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very normal and not astroturfed

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Layla Al-Attar, Iraqi artist and painter, killed by a U.S. missile attack on Baghdad in 1993, as ordered by Bill Clinton.

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#liberalism 🤝 fascism

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cheers was right.. makin your way in the world today takes everything you got

#so drink 10 beers!

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#nasser hospital #khan younis #gaza #palestine #crimes against humanity #genocide

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More reporting from May 2023, ICYMI:

#tesla #tslaq

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Happy birthday, Mumia Abu-Jamal! (April 24, 1954)

A longtime political prisoner of the US prison system, Mumia Abu-Jamal was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and became involved with the Black Panther Party as a teenager. He left the party at age 16 and became a journalist, still active in local left-wing social movements. He became president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists and supported MOVE. In 1982, Abu-Jamal was convicted of the murder of a police officer, in a trial marred by unreliable evidence and falsified witness testimony. He has remained a prisoner of conscience ever since, continuing his appeals. He has become the subject of a movement dedicated to securing his release.

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April

by Mary Oliver

I wanted to speak at length about the happiness of my body and the delight of my mind for it was April, a night, a full moon and --

but something in myself or maybe from somewhere other said: not too many words, please, in the muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

#poetry #april #full moon

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broke my damn phone screen =⁠_⁠=

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#if you got it flaunt it

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Geometric Shapes / 240423

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What always gets me about learning about settler colonialism is how once you learn about it you cannot unsee the violence to the land itself. My home state was previously nearly 100% wetlands, apart of the wider Ohio river valley whose biodiversity supported such large populations of hundreds of different species that many contemporary source from settlers describe it as like the garden of Eden.

The Indigenous people who farmed and hunted here (and still farm and hunt in what land they have been able to keep and reclaim) were able to grow miles of upon miles of crops with multiple harvests a year, encouraging this biodiversity by creating forest gardens with incredible amounts of food from staples like corn and squash to local fruits like pawpaws to European imports like apples alongside controlled burns which allowed fields and buffalo ranges to expand.

Nowadays my state is known almost exclusively for its fields of nothing but corn and soy beans. Driving through in between the comparatively small cities you'll see nothing but fields where the plethora of different trees and plants were chopped down mile by mile, the remaining wetlands drained and flattened, and the rich black soils robbed of their nutrients through decades upon decades of monocrop agriculture now preserved through the life blood of petrochemical fertilizers which destroy the surrounding environment.

This process was done mile by mile as the tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed and displaced by settlers and the US army, the land measured and sold acre by acre to white settlers who raped the land as described, filling the pockets of wealthy land speculators (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who bought the land directly from the government in schemes so corrupt historians have dedicated entire careers to mapping out their dramas.

It's like learning about commodity fetishism and suddenly seeing hundreds of strangers in the products that surround you. Once you learn how the land was destroyed for profit you'll never look at the miles of fields or the cracks in the concrete of buildings built on wetlands or the stench of now obsolete canals built solely for a once boat-dependent economy with no care for the environment the same.

#environmentalism #ecosocialism

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Their barbaric government operated reeducation camps versus our enlightened private institutions for troubled teens

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Happy birthday, Nicola Sacco! (April 22, 1891)

An Italian immigrant to the United States and an anarchist, Nicola Sacco, along with Bartolomeo Vanzetti, was accused in 1920 of the murder of Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter during an alleged armed robbery. They were convicted in 1921, amidst a trial riddled with xenophobia and anti-anarchist bias. The pair became a progressive cause celebre, with many public figures lobbying for clemency and many protests being held. In the end, after the appeals process was exhausted, Sacco was executed along with Vanzetti by electric chair. It is today accepted that the pair was wrongfully tried, convicted, and executed, and in 1977 Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation declaring so.

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Happy birthday, Vladimir Lenin! (April 22, 1870)

One of the most relevant and influential revolutionary figures of the 20th century, Vladimir Lenin, birth name Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, was born in Simbirsk to a well-off family. Lenin's brother was himself a revolutionary, and his execution in 1887 for the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III spurred Lenin to embrace revolutionary socialist politics. He was eventually sent into internal exile in Siberia for his activities, before relocating to Western Europe. Lenin became a prominent figure in the Russian Social Democratic Party, and led the Bolshevik faction in the party's split, opposing the Menshiviks. During World War I, Lenin articulated the position of the international socialist movement's left wing, arguing that socialists should oppose their imperialist governments in wartime and work to convert the imperialist war into a war to enact the overthrow of capitalism. After the Tsar was overthrown in the February Revolution, Lenin returned to lead the Bolsheviks in Russia, and they soon seized state power in the October Revolution. The Social Democratic Party was soon reformed into the Communist Party, and Lenin led the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in withdrawing from the world war, defeating the right-wing Whites in the Russian Civil War, and establishing the Soviet Union. Lenin also founded the Communist International in order for the international socialist movement to coordinate strategically. In the aftermath of the civil war, Lenin promulgated the New Economic Policy, which was intended to help the Soviet Union rebuild and develop its productive forces. Lenin died soon after the end of the civil war in 1924, and was ultimately succeeded as leader of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin. Lenin's developments to Marxist theory are known as Leninism, and his most prominent works include What is to be Done?, The State and Revolution, and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

"The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists."