The entire British establishment supported Nazism.

When anticommunists whine about Soviets signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact they ignore that the British spent the entire 1930s claiming that Britain and Nazi Germany will be a bulwark against communism and signed three pacts with Hitler which were all directly against the Soviet Union: the Four Powers Pact meant to exclude and isolate the Soviets, the Naval Agreement meant Germany could have a navy up 35% of the British navy meaning it wouldn't threaten British empire but every country on the Baltic sea... i.e. the Soviet Union, and finally the Munich Betrayal which was understood to be a gesture of a "free hand" (British diplomat's words not mine) for Hitler to go east.

In spite of these difficulties he (Lord Halifax) and other members of the British Government were fully aware that the Fuhrer had not only achieved a great deal inside Germany herself, but that, by destroying Communism in his country, he had barred its road to Western Europe, and that Germany therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against Bolshevism

and

In spite of these difficulties he (Lord Halifax) recognised that the Chancellor had not only performed great services in Germany, but also, as he would no doubt feel, had been able by preventing the entry of Communism into his own country, to bar Its passage further West. The Prime Minister held the view that it should be possible to find a solution of out differences by an open exchange of views

Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War Vol. 1

When the Soviets liberated Germany they were able to get a huge cache of British diplomatic documents. The Soviets released the above book and Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War Vol. 2 full to the brim of diplomats praising Nazi Germany as a twin pillar alongside Britain stopping communism.

Lenin pointed this out in Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism and dug a quote out from Cecil Rhodes (a disgusting colonial piece of shit) who said:

I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

The imperialists have understood for a long time to prevent socialist revolution they must by all means have new lands, new markets, new pools of cheap labour to rinse to placate the workers in imperialist nations.

The only real difference between someone like Churchill and Hitler was Hitler waged this violence against Europeans for his Lebensraum.

credit to u/JoeysStainlessSteel

Stalin was a violent revolutionary who absolutely did see violence as a tool for political change and he was right about that judging by how much change he achieved.

He was also the leader of the fight against Nazism, he stood against Nazism in Spain in the civil war and he attempted to form a coalition against Nazism during the Czechoslovakian crisis, then finally he led the final defeat of Nazi Germany.

And while leading a country from a wracking civil war, through world war 2, and straight into the hostility of the Cold War, he also transformed the USSR from a still basically semi-feudal agricultural society into the second most powerful industrial power and an almost entirely self contained economy, the greatest raising of the standard of living for such a large group thats only surpassed by China.

And while doing all this he supported countless anti-imperial struggles in the colonial British, French, and American empires with communist support for anti-colonial insurgencies being the major reason why those European colonial empires finally collapsed.

He was one of the greatest men of the 20th century, arguably one of the most significant men of all history. He’s far too complex a character to reduce to a thumbs up or a thumbs down that’s just inane. It’s not possible to cause as much change as Stalin caused without creating a lot of losers alongside all those winners, but at most you can criticize him for the ruthlessness of his pursuit of a greater world for all.

The negatives of his rule exist but they have been greatly exaggerated. Exaggerated and overemphasized. This is a kind of narrative emphasis, a choice of perspective chosen by pro-capitalist and pro-western or anti-communist historians to immediately frame Stalin for you.

For example, when we talk about Churchill the framing is on his resistance to Hitler. We don’t emphasize the many crimes against humanity this colonial imperialist committed. No, the framing we receive of Churchill is the dogged resistance of the English character. Not millions of starving Bengalis or the victims of colonial police massacres, we don’t get that framing.

For Stalin, he’s never framed as the man who lifted about 200 million people out of poverty while fighting off Hitler and politically sponsoring the invention space travel, all while supporting the end of 19th century European colonialism in Africa and Asia. We don’t get that framing.

Instead we get an effort to equate him with Hitler.

The claim is made that the holodomor was a genocide which is a lie that began with WW2 Nazi propaganda that’s been debunked repeatedly in academia but keeps being asserted as an unquestionable fact.

Or the invasion of the Baltics or Finland is decontextualized from these nations de facto alliance and collaboration with Nazi Germany, frequently also the ideological affinity of their political leaders with Nazi Germany, which was openly hostile to the existence of the USSR and indeed hostility to the existence of the Slavic peoples and other minorities. Stalin was a hard man getting ready for what he could see would be a titanic clash. Sorry for your borders that is regrettable but maybe you shouldn’t haven’t chosen to host German military units so close to Leningrad. What’s gonna happen?

Or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The dozen or so pacts the western allies made with Hitler are just ignored or framed as “that was just Chamberlain”. The pact Stalin made is framed as the betrayal that allowed WW2 to happen. In reality Stalin saw what Nazism was early in the 1930s and actively pushed for the treaty of Versailles to be enforced. It was the western powers that bank rolled the German reindustrialization and remilitarization. Stalin was sending tanks and fighter planes to Spain while Britain was writing loans for Hitler and preventing France from intervening for the republic. Only Stalin stood against fascism in Spain.

And again with Czechoslovakia. Stalin made an alliance with France specifically to protect Czechoslovakia against German aggression. When the Nazis claimed the Sudetenland it was Stalin that pushed to fight back. Britain pushed France not to act, meaning the German-Polish pact to subjugate Czechoslovakia was effective.

Or the occupation of Poland, leaving out the fact Poland had its own expansionistic and fascistic government, was taking pieces of its neighbors, and the part of Poland that was occupied by the USSR was the part of Ukrainian and Belorussian populated USSR that Poland had taken by force in the 1920s. That recent history is actually highly relevant to the conflict but it is simply erased from history.

You see it wasn’t just “peace in our times”. Lords Halifax and Chamberlain were trying to forge a German-Polish alliance against the USSR and were perfectly happy for Nazi militarism to go to war with the USSR. That was their plan to fight communism, a threat to their colonial empires. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was Stalin breaking this anti-Soviet alliance. The betrayal wasn’t the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the betrayal was the western support for the Nazis in Spain and the betrayal was the subjugation of Czechoslovakia.

Or they will emphasize the truly regrettable policies such as the forced population transfers eg the tartars but they’ll just leave out that these highly offensive policies were unfortunately commonplace throughout the world including the USA, Canada, and Australia with reservation systems or the population transfers of the British empire or of the post-WW1 and post-WW2 settlements. Most of the time there is a Stalinist policy that’s truly horrendous you’ll find that while we can and should criticize Stalin for that policy, it was unfortunately common for the era meaning it’s not a reason to criticize Stalin in particular in a way we wouldn’t also have criticized the other leaders of the era but historians seem to reserve these criticisms for Stalin while ignoring them for FDR.

The framing they wish to create is to frame you to think of Stalin in the same thought as Hitler. They want you to equate these two figures. So they pick and choose and cherry pick from history. The occupation of the Baltics is decontextualized from WW2 and their collaboration with the Nazi regime from their far right governments is just quietly ignored, and bam, territorial aggression. The holodomor is exaggerated as a genocide by relying on WW2 Nazi propaganda and an extremely notable reliance on unreliable anecdote instead of data and bam you’ve got his Holocaust. The death rate of the gulag being high during times of extreme famine or by including all MIA German soldiers in WW2 and in the 1950s being less than twice that of the US prison system and those are your death camps.

Stalin was one of the greatest men of the 20th century. It’s just silly to reduce him to the essentialist idea of “he was a good guy” or “he was a bad guy”. The fact is he was an extremely impactful person far too complex to reduce to a single judgement.

Having said all of that, he receives very little praise when actually he deserves a lot, and he receives endless and extreme condemnation when in reality he only deserves criticism and critique.

—@420stalin69

• Whitey Bulger: protected by the FBI for decades while being the biggest heroin importer in the northeast
• Freeway Ricky Ross: supplied by the CIA with coke from the Contras, in a relationship mediated by a DEA informant
• Golden Triangle heroin trade: controlled by the CIA for decades after the Korean War, arming and protecting manufacturers and traffickers, with heroin flown on CIA planes
• The French Connection: French gangsters were protected by the CIA and allowed to import heroin to their primary market, the US, in exchange for keeping the port of Marseille out of the control of French communists
• La Corporacion: the biggest Bolivian cocaine cartel, the "GM of cocaine", started with the cooperation and protection of the CIA according to a DEA agent whose investigations into them were repeatedly thwarted by the State Dept and CIA
• Ronald Stark: the world's biggest manufacturer and supplier of LSD for a period after its criminalization, sole supplier of late-period Brotherhood of Eternal Love, threw parties at the US embassy in Brussels, sent letters using their letterhead, and when he was finally arrested in Italy, the judge in his case accused the CIA of protecting him

The drug war has always been a hoax. There are more drugs in the US now than there were when prohibition started. The cops have always been in on it.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/126p3ys/san_jose_police_union_director_charged_with/jebbmyy/

democracy, people who everybody hates make laws nobody except rich people wants

—mustGo

On Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), in the scene where Bond is about to parachute jump into Vietnamese waters, [the Department of Defense liason] Strub successfully requested that a CIA agent not warn Bond: ‘You know what will happen. It will be war, and maybe this time we’ll win.’

from National Security Cinema by Alford & Secker [PDF]

These are the days of subscription campaigns. The editors and administrators of bourgeois newspapers tidy up their display windows, paint some varnish on their shop signs and appeal for the attention of the passer-by (that is, the readers) to their wares. Their wares are newspapers of four or six pages that go out every day or evening in order to inject in the mind of the reader ways of feeling and judging the facts of current politics appropriate for the producers and sellers of the press.

We would like to discuss, with the workers especially, the importance and seriousness of this apparently innocent act, which consists in choosing the newspaper you subscribe to. It is a choice full of snares and dangers which must be made consciously, applying criteria and after mature reflection.

Above all, the worker must resolutely reject any solidarity with a bourgeois newspaper. And he must always, always, always remember that the bourgeois newspaper (whatever its hue) is an instrument of struggle motivated by ideas and interests that are contrary to his. Everything that is published is influenced by one idea: that of serving the dominant class, and which is ineluctably translated into a fact: that of combating the laboring class. And in fact, from the first to the last line the bourgeois newspaper smells of and reveals this preoccupation.

But the beautiful – that is the ugly – thing is this: that instead of asking for money from the bourgeois class to support it in its pitiless work in its favor, the bourgeois newspapers manage to be paid by...the same laboring classes that they always combat. And the laboring class pays; punctually, generously.

Hundreds of thousands of workers regularly and daily give their pennies to the bourgeois newspapers, thus assisting in creating their power. Why? If you were to ask this of the first worker you were to see on the tram or the street with a bourgeois paper spread before him you would hear: “Because I need to hear about what happening.” And it would never enter his head that the news and the ingredients with which it is cooked are exposed with an art that guides his ideas and influences his spirit in a given direction. And yet he knows that this newspaper is opportunist, and that one is for the rich, that the third, the fourth, the fifth is tied to political groups with interests diametrically opposed to his.

And so every day this same worker is able to personally see that the bourgeois newspapers tell even the simplest of facts in a way that favors the bourgeois class and damns the working class and its politics. Has a strike broken out? The workers are always wrong as far as the bourgeois newspapers are concerned. Is there a demonstration? The demonstrators are always wrong, solely because they are workers they are always hotheads, rioters, hoodlums. The government passes a law? It’s always good, useful and just, even if it’s...not. And if there’s an electoral, political or administrative struggle? The best programs and candidates are always those of the bourgeois parties.

And we’re aren’t even talking about all the facts that the bourgeois newspapers either keep quiet about, or travesty, or falsify in order to mislead, delude or maintain in ignorance the laboring public. Despite this, the culpable acquiescence of the worker to the bourgeois newspapers is limitless. We have to react against this and recall the worker to the correct evaluation of reality. We have to say and repeat that the pennies tossed there distractedly into the hands of the newsboy are projectiles granted to a bourgeois newspaper, which will hurl it, at the opportune moment, against the working masses.

If the workers were to be persuaded of this most elementary of truths they would learn to boycott the bourgeois press with the same unity and discipline that the bourgeoisie boycott the newspapers of the workers, that is, the Socialist press. Don’t give financial assistance to the bourgeois press, which is your adversary. This is what should be our battle cry in this moment that is characterized by the subscription campaigns of all the bourgeois newspapers. Boycott them, boycott them, boycott them!

from Newspapers and the Workers by Antonio Gramsci (1916)

• "Israel" sterilized without their consent Ethiopian Jews immigrating to Israel: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-ethiopians-fooled-into-birth-control-1.5226424

• "Israel" harvested dead body parts from Palestinians without the consent of family members: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna34503294

• "Israel" established secret concentration camps for Palestinians in 1971: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-israel-secretly-detained-innocent-palestinians-in-desert-camps-in-1971-1.10050775

• "Israel" offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa in 1975: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/23/israel-south-africa-nuclear-weapons

• Adolf Heusinger, chief of the Operationsabteilung (third-in-command of the Wehrmacht) from 1940-1944 and Hitler’s acting Chief of Staff 1944, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee 1961-1964

• Hans Speidel, chief of staff to Erwin Rommel, Supreme Commander of NATO’s ground forces in Central Europe 1957-1963

• Johannes Steinhoff, Luftwaffe fighter pilot during WWII and recipient of the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross (the Nazi military’s highest award), Chairman of the NATO Military Committee 1971–1974

• Johann von Kielmansegg, General Staff officer to the High Command of the Wehrmacht 1942-1944, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1967-1968

• Ernst Ferber, Major in the Wehrmacht and group leader of the organizational department of the Supreme Command of the Army (Wehrmacht) 1943-1945 and recipient of the Iron Cross 1st Class, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1973-1975

• Karl Schnell, battery chief in the Western campaign in 1940/later First General Staff Officer of the LXXVI Panzer Corps in 1944 and recipient of the Iron Cross 2nd Class, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1975-1977

• Franz Joseph Schulze, Lieutenant in the reserve and Chief of the 3rd Battery of the Flak Storm Regiment 241 and recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in 1944, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1977-1979

• Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin, Lieutenant of 24th Panzer Division in the German 6th Army, participant in the Battle of Stalingrad, adjutant to Army High Command, and recipient of the German Cross in gold, NATO Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe 1979-1983

Let’s begin with the classic case of US military film propaganda. In The Green Berets, Western star John Wayne convinces sceptical news reporters that the Vietnam War is necessary and leads a team of Green Berets (US Special Forces) and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers on a successful mission to capture a top North Vietnamese field commander.

During production of Green Berets, the DOD requested that the scriptwriter delete any mention of the soldiers entering Laos because it ‘raises sensitive questions.’ Presumably, these questions revolved around the fact that in the real world the US had been secretly bombing a neutral country for the past three years.

In a scene that explains the purpose of the war at the start of the film, Francis Tully, Speech Review Staff for the Department of State, also suggested that the scriptwriters insert the following language:

We do not see this as a civil war, and it is not. South Vietnam is an independent country, seeking to maintain its independence in the face of aggression by a neighbouring country. Our goal is to help the South Vietnamese retain their freedom, and to develop in the way they want to, without interference from outside the country.

These lines do not appear in the final film, but Tully’s suggestion indicates that he hoped to simplify the war in Vietnam in a way that Americans could support, and this simplification occurs though in the final version of the scene, as military leaders explain to reporters that the war boils down to stopping 'Communist domination of the world.'

from National Security Cinema by Alford & Secker [PDF]

Reagan invited the Taliban to the White House in the 1980s and called them the moral equivalent of the founding fathers. The CIA under Eisenhower approved the killing of Patrice Lumumba by Mobutu and shielded Stepan Bandera from the KGB. This is who America has always been. America is a country run by Nazi death squad killers. The American private sector injected billions into the third reich’s military to use it as a genocidal bludgeon against the USSR, and then swooped in and took the credit for the the victory after the Soviets did all the fighting and dying for everyone.

everyone on this site should have cleared the prerequisite Blowback listen and therefore know brainwashing was invented by the USA to claim soldiers confessing to dropping germ bombs did it bc sissy hypno

Why do you hate our cops so much?

Let me help your shit out. When I was in high school I used to play poker with some older guys, two of whom were cops. They supplied the pot, cocaine and beer that they had taken from people they busted and high school kids. They busted a lot of kids I knew and were always fucking assholes. No big deal.

When I was in college, there was a celebration after a college basketball game. People were going crazy. Some drunk guy ran off the cliffs in Isla Vista. My friend ran to tell the cops and in return, they beat the living shit out of him and broke his arm and clavicle. He won $125,000.

When I was in college in Isla Vista, someone broke into our apartment and stole a bunch of small shit. The cops said they caught the guy, a black guy, and all we had to do was lie and say we had seen him casing out our place. We didn't.

Another time in college, there was a small riot going on in Isla Vista. My friends decided the best thing to do was to stay inside and watch tv. One of my friends was putting peanut butter on a piece of toast when three cops crashed in the door, ran in, and beat the living shit out of my two friends. In their apartment.

When I was going to school in San Luis Obispo, everyone would congregate at a Taco Bell starting at midnight to eat shitty food. The guy in line in front of me was drunk. He thought he was owed more in change, so he grabbed the glass windows and pulled on them, shattering them. The cops were called and the taco bell shut down. I saw the asshole getting into his car while the employees were talking to the cops. At 18, this was the last time I would ever initiate speaking to a cop. I walked over and said, "Hey, the guy who did it..." The cop responded, "Shut up I will get to you when it is time." The guy then got into his car and drove off. At which point I said, "He's gone now." And walked away. I was then hit in the back, dragged across a parking lot by my hair and slammed agains a car. My friends, who were climbing into the car, were also hit and attacked. One suffered permanent back damage because he was slammed into the side of a car door. They charged me with swearing at a police officer and disturbing the peace. The judge admonished them.

When I was living in San Luis Obispo, we had a crazy guy living across the street. He had a crush on one of my roommates girlfriends. We had to order him out of the house during a get together. He went across the street and pulled out a revolver and stood looking at our house on the sidewalk. We called the cops. He turned out to be one of those volunteer dickheads who rides around with cops. They allowed him to stand outside of our house day after day, night after night, whenever in the fuck he wanted, holding his revolver.

At that same house, we had a party. The cops came and broke it up. My friend Jesse was too drunk to drive. The cops asked if he lived there and he said no but he was staying the night. They ordered him to leave. He said he was too drunk. They physically put him in the car and told him to turn on the engine. They then arrested him for drunk driving.

When I was living in LA, a neighbor punched a woman who lived in our building in the face outside on the street. The cops arrived. The puncher was an ex Iraq vet. The woman had done nothing and I had seen the entire thing. The guy explained he was a vet. They arrested the woman for assault.

So, why do people hate cops? Because a shit load of them are fucking assholes.

And these stories make a judge shake her or his head everytime I'm up for jury duty and dismiss me.

—Dave Anthony

In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

—James Madison

You can look at any existing socialist country— if you don’t want to call them socialist, call them whatever you want. Post capitalist— whatever, I don’t care. Call them camels or window shades, it doesn’t matter as long as we know the countries we’re talking about. If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways. One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling. That’s what so compelling about Cuba, for instance. When I was in Cuba I was up in the Escambia, which is like the Appalachia of Cuba, very rugged mountains with people who were poor, or they were. And I said to this campesino, I said, “Do you like Fidel?” and he said “Si si, with all my soul.” I remember this gesture, with all our souls. I said “Why?” and he pointed to this clinic right up on the hill which we had visited. He said, “Look at that.” He said “Before the revolution, we never saw a doctor. If someone was seriously ill, it would take twenty people to carry that person, it’d go day and night. It would take two days to get to the hospital. First because it was far away and second because you couldn’t go straight, you couldn’t cross the latifundia lands, the boss would kill you. So, you had to go like this, and often when we got to the hospital, the person might be dead by the time we got there. Now we have this clinic up here with a full-time doctor. And today in Cuba when you become a doctor you got to spend two years out in the country, that’s your dedication to the people. And a dentist that comes one day a week. And for serious things, we’re not more than 20 minutes away from a larger hospital. That’s in the Escambia. So that’s freedom. We’re freer today, we have more life.” And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.” Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?” I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. He opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, don’t worry about that. I mean I wrote it for you, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you have people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were treated like animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read. So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.

—Michael Parenti

Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital (1879)

There's a documentary from 1972 called Winter Soldier, where veterans of the US invasion of Vietnam testified to their war crimes. Here are a few excerpts of the transcript: http://links.org.au/node/3343

Consider the following recollection of Vietnam-style “counter-insurgency” warfare, provided by Scott Camil, a former member of the 1st Marines:

Anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" and the general reply would be, "He's dead," and that was sufficient. When we went through the villages and searched people the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn't have anything hidden anywhere and this was raping but it was done as searching… The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren't supposed to do, but if there was no press there, it was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.

An ex-machine gunner with the 1st Air Cavalry detailed the routine violence that accompanied cargo runs on his CH-47 “Chinook” helicopter:

It was quite usual that there would be a sniper outside a village in the foliage, in the trees, and if we took fire from one sniper we'd return fire on that sniper and then continue to spray the entire village with machine gun fire and M-16 ammunition until we either ran out of ammunition or we had flown so far away from the village that we could no longer reach them with the weapons…The free fire zones were posted on the operation map in the operations tent and this gave us a policy to kill anything that moved within that area.

Sadistic games at the expense of civilians were used to spice up the day:

Rotor wash was also used to blow down the huts, literally blow down the villages….So we'd come in and flair on a ship and just blow away a person's house. Also, the Vietnamese, when they've harvested a crop of rice, put it out on these large pans to dry and that harvest is what is supposed to maintain them for that season— what they're supposed to live on. We'd come in to flair the ship, and let the rotor wash blow the rice, blow their entire supply of food for that harvest over a large area. And then laugh, as we'd watch them running around trying to pick up individual pieces of rice out of a rice paddy.

While it was unusual for hundreds to be gunned down in a single location (as occurred infamously at My Lai in April 1968), the Winter Soldier testimony confirms that it was nothing out of the ordinary for dozens or scores of civilians to be slaughtered in “search and destroy” missions:

We moved into a small hamlet, 19 women and children were rounded up as VCS— Viet Cong Suspects— and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them. The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it… I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.

I was reading a book about American Chattel Slavery called "Slavery's Capitalism" and that book made it clear how plantation overseers would use small prizes as an incentive to get slaves to compete with each other. Two able bodied slaves might compete with each other over a cup of sugar, or a hat (commodities which they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to have), for instance. The overseers would use this to get them to reveal their capacity for excessively hard work and, this part is key, then proceed to raise the harvesting quota on all the other slaves. Failure to meet quotas would result in one whip lash per pound by which they fell short. Here's the larger quote:

In other cases, enslavers used positive incentives to get people to pick faster, setting up races between individuals with prizes like a cup of sugar, a hat, or a small amount of money. But such speed-ups shouldn't be seen simply as attempts to import positive incentives into a system dominated by negative ones. They were also tricks, designed to get enslaved people to reveal capacities they were hiding. In Georgia, John Brown's enslaver Thomas Stevens would "pick out two or more of the strongest and sturdiest, and excite them to a race at hoeing or picking, for an old hat, or something of the sort. He would stand with his watch in his hand, observing their movements, whilst they hoed or picked across a certain space he had marked out. The man who won the prize set the standard for the rest. Whatever he did, within a given time, would be multiplied by a certain rule, for the day's work." But enslavers also whipped greater picking speed out of enslaved people in the field itself, forcing their targets to devote sustained attention and unrelenting effort to their speed and accuracy (less leaves, dirt, "trash," etc. in the picked fibers). This kind of invigilation reveals yet again the major differences between the labor system used on the cotton frontier and that used in the Lowcountry. It also reveals the essence of the enslavers' plan: to force enslaved people to show their left hands. Here, on the cotton frontier, enslavers "whipped up" enslaved people to force them to reveal capacities they were hiding, or that had not yet been created. "As I picked so well at first," remembered John Brown, "more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day," after starting at a minimum requirement of 100. "Old man Jonas watched us children and kept us divin' for that cotton all day long," remembered lrella Battle Walker, and "us wish him dead many a time."

Similarly, under post-slavery wage servitude, we are incentivized as workers to compete with each other over small concessions, small privileges, for which we are supposed to be proud of having, but our overexertion in attempting to beat each other, and win those privileges, is used to raise the expectations on everyone else. Productivity increases while wages fail to keep up with inflation. More and more surplus value is extracted by the Capitalist, and we are inundated with "hustle and grind" propaganda.

—@[email protected]

Every government is authoritarian. You only consider it not to be "authoritarian" when you support its use of authority. Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People who always justify the use of authoritarian means by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn't "authoritarian".

Is the US "authoritarian" when it bombed Vietnam back into the stone age and Eisenhower himself said they refused to hold elections because they knew the US occupiers would only get 20% of the vote? The Vietnam war, the Afghanistan war, the destruction of Libya, or the US prosecution of Julian Assange, or the Smith Act Trials, Operation Earnest Voice, Operation Condor, Operation PBSUCCESS, Operation Ajax, Operation Mockingbird, etc, etc, were not "authoritarian"?

Maybe you'd agree these things are "authoritarian", but either way it proves my point. Plenty of people like to insist the US isn't "authoritarian" not because it actually isn't but because they support what it does.

If you never desire to leave your cage, you might feel incredibly free. Liberals who never genuinely try to challenge the authority of the liberal state they live under have a tendency to believe that it isn't authoritarian, because they have never once even desired to challenge that state's authority. (Yet, ironically, they will always support the state's authority when they see it used against those who do try to challenge it.)

credit to zhenli真理

Korea was fully liberated in 1945 with the birth of the Peoples Republic of Korea (Unified Korea) following the defeat of Japan who had treated Korea like a colony.

The US proceeded, in 1945, to cut the country in half and it was run under a "US Military Government" with the US flying in Syngman Rhee, who between 1905 and 1945 had spent only a few years living in Korea and the most of his time living in United States. So a literal comprador stooge flown in to run America's new colony.

As the communists had been the most ardent fighters against Japanese colonialism they had garnered great respect and began demanding elections for March 1946:

The Korean People’s Republic released political prisoners, organized the distribution of food, and called for national elections as early as March 1946. It announced the confiscation of lands held by the Japanese occupiers and Korean collaborators; an agrarian reform on these and other lands; nationalization of mining, major industries, banking, and transportation; universal suffrage; and a minimum wage and eight-hour day.

from https://www.themilitant.com/2017/8118/811890.html

In response to the overwhelming backing of the communists in Sept 1945, a US military general, declared that the official language of Korea would now be English and Korea would be under US Military control and began putting the Japanese colonizers back into positions of power:

So on Sept. 7, the day before U.S. occupation forces landed on Korean soil, their commander, General MacArthur, decreed that the entire administrative power in Korea south of parallel 38 was under his jurisdiction. The U.S. general warned that, “All persons will obey promptly all my orders and orders issued under my authority. Acts of resistance to the occupying forces or any acts which may disturb public peace and safety will be punished severely.” During the period of military occupation, he said, Korea’s official language would be English.

The U.S. military government refused to acknowledge the Korean People’s Republic and continued enforcing the laws of the hated Japanese colonial administration. The U.S. occupiers even kept in place Tokyo’s officials, including Gov. Gen. Abe Nobuyuki.

from https://www.themilitant.com/2017/8118/811890.html

So given that the Koreans had just fought the Japanese off their soil why should they have allowed the Americans on their soil?

And during the war the DPRK rofl-stomped the south and it took the greatest, most murderous empire this world has ever seen to fight them to a standstill back to the 38th parallel where they had started.

The DPRK didn't have to use child soldiers during that war, but the US-owned South did:

Of the 60, 46 of them were of various ages under 30, including some under 20, and one was a 9-year-old child. The oldest was 51. Forty-eight of the people were described as staff at U.S. military bases in Japan, 12 of whom were minors. The occupations of the other 12 people are unknown, though it is known that six of them were minors.

from https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200622/p2a/00m/0na/020000c

And despite the US committing a genocide in Korea by killing 20 percent of the population in the North, they were still unable to beat them.

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.

from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-war-crime-north-korea-wont-forget/2015/03/20/fb525694-ce80-11e4-8c54-ffb5ba6f2f69_story.html

Even committing such crimes against humanity as using biological warfare against them:

• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/7811949/Did-the-US-wage-germ-warfare-in-Korea.html

• https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-long-suppressed-korean-war-report-on-u-s-use-of-biological-weapons-released-at-last-20d83f5cee54

And the only reason Korea isn't unified today is because the USA needs a foothold against China. But the USA will be pushed out of Korea in the next 20 years.

America will pay for its crimes against humanity.

credit to u/JoeysStainlessSteel

For me it took several years. I learned several things about the USSR one by one that softened my opinion of it. I don't even remember what order I learned these things in, but here they are.

• the USSR had a lot of things that the Russian Federation and other post-soviet nations don't (like universal healthcare and free college).
• the USSR's collapse plunged a lot of people into poverty, and the opportunistic privatization that happened in the wake of that plunged even more people into poverty.
• Yeltsin shelled parliament and suppressed popular protests.
• polling data in the USSR showed that most citizens wanted to remain in the USSR at the time of its dissolution.
• the whole "Stalin and Hitler made a pact" mythology that the bourgeoisie like to push is bullshit. The USSR was the last nation, not the first, nor the only, to make a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and they were basically doing it to buy time and move all their critical military infrastructure and factories East to hold off operation barbarossa.
• the Winter War between USSR/Finland only happened because Finland didn't want to let the USSR purchase or trade land with them, so the USSR could better prepare themselves for Nazi Germany's invasion. Even though the USSR was offering more acres of land in exchange than they were hoping to buy from the Finnish in the first place. Also after the Winter War the Finnish immediately became patsies of the Nazis and gave them intelligence.
• the USSR only invaded (a by that point borderline fascist and highly uncooperative) Poland to create a bigger buffer zone between the USSR and the advancing nazis.
• gulags paid their prisoners and were more humane than the American prison system.
• 14 nations intervened in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the White movement, which to me proves the desperation of the international bourgeoisie to prevent the USSR from coming into existence in the first place.
• fascism was basically capitalism's immune system response to the soviet union continuing to exist, and the international bourgeoisie, especially England and America, played a huge role in re-militarizing Germany and helping the nazis during the interwar period.
• the USSR rejected the marshall plan because it would have forced them to privatize their economy and put them in debt to the USA. Not because they wanted to start the cold war for no reason.
• the USSR tried to join NATO in 1954 but wasn't allowed. Yet the year after that, West germany was allowed in, even though they had just got done doing the holocaust 10 years earlier.
• Churchill wanted to immediately re-arm nazis and use them to invade the Soviet union (operation unthinkable) but this idea was scrapped thankfully.
• Operation paperclip and Operation bloodstone are way way way worse than operation Doviakhim, despite people trying to pretend they're mirror images of each other. the USSR kidnapped several hundred low-level German scientists and engineers and used their expertise to help rebuild after WW2. Meanwhile the USA took several high ranking nazi war criminals like Adolf Heusinger and put them in the CIA, NASA, NATO, and the EU commission.
• the KGB never tried to spread socialist revolution around the world. it just kept spontaneously happening in all these different nations in the global south because the working class was fed up. However, the CIA did spread anti-communist counter revolution around the world. Yet the liberals want us to believe that the cold war was two sides, with perfectly symmetrical motivations.
• the USSR lost 20 million people fighting fascism while the USA basically waited as long as they could to enter the war while selling weapons to both sides.
• holodomor genocide is an anticommunist atrocity propaganda created and spread by nazi collaborators. Stalin was literally giving Ukraine and Bengal food aid during the 1930s, ironically when Churchill was doing his best to starve Bengal on purpose.
• if Stalin's homophobia and other problematic aspects of his legacy is supposed to make me ignore everything above and I'm supposed to be anti-communist on that reason alone, then why should I support the liberal democratic party of the USA, which has a record of upholding slavery before and during the civil war?
• way more stuff that isn't coming to mind right now.

It basically was a long process of unlearning a lot of "red fascism" mythology about the Soviet Union. Each time I unlearned something, I was less surprised. I went from going "wow I can't believe I'm defending the USSR against unfair slander." to "of course that was just another lie they told me. why would it have been anything else?"

It's hard to teach other people this stuff, especially because of the Russian/Ukrainian war and all the NATO propaganda surrounding that. Even before then, though, it was an uphill battle. Because people hear their whole life that the USSR was a starving hellhole ruled by despots and torturers and here comes some naive person (or treasonous commie psycho) telling them, no, here's a bunch of facts contrary to everything they know. It just makes me sound like a "Kremlin shill" or something in their minds. After all, how can the experts and reliable sources be wrong? People think that because you can trust the government not to lie to you about how many calories are in a serving of milk, that you can also trust them about state enemies. That's the mistake.

Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war against them in 1969. He called the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.

The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and participating children were photographed by Chicago police.

“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”

Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member Norma Amour Mtume told Eater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.

from https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party

even the UN called it apartheid until the Zionists made them pull the paper

Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid [PDF]

" The boyfriend" looks nice and the girls seem to have eaten their spaghetti and meat balls!

crying "whataboutism" was what the USA resorted to after they couldn't come up with a comeback against the Soviets, because every time they tried to criticize the USSR for being oppressive the Soviets would just respond with “you literally lynch black people”.

Citations Needed Ep 66: Whataboutism - The Media's Favorite Rhetorical Shield Against Criticism of US Policy

But what if "whataboutism" isn’t describing a propaganda technique, but in fact is one itself: a zombie phrase that’s seeped into everyday liberal discourse that – while perhaps useful in the abstract - has manifestly turned any appeal to moral consistency into a cunning Russian psyop. From its origins in the Cold War as a means of deflecting and apologizing for Jim Crow to its braindead contemporary usage as a way of not engaging any criticism of the United States as the supposed arbiter of human rights, the term "whataboutism" has become a term that - 100 percent of the time - is simply used to defend and legitimizing American empire’s moral narratives.

• New Evidence Reveals That Senator John McCain and Other High-Ranking Vietnam War POWs May Have Lied to the American Public About Being Tortured

• McCain was not tortured, PoW guard claims (archived here)

In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Nguyen Tien Tran acknowledged that conditions in the prison were "tough, though not inhuman". But, he added: "We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded."

but in contrast the USA's Phoenix Program is well-documented

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit— and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate— died of malnutrition— because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.

from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm

Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up!

The Acapulco crash that left her left leg shorter than her right, was to be the first of many for Walton. Five years later, while speeding in Fayetteville, Ark., she struck and killed Oleta Hardin, a 50-year-old cannery worker. She never received so much as a ticket.

Walton managed to keep her fender clean for nearly a decade after the deadly collision but, in 1998, she got wasted and totaled an SUV in Springdale, Ark.

"Do you know who I am?" She asked responding officers who charged her with a DWI. "Do you know my last name?" It was a rhetorical question.

from https://www.mic.com/articles/79039/the-untold-story-of-alice-walton-s-dwi-incident

Here, then, is the problem with the magazine: readers are consistently given the impression, regardless of whether it is true, that unrestricted free market capitalism is a Thoroughly Good Thing, and that sensible and pragmatic British intellectuals have vouched for this position. The nuances are erased, reality is fudged, and The Economist helps its American readers pretend to have read books by telling them things that the books don’t actually say.

How The Economist Thinks | Current Affairs

• The History of US and British Support to Mussolini’s Fascism https://janataweekly.org/the-history-of-us-and-british-support-to-mussolinis-fascism/

• How Mussolini once worked for British intelligence https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mussolini-idUSTRE59D4MW20091014

Colonists steal native land and rename it Massachusetts. Centuries of exploitation, slavery, and war go by to establish white supremacist authority in the region. Henry David Thoreau is born. He goes to live in a shack his friend helped him build and his sister and mom helped him finance. The property is owned and controlled privately and administered by an evil slave-owning empire. His mom visits twice per week to give him pies and clean his socks. He regularly goes into town to buy food grown by exploited farm labor and probably slaves too.

Thoreau: "Ah, untapped, unspoiled nature. Living off the land and writing fancy boy essays. I'm truly the master of my own destiny."

I've been reading 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, and my god EVERYONE knew Poland was happy to work with Hitler. Churchill spoke of it himself:

How quickly time would pass: the Polish victim of 1939 was only months following the Polish aggressor. "Groveling in villainy," said Churchill, the Polish vulture picked at left-over carrion.

A bit earlier:

The war scare prompted the French government to sound out Poland about its support, though the Poles had already offered numerous indications of their intent. On May 22 Bonnet called in the Polish ambassador in Paris, Juliusz Lukasiewicz, to ask what the Polish policy would be. "We'll not move," replied Lukasiewicz. The Franco-Polish defense treaty included no obligation in the event of war over Czechoslovakia, if France attacked Germany to support the Czech government, then France would be the aggressor. Not apparently overreacting to this extraordinary statement, Bonnet then inquired about the Polish attitude toward the Soviet Union, stressing the importance of Soviet support, given Polish "passiveness." Lukasiewicz was equally categorical: "the Poles consider the Russians to be enemies....[we] will oppose by force, if necessary, any Russian entry onto [our] territory including overflights by Russian aircraft." Czechoslovakia, Lukasiewicz added, was unworthy of French support.

If Bonnet had any doubts that the Polish ambassador was not accurately representing his government's views, these were quickly put to rest by Field Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz. He told the French ambassador in Warsaw, Leon Noel, that the Poles considered Russia, no matter who governed it, to be "Enemy No. 1" "If the German remains an adversary, he is not less a European and a man of order. For Poles, the Russian is a barbarian, an Asiatic, a corrupt and poisonous element, with which any contact is perilous and any compromise, lethal." According to the Polish government, aggressive action by France, or movement of Soviet troops, say even across Romania, could prompt the Poles to side with Nazi Germany. This would suit many Poles, reported Noel: they "dream of conquests at the expense of the USSR, exaggerating its difficulties and counting on its collapse." France had better not force Poland to choose between Russian and Germany, because their choice, according to Noel, could easily be guessed. As Daladier put it to the Soviet ambassador, "Not only can we not count on Polish support, but we have no faith that Poland will not strike [us] in the back." Polish loyalty was in doubt even in the event of direct German aggression against France.

Colonel Jozef Beck was the Polish foreign minister and a key subordinate of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the Polish nationalist leader who had died in 1935.....like Pilsudski, Beck was a Polish nationalist who hoped to reestablish Poland as a great power, as it had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and this failure left Polish nationalists sour and quick to take offence. Yet they tended to carry on the business of state as though Poland was a great power— dangerous conduct in the 1930s as Nazi Germany grew stronger and more predatory......

....Beck said that Poland would not "tie its hands" regarding Tesche, "it did not have belligerent intentions but it could not agree that German demands being satisfied, Poland should receive nothing." Put another way, Beck said that he did not intend to leave Germany the exclusive benefits of a dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

Suffice to say, Poland was a fucking vulture here, actively working to not only invade Czechoslovakia, but threatening to join the Nazis fully if attempts to work with the USSR to save Czechoslovakia or perhaps even France occurred.

—@[email protected]

ask a communist and a capitalist to criticize each others’ ideas, and they’ll both describe capitalism.

Before the war, the USSR gave Finland several proposals to create mutually benefical alliances to defend both of them from inevitable Nazi aggression, but in every case Finland refused.

“Our proposals in the negotiations with Finland are modest, and they are confined to the minimum, short of which is it impossible to ensure the safety of the Soviet Union”
[...]
“The Government of Finland feels obliged to maintain the attitude which it has taken up from the outset regarding the proposal that it should lease the port of Hanko and the surrounding district to the Government of the USSR and place the Bay of Lappohja at the disposal of the naval forces of the USSR for use as an anchorage”.

—V. M. Molotov: The Development of Finnish-Soviet Relations

The Soviet Union needed strategic security from the Nazis. They were negotiating to rent some small pieces of land to be able to close the Gulf of Finland to enemy naval forces in the event of war to protect Leningrad. The USSR also needed the border near Leningrad itself to be moved outside of the artillery range. In exchange for a total of 2700km² the Soviets offered 5500km².

The Nazi-sympathizing government of Finland of course refused and took a hostile stance against the USSR. Eventually there was a build up of troops at the border near Leningrad and shells were fired into Soviet territory. This led to a costly war that the USSR eventually won and in peace demanded essentially what they had asked for before the war.

The USSR managed to take several important regions of Finland. The areas taken contained several large cities and industrial areas and ports, giving them greater access to the gulf.

“The meaning of the war in Finland lay in the necessity for safeguarding the security of the north-western frontiers of the Soviet Union and above all of the safeguarding of the security of Leningrad.

The Soviet Union smashed the Finnish Army and having every opportunity of occupying the whole of Finland, did not do so and did not demand any indemnities for her war expenses, as any other power would have done, but confined her demands to the minimum.

We pursued no other object in the Peace Treaty but that of safeguarding the security of Leningrad, Murmansk and the Murmansk railway”.

—V. M. Molotov: Speech to the 6th Session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR

In this sense, the USSR won in that they got what they wanted (achieved their war aims). The fact that it took the Red Army several months to defeat the Finnish forces was used as propaganda to claim that the Red Army was ineffective.

adapted from a Quora post by David King

IQ demolished. Definitively. Goodbye IQ. You’re not real. Brain numbers are a foolish undertaking, tied to unimaginable suffering and horror. You are not science. Bye bye.

https://srslywrong.com/podcast/253-why-iq-is-bullshit/

She just died? Wow. I didn't know that, I just uh... you're telling me now for the first time. She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman... whether you agree or not, she was an amazing woman, who led an amazing life. I'm actually sad to hear that. I am sad to hear that.

i have more fish and tape and will,, power than youre intire organisation

Grimes NEVER said I had a “weird dick” and “smelled like nachos” and if you repost this you will be arrested

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported -- what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

—Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method