#Iraq war era

[vertigoartgore]

Arrested Development's pilot turn 20 today. Feel old yet ?

[danzafila]

man i really wish i hadn't lost my copies of the manga like a decade ago because i've really been craving an fma reread for awhile now. guess i'll have to settle on a combined 2003/brotherhood rewatch instead lol

[spohkh]

while taking notes during class i decided to also note the out of pocket shit this man said and i just want to say that the ratio of real content to insane quotes is an accurate gauge for the entire 3 hour block.

[mechadria]

i am Fascinated by how unlikeable the showrunners and writers make bones within just like. 3 seasons of it starting. like she talks 10 minutes with booth's little brother, decides that him reading booth pretty fucking correctly equates to booth being a loser (a random conclusion she makes herself), and then gets mad at him to the point of physical assault because she... decided to trust his opinion? after being rude and dismissive with her friends because she needs "evidence"????

like i was ready to love boothxbones soooo much when i started this but she's the embodiment of scientific progress and inclusion and people being allowed to be weird and successful and he's the poster child for everything the world, including i, hates about america (religious to the point of nevrosity, constantly looking down on people who won't share his beliefs, absolutely bigoted, an absolute dick to people he's known for years because he considers scientists to be below FBI grunts????, thinks the FBI is good which is like, embarrassing, fucking pro cop and pro military so bad he's about to have an aneurysm???). not even kidding when i say i skip any scene that has to do with booth and /his/ interpersonal relationship. get my girl a man who's not an intolerant caveman who thinks women are lesser than men pls

[riverpiracy]

me: no, so while black ops is technically a direct sequel to world at war, it's really doing its own thing, minus the reznov connection, and later installments are just fully unrelated tbh. anyway, while the original modern warfare was playing around with evoking iraq war imagery, and to a lesser extent some bosnian war stuff, the reboot is heavily focused on the isis era of the war on terror, including a bunch of stuff with us-backed local militias that's, in my opinion, based on the ypg, but of course ideologically neutered and fighting russia instead. all of this loops around to my main point,

my purgatory cellmate:

purgatory guard: no suicide

purgatory cellmate: i wasn't

[lipglossboy]

Disgusting holy shit

and while we’re talking abt noah schnapp as a fandom, we should also be calling out brett gelman who is a HUGE zionist and is posting increasingly troubling calls for violence, is vehemently opposed to a ceasefire, and posts pictures of normal (aka non-famous/public figures) pro-palestinian protestors to his insta story, basically saying “find them” to his almost 1 millions followers

[morlock-holmes]

Maybe this is appropriate for September, but I watched this joke when it first aired:

And as I approach late middle age I'm struggling to deal with the question not of how I deal with the fact that it happened, but with the fact that it didn't.

You just are never going to convince me that I'm as culturally different from the Zoomers as the baby boomers were from their WWII-era parents, and you aren't going to convince me of it because it is so incredibly, self-evidently untrue.

The reason I say this is appropriate for September is that after the 9/11 attacks some people tried to talk about the cultural death of irony and its replacement by the New Sincerity, which I now take to be an attempt to convince ourselves that the pace of cultural change wasn't slacking, but there was no New Sincerity, and the irony of the 90s continues unabated to this day.

After that Bush II created the disgusting morass of the Iraq war, and people said, "Well, at least we'll get some great protest art and comedy out of this".

I remember Jon Stewart talking about how it was fundamentally unserious to even suggest that the moral horrors of the 00s were worth it because we might get some good comedy out of it, and while that was a good point it kind of overshadowed the fact that, for the most part, the biting satire and artistically vital protest art didn't actually materialize at all.

Now we're trying to gin up this generation gap nonsense and we are on at least the third attempt of my life to cargo cult the moral and artistic vitality of the 60s back into existence.

But man, like, that radio tower is just a stack of bamboo and that headset is made of coconuts.

[dev-solovey]

Reading up on the history of American Idiot (album) and realizing exactly how revolutionary it was and I just have to yell about it for a hot second

So, before they started working on American Idiot, the band was having problems and they were thinking they were going to break up. But for a couple of reasons, they switched directions, most notably because they all felt strongly about the Iraq War and how it was manufactured by greed and warmongering from the Bush administration, which was amplified by the news media. I read a quote from Billie Joe Armstrong where he talked about how the news media was becoming "more of a reality show" than it was news, and he couldn't have been more right. In fact, that problem got worse, and now we're living in an era of rampant misinformation where everything is politicized to a point where just supporting human rights for marginalized people is considered controversial. The song American Idiot came out in 2004, and when Donald Trump first visited the UK at the beginning of his presidency, it was the top played song on every UK radio station, 12 years after it was released. Most things would be culturally irrelevant at that point.

When creating the album American Idiot, a lot of thought went into it - they had a very specific message in mind, and their goal was to send that message to youth. This is because they realized at some point that their fanbase was a bunch of teenagers, and even though they hadn't necessarily intended it that way, they suddenly had a platform with the youth of America and they decided they ought to do something good with it. The drummer, Tré Cool, said something along the lines of "I've never really liked the idea of preaching to kids, but I realized we don't really have a choice at this point." And I love that so much because like, so many people who get rich and famous just become completely out of touch, and when they get a platform, it's very easy to exploit that platform, influence them with terrible ideas, or encourage them to act in terrible ways for self-serving reasons (ex: JK Rowling, Andrew Tate, Dream, Logan Paul, Onision, etc etc). Green Day refused to allow themselves to get to that point. They know the platform they had gave them power and they made an active choice early on to be responsible with it. And a lot of that moral code comes from the fact that they came up in the DIY punk scene in Oakland, which held its members to a very high standard of ethics, a code that they still follow even after they were disowned by that scene when they signed on with a major record label in 1994.

The song American Idiot has a message of "this mass media hysteria is manufactured bullshit, don't fall for it," and it is not subtle about that message. It punches you right in the face. I remember being 12 years old and listening to it and thinking, "yeah, I don't want to be an American idiot." And now, at the age of 28, I am a staunch leftist who is firmly against the atrocities the US government commits, and I feel strongly about stopping misinformation. So I can say with absolute certainty that they succeeded.

I also get like, really upset when people say that American Idiot is the album where they sold out, because that's objectively not true, both for the reasons I've provided above, and also because of the song Wake Me Up When September Ends. Not a lot of people know the story behind this song, but it's actually a song that Billie Joe wrote about the experience of his dad dying of cancer when he was 10 years old. The story, as he tells it, is that when he came home from school, his mom gave him the news, and being (understandably!) upset, started crying, ran to his room and slammed the door. When she knocked on the door to try and talk to him, he shouted "wake me up when September ends!!" in response. It took him decades to be able to write this song, and it shows because it's the perfect grief song, having been played at benefits for 9/11, hurricane Katrina, and so on. The first time I heard that song it reduced me to tears, because you can hear the intense sadness in it. A "sellout" would never write a song like that!! (Side note: maybe stop tweeting at Green Day to wake up every October 1st, it's super tone deaf given the subject matter,,,)

Anyway, I think I'm done being autistic about Green Day (that's a lie, they'll forever be my special interest), so TL;DR:

Thank you, Green Day, for creating a generation of leftists who aren't about the bullshit

[houseofbrat]

Bernie Would Have Won

By Krystal Ball

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases. 

But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. 

Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status.

Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while regular people were left to wither on the vine?

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life. 

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.  

These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and deregulation in his first term in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here. But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves, perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist, leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and has served as a warning and threat to the rest.

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s basic ideology was also successful in our own history.

In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left. 

Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental tenets of the Trumpist worldview. 

They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post have already abandoned their resistance.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Many on the right have sought to depict the protesters as extremists, but the sheer scale and regularity of the protests and actions are in fact a sign of how mainstream pro-Palestinian feeling is within British society. The question, assuming the movement succeeds in ending the Israeli assault, is where does it go next? What becomes of movements when they stop moving? Traditionally, social movements went through phases of emergence, coalescence, institutionalisation and decline, followed by dissipation and co-optation by mainstream parties. This usually took decades, the classic case being the US civil rights movement. Yet the era since “Occupy Wall Street” in 2011 has been one of so-called “flash movements”. From Black Lives Matter to the gilets jaunes, movements have coalesced around hashtagged slogans with astonishing celerity, producing deep political crises – and then subsiding. The Gaza campaign resembles a flash movement. It didn’t come out of nowhere. Palestine has been a cause of the international left since the six-day war in 1967, and the UK has seen repeated protests over Israel’s flattening of the West Bank, invasion of Lebanon and serial bombardments of Gaza. There is a network of organisations doing the groundwork, such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War. But the turnout for these protests shows the virtues of the flash movement: it can rapidly mobilise masses of people, tolerate a diversity of tactics and keep focus on a simple, morally obvious demand. In many respects, it is succeeding. In the UK, despite efforts to demonise the protests as “hate marches”, and the then home secretary Suella Braverman’s inept provocation of the far right against the protests, the demonstrations brought up to 800,000 people to the streets on 11 November. This was the largest such demonstration since the invasion of Iraq. Nor was the UK alone. There have been mass protests everywhere from Tokyo and Kerala to Cairo, Washington DC and Rio de Janeiro. In France and Berlin, protesters have defied official bans. In the US, the Jewish left has led the movement and often engaged in the most militant tactics,including blockading Manhattan Bridge. The embattled Israeli left has also staged protests, despite a climate of police repression and mob violence. The movement has done what successful movements do: win over public opinion, catalyse cracks in elite consensus and expose divisions in the state. These splits were visible in the form of staffer dissent in the US state department, frontbench resignations in Labour over Keir Starmer’s refusal to support a ceasefire, protests by Dutch civil servants and EU employees, Macron’s ceasefire demand, and recently the call from Canada, Australia and New Zealand, three of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing coalition countries, for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”. Only the US now vetoes UN ceasefire resolutions.

[queerism1969]

Atrocity created by CAPITALISM

Irish Famine (1845-1852)

Indian Famines during British colonial rule (Various, 18th-20th centuries)

Indigenous Genocide (Ongoing since colonization)

Slavery (16th-19th centuries)

Indonesian Genocide (1965-1966)

Pinochet Dictatorship (1973-1990)

Argentina Dictatorship (1976-1983)

Brazilian Dictatorship (1964-1985)

Pakistan Incident (Bangladesh Genocide, 1971)

The Gilded Age (Late 19th century)

The Great Depression (1929-1939)

Operation Condor (1960s-1980s)

Banana Wars (Early 20th century)

Batista Dictatorship (1952-1959)

Guantanamo Bay (Ongoing since 2002)

Vietnam War (1955-1975)

My Lai Massacre (1968)

Sinchon Massacre (Korean War, 1950-1953)

Kent State Massacre (1970)

Patriot Act (2001)

Red Summer (1919)

Jim Crow (Late 19th-20th centuries)

MK Ultra (1950s-1970s)

1985 MOVE bombing (1985)

1921 Battle of Blair Mountain (1921)

Malayan Emergency (1948-1960)

Mau Mau Rebellion (1952-1960)

Covert war in Yemen (Ongoing)

Stanley Meyer incident (1998)

Genocide in Turkey (Armenian Genocide and others, WWI era)

Congolese Genocide (Late 19th-20th centuries)

Greek Civil War (1946-1949)

Invasion of Cyprus by Turkey (1974)

Washita River Massacre (1868)

Minamata Disaster (1950s-1960s)

Bhopal Disaster (1984)

Kentler Project (1960s-2003)

Thomas Midgley Jr. and leaded gasoline (Early 20th century)

Forced labor in private US prisons (Ongoing)

Collateral murder in Iraq (2010)

Julian Assange and leaks (Ongoing)

US drone strikes (Ongoing)

US sanctions (Ongoing)

US support for dictatorships (Ongoing)

Korean War and civilian casualties (Korean War, 1950-1953)

Nazi funding and collaboration (WWII era)

Hitler and "Judeo-Bolshevism" (WWII era)

[metamatar]

In 1975, civilian nuclear technology was part of a worldwide strategy to bring the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) to heel. That body’s power seemed unprecedented, given that most of its countries were historically impoverished or “backward” peoples. [...]

Many developing countries did adopt nuclear technologies, often with crucial parts of their national infrastructures relying on American and European expertise, equipment, and fuel. Rather than seeing liberation from nature, such countries faced renewed forms of dependence. Iran certainly never gained reliable access to uranium and did not become the economic miracle envisioned by Ansari back in 1975. Instead of lifting up the poorer nations of the world, the global nuclear order seemed structured in ways reminiscent of the colonial era. The most heated debates within the IAEA pitted the nuclear weapons states against the so-called LDCs—less developed countries. The agency never became a storehouse for fission products. Instead, one of its primary functions was to monitor an arms control treaty—the Treaty 4 on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. By the end of the century, the IAEA was referred to as a “watchdog,” known for its cadre of inspectors. In 2003, IAEA inspections were crucial talking points in public debates about the invasion of Iraq by the United States [...] evidence gathered over the years by the agency created for the peaceful atom was being interpreted by the United States government as justification for military intervention. [...]

Focusing only on arms control glosses over the domestic politics of nuclear programs, particularly the role of high technology as symbols of state power and legitimacy. But it also does not square with what scholars of the Cold War have been pointing out for decades—that governments, especially the United States, deployed science and technology as diplomatic tools, to achieve feats of prestige, to shape business arrangements, to conduct clandestine surveillance, or to bind countries together with technical assistance programs. Poorer countries’ dreams of modernization, of using advanced technology to escape hunger, poverty, and the constraints of nature—these were the stock-in-trade of US diplomacy. Why, then, should we imagine that the promises connected to peaceful uses of atomic energy were any less saturated with geopolitical maneuvers and manipulation? [...]

American officials in the late 1940s and early 1950s were very worried that commercial nuclear power would siphon off supplies of uranium and monazite needed for the weapons arsenal. So they explicitly played down the possibility of electricity generation from atomic energy and instead played up the importance of radioisotopes for medicine and agriculture—because such radioisotopes were byproducts of the US weapons arsenal and did not compete with it. The kinds of technologies promoted in the developing world by the United States, the USSR, and Europeans thus seemed neocolonial, keeping the former colonies as sites of resource extraction—a fact noticed, and resented, by government officials in India, Brazil, and elsewhere. Mutation plant breeding, irradiation for insect control or food sterilization, and radioisotope studies in fertilizer—these were oriented toward food and export commodities and public health, problems indistinguishable from those of the colonial era. These were not the same kinds of technologies embraced by the global North, which focused on electricity generation through nuclear reactors, often as a hedge against the rising political power of petroleum-producing states in the Middle East. By the mid-1960s and 1970s, the United States and Europe did offer nuclear reactors even to some of the most politically volatile nations, as part of an effort to ensure access to oil. Convincing petroleum suppliers of their dire future need for nuclear reactors was part of a strategy to regain geopolitical leverage. Despite the moniker “peaceful atom,” these technologies were often bundled in trade deals with fighter jets, tanks, and other military hardware [...]

By the close of the century, two competing environmental narratives were plainly in use. One was critical of atomic energy, drawing on scientific disputes about the public health effects of radiation, the experience of nuclear accidents such as Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986), or the egregious stories of public health injustice—including negligence in protecting uranium miners or the wanton destruction and contamination of indigenous peoples’ homelands. In contrast was the narrative favored by most governments, depicting nuclear technology in a messianic role, promising not only abundant food, water, and electricity, but also an end to atmospheric pollution and climate change. [...]

As other scholars have noted, the IAEA tried to maintain a reputation of being primarily a technical body, devoid of politics. But it had numerous political uses. For example, it was a forum for intelligence gathering, as routinely noted by American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents. It also outmaneuvered the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization in the early 1960s and was able to assert an authoritative voice playing down public health dangers from atomic energy. Further, it provided a vehicle for countries to stay engaged in atomic energy affairs even if they did not sign on to the non-proliferation treaty—India, Pakistan, and Israel most notably. It provided apartheid-era South Africa with a means of participating in international affairs when other bodies ousted it because of its blatantly racist policies. By the same token, it gave the Americans and Europeans political cover for continuing to engage with South Africa, an important uranium supplier.

Introduction to The Wretched Atom, Jacob Hamlin

[qqueenofhades]

Man, the Russia/Ukraine war has led to a lot of terrible takes from far leftists. I have a mutual from Brazil, a self identified socialist, who is convinced that Ukraine is full of nazis. While they don't support Russia, they questioned why they have to be "pro-Ukraine" or "pro-Russia". They call Ukraine a "nazi hole" but call Russia merely "fascist". Am I wrong in thinking that they've been influenced by Russian propaganda? I know Ukraine does have a nazi/far right problem, but so does the US? And most European countries? idk they strongly hate the US/US government too, and it seems to create some kind of brainrot. at least they don't blindly support China or Russia like tankies do (nor identify with them), but it's still frustrating to take a neutral position on a pretty black and white situation.

I don't want to confront them 1) cause I'm not the type to argue over serious things like this and this may break our long friendship and 2) I'm not super educated on the nazi situation in Ukraine.

Anyway thank you for letting me rant in your inbox.

Yes, Russia has specifically focused its propaganda efforts on Latin America, Africa, and other regions that HAVE suffered from Western/European/American imperialism and are thus predisposed to take the worst view of them/believe that this situation is their fault somehow. This is similar to what the USSR did in newly postcolonial Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, positing themselves as offering the shared hand of communist brotherhood from Western oppressors. Because of more recent events like the invasion of Iraq, which was fully as unjustified as the invasion of Ukraine, Russian propagandists and their eager tankie/leftist foot soldiers have also got a lot of mileage out of "whataboutism." This is likewise an old Soviet propaganda technique designed to deflect any criticism of the actual situation by disingenuously asking "what about this other one!!!"

Likewise, the idea that Ukraine has a "Nazi problem" is itself propaganda. In the last election, far-right/Nazi-identified parties won barely 2% of the vote and AFAIK, no seats at all in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament). This is far lower than the nearly half of the USA voting for the far-right/Nazi-sympathetic Republican Party, and as noted, the far right elements in the UK and Europe. The idea that Ukraine is "full of Nazis" (with a Jewish president who just celebrated iftar with the Ukrainian Muslims/Crimean Tatars during Ramadan and instituted observance of Muslim holidays nationwide, very Nazi of him) is a line used by Russian propagandists to "justify" their attack and appeal to national memories of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and the struggle against the Nazis, which is the central cultural grievance/memory in modern Russia. The Putin regime has referred to anyone they don't like, but especially the Ukrainians, as "Nazis" for a long time now, so it's supposedly their holy duty to kill them/commit ethnic cleansing/forcibly reunite the "fraternal" people of "Little Russia," as Ukraine has been called since the 17th century, with "Great Russia." And yeah, no.

Because the West and Europe has been pretty solidly on Ukraine's side, Russia has therefore cultivated countries like China, India, Brazil, etc, who have all suffered from Western interference and are looking to move into the first rank of global superpowers. This is, as noted, similar to the competing systems of influence built during the Cold War, but it also relies on much deeper Russian grievances that go back to the medieval era. Anybody who knows a thing about actual Russian history would therefore know that every single word it says about the Ukraine situation is a lie, but because that lie is useful for many other countries and fits into their own understanding of themselves, it is easy to repeat and act like it's a so-called superior moral position. This is also why US/American tankies so eagerly lap up Russian propaganda, because it plays into their moral sense of themselves as far better than the rest of the West and "righteously" discovering that the West is responsible for all the evil in the world etc etc. While non-Westerners are just helpless misunderstood puppets with no real agency or ability to make complex choices. This totally makes sense!!!

[nuttysaladtree]

"Ashes to ashes," he [the preacher] said. "Dust to dust." Tears filled Angel's eyes. She shook her head. No, she thought, Astra to astra, stardust to stardust.

—The Same Stuff as Stars by Katherine Paterson. Italics original. In the 2004 paperback (1st Harper Trophy ed. ISBN 0-06-055712-5), this is on page 241; other editions may have different pagination but will probably still end chapter 19, "Stardust to Stardust" with the above.

Love this one...

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #6 – Exordia by Seth Dickinson

This is a book I have been looking forward to for quite literally years, from someone who is easily one of my favourite working authors. I also read the short story the book was expanded out from before I even knew it was going to be a book, and so went in spoiled on the broad strokes of what turned out to be the climax of the whole thing. All to say my opinion on this is unlikely to match that of the typical reader, I guess.

Anyway, Exordia is a glorious spectacular mess that has no right to cohere anywhere near as well as it does. It’s target audience is small, but I’m certainly somewhere in it. Please ignore all the marketing it’s so bad you have to wonder if someone at Tor just has it out for the author.

Exordia is a, well, a profoundly difficult book to give any sort of plot summary for. The first act involves Anna, a 30-something survivor of the Anfal Genocide now living a rather unimpressive life in New York City, until one day in the early 2010s she sees an alien eating the turtles in Central Park. Then there’s a cat-and-mouse hunt between terrifying alien snake-centaurs for the future of free will in the galaxy, and the plot jumping to kurdistan, and six more POV characters from as many different nations, and nuclear weapons, and oh so many people dying messily. The first act is an oddly domestic and endearing piece of table setting, the second is (to borrow the idiom of the book’s own marketing) Tom Clancy meets Jeff Vandermeer or Roadside Picnic, and the third is basically impossible to describe without a multipage synopsis, but mostly concerned with ethical dilemmas and moral injuries. It’s to the book’s credit that it never bats an eye at shifting focus and scale, but it does make coming to grips with it difficult.

This is, as they say, a thematically dense book, but it’s especially interested in the fallout of imperialism. The Obama-era ‘don’t do stupid shit’ precise and sterile form of it in particular – the book’s a period piece for a reason, after all. The ethics of complicity – of being offered the choice of murdering and betraying those around you or having an alien power with vastly superior destructive powers inflict an order of magnitude more misery to you, them, and everyone in the same general vicinity to punish you for the inconvenience – is one that gets a lot of wordcount. It is not an accident that the man most willing and able to collaborate with the overwhelming powerful alien empire in hopes of bargaining some future for humanity is the National Security Council ghoul who came out of organizing surveillance information for the drone wars. It’s also not a coincidence that the main (if only by a hair) protagonist is someone with a lot of bitter memories over how the US encouraged Iraq’s kurdish population to rebel in the ‘90s and then just washed their hands and let them be massacred (the book couldn’t actually ship with a historical primer on modern kurdish history, so it’s woven into the story in chunks with varying amount of grace. But it is in fact pretty thematically key here).

Speaking of complicity, the book’s other overriding preoccupation in (in the broadest sense) Trolley Problems. Is it better to directly kill a small number of people or, through your inaction, allow a larger number to die? Does it matter is the small number is your countrymen and the larger foreigners, or vice versa? What about humans and aliens? Does it matter whether the choice is submitting to subjugation or killing innocents as a means to resist it? What about letting people around you die to learn the fundamental truth of the cosmos? Does the calculus change when you learn that immortal souls (and hell) are real? This is the bone the story is really built around chewing on.

All that probably makes the text seem incredibly didactic, or at least like a philosophical dialogue disguised as a novel. Which really isn’t the case! The book definitely has opinions, but none of the characters are clear author-avatars, and all perspectives are given enough time and weight to come across as seriously considered and not just as cardboard cutouts to jeer at. Okay, with the exception of one of the two aliens who you get the very strong sense is hamming it up as a cartoon villain just for the of it (he spends much of the book speaking entirely in all caps). There definitely are a couple points where it feels like the books turning and lecturing directly at the reader, but they’re both few and fairly short.

The characters themselves are interesting. They’re all very flawed, but more than that they’re all very...embodied, I guess? Distracted with how hot someone is, concerned with what they ate that morning or the smell of something disgusting, still not over an ex from years ago. Several of them are also sincerely religious in a way that’s very true to life to actual people but you rarely see in books. The result is that basically comes as being far more like actual humans than I’m at all used to in most fiction (of course, a lot of those very human qualities get annoying or eye-roll inducing fairly quickly. But hey, that’s life). Though that’s all mostly the case at the start of the book – the fact that the main cast are slowly turning into caricatures of themselves as they’re exposed to the alien soul manipulation technology is actually a major plot point, which I’m like fifty/fifty on being commentary on what happens to the image and legacy of people as they’re caught up in grand narratives versus just being extended setup for a joke about male leads in technothrillers being fanfic shipbait.

Part of the characters seeming very human is that some (though by no means all) of the POVs are just incredibly funny, in that objectively fucked up and tasteless way that people get when coping with overwhelming shock or trauma. It’s specifically because the jokes are so in-your-face awful that they fit, I think? It manages to avoid the usual bathetic trap a lot of works mixing in humour with drama fall into, anyway.

Speaking of alien soul manipulation technology – okay, you know how above I said that the points where the book directly lectured the reader were few and far between. This is true for lectures about politics or morality. All the freed up space in this 530 page tome is instead used for technobabble about theoretical math. Also cellular biology, cryptography, entropics, the organization of the American security state, how black holes work, and a few dozen other things. This book was edited for accuracy by either a doctoral student from every physical science and an award winning mathematician, or else just by one spectacularly confident bullshitter with several hundred hours on wikipedia. Probably both, really. I did very much enjoy this book, but that is absolutely predicated on the fact that when I knew when to let my eyes glaze over and start skimming past the proper nouns.

The book has a fairly complete narrative arc in its own right, but the ending also screams out for a sequel, and quite a lot of the weight and meaning of the book’s climax does depend on followthrough and resolution in some future sequel. Problematically, the end of the book also includes a massive increase in scale, and any sequel would require a whole new setting and most of a new cast of characters, so I’m mildly worried how long it will be before we get it (if ever).

The book is also just very...I’m not sure flabby is the right word, but it is doing many many different things, and I found some of them far more interesting than others. I’m not sure whether Dickinson just isn’t great at extended action scenes or if I am just universally bored by drawn out Tom Clancy fantasies, but either way there were several dozen pages too many of them. The extended cultural digressions about the upbringing and backstories of each of the seven POVs were meanwhile very interesting! (Mostly, I got bored of the whole Erik-Clayton-Rosamaria love triangle Madonna complex thing about a tenth of the way into the book but it just kept going.) It did however leave the book very full of extended tangents and digressions, even beyond what the technobabble did. Anna herself, ostensibly the main protagonist, is both utterly thematically loadbearing but very often feels entirely vestigial to the actual, like, plot, brought along for the ride because she’s an alien terrorist’s favourite of our whole species of incest-monkeys. The end result is, if not necessarily unfocused, then at least incredibly messy, flitting back and forth across a dozen topics that on occasion mostly just seem unified by having caught the author’s interest as they wrote.

It’s interesting to compare the book to Anna Saves It All, the short story it was based on – quite a lot changed! But that’s beyond the scope of this already overlong review. So I guess I’ll just say make sure to read the book first, if you’re going to.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Lee Smith

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s success against Hezbollah the last two weeks alarmed the former Obama officials staffing the current administration. After all, Obama’s strategy to realign U.S. interests with Iran was predicated on the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which put Iran’s nuclear weapons program under the umbrella of an international agreement guaranteed by the United States. The Iranians armed Hezbollah with missiles in order to deter Israeli action against their nuclear facilities, which is to say that the Lebanese militia serves not only Iranian interests but also those of the Obama faction.

The Biden team tried to stop Netanyahu from continuing his Hezbollah campaign by outlining how it intends to punish Israel in the period between the November election and the January inauguration with sanctions and other anti-Israel measures. But by telegraphing its intentions, the White House inadvertently incentivized Netanyahu to act quickly. Since a Harris victory ensures four to eight more years of a White House filled by Obama aides determined to protect the Iranians and their proxies, and a Donald Trump win means Biden’s punitive actions go away, Israel saw it had nothing to lose in either case. So on Friday, Netanyahu brought the era of permanent resistance to an end by killing the cult leader the Obama faction so desperately wanted to but could not keep alive.

In the past, Israeli officials warned against targeting the terror chief. They feared it might bring about an even more ruthless leader just as Israel’s 1992 assassination of then-Hezbollah chief Abbas al-Mussawi elevated, in their eyes, the more effective Nasrallah. But what made Nasrallah special, what gave rise to the personality cult around the man whose name means “victory of God,” was his relationship with Khamenei.

In 1989, Nasrallah left Lebanon for Iran, where the 29-year-old cleric was introduced to Khamenei. In the vacuum left by Khomeini’s death, Khamenei was working to consolidate his power, which included taking control of Hezbollah, Tehran’s most significant external asset. He saw Mussawi’s assassination as an opening to put his own man in place, and with Hezbollah’s operations against Israeli forces in Lebanon, Nasrallah’s legend steadily grew. Even Israeli officials credited Hezbollah for driving Israel out of the south in 2000, a singular triumph worthy of the name Nasrallah, a victory against the hated Zionists that no other Arab leader could claim.

But the myth of Nasrallah as Turban Napoleon was dispelled with the disastrous 2006 war which he stumbled into by kidnapping two Israel soldiers. Later he said that had he known Israel was going to respond so forcefully, he’d never have given the order. And yet despite the thousands killed in Lebanon, Hezbollahis and civilians, and the billions of dollars worth of damage, he claimed that Hezbollah won just because he survived. Before his demise, he’d been in hiding since 2006.

Israel’s recent demonstrations of its technological prowess show that Nasrallah survived this long thanks only to the sufferance of the Jerusalem government. Netanyahu and others seem to have hoped the Hezbollah problem would resolve itself once the Americans came to their senses and recognized the threat Iran posed to U.S. regional hegemony. But the Israelis misread the strategic implications of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The George W. Bush administration’s freedom agenda gave Iraq’s Shia majority an insuperable advantage in popular elections. And since virtually all the Shia factions were controlled by Iran, democratizing Iraq laid the foundations for Iran’s regional empire as well as Obama’s realignment strategy, downgrading relations with traditional U.S. allies like Israel and building ties with the anti-American regime. Even Trump, whose January 2020 targeted killing of Iranian terror chief Qassem Soleimani and his Iraqi deputy Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was far and away the most meaningful operation ever conducted by U.S. forces on Iraqi soil, couldn’t entirely break the mold cast by his predecessors and which the Pentagon protected like a priceless jewel.

U.S. forces are still based in Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS and any other Sunnis the Iranians and their allies categorize as threats to their interests. The detail seems almost like a medieval curse imposed on the losing side in a war. After the Iranians killed and maimed thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq, and helped kill and wound thousands more by urging their Syrian ally Bashar Assad to usher Sunni fighters from the Damascus airport to the Iraqi front, America’s best and bravest are condemned to eternal bondage requiring them to protect Iranian interests forever.

The idea advanced by conspiracy theorists from the U.S. political and media establishment on the left as well as the right that Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. into a larger regional war with Iran—a thesis sure to be cited repeatedly in the aftermath of Nasrallah’s assassination—is absurd. The Obama faction, of which Biden and Harris are a part, is in Iran’s corner. Moreover, only a fool could be blind to the fact that the Pentagon way of war, three decades into the 21st century and a world away from the United States’ last conclusive victory, means death for all who pursue it.

If Washington and the Europeans are appalled by Israel’s campaign over the last two weeks, it’s because the Israelis have resurfaced the ugly truth that no modish theories of war, international organizations, or even American presidents could long obscure. Wars are won by killing the enemy, above all, those who inspire their people to kill yours. Killing Nasrallah not only anchors Israel’s victory in Lebanon but reestablishes the old paradigm for any Western leaders who take seriously their duty to protect their countrymen and civilization: Kill your enemies.