Change the title.
The United States, in cooperation with Nigeria, conducted air attacks against fighters in northwest Nigeria.
Change the title.
I don’t think we will.
The United States, in cooperation with Nigeria, conducted air attacks against fighters in northwest Nigeria.
The United States, in cooperation with its Nigerian compradors, conducted air attacks against anti-colonial fighters in northwest Nigeria.
.world: "Mods on .ml are authoritarian"
Also .world: "I don't like the title, abuse your power to change it!"
I wasn’t asking you to change the title.
I don’t 2 shits about the mods here and I certainly don’t look or care about what instance I’m on.
That’s true, someone else asked us to.
Who are these anti-colonial fighters?
Anyone who fights against a colonial power and its compradors is an anti-colonial fighter. In this case, at the 10,000’ view, it’s the Alliance of Sahel States.
The confederation is against neo-colonialism and has demonstrated this with acts such as downgrading the status of the French language, renaming of colonial street names, and in the case of Mali suspending teaching of the French Revolution in schools. The AES is also anti-French and anti-ECOWAS in outlook, as it disagrees with many of their policies.
Oh okay, thought you were talking about ISIS for a second. But then again, I wasn't really sure who they were targeting in the first place.
I know Niger is involved in the AES, but where does Nigeria come in?
Oh hah, my bad. This is happening not far from the border with Niger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoto_State
Sokoto has a population of Muslim pastoralists, who are undergoing proletarianization.
Their frustration with this gets expressed through a fascistic Islamism, with appeals to the Golden Age of the independent Sokoto Caliphate (hence the name of the Nigerian state).
Insurgent movements like this are a bit problem for States in the region, and it's part of why AES formed. ECOWAS was largely incapable of dealing with internal security issues, due to its main role as a mechanism of Imperialist value extraction
I don’t know what exactly is going on there right now, but among the possibilities I can think of, perhaps these are Salafi Jihadists who got pushed out of Niger and went over the border. That’s one of the least nefarious reasons the US might be attacking.
I really can't tell who are the "good guys" anymore
After some cursory research, is Lemmy getting behind the Muslim caliphate or Islamic state trying to overthrow the country?
Religion has nothing to do with it. This is about imperialism, both old school and new school.
📺 Africa isn’t underdeveloped; it’s overexploited.
Religion is a red herring, just as it was during the War on Terror. Imperialist states, corporate media, and imperial core non-profits (which are funded by those same states & corporations), will always spin narratives to manufacture our consent, or if not our consent then at least our acquiescence or apathy. Real media literacy takes some effort.
Also, fun fact, the Islamic State is a product of the the US (as well as the UK and Israel). We’ve been funding, arming, and advising Salafi Jihad terrorist cells since at least the first Afghan war, when we funded Osama bin Laden to stir trouble at the USSR’s border.
So are you suggesting there are no "good guy" groups in Nigeria?
You should stop trying to frame things in comic book terms
What you're trying to say is the people that live there are fucked either way
The “good guy” vs “bad guy” dichotomy isn’t how we usually approach these things, but let’s roll with it.
This is a fight for independence from the imperial core. A fight for real sovereignty.
Who did you root for in A New Hope, the Galactic Empire or the Rebel Alliance? The US or the Viet Cong? This fight is between Western imperialist states, led by the imperial hegemon, the US, and the AES Confederation.
Are you saying Islamic state is the US in this fight? If so, why bomb themselves?
It would hardly be the first time we’ve attacked—or claimed to attack—Islamic Jihadi terrorist cells. ISIS is providing a pretext for the US to intervene against Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso developing genuine sovereignty.
The terrorist groups are essentially chaos monkeys who are there to destabilize the region, similar to how they did (or tried to do) in Afghanistan, Xinjiang, and Syria.
What went unmentioned in Biden’s celebration of the fall of Assad was the role the U.S. played in the Syrian civil war. In addition to openly supporting and arming Kurdish-led forces, the CIA ran a covert program to arm and train so-called “moderate rebels” from the Free Syrian Army in the early years of the war at an estimated cost of roughly $1 billion a year. Over the past decade, the U.S. has carried out airstrikes in Syria, primarily against ISIS forces, and is believed to have continued its clandestine training and arming of opposition forces.
Like most countries in Africa, they have been burdened by a legacy of colonial exploitation that has left them vulnerable to exploitation by commercial interests and islamic religious imperialism.
As usual the good guys are the innocents in the middle just wanting to live and let live.
If Nigeria is asking for it, it would be their crimes.
Difficult under international law to declare such military actions as crimes if its done by the elected and recognized government of Nigeria.
Sure, it's not like the US has based its entire nation's foreign policy in literally hand-picking leaders in other nations either by coups, black ops, invasions, and whatever you can imagine. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt because US can't be as bad as Russia or China, right? It's funny, you people are always the one that complain about whababubism.
People are making legal arguments, so I pointed out the flaw in it.
Morally and strategically, the US is a neocolonial power just like China and Russia. China and the US is probably at the same level of exploitation with their methods being economic in nature. Russian being worse given they like to foster internal conflcit in order to keep their resource exploitation in place.
Also, Nigeria has had a democratic government since 1999. The last coup was in 1993. So it would not be fair to infer they are a puppet government of the US. There are other examples of that.
Russian being worse given they like to foster internal conflcit in order to keep their resource exploitation in place.
I have some bad news for you about the origins of South Korea, South Vietnam, and ISIS. Also, what do you thing a coup is if not fostering internal conflict?
I was referring to the last 35 years. Before then the US strategy was different. Their tactics are different now. China also made the same change.
Dawg what? The US strategy is primarily coups, bombings, piracy, working through proxies and fomenting fundamentalist and separatist movements which are, again, exactly what you villify others for. What the hell is China doing in your estimation that even approaches that level? This is just the classic "sure we did (bad thing we are still doing) in the past, but at least we've changed unlike (countries your government wants you to hate that are not doing those things)"
You are probably correct that the Trump government is returning to the "good old days", so I concede that point around their current policies.
The predominant strategy from the US and China has been to leverage corruption in regional governments to obtain control of strategic assest like ports, transport hubs, mineral resouces etc, and then place those assets under the control of a few party adjacent corporations. Thus they extract those resources over local companies in the region. After making sure that the local politcal elite gets their miniscule cut of course.
Economic neocolonialism. Far less shooting and a lot more wealth extraction from a country.
You’re projecting US strategy onto China. The Atlantic, 2021: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
Yes the debt trap is a myth. The rest of it is true.
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