Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies — Rolling Stone
Henry Kissinger has died at age 100, his consulting firm said in a statement on Wednesday.
it appears to have been mutually understood
After the Seige of Perekop, Makhno's aide-de-camp Grigori Vassilevsky, announced the agreement was over:
That's the end for the agreement! Take my word for it, within one week the Bolsheviks are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks!
— Grigori Vassilevsky, quoted in the same book
The larger response is in this thread where the meme was crossposted, almost 400 comments
driving them out of their homes and into shrinking, increasingly crowded prison cities with horrendous living conditions is ethnic cleansing. But they also have killed many thousands of Palestinians, not counting the 11,000 since Oct 7.
well yeah, fuck the CEO and upper management. This was my response to /u/SCB telling you there's no wealth to redistribute. I tagged you so you would also see it.
If your only justification here is
The first thing I mentioned was ethnic cleansing, which tends to radicalize people after a few decades of it.
But also, Israel has Palestine inside a literal fucking fence. They control the fucking water supply. Yes, they are responsible for Palestine
Why do you expect the Israeli government to prioritise the lives of Palestinian over their own citizens when trying to smack out a terrorist threat?
Because they were instrumental in creating that terrorist threat in the first place, not only by perpetrating ethnic cleansing but by directly funding Hamas in the 70s and 80s as a counterbalance against the secular PLO.
hexbear had an entire thread with hundreds of comments where they all agreed they hated trump and viewed him as an odious fascist
https://lemmy.ml/post/4040923?scrollToComments=true
The closest thing you find to support for trump in there is some of them thinking he is a less effective imperialist.
Here is Makhno in 1920 after agreeing to a temporary ceasefire:
"Military hostilities between the Makhnovist revolutionary insurgents and the Red Army have ceased. Misunderstandings, vagueness and inaccuracies have grown up around this truce: it is said that Makhno has repented of his anti-Bolshevik acts, that he has recognized the soviet authorities, etc. How are we to understand, what construction are we to place upon this peace agreement?
What is very clear already is that no intercourse of ideas, and no collaboration with the soviet authorities and no formal recognition of these has been or can be possible. We have always been irreconcilable enemies, at the level of ideas, of the party of the Bolshevik-communists.
We have never acknowledged any authorities and in the present instance we cannot acknowledge the soviet authorities. So again we remind and yet again we emphasize that, whether deliberately or through misapprehension, there must be no confusion of military intercourse in the wake of the danger threatening the revolution with any crossing-over, 'fusion' or recognition of the soviet authorities, which cannot have been and cannot ever be the case."
— quoted in Nestor Makhno: Anarchy's Cossack, a pro-Makhno book
we need only look at democratic socialist countries like Denmark
Sure helps when Europe benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net extraction from the global south
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
Why would you make light of CIA propaganda in the title? It’s one of the main things they do.
Instead of the CEO and other upper management, try stock buybacks and dividends, which enrich the actual owners. GM spent $21 billion on stock buybacks in the past 12 years, and around $18 billion in stock dividends. That averages to over $3 billion a year, which is over twice the worker raise from the strike — and a lot of that raise is going toward correcting the 19.3% pay cut they took after 2008.
Everyone on hexbear and lemmygrad is already a communist, so they don't spend a lot of time trying to convince each other that communism is good and capitalism is bad, although they do post specific examples. It's mostly current events, venting, and shitposting. A lot of the serious discussion is either in the weekly news megathread or buried in the comments under some shitpost begging xi jinping to nuke the white house.
transphobia and an adult abusing his position of power to hurt a kid, two berserk buttons in one headline
Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis
Animal Farm
The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It's so vague and allegorical that you can't really critique it. The message is basically "if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you." Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It's a very "American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that" kind of book.
It's not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed "anti-white."
https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/
I'll also throw in Asimov's review of 1984 while I'm ranting about this creep
http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
framework for statecraft
I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It's sort of an "I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls" shibboleth.
hey look I found the exact issue the UN peacekeepers address in these exact situations
Yeah? And how the fuck did that strategy work out anywhere else in the middle east?
people who want democracy
The coalition air mission was to support Islamic extremists in battles against the Libyan government. Those rebels wanted an Islamic state in Libya, not a democracy. They were also committing racist pogroms and atrocities against black Libyans, and western operatives on the ground were aware of it the entire time.
Read the fucking article. Here it is again:
Read every word of it before you respond to me.
Europe also benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net wealth extracted from the global south.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens
Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.
Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm
The UN working in Libya as peacekeeping forces would’ve prevented the monstrous situation we’re in now
Because it's that easy to counter Islamic extremism in a power vacuum. ISIS was active and gaining power in 2011, including in Libya.
to deny Iraq is currently a functional, if very deeply flawed, democracy is, in my view, to devalue the Iraqi citizens and the fledgling democracy they have.
The state of Iraq's corrupt democracy as of 2023 is little better than under Saddam
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/4/16/the-long-shadow-of-saddams-dictatorship-in-iraq
And all it cost was over a million Iraqi civilian deaths, millions of refugees, and the birth of ISIS in 2007.
The 2015 British Parliament inquiry found that the Islamic extremists fighting Qaddafi would not have succeeded without western air power, weapons, intelligence, and personnel, meaning the best way to prevent the humanitarian crisis in Libya would have been to fucking leave Libya alone in the first place. The inquiry also found that the intervention was economically motivated rather than humanitarian.
houses and cars are inanimate objects.
Juries acquited these activists of theft in previous cases, because they were shown footage of the awful condition the stolen animals were in. Which was why, in this case, the prosecutors dropped the theft charges, put a gag order on the footage, and instead threw a “felony conspiracy to commit trespassing” charge at the leader of the group, who didn’t even participate directly in stealing the animals.
The GOP has a master plan to criminalize LGBTQ people
Most people aren’t aware of Project 2025, or its playbook, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”—but you need to be. In stark terms, Project 2025 reveals the conservatives’ plan to enact a sweeping “Don’t Say Gay” policy that will effectively blot out all LGBTQ content on the internet a...
Some quotes:
> “The Mandate for Leadership” is a 920-page document that details how the next Republican administration will implement radical and sweeping changes to the entirety of government. This blueprint assumes that the next president will be able to rule by fiat under the unitary executive theory (which posits that the president has the power to control the entire federal executive branch). It is also based on the premise that the next president will implement Schedule F, which allows the president to fire any federal employee who has policy-making authority, and replace them with a presidential appointee who is not voted on in the Senate.
So they're gonna take over the executive branch.
And businesses will support and fund this effort because:
> The business wish list calls for eliminating federal agencies, stripping those that remain of regulatory power, and deregulating industries. The president would directly manage and influence Department of Justice and FBI cases, which would allow him to pursue criminal cases against political enemies. Environmental law would be gutted, and states would be prevented from enforcing their own environmental laws.
And what about the social wish list?
> The social conservative wish list calls for ending abortion, diversity and inclusion efforts, protections for LGBTQ people, and most importantly, banning any and all LGBTQ content. In fact, “The Mandate for Leadership” makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority. Its No. 1 promise is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” They are explicit in how they plan to do so, as you’ll see in the paragraph below. They plan to proceed by declaring any and all LGBTQ content to be pornographic in nature. > > > “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” > > When they talk about pornography, this includes any content discussing or portraying LGBTQ figures from the children’s books I Am Jazz and And Tango Makes Three to the Trevor Project’s suicide hotline. We know this by looking at how “don’t say gay” laws have been implemented in Florida: This is literally their model. It’s been tried in Virginia. It’s also arguable that LGBTQ parents would be subject to arrest, imprisonment, and being put on sex-offender registries for “exposing children to pornography” simply by being LGBTQ and having children. > > It would also likely criminalize any therapist, doctor, or counselor who provided affirming therapy to trans youth. Indeed, the document makes it explicitly clear they want nationwide bans on abortion and access to affirming care for trans youth, while calling for conversion therapies to be the only available treatments. It could be argued as well that people who are visibly trans in public are pornographic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This understanding of intent is in line with the call to “eradicate transgenderism from public life.” > > There’s also the matter of the internet: Any Internet Service Provider (ISP) that transmits or receives data about transgender people could potentially be liable if conservatives have their way. When you read the final sentence of the excerpted paragraph, the clear intent is that the same would apply to any social media company that allows any (positive) discussion or depiction of transgender individuals, as it would be considered pornographic and contributing to harming a minor.
And how will they do this shit?
> The organizations that drafted “The Mandate for Leadership” understand that blue states, which have sanctuary laws for transgender people, are unlikely to comply. It’s difficult to imagine California arresting and prosecuting teachers, librarians, doctors, therapists, bookstores (virtual or physical), LGBTQ parents, and especially LGBTQ people merely for existing in public. This is why they included the following paragraph: > > > “Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the “equal protection of the laws” by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).” > > This is calling for the executive branch to use the Department of Justice to threaten prosecution of any local or state officials if they do not charge LGBTQ people and their allies with crimes under the pretense that they are breaking federal and state laws against exposing minors to pornography. If people at the Department of Justice refuse to go along with this, then they can simply be replaced under Schedule F. While the excerpted paragraph above includes references to immigration, the fact that it explicitly includes gender identity, and fits in with the previous calls to designate anything trans-related as pornographic, clearly telegraphs their intent. > > The result of these actions will be perhaps the biggest power play against states rights in American history, and the threat is clear. If blue states refuse to turn on their own transgender citizens, then the federal government will do everything in its power to decapitate the leadership of those states using the Department of Justice. Conservatives are making the bet that individual district attorneys will not risk prosecution, and prison, on behalf of a tiny, despised minority. They’re betting that state governors will not be willing to risk both prosecution and a constitutional crisis over transgender people.
Well, fuck!
In addition to voting, what should we do about this?
The GOP has a master plan to criminalize LGBTQ people
Most people aren’t aware of Project 2025, or its playbook, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”—but you need to be. In stark terms, Project 2025 reveals the conservatives’ plan to enact a sweeping “Don’t Say Gay” policy that will effectively blot out all LGBTQ content on the internet a...
Some quotes:
> “The Mandate for Leadership” is a 920-page document that details how the next Republican administration will implement radical and sweeping changes to the entirety of government. This blueprint assumes that the next president will be able to rule by fiat under the unitary executive theory (which posits that the president has the power to control the entire federal executive branch). It is also based on the premise that the next president will implement Schedule F, which allows the president to fire any federal employee who has policy-making authority, and replace them with a presidential appointee who is not voted on in the Senate.
So they're gonna take over the executive branch.
And businesses will support and fund this effort because:
> The business wish list calls for eliminating federal agencies, stripping those that remain of regulatory power, and deregulating industries. The president would directly manage and influence Department of Justice and FBI cases, which would allow him to pursue criminal cases against political enemies. Environmental law would be gutted, and states would be prevented from enforcing their own environmental laws.
And what about the social wish list?
> The social conservative wish list calls for ending abortion, diversity and inclusion efforts, protections for LGBTQ people, and most importantly, banning any and all LGBTQ content. In fact, “The Mandate for Leadership” makes eradicating LGBTQ people from public life its top priority. Its No. 1 promise is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” They are explicit in how they plan to do so, as you’ll see in the paragraph below. They plan to proceed by declaring any and all LGBTQ content to be pornographic in nature. > > > “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.” > > When they talk about pornography, this includes any content discussing or portraying LGBTQ figures from the children’s books I Am Jazz and And Tango Makes Three to the Trevor Project’s suicide hotline. We know this by looking at how “don’t say gay” laws have been implemented in Florida: This is literally their model. It’s been tried in Virginia. It’s also arguable that LGBTQ parents would be subject to arrest, imprisonment, and being put on sex-offender registries for “exposing children to pornography” simply by being LGBTQ and having children. > > It would also likely criminalize any therapist, doctor, or counselor who provided affirming therapy to trans youth. Indeed, the document makes it explicitly clear they want nationwide bans on abortion and access to affirming care for trans youth, while calling for conversion therapies to be the only available treatments. It could be argued as well that people who are visibly trans in public are pornographic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor. This understanding of intent is in line with the call to “eradicate transgenderism from public life.” > > There’s also the matter of the internet: Any Internet Service Provider (ISP) that transmits or receives data about transgender people could potentially be liable if conservatives have their way. When you read the final sentence of the excerpted paragraph, the clear intent is that the same would apply to any social media company that allows any (positive) discussion or depiction of transgender individuals, as it would be considered pornographic and contributing to harming a minor.
And how will they do this shit?
> The organizations that drafted “The Mandate for Leadership” understand that blue states, which have sanctuary laws for transgender people, are unlikely to comply. It’s difficult to imagine California arresting and prosecuting teachers, librarians, doctors, therapists, bookstores (virtual or physical), LGBTQ parents, and especially LGBTQ people merely for existing in public. This is why they included the following paragraph: > > > “Where warranted and proper under federal law, initiate legal action against local officials—including District Attorneys—who deny American citizens the “equal protection of the laws” by refusing to prosecute criminal offenses in their jurisdictions. This holds true particularly for jurisdictions that refuse to enforce the law against criminals based on the Left’s favored defining characteristics of the would-be offender (race, so-called gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) or other political considerations (e.g., immigration status).” > > This is calling for the executive branch to use the Department of Justice to threaten prosecution of any local or state officials if they do not charge LGBTQ people and their allies with crimes under the pretense that they are breaking federal and state laws against exposing minors to pornography. If people at the Department of Justice refuse to go along with this, then they can simply be replaced under Schedule F. While the excerpted paragraph above includes references to immigration, the fact that it explicitly includes gender identity, and fits in with the previous calls to designate anything trans-related as pornographic, clearly telegraphs their intent. > > The result of these actions will be perhaps the biggest power play against states rights in American history, and the threat is clear. If blue states refuse to turn on their own transgender citizens, then the federal government will do everything in its power to decapitate the leadership of those states using the Department of Justice. Conservatives are making the bet that individual district attorneys will not risk prosecution, and prison, on behalf of a tiny, despised minority. They’re betting that state governors will not be willing to risk both prosecution and a constitutional crisis over transgender people.
Well, fuck!
In addition to voting, what should we do about this?