darkcalling [comrade/them, she/her]

It’s a very good question and one I don’t have a good answer.

Thinking aloud I’ll admit in Stalin’s case there was definitely some pragmatism to not going off on the west. The USSR was still behind developmentally and especially after the great war and losing so many people, so much industry, farmland, etc there might have been real fears of collapse or being overrun and so there might have been a really strong attempt to offer an olive branch, to do the utmost to be conciliatory and non-threatening to buy time to grow, recover, develop. Though after a certain point this does make less sense.

The capitalists and liberal-roaders during late (Gorbachev) and after the fall of the USSR make far more sense given they strongly believed that the difference between west and Russia wasn’t that the west was a club of aristocratic old racists and colonialists intent on dominating and exploiting everyone not a member of the club but that it was all shared values and that the communism was the threatening thing instead of the whole Russian bourgeoisie being minor outsiders who were not desired to grow to the heights of the western capitalists and aristocracy as Russia was slated for plunder. Besides that the planners of empire of course, the US and UK specifically knew a country as large, diverse, rich in resources as Russia could not be allowed to rise and join the club as it would inevitably seize a large amount of power from their factions for itself and its interests.

When talking of Russian reluctance to confront the west over e.g. Ukraine it is also important to remember material interests. Russia has been slapped with massive sanctions, their economy has been partially decoupled from by the west and the west is gearing up for war with Russia within the next 10 years and calling them a threat which must be destroyed. All because Russia had the audacity to swat away the dagger being positioned under its heart in Ukraine. Putin was definitely suckered by the west for a while but it was an inconvenient reality to face the need to confront the west. The result has been painful. Right now Russia is staring down a likelihood of years of devastating and spectacular western intelligence service aided terrorist attacks like those recently seen on two passenger trains where bridges were blown up and the attacks on their strategic bombers. They’ve had top generals assassinated in Moscow. They are enduring a horrible pain and knew to some extent they’d get things like this for challenging the west so were inclined to try diplomacy past the point of foolishness just in some vague hope they could work this out. As you I’m not convinced Russia won’t drop many of its critical demands or moderate them and make concessions to end the Ukraine war. I hope they don’t. I think it’d be foolish and selling the future for the present but they might and the west thinks they might which is why they’re doing all this.

I suppose I’d have to guess it may be the whiteness, the lack of experience with the full brutality of extended colonization (though I’ll note fascism is really just colonialism used on white people and over 1940-1944 the USSR experienced a great deal of pain inflicted in a short period by that though admittedly the end of that did have some help from the west who were portrayed as allies against it).

Thinking about the DPRK they were never really courted in the way the west has courted and tried to deceive and charm Russia/USSR and its leadership. Thinking of Iran they likewise were saddled with dictatorship and never really courted by the west but imposed with isolation and sanctions for their revolution. China has somewhat warmer relations but pragmatism and that comes from the west courting them for the Sino-Soviet split and because they exploited the west’s hunger to profit from their population. Many smaller socialist states like Cuba, etc have been subject to crushing sanctions, coup attempts, color revolutions, etc perhaps because they’re seen as small enough to easily crush while larger powers like the USSR and China are seen as better dealt with through courting and deception. I think the role of diplomacy and messaging may play a role as the west has certainly fostered a certain kind of attitude towards some nations and not others.

The BBC video said that the phones had no access to internet but if it has a News app, then it has some form of internet.

Maybe some form but “THE” internet is different from “A” internet. THE internet is the big global network that you access propaganda rags like the BBC on as well as the website for the Russian military, as well as the page for the New York History Museum as well as Temu among many other things. An internet could just be a few networks connected together and indeed could include access to news services even ones accessible via HTTP or similar.

So technically correct I suppose in that if true you can’t with that phone go and buy Yankees tickets online or post “down with western imperialism” in the comments section of the NYT but you can access remote networked resources. I approve of China’s great firewall so I can’t really argue against something like this.

Kind of predictable though when the other guy went after low level embassy staffers. Unfortunately you start doing that and people see it a lot differently than doming Healthcare CEOs, the message copycats get is just get anyone involved at any level, just unleash your frustrations on easy access soft targets. And that’s appealing to people because hitting the targets that kind of matter more is often much more difficult and challenging and many of these people are acting emotionally and in an undisciplined, glory-seeking way.

This is unfortunately what you get. People doing these kinds of attacks that don’t in any way disrupt the zionist machine, don’t really intimidate those who matter at the top because you’re just hitting the very bottom and play right into their narrative and let them justify more crackdowns and paint everyone with the same broad brush as just hating Jews, as being terrorists, as being willing to kill uninvolved civilians.

People you know justified the attacks on those embassy people because they posted ghoulish pro-zionist views online, well these people were posting those views IRL with their little protest here and the only difference is those other people were official low level but easily replaced employees. Neither one is going to resonate as justifiable to most people, most Americans, but this is even less so.

It’s very ineffectual. What the ‘left’ in the US does compared to even the UK where those activists regularly shut down Elbit systems and their suppliers. You know I think most British people don’t look at those activists there shutting down the weapons companies as dangerous, hateful terrorists whereas it’s easy to paint these attackers in the US as just that and that’s a problem. These are acts of undisciplined despair and emotion but they’re going to hurt the disciplined parts of the movement all so they can feel better about themselves by taking action. It’s very selfish and it plays right into the hands of the zioniosts who get to claim Jews are under attack and rally around needing to uphold the zionist project.

This isn’t going to scare zionists from the streets. It isn’t going to slow the genocide, it isn’t going to give pause to those carrying it out, it isn’t going to give pause to them abetting it here in the US.

Everyone’s upset and we should be but this is a mistake. This is the kind of unpopular escalation that if repeated gets spread around in raw videos online and turns more people on the side-lines against them.

As Malcolm X said, those chickens are going to eventually come home to roost.

We’re probably getting the fucked timeline where space is heavily militarized. I fear the US is going to very shortly move to placing nuclear in space aimed at China and at that point the race is on to place defensive and offensive assets in space with each Chinese (and Russian) response to the US aggression being met by more escalating aggression. US will almost certainly place interceptor systems in space along with offensive weapons systems. They’re going to be sending NSA agents up into space every month trying to latch onto and plant hacking hardware/explosives on Chinese and Russian space assets and all sides are going to start booby-trapping their systems as a result. Fuck.

(In case you’re wondering they more or less admitted to trying to gain access to and sabotage Chinese equipment when it was reported in the press that they tried approaching a Chinese satellite once and it moved away “at speed with complex maneuvers”. The cover story of course being they were just peering at it with their own satellites but the certain truth behind the space force being it was a human or robotic sabotage crew trying to get access to it to allow the US to render it useless or destroyed in the event of war)

The predictable swerve, the pivot. The ability to point back to their last minute words only objections to the genocide after it’s concluded and sob about how they realized too late what those scheming Jews were up to and how they tricked them and oh it was all Netanyahu and a few other bad apples really. Thus they believe preserving their righteousness, their ability to shit on China and Russia and other places. Never forget their actions, their support, their lack of action and duty to stop it even after admitting it was going wrong. They’ll claim it was only after that they realized it amounted to genocide and wring their hands and weep for the Palestinian people who once were and once again say never again while casually slinging around the genocide accusation at Russia, at China, at AES, etc.

Paywall. Archive link?

Edit: I’ll do it myself: https://archive.is/nzDtc

The site was part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.

Important info. This isn’t anything super recent or relevant. It was part of a huge network of front sites for communicating with informants.

Ciro Santilli, the researcher, said he was drawn to investigating the network of CIA sites for various reasons: his interest in Chinese politics (he said his mother-in-law is part of the Falun Gong religious movement)

Love to be an impartial reporter and call a dangerous, coercive, violent, racist, controlling cult which itself receives CIA backing (relevant) a “religious movement”.

Honestly I think it’s an act. Maybe he thinks that way but his role is to be the unreasonable, mad attack dog snarling at the west and threatening them with a worse time which makes Putin look reasonable and illustrates the possibility of someone worse. Maybe he’s gotten angrier and harder edged since he was in power after all the issues and betrayals but I wouldn’t count on it necessarily.

It gives them the ability to bypass the blockade until the US bombs it either from the air pretty openly or using one of their various “moderate rebel” groups with access to suspiciously advanced weaponry and explosives and maybe submarines for some reason.

It’s good China is doing this but it’s on shaky ground as long as the US has the ability to coup, seed terrorists, etc as they plead in areas with governments that are at least a lot weaker than Russia in abilities of self-defense and security against an adversary like NATO.

They already have a vague interest in color revolution-ing or seeding “moderate rebel” maidan or ISIS types in these nations due to their historical affinity with the USSR and present-day proximity to and importance to Russia but cutting off the belt and road is going to be very high priority. Taking out just Turkmenistan here for instance completely blunts this and Uzbekistan while possibly to bypass by a long routing around via Kazakhstan is also pretty important.

Make no mistake if the US escalates to the point of a naval blockade of China from the first/second/third island chains they’re not going to flinch at using a proxy to blow up a rail bridge or do damage in ways that takes weeks to repair. For regular trade it’s a good thing and a poke in the eye to the US but if stuff hits the fan their most reliable routes overland are going to be via Russia which is already dealing with CIA proxies via Ukraine and has the experience and capabilities to counter them pretty effectively compared to most places. Ideally they put into place more alternate rail lines as well so it takes more leg-work to attempt to take them all out.

Don’t be so sure. Gladio never ended. The only ones allowed to make sense on Russia are the far-right reactionary parties. The left euro-coms are totally defanged NATO stans. Add in the huge anti-immigrant racism push by the bourgeois press and those parties are making continual massive gains year over year in France, Germany, elsewhere and I expect will sweep the continent within the next 10 years with a few hold-outs. Maybe in 20 years you could see some reaction to that, some rejection but between then and now IMO Europeans will experience horrible economies, being used as fodder against China, increased reaction, gutting of social services, scapegoating of minorities, etc. Europeans like Americans are so cooked in propaganda and white supremacy that they’re not going to break out and go anti-capitalist in the near term.

Human shields. As always with the west every accusation a massive projection of their own psychology, actions, and wants.

The anger I feel and the sadness is incredible. It hardens my heart against fascists, we will not need a lot of re-education camps when our time comes, we have plenty of mines.

My opinion is zionists are not going to be scared to be zionists because of one shooting which results in an overwhelming state response and likely passing laws to further protect them and criminalize any dissent. I mean this is the US, you’re likely to be shot for doing nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, one instance is kind of background noise when the targets are low level employees.

And if they are scared do you know what they do? They run to their colony, they run there and hide and proclaim loudly how unsafe they were as Jews outside it. Again it plays right into things. If this were replicated a dozen times like school shootings maybe but it still wouldn’t influence US policy-makers when it’s a bipartisan project, it wouldn’t scare Microsoft and Google from assisting them because it doesn’t target them, it wouldn’t scare the leadership in the entity because they’re safe and have police details when they travel. Which feeds into:

I think the only thing is that it should’ve targeted some higher people, in the same way the Japanese PM and CEO were targeted, why not aim for the highest of the high.

Not wrong. In that obvious symbols of power have more resonance. This was poorly done and I only hope against hopes this person has no relations to PSL, ANSWER, etc and wasn’t a rabid watcher of say Hasan because anyone they can tie this to they will and they will move to crush them. They can designate PSL a terrorist organization, ANSWER the same, they can arrest Hasan or at least deplatform him and this isn’t going to resonate. This isn’t going to get a bunch of people to say “obviously they deserved it” like if it had been someone much more central.

I mean this is just about the worse target you could pick. The zionist advocacy orgs are more directly responsible and obvious in terms of public resonance, the lobbying firms, the tech enablers, etc.

I think this was an ill thought out act of despair, it was individualistic, not carefully and extensively planned. His distant association with PSL was unfortunate and reckless and they’ve been looking for a way to crack down on the orgs organizing the pro-Palestine stuff for a while and even a distant link will be enough if the zionists seize on it. At the very least this turns up the heat on PSL which is not okay.

I maintain you want to scare the zionists and intimidate them within the entity where it matters, to drive them back to their homes in Europe and the US and you want to target the enablers with BDS and direct action in the enabling states. Activists in the UK have shut down suppliers for weapons companies, weapons companies in the US are well guarded but acts against the operability and profitability of their suppliers may be possible. Same with tech company enablers, you shame the employees, you implore them to join, you make them feel bad, you disrupt their CEO appearances and shame them, you tie them publicly to genocide and tarnish their company names and images and create negative sentiment which creators pressure.

This is frankly not good. Acts like this will lead to more excuses to crack down on pro-Palestine movement and BDS with incredible levels of harshness and state violence and yes probably moving to the level of outlawing groups and rounding people up. They’ll also lead to crackdowns and attacks by the way on online spaces like this. They’ve been looking for excuses, here’s one.

Adventurism doesn’t work. Killing a couple of them -outside- the occupation isn’t going to dissuade those in the entity from continuing the genocide. In fact it plays into their narrative of not being safe outside the entity and thus needing everyone to move to the entity and giving rise to the excuse for its existence and crimes. And it gives an excuse to play the victim again just when that was running dry. They don’t care about not feeling safe outside of their occupation, they very much desire it. What works are things like Oct 7th, that drove the settlers to flee back to their homes elsewhere, what works is Ansar Allah’s strikes and a bad economy.

If there’s a need to create a cost in the west it shouldn’t be against these but their enablers. Look at the actions of those activists in Britain shutting down weapons suppliers. Things like that have an positive impact by inflicting a cost for participating on those who are stuck there in terms of manufacturing or living situations.

Hope this guy is not part of or a frequent participant with any orgs. The gloves are not off yet contrary to what many may think and the US can hit much, much harder.

Terrorizing people is cheap. They’ve already committed to paying for tons of cops, this is just utilizing them for this purpose.

Besides even if it was more expensive it doesn’t matter. This is not a find the cheapest solution machine where cheapest one wins. This has a very real and practical benefit which is terrorizing those at the bottom and scaring those at risk of hitting that bottom into allowing harsher forms of exploitation of themselves, of disciplining them with the fear of seeing that oppression into keeping their heads down. It’s impossible for capital to put a price on subjugating and intimidating the proles into compliance and submission. Certainly not when the costs are not born directly by the bourgeoisie anyways but by the state financed off the back of imperialism.

The sad thing is it won’t be the same. The denial of the genocide will continue. The west allowed in the one unique instance of the Holocaust acknowledgment of the crimes in order to lionize themselves, demonize their enemies and gain some moral high-ground they very desperately needed to fight the USSR and communism because they fought on the right side in WW2. Because they could paint themselves as being on the right side on that one it was trumpeted around and taught and wailed about unlike all the others before it because it was part of a narrative of triumph over evil, of the west being good, of standing and fighting for good to justify it’s atrocities and attacks on communism. This instance because they’re not just on the side-lines but actively abetting will be denied for quite some time and when it is acknowledged it’ll still be contested in the way that teaching about Jim Crow and racism in America is contested today by chuds and quite a few liberals who will acknowledge but state they had no way of knowing, they were fooled by the tricksters who ran pissrael (happily engaging in anti-semitic tropes because they have their aided the zionists card). Or some other revisionism like it was all Netanyahu and a cabal of close others and a few bad apples in the IOF and how you can’t dismiss the whole of the zionist project and you’re not allowed to talk about the polls from the era showing the overwhelming support for genocide among the zionist colonists who live in the entity, etc, etc.

So I did.

Imagine going after the important US vassal ‘israel’ after seeing the US enact the Hague invasion act two decades ago and not thinking of things like this. Truly shows they’re all idealistic liberals there without a clue which is why they usually make such good puppets. The only problem in this case is one of them couldn’t be intimidated away from consistency like most. I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies mysteriously in the coming years either as a further signal to not mess with the zionists or US.

My cynical thoughts are:

Germany’s military will always be used for NATO aggression. They are already an occupied vassal, American troops are in the country (Rammstein base among others) and the reactionary German armed forces will NEVER use force to remove them, thus they can only be a pawn of them. Additionally most German officers are trained like dogs for loyalty with the American troops, additionally there is evidence the west runs a significant blackmail network as well as a spy network against its own and those officers and members of intelligence who would help the US coup Germany for its benefit are known and written down and will be called upon.

Remember what happened to Australia and Whitmer, there was a non-violent coup using arcane process to oust someone who wanted neutrality, they would absolutely use violent means to do what’s necessary. They installed a military dictatorship in Greece in the last cold war and would not hesitate to place Germany or other places under a similar yoke though would likely prefer to oust elements against them and spin up a tail of their treason and with the loyal German empire loving, immigrant scapegoating press I’m sure they’d have little issue at present or the near future doing so.

There are only two hopes I think for near-term freedom from the US yoke:

1. mass movement building and massive sustained protests and organized economic shut-downs to force the issue (even then 50/50 it goes to an open repressive reactionary dictatorship). It’s either that or 2) hoping US decline accelerates before they can drag the rebuilt German/Euro army into wars to sustain the empire in the 2030s and that it picks up to such a pace that they cannot maintain their occupation and control over Germany. Frankly I believe US decline will be slow and take many decades so the realistic hope is movement building. From what I’ve seen of the self-flagellating, genocide apologizing, self-hating, anti-Soviet German left they have their work cut out for them.

I saw a take that I fully believe as it so describes the deep mentality of Euro-liberals. Namely that the lesson Euro-liberals who run and love the EU today take from WW2 is that America will come and prevent Russia from de-Nazifying you in a war, and will prop up your fascist, reactionary people, install them in government, protect them and help build and maintain a joint bulwark against Russians and communists. Not that genocide is bad, not that war within Europe is devastating and self-defeating, because the wrong people (Nazis) were all installed in positions of power post-war and they learned to not do fascism openly without American help and that’s it and that’s why Trump has them so upset because Biden worked them all up to do aggressive support of open lovers of Nazism in Ukraine and now they’ve been blue-balled or feel the threat of it. Add on their decline, the loss of their neo-colonies in Africa, the drain of industry because of sanctions and its just even worse. And the only ones waiting in the wings to supplant these are the open admirers of fascism, the open far-right reactionary parties prepared to conduct a purge of immigrants, to scapegoat on that basis and build Europe up for war to be used as a tool of the US. They’ve been gaining in Germany, they’ve been gaining in France. German government pretended it might try to crush them but its hand was held back by the bourgeoisie who wish to have this tool available soon. It looks bleak.

Maybe the US hold on them slips but I think there’s a good chance that the European bourgeoisie without a much bigger stab in the back by the US (more than just abandoning Ukraine) still operate under the post-war delusion that they must maintain links with the US at all costs. More importantly they may be conscious enough of their class to recognize their position and understand the consequences of China rising unchallenged in the long-run and be willing to make a sacrifice as they have been doing for the safety of global capitalist hegemony even at the expense of their local profits.

I earnestly believe this will not have a chance to come to the point of causing tensions with France as they will be welded together, united in purpose to defend “the garden” in an attack on China or an attack on Africa to subjugate it again, to pull it away from BRICS and China and get to extracting again. That or a suicide run on Russia (after which they sit in the ruins of nuclear wasteland and pout at each other and the Americans and whine that the evil Russians ruined it all).

I really worry this is a stepping stone. They’ll next try and ban children’s toothpaste with fluoride (lower amounts than adult toothpaste due to the risk of kids swallowing it) and after that they’ll ban or demand much lower levels of fluoride in all toothpaste.

The only place you’ll be able to get it will be from a dentist and it’ll be deemed “medically unnecessary and experimental” so not covered by government insurance for the poor and possibly not by some scummy and especially short-sighted private dental plans (which are only really discount plans and a free teeth cleaning coupon anyways compared to regular non-teeth health insurance which actually covers procedures a lot of the time). The teeth of the poor will rot even more and serve as an even stronger class identifier.

I don’t normally think that removing pawns from the chessboard would meaningful change things but in this one instance I think if RFK got hit by a tidal wave of dewormer and/or dropped over dead from an overdose of the poison he takes this nonsense would stop. Yes they’d still be tearing down medicaid and still push some random woo bullshit but not all of this garbage this fast and this stridently.