#Bad ending : American imperialist hegemony

[irithnova]

Mongolia and America interactions are funny in the sense that they're both clearly fucking using each other HAHAH

Like Mongolia clearly is being suffocated by Russia and China and needs interactions and political friendships with other nations (third neighbour policy helloooo) even if it's with America.

He knows has his own issues and self interests I mean hell, America literally interfered with Mongolia's 1996 election. So Mongolia isn't stupid or naive when it comes to uh. America's reputation in the global south. But goddamnit regardless he shouldn't be relying on just Russia and China so much + it's really fucking funny to him seeing Russia and China seethe a little when he interacts with America. America likes it because toying with the designated "buffer state" between Russia and China is yet another way to 1) Pursue his self interests 2) Annoy the fuck out of them

[withbriefthanksgiving]

May I gently say that in general - but especially during a genocide and amongst those who want to bring it to its end - we need to start embedding disability justice.

How many Palestinians are now deafened, blind, mentally unwell, physically disabled etc? The world we want to build - can these people access it? What about our own disabled siblings and comrades - are we bringing them with us? Do we see them with us in this new world we are trying to make?

I know that there are many places where obviously, it will not be fully accessible. Nobody is saying we need a blind man to be a sharpshooter.

But what we are saying is that we need to wrestle with the ways that settler colonial, imperialist racial capitalism has successfully propagandised to us regarding disability. Things we take for granted. Things we see as common sense - are these things actually the natural state of affairs? Or does this mode of thinking reinforce capitalist and settler colonialist violences in small and big ways?

Let me bring this down from the abstract and macro, to the more concrete and micro. For example: we realise that:

one way the American (+ Israeli + other allies) retains its stranglehold on its hegemony is by a vast propaganda machine. This is audio visual media, like news, TV, books etc.

these countries do not want a politically educated working class. schools and universities do not give people the ways to analyse and critique their society, and come up with ways to change it for the good of everyone.

These countries have legal systems that facilitate (enable, make it easy) capitalist productions. Such as no maternity leave, bad workplace protections etc.

This type of working disables people. It makes people sick and unwell, physically and mentally. It’s hostile to anyone whose body or mind can’t function well in a job.

This is on top of historical processes of disablement and debilitation by genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, war etc.

The capitalist entertainment industry exists to make money, and to make money off a numb, overworked and tired population. there are a lot of tv shows books etc which have no real substance, and provide comfort for peoples difficult lives. And people are not encouraged to engage with this critically. Often they also don’t have the time or the tools to do so.

Therefore, any of us who seriously want to change this, must realise that

We have a lot of propaganda to counteract. I think many people realise this, and share a lot of tweets, book excerpts etc. however-

Sharing is not enough. We need to be sharing information in an accessible way.

This is because the masses are - for the reasons I’ve laid out above - tired and disabled. They may not be well educated or literate. They may not speak the dominant language of your country very fluently. They also have been drenched in capitalist and imperialist propaganda for years.

Therefore: order to reach these masses effectively, the information we are sharing should be shared as accessibly as possible.

A simple way we can do that is by copying and pasting text if we post screenshots of tweets, articles etc. This makes it easier for blind people and people with visual impairments. They can have the text read to them by using screen readers. But not everyone has screen readers, which also read alt-text. Image descriptions allow people to magnify or enlarge the text. People can also translate the text online to a language they understand better.

Please describe your screenshots.

The majority of image descriptions on this website are done by other disabled people. It takes longer for us to describe the images after, because you have to use an online converter. Or type it out ourselves. It’s a lot quicker if you are taking a screenshot to copy paste the text at the same time.

I know it’s not always possible to do. And it’s hard to get into the habit. But I think we need revolutionary discipline to practice and get into this habit, those of us who can.

I am also speaking to myself here. It took me 2 years before I started seriously to describe text. I was shamed into doing so by blind users on this app who were rightfully upset at how those of us with sight completely erase them from online experiences. It kind of awkward to do at first. You kind of feel silly. But you do get better. Even if you are a small account, it’s important to try your hand at this. It can be an introduction into mutual aid for a lot of us - helping each other out because it’s important for us to help each other and to have links with each other, including disabled people.

I think the more of us who try to do this, it will lead us to increase accessibility in other areas, like in-person organising.

If you’re interested in getting into describing text, have a look at my tag: image descriptions. It’s got some tips, tutorials and explanations written by people who rely on images being described to get info and navigate the web.

Thank you for reading.

[jyndor]

(Imperialism etc anon) Ok I get where you're coming from! Thank you for being understanding. While Zutara is obviously not inherently racist or anything there are zutara interpretations that *are* racist (example: fire lady katara which I can get into) and it does need to be acknowledged that Zuko's status as fire nation royalty does create a power imbalance between him and Katara. Now, this is a conversation that has a lot of nuance to it but it seems like the people harassing you are (1/2)

(2/2) just repeating some genuine critique they saw without understanding what it means just to say that they're right, harassing people in the process. I did not have that context when sending that first ask and I apologize, since anons harassing you and others are clearly doing it out of bad faith. I just didn't like the leveraging of concepts that really matter in real life (colonialism, etc), ykwim? But I get what you were trying to do.

hey anon I’m finally getting to you after 84 years XD

so first off, I want to be careful about how I approach this because I understand that as a white person (even if my ancestors experienced imperialism) in the US I absolutely benefit from imperialism and don’t want to like, idk, whitesplain XD so if anyone gets annoyed with any way I say anything, just lmk and I’ll rework it. and I also do understand that these are real world issues that are far more consequential than messaging in media (although I do think it’s very important that we challenge messages in media because of media’s influence on our thinking and politics).

but before I talk about zuko and his relationship to fire nation imperialism, and then later fire lady katara and why it isn’t INHERENTLY racist but definitely can be, I want to talk about the atla fandom and how we got here. like, why I assume that most anons who come at zutara shippers are asshats acting in bad faith. if you already know fandom history, skip this section.

1. atla and the fandom has always been kind of shitty and racist

so IDK if everyone is familiar with the history of the ship war in atla fandom, but it’s regarded as one of the nastiest ship wars in fandom history which I agree lol. atla’s creators were some of the first to interact with the fandom the way they did - back then it wasn’t all that common for creators to get into twitter feuds with fans and boundaries were respected more than they are now imo. but for better or worse, and it is a mixed bag, bryke interacted with fandom a lot. certainly at cons but also on social media.

but honestly things really got extra mean in fan spaces when bryke made a “joke” atla season 4 slideshow out of fan art (some of which was really sexual in nature and totally inappropriate) that mocked fans’ creations, but especially zutara fanart and zutara itself. it was pretty tasteless especially considering how most zutara fans were teen girls, and featured some art of sokka saying that if you think zuko and katara would be good together, you’re doomed to have failed relationships. that’s where the whole “dark and mysterious” bs came from, which does describe some zutara fic but not even most of it lol. I actually do respect bryke a lot despite my criticism of them, but I don’t think I’ll ever get over that shit. like even if you hate zutara, even if it’s a joke, we were kids. and they were adults, and the whole thing was nasty.

however, the ship war was chaotic and messy, but it does feel worse now. maybe it’s because back then the fandom was MOSTLY teens and kids, and I don’t think that’s true now. we were all trying to prove our ship was best with like, content from the show and theories and all that, and now it’s like... whose ship is ~problematic lol it’s a show by white us americans appropriating from various cultures impacted negatively by us/british imperialism that they then profited off of, of course it’s racist. that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about that, and in fact many poc have been saying this shit for years - that atla is racist and colorist at many times (guru pathik anyone?) and no one really listened.

if fans are complaining only about zutara, then I’m automatically writing them off as being insincere or ignorant. and since most of these people are anonymous, I have no idea if they are having substantive discourse about colorism in avatar or cultural appropriation (even if it is mostly appreciative). if you are on anon, I have no context about what you actually think except for what you give me. and that definitely is how I view anons in general but especially within the atla fandom because for all 13-ish years I’ve been in it, it’s been messy. that’s why zutara fans have isolated ourselves from the rest of fandom, because the rest of fandom has been really nasty to us. like did we give back some nastiness? absolutely.

but I would hazard a guess that most anti-zutara shippers don’t know about the conversations we have had in this community to make it safer for people of color, conversations that centered poc and woc especially. hey, that’s okay - not to compare zutara to r*ylo because eurgh but like, idk what discourse the r*ylos have about their community. no idea, I don’t go looking for it. and I don’t go to the tags and harass r*ylos - even though they harass the fuck out of everyone else.

2. so zuko and his privilege

undoubtedly zuko as fire lord is in a fairly privileged position LMFAO. but during the show zuko is very clearly exiled - he holds very little political power in the fire nation EXCEPT for during the first season when he is in command of a ship that ozai gave him on a punishment quest lol like yeah he does terrible things and he of all people would not excuse his actions even if he was a traumatized kid, that’s the point of his arc - that he got some exposure to the rest of the world and worked to be better. and the only reason he was exiled at all was because he cares about people - he didn’t question fire nation supremacy at 13, but he sure did question the morality of his people being lead to slaughter.

but after zuko and iroh defect from the fire nation and stop hunting aang, he has next to no power, in any kind of way. like the guy is a political refugee. and yes, he goes back to the fire nation for like five minutes before realizing that he hates everything about fire nation hegemony and that he wants to end his father’s reign of terror, like that isn’t exactly someone who is going to be well esteemed by the powerful elites when he returns and takes the throne.

and I disregard the comics because they suck lol but zuko does have power as the fire lord, but he limits his power. like compared to ozai, phoenix asshole? azula? for the rest of the world, zuko is kind of an ideal leader for a former colonizing/imperialistic nation to have - someone who worked to end that tyranny, who is anti-imperialist, who believes in justice and equality, who wants to make things right for the peoples who his family oppressed.

I do think it is important to talk about power dynamics and imbalances in relationships - for instance, one could argue that mai is at a significant disadvantage in her relationship with zuko. sure she is from a powerful family but not as powerful as zuko’s. sokka? hah forget it. he’s just as disadvantaged as katara is politically speaking. toph? well, she’s definitely not as powerful politically as zuko - her family tried to silence her for years because of her disability. and oh, she’s disabled so it might be ableist for zuko to strike up a relationship with her when they’re both adults. forgetting of course that toph and sokka and katara and suki and mai are not going to be shy about their wants and needs, that these relationships are not likely to be coercive by nature of the show they’re in and the characters they involve. this is not bill clinton with monica creepiness. like, you’d have to write the relationship that way.

the only person who arguably has more political power than zuko is aang. I guess zuko can’t ever be in a relationship with anyone other than aang. and zuko’s family massacred aang’s people so I guess we can’t ship zukaang. now I know you’re not saying that, context matters. power dynamics are important. but you can’t take away the agency of characters - katara, who is essentially a princess, has agency and can choose who she wants to be with. strictly speaking, aang is more powerful than anyone in terms of political power - he’s the avatar - and of course the dynamic is different by nature of aang not being from a line of oppressors, but there still is a power imbalance in their relationship. and I don’t know how many k/ataang shippers have discourse~ on that. not that I really feel like they NEED to, um idk what they talk about lol I’m not in those circles.

3. fire lady katara is in the eye of the beholder

so fire lady katara is not inherently bad or racist, it’s essentially like saying michelle obama shouldn’t have been first lady of the us (now I get that like the obamas being in power didn’t mean black people are not marginalized lol). you can have conversations about whether or not individual versions of fire lady katara are fucked up, and I’m superrrr open to that because I’ve seen it be kinda shitty before. i’m just gonna leave this link to @shewhotellsstories and her post on this.

but often times katara as fire lady is very dominant in global/fire nation/water tribe politics, she’s a game changer ambassador (that is probably the most popular headcanon I see), she holds on to her culture (and many fans have designed her being in her wt colors, zuko is respectful af to her, she and zuko spend extended periods in the swt, etc. like... it just depends on the way it’s written.

also leaving this response by @avatarnerdkiller to the idea of katara being a prize figurehead.

anyway, thanks for your patience anon and I am curious to see if you see this or even feel like responding after all this time XD

[placedupon]

Sovereignty isn’t enough: why colonized people have had to create Nation States

Often I see people saying things like “all states are bad,” and well meaning people calling different countries authoritarian. But in the world we live in, the United States economic and imperialist hold prevents any kind of community that threatens their hegemony-- socialists, anarchists, communists, have all been invaded, couped, and killed by the United States. There are only a few communist and socalist states that have been able to stand up against the USA-- and they have often had to form nation states and create weapons in order to preserve their peoples.

A good example of this is Hawaii. Hawaii was a soverign, multicultural nation, and was known as that in the world. The king of Hawaii even went on a world tour to ask other world leaders if they saw Hawaii as a legitimate nation (they did).

But white plantation owners wanted more control in Hawaii, so they got the US to basically coup it, destabilize Hawaii, made the king sign the “Bayonett treaty” where he signed away his own power as leader with a knife to his throat.

Ghana ended up similarly. Kwame Nkrumah was a radical socialist, who wanted to unite African nations with socialism, against US imperialism. He was recognized as a leader in the world. But while he was on a diplomatic visit to China, the US backed a military coup against him.

This has happened time and time again. It’s not enough even if the entire world recognizes the legitimacy of your “nation”-- the US will destroy whoever it wants, and go mostly unchallenged. We see this whenever a group of people (peaceful or not!) challenges US hegemony, as in Bolivia, Vietnam, Venezuela-- the US tries to take them down.

In order for a group of people to successfully hold it’s own against the United States, they need a lot of the infrastructure of a nation state-- and often military weapons. The two countries that have done the best against the US have been Cuba and North Korea, and both were forced to create weapons in order to gain the respect and legitimacy from the US. Now Cuba and North Korea are often called authoritarian dictatorships-- even by American leftists. But to hold these nations (and their people) up to this higher standard of what a nation state should be instead-- whether it be an anarchist community or something else-- is incredibly unfair! People have tried to create anarchist communities and been overthrown. (also, it’s important to learn the history of the Korean war before placing judgement on North Korea, but that’s a different post)

Colonized people, whether they like it or not, have had to form nation states to protect themselves against US imperialism

Colonized people almost always have to arm themselves, often with weapons of mass destruction, in order to not be massacred by the US military.

[collapsedsquid]

The new national conservatism, at least as articulated in Rome, is very different from Reaganism and Thatcherism. The starting point is that European integration and American hegemony are both evil, and that universal ideals like human rights are a dangerous ideology. These, in fact, are arguments made in Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, a work that synthesizes biblical history, the writings of John Locke, and contemporary politics into a caricature of a political philosophy for our times. Hazony has invented a definition of the nation—tribes that have agreed to live together, more or less—that applies to no existing modern state, not even Israel. He also attributes all of the good things about modern civilization to the nation and all of the bad things to what he calls “imperialism.” He puts countries and institutions he likes into the first box, and those he doesn’t like into the second. Thus it emerges that the Nazis, who specifically called themselves nationalists, were not nationalists but imperialists, as is the European Union, an organization created to prevent the resurgence of Nazism. Britain, Spain, and France, despite their long history as empires on land and sea, count as nations.

Hazony again, who takes his shit seriously?

[xhxhxhx]

“The Only Real Exception”

After writing about the education-polarization thesis and the future of Europe and Asia, I was curious: Has Japan polarized? One of Thomas Piketty’s students studied the question. They came to a surprising answer.

As Western Europe and North America have become increasingly polarized around education and income, Japan has actually depolarized.

Western Europe and Japan started in different places. In Western Europe, the educated classes traditionally supported parties of the right. In postwar Japan, they supported parties of the left. They moved in different directions. In Western Europe, the educated moved left. In Japan, they moved right.

From Amory Gethin, “Cleavage structures and distributive politics”: 

7.6 The end of ‘cultural politics’

One of the other specificities of Japanese electoral behaviour is the fact that higher educated individuals have continuously supported left-wing parties, especially during the twenty years following the end of World War II. The historical strength of education levels in predicting party choice in Japan is well-known: it reflects the freezing of the party system which had emerged in the context of the ‘cultural politics’ of the 1950s (Watanuki, 1991).

Even when controlling for the significant improvements in citizens’ education levels since the 1960s, this pattern has persisted for most of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, 65% of the 20% least educated voters supported the Liberal Democratic Party, against 41% of voters belonging to the top education decile (figure 7.3c). During recent years, however, these differences have decreased considerably, and popular vote for the LDP has oscillated between 40% and 45% for all education groups in 2009-2014. Looking more closely at intellectual elites confirms this evolution (figure 7.3d). In 1963-1967, top 10% educated voters were indeed less likely to support the LDP by about 15 percentage points (8 percentage points after controls). This figure remained broadly stable, staying between 5 and 10 percentage points during the 1963-1996 period. Starting in 2009, however, education lost significance, even when including controls. The decline of the Social Democratic Party during the 1990s and its replacement by the Democratic Party of Japan – which culminated by its victory in 2009 – therefore seems to coincide with the disappearance of what was one of the most fundamental political divisions of Japanese society. The fact that this dealignment was sudden and occurred at the same time as shifts in the structure of party politics suggests that this process is driven by top-down mechanisms rather than long-run evolutions in collective beliefs. 

7.7 From a multiple elites party system to political indifferentiation? 

Bringing these two dynamics together points to a trend which is the exact opposite of the one observed in most Western countries (figure 7.4). In the 1960s, intellectual and economic elites were clearly separated into two different groups. On the left of the political spectrum, university graduates were highly supportive of the Japanese Communist Party and the Japanese Socialist Party, who based their appeal more on liberal values than on class antagonisms. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democratic Party attracted both low income earners and business elites. Through its defense of organized capitalism, it created strong ties with top executives and industrial leaders who participated in developing Japan’s growth model. This structure of political competition suddenly ended in 2009, when the LDP was defeated for the first time. 

While these figures suggest that Japan was originally a perfect example of a multiple elites party system, this characterisation should not be over-emphasised. Persistently strong levels of support for the party among low income earners demonstrates that the LDP has never favoured exclusively economic elites. As was highlighted above, part of its remarkable hegemony came from its ability to distribute equally the fruits of the country’s long periods of growth. The non-linearity of the relationship between income and electoral behaviour is, to some extent, an interesting representation of the Japanese social compromise, which came with its dominant-party system. 

Piketty describes Japan as the exception to the education-polarization rule. From Capital and Ideology:

The only real exception to this general evolution of the structure of political cleavages within the electoral democracies of developed countries seems to concern Japan, which has never really experienced a party system of classist type comparable to those observed in European countries and Westerners during the post-war period. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been in power almost permanently in Japan since 1945. Historically, this almost hegemonic conservative party has achieved its best scores in the rural and agricultural world and among the urban bourgeoisie. The LDP thus succeeded in synthesizing between the economic and industrial elites and traditional Japan, around a project of reconstruction of the country, in a complex context marked by the American occupation and an anticommunism exacerbated by the Russian-Chinese proximity. Conversely, the Democratic Party (main opposition party) has generally achieved its best scores among modest and average urban employees and among the most highly qualified, who are willing to protest against the presence of the United States and the new moral and social order embodied by the LDP, but without succeeding in sustainably gathering an alternative majority8. More generally, the specific structure of the political conflict in Japan must be linked to the particular form taken by Japanese cleavages around nationalism and traditional values9.

8. See A. GETHIN, Cleavages Structures and Distributive Politics, op. cit., p. 89-100. See also K. MORI MCELWAIN, « Party System Institutionalization in Japan », in A. HICKEN, E. MARTINEZ KUHONTA, Party System Institutionalization in Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 74-107.

9. In The Game of the Century [The Silent Cry] (1967), Kenzaburô Ôé magnificently evokes the complexity and the violence of the relations between the intellectual elites and the popular classes in Japan, in particular around the urban-rural divide, traditional values and the question of the modernization of the country since the beginning of the Meiji era (1868), without forgetting the role played by the geopolitical positioning of the archipelago, the relationship with the United States and the antagonisms aroused by the presence of Korean workers.

Perhaps Japan was a precociously modern society in the 1960s, with an educated left and a uneducated right. Or perhaps it was a “post-colonial” society, with a self-consciously anti-imperialist left. 

The Japanese experience of the 1960s can certainly sound precociously modern. In Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (1987), one working class student was put off by the 1960s educated left:

"You know, when I went to university I joined a folk-music club. I just wanted to sing songs. But the members were a load of frauds. I get goose-bumps just thinking about them. The first thing they tell you when you enter the club is you have to read Marx. ‘Read page so-and-so to such-and-such for next time.’ Somebody gave a lecture on how folk songs have to be deeply involved with society and the radical movement. So, what the hell, I went home and tried as hard as I could to read it, but I didn't understand a thing. It was worse than the subjunctive. I gave up after three pages. So I went to the next week's meeting like a good little scout and said I had read it, but I couldn't understand it. From that point on they treated me like an idiot.

“I had no critical awareness of the class struggle, they said, I was a social cripple. I mean, this was serious. And all because I said I couldn't understand a piece of writing. Don't you think they were terrible?"

"Uh-huh," I said.

"And their so-called discussions were terrible, too. Everybody would use big words and pretend they knew what was going on. But I would ask questions whenever I didn't understand something. "What is this imperialist exploitation stuff you're talking about? Is it connected somehow to the East India Company?' "Does smashing the educational-industrial complex mean we're not supposed to work for a company after we graduate?' And stuff like that. But nobody was willing to explain anything to me. Far from it -- they got really angry.

“Can you believe it?"

"Yeah, I can," I said.

"One guy yelled at me, "You stupid bitch, how do you live like that with nothing in your brain?' Well, that did it. I wasn't going to put up with that. OK, so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions.

“Am I right, or what?"

"You're right."

"So that's when it hit me. These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hands up their skirts. And when they graduate, they cut their hair short and march off to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh! And the new members were just as bad. They didn't understand a thing either, but they pretended to and they were laughing at me. After the meeting, they told me, "Don't be silly! So what if you don't understand? Just agree with everything they say.'"

[...]  

"So then what happened with your club?"

"I left in June, I was so furious," Midori said. "Most of these student types are total frauds. They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all spout the same slogans, and they love listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that "revolution?"'

"Hey, don't ask me, I've never actually seen a revolution."

"Well, if that's revolution, you can stick it. They'd probably shoot me for putting umeboshi in my rice balls. They'd shoot you, too, for understanding the subjunctive."

"It could happen."

"Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. I'm working class.”

But those dynamics changed. Today, Japan is about as polarized by education as France and the United States were in the 1970s and the United Kingdom was in the 1990s: the more educated and the less educated vote the same way. 

I am still interested in whether Japan has depolarized at the level of opinion and policy. Under Shinzo Abe, the country has liberalized. It has more immigration and more women in the workforce. Perhaps that reflects the preferences of an increasingly educated population.

But it might be something else. The Liberal Democrats have a freedom of action that parties in competitive systems do not enjoy. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans must respond to changing preferences. In Japan, the Liberal Democrats can, more often than not, ignore them.

Perhaps Abe simply decided that cultural conservatism is not a winning program. But perhaps the country is changing beneath his feet. 

[exeggcute]

I think what's really frightening about the current state of the MAGA crowd and the far right (or at least, one of many frightening things) is that they seem to hold an equal amount of contempt for the current state of america as the left does, just in directly opposite ways. and I don't mean in the sense that republicans and democrats in power disagree (because as we all know, that's not even necessarily true), I mean both politicians and the general masses. the left is obviously (and rightfully) upset with america and its unrestrained atrocities at home and abroad, widening social inequality--you name it. but the right, especially the far-right, isn't content to already be at the top of the food chain of the american imperialistic empire. they also have immense dissatisfaction for current affairs, but to them it's because these atrocities don't go far enough. to broadly make assumptions, it strikes me that the average person on the left and the average person on the right are equally dissatisfied with america in exactly opposite ways, and it's extremely frightening to me that, not only is this schism so wide, but that a large portion of americans position themselves on the side of "actually, we need more injustice, because what little institutional pushback we're receiving from the left is cramping my style." it's not even that we necessarily have different visions of what issues are pressing in today's political climate, it's that some people want the direct inverse of what appears to be the greater social good. it's, in a word, reactionary--but in reaction to a barely-realized threat. the democrats certainly aren't doing shit, and more often than not work to uphold the same inequalities as the democrats, but the right perceives any small threat (whether in public opinion or actual legislation) to current hegemony as an attack and doubles down on their own bigotry.

and I don't know if this is actually a more pronounced phenomenon nowadays or if I was just too young and unaware to see it before--which is certainly possible. I was only four years old when GWB got elected. I remember wanting al gore to win the primaries because his color was green on the electorate map and green was my favorite color, so that's my pre-school level understanding of politics at the time. but I think people's general sentiment of "wow, politics are so cutthroat nowadays" is because the stakes are so high, and the right isn't content to sit back and let the machinery of empire continue wreaking havoc like it always has, they have to up the ante. obama's out of office, and even though very few aspects of american global power changed, they see the handful of "democrat" victories from his time in office (e.g., marriage equality, obamacare, whatever) as proof that america needs to be worse again. the fact that anyone wanted to vote for a blue president is evidence that american power is somehow in the shitter, despite the increase in drone strikes under obama. it has to be bigger and more theatrical, more proof of america's spot at the top. which is how, while the left organizes in the streets to bring up minimum wage and end police brutality, people on the far-right who think it's an equal injustice that we don't have a border wall. they can't be satisfied with how bad things are. they want to punish even more people, for things to be even worse.

[bimboficationblues]

I'm technically new to all this political stuff, so I hope you can help me out! - How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad? Why is the US also bad, and how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a "free country" and that we "at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest", etc. I'm very bad with words, I'm just a dumb kid. Sorry for bothering, and thank you. (:

I will answer these questions, but first off, I would say - read, listen, think. Ultimately it’s better if you can develop your own conclusions through a mutual dialogue and learning process with others rather than getting your talking points entirely from others, especially on a social media platform. But if you want resources or recommendations from others, Tumblr can be useful, and I’m happy to provide if you want.

As for answering your questions, it really depends: who is the person you’re talking to, and what do you want out of the conversation? Not everybody has the same interests or concerns or values, and sometimes they’re intractable for whatever reason. So there are other factors that should be taken into account. If you’re just trying to “win” a discussion, I don’t personally think that’s a worthwhile use of time - but if you are trying to convince someone interpersonally or just get better at clarifying your own perspective for the future, that could be valuable.

So, answering your questions under the cut:

How would you briefly explain to someone why capitalism is bad?

A) Capitalism stifles human freedom, and does so in both passive and active forms. This seems counterintuitive because capitalism is peddled as the fulfillment of human freedom (by way of innovation and freedom of choice - Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have claimed that so-called “economic freedom” is a necessary condition for political freedoms), so bear with me.

Passive forms: In order to live under capitalism, most people have to work - and for that matter, they have to tailor skills and interests to be rewarded on the labor-market. Furthermore, since capitalism is predicated on the principle of private property, some kind of state is necessary to enforce that principle through the law, and the state and law are blatantly forms of social control (see David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism for more info on this). As a Christian myself, this is the essence of idolatry. The capitalist world-system was made by humans, ostensibly to serve human needs, but is both bad at serving those needs in many ways (for reasons to be explained below) and uses us as the fodder for its self-perpetuation! 

And this generates alienation. There is nothing necessarily “wrong” with depending on other people - humans are social creatures and are themselves influenced by the conditions under which they live no matter what those conditions are. But when your labor and the product of your labor benefits others far better than it sustains you, when you are pushed to view all other people as competitors, when you are subjected to various forms of interpersonal and structural domination (detailed below), this produces quite a bit of psychological distress. (Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Deleuze & Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia touch on these in different ways.)

Active forms: Historically, in order to get people to be wage laborers, they had to be forced to do so - in England, which is generally regarded as the birthplace of capitalist modernity, laws were established to oblige people to work for a certain period and punish them if they didn’t. Similar legislation cropped up in Germany and France. And, of course, there was also the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the abuse and exploitation of indigenous populations throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, the confinement of women to the household for free labor. Though not all contemporary evils are the result of capitalism, they have all been shaped by capitalism. Primordial prejudices and mistreatment of “aliens” has been around for a long time, but anti-black racism and “scientific” racism developed out of the economic functions of slavery and capitalist development; though patriarchy predates capitalism considerably, it has been absorbed and reproduced by capitalism’s dynamics. 

One of the common selling points for capitalism is the voluntary character of the contracts, but again, I don’t think it’s a meaningful choice when your other options are “starve” and “beg.” But let’s grant that people enter into voluntary employment contracts to sustain themselves. Within those contracts, bosses behave like dictators, and this is a pattern of both small businesses and large corporations precisely because they want to get as much work and value out of you as they can in order to make a profit. (Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, while not about interpersonal domination by capitalists and employers, has a great chapter on the subject - “Capital’s Universalizing Tendency.”)

Now, although the standard of living and wages for American workers has been rising for a long time (only recently stagnating despite the growth in productivity, again the result of the neoliberal turn in the 70s and 80s), we have seen the most brutal forms of exploitation and domination displaced to other places - Southeast Asia, China, India, and Latin America being the most prominent cases. And still, as the article linked above demonstrates, there are lots of forms of interpersonal domination still going on in an American context.

B) Capitalism is anti-democratic. The concentration of wealth into a select few hands, and the associated political and social power that has become attached to greater social wealth, means that wealthier people have greater access to political power and influence. The Koch Brothers are probably the best example of this, though lobbying in general is an expression of this function. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one because I think it’s the least compelling argument personally even though I agree with it, but it is a popular and common one!

C) Capitalism is also fundamentally irrational. I think this is true in the way that we think about value and the way capitalism generates regular crises, but I’ll just use one example.

The convenient thing about money, as both Locke and Marx point out, is that it is potentially infinite unlike other resources. There is the possibility of limitless growth, of maximum expansion - which is why the capitalist mode of production began in Western Europe and the United States and has since spread around the world. (There is, of course, no such thing as limitless growth for anything, except perhaps cancer.) But capitalism takes this possibility as gospel and as a result, will do anything to maximize growth. 

Sometimes those things are good for working people (farm subsidies enabling cheap food - though without those subsidies there would probably be a famine from capitalists not investing capital in food production). More often they aren’t, whether that’s mistreatment of workers, lowering or stagnating wages, destruction of the environment, or outright warfare. Plus, because there is a limit to natural desires or even luxury desires, capitalists have to constantly concoct new desires for us to latch onto, which is why so much money is sunk into advertising.And this is not merely the result of the ethical whims or personal behaviors of individual capitalists (though those do factor in), but the necessary and logical result of a mode of production that has an internal logic of constant, endless reproduction.

Why is the US also bad? how would you respond to someone who claims that it is a “free country” and that we “at least have the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest”, etc.

This is, paradoxically, an easier argument to make empirically but a harder case to sell because American nationalism and American exceptionalism are pretty ubiquitous, and they’ve only gotten more intractable in the past four or five decades. It really depends on what you mean by “bad,” anyway. On one level, the United States is not that different from any other state historically (since they are usually founded through violence and domination) or contemporarily (since they all act in their own geopolitical interests, and that often means fucking other people over undeservedly).

But, on another level: The United States- were built on indigenous and later African slavery- regularly violated treaties or used duplicitous means to gain access to Native American land for investment and expansion purposes- deployed genocidal tactics and sexual violence against Native Americans throughout the expansion process (especially in California and the Southeast)- fabricated a reason to wage war on Mexico to seize territory from it- botched Reconstruction after the end of formal slavery while still allowing black Americans to be abused and exploited and criminalized en masse- had racial policies that the Nazis found inspirational- engaged in imperialist warfare in the Caribbean at the turn of the century- overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii for economic reasons- nuked a Japanese civilian target (TWICE) when their surrender was already in the cards- used its new hegemony to start launching coups against (mostly democratically elected and socialist-leaning) governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile)- held the rest of the world in a hostage situation alongside the Soviet Union by threatening nuclear annihilation- waged war on Vietnam after violating the agreement to allow democratic elections and unification to take place- illegally bombed Cambodia and enabled the Khmer Rouge to gain traction- financed Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union that were the precursors of al-Qaeda- engaged in Iran-Contra, basically the shadiest thing in existence, and failed to deliver any real consequences to the people involved - supported and continues to support dictators (Batista, Saddam Hussein, etc.) as well as death squads (right-wing paramilitaries in Latin America)- has the highest incarceration rate in the world- has massively expanded the surveillance and police apparatuses since 9/11- invaded Iraq under false pretenses and let Islamic State develop out of the chaos

This is just a minor selection. And to top it all off, the Constitution of the United States is designed to make government as dysfunctional and anti-democratic as possible. The powers of the President have been perpetually expanding for a long time, and the Supreme Court is such a shamelessly broken, unaccountable institution that I cannot believe we take it seriously. The Supreme Court’s rulings on free speech have been up-and-down, often determined by war and nationalism, and the social backlash and hostility to political protest every time the United States goes to war suggests that even with the freedom of assembly granted by the Constitution, nationalism takes priority over freedoms.

This post is long enough, but if you (or anyone else) want me to elaborate on anything I’ve said here, feel free to ask.

[rametarin]

If I had the ear of South America..

I would say, “Latinx is only the beginning.”

Yeah. It’s perceived as an anglo plot to colonize and imperialize the Spanish language, as it was born in the US thanks to a bunch of cultural marxist shitheads that are shamelessly trying to argue against gendered language on some futurist utopian transhumanist bullshit, white claiming it’s purely, “for diversity and inclusion of the transgendered and non-binary gendered people.”

But you aren’t going to stop or stem this tide of stupid by writing it off as some anglo plot. It just.. it won’t stop.

Here in the United States a guerilla cultural war went on. As a child I was exposed to radical feminists that took careful measures to engineer my experiences and get me to draw conclusions. That white people were evil, as individuals and as a group. That white people were destroying the world. That white people were soulless, cultureless imperialist monsters that just wanted to subvert all the innocent and harmless brown people and verifiably undeniably had enslaved everybody and everything.

That togetherness you enjoy under the label Hispanic and/or Latino? These people that formulated Latinx are working to subvert that, too. Here in the states, “I don’t see race” became controversial because the supposed progressives don’t like the egalitarian model that eliminates race and class from the equation to address if an individual is free or not based on their own personal merits, poverty level, education, etc. They DO like to ask, “Are these COMMUNITIES and MINORITY GROUPS (self identified) thriving and growing? If not, is it because the majority isn’t helping them grow at their own expense?”

In the United States, for the longest time, the narrative was that Spanish colonialism was irrelevant, at least in the US conversation about race and oppression, because, “Spanish speakers are marginalized and oppressed.” And also implied to be synonymous with being as different from white people as Asians and black Africans. So giving the Spanish the same stigma as they give, say, people descended from the English, or the French, or the Germans, was considered wrong.

But now that they’ve decided they want to cement more ties with drug cartels and guerillas across South America, the conversation and discourse has progressed. Now they want to kick up activity in Latin America to make society divisive and talk about how the black Latino is inherently oppressed by the white Latino. Rather than the discourse assume everybody south of the border is some big happy singular culture and family, it’s becoming clearer they don’t like white Spanish, and want the progressive and hip and cool kid view that white Spanish people, regardless of their origins or immigration status, are oppressors of people with different skin, solely on account of their, “privilege.”

This mentality that encouraged minority groups to militantly self-segregate and declare themselves separate cultures unto themselves, being oppressed by a white majority, is being used to sell social theories and scapegoat majorities for any and all problems being faced by a community .Exploiting the very real colorism and history of discrimination, but not for the ends of ending it, but for exploiting it to motivate division, discord and violence.

Feminism’s surface stated values and goals in and of themselves aren’t all bad. Obviously, there are backwards and exploitative or outright misogynistic views, values and social policy put in place to prevent women from living independent lives or progressing in work or business. The concept of a niche of interest that covers that WOULD be good, except it has been co-opted and platformed by these same marxist guerilla people for the purposes of selling dialectic materialistic views on what is unfair and what is unjust, and they’re harnessing that anger to create a culture that makes women feel oppressed as a class and under the auspices of what they’re learning from the Marxists.

They use and exploit this niche, this legitimate advocacy towards equality and advancement for women, the way a horror movie monster wiggles into the skin of a crewmate to characterize itself as something it is not while sabotaging the environment and exploiting the situation for its own ends. Infiltration. So female uprightedness and empowerment in and of itself is not the problem, but ‘feminism’ as a social organization is. The banner has been platformed and tained, and a lot of the literature mixed in with it is more of the same Critical Legal Theory crap that tells them certain things are true and absolute based on arbitrary theory.

It is important to not see this egalitarian undertone as the problem. It is not. The egalitarian element that is appropriated by these conspirators and guerillas is not the issue. The issue is the people that have exploited the conversation of female equality, are doing so to stick lenses over the eyes of the people with the only outlet of social organization they can see or know to do anything about it. And that’s how you get populist radical feminism as the only or biggest, loudest game in town for their organizing.

That’s how you get buzz cut self-proclaimed radfems rioting and attacking churches and other, “patriarchal organizations.” That’s how you get the same sort of woman taking the liberty of telling young girls (whom then go on to see young boys so dourly and poorly) that “society is corrupted and evil.”

It is so, so important going forwards to fight shit like Latinx in the correct way. If you make the wrong arguments, you won’t break through to your daughters or sons. They’re being told that white people (and this now includes Spanish-Latinos) are monsters. And they’re being told that men are shit. Little boys (like I was) are being cornered by their female age-group peers, their peers older sisters, aunts, mothers, other peers, that men by default are oppressive, woman-hating monsters by default and by society/culture.

You need to understand that the things these supposed progressives try to fight for, they do it solely to take the niche away from anybody else and DEFINE progressivism as what they want, and anything they do not, to be more of the same oppression by race, by sex, by religion, by culture, by money. It’s a propaganda game, and the more any of you try to preach about Jesus or the church knowing best, or ‘things are just naturally a certain way and you need to understand that,’ the more you play into their hands.

Your enemy is radical, and it is only secular on paper. But they’ll induct people to have “important conversations” with your children and community that appeal to what they only call science and logic, that are in fact only loosely that. And really just subjective opinion, philosophy. Social science. You try and appeal to religion to argue their stuff, they’ll beat you like a drum and you’ll just prove them right in the developing hearts and minds of a generation that is trying to not be stuck with the stigma of their parents or ancestors in the eyes of their friends.

This is not an enemy you can just sing a song about Jesus and Mary and defeat. These people will take and twist any real or even perceived and interpreted flaw in your society and those that suffer from the ills the most will internalize it, if what’s made to appeal to their sensibilities takes.

In America, that comes in the form of mixing racial separatism and supremacism with conflating it for the struggle for black freedom and equality. And I cannot imagine it being any different south of Mexico, whatsoever. They’ll work on the girls and tell them that to be born white-Latino is to be an oppressor, tell the girls they’re largely exempt from this because women are a marginalized and oppressed minority/demographic, and tell the misc. non-white groups across South America that they should organize against the hegemony of white people and “whiteness.”

They’ll do it while pretending their attempts and desire to spread disunity and hostility is “sticking up for the little guy.” They’ll do it while confronting overbearing actual patriarchal culture and binary gendered culture (so long as it’s white)  and write off ALL of Catholicism in South America as equal to the WORST of examples of bad Catholicism.

American conservatives continue to struggle dealing with these people because they see an opportunity to polarize and capitalize on the totalitarian nature of this polarization. They see it as a way to incentivize people to vote for more conservative, religious and similarthings, because if their alternative are literal communists and socialists, they can afford to ask for more.

Meanwhile they lose when it comes to hearts and minds of the young because their messages are just utterly worthless when as a 2-13 year old, you’re being told religious, old, white, capitalist people are oppressing everybody and destroying everything and trying to force everybody to live and society to work under the totalitarianism of religion.

When the angry political lesbian type corners you as a small child and explains that men are why women are so afraid of men, and you can’t even rebutt that it’s a feminist talking point without them talking about how that’s a Nazi/conservative propaganda view, and the young girls they’re grooming go with that interpretation of the world and events because it holds more romantic value for them, things they want to be true and things that they’ve been given just enough facts and reason to think are true, it doesn’t help when competitive arguments are either, “you’re too young to think about or talk about social issues or political discourse,” or, confirm every negative suspicion they now have with, “well they’re right, we are oppressing them, but we have every right to.”

The only way to truly beat these manipulative, lying, exploiting animals is to beat them at their own game.

They do not care about minority welfare or rights beyond their solutions on how to address any given injustice they can think of. Whether it be by making society respect the establishment of different racial communities again solely to provide financail welfare to people on the basis of race, or rules that say they’re free to discriminate against groups of people in the name of hiring and defending others. They care only about using those struggles to give the state more power over not just people, but groups, and even how communities are defined. Right down to trying to demand biological sex be marginalized in importance of terms like gender solely because less than .4% of the human population claims to not be defined by the biological sex/gender binary.

So the only way to defeat them is to address the problems in a way that route and solve them, while you still have power and the means by which to solve them the proper way. For if you don’t, the Marxist village idiots will.

[fapangel]

You've mentioned "The Big One" with China a few times now. Mind giving us your back-of-the-dust-jacket summary of what you think's gonna happen?

Short version: China gets their assholes kicked square. 

Long version: China knows they can’t possibly prevail in an all-out, knock-out brawl, but they do think they can bloody our noses bad enough to make us think twice about sticking it into “their” backyard. Imperial Japan thought that way too -  and back then, there was actually a good possibility they were right - but then they cocked it up by kicking us in the balls without provocation. Then we fucking crushed them.

America’s comparative power versus China is far greater than it was versus Imperial Japan in 1941. We’re also the end-product of a fifty-year long Cold War in which the name of the game was expanding one’s hegemony over as much of the globe as possible, through every and all means possible, which has resulted in a vast network of military bases, regional alliances and diplomatic clout that look our 1941 strength look pathetic by comparison. In 1941 it was still mostly MONROE DOCTRINE GET OUT OF MY HEMISPHERE REEEE, as evidenced by the very strong isolationist sentiment arguing against involvement in WWII. Post WWII, it was “if you don’t send the CIA in to spy, meddle and murder, you get Soviet SRBMs in Cuba, checkmate, good night, RIP America.” For five decades it was a matter of life and death to be the biggest swinging dick in as much of the world as possible - and now that Putin’s restarted the Cold War and terrorism (which is a psychological/propaganda war as much as anything else) is the second-biggest threat, that swinging-dick philosophy is once again relevant. That’s on top of it being ingrained in both American and international views of world affairs. 

That’s the fancy way of saying that if they bloody our nose - or attack Taiwan, or Japan, or the Philippines, or anyone else that has asked for and traditionally received our protection, the American public will treat it very much like Pearl Harbor. Even if they manage to sink the 7th fleet’s carrier in Yokosuka - especially if they manage that - it’s only going to lead to a hardened conviction to see America’s superpower status affirmed, and that sense of security returned - and the only way to do that would be to chew up the entire Chinese armed forces and shit them out. 

And we absolutely can do it. We have more carriers in reserve, at dock, than most nations have ever built. We can cross the largest ocean on earth and kick in their shit and it’s all they can do just to pose a credible threat to us in their own backyard. America is not someone to fuck with lightly. But they will fuck with us. There’s two reasons for that. 

The first is the nuclear deterrent. See, if you’re a non-nuclear nation, and you wind up and kick America in the balls - say, by blowing up two skyscrapers in New York - America shows up at your door, sits on your head, and shits down your throat nonstop forever. And I do mean fucking forever - not only do they keep your clay, (Okinawa, South Korea, Guantanamo Bay,) but they can singlehandedly resign your country to decades of miserable, grueling poverty (Cuba, North Korea, Iran, etc.) because you do not lightly fuck with the United States. You do not go to America. America comes to you. And sometimes they do it just because you pissed them off one too many times. If you are the leader of Fuckistan, discussing the possibility of some light-to-moderate fuckery with the US and/or their allies or interests, you - and everyone else in the room - knows that this might well end with your head popping off at the end of a hangman’s rope, like Saddam and/or being sodomized before summary execution after being pulled out of a spider hole, like Ghaddafi. You do not lightly fuck with the United States. 

Unless you have nukes. Because the entire point of nukes are to guarantee a nation’s existential survival - “destroy us, and we take you down with us.” With the possibility of being made very fucking dead off the table, all sorts of gambles become a lot more palpable. Especially if you have some economic clout to weather sanctions. Look at fucking Iran - not nearly the economic clout of China, but as hard as sanctions have been on them, they have persisted in their pursuit of WMD and are still playing fucking games after the “deal,” because having nukes will give them a much freer hand. So imagine how China, with their economy, evaluates the risks. 

Second is psychology. I’ve already explained why American Hegemony is so important to the United States that we’ll fight a war to defend it - while the renewed strategic importance is a significant factor, it owes even more to the psychology of five decades of practicing it as a matter of life-or-death. The Cold War was a prolonged dogfight, i.e. a grueling battle where winning the battle for position is everything, and weapons release is a final formality. And since America - arguably the most liberal nation on earth - formed the hegemonic core of pretty much the entire “free world” against a union of oppressive, Orwellian police state hellholes, it played right into the Good Versus Evil storyline, a concept so natural to humans that it features in most of our stories for as long as we’ve been telling them. 

Now get this - China also has a Righteous Empire narrative, but they’ve had it for longer than America has existed as a nation, and they don’t need any of that Good Versus Evil, Leader of the Free World bullshit to justify it, either. Unlike Europe, which has been one long bar brawl for most of history, China’s been like an Irish-Catholic family - always beating the shit out of each other, but still a family. There’s an ethnic, cultural, and ideological homogeneity to China that you just don’t find in the West. The “Holy Roman Empire” was considered to be a good fuckin giggle (m8) by the people who lived under it, even - China was much different. 

Look at you, Mr. White Dude reading this - you’re used to being Western, comfortable and confident in being First World, as opposed to those poor motherfuckers in Bumfuckistan who still herd fucking cattle like they’re living in 750 AD. It’s a simple matter of fact that you, and your culture, run the fucking world because you were the leader in science, math, and pretty much everything. YOU A WINNAR. It’s not a matter of pride - it’s just how it is. 

That’s how China views itself - except moreso, because besides being a cultural, scientific and technological powerhouse just as big and bad as the West for most of history, they were also an actual cohesive Empire for the most part. They view China as the Center of the World, and the current world is just The Empire regaining its rightful ascendancy over everyone else. With a generous side helping of IMPERIALISTS GET OUT REEEE, of course. They’re similar to Russia in this regard - Russia is also a massive nation who’s natural resources, size and relative cultural/ethnic homogeneity have always made it an inevitable superpower - but China has an Imperial history - and grudges - graven much deeper. And unlike Russia, they’re in an economic position to do something about it. 

This Earth ain’t big enough for two superpowers - never has been, never will be. Only so many dicks can get swung around in the South China Sea, and only for so long before they collide and the jousting match begins. (No homo.) The first reason (nuclear deterrent/homeland safe from Ultimate Defeat) is like the second in that it’s shared with the United States, you’ll note. It’s the classic unstoppable force meets immovable object. 

It’s going to be a mess. 

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Trump takes on the world How to explain the welter of contradictions in US politics these days? * Trump’s enthusiasm for peace with Russia vs his acceptance of Cold War II with Russia, launched even as Trump declared victory in 2016. * Trump’s virtually declaration of war against the mouse, Canada, next door, with his cutting insult to Justin Trudeau as weak and dishonest, as he left the summit early and refused to endorse its free trade plea. * Trump’s original enthusiasm for pulling out of Syria and elsewhere, pursuing an old fashion Republican isolationism, vs his sudden flurry of bombings in Syria recently and the threat of invasion of others (Iran, North Korea, Venezuela). * Trump’s dumping of the carefully crafted nuclear agreement with Iran, renewing sanctions and threats in the face of world opposition, both domestic and foreign (ok, the Zionists are happy, but no one else). * Trump’s unsolicited ‘deal of the century’ with Israel-Palestine. The Russians are coming There are behind-the-scenes forces at work with Russia at the centre. Obama’s and the western media’s human rights spat with Russia over Ukraine and Crimea are not important to the long term strategy of the neocons. Trump and his deep state backers understand this. Kissinger admitted it in June. They want Russia back in a new G-8, as Trump so loudly proclaimed at the G-7 in Quebec in June. But a Russia on the defensive is also in their interests, the better to make Russia bow more respectfully to US world hegemony in any grand compromise. Good cop, bad cop. Trudeau was comforted by his Euro colleagues when called a liar by the bully, but Trump has no time for wimps,* pious words attacking Russia or promoting gender equality and the environment. The ‘grand strategy’ of the Pentagon and neocons is about world control. “His message from Quebec to Singapore is that he is going to meld the industrial democracies to his will — and bring back Russia,” said Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign and White House adviser. Bannon said China is “now on notice that Trump will not back down from even allies’ complaints in his goal of America First.” What Europeans deride now as “G-6 plus one” would become again the G-8. Russia will dump Iran and China, and be a nice US puppet. There is a reason that neoconservatives are said to be the heirs of Trotsky: Trotsky wanted to export revolution to all countries, whether they were ready for it or not (with the subsequent goal of destroying national boundaries and traditional cultures); Trump’s neoconservatives want to spread neocon ideology to all countries (e.g., globalism, the dominance of western corporations and markets, ‘democracy’, relativising traditional society). The dialectic has come full-circle. In a weird sort of way, the (Christian) US is the anti-Christ to the (atheist) Soviet Christ. Both are/were radical universalists. Putin understands this and is neither a communist nor is he likely to take the neocon bait, as did Gorbachev-Yeltsin. Neither is Kim Jong-un. The Palestinians are coming Trump enthusiast Leon Haider praises Trump’s rejection of a “make-believe ‘peace process’”, replacing it with his “deal of the century”, that counts on moderate Arabs convincing the Palestinians to “take the route towards coexistence” with Israel that will “eventually lead to a peace deal, the deal of the century.” Bully the Palestinians into a deal that they can’t refuse. Trump somehow thinks this bullying will succeed where all of his predecessors have failed. But the so-called moderate Arabs are anything but. * Saudi Arabia is a feudal fiefdom, the source and inspiration of al-qaeda/ISIS through Wahhabism and petrodollars, provided discretely both officially and unofficially (by dissident princes). Its list of human rights violations grows daily, presently torturing its old rival Yemen for no apparent reason. * Egypt is being run into the ground by a vicious dictator-general. * Turkey, the most important actor, is ignored and isolated over the Kurdish problem. * Jordan is in upheaval protesting IMF-backed price increases and a new tax reform law. These countries are hardly poster children for the advantage of being a friend to the US and Israel. The other Arab country, Syria, just barely survived the US-backed insurgency and is back in the anti-imperialist fold (i.e., pro-Iran/ Russia) after 7 brutal years when it was betrayed by ‘moderate Arabs’ (not to mention Turkey). It is my choice as a ‘moderate Arab’, but will continue to oppose the US ‘grand stategy’ for the region, along with a chastened Turkey. Where is the grand strategy here? Bin Salman personally delivered Trump’s secret ‘deal of the century’ to Abbas, who refused to even open the envelope. For Trump’s ‘moderate Arabs’, read: Shia-hating Sunnis, led by King Bin Salman. Their hatred is mostly sour grapes for Iran’s proud defiance of US dictates. Arabs were traditionally the freest of peoples, the heirs of the Prophet, who was no friend of Rome. Those Sunnis would dump the US in a flash if they didn’t need Bin Salman’s billion-dollar bribes, and if there was another patron to feed them. Do they help the US achieve world control, the underlying strategy? Only Israel is more or less happy. It is their ‘grand strategy’ for the Palestinians that is closer. Its goal appears to be to annex the occupied territories unilaterally, set up a Quisling Palestinian Authority to police what’s left of the West Bank, under Israeli control. A variation would be to force Palestinians and Jordan to make the occupied territories Jordanian (but policed by Israel) and make all Palestinians ‘Jordanians’, after first taking most of the desirable bits for Israel. If the Israeli Arabs cause too much fuss, they too can go to their new ‘homeland’ (Jordan West Bank), along with Gazans, once Gaza is declared uninhabitable. Postmodern ethnic cleansing. Not so many deaths, wipe out the refugee problem at a stroke, dispense with the pesky ‘return’ problem. That would leave Iran or Iran/Syria as the target of Israel’s next and final war, not the Palestinians — and the Sunni Arab world will watch from the sidelines, and would not be unhappy to see Iran destroyed. That would allow Israel to proceed with its ‘final solution’ for the Palestinians, once Iran is out of the picture, even as these ‘moderate Arabs’ squawk (or are overthrown). The Iranians are (not) coming Trump’s summit with Kim Jong-Un in Singapore looks and tastes like Nixon in China, but was it a fraud, the icing laced with artificial sweetener or maybe arsenic? Surely Kim realizes that he must hold out for the closure of US bases in South Korea, as only that could possibly guarantee denuclearization of the peninsula. And why no mention of Iran in all the hype, let alone a stopover in Tehran, if denuclearization is the real issue? It appears that by allowing the interventions in Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. (R2P responsibility to protect), the so-called international community did only one thing, it created more possibilities for new interventions, interventions that promote western control; i.e., imperialism. Russia will have no truck with this, as it is not interested in promoting western imperialism. Libya was the last straw, and instead, Russia moved on its own to help stabilize Syria without these dubious ‘protectors’. The disasters these interventions have resulted in means it is unlikely they can be repeated, despite Pence’s warning to Kim that he might end up “like Libya”. Probably Iran is safe, given Russia. A real strategy would involve making peace with Iran, not war. War is the way imperialism deals with problems, and is what US ‘allies’ Saudi Arabia and Israel want for their own reasons, which have nothing to do with peace or US security. Both the Saudis and Israel benefit(ed) from terrorism directed at US targets and celebrate them. (To the Saudis, the Americans are kufar and deserve to die. Remember Netanyahu’s comment on 9/11 “It’s very good”?). [Update: Trump pulled yet another fast one on July 31, 2018, offering to meet Rohani, but the jury is still out.] Peace with Iran would knock some sense into both the Saudis and Israel, and would curb the lust for war. The Saudis would fume, maybe instigate some terrorism themselves, but they are so tightly knit in the US orbit, this could be managed. Israel has its Jerusalem but nowhere to turn to. Israel’s life blood — Jewish Americans — are increasingly hostile to Israel, given its murderous policy of expansion. The fallout from such a truly ‘grand strategy’ would benefit both the US and the world, as the US and Russia revive their ‘grand compromises’ of the past (WWII, 1960s–70s detente). A ‘grand compromise’ for Turkey’s, Iraq’s and Iran’s Kurds could finally be addressed. Devastated Syria and Iraq would not be distracted by US-Iranian hostility and would rebound quickly. Iran’s only pretension internationally is to help the Palestinians, though the US did leave a vacuum in Iraq with the destruction of that state, and Iran is now playing its logical role as supporter of Shia next door and as a good neighbour. “Don’t hold your breath,” writes Stephen Walsh in Foreign Policy. Making peace with Iran would require Trump (and Congress) to ignore the lobbying and propaganda emanating from the Israeli and Saudi lobbies. But after the recent Israel massacre of Gazans, and given the ordinary American’s distaste for the Saudis and their massacre of Yemenis, there is no better time. Congress is not lying down. The sole Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, put together a nonpartisan amendment of the National Defense Authorization Act to specifically prevent the president from launching war against Iran without congressional authorization. Even if the Ellison amendment survives the Senate, Trump could ‘pull a Trump’ and violate it. He could target Iranian individuals as “suspected terrorists” on his global battlefield and/or attack them in Iran with military force under his new targeted killing rules. It does not prohibit the expenditure of money to attack Iran. Nor does it proscribe the use of sanctions against Iran. But it shows that Trump does not have a blank check for his ‘grand strategies’. Jewish Americans hold the key Nor are the ‘good’ Jews in the US, energized by Israeli atrocities, silent anymore. A groundswell of Jewish protests is making room for the rest of Americans to brave the Zionist thought police. It is complicated piecing Trump’s grand strategy together, partly because he is a loose cannon, with his own self-aggrandizing agenda, and partly because of the chaotic conditions and opposing forces elsewhere. He is gambling on using good-cop/ bad-cop with Russia, plain old bad-cop with Iran and North Korea, to achieve his ends. Gunboat diplomacy. The US (and more so Trump’s) unreliability as a representative of US policy, willing to tear up treaties, makes it unlikely that Trump’s fish will bite. Israel’s strategy is also unlikely to prevail. Young US Jews** are already getting arrested protesting Israeli actions, much like they did in the 1950s–60s when they virtually led in the civil rights movement for blacks, and again in the 1980s, when they backed the anti-apartheid struggle. Then, their Jewishness was downplayed, but in this last war, they hold the trump card to successfully fight Israel, and must speak out for peace. As for Russia and Iran, Trump finally got some cajones and defied his backstabbers, not only meeting Putin, but out of the blue declaring he will meet Iran’s President Rohani, “no pre-conditions”. This is now a ritual for him facing off against his ‘enemies’: threaten to invade (Kim the Rocketman, NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE) and then coolly agree to negotiate. As for drama and idiocy, ‘Who could ask for anything more?’ *** *Trudeau is indeed weak and dishonest, as Trump’s advisers told him after perusing his many broken promises as prime minister ** IfNotNow is the latest, composed of Jewish teens. *** Thank you, Gershwin. http://clubof.info/

[96thdayofrage]

“If the historical crime is not linked to demands for the righting of present-day wrongs, there will be no lasting benefit to the people’s struggle.”

The landscape of the United States is littered with physical testimony to the nation’s origins as a white settler colonial outpost of land pirates who exterminated and enslaved their way to global capitalist empire. Purging the evidence of historical crimes is a great catharsis, especially for the victims of U.S. “Manifest Destiny.” However, this intrinsically righteous project can be subverted into a kind of ritual national cleansing that leaves the essential nature of the current regime not only intact, but rejuvenated and exuberant -- “born again,” this time as the planet’s unassailably “exceptional” nation. Blacks and their progressive allies will be thanked for (once again) cleaning up Uncle Sam’s racist, imperial act.

Such is precisely the goal of U.S. corporate rulers and military chieftains, who were quick to disassociate themselves from Donald Trump’s defense of the old stone symbols of white power. Global hegemony requires a different symbolic repertoire.

The national Democratic Party -- to which almost all of the personalities depicted in the besieged statues belonged, and which was the White Man’s Party for most of the nation’s history before switching places with the GOP two generations ago -- is most anxious for a symbolic national makeover. Firmly controlled by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, the party offers nothing of substance to its Black and brown constituencies; symbolism is its electoral stock in trade.

“Corporate rulers and military chieftains, who were quick to disassociate themselves from Donald Trump’s defense of the old stone symbols of white power.”

National “unity” has always been the watchword of the bipartisan War Party: unity behind the mission of global domination. The U.S. armed forces led in the process of racial integration, the better to subdue the non-white populations of the world. Corporate capital takes on whatever ethnic and racial camouflage is necessary to envelop the planet in its tentacles. Stonewall Jackson is no asset to the imperialist Project for a New American Century. Neither is Robert E. Lee a good fit for corporate governance treaties like NAFTA and TPP.

The Black political (misleadership) class, having no agenda beyond maintaining its own presence and self-dealing opportunities on the peripheries of power, traffics entirely in symbols. They are eager to enlist in every national “unity” project sponsored by corporate interests, to highlight their purported “strategic” presence within power structures. In their world, Black faces in high places is an end in itself; politics is the manipulation of symbols, which are substitutes for power.

In their appeals to corporate power, Black misleaders invoke national “unity” as a euphemism for color-blindness. Rather than cultivate Black communal power, they ask for a place for themselves “at the table” of the rulers -- no agenda required.

“Stonewall Jackson is no asset to the imperialist Project for a New American Century.”

For example, in the fall of 2010, the NAACP led a “One Nation Working Together” rally at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington. Nearly 200,000 people showed up, but even Wade Henderson, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called it “a march without a plan of action.” Speakers endorsed the Democratic Party’s general campaign positions. Only Harry Belafonte made any mention of the multiplying wars Barack Obama was waging. His remarks were considered bad form in the context of national “unity.”

For the next six years, the NAACP and other established Black civic groups claimed to be grappling with formulating a broad Black political agenda. They failed to produce even a semblance of an agenda, because that would entail making demands on the Democrats in power, including the Black president. Instead, these misleaders acted as annexes of the Democratic Party and called for national unity in the face of Republican racism -- their default, useless position.

In the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, last November, Black Democrats quickly joined in the manufactured anti-Russian hysteria. This can be understood both as a visceral willingness to believe anything negative about the loathsome Orange Menace in the White House, and as an appeal for national unity against the racist hordes in Trump’s base, who were somehow allied with the Kremlin. The result, however, was to place Black politicians, including Barbara Lee and John Conyers, in an alliance with the War Party. Regarding Trump, Lee wondered“Where do his loyalties lie?”

“Black misleaders invoke national ‘unity’ as a euphemism for color-blindness.”

Almost the entirety of the U.S. ruling class is eager to treat the racist statues battle as a question of national unity -- although they will draw the line, as has Trump, at George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other Great White Men that did not wear the Confederate States uniform. It is, of course, vital, in mass political education terms, to point out the monstrous social crimes and contradictions embodied in the monuments. It is also important to win victories that people can see with their own eyes, as the statues tumble or disappear in the night. But, if the historical crime is not linked to demands for the righting of present-day wrongs, there will be no lasting benefit to the people’s struggle. Rather, the movement will have removed a blemish from the face that the U.S. presents to the world, without effectively challenging current structures of oppression. That’s a win-win for the bipartisan War Party, the Democrats and international capital, and is the perfect kind of symbolic victory treasured by the Black political class, but will produce meager and diminishing returns for Black empowerment.

Frederick Douglass’s dictum applies generally: “Power concedes nothing without a demand -- it never has and it never will.” Protests that focus on the racist personalities and structures of the past must demand remedies for oppressions of the present.

“Taking down those monuments is good, that was right, but meanwhile it doesn’t help anybody get food and shelter.”

In Baltimore, where the mayor pre-empted protesters by dismantling and hiding racist monuments in the dead of night, activists have erected a tent city to demand housing and jobs, and a $2 billion equity fund to finance ongoing reforms. “Taking down those monuments is good, that was right, but meanwhile it doesn’t help anybody get food and shelter,” said Rashid Abdul-Aziz, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The group Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle tweeted, “Take down racist statutes along with racist statues.”

In Philadelphia, the statue in question honors a more recently deceased white villain. Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner and mayor who died in 1991, was a northern version of Birmingham’s Bull Connor. Rizzo’s statue was recently spray painted with the words “Black Power,” allegedly by Diop Olugbala, of the Black Is Back Coalition. A coalition has come together, to demand not only the removal of Rizzo’s statue, but that the city council consider legislation for Black community control of the police – which would be a fitting reverse-memorial for the despicable Rizzo.

[crimethinc]

Solidarity from Slovenia with J20 Demonstrators : For a World without Representation

This is a translation of a solidarity statement from Slovenia, a nation that swept from obscurity into the spotlight as a result of Melania Trump’s impending stint as First Lady. Not everyone in Slovenia is excited about this sort of publicity. “Make Slovenia Slovakia again,” demanded one popular meme in Slovenia last fall, lampooning the ignorance of US citizens and rejecting media coverage as an exotic shopping district for mail-order brides.

Melania Trump’s own immigration history is hardly a model of unblemished legal conduct: like countless other immigrants, she was not always able to adhere to all the regulations. Supporting a politician who swept to power on promises to break up families and deport immigrants, she represents the epitome of hypocrisy and betrayal. She is the perfect First Lady for all the former immigrants who voted for Trump in hopes of excluding others like themselves from competing for a piece of the American pie. Siding with those who have more power than you against those who have less is never a safe bet: as soon as your superiors have no more use for you, you can be sure they’ll treat you the same way they treated those beneath you, and no one will have cause to stand up for you.

There are countless Slovenians who will never have the option to benefit from all the plunder that vultures like Donald Trump have hoarded in the US—just as countless migrants in Slovenia who have escaped from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places wrecked by US intervention are now at risk to be sent back to those warzones. Trump and his cronies aim to turn the entire world into a patchwork of gated communities arranged in concentric circles of privilege, in which the only people who are permitted to pass from one circle to the next are the ones who are willing to play a role keeping everyone else out.

We stand with everyone who desires a world without borders and oppression, against Donald Trump and the forces that produced him. Like our comrades in Slovenia, we have concluded that the only hope for humanity lies in solidarity and collective struggle against all forms of hierarchy and exclusion.

This Friday, the Presidential inauguration in the US will offer a brand new chance for local politicians in Slovenia to reaffirm their well-known servility. They already demonstrated it in November when they warmly welcomed Donald Trump's victory—and not just because the Slovenian nation is now supposedly proud of its daughter Melania, and not only because they think her husband will be good for Slovenian business.

The US election results are echoing around the world, especially in regions affected by US foreign policy—whether that be regular fly-overs of their war planes, the presence of US troops, US and NATO military bases, frequent bombings, or recruiting for devastating wars in the Middle East.

Slovenia is no exception. We still remember how we took the streets chanting “Your wars, our dead” when we fought against US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. We remember fighting against the militarization of our society supported by membership in NATO war coalitions. We were angry because they were building a NATO airbase in Slovenia—and we were furious when they enforced transatlantic free trade agreements on us. We suffered economic crisis and austerity measures, the consequences of global economic policies dictated to us by the US and their loyal assistants in European Commission. We have not forgotten military interventions NATO carried out under US command against civilians towards the end of the Balkan wars in the 1990s, when they bombed Belgrade and other Balkan cities.

If it seems that Trump himself has been critical of NATO, the truth is that his new plan is to maintain the supremacy of the United States while forcing the countries on the receiving end of imperialist exploitation and occupation to pay for it themselves.

Knowing what it means to be on the receiving end of US imperialism, we had little hope that American foreign policy would be any different under a new Clinton administration. The US would still be dropping bombs, creating war zones, and spreading fear and bigotry in the name of the War on Terror—just as under Trump, we will still see the neoliberal exploitation of the global periphery, including the European South. All this is just the desperate thrashing of a collapsing superpower scrambling to maintain the illusion of economic and political hegemony.

However, Trump's victory does represent a shift to the right, both symbolically and materially. It stands for the legitimization of the rhetoric of hatred in the streets and in public discourse. It is a signal to grassroots fascists all around the world that their politics are becoming more acceptable. It is also a signal to all the patriots in nice suits who are trying to persuade themselves that they are not fascists when they violently fight for their supposedly autochthonous culture and for conservative values like state control of women’s reproduction and deference to the family, to the nation, and to democracy and capital. And even though Trump will simply continue the mass deportations that intensified under Barrack Obama, along with the torture camp of Guantanamo, invasions in the Middle East, and racist politics within the US, we understand the uneasiness that overwhelmed US and the world. Trump's election has left little room for doubt about what is taking place in the world. What used to happen in the shadows or was seen as an anomaly has now become official policy.

Trump’s victory puts the US on the world map of authoritarian regimes in a global transformation. In some places, this takes the form of extremist parties openly preaching racism and bigotry. Elsewhere, this process takes place in the name of centrist policies of order and security—values that ultimately produce results that fulfill the fascist agenda. They break society in half, into those who are good and those who are bad—those who are privileged and those who are robbed of their basic dignity. Such is the case in Slovenia.

We were not surprised to discover the Slovenian primer minister Miro Cerar trolling Twitter, expressing happiness over Trump's victory. He must have been very happy indeed to get an ally in Washington who will understand his desire to close down Slovenian borders for migrants, introduce a state of emergency, increase the authority of the police and army, build a wall of barbed wire on the southern border, and deport migrants in massive numbers. Not to mention they both know how to create a social climate in which a right-wing uprising is just around the corner. What Trump wants, Cerar has already succeeded in accomplishing.

There is a particular twist in Trump's victory: the origin of Melania Trump, who was born and raised in Slovenia. In US, but also elsewhere, her life story is used to portray a good, beautiful, white migrant—who respects the law, is an exemplary image of conservative values as a wife and a mother, and loves her new state. This image serves to cast a shadow over all the migrants who are living in the US illegally, who are not white, who are supposedly taking jobs from US citizens and therefore deserve deportation and hatred. In Slovenia, the Melania narrative stands for the affirmation of privilege, reinforcing conservative notions of gender in which obedient servitude to a husband is rewarded with a comfortable life.

Melania's story is the background on which Slovenia is building its national pride by claiming a female body (that belongs to a person who actively supports Trump's politics of bigotry) as a body that belongs to a nation. In Slovenia, Melania is now served in the form of fancy cake in restaurants; the Christmas tree on the central square in the capital of Slovenia was named after her. Melania has been forced on us as our first lady—though we anarchists refuse to have anything to do with any nation. American, Slovenian, or any other.

The Trumps are telling the world that we can still believe in the illusion that the gated communities of privilege will include us: that we can benefit from the boundaries set up around the white race, Western imperialism, and the neoliberal economy. This is the world in which a few own everything while most of us have nothing. The only way to maintain the illusion that these things benefit us is by imposing a politics of separation: expulsion, wars, and borders. Extreme repression and extreme hatred.

This is why we support the efforts of our comrades in the US and elsewhere who are organizing to fight all the forms of segregation and division in our societies, who are fighting against rising fascism, deportations, the massive development projects that are destroying nature, police killings of people of color, and all sorts of wars.

This is much more than a struggle against Trump. It is a struggle against the global politics of exploitation and a struggle against all politicians, some of whom will now try to persuade people in the US that the only way to stop Trump is to elect them instead. They hope to hide their true agenda: to maintain the world as we know it, a world that actually ceased to exist a long time ago. Trump's victory is neither a surprise nor an anomaly. It is just a garish reminder that representative democracy always entails the mechanisms of exclusion, violence, and hierarchy. This is the system in which we are all losing while the privileged ones are winning. If today the decision to protest in the US might be a bit easier because a bigot is ascending to the throne, we must never forget that this system deserves our resistance even when a politician with a kinder face comes to power.

When the system attacks us, we respond with fury. When they send the army to our streets, we respond with courage. When they take our voices away, we answer with actions. On January 20, the US is to play the starring role in a performance for the world in which they will try to convince us that reconciliation is possible, that the normalization of the politics of hatred and separation is desirable.

Many will not be convinced. Your courage is our inspiration. #DisruptJ20.

Anarchist initiative Ljubljana<br> Ljubljana, Slovenia, January 2017

[fapangel]

>The North Koreans are nowhere near getting MIRVs just yet That's what we said about the DPRK and nukes small enough to fit on a missile, oh look they developed those within a month of that statement!

Yeah,no. 

There’s another question in my inbox asking me if I’m surprised that things are happening this fast - in regards to the now confirmed existence of North Korea’s functional re-entry vehicle. That was another “leak” to the WaPo, naturally, with someone “reading a DIA report to them over the phone.” But this leak seems like something any number of people would want to make - to make it absolutely clear to the public just how immediate and dire the threat is, considering the usual fuckface retards are mouthing platitudes about “diplomacy being the only way forward” as we sit here watching them finish loading their goddamn gun, sitting on the world’s biggest arsenal of loaded guns we refuse to use. The media is currently launching an all-out campaign to convince the world that we just can’t possibly take out North Korea, that it’s all over, that there’s no possible way the most advanced and powerful military in the world could decisively end this existential threat to our people. This has led to the simpering fucks at the Guardian telling us we should reward North Korea by giving them what they’ve demanded for thirty years, a retreat from the South Korean peninsula, as if proving that we’re cowards that can be intimidated will somehow make them stop intimidating us and throw away the tools of said intimidation. That’s how we get the usual hand-wringing apologists in the Atlantic whining about the unacceptable one percent chance of North Korea nuking their regional neighbors now that we’re staring down the barrel of a very likely fifty or hundred percent chance of them nuking our own fucking cities. Naturally, they cite civilian “analysts” and “former Generals” presenting worst-case doomsday scenarios - neither of which have access to current intelligence, and neither of which represent the full consensus of everyone else in the military and intel community who’s job is to analyze this shit. Every histrionic doomsday scenario ever voiced by the likes of War is Boring or other horseshit-mongering outlets are mouthed verbatim without a shred of critical skepticism - all to support the conclusion that all we can do is sigh and fold our hands and just bend over and accept the inevitable. 

This is how they always do things - they actively work against containment measures - building a fucking nuclear reactor for North Korea, making a sham “deal” with the Iranians that they’re already openly flaunting, etc. - and then when they finally do get weapons they whine and cry and throw their fainting forms over the furniture and go “oh no, it’s too late now, we just have to accept the world as it is.” 

This is deliberate; a direct reflection of their moral relativism that posits America no better than any other state, no matter how despotic, depraved or vile it is. Nothing emphasizes the point better than this passage:

Then Kim Jong Un, with his bad haircut and his legion of note-taking, big-hat-wearing, kowtowing generals, would be gone. South Korea’s fear of invasion from the North, gone. The menace of the state’s using chemical and biological weapons, gone. The nuclear threat, gone.

Such a stunning outcome would be a mighty triumph indeed! It would be a truly awesome display of American power and know-how.

What would be left? North Korea, a country of more than 25 million people, would be adrift. Immediate humanitarian relief would be necessary to prevent starvation and disease. An interim government would have to be put in place. If Iraq was a hard country to occupy and rebuild, imagine a suddenly stateless North Korea, possibly irradiated and toxic, its economy and infrastructure in ruins. There could still be hidden stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons scattered around the country, which would have to be found and secured before terrorists got to them. “Success,” in other words, would create the largest humanitarian crisis of modern times—Syria’s miseries would be a playground scuffle by comparison.

God for-fucking bid the North Koreans be liberated from the murderous, insane regime that keeps them in miserable, dirt-scraping poverty, inches from starvation, that tortures them to death, that puts multiple generations of families in prison camps where they’re worked to death for the slightest of imagined political “crimes-” god forbid they be set adrift. I grew up with the Iraqi war, listening to these sniveling cunts rhapsodizing about how much better Iraq was under Saddam, how children were “flying kites without a care,” how the Iraqi people were safer and better off under the brutal tyrant who slept around in a dozen palaces, murdered and gassed his own people by the thousands, and who’s brother was infamous for his “rape rooms” where he’d savagely violate random women he had his goon squad snatch off the street. 

This is the true nature of the people who got us into this fucking mess in the first place - the moral relativist rot at their core.

Fuck these people - and all of their ilk. We have ALWAYS known this was coming - it’s only these fuckheads who are acting surprised about it. 

In 2009 I wrote a paper for a level 400 Poli-Sci class on international relations, specifically about the North Korean Tapedong-2 ICBM. The Tappy-Dong is a glorious clusterfuck more resembling a Kerbal Space Program atrocity than an actual launch vehicle; it’s three different Chinese-sourced SRBMs (thanks, China,) taped together, one atop another, to form a ghettoized three-stage weapon. Technically speaking, this unreliable, rickety pile of shit is ICBM capable - it’s the launch vehicle the Norks used to put their recent satellites into orbit. During my research I uncovered extensive information regarding the intensive co-operation between North Korea and Iran, which has a much more mature SRBM/MRBM force that they rely on to ensure regional hegemony. I also learned that Iran has a surprisingly advanced domestic arms industry - though their fully indigenous development programs still leave much to be desired, they’re still capable of manufacturing most of the spare parts for their foreign-sourced weapons themselves - like the Chinese, their tech base is competent enough to copy other’s innovations fairly well, and iterate on them. That’s a tech base quite capable of making advancements on ballistic missile technology, and Iran is also an oil-rich nation that’s similarly an international pariah, with every reason to work together with the North Koreans to circumvent the punishing economic sanctions that inhibited both of them. 

I saw all of this coming in 2009. I knew it wouldn’t be long - 2020 at the latest, 2015 at the earliest. And sure enough, here we fucking are. The only people who didn’t see it are the one who willingly covered their eyes and are now gleefully telling those big bad Imperialist Americans that there’s nothing we can do now, oh em gee, just accept it you big bullies! 

Fuck all of these bastards. I mad.