypertrophy of digital technology and its colonization of every sphere of human existence contnue to advance, portending the ultimate eclipse of human culture and real life, the death of literacy, and the hegemony of saturation propaganda. While the Arab Revolution of 2011 was facilitated through social media, those same platforms are today being used as conduits for propaganda and disinformation lubricating the reconsolidation of dictatorships. This is all about to get much worse—with propaganda especially getting exponentially more sophisticated—through the advent of artificial intelligence. What is urgently mandated—ultimately, even to be able to effectively oppose genocides and dictatorships—is a revolution of everyday life, reclaiming human reality from digital totalitarianism. The uprising in El Salvador against the mandatory imposition of Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 still stands as a glimmer of hope, pointing the potentiality of this kind of revolution—even if the aspiring autocrat Nayib Bukele, who made Bitcoin a national currency, put down the uprising and is now consolidating an authoritarian regime. Bill Weinberg rants against the digital Borg in Episode 242 of the CounterVortex podcast.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 69 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 70!

With anti-Semitic and Islamophobic violence in the US both rising since Israel began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, it is incumbent upon Palestine solidarity activists not to play into this dynamic by engaging in rhetoric and tactics that demonize Jews as the "other." Cynical weaponization of the accusation of anti-Semitism by Zionist propaganda increases rather than decreases our responsibillity to be clear about recognizing and opposing actual anti-Semitism. Alas, in cases from Chicago to Seattle to Philadelphia to Washington DC, activists have failed to make this critical distinction—not only providing propaganda ammo to Israel's supporters, but displaying a paradoxical point of convergence with the MAGA right. In Episode 241 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg rises to the odious task of calling them out.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 69 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 70!

In Episode 240 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses China's hubristic plans for massive expansion of its nuclear power sector—and notes that some of the new plants are slated for the southern province of Guangdong, which in recent years has seen repeated outbursts of protest over land-grabs and industrial pollution as well as wildcat labor actions (and was, in fact, the site of a nuclear accident in 2021). China's expropriated peasant class has been left behind by the breakneck industrialization of the past decades, and may prove a source of resistance to the new thurst of nuclear development that would further accelerate it—despite the current crackdown on dissent.

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Production by Chris Rywalt

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In Episode 239 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg provides an overview of the protest waves and popular uprisings going on across the planet—in Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, China, Serbia, Venezuela, and in Israel. This as worldwide protests in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza continue. Amid ongoing protests aganst Netanyahu in Israel, there have also been protests against Hamas in Gaza. Despite internal dangers and contradictions in all these upsurges, there is a sense that we could be approaching a revolutionary moment such as that seen in 2011—the year of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. And with the planet on an accelerating trajectory toward world war, the linking of these upsurges through conscious solidarity and the infusion of anti-war content to their demands is urgently mandated.

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In Episode 238 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg takes stock of the Democratic ticket's new vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and the role he played as Minnesota governor in two of the major activist struggles in the North Star State over the past years—the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, which began in Minneapolis; and the fight against Line 3, which delivers Canadian shale oil to US markets, and imperils the ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe indigenous people.

MAGA excoriates Walz for his supposed coddling of the "rioters" in 2020, when in fact the National Guard troops he mobilized committed human rights abuses. On the other hand, he did open a civil rights investigation into the Minneapolis police department, finally resulting in a consent decree mandating "changes to address race-based policing." Similarly, Walz capituated to the oil interests on Line 3, which went operational in 2021. But despite this betrayal, he has won plaudits from progressives for his policies in support of labor and decarbonization of the state econmy. And the cannabis legalization bill he signed in 2023 expicitly recognizes the sovereign powers of Native American nations, allowing a cannabis economy to take hold on the state's Anishinaabe lands.

Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

Production by Chris Rywalt

We ask listeners to donate just $1 per weekly podcast via Patreon -- or $2 for our new special offer! We now have 66 subscribers. If you appreciate our work, please become Number 67!