Here’s what I got so far:

  • The term “capitalism” was invented by a socialist (either Louis Blanc, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, or Karl Marx, depending on which historian you ask)
  • The term “capitalism” was originally created to refer to private control of the means of production, and had nothing to do with market systems. The libertarian “capitalism = free markets” definition is a revisionist definition
  • The term “meritocracy” was invented for satirical purposes by Michael Young; he wrote a facetious book about how a society stratified on the basis of “merit” would become a dystopia
  • The term “privatization” was invented to describe something the Nazis did
  • The term “libertarian” originally referred to anarcho-communists
  • The term “the economy” wasn’t commonly used until the great depression
  • Karl Marx supported gun rights
  • Albert Einstein was a socialist
  • Charlie Chaplin was a socialist
  • Bertrand Russell was a socialist
  • Malala Yousafzai is a socialist
  • Wallace Shawn is a socialist (INCONCEIVABLE!)
  • George Orwell was a socialist (although a pretty bad one)
  • Joseph Weydemeyer was a Prussian communist military officer who came to the US during the American Civil War to fight on the side of the Union Army. After the war was won, he joined the Republican Party
  • August Willich was a Prussian communist military officer who came to the US during the American Civil War and supported the Union Army. He, like Weydemeyer, joined the Republican Party after the war was won
  • The New York Tribune, a Republican-aligned newspaper, employed Karl Marx as its European correspondent between 1852 and 1862
  • Karl Marx congratulated Abraham Lincoln when Lincoln got reelected
  • The idea that “money was created to make bartering easier” is an ahistorical myth. The first currencies were created by militaries so that they could fund themselves - they levied taxes in a currency that they controlled the supply of, which made people have to sell them food and supplies in order to get currency to pay the taxes.
  • The FBI killed Fred Hampton and tried to get MLK to kill himself
  • A civil trial in 1999 found that MLK’s assassination was a conspiracy involving the US government
  • The US is a rogue state that refuses to obey international criminal courts
  • Henry Kissinger, beloved figure of the foreign policy establishments of both parties, once said this regarding Chilean democracy in the context of the 1973 coup: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
  • The US government killed Anwar al-Awlaki in September 2011; Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in October 2011; and Nawar al-Awlaki in January 2017. All three were American citizens.
  • Gary Webb was an investigative journalist who worked on the involvement of the CIA in the crack-cocaine drug trade. He was found dead in his home with two bullet wounds to the head. It was ruled a suicide.
  • “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around.” - Ray Dalio, hedge fund manager, in 2004 (Ray Dalio’s net worth as of 2020 is app. $20 billion)
  • The US military used depleted uranium munitions in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004. Ever since then, Fallujah has had the highest rate of birth defects in the world, a rate similar or possibly even higher than that of Hiroshima, Japan in the years following the atomic bomb in 1945. https://twitter.com/FDefects
  • evilgiraffemonkey [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 years ago

    I love posting these JFK quotes on Cuba:

    I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

    — U.S. President John F. Kennedy, to Jean Daniel, October 24, 1963

    Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years … and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state—destroying every individual liberty. Yet our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror. Administration spokesmen publicly praised Batista—hailed him as a staunch ally and a good friend—at a time when Batista was murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people, and we failed to press for free elections -JFK, October 6, 1960