#understanding imperialism

[workersolidarity]

Watch "Understanding money and the dollar system's contradictions with Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson" on YouTube

Understanding money and imperialism

[jingerpi]

Nazi Germany lasted for ~10 years. the US' genocide of indigenous people inspired the Nazis, and we've been at it for ~500 years. 55 MILLION indigenous turtle Islanders were killed by American colonialists. Tell me again why we're arguing over whether or not these bourgeois politicians are 99% Hitler? This country is far worse than the Nazis were even remotely capable of. There are nearly 1.8 MILLION people in Slavery in the United States right now. This country is cartoon levels of evil, and beyond that! it's beyond parody! it's worse than you can possibly imagine. and that's just two examples over the 500 years they've been at this, and they only domestically! Do you have any idea what the ruling class has done in other countries? the war and famine they've intentionally induced from profits? The millions they've bombed? The only country to ever use nuclear bombs! and it was on civilians!

So yes, of course we cry out death to [US]America. Do you seriously not understand how deeply deeply evil this country is? Again:

Death to the USA

[txttletale]

usamericans love to pretend that black people don't exist outside the us, that the world is not filled with e.g. afrolatines who are affected both by global antiblackness and by global imperialism -- & conversely it disquiets me seeing fellow nonblack latines talk about how usamericans don't understand or purposefully misunderstand latinamerican racial dynamics (which, to be clear, is true) in a way that seems to elide or deny the existence of pervasive antiblackness against those very same afrolatines throughout latin america.

[irawhiti]

while everyone's rightfully talking about oppenheimer and its flaws regarding the erasure of japanese and native american voices regarding nuclear testing and detonations, i'd like to bring up the fact that pacific islanders have also been severely impacted by nuclear testing under the pacific proving grounds, a name given by the US to a number of sites in the pacific that were designated for testing nuclear weapons after the second world war, at least 318 of which were dropped on our ancestral homes and people. i would like if more people talked about this.

important sections are bolded for ease of reading. i would appreciate this being reblogged since it's a bit alarming how few people know about this.

--

in 1946, the indigenous peoples of pikinni (the bikini atoll) were forcibly relocated off of their islands so that nuclear tests could be run on the atoll. at least 23 nuclear bombs were detonated on this inhabited island chain, including 20 hydrogen bombs. many pasifika were irreversibly irradiated, all of them were starved during multiple forced relocations, and the island chain is still unsafe to live on despite multiple cleanup attempts. there are several craters visible from space that were left on the atoll from nuclear testing.

the forced relocation was to several different small and previously uninhabited islands over several decades, none of which were able to sustain traditional lifestyles which directly lead to further starvation and loss of culture and identity. there is a reason that pacific islanders choose specific islands to inhabit including access to fresh water, food, shelter, cloth and fibre, climate, etc. and obviously none of these reasons were taken into account during the displacements.

200 pikinni were eventually moved back to the atoll in the 1970s but dangerous levels of strontium-90 were found in drinking water in 1978 and the inhabitants were found to have abnormally high levels of caesium-137 in their bodies.

--

i'm going to put the rest of this post under a readmore to improve the chances of this being reblogged by the general public. i would recommend you read the entirety of the post since it really isn't long and goes into detail about, say, entire islands being fully, utterly destroyed. like, wiped off of the map. without exaggeration, entire islands were disintegrated.

--

as i just mentioned, ānewetak (the eniwetok atoll) was bombed so violently that an entire island, āllokļap, was permanently and completely destroyed. an entire island. it's just GONE. the world's first hydrogen bomb was tested on this island. the crater is visibly larger than any of the islands next to it, more than a mile in diameter and roughly fifteen storeys deep. the hydrogen bomb released roughly 700 times the energy released during the bombing of hiroshima. this would, of course, be later outdone by other hydrogen bombs dropped on the pacific, reaching over 1000 times the energy released.

one attempt to clean up the waste on ānewetak was the construction of a large ~380ft dome, colloquially known as the tomb, on runit island. the island has been essentially turned into a nuclear waste dump where several other islands of ānewetak have moved irradiated soil to and, due to climate change, rising seawater is beginning to seep into the dome, causing nuclear waste to leak out. along with this, if a large typhoon were to hit the dome, there would be a catastrophic failure followed by a leak of nuclear waste into the surrounding land, drinking water, and ocean. the tomb was built haphazardly and quickly to cut costs.

hey, though, there's a plus side! the water in the lagoon and the soil surrounding the tomb is far more radioactive than the currently contained radioactive waste. a typhoon wouldn't cause (much) worse irradiation than the locals and ocean already currently experience, anyway! it's already gone to shit! and who cares, right, the only ""concern"" is that it will just further poison the drinking water of the locals with radioactive materials. this can just be handwaved off as a nonissue, i guess. /s

--

at least 36 bombs were detonated in the general vicinity of kiritimati (christmas island) and johnson atoll. while johnson atoll has seemingly never been inhabited by polynesians, kiritimati was used intermittently by polynesians (and later on, micronesians) for several hundred years. many islands in the pacific were inhabited seasonally and likewise many pacific islanders should be classified as nomadic but it has always been convenient for the goal of white supremacy and imperalism to claim that semi-inhabited areas are completely uninhabited, claimable pieces of terra nullius.

regardless of the current lack of inhabitants on these islands, the nuclear detonations have caused widespread ecological damage to otherwise delicate island ecosystems and have further spread nuclear fallout across the entirety of the pacific ocean.

--

while the marshall islands, micronesia, and the surrounding areas of melanesia and polynesia were (and still are) by far the worst affected by these atrocities, the entirety of the pacific has been irradiated to some extent due to ocean/wind currents freely spreading nuclear fallout through the water and air. all in all, at least 318 nuclear bombs were detonated across the pacific. i say "at least" because these are just the events that have been declassified and frankly? i wouldn't be shocked to find out they didn't stop there.

please don't leave the atomic destruction of the pacific out of this conversation. we've been displaced, irradiated, murdered, poisoned, and otherwise mass exterminated by nuclear testing on purpose and we are still suffering because of it. many of us have radiation poisoning, many of us have no safe ancestral home anymore. i cannot fucking state this enough, ISLANDS WERE DISINTEGRATED INTO NONEXISTENCE.

look, this isn't blaming people for not talking about us or knowing the extent of these issues, but it's... insidiously ironic that i haven't seen a single post that even mentions pacific islanders in a conversation about indigenous voices/voices of colour being ignored when it comes to nuclear tests and the devastation they've caused.

[haridraws]

Excuse the format (I made this for instagram since that's what the publisher wants, rip) but this is basically a shorter, easy-to-read version of the history section at the back of my new book.

(Part 2 || The book)

---

Disclaimer: I'm extremely not an expert, and this is only scratching the very surface of complex topics that are hard to simplify. I mostly made this to EXTREMELY rec these books and podcasts, and would urge you to go check them out if you're not familiar!!

This stuff might seem obvious to some of you, but let me tell you, I do NOT think it's widely known in the general UK population.

Imo a lot of the general (especially white) public think that the Windrush generation - Caribbean migrants brought in to help rebuild postwar Britain in the 50s - were the first Black communities in the UK. And yet there's deliberately not much focus on why the Caribbean has links with northern europe. HMMMM

(Britain loves, for example, to celebrate the abolition of slavery without mentioning WHAT CAME BEFORE IT - Britain being the biggest trader of enslaved people, with more than 1 million people enslaved in the British Caribbean. They literally just did it overseas.)

Telling the truth about history or British imperialism gets this massive manufactured backlash at the moment. There are so many ideas prevalent in UK politics - anti-Black, anti-refugee, anti-trans - based on going ‘back’ to some imaginary version of the past. Those are enabled by a long tradition of carving parts out of the historical record, and being selective about whose histories get told and preserved. Even though the book I was making is a fun rom-com, by the time I finished researching, I decided to make an illustrated history section at the back too (this is a mini version). My hope is that readers who haven’t come across these histories might get an introduction to them - and some pointers of what they could read next to get a clearer view of our past.

[scribefindegil]

As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.

[a-side-character]

I am once again thinking about Breq and Mercy of Kalr.

Specifically, I'm thinking about how and why their relationship is so different from any other relationship in this series, and what that means for them as characters.

I'm thinking about Breq's response to being told by other people, often people she likes or respects, that they don't see her as an ancillary. Because they (for the most part) mean it as a compliment, a way of validating her and expressing that they care about or think highly of her. But she never takes it as such, and is always made uncomfortable by it.

Because she IS an ancillary, and by using "I don't think anyone here sees you as an ancillary" as a compliment, or as a reason why her life matters and she deserves to be taken care of, only furthers her belief that what she IS is wrong, is inherently less deserving.

I'm thinking about how the only time people use it/its pronouns - the identity she used for 2,000 years and continues to use to refer to her cousins and fellow AI - to refer to her is when they're trying to disrespect or demean her. How her crew looks at her, horrified, and says "sir, none of us would ever call you it" while continuing to use those same pronouns to refer to their own ship. It shows her that the only reason people think they care about her is because they're too caught up in the version of her she pretends to be (human, Radchaai, she), however wrong that viewpoint may be.

I'm thinking about how, in Ancillary Mercy when Breq breaks down and repeats the line "ships don't love other ships", Mercy of Kalr responds with "ships love people who could be captains." It doesn't say 'well that's okay, because I don't see you as a ship', it doesn't treat her as some exception to the supposed rule that ships and ancillaries aren't people worthy of love, it tells her 'you, Breq, Justice of Toren, One Esk Nineteen, YOU are my captain, and I can't help but love you.'

I'm just. thinking

[daggerfall]

Annoying pet peeve of endgame is how many people misspell Zenas' Empowering Disc (I can tolerate Zenas but I will not stand for people calling it Zena), but only partly for the typo reason.

The real reason is they don't even know who Morian Zenas is. Like hey that's my niche lore character whose only appearance for years was in lore books and, of all things, the crafting motif books from the base game that also tell an insane story about a love triangle between him and Divayth Fyr of all people competing for the attentions of a woman, until Fyr trapped Zenas in a apocrypha to get rid of the competition.

Put some RESPECT to his name! And his disc!

[empressofmankind]

CROCTOBER 1/31 - "Uncle Croc"

Not Crocodile bringing a gun to the custody knife-fight...

Inktober masterpost

[elbiotipo]

Leer un libro de ciencia y que de repente te pongan la temperatura con Farenheit es como pisar caca descalzo

[gotyouanyway]

i do honestly think hell bent had the worst take on rassilon which is a shame bc he had the best costume by far

[necromancelena]

why is not voting preferable to voting for biden? (genuine question)

Because supporting biden means that there is literally no line that the democrats can cross that would lose your support. Even meeting biden supporters within their framework of "this system sucks but it can't be helped right now so we need to do damage control and support the lesser evil", not voting democrat in this election would still be the 'pragmatic' choice. There are going to be republican presidents off and on until the American empire collapses, so if it is your belief that the democrats can truly be pulled left, the way to do so would be to show them that they will lose if they do bad things, even if it means life would get worse for usamericans.

[thorough-witness-enjoyer]

anon because im on the wrong blog rn but i wanted to say i really enjoyed your witness analysis post. i havent really seen many comparisons about the colonisation aspect of what the witness does (though to be fair, im not really in touch with fandom). so it was nice to these themes touched on especially so eloquently !

Greetings anon!!!

Thank you so much for the kind message!! I deeply appreciate your words as the Witness is a character that is extremely close to me, quite literally being one of my favorite characters in media ever and someone who revolves in my head like a rotisserie chicken 24/7!!!

I truly believe that if you don’t see the content you desire in the world, you should go out and make it, so when I didn’t see mountains of the most bitter vitriol towards the Witness, I knew I had a job to do!

I’ve been left to pick up the pieces of the Witness’ long legacy of reducing my people and culture to what is “palatable and profitable”, my family has a prophecy (a destiny if you will) that I will form my own Witness in this life to enact an ideology and force that idea on me, I was once a precursor who raged against a silent god by abandoning my self, I’ve met many disciples of the Witness in my life and many more victims of it. This character has been so firmly tied to my life that I just had to share my perspective with the world in an attempt to make people understand just how important the lessons we can learn from it are!! I could talk about the Witness for eons!!!

There has been a lot of Witness works ( fanfiction, memes, art work, etc.) produced and a lot of it has been absolutely phenomenal work!! They are all clearly created by people who have a deep affection for the character that clearly shows in their fantastic pieces and I truly love that, but a lot of what I saw left me feeling restless because none of it (from what I’ve seen) truly tapped into the absolute nightmarish nature of what this entity has brought down on civilizations. I really wanted to bring in another voice on this character because I couldn’t be moved so deeply by its defeat and sit still on it!!

Again, if no one is making the content you would like to see, make it! That’s actually the biggest reason why I started making posts for this blog, I wanted to help others see that there is much more to talk about when it comes to the Witness than its philosophical views on reality and it’s big eyes (as well as not keeping my trillions of thoughts in my head).

To me, characters as awful as it should always have their victims struggles voiced first and foremost and the Witness is much bigger than itself for it has forced its necrotizing fingers into the lives of everyone in the Destiny universe.

The story and focus will never be on the Witness for me, it will always be on its victims and their recovery.

I think about how I struggle to find traditional names for my heritage because everyone has a name from the beliefs of our imperialists instead of the victims they forced to be remembered as necessary casualties on a path to “civilization and salvation” and I am putting the Witness through a million glass tables.

I think about how all I know of my relatives who were born not that long ago was that they were only allowed to be “field workers and strong believers “ and here comes a massive anvil over its head.

Speaking on this matter, I am still working on a small thought dump on how Rhulk is a prime example of someone who sheds their cultural and personal ties to go from victim to perpetrator and it’s been hard!!

In all honesty, it has really taken an emotional and mental toll on me for how deep it cuts and how much of it reminds me of all that could of have been in the lives of so many if they weren’t groomed into believing that the only way to get justice for their lives (lives affected by the conditions the ideological groomers use to be opportunistic) is to take on a position where they are a subjugator, not the subjugated.

It’s very painful to write about and Rhulk as a character makes the very core of my being ache as every time I read Shattered Suns, I have to sit back and clench my fists at the invasive, predatory behavior the Witness displays towards Lubraens. Those same words it coerces Rhulk with are the same ones that resulted in hollow people in my life who were prideful in turning their backs on their cultural ways and community if it meant gaining the security and sense of righteousness the oppressors offered. The Witness preyed on Rhulk and turned him into something truly awful, something I see so often that I cannot stand by and not say anything on it.

I wish to see Rhulk content that does not focus on him just being a devoted disciple of the Witness or some super strong villain who’s cool, I really want to see more content touching on what happened to make him fall so far into the Witness’ clutches and views him as the victim he is! I want to make content that shows how REPUGNANT their relationship is and how Rhulk is an example of the need to provide preventative community and understanding to those vulnerable to ideological grooming, especially in our modern era where harmful beliefs are ever present and looking to find people to sustain them!

This is getting very long, but in essence, thank you! Thank you so much anon for your words!!

I truly believe in the importance of POC voices, especially black voices, in fandom spaces as we have been left out of a lot of discussions that have heavy implicit (and explicit) ties to race and culture when it comes to sci-fi and fantasy settings! We get strength from community and understanding, it is how we can better make fandom spaces comfortable for all!! By giving my views on the Witness and its ills, I wish to help the Destiny fandom understand some of the ties it has to real life issues and hope that it helps people be more conscious of the teachings in media they invest in!

It was so nice to see people contribute to my Witness post with their own connections or point out connections other people have made like with evangelicalism and Polish fascism. I’m very glad many people can unite on the fact that the Witness is abominable and that we can face irl Witnesses by defeating ignorance hand in hand!! My understanding and beliefs are always evolving with new information and I’m always happy to grow alongside others!

Just remember guys, make the content you want to see in life and if you are a POC, voicing your discomfort or offering your perspective on matters discussed in sci-fi and fantasy settings is essential to getting proper representation in media that is done with nuance and respect as well as help both audiences and writers craft better narratives!!!

And trust me, the Witness (especially the behaviors it displays towards Rhulk and it’s other victims) makes me deeply, deeply,

deeply

deeply

Uncomfortable.

I will never forgive the Witness for all it has done and I never want to see it pleased with its work EVER. The only redeeming I want to hear about the Witness is how it can redeem this coupon for my fist in its face, free of charge, guaranteed by me, filled with the force of all my relatives who did not live long enough to see that they could have always mattered in this world.

[shadowthief78]

Having Kassa's first language not be Basic is so important to me. literally 50% of the reason I love the characrer of Cassian Andor. Maybe more.

[a-side-character]

Frustrated with whoever edited the pronouns in the Imperial Radch Wiki. I mean, look at this for Seivarden:

Guys... her pronouns are She/Her. Regardless of where she is. Because she's Radchaai and those are the only pronouns she feels comfortable with. Nilters misgendering her based on their own gender conventions doesn't change HER pronouns, just like how a Radchaai misgendering every non she/her user in sight doesn't magically change that person's pronouns.

Also, MALE DOES NOT EQUAL HE/HIM

Yes I know the book mentions that Denz Ay is a grandfather and Breq uses "the simple respectful address towards a male person", but that tells us nothing about her (using the only pronoun we're given in the book to refer to Denz Ay, which is admittedly biased) actual pronouns. "Male" could mean literally anything to the Orisians, and we would never know because the narrator has no clue either.

The fact is, we'll never really know the pronouns of non-Radchaai characters unless we hear them referred to by others in their culture/language, like how we know that Uran uses he/him and Queter uses she/her, because that's how their family refers to them.

[optimnihilist]

i started nirvana in fire this weekend and its so good i cant. 3 episodes in i went on ao3 to check if my shipping predictions were correct and i was shocked not to see commander meng x mei changsu higher up lol. i thought the ‘recognizing someone after a single meeting even though they’re using a fake identity and have a whole different face from the last time you saw them which was a decade ago’ would have gone somewhere but apparently not! although tbh this was before jing-wang and the ‘i choose you’ scene so. anyway i can’t wait to see where this goes from episode 7! nihuang-junzu is so cool! xia dong-jiejie is so cool! fei liu is adorable! the crown prince is so pathetic and not in a good way! i can’t wait to know everyone’s names and titles and familial connections because at this point the only person whose name im sure i know is mei changsu’s! i still don’t know which of his two (not?) friends is who! what the fuck!