CounterVortex Podcast

In Episode 19 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses the urgent

need for solidarity with Idlib, the last remaining stronghold of the Syrian

Revolution, and looks at heroic examples of the civil resustance there, which

is standing up the Assad regime and jihadists alike -- such as Rania Kisar,

who has been running schools and other civil institutions; and Radio Fresh,

which is continuing to broadcast in defiance of threats and censorship from

the jihadists. The weekly Friday demonstrations in Idlib continue to keep

alive the spirit of the 2011 Arab Revolution, demanding a democratic future

for Syria. In a victory for the forces organizing in solidarity with Idlib

around the world, the long-planned Assad regime invasion of the opposition-held province has been postponed (at least) in a deal negotiated by Russia and Turkey, buying time for the survival of the revolution. But those who stand in solidarity with Idlib in New York City have themselves been threatened and physically attacked by followers of sectarian pseudo-left factions that support the genocidal Assad regime. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Idlib (The Revolution Lives)" by Dylan Connor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5I9Bj2ouLk

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 18 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg looks back at the

Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement of the closing years of the Cold War, when the

Western Shoshone people, whose traditional lands were being contaminated by

the nuclear blasts at the US government's Nevada Test Site, made common cause

with the Kazakh people of Central Asia who opposed Soviet nuclear testing at

the Semipalatinsk site. Kazakh activists travelled to Nevada to join protests

at the Test Site, while Western Shoshone leaders travelled to Kazakhstan to

join protests at Semipalatinsk. This initiative eventually evolved into the

Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which as recently

as 2016 held an International Conference on Building a Nuclear-Weapon-Free

World in Astana, Kazakhstan, again attended by Western Shoshone leaders. The

story of indigenous peoples impacted by nuclear testing on their usurped lands

has come to us from several places around the world, including the French test

site at Gerboise Bleue in Algeria -- known to the local Tuareg nomads as Tanezrouft. Other examples are the Chinese test site at Lop Nur, on lands of the Uighur people in Xinjiang, and British testing on Aboriginal lands at Maralinga, in the Australian outback. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement provides an inspiring example of indigenous peoples and their supporters building solidarity across hostile international borders and superpower influence spheres. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: Kazakh Folk Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-IjHVhbTo

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 17 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses the growing repression against the Tatar people of the Crimea, and the abrogation of their autonomous government by the Russian authorities since Moscow's illegal annexation of the peninsula. This is a clear parallel to violation of the territorial rights of the Lakota people in the United States through construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the legal persecution of indigenous leaders who stood against it. The parallel is even clearer in the cases of the Evenks and Telengit, indigenous peoples of Siberia, resisting Russian construction of pipelines through their traditional lands. Yet the US State Department's Radio Free Europe aggressively covers the Tatar struggle, while Kremlin propaganda organ Russia Today (RT) aggressively covered the Dakota Access protests. Indigenous struggles are exploited in the propaganda game played by the rival superpowers. With the struggles of the Tsleil-Waututh people of British Columbia against the Trans Mountain Pipeline and the Red Lake Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota against the Line 3 Pipeline now heating up, it is imperative that indigenous peoples and their allies overcome the divide-and-rule game and build solidarity across borders and influence spheres. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Echo Of The Steppes" by Julian Kytasty

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/julian-kytasty-mn0000257615

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 16 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg discusses how Berbers, Palestinians, Sahrawi Arabs and other subjugated peoples of the Middle East and North Africa are pitted against each other by the Great Game of nation-states. Berbers in Morocco and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories face identical issues of cultural erasure, yet Moroccan support for the Palestinians and retaliatory Israeli support for the Berbers constitute an obstacle to solidarity. The Sahrawi Arabs are meanwhile fighting for their independence from Morocco in their occupied territory of Western Sahara. But the Arab-nationalist ideology of their leadership is viewed with suspicion by the territory's Berbers—leading to Arab-Berber ethnic tensions in Morocco. Algeria, Morocco's regional rival, is backing the Sahrawi struggle, while denying cultural rights to its own Berber population. But there are also signs of hope. Arabs and Berbers were united in the 2011 Arab Revolution protests in Morocco, and greater Berber cultural rights were a part of the constitutional reform won by those protests. Algeria, facing resurgent Berber protests, adopted a similar constitutional reform in 2016, and has taken other measures to expand recognition of Berber cultural rights. And the new protest wave in Morocco's Rif Mountains over the past year has united Arab and Berber. These developments point to hope for the subaltern peoples of MENA to overcome the divide-and-rule game and build solidarity. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Asirem" by Ferhat Mehenni

http://ferhat-mehenni.com/Asirem.html

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 15 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg reports on the 10-year commemoration of the 2008 Tibetan uprising held by Students for a Free Tibet in Astoria, Queens, New York City. A decade after the uprising was put down, struggles for land recovery and language preservation continue in Tibet, as well as among the Mongols, Uighurs and other indigenous peoples of the territory that constitutes the People's Republic of China. Weinberg provides an overview of these ongoing struggles, and draws parallels to related struggles in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and elsewhere in the Americas—including the movement against the Dakota Access pipeline. These parallels point to the urgent need for grassroots-to-grassroots international solidarity across superpower infuence spheres. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Liberation" by Namgyal Yeshi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiq7Da95res

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 14 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the national

protest wave that brought down president Park Geun-Hye in South Korea last

December, and asks why Americans can't similarly rise to the occasion and

launch a mass militant movement to remove Donald Trump. Given this extreme emergency—the detention gulag now coming into place, with undocumented migrants the "test population" for domestic fascism—we should be mobilizing in our millions. Apart from the broad masses being simply too distracted by gizmos and consumerism to see the walls closing in (a problem to be discussed elsewhere), Weinberg identifies two significant obstacles to unity: 1. The fundamental split in the left over the whole question of Russia and its electoral meddling; and 2. The phenomenon of party parasitism, with both the Democrats and sectarian-left factions seeking to exploit popular movements to advance their own power. He concludes by asking whether social media, which is partially responsible for getting us into this mess through its totalizing propaganda environment, can help get us out—whether it can empower us to sidestep the Dems and the alphabet-soup factions alike and work rapidly and efficiently to build a leaderless, broad-based, intransigent movement around the aim of removing Trump. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

The text of this rant is also on Bill Weinberg's Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/bill-weinberg/what-will-it-take-to-stop-trump/1839750179401741/

Music: "General Strike" by D.O.A.

http://www.suddendeath.com/bands/d-o-a

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 13 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg deconstructs Trump's executive order ostensibly ending the policy of family separation on the southern border, and demonstrates how it actually lays the groundwork for indefinite detention of migrants on military bases. The Central American peasantry, expropriated of its lands by state terror, CAFTA and narco-violence, are forced to flee north—now into the arms of Trump's new gulag. The judiciary may yet pose an obstacle to enforcement of Trump's order, but this brings us to the Supreme Court's upholding of Trump's Muslim travel ban grim implications of Justices Anthony Kennedy's imminent resigantion. With Congressional calls mounting for putting off confirmation of Kennedy's replacement while Trump remains under investigation over the 2016 electoral irregularities, a constitutional crisis is imminent. This represents a critical turning point. Immigrants are the proverbial canaries in the American coal-mine. The Trump crew are testing their methods on them because they are vulnerable, and banking on the likelihood that non-immigrants will say "not my problem." But if they get away with what they are doing now to a vulnerable and isolated population of non-citizens, it sets a precedent—and ultimately nobody is safe. Which inevitably brings to mind the famous quote from Martin Niemöller, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, "First they came for..." Now they are coming for the immigrants—even those who are here legally and have been naturalized, or are serving in the armed forces as a path to citizenship. This is the turning point where an actually fascistic order can be consolidated in the United States. The good news is that Trump's order was a response to popular protest and opposition, But it is imperative that we do not allow it to buy our complacency, but urgently build uncompromising civil resistance. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: "Let Them In" by Soul Inscribed feat. Frank Waln

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izoRTQEkvBM

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 12 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg pays homage to the martyred Algerian Berber singer and songrwiter Lounes Matoub on the 20th anniversary of his assassination. It remains unclear to this day if Matoub was killed by agents of the Algerian state or militants of the Islamist opposition -- as both were equally opposed to the Berber cultural renaissance that he represented. The Berbers, or Imazighen (singular: Amazigh), are the indigenous people of North Africa, whose language and culture have been suppressed to varying degrees by Arab-dominated regimes from Morocco to Libya. The 1980 "Berber Spring" in the Kabylia region of Algeria was key to Matoub's politicization, and his assassination was followed by a second round of "Berber Spring" protests in 2001. This presaged the international Arab Revolution that broke out a decade later -- which in North Africa was really also a Berber Revolution. The 2011 protests and uprisings resulted in advances for Berber cultural rights and autonomy in Algeria, Morocco and Libya alike -- a sign of hope amid the current atmosphere of counter-revolution and reaction throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: In Memory of a Hero by Moh Alileche

http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/malileche-hero?song=4

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 11 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg compares the legacies of revolutionary struggle in Nicaragua and Syria. The Somoza and Assad regimes were both hereditary family dictatorships. The Sandinistas and Syrian revolutionaries alike have roots in anarchism. Yet Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, again Nicaragua's president, is today himself facing a militant opposition movement, and has betrayed the Syrian revolutionaries in the interests of playing for Russian support in the Great Power game. His regime has employed state terror against peasant communities and campesino opponents of his inter-oceanic canal mega-scheme. In Syria, meanwhile, the secular, pro-democratic civil resistance continues to exist in spite of everything, and still governs areas of the country under a model of council-based popular democracy. This civil resistance has even liberated territory from jihadist factions through nonviolent mass uprisings, just as they had previously liberated their towns from the Assad dictatorship. The Kurdish autonomous zone in Syria is also informed by an anarchist ethic of direct democracy. Yet the Kurds and Arab-led civil resistance have been pitted against each other by Great Power intrigues. How can activists in New York and the United States move past global divide-and-rule stratagems and build solidarity with Syria's Arab and Kurdish opposition alike, as well as the campesinos and grassroots-democratic forces in Nicaragua? Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: Hope by Moh Alileche

https://www.musicpage.com/mohalileche

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15.

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.

In Episode 10 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the re-emergence in the news of three figures associated with the drama that played out over revolutionary Nicaragua in the 1980s. Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua then, is again today, and just faced massive protests calling for his ouster. Oliver North, who headed the Reagan White House covert operation to destabilize Nicaragua's Sandinista regime back then, was just named as head of the National Rifle Association. And Luis Posada Carriles, the right-wing Cuban terrorist who was part of North's private spy network back then, just died. Historical ironies abound. North, who supported a counter-revolutionary terrorist network in Nicaragua (the "contras"), now baits nonviolent gun-control activists as "terrorists." Ortega, whose government distributed land to the campesinos in the '80s, is now seizing land from campesinos for his monstrous inter-oceanic canal plan. And the conspiracy theory popular among the NRA's white heartland base about the government preparing to disarm the populace and detain resisters in military camps has its roots in the actual FEMA martial law plan drawn up by Oliver North, to be implemented in the event of a US invasion of Nicaragua—with Central American refugees to be detained in military camps. A final irony is the NRA-Russia connection, which comes as Nicaragua is cooperating with a resurgent Russian military presence in the Caribbean. Vladimir Putin recently became the first Russian (or Soviet) leader to visit Nicaragua. So is it possible that we are today so far through the proverbial looking glass that Oliver North and Daniel Ortega are now on the same side? Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

Errata:

Anastasio Somoza did not flee to Miami along with his henchmen upon his ouster in 1979, because he was denied entry by President Carter. He instead took refuge in Paraguay, where he was assassinated the following year.

During the 1980s, Luis Posada Carriles was living in El Salvador. He did not arrive in Miami until 2005, when he sought asylum in the United States.

Oliver North was convicted of lying to Congress and other charges in 1989, but the convictions were thrown out on appeal on the grounds that testimony in the trial might have been influenced by North's testimony before Congress under immunity.

Music: Carlos Mejía Godoy's Nicaragua Nicaraguita, performed by Bill Weinberg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp7-nWslZe0

Production by Chris Rywalt

We are asking listeners to donate just $1 per episode via Patreon. A total of $30 per episode would cover our costs for engineering and producing. We are currently up to $15. https://www.patreon.com/countervortex

New episodes will be produced every two weeks.

We need your support.