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#at the hands of western imperialism
elderbeariez · 6 months
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Sing to me of fury's burn,
Of ashes scattered to the wind;
Of phosphor skies and wartime sins,
Of people snuffed like flame.
O muse of revolution,
Ever hallowed be thy name;
Sing a song of pain, of rage,
Of faith used as a bludgeon
To keep down the colonized.
Enough! The pressure's building
Crystallizing rage,
And yet, the detonation's a surprise?
An order of magnitude more is their toll.
Do you not see the vampirism of the masses?
The endless thirst for gore?
Enough is Enough, they say,
And still, with every passing day
The death toll rises higher
And higher
And higher
And-
Enough!! Your God would be ashamed!!!
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darkhopping · 2 years
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thoughts on vktm so far: fucking great !! grea treminder 2 think abt what one is listening to/reading/watching etc u kno . media literacy shit but also really fucking funny . microdosing on being american by reading vktm skips
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necromancer-mango · 2 years
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been feeling some kind of way since attending one of the local conventions around here, there was a lot more anime stuff than before which was neat and some of the panels were interesting but attending them seeing all white panelists talking about nuanced subject matters sure is huh.
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menderash · 3 months
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How can you talk about anything else today. She was six. Millions heard her cries begging to be saved. We heard her older cousin be slaughtered, heard the baby pull the phone from her cousin's dead hands, heard her cry and beg to be saved, to be allowed to live, to be pardoned for a crime no one in that fucking car committed. The occupation knew she was there, knew she was the only one alive in that pile of bodies, and they killed her anyway. They knew, they knew, they knew. They allowed paramedics to approach her, and then bombed them just mere meters away from her, then killed her. The occupation allowed them to believe she could be saved and then killed all of them moments away from her rescue. She was in a car fleeing the evacuation zone along the correct route as instructed. The ambulance waited three hours, three hours of her being trapped between the rotting bodies of her dead family, for the occupation's permission to save her, and when they gave it, the occupation killed them anyway. What else is there to say. How can you quantify that level of cruelty. How many more worse things have happened that we don't have a recording of? How much evil has the zionist occupation regime been allowed to get away with in the interest of western imperialism? How many six year olds who love bratz, who have a bluey plush, who want to grow up to be doctors or ballerinas or astronauts, have been sniped from this earth? Their bodies desecrated, left to bloat and be eaten by animals and have their graves bulldozed and their bodies deliberately crushed beneath treads like roadkill? At least ten fucking thousand. At least.
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emily84 · 10 months
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it's so fucking telling, how this oceangate thing is all that's being talked about these past three days.
meanwhile, boats carrying dozens, hundreds of people sink every week on the Mediterranean and nobody even spares a thought. the far right all throughout Europe not-so-secretly spewing "we should sink them all" and "if we could just bomb them back to where they came from" rhetoric, like these people aren't fleeing from countries whose instability is a direct result of colonialism and neo-imperialism and on top of that, Europe jailing people and ngo's who try to do something
meanwhile, how much is the coordinated effort to save a handful of billionaires going to cost?
I do hope, against hope, that they find them, alive and well, but jesus fucking christ, the glaring disregard for human life when it's not a white wealthy westerner drives me up the fucking wall.
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tikkunolamresistance · 3 months
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Zionism has taught Jews that we are ontologically different from the rest of humanity and collective community. Instilled within us that our only claim to safety, the only true way we can be undoubtedly safe, was through the existence of a quasi-Religious, ethno-nationalist state strictly dictated by the Zionist project. That the self-determination of Jews can only, exclusively, be achieved through the establishment of this colony of forced-assimilation. The equation of Zionism equals Judaism, no matter the disastrous consequences of which, has raised millions of Jewish people around the world.
And trust, it has not only been by the hands of Jewish Zionism. For Christian Zionism plays a major, glaring role in this indoctrination. With there being more Christian Zionists than there are Jews in the world (with much of the Republican and Democratic parties being Christian Zionists) the ideology of The Rapture, second coming of Jesus, with establishment of Jerusalem as the World’s new Capital following; Jews and Palestinians are just canon-fodder; pawns to summon Jesus. We implore that you do further reading on this matter and it’s instrumental role in Zionist ideology.
And one can only wonder, one can only assume, that has this not since opened an irrefutable Pandora’s Box of a new kind of capitalist nationalism onto the global Jewish community? To appoint a group as above another is a complexity of supremacy that we’ve seen through history. If we look at Imperialist history, we see what ideology has forced its way through epochs to excuse brutal expansionist policy.
What’s worst, and what’s most enraging, is that Shoah has been weaponised not only from the Holocaust industry— the billions made from displaying Jewish generational trauma and the cinematic brutalisation of our people— to ensure the West can constantly remind us that their role in the war was for Jewish liberation, and certainly not due to fearing Nazi imperial domination as a threat to Western imperial interests… but to merit the Israeli States’ “right to self determination” and “self-defence” against inevitable Native Palestinian uprising.
Zionism is a right-wing, ethnonationalist idology that has been used to control and influence Jewish communities for decades, to justify imperialist expansion. It’s an insult, a disgrace, to Jewish history, identity and peoplehood.
Anti-Zionism is the radical rejection and desire to dismantle the very systems that harm not only us, Jews, but our brothers and sisters in this fight against capitalist regime. We seek unity, liberation, equity, justice. We seek love where there has been unprecedented hatred. We seek grace where there has been insolence. Anti-Zionism is integral in the fight for true global liberation.
There is pain upon the Holy Land, Palestine, and we must admit that we can do something about it.
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ghelgheli · 3 months
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I don't think now, at the time Iran is viciously defending against US imperialism, is the time to be making left-communist critiques of them.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is not some unimpeachable bastion of anti-imperialism in western asia and it is dangerous to withhold critique just because it is opposed to US hegemony. The IRI is a theocratic ethnostate pushing back against euro-american imperialism while enacting its own centuries-long imperialism on the ethnic and religious minorities that fall within and around its borders. On a weekly if not daily basis, the IRGC, the paramilitary basijis, as well as the regular police harass, arrest, and kill not only such minorities as Kurds, Balochs, and Ahwazi Arabs (don't have to look far for this), but also ethnic Persian political dissidents and gender and sexual minorities.
The history of the 1979 revolution speaks to the development and rise of Khomeinism in the 1970s as a bourgeoisie opportunism that claimed the martyrs of Iranian communists while at every turn promising the disenfranchised baazaaris the protection of their private property. The purge of the Mojahedin in the months after the revolution, the associated purge of all deemed communist, and the immediate suppression of Kurdish autonomy movements in the northwest, all form the legacy of Khomeinism. It is important to be honest about this, to be honest about the reformulation of institutional misogyny and the other ills of Pahlavi Iran under the IRI, while simultaneously recognizing that the revolution was successful in one thing: exorcising the puppeteering hands of the united states from the country. It is important not to fall into the trap of valorizing an imperial power, while understanding that the only liberatory future for the people on the plateau and surrounding regions is revolution from within and below, not external intervention. These are compatible and, indeed, complementary halves of a whole politic!
As a Tehrani, and particularly as an ethnic Persian/Iranian Azerbaijani (Iranian Azerbaijanis being subject to linguistic and cultural suppression, but nonetheless perhaps the most integrated minority), it strikes me as my responsibility to talk about this. And it is something I talk about regardless of what is going on. As an esoteric Shi'a, it especially seems like my responsibility to talk about what Khomeinism has wrought.
And all of that is to say nothing of the fact that in my post I was just critiquing left-Shi'a infatuation with Khomeinism qua ideology, with no mention of the IRI—whose relationship with Khomeinism is varied, nebulous, and I would say secondary to the three decades of theocratic nationalism that has developed since Khomeini's death.
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heritageposts · 1 year
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how do i start to read marxist leninist/leftist stuff ? i searched on the internet but it’s super confusing lol
the most important value for me as an ML is anti-imperialism, so i guess i'll always recommend that people start with works centred on that
some suggestions below (all books should be available either on marxist.org or as pdf/epub files on libgen)
American Holocaust by David E. Stannard
about the colonization of america. not explicitly marxist, but it's probably done more to radicalize me than any other piece of writing. this is the pile of corpses capitalism is built on:
Within no more than a handful of generations following their first en counters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples had been exterminated. The pace and magnitude of their obliteration varied from place to place and from time to time, but for years now historical demographers have been uncovering, in region upon region, post-Columbian depopulation rates of between 90 and 98 percent with such regularity that an overall decline of 95 percent has become a working rule of thumb. What this means is that, on average, for every twenty natives alive at the moment of European contact-when the lands of the Americas teemed with numerous tens of millions of people-only one stood in their place when the bloodbath was over. To put this in a contemporary context, the ratio of native survivorship in the Americas following European contact was less than half of what the human survivorship ratio would be in the United States today if every single white person and every single black person died. The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls. - David E. Stannard
2. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin
Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. - Vladimir Lenin
3. The Wretched of The Earth by Franz Fanon
Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners nor victims. Very well then; if you’re not victims when the government which you’ve voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of doubt, executioners. And if you chose to be victims and to risk being put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your irons out of the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out; they’ll have to stay there till the end. Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors. - prefrace by Jean-Paul Sartre
4. Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa I have talked a good deal about Hitler. Because he deserves it: he makes it possible to see things on a large scale and to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics. Whether one likes it or not, at the end of the blind alley that is Europe, I mean the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and a few others, there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophicrenunciation, there is Hitler - Aimé Césaire
5. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti
probably the most accessible introduction to communism that doesn't demonize countries that have undergone—or attempted to undergo—a transitation into socalism (like the ussr, cuba, etc.)
The very concept of "revolutionary violence" is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like. - Michael Parenti
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yourtongzhihazel · 3 months
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Hi, i was wondering what you were referring to here: "The state department will slip in some bullshit on the Uyghur genocide". What do you mean by bullshit?
There is no Uyghur genocide. It is entirely fabricated by the us within the last 4 years. The myth originates from a far-right christian fundamentalist adrian zenz working with the victims of communism foundation. Most of the claims come from the Uyghur World Congress, which is a group entirely associated with the us state department. The "East Turkestan Islamic Movement", the group most people point to as the Uyghur independence movement was listed by the us as a terrorist group before 2019 after which they began ramping up their Uyghur genocide narrative.
China has invited many international organizations to inspect and verify their claims and many have agreed that no genocide is occurring. Even the us state department themselves had to admit defeat and say no evidence of genocide can be found (this is obvious because they are working backwards from the manufactured narrative of genocide and looking for "evidence" that supports that). China is one current target of us imperialism. Xinjiang sits at a crossroads of Beijing's Belt and Road initiative. A disruption to a global development/trade plan here would serve us interests very well.
If you've seen my posts on terrorism/terrorists, you know that I don't see designations of 'terrorist groups' for much. My point there is the political posturing for propaganda. Terrorism arises from dire material conditions from which radicalization can occur, and indeed, terrorism in Xinjiang had been a serious, deadly issue. The PRC response was to build vocational schools and deradicalization centers whose aims are to eliminate the material foundations that lead to terrorism. Individually, this heavy handed approach is not ideal, yes, but astute readers will note that this pales in comparison to western styles of counter-terrorism: bombs and genocide. It's not even the first time vocational schools/deradicalization centers have been used either; Malaysia also employs them.
I am reminding you, dear reader, that the vast majority of sources on this subject come from western NGOs, media, and government sources, who are currently engaged in the erasure of several real genocides in the world, such as Palestine. If you compare the international response to Palestine versus with Xinjiang, you will see that the hallmarks of a genocide is not present. There is no mass refugee crisis in the countries surrounding Xinjiang; there are no verifiable recordings of any sort of genocidal action in Xinjiang; and there is not a stifling of journalistic transparency that we see in Palestine (i.e. the murder of journalists and censorship by western media), but, rather a silencing or refusal to participate from the west itself (one example).
I am glad many are sensitive to accusations of genocide; it is the duty of all people to stop them when they occur. However, because of our sensitivity, those who seek to enact imperialism across the world will take advantage of that instinct to manufacture consent for imperialist attacks on targeted countries. We have to stop and critically analyze any and all claims of genocide that come from the governments and media of the largest exporters and perpetrators of genocide: the west.
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botaniqueer · 4 months
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One of my spicier takes is that the United States is essentially what a successful Nazi Germany would have looked like.
A reason that Nazi Germany failed and why the US lives on to do imperialism another day in success, is that Nazi Germany burned too bright and too fast, which forced others to act that were previously willing to let it be because it was too heavy handed and started encroaching on other western powers.
The US on the other hand is much better at managing optics and pacing itself. The Democratic party acts like a coolant to prevent the US from running too hot; the Republican party being in power is like a gun in use, or some other sort of machine, while the DNC is the coolant that stops the machine from breaking down and causing domestic rebellion and international action.
They're played against eachother in team sports-style politics, but fundamentally they're both colonial right wing parties that act in concert to maintain the US and its imperialism. (If this sounds conspiratorial, this isn't conscious on most people's part and is just the way the US as a system stabilized.) If the Republicans are in power for too long it makes it possible for left wing movements to take advantage of brittle points that form in the "machine" and crack it, which is where the democrats come in.
As a result the US now has a body count that would make Nazi Germany absolutely salivate with envy.
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theriverbeyond · 6 months
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how do we know in the books that john is indigenous? can you say more about how his indigeneity is important to his story?
hello! so there is a word of god post on race (doesn't mention John but mentions that Gideon is "mixed Maori"), BUT I frankly don't think word of god statements are worth any weight without actual in-text support (see: the "dumbledore is gay" situation). SO!
Specific evidence that John Gaius is Maori, as revealed in Nona the Ninth:
When he is listing his education, John mentions having gone to Dilworth School (John 20:8). Dilworth is an all boys boarding school in Auckland and accepts students based on financial need instead of academic or sporting achievements. Demographics appear to be about 70% low income Maori boys, indicating that it is highly likely that John is Maori
John reports that P- said he looked like a "Maori-TV pink panther" (John 15:23) when his eyes turned gold. Maori TV is a TV station that is focused primarily on Maori culture & language revitalization, with presumably all or mostly Maori hosts, and tbh I don't see why P- would say this unless John was himself Maori
John uses a te reo Māori phrase ("kia kaha, kia māia") (John 5:20) when he is saying goodbye to the corpses in the cryo lab before the power is shut off. Though it is possible he said this as a non-Maori kiwi, but in combination with the previous two points of evidence I think this all very strongly points to him being Maori
He also renames his daughter Kiriona Gaia, "Kiriona" being just literally the name "Gideon" in te reo Māori
TLT is not a series that hands you anything on a silver platter but to ME this is all pretty solid proof
Why is this relevant to The Locked Tomb?
In Nona the Ninth, we learn that before he completed apotheosis and ate the solar system, John was basically trying to save the earth from capitalism-caused climate change. Climate justice and the rights of indigenous people over their own land are deeply tied together, in the same way that climate catastrophe and capitalism/ imperialism/ colonialism are linked. disclaimer that this is NOT my area of study and others have definitely said it better; this is just the basic gist as I understand it, but on quick search I found some sources here and here if you want to do some reading.
TLT is not a series that hands you anything on a silver platter, but i don't think it is a stretch to see John as an indigenous man trying to save the earth and getting ignored and shut down at every turn by primarily western colonial powers (PanEuro, the USA) who declare him a terrorist and then as a reader thematically connecting that to the experience of indigenous climate activists IRL
there are absolutely TLT meta posts that have discussed this before me; tumblr search is nonfunctional and I have been looking for an hour and a half and cannot find anything specific even though i KNOW i reblogged multiple posts about this in the first few weeks following NTN's release. sad & I am sorry
I think that by the time the books take place, John is 10k years removed from the cultural context he grew up in, with the Nine Houses having become a genocidal colonial power in their own right (with more parallels to be made between John's forever war for the resources of literal life energy and like, oil wars), but I also think that John Gaius is a fictional character who can represent and symbolize multiple different things in service of telling a story. (not to mention the potential thematic parallels being made to how oppressed people sometimes are pressed into replicating the power dynamics of their oppressors and continuing the cycle--now that is a tumblr post i KNOW i read last year and definitely cannot find right now, once again sad & I am sorry)
How Radical Was John Gaius, Really is a forum thread that was locked by the moderators after 234534645674564 pages of heated debate
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zvaigzdelasas · 6 months
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What will cause a change in Western policy is Israeli military failure. That is why the Biden administration has devoted more energy to compelling Israel to formulate attainable objectives than it has counseled the restoration of fuel and water to Gaza’s hospitals.
To give a prominent recent example in this regard, in 2006, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ecstatically welcomed Israel’s war against Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Confident that Israel was pulverizing Hezbollah, the U.S. imperiously dismissed efforts to achieve a cessation of hostilities. Yet, as soon as Israeli armored columns and ground forces faced slaughter when they attempted to advance into southern Lebanon, the U.S. immediately changed its tune and beseeched the UN Security Council to adopt a ceasefire resolution.
Similarly, in 1982, the U.S. gave Israel a free hand to eradicate the PLO in Lebanon. Once it became clear it lacked the capacity to occupy West Beirut, the Reagan administration sent Philip Habib to negotiate an agreement that preserved the PLO. In other words, so long as the U.S. and other Western governments reject a Gaza truce and focus on meaningless obscenities like “humanitarian pauses,” it means they still believe Israel will or can succeed. If they reverse their position, you can take all the homilies about civilian suffering motivating their new position with a grain of salt. Window dressing. It means they have concluded Israel has failed.
An alternative scenario would be that Western governments have concluded that their and Israel’s conduct is producing a significant threat to their own interests and that it’s time to wind down the clock.
12 Nov 23
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qqueenofhades · 7 months
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Hwy dod we even need to send more money to Ukraine tho like we’ve already supported them plenty! But let Europe pull their weight and we can go back to spending that money on American policies
Do you read like, any news outside Tumblr, any Ukrainian perspectives, any basic analyses of the conflict, any rationale from Democrats or Congress, or anything? Because, in brief:
Ukrainians are currently facing a full-scale genocide. It has been going on for over a year and Russian military leadership has every plan to continue until fruition. If they stop resisting, there will be no more Ukraine or Ukrainians. So all the "appeasers" or "realists" insisting that Ukraine should "give up land for peace" (which notably worked so well with Czechoslovakia and Hitler in 1938) are basically deciding that it's fine to let the genocide be carried out, if it's even minorly inconvenient for us. Putin and cronies have repeatedly stated that if they are successful in taking Ukraine, they will go further. This is the exact scenario that leads to the "escalation" and/or WWIII that various people keep wringing their hands over. It is far more just and safe for Ukraine to be supported now and to stop that before it gets even worse.
America is not actually giving over buckets of black cash, regardless of what various bad-faith takes claim. They are handing over weapons valued at various amounts of money, along with some financial and budgetary aid. A lot of these weapons are older and would cost more to decommission than they cost to give to a sovereign democracy fighting for its life against an imperialist autocratic neighbor. This is some tiny amount like 5% (if that) of America's bloated military budget. And again: it's actual weapons valued at a certain dollar amount. These cannot be spent on American domestic policies.
The idea that helping Ukraine is directly coming out of our own pockets or preventing us from spending as needed on our own needs is propaganda. It is not good to repeat it.
I wrote this post the other day about why Putin is trying so hard to break American/Western support for Ukraine, and why the hard-right MAGA has enabled him in it. Putin's Russia is the motivating nexus, coordination, and funding center for Russian/European/American far-right theocratic fascism. This whole "America Only" is the exact rationale that appeals to said far-right domestic fascists and gives Putin and other imperial expansionist kleptocrats the justification to just throw away post-WWII international order and declare that any larger and more powerful state can systematically eradicate any neighboring country, claim its territory, destroy its government, kill its people, and get away with it. Because why would they stop, if there aren't any consequences and they are rewarded for it?
Putin has repeatedly interfered in American elections to help Trump and the Republicans. That should tell you something about who he sees as most favorable to his interests and what he would do again if allowed to emerge victorious.
Europe IS actually pulling its weight! They just brought all 27 defense ministers to Kyiv, they have been working on Ukraine's accession talks, they have committed all types of weapons (including the long-range missiles that the US still won't clearly authorize), they've committed a new tranche of 5 billion euros in long-term assistance, etc. But the whole "we should pull out of NATO and leave Europe to fend for itself" was a key isolationist and xenophobic Trump idea. We can see what that led to.
American aid is vital to Ukraine's continued existence as a sovereign country, period, and it is in American interests to continue to provide it as agreed upon. Not least because such an egregious betrayal of a democratic ally would empower the fascists of the world, both Russian and American, and because as noted, if this conflict was not stopped and got bigger, it would then involve American troops. It is a moral, democratic, political, and ethical imperative. This is not a difficult call or a complicated situation, regardless of what the Online Leftist tankies and the MAGA-world nutcases (because horseshoe theory) want you to think.
Слава Україні.
The end.
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dostoyevsky-official · 2 months
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In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself.’ Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.
Evron urged caution, too, against Israel’s (then new and ardent) supporters in the Jewish American population. For them, he argued, championing Israel had become ‘necessary because of the loss of any other focal point to their Jewish identity’ – indeed, so great was their existential lack, according to Evron, that they did not wish Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American support.
Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness, despaired of what he saw as the ‘privatisation’ of the Shoah by Israel and its supporters. It has come to be remembered, he wrote in 1988, ‘as a private experience of the Jews, as a matter between the Jews and their haters’, even as the conditions that made it possible were appearing again around the world.
[...] Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism and ignoring the lessons of the Shoah. And a distorted consciousness of the Shoah ensures that whenever the victims of Israel, unable to endure their misery any longer, rise up against their oppressors with predictable ferocity, they are denounced as Nazis, hellbent on perpetrating another Shoah.
[...] One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the colour line into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.
[...] Netanyahu and his cohort threaten the basis of the global order that was rebuilt after the revelation of Nazi crimes. Even before Gaza, the Shoah was losing its central place in our imagination of the past and future. It is true that no historical atrocity has been so widely and comprehensively commemorated. But the culture of remembrance around the Shoah has now accumulated its own long history. That history shows that the memory of the Shoah did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945; it was constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends. In fact, a necessary consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on its memory.
[...] In Israel itself, awareness of the Shoah was limited for years to its survivors, who, astonishing to remember today, were drenched with contempt by the leaders of the Zionist movement. Ben-Gurion had initially seen Hitler’s rise to power as ‘a huge political and economic boost for the Zionist enterprise’, but he did not consider human debris from Hitler’s death camps as fit material for the construction of a strong new Jewish state. ‘Everything they had endured,’ Ben-Gurion said, ‘purged their souls of all good.’ Saul Friedlander, the foremost historian of the Shoah, who left Israel partly because he couldn’t bear to see the Shoah being used ‘as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures’, recalls in his memoir, Where Memory Leads (2016), that academic scholars initially spurned the subject, leaving it to the memorial and documentation centre Yad Vashem.
[...] It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Israel seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies, that the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both Israel and the United States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world. [...] A Jewish political tradition preoccupied with inequality, poverty, civil rights, environmentalism, nuclear disarmament and anti-imperialism mutated into one characterised by a hyper-attentiveness to the Middle East’s only democracy. [...] Recent American literature most clearly manifests the paradox that the more remote the Shoah grew in time the more fiercely its memory was possessed by later generations of Jewish Americans.
[...] All these universalist reference points – the Shoah as the measure of all crimes, antisemitism as the most lethal form of bigotry – are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, razes their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, bombs them into smaller and smaller encampments, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist, from the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the Spanish, Irish, Brazilian and South African governments and the Vatican. Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.
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tikkunolamresistance · 3 months
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The thing is, the Western superpowers NEED the people divided. Division leads war, displacement, economic collapse, forced assimilation— repercussions that generate income for the overarching hegemony. Division is their backbone. This is why any act of unity in history has been retroactively distorted to brainwash us into thinking there is no alternative to Capitalism. The United States attempted to physically divide Vietnam in the US attempted- intervention on Vietnam, and successfully divided Korea shortly after the nation’s liberation from brutal Japanese occupation.
You can read about the ongoing Korean War here, and see a timeline here.
North Korea has been systematically demonised for being one of the few successful modern Socialist states; for the crime of liberation. They are a demonstration of what anti-Capitalism looks like, and yet we are barred from witnessing that with our own eyes. The Western propaganda machine works at maximum capacity to ensure the masses are deluded into believing North Korea is an evil, oppressive regime, a corrupt government that abuses and oppresses its people— whilst homelessness is at an all time high in the United States and Western nations, with an extortionate cost of living, inaccessible health care and rampant medical negligence, Not to mention, police brutality, Neo-Nazism (like, Western-funded Ukraine’s historic complicity with Nazism) anti-Trans laws that lead to murders of Trans people, and the Western Israeli Regime’s support in multiple genocides across the globe (Mayan, Tamil, Rwanda and of course, Palestine). Not to mention, North Korea has had unwavering support for Palestine
The West has been lying to us for years about China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, Iran and so many more nations to mask their deadly Imperial ambitions, money-hungry forceful acquisition of oil and resources, and further imposition of globalised White Supremacy. We, the people, suffer at the hands of our very nations that copiously delude us into thinking there’s no way out, there’s no alternative, there’s no hope.
We implore you learn more about North Korea, and will be adding more resources to our Drive, linked in our link tree. Here’s some more resources on Korea:
Nodutdol 노둣돌 is an excellent pro-Palestinian organisation of diasporic Koreans organising for a world free of Imperialism, and for the reunification of Korea. Check out their page, and website, to keep up to date on their events, organising and get more information on what the West try to hide.
We also recommend this excellent documentary:
youtube
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i’ve witnessed some organizational “failure” as a result of what i believe is this manufactured urgency and resistance to critique. this urgency also heightens isolation, and for many makes it feel difficult to voice their opinions and ideas. the result of this are movements not built to last, and shaky foundations. radical movements have been usurped by the state repeatedly through history, but many of us are now playing by the CIA op handbook on our own. read your books, engage with people, learn the history to allow ourselves to act swiftly. if we do not build something ourselves, we will end up relying on state structures to enact “change”, and further perpetuate western imperialism.
also, to be called divisive or derailing in groups organizing primarily minimally disruptive protest actions is nuts. but i digress.
[Image ID:
Image 1: Cartoon letters that read “manufactured urgency and resistance to critique” above a cartoon person gripping their head in distress.
Image 2: Text that reads “a term often hsed in organizational work culture, it is the pressure to act quickly instead of thoughtfully in order to meet deadlines. Corinne L. Mason also uses this to discuss the development of anti-violence policies that are technocratic, depoliticized, and ineffective towards the women they claim to help. Manufacturing Urgency, U of R Press, 2017.”
Image 3: Cartoon lettering that reads “isolation limits our ability to organize” above a cartoon person staring at their phone with a look of distress alone in the dark.
Image 4: Text that reade “manufactured urgency also makes us resistant to critique.” Below a cartoon person has their speech interrupted by other speech bubbles that read “there is a genocide! You are derailing!” and “don’t be divisive!”
Image 5: Text that reads “openness to critique is necessary to build our solidarity! We have time to…” Below is a cartoon of three characters holding hands wearing shirts that read “learn, build, and sustain.”
Image 6: Text that reads “no one is seeking perfection. We are seeking to develop solodarity that will last our entire lives.”
End ID]
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