#capitalism and the state sustain themselves on violence

[maester-cressen]

An opinion: The Conqueror Trio (Aegon I, Visenya and Rhaenys) cannot be colonizers because their conquest of Westeros lacks the historical components of colonization in our world

To simplify a complex topic such as colonization is usually not my cup of tea, but it is best when I'm simply stating my opinion as both a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire and as a person born and raised in a country victim of colonization.

Historically speaking, colonization involved many layers of exploitation of a territory in service of another. The resources of a country, such as minerals, plants, construction materials and animals were taken away from their original land and brought to the colonizers' land. At no point did the Conqueror trio relocated those resources to Valyria, Dragonstone, Tyrosh or the other locations they might've lived on, nor did they concentrate all of those resources upon making King's Landing the new capital.

The original population was killed and the survivors were either enslaved or driven away from their homes or forced to give up their identities/cultures/beliefs in order to live with the colonizers. As per Fire and Blood and World of Ice and Fire, the Conqueror trio did not organize a genocide of Westerosi population neither attempted to interfere with their lives to that extend. On the contrary, they molded themselves to the land they were conquering, to the point of adapting religious/cultural symbols and making many concessions in order to appease the rulers of Westeros.

Many colonizers created settler colonies, where people from the colonizer nation would move into the colony to replace the population. Said replacement was backed up by preventing the original population from outgrowing the settlers (killing the younger ones, installing laws to prevent them from having children, taking away resources necessary to raise a child, creating unsafe conditions for children, among other things). The Conqueror trio did not went out of their way to kill any of the kings of Westeros. They attempted peaceful engagements with all the leaders and, even when resorting to violence, did not went out of their ways to wipe out entire clans from the map. All of the surviving leaders kept their lands and ruling over their minor houses, just changed their titles and unified themselves under a new ruler.

The colonizers ruled the colony with the objective of complete subjugation. They only cared to sustain the forces enough to exploit them. The Conqueror Trio brought a much needed peace to Westeros (more than it ever saw prior to the Conquest) and created laws, buildings and systems that helped the population get access to better living conditions.

The colonizers went out of their ways to demonize the original population and their cultures, beliefs and laws. They forcibly converted the original population to their religion, outlawed customs, raped women, expelled thousands of people from their lands and painted the picture of "educating those ruthless savages". The Conqueror Trio didn't interfere with the customs of Westeros and allowed them to keep to themselves.

Colonizers believed themselves to be better than the original population and did not attempt to form respectful relationships. The Targaryens formed alliances with the houses of Westeros via numerous ways: arranged marriages with over 30 non-Valyrian houses, positions of power in Councils, peace treats and friendships.

The effects of colonialism are devastating and felt to this day in many countries, including my own. Colonizers are not remembered fondly in any capacity because they quite literally destroyed any attempt of progress and freedom the colonized ever attempted to make. The Conqueror Trio (and many of their descendants) worked together with the rulers of Westeros to bring in so many changes they are still remembered fondly by the nobles and commoners of Westeros alike.

[transhawks]

yeah it is true, what you're saying about the league, but even if that is the case, the heroes winning this fight (even if they do wind up saving the villains) is the worst thing that could happen in bnha with everything we've been shown so far in the story.

Especially if shouji's ''solution'' to the issues facing the mutants is any indication of things to come. Trauma based politics does have a lot of faults, and afo and the villains come with all their own problems but the heroes 'right way' ineffective solutions to the issues presented in bnha (a practically suicidal ideal in shouji's answer) could doom everyone even worse than any destruction the villains could bring.

The quirk singularity being the biggest elephant in the room that the heroes won't even acknowledge, something only the worst of the villains have accepted and tried to beat, true in there own evil way but still they are the only ones trying, there is no one else.

The series can't end with shouji and the hero kids being right and the final answer to things, because that'd be a bad story with all the inconsistency we've been shown, and an even worse message. Hori couldn't do that even in a shonen jump series.

*cracks knuckles* Aight, Imma go in.

what you're saying about the league, but even if that is the case, the heroes winning this fight (even if they do wind up saving the villains) is the worst thing that could happen in bnha with everything we've been shown so far in the story.

Babe, we're reading My Hero Academia, not My Villain Academia. I hate to appeal to "it says it on the tin" but it does tho. Like.... What did you think was going to happen? Deku's the protagonist. He tells us the story is about people not being equal - AND THEN how it's about him becoming the greatest hero. We still don't know what that means, but it doesn't mean All For One getting to become Supreme Ruler of the world like he wants. Nor does it mean the League get to go off in the sunset at the end of the day. That doesn't resolve their issues either.

Especially if shouji's ''solution'' to the issues facing the mutants is any indication of things to come. Trauma based politics does have a lot of faults, and afo and the villains come with all their own problems but the heroes 'right way' ineffective solutions to the issues presented in bnha (a practically suicidal ideal in shouji's answer) could doom everyone even worse than any destruction the villains could bring.

You're right! You've done it! You've found the contradiction in liberalism!!! Amazing!! Now go read this and think about why an inherently flawed ideology produces inherently flawed ideological works. The leftist critiques here are all relevant - you can't have principles that promote equality in some societal spaces and ignore others. The hero system works on that concept (outside of the HPSC murders to maintain societal peace).

For real, there's a reason I get repeating this is an issue with politics and polemics. You can call it "bad writing" all you want, but it's actually the cognitive dissonance on behalf of liberalism thinking reforming a system designed to be oppressive works in removing oppression. As long as there isn't a horizontal structure of power, there's no real solving these issues but most liberals consider that too utopian to contemplate and, in all honesty, the amount of violence it takes to create those systems seems like its not worth it (even if there's an argument that it's proportional to the violence the state and capitalism enact to sustain themselves).

It's not "bad" writing inasmuch as it's a writer not able to square away his writing with political realities and the understanding that any attempt at anything more radical will not be fit for publishing.

I've brought this up to @haleigh-sloth and she pointed out to me that one of the issues here is that people like me who wanted the radical ending wanted a plot-driven story where the world is prominent instead of the character-driven story it is. The story is more about individuals changing. Now, is the society going to change? Yeah. But not to the extent we want because that's a different story than the one Horikoshi is writing.

Again, I keep reiterating - this story is not written for people who think like me or even you. It's written for mass consumption for a Japanese audience of young boys. Even when the real demographics of BNHA/WSJ are different than the targeted audience, remember - preteen Japanese boys. This story is written and edited and published with them in mind.

The quirk singularity being the biggest elephant in the room that the heroes won't even acknowledge, something only the worst of the villains have accepted and tried to beat, true in there own evil way but still they are the only ones trying, there is no one else.

So, my approach to this is either - one the quirk singularity is closer to Malthusian thinking and is overblown OR idk, my theory about All For One doing this all to stop the Singularity a la Adrian Veidt trying to stop the Mutually Assured Destruction and Nuclear Armageddon by killing millions of people is possible. Or Eri does something. Whatever the solution, Horikoshi has it in mind already. This plot point is like the one I'm least worried about because Horikoshi has been setting it up.

The series can't end with shouji and the hero kids being right and the final answer to things, because that'd be a bad story with all the inconsistency we've been shown, and an even worse message. Hori couldn't do that even in a shonen jump series.

First off, that's how it ends.

Let's get that clear.

Likely there will be surface changes - HPSC disbanded or something, the ranking system ended, and perhaps a lot of reforms stopping Heroes from getting into it for the money and fame. Probably a redistribution of resources so citizens feel more comfortable intervening in situations like Tomura's instead of waiting for heroes. Heck, laws might be even loosened about quirk usage so it's not just heroes.

But...

I'm gonna break it to you, whatever our epilogue, that won't be the focus. We'll be told these things or shown some pages, but ultimately what Horikoshi wants to show is where the characters are. If that means seeing a Todoroki family dinner with the Todoroki boys collectively slurping soba at their father while Rei laughs and Fuyumi gets annoyed, so be it. If that means Deku and Shigaraki going shoe shopping in the mall, so be it. If that means Ochako and Toga and Tsuyu having fun together in some way, so be it. That's the ending Horikoshi has been trying to write.

It's bad if you were hoping for other things. I posted that post to get you to stop hoping. And for your last line, because I have experience with this being in that fandom 2013-2014...

Have you ever read Naruto?

[beguines]

Previous attempts to answer the question of how capitalism reproduces itself have tended to remain within the boundaries of what Nicos Poulantzas once called "the couplet violence-consent or repression-ideology". The (often implicit) assumption at work in this conceptual scheme is that there are two fundamental forms of power to which all exercise of power can be reduced: on the one hand, violence or the direct, physical coercion of the body, and, on the other hand, ideology or the formation of systems of representations, pictures, concepts, symbols and forms of thought that shape the ways in which people perceive social reality, including themselves. Alternative versions of this duality include coercion and consent, hard and soft power, dominance and hegemony, and repression and discourse. One of the clearest examples of this tendency to think of power in terms of such couplets can be found in Louis Althusser's analysis of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. According to him, this reproduction "is ensured by the superstructure, by the legal-political superstructure and the ideological superstructure". Capitalism is, in other words, reproduced by the state-apparatuses, which are divided into two sets according to the form of power they primarily rely on: the repressive state-apparatuses (violence) and the ideological state-apparatuses (ideology).

The perhaps most fundamental claim of this thesis is that the couplet violence-ideology leaves an important form of power unexamined, namely what I will refer to as economic power. This form of power has its roots in the ability to re-organise the material conditions of social reproduction. By social reproduction, I mean the processes and activities involved in securing the continuous existence of a given society. Whereas violence and ideology directly address the subject, economic power addresses it only indirectly through the manipulation of its socio-material environment. Economic power thus has to do with the way in which social relations of domination reproduce themselves by being inscribed in the environment of the subject.

Another equally important claim of this thesis is that Marx's critique of political economy contains an indispensable basis for a theory of the economic power of capital, and that it is impossible to explain the paradoxical persistence of capitalism without such a theory. In a decisive passage in the first volume of Capital from which this thesis derives its title, Marx argues that once capitalism has been established,

"the mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker [der stumme Zwang der ökonomischen Verhältnisse besiegelt die Herrschaft des Kapitalisten über den Arbeiter]. Extra-economic, immediate violence [Außerökonomische, unmittelbare Gewalt] is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them."

What Marx points to in this passage is that capitalism has a unique ability to reproduce itself by means of a form of impersonal, anonymous and abstract power embedded in the economic processes themselves. The social relations of domination involved in the economy is thus not sustained only by processes "external" to the economy, as in Althusser's theory where the reproduction of the property relations in the economic "base" occurs "outside" of this base. The characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to reproduce itself through economic processes, or, put differently, that the organisation of social reproduction on the basis of capital gives rise to a set of powerful structural mechanisms which ensure its reproduction all by itself, as it were. Here, we see the significance of the distinction between the original creation of capitalist relations of production and their reproduction. Marx's claim is that, while the historical creation of capitalism was premised on massive amounts of violence, the reproduction of those relations also—though not exclusively—relies on the "mute compulsion of economic relations", or what I referred to as economic power.

Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

[happyfanofeverything]

I’ve been peeking at your liveblogging but I’m a little confused as to what you mean by the post about describing power and abuse as filth and whatnot :0c

okay this ended up quite long but i wanted to try my best to explain what i mean here:

tl;dr framing abuse of power as “filth”/“disgusting”/“dirty” etc is inaccurate and supports abusive power structures. umineko does this, at least in the question arcs, which i’m hoping is buildup to correcting it.

i always take care to describe abuse of power in the most accurate ways i can, like, “child abuse”, “misogyny”, “ableism”, “sexual predation”, “capitalism”, whatever it may be, because at their core, they are the subjugation/control/killing of people who have been forced into marginalized/oppressed positions on a large structural scale.

the siblings fighting over kinzo’s inheritance isn’t “filthy”, it’s family members using abusive power structures established in their family and in their broader capitalist society to fight for vast amounts of money kinzo gained from imperialist-fascist mass murder and capitalist exploitation. eg eva using patriarchy/misogyny as a weapon against natsuhi, the older siblings using the childhood trauma they inflicted on their younger siblings as weapons, etc. nearly every tool they use to fight is a tool of abuse and their prize is resources made from abuse to continue abusing people to sustain themselves.

^ that’s why i hate how the ushiromiya siblings fight for the inheritance. not because it’s “disgusting” or “dirty” or anything inaccurate like that.

associating “bad”ness with dirtiness or grossness etc is playing into ableism and classism and racism and colorism and more - this sort of framework materially harms people on huge scales. people with dark skin, houseless people, disabled and disfigured people with conditions like eczema or facial paralysis or burn injuries or much more, chronically ill people who can’t clean ourselves much, i could go on a lot here. tl;dr it’s abusive language and it’s not accurate.

(sidenote, i also take care to not frame abuse of power as violence, because that’s not accurate - violence can be revolutionary, fighting against abusive power structures. i also take care to not frame abuse of power as originating from an abuser’s character or mental state, because the fundamental problem is the material power structure enabling them to harm people. and more. i can talk a lot about this)

(higurashi chapter 6 spoilers:)

many people (like Rena!) use frameworks like metaphorical-“filthiness” to understand their experiences. it’s ultimately inaccurate, and inaccurate frameworks generally benefit abusive structures and harm the people marginalized/abused. eg i ease myself out of delusional spirals about my own “disgustingness” by reminding myself that that is ableist, which helps me understand what triggered me in a way more beneficial to myself (especially because the trigger is usually an external entity harming me with ableism). ryukishi shows rena experiencing something like this, the way she survives via categorizing her experiences with mental illness as “ickiness” and trying to fully cast them aside, and how this hurts her, and how friendship that truly accepts her for all of her experiences is what she needs.

umm Yea i think that’s all the thoughts i can get down rn. thank you and please feel free to send me more asks, i probably won’t write this many words every time svxbsbcbnsbcnd though my rambley incoherently-structured writing style will probably stay

[kaninchenzero]

this whole "the left is bad at messaging" thing makes me want to bite people to death

political messaging from the left 1) is not backed with nigh unlimited cash from oil billionaires, a) is violently suppressed using the armed might of the state both in the imperial center and periphery, and i) ideally doesn't leverage white supremacy in promoting our message

and messaging from the right has always been that the concentration of power and resources is good for everyone normal and decent and white

and fuck all those abnormal indecent nonwhite creatures who are stealing from the normal decent white humans by daring to have anything of value their labor very much included

this is an inherently easy message to promote to those who consider themselves normal and decent and white

it is deeply unfortunate and regrettable but a nonviolent transition from totalizing neoliberal capitalism to anything beyond the mildest of social democratic policies is functionally impossible at this point

totalizing neoliberal capitalism was, after all, imposed upon the world by force of arms and is maintained through force of arms

the difficulty leftists face in affecting systemic change through messaging is not unlike the difficulty a person using a wheelchair faces in ascending a long staircase when any attempt to build an elevator must be done under continuous artillery fire

a message as innocuous as "we would like it if there were, occasionally, negative consequences for police who literally kill us in our sleep" is met with an immediate escalation in police violence and propaganda

our problem isn't that we're bad at marketing

our problem is that our opponents have spent centuries gathering power to themselves and attacking us

during the great hunger in ireland the irish did nonviolent organizing and protest on a monumental scale - if the 2020 protests in the united states had reached a similar fraction of the population tens of millions of people would have been in the streets

the british government responded by sailing warships into dublin harbor and announcing that if protestors assembled at clontarf as planned they would do so under not at all metaphorical artillery fire

the protest was canceled

much later direct colonial occupation ended in most of ireland after years of armed insurrection and civil war (though the colonialist economy remains in place)

i use this example because it's relevant to me personally

there are others from every part of the colonized world starting shortly after the black death and continuing to the moment i hit post

chile iran congo vietnam afghanistan

this idea that capitalism can be removed from power by getting better at marketing leftist policy in this environment seems to me to fill the same function that FUD does in crypto spaces

we can get socialism by doing podcasts and video essays more and harder!

no

we can't

it's not that leftists are doing leftism wrong

any more than our hypothetical wheelchair user is getting up fifty-leven flights of stairs wrong or the irish did nonviolent protest wrong during the potato blight

capitalism will be removed from power if and only if it becomes more personally, individually dangerous for capitalists to do capitalism than it is now personally, individually dangerous for leftists to do leftism because that is how capitalism has structured the world

this sucks! i hate everything about this!

well, most everything

i am petty and vengeful and not a pacifist

i hate the suffering that will devolve upon billions of people already suffering under debt and plunder

i hate that the only hope i see of establishing a more equitable, sustainable society lies in those who survive the collapse of fossil-fueled industrialism (available evidence strongly suggests this particular event horizon has been passed) choosing to relentlessly oppose the individual accumulation of wealth and power

i will not be among the survivors

but i do hope

[domascaini]

Blog 4 - CMS/PL 348

Nicholas Mirzoeff - The Spaces of Appearance #BlackLivesMatter

How many more black bodies have to be gone and killed before humanity can understand that it is inhumane to kill innocent and defenseless people? 

Nicholas Mirzoeff, the author of "the spaces of appearance”, and many other books that we have analyzed so far in this class managed to explain and show so many unclear events in history. The spaces of appearance are basically a crack in the society of control, societies were supervised and controlled society but standardized life that is controlled by the capitalism stated. Since the beginning of this course, I have only learned so many disgusting and horrible stories that we younger generation are unaware of. So to begin, we started with the accusation of Colin Powell against the Iraqi people killing most of the citizens by using blurred images. Then we proceeded with the story of Abu Ghraib, which almost no one knows about it, and those that do know decided to hide it. Therefore, here we are talking about once again, discriminating and dehumanizing a minority group. This blog is about the Black Lives Matter movement that started, way back in American history when they would kill so many black innocent bodies, for just looking at someone with lighter skin. However, the movement really began to matter, with the civil rights movement, which create a movement on protecting the black communities from discrimination and slavery. However, this really became to matter only when in 2013 with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, social media platforms spread the hashtag word. This concept finally created a new way of seeing. The ‘seeing’ meaning at that point of intersection of what we know, what we perceive, and what we feel by using all our senses.

The images below do not show that history has taught humanity to learn from past events. in America still today, even after the application of civil law and all the protests on black lives matter, nothing changed. The images are from all the protests, done against the unjustified killing of black community people. 

Mirzoeff ties this action of killing the black bodies back to American history, where it begins with Slavery sustaining its regime, which he calls the “oversight,” which is then felt surveillance of the overseer of enslaved human beings. This regime was ultimately allowed by cruel violence, which lead to the quotidian performance of complicated labor, often not under direct supervision. Many black people also met their death by lynching as a result of such purported looking. This can be tied back to the reading from Butler's "endangers", which explains the aggressive reading of the evidence of the actual victims due to the white paranoia. White Paranoia, which believes that white has power over any other color, is superior to the west. However, Mirzoeff, from his reading, explains the change in the BLM movement and how they overcame to raise their voice to make their way through social media platforms to make the entire world see the truth. Black Lives Matter protesters have described the experience of the movement as a coming-to-meet-the-police gaze. No matter how hard these activists fight against racial justice, it seems never to get over it. The reading also talks about the power of visual culture in shaping social and political movements, by continuously bringing up the unfair racial justice struggles in more countries.

The freedom of appearance is a practice, whereby people make themselves visible to each other. These people make this happen, by using visual media through social media content. One example Mirzoeff gives is the union of Palestine and the Black Lives Matter movement, by supporting each other's movement. 

“Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” the gesture of raised hands is to show that the hands are empty and they have nothing to arm anyone. Police show no mercy when they shoot a black body, because the body they are choosing to eliminate is a minority, and police know that the law will always protect them. The “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, became the existing language of Black protest, by encouraging more people to join. The gesture paradoxically shows the vulnerability of the people computing the action. Right after all the protests and symbols, white police killed a young boy Darren Wilson, even though he had his hands up. From the images below we see that the younger generation is being raised in this ugly environment, but so many politicians do not care because it's not their white privileged children. 

One great movie that shows a broken justice system is "The Hate You Give Me”, the first time when I saw the movie I did not believe that the authorities could have pointed a gun at a kid. Visual media is everyone where and the demonstration of discrimination against minority groups still follows. Throughout, there is a scene where a little kid wants to defend his dad and pulls out a gun and points it against white police. Then the sister, put her hands up, like "hands up don't shoot", she does that because the police had pointed the gun against the little boy.

The purpose of social media here is to make people see what is going on in real life and make them aware to participate and be aware of where they go. Mirzoeff, in his book, describes so many failed prevention efforts on the protection of civilians black civilians, because the system is a broken window with white supremacy. Despite all the millions spent, police rarely prevent violence. Polices were mostly focused on criminal matters of any kind, rather than seeing and dealing with violent criminals. The justice system is not fully protecting civilians' lives or giving them their right to human rights. Rather is doing the opposite, those who made the law are the first tone to break them, consequently, the rest will follow the flow. Nevertheless, those to suffer will always be minority groups and innocent civilians from being the way they were born.

[processedlives]

After Tamir and Richard were murdered, when we had to bury our sons, we didn’t see ‘Black’, ‘Lives’, or ‘Matter’. Our DNA changed when our sons were murdered. It took breath out of our bodies. When y’all go home, y’all chant “Black Lives Matter!” When we go home, we miss our sons. We don’t need y’all to stand in front of us to tell our story. We need y’all to stand in back of us, and lift us up! If your agenda is not about helping our children, men, and women, then get out our fight! Enough is enough!

We released a public statement that expressed our concerns with Tamika D. Mallory, Shaun King, Benjamin Crump, Lee Merritt, Patrisse Cullors, Melina Abdullah, and the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation to stop capitalizing off our loved ones, and we call on the People to join our fight for accountability.

*****

The mothers, families who have lost loved ones to police violence, Black grassroots organizing communities—and those who exist in proximity—are increasingly skeptical about the donors, ideologies, and political economies of “Black leadership.”

We condemn capitalism’s monetization of Black people’s death and dying through the following modes of violence: “celebrity activism,” along with fundraising without transparency. We need structured distribution of funds to Black working class families and grassroots organizations. Families of those who are killed by the police—and whose loved ones’ deaths spark mass movements—continue to navigate political misrepresentation, battle zones of police repression, homelessness, and poverty, while Black “leadership” that has not been selected by the masses flourishes through celebrity status. These families must be provided the resources to sustain themselves, their families, and their work dedicated to building community infrastructure.

The mothers, and Black people en masse, call for accountability and transparency that fuel collective organizing in support of Black families victimized by state-violence. Contradictions within our movements—within the crisis of anti-Blackness, broadly, and predatory capitalism more specifically—reduce our deaths to monetized commodities. Stop celebrity activism; stop corporate investments that support lobbyists for this norm; put an end to the political-economy’s parasitism on Black death and poverty.

[antoine-roquentin]

As the virus seized the world last year, a new, epidemiological metaphor for bad information suggested itself. Dis- and misinformation were no longer exogenous toxins but contagious organisms, producing persuasion upon exposure as inevitably as cough or fever. In a perfect inversion of the language of digital-media hype, “going viral” was now a bad thing. In October, Anne Applebaum proclaimed in The Atlantic that Trump was a “super-spreader of disinformation.” A study earlier that month by researchers at Cornell found that 38 percent of the English-language “misinformation conversation” around COVID-19 involved some mention of Trump, making him, per the New York Times, “the largest driver of the ‘infodemic.’”

This finding resonated with earlier research suggesting that disinformation typically needs the support of political and media elites to spread widely. That is to say, the persuasiveness of information on social platforms depends on context. Propaganda doesn’t show up out of nowhere, and it doesn’t all work the same way. Ellul wrote of the necessary role of what he called “pre-propaganda”:

Direct propaganda, aimed at modifying opinions and attitudes, must be preceded by propaganda that is sociological in character, slow, general, seeking to create a climate, an atmosphere of favorable preliminary attitudes. No direct propaganda can be effective without pre-propaganda, which, without direct or noticeable aggression, is limited to creating ambiguities, reducing prejudices, and spreading images, apparently without purpose.

Another way of thinking about pre-propaganda is as the entire social, cultural, political, and historical context. In the United States, that context includes an idiosyncratic electoral process and a two-party system that has asymmetrically polarized toward a nativist, rhetorically anti-elite right wing. It also includes a libertarian social ethic, a “paranoid style,” an “indigenous American berserk,” a deeply irresponsible national broadcast media, disappearing local news, an entertainment industry that glorifies violence, a bloated military, massive income inequality, a history of brutal and intractable racism that has time and again shattered class consciousness, conspiratorial habits of mind, and themes of world-historical declension and redemption. The specific American situation was creating specific kinds of people long before the advent of tech platforms.

To take the whole environment into view, or as much of it as we can, is to see how preposterously insufficient it is to blame these platforms for the sad extremities of our national life, up to and including the riot on January 6. And yet, given the technological determinism of the disinformation discourse, is it any surprise that attorneys for some of the Capitol rioters are planning legal defenses that blame social-media companies?

Only certain types of people respond to certain types of propaganda in certain situations. The best reporting on QAnon, for example, has taken into account the conspiracy movement’s popularity among white evangelicals. The best reporting about vaccine and mask skepticism has taken into account the mosaic of experiences that form the American attitude toward the expertise of public-health authorities. There is nothing magically persuasive about social-media platforms; they are a new and important part of the picture, but far from the whole thing. Facebook, however much Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg might wish us to think so, is not the unmoved mover.

For anyone who has used Facebook recently, that should be obvious. Facebook is full of ugly memes and boring groups, ignorant arguments, sensational clickbait, products no one wants, and vestigial features no one cares about. And yet the people most alarmed about Facebook’s negative influence are those who complain the most about how bad a product Facebook is. The question is: Why do disinformation workers think they are the only ones who have noticed that Facebook stinks? Why should we suppose the rest of the world has been hypnotized by it? Why have we been so eager to accept Silicon Valley’s story about how easy we are to manipulate?

Within the knowledge-making professions there are some sympathetic structural explanations. Social scientists get funding for research projects that might show up in the news. Think tanks want to study quantifiable policy problems. Journalists strive to expose powerful hypocrites and create “impact.” Indeed, the tech platforms are so inept and so easily caught violating their own rules about verboten information that a generation of ambitious reporters has found an inexhaustible vein of hypocrisy through stories about disinformation leading to moderation. As a matter of policy, it’s much easier to focus on an adjustable algorithm than entrenched social conditions.

Yet professional incentives only go so far in explaining why the disinformation frame has become so dominant. Ellul dismissed a “common view of propaganda . . . that it is the work of a few evil men, seducers of the people.” He compared this simplistic story to midcentury studies of advertising “which regard the buyer as victim and prey.” Instead, he wrote, the propagandist and the propagandee make propaganda together.

One reason to grant Silicon Valley’s assumptions about our mechanistic persuadability is that it prevents us from thinking too hard about the role we play in taking up and believing the things we want to believe. It turns a huge question about the nature of democracy in the digital age—what if the people believe crazy things, and now everyone knows it?—into a technocratic negotiation between tech companies, media companies, think tanks, and universities.

But there is a deeper and related reason many critics of Big Tech are so quick to accept the technologist’s story about human persuadability. As the political scientist Yaron Ezrahi has noted, the public relies on scientific and technological demonstrations of political cause and effect because they sustain our belief in the rationality of democratic government.

Indeed, it’s possible that the Establishment needs the theater of social-media persuasion to build a political world that still makes sense, to explain Brexit and Trump and the loss of faith in the decaying institutions of the West. The ruptures that emerged across much of the democratic world five years ago called into question the basic assumptions of so many of the participants in this debate—the social-media executives, the scholars, the journalists, the think tankers, the pollsters. A common account of social media’s persuasive effects provides a convenient explanation for how so many people thought so wrongly at more or less the same time. More than that, it creates a world of persuasion that is legible and useful to capital—to advertisers, political consultants, media companies, and of course, to the tech platforms themselves. It is a model of cause and effect in which the information circulated by a few corporations has the total power to justify the beliefs and behaviors of the demos. In a way, this world is a kind of comfort. Easy to explain, easy to tweak, and easy to sell, it is a worthy successor to the unified vision of American life produced by twentieth-century television. It is not, as Mark Zuckerberg said, “a crazy idea.” Especially if we all believe it.

[anarcho-smarmyism]

Ⓐ WE WANT EVERYTHING! Ⓐ

We want all of the Earth to be free and no longer held captive by the specter of Capital that is currently destroying it. We want to reform our agricultural systems completely into something that is equitable and efficient, able to feed all; one that is sustainable and treats the Earth with respect and dignity; and one that treats livestock and animals we eat with respect and dignity, rather than leaving them to live horrible lives before they are slaughtered.

We want all nations to be free of the noose of imperialism that empires like the United States have spent decades or centuries tightening around their necks. We want indigenous lands to be returned to the hands of the indigenous peoples who lived on them and managed them successfully for thousands of years.

We want all industries to be placed in the hand of the workers, to decide how to run and what to produce democratically and equitably. We want to reform industry and factories to no longer pollute the Earth for profit, and no longer grind the laborers into dust with their unnecessary drudgery and indignity.

We want accommodations for disabilities of all varieties to be the social norm.  We want all mobility aids, medication, and medical treatment to be provided to those who need it free of charge. We want all people who cannot labor for their survival to be kept alive, comfortable, and with their dignity intact, knowing that they are valued for their humanity and not for what they can produce.

We want all prisoners freed, all the cages emptied, all prisons and police forces abolished, and to begin building alternatives to the Injustice System focused on rehabilitation and restorative justice for antisocial behavior, not focused on brutal punishment for punishment’s own sake.

We want all People of Color to be fully emancipated, to receive reparations, to rest easy at night knowing that white people have no power over them and will not be able to keep them from living their lives as they please. We, white anarchists and other leftists, want to learn to destroy racist social structures and cure ourselves of the disease of white supremacy, so that we will not brutalize or disrespect others in racist ways even on accident ever again. We want to decolonize our minds and our society, so that young people of color don’t have to grow up too fast to cope with the way the world treats people like them, so that they are not Othered and are not prevented from engaging in their cultures and presenting themselves and their bodies to the world in whatever way they so please.

We want all women to be fully emancipated from capitalist Patriarchy, to be full citizens of the world on equal ground with all other genders, to no longer be reduced to their reproductive capabilities or to sex objects, to no longer receive societal scorn and violence at the hands of men. We want to reclaim motherhood as a blessing for those who wish it and not a martyrdom for all who can give birth. We want to erase racism and transphobia from the Earth and from our minds so that our sisters will not have to suffer transmisogyny, misogynoir or any other racialized sexualization. We want to emancipate men from the poison of patriarchal conditioning and toxic masculinity, so that they can fully feel their emotions and connect as equals with their brothers and sisters in this life.

We want trans people, LGBT+ people, and queer people of all stripes to be fully free to be themselves and live their lives, looking and presenting however the hell we want, without fearing becoming the victims of violence and discrimination. We want to queer the culture to the point that straight/gay, trans/cis are no longer seen as strict binaries, so that all can be free to express their desires and their self-image however they want. We want HRT to be safely and freely available to all who need it. We want everyone to be able to marry whoever they please, and to adopt children if they please, regardless of their gender or sexuality. We want cops and corporations out of Pride. We want queer liberation for each and every one of us on the Earth.

WE. WANT. EVERYTHING!

And we’re not ashamed of that!

Each of these things will require a herculean effort on the part of unknowable multitudes of people to acquire. Each of them is something you may fight tooth and nail for your entire lifetime, and only see society progress in baby steps toward, if at all. Each of them is a demand that a liberal may tell you is noble but misguided, because obviously these things are too radical to be possible, and isn’t it better to keep an eye on optics and only demand things that are “reasonable” according to modern centrist liberals? A world where all these demands are met is so alien to ours that imagining it is virtually impossible. There are so many things that could go wrong between now and then, and when the forces of capital, the state, and low prejudice seem to hold such a monopoly on our entire lives, it’s easy to think that these things are impossible.

People thought the same about the divine right of kings. Just because it sounds excessive or impossible doesn’t mean it is, and when we surrender ground to only demanding “reasonable” things, we forget that we are in a struggle for the liberation of all humankind, not only a struggle for the next liberal reform -although some liberal reforms may be a goal worth pursuing in the short term, never take your eyes off that long-term goal! Once we achieve one short term goal on the path to fulfilling one of our demands, we celebrate the victory and then jump back into the struggle, because there is still work to be done, prisoners to be freed, chains to be broken, an Earth to save from climate disaster, a world to reclaim for us and for everyone who has suffered more than we have!

We have taken on a project of generations, passed to us from Marx and the first socialists, to stand in solidarity with the freedom fighters and revolutionaries who have been fighting to oppose the imperialist pigs taking their countries from them in our (white American, in my case) names. We contribute to this project not because the downfall of capitalism is a realistic 5-year plan, but because we believe a better world is possible, and because our consciences compel us to fight for that better world, even when the darkness of the current world seems overwhelming.

Don’t stop at demanding $2000. Don’t stop at demanding rent be frozen. Demand everything, and fight like hell to give it to your friends and your descendants.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi there, I really liked what you had to say about the upcoming election. I was wondering if you have published any articles recently in regards to that? I know you said you were a historian.

Aha, thank you so much, this is very flattering. Alas (?), the book that I have just published is about the crusades, as I am a medieval historian by training. However, one of my main research interests is the role of the “imagined medieval” in modern culture, I have written a book chapter about the role of the crusades in post-9/11 political and cultural rhetoric, and I am developing a research project that examines the current crisis of public history through a medievalist perspective. That, however, is still in draft stages.

That said, I absolutely DO have a mini reading list for you (and a lecture to go with it, because as noted, I am an academic and this is how we function!) The topic of today’s class is “Why Accelerationist Ideology Is And Always Has Been Horrifically Racist and Genocidal Throughout History, and White Americans Only Like It Because They Don’t Live In Countries Where It Was Done (By America).” Not very snappy, but there you have it.

The reading list, to start off, is:

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachel Maddow

The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia by Michael Sells

These are all hefty books (though the Maddow and Sells books are shorter) but they’re accessible and written for the layperson, and we always have time to educate ourselves. Why are they relevant to the 2020 election, you might ask?

First: the Cold War book lays out in great, GREAT detail the consequences of a global world order absolutely gripped by a competing standoff of ideologies (American capitalism vs. Soviet socialism) and how these two forces gulped up the politics of the rest of the world, destroyed numerous satellite states, and tried to rebuild them from the ashes into new ideological utopias -- precisely what a lot of people are suggesting now with the ridiculous “just burn everything down and it will magically fix itself!” theory that is somehow presented as the Moral Alternative to voting for Biden/Harris. You know what this caused during the Cold War? Yep. Human suffering on a massive scale, and absolutely zero utopian perfect states, whether capitalist or socialist. It also makes the extremely salient point that in the 1930s, German leftists and liberal democrats were infighting among themselves as to who was Less Morally Pure, and couldn’t agree on a candidate or a moral imperative to oppose the other guy, and figured that their flawed liberal idealists were “just as bad” as said other guy. Was that guy’s name Adolf Hitler? Why yes. Yes it was. Is there a lesson here for us? Who can say. Seems hard to figure.

Leaving aside the tragedy and pointlessness of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, both fought as proxy battlefields between Americans and Soviets, let’s consider the Great Leap Forward, in China (1958-1962) under Chairman Mao Zhedong. The idea was to dismantle traditionalist Confucian Chinese society and rebuild it as a modern socialist state, which was the goal of a lot of twentieth-century old-school socialist/Marxist “people’s republics.” Mao took this exact “burn conservative society down and rebuild it according to Enlightened Leftist Principles” approach and it was... a disaster. A total and epic disaster that caused both short and long-term suffering to the Chinese people and, wouldn’t you know it, did not result in a utopian Chinese state. This is also the reason you cannot say anything complimentary about Fidel Castro, especially if you want to win Florida, no matter how “good” you think his socialist principles were in the abstract, because: Cubans and Cuban-Americans fuggin’ hated the guy. You know why? Because he also destroyed their lives.

Obviously, there is a ton of distance between old-school Communism in the 20th century and 21st-century modern democratic socialism such as that run in Norway (and the Scandinavian countries in general), no matter if your racist uncle on Facebook insists on conflating the two and howling about the Red Menace like it’s still 1962. But the point is that radical leftist accelerationist theory hasn’t changed from 1962 (or frankly, from Karl Marx) either. It still figures that by some miraculous principle, the entrenched systems and ideologies will either just disappear or be “torn down,” the Peasants will Rise Up and Overthrow the Aristocracy, and something something socialist utopia. Except that was tried multiple times in the 20th century and it always failed. More than that, even if it was supposedly “leftist,” it inflicted just as much suffering on its own people as fascist right-wing dictatorships. Americans have always been infused with the triumphalist confidence that they “won” the Cold War because socialism was bad, and it was the inherent flaws in socialism as a world order that doomed it to defeat, unlike rah-rah Red White and Blue American Capitalism. So capitalism, ignoring its own fatal flaws, went hog-wild in the 80s and 90s, establishing Reaganite deregulation as the core and unimpeachable tenet of the market, and we’re all living in the increasing wreckage of that economic system now. Obviously the right wing uses “socialism” as a bugaboo to scare us that Things Could Be Worse, but I haven’t seen the faintest trace of historical context or awareness from the particularly deluded breed of hard leftists who still cling onto the magical theory that a Perfect People’s Uprising Will Fix Everything.

On that note, let’s move to Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine lays out in similar excruciating detail how the U.S. systematically destroyed the economic systems of countries particularly in Asia and Latin America (and the entire shameful history of Uncle Sam in Latin America should be required reading for EVERYONE) and sold them a bill of goods about “free market economics” in the Keynesian model. Guess what resulted from this attempt to destroy entrenched societies overnight and rebuild them in the name of Ideology? If you guessed “massive human suffering and ongoing generational devastation and dysfunction” you’d be right again! This was accompanied with constant political interference from the CIA and the State Department to support right-wing dictators and military takeovers in a way that have left the politics and institutions of Central America in permanently broken disarray, because it turns out it’s a lot easier to keep exploiting those brown people in governmental systems that don’t allow dissent or democracy, no matter the exalted principles you like to preach about Freedom and Liberty. The U.S. likes to act as if the Central American refugee crisis is this unwarranted invasion of these dirty immigrants, as if it didn’t play a DIRECT AND LONG LASTING EFFECT in destroying the infrastructure of these countries to the point where they’ve become incapable of functioning as healthy democracies. If you think “banana republic” is the name of an upscale clothing store, I beg you, research the history of that term.

This hasn’t even gotten to the absolutely horrible history of Africa’s treatment at the hands of white Europeans (see the Kendi book for obvious anti-racism education and also how those racist ideas are directly built into the ideological infrastructure of America). Somehow white leftists, while professing to be allies of Black Lives Matter and proclaiming themselves Woke, have managed to overlook this, and I don’t know how??? (Answer: it’s racism Jan.) First it was the transatlantic slave trade and the large-scale kidnapping, sale, and chattel bondage of generations of people. Then it was 19th-century colonialism and imperialism, where Europe thought it could “civilize” the “Dark Continent” and rebuild it to an “enlightened standard.” This was not a right-wing project; this was solidly mainstream and it was enthusiastically advocated by many liberals and intellectuals who busily composed an entire academic and “scientific” literature to support it. Did the European wholescale destruction of traditional societies in an attempt to build a Perfect Ideological Utopia result in... massive human suffering, by any chance? Leopold II of Belgium might have something to say about that. Then when an overstretched Europe was finally forced out of its overseas colonies in the aftermath of World War II, guess what resulted? Did African society spring from the ashes and remake itself in a perfect image? Nope! It became subject to decades-long civil wars and bloody military dictators because its infrastructure had been so crippled (very deliberately so) by its departing colonialist overlords that it likewise had no sustainable model for development. It turns out when you break things out of the idea that they’ll magically fix themselves, they just stay broken and they get worse. Now we once more have the West acting like Africa is a hotbed of Primitives while ignoring its own role in destroying it (and the situation in the Middle East, but that’s a whole OTHER can of worms! So many cans! So many!)

The Peter Frankopan book is an excellent exploration into the flourishing medieval trade networks across the East, the function of the Silk Road in bringing culture and commodities across the known world, and how Europe’s intervention and eventual ascendancy was marked by profound violence, the destruction of these networks, and the outright pillage of non-white people and riches. Which we know, but... read it. Europe and its heir (America) started the crusades, colonialism, imperialism, two world wars, and other conflicts that always contained a virulent aspect of spreading Ideology and getting people to Believe The Right Thing. These cumulative conflicts have devastated the planet repeatedly and we are still feeling their effects right up to this minute. They were all connected to Establishing Supreme Ideology and Supreme Whiteness (and Supreme Christianity). I’m detecting a pattern. The Rachel Maddow book explores how from the 1980s onward, America went absolutely hog-wild with the military/military ideology as a central way to solve its problems, which was tied to the Cold War, capitalism, and extreme individualism. All of which are tied to our current mess today.

Obviously, the most extreme examples of putting ideology above people result in outright holocausts, which is why you should read the Michael Sells book about Bosnia. Everyone knows about the WWII Holocaust of the Jews (and we have already seen how that is busily being denied along with the return of anti-Semitism, which never goes away), but the Bosnian holocaust was happening while most of us were alive. The West deliberately ignored it, because it was framed as the “last crusade” against Muslims in Europe and they needed to be removed in order to create a Pure Christian Europe; hence the Bosniaks were apparently an acceptable sacrifice in achieving this. I have some words on my tongue, I think they start with “massive human suffering,” and how that is constantly what results when an existing society, no matter how flawed, is attacked by ideological zealots who see huge amounts of death as an acceptable price to pay for their brave new world, as long as it’s not theirs (and sometimes even when it is). In fact, the accelerationist theory of social change is so profoundly racial and genocidal (and is indeed being used in exactly that way by the neo-Nazis and white paramilitary elements today) that it’s even more shocking to see supposedly progressive and moral people advocating so enthusiastically for it. It is a white supremacist Nazi wet dream of an ideology in which all the “flawed” people just vanish (spoiler alert, they don’t vanish, they are brutally murdered or allowed to die from deliberate and arrogant negligence) and the Aryans cavort in paradise. Just replacing that with some socialist jargon buzzwords doesn’t change the underlying framework.

And this is STILL NOT GETTING to America’s own history, and you know, the fact that this continent was occupied when white settlers arrived, declared it “terra nulla” or “empty land,” and set about slaughtering the existing advanced civilizations and their people in the name of! You guessed it! SUPERIOR IDEOLOGY! Funnily enough, destroying the Native Americans “for their own good” didn’t result in utopia for them. It resulted in.... yeah, I think we get it by now, but just in case, one more time: MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING.

Tl;dr: The accelerationist theory of social change (just destroy everything and it will magically rebuild according to our preferred ideology) is a racist and genocidal fantasy of orgiastic destruction that has caused untold damage throughout history. White Americans whether on the right or left are fond of it, because they have never lived in a country where this has been repeatedly and horribly done to them (often by America itself) and which has cost uncountable Black, brown, Muslim, Jewish, Latin American, Native American, etc lives. The deliberate or deliberately negligent destruction of society does not lead to regeneration. It leads to long-term and unfixable damage, and the people who profit the most from deliberate disaster are the capitalist corporate overlords that the left professes to hate. This country is a racist garbage fire and nobody denies that it needs to change or die, but buying into this theory about how you should just stand back and let it burn/obstruct efforts to work within the system and mitigate the damage IS BULLSHIT and RESULTS IN MASSIVE HUMAN SUFFERING AND DEATH. Which, so far as I know, wasn’t supposed to be a progressive value, but hey, I could be mistaken.

Learn some history. Wear a mask.

Don’t be a whiny pissbaby that makes the rest of us die.

Vote Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 2020.

[comrade-meow]

The Marxist left finds itself confronted by three insidious big lies that threaten the revolutionary and emancipatory foundation of the Marxist project, all related to undermining women’s liberation; they are:

1. Transwomen are women.

2. Sex work is work.

3. Feminism is bourgeois.

Misogyny in its many forms has long been a challenge for the left; not just the misogyny of the reactionary right, but misogyny coming from within the left itself. But it has not been until recently that this leftist misogyny has sought to portray itself as being inherently progressive. By engaging in revisionism of the most blatant kind, reactionary elements within the left have managed to posit themselves as the agents of progress. Much has already been written about the harms caused by these three lies, but no attempt has yet to be made to debunk them from a solidly Marxist standpoint. That is what we are out to accomplish here; to demonstrate definitively that these big lies are not just regressive, but inherently revisionist and anti-Marxist to the core.

The first of these three big lies, “Transwomen are women”, might well be the most damaging, because it directly contradicts the heart of the Marxist method: dialectical materialism. There are two main definitions used by proponents of transgenderism to explain their narrative. The first is that gender is an identity; the state of being a man or a woman (or any one of the other numerous “gender identities”) stems not from biological sex (to the extent that transactivists acknowledge the existence of biological sex), but from an internal identity, i.e. personal feelings, personal consciousness. The second definition says that transpeople are not really the sex they physically are, but the sex they say they are, because they really have “male” or “female” brains. Both of these definitions are rooted in the personal, not the material. One of the patron saints of queer theory, Judith Butler, says:

“It’s one thing to say that gender is performed and that is a little different from saying gender is performative. When we say gender is performed we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way and that our acting or our role-playing is crucial to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world. To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.”[1]

Though queer theory is a postmodernist philosophy, its roots go far deeper than just postmodernism; rather, this statement of Butler’s is an example of the dialectics of idealism. Marxism, as a philosophy, was formed in reaction to the idealist dialectics of the Young Hegelians. The dialects of idealism posit that reality flows from consciousness. Marx, on the other hand, argued “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”[2] That is, it is not our thoughts that shape material reality, but material reality that shapes our thoughts. In fact, Marx’s first major work, The German Ideology, is exclusively dedicated to explaining this.

So what is the materialist definition of gender? And how does the embrace of the idealist definition under the guise of Marxism harm the Marxist aim of women’s liberation? The foundational Marxist text dealing with the oppression of women is Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. According to Engels, while there has always existed a sexual division of labor in human society, it is not until the rise of private property that this division becomes hierarchical. Before the rise of private property, society was organized under what was called “mother right”, i.e. a person’s family is traced through their mother, given the difficulty of identifying with certainty the father in primitive communist society. But because private property grew out of male labor, and became concentrated in male hands, mother right gave way to “father right”. In order to bequeath his property to his son, the father needed to know with certainty who his sons were. This meant controlling the reproductive labor of the female sex, and its subordination to male supremacy; thus the advent of patriarchy. In Chapter II of Origin of Family Engels calls the overthrow of mother-right “…the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”[3] Note that Engels here is dealing with sex, with biology. Women are not oppressed because of some abstract gender identity, but because of their sex. Class society and patriarchy, the two of which exist in a symbiosis, need to control women’s reproductive labor to sustain themselves. To put it more bluntly, they need to control the means of reproduction. Thus, women’s oppression has its origin in material reality.

But we have not yet dealt with the concept of gender. In the current queer theory dominated discourse, sex and gender are increasingly become conflated to the point that they are being used as synonyms for one another. Engels analysis of patriarchy is in many ways incomplete, but it forms the basis of future materialist explorations of sex and gender. The second-wave feminists who developed much of the thought around gender did not revise these fundamentals, but expanded on them, the opposite of what today’s revisionists are doing. Gender, according to the radical feminist Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, is “the value system that prescribes and proscribes forms of behaviour and appearance for members of the different sex classes, and that assigns superior value to one sex class at the expense of the other.”[4] Gender is therefore not the same thing as biological sex, but a kind of parasite grafted on top of biological sex to maintain the current sexual hierarchy, and ensure continued male control over reproductive labor. Gender non-conforming, as well as homosexual, men and women are therefore “exiled” from their gender community not because of some abstract identity, but because they do not fulfill their proscribed functions as members of their sex class; they are essentially class traitors. Intersex people, which form a distinct material category, are also lumped into this community of “exiles” because they too are unable to fulfill the goals of the patriarchal sexual hierarchy. Such communities of exiles have existed throughout history, and continue to exist to this day in all parts of the world, from the hijra in India to the two-spirited people of the Native Americans to the contemporary shunning and violence directed at gender non-conforming individuals. But to reiterate, none of this has to do with identity, but with the material structuring of class society.

While transactivists have started to turn against the biomedical explanation for transgenderism, it is very much alive and well in the medical and psychological community. Victorian-era theories about “brain sex” that would have earned the ire of Marx and Engels are now making a comeback. At best, these theories are chimerical pseudoscience which have not even come close to being conclusively proven in any legitimate scientific study. The standards by which gender dysphoria is diagnosed falls back on the constructed tropes of masculinity and femininity already discussed. Such theories risk misconstruing gender roles as being rooted in nature as opposed to constructions that reinforce ruling class control. Rather than being seen as the disease, dysphoria should be seen as the symptom of the sexual hierarchy. The pressures of gendered socialization are ubiquitous, and begin at birth. Very often we are not aware of the subtle forms socialization exerts upon us. For those who reject this socialization, it follows that they would experience levels of extreme discomfort and anguish. Gendered socialization is not just some abstract phenomena, but is, again, literally grafted onto us. Under this system of socialization, the penis becomes more than just the male sex organ, but the symbol of male aggression and supremacy, in the same way the vagina becomes the symbol of female inferiority and subjugation. Sensitive individuals who struggle against this socialization often hate their bodies, but not because their bodies are somehow “wrong”, but because of what they are drilled into believing their bodies are. What they suffer from is the inability to tear away the curtain that has been placed in front of material reality and to see reality in an objective manner. The fields of medical and psychological science are not immune from the influence of the ruling class. This is especially the case in the world of psychology, where a method of analysis is employed that isolates the individual from the wider society around them, preferring to view internal struggle as the result of some defect as opposed to the result of material and social forces exerted on the individual.

While capitalism has broken down certain elements of patriarchy, and allowed for women to make some gains, it has not dismantled patriarchy completely. Capitalism, being a class system, still needs to retain control of the means of reproduction. For example, laws that restrict access to abortion and contraceptives, while having negative repercussions for all women, have the most negative impact on poor, working-class women. These laws may be cloaked in the terminology of moralism, but have a far more base logic; they ensure the continued production of future proletarians for the benefit of the capitalist machine.

By shifting the definition of “woman” away from a materialist one to an idealistic one, we lose the ability to define and fight the causes of women’s oppression. In its most extreme form it erases women as a class, and makes it impossible to talk about patriarchy as an existing force. Why, then, are Marxists, who are supposed to be dialectical materialists embracing a set of ideas the very opposite of dialectical materialism? To answer this, we need to look at the nature of patriarchy; it is a system that predates capitalism. As already stated above, patriarchy and class exist in a symbiosis with one another. The one cannot be eliminated without the elimination of the other. Overthrowing capitalism is not the same as overthrowing class. As Mao pointed out, class dynamics still exist in the socialist society, and require continuous vigilance and combat on the part of revolutionaries. This is why many socialist states still restricted women’s rights to certain degrees, such as the draconian anti-abortion laws of Ceausescu’s Romania. All males benefit in some way from patriarchy, even males in a socialist society. It therefore follows that socialist males fighting capitalism also benefit from patriarchy. While men and women may be in solidarity with one another as workers, working class men also belong to the male sex class, a class that predates the existence of the modern working class. Class allegiances run deep. This is why so many socialist and “feminist” men are quick to defend and even endorse the violent language and actions perpetrated by some gender non-conforming men against the female sex class, regardless of how these gender non-conforming men identify themselves. This is not to deny that gender non-conforming men are discriminated against, and face harassment and violence themselves, but even as exiles from the male sex-class, they still benefit from some of the privileges awarded to this sex class. Note that I do not use privilege in the manner it’s currently used by the regressive left, i.e. as some abstract notion that needs to be “checked”. Rather, it is an actually existing force that must be combated, just as white revolutionaries must actively combat white supremacy, and first world revolutionaries must actively combat “their” state’s imperialism.

Opportunism and the “fear” of being on the “wrong side of history” are also driving forces behind this embrace of revisionism. The Anglophone left, especially in the United States, given its weakness in the overall political arena, has long sought to be seen as “acceptable” and “polite”, and is often eager to jump on any bandwagon it believes can advance it. This desire to be accepted also drives the fear. It is true that communists have made serious errors in judgment in the past, but that is not an excuse to rebel against core philosophies and hastily embrace ideas and movements without fully analyzing their beliefs and goals. This is not to say that communists should not be on the forefront in defending gender non-conforming individuals. A thoroughgoing socialist revolution requires that these existing oppressive structures be cast aside. But it is possible to defend gender non-conforming people without embracing misogynistic pseudoscience and revisionism.

Women are not just oppressed, but thoroughly exploited. Working class women make up what is possibly the most thoroughly exploited section of human society. By embracing philosophies that not only erase their ability to define and explain their exploitation, but also deny them the agency to organize as a revolutionary class, these “Marxists” have proven that they are in direct contradiction to Marxist philosophy and ideas. They are engaging in revisionism.

In the next part, we will examine the second big lie plaguing the left today, the notion that “sex work is work”.

[punkofsunshine]

The (Informal) Miniature Anarcho-Solarpunk Manifesto

The integration of communalism into a classless system away from the main caste-esque system of hierarchy around the world is very costly when viewed from a consumer lens, but is essential in the degradation of the overbearing hierarchy that the main populace is subjected to and thusly become numb to the pressures placed upon them from an early age, spiral into endlessly consuming for a sense of being in a world that doesn’t care if you’re alive, to them you’re just a replaceable cog in the profit machine. The goal of the communalist, socialist, solarpunk, etc. should not be to live in their own bubble, but to expand their influence exponentially through participation with the outside world, turn a commune into a city as it were. Less people in a place that has dictated control by the state and the consumers within, the less control the state and capital have over people. A migration of people increases quality of life and food consumption, luckily food growth can be optimized to accommodate many people when given according to need as opposed to given to whomever has the money to afford produce. One must also keep in mind, the debt accrued is now a community responsibility, so the members will do everything in their power to keep people functioning in the community, that must include people paying off debts. Who are you if you let a fellow worker suffer on their own? Who are you to let a human such as yourself be subjected to the violence of the state in its many forms? Pushing back against such oppression is why we ascribe to this ideology, so we can taste freedom and save the earth from ourselves.

No individual is solely responsible for the pollution and poverty. Multiple corporations and their figureheads are. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Bernard Arnault, Qin Yinglin & family, Michael Bloomberg, The Koch family, Jim Simons, Alaian & Gerard Wertheimer, Mark Zuckerburg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, the Walton Family, Steve Ballmer, Carlos Slim Helu & family, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Francoise Bittencourt Meyers & family, Jack Ma, Ma Huateng, Mukesh Ambani, Mackenzie Scott, Beate Heister & Karl Albrecht Jr., David Thomson & family, Phil Knight & family, Lee Shau Kee, François Pinault & family. Sheldon Alelson, The Mars family, Elon Musk, Giovanni Ferrero, Michael Dell, Hui Ka Yan, Li Ka-Shing, He Xiangjian, Yang Huiyan & family, Joseph Safra, Dieter Schwarz, Vladimir Potanin, Tadashi Yanai & family, Vladamir Lisin, Ray Dalio, Takemitsu Takizaki, Leonid Mikhelson, etc. (Forbes) The list could go on, but I’m not about to list four-hundred people, the people have to change what the ruling class refuses to, hijacking corporate manufacturing and removing police of their power is essential. The police are targets due to the fact they protect corporate interests and stunt progressive growth, all of the people listed above refuse to let power be taken from them, there are too few people willing to make attempts to go after them because what would happen to their favourite source of consumption if that happened? What would happen to convenience? It would disappear, they don’t want to have to make things themselves, such is the first world’s entitlement. Doing without the convenience to save the environment should be a priority, things aren’t going to just get better on their own just because you installed solar panels and an eco-friendly water filtration system. The extent of the work that needs to be done is tremendous and must be organized efficiently and with regard to equivalency of power.

The world is in the process of ending due to all the turmoil we put it through, but the fact we’re more worried about comfort and convenience is very telling of what kind of culture western society has, instead of trying to fight those who destroy the environment and oppress us, we’re eager to mimic them. Why? Because they have and we have not. Such is the downfall of the consumerist mind. A majority of Americans think like consumers, not citizens, which is very telling because the anti-communist culture moted it be after the second world war. (Vox) There’s no telling where the zeitgeist is headed, but there’s political radicalization on both sides of the spectrum, sadly the other side of the spectrum is what we fought against, fascism, nazism, and authoritarianism. 2016 through 2020 were the worst years in terms of hate crimes committed on minority groups since the 60’s which is really saying something, neo-nazi groups sprung up and made themselves the focus, where there are fascists, there will always be anti-fascists or to be informal, antifa. I, the author am a background informant for the loose collective known as antifa, our job is simply to let people know where rallies are going down, we use pseudonyms and VPNs so we cannot be tracked. So why am I telling you this? Isn’t this supposed to be about what we can do to rebel against the systems that oppress us? Yes, and I’m getting there. There’s a reason I’m talking about fascism, and that is the fact fascism and capitalism are linked together.

Fascism/imperialism has been described as “capitalism in decay” by Vladimir Lenin due to the fact that neoliberalism is capitalism functioning as normal, communism post-capitalism, and fascism is capitalism going away slowly. It is an unjust and evil way of looking at the world, but once capitalists sense danger to their power, they fund fascism just so they can keep their power for longer. Anti-fascist action is also anti-capitalist action, for every nazi destroyed, we are one step closer to freedom. For every capitalist institution raided and demolished, we are one step closer to freedom. The city isn’t made of buildings that you can buy from, it’s made of the people who live there, so when the BLM protests occurred and stores were “looted” and burned, that was a form of praxis that hasn’t happened in years it was truly inspiring to see the people of Oregon (among other places) fight the police, fight back the alt-right, give capitalists the middle finger, create autonomous zones, and keep people from getting evicted during the pandemic. That is what communalism is partly about, supporting each other in the face of adversity no matter the cost of personal wellbeing, it’s the pinnacle of mutual aid.

Revolutionary action is one-hundred percent essential in securing future freedoms for not only generation Y, but generation Z and subsequent generations. As a member of generation Z, I feel fear, anger, and dread when it comes to climate change and the fact our generation will have to clean up the messes of the former generations when it comes to pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, unsustainable farming practices, soil health degradation, deforestation, the melting of polar habitats, natural disasters, etc. The weight of the world falls upon our shoulders and we realize this as a truth or we reject reality and follow in our parent’s footsteps and do nothing about it, it’s up to us, the most depressed and angry generation in the U.S.’s rather short history to right the wrongs made by former generations when most of us can’t even find motivation to get out of bed in the morning. I am writing this manifesto in my bed as I have been for the past week when I remember to write it down. It’s not enough to just write a theory however, put practice in it and it becomes more than just a talking point. It becomes a movement, how far you want to take it depends on you, but I do not condone violence against any of the people in the list above for strictly legal reasons. It is not absurd to think that we don’t have a snowball's chance in hell to stop the impending climate disaster that is about to fall onto us, because that assumption is correct. The best we can do is rebuild afterwards then hope and pray the next generation continues our work to restore the planet and maybe move outside our solar system, god willing.

I’ve tried writing a short solarpunk novel, I realized that the fiction may be important for outreach, but I was trying to add personal political theory to a narrative that’s supposed to be about a character’s internal conflicts as opposed to what I’m doing now, informal political theory, which is why I’m addressing you, the reader. I’ve read and listened to political theory in the past, and it’s incredibly dry and hard to pay attention to, don’t get me wrong, it’s important when you’re a part of various movements such as eco-socialism, communalist-anarchism, and anarcho-solarpunk, but I think it’s more important to connect with a reader or listener to make sure they understand the message before saying “do some praxis.” That is the goal here, not to be the leftist, humane version Ayne Rand, but instead instill in people a hope for the future that learns to do without mass manufacturing, that learns to make their own food sustainably, that learns that we all have a right to food, clean water, housing, medical treatment, and clean air without having to pay for all of those things. I may not be a part of the bottom percentage of people, but if I were my point would still stand strong, the notion that you have to work to get basic necessities is immoral on many levels, but in “free market” economies that’s the standard and I was as blind to it as most people before I found solarpunk, it started out by liking the aesthetic, but I started thinking about what we do to our planet and realized this isn’t just a bunch of pretty pictures, this is an idea for a utopian future entrenched in equality, sustainability, environmentalism, and anti-corpocracy.

Many people say that socialism has never worked, they give reasoning such as “Income inequality expands under socialism.” Which is just capitalist projection, during the 2020 pandemic, which is still ongoing at the time or writing, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. “. . . in the months since the virus reached the United States, many of the nation’s wealthiest citizens have actually profited handsomely. Over a roughly seven-month period starting in mid-March – a week after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires grew their net worth by a collective $931 billion.” (USA Today) The middle class, which skyrocketed post-feudalism/post-monarchy has been getting erased by the ruling class, which is the goal of capitalism. Capitalism is rooted in the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie and was created to have control over the masses without having a direct economic power structure overhead. Things may have gotten better for the growing middle class and the poor marginally, then the industrial revolution kicked in and everything went downhill from there. Pollution began with burning coal, the car came along, now it’s coal and oil, and so on until today where we have access to truly world-altering technologies, but what’s holding us back are the people who continue to exploit non-renewable resources for profit and solely profit. The betterment of mankind isn’t on the mind of the capitalist, they can avoid global catastrophe, they aren’t the peasants, they’re the monarchs. Why do you think billionaires fund space travel and cryogenics research? It’s not to better the rest of the world, it’s to get the hell out of dodge after global warming takes its toll and they have no more workers willing to fill their pockets by letting their labor be exploited. As I said above, it’s up to my generation to fix the mess they made. Maybe we’ll learn a lesson, or maybe we’ll die in the process, either way the situation is dire and action needs to be taken.

Who will take action? Well, if you made it this far into the manifesto without falling asleep or getting angry at the things I have to say, it’s you, me, and everyone else who cares, is tired of selling their soul, and wants freedom. Freedom, not via the dollar, but via being human. It matters not your ethnicity, skin colour, religion (or lack thereof), sexuality, gender, or anything else; you matter, the world matters, and it takes all of us to save it.

-A manifesto by Aeron Fae Greenwood

[forbidden-sorcery]

The idea of targeting crucial nodes of power is not new to insurrectionism. According to Bonanno, because power is exercised through control over physical spaces, it can be attacked in its presence in physical space. A single act of destruction is not the same as bringing down the entire system. But multiplied enough times, it renders parts of the system unworkable. Effective insurrections often take the form of the sustained reproduction of the destruction or blockage of nodes, through time and space. Everything depends on keeping the action going, expanding it, and responding to moves to make it more difficult. There is not a qualitative difference between the small victories, tearing down all the surveillance cameras in an area or making squat eviction impossible, and the eventual destruction of capitalism and the state. The latter is an accumulation of the former, to the point where the system's functioning becomes impossible. Furthermore, if mechanisms necessary for state control or capital accumulation are taken out in this way, the state and/or capitalism would be expelled from the space in question. Social relations themselves can't be destroyed by sabotage, but they are embedded in infrastructures which can be physically targeted. The power and extent of such infrastructures affects greatly whether autonomous spaces can appear, and the costs of sustaining them make them a weak link.                 There is, of course, also the question of building other worlds in liberated spaces. This process is affirmative, not destructive, and may involve quite different 'virtues', quite different forms of social relations from those involved in destroying capitalism. This needs to be done well, because the problems with the system (particularly informal hierarchies, exclusion, and patterns such as racism and sexism) are often reproduced in autonomous spaces. But this process by itself, without insurrection, could not be enough. Furthermore, since social relations recompose whenever a crisis disrupts the status quo (think of New Orleans, the Argentinazo, etc), it seems the insurrectionary part is the more difficult part. In addition, sabotage can help in the reconstruction of other worlds. Sabotage is often highly emotionally empowering. In a Black Block statement (see The Black Block Papers, p. 45-6), it is described as cracking the veneer of legitimacy, exorcising structural violence, turning limited exchange-values into open-ended use-values, changing how we see objects, increasing the 'potential uses of an entire cityscape', and breaking spells by making the impossible possible.

Lupus Dragonowl - The Future of Insurrection

[arcticdementor]

By now, the spectacle that is South Africa’s insurrection has been dominating the attentions of just about every political junkie on twitter, drawing the best minds from every corner of the world to bear witness to the fall of the rainbow nation into a predictable quagmire of irresolvable chaos. At home, the pessimism comes in many flavours, and the denialism in many, many more.

The brute facts are now well-known. After dodging prosecution for extreme corruption for over a decade, the former president Jacob Zuma was finally arrested for the relatively minor charge of contempt of court, for not appearing when summoned. While he held out for several days as his supporters (who comprise about half the ruling party including several senior cabinet ministers) picketed outside his palatial compound (bought with the UK foreign aid budget of 2017) and blocked police from entering, he eventually handed himself in. So concluded a long factional battle between Ramaphosa and Zuma that claimed hundreds of lives in burned freight trucks, assassinated councillors, and billions of Rands in legal fees, patronage and PR. Or so it appeared.

On the 8th of July, the president disbanded the Umkhonto weSizwe Veterans Association, essentially the continuation of the old military wing of the ANC, and fiercely loyal to Jacob Zuma. The next day, together with assistance from elements within state intel and security, they deployed to major transport routes, food depots, retail outlets, police stations, power stations, water treatment plants, and ports, to shut down and burn what they could, crippling the Johannesburg-Durban trade artery that carries 65% of our trade volume and half our economic capacity.

After encouraging looting targeting white-owned businesses or “white monopoly capital”, the MK vets could watch as riots burst out to take advantage of the chaos and everything was stripped to the bone by opportunistic looters. In the shadows, organised and disorganised elements blurred together, as even the wealthiest elements of black society got in on the fun of looting, packing luxury sportscars with groceries and appliances before watching the flames tear down the shops and factories.

The police and the military did nothing, and the president was silent, paralysed. Soon the violence spread to the suburbs, and residents cobbled together militia to guard their homes. Proof of address was required to buy groceries. This received wails of agony from the press class and black social media. Slogans calling for the slaughter of Indians (who form a large minority in Durban) and whites became common, and soon the newspapers were joining in on the scapegoating, accusing the citizens’ militia of racism.

…

Everyone here saw this coming, but for decades now, it has been an unacceptable thing to do, to remark upon the inevitable future we find ourselves in. Why it came to all this, and why it matters to Americans and Europeans, is the point of this essay. It will be uneasy to stomach, but it must be swallowed. We live on the brink of barbarism, and the West is following us every step of the way.

A nation may have a lot of ruin in it, but a poor nation has less ruin in it than a wealthy one. When a state collapses or undergoes revolution in the distant reaches of Africa or Asia, there is a certain social distance which prevents Westerners directly apprehending the significance of the social dynamics, the closeness of the dangers, the universality of the lessons, the pain and the tragedy of the loss.

But South Africa is different. South Africa is at once Western and alien to Westerners. Our constitution is Western. Our revolutionaries and our reactionaries and our racial cosmology is Western. Our highest aspiration is that of the West at large – a universal state which recognises no difference of class, race, or creed. And that is why when we observe South Africa, we stare into the abyss of Western civilisation and its global future. Each Westerner sees himself reflected in that void, from the national-socialist, to the anarcho-communist, to the black-nationalist and the bleeding-heart liberal.

And they are right to.

…

Watching any graph of any indicator in South Africa sees every resource drying up, every indicator of health taking a nosedive, and the population booming beyond control, kept in check only by the enormous and perennial pandemic of AIDS and tuberculosis that take many times the number of victims supposedly taken by the SARS-CoV2 virus, every year. We are the rape capital of the world, have seen over half a million homicides since 1994, and the state has not replaced any of the infrastructure built by the Afrikaner nationalist government. The graphs just spell doom in their trend lines, and have for years now, as the Centre for Risk Analysis’s I-told-you-so’s often repeat.

When they came to power, the ruling party was a coalition of communists, black nationalists, organised criminals and common thugs. However, their patrons in the Soviet Union were disbanded, and the Western state apparatus was still composed of law-abiding institutions and competent civil servants. So they purged the minorities, and placed party members at all key posts throughout, to ensure ideological and partisan loyalty – this was called cadre deployment. This crippled the institutions. When the last of the old guard experts were ushered into the wilderness in 1998, they made several systematic departmental reports, which declared the need for replacing infrastructure immediately, to cope with the increased dependent population. This was ignored, largely because the experts were white.

…

While many see the doom as setting in after 1994, it in fact began much sooner. The means by which the ANC gained power was not through civil disobedience, but through a long and sustained campaign of totalitarian violence called the Peoples War, which raged from 1979 until 1993. Black wage increases increased faster than white until this period (51.3% vs 3.8% since 1970), economic growth was over 5%, inequality was falling and blacks enjoyed the highest standard of living of any black population on the continent.

The addiction to cheap black labour meant that industry was irritated with state policies, and in the end, it was the local plutocrats like Harry Oppenheimer and the old secret societies like the Afrikaner Broederbond who opened secret negotiation to end apartheid. And while SA may have had a robust economy once, nothing survived the People’s War. It aimed to “make the country ungovernable”, and largely succeeded. Controlling migration from the black homelands became impossible, and maintaining law and order as the bodies piled up became harder and harder.

…

But the liberal establishment could not bring themselves to believe there were systemic reasons for this state of affairs beyond “corruption” or “inequality”, and the struggle to blame the status quo on the previous regime became ever harder. So they blamed Zuma. The lost decade, they called it. So when Cyril Ramaphosa, a man largely blamed for the Marikana massacre, finally took the party leadership in 2017, after a long, expensive battle of assassination, bribery and skulduggery, he billed himself as a liberal reformer and anti-corruption campaigner, and the international community fell for it hook line and sinker, and local liberals worshipped him like the coming of a new Mandela. He promised the 4th Industrial Revolution. He promised the reigning in of BEE. The Economist endorsed him over the liberal DA.

But he was lying.

…

There are only three sources for non-socialist print media coverage of politics in South Africa. Politicsweb, where all the old senior analysts go when they become persona non grata, the Institute of Race Relations (a venerable old classic-liberal institute with a daily paper, the Daily Friend, and a consulting business, Centre for Risk Analysis), and Maroela Media, an Afrikaans-language publication run by Afriforum, the civil rights activist organisation which sprung from the Afrikaner-national Solidariteit movement.

Aside from this, every other publication leans further to the left than a man with his left leg blown off, and due to a hangover of apartheid-era Cold War politics, “left and right”, terms only applicable among the educated classes, roughly align with a black-vs-white friend-enemy distinction. The Mail & Guardian, for instance (indirectly owned by the Open Society Foundation), has refused to cover any rural homicide committed against a white victim in nearly a decade, despite a global magnifying glass being placed on the barbaric torture and murder spree that has slowly been smouldering across our rural hinterlands. When a white person commits a crime, it is milked dry every day until the journalists get carpal tunnel. But against the ocean of violent depravity committed by the racial majority, which has taken half a million lives since the fall of apartheid, we receive virtual silence. Swaziland, seeing the same kind of violent uprising as KwaZulu Natal is, is treated as a democratic revolution against a tyrannical absolute monarch, despite the opposition being mainly violent communists receiving support from South African parties like the EFF.

…

I was a communist when I was at university. I was delivered a faithful belief in progressivism, nonracialism, revolution and universal democracy, through the national curriculum in South Africa.  I was introduced to Marx and Mill as an A Level student in the UK, and when I returned to my native country, I was exposed once more to the poverty and desperation and racial tensions. I assumed all the positions one would expect. More democracy, more repudiation of Christianity and white people, more redistribution, more socialism. But the political waters were calm in those days, and this was mere posturing. Then in 2015 my friends began a campaign to topple the statue of Cecil Rhodes overlooking Cape Town from the university his will founded.

#RhodesMustFall mushroomed rapidly, and became the romantic darling of not only us horny little revolutionaries, but leftists worldwide, who exported the new iconoclasm to Oxford and South Carolina. It is now remembered as #FeesMustFall, a campaign to make tertiary education free (for blacks). But I watched it grow from the inside, and partook in the occupation of admin buildings, touring other college protests in the Cape out of solidarity. But it became clear that it was first and foremost about racial hatred and the purging of Western influence, under their holy trinity of Steve Biko, Franz Fanon and Kimberlé Crenshaw – segregation, national-socialism and a metaphysical racial hierarchy, in new nation called Azania, synonymous with the basketcase fictional nation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Black Mischief.

This movement, while it began as nonracialist, soon became openly genocidal. Student leaders who called for genocide went unpunished, even praised by the VC of the University of Cape Town. This movement spread to every single university in the country, and despite prominent student leaders praising Adolf Hitler and calling for whites to be swept into the sea, singing genocidal songs at every protest, white students still offered themselves as human shields before police. Dining halls were segregated, classes were violently shut down, nonparticipants in some universities were beaten in their dormitories, staff were chased with buckwhips, buses were burned, paintings were burned, even security guards were burned, and more recently, so was the continent’s largest library. But no big newspaper offered moral criticism, just worries about whether the tactics were effective.

These young people defined a new era, and a new consensus – all struggles are one, and all are about black vs white, and whites must hand over everything and beg for their lives. The only lecturer in the entire country who stood up in public against this cultural revolution was the antinatalist philosopher David Benatar. All others kept their heads down, dithered, or joined the fray, calling for the heads of their less enthusiastic colleagues. Now the Fallists’ ideology is the official pedagogy of the entire university system. But this agitation had been the nature of political life at the poorer “bush colleges” for years now, just without the presence of minority students to trigger resentment or the ideas to build ideology: shut down every exam season to extract more lenient standards and increases in student grants.

And much like the explosion of violence seen at the national level today, South Africa’s poorer areas have been an unremitting hell for all those living in it below a certain class divide. 15% of all women are prostitutes, and the homicide rate is among the highest in the world, and some areas experience permanent civil war level violence. The old apartheid era town planning meant that black areas and minority areas were clearly separated, and this has meant a geographical buffer, where violent protest, which is again among the highest in the world, has largely left the middle classes out of it, even while it occasionally diverts traffic. Protests flare up constantly, as rival factions of the ANC, hamstrung by a corrupt internal promotions process and forbidden from dragging out dirty laundry in public, instead mobilise violent protests to contest wards and civil service posts, often burning down public infrastructure while the mob on the ground chants for “service delivery”.

…

Whatever else Nick Land writes, the lasting impact he had on me was in the very first essay at the opening of Fanged Noumena. He wrote it in 1989, when nobody beneath the highest reaches and darkest recesses of the Atlantic power structure had any awareness that South Africa was about to change forever.

Apartheid still seemed undefeatable to outsiders. The NP had recently smashed the heart of the ANC’s military campaign, creating a bloody hurting stalemate that observers at the time had no expectation would result in any pleasant outcome. Tens of thousands had already been massacred in the Peoples War to give the ANC a monopoly over the black liberation movements, but they seemed to be running out of steam. And so did Pretoria – influx from the Bantustans was unstaunchable, dependence on black labour was firm, and confidence in local cultural hegemony collapsed in 1976.

Nick Land, watching this, noticed something peculiar.

For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature. The most basic aspiration of the Boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that by means of 'Bantustans' or 'homelands' the black African population can be suspended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis. […] My contention in this paper is that the Third World as a whole is the product of a successful - although piecemeal and largely unconscious - 'Bantustan' policy on the part of the global Kapital metropolis.

…

When the British seized the Boer republics in 1900, they drew up the limits of control of the native African tribes where they already lived, and displaced a few thousand of them to tidy up the borders. These eventually became the Bantustans. Immediately, a long slow trickle of immigration was encouraged, not just from the Bantustans, but from British possessions in Asia. The migrant labour created a dense network of diffident ethnicities who demanded fences between them and their neighbours, while attempting to pursue economic exchange.

Black men, who could achieve far greater material wealth from working in the white economy than raising cattle and sorghum in the homelands, flowed steadily into white farmland areas and mining towns. In 1922, the South African Communist Party launched a general strike to demand the enforcement of a colour bar – “CPSA for a white South Africa!”. They were put down in a hail of gunfire by Jan Smuts, the architect of the unitary constitution, which allowed no devolved powers for regional self-governance.

Smuts was a member of Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table club, and shared Rhodes’s ambition to create a grand state where all literate English-speaking men and women south of the Zambezi would have the vote regardless of colour, and all the resources would belong to one grand cartel controlled by a British-American elite of enlightened natural aristocrats. Rhodes used money from his diamond empire and loans from Nathan Rothschild to fund the Jameson Raid and other means to instigate war with the Boer republics, which eventually resulted in the second Boer War and the creation of the Union of South Africa.

…

Smuts, architect of the Union of South Africa, also had a grand philosophy not unlike Nick Land’s – Land treats all matter and life as being ontologically the same, driven by “machinic desires” – all tendencies to motion and behaviour, whether in living or non-living material being fundamentally the same. All matter seeks more complex and integrated forms over time as a result of the force of entropy. Smuts’s grand philosophy, of which he wrote at length in Holism and Evolution, envisaged a means of looking at the world in which all of nature and society could be apprehended and governed as a single holistic system – all organisms, all cultures, all individuals, were destined to evolve into a greater whole, in which each part had its natural place, and that the common teleology of all matter and spirit was the global state, embodied in the League of Nations, the constitution of which he penned himself.  Together with his extensive biological knowledge, Smuts and his London interlocutor Arthur Tansley gave birth to the modern systems theory of ecology, and hoped to see a central global technocracy overseeing a holistic ecological management system.

The aims of the United States since the Second World War have some remarkable similarities in approach. The post-war order saw the US employing a philosophy of “defence in depth,” controlling a defensive frontier from the China Sea in the East to the very edge of the Warsaw Pact countries, to ensure freedom of trade throughout this entire region. But this extended beyond military control. The use of embedded CIA operatives meant that those democratic representatives who resisted the grand plans of Atlanticism were swiftly dealt with under insidious operations like Gladio.

…

As these ideas bled into the old left, who were increasingly disillusioned from the failures of the Soviet Union. They turned, as Laclou and Mouffe did, to the notion of using sectional grievances to deconstruct the nation state, leading to the birth of intersectionalism under Kimberlé Crenshaw. The very foundations of nationhood and capitalist Christian civilisation could be toppled if only we united our struggles by leveraging our historical grievances, creating acrimonious divisions in the body politic on the basis of sex, sexuality, race and religion. Thus, the universal loyalties of the nation state that supposedly upheld capitalism would fall, and revolution would arise. This fell right into the plans of the American ruling class.

However, when the social morality of the postwar American colonial project in Europe met the plans of the military and the Malthusian tendencies of the RAND corporation, everything took on a far more ambitious character, with the help of a concept called “environmental security”. The first reference to ES in the sense of protecting the natural environment comes from the US EPA Technical Committee in 1971, as part of an ambitious attempt to quantitatively measure total social wellbeing. This EPA committee was the first to make environmental regulation part of a comprehensive plan for social wellbeing, driven by Holism and cybernetic ecology. They were exceeded in scope by the UN’s 1972 Stockholm Conference, where the idea of “comprehensive” (today, “human”) security emerged, and further, the Palme, Brundtland and Brandt Reports.

…

Under these new umbrella concepts came “human security” and environmental security, the Social Sciences Department of UNESCO and the SSRC found the unifying principles and programs they had sought since the 1950s, and pushed a proselytising program grounded in cross-discipline application of avant-garde ideas to seek “new ways of knowing”, promoting not scientific objectivity, but a synthesis of diverse perspectives. A wholesale transformation of the rules and discipline of social sciences followed, in service of global governance (see the works of Perrin Selcer).

UNESCO even deliberately set about creating a new world religion, in the words of its founder Julian Huxley, and formed the United Religions Initiative, to mould the world’s spiritual beliefs in line with international Anglo progressivism. Feminism and sexual libertinism formed a crowbar against the community cohesion that couldn’t be attacked by means of anti-nationalism, and into this soup of value inversions (erosion of disciplinary distinction, inter-subjectivity [i.e., truth-by-consensus over objectivity], and utopian welfare ideals like “freedom from fear”; “freedom from want”), dropped three wonder pills: Poststructuralism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Global Warming. Now the great power-narratives of the Atlantic empire were consolidated – Malthus-by-proxy, anti-traditionalism, international diversity-and-inclusion, and the free-trade, open-borders paradigm of the 90’s.

In the same moment as de Klerk gave up on apartheid, the West gave up on the nation state, and handed control to the internationalists, under hegemony of the Atlantic community. A new empire was being consolidated from the territories captured by the Allies in WWII. Thirty years later it is becoming transparent –  the new centralised global tax regime has cemented it. Just as the ANC funds the influx of black voters into urban minority areas to build shacks on squatted land, the West welcomes mass migration from the third world, total open-borders, to transform the electoral system against the interests of the native population who might have their own desires, against the grain of global empire. Every corporation and state in the Western world discriminated against whites in hiring. The CIA peddles Critical Race Theory and actively recruits sexual minorities. Colour revolutions can be spotted whenever the rainbow flag or black fist makes an appearance.

Today, the Democratic Party in the US openly looks to South Africa for inspiration in dealing with what Yarvin called the “outer party” – all conservatives are being purged from every institution, in a vast cadre deployment program to ensure the core of the establishment becomes forever untouchable. On the streets they have even begun to use the same tactics for control – deploying huge mobs to destabilise cities when election season is approaching.

Minimum wage rises funnel employment into companies in public-private partnerships with the state, like Amazon, who is part of the Enduring Security Framework partnership of the CIA (which includes Facebook and Google). The analogies between their experimental management strategies and collectivised central-planning are no accident – any company that aims for a total retail monopoly through state-subsidised negative-profit growth is merely another route to total control.

And as the nation and the state are decoupled, the liberal-democratic institutions are being geared toward the concentration of power and wealth, and a strategy of divide-and-rule, to create a cannibal economy. Only a few, like Denmark, have realised what they have gotten themselves into.

…

Much as Aristotle said, a democracy can only function beneficially when steered by the middle class, as it was in Rhodesia and the old Cape, which restricted the vote to property-owners of all races. The middle class’s needs are the core of the productive community, and as Marx observed, they are loyal to the requirements of productive industry and local trade. With the combination of the proliferation of the welfare state and globalisation, the middle class has been whittled away in the West, just as it has here in southern Africa.

Reliance on the state for services means they can’t be sacrificed – in the UK, the NHS has become essentially a religious cult, feeding the civil service, medical contractors, immigrants and the poor alike, in a financially unsustainable way, for decreasing returns. As Philip Bagus observed, the democratic pressures to maintain institutional support via this sort of patronage forces modern western states to take on ever more debt and expand taxation to the limits. This then must be offset by QE, which must be guaranteed by the central state at a rate that benefits the most fragile provinces of any empire so that the whole system does not collapse.

…

What Robert Mugabe did was pursue the universal extension of a first-world welfare state to every peasant in the hinterland, praised by the global left. This required taking on an enormous amount of national debt. Once the IMF tried to impose austerity, Mugabe found this politically unsustainable – his support depended on the handouts, corrupt and legitimate, that he was delivering. So he had to switch to printing money to pay the debts. When inflation became too much to handle, they replaced the core of the economy with dollars, and only elites could survive, much like Venezuela today. As the national treasury ran dry, the military and the civil service became restless. To placate them, they were fed the farms and businesses of the remaining white minority, as well as many areas formerly occupied by black peasants. The state had to cannibalise itself to sustain the predatory ruling class.

During this time, Mugabe attempted to control every aspect of the environment and economy through price and capital controls, suffocating every aspect of social life with red tape. It only accelerated the process. While the vast global network of UN subsidiaries extract compliance from the US client states

In South Africa today, the state coffers are empty. Even the ruling party is feeling it, as their headquarters Luthuli House was attached by the court to pay for a crooked PR contract they refused to deliver on. We have since taken out an IMF bailout, which is being poured into infrastructure, mostly Durban’s port, which is now choked by smoke and looting. Our president’s advisors are pushing for land reform, and remarkably, one of them, Ruth Hall, was advising Robert Mugabe how to liquidate his pale kulaks back in 2002. Other advisors, like Thembeka Ngcukaitobi, call for the fulfilment of the genocidal prophecy of Makhanda, and have whites deprived of all land and all moveable and liquid assets. This is deliberate Zimbabwefication.

The same economic dynamics are present in the world at large – the share of GDP spent on welfare keep increasing, as does the debt-GDP ratio. Capital formation has been falling for decades, and chronic inflation is treated as a static phenomenon, which nobody dares reign in, because the entire system is dependent on low interest rates to keep the constant corrosive consolidation of the global market going full steam ahead. This arrangement results in the inflation of property prices as along term hedge against inflation which, when the plebs followed suit resulted in the 2008 bubble, when they tried to play the elites’ asset accumulation game with borrowed money.

…

What has America been doing these past 18 months? It has been printing money so fast that it has kept pace with the plummenting Rand, and allowed Cyril Ramaphosa to tell investors that his economy is relatively strong – the Rand has “stabilised”. Error of parallax. Nor is it even just America printing money. While they certainly can afford to, as the holders of the world’s reserve currency, China is attempting to do the same, only they are directly funnelling the cash into commodities, rather than spreading it around a financial elite over which they have minimal control.

And yet their leverage is far worse than America’s – Kyle Bass, who has been shorting the Chinese market for years now, insists that the historically unprecedented levels of leverage in the Chinese economy are unsustainable, and that they cannot, even under miracle conditions, correct their shrinking population trends sufficiently to turn this ship around. But what many forsee in dreams of revolution and revolt, the breakups of massive crumbling empires, is not going to happen as they hope.

Instead, the state will protect the stability of the ruling class and its control over the levers of power at the core, bleeding everyone dry and terrorising them into submission. What happened to Zimbabwe is a warning, but it only happened the way it did because half the population could leave and send home remittances. The iron fist of a “democratic” government capable of rigging its elections and gagging the press and the courts is only as tyrannical as the cost of a bus ticket to the next country. After 900-member Zoom calls and election “fortification”, I shouldn’t need to gild the lily any more.

As many observers of China remark, an economic collapse of a country of its nature will not result in a breakup or a massive reform, but in the shrink-wrap tyranny of North Korea, an eternal sclerotic stagnation, fed by government dependency, held in place by state security. The West is losing control of its ability to provide the kind of total state security required for this however, and has been reaching for a far more sinister method of control – the financial system.

And this is where all analogies break down, because what is about to happen here is unprecedented. The international Bank of Settlements has recently announced that they intend to use Central Bank Digital Currency to control the spending of all global citizens, and have the tech and the power to control each and every expenditure, and to shut anybody out of the ability to feed themselves if they so choose. But this movement to kick away the ladder and consolidate total control follows the same logic as Zimbabwe’s – the poor can only be fed for so long, but the ruling elite must be fed forever, or else the whole house comes down.

…

The twin systems of China and Atlantis are both attempting to consolidate total control over their economic and social environment. And in order to achieve the kind of reforms that he wishes to, Ramaphosa has reached for the help of both power blocs. China has colonised our northernmost province, and receives special treatment from law enforcement that must learn Mandarin. Chinese are registered as black, to benefit from the racial privileges blacks enjoy under Black Economic Empowerment. While the government’s reports usually look like a dog’s breakfast, their reports on the UN sustainable development goals are always crisp, professional, and detailed. SDG 10 justifies the expropriation of property, according to their logic.

…

The erosion of the middle class, the working class, the institutions of law and order and even the substance of the informal economy was dry tinder to the Zuma-faction’s firebrands. To fulfil his mandate to end corruption, Ramaphosa had begun prosecutions proceedings into the Zuma faction – tentatively of course, since any too-wide-ranging investigation would unearth the corruption of all. But lawfare isn’t enough. They were cut out of party patronage systems as big figures like Ace Magashule were expelled from the party. Judges ruled that the state would not cover their defence costs anymore.

When the Umkhonto we Sizwe veterans association was disbanded and cut off from “pension” money, they finally put into action something that they would have had up their sleeve for months. Police armaments caches had been going missing for months. Firearms training for youths had been going on at the local branches for years. Every storage depot and major highway was targeted, petrol stations, power stations, water treatment plants were hit. They needed to make the country ungovernable, and they did. But this time they didn’t have the support of the Swedish, the Russians or anybody else.

Complicit elements are even inside the SSA, our central intelligence agency. What it will take for Ramaphosa to clear the state and party of seditious elements will give him the power of a modern dictator, cheered on my the press and everybody else, who despises Zuma and his people for what they’ve wreaked upon us. But with three months left of military deployment, all of the military capacity in one province, and the president fearing wielding lethal force on black mobs for fear of his Marikana ghosts coming back to haunt him, the rebels have three months to decide whether to act.

That leaves three months to see whether we become a black-nationalist disctatorship, or a new Yugoslavia. The Zulu, who form the backbone of the rebellion, have cheered for Zulu independence before, though their forces are split – the Zulu nationalist/traditionalist party the IFP have stood firmly against this chaos. Zuma’s people are still pushing black identity over tribal. Zuma may have been a traditionalist, a defender of the Swazi royal house when in crisis, an expander of chieftains’ rights, but his time in head of the ANC death squads in Zululand in the 1990s makes Zulu solidarity impossible.

So chaos it is.

[nitewrighter]

cottagecore with colonialist implications?

Oh yeah, I’ve just noticed a lot of criticism leveled at cottagecore for echoing colonialist and sometimes nationalist sentiments, (it’s not always American--there’s the German Volk and the conservative ideals of “Jolly old England”) and its aesthetics have known to attract tradwifes and ecofascists.

And like, strictly speaking in an aesthetic sense, I understand cottagecore’s appeal (I grew up absolutely adoring Beatrix Potter books), and for some people cottagecore can be an anticapitalist reclamation of softness and femininity, but for others it’s “checking out” of capitalism’s global effects and at the same time staking out land that is only available to you due to the violence of capitalism and colonialism.

It’s a complicated issue, so it’s kind of like, “Okay how much of this is legit politics and how much of this is people getting mad at teenage girls for being really into Moomin and Ghibli movies” but I think that’s why I prefer “Mori” as an aesthetic. It’s more about clothes and more couched in its overall concept being fantasy. It doesn’t really tie itself to notions of “rugged individualism” (I see a lot of cottagecore blogs quoting Thoreau’s Walden and as much as I love my boy Thoreau, I feel like that kind of reinforces indigenous criticisms of cottagecore) it’s more like “I want to dress like a Beatrix potter character because it’s pretty and soft and cute :).”

Now I don’t think there’s anything wrong with living simply and sustainably,  or just wanting to live somewhere quiet, but I think people should educate themselves about how politics are deeply entrenched in the land itself. I suggest my followers in the states especially look at the #Landback movement and also food and land justice movements for African Americans.

[newstfionline]

Monday, August 16, 2021

U.S. Air Force veteran comforts children plagued by gun violence (Reuters) Like many cities across the United States, Washington has seen a spike in shooting-related deaths during the pandemic. Homicides were up 19% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. This month’s data shows that the city has already clocked more cases than at the same time last year. “It’s like a war zone. It’s like being in the military,” Jawanna Hardy said. Frustrated by the senseless loss of life, Hardy, an Air Force veteran and now a 34-year-old high school English teacher, launched ‘Guns Down Friday,’ an outreach program to support neighborhoods plagued by gun violence—including the one she has lived in since childhood. She has raised money for shooting victims’ gravestones, advocated for more streetlights, and trained people how to treat bullet wounds themselves. She drives her van—adorned with photos of young gun violence victims—through the streets to greet youngsters. On a recent Friday, she arrived with water balloons. “Put your guns down and pick your water balloons up!” Hardy cried through a megaphone as children outside an apartment complex in southeast Washington laughed and scrambled to drench one another. She knows her Friday night street parties will not stop gun violence but hopes they can at least provide children a brief respite from the constant fear in which many live.

Haitians scramble to rescue survivors from ruins of major quake (Reuters) Haitians labored overnight to pick through shattered buildings in search of friends and relatives trapped in the rubble after a devastating earthquake struck the Caribbean country on Saturday, killing 1,297 people and injuring at least 5,700 more. The 7.2 magnitude quake flattened hundreds of homes in the impoverished country, which is still clawing its way back from another major temblor here 11 years ago, and has been without a head of state since the assassination of its president last month. Churches, hotels, hospitals and schools were badly damaged or destroyed, while the walls of a prison were rent open by the violent shudders that convulsed Haiti. Access to the worst-hit areas was complicated by a deterioration in law and order that has left key access roads in parts of Haiti in the hands of gangs, although unconfirmed reports on social media suggested they would let aid pass.

Want to stay long term in France? First come the classes on how to be French. (Washington Post) In France, la vie en rose comes wrapped in red tape. Foreigners hoping to stay here long term must sign an “integration contract” and agree to uphold French values. The contract requires four days of civic education, yet what’s taught is more akin to a government crash course in how to be French. There are discussions about Marianne—the symbolic embodiment of the French Republic—and about classical culinary dishes, such as duck confit and escargot. France 101 covers both the cultural (how to visit museums) as well as the practical (how to navigate the national health-care system). The classes, plus language lessons for anyone whose fluency doesn’t measure up, help determine whether an applicant gets a multiyear visa. Every year, an average of 100,000 people take the courses, in cities across the country. The contemporary agreement explicitly states that receiving an extended residency visa is conditional on abiding by its terms, a key one being deference to French values. After an applicant signs the document, the language test is administered and 24 hours of classes scheduled.

Taliban sweep into Afghan capital after government collapses (AP) The Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital Sunday after the government collapsed and the embattled president joined an exodus of his fellow citizens and foreigners, signaling the end of a costly two-decade U.S. campaign to remake the country. Heavily armed Taliban fighters fanned out across the capital, and several entered Kabul’s abandoned presidential palace. Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman and negotiator, told The Associated Press that the militants would hold talks in the coming days aimed at forming an “open, inclusive Islamic government.” Kabul was gripped by panic. Helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out. Fearful that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights, Afghans rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor—who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital—remained in parks and open spaces throughout the city. Many people watched in disbelief as helicopters landed in the U.S. Embassy compound to take diplomats to a new outpost at the airport. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the U.S. pullout from Vietnam.

From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project (Washington Post) Twenty years ago, when the twin towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, there was a sense among America’s warrior and diplomatic class that history was starting anew for the people of Afghanistan and much of the Muslim world. “For you and us, history starts today,” then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told his Pakistani counterparts. Earlier this month, as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, retired Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, a two-time veteran of the war, stumbled across Armitage’s words. To Dempsey, the sentiment was “the most American thing I’ve ever heard” and emblematic of the hubris and ignorance that he and so many others brought to the losing war. “We assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,” he said. “And we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.” Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong. Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010, said, “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.” Flournoy acknowledged in hindsight that the mistake was compounded across Republican and Democratic administrations, which continued with almost equal fervor to pursue goals that ran counter to decades—if not centuries—of the Afghan experience.

Afghanistan’s collapse leaves allies questioning U.S. resolve on other fronts (Washington Post) The Taliban's stunningly swift advances across Afghanistan have sparked global alarm, reviving doubts about the credibility of U.S. foreign policy promises and drawing harsh criticisms even from some of the United States' closest allies. And many around the world are wondering whether they could rely on the United States to fulfill long-standing security commitments stretching from Europe to East Asia. "Whatever happened to 'America is back'?" said Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the Defense Committee in the British Parliament. "People are bewildered that after two decades of this big, high-tech power intervening, they are withdrawing and effectively handing the country back to the people we went in to defeat," Ellwood said. "This is the irony. How can you say America is back when we're being defeated by an insurgency armed with no more than [rocket-propelled grenades], land mines and AK-47s?" As much as its military capabilities, the United States' decades-old role as a defender of democracies and freedoms is again in jeopardy, said Rory Stewart, who was Britain's minister for international development in the Conservative government of Theresa May. "The Western democracy that seemed to be the inspiration for the world, the beacon for the world, is turning its back," Stewart said. Rivals of the United States also have expressed dismay. Among them is China, which fears that the ascent of an extremist Islamist government on its western border will foster unrest in the adjoining province of Xinjiang, where Beijing has waged sweeping crackdowns on the Uyghur population that have been denounced by the West. The United States' Arab allies, which have long counted on the U.S. military to come to their aid in the event of an attack by Iran, also have faced questions over whether they will be able to rely on the United States.

Torrential rains lash wide areas of Japan, three feared dead after landslide (Reuters) Torrential rain lashed much of Japan on Sunday, flooding roads and buildings in the western part of the country, while three people were feared dead after a landslide in central Nagano prefecture. Large parts of Japan, particularly the southernmost main island of Kyushu, have seen record levels of rainfall, causing rivers to overflow and triggering landslides. While the rain had stopped in much of Kyushu as of Sunday morning, Tokyo and other parts of the country were pounded by the downpour. Japan “will continue to face conditions in which a large-scale disaster could occur at anytime, anywhere,” Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said at a ministerial meeting on Sunday. He called on local municipalities and relevant organisations to cooperate and act with speed on rescue missions and aid.

More military personnel deployed to enforce Sydney Covid restrictions as entire state locks down (CNN) Additional Australian military personnel will be deployed to enforce tighter Covid-19 restrictions in the greater Sydney area next week, authorities announced Saturday, as the entire state of New South Wales (NSW) prepares to go under lockdown. Stay at home orders will be applied across the country’s most populous state, with people only permitted to leave home to shop for essentials, receive medical care, outdoor exercise with one other person, and work if residents cannot work from home. Schooling will also be moved back online. Sydney, the capital of NSW, has been under lockdown measures for more than seven weeks now, and they will likely be extended further; they were set to end on August 28 but the state government has indicated restrictions will remain through September.

Fuel explosion in Lebanon kills 28, wounding dozens (AP) A warehouse where fuel was illegally stored exploded in northern Lebanon early Sunday, killing at least 28 people and injuring 79 more in the latest tragedy to hit the Mediterranean country in the throes of a devastating economic and political crisis. It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion near the border with Syria. Fuel smuggling operations have been ongoing for months. The Lebanese Red Cross said a fuel tanker exploded and its teams recovered 28 bodies from the site in the border village of Tleil. In a statement, it said it evacuated 79 people who were injured or suffered burns in the blast. Hours after the blast, Lebanese Red Cross members were still searching the area for more victims as Lebanese soldiers cordoned the area.

'Once the best in the Middle East,' Beirut hospital pleads for fuel as it faces shutdown (The Week) A once-famed Beirut hospital is now pleading for international aid to avoid running out of essential resources. The American University of Beirut Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon, is making an urgent appeal to the United Nations and its specialized agencies, the World Health Organization and the U.N. Children's Fund, to supply the hospital with fuel before it's forced to shut down by Monday. Lebanon is mired in an economic and political crisis, and the nationwide fuel shortage is currently the most dire consequence. That's perhaps most clearly reflected in the plight of AUBMC, which said 40 adults and 15 children living on respirators would die immediately and many other patients will be at great risk if the shutdown is not avoided. The medical center said it's been rationing fuel and electricity for weeks, but is running out of both. Liz Sly, The Washington Post's Beirut bureau chief, notes that the American University hospital "was once the best" in the entire Middle East region; the announcement shows that the country is "truly heading to disaster," she writes.