Man I hate this dude

The history of the Middle East since 1948 shows Israel constantly striving for peace, only to be rebuffed time and again by the Arabs.

-- Antony J. Blinken, "Lebanon and the Facts", 1982

Israel is not, has never been, nor will ever be the irreproachable, perfectly moral state some of its supporters would like to see. Israelis are, after all, only human. Still, one pedestal the Jewish state can stand on--and stand on alone in the Middle East--is that of a democracy. Yes, there are tragic excesses in the occupied territories. True, the invasion of Lebanon claimed many innocent lives. The fact remains, though, that Israelis question themselves and their government openly and honestly. Eventually, as in other democracies, those responsible for wrongdoing are held accountable.

-- Antony J. Blinken, "Israel's Saving Grace", 1982

The summer of 1982 may be remembered in history as the time Israel passed from adolescence to adulthood. The illusions of a child are left behind. But the Jewish state remains special, an oasis in a desert. Its citizens have built a working democracy from scratch in a region that has no others. Israelis must treasure that democracy, protect it with all their will. For if they don't, the growing pains that are Lebanon, Shatila and Sabra, the repression of Arabs and the feud between Ashkenazim and Sephardim could turn into a plague.

-- Antony J. Blinken, "The Danger Within", 1983

When reading books written in the imperial core, about the enemies/targets of imperialist nations, I would keep this in mind:

Former CIA case officer John Stockwell: Well for example, in my war, the Angola war, that I helped to manage, one third of my staff was propaganda. [...] We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia Times, and then pulled them out and sent them to a journalist on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be what he had gotten from his stringer in Lusaka, who had gotten them from the Zambia Times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists, Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now, our contact man in Europe was. And we pumped just dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists--in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimbundu maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimbundu women who supposedly had been their victims.

Interviewer: These were fake photos?

Stockwell: Oh, absolutely. We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know eating babies for breakfast and the sort. Totally false propaganda.

Interviewer: John, was this sort of thing practiced in Vietnam?

Stockwell: Oh, endlessly. A massive propaganda effort in Vietnam in the '50s and in the '60s, including the thousand books that were published--several hundred in English--that were also propaganda books sponsored by the CIA. Give some money to a writer, "Write this book for us, write anything you want, but on these matters, make sure, you know, you have this line."

Interviewer: Writers in this country? Books sold and distributed in this culture?

Stockwell: Sure. Yeah. English language books, meaning an American audience as a target, on the subject of Vietnam and the history of Vietnam, and the history of Marxism, and supporting the domino theory, et cetera.

Interviewer: Without opening us up to a lawsuit, could you name one of them?

Stockwell: No, I could not. The Church Committee, when they found this out, demanded that they be given the titles so that the university libraries could at least go and stamp inside "Central Intelligence Agency's version of history," and the CIA refused because it's been commissioned to protect its sources and methods, and the sources would be the authors who wrote these false propaganda books, some of whom are now distinguished scholars and journalists.

Source (video interview)

Also note:

• It's a recognized problem in south Korea that "time and time again, conservative outlets and foreign media circulate and reproduce rumors [about DPRK] based on questionable sources ... retractions and apologies are rarely ever provided when the reports are shown to be false" and "Sometimes, the South Korean government itself has been the epicenter of false reports ... The situation has been made worse by defector groups aggressively proliferating claims from unverified 'North Korean sources,' as if attempting to draw attention to themselves."

• South Korea's national intelligence service (NIS) forges documents to frame people and tortures them into false confessions as well as pays defectors for sensational stories and harasses and silences people who say positive things about DPRK (and takes away their passports so they can't go back, even when they came to south Korea against their will)

• UN human rights researchers who have worked directly with defectors from DPRK have written about how testimonies are made unreliable by cash incentives paid by the NIS and other organizations: "North Korean refugees are well aware of what the interviewer wants to hear. ... The more terrible their stories are, the more attention they receive. The more international invitations they receive, the more cash comes in. It is how the capitalist system works: competition for more tragic and shocking stories. ... In my 16 years of studying North Korean refugees, I have experienced numerous inconsistent stories, intentional omission and lies. I have also witnessed some involved in fraud and other illicit activities. In one case the breach of trust was so significant that I could not continue research."

Edit: So, to summarize -- Former CIA case officers have discussed how they pay academics and journalists to write thousands of books about foreign communist enemies that contain whatever content the author wants as long as it pushes certain specific lines; the CIA regularly plants false stories into foreign newspapers and gets them circulated around; the NIS (formerly the "KCIA", formed on the US-backed side during the Korean War to combat communists) is known to forge documents, extract false confessions, pay people to lie or embellish to the point that mainstream south Korean liberal media and UN researchers say it's making it too hard to tell what's true; defectors with sensational stories receive payments and get book deals and international speaking tours while people with positive things to say get arrested and surveilled by intelligence agencies...So, keep that info in mind as you consider what's going on with these books.

Apparently the attacker was also their landlord:

According to the Will County sheriff’s office, the woman had called 911 to report that her landlord had attacked her with a knife, adding she then ran into a bathroom and continued to fight him off.

The Muslim civil liberties organization called the crime “our worst nightmare” and part of a disturbing spike in hate calls and emails since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. The group cited text messages exchanged among family members that showed the attacker had made disparaging remarks about Muslims.

I'm taking a look through the link that @GrainEater@lemmygrad.ml stickied on c/GenZhou. I'm also trying to learn more about the early history of the region, as I also mostly only know about the more recent history. So, take my post as someone else also learning about this too and sharing my notes, not as someone well-versed on the topic.

Here's a page from there: Myth: My people were here before your people.

Key points from the page:

The ethnic cleansing, massacres and colonialism needed to establish Israel can never be justified, regardless of who was there first. It’s a moot point. Even if we follow the argument that Palestinians have only been there for 1300 years, does this suddenly legitimize the expulsion of hundreds of thousands? Of course not. There is no possible scenario where it is excusable to ethnically cleanse a people and colonize their lands. Human rights apply to people universally, regardless of whether they have lived in an area for a year or ten thousand years.

A point regarding the historical issue of the population (read the whole page for more info about that):

[T]he Palestinian Arabs of today did not suddenly appear from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century to settle in Palestine, but are the same indigenous peoples living there who changed how they identified over time. This includes the descendants of every group that has ever called Palestine their home. When regions change rulers, they don’t normally change populations. Throughout history, peoples have often changed how they identified politically. The Sardinians eventually became Italians, Prussians became Germans. It would be laughable to suggest that the Sardinians were kicked out and replaced by a distinct foreign Italian people. We must separate the political nationalist identity of people from their personhood as human beings, as nationalism is a relatively modern concept, especially in the Middle East.

"Jewish history ... forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does ... These positions can be maintained while simultaneously rejecting Zionism and its colonialism"

If we reject the “we were there first” argument, and not treat it as a legitimizing factor for Israel’s creation, then we can focus on the real history, without any ideological agendas. We could trace how our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. After all, there is indeed Jewish history in Palestine. This history forms a part of the Palestinian past and heritage, just like every other group, kingdom or empire that settled there does. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities, because for most of history they have not been. These positions can be maintained while simultaneously rejecting Zionism and its colonialism. After all, this ideologically driven impulse to imagine our ancestors as some closed, well defined, unchanging homogenous group having exclusive ownership over lands corresponding to modern day borders has nothing to do with the actual history of the area, and everything to do with modern notions of ethnic nationalism and colonialism.

Another page: Myth: The "conflict" is ancient

This shallow analysis of the question of Palestine serves multiple functions; First, it is an attractive and easy way to comment on the situation without actually saying anything or taking a side. It is convenient because it spares you the need to do any research or take a stance while simultaneously morally elevating yourself over the “backwards” people in the region. This is done in an attempt to project a false image of understanding or nuance.

[T]he question of Palestine is not some ancient blood feud between eternally warring peoples, it is a recent struggle resulting from settler colonialism infused with reactionary ethnonationalism, both relatively new concepts originating in the last couple of centuries. The analysis of the question of Palestine through any other lens will produce a flawed and misleading understanding of the facts on the ground and will result in shallow and ahistorical interpretations of the region as the one discussed above.

Since iirc the video you linked mentioned this: Myth: The name "Palestine" was a Roman invention

As I said, I am also learning more about the more distant past history of this region, and at the moment I am in the phase of just gathering information and reading up, not yet at a phase of fact-checking certain details (though, as the pages above importantly point out, certain facts are moot points in regard to justifying settler colonization--nonetheless it's good to be aware of factual historical information).

I'm going to be taking the information on the above pages as a jumping off point as I learn more about it. I noticed that each page in their myths section contains a list of sources, so maybe you (and I) could start looking into those. I know you said you know about the more recent history but I thought this Empire Files video was informative due to containing several quotations from Zionists before and throughout the history of their colonization of Palestine and context about European colonial projects: How Palestine Became Colonized.

Again, this video, like the above website, and also like the video you linked, are all media intended to quickly introduce information to a mass audience, so we should always be taking them as a starting point for more detailed research. As someone else in this thread mentioned, keep learning about the history, keep expanding your knowledge of the context. Read widely with a critical mind and with a materialist analysis and keep wary of the imperialist point of view being the default in many sources. Explicitly Marxist histories of events can help very much in orienting your research but you can also do your best to make that kind of analysis yourself as you become more informed using sources of all kinds as long as you remain critical.

Transcript contains some errors, typos, and spots where I was unsure of what exactly was said, which I marked by a question mark, but should be mostly readable. Feel free to correct any problems you see.

https://paste.lcomrade.su/XVquKDWC

All this week I keep thinking about/looking up Haitian revolution images too...

In America there are signs posted all over residential zones reminding citizens that they are being spied on by their neighbors who will immediately report all "suspicious persons and activities" to the authorities 😱 Some signs even mention the people have been "trained" to report/spy on each other's family members 😢

“We have many interesting projects,” Putin promised, naming as one example the plan to develop Russian railroad connectivity through North Korea. (Source)

Really interested to see if this is pursued.

This is an old article (2018) but it outlines the kinds of projects that have been discussed before concerning Russia-DPRK-ROK:

One such project could be a railway that will be able deliver goods from Russia to South Korea through North Korea. "Once the Trans-Korean Main Line is built, it may be connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway. In this case, it will be possible to deliver goods from South Korea to Europe, which would be economically beneficial not only to South and North Korea but to Russia as well," Moon Jae-in said in an interview with Russian media ahead of his state visit to Moscow.

A gas pipeline coming from Russia to North Korea to be extended to the South is another possibility, he said. "We can also build a gas pipeline via North Korea, so that not only South Korea will receive Russian gas but we will also be able to deliver it to Japan," the South Korean president said.

The project to unite the Korean Peninsula with a gas pipeline has been discussed for a long time, but official talks started in 2011. The negotiations were frozen after relations between Seoul and Pyongyang deteriorated. Last week, Russian energy major Gazprom announced it resumed talks with Seoul over the construction of a gas pipeline connecting Russia with North and South Korea.

The countries could also connect their electricity grids, Moon Jae-in said. "We can also establish a powerline that would allow us to receive electricity from Russia. It could also be delivered not only to South and North Korea but also to Japan.”

I don't recall the exact details as I believe it was the usual UN demands about DPRK's missile launches, but basically China went along with a round of security council sanctions adopted in 2017, which meant that petroleum exports become more restricted and thousands of people from DPRK who were working in China had to go home and a bunch of joint ventures were forced to shut down as well. However, in 2022, China and Russia vetoed a new round of US-sponsored UN sanctions on DPRK, and recommended lifting some of the earlier sanctions, as they felt the US had failed to engage in its end of diplomacy with DPRK, and therefore the earlier sanctions should be reduced and no further ones should be imposed.

Watch the 2016 film "Donbass" by Anne-Laure Bonnel, to see the things people are referring to about the violence there over the past several years. Warning that if you look into what was going on in Donbass during those years, you are going to see a lot of footage of people dead/dying in the street with their limbs blown off. This film shows a bit less of that than others do.

Also here is a clip from the documentary, with footage of the 2014 burning of the trade union building in Odessa, where Ukranian nationalists burned the building down and beat and shot the people who jumped out of the windows to avoid burning. The people in the building were Russian speakers who were protesting a ban on Russian language, and took refuge in the trade union building when the right-wing nationalists showed up. The person being interviewed is a former Ukranian soldier from Donestk, who left the military because he didn't want to join in the violence enacted on the region. Warning that you will briefly see bodies of people who burned to death.

Yes, the US is purposely starving the world.

Yep. I doubt you'll care to read the following but I'm putting it here for others to see.

The United States is the world leader in imposing economic sanctions and supports sanctions regimes affecting nearly 200 million people. ... Targeted countries experience economic contractions and, in many cases, are unable to import sufficient essential goods, including essential medicines, medical equipment, infrastructure necessary for clean water and for health care, and food. ... While on paper most sanctions have some humanitarian exemptions for food, necessary medicines and medical supplies, in practice these exemptions are not sufficient to ensure access to these goods within the targeted country. (Center for Economic and Policy Research)

It's well known that sanctions are ineffective for pressuring governments, but very effective at waging siege warfare by starving and killing ordinary citizens by disease and infrastructural failures. Continuing to use sanctions in this way and to this extent, when this is well known, is definitely "purposely starving the world". An independent expert appointed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in 2019 that US sanctions violate human rights and international code of conduct and can lead to starvation. Why does the US continue to be the world leader in imposing sanctions, increasing its use of sanctions by 933% over the last 20 years, when this is well known? It's because they know the effect, and they're doing it on purpose.

We can also look at some US internal memorandums from before it was more politically incorrect to talk about starving people in other countries. In 1960, U.S. officials wrote that creating "disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship" through denying money and supplies to Cuba would be a method they should pursue in order to "bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government" in Cuba.

In other countries, we see a pattern of US officials and US-backed institutions purposely denying aid and loans to governments they don't approve of, and then suddenly approving aid and opening up loans when a coup brings a leader they're happy with into power. When Ghana was requesting aid under an administration that the West's bourgeoisie didn't like, U.S. officials said this: "We and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah’s pleas for economic aid. The new OCAM (Francophone) group’s refusal to attend any OAU meeting in Accra (because of Nkrumah’s plotting) will further isolate him. All in all, looks good." The "situation" they were helping to set up was a coup they knew was going to happen. After a US-friendly coup took place, suddenly it was time to give the "almost pathetically pro-Western" government a gift of "few thousand tons of surplus wheat or rice", knowing that giving little gifts like this "whets their appetites" for further collaboration with the US. You will find the same song and dance in numerous other countries, Chile being a well-documented example, if you simply look for it.

The US imposes starvation and depravation of other countries on purpose, using it as an economic wrecking ball, then pats itself on the back for giving "aid" to the countries which have been hollowed out by such tactics.

The loans which magically become available to countries that meet the US approval standards are not so pretty either, as a former IMF senior economist said, he may only hope "to wash my hands of what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples", there not being "enough soap in the world" to wash away what has been done to the global south through the calculated fraud of the IMF, whose tactics are designed to accomplish the same kind of goals as the sanctions are--to prevent the economic rise of any country but the US by wrecking its competitors economically, tearing apart their local manufacturing capacity and transforming them into mere resource extraction projects, redirecting their agricultural industries into exports to make sure they reach a level where they are more reliant on imports to feed themselves, and reliant on foreign aid which is ripped away whenever they do not do what the US approves of or make friends with who the US wants them to.

I refer to #3, why don’t they just do it then?

This is what secondary sanctions and the US's various protection rackets have always been designed to prevent, which has definitely been a powerful tool for them, but it seems with the rise of the new non-aligned movement and de-dollarization its becoming a less successful one and we can see countries "just doing" what they want more and more while the US leadership waves around, as usual, more sanctions and military threats in response.

If you have not seen it already, you may be interested in this short 2021 documentary, "A Day of Trans 跨越性别的一天", made by a Chinese director who is transgender, which interviews four trans people in China. There is a woman in her 60s who tells some of her life story, a man in his 30s who talks about a gender identity discrimination lawsuit that he won in 2016 and about general issues trans people face in society, and two younger people (one identifies as genderqueer/nonbinary and the other is agender) who talk about their trans rights advocacy work. Each interviewee also talks about the attitudes in society about trans people over time, their own journey, etc.