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freagle

@ frisbird @lemmy.ml

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686
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3 mo. ago

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • You need to read history. Russia has been a target of Europe for a very long time. They want the natural resources under their control. Napoleon invaded Russia in an attempt to dominate it and control who it could trade with. The US and the Allies invaded Russia in 1918 to stop the communists from taking over. Hitler invaded Russia intending to enslave everyone and control all their resources. And Western Europe was pretty bullish on that idea. Many American business leaders supported Hitler, as did many English political leaders and business leaders.

    When Russia was dismantled, Bill Clinton held NATO meetings with Yeltsin and Yeltsin made it clear that, following years of rapprochement with the USA, Russia would be a good capitalist ally. Clinton instead chose to expand NATO, a transnational nuclear military with no democratic accountability that was designed specifically to counter Russian military capabilities and staffed by Nazi officers specifically because they were trained on anti-Russian strategies and tactics. That choice demonstrated a US and European consensus to continue having a violently oppositional posture towards Russia and indeed enhance that posture over time. Putin continued to enrich Yeltsin's position of economic and military cooperation with the West, thinking that the expansion of NATO was just precautionary and eventually the West would accept Russia into the club. But after multiple failures of repeated attempts to integrate their Russian security framework with the West's, it became abundantly clear that the West would never accept anything less than total Russian subjugation.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • The US also helped put Saddam Hussein in power and look what they did? This is just more confirmation bias and selective reading of history. Yes, GWB said he looked into the eyes of Putin and saw in his soul that he was a good man. But Cheney is an anti-Trumper. So which is it? Trump is a personal puppet of Putin? The entire Republican party is individually or collectively controlled by Putin? Or the US (and its European a forebears) have always seen Russia as a prize to be conquered and ending communism was not enough for the US to change positions on that?

    If Russia is a long standing enemy, everything the US is doing is consistent with that thesis without needing to also establish that some significant portion of effective leadership is actually working for Putin. The waffling with the Ukrainian weapon support is classic North Atlantic proxy war behavior and does not require an entire 5th Column of Russian actors to explain.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • Yes. Which is why the discourse is so obviously manufactured I can't believe any of you don't see it.

    The enemy is both weak and strong. Russia is both losing terrible for 4 years straight and also we need another $100B worth of the most powerful weapons in the world. Russia is both sending soldiers out to the fields without shoes or guns and also if we don't send more support Ukraine will lose. Russia is both almost completely out of soldiers and tanks and also all they will invade all of Europe if Ukraine falls.

    It's so obvious. It's been obvious for years. The same people saying it's obvious that Russia is in an abject state are the same ones saying that unless we send weapons, or even troops, then Europe will be overrun by Russian hordes.

    It's important that we see this discourse for what it is - pure manipulation of the masses. It has no basis in reality. Most of the discourse on the conflict has no basis in reality. The ruling class of the Western empire has one objective - maintain power over the world, including and most importantly, their domestic working class.

  • Marco Rubio calls for revival of Western colonialism

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  • You need to do some more reading. Western colonialism is the dominant reality of the last 600 years for over 80% of the world's population

  • Not historically accurate but close enough.

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  • I don't laugh at erasure of atrocities.

  • What are some things about the past people get wrong today?

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  • In fact, it generally wasn't even a category. It was just a behavior

  • Cuba kills four crew members of a US civilian speedboat

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  • Uh. Do you not see how this is incredibly contradictory. How could people move migrants from Cuba to Florida if they abandon the boats on the North shore of Cuba?!

  • Not historically accurate but close enough.

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  • Liberal delusion.

    The US crashed the entire world economy after a massive wealth concentration "golden age". Millions died as a result. That depression created the conditions for the second world war. In the run up to that, the US was very much supporting the fascists, with most of our business leaders providing funds and openly collaborating with them. We had Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden. The second largest fascist movement was right here in the US.

    And then WW2 started and we did nothing. Not until the Soviets actually showed they could put up a fight. And we got involved so that we could stop the spread of communism, not to stop the fascists. Evidence? The US collaborated with the Vatican to safely evacuate 10k Nazis and place them all over the Americas, sometimes through the monastery system and sometimes just openly in governments. When the US built West Germany openly Nazi politicians were elected into positions of top leadership. NATO was staffed with Nazi officers. And one of the top missions of NATO, Operation Gladio, was to organize Nazi collaborators throughout all of Europe, including in those territories liberated by the Soviets, to create armed violent militias that could be activated to fight the Soviets if NATO required them to.

    Black/white apartheid was the law of the land well through WW2 until it finally started to break in the 1960s. Even then racial apartheid had become endemic, systemic, and the idea of repairing the damage done was never further from realization. By the 1970s mass incarceration and massive expansion of the parole system created a carceral system worse than anything the planet had ever seen. It imprisoned more people than the Soviet GULAGs ever did.

    And THEN Reagan showed up.

    This graph represents a professional white middle class perspective, completely isolated from the violent and heinous reality of the country and so insular as to be delusional from the perspective of the majority of people in the world

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    What is a not work or politics related positive thing reasonable American conservative men can do to build comradie and respect from peers and community?

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  • Who are the peers of American conservative men? Who are the communities of American conservative men?

    Is it considered political to suggest that the peers of American conservative men are immigrants, black people, women, trans people?

    Is it considered political to suggest that the community of American conservative men are immigrants, black people, women, trans people?

    Is it considered political to suggest that American conservative men could spend time visiting with leaders of churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, and other places of worship and just learn about other religions?

    Is it considered political to suggest that American conservative men could attend meetings of anti-racist organizations?

    Please clarify your terminology and help to draw clearer boundaries of what is considered "not work and not political", who is considered "peers and community", otherwise this will go nowhere

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    The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem. How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?

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  • What's changed is that the USA, and the white supremacist West more generally, has recognized that it is losing and is facing a real threat of losing for good. Throughout the last 600 years, whenever a European ruling class faces a legitimate threat, it activates divide and conquer strategies from patriarchy to racism to heteronormativity to religious conflict to red scares to yellow perils. The goal has consistently been to create a cross-class coalition to support the interests of the ruling class by any means necessary.

    The white supremacy you're seeing now was literally always there, but it was a suboptimal strategy for building that cross-class coalition to support ruling class interests. The civil rights movement is a classic example. They were more willing to build cross-class coalitions and become more inclusive on the basis of race but they were murdering anyone who dared merge black liberation with class consciousness.

    With Western economies in an unstoppable slide, austerity is going to have to be imposed at some point soon and that's going to create class consciousness in ways that almost nothing else can. To maintain their power, the ruling class needs to divide the working class. Hence, the new strategy you're seeing of intensifying gender oppression, racial oppression, language oppression, health oppression, ethnic oppression, queer oppression, etc. These things have always been here and the ruling class chooses which aspects to express based on the state of play.

  • Dems lack a coherent message on Trump's march to war with Iran

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  • They absolutely have a coherent message. That message is "Before you bomb anyone, you have to ask our permission and we'll give it to you"

  • Marco Rubio calls for revival of Western colonialism

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  • Well, Hitler took his ideas from Western colonialism, and particularly from American apartheid. The first gas chambers were an innovation by the French in their prosecution of the Haitian revolution. The methods of subjugating populations and turning them into productive contributors to the war efforts were developed by the UK, France, Spain, etc.

    It's not like the Western imperialists opposed Hitler. They just didn't think he would invade them. They though he was going to deal with those uppity communists and return the continent back to the same and rational liberalism that allowed the bourgeoisie to flourish.

  • The Left and Ukraine: Anti-Imperialism or Alter-Imperialism?

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  • Also completely garbage take that relies entirely on ignoring reality and psychologizing perceived enemies

    But it must be underlined that the Russian and Chinese governments respond, not as anti-imperialist forces, but rather with their own plans for control and dominance.

    There is no evidence of this. China is not merely weaker imperialism than the US. China has not dropped a single bomb in 35 years. That's not a Portugal to Spain. That's an entirely different class. China is not "carving up a sphere of influence" in the imperialist sense, nor is Russia. That phrasing emerged to describe the behaviors of Portugal, Spain, France, The Netherlands, England, and the US in their globe spanning military adventures to literally subjugate entire chunks of the world and bring the subjugated peoples' wealth into the economies of the subjugator. There is literally no equivalent analysis for China and Russia.

    But even more ridiculous is that we must oppose NATO expansion by focusing on improving living conditions. What the actual fuck? The only way to oppose military expansion is by stopping that expansion. In 4 years of conflict against a smaller weaker opponent, Russia has not made any attempts to expand into Ukraine and take it over and extract its wealth. Including the 2014 invasion of Crimea, it has only ever responded to its security assessment of NATO expansion. Unfortunately for people with actual national security responsibility, opposing NATO by voting for peace and focusing on living standards is not a real option and anyone who says that's the only legitimate way to oppose NATO is no better than an advocate for NATO expansion.

    And I mean that literally. If you watch a transnational nuclear military running live-fire simulations of invasions of foreign countries and say that the only legitimate opposition to it is non-violent, you're on their side.

  • Are people better off just doing what they want or do they need police watching them and forcing them to do the right thing?

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  • You might want to back down off that position. Just take a look at jim crow laws

  • Are people better off just doing what they want or do they need police watching them and forcing them to do the right thing?

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  • You're arguing in bad faith.

  • How (Not) To Apply the Marxist Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-first Century - New Politics

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  • Garbage Western Marxist. Multipolarity is not an ideology. It is a description of a world system. There is no path from the unipolar world to a socialist world without first going through a multipolar transition.

    The reason Great Power Rivalry does not factor in to contemporary Marxist analysis of geopolitical is because Russia and China are not yet great powers. The context of Great Power Rivalry during the period when the Marxist analysis of imperialism first emerged was a context in which multiple European war machines had already sailed clear around the globe and committed various genocides to claim entire populations as their subjugated peoples and were actively extracting their wealth to maintain their empires and war machines. It was not merely an analysis resting on big militaries but rather big imperialist states fighting with each other.

    Russia and China do not meet the standard of Great Power in this sense. If you take England, Spain, and France and scale them up to 21st century standards, Russia and China do not measure up.

    If Russia and China had, say even 100 foreign military bases each, while they wouldn't be as strong as the USA's 700, they would rightly be seen as imperialist Great Powers and thus engaged in inter-imperilaist conflict. But they do not have such an empire. They are almost entirely confined to their own long-standing geographical space. In short, "big military" is not equivalent to Great Power and to argue that they are simply because they have a big military and a capitalist arrangement of production is a complete misunderstanding of materialism and an adherence to idealist conceptions of imperialism. Which is what Western Marxists are consistently criticized for doing and which this author fails to avoid.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • The US is massively overextended in the region. And has limited platforms to deploy power from. Just as you say the US would first target Iranian launch capacity, Iran would first target US regional platforms, including the incredibly vulnerable carriers. Iran already demonstrated it can bypass missile defenses. The Houthis already demonstrated that they can threaten naval assets. Iran will target airfields and carriers first and those US bombers are going to have a hard time finding a place they can land.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • The CIA has consistently reported that not only do Russian strategists and leaders not have the intention to invade more of Europe, they also do not have the capability and capacity to do so.

    So yes, it's a crackpot hypothesis because it doesn't match reality as we know it.