“No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power! When the oppressed man finds no justice, When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals with fearless heart to heaven, and thence brings down his everlasting rights, which there abide, inalienably his, and indestructible as stars themselves. The primal state of nature reappears, wherein man confronts his fellow man; and if all other means shall fail his need, one last resort remains—his own good sword. The dearest of our goods we may defend, From violence. We stand before our country, We stand before our wives, before our children!

We want to be a single band of brothers, Never to part in danger or distress. We want to be free, as our fathers were, And rather die than live in slavery. We want to trust in the one highest God, And never be afraid of human power.”

“The Rütli Oath”, Friedrich Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell”

On March 1^st, Valery Gergiev was dropped by his manager and fired from his position as Chief Director of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra by Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter, for not denouncing Russia over its military intervention into Ukraine. Gergiev’s former manager Marcus Felsner stated to The Guardian that the Russian conductor is “the greatest conductor alive and an extraordinary human being with a profound sense of decency,” but he was unable to “publicly end his long-expressed support for a regime that has come to commit such crimes.”

The question is, who is the biggest loser in all of this? That is, who will suffer the greatest loss culturally from the voluntary dismissal of “the greatest conductor alive”?

No decent human being longs for war. War has historically been recognized as the weapon, the tool of the tyrant. To threaten force upon a people, a civilization and risk its destruction, only to usurp a temporary and precarious throne is rightfully seen as the ambitions of a mad man.

The question is, to whose mad ambitions and designs of war are we, as a global populace, held hostage? That is, who is the tyrant? And who are the upholders of liberty, who have a right to “defend from violence” by their “own good sword”?

Many of you may be wondering what is the “Rütli Oath” and who is Friedrich Schiller?

Well, that is exactly the point. If you do not know, you have been robbed of something and it was done consciously so that you should not know, or remember such things. A citizenry that wishes to be free and would “rather die than live in slavery” and “never be afraid of human power” is certainly not acceptable storytelling for children, let alone adults, in a world where we do not have a right to choose what the future holds.

Schiller is in many ways, the forgotten Shakespeare of Germany.

Today, we can still hear the name of Goethe mentioned frequently, but rarely do we hear the name of his dear friend, collaborator and in many ways mentor, Friedrich Schiller.

The Goethe and Schiller Monument in front of the National Theater in Weimar (1857)

Goethe and Schiller were recognised in the 19^th century as the two most revered figures in German literature. Both men had lived in the city of Weimar located in central Germany and were the seminal figures of the literary movement known as Weimar Classicism.

Weimar Classicism, contrary to what Wikipedia would have you believe, was never a new humanism which emerged from the ideas of Romanticism.

In fact, it was the mythologies of the Romantic movement that launched a form of cultural warfare against the German classics. From Nietzsche, to Wagner, the “Romantic” protest movement of the Jugendbewegung [German Youth Movement], to the Romantic cultural pessimism and existentialism of the post-WWI period known as the “Lost Generation,” all of these waves of “thought” were essentially a part of the same uninterrupted tradition that ran counter to German classicism, since it was Germany who had become a leader in creating geniuses of the Classics.

All of these so-called “Romantic” movements promoted forms of “heroic nihilism” as seen with such individuals as Ernst Jünger, Oswald Spengler, Arthur Moeller van den Brück and others, who helped shape the ideological environment of the Nazis.

The attack on Weimar Classicism began with the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). Many historians in fact recognise that the Congress of Vienna, which was responsible for the inhumane carving up of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, was largely to blame for the political foment that led to WWI a century later.

The Carlsbad decrees were adopted by the German Confederation in 1819 as an offshoot to the vision for Europe as defined by the Congress of Vienna which upheld the rule of empire and monarchy. It established severe limitations on academic and press freedoms and set up a federal commission to investigate all signs of political unrest in the German states. This was in reaction to the wave of republicanism that was sweeping throughout Europe after the success of the American Revolution against Britain’s monarchy. Thus, the organizers of the Congress of Vienna saw this spirit of republicanism as a form of revolutionary sedition which had to be crushed at its cultural root at all costs.

What is Weimar Classicism?

The “Weimar Classical” period, beginning around 1772, was named after the place in which much of the leading thinkers lived at the time, such as Goethe, Schiller, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, among others [The Humboldt educational reforms became heavily attacked under the Carlsbad decrees and many of the best teachers in Germany ended up migrating to the United States due to heavy censorship].

The Weimar Classical period was defined by a revolutionary spirit for creativity in literature and culture. It was not just about creating anew, but about building upon the richest classical traditions of the past and was very much influenced by Greek Classicism.

Goethe (1749-1832) and Schiller (1759-1805) became the leaders of the literary dimension of this movement. Goethe would be appointed the Director of the Weimar Theater (the National Theater today) in 1791, and it was during this period that Schiller’s epic dramas such as “The Wallenstein Trilogy,” “The Maid of Orleans” (about Joan of Arc), “Maria Stuart” and “Wilhelm Tell” were first performed on the stage.

Schiller, known during his time and beyond as the Poet of Freedom, wrote “Wilhelm Tell” in 1804. It is considered a masterpiece to this day and is especially loved by many in Germany and Switzerland. It is a story of how tyranny and empire were defeated by a people who upheld and defended their dignity and liberty.

The folk story is set in 14^th century Switzerland during the Habsburg rule of the Austrian Empire. According to historical records, referenced in the White Book of Sarnen, written in 1474 as a collection of medieval manuscripts, the Rütli Oath was a conspiracy to overthrow the Habsburg tyranny and is what launched the Burgenbruch rebellion. Among the names mentioned in the medieval manuscript is that of the hero, Wilhelm Tell.

This small grouping of Swiss people from just three cantons (townships) at the time, which grew to 26 cantons, went on to oppose the tyrannical rule of the Austrian Empire and form the Heveltic Confederation. The Rütli Oath was the first declaration of independence for Switzerland.

Germany during the time of Schiller’s writing “Wilhelm Tell,” was not a sovereign nation but rather was ruled between the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy and the Kingdom of Prussia. After the Napoleonic era, the Congress of Vienna founded the German Confederation (as a replacement to the Holy Roman Empire), loosely made up of 39 states. The Emperor of Austria held the permanent “presidency” of this German Confederation until the Seven Weeks’ War between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire in 1866. Prussia won and took over the “inherent right” to rule the German lands.

Thus, the effects of Schiller’s controversial choice of historical setting for his epic drama “Wilhelm Tell” during his life and beyond, should not go unnoticed. Schiller had chosen to stress this period in history, very much like what Shakespeare had done, as a lesson for the people of his time, that no one should subject themselves to the folly and whim of a tyrant. In turn, Schiller defined the spirit that would be required to oppose the bondages of empire and imperial rule. It is for this reason that “Wilhelm Tell” is among the most loved dramas by Schiller.

It is no coincidence that Beethoven (1770-1827) would choose a poem by Schiller, “Ode to Joy” to culminate his own life’s work in his 9^th Symphony.

Beethoven was also for republicanism and his 9^th Symphony is clearly a call for the voice of the people to rejoice in the recognition that all men are brothers and that all humankind was destined to live in harmony and peace. Ode to Joy was originally titled “Ode to Freedom” by Schiller. Alexander Thayer in his biography of Beethoven wrote “the thought lies near that it was the early form of the poem, when it was still an ‘Ode to Freedom’ (not ‘to Joy’), which first aroused enthusiastic admiration for it in Beethoven’s mind.”

This was the spirit that had come under attack by the Carlsbad Decrees and the Romantic movement, as epitomised by Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).

It is also no coincidence that Wagner was Adolf Hitler’s favourite composer. You may think this unfair to Wagner, but it is nonetheless very relevant.

Hollywood movies have long projected the idea that a deep appreciation of classical music is connected to Nazis or psychopaths, especially where the music of Johannes Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is concerned.

Besides countless movie scenes of SS officers playing classical music on their gramophones right before doing something heinous, there are also scenes like this one in Schindler’s List where Bach’s Prelude from English Suite no. 2 is played while horrific acts of violence are conducted by Nazis.

We also see this in Hannibal Lecter’s love for Bach’s Goldberg Variations along with scenes of cannibalism, seen in the original and the 2013 tv series remake. And once again in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange where Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony is played during the “brainwashing scene” with Nazi references and symbolism, and in another scene where the protagonist is having violent visions and fantasies.

Pairing classical music with Nazis and psychopaths is no coincidence. It is part of the ongoing cultural warfare against Weimar Classicism and classicism in general as something akin to totalitarianism. Whereas in fact, it was the very opposite. Totalitarianism viewed Weimar Classicism with its revolutionary bent of liberty for the people as a mortal threat to its existence.

Hitler made it known who were among his favourites, including “Germanic” composers such as Wagner and Anton Bruckner who were both paragons of the Romantic movement. During the Nazi reign, heavy censorship and cultural controls were enforced to uphold what Hitler identified as a strong Germanic identity, heavily influenced by artists from the Romantic movement.

The legendary and extremely gifted German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954), stands out during this period of heavy censorship. He not only refused to become a Nazi adherent, but the Gestapo was aware that he was providing assistance to Jews and giving much of his salary to German emigrants during his concerts outside of Germany. (1) Georg Gerullis, a director at the Ministry of Culture remarked in a letter to Goebbels, “Can you name me a Jew on whose behalf Furtwängler has not intervened?” (2)

Furtwängler was the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1922-1945. In 1934, Furtwängler publicly described Hitler as an “enemy of the human race” and the political situation in Germany as a “schweinerei” (meaning literally swinishness). (3)

In 1933, Furtwängler met with Hitler to try to stop the antisemitic policy in the domain of music. Berta Geissmar, a close associate of Furtwängler, wrote “After the audience, he told me that he knew now what was behind Hitler’s narrow-minded measures. This is not only antisemitism, but the rejection of any form of artistic, philosophical thought, the rejection of any form of free culture...” (4)

So many years later, Furtwängler would be a major target for destruction by the new CIA-run cultural witch-hunt known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (the new Congress of Vienna) founded in 1949 to launch a post-modernist assault on German classical culture.

Furtwängler wrote in his diary in 1935 that there was a complete contradiction between the racial ideology of the Nazis and the true German culture, the one of Schiller, Goethe and Beethoven. (5) He added in 1936: “living today is more than ever a question of courage”. (6)

It is this question of courage that will define what will dictate the future culture of Germany. Would Culture and Art be ultimately judged by the standards of truth, beauty and goodness? Or would such things be buried in the ground, and forgotten, as what largely happened to both Schiller’s works and his mysterious and abrupt death in 1805 which led to his body being dumped in a mass grave before a proper funeral service could be held?

[For more on this story, refer to Irene Eckerts’ beautiful paper “Schiller vs. the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”]

An Ode to the “Pearl of the Desert”: the Ancient City of Palmyra

Palmyra is an ancient city in Syria that dates as far back as the second millennium BC. It grew in wealth from the trade routes along the Silk Road. This wealth enabled the construction of monumental projects such as the Great Colonnade, the Temple of Bel and the tower tombs. Greco-Roman culture influenced the culture of Palmyra, which in turn produced distinctive architecture that combined eastern and western traditions. Palmyra is considered one of the most important historical sites in West Asia.

Syria is located within the cradle of civilization. For this reason, it is immensely rich in a diversity of cultures, religions and schools of thought. It has many ancient cities, many ancient memories.

In 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), occupied the city of Palmyra and began executions of hostages within the amphitheater. They also detonated explosives that destroyed the iconic Baalshamin Temple among other ancient architectural treasures.

As the ancient city was being destroyed over a period of two years, the west used ISIL photos to boost their news ratings as clickbait. It should also not go unmentioned, that the United States in particular, but several western countries in total, have been responsible for the backing of terrorism in West Asia.

ISIL was clear with its intention, they were not just attacking anyone who did not fit into their idea of what they thought a Muslim world should look like, attacking both Muslims and non-Muslims who did not fit into this narrow and barbarous view. They were also attacking the history of all civilization itself. For in their eyes, it was all of civilization that was at fault and would have to be wiped off the face of the Earth so that the new world could be built anew. ISIL, though very much a war against the people, was ultimately a war against whole civilizations and their ancient cultures.

During this tragedy, as with countless others, the west was largely unaffected. On March 2, 2017, the Syrian Army, along with support from the Russian military, were successful in taking back Palmyra.

Extensive damage had been done during the ISIL occupation and much of the ruins of Palmyra have been lost forever. There was also the painful memory that was now associated with the ancient city, that of death and terror, for public executions were displayed in the amphitheater for a two-year period, including that of Khaled al-Assad who was the director of antiquities and had been tortured for days for information on hidden artifacts.

It seemed like the memory of Palmyra would be stained with this tragedy for many generations. ISIL may have left, but its spirit of terror and destruction remained.

The response to this destruction was one of the most beautiful displays of courage and dignity that I have ever seen in my lifetime. And of course, many in the west have likely never heard of it or understood its strength and magnitude in face of what was occurring in West Asia.

In response to the attempt to erase all memory of civilization, the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra from St. Petersburg traveled to Palmyra’s Roman Theatre and performed for an audience of Syrian people and some western dignitaries. The date of the concert coincided with the handover for the burial of the remains of special forces officer Aleksander Prokhorenko, who died after ordering an airstrike on his own position after he was surrounded by IS fighters.

The concert “Pray for Palmyra” was conducted by none other than Valery Gergiev, and the first piece that was chosen by Maestro Gergiev was Bach’s Chaconne piece performed by Pavel Mulyukov (his performance starts at min 27:26).

For anyone who has not seen this performance, it is really a must. It speaks to both the pain and sorrow from such horrific tragedy. But, it also speaks to hope and optimism, to beauty and strength. There were no words that could respond to what happened in Palmyra, it was only through the beauty of the music from the German classic composer Bach, that was profound enough to both acknowledge the level of pain and despair as well as the immortality of the soul and the sacredness of the individual. That no matter the level of carnage and mayhem, it could never eradicate the sanctity of human life.

This beautiful message was a Russian initiative, and we should all thank Russia for reminding us of this.

Munich Fires “the Greatest Conductor Alive”

Valery Gergiev, who was the chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic from September 2015, was fired on March 1, 2022, for refusing to denounce President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. That is, Maestro Gergiev was fired for what he wouldn’t say, and not for what he said.

Alongside this, 20 year old pianist Alexander Malofeev who was scheduled to play a Vancouver concert in August was “postponed” indefinitely. Why? Because Malofeev is Russian. It is as simple as that.

Leila Getz, Vancouver Recital Society’s artistic director felt that hosting a Russian performer might impact Vancouver’s large Ukrainian Canadian community. In this case, it did not even matter if Malofeev was willing to publicly criticize Russia’s intervention.

Anna Netrebko, a famous Russian opera singer was withdrawn from her future performance at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera because she refused to denounce President Putin, although she did publicly denounce the war. In this new McCarthyite atmosphere, that was not enough. The Met General Manager Peter Gelb acknowledged that Netrebko “is one of the greatest singers in Met history…”

This purging of Russian artists in the music domain also coincides with the smearing of 15 year old Russian skater Kamilia Valieva during the 2022 Olympic Games. Valieva was vilified after the suspicious and unprofessional handling of details around possible doping, which was a carefully-timed set-up in order to manipulate the relative standings of the figure skater. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) bent their own rules and guidelines in order to baselessly ostracise and vilify Valieva.

Valeria Nollan and Alexandra G. Kostina write in their article “Has the West Lost Its Soul and Feelings for Beauty and Fairness?”:

“For the envious elites, it is precisely Valieva’s otherworldly beauty and innocence, especially when connected with Russianness, that must be destroyed.  [Finnian] Cunningham notes, ‘Such a beauty could not be tolerated for it destroyed the US media campaign to otherwise demonize Russia and instill enmity towards that nation.’ They detest the Russianness that manifests sheer joy and freedom from their control, at the same time envying the culture that could provide such fertile soil for beauty to flourish.  How, they say, can a nation of barbarians and Untermenschen grow such magnificent flowers?  Ultimately, they want to banish the “alien” country that dares to remind them of what they have lost—the feelings for beauty and innocence.  Because beauty is both an aesthetic and spiritual category in which perception of something outside the self can resurrect the human being, it also encompasses feelings for one’s homeland, its flag, and its national anthem.  Perhaps this tearing away of these sources of pride and inspiration for Russian Olympic athletes is part of the carefully curated humiliation imposed on Russia as a result of dubious charges of doping, both individual and institutional.”

Although much of the witch-hunt against Russian artists, performers of beauty and optimism, is clearly an attack on Russian culture, where now even Russian art will be subjected to censorship for the mere fact that it is Russian, with the goal of causing shame and humiliation for merely being Russian. The loss is not one sided and the greatest loser in all of this will not be the Russian people.

As seen in the historical case of Germany, any artist that is a vehicle for beauty and optimism is considered a threat to the status quo within a system of empire. For it is beauty and optimism which allows a people, a culture, to find the courage to oppose the shackles of the censors, and dare to fight for liberty. For if one recognises the sanctity that lies within all human life, the unnatural bondage and humiliation of that life becomes intolerable. Thus, when a people, a culture, would rather die to fight for this liberty from empire than live a life of drudgery, forever the servant of another; this is obviously unsustainable to the status quo and an empire will always seek to crush such a spirit.

Thus, any culture, any art that represents such an idea, is a threat to the western system of our present day.

This can be clearly seen with the attack on anything deemed “classical” by the Frankfurt School (7) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The removal of these Russian artists is not only being done as an attack on the Russian people and Russian culture, it is an attack on all of us, for it is robbing us all of that beauty and optimism needed to fight for true political freedom.

If we are to believe that the Russians are inherently villainous by nature, it can no longer be tolerated that high standards of Russian artistry be permitted to be shown to the world, for it would stand in stark and sublime contradiction to what the censors would have us believe. That perhaps, the Russians actually remember something that we here in the west have forgotten, but once knew.

When Maestro Gergiev was fired from the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra for refusing to denounce President Putin, his manager, Marcus Felsner said in a statement to The Guardian that dropping Maestro Gergiev was “the saddest day of my professional life.” He called Maestro Gergiev “the greatest conductor alive and an extraordinary human being with a profound sense of decency,” and yet this was apparently not enough. If you are not with the censors, you are against the censors, and a powerful influencer of beauty and optimism like Maestro Gergiev thus had to be banished from their lands.

Who truly looses from such a banishment?

Perhaps the German people would do well to remember the attack, that is ongoing, on their own classical culture, which was among the greatest in the world. The German people would also do well to remember that their country has never truly been sovereign; once again cut up into pieces by the Versailles Treaty, which led to the crippling of German industry and the slow starvation of the German people.

However, most importantly, the Germans would do well in remembering that it was never their choice to join NATO, but that West Germany was an occupied country by the UK, USA and France from 1945 to 1955. And that this direct occupation only ended after West Germany agreed to join NATO in 1955. It was never Germany’s choice but rather was an offer by gun point for a piece, a crumb of “liberty.”

“Independence” on a short leash.

However, the occupation never truly ended, and Germany in all of its history has never truly been free.

It is time Germany break free from its Stockholm Syndrome, for it is their own classical cultural heritage that is at risk of being entirely erased.

The author can be reached at cynthiachung.substack.com

(1) Prieberg, Fred K. (1991). Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Third Reich. Quartet Books.
(2) Ibid.
(3) L’atelier du Maître “, article by Philippe Jacquard
(4) Geissmar, Berta (1944). The Baton and the Jackboot: Recollections of Musical Life. London and Edinburgh: Morrison and Gibb ltd.
(5) Wilhelm Furtwängler (trad. Ursula Wetzel, Jean-Jacques Rapin, préf. Pierre Brunel), Carnets 1924-1954 : suivis d’Écrits fragmentaires, Genève, éditions Georg, 1995, p. 39.
(6) Wilhelm Furtwängler (trad. Ursula Wetzel, Jean-Jacques Rapin, préf. Pierre Brunel), Carnets 1924-1954 : suivis d’Écrits fragmentaires, Genève, éditions Georg, 1995, p. 11.
(7) While many have come to realize that the rot within the western education system is tied to the growth of Critical Race Theory, few have come to realize that the school that birthed this perverse analysis of sociology and history is found in a group called the Frankfurt School that emerged out of a sick network of Marxist academics in Frankfurt Germany who envisioned curing society from the tyranny of its traditions which they concluded were the source of fascism. Using a mix of Freudian and Marxist theories applied to sociology, these nihilistic reformers shaped the entire Congress for Cultural Freedom, promoted relativism and destroyed the classical humanist foundations in education that had formerly governed western schooling relegating the study of the classics to obsolete “dead white European males”.

For many decades, every American public institution – from the spook-infested studios of Hollywood to the dinosaur legacy media – presented a tired and repugnant image of the Russian people to its audiences. Now, with Moscow forced to contend with a neo-Nazi element smack on its border, the by-product of that sinister propaganda campaign is targeting Russians in the form of pure racism.

If the Western world’s contempt for Russia could somehow be converted into reusable fuel, the Western world would have enough oil and gas reserves to last the next 1,000 years and probably much longer. But alas, the world of science and technology has not yet found a way of tapping into human irrationality for any strictly practical purposes, thus we’re just left with crude displays of xenophobia in some of the most unexpected places.

This week, for example, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra fired famed Russian conductor, Valery Gergiev for not denouncing Moscow’s special operation in Ukraine. Gergiev, 68, a vocal supporter of Vladimir Putin, had previously expressed his approval of Crimea becoming part of the Russian Federation. And while Germany’s cultural elite are free to hire and fire whoever they like, and for whatever political views they deem inappropriate, it would be good to see some consistency on such matters. When U.S.-led NATO forces unleashed hell on Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011, for example, were any American or European composers sacked because of their views and place of birth? In fact, cheering on Western forces during their long run of illicit warmongering, in hardscrabble places like Iraq, Syria and Libya, would have done nothing to hurt a person’s career and more than likely advance it.

On the other end of the cultural spectrum, in the realm of sport, Russian and Belarusian athletes were banned from competing in the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games due to the military conflict in Ukraine. Again, where is the precedent for this noxious form of discrimination, where competitors are outright banned solely for the ‘crime’ of being born in a particular country? And let’s not forget, as much as the mainstream media would like us to, that Russia was not the only nation that found itself engaged in a military operation at this period in time.

On February 24, the very same day that Russia began its special operation in Ukraine, Israel conducted yet another air strike near the Syrian capital Damascus. The unprovoked attack left three Syrian soldiers dead, according to Syria’s state media. How many people are aware that it was the fourth reported time this month that Israel has launched strikes inside of Syria? If the International Olympic Committee was aware of it, why did that unsettling information not stop Israeli athletes from competing?

Former Russian Olympic champion Alina Kabaeva said the sanctions unfairly targeting Russian athletes represent the “most disgraceful page in the history of world sports.”

“The leadership of many international sports organizations has long been engaged in completely unsportsmanlike affairs under various pretexts,” continued Kabaeva, who went on to become a State Duma Deputy following her retirement from sport. “Now it is no longer hidden.”

And finally there has been a refusal on the part of journalists to hear the perspective of Russian citizens.

On March 3, the Australian talk program Q&A took questions from the audience as part of its extremely biased discussion on the events in Ukraine. During the program, a viewer in the audience, one Sasha Gillies-Lekakis, introduced himself as part of the Russian community in Australia before saying, “I’ve been pretty outraged by the narrative created by our media depicting the Ukraine as the ‘good guy’ and Russia as the ‘bad guy’.” He went on to explain, correctly, that since 2014, “the Ukrainian Government together with Nazi-groups like the Azov Battalion have besieged the Russian populations in the Donbas, killing an estimated 13,000 people according to the United Nations. My question is where was your outpouring of grief and concern for those thousands of mostly Russians?”

It seems to be a reasonable question that deserves a fair answer, but Q&A host Stan Grant was having none of it: “Sasha, people here have been talking about family who are suffering and people are dying, and I understand you wanted to ask your question is there some reasoning for this. But you supported what’s happening [in Ukraine] hearing that people are dying and can I just say I’m not comfortable with you being here. Could you please leave?”

And that pretty much sums up the Western media’s mindless approach to the conflict if you happen to be Russian or pro-Russian – “Could you please leave” – that is, if you were fortunate to have been invited in the first place. This month, RT and Sputnik were blanked across the EU, while Strategic Culture Foundation has suffered heavy censorship since at least 2020 for ‘the crime’ of being a Russia-based analytical platform that presents an alternative voice to the West’s obsessively controlled narrative. Such attacks on free speech, which carry unmistakable racist overtones, have been coming so thick and heavy that an entire Telegram channel, called ‘Russophobia Watch,’ has been created just to track them.

It is no secret that the media has been priming the public mind for a long time about the “aggressive Russians” with numerous debunked stories, like Russiagate, where somehow a handful of Russian social media posts, as the fairy tale goes, managed to sway the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump. Once again, it seems that the real culprits of such political shenanigans – liberal-driven Silicon Valley behemoths, like Google, who really does have the infinite power to sway elections – were merely projecting and protecting their own misdeeds behind their favorite fall guy, Russia.

Speaking of aggression, let us not forget, since the mainstream media certainly has, that for many years humanity has been held captive audience as U.S.-led NATO launched a number of unprovoked wars in places like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Where was the virtue-signaling pearl clutching then from the sanctimonious liberal capitals, especially when none of those brazen military escapades were remotely justified? Meanwhile, Russia has been warning on NATO expansion very publicly – at least since Vladimir Putin’s now-famous presentation at the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy – to absolutely no avail. Yet now the West, in all of its dripping hypocrisy and double standards, wants to lecture Russia on the merits of peace, yet that is exactly what Moscow was attempting to achieve for many years.

By Joe LAURIA

consortiumnews.com

Occasionally a peek behind the iron curtain of our powerful institutions happens through unorthodox ways, as was the case when a pop star decided to cancel her attendance at one of America’s premier social events because of vaccine requirements, thereby unleashing a veritable firestorm from sea to shining sea.

Nicki Minaj, the Trinidad-born rapper who has churned out a string of trashy smash hits over the last decade, is probably the last person I ever thought I’d be writing about. At the same time, it’s probable that many readers of this publication have ever heard of this hip-hop star as well. Until last week, that is.

The story begins in early September, when Minaj announced she would not be attending the Met Gala fundraising event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City due to the Covid-19 vaccine requirement. Harmless enough, right? After all, ‘my body, my choice;’ if a citizen of a democracy comes to the conclusion that they don’t want to receive a drug courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry then everyone should respect that decision and move on. Sadly, those days of free choice are quickly coming to an end.

They want you to get vaccinated for the Met. if I get vaccinated it won’t for the Met. It’ll be once I feel I’ve done enough research. I’m working on that now. In the meantime my loves, be safe. Wear the mask with 2 strings that grips your head & face. Not that loose one

— Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ) September 13, 2021

This month, U.S. President Joe Biden stunned the nation by declaring to his fiercely divided flock that “patience is wearing thin” for the ‘anti-vaxxers’ as he went on to declare a vaccine mandate for millions of American citizens. The draconian move will force companies with 100 or more employees to provide proof their workforce is fully vaccinated, or have their unvaccinated employees produce a negative Covid-19 test at least once a week. Overall, the plan will affect an estimated 80 million Americans, in addition to some 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid.

Of the millions of U.S. citizens who condemned the move as a gross encroachment on freedom and liberty, pop star Nicki Minaj had suddenly found herself smack in the middle of the political swamp. On the right, she had become a heroine who had stood up to the covid authoritarians drunk on unchecked power. On the left, she was a treacherous traitor to the radical Democratic agenda which allows absolutely no dissent. Minaj’s unforgivable crime was to remind people that, despite all outward indications, they do possess a frontal lobe and are capable of making decisions without Uncle Sam holding the proverbial gun to their heads.

“They want you to get vaccinated for the Met,” Minaj wrote on Twitter. “if I get vaccinated it won’t for the Met (sic). It’ll be once I feel I’ve done enough research. I’m working on that now…”

In a separate message, Minaj advised people to “make the decision yourself…don’t be bullied.”

Here it’s crucial to recall that Nicki Minaj is no ordinary social media presence. She has 22.8 million followers on Twitter – or about 10 million more than the American president – and 158 million on Instagram. With such massive clout and brand recognition, it would have been too conspicuous for Big Tech to have disappeared her down the memory hole, as has been done to countless millions of other ‘wrong thinkers.’

So when Minaj announced to her millions of followers that she would delay getting the jab until “I feel I’ve done enough research,” while claiming that a family friend back in Trinidad had become “impotent” after getting the vaccine, this was a shot across the bow of the U.S. establishment that is fully invested in getting every single American to roll up their sleeve.

Naturally, this caused the zombie media to go into full blown destructive mode. After all, how could anyone distrust the U.S. Mask & Vaccine Tsar Anthony Fauci, the very individual who Republican Senator Rand Paul has accused of funding, through the National Institute of Health, “gain of function” research in Wuhan, China? Naturally, Fauci has vehemently denied the claims, as has China.

Meanwhile, Big Pharma enjoys full indemnity in the case of vaccine injuries and fatalities, yet somehow the people are shunned for questioning the safety and efficacy of their product. And yes, there are injuries that are believed to be a direct result of the vaccinations (For proof, watch this short video that documents what has happened to some of the people following their jabs here). These are real people whose lives have become completely upended overnight. They will never be the same again. This is not an argument against vaccinations, which have performed wonders in the past, but rather evidence that people should have the freedom to ask questions and do their own research without being turned into social pariahs. Finally, they should never be forced to take the vaccines on pain of losing their livelihood and excommunicated from polite society.

The White House has invited me & I think it’s a step in the right direction. Yes, I’m going. I’ll be dressed in all pink like Legally Blonde so they know I mean business. I’ll ask questions on behalf of the ppl who have been made fun of for simply being human. #BallGate day 3 https://t.co/PSa3WcEjH3

— Nicki Minaj (@NICKIMINAJ) September 15, 2021

A closing word on the Met Gala. If the liberal elitists are so dogmatic about ‘trusting the science,’ and every single word that emanates from Joe Biden’s teleprompted speeches, then why were the celebrities attending the event sans mask? Where were the Covid patrols to insist on proper pandemic etiquette? None of the celebrities were seen wearing their face diapers, whereas their attendants, seen adjusting the flowing gowns of the elite as they ascended the staircase, looked and performed like actual slaves. This is where the Democrat’s vaccine narrative has broken down against the rocks of common sense and decency.

Although Nicki Minaj may eventually cave in the face of the mob’s relentless full court press, as the majority of people ultimately do, her ‘fifteen minutes of Covid fame’ has awakened many people to their rights and that can only be a good thing in these modern times of troubles.

By Max BLUMENTHAL

“My people need Europe, my people need Europe to point out the abuser,” Yotuel, a Spain-based Cuban rapper, proclaimed in an EU parliament event convened by right-wing legislators before handing the mic over to Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó. Days later, Yotuel held a Zoom call with State Department officials to discuss “Patria y Vida,” the anti-communist rap anthem he helped author.

As the dust clears from a day of protests across Cuban cities, The Wall Street Journal has dubbed “Patria y Vida” the “common rallying cry” of opponents of Cuba’s government, while Rolling Stone touted it as “the anthem of Cuba’s protests.”

Besides Yotuel, two rappers who collaborated on the song are among a collection of artists, musicians and writers called the San Isidro Movement. This collective has been credited by U.S. media with “providing a catalyst for the current unrest.”

Throughout the past three years, as economic conditions worsened under an escalating U.S. economic war while internet access expanded as a result of the Obama administration’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba, the San Isidro Movement has invited an open conflict with the state.

With provocative performances that have seen its most prominent figures parade through Old Havana waving American flags, and through flagrant displays of contempt for Cuban national symbols, San Isidro has antagonized the authorities, triggering frequent detentions of its members and international campaigns to free them.

By basing itself in a largely Afro-Cuban area of Old Havana and working through mediums like hip-hop, San Isidro has also maneuvered to upend the racially progressive image Cuba’s leftist government earned through its historic military campaign against apartheid South Africa and the asylum it offered to Black American dissidents. Here, the San Isidro Movement appears to be following a blueprint articulated by the U.S. regime change lobby.

Over the past decade, the U.S. government has spent millions of dollars to cultivate anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit bid to weaponize “de-socialized and marginalized youth.”

The strategy implemented by the U.S. in Cuba is a real-life version of the fantasies anti-Trump Democrats entertained when they fretted that Russia was covertly sponsoring Black Lives Matter and Antifa to spread chaos through North American society.

U.S.-backed Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó appeared alongside Yotuel to celebrate the release of “Patria y Vida” in the EU parliament. (The Grayzone)

As this investigation will reveal, leading members of the San Isidro Movement have raked in funding from regime change outfits like the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S. Agency for International Development while meeting with State Department officials, U.S. embassy staff in Havana, right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.

San Isidro has also welcomed support from a network of free market fundamentalist think tanks which make no secret of their plan to transform Cuba into a colony for multi-national corporations. Days after protests broke out in Cuba, San Isidro’s leadership accepted an award from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a right-wing Republican think tank in Washington that includes Nazi German soldiers in its count of historic deaths at the hands of communism.

Behind their branding as cosmopolitan intellectuals, renegade rappers, and avant garde artists, San Isidro has openly embraced the extremist politics of the Miami Cuban lobby. Indeed, its most prominent members have expressed effusive support for Donald Trump, endorsed U.S. sanctions and clamored for a military invasion of Cuba.

The cultural collective has nonetheless made inroads into progressive circles of North American intelligentsia, working to weaken traditional bonds of solidarity between the Cuban revolution and U.S. left. As we will see, the rise of the San Isidro Movement is the latest chapter in the emerging playbook of intersectional imperialism.

‘Forgotten People’

The scenes of an overturned police car in Havana’s October 10 neighborhood, mobs pelting police officers with Molotov cocktails, and the looting of commercial centers this July 11 ripped the cover off the resentment of a class of citizens that has fallen through the cracks of Cuba’s beleaguered special economy.

Following years of deepening economic deprivation, Cubans have experienced blackouts and food rationing brought on by former President Donald Trump’s intensification of the 60-year-long U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. A sudden collapse in tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic together with the government’s elimination of Cuba’s dual currency system exacerbated the economic chaos.

Cristina Escobar, a Havana-based journalist and one of the most widely watched news personalities on Cuba’s state broadcasting channel, described the protest rank-and-file to The Grayzone as the byproduct of sustained marginalization.

“There’s a group of people in urban places like Havana that have the following characteristics,” Escobar explained. “They’re usually from rural poor areas and have moved to the city looking for better opportunities; usually not white with all the gradients there, and live at the margins, receiving whatever state benefits that are available. They often work in informal economy, they feel disaffected and don’t have involvement in patriotic ventures because they’re the victims of the special period of poverty.”

While Cuba’s social safety net has prevented this demographic from slipping into the misery familiar to slums of IMF-managed states such as Haiti or Honduras, Escobar says “they are a forgotten group of people, disintegrated, without roots in society. They are expressing the inequality they experience and unfortunately, they are not doing it peacefully anymore.”

U.S. corporate media has seized on the images of Afro-Cuban protesters to paint the demonstrations as an expression of explicitly racialized discontent. In an article headlined, “Afro Cubans at forefront of [Cuba’s] unrest,” The Washington Post quoted anti-government NGO’s and activists associated with the San Isidro Movement denouncing Black Lives Matter for its statement of solidarity with the Cuban revolution.

Left unmentioned by The Washington Post was the role of the U.S. government in backing many of these same NGOs and activists in a bid to weaponize the Cuba’s underclass. At the forefront of Washington’s strategy are two traditional CIA fronts: the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Throughout the Cold War, USAID worked alongside the CIA to liquidate socialist movements across the Global South. More recently, it helped implement a phony CIA vaccination program in Pakistan to track down Osama bin Laden, and instead wound up spawning a massive polio outbreak. Across Latin America, USAID has funded and trained right-wing opposition figures, including Venezuela’s U.S.-appointed pseudo-president Juan Guaidó.

For its part, the NED was established under the watch of former CIA Director William Casey to provide support to opposition activists and media outlets wherever the U.S. has sought regime change. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein told journalist David Ignatius, who celebrated the organization as “the sugar-daddy of overt operations.”

Throughout their history, USAID and NED have worked to exploit the grievances of ethnic minority groups against socialist and non-aligned governments. Their financial and logistical support for the Uyghurs against China, the Tatars against Russia, and indigenous Miskito people against Nicaragua are among many examples.

In recent years in Cuba, Washington’s regime-change specialists have homed in on Afro-Cubans and marginalized youth, harnessing culture to turn social resentment into counter-revolutionary action.

Weaponizing ‘De-socialized’ Youth

A 2009 paper in The Journal of Democracy, the official organ of the NED, outlined an ambitious blueprint for cultivating Cuba’s post-Cold War underclass as an anti-government vanguard.

“Using the principles of democracy and human rights to unite and mobilize this vast, dispossessed majority in the face of a highly repressive regime is the key to peaceful change,” wrote Carl Gershman and Orlando Gutierrez.

Gershman and Gutierrez are influential figures in the world of overt regime change operators. The founding director of the NED, Gershman presided for four decades over U.S. efforts to destabilize governments from Managua to Moscow. Gutierrez, for his part, is an outspoken advocate of a U.S. military invasion of Cuba who serves as national secretary of the USAID and NED-funded Cuban Democratic Directorate.

#UnitedStates | Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, a Cuban-American based in South Florida, leads the organization. On December 4, Boronat expressed his support for an armed invasion of Cuba to overthrow the socialist government.https://t.co/pEbsGnYrBQ

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) December 9, 2020

Gershman and Gutierrez advised a strategy that encouraged “non-cooperation” with Cuba’s revolutionary institutions among those they described as “ ‘desocialized’ and marginal youth – the dropouts, the jobless young people who make up nearly three-quarters of Cuba’s unemployed, and those who are drawn to drugs, crime, and prostitution.”

The two regime-change specialists pointed to music and online media as ideal vehicles for harnessing the frustrations of Cuban youth: “The alienation of the young reaches into the mainstream and expresses itself in the angry lyrics of rock musicians; the bloggers’ depictions of the frustrations and tawdriness of everyday life; the frequent evasion of agricultural work, voluntary service, and neighborhood committee meetings; and the general disengagement from politics that is the fruit of a half-century of coerced participation and force-fed political propaganda,” they wrote.

The year that Gershman and Gutierrez’s influential paper appeared, Washington enacted an audacious covert operation based on the strategy they outlined.

‘Rap is War’

In 2009, USAID initiated a program to spark a youth movement against Cuba’s government by cultivating and promoting local hip-hop artists.

Because of its long history as a CIA front, USAID outsourced the operation to Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C.-based firm with its own track record of covert actions.

Creative Associates found its point man in Rajko Bozic, a veteran of the CIA-backed Otpor! group that helped topple nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic, and whose members moved on to form an “‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a number of color revolutions.”

Posing as a music promoter, Bozic approached a Cuban rap group called Los Aldeanos that was known for its ferociously anti-government anthem, “Rap is War.” The Serbian operative never told Los Aldeanos he was a U.S. intelligence asset; instead, he claimed he was a marketing professional and promised to turn the group’s front man into an international star.

To further the plan, Creative Associates rolled out ZunZuneo, a Twitter-style social media platform that blasted out thousands of automated messages promoting Los Aldeanos to Cuban youth without the rap group’s knowledge.

Within a year, as Los Aldeanos escalated its rhetoric, taunting Cuban police as mindless drones during a local indie music festival, Cuban intelligence discovered contracts linking Bozic to USAID and rolled up the operation.

Embarrassment ensued in Washington, with Sen. Patrick Leahy grumbling, “U.S.AID never informed Congress about this and should never have been associated with anything so incompetent and reckless.”

Danny Shaw, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the City University of New York, encountered Los Aldeanos during several extended visits to Cuba. He also got to know Omni Zona Franca, a collective of poets and Rastafarian-oriented performance artists based in the Alamar neighborhood of Havana which formed the inspiration for the San Isidro Movement.

Shaw said the artists’ hostility towards Cuba’s socialist system was so intense that many of them denied the U.S. blockade’s existence. “I tried to explain to them my understanding of the economic war, and they said, ‘You can come and go as you please, you don’t live here, so it’s easy for you to be a Marxist.’ And they had a point  – if you completely decontextualized the situation,” he told The Grayzone.

According to Shaw, some Omni Zona Franca members began visiting the U.S. and Europe for art festivals and interviews with corporate Spanish-language media. “When the stories about USAID supporting Cuban rappers and artists came out, then it all kind of made sense to me,” he reflected.

In 2014, USAID was exposed again when it tapped Creative Associates to organize a series of phony HIV prevention workshops which were, in fact, political recruitment seminars.

An internal Creative Associates document leaked to the media in 2014 referred to the bogus HIV workshops as the “perfect excuse” to enlist youth into regime change activities on the island.

President Barack Obama introduced his plan to normalize relations with Cuba’s government just as U.S.AID’s latest operation was exposed. As a condition of diplomatic recognition, Obama insisted that Cuba expand internet access.

Venezuelan investigative website Misión Verdad warned at the time,

“We are witnessing an update in the mechanisms, methods and modes of intervention. All the harmony at this time is totally illusory. What is already being placed under the label ‘normalization’ in the Cuban sociopolitical environment provides the minimum operating conditions to facilitate the idea of a ‘Cuban spring,’ a test tube revolution…”

Internet Expansion & US Infiltration

The 3G internet network arrived in Cuba in 2018, enabling young Cubans to access social media on their phones. Now, instead of spinning out social media platform like ZunZuneo, U.S. intelligence focused on developing technology like Psiphon so Cubans could access Facebook and YouTube despite internet blackouts.

The NED and USAID exploited the opening to build a potent online anti-government media apparatus. The new batch of U.S.-backed outlets like CubaNet, Cibercuba and ADN Cuba represented an echo chamber of toxic insurrectionism, mocking President Miguel Diaz-Canel with insulting memes and calling for his prosecution for high crimes including genocide.

ADN Cuba mocks Diaz-Canel by merging his face with that of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. (The Grayzone)

The Dutch Foreign Ministry has advanced the U.S. efforts, helping to set up and fund the anti-government blog, El Toque, through an NGO called RNW Media.

Ted Henken, a U.S. academic and author of Cuba’s Digital Revolution, remarked to Reuters that Cuba’s leadership “miscalculated in that they didn’t realize that [expanded internet access] would very quickly, in two and a half years, blow up in their face.”

“None of [the protests] would have been possible without the nascent 3G network that has allowed millions of Cubans to access the internet via mobile devices since 2018,” the corporate online outlet Quartz declared.

As Cuban access to anti-government media grew, the Trump administration increased NED’s budget by 22 percent in 2018.

That year, NED’s Cuba budget earmarked close to $500,000 for the recruitment and training of anti-government journalists, and to establish new media outlets.

Another NED grant budgeted funds to “promote the inclusion of marginalized populations in Cuban society and to strengthen a network of on-island partners,” implying the targeting of Afro-Cubans.

The NED has placed a heavy emphasis on infiltrating Cuba’s hip-hop scene. In 2018, the U.S. government entity contributed $80,000 to the Cuban Soul Foundation to “empower independent artists to produce, perform, and exhibit their work in uncensored community events,” and $70,000 to a Colombia-based NGO called Fundacion Cartel Urbano for “empowering Cuban hip-hop artists as leaders in society.”

Cartel Urbano publishes an online magazine clearly modeled off of Vice, the premier vehicle for hipster imperialism. Besides keeping readers informed about the latest releases from anti-government Cuban rap artists, the U.S. government-funded magazine dedicates entire sections on its website to drug use, trans culture and the green vegan lifestyle.

In catering to the sensibilities of academically oriented, self-styled radicals, the outlet’s writers routinely deploy the letter “x” to erase gender distinctions, leading to passages like the following: “cuerpxs trans, marikonas, no binarixs, racializadxs, monstruosxs…”

Cartel Urbano is sponsored by the U.S. government to train and promote Cuban hip-hop artists. (The Grayzone)

The startling proliferation of online opposition media, vitriolic anti-government propaganda, and U.S. infiltration of Cuba’s cultural scene that accompanied the expansion of the country’s internet services prompted an unprecedented crackdown by the country’s leadership.

“The years when we had the thawing of relations with the U.S., we had so much tolerance domestically,” Cristina Escobar, the Cuban journalist, reflected. “That’s because the government did not see itself as under siege. But then Trump won. And now the leadership feels like they should have never trusted Obama.”

Just hours after taking office in April 2018, President Diaz-Canel proposed Decree 349. The new measure would require that all artists, musicians and performers obtain prior approval from the Ministry of Culture before publicizing their work.

Put forward in direct response to the recruitment of rap artists and other cultural figures by U.S. intelligence, Decree 349 explicitly forbade the dissemination of audiovisual materials containing “sexist, vulgar or obscene language.” Though the law would never be enforced on a formal basis, the provision was viewed by Cuba’s opposition as a direct attack on the subculture of reggaeton seeping into the country’s urban landscape.

Almost overnight, a collective of artists and musicians mobilized to protest the decree. Named for the hardscrabble San Isidro neighborhood in Old Havana where several of its members lived, the new movement appealed directly to cultural influencers in the Global North, marketing itself as a diverse collection of visual creators and independent rappers struggling for nothing more than artistic freedom.

For perhaps the first time, Cuba’s right-wing opposition had a vehicle for making inroads into progressive circles abroad.

Courting Celebrity

On Nov. 6, 2020, a police officer appeared in the home of Denis Solis, an outspoken anti-government rapper affiliated with the San Isidro Movement. Solis quickly turned his cellphone camera on the cop and livestreamed his defiant encounter on Facebook.

After taunting the officer with anti-gay slurs, Solis proclaimed, “Trump 2020! Trump is my president!”

The police visit was triggered by the excited coverage Solis received from Diario de Cuba, a NED-funded publication, and other anti-government outlets, for a tattoo emblazoned across his chest that read, “Change; Cuba Libre.” He had also taken to Facebook to boast, “Communists, now they’re going to have to tear the skin from my chest.”

The eight-month prison sentence Solis received for “contempt” — a punishment clearly inspired by the spectacle he generated with his livestream – provided the spark for the November 2020 hunger strike that vaulted the San Isidro Movement onto the global stage.

The strike was held inside the Old Havana home of the San Isidro Movement’s coordinator, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. An Afro-Cuban performance artist, Otero has courted the ire of the government by defiling the Cuban flag, wrapping it around his naked torso on the toilet and while brushing his teeth, or by sprawling out on it while clad in underwear bearing the U.S. flag.

The art of San Isidro Movement coordinator Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. (The Grayzone)

In another provocative display, Otero gathered children to run through his neighborhood waving a giant American flag, triggering an immediate police response and his own detention for four days.

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara enlisted Cuban youth to run through Old Havana bearing U.S. flags. (The Grayzone)

The week-long hunger strike at Otero’s home generated an unprecedented international media spectacle, and generated supportive statements from Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s incoming national security adviser, and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

We urge the Cuban regime to cease harassment of San Isidro Movement protestors and to release musician Denis Solís, who was unjustly sentenced to eight months in prison. Freedom of expression is a human right. The United States stands with Cuba’s people.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) November 24, 2020

A cleverly staged visit to the site of the hunger strike by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, a high-profile Mexico-based Cuban journalist and literary figure, had helped galvanize international media interest.

Clad in a black turtleneck and hailing from the ranks of Cuba’s educated elite, the bespectacled Álvarez presented a stark contrast to Otero and his rugged wingman, the anti-government rapper Maykel Osorbo. For governing officials tempted to dismiss the protest leaders as a bunch of vulgar street urchins, the figure of the genteel scribe presented serious complications.

Journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez, center, with Luis Miguel Otero, on right, and rapper Maykel Osorbo. (The Grayzone)

Álvarez soon found space in The New York Times opinion section to market San Isidro to a liberal U.S. audience while rattling off literary metaphors about walking over cobblestone in high-heeled shoes to denigrate Cuba’s communist bureaucracy.

“The [San Isidro] movement has become the most representative group of national civil society, bringing together Cubans of different social classes, races, ideological beliefs and generations, both from the exile community and on the island,” the writer claimed.

On Nov. 27, 2020, as the confrontation between Cuban artists and the state deepened, a group of artists initiated a sit-in outside Cuba’s Ministry of Culture. The original demonstrators consisted largely of artists whose work had been sponsored by the Cuban state. And unlike San Isidro, many of them rejected regime change rhetoric, opting instead for a dialogue with the culture minister to resolve the conflict over freedom of expression.

As sociologist Rafael Hernandez explained in a detailed study of the sit-in, the dialogue collapsed when the San Isidro Movement and other U.S.-backed elements imposed their maximalist agenda on the organizing body, which came to be known as N27.

The New York Times and other other Anglo outlets focused their coverage squarely on the anti-communist rabble rousers of San Isidro, while leftist Cuban artists  “remained invisible to the foreign press, which does not consider them news, as it does the veteran and youth dissidents,” Hernandez observed.

The intensive media coverage of the sit-in vaulted the San Isidro Movement onto the international stage, earning them the attention of celebrity artists and writers in the U.S. and Europe.

In May 2021, after Otero was again detained by Cuban security, an open letter to President Diaz-Canel appeared in The New York Review of Books, a leading journal of the liberal U.S. literati, demanding his release.

Signed by a cast of prominent Black and Afro-Latin cultural figures, including Henry Louis-Gates, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, the missive illustrated the success San Isidro was enjoying in eroding the support of Black American intelligensia for Cuba’s revolution.

With access to the leading liberal organs of U.S. media and support in Latin American studies departments across the country, the cultural collective was breaking Cuba’s anti-communist opposition out of its traditional right-wing Miami base.

But its success was hardly an organic phenomenon. Indeed, San Isidro had been propelled onto the international stage thanks to substantial support from the U.S. State Department, its regime change subsidiaries and right-wing corporate lobbyists eager to see Cuba open up for business.

State Department, OAS & Corporate Lobbyists 

Each day at the El Estornudo magazine he founded, Carlos Manuel Álvarez and his colleagues present the bad news from Cuba. While painting the country as a catastrophically-run communist hellscape overrun with Covid-19 casualties, he markets his outlet as “independent.”

In reality, El Estornudo appears to be one of the many media projects incubated by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

“The collaborators who make the magazine are paid per work produced, with a fixed salary of 400 CUC. Until I left, El Estornudo was financed by the NED and Open Society [foundations],” said Abraham Jiménez Enoa, a former writer for the magazine, referring respectively to the U.S. government’s regime change arm and the foundation of George Soros.

El Estornudo is among a constellation of outlets delegated to criticize Cuba’s Covid response by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), an NGO that received $145,230 from the NED in 2020 to “strengthen collaboration among Cuban independent journalists” and train them in social media.

The anti-government outlets operating under the auspices of IWPR also include Tremenda Nota, an LGBTQ-themed site that routinely accuses the Cuban government of homophobia and transphobia, even as the Diaz-Canel administration has moved to legalize gay marriage, opened the army to gay soldiers and initiated official pride events.

IWPR’s board is comprised of former NATO officials and corporate media figures, including the former chair of The Financial Times. Though the NGO has since scrubbed its list of patrons from its website, an archived page reveals partnerships with the NED and its U.S. government subsidiaries, as well as confirmed British intelligence contractors like Albany Associates and the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Carlos Manuel Álvarez is far from the only San Isidro member close to U.S. regime change entities. Besides him, there is Yaima Pardo, a Cuban filmmaker and tech specialist whose 2015 documentary, Offline, emphasized the need for internet expansion to foment dissent.

Pardo is currently the multi-media director for ADN Cuba, a Florida-based anti-government outlet that received $410,710 from USAID in 2020 alone.

San Isidro’s Esteban Rodríguez, a reporter for ADN Cuba, has celebrated the economically debilitating ban Trump imposed on family remittances to Cuba as “perfect.” “If I was in the U.S., I’d have voted Trump,” Rodríguez told The Guardian.

When San Isidro launched its international campaign against Decree 349, it chose to do so at the Organization of American States (OAS) – the Washington, D.C.-based regional organization derided by former Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa as “the Yankee ministry of the colonies.”

There, San Isidro co-founder Amaury Pacheco was received by Luis Almagro, the OAS secretary-general who would help orchestrate the right-wing military coup in Bolivia later that year. Also on hand to welcome the Cuban artists were State Department officials and Carlos Trujillo, a right-wing Trump loyalist serving as the U.S. representative to the OAS.

“Art in Cuba is more necessary than ever,” Almagro proclaimed. “It is necessary to expose the challenges of repression” by the Cuban state.

OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro with San Isidro Movement co-founder Amaury Pacheco (second from right) and other artists affiliated with the collective. (The Grayzone)

As the Venezuela-based Instituto Samuel Robinson reported, San Isidro has deepened its ties with the international right-wing through the CADAL foundation, which nominated it for the NATO state-sponsored Freemuse Prize for Artistic Expression. CADAL is at the heart of a network of libertarian organizations that leverage corporate money to push free market fundamentalism across Latin America.

Among CADAL’s closest partners is the Atlas Network, a corporate lobbying front established with help from the Koch Brothers to advance libertarian economics and undermine socialist governments across the globe.

The think tank is also sponsored by the U.S. State Department, the NED, and its subsidiaries, including the Center for International Private Enterprise, which devotes itself to “strengthening democracy around the globe through private enterprise and market-oriented reform.”

In January 2021, leading members of San Isidro including Otero and Pardo participated in a webinar hosted by another corporate-backed, right-wing think tank. This time, they were guests of the Latin American Center of Federalism and the Freedom Foundation.

Sponsored by multi-national corporations determined to transform Cuba into a free-market haven, and inspired by the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the Argentina-based foundation is also directly affiliated with the Atlas Network.

Among the participants in the webinar was Iliana Hernandez, a reporter for Cibercuba – one of the many anti-government outlets that cropped up in recent years following the expansion of internet services.

In a November 2020 discussion about the U.S. election on her Facebook page, Hernandez argued that because Trump was “going to take harsher measures against the tyranny… I think that, for Cuba’s freedom, Trump should win.”

She also detailed extensive coordination between the San Isidro Movement and State Department officials serving at the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

Referring to her discussions with the hardline U.S. Charges d’Affaires Timothy Zúñiga-Brown and his predecessor, Mara Tekach, Hernandez remarked, “In this last conversation with Mr. Tim [Zúñiga] Brown, what he told me was, ‘how can we be of help?’ Meaning, what can we do? Because, I mean, he wanted to get orders from me and not the other way around. I told him how he could help.”

Otero has also nurtured close relations with U.S. State Department officials. In July 2019, he and other San Isidro members strutted proudly around the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Havana during an event commemorating U.S. Independence Day.

Otero and Milan of San Isidro celebrating Independence Day inside the U.S. ambassador’s residence. (The Grayzone)

“Viva la anexión,” Milan wrote in a post expressing his “fervent passion for the beautiful gringa.”Adonis Milan, a Havana-based theater director affiliated with San Isidro, posted photos on Facebook of himself, a reggae artist and San Isidro member named Sandor Pérez Pita, and Otero “enjoying a few hour of freedom inside Cuba” while snapping selfies with U.S. Marines.

Asked by a reporter about a meeting he held on a Havana street with former U.S. Chargé d’affaires Tekach, Otero responded, “She is a diplomat. I can meet with Mara Tekach or the French ambassador; my friend, the ambassador from the Netherlands, or the one from the EU. Even with the Cuban President, Miguel Diaz-Canel, if one day he would like to talk to me.”

Adonis Milan captioned his portrait with U.S. Marines: “Long live annexation.” (The Grayzone)

In April 2021, the Cuban government claimed to have uncovered documents revealing payments of $1,000 a month to Otero from the National Democratic Institute, a subsidiary of NED. The accusations surfaced just as the artist planned to exhibit paintings of candy wrappers at his home and invite local children to view them, teasing the kids with the sweet life socialism had denied them. He flatly denied taking any payments from U.S. government regime change outfits.

By this point, Otero had become a star in a collaborative viral anthem that had provided Cuba’s counter-revolution with a unifying slogan and protest soundtrack.

‘Patria y Vida’

San Isidro members Maykel Osorbo, and El Funky, right, flank Otero Alcántara in the video of “Patria y Vida.” (The Grayzone)

The first song directly credited with mobilizing Cubans to protest their government was recorded by a collection of rappers and reggaeton artists that included two members of the San Isidro Movement.

Hailed by U.S. state media outlet NPR as “the song that’s defined the uprising in Cuba,” “Patria y Vida” has racked up over 7 million views since it debuted on YouTube on February 16, 2021

Recorded in Miami, the song features three self-exiled Cuban performers: Yotuel of the Orishas hip-hop group, the reggaeton duo Gente de Zona, and singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno. They were complimented by two Havana-based San Isidro Movement members: hip-hop artists El Funky and Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo.

Osorbo has proclaimed that he would “give [his] life for Trump” if the U.S. president imposed a total blockade on Cuba with “the coasts blocked, that nothing enters in, nor anything goes out… as they did in Venezuela.”

The video for “Patria y Vida” opens with the curious image of anti-colonial Cuban hero Jose Marti merging into that of U.S. founding father and settler-colonial slave owner George Washington.

At the song’s climax, rappers Osorbo and El Funky appear on screen flanked by San Isidro’s Otero. Claiming to have filmed their performance surreptitiously, the rappers nonetheless appear in high-quality video chanting “Patria y Vida!”

This slogan was an overt twist on Cuba’s revolutionary mantra, “Patria o Muerte,” which was first uttered by Fidel Castro at a memorial for dockworkers killed by the CIA’s deadly sabotage of the La Coubre freighter in Havana harbor in 1960. By reversing Castro’s vow to defend Cuba’s sovereignty with his life, the song’s authors take aim at the anti-imperialist political culture instilled in Cubans throughout the course of six decades.

Osorbo and El Funky’s verses mix lacerating attacks on the socialist government with tributes to San Isidro:

“We continue going in circles, security, deflecting with prism
These things make me indignant, the enigma is over
Enough of your evil revolution…”

Just one week after the song’s release, incoming USAID director Samantha Power took to Twitter to trumpet “Patria y Vida” as a reflection of a “new generation of young people in Cuba & how they are pushing back against govt repression.”

Such an interesting look at the new generation of young people in #Cuba & how they are pushing back against govt repression. A group of artists channeled their frustrations into a wildly popular new song that the government is now desperate to suppress. https://t.co/47RGc9ORuR

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) February 24, 2021

While Power is not especially known as a hip-hop connoisseur, she has earned a reputation for creating failed states in places like Libya by orchestrating humanitarian interventionist military campaigns. It is hard to imagine that her sudden interest in a viral Cuban rap anthem was not guided by a dedication to regime change on the island.

The European Parliament’s center-right European People’s Party Group also rallied to promote “Patria y Vida” just one week after its release. In Brussels, EU parliamentarian Leopoldo López-Gil – the oligarchic Spanish father of right-wing Venezuelan putschist Leopoldo López – helped host San Isidro Movement’s Otero, Yotuel, and several other figures behind the creation of “Patria y Vida.”

“I ask you today to condemn the Cuban government, so that my island has the strength to rise up…” Yotuel declared. “My people need Europe, my people need Europe to point out the abuser.”

Also on hand for the EU parliament event was Juan Guaidó, the U.S.-appointed faux “president” of Venezuela who launched a failed military coup alongside his mentor, Leopoldo López Jr.

In the days that followed, the performers of “Patria y Vida” continued to make the regime change rounds. On March 12, Yotuel and Gente de Zona held a Zoom call with State Department officials, briefing them about the success of the song and the demands of the San Isidro Movement.

Inspiring call today with @yotuel007, @GdZOficial, and @EsBeatrizLuengo, where State Department officials heard about the viral #PatriaYVida. pic.twitter.com/EhVTMW0ghC

— Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (@WHAAsstSecty) March 12, 2021

Three months later, as journalist Alan MacLeod reported, Power’s USAID issued a notice of $2 million in grant opportunities for “civil society” organizations seeking to advance regime change in Cuba.

Highlighting the agency’s longstanding strategy of exploiting the demographics hit hardest by U.S. sanctions, the document emphasized the need for programs that “support marginalized and vulnerable populations, including but not limited to youth, women, LGBTQI+, religious leaders, artists, musicians, and individuals of Afro-Cuban descent.”

In the document, USAID pointed to “Patria y Vida” as a propaganda victory that helped produce a “watershed moment” – and which foreshadowed the protests to come.

A June 2021 USAID appeal for grant proposals in Cuba singles out “Patria y Vida” as a major propaganda victory.

Less than a month later, on July 11, Otero issued a call to take to the streets of Havana on behalf of the San Isidro Movement. Soon, hundreds of protesters had gathered on the city’s seaside Malecon, some with signs reading “Patria y Vida.” The opposition’s vision of a national uprising capable of washing socialism away seemed to be coming into focus.

#11JCuba Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara y el Movimiento San Isidro convocan a los cubanos a salir a Malecón para reclamar libertad en La Habana pic.twitter.com/jN4vZHyZLK

— Mario J. Pentón (@MarioJPenton) July 11, 2021

An array of factors lay behind the protests, from the collapse of an electricity station in the city of Holguin, to the government’s sputtering attempts at currency unification, to the economic wounds opened by the U.S. blockade and kept festering by the special period of deprivation.

But through the culture warriors of San Isidro, now delegated by Washington as the official faces and voices of Cuba’s opposition, the demands of the demonstrators were interpreted as a maximalist cry for Washington to escalate its efforts at regime change.

San Isidro Movement Goes to Washington

Though the protests quickly fizzled out, remarks by President Joe Biden denigrating U.S.-embargoed Cuba as a “failed state,” and vowing to add new crushing sanctions to those imposed by Trump suggested the Democratic administration would not return to Obama’s process of normalization. A key short-term objective of the Miami regime change lobby was therefore achieved.

July 20 congressional hearings on Cuba in the House Foreign Affairs Committee highlighted the pivotal role San Isidro has played in the renewed push to topple Cuba’s government.

There, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, a right-wing Democrat from South Florida, cited commentary by liberal academic Amalia Dache assailing Black Lives Matter for its statement of solidarity with the Cuban revolution. She then pointed to Afro-Cubans as an emerging base of anti-communist ferment on the island.

Several feet away sat Rep. Mark Green, a pro-Trump Republican, sporting a shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Patria y Vida,” beneath his suit jacket.

U.S. Rep. Mark Green sports a “Patria y Vida” during a July 20 House Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Cuba. (The Grayzone)

That same day on Capitol Hill, the right-wing Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation honored the San Isidro Movement during its Captive Nations Week Summit.

In his remarks presenting the Dissident Human Rights award to the San Isidro Movement, Victims of Communism founder and veteran conservative movement operative Lee Edwards declared, “it isn’t always politics, but culture, which is so important in the battle we’re engaged in right now.”

Maykel Osorbo, the hip-hop artist who starred in “Patria y Vida,” accepted the award on behalf of San Isidro. “My brother, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he exclaimed in a pre-recorded message to the crowd of silver-haired, right-wing Republicans.

The Grayzone via consortiumnews.com

We have all seen pictures from the growing “trend” of having transsexuals in full regalia read to children at public libraries. This interaction with the youth of America to a less twitter-trendy extent also encompases gay pride parades and what looks to be a recent birthday party with strip show that went viral on Tik Tok. On an instinctual level something about this does not sit right with most people. Getting small children involved in things of a sexual nature before they are old enough to understand it has been generally considered a terrible idea by the great civilizations of humanity. When exactly and how the shift from a sex-free childhood to the adult world of physical pleasures should happen is up for debate but we all know, on a primal level, that children should be divided from sex. But these “instincts” of ours have failed over and over again to be a valid argument in the political realm where it matters most. In fact today’s postmodern society seems to stand in direct opposition to the “gut feelings” that used to keep us in check. And it is the Right’s/Conservatives’ complete inability to create the verbiage needed to defend their positions that is dooming them to slow slide into total obsolescence.

The things that are happening now to children and the family are a direct result of the ineloquence of any forces that tried to resist the Sexual Revolution (and Feminism) and its subsequent gains. There was very vocal opposition to these events of the 1960s but these voices were instinctual and incoherent which ultimately made them fail to convince the public at large to keep things the way they were. In fact if we turn back the clock to the middle of the twentieth century we will see the first great failure of American Conservatives to put their fears into words – Elvis Presley.

At that time there was something about the way that the king of rock-n-roll shook his hips on the brand new gleaming television screens of America, that just did not sit right with the old protestant ladies who had the free time to notice and complain. They could see but not express the slippery slope before their eyes that as soon as the first domino fell with sexuality being normalized on TV everything else after that would go down the toilet. They perhaps saw the miserable society that is becoming ever more free of family (and ironically sex itself) degenerating into something unrecognizable. They could see this but simply could not express it into cohesive arguments as the actual factual counter-reaction to Elvis’s gyrations were the typical right wing “that’s bad” finger pointing and some sort of appeals to the Bible as an authority in a secular country.

The protestant grannies of yesteryear did see in Elvis’s hip flailing a vision of the future that we live in now in which sex has been trivialized and marriage is dead but they were unable to put that sexual dystopia into words. They merely sat there waving their wrinkled hands to shame young people into not liking “fun” and trying to out quote Pat Robertson’s Bible knowledge on his best day.

The arguments for Elvis to instead go full throttle made much more sense… “what’s the harm in dancing?”, “how could showing a man’s hips on TV hurt anyone?” and so on. And here we are a few generations later asking ourselves “what’s the harm?” of a tranny performing a lap dance on a child. Or the now famous Swedish supreme court case where no harm was found in public masturbation, after all it does not make physical contact with other people.

The reason that Western and especially English-speaking Conservatives have been left dumbfounded for generations is that they do not see the connection between freedom (in the Liberty sense, as being freedom from restrictive forces) and living in a world the Bible frowns on. At the very core of this concept of Liberty is that “your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins” but the problem with this reasoning is that it allows us to live in a daily freak show where everyone is flailing their arms about like shamans in a mad ritual.

Another key issue is the human desire to be enticed by that which is shocking, so as we move farther into the age of everyone of us having their own YouTube studio in their pocket we are only going to see more behavior that the Silent Majority will find questionable or unsettling and yet not be able to look away, but they have and will continue to defend the freedom to do just this.

So the Right is really left with two options.

One: it’s time for English-speaking Conservatives to stop being shocked and except that when given Liberty there are going men who dress up as garish women to perform sexual dances in public, that there will be families with an untold number of parents with all sorts of different genders-of-the month and plenty of public initiatives based on pseudo-history to convince boys that they are the perpetuators of an evil Patriarchy that is responsible for slavery or something.

Two: advocate for living in a society where guys in fancy uniforms would have had a strict chat with Elvis about what can be shown on television, with certain possibly painful results for “violating public decency”. In this society things would have gone very differently over the last few generations, but at what cost? Would sacrificing Liberty really be worth it to maintain some sort of high level of social cohesion with “degeneracy” being locked away in a few private night clubs and basements of the odd couple that lives at the end of the lane.

We are seeing that if society gives itself enough rope it will hang itself, but for some that may still be better than the alternative. But perhaps there is a third option – finding an answer to the “what’s the harm” argument. It hasn’t been found in 100 years but tomorrow is a new day.