Um actually, you shouldn't rely on the media, and you should just assume every geopolitical rival of the US is evil based on nothing.
Objection
joined 2 years ago
Well, the funny thing about that is that Chinese state has actually done that. Or Mao did, anyway.
See, Mao feared that the government was going to follow the same reformist path as the USSR, so he issued a series of declarations saying that the government had been infiltrated by bourgeois elements, that the people of China had a "right to rebel," and finally calling on them to "Bombard the Headquarters."
These declarations created a period of violence and disorder known as the Cultural Revolution, where independent, student-led militias known as Red Guards formed and started fighting whoever they suspected of being counter-revolutionary. With no command structure, they often wound up fighting each other, when they weren't committing atrocities.
Ironically, all this did was discredit this approach and convince a lot of people of the necessity of the reforms they were meant to prevent, and of the central government.
Of course, there were another time in Chinese history where China lacked a strong central government. After the fall of the Qing, there was no central government at all. This is generally referred to as the warlord period, and it sucked so bad that the communists and nationalists put aside their differences to try to end it. Unfortunately, China remained largely decentralized, which allowed the much smaller but more centralized nation of Japan to invade and kill tens of millions of people.
If you don't read theory/study history, it's easy to just rail against authority and centralization from an idealist perspective, but if you actually study China's history and conditions, you'll find reasons for every path they've chosen.
evidence of ideological impurity!
It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
"Ideological purity" first off, isn't really a thing in Marxism-Leninism, because Marxism-Leninism explicitly calls for adapting policies to specific material conditions. To the extent that people have tried to pursue an "ideologically pure" version of it, it generally hasn't worked so well. The Great Leap Forward, for example.
Now, one would think that China learning from its past mistakes and adapting policy in such a way that 700 million people get lifted out of extreme poverty would be seen as a good thing. And one would think that if someone didn't see this move as a good thing, then they must prefer China's pre-reform policies when they didn't have billionaires and a stock market. Yet somehow, y'all seem to just blindly hate China regardless of what kind of policy they implement.
It kinda seems like what we are dealing with is an anticommunist ideological framework that can transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence, a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
Vietnam.
maybe even raped children
but
I swear, it's impossible to parody lesser-evilists because you're all self-parodies at this point.
What a ridiculous article, full of baseless speculation. At least it has the decency to mention the obvious explanation, in between all the nonsense:
Akaash Maharaj, senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Public Policy, says it’s also possible Khamenei is simply in hiding, given the dangers of offering even a small clue regarding his whereabouts to U.S. and Israeli forces.
“Every time a member of his regime lifts his head above the parapet, it has a bad habit of being blown off by the Americans or the Israelis," he said. "And even a highly controlled video would provide some clues to the person's location and his condition.”
> Fires the guy whose job was assassinating heads of state
> Gets assassinated
> Guy who got fired gets on the investigative comittee which fucks up the investigation
Who could it be 🤔
The Japanese fascists didn't give a shit about the people getting nuked. If they did they would have started the war in the first place. The most the nukes gave them was an excuse, they could pretend that's why they surrendered to make themselves look better. The only thing they cared about was their own skin. The reason they didn't want to submit to unconditional surrender was because they didn't want to hang.
The desperate hope that they had been hanging on to was that they could negotiate with the USSR to mediate the surrender (in fact, the USSR was just buying time as they moved troops to attack). This hope was prolonged because Truman pulled out of a joint statement with the USSR calling for surrender, and the reason he did that was because he wanted an opportunity to use the bomb.
The USSR declaring war is the thing that removed the last hope the Japanese fascists had for a conditional surrender. They were then allowed to save face by claiming they cared so much about sparing the people from nukes. Because really the only reason the US was so insistant on unconditional surrender in the first place was because it would sound more badass in the papers and help Truman get reelected. Dropping the nukes also served as a way to justify the costs of the program, and to intimidate the Soviets.
The projections for a possible invasion were all invented after the war as a talking point. No such projection existed during the war, nor was any invasion planned.
A lot of his base believe that the reason the US goes around the world plundering and killing is for the benefit of the people in those countries. It's utterly delusional, White Man's Burden bullshit but that's what the media says and they're gullible enough to believe it (as are some liberals tbh). The main thing they want is to stop carrying this imagined White Man's Burden. They don't give a single shit about what kind of harm is inflicted on foreigners, they just don't want to feel like they're paying to help foreigners (or anybody else).
All that adds up to, if Trump does terrorist strikes that kill schoolgirls and destabilize countries to the benefit of absolutely no one, they don't care. At best, they might care a little about US troops who are killed because they don't see them as subhumans (like they do foreigners), but even then it's a toss-up because they might decide to want vengeance.
There is an "isolationist" current because they can see the failure of the occupation of Afghanistan but they also have incoherent worldviews and little ability to resist propaganda. So they blame that failure on "woke" and on it being nation-building, without realizing that the "woke" was just a pretence and also that Bush also claimed he didn't want to get involved in nation-building because of Vietnam.
Obviously it's really about oil but this is a shitpost.
FFIV's great opening
This is an interesting little historical artifact I came across the other other day. The "Why We Fight" series was directed by Frank Capra (of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington") working for the War Department (as it was called at the time) as an attempt to counter the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph of the Will," and to explain to soldiers what they were fighting for, as well as familiarizing them with the basic conditions that allied countries had experienced.
The film has a couple of inaccuracies, and Chinese communists are completely absent from it, focusing entirely on the KMT. And of course, it's full of slurs for the Japanese (I think I actually learned a new one from it). The claim that China "has never once waged an aggressive war in it's 4000 years of history" seems, uhh, somewhat dubious, let's say. It cites the "Tanaka Memorial," a document which historians dispute the existence of. Otherwise, the film is fairly accurate and pretty interesting, if nothing else, because of how much it contrasts with narratives people have put forward in recent times where China was always some uniquely evil villain throughout it's whole history.
But there are a couple points that I found particularly relevant to certain modern discussions, such as:
"This vast area consists of China Proper and four outer provinces."
Tibet, a province of China? In 1944, before the PRC even existed? Huh. Wasn't 1944 during the period of time that people say it was an independent country?
"But how could Japan, only 1/20th the size of China, and with only 1/6th it's population, think of conquering China, much less the world?"
"Modern China, in spite of its age old history, was like the broken pieces of jigsaw puzzle, each piece controlled by a different ruler, each with his own private army. In modern terms, China was a country, but not yet a nation."
Why, that's certainly an interesting point, isn't it? Back when China was divided, with all these different warlords doing their own thing, it was certainly quite a bit more vulnerable to foreign aggression, compared to when it became more unified.
It kinda makes me wonder if the Japanese -or any foreigners, really - ever thought of intentionally trying to drum up internal strife within China, say, in Chinese provinces like Tibet or Xinjiang, for the purposes of weakening and exploiting the Chinese people as a whole 🤔
Anyway, to whatever time-traveling tankie went back and infiltrated the US government to add these things to the film, I just wanted to say, I see you.
This is an interesting little historical artifact I came across the other other day. The "Why We Fight" series was directed by Frank Capra (of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington") working for the War Department (as it was called at the time) as an attempt to counter the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph of the Will," and to explain to soldiers what they were fighting for, as well as familiarizing them with the basic conditions that allied countries had experienced.
The film has a couple of inaccuracies, and Chinese communists are completely absent from it, focusing entirely on the KMT. And of course, it's full of slurs for the Japanese (I think I actually learned a new one from it). The claim that China "has never once waged an aggressive war in it's 4000 years of history" seems, uhh, somewhat dubious, let's say. It cites the "Tanaka Memorial," a document which historians dispute the existence of. Otherwise, the film is fairly accurate and pretty interesting, if nothing else, because of how much it contrasts with narratives people have put forward in recent times where China was always some uniquely evil villain throughout it's whole history.
But there are a couple points that I found particularly relevant to certain modern discussions, such as:
"This vast area consists of China Proper and four outer provinces."
Tibet, a province of China? In 1944, before the PRC even existed? Huh. Wasn't 1944 during the period of time that people say it was an independent country?
"But how could Japan, only 1/20th the size of China, and with only 1/6th it's population, think of conquering China, much less the world?"
"Modern China, in spite of its age old history, was like the broken pieces of jigsaw puzzle, each piece controlled by a different ruler, each with his own private army. In modern terms, China was a country, but not yet a nation."
Why, that's certainly an interesting point, isn't it? Back when China was divided, with all these different warlords doing their own thing, it was certainly quite a bit more vulnerable to foreign aggression, compared to when it became more unified.
It kinda makes me wonder if the Japanese -or any foreigners, really - ever thought of intentionally trying to drum up internal strife within China, say, in Chinese provinces like Tibet or Xinjiang, for the purposes of weakening and exploiting the Chinese people as a whole 🤔
Anyway, to whatever time-traveling tankie went back and infiltrated the US government to add these things to the film, I just wanted to say, I see you.
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https://youtu.be/BG7273yDpdA