Even though we had a little bit of warning about federation, I think we're off to a rocky start. Maybe we should have compiled a list of things we think that may make other people very upset. That way they can quickly get to know what we're about and go hide in a social media bubble if it scares them.

I figure I'd start with a good one. America deserved 9/11. I'm burying the lede a bit with that one. I don't think random acts of violence really accomplish much and I don't think randos, albeit imperial core randos, should die. But this wasn't a random act of violence, was it?

There's a little something called Foucault's Boomerang. Basically it's the tools, means, and experiments carried out by imperial countries tend to make their way back home one way or another. Military gear gets tried out on the battlefield then next thing you know cops at home have the same equipment. It also works for cause and effect. America did 9/11 to itself.

After WWII America courted the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, who had some really "interesting" religious ideas at the time, to ensure a source of oil. Oil was very important to American manufacturing and the war effort. Our domestic reserves helped us get through WWII. We needed more. So the US decided to look the other way on Saudi foreign policy while they ensured us first dibs on the oil. The UK also made deals on building their infrastructure and finance needs, to which the US eventually pushed them of the back rooms where such deals were made. But that's another story.

The US also backed anti-Soviet/anti-Communist groups in the Middle-East as they had in other parts of the world. This meant giving aide and weapons and training to those groups. In exchange they would beat up all the communists and pro-soviet people in their country and keep the borders open for US trade.

Not to "yadda yadda yadda" through a lot of interesting history but the US made a lot of enemies and ruined former alliances in these places because we valued the exploitation of their resources more than the actual relationships formed. Once the Soviets were gone, we could just do what we wanted to them and there was nobody left to oppose us.

So our former (and some current) friends stabbed us in the back. The imperialism boomeranged back home and we got a terrorist attack on US soil.

The people who died didn't particularly deserve it but people die when an imperial power does imperialism. That's part of why it's bad. Imperialism will never benefit the common person, it will only hurt us in the end. You best believe all this funding, weapons, and shit going into Ukraine will come back on us too.

What are some other real-ass takes for our visitors who need disillusioning?

  • BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.

    Capitalism requires endless growth, endless expansion: the economic engine that drives it is profit. It must constantly take more. But the world is not infinite. Once capital has nowhere else to expand, the only way it can increase profits is by intensifying exploitation within its territories: unions are busted, wages are depressed, costs of living rise. The working class must give more and get less. To facilitate this, capital funnels money into police, passes ever more draconian laws, restricts franchise, defunds public services, and redirects working class anger against suitable scapegoats - minorities who do not have the population, money, or political power to fight back. The result is widespread political persecution, pogroms, impoverishment, decay of infrastructure except the tools of oppression: features characteristic of imperial periphery countries arising in the imperial core.

    Aime Cesaire describes this process aptly in his brilliant work Discourse on Colonialism:

    CW for descriptions of colonial violence, including sexual violence

    Each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

    And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

    People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

    Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the [slur]s of India, and the [n-word]s of Africa.

    Michael Novick likewise explains this in Fascism And What Is Coming:

    In general, fascism can best be understood as bringing the methods of imperial rule in the colonies into the metropole. In the colonies, genocide has been the rule, not the exception, of imperial rule. Democracy is only for a select few of settlers; dictatorship and slave labor applies to the indigenous and other colonized people. The corporate model developed in colonial enterprise. The first corporations were the colonizing corporations—British East India Company, Hudson's Bay Company, etc.— who could bear the costs and risks of colonization because of shared and limited liability, and exercised state power directly over the colonized territories and populations. The mass base of participation in colonial rule came via the settler population, who participated actively and often independently in land grabs and extermination without waiting for bourgeois legitimacy.

    All this was translated to the metropole by Hitler, however he may have defined or proclaimed his system. Except that the mechanisms— dictatorship, slave labor, corporatization of the state and society, mass participation in militarism, looting and oppression independently of the bourgeoisie—were seen operating directly within the German population at large, including against its racially and ethnically defined minorities, and its European neighbors.

      • BeamBrain [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        It's an excellent essay and short enough to read in an hour or so.

      • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Also a gorgeous audiobook is fairly easy to find of it, meaning gorgeous to your ears. I first listened before reading it: tried to get a good outline before digging in that way because it felt important enough. Would recommend that if you have the time, ability, and energy

    • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/

      I don't know how often I can link this, but I genuinely just find it the most encapsulating and important take on fascism since Cesaire. (Might be exaggerating, but it's so digestible and very thorough).