Obama's Move "Forward"

Forward?  To Hawaii, Russia, and China

On April 30, 2012, having successfully wreaked his "hope" for fellow-traveling Marxists and "change" upon not just America's wealthy but her middle class for the sake of the have-nots, Obama introduced his new, 2012 campaign slogan, Forward, many Conservative bloggers recognized it immediately as a famous Marxist slogan.  Many attributed it to Josef Stalin.  Others were able to date it back to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov “Lenin.”

The propaganda slogan, “Forward!” reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected the march of history, of progressivism, which would move the world “forward” past capitalism and into socialism and Communism.

Clearly, it’s a Marxist slogan, a fact Obama would rather the public not know.  However, since so many bloggers published the story, it would be hard for anyone to ignore it or its significance.  But what about the date Obama chose to announce it?  Communists, Islamists, and anti-colonialists are very fond of anniversaries.  They love to bask in the limelight of their moment in history.  So let’s take a look some moments in history from the date of April 30^th:

·         1006 – Scientists record the brightest supernova in history

·         1661 -  The Chinese lay siege to the Dutch fort Zeelandia on the isle of Formosa (Taiwan)

·         1789 -  George Washington inaugurated as the first President of the U.S.

·         1861 -  Pres. Lincoln ordered Federal troops to evacuate Indian territory

·         1864 – New York becomes 1^st state to charge a hunting license fee

·         1898 – Shaka, the great Zulu warrior is killed

·         1900 – Casey Jones dies in the Cannonball Express train wreck – very apropo

·         1900 – The U.S. annexes Hawaii under Pres. McKinley

·         1945 -  Adolf Hitler commits suicide

·         1903 -  The N.Y. Highlanders (later the N.Y. Yankees) play their 1^st home game

Wait, wait, and wait!  Let’s back up a few steps.  The United States annexes Hawaii on Apr. 30, 1900  – much to the dismay of the islanders who fault missionaries for introducing disease and traders for introducing agriculture and capitalism, and dispensing with such customs as incest.  Hmmm.

Now, the Cannonball Express came on April 30, 1900 (according to Wikipedia).  Very fitting, given the sabotage of our train-wrecked economy by the Democrats.  The exact date of Hawaii’s annexation is actually unsubstantiated; still, Obama chose that exact date.  The royal governance of the island was not overthrown by the U.S. government but a group of American and European businessmen in 1893. However, what it was granted in 1900 was the right to self-governance and the restoration of Iolani Palace.

In January 1893, Queen Liliʻuokalani was overthrown and replaced by a Provisional Government composed of members of the Committee of Safety. Controversy filled the following years as the queen tried to re-establish her throne. The administration of President Grover Cleveland, a friend of the queen, commissioned the Blount Report, which concluded that the removal of Liliʻuokalani was illegal. The U.S. government first demanded that Queen Liliʻuokalani be reinstated, but the Provisional Government refused.  Congress followed with another investigation, and submitted the Morgan Report on Feb. 26, 1894, which found all parties (including Minister Stevens) with the exception of the queen “not guilty” from any responsibility for the overthrow.  The accuracy and impartiality of both the Blount and Morgan reports has been questioned by partisans on both sides of the debate over the events of 1893.

In 1993, a joint Apology Resolution (so Obama was not the first Apologizer-in-Chief) regarding the overthrow was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton, apologizing for the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.  It is the first time in American history that the United States government has apologized for overthrowing the government of a sovereign nation.  The Provisional Government of Hawaii ended on July 4, 1894, replaced by the Republic of Hawaii.

After William McKinley won the presidential election in 1896, Hawaii’s annexation to the U.S. was again discussed. The previous president, Grover Cleveland, was a friend of Queen Liliʻuokalani. McKinley was open to persuasion by U.S. expansionists and by annexationists from Hawaii.  He met with three annexationists from Hawaii.  After negotiations, in June 1897, Secretary of State John Sherman agreed to a treaty of annexation with these representatives of the Republic of Hawaii.

The treaty was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. Instead, despite the opposition of a majority of native Hawaiians, the Newlands Resolution was used to annex the Republic to the United States and it became the Territory of Hawaii. The Newlands Resolution was passed by the House on June 15, 1898, by a vote of 209 to 91, and by the Senate on July 6, 1898, by a vote of 42 to 21.

Puerto Rican immigration to Hawaii began when Puerto Rico's sugar industry was devastated by two hurricanes in 1899. The devastation caused a world-wide shortage of sugar and a huge demand for the product from Hawaii. Hawaiian sugar plantation owners began to recruit the jobless, but experienced, laborers in Puerto Rico. Two distinct waves of Korean immigration to Hawaii have occurred in the last century, arriving between 1903 and 1924; and then, the second wave began in 1965.

In 1900, Hawaii was granted self-governance and retained Iolani Palace as the territorial capitol building.  Despite several attempts to become a state, Hawaii remained a territory for 60 years. Plantation owners and key capitalists, who maintained control through financial institutions, or “factors,” known as the “Big Five”, found territorial status more convenient than statehood, enabling them to continue importing cheap foreign labor; such immigration was prohibited in various states.

As the pineapples ripened, so did Hawaii’s economic status, but it was also fertile ground for Marxist anti-imperialists and anti-Capitalists such as Frank Marshall Davis.  So, where did Davis get his anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist philosophies from.  Why, from Vladmir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, of course.  Who else?

Vladmir Illyich Ulyanov “Lenin” (“Lenin” was his nom de guerre, taken from the Russian River, Lenina) founded the publication Vpered (Russian for “forward” in 1905.  Marxist artists set to work creating many propaganda posters with this word, and Soviet propaganda film maker Dziga Vertov made a documentary entitled “Forward, Soviet”, “soviet” being the Russian word for “council”.  One of his pamphlets, published in 1917, was entitled:  “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It:  Can We Go Forward If We Fear to Advance Towards Socialism?”

At the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution, upon returning from exile on April 15, 1917, at Finland Station, in Petrograd, Russia, Lenin told the waiting crowd:

“The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe ... The world-wide Socialist revolution has already dawned ... Germany is seething ... Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash ... Sailors, comrades, we have to fight for a socialist revolution, to fight until the proletariat wins full victory! Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!” 

In exile again, reflecting on the July Days and its aftermath, Lenin determined that, to prevent the triumph of counter-revolutionary forces, the Provisional Government must be overthrown by an armed uprising.  Meanwhile, he published State and Revolution (1917), proposing government by the soviets (worker-, soldier- and peasant-elected councils) rather than by a parliamentary body.

Lenin had argued in a newspaper article in September 1917:

“The peaceful development of any revolution is, generally speaking, extremely rare and difficult ... but ... a peaceful development of the revolution is possible and probable if all power is transferred to the Soviets. The struggle of parties for power within the Soviets may proceed peacefully, if the Soviets are made fully democratic.”

On the evening of Oct. 26, 1917, Lenin attended the Congress of Soviets.  American journalist John Reed described the man who appeared at about 8:40 p.m. to “a thundering wave of cheers:” 

“A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging. Little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide, generous mouth, and heavy chin; clean-shaven now, but already beginning to bristle with the well-known beard of his past and future. Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader—a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies—but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analysing a concrete situation. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.”

According to Reed, Lenin waited for the applause to subside before declaring simply: “We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!” Lenin proceeded to propose to the Congress a “Decree on Peace”, calling on “all the belligerent peoples and to their Governments to begin immediately negotiations for a just and democratic peace,” and a “Decree on Land,” transferring ownership of all “land-owners’ estates, and all lands belonging to the Crown, [and] to monasteries” to the Peasants’ Soviets. The Congress passed the Decree on Peace unanimously, and the Decree on Land faced only one vote in opposition.

To initiate the Russian economic recovery, on Feb 21, 1920, Lenin launched the GOELRO Plan, the State Commission for Electrification of Russia, and also established free universal health care, free education, and promulgated the politico-civil rights of women.  Moreover, since 1918, in re-establishing the economy, for the productive business administration of each industrial enterprise in Russia, Lenin proposed a government-accountable leader for each enterprise. Workers could request measures resolving problems, but had to abide the leader’s ultimate decision. Although contrary to the theory of workers’ self-management, such pragmatic industrial administration was essential for efficient production and employment of worker expertise.

Yet Lenin’s doctrinaire Bolshevik opponents argued that such industrial business management was meant to strengthen State control of labor, and that worker self-management failures were owed to lack of resources, not incompetence.  Lenin resolved that problem by licensing (for a month) all workers of most factories; thus historian S. A. Smith's observation: “By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers’ state.”

On Dec. 20, 1917, “The Whole-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, the Cheka (Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya – Extraordinary Commission) was created by a decree issued by Lenin to defend the Russian Revolution.  The establishment of the Cheka secret service, formally consolidated the censorship established earlier, when on “ Nov. 17,  the Central Executive Committee passed a decree giving the Bolsheviks control over all newsprint and wide powers of closing down newspapers critical of the régime. . . .”; non-Bolshevik soviets were disbanded; anti-soviet newspapers were closed until Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (The News) established their communications monopoly.

According to Leonard Schapiro,  the Bolshevik “refusal to come to terms with the [Revolutionary] socialists, and the dispersal of the Constituent assembly, led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed, not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker, or peasant, who opposed Bolshevik rule.”" On Dec. 19, 1918, a year after its creation, a resolution was adopted at Lenin’s behest that forbade the Bolshevik’s own press from publishing “defamatory articles” about the Cheka.  As Lenin put it:  “A Good Communist is also a good Chekist.”

In response to Fanya Kaplan’s failed assassination of Lenin on Aug. 30, 1918, and the successful assassination of the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky, Stalin proposed to Lenin “open and systematic mass terror . . . [against] . . . those responsible”; the Bolsheviks commenced a Red Terror campaign.  Among other acts, Lenin signed execution lists authorizing the Lenin authorized the shooting of 25 Tsarist ministers, civil servants, and 765 White Guards in September 1918.  In his Diaries in Exile, 1935, Leon Trotsky recollected that Lenin authorized the execution of the Russian Imperial Family. However, historians have debated the authenticity of Trotsky’s recollections, while others claim there is abundant evidence that Lenin authorized the executions in Alapaevsk, about 100 miles from Yekaterinburg.

Other Bolsheviks had warned the Party that terrorist rule was inevitable, given Lenin's assumption of sole command. In late 1918, when they tried curbing Chekist excesses, Lenin overruled them; in 1921, via the Politburo, Lenin expanded the Cheka’s discretionary death-penalty powers.

The foreign-aided White Russian counter-revolution failed due to lack of popular Russian support, because the Bolshevik proletarian state, protected by “mass terror against enemies of the revolution,” was socially organized against the previous capitalist establishment, thus class warfare terrorism in post–Czarist Russia originated in working class (peasant and worker) anger against the privileged aristocrat classes of the deposed monarchy.   During the Russian Civil War, anti-Bolsheviks faced torture and summary execution.  By May 1919, there were some 16,000 “enemies of the people” imprisoned in the katorga (prison farm) labor camps; by September 1921, the prisoner populace exceeded 70,000.

Professor Christopher Read states that though terror was employed at the height of the Civil War fighting, “from 1920 onwards the resort to terror was much reduced and disappeared from Lenin’s mainstream discourses and practices.”  However, after a clerical insurrection in the town of Shuia, Lenin sanctioned action against defiers of the decreed Bolshevik removal of Orthodox Church valuables: “We must... put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades... The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing... the better.”  As a result, historian Orlando Figes estimates that perhaps 8,000 priests and laymen were executed. The crushing of revolts in Kronstadt and Tambov in 1921 resulted in tens of thousands of executions.

In 1917, as an anti-imperialist, Lenin said that oppressed peoples had the unconditional right to secede from the Russian Empire; however, at end of the Civil War, the USSR annexed Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, because the White Movement used them as attack bases.  Lenin pragmatically defended the annexations as geopolitical protection against capitalist imperial depredations.

To maintain the war-isolated cities, keep the armies fed, and to avoid economic collapse, the Bolshevik government established war communism, via prodrazvyorstka, a Russian word for which there seems to be no translation, but was a Bolshevik policy and campaign of confiscation of grain and other produce from peasantry for a nominal fixed price).  This policy resulted in armed confrontations over food requisitioning from the peasantry, for little payment, which peasants resisted with reduced harvests.  The Bolsheviks blamed the kulaks’ withholding grain to increase profits; but statistics indicate most such business occurred in the black market economy. Nonetheless, the Cheka and Red Army suppressed the peasant resistance with shooting hostages, poison gas, and labor-camp deportation.  Still, Lenin increased the requisitioning.

The six-year long White–Red civil war, the war communism, the famine of 1921, which killed an estimated five million, and foreign military intervention reduced much of Russia to ruin, and provoked rebellion against the Bolsheviks, the greatest being the Tambov Rebellion (1919–21).

After the March 1921 left-wing Kronstadt Rebellion mutiny, Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), and successfully rebuilt industry and agriculture. The NEP was his pragmatic recognition of the political and economic realities, despite being a tactical, ideological retreat from the socialist ideal; later, the doctrinaire Joseph Stalin reversed the NEP in consolidating his control of the Communist Party and the USSR.

Communism took hold in China in 1947, with Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward, an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China, a central planning program from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China’s vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern communist society through the process of rapid industrialization and collectivization.  Mao led the campaign based on the Theory of Productive Forces, a widely-used Marxist concept placing primary emphasis on technical advances and strong productive forces in a nominally socialist economy before real communism, or even real socialism, can have a hope of being achieved. The Great Leap Forward intensified after being an impending disaster from grain shortages was discovered.

Chief changes in the lives of rural Chinese included the introduction of a mandatory process of agricultural collectivization, which was introduced incrementally. Private farming was prohibited, and those engaged in it were labeled as counter revolutionaries and persecuted. Restrictions on rural people were enforced through public struggle sessions and social pressure, although people also experienced forced labor.  Rural industrialization, officially a priority of the campaign, saw “its development … aborted by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward.”

The Great Leap ended in catastrophe, resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths.  Estimates of the death toll range from 18 million to 45 million, with estimates by demographic specialists ranging from 18 million to 32.5 million. Historian Frank Dikotter asserts that “coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward” and it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history.”

The years of the Great Leap Forward in fact saw economic regression, with 1958 through 1961 being the only years between 1953 and 1983 in which China's economy saw negative growth. Political economist Dwight Perkins argues, “enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. … In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster.”

In subsequent conferences in 1960 and 1962, the negative effects of the Great Leap Forward were studied by the CPC, and Mao was criticized in the party conferences. Moderate Party members rose to power, and Mao was marginalized within the party, leading him to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In light of this history of Communism, Obama’s adoption of the slogan “Forward!” for his campaign, and rumors that the DHS has ordered law enforcement to heavily arm themselves against some mysterious insurrection, it’s no wonder authors like Dinesh D’Souza are warning against the re-election of Obama (although D’Souza insists Obama is not a Marxist or Communist).

Having studied these matters since childhood, I would submit that our worry is not even 2016, but 2012.