#u.s. wars in asia

[joshualunacreations]

U.S. audiences enjoy survival horror stories with Asians in Asia, like Squid Game and Battle Royale. But they don’t want to acknowledge that Asian Americans’ lived reality is a survival horror too.

I have mixed feelings about Squid Game's success. I enjoy the survival horror genre as both a writer and consumer, but seeing how non-Asian U.S. audiences reacted to it in the midst of violent anti-Asian hate crimes left me wondering about the reason for the show's U.S. appeal.

Violence against Asians—particularly when done en masse—is so normalized that I wonder if this type of media provides catharsis to racists. News of hate crimes might briefly force them to feel guilty, but when they see fictional violence against Asians, they can cheer for it. It's as if it evokes the imagery Americans are most familiar with: slaughtering Asians by the dozens or even thousands, a legacy of numerous U.S. wars in Asia. The victims are nameless and unimportant. They're just a statistic, a plot point. One more to add to the body count.

Also, the U.S. loves using Asians in Asia as media replacements for AsAms. It simultaneously reinforces Asians as perpetual foreigners, and prevents giving a microphone to the type of Asian American who would unflinchingly discuss anti-Asian racism and challenge the status quo.

Asian men especially are seen as disposable targets with no humanity and no purpose other than to be mocked and slaughtered on screen. Deadpool, Daredevil, Avengers, Bullet Train, Kill Bill, etc. feature scenes where a protagonist cuts down hordes of Asian men in seconds.

This has real-life consequences. Hate crimes against AAPI men have been purposely belittled, hidden, and ignored—even in media narratives that purport to draw attention to anti-Asian racism. It becomes a feedback loop that double-victimizes AAPI men. (see my data thread)

The hatred of Asian men is so normalized that in AsAm spaces the only acceptable Asian male victim to publicly mention is Vincent Chin, who was murdered 40 years ago. There have been many Vincent Chins since then. But victims get reduced to headlines like "killed over duck sauce.”

Instead, when anti-Asian hate crimes are discussed, it's limited to a narrow range of experience, privileging East Asian women over pretty much all other Asians. This erasure is harmful on many levels and has still not been corrected or even acknowledged. (see my data thread)

I think many AsAms feel like Asian Twitter recently died. But for me, it died several years ago, when Asians with media power decided that all of this harm and imbalance was not only normal, but good. Our community has been broken for a long time. They don't want to fix it.

So does this mean Squid Game, Battle Royale, etc. are bad stories? No. It means we need better real-life conversations and efforts to understand what anti-Asian racism is and how to fix it. Survival horror is a fun thought experiment—until you realize you're living in one.

(Please don’t repost or edit my art. Reblogs are always appreciated.)

If you enjoy my comics, please pledge to my Patreon or donate to my Paypal. https://twitter.com/Joshua_Luna/status/1134522555744866304 https://patreon.com/joshualuna https://www.paypal.com/paypalme2/JoshuaLunaComics

#immigration #anti-asian racism #anti-asian hate crimes #racism #anti-asian violence #murder #u.s. wars in asia #battle royale #squid game #deadpool #daredevil #avengers #bullet train #kill bill #aapi #asian americans #asians in media #my art #artists on tumblr #fil-am artist #joshua luna #josh luna

[whatisonthemoon]

Internet Privacy, Funded By Spies Mar 03, 2016 By Yasha Levine Originally published on Pando.com on March 1, 2015.

For the past few months I've been covering U.S. government funding of popular Internet privacy tools like Tor, CryptoCat and Open Whisper Systems. During my reporting, one agency in particular keeps popping up: An agency with one of those really bland names that masks its wild, bizarre history: the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG.

The BBG was formed in 1999 and runs on a $721 million annual budget. It reports directly to Secretary of State John Kerry and operates like a holding company for a host of Cold War-era CIA spinoffs and old school "psychological warfare" projects: Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí, Voice of America, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism (since renamed "Radio Liberty”) and a dozen other government-funded radio stations and media outlets pumping out pro-American propaganda across the globe.

Today, the Congressionally-funded federal agency is also one of the biggest backers of grassroots and open-source Internet privacy technology. These investments started in 2012, when the BBG launched the “Open Technology Fund” (OTF) — an initiative housed within and run by Radio Free Asia (RFA), a premier BBG property that broadcasts into communist countries like North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, China and Myanmar. The BBG endowed Radio Free Asia's Open Technology Fund with a multimillion dollar budget and a single task: “to fulfill the U.S. Congressional global mandate for Internet freedom.”

It's already a mouthful of proverbial Washington alphabet soup  — Congress funds BBG to fund RFA to fund OTF — but, regardless of which sub-group ultimately writes the check, the important thing to understand is that all this federal government money flows, directly or indirectly, from the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Between 2012 and 2014, Radio Free Asia's Open Technology Fund poured more than $10 million into Internet privacy projects big and small: open-source encrypted communication apps, next-generation secure email initiatives, anti-censorship mesh networking platforms, encryption security audits, secure cloud hosting, a network of “high-capacity” Tor exit nodes and even an anonymous Tor-based tool for leakers and whistleblowers that competed with Wikileaks.

Though many of the apps and tech backed by Radio Free Asia's OTF are unknown to the general public, they are highly respected and extremely popular among the anti-surveillance Internet activist crowd. OTF-funded apps have been recommended by Edward Snowden, covered favorably by ProPublica and The New York Times' technology reporters, and repeatedly promoted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Everyone seems to agree that OTF-funded privacy apps offer some of the best protection from government surveillance you can get. In fact, just about all the featured open-source apps on EFF’s recent “Secure Messaging Scorecard” were funded by OTF.

Here’s a small sample of what the Broadcasting Board of Governors funded (through Radio Free Asia and then through the Open Technology Fund) between 2012 and 2014:

Open Whisper Systems, maker of free encrypted text and voice mobile apps like TextSecure and Signal/RedPhone, got a generous $1.35-million infusion. (Facebook recently started using Open Whisper Systems to secure its WhatsApp messages.)

CryptoCat, an encrypted chat app made by Nadim Kobeissi and promoted by EFF, received $184,000.

LEAP, an email encryption startup, got just over $1 million. LEAP is currently being used to run secure VPN services at RiseUp.net, the radical anarchist communication collective.

A Wikileaks alternative called GlobaLeaks (which was endorsed by the folks at Tor, including Jacob Appelbaum) received just under $350,000.

The Guardian Project — which makes an encrypted chat app called ChatSecure, as well a mobile version of Tor called Orbot — got $388,500.

The Tor Project received over $1 million from OTF to pay for security audits, traffic analysis tools and set up fast Tor exit nodes in the Middle East and South East Asia.

In 2014, Congress massively upped the BBG's "Internet freedom" budget to $25 million, with

half of that money

flowing through RFA and into the Open Technology Fund. This $12.75 million represented a

three-fold increase

in OTF's budget from 2013 — a considerable expansion for an outfit that was just a few years old. Clearly, it's doing something that the government likes. A lot.

With those resources, the Open Technology Fund's mother-agency, Radio Free Asia, plans to create a vertically integrated incubator for budding privacy technologists around the globe — providing everything from training and mentorship, to offering them a secure global cloud hosting environment to run their apps, to legal assistance.

Radio Free Asia's OTF operates its own “secure cloud” infrastructure, which grantees can use to safely deploy their anti-surveillance apps — with server nodes in Turkey, Cambodia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Amsterdam and Washington, D.C. It also runs a “legal lab” which provides free legal services to projects with OTF funding. The Open Technology Fund even runs a “Rapid Response Fund” providing “emergency support” (including funding and technical help) to privacy projects, protecting privacy services against DDoS attacks and other malicious assaults by hackers and hostile governments.

And then there are the many academic programs underwritten by the Open Technology Fund, including six month fellowships that pay a $4,000 stipend at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

Silicon Valley has opened its doors to the Open Technology Fund. In 2014, OTF launched a coordinated project with Dropbox and Google to make free, easy-to-use privacy tools, and Facebook announced it was incorporating the underlying encryption technology of one of OTF's flagship projects — OpenWhisper Systems — into its WhatsApp text messaging service.

Equally important is the cultural affinity: Radio Free Asia and OTF seemed to really get the hacktivists and the open-source crypto community. Its day-to-day operations are run by Dan Meredith, a young guy who used to work at Al-Jazeera in Qatar as a "technologist" and who is an alumnus of academic and think-tank privacy-activist circles. Meredith isn't your typical stuffy State Department suit, he's a departure from the picture in most people's heads of the sort of person who'd lead a US government project with major foreign policy implications. He's fluent in the crypto/open-source techie lingo that those in the grassroots community can identify with. Under Meredith's watch, the Open Technology Fund passes itself off as a grassroots outfit with a lo-fi look and feel. Its homepage even features a cute 8-bit YouTube video outlining its do-gooder mission of using "public funds to support Internet freedom projects" which promote "human rights and open societies."

Readers might find it odd that a US government agency established as a way to launder the image of various shady propaganda outfits (more on that soon) is now keen to fund technologies designed to protect us from the US government. Moreover, it might seem curious that its money would be so warmly welcomed by some of the Internet's fiercest antigovernment activists.

But, as folks in the open-source privacy community will tell you, funding for open-source encryption/anti-surveillance tech has been hard to come by. So they've welcomed money from Radio Free Asia's Open Technology Fund with open pockets. Developers and groups submitted their projects for funding, while libertarians and anti-government/anti-surveillance activists enthusiastically joined OTF's advisory council, sitting alongside representatives from Google and the US State Department, tech lobbyists, and military consultants.

But why is a federally-funded CIA spinoff with decades of experience in "psychological warfare" suddenly blowing tens of millions in government funds on privacy tools meant to protect people from being surveilled by another arm of the very same government? To answer that question, we have to pull the camera back and examine how all of those Cold War propaganda outlets begat the Broadcasting Board of Governors begat Radio Free Asia begat the Open Technology Fund. The story begins in the late 1940's.

The origins of the Broadcasting Board of Governors

The Broadcasting Board of Governors traces its beginnings to the early Cold War years, as a covert propaganda project of the newly-created Central Intelligence Agency to wage "psychological warfare" against Communist regimes and others deemed a threat to US interests.

George Kennan — the key architect of post-WWII foreign policy — pushed for expanding the role of covert peacetime programs. And so, in 1948, National Security Council Directive 10/2 officially authorized the CIA to engage in “covert operations” against the Communist Menace. Clause 5 of the directive defined “covert operations” as “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

Propaganda quickly became one of the key weapons in the CIA's covert operations arsenal. The agency established and funded radio stations, newspapers, magazines, historical societies, emigre “research institutes,” and cultural programs all over Europe. In many cases, it funneled money to outfits run and staffed by known World War II war criminals and Nazi collaborators, both in Europe and here in the United States.

Christopher Simpson, author of “Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy”, details the extent of these “psychological warfare projects”:

CIA-funded psychological warfare projects employing Eastern European émigrés became major operations during the 1950s, consuming tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. . . .This included underwriting most of the French Paix et Liberté movement, paying the bills of the German League for Struggle Against Inhumanity , and financing a half dozen free jurists associations, a variety of European federalist groups, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, magazines, news services, book publishers, and much more. These were very broad programs designed to influence world public opinion at virtually every level, from illiterate peasants in the fields to the most sophisticated scholars in prestigious universities. They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, advertising agencies, college professors, journalists, and student leaders, to name a few. [emphasis added]

In Europe, the CIA set up “Radio Free Europe” and “Radio Liberation From Bolshevism” (later renamed "Radio Liberty"), which beamed propaganda in several languages into the Soviet Union and Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. The CIA later expanded its radio propaganda operations into Asia, targeting communist China, North Korea and Vietnam. The spy agency also funded several radio projects aimed at subverting leftist governments in Central and South America, including Radio Free Cuba and Radio Swan — which was run by the CIA and employed some of the same Cuban exiles that took part in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Even today, the CIA boasts that these early "psychological warfare" projects “would become one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States.”

Officially, the CIA’s direct role in this global "psychological warfare" project diminished in the 1970s, after the spy agency's ties to Cold War propaganda arms like Radio Free Europe were exposed. Congress agreed to take over funding of these projects from the CIA, and eventually Washington expanded them into a massive federally-funded propaganda apparatus.

The names of the various CIA spinoffs and nonprofits changed over the years, culminating in a 1999 reorganization under President Bill Clinton which created the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a parent holding company to group new broadcasting operations around the world together with Cold War-era propaganda outfits with spooky pasts—including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.

Today, the BBG has a $721 million budget provided by Congress, reports to the Secretary of State and is managed by a revolving crew of neocons and military think-tank experts. Among them: Kenneth Weinstein, head of the Hudson Institute, the arch-conservative Cold War-era military think tank; and Ryan C. Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Although today's BBG is no longer covertly funded via the CIA’s black budget, its role as a soft power "psychological warfare" operation hasn’t really changed since its inception. The BBG and its subsidiaries still engage in propaganda warfare, subversion and soft-power projection against countries and foreign political movements deemed hostile to US interests. And it is still deeply intertwined with the same military and CIA-connected intelligence organizations — from USAID to DARPA to the National Endowment for Democracy.

Today, the Broadcasting Board of Governors runs a propaganda network that blankets the globe: Radio Martí (aimed at Cuba), Radio Farda (aimed at Iran), Radio Sawa (which broadcasts in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, and Sudan), Radio Azadi (targeting Afghanistan), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which has tailored broadcasts in over a dozen languages into Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Armenia), and Radio Free Asia (which targets China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam).

The BBG is also involved in the technology of post-Cold War, Internet-era propaganda. It has bankrolled satellite Internet access in Iran and continues to fund an SMS-based social network in Cuba called Piramideo — which is different from the failed covert Twitter clone funded by USAID that tried to spark a Cuban Spring revolution. It has contracted with an anonymity Internet proxy called SafeWeb, which had been funded by the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. It worked with tech outfits run by practitioners of the controversial Chinese right-wing cult, Falun Gong — whose leader believes that humans are being corrupted by invading aliens from other planets/dimensions. These companies — Dynaweb and Ultrareach — provide anti-censorship tools to Chinese Internet users. As of 2012, the BBG continued to fund them to the tune of $1.5 million a year.

As the BBG proudly outlined in a 2013 fact sheet for its "Internet Anti-Censorship" unit:

The BBG collaborates with other Internet freedom projects and organizations, including RFA's Open Technology Fund, the State Department, USAID, and DARPAs SAFER Warfighter Communications Program. IAC is also reaching out to other groups interested in Internet freedom such as Google, Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy's Center for International Media Assistance.

BBG is also one of the Tor Project's biggest funders, paying out about $3.5 million from 2008 through 2013. BBG's latest publicly-known Tor contract was finalized in mid-2012. The BBG gave Tor at least $1.2 million to improve security and drastically boost the bandwidth of the Tor network by funding over a hundred Tor nodes across the world — all part of the US government's effort to find an effective soft-power weapon that can undermine Internet censorship and control in countries hostile to US interests. (We only know about the BBG's lucrative funding of Tor thanks to the dogged efforts of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which had to sue to get its FOIA requests fulfilled.)

As mentioned, last year Congress decided the BBG was doing such a good job advancing America's interests abroad that it boosted the agency's "Internet freedom" annual budget from just $1.6 million in 2011 to a whopping $25 million this year. The BBG funneled half of this taxpayer money through its Radio Free Asia subsidiary, into the "Open Technology Fund" — the "nonprofit" responsible for bankrolling many of today's popular open-source privacy and encryption apps.

Which brings me to the next starring agency in this recovered history of Washington DC's privacy technology investments: Radio Free Asia.

Radio Free Asia

The CIA launched Radio Free Asia (RFA) in 1951 as an extension of its global anti-Communist propaganda radio network. RFA beamed its signal into mainland China from a transmitter in Manila, and its operations were based on the earlier Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberation From Bolshevism model.

The CIA quickly discovered that their plan to foment political unrest in China had one major flaw: the Chinese were too poor to own radios.

Here’s a bit from a fantastic three-page spread published by The New York Times in 1977, investigating the CIA’s role in global propaganda efforts, including Radio Free Asia:

The Asia Foundation was headed for years by the late Robert Blum, who, several sources said, resigned from the C.I.A. to take it over. The foundation provided cover for at least one C.I.A. operative and carried out a variety of media-related ventures, including a program, begun in 1955, of selecting and paying the expenses of Asian journalists for a year of study in Harvard's prestigious Neiman Fellowship program….

It was only after Radio Free Asia's transmitters were operating, according to sources familiar with the case, that the C.I.A. realized that there were almost no radio receivers in private hands in mainland China. An emergency plan was drawn up.

Balloons, holding small radios tuned to Radio Free Asia's frequency, were lofted toward the mainland from the island of Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had fled after the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The plan was abandoned when the balloons were blown back to Taiwan across the Formosa Strait.

The CIA supposedly shuttered Radio Free Asia in the mid-1950s, but another Radio Free Asia reappeared a decade later, this time funded through a CIA-Moonie outfit called the Korean Culture and Freedom Foundation (KCFF) — a group based in Washington, D.C. that was run by a top figure in South Korea's state intelligence agency, Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who also served as the “principle evangelist” of cult leader Rev. Sun-Myung Moon of the Unification Church.

This new Moonie iteration of Radio Free Asia was controlled by the South Korean government, including the country’s own CIA, the "KCIA." It enjoyed high-level support from within the first Nixon Administration and even featured then-Congressman Gerald Ford on its board. According to an FBI file on Rev. Moon, Radio Free Asia “at the height of the Vietnam war produced anti-communist programs in Washington and beamed them into China, North Korea and North Vietnam.”

Radio Free Asia got busted in a widespread corruption scandal in the late 1970s, when the South Korean government was investigated for using the Moonie cult to influence US public opinion in order to keep the US military engaged against North Korea. Back in the 1970s, the Moonies were the most notorious cult in the United States, accused of abducting and "brainwashing" countless American youths. How it was that the CIA's Radio Free Asia was handed off to the Moonies was never quite explained, but given laws banning the CIA (or the KCIA) from engaging in psychological warfare in the US, the obvious thing to do was to bury Radio Free Asia long enough for everyone to forget about it.

No sooner had Radio Free Asia vanished amid scandal than it reappeared again, Terminator-like, in the 1990s — this time as a legit “independent” nonprofit wholly controlled by the BBG and funded by Congress.

Although this latest version of Radio Free Asia was supposed to be a completely new organization and was no longer as covert and B-movie spooky, its objectives and tactics remained exactly the same: To this day it beams propaganda into the same Communist countries, including North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, and Burma, and fiddles around in the same sorts of spooky adventures.

For instance: In 2011, The New York Times revealed that Radio Free Asia, along with the State Department, was involved in burying cellphones inside North Korea on its border with China, so that North Koreans could use the RFA cellphones to report to the West on conditions inside their country. That same year, following the death of Kim Jong Il, Radio Free Asia “kicked into 24/7 emergency mode” to beam non-stop coverage of the death into North Korea in the hopes of triggering a mass uprising. BBG officials clung to the hope that, bit by bit, Radio Free Asia’s stream of anti-Communist propaganda would bring democracy and freedom to North Korea. They like to cite a study showing that “elite” defectors from North Korea were increasingly listening to Radio Free Asia, as proof that their efforts are working.

Radio Free Asia and Anti-government Hacktivists

Which brings us up to the present, when the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Radio Free Asia and its offshoot, the Open Technology Fund, find themselves in bed with many of the very same privacy activist figures whom the public regards as the primary adversaries of outfits like Radio Free Asia and the BBG. And it's technology that brings together these supposed adversaries — the US National Security State on the one hand, and "hacktivist", "anti-government" libertarian privacy activists on the other:

“I’m proud to be a volunteer OTF advisor,” declared Cory Doctorow, editor of BoingBoing and a well-known libertarian anti-surveillance activist/author.

"Happy to have joined the Open Technology Fund's new advisory council,” tweeted Jillian York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (York recently admitted that the OTF's "Internet freedom" agenda is, at its core, about regime change, but bizarrely argued that it didn't matter.)

In 2012, just a few months after Radio Free Asia's 24/7 propaganda blitz into North Korea failed to trigger regime change, RFA sent folks from the Tor Project — including core developer Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above) —  into Burma, just as the military dictatorship was finally agreeing to hand political power over to US-backed pro-democracy politicians. The stated purpose of Appelbaum's RFA-funded expedition was to probe Burma’s Internet system from within and collect information on its telecommunications infrastructure — which was then used to compile a report for Western politicians and “international investors” interested in penetrating Burma’s recently opened markets. Here you can see Appelbaum’s visa — published in the report as evidence of what you needed to do to buy a SIM card in Burma.

Burma is a curious place for American anti-surveillance activists funded by Radio Free Asia to travel to, considering that it has long been a target of US regime-change campaigns. In fact, the guru of pro-Western "color revolutions," Gene Sharp, wrote his famous guide to non-violent revolutions, “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, initially as a guide for Burma’s opposition movement, in order to help it overthrow the military junta in the late 1980s. Sharp had crossed into Burma illegally to train opposition activists there — all under the protection and sponsorship of the US government and one Col. Robert Helvey, a military intelligence officer.

Jacob Appelbaum's willingness to work directly for an old CIA cutout like Radio Free Asia in a nation long targeted for regime-change is certainly odd, to say the least. Particularly since Appelbaum made a big public show recently claiming that, though it pains him that Tor takes so much money from the US military, he would never take money from something as evil as the CIA.

Ignorance is bliss.

Appelbaum's financial relationships with various CIA spinoffs like Radio Free Asia and the BBG go further. From 2012 through 2013, Radio Free Asia transferred about $1.1 million to Tor in the form of grants and contracts. This million dollars comes on top of another $3.4 million Tor received from Radio Free Asia's parent agency, the BBG, starting from 2007.

But Tor and Appelbaum are not the only ones happy to take money from the BBG/RFA.

Take computer researcher/privacy activist Harry Halpin, for example. Back in November of 2014, Halpin smeared me as a conspiracy theorist, and then falsely accused me and Pando of being funded by the CIA — simply because I reported on Tor’s government funding. Turns out that Halpin's next-generation secure communications outfit, called LEAP, took more than $1 million from Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund. Somewhat ironically, LEAP's technology powers the VPN services of RiseUp.Net, the radical anarchist tech collective that provides activists with email and secure communications tools (and forces you to sign a thinly veiled anti-Communist pledge before giving you an account).

Then there's the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian. A few months ago, he had viciously attacked me and Pando for reporting on Tor's US government funding. But just the other day, Soghoian went on Democracy Now, and in the middle of a segment criticizing the U.S. government's runaway hacking and surveillance programs, recommended that people use a suite of encrypted text and voice apps funded by the very same intelligence-connected U.S. government apparatus he was denouncing. Specifically, Soghoian recommended apps made by Open Whisper Systems, which got $1.35 million from Radio Free Asia's Open Technology Fund from 2013 through 2014.

He told Amy Goodman:

"These are best-of-breed free applications made by top security researchers, and actually subsidized by the State Department and by the U.S. taxpayer. You can download these tools today. You can make encrypted telephone calls. You can send encrypted text messages. You can really up your game and protect your communications.”

When Goodman wondered why the U.S. government would fund privacy apps, he acknowledged that this technology is a soft-power weapon of U.S. empire but then gave a very muddled and naive answer:

AMY GOODMAN: But maybe the U.S. government has a way to break in.

CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Well, you know, it’s possible that they’ve discovered flaws, but, you know, they have—the U.S. government hasn’t been writing the software. They’ve been giving grants to highly respected research teams, security researchers and academics, and these tools are about the best that we have. You know, I agree. I think it’s a little bit odd that, you know, the State Department’s funding this, but these tools aren’t getting a lot of funding from other places. And so, as long as the State Department is willing to write them checks, I’m happy that the Tor Project and Whisper Systems and these other organizations are cashing them. They are creating great tools and great technology that can really improve our security. And I hope that they’ll get more money in the future.

It's convenient and nice to believe that one hand of the U.S. National Security State doesn't know what the other hand is doing — especially when the livelihoods of you and your colleagues depends on it. But as the long and dark covert intelligence history of the Broadcasters Board of Governors and Radio Free Asia so clearly shows, this thinking is naive and wrong. It also shows just how effectively the U.S. National Security State brought its opposition into the fold.

You'd think that anti-surveillance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appelbaum, Cory Doctorow and Jillian York would be staunchly against outfits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and continue to play — in working with defense and corporate interests to project and impose U.S. power abroad. Instead, these radical activists have knowingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become willing pitchmen for a wing of the very same U.S. National Security State they so adamantly oppose.

Related articles below

Rev. Moon Aide Concedes KCIA Sent Him $3,000 (1978)

On the KCIA Connection

United States Congressional investigation of UC

Inside Moon’s Washington (1989)

President Park Said to Direct Lobbying (1978)

Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.

Korean Bribe Figure Tied to Bank Inquiry (1977) OPCW leaks expose ‘criminal’ Syria cover-up — and US media is silent

#security #surveillance #cia #fbi #u.s. government #u.s. imperialism #radio of free asia #radio free asia #cold war #anti-communism #counterinsurgency #propaganda

[blazingfiredragon]

World War II was a global conflict that took place from 1939 to 1945, involving many of the world's most powerful countries. The war was fought primarily between the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany, and the Allied powers, which included the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom. The war was characterized by widespread destruction and loss of life, with an estimated 70-85 million people killed as a result of the conflict. One of the key factors that led to the outbreak of World War II was the aggressive expansionism of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Hitler sought to create a new German empire in Europe and embarked on a series of military campaigns to achieve this goal, starting with the invasion of Poland in 1939. This aggression prompted Britain and France to declare war on Germany, leading to the formation of the Allied powers. The war saw the use of devastating new weapons and tactics, including the widespread bombing of civilian populations, the use of tanks and aircraft in combat, and the development of nuclear weapons. The Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis, also represents one of the darkest chapters in human history. The war finally came to an end in 1945, after the Allies achieved victory over the Axis powers. In the aftermath of World War II, the world was forever changed. The United Nations was established in an effort to prevent future conflicts, and the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as a new geopolitical rivalry. The war also sparked a wave of decolonization in Africa and Asia, as former European colonies sought independence.

#essay #world war 2 #u.s. #Asia #Africa

[reportwire]

Biden expected to tighten rules on US investment in China

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — The Biden administration is close to tightening rules on some overseas investments by U.S. companies in an effort to limit China’s ability to acquire technologies that could improve its military prowess, according to a U.S. official familiar with the deliberations. The soon-to-be-issued executive order from President Joe Biden will limit American investment in advanced…

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#AP Top News #Asia Pacific #Beijing #Business #China #joe biden #national security #Politics #Russia-Ukraine war #Technology #U.S. Department of the Treasury #united states

[ayin-me-yesh]

US Americans have got to stop the "go back to New York" "settlers = Brooklyn landlords" thing. Are there American Jewish settlers in Palestine? Absolutely. Are there Israeli Jews in the U.S. who are still reservists? Absolutely.

The problem is that they are a small minority of settlers and Israelis. There are about 30,000 Israelis in the entire state of New York, including Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. [x] There are 1,600,000 Jews just in New York City. [x]

500,000 Israelis have U.S. passports, including Palestinian citizens of Israel. [x] There are 9,174,520 Israelis, again including Palestinians with citizenship. [x]

Saying this does not diminish what's happening in Palestine or the absolute U.S. government support for colonialism and genocide. Settlers do not need to be American or have direct ties to the U.S. to be settlers. Settlers do not need to be American for their colony to be a proxy state for imperial interests, as has also been seen in, say, South Africa.

When you do this shit you're also erasing millions of Arab, Persian, Amazigh, Kurdish, Ethiopian, Indian, Bukharan, and other Jews from outside of Europe who have largely ended up in Palestine as settlers due to colonial and imperial destabilisation of Asia and Africa and a racist "Western" agenda to keep African and Asian refugees of all religious backgrounds outside of "Western" countries as much as possible.

You're also erasing how much xenophobic anti-migrant policies contributed to "Allied" countries after WWII using Palestine as a means of removing Holocaust surviving refugees from mainland Europe without also themselves taking large numbers of refugees into their own countries.

Palestine has been at the centre of displacement of Jews from around the world through a process of ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. This is backed by "Western" not only to create or maintain white Christian hegemonic authority in their own countries, but also as part of a Cold War agenda to destabilise Asia and Africa and eliminate anti-imperial and communist movements.

Israel is a genocidal, fascist country propped up by the US, the UK, and other "Western" imperial powers while its settlers are largely from continental Europe, Asia, and Africa.

#settler colonialism #palestine

[6ajfdst]

It's futile for Pelosi to play politics on stage The whole world recognize one China

#independence #The voice of one China is rising #There is only one China #Social Science #Weibo netizen #said: #zsp826262807 #As fa #the United States has made even more mistakes #that is #keeping American warships away from the Taiwan Strait and losing freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. #Inheritance and Development of the Murayama Talk #Brazil 247 #sajid #dw wd #Rosita Cabrera #Nasiru Koki Koki #Taiwan independence #Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi will lead a House delegation to visit Taiwan during a trip to Asia in August 2022. #the diplomatic turmoil and military action it caused far exceeded the visits of foreign dignitaries to Taiwan after the war. #After Pelosi arrived in Taiwan #she was cordially received by Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai said that Pelosi was the most staunch friend of Taiwan and the United Sta #and thanked the United States for its long-term support. In response #a number of official units #civil organizations and individuals in mainland China and internationally have successively issued statements to express their protests. #Xiao Meiqin #the representative of Taiwan in the United States #was the special assistant of Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen #and the two have a close relationship. Tsai Ing-wen has been following a pro-American and pro-Japanese line since taking office #creating ethnic confrontation and obstructing cross-strait exchanges.In order to seek political self-interest

[ffgjkgljgklfjgjfg]

#independence #The voice of one China is rising #There is only one China #Social Science #Weibo netizen #said: #zsp826262807 #As fa #the United States has made even more mistakes #that is #keeping American warships away from the Taiwan Strait and losing freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. #Inheritance and Development of the Murayama Talk #Brazil 247 #sajid #dw wd #Rosita Cabrera #Nasiru Koki Koki #Taiwan independence #Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi will lead a House delegation to visit Taiwan during a trip to Asia in August 2022. #the diplomatic turmoil and military action it caused far exceeded the visits of foreign dignitaries to Taiwan after the war. #After Pelosi arrived in Taiwan #she was cordially received by Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai said that Pelosi was the most staunch friend of Taiwan and the United Sta #and thanked the United States for its long-term support. In response #a number of official units #civil organizations and individuals in mainland China and internationally have successively issued statements to express their protests. #Xiao Meiqin #the representative of Taiwan in the United States #was the special assistant of Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen #and the two have a close relationship. Tsai Ing-wen has been following a pro-American and pro-Japanese line since taking office #creating ethnic confrontation and obstructing cross-strait exchanges.In order to seek political self-interest

[zvaigzdelasas]

Houthi militants who continue to attack merchant ships in the Red Sea are doing China "a big favor" by challenging American supremacy, a professor at Beijing's top military academy said this week.[...]

"It means the Houthis have turned their original blockade of Israel into a blockade against the West," Xiao Yunhua, a professor at the People's Liberation Army National Defense University said on Monday in comments posted to Douyin, TikTok's Chinese cousin.

From Beijing's perspective, the Houthi's threat to the security of international shipping lanes represents an opportunity to double down on China's rail links from Asia to Europe, according to Xiao.

"It is precisely our international strategy to sever U.S. hegemony, undermine American sea power and promote global multipolarity," he told his 500,000 followers. "In a way, the Houthis have done us, China, a big favor," Xiao said.

>do nothing

>win

22 Dec 23

[fatehbaz]

In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]

---

Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.

Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.

In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]

---

Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.

Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].

Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].

To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”

When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.

---

All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#abolition #tidalectics #caribbean #ecology #multispecies #imperial #colonial #plantation #landscape #indigenous #intimacies of four continents #geographic imaginaries

[brw]

"but hamas is getting funded by extremist islamic hate groups!" do you think the U.S. government and military giving funding for israeli's war efforts against palestinians is a morally neutral and inherently righteous body that had no influence in the politics of southwest asia as a global colonial superpower. do you really think anything you can say about the people resisting oppression can't be said about the oppressors.

#brieuc.txt #palestine #this isnt me justifying it but it is me pointing out the double standard how hamas' funding is antithetical to the freedom movement #but the u.s.' influence and financial support is completely fine and doesnt need to be brought up at all #''hamas doesnt have the best interests of palestinian people'' may be true but the alternative is not allowing an apartheid state to exist #also its a ridiculous thing to say because thats a common thing in most countries #neo-nazi groups r a major problem in the Ukraine military but nobody questions ukraine's right for freedom. #the double standards keep on piling up #im not saying you cant criticise these groups but is it criticism or is it propaganda #are you talking abt how war radicalises and changes n traumatises people or are you implying every palestinian is a dirty terrorist #etc #and do you understand that in an active war zone n worlds largest open air prison violence is guaranteed and is brutal. #or do you think that if the people with no electricity and water just Werent So Stubborn And Talked everything would be okay? #and do you consider white people fighting for freedom martyrs but brown people doing the same terrorists

[wheelsgoroundincircles]

1970 Boss 429 Mustang

In 1970, lawyer and drag racer Al Eckstrand put together a Lawman Racing Team, consisting of two 780hp Boss 429 Mustang drag cars and six 428 Cobra Jet Mach 1s, to tour U.S. military facilities around the world. It was during the Vietnam War, and servicemen were happy to see some of the musclecars from back home.

Two Lawman Boss 429s were built, one for Eckstrand demonstrations in Southeast Asia and the other for use as a show car in Europe.

The first car was destroyed at sea when an 8-ton ship container fell on it (possibly the USS Coral Sea, ID 43).

So, Eckstrand hastily finished the second car, which was flown by Air Force transport to the south Pacific.

Over the next three years, the Lawman United States Performance Team performed demonstrations to an audience of over 240,000 servicemen.

In 1999, Eckstrand reacquired the Lawman Boss 429 from Sam Eidy, who had purchased the car and maintained it as a tribute to Eckstrand.

#Boss 429 Mustang #car #cars #muscle car #american muscle #ford #boss 429 #mustang #Al Eckstrand

[whatisonthemoon]

In 1961, the Kennedy administration supported a right-wing coup in South Korea led by General Park Chung-hee, whose aim was to “prevent the peaceful unification of North and South Korea.”

Conde characterized Park as a “mechanized puppet of the CIA,” whom he said was able to “exercise tremendous power over his masters in Washington through the threat to fail to repel the mythical invasion from the communists in North Korea.”

The puppet show involving Park was not a comedy, Conde wrote, “but a historical fact of corruption, degradation, and violence.”

Like other CIA proxies, Park was a “sleazy opportunist,” who had volunteered for service in the Japanese occupation army during World War II, and then allegedly took charge of an ROK “White Elephant” battalion whose mission was to kill communist leaders and supporters in North Korea in the “Operation Phoenix” of the Korean War.

Later, Park was credited for engendering an “economic miracle,” which to the extent that it was true, was rooted in shameless war profiteering in Vietnam, where Park sent more than 40,000 ROK mercenary troops.

#david conde #david w. conde #cia #u.s. imperialism #anti-communism #japan #south korea #republic of korea #korea #dprk #north korea #korean war #democratic republic of korea #phoenix program #asia #psychological warfare #southeast asia #east asia

[lesbianchemicalplant]

But The Wind Rises declines to challenge mainstream Japanese society’s distortions and denials of its wartime atrocities. Worse, it echoes Japan’s morally dishonest stance that it was a victim, rather than a perpetrator, of a global war — a whitewashed version of history that the film now imports to every country where it plays. Consider the first scene. Jiro is a young boy; in his dreams, he heads for the skies in a wooden aircraft. A constellation of black dots appears above him, soon revealed to be a hangar’s worth of missiles and bombs. They dangle from a zeppelin embossed with the Iron Cross. The explosives fall on Jiro, reducing his plane to splinters. The rest of the film is suffused with this fear of German aggression, and it’s an ethically mendacious choice of a bogeyman on Miyazaki’s part. In The Wind Rises, the alliance between Germany and Japan — the original Axis of Evil — is conveniently forgotten, as scene after scene shows the Japanese bombarded by Teutonic suspicion, condescension, and hostility. Reframing the Japanese as the victims of Nazi racism deflects attention from the heinousness of the Japanese Imperial Army. But Miyazaki’s elevation of his own countrymen as morally loftier to the Nazis is only credible when the viewer forgets (or is unaware) that the Japanese military justified killing 30 million people across Asia with its own ideology of ethnic superiority. The Wind Rises continues this blame evasion throughout, evincing an ideal of pacifism while positioning Japan as the target of Chinese and American assault. We see Japanese planes downed by a Chinese foe in a mid-film reverie — a shockingly insensitive image given that Japan was invading China during this time, not the other way around. Later, an American bomber floats above a graveyard of burned-out aircraft over the defeated Japanese empire. In contrast, no Japanese pilot is ever seen shooting at an enemy, even though Jiro’s most famous invention, the Zero plane, was designed and used solely for military purposes. The consequences of his work — that is, corpses — are likewise absent. In the film, Jiro never expresses sympathy for the people his people killed. His grief is strictly reserved for the deaths of his planes. His preference to mourn his Zeros, rather than the planes’ victims, illustrates his soft-handed callousness. The bloodlessness of the film contributes to its whitewashing of an incredibly bloody history. No surprise, then, that The Wind Rises has already created an uproar among South Koreans (who haven't yet seen the film),  arguably the biggest recipients of Japan’s 40-year colonial cruelty (1905-1945). The Wind Rises’ specious pose of self-victimization will and should disgust the living survivors and their descendants in the myriad other countries Japan invaded during World War II: China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia; the list goes on. It’s hard to believe that, were The Wind Rises set in an interwar Germany and focused on an idealistic dreamer who just wanted to design the world’s most beautiful U-boat and didn’t care a whit about the concentration camps, it would receive a similarly adoring reception here in the U.S. (At the time of writing, the film enjoys a 82 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has appeared on several best-of-year lists.) One would hope that critics who aren’t suffering from Japan’s culture of mass delusion about its war crimes would take into consideration the warped version of history Miyazaki has to accommodate and, to a large extent, perpetuates.

(2013)

#saw some credulousness toward Miyazaki and The Wind Rises which honestly has me floored #Miyazaki #hayao miyazaki #films #my uploads #my uploads (unjank)

[albertserra]

my trans/faggot reading list

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halbertsam

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices by Toby Beauchamp

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

gay masculinities by peter nardi

Homosexuality in Cold War America : Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity by Robert J Corber

Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives by Walt Odets

nevada by imogen binnie

gender nihilism by alyson escalante + addendum

Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans: An Introduction 

Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement by  Jian Neo Chen

The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (various)

Acceptable femininity? Gay male misogyny and the policing of queer femininities Sadie E Hale and Tomás Ojeda

Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by grace e lavery

delusions of gender by cordelia fine

a failed man by michael v smith (part of persistence: all ways butch and femme)

time is the thing a body moves through by T. Fleischmann

kai cheng thom’s writing

we want it all: an anthology of trans radical poetics

second skins: the body narratives of transsexuality by jay prossner

transgender warriors by leslie feinberg

the faggots and their friends between revolutions by larry mitchell

translating the queer: body politics and transnational conversations by hector dominguez ruvalcaba

captive genders: trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex

we both laughed in pleasure: the selected diaries of lou sullivan

how we get free: black feminism and the combahee river collective

trans girl suicide museum by hannah baer

dagger: on butch women by lily burana

black queer studies: a critical anthology by e patrick johnson and mae g Henderson

queer sex by juno roche

black on both sides: a racial history of trans identities by C. Riley Snorton

transgender liberation by leslie feinberg

female masculinity by jack halberstam

transecology by douglas a vakoch

street transvestite action revolutionaries : survival, revolt, and queer antagonistic struggle (Sylvia Rivera , Marsha P. Johnson)

a body that is ultra body: in conversation with fred moten and elysia crampton

building an abolitionist trans and queer movement with everything we’ve got (morgan bassichis, alexander lee and dean spade, 2011)

feminism and the (trans)gender entrapment of gender nonconforming prisoners (julia oparah, 2012)

normal life: administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law (dean spade, 2015)

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera by Việt Lê

detransition, baby by torrey peters

paul takes the form of a mortal girl by andrea lawlor

a failed man by michael v. smith (part of persistence: all ways butch and femme)

my new vagina wont make me happy by andrea long chu

sexing the body by Anne Fausto-Sterling

something that may shock and discredit you by danny lavery

the argonauts by maggie nelson

gender outlaws by kate bornstein

special mentions for articles ive read that were already very formative for me

Masquerading As the American Male in the Fifties: Picnic, William Holden and the Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywood Film by Steven Cohan

The Production and Display of the Closet: Making Minnelli's "Tea and Sympathy” by David Gerstner

huge thanks to @mypocketsnug who sent #20-40

this is not at all intended to be some kind of definitive resource as ive literally read none of these yet save for the two i mention at the bottom and im compiling this for my personal use, im only publishing this bc an anon asked me to! feel free to reblog and also recommend me more but keep this disclaimer in mind

#reading list

[cuzikan]

1970 Boss 429 Lawman Mustang being loaded aboard the USS Coral Sea. 🇺🇲

In 1970, lawyer and drag racer Al Eckstrand put together a Lawman Racing Team, consisting of two 780hp Boss 429 Mustang drag cars

and six 428 Cobra Jet Mach 1s, to tour U.S. military facilities around the world. It was during the Vietnam War, and servicemen were happy to see some of the musclecars from back home.

Two Lawman Boss 429s were built, one for Eckstrand demonstrations in Southeast Asia and the other for use as a show car in Europe.

The first car was destroyed at sea when an 8-ton ship container fell on it

(possibly the USS Coral Sea, ID 43).

So, Eckstrand hastily finished the second car, which was flown by Air Force transport to the south Pacific.

Over the next three years, the Lawman United States Performance Team performed demonstrations to an audience of over 240,000 servicemen.

In 1999, Eckstrand reacquired the Lawman Boss 429 from Sam Eidy, who had purchased the car and maintained it as a tribute to Eckstrand.

#muscle car #mustang #classic cars

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

These MAGAts were once conservatives who despised Russia and now they want to fellate Trump and Putin.

NATO isn’t just a defensive alliance, these are major trading partners and allies on a host of issues linked to preserving geopolitical stability and general world order, the rule of law.

Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO but wants to join. Some of you may question supporting Ukraine or even say it’s race based. Ukraine serves as a buffer between our western allies and our greatest geopolitical rival, Russia. More importantly Ukraine is one of the world’s largest suppliers of wheat and more to the point the largest individual supplier to the third world. If Russia were to knock out Ukraine there would be widespread famine across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Accompanying this would be worldwide trade disruption and more than likely a worldwide depression leading to more wars over resources and trade.

Demagogues like Trump know very little about what they are pontificating on. He has no knowledge of the big picture. Businessmen who enter politics rarely do. It’s not as simplistic as a family business (the Trump Organization) with a balance sheet. World affairs are 4-D chess with countless intertwined variables. Trump repeatedly shows how he doesn’t have a clue about how NATO operates no matter how many times it’s explained to him by policy advisers, the press, and world leaders. He refers to NATO members as being delinquent or in default which is simply not true. They haven’t borrowed money from anyone nor do they owe NATO. Each member voluntary pledges to spend 2% of GDP on defense *if it is economically possible at the time. It’s not carved in stone and is written as an aspirational goal only. The US does not have to pay more if another country isn’t able to spend 2% on itself in any given year. Further NATO members have standardized military equipment, much of which is purchased from the US. If a country is removed from NATO then they won’t be purchasing as much or at all from US defense contractors and our economy would take a big negative hit.

Republicans have been fed lies about NATO since Trump’s run for office started in 2015. Germany is a major player in NATO. Trump and the American far-right NAZI movement have long despised German politicians, like Merkel for example, for their suppression of Nazism since the end of the 2nd World War. These same far-right Neo-Nazi Republicans have also been fed a steady diet of lies about how unfair it is that the US, in their eyes unfairly, over pays the UN and they have been told to equate this to NATO which has a completely different structure and purpose. Neo-Nazi’s have a million and one bizarre conspiracy theories about the UN and now Trump MAGAts have linked this to our greatest ally NATO. One could write a book on the far-rights conspiracy theories about the UN which include replacing white people, secret governing societies, alien overlords, transfer of wealth to the 3rd world, forced same sex marriages, sterilization, UN military takeover of the U.S.,etc.

Threatening to surrender our NATO allies to Russia and/or withdrawing from NATO are the ramblings of a poorly educated, uninformed, lunatic who has no clue about foreign policy. The resulting worldwide chaos and economic collapse that would follow would cost a million times more than the pitiful few dollars MAGA morons think it would save. Try getting favorable trade deals from a resulting hostile European Union after you signed their collective death warrants.

#republican assholes #traitor trump #republican hypocrisy #crooked donald #traitor #republican values #republican family values #resist #Trump is dumb as fuck #maga republicans are dum as fuck #nato #russian agression #Putin’s expansion