I went to Washington DC a little while back with my family, we had my four younger siblings with us so of course we did the entire propaganda tour of the city. Most of this stuff I think is pretty benign - we saw the MLK memorial, the JFK gravesite, FDR memorial, etc - but when we got to the Korean War memorial I got into an argument with my stepmom over it. I tried to explain that we killed 20% of the northern population, 5 million people, and bombed so many buildings that our bombers were dropping their payloads in the ocean because they couldn't find more targets. I told her that it was a crime against humanity that was absolutely on the same level of evil as the Holocaust, a genocide that was perpetrated against Koreans instead of Jews. And she just kept telling me I was wrong without offering a single counterpoint. Then we got to the Vietnam memorial and I got into the exact same argument with my birth mom, kids in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are STILL being born with birth defects, people there are STILL finding unexploded ordnance, but she just didn't want to hear it. To her the people who went to that country and murdered civilians were somehow justified, and people like me who wanted to hold the country accountable for its crimes were the ones doing something wrong. By the time we got to the World War I memorial and saw the plaque commemorating the "heroes" who jumped in on the Russian Civil War to prop up the white army a little longer, I was definitely numb.
Fuck. The Russian whites feels like the perfect crescendo to the whole heap of liberal bloodthirstiness
I can't really place one definitive moment, deeply hating this country has been a gradual process of intensification pushed forward by learning things like this. And I'm not sure I'm numb yet, thankfully, it still upsets me. But when I learned a couple years ago that the Nazis took direct inspiration from American colonialism and racism, and the reality that there is no substantive difference between Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum really set in... I think that's when I could never look back, when I not just learned but mentally confronted the reality of centuries of extermination. When my country is built on a Holocaust that is not remembered, not understood in its gravity, I don't need to know any more to know it is irredeemably monstrous.
A deep part of me wants to believe in the American people of the 21st century not being irredeemable, that when the United States dies, something positive could come out of here one day. If events to come make me lose that belief, then I'll be numb. Truly, fully numb.
Keep in mind the DDR was beautiful, and it rose from the ruins of the Third Reich
Good point. It's examples like that which give me some hope; terrible circumstances can give way to better futures. And the fact that the US comparatively has way more intractable domestic issues and destitute people than the EU for instance, makes me think that of all the imperial core countries, the US has the highest likelihood of a revolutionary situation. The hard task is building the movement to take advantage of the chaos under heaven.
It starts with teaching people to aim their grievances at the class war rather than seeking racist scapegoats. Motivation is useless without an apt target.
I think my disgust is total, but I'm not numb. You can draw a straight line from slavery to the trail of tears to operation paperclip to Korea and SE Asia to the cold War nonsense in LATAM to the horrors perpetrated on the Middle East the past 20 years. The US is pure evil. I have this bubbling rage in me that never really goes away. I'll never do any lone wolf stuff because it's counter-productive but damn I'd love to see the people pulling the strings absolutely destroyed.
Same, friend. And on adventurism, I always try to remember that it is harder to live for something than die for something. Going nuts and lashing out uselessly against a world that feels hopeless is what the bourgeoisie want, living committedly against it is what they fear.
edit: misgendered term
When we were studying WWII, I informed my classmates about Operation Paperclip. They confirmed it with the teacher about it being real. Their response was essentially "Well, if they were rehabilitated and were no longer nazis then it's okay....they were rehabilitated, right?"
The look of despair on their faces when I had to tell them that, no, they weren't, and that in fact they continued human experimentation on people of colour and disabled people, up to the current day, was when I came very close to being numb. I try my best not to become desensitized to this sort of thing, and inform people of these tragedies, hopefully to radicalize them, but it's incredibly hard to not be overcome with despair. :desolate:
you read about 731 and their "experiments", like those conducted by the Nazis, were literally just torture and unusual execution.
they gathered nothing of scientific value and the yanks spared their asses out of admiration for homicidal enthusiasm
Not true. We used their data from purposely infecting Chinese people with deadly diseases and then committed bioterrorism during the Korean War. :so-true:
At the risk of destroying my current chill vibes, where can I find further reading about the bio-weapons used on Korea?
be warned the reading on this is extremely gory and will probably traumatize you
Some of what they developed did work, in addition to the pointless sadism
America was happy to take the plague bombs that weren't used for Operation Cherry Blossoms At Night and point them at Korea
i very much suspect one couldve figured that stuff out thru chinese reports or just the notes
i went down a rabbit hole and read up on it (:sadness-abysmal: ) once and actually the findings they did for things like spreading various diseases among a population were directly translated into the korean war. a lot of experiments were like 'how many fleas in an open field does it take to spread the bubonic plague' or 'how many x parasitic insects does it require to destroy a rice crop'
after enough holy shit moments you want to tell people about them, but after enough tries of people treating you like some conspiracy nut nazi, the numbness sets in
I think it was learning about Abu Ghraib, the slap on the wrist punishments for the abuses, and the Iraq War that kind of disillusioned me about the "virtue" of the United States.
Now I understand why the US is still so shit: it has been harboring the Axis the whole time. The Cold War was little more than an extension of WW2. Civil rights are going down the shitter again because there is no Soviet Union to intimidate fascists.
The Nazis didn't lose the war, that's a lie
No, no, they didn't lose, they just swapped sides
finding out that a. kishi nobusuke became a prime minister and b. that abe shinzo was related to him was a big holy shit this country is irredeemably corrupt moment and it wasn't difficult from there to start using china as a point of comparison which is how i became a communist
I just read that Ukraine has released some of the key members of Tornado battalion as some kind of neo-Nazi suicide squad situation, after a lot of them were convicted and sentenced (can't make it clear enough how bad it was that you got post-Maidan Ukraine to sentence them) for "rape and torture, kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, extortion, robbery, and creating a criminal gang"
Somehow still not numb enough to get over news like that
Ukrainian SSUkrainian VolksturmUkrainian Hitlerjugend-> Ukrainian Direlwanger
Estimates of those killed by Unit 731 and its related programs range up to half a million people.
I don't think I ever really believed the bullshit long enough in the first place for the cynical slap of reality to whiplash me. But, being British it's easier to see the fucked shit we did out in the open than America where it's very obfuscated, we also got a couple centuries head start doing worse things before people cared about PR and didn't hide things
