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Authored by Paul Antonopoulos via AntiWar.com,

The North Macedonian House of Representatives this week unanimously approved for their country to accept the NATO Accession Protocol, taking the former Yugoslav Republic a step closer towards accession into NATO which is expected to be completed and finalized in the spring.

North Macedonia’s rapid accession into NATO is only possible because of the Prespa Agreement signed between Athens and Skopje in June 2018, bringing an end to the name dispute between the two countries that emerged in 1991 with the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The Prespa Agreement, named after a lake that traverses the borders of Greece, North Macedonia and Albania, defined exactly what was meant by “Macedonia” and “Macedonian.” For Greece, according to the agreement, these terms denote an area and people of Greece’s northern region, who continue the legacy of the Ancient Macedonian Hellenic civilization, history and culture, as well as the legacy of Alexander the Great.

In reference to North Macedonia, these terms denote the modern territory of North Macedonia, the Slavic language and Slavic people with their own history and culture unrelated to the Ancient Macedonians. The agreement also stipulates the removal of North Macedonian irredentist efforts against Greek territory and to align them with UNESCO and Council of Europe’s standards.

With Greece no longer blocking North Macedonia’s attempts to join NATO and the European Union, no time has been wasted to elevate the Balkan country into the Atlanticist organization. There is no doubt that the Prespa Agreement, which caused political turmoil in Athens and Skopje, was signed only for North Macedonia’s rapid entry into NATO.

The acceleration of North Macedonia into NATO is not only a key priority for the organization to reduce Russian influence in the Balkans, but to continue pressurizing Serbia that was bombed by NATO in 1999 in response to the Serbian military operation against the “Kosovo Liberation Army” terrorist organization. North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia are the only non-NATO members remaining in the Balkans, however it is important to remember that Bosnia is effectively a U.S. protectorate, while North Macedonia has been trying to join NATO since 1995 when Yugoslavia was completely destroyed in all but name.

Serbia has no such ambition to join NATO and is considered a problematic country as it is the only remaining bastion of Russian influence left in the Balkans and is preventing full Atlanticist hegemony over the region.

Syriza, the ruling Party of Greece at the time of the signing of the Prespa Agreement, knew full well that the Prespa Agreement was largely despised by the Greeks, but none-the-less pushed for it and signed it. It is very obvious that the Prespa Agreement was to accelerate North Macedonia primarily into NATO, especially as not only Syriza, but also the current ruling party of New Democracy is loyal to NATO, with North Macedonia’s entry into the EU being only a consolation prize for Western powers.

Less than a month after signing the Prespa Agreement, North Macedonia received an invitation to join NATO on 11 July 2018 with the accession protocol made in February 2019. North Macedonia’s accession into the EU on the other hand has made no progress since the Prespa Agreement was made.

For the Atlanticists, a rapid accession into NATO to contain and weaken Russian influence in North Macedonia and to also further constrain and pressurize Serbia was a higher priority than formalizing the Balkan country into the European neoliberal order as an official member. Although North Macedonia will undoubtedly join the EU eventually, it is not a matter of urgency as making the country into a NATO member.

The Prespa Agreement is highly unpopular in both countries as they both feel they have lost out and did not achieve their objectives of promoting their interests with the name issue. NATO was unwilling to risk the Prespa Agreement failing and the name issue re-emerging which would once again put on hold North Macedonia’s accession into the organization.

North Macedonia cannot contribute to NATO in any meaningful way as it is a poor country of just over two million people and not close to the Russian border like the tiny Baltic states. Its accession into NATO is only for the purpose of weakening or preventing any Russian influence in the country and to further isolate Serbia.

Despite North Macedonia being an overwhelmingly Orthodox and Slavic country that had the potential to become another pro-Russia state in the Balkans alongside neighboring Serbia, since its separation from Yugoslavia in 1991, Skopje pursued a pro-Western policy and joined the NATO program Partnership for Peace as early as 1995 and became a European Union candidate a decade later.

Why North Macedonia has pursued such a Western-centric policy since its separation with Yugoslavia is not clearly understood, but it is certainly understood why NATO has accelerated North Macedonia’s membership into its organization.

Paul Antonopoulos is a research fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Most of the world views NATO in a favorable light, according to a Pew Research Center survey, however citizens of two major members – the U.S. and Germany – did not show higher-than-average levels of favorability towards the 71-year-old alliance.

The survey showed a median favorability of 53 percent among the 16 member countries, with only 27 percent saying they view NATO negatively. The U.S. and Germany fell close to the median with 52 percent and 57 percent, respectively, viewing NATO favorably. 26 percent of Americans viewed the military alliance negatively compared to 33 percent of Germans.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Turkey, a NATO member since 1951, recorded the lowest favorability among members with only 21 percent, along with an unfavorability of 55 percent. The only country where more people had an unfavorable opinion of NATO was Russia, a non-member with a favorability of 16 percent and unfavorability of 60 percent. Russia has been a common talking point for NATO countries, with encroachments on Ukraine and other countries testing allies’ commitment to the military alliance.

Favorability of NATO has fluctuated since the Pew Research Center began their survey in 2007, particularly in the U.S. Generally, Democrats have held a favorability 10-20 points higher than Republicans, with 61 percent and 45 percent holding favorable views of NATO, respectively, in 2019. Both of those numbers, however, dropped from their high of 76 percent and 52 percent in 2018.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Last week I outlined why Thuringia was ground zero for seismic shifts in German politics. The fallout from the bombshell dropped on Chancellor Angela Merkel continues this week.

First Merkel had to remove hand-picked successor Annagret Kramp-Karrenbauer from leading the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) because she is inept.

Now, the head of the CDU state party in Thuringia, Mike Mohring, has stepped down, another casualty of Merkel’s iron-fisted policies to deny parties outside of her purview from entering the German political mainstream.

Mohring understood that there was no coalition in Thuringia without the CDU climbing down off its high horse and making a deal with either euroskeptic parties which dominated the polls there — Die Linke or Alternative for Germany (AfD).

And, according to this article from Zeit Online (English translated version by Deepl is here) Mohring tried to work with everyone to come up with a solution which didn’t end in tears.

But none of those were acceptable to Merkel because not only did she make an alliance with AfD verboten for the local CDU, so was any alliance with Die Linke, who were the winners in the election.

This makes zero sense since a Die Linke/CDU alliance in Thuringia would have kept continuity of government there with Bodo Ramelow remaining in charge.

Why would Merkel do that? Die Linke isn’t a direct threat to Merkel’s CDU nationally nor was their win there out of the ordinary.

Again, it comes back to what I’ve talked about in previous articles on this, Merkel’s now not-so-secret alliance with the Greens. The Greens have, for decades, had outsized control over the legislative agenda because of their thin spread across the Bundesrat which gives them de facto veto status in the German Upper House.

In demanding that the FDP’s Thomas Kemmerlich step down as Prime Minister of Thuringia through the unelected and non-constitutional Coalition Committe, Merkel is committing a Reichsexekution, or intervention into state-level affairs, that is a direct contravention of German Basic Law.

Rightly, AfD see this and have sued Merkel over this. Kept German media are downplaying this but this is a real constitutional crisis, especially now that the latest polling has the most likely outcome of snap elections in Thuringia ending with a Die Linke/AfD coalition.

Germany (Thuringia): After the regional government crisis in Thuringia has lead to discussions about government cooperations with left-wing LINKE (LEFT) and right-wing AfD (ID), today’s Infratest dimap poll shows enormous shifts in Thuringia’s party system. #Thueringen pic.twitter.com/1DWAiOCVDm

— Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) February 10, 2020

Because Merkel’s problem doesn’t solve itself if the Greens don’t capture at least 5% to qualify for seats in Thuringia’s parliament and therefore can’t be part of the coalition government.

CDU membership in Thuringia don’t hold with Merkel’s autocratic rules on acceptable behavior. They see their party collapsing from internal strife and Merkel’s intractability. They are paying the price at the state level.

The result is a quickly fracturing CDU with leadership candidates like Frederich Merz proving nearly as tone-deaf to what’s happening as Merkel.

Merz has to walk back comments implying AfD were “Holocaust-denying rabble” while he downplays his favoring an outright Green/CDU coalition.

Comments like this will not endear him to traditional CDU supporters, nor will a CDU/Green coalition be something they’ll vote for. At some point, AfD have to see the opportunities in front of them to take just five points from the CDU and throw Merkel’s electoral calculus into complete disarray.

The problems in German politics extend far beyond Angela Merkel. And AfD’s rise puts pressure on people unaccustomed to dealing with this kind of pressure.

We’ve seen this story before. It’s played out with the inept, bumblers trying to stop Brexit and impeach Donald Trump. We’re watching another round of it trying to put Matteo Salvini in jail for doing his job in Italy, a job for which even the prosecutor in Sicily absolved him of.

This is the fundamental problem of German politics. Merkel uses the Greens to betray Germany to the EU against the a healthy resurgence of German national spirit which is truly trying to reconcile the country’s shameful 20th legacy with the realities of today.

But the constant shaming of people nearly-four generations removed from those events to twist electoral politics only lends AfD’s criticisms of Merkelism more credence. It only enrages and alienates more people from the traditional parties.

This situation isn’t going away. It’s going to get worse as the CDU is now in disarray. AfD have their sights firmly set on Merkel and we’re just eighteen months from a general election in Germany.

The center has completely collapsed in Germany, as it has in so many countries in Europe. The European parliamentary elections made this point loud and clear.

But whatever happens in Thuringian politics over the next few weeks, I’m certain they will have far bigger effects than who controls the budget of a small east German state.

*  *  *

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Authored by Larry Romanoff via GlobalResearch.ca,

Read Part 1 here…

It should be apparent that the launching of bio-warfare, as with conventional warfare, is considerably eased by locating military bases, offensive weapons and delivery systems as physically close as possible to one’s potential enemies. This is one reason the US has established its nearly 1,000 foreign military bases – to ensure the capability of putting an enemy under attack within 30 minutes anywhere in the world. Clearly, the same strategy applies to biological warfare, the US military having created scores of these labs euphemistically defined as “health-security infrastructure” in foreign countries.

It is frightening to learn that many of these foreign bio-installations are classified as so “Top-Secret” they are outside the knowledge and control of even the local governments in the nations where they are built. It is also frightening to learn that the Ebola outbreaks all occurred in close proximity to several of these well-known (and top-secret) US bio-weapons labs in Africa.

There were great fears a few years ago when American scientists recreated the Spanish flu virus that killed around 50 million people in 1918. They spent nine years on this effort before succeeding, and now large quantities of this virus are stored in a high-security government laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia. More recently, scientists have created a mutated super-strain of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus that is directly transmissible among humans and would have at least a 50% kill rate, spawning fears in 2005 of a global pandemic that might kill hundreds of millions.

In late 2013, more than 50 of the world’s most eminent scientists severely criticised the research Ron Fouchier and colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, who have been developing mutant varieties of the H5N1 bird-flu virus that are far more dangerous to humans. The scientists wrote that the research was designed to make the virus fully transmissible between humans, and clearly had a dual civil-military function. This engineered flu could kill half the world’s population, and not by accident. The US military funded this research with more than $400 million.

The Korean War

During and after the Korean War, China produced considerable evidence that the US military was employing biological pathogens against both the Chinese and the North Koreans. More than 25 US POWs supported Chinese claims – and provided further, and very detailed, corroborating evidence  of anthrax, various insects such as mosquitoes and fleas carrying Yellow Fever, and even propaganda leaflets infected with cholera, over the entire North-East of China and virtually all of North Korea. The US government immediately filed charges of sedition against the soldiers who told their stories of these illegal activities, applying enormous pressure to silence them, even threatening defending lawyers with unspecified retribution. As a final desperate attempt to silence these former POWs, the US military relied on the CIA to subject them to extensive treatments with a newly-discovered and dangerous drug called Metrazol, in attempts to totally erase all memories of their activities in Korea, apparently destroying the mens’ minds in the process.

Global Research published an article on September 07, 2015 by David Swanson which provided some detail on American attempts to flood North Korea with the Bubonic Plague, beginning with the statement, “This happened some 63 years ago, but as the U.S. government has never stopped lying about it, and it’s generally known only outside the United States, I’m going to treat it as news.”

Correct on all counts. Curtis LeMay not only conducted his sincere attempts to exterminate the entire civilian population of North Korea by bombing virtually every house in the country, but there is now a huge and still emerging volume of indisputable evidence the Americans dropped on both North Korea and China insects and materials carrying anthrax, cholera, encephalitis, and bubonic plague.

Then on September 10, 2012, the Los Angeles Times ran an article discussing the topic of doctors “still trying to diagnose mysteries of the Hantavirus” more than 20 years after this deadly pathogen was first identified in the US in 1993.  In this case, the virus appeared to attack only native Indians – the infections concentrated in a four-state area – who developed sudden respiratory problems and were often dead within hours. Most victims reported “not feeling well” one day, and were dead the next, from what appeared as a very mysterious pathogen with an undeterminable source. But then, “a lucky clue” arose from a television viewer, a physician who stated this illness seemed very similar to that caused by a virus he had observed the US military using in Korea in the 1950s. And sure enough, tests proved the illness to be caused by a variation of the same Hantavirus that attacked troops in Korea.

The virus attracted attention because some American troops were accidentally exposed to it in Korea, most of whom died very suddenly. Two facts that were eliminated from the public reports of the time: (1) the virus attacked North Koreans and Chinese in greater numbers, and (2) this Hantavirus was one item in the treasure trove of biological weapons the Americans inherited from Dr. Ishii and his Unit 731. The Japanese were light-years ahead of the Americans and the Western Allies in virus research and had isolated the lethal Hantavirus by the late 1930s, with much evidence it was used against China by the Japanese and later against both China and North Korea by the Americans. It seems that some of this weaponised material escaped containment and exposed American and South Korean soldiers to their own handiwork.

US Biowarfare on Cuba

One of the commonly-known (outside the US) biological warfare programs conducted by the US, remarkable for its longevity, is the decades-long offensive attack on Cuba. The US military and CIA conducted so many of these biological assaults that there is a museum in Havana that provides substantial evidence of the many years of biological warfare against this small country. Jeffrey St. Clair noted in an article a few of these events, as follows:

“In 1971 the first documented cases of swine fever in the western hemisphere showed up in Cuba, resulting in the deaths of more than 500,000 hogs. Cuba accused the US of importing that virus into the country, and a CIA agent later admitted that he delivered the virus to Cuban exiles in Panama, who carried the virus into Cuba. The news was public, but the US media ignored it. In 1981, Fidel Castro blamed an outbreak of dengue fever in Cuba on the CIA. The fever killed 188 people, including 88 children. In 1988, a Cuban exile leader named Eduardo Arocena admitted bringing some germs into Cuba in 1980. Another occasion involved an outbreak of thrips palmi, an insect that kills potato crops, palm trees and other vegetation. Thrips first showed up in Cuba on December 12, 1996, following low-level flights over the island by US government spray planes. The US was able to quash a United Nations investigation of the incident.”

This was only a small part of America’s biological aggression against Cuba. In 1979, the Washington Post published reports on a long-standing American bio-warfare program against Cuban agriculture that had existed at least since 1962, by the CIA’s biological warfare section. And in 1980, the US believed it had discovered a biological agent that would target ethnic Russians, and sent a ship from Florida to Cuba on a mission to “carry some germs to Cuba to be used against the Soviets”. And as recently as 1996 and 1997, the Cuban government was again accusing the US of engaging in biological warfare by spraying Cuban crops with biological pathogens during illegal “reconnaissance flights”. It was also definitively reported that during the Cuban missile crisis, large numbers of chemical and biological weapons were loaded on American military aircraft in preparation for use on Cuba.

American bio-warfare efforts have also been launched on at least several other nations in Central and South America, involving a number of viral pathogens, cancers and chemicals. In his article, St. Clair referred to an epidemic of dengue fever that erupted in Managua, Nicaragua, where about 50,000 people became seriously ill and many died. The attack occurred during the CIA’s war against the Sandinista government, where the outbreak immediately followed a series of low-level so-called “reconnaissance flights” conducted by the Americans over Managua.

It has also been reliably reported by several sources that the US military has used Haiti as a kind of “open season” biological lab, exposing the local population to almost everything imaginable, with the US media keeping a very tight lid on information leakage. Even more reprehensible was the treatment awarded to those Haitians who made the serious mistake of becoming “boat people”, i.e. escaping their American pathology lab by emigrating in small boats to the US. The US government deported most to Puerto Rico to be used as guinea pigs and lab rats, where they would be out of view of Congress and the media and, according to reports, having contained them in concentration camps to inflict upon them whatever ‘scientific tests’ they avoided at home. In one case as recently as 1980, hundreds of Haitian men in these detention camps developed full-size female breasts after being injected repeatedly with unknown hormones by US military physicians. The historical record tells us the same was done to the same people in a publicly off-limits military base in Florida.

Along with Cuba, there is the strange case of the more or less simultaneous occurrence of cancers among the leaders of South American countries, coincidentally in each case, the infection of a national leader the US despised and had tried to remove by several other means. We had Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo, and the former Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. A former Brazilian President, speaking of these cancers, said in an interview,

“It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It’s at the very least strange, very strange.”

The Secret WW II US-Japan Bio-Partnership

When Japanese troops invaded North-East China in 1932, Dr. Shiro Ishii began his notorious biological warfare experimentation program in a sector near Harbin disguised as a water-purification unit, then known as Unit 731. He began with various poisonous gases including mustard gas, then used aircraft to distribute cotton and rice husks contaminated with the bubonic plague, in various parts of Central China. His unit collected Chinese resisting the Japanese occupation, using them for unlimited medical atrocities including live vivisection. The New York Times reported one instance of a Japanese physician describing his experience there:

“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

Ishii would first have his teams infect the victims with anthrax, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, dysentery, syphilis, the bubonic plague and other pathogens, then dissect them while still alive to examine the results, followed by cremation of the evidence. The US military’s Surgeon-General’s Department estimated that 580,000 Chinese were killed in this manner, with atrocities committed by some of Japan’s most distinguished physicians.

At the end of the war when it became clear Japan was losing and would have to evacuate China, Ishii ordered all the remaining Chinese in custody to be killed and their bodies burned, then destroyed with explosives the entire Unit 731 compound to hide all traces of his experiments. General Douglas MacArthur, then Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, made a secret deal with Ishii and the entire staff of Unit 731 to transfer to the US military all records of the biowarfare and vivisections for US military study, in exchange for a complete cover-up of all evidence of the existence of these activities, and a promise of immunity from war-crimes prosecution.

Ishii turned over to the US military on one occasion alone more than 10,000 pages of his “research findings”, after which the Americans re-wrote Japan’s history books, which is why neither the Japanese nor the world know of the massive atrocities committed in China, and which is where the American military gained much of its expertise and know-how in chemical and biological weapons and the methods of human experimentation it would later apply so freely in Korea and Vietnam and to American citizens.

On 6 May 1947, MacArthur wrote to Washington that “additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii probably can be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘War Crimes’ evidence.” Some Japanese were arrested by Soviet forces for their biological crimes against Russians, and tried at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949 but, to cover their own tracks, the Americans dismissed all surviving victim testimony and Russia’s war-crimes trials of Japanese as “communist propaganda”.

Not only did the US government and military provide Dr. Ishii and his staff total immunity from prosecution, they imported the entire group to the US, all secretly stationed on US military bases and on the US Army payroll. Ishii was for years a frequent guest lecturer at the US military’s bio-warfare school at Fort Detrick, and given a lucrative post as full professor and supervisor of biological research at the University of Maryland until he died decades later. It was only in 1995 that the US military finally admitted it had offered immunity, secret identities, and good jobs with high salaries, to these Japanese scientists and physicians in exchange for their work on biological warfare research and human experimentation. These people were recruited not only by the military, but by the CDC, the US State Department, military intelligence, the CIA, and the US Department of Agriculture, all for work on “secret government projects”.

Epilogue

From the very earliest days of America’s bio-warfare experiments, US political and military leaders, as well as CIA officials, made no effort to hide their interest in developing methods of infecting individuals with cancer as a method of ridding themselves of national leaders they didn’t like, a method with perfect deniability. The US record of having assassinated by various means about 150 political leaders in other nations will attest to this assertion.

“The attraction is that bio-weapons are not only very efficient mass killers but are quite cost-effective compared to shooting wars. As well, genetic weapons can be dispersed in a multitude of ways, using virus-infected insects or bacteria, or spliced into GM seeds. These weapons are difficult to detect and identify, and often a treatment or vaccine could be years in the making.”

Dr. Leonard Horowitz, the famed pharma industry whistleblower, quoted one expert as saying he would plan a bio-attack

“with subtle finesse, to make it look like a natural outbreak. That would delay the response and lock up the decision-making process. Even if you suspect biological terrorism, it’s hard to prove. It’s equally hard to disprove . . . You can trace an arms shipment, but it’s almost impossible to trace the origins of a virus that comes from a bug.”

One author noted that a properly-done release of an infectious agent would make diagnosis and treatment difficult, adding that this kind of bio-warfare cannot be traced to its source and might be considered an “act of God”.

Many recent disease outbreaks would seem to properly qualify as potential bio-warfare agents: AIDS, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Hantavirus, Lyme Disease, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Polio (Syria), Foot and Mouth Disease, the Gulf War Syndrome and ZIKA.

The Western mass media have ignored all of this, censoring this entire portion of history, and even the Internet has been scrubbed with Google and Bing unable to find the truth which is out there. Once again, freedom of speech depends entirely on who controls the microphone.

NASA has confirmed that a potentially hazardous asteroid is traveling towards Earth at a mind-numbing 34,000 mph this weekend, the International Business Times reported.

NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) detected the incoming asteroid as 163373 (2002 PZ39), measures about 3,250 feet across, and is expected to pass over Earth on Saturday. 

“Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth,” NASA said in a statement.  

NASA has been simulating for an “asteroid apocalypse” to help the space agency better prepare for an asteroid strike. But don’t be alarmed, this weekend’s extremely close pass over will miss Earth by a distance 0.03860 astronomical units, or about 3.6 million miles.

With a near-miss expected this weekend, there’s another asteroid lurking above that measures a mile long and could threaten human civilization. 

Japanese scientists warned last month, “the potential breakup of the rock could be dangerous to life on Earth. Those resulting asteroids could hit the Earth in the next 10 million years or so.”

And it makes complete sense, why not just NASA, but Zerohedge readers are really going to like this, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also been preparing for a possible disaster of an asteroid strike. 

The European Space Agency (ESA) recently ran simulations of an asteroid strikes on Earth, indicating that it too is preparing for a future catastrophic event.

And why are government agencies around the world preparing for asteroid strikes? 

Well, it could be due to the “God of Chaos” asteroid, which is slated to skim past the Earth in 2029, could be what ends life as we know it.  

Authored by Allen Gindler via The Mises Institute,

There are myriads of words written about socialism, and yet lots of misconceptions about it still exist even in the minds of those who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The most striking and frequent blunders are the identification of socialism exclusively with Marxism, the confusion between the concepts of socialism and communism, and the claim that fascism and National Socialism belong to the right, to name a few.

It is necessary to give a comprehensive definition of socialism, determine the principal attributes that indicate belonging to socialism, and to classify the socialist trends on these grounds to clarify the concept once and for all.

The contemporary meaning of socialism often runs along the lines that it is a politico-economic theory in which the means of production, wealth distribution, and exchange are supposed to be owned and regulated by the community as a whole. This characterization of socialism emphasizes its important economic features; however, it cannot be considered a comprehensive definition. The wording implies a narrow understanding of socialism from the point of view of materialist and positivist currents of socialism but does not fully encompass the features exhibited in antimaterialist, anti-Cartesian, and Kantian members of the socialist family.

It seems to me that the most inclusive definition of socialism is as follows:

Socialism is a set of artificial socioeconomic systems that are characterized by varying degrees of collectivization of property, or consciousness, or the redistribution of wealth.

Notice that socialism is designated as an artificial entity, meaning that it does not occur naturally during the evolution of human society but is imposed on nations coarsely through the actions of activists.

This definition derives from the parsimonious solution of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of the twelve most relevant currents of socialism, and it meets the criterion of necessity and sufficiency. In other words, socialization of property, collectivization of consciousness, and wealth redistribution are necessary and sufficient causative factors that taken separately or in combination unambiguously define an ideology as socialistic and designate preferred paths to socialism.

Given these three main causative conditions, it is easy to identify and classify socialist movements in the universe of political philosophies. The nuanced distinction between socialist movements is explained by attributes that seem essential but not general enough to influence the grouping of political philosophy in one direction or another. At the same time, any of the following ideologies has at least one causative factor that fully characterizes the doctrine as socialist.

The generic realm of socialism comprises several ideologies, which, more often than not, have historically been hostile to each other:

Marxism is the particular and extreme case of socialism named communism. Marx did not invent the notion of socialism. The ideas of socialism were known long before Marx and indisputably influenced his worldview. Instead, Marx created the theory of “scientific communism.” Communism is characterized by the complete socialization of property and the total collectivization of consciousness. The orthodox Marxism has never been materialized.

Marxism-Leninism, also known as Bolshevism, is a revision of Marxism regarding the scope and driving forces of the communist revolution. If, as according to Marx, the revolution should be brought on simultaneously in developed industrialized countries by the mass proletarian movement, then, for Lenin, the Bolshevik revolution might take place in a single agrarian country under the leadership of the vanguard of revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the goal of Marxism-Leninism was communism, implying total collectivization of everything and everyone. A Bolshevik coup succeeded in the Russian Empire, and the communist regime existed from 1917 to 1991.

Trotskyism is, in essence, genuine Marxism-Leninism, which tries politically to preserve its theoretical purity. Trotsky was a founder of the theory of “permanent revolution,” which posits that a proletarian revolution in one country should spread to neighboring nations until communist revolutionary transformations embrace the whole world. He criticized Stalin’s policy from the left, arguing that building communism in one separate country was a deviation from the original intent, that the expropriation of peasant property should have been completed immediately, and that the proletariat had been deceived and continued to be exploited but this time by the Soviet nomenclature. In general, Trotsky accused Stalin of betraying the ideals of the proletarian revolution.

Anarcho-communism also implies the complete collectivization of property and consciousness. However, the doctrine does not accept the Marxist idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the appointment of the working class as the sole agent of the revolution, and two stages on the path to a communist society. The anarcho-communists hoped to build a stateless communist society as soon as they gained power during the revolutionary war. Anarcho-communism was briefly institutionalized on the free territory of southeastern Ukraine from 1918 to 1921, during the revolution and the civil war in the Russian Empire.

Reformism or Social Democracy (Europe), also known as Democratic Socialism in the USA, is a significant revision to Marxism, which practically does not leave even the foundation of genuine Marxist principles. Reformism has been a mainstream form of socialist ideology and practice since the end of the nineteenth century. Redistribution of wealth and partial socialization of consciousness are the main paths being utilized by the doctrine. Socialism is supposed to be gradually built within a capitalistic society by methodically changing the socioeconomic laws of the land using parliamentary procedures. Great importance is also attached to the mental transformation of members of the society through the indoctrination of the population in educational institutions and the propaganda of the socialistic ideals in the mass media, social networks, and materials of pop culture.

Revolutionary Syndicalism (in Italy, France), Anarcho-syndicalism (in Spain), and Guild Socialism (in Great Britain) are non-Marxian currents of socialism, meaning that they did not adhere to the tenets of scientific communism. The main path to socialism is the expropriation of private property from its rightful owners, with its subsequent collectivization and transfer to the management of the labor collective. It was assumed that the fruits of labor would be exchanged in the market between various producers as well as between the villages and the cities. Anarcho-syndicalists managed to gain political power in Aragon, Andalusia, and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).

Fascism (Italy) is a non-Marxian, antimaterialist, antipositivist current of socialism. Italian fascism envisioned a new type of society that would supersede both communism and classical liberalism; it was conceived as neither on the right nor the left. However, the practical implementation of fascism was the complete socialization of the consciousness, the partial collectivization of the means of production, and unprecedented wealth redistribution. The means of production de jure remained in possession of the owners, but de facto they could not freely dispose of them. Fascism was imposed on Italian society from 1922 to 1945.

National Socialism (Germany) is a non-Marxian flavor of socialism, based on the racial and pseudo-scientific theory of the superiority of Aryans. National Socialism pursued complete collectivization of the consciousness, partial socialization of the means of production, and aggressive wealth redistribution as a method of achieving a socialist paradise for das Volk. As in any other totalitarian society, the state was the ultimate owner of the means of production, despite a de jure allowance of private ownership. Contrary to fascism, National Socialism did not believe in the antagonism between labor and capital and insisted on the unity of the nation in the face of socioeconomic and military challenges. National Socialism materialized in Germany and lasted from 1933 to 1945.

It should be noted that if a socialist current of any flavor is given sufficient run time, then, regardless of the chosen path, all causative factors will reach their maximum value.

That is, in the limit, as mathematicians say, all means of production will inevitably be socialized, and the individual will be coercively subjugated to the collective. In this sense, such a seemingly mild current like democratic socialism is just as dangerous as all the other members of the socialist family.