Reducing Mueller probe to the “deep state” is too simplistic

People’s World readers offer their take on a number of recent articles featured in our pages. The comments below have been proofread and edited for length. Join the discussion on the PW website and on Facebook, or submit your comments directly to editors@peoplesworld.org.

Re: The noose tightens around Trump’s neck

Roberta Wood says:

I agree that there is a Constitutional crisis brewing, but I think it is wrong to reduce the Mueller probe to the operation of the “deep state” and competing imperialist rivalries. I think there are real democratic questions that are of concern to the whole of the American people and defending democratic processes that are in place. Also, I question the promotion of this “deep state” narrative that seems to serve the ultra-right. Furthermore, I’m wondering what the basis is of the theory that the ruling class is divided into three groups. I think that is kind of mechanical. Depending on the issue, the divisions change. For example, on the question of the defense of public education. We have to look at what the divisions are in each case and try to build unity in the interests of the working class. But there is an overriding concern we should focus on—and that is uniting all forces possible against the most reactionary section of finance capital. It seems to me that to focus on new schemes of division within the capitalist class undermines or confuses that strategy.

 

Re: ‘Cargo’: Netflix’s Australian zombie film spotlights Aboriginal talent and struggle

Carole Avalon says:

I like how Simone Landers appears early on, although largely dialogue free until the male lead ends up in her company. Martin Freeman, such a good choice. Unassuming in his demeanor. Though steadfast, he’s not a Mad Max, not a macho man. He bows to an armed white man at one point in order to try and save his baby, then later attempts to bond with Simone Landers’s character, again to try and save his baby. I figure any diapering happened off-screen.

When Clever Man appears, he doesn’t offer a magic spell, only a particular set of skills, so to speak. Again, so appreciated by this viewer. The various Aboriginal tribes retreated to bush for good reason in this narrative, knowing they’d be the butt of white insanity, as usual. Rosie, along with prospective film viewers, is in good hands.

 

Re:  Iraq elections: A step toward rebuilding popular power

Norman Markowitz says:

Truly a valuable article. It is especially valuable for those on the left who too often take the position that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, defending in the past Saddam Hussein from the Bush presidents and the clerical regime in Iran (and for that matter Putin today from those who recycle Cold War ideology to attack Russia) The Sairoun coalition represents the kind of anti-imperialist democratic politics that serves as a concrete answer to ethnic and religious separatism that imperialist powers have always used in both their subjugation of peoples and their conflicts with each other.

 

Re: Want to attract women? Try not hating us.

Barbara Russum says:

Thanks for this interesting article. I would only add that “men” like Trump and his GOP and so-called Christian followers promote a hateful ideology that emboldens violence against women. They and their hateful followers may not respond to attempts to change their way of thinking and doing, so they need to be isolated and neutralized, and by neutralized I mean removed from office and denied control of the media that they use to spread hate. They are waging a war against women, and we need to fight back!

 

Re: Top NAACP official slams charter schools

Ray Sanders says:

Great analysis. Charter schools under the mask of school reform destroy schools and eliminate the little hope left in urban minority communities for full citizenship. In addition to turning our schools into profit centers and a pipeline into prison, it has resurrected equity and access issues eliminated years ago.

As a point of clarification, Dr. Ray Goode from the University of Minnesota developed the concept of charter schools in a paper he presented at a conference in 1974. Several years later, Albert Shanker endorsed the idea as a model to improve education through community-driven schools. Shortly afterwards, he withdrew his support once he realized that the charter school concept was hijacked to turn schools into profit centers.

 

Re: I was curious, so I saw ‘The Death of Stalin’

Hershl Hartman says:

There is a cliché about film critics: that when they disparage a film, it is because it is not the film that they would have made. I regret that we are dealing here with proof that the cliché is true.

The Death of Stalin is not a balanced history of the Soviet Union, as Eric Gordon seems to have preferred. It is not even a history of those days in 1953, just before and after March 5th of that year. It is, rather, a parody of the undoubted rivalry among tremendously powerful men seeking desperately to be the ones—or The One—to fill a newly-created void of unbelievable power.

As such, there were, for me, very few moments of laughter. I lived through those days, oblivious to what was happening and, at the time, quite unlikely to have believed, even if I had known. I was then an unwilling draftee of the U.S. Army during the waning Korean War, a disastrous event Eric overlooks in his sweeping review of that year’s history.

A “security hold” in Fort Dix, N.J., I recall my utter devastation when the radio announced the death of Stalin. Four years later, after Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes (omitting his own) and—more importantly—the crushing of reform within the Communist Party USA, I left behind misplaced loyalties to Central and National Committees, but not to the basic ideas and ideals of democratic socialism.

Given that personal history, I suppose I brought a different sensibility to the film than Eric did. It wasn’t the absence of Prokofiev’s music that disturbed me, but the failure of the film to note that important aspects of matters it did deal with—the “Doctor’s Plot,” Molotov’s wife Polina, and Lazar Kaganovitch—were not incidentally Jewish, but deliberately chosen as targets by Stalin’s paranoia and anti-Semitism. And of course, the August 12, 1952 execution of the leaders of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, precisely 13, not Eric’s “a dozen or so.”

 

Re: GOP pushes through law allowing auto loan discrimination

Ken Dyier says:

I saw a headline regarding this atrocious piece of discrimination yesterday on TV and decided to look further. What the GOP Congress and Trump have done is truly awful and should be fought. Then I read your account here. I’d like to know what people can do to push back against this. I just bought a car recently, and I’m black. I financed the minimum that banks allow. My payment is low, and I’m satisfied with the purchase overall. What concerns me is that a bank is now free to discriminate against me and essentially gouge me for no other reason than because I’m black. How can I make sure that doesn’t happen?

 

Re: The problem with dividing “good Muslims” from “bad Muslims”

Jose Luis Cisneros says:

I understand the outrage from your insight. What I’m more alarmed about is that nobody else is discussing this. For many years, I’ve been describing “good Muslims” as people that are just sick of the fighting going on around them and just want a normal world to live in. I stopped calling them “good Muslims” because that’s describing everyone else around the world; that’s exactly what we ALL are. “Good Muslims” are just regular people, like me, who just want to live out their lives in normalcy and without the threat of death for wanting to live out our lives the way we want. We’re all just people that want the fighting to stop and just live out our lives. They’re just people…like me.

I live in a country where the majority feel that those who believe in the doctrines of Mohammed are subhuman; the same country whose people tell me that I’m an illegal alien because my skin is a darker shade of brown and my name is of obvious Hispanic origin and that I can speak Spanish to a proficiency greater than 32 percent—all completely ignoring the fact that I am actually a fourth generation American citizen. What I want for my country is for such divisions to end and that we see each other as just fellow humans that just want our country to be better.