copypasta

August 15 is Liberation Day in Korea. #OTD in 1945, 35 years of Japanese colonialism came to an end.

Over 75 years later, Korea remains divided and occupied. To understand why, we have to look at what happened from 1945-1950 on both sides of the 38th parallel.

• https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1426987082006806536.html
• https://xcancel.com/nodutdol/status/1426987082006806536

Libby Watson said it best:

Carlson, making his trademark “watching two dogs in full 69 at a distance” face,

Friendly reminder the first mobile phone was invented between 1954 and 1957 by Soviet scientist Leonid Kupriyanovich.

It was the basis for the world's first 0G mobile network, "Altai", which was built in 1963 and available in large cities all across the USSR by 1965. It is still in use to this day.

In the 70s and 80s emergent satellite technology revolutionized mobile communication and forever changed the world as we know it. The first satellite, "Sputnik", was designed, manufactured, and launched in the USSR in 1957.

My phone was manufactured in China, and connects to a 5G mobile network running exclusively on Chinese equipment despite the fact it presents a known national security threat because Western manufacturers can't even replicate the technology.

Capitalism only exists in the 21st century because American capitalists got rich enough selling toaster ovens and clunkmobiles to a WW2 devastated Western Europe to fund a ridiculous war machine over-powered enough to spread mayhem throughout the world as a means to an end of propping up its bloated corpse for a little while. That system is falling apart now and will collapse in on itself before the end of this century. It's already falling behind.

Citation Needed Episode 91: It's Time to Retire the Term "Middle Class"

The term “middle class” is used so much by pundits and politicians, it could easily be the Free Space in any political rhetoric Bingo card. After all, who’s opposed to strengthening, widening, and protecting the “middle class”? Like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights”, “middle class” is an unimpeachable, unassailable label that evokes warm feelings and a sense of collective morality.

But the term itself, always slippery and changing based on context, has evolved from a vague aspiration marked by safety, a nice home, and a white picket fence into something more sinister, racially-coded, and deliberately obscuring. The middle class isn’t about concrete, material positive rights of good housing and economic security––it’s a capitalist carrot hovering over our heads telling us such things are possible if we Only Work Harder. More than anything, it's a way for politicians to gesture towards populism without the messiness of mentioning––much less centering––the poor and poverty.

Liberal economics is not a science but based on bad philosophy and assumptions about human psychology, dreamt up by "economists" with no background in psychology nor based on any empirical research, which have never been demonstrated in practice. Not only aren't they demonstrated, but they build mathematical models on top of these assumptions, but if the assumptions are meaningless, all the models are meaningless.

If you point this out, they will tell you, "sure, these assumptions aren't literally true, but they're just approximate." But in any rigorous science, if you approximate something, you're expected to calculate your error bars, so you can have an idea of just how approximate it is. If you don't, then for all you know, the error bars can be so big it has no relation to the real world. No liberal economist can tell you any way to actually determine how inaccurate their assumptions are, so you end up with a lot of maths, but none of it points back to anything real.

Conveniently, though, their maths just so happen to always work out to prove the conclusions they started with: free markets are inherently good, state controls are inherently bad. They have never updated their theories after witnessing their complete failure in eastern Europe, they in fact try to rewrite history to pretend like it was state controls that destroyed Russia's economy and free market anarchy that saved China's, which, as this video shows, the most basic overview of the facts shows to be the exact opposite of what happened.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/v8n50b/how_china_actually_got_rich_by_the_gravel/ibrgh7h/

Why can’t capitalists replicate these strategies, even cynically, in pursuit of long-term profit? As per Lenin, “the degree of concentration which has been reached forces [capitalists] to adopt [imperialism] in order to obtain profits.” These strategies are only available to China because the CPC — China’s sovereign, the political authority — is able to check the power of capital.

from https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

under the dictatorship of capital, elections are an individualist consumer ritual that allows liberals to assuage guilt over their complicity and diverts energy away from collective action

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich— that is the democracy of capitalist society.

—Lenin, State and Revolution

Evo Morales, a man accused of “dictatorship” for repeatedly winning popular elections, summarized it well in 2019, after his party was temporarily ousted from power in a US-backed coup:

As far as I can tell, American democracy deceives its people into voting, but neither the government nor the people actually govern. It’s the transnational corporations who govern. [12]

from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

Deaths Under Communism vs. Capitalism | Matt Christman as a guest on Pod Damn America

liberals adore non-violent resistance because it poses no threat to the status quo (protecting their material privilege) yet it allows them to feel absolved

Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.

—Kwame Ture

It always comes across to me as maximum cope when Americans brag about "winning the space race". I mean, even if it was true, the US's economy was massively wealthier than the USSR's. This "race" was literally between the wealthiest country on earth and a very poor country. Even at the height of the USSR, its GDP was only about half that of the US's.

It really does not show the US's "strength" to brag so much about winning against someone with so much less resources. It's a sign of weakness to actually even be in a "race" with a developing country to begin with, which suggests they are actually competitive and have a chance of winning.

That's really what the whole "space race" shows. It does not matter who "won", the very fact a poor developing nation could compete with the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth in the first place demonstrates the extraordinary weakness of the capitalist system.

The US only placed a man on the moon because of NASA, which they founded as a direct response to the Soviets launching Sputnik. Meaning, the US literally only implemented this space program as a response to the Soviets, they were not a natural outgrowth of the US's system and would not have happened without the Soviets (as we have seen NASA massively defunded ever since). The fact the US even got on the moon in the first place only happened because of the USSR.

That was back in 1969, and we're now in 2022 yet, funnily enough, the capitalist private sector has not got a man that far yet.

by zhenli真理

democracy is not possible under capitalism due to the outsized power of the ownership class over the means of production

Your Democracy is a Sham and Here's Why: | Halim Alrah

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

—mustGo

Consider how an early Nietzsche polemicizes in favour of a “new slavery” and the virtues of the ancients, whereas for Marx there is no question that the greatest hero of antiquity is the leader of slave revolts: “Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history.” [51]

A young Marx, musing on his vision of utopia in The German Ideology, waxes poetic about the possibility of a society freed from the division of labor itself:

In communist society, nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. [52]

Nietzsche, meanwhile, in Human, All Too Human, describes a different kind of utopia, a grim society organized around the harsh exigencies of breeding genius in the midst of scarcity:

My Utopia. — In a better arranged society the heavy work and trouble of life will be assigned to those who suffer least through it, to the most obtuse, therefore; and so step by step up to those who are most sensitive to the highest and sublimest kinds of suffering, and who therefore still suffer notwithstanding the greatest alleviations of life. [53]

Nietzsche was no fool. It would be a mistake to dismiss these aphorisms as the antisocial madness of a lone misanthrope; to recall Waite, Nietzsche’s project is “the only position outside communism.” Nietzsche is articulating widespread skepticism about the ability of socialism to deliver mass happiness, and his critique resonates powerfully with anyone who feels their individuality imperiled by a collective. Stalin (and his cohort) claimed Marx, while Hitler (and his cohort) claimed Nietzsche… and the majority of the Western world went on to claim Nietzsche too. Just take a trip to your local bookstore — everything Nietzsche ever wrote is now a classic that never goes out of print, finding its way into teenagers’ backpacks and academic seminars alike.

Accusing Nietzsche of being the ur-fascist, let alone a proto-fascist, has predictable consequences: his countless fans swarm to explain that he never actually endorsed the Nazi party because he was already dead, that any linkages to the Nazi project are the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by his German-nationalist sister, that he denounced German ethnonationalists and mocked antisemites, that his philosophy was in fact aesthetic and spiritual and anti-systematic and impossible to pin down, and that he grew out of any misguided ideas he may have held in his youth.

Domenico Losurdo examines each of these defenses in detail, including the conspiracy theory, in his critical biography of Nietzsche. Nietzsche comes across as a powerful and complex thinker, who indeed went through multiple phases and espoused contradictory beliefs, but Losurdo shows that one thing remains constant: Nietzsche never stopped experimenting to find the best way to oppose the egalitarian leveling tendencies of modernity that he despised. Funnily enough, after exposing the extent to which Nietzsche corresponded with out-and-out antisemites in his youth, Losurdo cedes some ground to Nietzsche’s apologists:

Cosima’s advice to be careful about what he said may have had a positive effect: far from remaining confined to the verbal level, the self-censorship led to a kind of sublimation and transcendence of immediacy, in the sense that the merciless analysis of modernity became to a certain extent autonomous of the Judeophobic themes that accompanied it. [54]

In other words, when his antisemitic interlocutors advised Nietzsche to mask racism in his writing, they inadvertently spurred him to find justifications for slavery and elitism that weren’t rooted in the all-too-modern and universalist (and thus unstable, empirically refutable) arguments of “race science.” After all, “race science” is, both historically and logically, a liberal concept. If racial differences turn out not to be inherent, there goes the whole (liberal) argument for white supremacy. Liberal racism still feels the need to justify itself in scientific, i.e. universalist terms. As Nietzsche correctly observed, this is already a capitulation to socialism, which wins more the more people scientifically reason together. To truly condemn socialism, Nietzsche painted the issue of class domination as one of will, aesthetics, “freedom,” and spirit.

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

With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative, of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity.

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the “general interest,” but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural [class] society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

—Marx, The German Ideology

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

—John Rogers

美国梦是个人发财的梦
讲究冒险
通过个人奋斗达到所谓的成功
成为有产者
然后去剥削别人
中国梦是共同富裕
追求的是人民幸福
换句话说
美国梦是个人梦
是为美元的梦
中国梦是人民梦
是为人民服务的梦
这就是二者的本质区别
以后不要在我面前提起美国梦
俗气

from https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pP7p2ocNWZo

Some of my saved quotes & quotables

Letter to NYT decrying Zionism in 1948, signed by Albert Einstein

"In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience"

"A riot is the language of the unheard"
"I happen to be a pacifist, but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporarily given up my pacifism and taken up arms."
-MLK Jr, The Other America

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror —that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame, but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae's chapter "On Anger" is great and defends the morality of righteous anger.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

-Abraham Lincoln

Marxism is dialectic, it rejects absolute pure categories. Things sort of exist on a spectrum but sort of don't. The way Marxists use categories is to understand that everything is connected to each other through a series of quantifiable interconnected steps, but that something is always dominant, and this dominant aspect is what determines the overall quality of the thing in question.

If you're trying to shove everything into a pure category of absolutely worker, absolutely capitalist, then this is just a useless endeavor. When we talk of "worker" or "capitalist," we don't mean it as if these are pure categories, where a worker can't ever own capital, or that a capitalist can't ever do labor. They may do these things, they may exist somewhere in between. But clearly at some point, certain characteristics become dominant over others. Clearly Jeff Bezos's class interests are not the same as a minimum wage worker, as the latter likely has next to no capital while the former has far more capital than he could ever, by his own labor, afford.

There is no reason to try and shove this person you're describing into a specific absolute box. If they're a salaried worker who runs some very small business / self-employment on the side as supplemental income, you could just say they're a worker with petty bourgeois characteristics. You don't have to say they're absolutely "petty bourgeois" or a "worker". You can just describe that they have characteristics of multiple categories. No reason you cannot do this.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/vcbu0m/a_question_about_the_marxist_class_structure/icdkond/

The reason libs do this is because they're so extremely dogmatic that they don't even see their ideology as an ideology anymore but simply a "fact", and thus they don't see their political and economic system they advocate for as having anything to do with ideology but is merely based on "facts", so they ultimately see capitalism and support for capitalism as being devoid of any ideology. If there is no ideology involved in the justification, construction, or maintenance of a capitalist society, then you can't blame any ideology if people die in it. In fact, these people just view capitalism as "natural", and therefore, if anyone dies, it might be sad, but they died of "natural causes". Millions dying of a preventable disease because the system did nothing to respond to it, this can't be attributed to failures of liberal ideology, because to them, it's more comparable to like deaths from a hurricane. It's a natural disaster to them and nothing more.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/v4n3nr/neolib_says_that_socialism_is_a_failed_ideology/ib7ii8i/

Citations Needed Ep 25: The Banality of CIA-Curated Definitions of ‘Democracy’

Few words elicit such warm feelings as the term "Democracy." Wars are supposedly fought for it, foreign policies are built around it, protecting and advancing it is considered the United States' highest moral order.

Democracy's alleged opposite - broadly called "authoritarianism," "autocracy" or "tyranny” - is cast as the ultimate evil. The stifling, oppressive boot of the state that curtails liberties and must be fought at all costs. This is the world in which we operate and the one where the United States and its satellite media and NGO allies fight to preserve and defend democracy.

So how is "democracy" defined and how are those definitions used to justify American exceptionalism? Where do positive and negative rights come into play, and how do societal choices like illiteracy, poverty, and hunger factor into our notions of freedom?

On today's episode, we discuss the limits of democracy rankings, the oft-cited "Polity IV" metric devised by the CIA-funded Center for Systemic Peace, and more with guest George Ciccariello-Maher.

Episode transcript here: medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/ep…ocracy-aa183c697ccc

We have started out from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation of labour, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of labour; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc. From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.

—Karl Marx, Estranged Labour

UN report called Israel an apartheid state (the report can be read here) but Israel was able to apply enough pressure to get the report withdrawn

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-report/israel-imposes-apartheid-regime-on-palestinians-u-n-report-idUSKBN16M2IN

http://opiniojuris.org/2017/03/19/the-disappearing-un-report-on-israeli-apartheid/

As much as the erasure of the Soviet involvement in WW2, and more importantly, them being the primary reason the fascists were defeated is terrible, China's equivalent is so much worse. The primary reason Japan was able to be defeated when they were, and possibly at all, and the primary driving force of their defeat, was absolutely China.

"75-80% of Japan's military was trapped in China for most of the war. Nationalist Chinese resistance to these Japanese advances was ineffective, primarily because the Nationalist leadership was still more interested in holding their forces in reserve for a future struggle with the Communists than in repelling the Japanese. By contrast, the Communists, from their base in north-central China, began an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in Manchuria and North China. The Japanese needed large numbers of troops to maintain their hold on the immense Chinese territories and populations they controlled. Of the 51 infantry divisions making up the Japanese Army in 1941, 38 of them, comprising about 750,000 men, were stationed in China (including Manchuria). Including the strong Japanese Kwantung Army stationed in Northeast China, were pinned down. Thus Japan was able to employ only 10 or 11 divisions in the Pacific theatre, with the other five divisions stationed on Japanese islands." (Britannica)

"The scale of China's resistance destroyed Japan's strategy. At the time of Pearl Harbour 80% of Japan's troops were in China. They could never be released to form the Pacific perimeter against the US due to China's resistance. Japan launched repeated attacks in China including in 1944 using 500,000 troops in the Ichi-Go offensive. This was almost twenty five times the 21,000 Japanese troops that fought the US at Iwo-Jima or more than six times the 76,000 regular Japanese troops that defended Okinawa. Given appalling US casualties in both battles if Japan had been able to release hundreds of thousands of troops from China to defend its Pacific perimeter the total Allied victory in Asia's war at worst might not have been achieved, and at best would have involved far greater US causalities.

Unlike Hollywood China is not seeking any pre-eminent position. It states every country that participated in the greatest military conflict in human history, the World War to defeat Japanese aggression and Nazism, played a vital role. The sole reason the present generation enjoys relative peace and prosperity, and are not called upon to show the same courage as the generation of 1931-45, is because of that gigantic earlier sacrifice. But regarding such immense events there are two great truths. Individually the courage of combatants of every country participating in the great defeat of aggression and fascism was equal, and that in that struggle no country played a greater role than China." (China daily)

Japan sustained losses and casualties totalling 1.5 million in China and at the end of the war, China accepted the surrender of 1.28 million Japanese soldiers.

By comparison, the allied American, British, and Canadian forces killed, wounded and captured a total of 1.25 million of the Japanese forces. Which would mean 70% of Japanese forces were killed and captured by China. While the other allies combined only eliminated 30%. (WW2 database) (China daily) (Wikipedia)

The Soviets were the sword that decapitated the Nazis, (and to an extent the Japanese) while the China was the shield that held back/trapped the Japanese. 35,000,000+ Chinese and Soviets died holding back/crushing the fascist hordes. We owe everything to their sacrifices.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/o3q9yl/i_found_it_the_worst_post/h2egiyx/

Thats fucking baseball right there. None of that pansy ass dick tugging smile for the camera bullshit. Men puke, men poop on the field, men deliver their new born baby in the dugouts. Fucking hard core dick in the ass butterball foosball fuck it chuck it game time shit. Take it to the showers. Dicks get shoved in places you don’t even remember. We win together we celebrate together. Baseball is back baby.

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

—Michael Parenti, Left Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cut

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.

from https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

What can we make of the tendency of Westerners to flippantly regurgitate the accusation of brainwashing against another country and its people, but then display indignation when that same allegation is made about their own?

A common exchange may play out like this:

American: You can’t imagine the scope of Chinese propaganda, everyone’s brainwashed.

Non-American: Almost every single Western news network and print publication is part of a US-run propaganda program. Any exceptions are ruthlessly harassed and shut down.

American: That’s absolutely ridiculous! We’re free!

from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

US media are state propaganda. They have merely managed to create an illusion of independence because the methods by which they are controlled are sophisticated and embedded into the system itself via class interest. The control mechanisms are so omnipresent that people in the west don't even notice them, much like a fish doesn't notice the water around it because it is completely surrounded by it and has known nothing else its entire life. This is what the Nazis called "Gleichschaltung", a complete and total ideological alignment of all mainstream media, educational institutions and big capital with the ideology of the state, they are all in lockstep with the neoliberal imperialist agenda. There is no major institution of American society that dares contradict the official line when it comes to the political or economic system, or the United States' global imperialist project.

(possibly @Eugene_V_Dabs@hexbear.net but not sure)

“Crowning" the landlords and parading them through the villages. This sort of thing is very common. A tall paper-hat is stuck on the head of one of the local tyrants or evil gentry, bearing the words "Local tyrant so-and-so" or "So-and-so of the evil gentry". He is led by a rope and escorted with big crowds in front and behind. Sometimes brass gongs are beaten and flags waved to attract people's attention. This form of punishment more than any other makes the local tyrants and evil gentry tremble. Anyone who has once been crowned with a tall paper-hat loses face altogether and can never again hold up his head. Hence many of the rich prefer being fined to wearing the tall hat. But wear it they must, if the peasants insist. One ingenious township peasant association arrested an obnoxious member of the gentry and announced that he was to be crowned that very day. The man turned blue with fear. Then the association decided not to crown him that day. They argued that if he were crowned right away, he would become case-hardened and no longer afraid, and that it would be better to let him go home and crown him some other day. Not knowing when he would be crowned, the man was in daily suspense, unable to sit down or sleep at ease.

—Mao Zedong, Report On An Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, March 1927

There was a weather-driven famine happening in the region at the time and people were starting to starve, particularly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Part of the problem was that for generations, a new class of peasants had begun to form who were able to buy and own land, gradually displacing the former feudal system where most of the land was used by peasants for distant landowners who weren't really interested in the region.

This new landlord class (kulaks) basically perpetuated the same feudal system, with other peasants continuing to work for them on the land they acquired. Naturally this exacerbated wealth inequality in the region and gave the landlord class relative privilege and control over the peasant workers.

When the famine hit and people started to starve, the landlord class was relatively insulated from the problem, even being able to hoard food and resources. As the workers became more desperate, they were willing to work for less food, which allowed the landlords to hoard more, which made the workers position more desperate, causing them to be willing to work for less, and so forth in a snowball effect.

All of this was pretty normal for the region. It was a problem, with the relatively wealthy hoarding wealth and the workers becoming increasingly desperate to work for them in the middle of a natural disaster, but it was a problem the region had been dealing with for hundreds of years, if not longer. The new landlordism wasn't particularly parasitic when compared to feudalism, but it was parasitic nonetheless.

When people started starving to death the government stepped in and started organizing collective farms, redistributing land and hoarded resources to the peasants so that they could work for and feed themselves in a more efficient, equitable model for everyone.

The landowning class however, like capital controlling classes throughout history, weren't satisfied to work for themselves and allow the peasants to work for themselves alongside them.

Their response was to start sabotaging the collective farms, and to begin raiding and destroying depots where food was being distributed to starving people, as well as burning fields, grain silos, and slaughtering livestock, including breeding stock and egg and dairy producing stock.

Even anti-Communist propagandists like Robert Conquest (whose propaganda was cited extensively during the Cold War before most of it was debunked and he was forced to recant his claims over and over again) claim that the landowning class destroyed about 96 million head of cattle, and possibly twice as much tonnage of grain and other foodstock, completely wrecking the food production capacity of the region in the middle of the famine and exacerbating the problem beyond anything seen before.

The death toll is vastly overblown by those who want to make it out to be a genocide perpetrated the the Soviet government against her own people. The aforementioned Robert Conquest initially claimed a completely unrealistic 20-30 million deaths, before revising his claim by several million just years after his now infamous propaganda piece was published, and again as low as 13-15 million deaths decades later when his claims were immediately and categorically disproven by the opening of the Soviet archives.

As genuine investigative research continues to debunk claim after claim made by propagandists like him, the numbers continue to dwindle and the legacy of the self-proclaimed "Cold Warriors" is continuously eroded. To this day, the Ukrainian government claims ~4 million cases of starvation in the region during that period, completely disregarding blatantly false "research" conducted from a time before evidence was even available.

Eventually before his death, Conquest was forced to admit that there was no way the Soviets could have caused the famine, although he stubbornly refused to admit that they did anything to prevent it or that the land-owning capitalist class destroying 2-4 million tons of food for every starving person and wrecking the productive capacity of the region might have been responsible, despite this being the inevitable conclusion of his lifelong body of work, ironically vindicating the Soviets through desperate attempts to portray them as villains.

Decades of propaganda and its consequences are hard to undo however, and these indisputable, verifiable facts of recorded history are never welcomed in certain circles. The western public consciousness truly is a poisoned well, and facts alone aren't enough to undo that damage.

credit to u/spookyjohnathan

The American liberal, faced with this reality, tends to concede that truth is in fact drowned out by a relentless tide of spin and propaganda. Their next move is always predictable, however. It’s another lesson dutifully drilled into them in their youth: “At least we can dissent, however unpopular and ineffectual!” The reality, of course, is that such dissent is tolerated to the extent that it is unpopular.

Big-shot TV host Phil Donahue demonstrated that challenging imperial marching orders in the context of the invasion of Iraq was career suicide, when a leaked memo clearly explained he was fired in 2003 because he’d be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” [5] The fate of journalists unprotected by such wealth or celebrity is darker and sadder. Ramsey Orta, whose footage of Eric Garner pleading “I can’t breathe!” to NYPD cops choking him to death went viral, was rewarded for his impactful citizen journalism by having his family targeted by the cops, fast-tracked to prison for unrelated crimes, and fed rat poison while in there. [6] The only casualty of the spectacular “Panama Papers” leak was Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist who led the investigation, who was assassinated with a car-bomb near her home in Malta. [7] Then there’s the well-publicized cases of Assange, Snowden, Manning, etc. That said, I tend think to such lists are somewhat unnecessary since, ultimately, most honest people confess that they self-censor on social media for fear of consequences. (Do you?)

In other words, the status quo in the West is basically as follows: you can say whatever you want, so long as it doesn’t actually have any effect.

from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

Detainees were blindfolded on arrival and left that way throughout their stay in overcrowded cells. Music blared non-stop to drown out the sounds of torture – earning the centre the wry nickname "The Disco."

"Here resounded our screams, our cries," Bataszew told AFP on a recent visit to the place of her nightmares.

The building today is a private residence despite being earmarked as a memorial site. On the street outside, an improvised metal monument displays photographs of women who never came back from "The Disco."

'More viciousness'

"Women were a tough nut to crack and... punished with much more viciousness than men," said Bataszew.

More than 40,000 people were tortured and some 3,200 were killed or made to disappear in the 17 years of Pinochet's post-coup rule from 1973 to 1990.

Torture was different for women than for men. Some of the methods included raping them in front of their partners, or inserting live rats into their vaginas.

Some 35,000 victims of the military junta gave evidence to the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture in 2005, of which nearly 13 percent (3,399) were women – almost all of them subjected to sexual violence.

Victims testified of electric shocks to their genitals, or being raped with dogs trained to perform this vile act.

[...]

Cristina Godoy-Navarrete, now 68 years old and a retired immunologist, was one of the first captives at "The Disco," which was also known as "Venda Sexy" for the nature of the abuse meted out there.

"When I arrived there were only two other women. They took you to an underground area where they had equipment to apply electricity... and where they had the trained dog [for the rapes]," she told AFP from London, where she went into exile after being freed a year after her arrest in 1974.

Some of the worst punishments involved women's loved ones.

The report produced by Chile's torture commission recorded evidence of men being forced to rape their daughters or sisters.

"They held me to be tortured in front of him, as his wife," recounted Erika Hennings, wife of Alfonso Chanfreau – a philosophy student and an MIR leader still listed as "disappeared."

The retired teacher, 69, said she was detained for 17 days at the torture centre known as "Londres 38" after its street address, crammed into a room with 80 other people without beds and blindfolded for 24 hours.

"Londres 38 was a center of repression, torture... where I first encountered evil and cruelty," she recounted.

She said she was "used as a woman" to put pressure on Chanfreau.

'I get angry'

At Villa Grimaldi, yet another torture chamber, Shaira Sepulveda was held for 10 days.

"They got a special kick out of trying to denigrate, to destroy women," the 72-year-old told AFP.

Michelle Bachelet, a former president of Chile and now UN Commissioner for Human Rights, was also held at Villa Grimaldi in the 1970s with her mother Ángela Jeria.

"I get angry, I get angry, I get angry to see how they took advantage to destroy and kill our companions," Sepulveda said as she recently toured a rose garden created at the center in memory of female victims of the junta.

"They didn’t get what they wanted and I hope that someday we can have justice because they (the women) deserve it."

from https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/latin-america/slow-justice-for-women-abused-by-chiles-dictatorship.phtml

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

Charlie Chaplin’s 2,000-page Bureau file shows that, as a result of his left-wing beliefs, the FBI conducted lengthy investigations into his politics and his sex life, including pursuing leads offered by anonymous sources, clairvoyants and gossip columnists. Destroying Chaplin’s iconic status became an obsession for the Bureau, who reached out to MI5 for help trying to dig dirt, though the British found nothing indicating he was a Communist, let alone a Soviet spy. In September 1952, Chaplin and his family left the US to go on a European tour to promote his new film, and, after consulting with Hoover, the Attorney General revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit, banning him from the country. Even though the Bureau’s files concede that they had no evidence that could be presented in court to justify barring him from re-entering the US, Chaplin decided not to contest the decision and lived the final 25 years of his life in Switzerland. He did not return to America until 20 years later. In short, the FBI quietly ended the career of the greatest comedian of all time on the false grounds that he was a Communist.

from National Security Cinema by Alford & Secker [PDF]

So you compare a country to what it came from, with all its imperfections... and those who demand instant perfection, the day after the revolution they get up and say "are there civil liberties for the fascists?? Do they get to have their newspapers and their radio programmes? 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 were dumping and destroying and murdering people before.

My criteria is— what happens to those people that couldn't read? What happens to those babies that couldn't eat, that died of hunger? See that's why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.

—Michael Parenti

Here is, specifically, what Bezos did:

• Recognize that an internet storefront could gather huge amounts of data on customers
• Recognize that by selling books, he could stock a non-perishable product that is attractive to upscale, middle-adopter consumers (i.e. the best for long term gains)
• Recognize that the big delivery-based operations like Sears had horrible logistics and poor delivery times and service

It all spun out from there. That's all he did, and he didn't even actually do that himself, he just got it started and built it beginning with a $250,000 "investment" from his parents.

Amazon did a lot of things since then- but Bezos didn't do them. Bezos hired people to create Amazon Web Services, to provide a product that alread existed on the market. He didn't invent eBooks or even popularize them; he paid people to come up with a way to exploit them and strongarm authors into submitting to unfair business practices.

He didn't invent or design or create anything. All of the creative work done at his company is done by other people.

Billionaires are all basically the same: Ruthless sociopaths who notice, and viciously exploit, a particular combination of business practices, products, and markets while taking credit for the actual work done by other people.

credit to u/catgirl_apocalypse

NYTimes obituary 2003 :

In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''

Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.

bonus from 1974:

PARIS, Feb. 5 (Reuters)—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today.

Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information:

She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced.

She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”

Lenin undertook his detailed study of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, basing it on the research of an English economist named Hobson. His analysis continues to explain what is happening in the world today as we enter the 21st Century.

Lenin saw capitalism evolving into a higher stage. The key to understanding it was an economic analysis of the transition to monopoly: "...imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." As Lenin would point out in another article written in 1916 (Imperialism and the Split in Socialism), imperialism was a new development that had been predicted but not yet seen by Marx and Engels.

Lenin provides a careful, 5-point definition of imperialism: "(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this "finance capital", of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed."

the bourgeoisie are increasingly compelled by a falling rate of profit to use their dominance of the state apparatus to open new markets or access to resource extraction

“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.

The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.

The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.

In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.

In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.

—Lenin, Congress of the First Comintern

and yet ~70% of China's millennials own their own home while ~50% of US millennials still live with their parents.