Comrade:Verda.Majo

Hello, my name is Verda.Majo. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I hope to contribute what I can to increase peoples' access to information and knowledge through this project. Currently I am re-reading and making notes on Mao's "On Contradiction" and Stalin's "Dialectical and Historical Materialism." Hopefully one day I can turn my notes into something helpful for others. I am very interested in working together with others to expand our knowledge and understanding on such topics and make such information more accessible to people in general. I'm not very experienced with Wiki editing but I am very motivated to learn and make helpful contributions to this project.

Current topics I am researching

Here are a few topics I am doing research into and some of the materials I am using, along with some quotes from these works.

Atrocity propaganda

In respect to atrocity propaganda, I am reading a few works with different subjects and scopes, to gain an understanding of (1) how atrocity propaganda functions, (2) specific historical examples of it, (3) how people have attempted to combat against it (such as by writing the books on topics (1) and (2) that I am reading).

Ponsonby, Arthur. Falsehood in War-Time: Propaganda Lies of the First World War. 1928. Kimble & Bradford, London.

This book was written in the wake of World War I, with the author hoping that by cataloguing various rampant lies and falsehoods that circulated in the lead up to World War I would prevent such common acceptance and spreading of lies in the future. He distinguishes somewhat between intentional lies and unintentional lies, as well as between truth-distortions and full-on fabrications, and describes their methods of spread.

Man, it has been said, is not “a veridical animal,” but his habit of lying is not nearly so extra-ordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish. (p. 13)

Swanson, David. War is a Lie. 2016. Just World Books.

This is a book very similar in its method and intention to the Arthur Ponsonby book. However, it details more modern lies. The author's website describes this book as "a handbook of sorts [...] that can be used to debunk future lies before the wars they’re deployed to justify have any chance to begin."

Today, the case for war must overcome people's resistance to arguments that they know have fooled them in the past. But, in order to support war, people need not be convinced to make great sacrifices, enlist, register for a draft, grow their own food, or curtail their consumption. They just have to be convinced to do nothing at all, or at most to tell pollsters on the phone that they support a war. (p. 14)

McGehee, Ralph. Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA. 1983. Open Road Integrated Media, New York.

The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the President, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering "communist” weapons caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the "intelligence" it feeds to policymakers. Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of whole cloth "intelligence" to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers then leak this "intelligence" to the media to deceive us all and gain our support. (p. 15)

Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics of Mass Media. 1986. St. Martin's Press, Inc. New York.

The campaign against the Red Menace was not exclusively a media creation but reflected the interests of the dominant corporate-political class of which the media is a part. The twists are turns of media anticommunist alarmism largely parallel similar shifts in official policy. This anticommunism can change its direction and its targets but it can never be put to rest for it is a necessary component in making life safe for corporate capitalism both at home and abroad. Just when we think the cold war is a thing of the past, it reappears like some epic cinematic return. (p. 135)

Korea

Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. 2010. Modern Library, New York.

The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs in Korea (not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II. Whereas sixty Japanese cities were destroyed to an average of 43 percent, estimates of the destruction of towns and cities in North Korea 'ranged from forty to ninety percent"; at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North's twenty-two major cities were obliterated. (p. 159-160)