CeCe Rogers on Facebook writes: "Two Black Tennessee lawmakers were physically escorted out of chambers this week while Republicans quietly held a hearing to approve gerrymandered maps that would eliminate the state's only majority-Black congressional district.
No referendum. No special election. No public vote.
Because they know what happens when voters actually get a say — just look at Virginia, where the people spoke so loudly that Republicans had to drag the courts in to override them.
This isn't new. During Reconstruction, Black Americans held more congressional seats than at any point in the prior 90 years of American history. And white supremacists spent the next several decades tearing that down, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, and voter intimidation.
150 years later, the same tools. Different suits.
The audacity of escorting Black lawmakers out of their own chambers while dismantling Black political representation, and then telling us the courts aren't political, is breathtaking. These are the same courts they're counting on to make it stick.
This is a coordinated, multi-front assault on Black Americans. And we need to say it exactly that plainly."
"What if we find a way to keep fetuses alive outside the womb" that already exists, it's called the NICU and it took decades of advancements in medical science and technology. it takes an entire team equipped with state of the art technology to keep a fetus alive outside the womb. because it cannot perform basic life-supporting functions like breathing on its own. this isn't an anti-NICU post tbc. I'm actually considering the nicu as an option after going back to school because I really like fetuses and babies, I think they're neat. but the fact remains that it takes an entire team of doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, and more to keep a micropreemie alive. and most abortions occur even before the point that it becomes possible at all. "viable" doesn't mean ready to be born. it means it is possible to keep it alive thanks to medical science developed by the same "abortionists" whose executions you're always calling for.
absolutely. and to add onto this, i was a nicu baby, and i was a late term abortion. when i was still in the womb i was dying inside my mother, so they had to induce her extremely prematurely to save our lives. there was a very high chance of me dying because they took me outside of the womb before they knew if i could survive on my own, but the chances of me and my mother dying if i stayed inside her were 100%.
the procedure to remove me is medically and legally a late term abortion. i was aborted, and it saved my life. if they hadn’t aborted me, my mother and i would both be dead, my siblings would have been left with a dead mother, and i would have never even gotten a chance to live a single day. and now, people are being denied this procedure and dying because it’s literally an abortion!! mothers and their babies are being killed because their doctors are not allowed to perform life-saving abortions.
on the same note, my sister was recently denied an abortion. which is to say, cleaning out the already dead fetus after she had a miscarriage from a wanted pregnancy. they refused treatment unless the DEAD fetus was actively killing her, because the procedure to remove it is medically and legally an abortion. they basically said to her “come back when you’re dying of an infection or sepsis or something, until then you just have to bleed out.” my sister could have died from this, people HAVE died from being denied abortions after having a miscarriage. if she was one of these people, my sister would have been dead, my mother would have to live the rest of her life without her daughter, and my nephew would have had to live the rest of his life without a mother.
sick and tired of people saying to me “yeah, but that’s different. you can’t really call those procedures an abortion, they’re not really an abortion.” yes it is. it’s an abortion. any procedure that entails unnaturally removing a fetus and/or baby from the womb before they’re sure it can survive outside of it is an abortion. if it wasn’t, people wouldn’t be being told that, sorry! we can’t do that! you’ll have to come back when you’re already dead. i was aborted, my mother had an abortion when she was pregnant with me, my sister needed an abortion after she had a miscarriage. all of these things are ABORTIONS! and now mothers and babies are being killed, murdered by these anti-abortionist fuckers and the laws they put in place to “save and protect poor, innocent lives!”
Hello Miss jigerpi, would you happen to have resources on trotskyism and anti-trotskyism? I am on the beginning of my studies on communism and ive seen a couple of people say thay theyre marxists and trotskysts, that trotsky was not an actual marxist, that marxism and leninism were opposites, etc. Sorry for my ramble and i don't mean to sound ignorant. But this communist experiments shit are crazy..
hi! no worries about ramble, this was perfectly coherent and i understand and appreciate the desire to learn on these things.
so firstly I will say, my own study of trotsky is less developed than I'd like it to be, largely because his ideas never struck me as having so much merit to warrant deep study in the first place, nor are they especially popular. so this reply is largely going to rely on sources which you can study on your own, rather than an indepth breakdown of my own.
to contextualize what I will later say from my position, lets first look at the positions of some influential communist. You're no doubt aware to some extent that Trotsky was unpopular within the USSR, but how about other socialist countries?
Quote from Fidel Castro, revolutionary and the first leader of socialist Cuba:
the Fourth International fixed it up so that that leader, who was ignorant of the profound problems of politics and of the history of revolutionary thought, would permit that agents of Trotskyism, about whom we do not have the slightest doubt that he is an agent of imperialism, to publish a newspaper which copies outright the program of the Fourth International. By doing this, the Fourth International committed a real crime against the revolutionary movement to isolate it from the rest of the people, to isolate it from the masses, when it contaminated it with the stupidities, the discredit, and the repugnant thing which Trotskyism today is in the field of politics.
Even though at one time Trotskyism represented an erroneous position, but a position in the field of political ideas, Trotskyism became during the following years a vulgar instrument of imperialism and reaction. This is the way these gentlemen think. For example, in relation to South Vietnam, where a broad revolutionary front has united the overwhelming majority of the people and various sectors of the population, has united them closely around the liberation movement in the struggle against imperialism. For the Trotskyists that is absurd; that is counterrevolutionary. Yet these gentlemen who serve imperialism have the gall to do such an unusual thing in the face of the facts and realities of history and against the revolutionary movement and to express themselves in this manner.
Quote from Ho Chi Mihn, revolutionary and the first president of socialist Vietnam, in communication with Communists in China:
Dearly beloved comrades,
In the past, in my eyes and those of a good number of comrades, Trotskyism seemed a matter of a struggle between tendencies within the Chinese Communist Party. That’s why we hardly paid it any attention. But a little before the outbreak of war, more exactly since the end of the year 1936 and notably during the war, the criminal propaganda of the Trotskyists opened our eyes. Since then, we have set ourselves to study the problem.
And our study has led us to the following conclusions:
(...)
3. The Chinese Trotskyists (like the Trotskyists of other countries) do not represent a political group, much less a political party. They are nothing but a band of evil-doers, the running dogs of Japanese fascism (and of international fascism).
4. In all countries, the Trotskyists give themselves fine names in order to mask their dirty work and banditry. For example: in Spain they call themselves the United Marxist Workers Party (POUM). Do you know that it’s they who constitute the nests of spies in Madrid in Barcelona and in other places in the service of Franco?
It is they who are organising the infamous ‘fifth column’, the espionage body of the army of the Italian and German fascists. In Japan, they call themselves the Marx-Engels-Lenin League (MEL). The Japanese Trotskyists lure youth into their league, then they denounce them to the police. They seek to penetrate the Japanese Communist Party with the aim of destroying it from within. To my mind, the French Trotskyists now organised around the Proletarian Revolution Group have settled on the aim of sabotaging the Popular Front. On this subject, I think you are surely better informed than I. Here in China, the Trotskyists are regrouping around formations such as The Struggle Against the Japanese, Culture and Red Flag.
5. The Trotskyists are not only the enemies of Communism, they are also the enemies of democracy and of progress. They are the most infamous traitors and spies.
Perhaps you have read the charges in the proceedings against the Trotskyists in the Soviet Union? If you have not read them, I advise you to read them and to get your friends to read them. This reading is very useful. It will help you to see the true repugnant face of Trotskyism and Trotskyists. Here, I have taken the liberty of extracting some passages directly concerning China.
Before the tribunal, the Trotskyist Rakovsky has sworn that, in 1930, when he was in Tokyo (as representative of the Soviet Red Cross) a person highly placed in the Japanese government said to him: “We are now expecting a change of strategy from the Trotskyists. I won’t enter into the details. I only want to tell you that we expect from the Trotskyists actions which favour our intervention in the affairs of China”.
Replying to the Japanese, Rakovsky said: “I will write to Trotsky on this subject". In December 1935, Trotsky sent his followers in China instructions in which he underlined several times this phrase: "Do not create obstacles to the Japanese invasion of China".
(...)
In September 1931, at the time of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, Japanese Security made contact with the first three. The two parties signed a pact: the Trotskyist group agreed not to advance any propaganda against the Japanese invasion. Japanese Secunty agreed to make over to the Trotskyists a sum of three hundred dollars monthly as well as other supplementary sums, according to the ‘results of the services rendered’.
From this moment, Chen Duxiu (Tran Doc Tu) and his accomplices immediately set to work. With the Japanese funds, they published magazines and satirical pamphlets to propagate ideas such as: ‘In occupying Manchuria, the Japanese wanted to rapidly settle the conflict and suspend it, they did not aim to make themselves masters of China’.
Scarcely had these ideas been propagated in the columns of their publications than Shanghai was attacked in turn in January 1932 by Japanese troops.
At this moment, what do the Trotskyists say? Do they recognise that they were wrong? Do they cease collaborating with the occupier? Absolutely not! While the soldiers of the 19th army spill their blood to defend the Fatherland, the Trotskyists, in acts as in words, continue to commit crime upon crime. On one side, they write: ‘The war for Shanghai doesn’t concern the people at all. It is not a case of a national revolutionary war. It is a case of imperialist war’. On the other side, they spread false rumours, put forward slogans of a defeatist character, gave away defence secrets, etc.
But that’s not all. Trotskyists such as Hoa Van Khoi and Cung Van Thu, in secret liaison with the police and the Japanese bosses, infiltrated into the workers’ strike at Shanghai and employed all means to sabotage the movement. To the point where they managed to have the most talented activists in the strike arrested.
There is a lot more in this source, but this is already a very long block quote, so I highly encourage you to read the rest yourself, its only a few pages (link above)
To answer the first bit of your ask from my own view, I would say that yes, most trotskyists would consider themselves marxists, but also that trotskyists have significant rifts from actually established marxist projects, and indeed "leninism" in particular. One of the first things that pushed me away from trotsky was his antisoviet practices, he was charged with treason, terrorism, and espionage, in collaboration with Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, by soviet courts. While the actual specifics of this is contentious, he was indicted in soviet court and never showed up to despute the claims - most of the contentions seemingly come down to "the dastardly lying communists made it up", and painting the courts as malicious. You can see the earlier quotes from Ho Chi Minh for some of the evidence presented in court, which personally I find rather damning despite being only a fraction of what was presented, and while this particular source is especially contentious, I would be remiss to not at least offer it [link], you can read and come to your own conclusions.
Personally, having investigated the USSR prior to hearing trotsky's ideas, and reading about how revolutionary the union was, how massively it helped people, how the claims about stalin being a dictator are fabricated (even admitted by the CIA themselves) about how they actually had more calories on average than US-americans, how the famines were regularly occuring before the USSR and the USSR is only blamed for "causing" them now because the were able to stop them from ever occuring again through industrialization, how they increased literacy rates and Physcial Quality of Life drastically, that they were the primary force against nazi germany, etc... hearing these anti-Soviet contentions from Trotsky immediately threw off alarm bells for me. I imagine many new Marxists who are not yet familiar with the reality of the soviet union, may find Trotsky's actions against the USSR to be inline with what they've been told about the union previously, and so be more inclined to support them, and view him charitably, but in many ways thats an artifact of anticommunism. This, as well as the rift between trotskyism and marxism-leninism, are covered in depth by the following article
Jeff KorolevTrotskyism: A Deformed Worker's Ideology; Or, a Reiteration of the Antagonistic History of Trotskyism and LeninismIntroductionLe
thank you to @stillnaomi for the source.
You may also find these of interest, though more supplimental- Trotskyism Counter-Revolution in Disguise, and Trotsky's Day in Court, both also given to me by stillnaomi
I could go on with some more analysis of his theory, but I'm not sure I'm the best person to do so. I will mention though, that its not just him or his followers which acted poorly at times, his theories are also rife with issues, such as the relatively nonsense notion of "permanent revolution", and divergence from marxist positions on several other matters, like rejecting the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, the alliance which resulted in the famous Hammer Sickle flag (Hammer for industrial proletarians, and Sickle for the peasantry). If you'd like to know more about trotsky's theories, you're welcome to read them on your own time and see what you think. He isn't entirely wrong about everything, and was nominally marxist several of the more basic ways, but his theoretical divergences from generally accepted marxist line are plentiful, and informed many of the most heinous acts he commit, which were not in fact just unrelated mistakes. His and his followers imperialist actions for example, come as a direct result of his theory on the national question and downplaying struggle against imperialism.
im already sick to death of this new wave of epstein conspiracy theories. He did not cunningly mastermind the rise of online fascism he met with poole because it boosted his self image as someone on the Cutting Edge of tech and science and told him some shit like "politics is the judo of the mind"
if i may add to your post, i'll go a step further. a lot of people became friendly with him/met up with him after finding out he was a sex trafficker, but i imagine that 99/100 of them did not do so in order to be participate in trafficking. the reality is much more banal and shitty: none of these people cared that he was a rapist who was hanging out with other rapists or who organised the rape of children. they mostly cared that he was rich, and that he had many friends in all kinds of places. they wanted to be closer to his world of influence and use his connections, they wanted to be part of the It Club. and frankly, like with near any in-group at any societal level, the vast majority of people will ignore allegations against a charismatic person who's in the higher ends of the hierarchy of said in-group (be it your local scene or sports club or industry etc)--because they want to climb up the ranks, and especially if the victims are people whose lives and whose words are already devalued (women, being trans, being poor, being racialized). just look at chomsky in his emails moaning about how MeToo went too far and how hysterical women lie about rape, to a convicted rapist! i suspect it's also why the epstein conspiracy theories present his victims not as they actually were--mainly working class teenagers, many of whom were racialized--but as nebulous babies and prepubescent children assumed to come from Good Families (white, middle class). in reality, had all of this come out at the time it happened and these victims been a lot more front and center, you know a lot of folks would accuse these girls of being sluts and whores for "allowing themselves" to be abused.
Hey I was the anon who asked about anarchists during the Spanish Civil War ( Sorry I forgot about the anon thing, it's been awhile since I read your about page 🤦♀️) If you want to answer it privately you can, I know that can be a sensitive topic and you always try to be fair when dealing with anarchists, which isn't always easy!
Thank you for resending! I already had the answer written out after an hour and a half of writing so I'm glad you did. If you want to reply to it, or follow up with another ask, or just dm me, I'm always open o77. That said, here's the original ask:
Generally speaking, I'm of the opinion that the anarchists' role in the defeat of the republic was one of the dominant ones, however I wouldn't go as far as some authors (such as the one I link below) or comrades and say that they and they alone were the cause of the Republic's fall. It is important to look at one's own mistakes with double the attention one gives their opponent's mistakes.
Militarily speaking, the anarchist columns were generally undisciplined and ineffective. They often stockpiled weapons and ammunition far from the front, expecting to have to fight the republic as well. On the front itself, they mostly sat still, letting the fascist side do as they pleased, ignoring orders from the republic, and often from their own parties/organizations.
Economically speaking, and first in the countryside, anarchists were excessive in executions to the point of losing favor among the peasantry, the vouchers that were introduced to replace money were only useful in the villages they were issued in, effectively disconnecting the villages from the towns, creating unnecessary poverty. Though their policies had some successes, these were exceptions to the rule. Their excesses and shortcomings in the countryside ended up turning some of the peasantry in the favor of the communists or the republican government as a whole. Their attempts to push forward their revolution also took away valuable weapons and volunteers from the front, compounding on their ineffectiveness in that regard.
In the industry, it is fair to say, using the figures given by the anarchists themselves, that the potential of Cataluña was completely squandered. Shells were produced but no artillery to fire them with, the few that were seeing the war passed in places without any fighting. Salaries in the factories were equal, but not equal between factories, and the gender wage gap was nevertheless enforced. It was FAI policy to pay women less for the same work. As with everything, the source I mention farther below goes into more detail with everything.
Lastly, the infighting. It seems that the FAI was much more predisposed to it than the CNT, that in multiple occasions held them back, such as when the FAI had planned an assault on the Bank of Spain in Madrid to get the gold for Cataluña, all while fascist troops were marching on Toledo. There are more notable examples; the 1937 revolt in Barcelona against the republic, and the attack carried out on communist and socialist forces by anarchist militias during the final retreat of 1939, on the orders of Casado, who had surrendered Madrid to Franco.
The evidence is damning against the effectiveness of anarchism in Spain. However, the mistakes and shortcomings on the republican side cannot be overlooked or minimized. Contrary to what the massively popular and trotskyist film Tierra y Libertad shows, the formalization of the Republican army and the integration of militias into it wasn't done soon or hastily enough. Militias, often stocked by untrained volunteers who spent more time debating orders than following them, wasted the few weapons and ammunition that did get to the front. This is a shared responsibility between these militias and the Republic that was unable to deal with them. Politically speaking, I have argued before and continue to hold that the entire popular front strategy was a complete misstep on the part of the PCE and of the Comintern. It should have been clear from the experience of 1934 that the Second Republic, as a bourgeois state, could not effectively and consistently be an anti-fascist element. The progressive biennial, as the 1931-33 period is called, was, on the one hand, not swift enough in its land and labor reforms for the day laborers, peasants and workers, and on the other, too swift in its application in a way that antagonized and radicallized the bourgeois and landowner classes. And this is just a cursory overview of the major limitations and faults on the Republican side.
The contextual cards were also simply stacked against the republic. All across Europe, anywhere that didn't find itself under a socialist government saw a meteoric rise of fascistic forces in lockstep with an almost systematic failure of the political leftwing: social-democrat parties, which in the interwar period all developed a radicallized left wing that approached the positions of communists, could not work through these divides to exert any kind of opposition, and often it seemed like the less radical wing of social-democracy was not very interested in opposition outside the halls of parliament. Communist parties, meanwhile, struggled to garner support outside the immediate leadup to the decisive conflicts, on top of the confused popular front strategy. The liberal democracies of the time, with regards to Spain, all showed tacit support for the insurrectionist side in the civil war. You can easily find sources that detail how the non-intervention agreement only gave a carte blanche for the very extensive material and military support sent by Germany and Italy, while slowing down the efforts of the USSR, and later on Mexico under pressure from the PCM, the only 2 countries that supported the Republic in any official capacity.
Perhaps Spain is seen as the one time in 1930s Europe that the rise of fascist movements could have been stopped because the coup d'etat failed and devolved into a civil war. However, I believe that it is because it evolved into a civil war that the Republic could not have won under reasonable "what ifs". The potential of anti-fascist forces at this time lie not in military capacity, as not even the USSR was ready to face any kind of involved open conflict in 1936, it lie in preventing the attempts of fascist movements at taking power, and it lie in the potential to recruit hundreds of thousands, if not millions, to their ranks. I don't find it useful to dwell excessively on the failures of anarchism as a communist, beyond as a historical argument against the merits of anarchism today. Anarchism grew roots in Spain before marxism did in the days of the first International, it had always been a political force in the country and it still is, so it seems quite useless and masturbatory to me to imagine a reality in which anarchists had not been a factor in the civil war. If they hadn't been, enough would have changed about Spanish political history that the 30s would be quite different. Some day I'd like to investigate on the apparent Spanish propensity to anarchist and adjacent ideologies (the cantonalist revolts of the 1st Republic come to mind), but I don't have an answer to that question yet.
As for sources, there is a good english language one: Spain: The Unfinished Revolution, by Arthur H. Landis. I've pasted at the end of the post some of the quotes from his book that go over the anarchists' work in the civil war, if you're interested. I also recommend just reading the book, and the quotes I've pasted below are from these pages.
Before these, a quick overview of acronyms and initialisms:
FAI: Iberian Anarchist Federation. During the war, they were organized with the
CNT: National Labor Confederation. An anarcho-syndicallist union
POUM: Unified Worker's Marxist Party. A trotkyist-slanted party that created some militias. Orwell notoriously fought with them, leaving a bad impression on his co-combatants. There is proof it was also effectively infiltrated by the MI6
PCE: Communist Party of Spain. Created as a section of the Communist international in 1921.
On July 24, the F.A.I. sponsored Committee of Militias organized the first volunteer column to leave for Aragón. It numbered 3000 men and was under the command of Bunenaventura Durruti. The ruophoria was such that to the F.A.I. the taking of Zaragoza at that moment was looked upon as but a military "paseo" [cakewalk]. They even envisioned a march to the Asturias [sic.] for a link with the C.N.T. in Oviedo and Santander; upon which a firm base for the extension of F.A.I. power to the rest of Spain would then be complete.
[...]
Other than the personal courage of Durruti and many of his men, the F.A.I. conception of organization seriously reduced the efficiency of the column. And slogans pertaining to the advantages of "disciplined indiscipline" were no help. Indeed, Anarchist excesses in almost every area provided no recruits for the attack on Zaragoza and created a situation in which hatred against themselves was generated among the populace of the villages.
Franz Borkenau who spent precisely this period with the Anarchist columns in Aragón writes that: "The policy of the Durruti column was really unpleasant. It seems that amidst the general enthusiasm of the peasants for the Republican cause that they have found the strange secret of how to make themselves hated. They had to leave the village of Pina for no other reason but the silent resistance of the peasants, which they were unable to overcome. It seems that they had been ruthless, both in requisitions for the militia and in executions of both real and pretended "fascists", that they very nearly provoked a rebellion. Neither had the executions yet stopped. They are, it is said, a more or less regular feature of the activities of Durruti's men...".
Borkenau then writes of the inactivity that developed; of the divisive, irresponsible and totally mendacious charges of the P.O.U.M. that the "Madrid Government was handicapping the operations." Of the real reasons for the failure to capture Zaragoza, he says: "It is quite obvious that nothing of the sort will happen not because of treason in high quarters (the Poumist charge), but from sheer inefficiency and incompetence all along the line."
Would that it had been only incompetence that prevented the fall of Zaragoza: for there was treason. But not from the embattled Madrid Government. The Anarchist cadres, plus those of the P.O.U.M., being by far the majority of the troops in Aragón were responsible for this new inactivity -- a situation which allowed the enemy to do as he pleased on other fronts with no threat to his rear.
[...]
Other than the seemingly sudden F.A.I. realization of its own inadequacies in terms of offensive action against a small but disciplined enemy — inadequacies that could easily have been overcome — they were now faced with another moment of truth.
In direct proportion to the growing enthusiasm for the generally correct policies of the Socialists and Communists of the Center Front, and the P.S.U.C./U.G.T. in Catalonia and Aragon, Anarchist strength was waning. They could recoup a certain amount of popularity, perhaps, by capturing Zaragoza. But they might also be seriously weakened in the process — and at the expense of strengthening their enemy, i.e., the Government of the Spanish Republic.
Ergo, hold the line Do nothing. And wait! But wait for what?
Anarchist private documents and books written after the war give some indication of this problem, and of the grave responsibility of the F.A.I. in what can be described as nothing short of treason to the Spanish people and the Government of the Popular Front.
Referring to the situation, Santillan states candidly that, “We can no longer conceal the fact that while at the front itself, we had but 30,000 rifles (and perhaps as many as 24 batteries, 100 heavy guns) in the rear, in the power of the organizations, we had an additional 60,000 rifles with more ammunition than was ever in the proximity of the enemy.”
From this same fountain of information — the most authoritative in this case — we read that the F.A.I./C.N.T. had decided that their principal cadres were not to go to the front to organize and direct the fight. Rather, they were to be held in the rear, conserved, as it were, for use against the other parties after the war had been won.
“If the leaders of the Libertarian organizations,” wrote Santillan, “had ever seriously resolved to send all their armament, their war material and their best men to the front — the war would easily have been over in a few months.”
[...]
And finally the explanation of treason — if such can be explained — in the following words, “To understand what was done in March of 1939, in Madrid and Levante (when the Anarchist troops of Mera attacked the Communists and Socialists at the request of the Casado-Besteiro Junta and opened the front to Franco), we must return to what was done in Catalonia in March of 1938 (when the Aragon front was broken with little or no Anarchist resistance), if not to May and June of 1937 (the rising in Barcelona against the Government). We had to free ourselves of any responsibility within the government; though the F.A.I. alone could not cause rebellion against the government, since that was not in harmony with the C.N.T.”
Onto the rear:
In each village thereafter Anarchist power was incorporated into a committee of the above organization [Comité de Nueva Estructuración Social de Aragón, Rioja y Navarra]. These "committees" took over the lands, the goods, and the animals of the peasantry — even from the poor. The peasants were then forced to work for a salary — "equal for everybody," and all submitted to the vigilance of the armed groups of the F.A.I.
In most cases money was done away with. The committees issued vouchers to be used only in the villages where issues. In this way the interlocking economy of town and village was destroyed — a forced return to a primitive economy, in which each village was thrust back upon its own resources. All silver and hard money was given over to the F.A.I. committee in exchange. Little of this "loot," for it can only be defined as that, was ever seen again.
Juan Peiró, one of the outstanding leaders of the C.N.T., and F.A.I., refers to the disillusion and resultant apathy of the peasantry as a result of these acts. “Does anyone believe,” he writes, “that through acts of violence an interest in or a desire for socialization can be awakened in the minds of our peasantry? Or perhaps by terrorizing it in this fashion it can be won over to the revolutionary spirit prevailing in the towns and cities?”
“The gravity of the mischief that is being done compels me to speak clearly. Many revolutionaries from different parts of Catalonia after conquering their respective towns have tried to conquer the countryside, the peasantry. Have they tried to achieve this by informing the peasantry that the hour of its emancipation from the social exploitation to which it has been subjected year after year has arrived? No! Or have they tried to accomplish this by carrying to the countryside, to the consciousness of the peasant, the spirit and the moral standards of the revolution? No, they have not done that either. When they have gone into the countryside, carrying with them the torch of the revolution, the first thing they have done has been to take away from the peasant all means of self-defense ... and having achieved this, they have robbed him even of his shirt.”
[...]
For, paradoxically, though Catalonia was the heartland of F.A.I. control, its influence did not extend to the Catalan peasantry. Gerald Brenan, reflecting upon this phenomenon, writes that, “The Anarchists stood for a system of collectivization of agricultural workers which was well suited to conditions in Andalucía But the greater part of Andalucía fell at once into Nationalist hands, and when the Anarchists of the large industrial towns attempted to impose collectivization upon Catalan peasants and Valencian rice growers, the met with strong opposition. The peasants, looking around for someone who would defend them against this unwanted "revolution," found their champion in the Communists."
On the other hand there can be no doubt that in many areas, towns and villages, the idea of Libertarian Communism was met with enthusiasm and support. And under the guidance of concerned and honest leadership, actually worked and worked well. The valley of the Llobregat would be an example of this limited success. The point is, however, that these were the exception and not the norm.
[...]
Witness the rest of Spain in which the greater part of the land had also been drawn into the collective system — but not with the program of “Libertarian Communism,” and not as a result of a village meeting in which armed men dictated the form and procedure whereby the villagers would rearrange their lives. The Spanish peasantry of Castile and Estremadura, and indeed all of loyal Spain — inclusive of the Anarchists of those zones — had been generally free to decide their own procedures in open discussion and in democratic assembly. And in the end, though the villages tilled the land collectively, their clothes remained their own, as did their chickens and animals and household articles, and the money shared as a result of harvests sold, was the money of the Spanish Republic and not a stamped voucher issued by strangers from a city fifty kilometers away.
[...]
The agriculture of both Catalonia and Aragon, beneath the dictates of the F.A.I., suffered to the point of ruin. Surface areas of regions under tillage fell between 20 to 30 percent within the first year. Agricultural products diminished proportionately so that a zone which in the past had been completely self-supporting, was now forced to import foodstuffs to live. Simultaneously with this the corresponding and interrelated economy of the areas — concomitant with the provisioning of the cities — was almost totally destroyed.
[...]
Within two weeks of the total application of Libertarian Communism in Aragon, collectivized businesses became vacuums of empty stores and warehouses, creating a serious supply problem. The textile industry, the produce industry and in general, all light industry in Catalonia, also collectivized by the Anarchists, refused to accept the vouchers and other paper money given out by the "Committees" in Aragón. They demanded be paid in the coin of the Republic.
[...]
The Anarchists forgot, or never knew, the simple, elemental reality, that production is the decisive aspect of any active economy; if you do not produce there is nothing to distribute. They put down the problems of production, concentrating solely, in their demagoguery, upon their programs for “equal distribution.” In fact this highly touted “equality” didn’t apply either, since salaries differed from one factory to another. The workers collected according to the fortunes and the reserves of their particular factory, and were continually subjected to the caprices of the omnipotent Committees. When the reserves were spent the F.A.I. then went to the State to ask that it subsidize the payrolls.
This process of applied egalitarianism went to such extremes that actors and entertainers collected the same as the cleaning woman in the theater. And if this sounds inspiring to “Women’s Liberation,” know this: equality stopped with the differentiation between the sexes. The F.A.I. maintained the principle that the wages of woman workers would continue to be inferior to those of men, though they did the same work.
[...]
The industrial might of Catalonia, with a metalurgical and chemical indsutry equal to that of some of the most advanced countries, was sufficient to have provided all the small arms — rifles, machine guns, mortars and cartridges, plus all manner of artillery shells, that the Republic needed.
The Anarchists, who for the first critical year of the war, controlled this industry, and in effect sabotaged its potential for the war, will forever share the guilt along with the capitulationists and the defeatists, for the final Franco victory.
D. Santillán boasts that at the end of the three months they were producing approximately 4,000 shells per month. This is at less than 150 per day; less than the total potential of any medium sized machine shop. He also boasts of 1,000 kilos of T.N.T. being produced per day, after one year, and 600,000 fuses for shells and grenades during that year. And this was done, he writes, with approximately 150,000 workers in the war industry. If his production figures reveal nothing more than the total waste of manpower here, one will have some idea of the tragedy of the Spanish Republic Where were the rifles and the small arms So desperately needed? There is no mention anywhere of this kind of production in Catalonia Any applied statistics will show that the zone was capable of producing these weapons in the tens, if not in the hundreds of thousands. But this was not done, so that in the end, when Catalonia fell, Alvarez del Vayo could say that the remnants of the Peoples Army in its retreat across the French frontier, had but 30,000 rifles to defend itself against a Franco Army — in Catalonia alone — of over 350,000 men inclusive of five complete Italian divisions.
Absolving themselves of any guilt in the matter by simply hiding the facts from the world — and they had plenty of help in this — they then, in what can only be described as an act of supreme arrogance, denounced the Central Government of the Popular Front for not issuing Soviet arms to their units in Aragón this, while the Madrid militia battalions were bleeding to death before the guns of the Army of Africa and the bombs of the Condor Legion; while Málaga fell, and while the Fascist onslaught in the valley of the Jarama and before Guadalajara was being desperately contained. “It is obvious,” they announced pontifically, and ignoring any vestige of reality, “that these arms are being given only to Communist led units to enhance the prestige and power of the P.C.E.”
Last Thursday it was 50 years since Franco died and while I didn't post anything because I was busy + taking a break, if I wasn't I still wouldn't have because the date and the occasion feels simply empty. Our Congress hosted an interpretative dance about political concessions and dialogue and shit like that, while even after almost 9 years now of social-democratic government (ouch), things regarding "memory" aren't that meaningfully different. For the occasion the state broadcaster released an interactive map of every known mass grave from the civil war, either excavated or still untouched, but did it really have to be 50 years after the guy died of old age? Is it done now because they actually care about the dictatorship or because of the date?
The Falange is still a legal party that is allowed to play Cara al Sol (fascist hymn) in their electoral propaganda on TV. Almost all of the work done regarding the repression suffered up to and after the approval of the Constitution is done only as things to "remember", as if the victims still aren't alive, and as if that was enough to educate new generations about the dictatorship (it clearly isn't). The General Security Directory, hosted in the very center of Madrid in the building of what is now the regional government, tortured communists and organized workers in its basement even after Franco died, during the so-called Transition, and there is no such thing resembling even the most basic form of "memory". Last year I spoke with men and women who had been tortured in there. The most infamous officers who carried out these tortures are also still alive, living in comfy homes, never coming close to facing any sort of punishment or attempt at remorse for what they did.
This is very unstructured, maybe because like I said, this topic feels quite empty for me. Every day I study in an university built with tunnels that connect to the nearest police station, whose halls were built to accommodate police charges on horseback, and all we get are two 5 minute videos from 20 years ago shown in some basement for 2 months. Half this country would prefer if everything was forgotten, and all the other half wants to do is remember as if it was all just a bad memory that passed. Is it any surprise my classmates in middle school hailed Franco with an outstretched arm? There is nothing to celebrate 50 years after he died. What could you celebrate about an episode that was quietly put away in a cabinet instead of being thrown out by a generation whose mouths overflowed with "democracy", "compromise" and "forgiveness". The major right wing party was founded by francoist ministers and pointing this out is seen as a gotcha rather than an acknowledgement of the shallowness of that Transition that is lionized more every 5 years. My grandfather's mother was almost taken to a concentration camp during the war and all he ever got to do was stomp on Franco's marble grave. Most people don't even know there were concentration camps.
Something that the "left" "wing" of Spain also fails to properly reckon with is that, for most Spanish (the meaning of "Spanish" that the dictatorship supported) people, the years under Franco really weren't that bad. Sure, you had rationing into the 50s, but any country in Spain's position after the 30s would have struggled a lot for at least a decade after the war. Funnily enough what allowed Spain to begin a modernization and to be able to offer both consumer goods and decently accessible livelihoods was the opening up to US involvement and the IMF's stabilization plan of 1959. The social housing the state built was not good and not serviced as it should have been, but you could also make a similar criticism of any of the European post-war reconstruction housing. I'm not attempting to whitewash some aspects of the dictatorship, I usually find myself more critical of the latter half of the dictatorship than the general narrative. The move towards technocrats leading the government in the 60s and pushing away the military falangists did not make the "late francoism" any less fascistic or repressive as it is often put. And in some aspects the very last years were just as repressive if not more, because it had to beat down a strengthened opposition movement. The work CCOO and the PCE did in those later years that had to be beat down just was not possible in the early years because of the exile and devastation post-ww2 and the "betrayal" of the western liberal democracies that refused to intervene in Spain after the world war in Europe finished.
Back to the point of this reblog, even still, most people lived fine in the dictatorship. It is a necessity for a fascist movement that succeeds that it actually positions a social majority (or creates that majority) at an advantageous position, at the expense of the lower end of society's ordered hierarchy. It is probably unstable because of this but in the span of decades it can maintain itself. But when it comes to "democratic memory", understandably, all of the focus is placed on the victims. The syndicallists, anarchists and communists tortured, the students assassinated, the intellectuals exiled, the colonies kept under the boot. But that memory is, I think, devalued and disrespectful to those victims when it is not acknowledged that a majority of Spanish people were not opposed to those things because they did benefit from it. My maternal grandfather who kept his wife afraid of the outside world and his children punished by prohibiting reading books was probably a big fan of a state that disallowed women from opening bank accounts or having jobs without husband/father approval, and that left any parenting "choices" shy of outright physical neglect as his sole jurisdiction, even if he never said so. And the maternal side of my family probably did not wonder much about the Saharan phosphate mines that fertilized the beloved Raff tomatoes grown in their province. Just like most Spaniards now don't think a lot about the migrant workforce from North Africa who sweat 11 hour days in the plastic greenhouses of El Ejido.
Franco agony (he never dies in Spain) - Mirror Noir (2010)
Calling particurally oppressive marriages (for lack of a better term) 'historical marriages' is one of the many annoying statements that ~western~ feminist make that is deeply betraying of issues with their current conception of the patriarchy and women's global status.
Such linguistic positioning of these marriages works to completely relegate them to the books of history, when they are in fact alive and well within all nations; yes including within the imperial core and the countries these type of feminist tend to inhabit. While how prevent these marriages (ie where the woman is more similar to owned property than equal partner) are does vary country to country as the situation of women's rights globally is not equal, to relegate it to the past is actively idealistic and deeply downplays the postion of women in heterosexual marriages to this day.
Furthermore, the 'historical' label implies that countries where these marriages are more prevelent are more culturally 'backwards' for still having historical oppressions that 'The West Has Shaken Off Long Ago'. Which, when the rhetoric of Women's Rights is continually used by imperial core countries to justify intervention and war in the global south, to even inadvertently bolster such rhetoric is exceedingly dangerous and shows a unexamined bias and internalisation of ideas of Western Progress vs The Backwards Other.
If you (you here is addressing imperial core feminists) seriously think these types of marriages are 'historical' or saw no issue with labelling them as such I highly suggest you look deeper around you at the postion of women in heterosexual marriage within your own country and internationally. This site loves to pretend misogyny is a lesser issue or oppression, or at worst even a solved one. You need to resist this type of thinking and realise that women are far more oppressed than you often realise.
Also it really ignores places and even individuals in the past who did not have these types of relationships. Pick a time period and there were people somewhere who didn't buy into it, or whose local traditions did not include it. Acting like it was a universal way of life at any point of time is a very reductive perspective on the past and poor understanding of humanity in general.
There is no heterosexual marriage that has not occurred under patriarchy, both in the past and today. To say that there where people in the past who 'didn't buy into it' or 'whose local traditions did not include it' [it here being the inherently sexist role of marriage within patriarchal societies] is to claim that people can separate themselves from the patriarchy in a way that is simply not possible. The patriarchy is (despite your comment) a universal dynamic and motivator for/ in marriages. This is especially true in contexts where a woman's marriage in far more akin to a deed of sale than a partnership. you cannot 'opt out' of the patriarchy, no matter how 'loving and equal' you think some partnership of old was or some tradition might seem to YOU - a bystander with no historical rigor as evidenced by your comment.
You are projecting a modern bias that marriage can be/ is For Love (a relatively new and novel way of viewing and incantating female/male partnership and marriage might I add) on to the past and having it confirmed through misreading material.
Furthermore, your assertation that some people could not 'buy into it' and 'opt out of it' implies that woman (historically and now) are complicit within their own oppression for 'choosing' to not simply 'opt out' of these arrangements. You are blaming woman for the coercive power of patriarchy in your pseudo-analysis, weather you realise it or not.
I highly suggest you reconsider your positions and gain a better awareness of your own knowledge gaps on this subject, as you clearly show that you currently are not capable of doing solid historical analysis of the position of woman historically and today within marriage. Nor do you have an awareness of how the rhetoric of Marriage as Love was formed, or how the patriarchy is a universal that cannot be 'opted out of' - unless of course you've found definitive evidence of a truly matriarchy society for the first time ever. Then by all means, send me your publications.
What happened with Operation Osoavkahim, when the ussr took in Nazi engineers? Is it one of the mistakes of the ussr, or one of the "this is being over emphasised by bourgouis media" things
"Operation Osoaviakhim" (the name is a CIA moniker and was never used by the Soviets internally or externally) refers to the transfer of German specialists and equipment from the Soviet occupation zone to the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of WWII. While many of these specialists (primarily those with Nazi backgrounds) were treated as prisoners of war and their labor considered part of German war reparations (such reparations being agreed upon by all Allied powers), some were also volunteers and thus not part of any "operation" despite their frequent inclusion as such in Western accounts. The Soviets made no effort to shelter any former Nazis from justice, labor as war reparations was public knowledge, and by 1958 all specialist PoWs (barring the few who died while in Soviet custody) had been repatriated back to East Germany.
In contrast, the Germans recruited by the US via Operation Paperclip were explicitly hired by the US government as employees and treated as immigrants to the United States, with most becoming naturalized citizens and many former Nazis among them avoiding trial or punishment. The US frequently covered up the Nazi backgrounds of these specialists to get around government policies barring the immigration and employment of Nazis, and the operation was kept hidden from the public as much as possible.
So even barring the class difference between labor in service of the USSR versus labor in service of the US, there were clear differences between the two operations stemming from the difference in attitudes towards the Nazis between the two countries. It is important to remember as well that the Soviets were aware of the strategic importance of the knowledge and skills of these individuals and that the US and UK were actively seeking them out at the same time. Both sides were operating with this same awareness and trying to deprive the other of access to not just specialists but also German equipment, workshops, laboratories, etc. which were effectively being divided between them during the Allied occupation of Germany. Had the Soviets not made an effort to secure specialists, they would have likely gone over to the West and effectively contributed to GDR "brain drain".
I never understood this argument. First off, its never accompanied by a source. Second off, if you look into it, of course more people went East-West, but many people (millions) went from West-East. And finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the end, it was no longer their state.
But its not politically convenient to talk about who went where and why.
Now why would East Germans travel to West Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Immidiately when they tore the Wall down, well obviously they went West. The protest was to remove the Wall, they wanted unity and peace, walking across a border is not equivalent to moving there or endorsing the government or whatever this argument is meant to convey. There was no mass leaving when the wall came down, just mass crossing.
If we are talking about the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall & reunification & the dissolution of East Germany, let me give you an excerpt from a timeline. (TLDR at the end).
03/06/89 - The Monday protests begin, only 27% of East Germans want reunification. 86% want socialist reforms and only 5% want capitalism.
03/07/89 - Before reunification is proposed, West German banks demand 180b DM from East German VEBs. Many VEBs go bankrupt and close.
24/10/89 - Erich Hoencker is removed from office before his term is over and replaced by Egon Krenz.
09/11/89 - The Berlin Wall falls.
06/12/89 - Egon Krenz is replaced by Manfred Gerlach as chairman of the state council of East Germany.
19/12/89 - The SED party is dissolved.
05/04/90 - Manfred Gerlach is removed from his position and the role of chairman of the council of ministers is abolished. Sabine Bergmann-Pohl becomes the interim leader until West Germany can fully occupy and force the East out of existence.
14/06/90 - 71% of East Germans are against unified Germany joining NATO.
17/06/90 - The Treuhand is formed, made of West German capitalists who immediately fire 2.5m/4m East Germans, abandon factory towns, and sell 95% of businesses to foreigners. In some cases, VEBs sold for as little as 1 dm, much the same as Germanisation efforts in Nazi Germany which sold Jewish businesses to Hitler’s friends at very low prices.
30/06/90 - West Germany forces a currency union before reunification at a 1;1 conversion rate (despite the honest conversion rate being 1;4.5).
16/07/90 - Pre-Unified Germany is approved to join NATO.
12/09/90 - The Zwei plus Vier Vertrag is signed, finalising reunification and naming the new German state as the legal successor of West Germany, essentially disregarding all of East German diplomacy, and coupled with the fact that East Germany was not dissolved yet and the West German Chancellor was elected on 01/10/82, & the President was elected 01/07/84, meant that East Germans had no say in their own state until after reunification, on 27/10/98 & 01/07/94 respectively. And civilians had absolutely no say in reunification anyway regardless of being from East or West Germany.
03/10/90 - East Germany is dissolved.
04/10/90 - Germany sacks 75.000 teachers with the excuse that they had been working for the East German state.
05/10/90 - Germany legally nullifies the East German housing trade, making roughly 50% of former East Germans homeless.
02/12/90 - Federal elections take place in Germany, the most popular East German political parties were not options despite there being no legal basis to ban them.
TLDR: So with all of this poverty, unemployment, governmental instability, lack of democracy, why wouldnt you leave.
Didnt communist germany famously drug thsir sports players???
The lab often accused of doping East German athletes (Kreischa) was approved by the International Olympic Committee, plus very few East German athletes failed drug tests.
While it is true East Germany did incredibly well in the olympics, notably in 1976 where they won 40 gold medals to West Germany's 10, that is not evidence of doping.
Source: Wikipedia, I spent a few hours last year scouring Wikipedia to come up with these figures.
Here is a lil graph I made (it took me an hour 💀) where you can see even after reunification, East German trained athletes outperformed former West Germans.
Maybe the next cope will be that the StaSi produced a drug that was so strong it stayed in your system forever.
Interesting addition, after reunification there was a spike in West German/United German medals won at the olympics, which dropped after 2004. 2004 was also the last year where all solo athletes raised in Germany were from either East or West Germany, meaning East Germans were bringing up the German average.
Source: West German total medals 1952-1988, Reunified German total medals 1992-2004, German medals since East German athletes became too old to participate 2008-2024.
24, 10, 13, 24, 26, 40, 39, 0, 59, 40
82, 65, 56, 49, 41
44, 42, 37, 33
Maybe when I have more time I will add in these numbers as a graph.
West Germany was better than East Germany because of the Stasi and they killed people at the Berlin Wall
You say this like West Germany didnt have the Bundesnachrichtendienst or Verfassungsschutz.
The thing about this is we know everything the Stasi ever did since their country was destroyed, however the Bundesnachrichtendienst & Verfassungsschutz still have classified files (famously even about Eichmann).
The Enquete Kommission was a investigation into the Stasi post-unification, it found that the stasi never murdered or assassinated anyone; and through the victim categories of deaths in custody, witholding of medical aid & forced adoptions that only 20 StaSi agents were guilty of any of those, and a quick google search tells us the StaSi had around 91,000 agents. Which is less than a third of their agents. The Enquete Kommission also discovered not one single case of torture using the catrgories of; drugging, radioactive radiation exposure, or electrical shocking.
Source: Deutscher Bundestag, 1994, Enquete-Kommission Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland, p.229 https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/12/078/1207820.pdf
Anon now seems confused about the Grenzpolizei & Grenztruppen and they appear to be refering to a popular lie; the Grenztruppen firearm law. §27 of Gesetz über die Staatsgrenze der DDR was often used as defence by Grenztruppen when they were put on trial.
To summarise
It may only be used as a last resort if other means fail
It may only be used in the case of a criminal act being committed (such as border crossers becoming violent with Grenztruppen & Grenzpolizei, or illegal border crossing)
It may only be used after Grenztruppen give warning
It is illegal if civilians are nearby, and if the criminal is a child
And Grenztruppen must provide first aid immidiately after firing in a non-lethal way (as such if somebody died of being shot by Grenztruppen, they were arrested for murder)
I dont think this was at all just, however I also dont think it was *as* evil as these people portray it as. After the StaSi discovered NATO plans for invasion of the DDR, they installed landmines at the Berlin Wall. Landmines have the potential to kill or maim others in the vicinity meaning it was highly important to prevent illegal border crossers who may trigger the landmines.
The Freie Universität Berlin published a study in 2017 on deaths at the Berlin Wall. The conclusion was that 37 border crossers & deserters & West German border guards & civilians who were shot by East German Grenztruppen (all of which were prosecuted) are victims of the Wall, in addition to 128 accidents & suicides & arrests near the border & deaths after relocation from the border & deaths of former Grenztruppen & Grenzpolizei, 100 elderly civilian heart attacks, 17 Grenztruppen & Grenzpolizei & civilians shot by deserters or border crossers, 14 unspecified unsourced deaths, 5 border crossers who went missing while crossing by boat, 3 criminals given the death penalty in another country (unclear why this is related to the Wall) , 2 civilians shot crossing into the East.
I would disagree with the characterisation of anyone outside of the 37 being considered as victims, but that is enough for me to be anti-§27.
West Germany has no such investigation or study against them, despite evidence showing they shot at border crossers too, including literal children.
Source: Myrdal, 1988, Ett femtiotal. Stockholm: Askelin & Hägglund, p. 15 https://runeberg.org/jmef/0015.html
And despite not all of the Bundesnachrichtendienst & Verfassungsschutz archives being publicly available they are still far more evil than the StaSi.
Crimes of the Bundesnachrichtendienst:
Der Spiegel Affäre, spying on & arresting journalists for being anti-rearmament
Absorbing Dienstelle 114 into the BND, an organisation created to recruit former Nazis to spy on leftists & pacifists
Employing Klaus Barbie
Employing Gudrun Himmler (daughter of Heinrich & Margarete Himmler, and wife of Wulf Dieter Burwitz of the NPD)
Employing Otto Skorzeny
Employing Otto von Bolschwing
Employing Silberbauer, the SS officer who arrested Anne Frank
Collaborating with the CIA
Purchasing Crypto AG to spy on civilians & governments around the world (instrumental in the coup of Allende, the Falklands war, Operation El Dorado Canyon & the US invasion of Panama)
28% of employees in 1946 being former Nazis
Collaborating with Stille Hilfe
Collaborating with Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit
Employing Bjorn Hornschau
Employing Elona B
Source: CIA, 2007, draft working paper, chapter 9, In Hindsight, p.36 https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA%20AND%20NAZI%20WAR%20CRIM.%20AND%20COL.%20CHAP.%201-10%2C%20DRAFT%20WORKING%20PAPER_0010.pdf
Crimes of the Verfassungsschutz:
Firing the first head, Otto John, for being anti-renazification
Replacing John with Hubert Schrübbers, who sent people to Auschwitz and served in the SS, SA, Wehrmacht & British Secret Service.
Spying on journalists (Päetsch whistleblower)
297 high officers of the BfV being former Nazis
Spying on journalists, again (Journalisten Skandal)
Source: De La Motte & Green, 2015, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise, p. 21 https://ia600605.us.archive.org/7/items/StasiStateOrSocialistParadise/StasiStateOrSocialistParadi-JohnGreen.pdf
I'm sure there is much more I am missing. So PLEASE reblog with extra info!
December 12, 2025 - The United Nations voted to declare December 14 2025 the first International Day against Colonialism in All Its Forms and Manifestations.
The proposal was adopted by a recorded vote of 116 in favour to 2 against (Israel, United States) with 54 abstentions (mostly current or former European colonial powers and their closest allies). [link]/[link]
Hey I just wanted to say that your antizionism has ventured quite a bit into antisemitism and I would implore you to follow more antizionist Jews specifically. The antizionist cause is righteous, but there is a shocking amount of historical revisionism happening that does have roots in antisemitism. On a last note I saw that post you reblogged criticizing that “Amsterdam is like Iran for Jews” graphic, I just want to remind you of where Anne Frank had to hide, which is the same place a pogrom occurred last year. (Iran does have a very solid Jewish population though, so valid criticism there.) keep fighting the good fight, and I hope this didn’t sound confrontational.
A pogrom did not happen last year in Amsterdam.
Fascist Israeli football hooligans spent two days singing songs about killing Palestinian children, ripping down Palestinian flags of locals homes, attacking people in the streets for wearing keffiyehs or Palestine flag pins, and drunkenly attacking taxi drivers. People organized after that to put a stop to it and attacked the Maccabi hooligans and kicked the shit out of them, as they deserved.
Here's [one video] looking at what really happened, that includes interviews with local antizionist Jewish people from Amsterdam and their view on what happened, and [another video] looking at how the "pogrom" propaganda story was spread.
I watched all this happen live over those several days, specifically following accounts of local antizionist Jewish Amsterdammers making it incredibly clear that the "pogrom" story was a complete lie. The propaganda was so bizarrely blatant that I think it actually had a somewhat significant effect on how the Dutch public viewed the genocide and the way it was being reported by the press in our country and internationally.
I do know where Anne Frank had to hide, but maybe you forget that the Netherlands isn't under occupation by Nazi Germany any more, which was a pretty significant factor in Anne Frank having to hide. In any case that does not really have anything to do with a far-right zionist organization saying "Amsterdam is like Iran for Jews" in 2024 because a bunch of fascist hooligans got an ass-kicking.
If there's something specific I say that is antisemitic feel free to call it out, as some of my lovely antizionist Jewish mutuals have done in the past, and I will be sure to think more critically about it in the future to avoid repeating the same mistake.
I like how the Dutch police actually confirmed that it was these Jewish supremarcists that started it, in fact, it was so bad, even the British police were consulted about it, hence why they took enough measure not to allow these Hitlerites inside Birmingham.
It should tell you just how much Liberal Zionists are so bent on defending a bunch of their ultra-nationalist counterparts, despite the claim that they oppose them.
I think it's kinda telling that the three bloggers on here who are most supportive of the idea of russophobia being an axis of material oppression are all both ethnic/religious minorities AND from the donbass.
Like with all due espect to them i think you ladies are extending undue solidarity to us slavic russians in russia haha.
"russophobia", while real, is best understood as like a foreign policy current in western nations I think, basically the only countries where russians are materially opressed for being russian are Ukraine (because it has 4 nazi battalions in its army) and maybe Estonia (because of the whole selective citizenship thing). And even then it affects Russian ethnic minorities way more (especially considering how much russophobia in those countries relies on painting russians as being uniquely asiatic in nature)
throwing my hat in the ring here in the least malicious way possible
i think that while its true that the countries where russians & russian ethnicised people are systematically oppressed by they government are limited, i also don’t think the outgrowth of russophobia into the west and other countries, partially because of those countries, can be ignored.
ukraine’s persistent anti russian propaganda aiming at drawing attention away from the ongoing genocide they were committing & demonising its victims (russians & russian speaking people who were often ethnicised as russian) & pre-existing russophobic sentiment, resulted in a massive uptick of attacks & harassment perpetrated against russians overseas. there has been ongoing vandal attacks against russian churches, including some being burnt down. i think back to that dw article in 2022 which described a a russian boy at a cologne high school being held down & beaten by his classmates, someone trying to set fire to a russian school in berlin & german adults shouting at children on the bus because they were speaking to each other in russian.
even before 2022 when a lot of this rhetoric which honestly already existed in the public conscience became acceptable, a report published by the ministry of employment & the economy in finland showed that job seekers with russian names with the exact same qualifications & work experience had to send in twice as many applications as potential hirers with finnish names before obtaining an interview. russians have always been portrayed as some sort of evil or unhuman in western media, that absolutely influences how people perceive & treat the russians that live there.
this year the czech senate passed a law that barred specifically russians from the legal right of all czech nationals to hold dual citizenship, & has announced that applications from russians, including long time residents of the czech republic, for czech citizenship will no longer be considered.
let it also not be forgotten british mps roger gale & tom tugendhat advocating in parliament for all russians to be deported from the uk, & democratic representative for california eric swalwell arguing that all russian students should be kicked out of the united states immediately.
and honestly, while yes in traditional conservative russophobic spheres being, in my case chuvash, is another point against you because that strain of russophobia explicitly lives in the realm of casting russians as uneuropean asiatic turkic-mongol invaders & such, we also live in an era, espeically online, of liberal russophobia where being an ethnic minority from this country can be a shield to a degree. i’ve managed to either shut down or entirely avoid russophobic harassment from people i know online by identity politicking about being chuvash, because indigenous people & ethnic minorities in russia are absolutely being exploited in liberal western narratives to attack russia on all sides. i read an article recently about a russian restaurant in the usa being the target of vandalism and the journalist goes out of their way to make the point that one of the owners isn’t even russian, she’s yakut, & implies basically that maybe she would deserve it if she was. would these people be absolutely evil if they met idk… a tatar in real life? probably. but unfortunately the online world is kind of the real world & on the online world being racist against russians is not only accepted but sometimes expected in alot of lib left spaces, & being one of russia’s poor toiling terribly treated currently being-genocided-by-putin-trust-me-bro indigenous groups does kind of provide you with a get out of jail for free card in those specific communities (see: all of tumblr).
somewhat re:lrb its fun sometimes reading old articles and seeing that despite clear authorial bias there was still some degree of factual reporting between the lines that you would never see today. in this case an article about crimea's annexation, which is to say the 1995 one where ukraine suspended crimea's president, abolished its constitution, and placed it under direct rule all because crimea was pursuing independence.
Aiming to curb the unruly and increasingly violent republic of Crimea, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a package of laws Friday abolishing t
this part in particular i just have to stare at because stop me if you've heard this again in the last few years because that sure is how several people i know thought about zelensky initially
on that note it is genuinely ghoulish every time i see someone say they hope whatever new weapons ukraine is getting will let them retake crimea (and more than same with donbass of course) as if it would be liberating them. like they seceded in 2014, same as they tried in 95. and they had every right to do so. ukraine's response at the time was to dam the north crimean canal and deny crimea 90% of its freshwater supply. this devastated crimean agriculture and industry for much of the last decade, has led to desertification as crimea has been forced to overdraw groundwater, and had for a time required significant quantities of bottled water to be shipped in by boat (or rail after the kerch bridge was completed) just for drinking and personal hygiene. there is zero liberation to be found in these war goals, only a desire to continue collective punishment of crimea. and sure, you can say that zelensky himself was not in politics at the time and but a simple comedian. have a look at his comedy routine though if you aren't already familiar (first upload of it i could find)
“Congrats to drugs for winning the war on drugs” is a phrase that is simply not true at all when you look at what the purpose of it was.
It was not to prevent the spread of drugs, it was to funnel Black people into prison and permanently curtail voting rights, to keep a provisional Jim Crow that could deflect criticism long enough to get the average white moderate to accept it, and to make the average white liberal’s dreams of “reform” still include the same framework.
Felons can’t vote because certain drug crimes were labeled felonies, because those drug crimes could be pinned on Black people and passed by or reduced to a misdemeanor on whites. Because you could cite the amount of (drug) felonies in an area (Black neighborhood) and assign more cops, militarized cops (why it was called a “war”), because you could claim random searches of suspicious individuals (Black people, including children) were necessary.
The war on drugs worked. It was never about the fucking drugs.
One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight
One of Richard Nixon’s top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper’s Magazine.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said.
“We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
