#us empire

[blbeloved]

The Sexy Anti Russian Orientalism of Heated Rivalry

Since Mark Carney is trending, mostly for admitting the liberal “rules based order” of freedom, human rights and democracy has always been a western fiction and he’s shocked that after all the raping and pillaging of weaker countries Canada participates in with US-led empire the American leopard is still planning on eating his country’s face, now’s a good time to talk about the Canadian government funded project, Heated Rivalry.

This TikTok’er is extending her critique of BBC’s Merlin to ask questions of western media in general, and specifically interrogating viewers’ reluctance to engage with everything but the deeper, structural subtext of a show, opting instead to fixate on the superficial aesthetics - camera language, colour palettes, sex scenes, identity representation.

The answer is to be found in the fact that lifelong indoctrination into liberal and more recently neoliberal philosophy means blanket acceptance of a raft of crimes against the majority of humanity by the imperial west, has been so naturalised as to become the water the fish are swimming in. We accept them not only because they confirm our existing biases but also because the subjugation of large swathes of the Global South is the source of exorbitant material wealth and privilege in the imperial north.

i know it’s cringe but i had to talk abt it #fyp #fandom #leftist #bbcmerlin #merlin

i know it’s cringe but i had to talk abt it #fyp #fandom #leftist #bbcmerlin #merlin

Some friends and I have been asking these same questions about Heated Rivalry - everyone’s talking about whether the copious sex scenes are gratuitous but no-one is mentioning the avalanche of homononationalism and queer imperialism, which is the very point of why the Canadian Government wanted to invest in this show. What are the aesthetics, the representation, the messages really in service of?

Samantha Youssef takes our avoidance of the structural load-bearing work the narrative is subtly doing, one step further by educating us why we should be more aware of the intention behind funders of first and second cinema. We all need to pay much more attention to the ideas embedded under the literal text which is the real goal of the production - *shaping our world view*, not the queer romance that’s sold on the surface.

The fact that viewers of western filmmaking have been trained in specific, often anti-humane and usually anti-collectivist ways to consume media is precisely why film productions like Heated Rivalry bear far more scrutiny than we typically give fictional queer works.

In Heated Rivalry we’re so busy rooting for the four key individuals, the “Russia bad” narrative doesn’t even need prior explanation, or even logic for that matter, to implant securely in our brains that Russia is the villain of the gay hockey show.

We see that Ilya has negative feelings about his Russian family and his status as a bi-sexual man in Russia while ignoring that the other two professional hockey players are both not out to their friends and family either even though they’re not backwards or primitive Russians. We’re supposed to get that the discovery of someone like Ilya having gay sex in Russia could be a life and death matter for him there yet ignore that it’s Ilya who has actually had gay sex in Russia as a vulnerable teenager while in the enlightened Canada Shane had never. We see Scott having a panic attack that strangers might suspect he’s not straight, despite not having a law against homosexual propaganda on the books in either Canada or the US but we’re encouraged to conveniently forget that’s because homophobia is a global phenomenon and doesn’t need a law for public discovery of one’s sexuality to ruin the career of any high-profile professional, which is why in 2026 most still guard that information carefully wherever they’re from.

Shane isn’t white, in a notoriously racist Canadian society, but we never see any racial or sexual animosity directed towards his Asianness, instead all the homophobic, identity-based aggressions in Heated Rivalry are directed solely to Ilya, whether he’s in Russia or in North America, as the only character deserving of homophobic violence in the entire series - I wonder why.

All these contradictions and more have to be memory-holed by already primed viewers, to maintain the orientalist fiction of “Russia bad” that Western Europe has woven about Russia for 200 years; it becomes critical at this present moment when Canada and its fellow NATO gang members have catastrophically lost their proxy war against Russia using Ukraine.

This isn’t internationalism. It’s queer imperialism dressed up as “solidarity” all aimed at winning the psychological warfare for hearts and minds, over a lost war carefully orchestrated by the U.S.-led west for more than a decade between Russia and Ukraine. A high stakes operation involving regime change colour revolutions; two USAID/NED-engineered coups; billions of dollars spent on political, ideological and military subversion; 1.4 million Ukrainians dead and a Ukrainian population left bereft at how they explicitly voted for a President who would be neutral (not join NATO) and make peace with Russia, but got the exact opposite. Someone has done a post with resources on the origins of the ongoing Russia/Ukraine conflict in a more detailed dive here:

Tumblr is a place to express yourself, discover yourself, and bond over the stuff you love. It's where your interests connect you with your

These factual and illogical atrocities under cover of a rainbow flag are employed to hijack our natural human empathy for marginalised people and underdog nations to intensify enmity and hatred, not for the NATO countries Canada is supporting multiple genocides alongside - but Russia, in an attempt to make gains in psychological warfare they’ve been unable to make in military warfare against a meticulously manufactured enemy.

Here’s an excellent historical summary of Europe’s long goal to isolate, invade and Balkanise, in order to degrade Russia’s development and sovereignty which started way before its communism revolution and goes all the way back to Napoleon:

European Russophobia and Europe’s Rejection of Peace: A Two-Century Failure - CIRSD

Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven pro

Why the ultimate target of this current western onslaught on Russia is China is a topic for another long post. In that one we’ll look at why China has been gatekeeping its information and media space from nefarious transatlantic ideological incursions and what that’s got to with Danmei onscreen adaptations in particular.

[sanguinesegasaturn]

reblog if you’re an illegal alien going in for transgender surgery in prison

[sandeebridges2]

Any American liberal who tries to spin involvement in Venezuela into something unique to Trump, to promote the Democrats, is either fundamentally dishonest or politically immature

The Democrats might have voted for the War Powers act, but I guarantee you they will not condemn the operation and will not do anything meaningful to help the people of Venezuela

The entire American political system in complicit in this aggression, the only solution is to tear it all down

[yipyipallyall]

[shinyasahalo]

"Once you realize how many traffic accidents Soviet Soldiers caused in East Germany (the reporting of which was actively suppressed by the Stasi) - it's no longer surprising to find German Roadsign and traffic rules plastered all over the now abandoned Soviet barracks."

"In the U.S. they do not have 'Do not shoot black people' on the walls in police stations."

Every time someone brings up an example of a moral failure of the Soviet Union as proof of how oppressive it was, there is always an example of how the "free" U.S. is even worse, especially in regards to Black and Indigenous people.

"The Berlin Wall was a zone of death." U.S. Border Patrol causes more death in one year than the Stasi did in its entire history.

There's a new movie called Fatherland that has an emphasis on censorship in the GDR. Where's the movie about COINTELPRO and how they imprisoned people and others had their professional careers destroyed? The US government killed many black radicals, and they even a president to protect its asset known as Israel (JFK).

It may seem like I am being antagonist but you should follow iamkosmonaut on Blue Sky if you're interested in GDR history.

[the-night-night-owl]

If you guys were actually locked into anti imperialist theory from the third world you would in fact know that this has been a criticism of NASA forever.

NASA is part of the US government. NASA' budget comes from US imperalist superprofits. NASA is hugely profitable and good rep for all it's massive military contractors. NASA heavily recruits war criminals, and always has. You can only make the argument that it is silly to say it's a distraction from US imperialism if you believe that US imperialism is - on some level - new and now how the US has operated forever.

Artemis is a great advancement for science and really cool and inspiring. Artemis is a function and propaganda tool for the US empire and its infinite pillaging of the third world. These are not separate ideas they in fact inform each other.

[mbrainspaz]

Sometimes I go about my daily life imagining the Fall of Civilizations podcast made about us 2000 years from now. "Despite the fast-fading illusion of democracy, everyday citizens had little say in the swift collapse of the US Empire. Their days would have consisted of laboring ever longer hours for the oligarchs as they struggled to afford housing owned by powerful management conglomerates and mass produced food that was no longer safe to eat. Everything they owned was made from a toxic substance called Plastics that was polluting the ground, the water, and even their bodies. Plastics were made from the oil their government had spent the past few centuries laying waste to poorer nations to supply. Nations that would one day unite to fight back. Here is a traditional ballad that might have played over the personal digital comm devices of everyday Americans as the nukes began to fall from their skies." *Toxic by Brittany Spears begins to play*

[cavalierzee]

The West Must Recolonize The Global South

This is insane.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio just gave one of the most explicitly pro-colonialist speeches I have seen in the 21st century.

The US empire wants Europe to help it recolonize the Global South.

Rubio praised Western colonialists for "settl[ing] new continents, build[ing] vast empires extending out across the globe".

Then Rubio complained about the Global South's decolonization, portraying it as a sinister communist plot.

Rubio lamented: "The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come".

Rubio delivered this speech at the Munich Security Conference, surrounded by European leaders, who gave him a standing ovation. They loved the pro-colonialist diatribe.

The US secretary of state insisted that North American and European imperialists should unite in order to reverse "the West’s managed decline", to revive "the West’s age of dominance", to "renew the greatest civilization in human history".

This is a blatant call by the US empire to resuscitate Western colonialism and recolonize the Global South (which represents the Global Majority).

What the US empire did to Gaza, Venezuela, and currently Cuba is what it wants to do to the entire Global South.

This is from the official transcript published by the US State Department:

https://state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference

Ben Norton