The Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-3 landed on the moon on August 23. It is now the fourth country to reach the moon’s surface.
The data it will communicate to the scientific community is part of the crucial information relevant to our survival on Earth.
China, the first country to reach the moon’s dark side, has used the data from its satellites to make a discovery about the plasma ocean surrounding the Earth, the magnetosphere. The plasmasphere researchers have found that material in the magnetosphere protects our planet from solar storms and other high-energy particles.
That information could give us a tool to fight climate change.
China’s discovery is built on data collected by the Soviet’s Luna 2, the first spacecraft on the moon in 1959, which verified the existence of the plasmasphere.
This is part of the knowledge used by over 160 countries working with China to shed more light on the matter. The world’s largest “artificial sun” project holds promise as a potential future energy source.
China is also set to launch in 2028 (two years ahead of time) the Solar Power project in space that will send energy back to Earth.
Many other scientific leaps relevant to the survival of our species, including vaccines, are coming from the socialist countries.
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” — Malcolm X
The funny thing is that the TV series “For All Mankind” barely mentions socialist China and leaves out India.
This award-winning Apple TV+ series depicts an “alternate history” set in the 1970s that is intent on showing that U.S. imperialism is the only way forward. The TV series also uses diversity, which should be a good thing, but it is unfortunately used to hide U.S. imperialism’s war crimes, like Vietnam.
The “alternate history” portrays the U.S. as an underdog victim of the Soviet Union – a communist country that will do anything to shape an authoritarian world devoid of freedom.
The series threads in true events and people to make it look more like a documentary showing the truth about space and the role of the Soviet Union vs. the U.S.
While the U.S. is presented as a place where people have the freedom to seize opportunities (even if they go against the leadership), the Soviet Union is presented as a place where the slightest differences with leadership would land one in a labor camp of hard work and torture.
Actually, neither China — with a population four times larger than the U.S. — nor Russia has a prison population nearing the two million prisoners in the U.S., the actual (not alternate history) largest population of prisoners in the world.
Regarding torture, the type of torture used by the U.S. in Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, is alive and well in U.S. prisons today, such as at Pendleton Correction Facility in Indiana. And the war crimes tortures of prisoners in the U.S.-occupied Guantanamo, Cuba, continue.
The real history of the Vietnam War
Like Captain America, the honorable character committed to freedom and justice, Ed Baldwin, portrays the real Air Force pilot, General Thomas Stafford. The fictional Baldwin has adopted a Vietnamese child who is saved and brought to freedom despite the implied Vietnamese military assault attacking civilians at the end of the Vietnam War. Although Ed Baldwin served during the U.S. war on Vietnam, he was not stationed there. And neither was the real Stafford. However, the fictional Baldwin believes his friends serving in Vietnam are protecting the U.S. and the children of Vietnam.
No mention is made in the series about the more than 3 million killed by the U.S. war on Vietnam. Around 20 million gallons of the chemical weapon Agent Orange were sprayed throughout by the U.S. military from 1961 to 1971. According to the Vietnam Red Cross, an estimated 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects due to Agent Orange.
Here’s where diversity is used to make us forget about the racist war crimes. The series shows that in the U.S., despite not having the first women in space, NASA is where women, including Black women, take leading roles; not only in NASA, they are commanding ships in space before the 1990s.
Danielle, the Black woman commanding the U.S. ship to Mars, must rescue the incompetent Soviet Cosmonauts in their ship that “copied U.S. technology,” which explodes due to the stupidity of the Soviet commander.
Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkora
That fiction again hits a wall of truth since Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova reached space long before the women in the TV series got into space. Tereshkova was the first woman in space in 1963 and is part of the initial 5-women team of cosmonauts.
Sally Ride, the first woman from the U.S. in space, got there in 1983. And the series put a woman in the Chief of the Astronaut Office. That didn’t happen until 2009.
Regarding incompetence and the theft of technology, it was the Soviet Union that landed the first spacecraft on the moon in 1959, with numerous ships following to continue scientific research.
The Soviet Union also launched the first human into space in 1961. Yuri Gagarin’s flight beat the aptly-named U.S. competing space program MISS (Man in Space Sooner).
These misses pushed the U.S. to begin a space race that made a priority of maintaining their show of capitalist superiority over socialism. The Apollo 11 mission to the moon was based on a rocket designed by Wernher Von Braun, a senior advisor to the Apollo project. During World War II, rocket scientist Wernher Von Braun (a Nazi Party member) had designed and built the V-2 rocket for Hitler that launched more than 3,000 missiles, while as many as 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died assembling the weapons.
The fictional Ed Baldwin defended Von Braun, and Von Braun said that working for Hitler was the “cost of progress.”
The person Baldwin portrays, Thomas Stafford, didn’t mention the contradiction of fighting for freedom with a Nazi. He did admit that the cooperation with the Soviet Union was productive, and, instead of accusing the Soviets of stealing technology, he said the Apollo space program studied and learned from the Soviet space program, though the Soyuz rocket was very different and used another propellant.
The interviews in Aerojet Rocketdyne and Spaceflight Insider also spoke about the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, which was the cooperative endeavor meant to ease the tension of the Cold War.
This was Stafford’s fourth and final flight, a mission to meet up with the Soviets in space.
Danielle, the African American character in the series who played the role of commander on the International Space Station, was another example of the alternate history. No woman from the U.S. went to space until 1983 – Sally Ride. And it took until 1992 before an African American woman entered space – Mae Carol Jemison, 17 years after the initial International Space Station mission.
In 1982, Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Y. Savitskaya and her two crewmates marked the first time a space station hosted a mixed-gender crew.
Unlike the portrait of women in space presented by the series, the Soviet Union broke records with the representation of women and also put the first woman from Britain and the first woman from France aboard the Soviet space station Mir.
From rockets to stealth attack aircraft
In 1975, Stafford commanded the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and shook hands with cosmonauts in space; in 1977, he took assignment as the Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Research, Development, and Acquisition. Although Stafford praised the cooperation with the Soviets and said the ISS helped to maintain peace — his new job was a reversal of those words. He led the design of stealth technology, producing the F-117A stealth attack aircraft, the advanced stealth strategic B-2 bomber, directly threatening the Soviet Union and China.
This stealth technology was used in the invasion of Panama in 1989, then with B2 bombers slaughtering Libyans in the U.S.-led NATO bombing in 2011 and during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq.
Frontline quotes from “Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report” by Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen: “F-117 and cruise missiles, these two platforms carried out all attacks against downtown Baghdad; the F-117 operated at night in a heavily populated city. … Both were aircraft of a kind that only a super-power could have, and both could deliver destruction with no advanced warning …
“Even without the flexibility of other aircraft, however, these platforms were able to set the terms for air operations over Iraq and to bring the reality of the war home to the residents of Baghdad.”
Did the Captain America-like character of Ed Baldwin, portraying the supposedly honorable and principled Thomas P. Stafford, ever send a laser-guided missile into a shelter where only civilian women and children resided?
The real-life Stafford did not fly the F-117A, but he led the design of the stealth attack aircraft that did. An F-117A stealth fighter launched two laser-guided missiles on February 13, 1991, in an attack on the al Amiriyah shelter, which resulted in the deaths of more than 400 Iraqi civilians.
This writer was part of a delegation in 1992 led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, getting a closer look at the real-life nightmares of U.S. imperialism. The walls of the thick concrete shelter were entered like butter by the missiles. The first laser-guided missile prevented the escape from the shelter; the second missile left nothing but shadows in the shape of the victims on the walls. This writer remembers the dark shadow in the shape of a woman carrying her baby. The many pictures of children matching the location of the victims were placed on the walls so people would not forget the evil of U.S. imperialism.
In Stafford’s interviews, like the Apple TV series, he forgets how his technology was used and never offers any apology. You can imagine him repeating the words of Von Braun: “Progress has a cost.” Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted to an interviewer on “60 Minutes” that she thought the cost of 500,000 children killed by the U.S. sanctions on Iraq was “worth it” (fascists define progress as the continuation of U.S. imperialist wars and its theft of self-determination and resources).
Ironically, one of the three creators of the “For All Mankind” series is Ben Nedivi. First, he should have less tolerance for injustice given that he was born in Tel Aviv and has a first-hand view of Israeli’s apartheid terror against Palestinians. And his grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. Why would the country that defeated the Nazi government of Germany — the Soviet Union — be portrayed in a false, stereotypical picture of the Cold War, especially since the Soviet Red Army liberated the Nazis’ biggest concentration camp at Auschwitz and freed the greatest number of Holocaust survivors in the extermination camps?
The United Nations General Assembly designated January 27 — the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army — as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The UN writes that it is worrying about the rise of neo-Nazi organizations and wants to use this commemoration to develop educational programs to prevent future genocide.
Justifying the collaboration with Nazis and the ongoing U.S. war crimes does the opposite. It looks like this TV series, in the interest of U.S. imperialism, was designed to sabotage progress at the cost of humanity.
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