#sanctions and their effects

[chromatic-lamina]

Chapter 1125 spoilers: Hunger

Also, I put it as an reply/reblog of another person’s post, but remember that the servants and slaves are starving too. They would have been malnourished, regardless, if we go by Kuma and Ginny's story, but if the food supplies to the Celestial Dragons have been cut, then you can believe that those to their workers are disrupted too. And they'll die for it. Whether from a bullet or lack of food. Oda is good with his layers.

[aropride2]

we have gottttt to start shaming people for saying shit like "fuck the police includes the identity/fandom/whatever police" like 😭 regardless of ur opinions on exclusionism or fandom discourse u have to be able to acknowledge that those are not even close to actual real life cops

[desidov]

I have seen some contradictory calls to action so I just want to boost the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) calls for boycotts as of Jan 5 2024:

The BNC is currently encouraging consumer boycotts of HP Inc, Chevron (Caltex, Texaco,) Siemens, PUMA, Carrefour, AXA, SodaStream, Ahava, RE/MAX, and Israeli produce.

The BDS movement calls for a complete boycott of these brands carefully selected due to the company's proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid.

The BNC supports grassroots consumer boycotts of McDonald’s (US), Burger King (US), Papa John’s (US), Pizza Hut (US), and WIX (Israel).

The BDS movement did not initiate these grassroots boycott campaigns but supports them due to these brands’ complicity in Israel’s genocide and apartheid against Palestinians. If these grassroots campaigns are not already organically active in your area, BNC suggests focusing your energies on their encouraged targets, though they specifically endorse escalating the boycott of McDonalds.

Focusing effort on completely boycotting a small number of targets is more impactful than attempting boycotts of every corporation in any way supportive of Israel, and it gives the movement fuel to pressure other corporations.

[ext-raordinarymachine]

thinking of how next year or maybe even this one might be the last years of not heavily restricted internet access in my country 🥲

[delusionalinsecurewreckpiningphd]

You know, with whatever the *gesture wildly at America* is going on, can't help but wonder where are all the fixit fic from political science, social science students and the like? Isn't this what we study for? The bs of politics may prevent things from being real and there are troves of published IPs about a fantasy land somewhere that has things done well for them but what about us?

Maybe, I don't know, what's going on with Florida currently. Yes, we understand that decades of gerrymandering have stripped the power of the people and enabled that ruling interest to extract and exploit to enrich their patrons. And yes, let's not go all "screw Florida" and "they deserve it for all of the shit they've done" because the action of the elite few also harms the population which has tried and failed to change, not they are a monolith that is uniformly ignorant or advocate for the same interest.

And any IR students ever studied economic sanctions can tell you that regardless of its effectiveness in instituting change, sanctions hurt the population more. Taking away federal funding from those states most likely mean the people who need it the most (from disaster, poverty, medical assistance program, even schools) will lose access to it, further worsen their life. Because that local government may not already be interested in funding those programs in the beginning, and yes they have only been taking the federal funding for themselves or other non-social welfare programs.

So how about this? A fixit fic based on the concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) born out of the 1990s where the international community considers the very specific conditions where the need to save a population from genocide or systemic violence override the respect for sovereignty. Yes, we need a distinct concept to basically go into another country to do good because it is the year 1990s and we're not imperialist colonizers anymore haha. But anyway how about that? Federal government just go into those states and do those things, you know, that they have a bunch of practice elsewhere in the world? Safe passage for refugee for instance, for those wishing to get the hell out of those holes. Relief program delivering food, necessities, water during flood or, maybe, preventable-but-happen-anyway power outage done not by the local government because they don't care anyway, but by the feds or an independent third party like the absolute symbolic-and-dubiously-effective UN Peacekeeper Red Cross or Doctors without Borders. Or, even better, satisfying the military industrial complex as well, initiating an armed campaign under the guise of "we installed nuclear weapons there" or "this is a failed state that threatens our security" and just overthrow that local government so that others will accuse you of regime change. And 20 years later, Hollywood will produce a summer blockbuster titled something like "24 Hours: Red vs Blue" by Michael Bay that half the country will not care about.

That is, if the Writer's Strike and the Actor's Strike end by then.

Please recommend me tag or blog to follow for this kind of fic Im desperate

[a-shrieking-cloud-of-bats]

like I dunno I played borderlands 1 for like fifteen minutes and decided I did not want to do that shit but the idea that in a game with randomly generated loot, there is a theoretical best option, and as a result that best option is astronomically rare, I don’t know who is legitimately factoring in this astronomically rare theoretical best option into their actual practical builds

I think there are games that do this wrong (path of exile comes to mind) but they’re pretty far and few between

[just2bruce]

Rail freight inducements hope to drive new loads

Several national rail agencies are actively working to increase rail traffic, with a focus on reducing costs and emissions.

This interesting article ties together several efforts by national rail agencies to drum up more traffic. The countries range from Russia to the UK. When you have a national railroad, rather than private enterprise, you can make quick changes that will reduce costs for the kinds of shipments you want. The article focuses on Russia, which is losing lots of cargoes from the Far East headed for…

[wonderhecko]

as you see the inhuman list of items banned from entry into gaza, you should be keenly aware the partner in israel's murder-suicide pact, the united states, has had an embargo on cuba (effectively doing the same to iran with sanctions too btw) for decades that includes medical supplies.

none of this was lifted for covid 19. both our cruel, barbaric countries will deny the absolute bare necessities for our genocidal economic projects

[twrambling]

.

This year is an election year for Venezuela ,,,, and I can't help but feel like something is gonna go wrong again

[heritageposts]

What does life in North Korea look like outside of Pyongyang? 🇰🇵

Hey, I'm back again with a very scary "tankie" post that asks you to think of North Koreans as people, and to consider their country not as a cartoonish dystopia, but as a nation that, like any other place on earth, has culture, traditions, and history.

Below is a collection of pictures from various cities and places in North Korea, along with a brief dive into some of the historical events that informs life in the so-called "hermit kingdom."

Warning: very long post

Kaesong, the historic city

Beginning this post with Kaesong, one of the oldest cities in Korea. It's also one of the few major cities in the DPRK (i.e. "North Korea") that was not completely destroyed during the Korean war.

Every single city you'll see from this point on were victims of intense aerial bombardments from the U.S. and its allies, and had to be either partially or completely rebuilt after the war.

From 1951 to 1953, during what has now become known as the "forgotten war" in the West, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs over Korea — most of it in the North, and on civilian population centers. An additional 32,000 tons of napalm was also deployed, engulfing whole cities in fire and inflicting people with horrific burns:

For such a simple thing to make, napalm had horrific human consequences. A bit of liquid fire, a sort of jellied gasoline, napalm clung to human skin on contact and melted off the flesh. Witnesses to napalm's impact described eyelids so burned they could not be shut and flesh that looked like "swollen, raw meat." - PBS

Ever wondered why North Koreans seem to hate the U.S so much? Well...

Keep in mind that only a few years prior to this, the U.S. had, as the first and only country in the world, used the atomic bomb as a weapon of war. Consider, too, the proximity between Japan and Korea — both geographically and as an "Other" in the Western imagination.

As the war dragged on, and it became clear the U.S. and its allies would not "win" in any conventional sense, the fear that the U.S. would resort to nuclear weapons again loomed large, adding another frightening dimension to the war that can probably go a long way in explaining the DPRK's later obsession with acquiring their own nuclear bomb.

But even without the use of nuclear weapons, the indiscriminate attack on civilians, particularly from U.S. saturation bombings, was still horrific:

"The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II" - Charles K. Armstrong

On top of the loss of life, there's also the material damage. By the end of the war, the U.S. Air Force had, by its own estimations, destroyed somewhere around 85% of all buildings in the DPRK, leaving most cities in complete ruin. There are even stories of U.S. bombers dropping their loads into the ocean because they couldn't find any visible targets to bomb.

What you'll see below of Kaesong, then, provides both a rare glimpse of what life in North Korea looked like before the war, and a reminder of what was destroyed.

Kaesong's main street, pictured below.

Due the stifling sanctions imposed on the DPRK—which has, in various forms and intensities, been in effect since the 1950s—car ownership is still low throughout the country, with most people getting around either by walking or biking, or by bus or train for longer distances.

Kaesong, which is regarded as an educational center, is also notable for its many Koryŏ-era monuments. A group of twelve such sites were granted UNESCO world heritage status in 2013.

Included is the Hyonjongnung Royal Tomb, a 14th-century mausoleum located just outside the city of Kaesong.

One of the statues guarding the tomb.

Before moving on the other cities, I also wanted to showcase one more of the DPRK's historical sites: Pohyonsa, a thousand-year-old Buddhist temple complex located in the Myohyang Mountains.

Like many of DPRK's historic sites, the temple complex suffered extensive damage during the Korean war, with the U.S. led bombings destroying over half of its 24 pre-war buildings.

The complex has since been restored and is in use today both as a residence for Buddhist monks, and as a historic site open to visitors.

Hamhung, the second largest city in the DPRK.

A coastal city located in the South Hamgyŏng Province. It has long served as a major industrial hub in the DPRK, and has one of the largest and busiest ports in the country.

Hamhung, like most of the coastal cities in the DPRK, was hit particularly hard during the war. Through relentless aerial bombardments, the US and its allies destroyed somewhere around 80-90% percent of all buildings, roads, and other infrastructure in the city.

Now, more than seventy years later, unexploded bombs, mortars and pieces of live ammunition are still being unearthed by the thousands in the area. As recently as 2016, one of North Korea's bomb squads—there's one in every province, faced with the same cleanup task—retrieved 370 unexploded mortar rounds... from an elementary school playground.

Experts in the DPRK estimate it will probably take over a hundred years to clean up all the unexploded ordnance—and that's just in and around Hamhung.

Hamhung's fertilizer plant, the biggest in North Korea.

When the war broke out, Hamhung was home to the largest nitrogen fertilizer plant in Asia. Since its product could be used in the creation of explosives, the existence of the plant is considered to have made Hamhung a target for U.S. aggression (though it's worth repeating that the U.S. carried out saturation bombings of most population centers in the country, irrespective of any so-called 'military value').

The plant was immediately rebuilt after the war, and—beyond its practical use—serves now as a monument of resistance to U.S. imperialism, and as a functional and symbolic site of self-reliance.

Chongjin, the third largest city in the DPRK.

Another coastal city and industrial hub. It underwent a massive development prior to the Korean war, housing around 300,000 people by the time the war broke out.

By 1953, the U.S. had destroyed most of Chongjin's industry, bombed its harbors, and killed one third of the population.

Wonsan, a rebuilt seaside city.

The city of Wonsan is a vital link between the DPRK's east and west coasts, and acts today as both a popular holiday destination for North Koreans, and as a central location for the country's growing tourism industry.

Considered a strategically important location during the war, Wonsan is notable for having endured one of the longest naval blockades in modern history, lasting a total of 861 days.

By the end of the war, the U.S. estimated that they had destroyed around 80% of the city.

Masikryong Ski Resort, located close to Wonsan. It opened to the public in 2014 and is the first, I believe, that was built with foreign tourists in mind.

Sariwon, another rebuilt city

One of the worst hit cities during the Korean War, with an estimated destruction level of 95%.

I've written about its Wikipedia page here before, which used to mockingly describe its 'folk customs street'—a project built to preserve old Korean traditions and customs—as an "inaccurate romanticized recreation of an ancient Korean street."

No mention, of course, of the destruction caused by the US-led aerial bombings, or any historical context at all that could possibly even hint at why the preservation of old traditions might be particularly important for the city.

Life outside of the towns and cities

In the rural parts of the DPRK, life primarily revolves around agriculture. As the sanctions they're under make it difficult to acquire fuel, farming in the DPRK relies heavily on manual labour, which again, to avoid food shortages, requires that a large portion of the labour force resides in the countryside.

Unlike what many may think, the reliance on manual labour in farming is a relatively "new" development. Up until the crisis of the 1990s, the DPRK was a highly industrialized nation, with a modernized agricultural system and a high urbanization rate. But, as the access to cheap fuel from the USSR and China disappeared, and the sanctions placed upon them by Western nations heavily restricted their ability to import fuel from other sources, having a fuel-dependent agricultural industry became a recipe for disaster, and required an immediate and brutal restructuring.

For a more detailed breakdown of what lead to the crisis in the 90s, and how it reshaped the DPRKs approach to agriculture, check out this article by Zhun Xu.

Some typical newly built rural housing, surrounded by farmland.

Tumblr only allows 20 pictures per post, but if you want to see more pictures of life outside Pyongyang, check out this imgur album.

[alastaircarstairsdefenselawyer]

this is your daily reminder that it's been over 65 years since cuba overthrew batista's US-backed fascist dictatorship and the US is STILL keeping cuba in extreme poverty using an "embargo."

back in the 1950s, using US funds and US-trained soldiers, batista (not castro) removed most of cubans' rights, including the right to strike, censored all media, and used secret police to torture and publicly excute anyone who protested his dictatorship. In a document released by the CIA in 2005, it stated as many as 20,000 people were killed. In return, batista gave control of most of the arable land to the US. during the revolution, this land was reclaimed and redistributed, which means that USAmericans can now sue anyone who "traffics" in this "confiscated" property.

Despite US sanctions being an "embargo," the US also fines foreign companies for doing business in Cuba, meaning it's effectively a blockade. Despite Obama lightening some of these restrictions, Biden has done little to undo the tightened policies from Trump's administration.

In November, the UN called for the 31st time (!!!) for the US blockade to end, supported by 187 countries and opposed only by the US and its bestest buddy (I'll let you guess who).

Cuba has been in economic crisis for years. Monthly income in Cuba is $30-60. There is very little food and it is hard to purchase anything like toiletries, clothes, and over-the-counter medicines. Domestic production is down because they don't have the resources to sustain them. The US has been intentionally impoverishing and starving Cuba for decades, and they continue to make it clear that it is not going to stop.

So, yeah. US democracy is a joke, end the US blockade on Cuba, and fuck genocide joe.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Malaysia’s government announced Wednesday that it was imposing a ban on all Israeli owned and flagged ships, as well as any vessels headed to Israel, from docking at its ports. The announcement by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s office said the ban would take place with immediate effect and was in response to Israel’s conduct[...]

“This sanction is a response to Israel’s actions that disregard the basic humanitarian principles and violate international law through the ongoing massacre and continuous cruelty against the Palestinian people,” the statement read.

20 Dec 23

[gme-news]

Ukraine We will retake Mariupol this year

via IFTTT

[mesetacadre]

this might be a silly question, but. ive recently learned more about the devastating effects of sanctions on countries like cuba, dprk, or venezuela, and how much unnecessary suffering they cause among the population, especially when it comes to food or medicine shortages. but then bds also calls for sanctions against israel, and im wondering, is there any meaningful difference between that and the sanctions already imposed by the US on other countries? i feel a bit hypocritical when i argue against sanctions while at the same time supporting bds, i feel like they are very different situations with different outcomes but i lack the understanding to really grasp how they are different, if that makes any sense

Sanctions are the systematic blockade of all or certain sectors of trade under military or economic threat by the sanctioner (mostly just the USA in recent history) to any potential agents who might try to ignore the sanction. These sanctions typically include things like medical supplies, food if the country is dependent on imports (like most countries who get sanctioned), electricity, fuel, both light and heavy industry, agricultural products and machines, the global financial system, and other such key sectors. These sanctions, overwhelmingly, only serve to impoverish the country, create undue suffering and political strife. This political strife/instability is usually the main goal of sanctions, to destabilize the target government. However, this political instability more often than not does not result in a magical restoration of "democracy" or "human rights", it usually leads the country down a path of further isolationism and political violence that only worsens its general situation. It also makes it much easier for factions like ISIS to gain popularity and support, since people are desperate. Sanctions are inhumane measures which only makes a country suffer for no good reason. The sanctioners know this, they don't care, and I'd wager that suffering is often the actual point of these sanctions. What has the 60 year old blockade achieved in Cuba? It has only caused pointless poverty, and the stated goal of the sanctions, which is to ultimately remove the communist government, has failed, is failing, and Cuba is managing to make due with what they have.

BDS call for sanctions mostly in regards to military equipment and related products/services, for NATO to stop aiding the genocide, or the banning of Israel from international events such as the olympics. No Israeli will ever go hungry because they no longer get European-made ordinance or because they don't get to participate in Eurovision. This is what BDS says in their Sanctions and governments campaign (which is behind two menus, this is also not the main focus of BDS, by far):

The BDS movement calls for sanctions against Israel, similar to the sanctions that were imposed against apartheid South Africa. These sanctions could include a military embargo, an end to economic links and the cutting of diplomatic ties. In the meantime, the BDS movement is calling for states to take steps to meet their legal obligations not to be complicit in the commission of particular Israeli crimes and not to provide recognition, aid or assistance that help Israel maintain its regime of settler colonialism, apartheid.. This includes, for example, the obligation for states to immediately end to all trade that sustains illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the suspension of free trade agreements and other bilateral agreements with Israel.

Notice the greater emphasis on military and diplomatic ties, and how economic/trade sanctions are only called for when it «sustains illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory». Sure, this will (if it is ever adopted by Israel's significant trade partners) cause some suffering for the poor illegal settlers who had just moved into their shiny new apartment blocks built atop acres of land that sustained the surrounding Palestinian villages. The mere existence of these settlements cause more suffering than any sanction could ever cause.

Calling for these sanctions against Israel, which again, don't even come from comparable agents, are both less harmful towards the total population of Israel, and occur in a completely different context. I'm not going to pretend I care about the wellbeing of settlers whose houses didn't even exist 10 years ago. If these sanctions ever do occur in a significant enough scale (dubious), and those settlers don't want to find themselves in a food desert because Carrefour closed all their stores in the west bank, they shouldn't have moved into land stolen from a people facing genocide in the first place. We're also wagering hypothetical and non-global suffering against the now more than 100,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza in the past year, not even counting those who died ever since the first Nakba.

Like BDS points out, these types of grassroots and targeted boycotts/sanctions worked in South Africa, and the white South Africans didn't even suffer that much. Wager these short-lived and targeted sanctions against these other half-century long sanctions sustained by the US' strongarm policy that have prevented basically anything from getting into Cuba or the DPRK.

While those two things are both called sanctions, they have radically different objectives, methods, range, timescale, and character. I can't reiterate this enough, the North Korean collective farmer and the Israeli settler in the west bank have nothing in common when it comes to their position. Only one of them is complicit in genocide through their own actions, only one of them has any degree of blame, and only one of their governments is actually doing anything that warrants any kind of international action. And again, the BDS strategy focuses much more on military sanctions. Let's also be practical for a second, and acknowledge that the US is never going to withdraw their support for Israel, and especially will never sanction Israel. Israel is simply never going to face the same kind of sanctions that Venezuela or Cuba are facing, nor with the same severity, nor with the same restrictions on products essential for life.

[sayruq]

The Occupied Palestinian Territory is enveloped in a spiral of unstoppable violence, with stories Palestinians and other witnesses relay adding new depths to atrocities the world has witnessed since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza over six months ago, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Francesca Albanese said today. “The pace and intensity with which this violence has spread to the rest of the occupied territory confirms that no Palestinian is safe under Israel’s unfettered control,” Albanese said, concluding a visit to Egypt and Jordan. The Special Rapporteur said Israel had once again arbitrarily denied her access to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, compelling her to report on the situation of Palestinians under occupation from neighbouring states. Albanese said her visit demonstrated that the situation in Gaza is worse than previously assessed, with serious and multi-layered long-term implications. Most victims she met had endured catastrophic injuries, witnessed family members killed and experienced the effects of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure, even after 26 January 2024, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a ruling ordering Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza. Patients that previously arrived in Egypt primarily with explosive and war injury-related symptoms are now joined by patients with chronic diseases and/or malnutrition, especially children, arising from Israel’s intentional humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. “Photos from a mere eight months ago show a chubby-cheeked 8-year-old Hamid, now rake thin and spending his days in excruciating pain due to pancreatitis developed through the harsh conditions of the siege,” the Special Rapporteur said. “Those who have left Gaza come out fractured and wracked by ‘survivors’ guilt’ and severe trauma,” Albanese said. “Just 50 kilometers away from the Gaza Strip, crucial, life-sustaining aid and goods, including water desalination equipment, first aid kits, oxygen cylinders and portable toilets – paid for by taxpayers across the world – languish in warehouses, barred entry into Gaza on the pretext of use by combatants.” “Humanitarian measures implemented so far – airdrops and maritime corridors – are a mere palliative for what is desperately needed and legally due,” the expert said. “These measures are grossly inadequate to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe that Israel’s assault has created.” “At this point, Israel has reneged on its international obligations to a degree that warrants a call for sanctions,” Albanese said.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

I'm asking this in good faith, but this is something I'm genuinely confused about. Regarding the Holodomor, or the Soviet famine of 1930 in general, why does it matter if it was a genocide or not? At best it seems to be a natural famine exacerbated by poor decision making, and while that is far different from a genocide, I don't understand why that specification matters, because it was still made worse by Soviet intervention, unless I'm getting the facts wrong which I probably am.

It matters to the Western propagandists who were insistent for decades despite zero evidence that the famine was used to commit atrocities against the people of Ukraine. The refrain the whole time was that once the Soviet archives were made public, they'd finally have the proof they needed. The archives are eventually opened, and surprise surprise, there's not only no evidence of the deliberate withholding of grain, there's evidence of significant amounts of food aid being sent to help alleviate the famine. The myth of a Ukrainian genocide began as Nazi propaganda and was adopted as part of the "double genocide" narrative by Western reactionaries after WW2 to downplay the crimes of the Nazis and to maintain a narrative about liberal opposition to "authoritarianism", painting Western capitalists as the "free world" fighting against both fascism and communism. (Don't ask them why they stopped fighting fascism after WW2 though.)

As for the human elements of the famine, it is also part of the typical Western narrative, even among those who admit the Holodomor was not a targeted anti-Ukrainian genocide and who admit that there were environmental factors, to try and put substantial amounts of blame on the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. I am not going to lie and say collectivization went smoothly with no issues, but you cannot ignore the factors of reactionary sabotage by kulaks (including the destruction of animals and grain and the outright murder of party officials) and the effects of Western sanctions and sabotage on the economic development of the USSR.

While some have argued that there was a complete "gold blockade" on the USSR during the famine and so the Soviet Union was forced to export grain to facilitate international trade, the blockade was never enforced by all Western nations at the same time and the Soviets were still able to export gold and silver at various times throughout the 1920s. It is true, however, that gold reserves were stretched thin at the time and the Soviets simply didn't have enough gold to cover their international debts. Soviet gold mines had never been extraordinarily productive and the rest of the Soviet economy was still developing at the time, so grain was one of the few things that they expected to have in surplus. In addition, there were various other sanctions in place by 1930 that did limit who they could trade with and what they could trade with, but the export of grain was almost never restricted. The famine caught them off guard at a very bad time.

While international grain exports were restricted during the famine as grain was diverted to famine-stricken regions of the country (and grain imports were increased as well), the problems with hoarding only worsened as in the panic of the famine, kulaks sought to exploit the people and create a profitable black market on grain. A struggle against the kulaks coincided with worsening environmental effects and the spread of disease among both crops and humans.

The famine was not man-made, it was not entirely natural, and it was not the inevitable outcome of collectivization. It was a perfect storm of a variety of factors. Stalin was not some heartless monster condemning millions of Ukrainians to death for daring to defy the glorious Soviet Union. He was not some idiot who had no idea what he was doing, plunging the nation into famine out of ineptitude. He was not a stubborn maniac who refused to abandon failing economic policies even at the cost of human lives. He was a human being, one of many in charge of the Soviet Union, dealing with concurrent disasters as best as they could.