Synergy posted:just being an anti-imperialist doesn't mean you have good politics elsewhere
but it couldn't hurt... I think probably though one of the better developments in politics in the english speaking world over the last 10-20 years is how Chomsky is no longer the easiest or most accessible entry point for young people into empirical study of imperialist policy
good book pic.twitter.com/t5bEOrDrnu
— hungy rodent (@damoj) May 2, 2018
tears posted:I read imperialism in the 21st century updating lenins theory a century later by the party for socialism and liberation (psl) which i found depressingly...not...wrong....but like weak, through omission and a lack of any real discussion about "late" neocolonialism beyond the wars, like no discussion of the transformation of classes. probably most irritating to me because it reads like something i would have written a year ago before i caught a heavy case of maoism
i haven’t read it but that seems right on the money for the marcyite line on imperialism in general. and i think any anti-war movement that’s gonna actually stop some wars (instead of merely register to bemused bystanders that 13 ppl in whatever given city disagree with the wars ) is going to need a deeper analysis that foregrounds how imperialism actually works every day, apart from the eye catching airstrikes. like probably it’s more important to build labor links between walmart employees in the u.s. and the ppl who produce for walmart overseas, for example, than it is to have some opinions about bombs that you shout about to mostly nobody every few weeks. or rather if you do more work like the former, the shouting will be to more than nobody.
Edited by tentativelurkeraccount ()
tears posted:also i want this book: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/insurgent-supremacists/
here's what looks to be a whole chapter of it presented as a standalone essay: https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/01/20/ctrl-alt-delete-report-on-the-alternative-right/
tears posted:
Keep thinking every few years how pissed off i am at Karl who put off his fundamental working out and writing about class until his old age (and died before finishing any of the writing he planned to do). Far as i’m concerned, he coulda shouda skipped the last few unreadably heavy vols. of Das Kapital and done a much-more needed explanation of his views on class instead.
- j. sakai
freakin karl, man
Please come to the
International. I've baked
a cake for you.
Yours truly--
Vladimir Ulyanov
Lenin
Next up is "What China Thinks" by Mark Leonard. Similarly out of date, already a very unpromising title, and the author seems like a total dumbass given that he wrote a book called "Why Europe Will Run The 21st Century" in 2006, but it was a euro to buy so fuck it. Short too, and my knowledge of present-day politics in China is thin.
a lot of people on this forum tend to believe the US empire is in decline which i tend to disagree with so it was interesting to see Parenti support my view
Robles: Regarding Imperialism; now, one of your recent books was called "The Face of Imperialism", kind of a big question, I would like to ask you about the United States. Is it a dying empire in your opinion?
Parenti: No, I don't think so. I think the empire is doing very well. The empire is racking up victory after victory.
The US Empire is now, despite its defeat in Indo China and Vietnam, it now has Vietnam in the market system pretty much. In these recent years it has knocked out Iraq, because Saddam Hussein was committing economic nationalism, and that's not allowed by an empire. And they've dismantled Libya and got rid of Gaddafi. They are destroying Syria, and it goes on and on, and they're targeting Iran.
i like his little anecdotes here
Robles: Since the end of the Soviet Union the Russian people just opened their arms to the West and welcomed everything.
Parenti: Well they have such a mythology, they just self-generated a mythology about the West. Everything in the West: “Oh yes, you have things that are wrong but you fix them, we don't. Oh, you are this, oh, you are that. There is no starvation, there is no poverty in the West”. I used to hear that from people. It was really something to hear it.
There was a guy in Moscow, he had gone to Moscow University, he spoke very good English, so he had a good education. He had a fairly small apartment, but a wall full of books and all that, and he seemed like he lived fairly comfortable. And he said: “The very poorest people in your country (in the United States) the very poorest people in your country live better than I do”.
And I say: “No, you don't know. They sleep in doorways in my country, the very poorest people, and there are hundreds of thousands of them.”
He said: “That’s all right, you don't have to lie to us anymore”. That was what he said. I couldn't believe the guy, yeah.
And they’ve even got racist, some of them, and they say: “Oh, well, that is just the blacks, they are stupid and lazy anyway and blah blah”.
I said: “No, it’s not just the blacks”. And anyway that’s an outrageous comment. So they were very much brainwashed.
I thought Lech Walesa, a couple of years ago (a few years ago) made a very, very good comment, I mean it is the first thing that ever came out of his mouth that I could tolerate anyway. He turned to his people, he was talking to the Polish people who were full of complaints about how terrible things were and how this and that. He said: “Look, you wanted America, you are getting America”. And that was it.
And their favorite theme, I mean, we saw some of this right here on the western media and I was so surprised that they even ran it. But they did a few little specials, like documentaries on what's happening in Poland. And these people were repeatedly saying, people they interviewed, were repeatedly saying: “It was better under the Communists. This is terrible, we've got to pay for this, we've got to pay for that, and so it was better under the Communists. I'm going to lose my little plot of land here now and it was better under the Communists’. Well, too late. you wanted America, and you are getting America.
And I think that same element, by the way, there is an element of that in Ukraine. Some of the people who are opposing the Russian and Ukrainian relationship and want Ukraine to go West, some of those people have the dream of: someday I’ll be dancing in Paris or New York or something, or there is so much I can get still, and some of its going to come down to me, I talked to all those people who rallied us and gave us some money. And there they are.
this Robles guy can't seem to accept the fact that the US has no altruistic goals whatsoever so it's kind of funny to see Parenti basically sigh and repeat himself over and over again
Robles: Why is the US now…(you’re there, I’m here right, so this is a good dialogue here,) can you tell me from sitting over there, why does the US keep demonizing Russia and why is it surrounding Russia with missiles, and China as well? And why is NATO continuing to expand, in your opinion?
Parenti: Well, as I just said, there are only two kinds of countries: satellites and enemies. And any country that can go its own willful way, and do what it chooses; any country that can shut out the US and Western plutocracy, that country is getting in the way of the profits and the dominance that people could have.
Some of the writers here in America will talk about this as “craving for power”, but I don't think so. They use the power for a particular function, which is to make the world safe for global capitalism because they have a huge link or investment in that global capitalism. It’s a class war, still very nicely disguised behind things like “security, democratic elections and humanitarian wars and fighting against genocide or something like that, and terrorism”.
But in fact, just take an area like the Middle East. If you have leaders who let the IMF in, let the World Bank in, opened the country to the western plutocratic investors, who rally their own people into a work force that works at a level of servitude, very poorly and all that, then that guy… those leaders are fine.
I'll give you example of one: Mubarak in Egypt. Now there has never been a harsh word in the US media about Mubarak, and the guy was a murderer and he was an oppressor, he was a dictator. But you never heard a word, now the US supported demonstrations and uprisings when it was in Libya and Syria, and Iraq, and Yugoslavia. But in Egypt, they didn't support that at all (they weren’t supporting it), and they would rather … they would rather end up as they did in Afghanistan.
They would rather end up supporting Islamic militant terrorists (not that I'm saying all Islamists are militant and terrorists but this extreme Sharia group)…
Robles: Of course not….
Parenti: … they would rather see those guys take over, they would rather see the Taliban take over in Afghanistan, rather than seeing the kind of country that the revolutionary movement in Afghanistan was trying to build: a country where the children could go to school, women could go to school, there was land reform, all the things I mentioned before; human services and the country was developing.
They don't want development, they want exploitation. They don't want people who have a keen sense of their own entitlement, who have a high level of expectations.
They do the same thing here in the United States. They fight against human services, they are still trying to attack and destroy Social Security, what little that we have left of our own social services.
They are furious against anything that resembles a social democracy of any kind. For them, they want us poor and hungry and ready to work at any desperate level that we have to. And it is time that we get our chains back on, and so that kind of struggle that they are carrying out in Ukraine or in the Middle East or in Central Europe with Yugoslavia, it’s the same struggle they are carrying out here in the United States itself.
Parenti describes the US joint chiefs of staff being somewhat neutral towards war with Iran which i'm skeptical of considering how badly the US needs war to move capital
Robles: Israel is still receiving much of its oil from Iran, you know that right?
Parenti: I didn’t know that, no, sorry.
Robles: Yeah, Iran is still, to this day as we are speaking, Iran is still the key supplier of oil and gas to Israel.
Parenti: Yeah, but the Israelis huh... well, Netanyahu didn’t sound like he wanted to be nice, nice with Iran. It didn’t sound that way at all. He was talking about a tougher line and the like.
Robles: Well, sure, they wanted to...
Parenti: There was a lot of people here talking about bombing Iran. They don’t … they would not … you see they’ve learnt from Yugoslavia – they could fight a whole war and not lose a single soldier. That’s what’s very unpopular in the US, when American soldiers are killed, and “Oh why are they getting killed there; what are we doing over there”, and all that?
But they could go in now and there have been people, including some Russian commentators, who said: “Well they will never go into Iran. It is a hilly country, it is twice as big as Iraq, it’s a bigger population. They would need a million troops”.
Well, they had no intention of occupying Iran, but they can use the model of Yugoslavia which is simply – to bomb it. They have about 10,000 targets: every warehouse, every utility, every power line, every military base, everything. The air force, the US air force is absolutely ready to do that.
Now the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which are the top military leaders of the Air Force, the Navy, the Army and the Marines, they all got together and most of the other people, aside from the Air Force, were very lukewarm and cool. Chief of the Joint Chiefsof Staff was Admiral Mike Mullen and he said: “What are we going to bomb Iran for? It is 80 million people, every one of them is different from each other, they are all human beings. What is the issue? What is this all about?”
And there was one general who also came out and said: “Why war with Iran? What the heck is that all about?”
So, I think by the way, that had an influence on Obama, along with the fact that the American people did not want to bomb, did not want to go into a war. But the American people did not want to go into a war in Yugoslavia, they didn’t want to go into a war in Iraq. But what happens is they play on the fear, and they say: “Oh, these people, oh Iraq - Saddam Hussein is worse than Hitler, he has these secret weapons of mass destruction. He could destroy the whole world.” And Milošević was another Stalin or something. They made up these bugaboo fright stories and a lot of people on the left even went along with that one.
he does mention that the republic is falling apart though
Parenti: ...Look, the Empire feeds off the Republic. Our Republic is going down. You asked me at the beginning of this interview: “Is the empire in decay, and all that?”
And I wanted to say, (no, the empire), I did say to you: “The empire is stronger and more better funded, bigger with forces than ever, more victories and all”.
But the Republic is going down the tubes, our bridges are falling apart. They are closing libraries here; the public schools are getting abolished. We have levels of hidden unemployment that they don’t talk about. People who have given up looking for jobs so they’re taken off the unemployment rolls as if they are employed, but they are not employed.
See the unemployment only is for how many people are looking for jobs and don’t have jobs. So if you’ve given up, because you’ve been looking for six years, and you’re in poverty and you don’t have food security, you can’t reach the end of the month with enough money for food and so forth. There are millions of people like this now, people who lost their homes and all that.
So, why? Because that money has to be used to go bomb people in Somalia and in Yugoslavia, and name all the countries, you can name them quicker than I can: Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, etc.
i thought this section on Obama was pretty funny
Robles: I think for me, I was pretty much looking for maybe puppet masters manipulating Obama and I thought maybe he...he was a well-intentioned guy who had some higher moral ideals...
Parenti: Oh you had a wait till then. Oh no God, yeah. No, he is a hypocrite all the way through. He just reaches out and loves the Conservatives and just keeps talking, just making compromises with them. He goes into making compromises even before they start any kind of negotiation about something. He is a real disappointment, I must say.
Robles: What did you expect from him, if you could?
Parenti: Oh I expected nothing. I expected nothing. But I hoped, I was saying: ‘I hope this guy surprises me and proves me to be wrong’. But he didn’t, he didn’t do that. He proved me to be right and that makes me sorry. He was not a Franklin Roosevelt, he is just another republican.
Robles: And not good at that I would say, but anyway...
Parenti: Yeah. He himself said: ‘Years ago I would be classified as a liberal republican or moderate republican’, or something like that. You know, even saying that is letting people know. Well, I think we’ve pretty much covered everything.
Dimashq posted:Sometimes I realize that if Marx lived to 100 he would’ve died in 1918. Imagine correspondence between him and Lenin.
"please, i need a cure for armpit boils, please cure them, or kill me, please"
Extensive Race Builder rules for building your own races, including 2 new races designed from the ground up to show you how it works
imagining exploring an ruin for treasure but finding the big book of race science instead
88888 posted:perusing some of the many monthly review online articles inexplicably written by David fucking Thorstad
I thought that the Monthly Review was free of sin. I already have to hate WSWS for its stupid take on #metoo. I really like Monthly Review but this stuff is just reprehensible.
https://mronline.org/2013/05/27/thorstad270513-html/
this piece was kind of confusing to me:
4. Let us turn now to the fourth question posed. How many people were sentenced to death prior to 1953, especially during the purges of 1937-38?
We have already noted Robert Conquest's claim that the Bolsheviks killed 12 million political prisoners in the labour camps between 1930 and 1953. Of these 1 million are supposed to have been killed between 1937 and 1938. Solzhenitsyn's figures run to tens of millions who are supposed to have died in the labour camps – 3 million in 1937-38 alone. Even higher figures have been quoted in the course of the dirty propaganda war against the Soviet Union. The Russian, Olga Shatunovskaya, for example, cites a figure of 7 million dead in the purges of 1937-38.
The documents now emerging from the Soviet archives, however, tell a different story. It is necessary to mention here at the start that the number of those sentenced to death has to be gleaned from different archives and that the researchers, in order to arrive at an approximate figure, have had to gather data from these various archives in a way which gives rise to a risk of double counting and thus of producing estimates higher than the reality. According to Dimitri Volkogonov, the person appointed by Yeltsin to take charge of the old Soviet archives, there were 30,514 persons condemned to death by military tribunals between 1 October 1936 and 30 September 1938. Another piece of information comes from the KGB: according to information released to the press in February 1990, there were 786,098 people condemned to death for crimes against the revolution during the 23 years from 1930-1953. Of those condemned, according to the KGB, 681,692 were condemned between 1937 and 1938. It is not possible to double check the KGB's figures but this last piece of information is open to doubt.
It would be very odd for so many people to have been sentenced to death in only two years. Is it possible that the present-day pro-capitalist KGB would give us correct information from the pro-socialist KGB? Be that as it may, it remains to be verified whether the statistics which underlie the KGB information include among those said to have been condemned to death during the 23 years in question common criminals as well as counter-revolutionaries, rather than counter-revolutionaries alone as the pro-capitalist KGB has alleged in a press release of February 1990. The archives also tend to the conclusion that the number of common criminals and the number of counter revolutionaries condemned to death was approximately equal.
The conclusion we can draw from this is that the number of those condemned to death in 1937-38 was close to 100,000 and not several million as has been claimed by Western propaganda. It is also necessary to bear in mind that not all those sentenced to death in the Soviet Union were actually executed. A large proportion of death penalties were commuted to terms in labour camps. It is also important to distinguish between common criminals and counter revolutionaries. Many of those sentenced to death had committed violent crimes such as murder or rape. 60 years ago this type of crime was punishable by death in a large number of countries.
i can't figure out where they got the 100,000 number from. either i'm missing something or they just arbitrarily picked that
cars posted:like if David Foster Wallace collected ninja swords as a hobby
"if"
cars posted:after a thorough investigation of Yukio Mishima, the results are in. he's like if David Foster Wallace collected ninja swords as a hobby
i agree that mishima was very cool
shriekingviolet posted:cars posted:like if David Foster Wallace collected ninja swords as a hobby
"if"
If read infinite jest because I was young and hype-prone. What a colossal waste of time. Better than sinking 40 hours into crusader Kings I suppose
Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:i read j sakai's thing on security (thanks to the red youth nwa wordpress)
i was typing this up lol
Synergy posted:i can't figure out where they got the 100,000 number from. either i'm missing something or they just arbitrarily picked that
If Volkogonov gives a low estimate of ~30k and the modern KGB gives a high estimate of ~680k, the total is much closer to 100k than to 10000k
swampman posted:Synergy posted:i can't figure out where they got the 100,000 number from. either i'm missing something or they just arbitrarily picked that
If Volkogonov gives a low estimate of ~30k and the modern KGB gives a high estimate of ~680k, the total is much closer to 100k than to 10000k
actually i think you'll find that no eastern european people have ever died in quantities not numerically shaming to holocaust victims