this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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A big thing that influenced me was actually the topic of the other day's megathread about the 1953 Iranian coup, because from a lib perspective Mossadegh did everything right and it didn't matter. All the Shah's Men is a pretty good telling of events, I looked up the guy who wrote it and he's a former NYT correspondent but he was skeptical of the media blitz against Assad and is also critical of NATO's role in the war in Ukraine (Stephen Kinzer, if you're low key a Hexbear poster, I liked your book). I think if you genuinely try to study world history in a way that emphasizes the perspectives of people in countries outside of the imperial core, then it's almost inevitable to come to our conclusions. It doesn't have to be that book or that country, there's tons of countries that can serve as case studies in why the US is the great Satan. Luna Oi has some videos about Vietnam and the Vietnamese War that are pretty good too imo.
Naomi Wu's story also did a lot to influence how I looked at things. She got in hot water with the cops in China some but a lot of it was because Western journalists have done things like publically outing her as a lesbian and taking clips out of context and using them in anti-China stories without her consent, and generally treating her like dirt, and she's generally more critical towards them than toward's China's government.
As for more theoretical stuff, I've been meaning to post this bit about Revolutionary Defeatism but I think it'd probably be too much for the libs (Lenin is a tankie!!! 😡). Really I think they need to be introduced to the idea of critical support but I don't know any good resources about that.
Honestly the hard part is just getting people to read or listen to anything. They're all allergic to sources and some of them seem to think that using any historical reference is "whataboutism."
:::spoiler The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War, V.I. Lenin
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