#history of being a proxy for america during the cold war

[1010ninetynine]

No sex with men, no dating men, no child rearing with men, and no marriage with men. But. BUT. Feminists in Korea are problematic AF.

Why is Korean feminism transphobic? In 2020, Korean feminists ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNED AGAINST a woman who was accepted to Sookmyung University. An all womens' university. But she was a woman, you say. What could be their problem? According to Korean feminists, they didn't want a "man" in their space.

And I don't want to hear it about the movement being so "young". Korean women have stepped up to the plate before in our history. We are capable of better than this fucking nonsense. It's a bunch of transphobic, gay hating radicals that have hijacked what was supposed to be about social justice.

id argue the opposite - you're not considering that Korea's a more conservative country and the movements that arise from it aren't going to be as politically correct - but they should be celebrated anyway because of how it's benefiting women in Korea.

Women should be encouraged to not get married if they don't want to - and that's what the 4B movement is - a fucking choice.

It's not perfect, fine. Korean feminists need to work on their transphobia ig (although if I'm being perfectly honest - I get why women are afraid of people they perceive as men entering women's spaces and that women aren't given the space to voice the basic concerns such as 'how do we prevent cis men from being able to enter, as that's literally the whole point of a women's university' and even the 'is this just a fetish' (because let's be honest. porn probably fucked over a lot of men's minds and dicks. it's a valid fear.). That conversation needs to happen more or women will get very bitter with the left.)

like tbh - MLK was misogynistic, and Susan B. Anthony was racist. Does not erase their societal impact, and the US is undeniably a better place for you and me thanks to them. Even tho Susan and MLK would denigrate you and me if we were to meet somehow.

If your feminism is transphobic, hates gay men, hates men in general, that's not the feminism I'd endorse.

ill be honest i've never understood what people mean when they say this. I've seen the way leftists talk about white people, about straight people and cis people, and I know it's out of bitterness. I'll be honest, as a bisexual Indian woman living in america, I've had more negative run ins with men as a group than I've had with white people or straight people as a group.

Transphobia and homophobia are terrible - we can agree there. But unless you're going to tell me no one should hate anyone regardless of their personal experiences - you cannot expect most women (when we've all faced sexual subjugation of some kind) to be comfortable around men the way we are around other women. Men are oppressors - we fear them and there are reasons.

some women will say they hate men, will turn fear to anger, anger that they can't fucking go outside at night because they fear men. Anger that they can't even fully trust their boyfriend because of how common intimate partner violence is. Anger that their male coworker gets taken more seriously without the makeup and the heels. Anger at her husband for acting like an idiot to manipulate her into doing all the chores, eating away at her time and energy because he views her as a tool.

And that is a sign of their oppression - not an act of oppression against men.

Individual men can be good but as a group they fail to take accountability for each other's actions - and that is why all women are afraid, and why many are angry.

im not asking you to say "I love korean feminism" because clearly your values don't 100% align with theirs. But surely you can see the social good the 4B movement would do for women in a country like Korea, plastic surgery capital of the world?

But if you are truly against the toxic patriarchy that exists in Korea, you must also help dismantle military conscription because that is where a lot of men become radicalized, bullied, etc etc and "grow up" to be the most toxic form of men seen on this earth.

I say this as someone who is against the military's existence and traumatizing men and women (because soldiers often rape women during war) for profit - expecting feminists to care about men's issues in the name of "dismantling the patriarchy" is missing the point of feminism.

Women are not the ones with the cards globally speaking - men are. I can't name a single female president unless you count acting president Harris which yay...she got to take over for Biden for a hot minute. Good for her.

Not the same as all other presidents, who got full 4 year terms, being male.

If you look in the news, at all, you'll know that men dominate the political sphere by a fucking landslide. Except in Rwanda. Cool place, that country. But point is - by and large governmental structures, such as the military, are constructed by men.

Men have made the mostly collective decision to send armies to war. For. Centuries. Women, historically, were not in a place to decide whether or not having militaries was a good idea. And even now, it's not a lot of women in power who get to decide these things.

War is a creation of man, not woman. It's not our fault, and expecting feminists to solve that is silly, and will not help women, which is the point of feminism. Even if men don't end up in the military they're going to be misogynistic - and even though the military is awful and I wouldn't wish it on anyone - you can't focus on everything or you'll get jack done.

There needs to be movements against the military system, but feminism should remain focused on women. Intersectional feminism and making women of color's voices heard is important, yes. The experiences of trans people should be valued, sure. But feminism can't become a hodge podge of everything - and frankly I think the making of it to become so is a large part of why Roe v. Wade's been turned - because we are no longer focused.

And I don't want to hear it about the movement being so "young". Korean women have stepped up to the plate before in our history. We are capable of better than this fucking nonsense.

do you mean korean history or american history?

I need people to stop glorifying the 4B movement in Korea, from a Western (white) perspective. Stop it. If you are blissfully unaware of this (having not been on TikTok) - in theory, it makes sense. No sex with men, no dating men, no child rearing with men, and no marriage with men. But. BUT. Feminists in Korea are problematic AF. I know this from both personal experience (having been on the receiving end of their ire online) and everything I've read about them, in Korean. I see all these white TikTokers (and even some in the Korean diaspora) fawning over how "we" in the US need this and, no. If your feminism is transphobic, hates gay men, hates men in general, that's not the feminism I'd endorse. Why is Korean feminism transphobic? In 2020, Korean feminists ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNED AGAINST a woman who was accepted to Sookmyung University. An all womens' university. But she was a woman, you say. What could be their problem? According to Korean feminists, they didn't want a "man" in their space. Because she is a trans woman. This is not unusual for Korean feminists. Having lived there for 5 years, to some extent, I understand their anger against misogyny. But if you are truly against the toxic patriarchy that exists in Korea, you must also help dismantle military conscription because that is where a lot of men become radicalized, bullied, etc etc and "grow up" to be the most toxic form of men seen on this earth. But Korean feminists don't give AF about that and in fact, I've read a lot of them express that it's good for men to suffer. Guess what? That view is internalized misogyny and toxic patriarchy, too. And I don't want to hear it about the movement being so "young". Korean women have stepped up to the plate before in our history. We are capable of better than this fucking nonsense. It's a bunch of transphobic, gay hating radicals that have hijacked what was supposed to be about social justice. WOMAD (link is to the Wikipedia article, not their site) and Megalia are the two sites they stem from. It is the most toxic group of people I've ever had the displeasure to encounter online. Any form of criticism is, at best, ignored and worst - I've been "called out" for being Korean-American, and therefore, to "butt out" of "Korean issues". Amongst other bullying I've personally received. And yes, not just on forums but on public articles that I've commented on.

I know it's a catchy title and it appeals in theory but please, please do not glorify these transphobes and TERFs. They don't deserve your attention.

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Something I've been considering recently: the big storytelling difference between Hideo Kojima and Yoko Taro.

There's an obvious reason I've been thinking about this, I feel: both these guys are, on the surface, exceedingly similar. They're both well-known Japanese video game creators*, they're both known for their eccentricities, they both tell stories that run the razor-thin line between 'Violence is corrupting and immoral' and 'Okay, but that bit of violence was pretty sick, right?' really well, as well as throwing in some really funny 'Hey, what the fuck did I just watch?' energy, hell they even both had a game in their series directed by Platinum Games, I don't especially think this is an overreach, here.

But they are different creators, and I've been thinking about their differences (specifically in storytelling - obviously one makes Action-RPGs and one makes Stealth Games and Baby Postman Simulators) as I play MGS3 and Nier Replicant, and I think I've come down to this: it's in how they condemn violence, and especially war.

Kojima bases all of his stories in reality - a heightened reality, perhaps, but there's a reason multiple MGS games end with long lists of dates and events, Kojima's made-up ones slipped in-between the actual history. Kojima bases his critiques on things that are real and tangible - MGS3 itself, more than any bee-wielding supervillain or photosynthetic sniper, is about the Cold War, and it's no accident that the Boss' speech at the end isn't about the Philosophers, or Volgin, or Metal Gear (METAL GEAR?) it's about soldiers, their fates and their traumas. Kojima lives in the world of... not exactly reality, but allegory-through-reality, and it makes his games pretty explicit in their messaging - which in my mind is a good thing, because it means that people who fundamentally misunderstand MGS aren't just wrong, they're obviously wrong - show me an MGS fan who thinks they're pro-America and pro-military, and I'll show you someone who did not pay attention to MGS.

Yoko Taro, on the other hand, is entirely a creature of allegory. Yoko himself has said in interviews that he tells stories primarily as a way to get people to feel something, and all other things like connections to the other games or even internal consistency comes as a secondary concern (as someone who's tried multiple times to tie everything Drakenier related together - that's believable.) As an inevitable result of this, his stories aren't really 1:1 parallels to history or the modern day, they're very general conflicts that speak to a wide range of topics.

Put it this way: in MGS4, Kojima describes in great detail a situation that is the natural endpoint of the geo-political situation (especially re: America) during most of the early 21st Century, especially The War on Terror - instead of war being a means of obtaining resources to generate income for big corporations, now war is the means of income, and all the inherent flaws of American late-stage capitalism have been applied to it - to the point that soldiers have to pay extra to use someone else's gun. It's a heightened, at times absurd version of reality, but it focuses on specific issues and flaws with the subject matter - The War on Terror, and through them highlights issues with our current world - hell, Kojima may have predicted some of the issue we currently face with capitalism.

In Nier Automata, however, Yoko doesn't present an exaggeration of a real-world conflict to portray it's flaws and its hopelessness. Instead, he constructs an entirely hopeless war, a war that is literally pointless on every side, and explores how people react to that. As opposed to Kojima's slight exaggeration of the War on Terror, by the end of Automata Yoko has presented a proxy war fought on behalf of two races that died off millennia ago, between two groups that are, at their core, exactly the same, made from the same components, fought on one side because of a poorly worded instruction from their creators that necessitates eternal total war as a basic fact of their evolutionary cycle but also inevitably results in their evolutions being violently purged because any form of passivity is betrayal, and on the other as a grand Machiavellian scheme to kill off their own troops, thereby concealing the deaths of their creators – a scheme, it’s worth noting, conceived of by an android that no longer remembers conceiving it, because his own scheme necessitates his constant assassination by the person he cares about the most to prevent him from discovering his own plan. Kojima's wars in MGS4 are absurd and pointless for us because we know what the results of the War on Terror were, Yoko's war in Automata is kinda like an onion - every layer you peel back on it, you discover a new way that it's pointless, and every time you do, you're crying a little bit more.

So, wrapping this up before people realise I just used the ultimate cliche of poorly-worded food metaphors, if you were to ask me what the big difference between Yoko Taro and Hideo Kojima was... well, I'd still go with the gameplay genres, but I'd also say that it's a slight, but really interesting, difference in how they go about their metaphors. As for which is better... neither, obviously. They're both really talented creators, this is just a style thing. You seriously expect me to choose between a series that includes 'a man pretended to be possessed by the ghost of his crush's son because he grafted his arm onto him and everyone bought it' and a series that includes 'at some point the Earth stopped spinning. This has never been explained in any of the games'? What are you, a cop?

*albeit if Yoko ever heard someone compare him to Kojima he'd probably simultaneously die of embarrassment and make a joke about being a younger, hotter Kojima.

[187days]

Day Sixty-Two

Here’s a thing that sometimes happens in teaching: you have a great rapport with a student, and then suddenly you don’t, and you have no idea what happened. And it could’ve been a lot of things: a miscommunication, a reaction to your class’ increasing difficulty, peer pressure to rebel, something unrelated to you entirely... I’m currently experiencing this with two of my ninth graders; one’s just stopped coming to class, the other has become disruptive in class. Both of these things suck, and it’s frustrating because I don’t know how to fix it. 

But I’ll keep trying!

Aside from that, things are good. It was another very serious day in APGOV: tackling Birth of a Nation and the revival of the KKK, the lynching of Leo Frank, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre, the Johnson-Reed Act, Father Coughlin, the America First Committee, the Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden... It’s bleak, but it’s important for students to understand that white supremacy was violent and had a pretty broad impact on popular culture, politics, and policy during that time period. If they don’t understand that, they won’t understand how significant the Civil Rights Movement really was. 

I was covering some serious history in World, too- namely the aftermath of WWII (lots of questions about the UN and international law, which was cool) and the start of the Cold War. I focused in on some of the deadliest proxy wars that occurred: Congo, Angola, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia (lots of questions about each of those conflicts, too) and on their long-term impact. Specifically, I mentioned the proliferation of weapons. When I said that we and the Soviets didn’t reclaim all the weapons we supplied various armed groups, one student in my Block 2 class asked, “But wouldn’t they end up being used in other conflicts?”

I said, “Sure would.” And, since it was right before the bell rang, I added, “I’ll tell you more tomorrow.”

You all know I love a good cliffhanger ending to class sometimes. That was fun.

What else? We had a really small group at track practice today because strep throat and other crud is going around, but it was still good! The Deans came in from bus duty as I was leading warm-ups, and joked that I’m involved in everything at the school. I said only the things I liked, and track’s always going to be at the top of that list.

[amandi-mga2024mi5015]

Artists Research - '60s and '70s Zeitgeist

America in the 1960s and '70s was an era of social upheaval: civil rights protests, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, etc.

American culture played a big role in defining global culture.

Post-WWII America

The early 1960s in America was a post-WW2 era: during and immediately after World War II, most of the mainstream western art was patriotic and optimistic, rallying countries around the idea of a robust, victorious nation.

During WW2, many women were encouraged and empowered to enter the work force due to all the men being away to fight in the war. The country was declining in manpower, so the solution was to completely change established gender roles, and in essence, change what it meant to be a woman. This is why we see many ads and such from this era that appear 'feminist' in their efforts to encourage women to join the workforce. Being a working woman who contributed to the war effort now meant that you were a patriot and a good American, and more than anything, a good woman.

However, once the war was over, the nation no longer had any need for women in the work force. They did however need to increase their population due to the casualties of war. So they shifted back to traditional gender roles. Once again, popular culture started advertising and advocating for women to stay at home and take care of the kids. This was presented as a woman's innate role in life, and to not fulfil it meant to not be a good woman.

War, Politics, and social change

The Cold War also defined much of the 1960s from the end of WW2 to to the collapse of communism. Proxy wars were being raged by both the US to the USSR.

This clash between communism and capitalism gave rise to the Red Scare in America. This was propaganda aimed at vilifying and creating fear of communism and the Soviet Union.

It also gave rise to the Truman Doctrine: a Cold War foreign policy set forth by President Harry S Truman, which stated that the US would give aid to any country that was supposedly under the threat of communism.

This doctrine in turn caused America's involvement in the Vietnam war. Many American youth protested this, which gave rise to the hippie movement of the 70s.

The Cuban Missile Crisis - This was the closest the Cold War came to becoming an all out war, or even worse, a nuclear war.

Hippie culture from the 1960s continued on, but the peaceful protests of the last generation took on a more demanding and often violent note. The Cold War continues, propelling innovation. The consumer culture of the 1950s and 60s had lead to debt and the 70s experienced a recession that caused a disillusion with optimism and structures of authority. The idea of a single style for most people disappeared and a multidude of trends appeared across all levels of society.

This was a time of great social change. This was when civil rights movements were in full swing. (poverty, segregation, feminism, gay/trans rights, etc.).

pop culture

In 1960, nearly half of America's population is under 18 years old. It's a young society, and the most affluent generation in U.S. history.

Definitive reads of the decade include To Kill a Mockingbird and Valley of the Dolls.

The Beatles are heard everywhere: pocket-sized transistor radios, eight-track stereos in cars, and portable record players. Everyone with a radio can sing along to the thrilling quality of stereo FM broadcasts. Although Elvis works hard to keep up, music is changing for good. The brightest stars are linked to the British Invasion, and the Motown and San Francisco sounds.

Mainstream religion is on the wane, except in growing evangelicalism and the new kind of relaxed non-denominational churches. In '66, the TIME cover story will actually ask "Is God Dead?" By the end of the decade.

Drug use was very popular. students and youth drawn to the counterculture experimented with drugs such as LSD and marijuana.

TV is the new craze. Color TV arrives in the early '60s and is embraced far more rapidly than the old black-and-white sets. By the end of the decade, 95 percent of homes have at least one TV.

Technology

The 1960s and 70s was also a time of great technological advancements. Especially in America, new innovations were constantly being made. Much of the technology we enjoy today was made during this boom.

Due to the explosion of television and cable, the film industry experienced an all time low. To combat this, the industry invested in magnifying celebrity culture and the allure of fame, bringing about the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame Stars.

This was still when celebrity culture was new.

Art

Music played a big role in this anti establishment culture. For example, punk and rock subcultures in the '60s and then disco in the '70s were largely a counter-cultural space. they were spaces of respite where marginalised people could be free from social barriers for just one night. It must be noted that the punk and rock subcultures originated from the youth of Britain.

Art movements in the 1960s was also very anti-establishment. with the rise of consumerism and the start of late stage capitalism, 60s artists were crucial to the emergence of social, political movements that defined this time. popular art styles in the 1960s included minimalism, conceptual art, psychedelic art, and pop art. the growth of consumerist culture and the increasing commodification of art caused many artists to revolt through their utilisation of commercial materials (especially in their imagery), emphasis on technique, and presentation of their art through installations/scluptures that were free and easily accessible to the public. while this was in part to rebel against abstract expressionism and the art world's institutions, it was, on a larger scale, a movement against everything the western world stood for. (eg: Andy Warhol, Ana Mendieta, Gordon Matta-Clarke)

Postmodernism emerged in response to modernism. it developed out of a skeptisicm for realism and the ideological systems that kept current systems of authority in power. It was a rejection of the idealism of the Modernist era and explored contradiction, juxtaposition and dystopia.

Postmodernism developed out of society’s realization that though they had been fighting for rights and freedoms for decades, the world was plagued with inequity. Systems weren’t changing to improve most people’s lives quickly enough. The 70s were not a time of optimism but more a time of anger and cynicism based on the ongoing suffering of so many areas of society. Artists were rejecting expected structures just as society was rejecting traditional expectations.

[atlas-atsus]

I read an article from the Associated Press this morning and it was eye opening if I am to be honest, it has resonated with me all day really

These calls feel a lot like letters from the world wars and hearing that the frontlines are moving into trench warfare was a bit shocking to me.

Especially in America we have a tendency to dehumanize these young men and of course, most of us who are more historically literate understand that it is not the soldiers at fault but the government, however it is also interesting to see how these boys justify it to themselves.

“F—-, you know, it’s driving me crazy here. It’s just that ... You were just … I felt you, touched you with my hand. I don’t understand how it’s possible, why, where … But I really felt you. I don’t know, I felt something warm, something dear. It’s like something was on fire in my hands, so warm … And that’s it. I don’t know. I was sleeping and then I woke up with all these thoughts. War … You know, when you’re sleeping — and then you’re like … War … Where, where is it? It was just dark in the house, so dark. And I went outside, walked around the streets, and thought: damn, f—- it. And that’s it. I really want to come see you.”

(Ivan, Russian Soldier, to his girlfriend Olya, AP News 2023)

Reading this and comparing it with letters written home by, for example, British soldiers during World War One

My Dearest Will, I feel I must write you again dear altho there is not much news to tell you. I wonder how you are getting on. I shall be so relieved to get a letter from you. I can't help feeling a bit anxious dear. I know how you must have felt darling when you did not get my letters for so long. Of course I know dear you will write as soon as ever you can, but the time seems so dull and weary without any news of you, if only this war was over dear and we were together again. It will be one day I suppose.

(Emily Chitticks to her fiance William Martin, 1917, Imperial War Museum)

Times may change but humans stay the same. History is repeating itself and it is absolutely tragic to watch.

We know this war will not end swiftly, it is an unfortunate truth of the cold war that has lasted long after Reagan declared it over, and in all honesty, nobody has a definitive solution to how to handle this situation, a one sided proxy war. I can only wish the best for all the civilians, and the soldiers, who are being played as pawns by their governments.

[rottingmanifesto]

Discussion/Ramble of post-9/11 AU

If you’ve read On Leave already, you’re aware of my American Idiot AU which is simply just Mafia 3, but post-9/11. Music plays a huge role in this as well, hence the title being one of the most politically scathing punk albums of the early 2000s. (What can I say? I’m a die hard pop punk and punk rock fan. I’m in the top 0.5% for Green Day and top 20% for Dead Kennedys, so that should say something.)

American Idiot takes place in a post-9/11 America and follows Lincoln Clay and John Donovan on their bumpy roads through (pseudo)-recovery, emotions, and pop culture. It’s essentially a semi-modern universe with punk music and it’s just one kid writing it instead of numerous people.

Here’s the ideas/WIPs I have at the moment:

American Idiot: The main “fic”, which is most likely going to be more of a timeline and general overview of the plot. I’m still undecided on how I want to execute this frankly.

City of the Damned: stories of Ellis, Danny, Giorgi, Lincoln, and Nicki (pre-Lincoln joining the Army). It’ll most likely include their reactions to 9/11 and domestic terrorism, so be warned.

Holiday: I honestly forgot, but probably just some small stories of Lincoln with his family/community.

Unnamed: A peek into John’s backstory, mainly his teenage years.

Novacaine: Lincoln smokes and talks with a war buddy while back in the states temporarily. He doesn’t go back home, for a myriad of reasons.

Coming Clean: Lincoln discovers that he’s not straight.

Know Your Enemy: John meets Connor Aldridge in the 90s (pre-9/11) and somewhat admires him. That gets destroyed after the events of 9/11, and the fic starts (or ends?) with John holding a gun to Aldridge’s head.

Letterbomb: Roxy is pissed at Lincoln for working with known racists (and a CIA agent, just look up the history of what the US government has done to the black community for details on that one), and loses her temper on him. That passion that Lincoln loved backfired on him.

I’m struggling with how Sal gets the money plates or if he should do something else, as the money-plates was heavily era-specific, but I’m open to ideas! Speaking of which, I probably will try to explore potential disorders that the characters have (I am not a professional, please don’t treat me as one lol) and how it manifests now that there are labels.

There’s more but that’s the basics for the actual verse!

History Ramble— Lowkey Important to ‘Verse

So I keep mentioning how a post-9/11 America directly mirrors the Cold War, and though it’s complicated to explain fully, I want to try to convey the basics of it. Warning for mentions of n@zis and general war/bad shit.

Note: this will be long, so click below to read!

Let’s start with WWII. USSR and US kinda hate each other, but meh, the n@.zis are way worse (well technically they took inspo from both other nations but that’s for later) so they shake hands and spill blood. Yay. The war’s won, which means we can now properly fistfight— well not really, because nuclear warfare is in its infancy, Europe is just fucked, and the US’s men are now boinking every broad they see, leading to the baby boom. No one really wants to have a WWIII, so the USSR and US stew. USSR develops (further) into an industrialist coalition of unwilling nations, and the US does its own imperialism and development. The next decades get… sticky, so bear with me.

1950s: The first hydrogen bomb is tested in 1950, the Korean War is a proxy-war for the USSR (North Korea) and the US (South Korea), and both the Space Race and Vietnam War begin, with SR being in ‘57 and VW in ‘59. The important thing here is the cultural change— modern ideals of ‘traditional’ are solidified here.

1960s: Ideally, Mafia 3 was a decent overview of general (and mildly romanticized) history, but during this era, the Vietnam War was in full swing (basically Korea part 2: the commies win), Civil Rights became a national debate, Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs, and the USSR dropped the largest atomic bomb known to humanity. By the end of this era, the threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction) and increasing costs of outright feuding between both superpowers caused a lull in tensions for a while. Basically like WWII— “fuck you, but I’m broke and not crazy so I’m not gonna nuke you.” “Same.”— and now it’s time for…

1970s: Economic crash right off the bat for the US. Hell, there was very little economic prosperity on either side, and the 70s saw far less public tension than the past 20 years. But ‘Nam dragged on, people became far more restless, and the CIA (and FBI) was head-on against the KGB. Going to be honest, not a lot happens in regards to the Cold War in the 70s, but you know what does happen? The CIA peddles drugs to underfunded and over-policed neighborhoods, specifically the black community! Who would’ve guessed. (Yes, I’m being sarcastic, fuck the US government. Sorry Donovan, that includes you.) Also evangelism takes a hold on the former 60s hippies, and would take America in its clutches. It would actually lead to Ronald Reagan’s popularity in the 80s, but that’s its own can of worms.

Side note: Ronald Reagan funded the Taliban ( AKA the CIA did it and used Reagan as a front man) during the time periods 1979-1989. I will DEFINITELY discuss this in American Idiot! because John will have an… interesting response to discovering his president and coworkers funded one of the largest Afghani terrorist organizations. Anyone who says John would like Reagan is absolutely wrong and doesn’t understand John nor the history surrounding it. Anyway, back to the timeline.

1980s: Whoo boy, there’s a lot. But here’s the main things:

1981: Ronald Reagan is elected president of the United States. Find out how he radicalized American politics here!

1989: the Berlin Wall is destroyed in one of the most monumental moments in modern history

Also 1989: USSR withdraws from Afghanistan after Operation Cyclone

1990s: The USSR officially crumbles on December 8th, 1991, after 45 years. Boris Yeltsin becomes leader of the “Commonwealth of Independent States”, but I don’t know enough about that to say how that affects anything.

Now to 9/11! Again, warnings for terrorism (including wh!te supremac!st domestic terrorism) and general war discussions, as well as islamaphobia. School shootings will also be mentioned.

Late 1990s: With the USSR no longer a threat, the US seemed to prosper until a little something known as Jihadism reared its head. During the dispute between the USSR and the US, numerous extremist groups such as al-Qaeda rose to prevalence in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. During this time, both domestically and internationally-fueled terrorism occurred, the most notable being below.

Right-Wing Terrorism

Oklahoma City Truck Bombing (1995), one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on US soil at the time. Left 168 dead.

Eric Rudolph’s many acts (1996-1998), namely the Centennial Olympic Park Bombing, killing two and injuring 111.

Columbine School Shooting (1999), two teenagers, affiliated with neo- n@zi beliefs, shot up their school and then killed themselves. 13 people died, 12 students and 1 teacher (not including them).

Side note: General Ku Klux Klan actions were occurring alongside the other attacks, but as per usual, the federal government did barely anything to combat these hate crimes. To no one’s surprise.

“Lone Wolf”

The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski (1970s-1990s), mailed his targets more than a dozen bombs that killed three people and injured many others.

Jihadist

New York World Trade Center attack (1993), a failed attempt to bring down the trade center that left six people dead.

Attacks on Kenyan and Tanzanian US embassies (1998), more than 200 left dead after the simultaneous attacks.

2000s: This decade became the catalyst for the new McCarthyism— fear of “who’s a terrorist”. It’s a hectic, loaded decade with political turmoil, some of my favorite albums/songs ever, and a push for social equality much like the 1960s (albeit it would be far more prevalent in the 2010s-20s.) Here’s some of the key events.

2001: September 11th, 2001. The twin towers in New York City are destroyed by two planes, one plane crashes into the side of the Pentagon, and the last lands off-course when the passengers fought their captors (sadly, ending their own lives in the process). This becomes the biggest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, and leads to a boom in nationalistic fervor with many young adults joining the military. Bush’s response of immediate attack also caused much of the modern perception of this era, but that is too long to explain in a Tumblr post.

2002: France openly criticizes the United States’ response to terrorism, causing a spike in hatred against the French/Western Europe (that heavily would affect meme culture in the late 2000s-today). “French fries” becoming “Freedom fries” is frankly pretty stupid in hindsight, but it goes to show just how common it was to hate anyone who disagreed with the government— this can be seen strongly during Trump’s presidency.

2008: Obama becomes the first black president, and the Recession occurs. The Recession mimics what 1970s America faced, with rising gas prices and an outdated federal minimum wage.

2010s: It’s impossible to really summarize this era, but here is what I’ll say: the radicalization of the right due to the alt-right pipeline (online spheres), as well as Jihadist recruiting via social media, heavily resembles mid-60s tensions and late 70s/early 80s evangelism.

2020s (thus far): The United States after 11 years officially withdraws from Afghanistan on August 30th, 2021, directly mirroring the USSR’s withdraw post-Op Cyclone. Right-wing terrorism and “satanic panic” rises again through right-wing online platforms such as QAnon, and we’re right back to where we began. Turmoil, a divided nation of ideals, and the CIA being cunts. Truly, a second Cold War.

Personal anecdote: QAnon’s effect on baby boomers could very well lead to a resurgence of the KKK. Just saying that makes me unbelievably pissed, but unfortunately, those who denounce history for being too “woke” are doomed to become the villains to the next generation. I could go on about how the political right wing uses fear tactics and strawman arguments without ever truly acknowledging any beliefs outside their own, but meh, that’s its own topic.

All sources not already linked:

Cold War

Missile Museum

PBS.org

Modern Terrorism

CNN

New America

US Department of Justice

————

I’m going to discuss how these events affect the characters/ their personal timelines in a later post, this one is getting way too long. If you stuck around this long, have some history memes for your patience.

[quakerjoe]

“VIOLENCE WILL NOT BRING CHANGE.”

That’s what Biden said in his latest advert.

Are we kidding ourselves here? Seriously? It’s the AMERICAN WAY! Let’s review a little history...

1619: SLAVERY BEGINS  in AMERICA

American Revolutionary War (1775–1783)

Cherokee–American wars (1776–1795) USA v. Native Americans

Northwest Indian War (1785–1793) USA v. Native Americans

Shays' Rebellion (1786–1787) USA v. Citizens During Debt Crisis

Whiskey Rebellion (1791–1794) USA v. Citizens over TAXES

Quasi-War (1798–1800) Naval Pissing Match- USA v. France

Fries Rebellion (1799–1800) USA . PA Dutch Farmers over TAXES

First Barbary War (1801–1805) USA & Sweden v. N. Africa (Pirates)

German Coast Uprising (1811) Slave Rebellion in New Orleans v. USA

Tecumseh's War (1811) Native Annihilation.

War of 1812 (1812–1815) USA v. Britain over UK’s seizure of ships and men

Creek War (1813–1814) USA v. Alabama Native Americans

Second Barbary War (1815) Again.

First Seminole War (1817–1818) USA v. Florida Native Americans

Texas–Indian Wars (1820–1875) USA v. Texas Natives & Spain/Mexico

Arikara War (1823)  USA v. Sioux Native Americans

Aegean Sea Anti-Piracy Operations of the United States (1825–1828)

Winnebago War (1827) USA v. Wisconsin Native Americans

First Sumatran expedition (1832) USA v. Indonesia

Black Hawk War (1832) USA v. Ill & Mich Native Americans

Texas Revolution (1835–1836) USA v. Mexico to steal Tex-ass

Second Seminole War (1835–1842) USA v. Native Americans in Florida

Second Sumatran expedition (1838)

Aroostook War (1838) USA v. Britain over N. Brunswick & Maine Border

Ivory Coast expedition (1842) USA v. Bereby, W. Africa against Slavers

Mexican–American War (1846–1848) USA v. Mexico to seize TX, NM & CA

Cayuse War (1847–1855) USA v. Oregon Native Americans (Annihilation)

Apache Wars (1851–1900) USA v. Apache Native Americans in s.west

Bleeding Kansas (1854–1861) USA v. USA Kansas & Missouri Conservative PRO-Slavery versus Abolitionist/Progressive ANTI-Slavery in new territories.

Puget Sound War (1855–1856) USA v. coastal Wash. State Native Americans

First Fiji expedition (1855) USA v. Fiji over the islanders not wanting rich American fucks there anymore. We did away with that by force, by Harry!

Rogue River Wars (1855–1856) USA v. Oregon Native Americans

Third Seminole War (1855–1858) USA purges last of Florida Natives

Yakima War (1855–1858) USA v. Washington Native Americans

Second Opium War (1856–1859) USA, Britain & France v. China over forcing the Chinese to buy opium to keep them compliant

Utah War (1857–1858) USA v. The F’n MORMONS  This was the Waco Tex-Ass of its time.

Navajo Wars USA v. New Mexico Native Americans (Long Walk)

Second Fiji expedition (1859) USA v. Fiji. We told them once...

John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry (1859) USA v. USA, Prelude to Civil War

First and Second Cortina War (1859–1861) USA (Then CSA) v. Mexico in TX

Paiute War (1860) USA v. Nevada Native Americans

American Civil War (1861–1865) USA v. CSA

Yavapai Wars (1861–1875) USA v. AZ Native Americans

Dakota War of 1862 (1862) USA v. Minnesota & Dakota Native Americans

Colorado War (1863–1865) USA v. Colorado, Wyoming & Nebraska Natives

Shimonoseki War (1863–1864) UK, USA, France, Dutch v. Japan over straight between Japan’s own islands.

Snake War (1864–1868) USA v. Native Americans in Oregon, Nevada, Idaho & California

Powder River War (1865) USA v. Native Americans in Montana & Dakota

Red Cloud's War (1866–1868) USA v. Native Americans in Wyoming & Montana

Formosa expedition (1867) USA v. Taiwan Natives in response to massacre of crew of wrecked USS Rover, a small bark.

Comanche Campaign (1867–1875) USA v. Native Americans in western states/territories

Korea expedition (1871) USA v. Korea in retaliation for being shot at because they hated us.

Modoc War (1872–1873) USA v. Native Americans in N. Cali & Oregon.

Red River War (1874–1875) USA v. Native Americans in S.W. 

Las Cuevas War (1875) USA/TX v. Mexican Raiders

Great Sioux War of 1876 (1876–1877) USA v. Native Americans in S.W.

Buffalo Hunters' War (1876–1877) USA v. Native Americans in TX & OK

Nez Perce War (1877) USA v. Native Americans in Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming & Montana

Bannock War (1878) USA v. Native Americans in Oregon, Idaho & Wyoming

Cheyenne War (1878–1879) USA v. Native Americans in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, S. Dakota and Montana

Sheepeater Indian War (1879) USA v. Native Americans in Idaho

Victorio's War (1879–1881) USA/Mexico v. Apache in Mexico

White River War (1879–1880) USA v. Native Americans in Colorado

Pine Ridge Campaign (1890–1891) USA v. Native Americans in S. Dakota

Garza Revolution (1891–1893) USA & Mexico v. Mexican Revolutionaries

Yaqui Wars (1896–1918) USA/Mexico v. Native Americans in Mexico & AZ

Second Samoan Civil War (1898–1899) USA v. Germany over Samoa Control because screw the natives already living there.

Spanish–American War (1898) USA v. Spain- when the US wanted to bugger Spain and used the likely accidental destruction of the USS Maine (”Remember the Maine!”) in Havana Harbor as an excuse for war.

Philippine–American War (1899–1902) USA v. Philippines because we won you from Spain in the last war; screw you if you’re a native on the island.

Moro Rebellion (1899–1913) USA v. Philippines because while we’re here, we’ll meddle in your politics too.

Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) USA v. China because they wanted those douchebag imperialists, foreigners and goddamn Christians to simply fuck the hell off back to where they came from because they suck.

Crazy Snake Rebellion (1909) USA v. OK Native Americans because Americans just LOVE betraying treaties and killing the native population.

Border War (1910–1919) USA v. Mexico & Germany because it’s more fun to play with guns and kill one another rather than sit at a table with a map and come to an amicable agreement. 

Negro Rebellion (1912) USA v. Cuba (under US control from war with Spain) where we literally went in and slaughtered Afro-Cubans for wanting freedom. (Part of the Banana Wars)

Occupation of Nicaragua (1912–1933) USA v. Nicaragua where the US seized land and occupied it because a canal was going to be built and never was. Oops.  (Part of the Banana Wars)

Bluff War (1914–1915) USA v. Native Americans in Utah and Colorado. Again. Why should the last generation have all the fun, right?

Occupation of Veracruz (1914) USA v. Mexico. Because fuck those Mexicans, right?

Occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) USA v. Haiti because why not? We own you now.  (Part of the Banana Wars)

Occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) USA v. D.R. because we may as well own you too while we’re in the area.

World War I (1917–1918)

USA arriving very late in the “War to End All Wars”. “Thanks for nothing,” said the allies, “But please; take all the credit.”

Russian Civil War (1918–1920) USA & Europe v. Bolshevik Russia which didn’t end well for the USA & allies. We totally lost that one.

Last Indian Uprising (1923) USA v. Native Americans in Utah because we’d rather have Mormons than the Ute and the Paiute tribes.

World War II (1939–1945)

USA fights Japan covertly in the Pacific, aiding China against Japanese aggression. USA assists Britain and occupied Europe against the FASCIST regimes of Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini in Italy and fucks off until the Attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941. “Oh, THIS shit again?” asks Europe. “Showing up late YET AGAIN, but sure; hey, USA, take all the credit yet again. Seriously, fuck you guys. Thanks for the assist, but we could have saved millions of lives of you’d gotten of your fat asses YEARS ago!”

Korean War (1950–1953) USA v. N. Korea in a proxy war with the USSR and China because fuck those commies, right? We won, even though they kicked our asses and a formal treaty was NEVER signed so technically the war is actually STILL ON.

Laotian Civil War (1953–1975) USA v. Laos and those commie scumbags. Yep. We don’t talk about this one because we LOST.

Lebanon Crisis (1958) USA v. Lebanon, Beirut, because we like Christians and fuck those Muslim twats, right? (God, we’re not a good people in the US...)

Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961) USA & Cuban Revolutionaries v. Cuban Government because fuck the commies. Maybe if we help, we’ll own Cuba again... Oops. Nope. Totally fucked that up.

Simba rebellion, Operation Dragon Rouge (1964) USA and EU Allies v. S.E. Asia in amounted to a total clusterfuck that dissolved Vietnam and was a precursor there as well as other areas. It helped the rise of dictators all throughout the region. Khmer Rouge anyone?

Vietnam War (1955–1975) USA, S. Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand etc. v. China-backed, USSR backed N. Vietnam. The Imperialist WEST v. the Communist EAST. That ended in a shit-show for the West like all proxy wars in southeast Asia do.

Communist insurgency in Thailand (1965–1983) USA/Local allies v. China/ally backed communist rebels. Pretty much a draw that petered out and Communism didn’t really stick... sort of.

Korean DMZ Conflict (1966–1969) USA v. N. Korea because they attempted to convince the S. Koreans to rise up and join the North, throwing out the WEST. No dice for them.

Dominican Civil War (1965–1966) USA v. Dom. Republic insurgents to restore Dem elected government. It worked so well that we would decide never to really do that sort of thing again when doing it the opposite way gets us more money.

Insurgency in Bolivia (1966–1967) USA (CIA) & Bolivia stomp out Che Guevara because we’ll have none of this uprising shit.

Cambodian Civil War (1967–1975) USA v. Cambodian communists, because we were in the area anyway... “THE KILLING FIELDS” happened.

War in South Zaire (1978) USA & Allies v. USSR & Allies in Africa. Yes, another Cold War proxy war. Finally, the US wins one. Yay.

Gulf of Sidra encounter (1981) USA v. Libya- a pissing contest over a line in the water. Libyan fighters fire upon US fighters and get their asses handed to them. USA! USA! USA!

Multinational Intervention in Lebanon (1982–1984) USA joins the U/N to shaft the P.L.O. and Muslims in Lebanon because fuck them and we love Israel.

Invasion of Grenada (1983) USA v. Cuban-backed commie bastards who overthrew the democratically elected government. I know we said we wouldn’t do that again, but we hate Cuba more than these guys.

Action in the Gulf of Sidra (1986) USA v. Libya because fuck you, Qaddafi, and that bullshit line in the water. We’re sending a carrier group in to show YOU where the REAL line is.

Bombing of Libya (1986) USA v. Libya because they keep bombing shit around Europe and they make us keep coming back. France still likes Libya and wouldn’t let US fighters through their airspace as they left German air bases. US pilots were a bit fatigued having to go around the long way and ‘accidentally’ bombed the French Embassy in Libya...

Tanker War (1987–1988) USA v. Iran because fuck them, that’s why. Iran & Iraq were duking it out and Iran thought shooting at US and allied shipping would be good fun. USS Vincennes then shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 passengers; 66 of which were children. Yeah, we totally fucked that up hard-core.

Tobruk encounter (1989) USA v. Libya. Again. That line. US F-14′s splash their MIGs. Now, stay. Good Libya.

Invasion of Panama (1989–1990) USA v. Panama dictator Manuel Noriega because he’s an evil cunt. No, not really. It was because he wouldn’t play ball with the US and the CIA. He was a drug lord anyway so fuck him.

Gulf War (1990–1991) USA & Allies v. Iraq because Saddam Hussein needed his dick slapped the fuck back out of Kuwait, a US & EU ally.

Iraqi No-Fly Zone Enforcement Operations (1991–2003) USA v. Iraq, because every now and then we had to go blow up some of their shit and keep them in their place.

First U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War (1992–1995) USA & Allies v. Somalia because why not? Lots of shooting, lots of dead, and nothing accomplished. The war is STILL going on.

Bosnian War (1992–1995) USA v. Bosnian, post USSR dictators because the US/NATO won’t act until AFTER the genocides...

Intervention in Haiti (1994–1995) USA v. Haiti, because damn it, we’ll restore your democratically elected government and put down that coup... for a price...

Kosovo War (1998–1999) USA and a fuck ton of allies v. Russia-backed Yugoslavia because human rights violations are for US southern CSA states only, fuckers. We sort of won this ‘contest’.

Operation Infinite Reach (1998) USA v. Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, because fuck those ‘towelheads’ we helped push out the Russians! How dare they turn on us imperialists when we treat them like peasants and shit on them? What nerve! How will Big Pharma keep up their poppy fields now? This means war...

THE 21st CENTURY

War in Afghanistan (2001–present)

2003 invasion of Iraq (2003) &  Iraq War (2003–2011)

War in North-West Pakistan (2004–present)

Second U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War (2007–present)

Operation Ocean Shield (2009–2016) USA v. Somali pirates

International intervention in Libya (2011) Because enough, Qaddafi. 

Operation Observant Compass (2011–2017) USA v. Uganda because of terrorist camps

American-led intervention in Iraq (2014–present) USA v. ISIS/ISIL in Iraq. Thanks, Obama; right?

American-led intervention in Syria (2014–present) USA v. ISIS/ISIL in Syria where we rounded up lots of ‘terrorist’ fighters.

Yemeni Civil War (2015–present)

American intervention in Libya (2015–present) USA v/ ISIS/ISIL in Libya. It’s as if the war in Iraq pissed off a ton of people in the region along with Israel’s expansion into Palestine territory over the years... Go figure.

THE TRUMP YEARS

Despite fucking over our allies in Syria and being far too cozy with Putin and Kim Jong Un and other dictators, sympathizing with Nazis in the US and having the KKK in his blood, trumplefuckstick hasn’t actually pushed any “NEW” wars upon the US so far. Sure, we’re in a state of chaos and about to collapse into a failed nation-state into that “shithole country” everyone thinks can’t happen here.

The point is:

“HEY JOE FUCKIN’ BIDEN! I DON’T MEAN TO THROW YOU OFF YOUR GAME HERE BUT WHILE I DO NOT CONDONE VIOLENCE, IT SEEMS THAT AS AMERICANS, IT’S THE ONLY WAY WE DO THINGS HERE TO GET SHIT DONE!”

Still don’t believe me? How about some non-war stuff...

How about EVERY act of white supremacist, KKK driven TERROR on non-whites since the Civil War ended or of the slave owners before them?

How about how our first real “police” in the US were bounty hunters looking for runaway slaves?

How about the Tulsa race massacre when white mobs attacked the black residents and business of the Greenwood District in Tulsa because the good people of Oklahoma didn’t want them “uppity niggers” to be doing as well or better than the white racist fucks were doing. That learned ‘em, didn’t it?

Let’s not forget the anti-union suppression! How about the  Herrin Massacre? During a United Mineworkers of America nationwide strike union miners shot at strikebreakers working at the mine. The mine's guards killed three union miners on June 21, and the miners killed 20 strikebreakers and guards on June 22.

What about the Hanapepe Massacre? During a strike of Filipino sugar workers, in an attempt to rescue two hostage strikebreakers police killed 16 strikers, while strikers killed four law enforcement members.

Kent State shootings: During a protest of the bombing of Cambodia at the University, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire, killing four and injuring nine people.

Jackson State University shooting: After responding to the University due to a growing unrest, officers opened fire on a dorm building and two students (one from a local high school) were killed and twelve were injured.

There are more, to be sure, but Mr. Biden, you ARE correct in one particular field here- gun violence. Look at this list HERE. So many acts of mass shootings going WAY back before Columbine. What’s been done about this by you, the Democrats or Republicans of the piece-of-shit NRA? Fuck-all NOTHING.

Your truth, Mr. Biden- in this instance, gun violence literally achieves NOTHING.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States#1920s

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I wasn’t expecting Russia to invade Ukraine until after their next election in 2024, but it looks as though things may kick off sooner rather than later.

In 2014, a pro-Russian candidate “won” a very dubious election, and the people ousted him from power. Russia subsequently invaded and annexed the Crimean peninsula under the guise of “providing military aid” to the ethnic Russians in the regions. It’s kinda like if the United States took over southern Ontario to protect Americans living abroad.

Shortly after this, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine (Donbass) rose up against the government and have been fighting a civil war ever since. Russia hasn’t directly gotten involved in the conflict, they just give supplies and funding to the rebels; imagine if the US started selling guns and tanks to pro-American rebels along the rest of the border.

While Russia could plausibly justify annexing Crimea because it had once been part of Russia and ceded to Ukraine in the 50s, there’s no way to justify taking a big chunk of eastern Ukraine. The war in Donbass has been raging on-and-off for years; there have been dozens of ceasefires, but none of them have lasted long. Russia is now building up troops along the border, signaling their intent to actually invade and help the rebels directly. This would be an inexcusable act of open war in Europe, which NATO would not stand for. Ukraine isn’t part of NATO, so they’re not technically obligated to respond, but they’re not going to just let Russia expand its sphere of influence by taking land from a strategically significant sovereign nation.

But Putin’s not stupid. He’s not going to start a war he doesn’t think he can win. NATO can’t really do anything to stop him unless the entire alliance commits to it, and there are at least three major obstructionists; the US, the UK, and Turkey (together the three largest militaries in NATO).

American foreign policy is all over the place, flipping back and forth depending on which political party controls the presidency; under Trump, the US would not only have allowed a Russian invasion, they would have encouraged it. Under Biden, he’ll take a more hardline stance (“hardline,” which like Obama in 2014 means sanctions and a strongly worded letter). Congress won’t want America to get involved in another foreign war; Republicans support Russia, and Democrats support Ukraine, but neither side will sign off on American interference because there’s no oil to be had. We’ll fuck around in the Middle East, sure, but Ukraine? Not gonna happen. And we’re so close to leaving Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, there’s no way Biden could commit troops to another war so soon after this one; it would be political suicide, even if it would help the Ukrainians.

UK foreign policy largely shadows the US, though the Conservative party (analogous to American Republicans) are staunchly Eurosceptic. They want to distance themselves from the continent as much as possible; they left the EU and will almost certainly try to leave NATO if the only other alternative is going up against Russia in a proxy war. Trump wanted to withdraw the US from NATO, and if some other Republican president follows through on this threat in the future, the UK will absolutely follow suit.

Turkey is backsliding towards authoritarianism; Erdogan was democratically elected, but has hijacked the executive branch to consolidate power and become a new Ottoman Emperor. Turkey is the second largest military in NATO behind the United States, and in recent years has been becoming closer to Russia then the rest of Europe. Erdogan and Putin are, for the moment, buddy-buddy; kindred dictatorial spirits. Turkey will likely withdraw from NATO to side with Russia in the Ukrainian conflict because they control the only straits connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. Russia needs to be in Turkey’s good graces or else they’ll be landlocked (save for Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg, but we’ll get to them later). Like Hitler and Stalin, they have an uneasy truce of convenience, but will almost certainly turn on each other later.

Putin has a blank check to do whatever he wants in Ukraine because Western Europe doesn’t want to start another Cold War. I thought for sure Russia would wait until 2024, then call the results of the election fraudulent as pretext for invasion. They very well still may, but given the troop buildup it’s possible the rebels are going to be getting a lot more support in the coming months.

And don’t even get me started on Belarus. Right now, there’s no indication that Belarus is involved with the Ukrainian situation, but the second they back Putin, it’s all over for Ukraine. Ukraine borders Russia to the east, and Belarus to the north; Kiev is within striking distance of the Ukraine-Belarus border, so if Belarus sided with Russia, then Russia could march troops directly on the Ukrainian capital, toppling the government and turning it into a pro-Russian satellite puppet. Belarus has been run by the same dictator ever since becoming independent from Russia in 1991, and the two countries share close personal ties, having joined the Union State in 1999. The Union State is a pact of Russian-Belarusian brotherhood, calling for economic and military unification.

Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia want to join the Union too, as does Moldova in Europe.

That said, the Belarusian dictator is a hardcore nationalist who wants to maintain independence from Russia rather than be annexed. He wouldn’t just let Russian troops occupy his country and march on Kiev; it would be like Belgium during the World Wars, with Germany (Russia) using them as a stepping stone to take France (Ukraine). We need to watch Belarus carefully to see how they respond to Russian interference. If they stand back and let it happen, Ukraine will fall without a fight, but if they try to maintain independence then it will trigger a full blown European war (quite possibly a prelude to WWIII)

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are part of NATO, so Russia can’t touch them without inviting total war. But do you notice that purple spot between Lithuania and Poland? That’s Kaliningrad, and though separated from the rest of the country, it’s part of Russia. Just north of Estonia, off the map, is St Petersburg, which along with Kaliningrad represent Russia’s only two port cities in the Baltic Sea. They both freeze over in the winter, rendering them unusable, which is why Russia cared so much about taking Crimea with its warm water ports in the Black Sea.

If Turkey and the UK and the US were to leave NATO, the entire alliance would pretty much collapse, giving Russia another blank check to do whatever they want with Eastern Europe. If Russia annexes Belarus, they could very likely annex Lithuania to reconnect Kaliningrad with the rest of the country.

The closest thing to a super power Europe has that could butt heads with Russia is Germany, but they’re dealing with their own internal struggles right now; the Alternative For Germany party (neo-Nazi party) is the fastest growing party in their parliament, and though they have nowhere near a majority it’s terrifying to think they could assert influence over the other right-wing parties and form coalition governments.

This is all just rampant speculation; Putin knows more than I do, he’s not an idiot, and I don’t claim to understand the inner machinations of the Red Army, but I can see the writing on the walls. There may not be a direct war, but whatever the conflict, it will look very similar to the events posited above.

In the unlikely event that Russia marches on Kiev, the Ukrainian government may fall back to a national redoubt (secondary capital) in the west, perhaps near Lviv or in the Carpathian Mountains along the border with Romania. If this happens, I could see Ukraine being split in two like Korea or Germany; East and West Ukraine, though both sides would claim sovereignty over the entire country.

[arcticdementor]

In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”

The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.

The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.

For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

…

A decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The NBA’s $1.5 billion contract with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”

Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

…

But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.

And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.

That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.

…

The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took another turn.

Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.

…

Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.

“It’s so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,” says former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding.

Unsurprisingly, the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only proposed tariffs but also his call for American companies to start moving critical supply chains elsewhere, even in the wake of a pandemic. The National Defense Industrial Association recently complained of a law forbidding defense contractors from using certain Chinese technologies. “Just about all contractors doing work with the federal government,” said a spokesman for the trade group, “would have to stop.”

…

Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.

The idea that countries that scorn basic human and democratic rights should not be directly funded by American industry and given privileged access to the fruits of U.S. government-funded research and technology that properly belongs to the American people is hardly a partisan idea—and has, or should have, little to do with Donald Trump. But the historical record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made himself a focal point for the China Class, which had adopted the Democratic Party as its main political vehicle. That’s not to say establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy—Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James Chao has benefited greatly from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators.

Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly served. Accommodation with even the worst and most threatening aspects of the Chinese communist regime, ongoing since the late 1990s, was put on fast-forward. Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.

…

There is a good reason why lockdowns—quarantining those who are not sick—had never been previously employed as a public health measure. The leading members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the population at large. It had never been used before as a public health measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political repression.

…

China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face—for instance that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn’t the bad guy here—it’s a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China’s lead. And by March, with Trump’s initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people.

Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer—$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone—while impoverishing Trump’s small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign. And yet in a sense, Joe Biden really did represent a return to normalcy in the decadeslong course of U.S.-China relations.

…

What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.

What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

[alistairlane]

A Century of Strife

               Since the dawn of civilization, men have driven others to war in order to service their own ends. Such an act betrays every noble virtue of any state of any kind.  There is no honor or glory in that a person should stake their life in a conflict decided by that callous men are incapable of maintaining their affairs without sending others to war.  For far too long has the world been governed by men who consider human life to be an expendable sacrifice.  The regimens of Capital are concerned with business interests do not seriously care for the lives of soldiers.  The various totalitarian dogmatists, in all likelihood, distrust their myrmidons. The sectarian fanatics are too fixated upon their obsessions to genuinely concern themselves with whether or not another may die so that they can maintain inane positions.  Those who are in favor of war should have to go to it. Such is the lot of such a psychological disposition.  The fear of violence is the condition that all of humanity seeks to liberate itself from. Why any person should choose to acquiesce to it is beyond me.

               War lost its verve in 1914.  The world could no longer accept that such cataclysms were let to occur when faced with the inescapable reality of them during the First World War.  The incapacity to cope with such a calamity led to an escapist reaction amongst men who were unwilling to face up to what the horrors of war revealed about the human condition.  Such a reaction laid the rudiments of the Third Reich.  Never has a Pacifist, such as I, been so plagued by such an adversary. Fascism is war profiteering at its zenith.  The Nazis were all but too perfect of an antagonist.  Never has humanity seen such evidence of the existence of evil.  It is easy to concede that the paroxysm of Fascism needed to be quelled.  What is difficult is to come to terms with what that such a catastrophe as the Second World War has created the circumstances of our global situation today. To speculate upon what the world would be like had the war not taken place is an exercise in reverie.  A Pacifist does not need to counter the begged question “What should we have done?” with alternative history.  One need only ask, “What was it for?”  The promise of a paradisiacal future was ephemeral. The Cold War began almost immediately after the Second World War ended.  The Cold War was comprised, along with the absurd logic of nuclear deterrence, of a series of proxy wars and clandestine operations between the United States and the Soviet Union.  The U.S. would arm, train, and, fund, a litany of Fascist terrorist cells and other nefarious malefactors, thereby resuming the alliance between American business and the far-Right that occurred before the Second World War, and, the Soviet Union would distribute weapons to any number of left-wing guerillas during this period of time.  Both sides propped up totalitarian dictatorships in their respective quests for global domination.  Arms were left all across the globe.  The Cold War, while resulting in any number of armed conflicts, was largely psychological. War had transformed from being a vainglorious battle between the people of one nation against another to a somewhat ubiquitous campaign for the hearts and minds of all.  The Soviet Union officially collapsed on the 26th of December in 1991.  The celebration of freedom was, again, short-lived.  The unrectified imperial haunts of the colonial era and the widespread distribution of weapons would result in the Rwandan Genocide and a series of civil wars in the Congo.  The Cold War may not have approached the casualties incurred during the First or Second World War, but, left a considerable body count in its wake.  

                 We now live in an era where war has become diffuse.  Conflicts occur and are largely ignored by the general populace.  War has become a state of affairs.  The “War on Terror” is an indefinite project with no foreseeable conclusion.  Such a conflict has no real enemies and is more or less an excuse to carry on war profiteering.  It is the case that war plays a significant role in the American economy.  Such wasteful expenditure could probably actually achieve the practical conditions of peace on Earth were it to be better purposed.  Such a program would do far more to counter terrorism than all-pervasive surveillance and asymmetrical warfare.  In its refusal to acknowledge that war is just simply undesirable, the globalized American state is becoming a latter-day totalitarian regime.  Should they be let to occur, the next series of conflicts will take the form of vitiated civil wars against and betwixt Empire.  While a number of revolutionaries may be keyed up in their anticipation of a spontaneous revolution, I fail be moved by the reckless form of suicide that consists of taking up arms against the United States of America.  The U.S. is the most heavily armed nation in the world.  The geopolitical bale of the nation will not be undone by violence. Only through the practical application of nonviolent resistance will the U.S. see a form of protest that is capable of putting its power in check.

                  War engenders devastation.  The world has still yet to learn from a historical event that occurred over a century ago.  A civilian populace can not concede to the destruction of their society.  A soldier can not agree to sacrifice their life to an adulterated cause given the full breadth of their endeavor.  All wars involve deceit.  A populace does not agree to go to war, they are beguiled by the many distractions and falsehoods promulgated by the State.  A soldier does not agree to stake their life in conflict without reservations, they are indoctrinated into a fabricated ideology propagated by their regimen.  The pillage of war goes only to those who advance its cause.  Those who conspire to wage war are the only parties who benefit from it.  All forms of war involve profiteering.  That a person should ask another to stake their life in a conflict that involves the killing of others for their own personal gain is inexpiable.  Such popular manipulation betrays every form of trust known to man.  War is unethical.  The freedom from coercion is the primary right of all people at all times.  It is demanded by that another exists.  No person can agree to be subject to violence. Such terms comprise the basic tenets of the democratic project as a whole.  War negates democracy.  The world should not concede to cynical atrophy.  The liberation of all of humanity demands an end to war.  Such a demand is as possible as it is necessary.

               The realization of peace on Earth is the reason for politics.  A genuine politician strives to prevent wars at all possible times.  The very process of politics exists due to a need to resolve conflicts.  There is no question as to whether or not global peace is reasonable as it is ought to be precisely what is entrusted to political delegates.  The purpose of politics is to prevent war.  The seemingly inescapable pathology of those who see war as being inevitable has distorted the political project since its inception. Such hypocritical cynicism is espoused to dispirit populaces.  Far too many elected leaders are in favor of waging wars as an appeal to nationalism is an effective means of silencing political opposition.  Such circumstances should not be let to continue.  Peace is not just possible; it is the necessary condition for democracy to occur.    

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: in my last post, I took the opportunity to teach a little bit of U.S. imperial history in Latin America by comparing the disturbing similarities between the Nixon White House’s fanatical quest to topple (and ultimately kill) Salvadore Allende in Chile, and the U.S.’s now decade and a half long crusade to topple the Chavez and Maduro governments in Venezuela. Today I thought I’d take a step even further back and talk about the long and brutal history of American imperialism in Latin America and why said history, makes it highly unlikely “the People of Venezuela” are interested in a U.S.-backed coup and Pig Empire-sponsored regime change.

Today’s passage comes from historian Greg Grandin’s 2006 book “ Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism” - a work recommended by no less an authority than the late Hugo Chávez, the then-President of Venezuela and a man who survived his own encounter with Pig Empire imperialism during a failed 2002 American-backed coup attempt against his government. Please note that while I am loathe to truncate content when quoting from such a great book, this passage contains two edits (as denoted by the ellipses) where I was required to remove a brief overview of the use of American “soft power” in Latin America - for the moment, we’re going to focus primarily on economic warfare (sanctions) and U.S. military interventions; whether by invasion, by proxy or by fomenting coups inside foreign countries.

The first and most obviously stunning thing you’ll notice about this quotation is both the elongated timeline and the stupefying volume of U.S interventions in Latin America. Over a span of more than a century and despite a near-constant churn of changing U.S leadership, the American crowning jewel of the Pig Empire has flexed some form of military or coercive economic power against almost every single nation in South and Central America; often on multiple occasions and typically with disastrously violent results.

It should also be noted that long before the United States even existed as a nation, much of what is now called Latin America had already been invaded and forced into a brutal colonial relationship with various Western European empires, like Spain, Portugal and France - sparking further atrocities that would continue well into the modern global era. Understanding this horrifying colonial history is important because of the drastic effect it has had on racially-influenced class dynamics frequently exploited by the Pig Empire to exert control over Latin America. The upper class elite in the region are typically members of families descended from those early, Western European colonizers. While the lower classes are over-represented among indigenous people and Afro-Latin Americans, who like their African American counterparts, endure still under the legacy of slavery and (still ongoing) exploitation that has prevented the accumulation of familial wealth to be passed down through the generations.

Although the timeline in the above passage runs from William Walker’s private invasion of Nicaragua in the 1850′s until roughly the end of the Cold War, and the U.S. invasion of Panama (a nation that only exists because of a prior American military intervention in Latin America), as the author notes in “Empire’s Workshop” the United States has coveted control of Latin America and the Caribbean almost from the moment our nation came into being. Indeed, the U.S. imperialist aspirational project in Latin America eventually soured strong, early American relations with the Spanish Empire, as tensions between the two empires grew, first in Florida and then in what is now Cuba; ultimately erupting into the Spanish-American War of 1898. 

Furthermore, as Grandin details elsewhere in the book, this military and economic coercion has marched virtually in lockstep with the business interests of American capital and corporations like Standard Oil, Ford Motors and the infamous United Fruit Company; even during the so-called “soft power” years under Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” the Pig Empire continued to core away at Latin American sovereignty and left wing economic reforms on behalf of ruthless U.S. business enterprises that in some cases, actually participated in the violence.

Finally it’s important to remember that the exertion of coercive American power did not stop at the end of the Cold War either. Including the 2002 U.S backed coup attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the two most recent attempts to topple his successor Nicolás Maduro, we can trace a distinct, unbroken line of election interference, economic warfare and Pig Empire-supported coups throughout Latin America - regardless of whether Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama or Trump have resided in the White House.

Each of these invasions, interventions and violations of sovereignty too were packaged and sold to a disturbingly credulous American public and international community as acts of civilization, humanitarianism or protective justice. Yet even after almost two-hundred years of U.S. attempts to “help” Latin America, the results have always been the same - war, violence, corruption, exploitation, fascist dictatorships, brutal suppression of left wing voices, the continued genocide of indigenous peoples, death squads, endless crushing poverty for the majority of the populace, as well as the further enrichment of American capital and the right wing elite in the countries we target.  

Processing this vast, five-hundred-plus year history of Western colonial exploitation and American imperial violence in Latin America is important in the context of the American-backed slow-motion coup in Venezuela, because it brings up a number of extremely germane questions.

Questions like, why the heck would this time be any different? Why would anyone believe that this time, the mainstream media isn’t just reporting what “anonymous officials” in our bloodthirsty, warmongering government tell them? Why would anyone believe that a few thousand affluent protestors on screen from Caracas represented the will of a nation of thirty million people? Why would anyone believe that this time, it’s not about the oil? Why would anyone believe it’s just an accident Latin America has seen a clean sweep of far right, pro-US governments in recent years? Why would anyone believe that this time, it really is about human rights? Why would anyone believe that this time, unhinged sociopath John Bolton is telling the truth? Why would anyone believe that Trump suddenly cares about the suffering people in “sh*thole countries?”

Most importantly however, it brings up the question of why after Iraq, Libya and two centuries of Pig Empire interventions in Latin America, anyone would believe “the people of Venezuela” want our help at all?

- nina illingworth

[klawsofwakandablog]

The Politics of Wakanda, Chapter Five: Wakanda Vs. All

The Politics of Wakanda: an in-depth look at those that shaped the politics of the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel universe.

All chapters:

Chapter one - T'Chaka

Chapter two - T'Challa

Chapter three - Killmonger

Chapter four - M’Baku

Chapter five - Shuri

===================================

King T'Challa’s reforms turned the formely hidden and isolationist nation of Wakanda into one of the most influential nations on earth. The country’s vast vibranium deposit, combined with T'Challa’s astute leadership and his connections with the superhero community, allowed Wakanda to exert its weight in international affairs.

Yet, the Wakandan people struggled to adapt to this new environment. Xenophobia, general distrust of the outside world, and a desire to retreat from the global community lingered amongst a notable segment of the Wakandan population. This negative perspective solidified when outsiders began confirming the Wakandan people’s worst fears of the outside world.

Some time after the Skrull infiltration of Earth, T'Challa nearly became a victim of Dr. Doom’s assassination attempt. Doom’s attack put Wakanda in great disarray, as T'Challa’s life hung in the balance and Wakandan had no idea if their king would survive. Fearing another attack was imminent and not knowing if T'Challa would live, the Wakandan government enacted its line of succession to find a new Black Panther.

Being that T'Challa had no heir, his then-wife, Ororo Munroe, was next in line to become a Black Panther. Ororo declined, electing to help save T'Challa’s life from apparent death. Instead, Ororo nominated Shuri–T'Chaka’s only daughter and the youngest child of the royal family–to become T'Challa’s successor.

This choice was of great significance. T'Challa has a long history of interacting with outsiders, resulting in him gaining a good amount of nuance concerning them and overall empathy for humanity at large.

Shuri, however, didn’t go through such experiences. She mostly remained in Wakanda. She was educated in her homeland. She didn’t have various excursions or adventures outside of her homeland, nor did she develop her own personal contacts or relationships with outsiders, including the superhero community.

Thus, Wakanda’s new leader was akin to a modern update of those that ruled before T'Challa. She looks down on xenophobia, but isn’t open to outsiders she doesn’t know and trust; she believes in maintaining lines of communication with the outside world, but had Wakanda less involved in international affairs. She believes that Wakanda can’t stay as it was, but will strongly defend the legitimacy of older customs.

Her biggest impact, however, was her focus on national identity. Unlike T'Chaka–who sought to change the old ways–and T'Challa–who sought to end them–Shuri emphasized being Wakandan over local and personal affiliations. In her mind, being Wakandan was what mattered and the welfare of the nation came first.

Shuri’s rhetoric was genuine, but also a political necessity. Soon after Doom’s attack on T'Challa, Wakanda was reeling from a vicious attack by Morlun, the totem eater. Not long after, Doom enacted a coup attempt using the Desturi, a hardline traditionalist faction in Wakanda, as proxies. The coup attempt resulted in the death of S'Yan, a former Black Panther and T'Chaka’s brother, and the majority of Wakanda’s vibranium deposits being inert.

These attacks, on top of causing mass panic domestically, made the Wakandan people question Shuri’s leadership and whether she was worthy of the throne. Her nationalistic rhetoric wasn’t just a public admittance of her political beliefs, but also a call for Wakandans from all walks of life to rally under her banner against the nation’s enemies. Said enemies weren’t local tribes or a charismatic individual vying for the throne, but hostiles from outside of Wakanda’s borders.

None of Shuri’s actions or rhetoric, however, could’ve prepared Wakanda from one of the biggest attacks ever on Wakandan soil. While the Avengers were in conflict with Phoenix force-influenced X-Men, Namor of Atlantis(who was influenced by the Phoenix force as well) attacked Wakanda upon learning that a mutant was held captive in Wakandan soil. Flanked by Atlantean forces, Namor launched a biblical flood, killing thousands of Wakandans and destroying a notable amount of the nation’s infrastructure.

Namor’s attack changed everything. No longer were outsiders a concern that Wakanda had to look out for. They were a problem that threatened the very existence of Wakanda itself. Nationalist sentiments in Wakanda became more widespread, both due to the severity of Namor’s attack and Shuri herself, who doubled down on her rhetoric.

The apparent progress made during T'Challa’s first reign came to a screeching halt. Wakanda began distancing itself from the international community; it began moving unilaterally once more; Wakandans became less welcoming to outsiders, leaning more and more towards their initial distrusts.

Meanwhile, Shuri had Wakanda take a more militaristic stance. She reversed T'Challa’s order of exile for the Hatute Zeraze–Wakanda’s former secret police formed by T'Chaka–and repurposed them into an elite strike forces. She built up Wakanda’s military readiness and shored up its national defense. Not long after, Wakanda and Atlantis entered a cold war phase, with Wakandan and Atlantian factions clashing in various parts of the world.

Unbeknownst to everyone in Wakanda and elsewhere, a world-ending phenomenon called incursions were discovered by T'Challa. Upon the discovery, T'Challa gathered the Illuminati (Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt, Reed Richards, Captain America, Beast and Namor) at the Wakandan Necropolis to help him solve this incredible problem. Namor and T'Challa decided to have a truce, after both concluded that the incursions were a threat to everyone. T'Challa and the Illuminati decided to work on solving the problem in secret.

Soon after, Namor shrewdly offered a secession of hostilities between Wakanda and Atlantis in order for both he and T'Challa to focus on solving the incursion threat. Namor was well-aware that Wakandans sought war and took advantage of the incursion crisis to offer what was essentially a poison pill of a peace offer. Shuri accepting the peace offer could rip the nation apart from within.  

Namor also revealed to T'Challa that elements within Wakanda were colluding with him to topple Shuri’s rule. With this revelation and the importance of solving the incursion crisis, Namor was utterly convinced that T'Challa, a former king and a highly-influential monarch, would be able to sway Shuri to not have an open war, even without admitting to the Wakandans about the incursions.

Namor greatly misunderstood the political landscape in Wakanda. All walks of Wakandan life, from the people, to members of the government, to Shuri herself, desired retribution for Namor’s attack. Wakandans rallied behind Shuri’s banner. By the time Namor’s offer was discussed, the nation was unified for war. Barring something incredible occurring, a military response was inevitable and not even T'Challa could stop it.

The Wakandan-Atlantean war was costly, though not for the reasons one would think. From a conventional standpoint, Wakanda had the upper hand. Wakandan forces destroyed Atlantis and Atlantean forces were ultimately no match for Wakanda’s military might.

In the background, however, Thanos discovered that the infinity gems were on Earth, and knew who recently used them (T'Challa and the Illuminati). Thanos’ fiercest lieutenants–the Black Order–went in force to each Illuminati’s base of operations. Proxima Midnight found Namor in a leveled Atlantis. Desperate to save whatever was left of his nation, Namor gave Proxima his allegiance to Thanos and a lie: that an infinity gem was in Wakanda.

Namor’s lie served as his counter attack. Based on his false statement, Proxima lead the full might of Thanos’ army to Wakanda. While T'Challa and the Illuminati were secretly fighting off an incursion, Shuri and the Wakandans fought back against Proxima and Thanos’ forces, but were ultimately forced to retreat.

T'Challa and the Illuminati returned from their fight to find both their base of operations in the Necropolis and Wakanda itself were under attack. Concluding that preventing their anti-incursion bombs from being destroyed was the bigger matter, T'Challa and the Illuminati chose to head to the Necropolis.

Tensions in Wakanda were at an all-time high. Wakanda’s walls were breached. Outsiders were threatning their very existence. On top of that, their former king seemed missing in action.

It was after the battle against Thanos’ full military might that Shuri discovered that T'Challa harbored Namor in the Necropolis all this time. Despite her insistence for an explanation, T'Challa kept his oath of secrecy with the Illuminati, refusing to tell Shuri why he harbored Namor on Wakandan soil. With the support of the Hatute Zeraze and the Dora Milaje, Shuri banned T'Challa from Wakanda. The nation came above all, including family.

Some time after, Namor broke away from the Illumanati and formed the Cabal, consisting of himself, Thanos, Thanos’ Black Order, Black Swan, and Maximus the Mad. The Cabal confiscated the anti-incursion bombs and made an offer to the world: let us destroy Wakanda and we’ll fight against the incursion crisis. The world gave in to the Cabal’s blackmail.

Wakanda was destroyed and its people victims of genocide. With all options exhausted, Shuri (who reconciled with T'Challa) decided to stay back and ensure that T'Challa could escape. Knowing that it meant certain death, she transferred the rulership back to T'Challa while giving him her final order as queen: kill Namor.

T'Challa managed to recreated the planet (including Wakanda) using the Infinity Gauntlet and, as it turned out, apparent death wasn’t the end of Shuri’s journey. After being defeated by Proxima Midnight and placed in a state between life and death, her soul found itself in the Djalia, the plane of Wakandan memory. There, she learned of Wakanda’s deep past and the traditions that went on to make the Wakandan nation-state.

Upon her return to the living due to T'Challa’s efforts, she found a fractured Wakanda. Insurrectionist were attempting a hostile takeover of the throne. The Dora Milaje broke away from their king and took over the Jabari-Lands. Her return to the living–and to T'Challa’s side–made her a stabilizing element during the crisis and aided T'Challa in regaining control of the nation.

Her journey in the Djalia, it turns out, reenforced her beliefs: the Wakandan identity is invaluable; the welfare of the nation trumps all. With all that she have experienced, Shuri could rightfully say that she lived by her ideals, something few could claim.

Hope that you enjoyed “The Politics of Wakanda” series! Be sure to check out the previous chapters (links are at the start of this blog post)!

[sovietvalleyartworkfmp]

The USSR and Oppression

History of the USSR:

The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) also known as The Soviet Union was a communist nation formed in 1922 and collapsing in 1991, it existed in what is now modern day Russia, the Baltics, Central Asia and the Caucuses. The Soviet Union was a major nuclear power from 1949-1991 which lead to a rivalry with the other world nuclear power The United States of America, this rivalry was nicknamed the 'Cold War' due to the fact that because both nations had nuclear weapons they would not engage each other in open warfare because of the risk posed by potential nuclear holocaust caused by the other, this lead to the only conflict by the two being either via proxy such as in Vietnam or Afghanistan or via intelligence agencies and their operations. Because the 'Cold War' was 'won' by the USA it meant that the Soviet Union was painted as the bad guy in the conflict whereas in reality they were both as bad as each other. This red scare created by propagandists in the US lead to a hatred of the Soviet people which continues to this day.

The oppression of the failed government:

The Soviets were not innocent by any means, they employed work camps such as the Germans did during the NSDAP's reign over it, they had curfews for all citizens, banned forms of media to restrict opinions and knowledge, removed unwanted political movements and parties from public knowledge for pushing to change the status quo. The Soviets also had the largest intelligence agency in the world with which they used to push their communist agenda on any fledgling nation on the brink of civil war, this angered the West, especially the US as collapsing governments to further their political, economic and world power was what the CIA's (the US Central Intelligence Agency)' speciality, the sheer amount of control being pushed over Central and South America by the CIA to control the governments, civil wars and dictators to further American agendas down South is outstanding. When you compare this to the Soviets the two do not seem so different, and yet today in modern media the US is portrayed as the valiant blue hero swooping in to save the day from the red bear in the east.

The unrealistic presentation in Western media:

I touched upon this briefly in my summary on this history of The USSR but I will expand further, in western media the Soviet Union is often portrayed as a giant bear with an iron curtain around eastern Europe, abusing her people and resources to remove the scourge that is modern day capitalism from the helpless workers of the west, obviously since western nations are run by the very companies that employ said workers the west fought tooth and nail to make the Soviets the bad guy in this near century long conflict between Red and Blue, East and West.

What I will take away from this for use in my project:

This whole concept of a great foreign enemy that is unseen in modern life is the main takeaway for me, most American and Soviet citizens were never to interact with each other for the full 45 year long conflict which lead to the whole concept of the red scare feeling 'far from home' and 'not the average citizens problem'. I really want to put this concept to good use in this project as you will never directly interact with the great enemy the state forces you to believe threatens your so called freedom every day. The sheer level of power that the state holds over its citizens is another take away from this research, both sides of the conflict had so much influence and knowledge of their citizens every move that you would think they were a spy-state such as Oceania.

[andrewuttaro]

30 Years on: What is America?

I am not of the belief patriotism is a disappearing attribute in this country. I think those who say such a thing tend to struggle with the difference between patriotism and nationalism. I digress, I already wrote that article. I’ll let you do your own research on that. To the degree patriotism is in flux at the moment regardless of anyone’s relative love for America I think it’s because we are at something of a national crossroads.

We’re collectively looking critically at our own history again for the first time in a long time. In the aftermath of a global pandemic the craving for normalcy belies an unsettling question about what that normalcy actually is and if its worth going back to: What is America? No really, what is the lived vision of America in 2021 CE? To the extent you read overzealous nuts on social media drooling over the prospect of Civil War or national partition there is in fact some hard soul searching about the what of America that has potential to lead to real political sectarianism.

I’ll check my privilege at the door and say yes: I, as a straight, white male, has never had a lot to lose in any past incarnation of the American identity. Part of the struggle here is a truly inclusive answer to Who is America? I write this under the assumption literally anyone can be American, and we should build systems that reflect that. Nonetheless, we do have to look to the past for fear of repeating it.

What is America? Well it’s a country for one: more than two hundred years old with a congressional democratic republic form of government. It’s had 46 Presidents and counting. It is composed of 50 States for now. America was founded on a couple core principles it defined around “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Anyone who seriously studies American History will tell you the promises of America’s founding documents were not all fulfilled in the beginning. America’s domestic history is defined by Civil Rights movements, reactions against said movements and a Civil War largely about who would receive the full promise of what America is. Indeed Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President who led America through that Civil conflict, spoke of this nation as the “American Experiment” that would not perish from the earth as long as the Union won. The Gettysburg Address Lincoln delivered about this vision of America was delivered on a battlefield where that nation was invaded by what can properly be called a different imagining of what the U.S. should be. Those invaders were former countryman, looking to make a different formulation of the experiment. America is an experiment, a work in progress, a project.

Nation-States as projects is not a new concept. Even before the United States of America’s War of Independence new nation-states were being founded across the world out of the milieu of Enlightenment Philosophy meeting political realities. In many places the nation-state was a more democratic, self-determining incarnation of what kingdoms and empires had been for millennia prior: the collective force of a like-minded ethnic, tribal, or familial group or otherwise aligned interested parties. The innovation of the American experiment, among other things, was perhaps that it was a nation-state for everyone seeking liberty and personal autonomy. Even though the founders envisioned the enfranchisement of a very specific kind of citizen, this American nation-state had potential from the beginning to be something that had never been attempted before.

Fast forward 128 years on from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The U.S. has not only survived its Civil War, but it has also exploded onto the global stage after two world wars catapulted it to an international superpower. Still believing itself to be the project of liberty and self-determination America had stood opposed to a distinctly oppressive superpower in the Soviet Union and won. In the process the American experiment had been exported anywhere the Soviets couldn’t stop it and now the whole world was familiar with its tenets if not copying its institutions. A Cold War that held all of humanity in suspense at the precipice of nuclear annihilation has yielded to a new reality where America found itself the dominant political force in the world unopposed. 1991, thirty years ago now, was a rare inflection point in history where suddenly massive forces of power were upended at once and there was no clear guiding philosophy for the global political order going forward… except the United States of America. What would America be now? The Post-Cold War reality was ours to lose.

Canada, America’s most intimate international partner and closest neighbor, similarly finds itself at a philosophical turning point. The Canadian author and commentator Will Ferguson points to three core guiding themes, however misled they were, for the Canadian project upon its modern founding in 1867: 1. Keep the Americans out, 2. Keep the French in, 3. Somehow make the indigenous disappear. In Canada’s 150-year history these three ideas color its every decision and define its character. All of these founding directives are now either reversed because they were outright morally wrong (See number 3) or have been killed by a thousand cuts. The nation-state to America’s north is also set to reexamine what it’s all about. In that reexamination of national identity there is great opportunity and great danger. As if an international support group, Canada’s stereotypical niceness reaches out to tell us, we’re not alone in this self-discovery process.

The answer to the Post-Cold War world for the American Experiment in 1991 was doubling down on Americana and exporting our cultural and economic mores around the world. Though this process had already begun in earnest after World War Two, now the whole world was its oyster. From aggressive, no-prisoners capitalism to unapologetic, imperial democracy, you can now find few places on the planet that are not familiar with some facet of the United States’ self-perception. America globalized who it was and not everyone liked it. Indeed many Americans began to increasingly look in the mirror this cultural hegemony provided with a critical eye. Then September 11th happened.

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 the United States cast its enemies in an axis of evil dualism in the War on Terror that provided an endless horizon of conflict for a military apparatus unseen in human history. The polar opposite, the truly evil enemy the Fall of the Soviet Union deprived America of, would now be replaced with a complex networks of dictators and non-state entities who recorded death threats in caves. While America doesn’t exist today like a traditional empire, its reach is unparalleled, and it can strike almost anywhere on earth in a matter of minutes. With no sufficient counterbalance it would seem its military industrial complex doesn’t know what to do with itself. That menacing, widespread inhuman enemy doesn’t actually exist much in the real world if it even did during the many proxy conflicts of the Cold War decades.

Domestically the thirty years of the Post-Cold War American Experiment has seen the two branches of our government that were supposed to be lesser to the legislative, balloon in importance. In a nation where every philosophical difference is magnified into a culture war the ultimate arbiter of those borderline violent disputes is a Court system that is supposed to be an afterthought and a Presidency that has become outright imperial in spite of the founders explicit anti-monarchical sentiments. When Supreme Court justices die or retire it really seems to be on par with a Pope’s death for political partisans stateside. All good and evil in the land of liberty seems to run through a council of black-robed appointees. All 5 Presidents of Post-Cold War America were cast as lightning rods for their bases and chastised by their opposition with every scandal that would stick (to varying degrees of success). The fourth of such Presidents, Donald Trump, openly rejected the idea of America as a pluralistic nation-state with any international responsibility at all to the contrary of the image that defines Post-Cold War America, in favor of a Pre-World War II image of an isolationist, explicitly white Christian nation. Yes, the current identity crisis played out in sharp contrast in the 2016 election cycle. Many Americans consider that election the perfect storm of two intractably terrible major party choices.

Perhaps we need to face the fact we did it to ourselves. We elect no-compromise fighters whenever we vote only to be shocked when Congress turns into a toxic mess that gets nothing done. It’s always easy to criticize a one-term President but the re-evaluation of what the American experiment will be is not limited to those of a more right-wing conservative bent. The left wing in this country increasingly discusses myriad reforms to everything from our election and representation systems to our healthcare and welfare systems. No matter what your future vision of America is you probably agree, perhaps for vastly different reasons than your neighbor, that America is not the somehow uniquely exceptional nation-state it’s insisted it is, not anymore at least. The Post-Cold War era saw the concept of “American Exceptionalism” become a punchline for Americans of both and every political affiliation. For numerous reasons America’s international and domestic vitality has diminished.

The current President, historically more of a traditionally moderate, establishment democrat, has even engaged in this revisionism aggressively seeking to revive Americans faith in their very form of government with stimulus, infrastructure and voting reform in the most evenly split congress in decades. More progressive types of the left-wing beckon in every election cycle now just as the former President refuses to go away, trying to weaponize the grievance of his increasingly right-wing base in the reimagining of the American experiment he set forth as a more authoritarian leader. We have to make an honest, good faith accounting of this effort toward a new definition of ourselves if any shared consensus as a nation will ever be possible again. There is of course great danger in redefining the purpose of a national project.

However America redefines herself going forward, finding these new definitions is not an optional project. With the U.S. shaken down from its international pedestal by trade war, an ascendant China, and a stubbornly plutocratic Russia, even America’s closest allies are reconsidering how they will persist with an unstable American self-image still able to exert its hard power anywhere on earth. As some Americans pursue a more equitable society at home for historical outgroups still struggling with society’s aged mores, those efforts have been met with open racism and a kind of selfish nationalism that has not been seen this ferociously in three generations. Unless a new lasting, inclusive, American self-image is agreed upon we may be at only the beginning of a long period of internal strife and discord. Increasing numbers of ideologs of both left wing and right-wing persuasions fantasize about cutting off whole sections of the nation whom they rarely agree with. American Statehouses are dominated by right-wing majorities more often than not who have actually initiated voter suppression efforts which positions America in a dangerous place for the next close enough national election. This is not to mention the way gerrymandering steals the power of congressional representation from the very people it was supposed to empower. This whole discussion doesn’t even touch on the increasing threat of environmental catastrophe rarely addressed in the halls of power.

The current American Identity Crisis leaves many issues unaddressed as a matter of fact. An opioid epidemic that is erasing broad swaths of the population, a wealth gap unseen since the gilded age, a skyrocketing suicide rate, a gun violence epidemic, natural resource exhaustion unrelated to climate change, police violence, the fourth rebirth of white supremacist organizations, DC and Puerto Rico Statehood, the Student Debt Crisis, an increasingly intractable housing market putting home ownership out of reach for many young Americans, and numerous other problems sit on the backburner without any signs of meaningful progress. On some level it seems we’ve all given up the project of governing for earning the most points in culture wars that now express themselves on as big a scale as a national election and all the way down to dinner tables and date nights.

What is American? How might we be optimistic about such a rapidly changing country on this Independence Day thirty years on from the end of the Cold War? Among people my age it would seem pessimism if not an outright nihilism about these sorts of things is the common response where activism seems to only make minor gains. Among the general population still rebounding from the COVID19 pandemic it would seem a certain empathy fatigue has set in. Where meaningful answers to these big, generational national identity questions are being formulated it is yet to be seen if a new American consensus can be found.

Perhaps our friend Canada would tell us: these days the most patriotic thing you can do is push for your country to do better. Reckoning with the past and present treatment of minorities and atrocities abroad is not optional if we are to have an honest, effective, united future. For now, if nothing else can move us to truly feel proud of our nation, then maybe this independence day we can recognize our internal interdependence on each other, however different we maybe. If anything the most patriotic way we can be this holiday and every day going forward as Americans is honest and patient about who we were, what we are and what we could possibly be if we commit ourselves to progress once again.

[fapangel]

Hi, that's a mighty wall of text, and very informative, thank you. A couple of issues which seem to me to undermine the point that you're trying to make. One, that sarin gas is difficult to manufacture doesn't seem to be a strong argument against a hypothetical 'deep state' false flag - one would assume such an entity would have the resources necessary to produce it. (1/3)

Two, while chemical weapons may produce an immediate tactical benefit, the fact that using them is a massive strategic mistake on Assad’s part is quite obvious - there is no more effective way to ensure the active, continuous presence of America and her allies in Syria than the use of CW. Unless one thinks Assad wants America to stick around longterm for some reason, or he is stupid enough to trade dead children for airstrikes 1/1, the thought that it wasn’t him is quite natural. (2/3)

Three, your tone of outrage seems inappropriate considering that the American government has conducted false flag operations in the past - Gulf of Tonkin and Project Ajax are two of the better known examples. It’s not ‘America would never!’, it’s ‘It wasn’t America this time, and here’s why.’ Thanks again for taking the time to put this together. (3/3)

I can answer these in order.

1.) At the moment most people - like Sargon, specifically - are suggesting that either no attack occurred at all, or any attack was launched by rebels gassing themselves, and the media and “deep state” are lying about it extensively to form a casus belli to war. People who suggest that we created Sarin just to drop it on civilians in Damascus to create a causus belli are so far around the fucking bend that Alex Fucking Jones would be worried in their company, as Alex Jones doesn’t actually believe any of the shit he says. It’s not hard to find a casus belli to take out Assad; the civil war has driven a massive immigration wave of refugees into Europe, further destabilizing Western societies (a situation Putin has deliberately and gleefully exacerbated) and Assad’s heinous war crimes against his own people are beyond the pale. To suggest that the United States needs to engage in elaborate conspiracy to justify intervention is a fantasy. We’ve outright killed people for much less. 

2.) Like hell it is. To date, Assad’s use of chemical weapons has cost him some older warplanes (by no means his entire fleet, or his most effective aircraft) and most recently… his CW capability itself. In over SEVEN YEARS of more or less regularly conducted chemical weapon attacks, he has suffered very little damage to his conventional warfighting capabilities. Also, he knows damn well that the United States does not want to stay in the country, and moreover, they don’t want to depose him, either, as the power vacuum will simply be filled by Iran and Russia might take extreme measures to keep their strategic gains (a military port in the Med.) In my own pre-strike analysis I predicted the US would target non-military governmental targets and important infrastructure or resources to punish Assad for using chemical weapons, to discourage others from doing the same, but that they’d have to carefully calibrate it not to weaken Assad too much. 

Instead, the US focused purely on taking out the chemical weapons themselves; which was a rather weaker statement but a much safer option from the power-balance perspective; making it clear that the US doesn’t give a shit about Assad killing his civilians with shells or machine guns, but only about keeping the WMD genie in the bottle so it doesn’t impact US interests in the future in other parts of the world. 

And you are telling me - after TWO military strikes by the US that actively focused on deterring or preventing chemical weapon attacks by Assad, without changing the strategic balance on the ground - that Assad would never have used CW? Losing chemical weapons capacity itself equals a wash, and if you weigh 20% of the SAAF’s oldest, least-capable airframes against the repeated battlefield gains he’s made by using CW, Assad has gained FAR more than he’s lost by using Chemical Weapons. 

Assad knows damn well that US and allied presence isn’t going to change one way or another no matter what he does, because even if “America” leaves; the Kurds certainly aren’t. Assad knows this because Trump stated his strategy bluntly during the Presidential debates and again the day after he was sworn in as President:

“If we kept the oil, you probably wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so we should have kept the oil, but, OK, maybe we’ll have another chance,” he said.

The Kurds are currently sitting along the Euphrates river, where they control a good portion of Syria’s oil fields. By Trump’s own long-standing statements it is squarely in America’s strategic interests that the Kurds stay there - especially after the Iranian-puppeted Iraqi government drove the Kurds out of oil-rich Kirkuk. It is far preferable for that oil money to stabilize a de-facto Kurdistan than to be up for grabs by jihadists or Iranian jihadist proxies (which at this point, includes Syria.) The United States was never going to pack up and make the Kurds give that all back to Syria before Assad’s latest gas attack. It is clearly and demonstrably Trump’s long-standing policy. 

So, in short, if Assad would “never use gas” because of all the horrible consequences, where are the FUCKING consequences? Because he has suffered very, very little. And there’s no shortage of people making that observation. 

3.) “False flag” operations in the past were justified by the need to prevail in an existential conflict with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, and current “commentators” see the Syrian situation through the same lens - witness Sargon of Akkad specifically mentioning Syria’s status as a “Russian ally.” However, the Russians are nowhere near as powerful as the Soviet Union was, militarily, diplomatically or economically, as Putin’s penchant for “hybrid warfare” and opportunistic shit-stirring demonstrates. 

We’ve returned to an era of “great powers conflict” but Russia is not the Soviet Union and the old Cold War era strategies are both ineffective and demonstrably not US policy. The Gulf of Tonkin incident is laughably overblown, as involvement in Vietnam was essentially an extension of our involvement in Korea - a policy of keeping Communism from spreading to new countries. The US had the demonstrated interest, the incident was just the PR excuse. Much the same could be said of the Iraq war - WMD was simply the casus belli; the Bush Administration was pursuing a much grander strategy involving nation-building in the Middle East. 

In Trump’s case, interventionism and foreign entanglement is anathema to the man and everything he’s ever advocated (witness his insistence on “keeping the oil” and even that mostly with Kurdish allies and not US troops) and the only evidence for his administration wanting “regime change” anyone can point to is by invoking ~the Deep State~ and left-wing outlets crowing about the statements of people who’ve since been fired out of a cannon by the Administration. Paying lip service to the idea of ousting Assad does not equal a fucking policy of regime change, especially as Assad and Assad’s regime are not the same thing. Assad’s Alawite sect is Assad’s regime, not Assad. (Americans, being members of the first nation really founded on a secular government, tend to forget that in most of the world for most of its history, politics and religion have been one and the same thing.) That Assad himself will have to step down from power to satisfy any lasting political settlement to divide Syria is not a great surprise; he’s presided over horrific amounts of bloodshed, slaughter, and brutality against his own civilians. But that simply means he’ll be replaced by another high-ranking member of his own government, another general, another strongman. 

In conclusion; these pro-Syrian conspiracy theories stem from an almost complete ignorance of the situation in Syria. In fact, they are calibrated to appeal specifically to those ignorant; ordinary folk with no in-depth knowledge of the military or politics, who simply fear a repeat of Iraq. The narratives are short, sweet, easy to remember and repeat, play on existing fears and fit what very limited information the average guy on the street is likely to know about a confusing conflict in a far-off land. In short it is classic propaganda, and you needn’t look further than RT.com and Sputnuk to see who fucking packaged it. 

[literature-islit]

Betty Medsger - The Burglary (2014)

I’ve been really into reading a lot of non-fiction recently, and so I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction book about people throughout history doing (imo) really cool things. 

This ^ an incredible account of the history of pirate radio in the UK (content warning: absolutely spot on description of wet days in a flooding boat with no power in the freezing cold that will absolutely have you shivering by proxy even in the heat of summer or curled up under the snuggest doona).

^^ this is literally the most eccentric story I have ever stumbled upon, about a man whose achievements include (directly copied from wikipedia): “[inventing] the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant,[1] and [pioneering] the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets”, who went on to become a disciple of an occultist, Alestair Crowley, live in a commune, spend most of his time trying to invoke otherworldly beings with witchcraft, indulge in polyamorous relationships and eventually blow himself up under mysterious circumstances... 

^^ and finally this book, which reads just like a spy novel, but was actually real life, about a female spy for the British who lived in Nazi-occupied France during WWII and, like, saved lives, lived undercover, did amazing things for her country... Just wow.

Turns out there’s a lot of people throughout human history who have done some crazy things that will blow ur mind. 

;) 

Anyway, most mind blowing of all, I reckon, is the tale of what happens when a group of ordinary citizens see injustice in a society and feel compelled to break the law to expose it, and restore democratic law and order that is chronicled in Betty Medsger’s The Burlary, a recount of the infamous burglary of FBI office that revealed what had been suspected but generally dismissed as a paranoid hippie delusion - that the FBI was routinely placing ordinary Americans under surveillance and harassing them for expressing their disagreement with official government policy. 

What is so crazy about the book is that, until its release, nobody knew the identities of the self-appointed “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI”. Medsger herself was one of the journalists to whom the stolen files were initially mailed to, and only years later, at dinner, did two of the burglars, just ur average suburban couple, reveal to her that it was them who did it, and they’d lived for a long time in fear of being found out and gone on to live ordinary American lives.

Y’all i know i keep coming back to the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s like a broken record, but I am just so continually fascinated by the era... from the actual level of desiring meaningful participation and involvement with the political processes of their communities, to the fact that some activists would just drop everything and hitchhike their way to move to ares where they could, for instance, help end bus segregation or live on communes. 

One of the participants in the burglary, interviewed in the book, said he was so outraged when he read a book about how unjust it was that America was participating in the war in Vietnam, he rang up the government and requested that they direct him to books and material that would back their position on the war. When they offered to send pamphlets of poorly-disguised propaganda, it wasn't enough. He called again and asked for more - can you image?

Like, it’s hard enough to get through to the Centrelink these days, let alone requesting the government provide sources to prove the correctness of official policy... 

I was hypnotised by recounts of the commitment of religious groups to non-violent protest - breaking into draft offices and destroying conscription records, just to save young men they didn't even know from getting involved in a conflict agains their will. I’m not gonna lie - I even cried while reading this book, multiple times. Protestors won court cases on the basis of their conviction that government actions were wrong. Parents realised their sons had died in Vietnam for less-than-noble reasons. Above all, the purity of a (perhaps naive? Perhaps mistaken? But still admirable) belief in the rightness of the principles of democracy shines through:

the likelihood that the government, through the FBI, was spying on Americans and suppressing their cherished constitutional right to dissent. If this was true, he thought, it was a crime against democracy – a crime that must be stopped... Without the freedom to dissent without being spied on… dissent was empty, erased, useless. 

innocent and pure times.