The Based Marxist

Formerly The Cultured Marxist

[captain-price-returns]

[thebasedmarxist]

In The Song of Roland, Charlemagne is so heartbroken that Roland, his specialest little guy, is killed in battle that he starts weeping and crying and tearing out his beard. The entire French army is so moved by his display of emotion that they start doing the same.

When Enkidu is killed, Gilgamesh covers himself in ash and sack cloth and basically wanders around Uruk wailing about how he'll never be whole again, because they're burying his heart in the earth without him.

[dumbpuppyfag]

listen up folks he may be a paleolithic racist who failed upwards until he was in a position to give tens of billions of dollars to enable a genocide but you're mean and that's worse. remember the human.

[dumbpuppyfag]

wait no not those ones

[dumbpuppyfag]

remember when he led opposition against active school desegregation? remember when he was best friends with the most notorious segregationist in washington? remember when he gave the eulogy at that guy's funeral? remember in 1991 when bush sr conditioned loans to israel on a halt to illegal west bank settlements and he co-sponsored an amendment to forcibly override it? remember when he drafted the 1994 crime bill that fueled the ongoing mass incarceration of primarily black men? remember when he bragged about it? remember when he led democrat support for the invasion of iraq? remember when he led an all-white congressional panel in dragging a black woman's name through the mud on live tv for the crime of being sexually harassed?

the nauseating reinvention of this lifelong monster as a civil rights hero is solely due to his proximity to the first black president, which he only had because they needed someone on the ticket to reassure racist liberals that the white house would stay white. he spent 50 years making the world a worse place. he bears personal responsibility for the imprisonment and death of millions of people in the us and in the global south. his presidency was delivered by a bourgeois class that was terrified of any challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy. his entirely self-interested decision to pursue re-election delivered the everyday horrors you're seeing now. this doesn't even touch on the genocide you've been watching play out for over a year. he is a vain, miserable, racist, warmongering, murderous sack of shit and you do not owe him any sympathy whatsoever. save it for his victims.

[segamascott]

[zerogate]

In its constant prudish anxiety, it was always sniffing out immorality in all aspects of life—literature, art and fashion—with a view to preventing any stimulation, with the result that it was in fact forced to keep dwelling on the immoral. As it was always studying what might be unsuitable, it found itself constantly on the alert; to the world of that time, ‘decency’ always appeared to be in deadly danger from every gesture, every word. Perhaps we can understand how it still seemed criminal, at that time, for a woman to wear any form of trousers for games or sports. But how can we explain the hysterical prudery that made it improper for a lady even to utter the word ‘trousers’? If she mentioned such a sensually dangerous object as a man’s trousers at all, she had to resort to the coy euphemism of ‘his unmentionables’.

It would have been absolutely out of the question for a couple of young people, from the same social class but of different sexes, to go out together by themselves—or rather, everyone’s first thought at the mere idea would have been that ‘something might happen’. Such an encounter was permissible only if some supervising person, a mother or a governess, accompanied every step that the young people took.

Even in the hottest summer, it would have been considered scandalous for young girls to play tennis in ankle-length skirts or even with bare arms, and it was terribly improper for a well-brought-up woman to cross one foot over the other in public, because she might reveal a glimpse of her ankles under the hem of her dress.

The natural elements of sunlight, water and air were not permitted to touch a woman’s bare skin. At the seaside, women made their laborious way through the water in heavy bathing costumes, covered from neck to ankles. Young girls in boarding schools and convents even had to take baths in long white garments, forgetting that they had bodies at all. It is no legend or exaggeration to say that when women died in old age, their bodies had sometimes never been seen, not even their shoulders or their knees, by anyone except the midwife, their husbands, and the woman who came to lay out the corpse.

Today, forty years on, all that seems like a fairy tale or humorous exaggeration. But this fear of the physical and natural really did permeate society, from the upper classes down, with the force of a true neurosis. It is hard to imagine today that at the turn of the century, when the first women rode bicycles or actually ventured to sit astride a horse instead of riding side-saddle, people would throw stones at those bold hussies. Or that, when I was still at school, the Viennese newspapers filled columns with discussions of the shocking innovation proposed at the Opera for the ballerinas to dance without wearing tights. Or that it was an unparalleled sensation when Isadora Duncan, although her style of dancing was extremely classical, was the first to dance barefoot instead of wearing the usual silk shoes under her tunic—which fortunately was long and full.

And now think of young people growing up in such an age of watchfulness, and imagine how ridiculous these fears of the constant threat to decency must have appeared to them as soon as they realised that the cloak of morality mysteriously draped over these things was in fact very threadbare, torn and full of holes. After all, there was no getting around the fact that out of fifty grammar school boys, one would come upon his teacher lurking in a dark alley some day, or you heard in the family circle of someone who appeared particularly respectable in front of us, but had various little falls from grace to his account.

The fact was that nothing increased and heightened our curiosity so much as this clumsy technique of concealment, and as it was undesirable for natural inclinations to run their course freely and openly, curiosity in a big city created its underground and usually not very salubrious outlets. In all classes of society, this suppression of sexuality led to the stealthy overstimulation of young people, and it was expressed in a childish, inexpert way.

-- Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

[segamascott]

[nitpickspot]

Cool, and I'm so very glad that they figured this out!

Maybe next they can figure out an open and democratic election!

[lordandgodoftheobvious]

You mean like the ones in America, where you can vote for one of whichever two of Jefferey Epstein's friends the media deigns are electable?

[nitpickspot]

As opposed to whichever military strongman prefers to die in office so he can spend however many millions building prison camps and trying to make cows the size of golden retrievers?

Yes, a choice is preferable, that is indeed how democracy works

[lordandgodoftheobvious]

Man, why is every single lie bootlickers tell about socialist states some shit America actually fucking did?

Seriously: Every. Single. Lie.

Also choosing between one of two oligarch-approved autocrats like you're betting on a sporting event every handful of years while otherwise being completely disengaged from the political process that you have no power to impact on between the aforementioned sporting events is NOT how democracy works, it's how an oligarchy pretending to be a democracy works.

Democracy is when the people have the power to, you know, set policy. It's literally in the name: people power. Like, for a totally random example, passing the most progressive family law code on Earth via nationwide plebiscite.

[thebasedmarxist]

American "democracy" is falling apart as it produces a series of ever more violent destruction around the world.

Cuban democracy produces vaccines, the only sustainably green economy on the planet, and the world's most progressive family law code, among other things, all while American "democracy" hovers over it with the constant threat of total annihilation.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Denver Urban Gardens started as a grassroots movement in the 1970s when North Denver neighbors created space for a group of local Hmong women to grow their own food. After transforming a vacant parking lot into the Pecos Community Garden, the group helped other neighbors start gardens, too. DUG officially became a nonprofit in 1985, and over the past four decades, it has grown and distributed more than 62,000 pounds of food throughout the metro area. In the nonprofit’s new food forest spaces, neighbors are welcome to enter and harvest a wide assortment of fruits, nuts, and berries. And unlike in DUG’s community gardens, where people pay a fee to have their own plots, this bounty is free. Beyond providing fresh food in neighborhoods that need it most, these agroforests reduce the urban heat island effect, create pollinator habitat, and combat pollution and climate change by absorbing and filtering harmful gases. They also create much-needed green space within communities. “Trees are so beneficial for mental health, neighborhood security, and certainly temperatures,” Appel Lipsius said. “You walk off the street into one of our food forests and it’s 5 to 15 degrees cooler.” Globally, farmers are increasingly turning to agroforestry techniques—which Indigenous peoples have employed for millennia—to improve, stabilize, and diversify crop yields in the face of climate change. And across the U.S., cities are embracing agroforestry as well. While Denver has a network of smaller food forests, cities like Seattle and Atlanta have very large standalone sites. Appel Lipsius points out that some cities may have community orchards—or simple plantings of fruit or nut trees—rather than multi-layered food forests.

29 September 2025

[help-me-yes]

yes... ha ha ha... yes!

[sheltiechicago]

The nine muses of Ancient Greece discovered in the ancient Greek city of Zeugma, now in modern-day Turkey. The mosaics have been almost perfectly preserved for over 2,000 years

[dushanbabe]

Literature on the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR)

There has been a lot of anti-communist propaganda spread about the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, particularly the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Warsaw Pact invasion, so I'd like to offer some more sources about Czechoslovakia which cover these topics well, are in English (unfortunately, not much socialist Czechoslovak literature has been translated into English, though I have been trying to translate some things from authors such as K. Gottwald, the first communist president, and other Czechoslovak theorists/economists) and are fully available online for free.

Most of these I have read to the end, and for the ones I haven't (I'm not really big on English-language sources), I still checked to make sure they're not actively hostile to communism, of course.

I will very likely add more, but finding communist-aligned perspectives on Czechoslovakia online is quite hard

ABOUT THE PRAGUE SPRING

Czechoslovakia and Counter-Revolution: Why the Socialist Countries Intervened

Czechoslovakia 1968: The Class Character of the Events

HISTORY

Socialism and democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1948

ECONOMY

Central Planning in Czechoslovakia

Urbanization Under Socialism: The Case of Czechoslovakia

ECONOMIC REVISIONISM

(The lead-up to the Prague Spring saw the rise of many economic "reformists", in particular Ota Šik. I believe his works are important to properly understanding economics in 60s Czechoslovakia, despite my own disagreements.)

Czechoslovakia: The Bureaucratic economy

The Communist Power System

Plan and Market Under Socialism

The Third Way: Marxist-Leninist Theory and Modern Industrial Society

CRITIQUE OF ŠIK'S ECONOMIC THEORIES: From Revisionism to Betrayal: A Criticism of Ota Šik’s Economic Views

[justalurkr]

Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.

But... Stochastic Parrots.

Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.

[irispurpurea]

This is the paper. It's excellent, highly recommend reading it.

I remember reading about Gebru's firing but I had no idea this was the paper she was fired over.

[kmbw]

Source: This Soviet World (1936) by Anna Louise Strong

[lesbianfidelcastro]

I always get confused on why in a lot of cases Che is portrayed in a more positive light than Fidel. I mean there’s anticomms who obviously slander both of them but like also I see a lot of discourses, media, video essays, journals and books portraying Che as a hero and Fidel in a very slandered dehumanized way like someone who just wanted power. I personally find it an issue because it frames the revolution with purity standards or sanitizes it. Medias that claim to be left-leaning/centrist in regards to presenting themselves as ‘nuanced’ even have this bias. There’s probably different reasons this is done but I’m interested in knowing the key reasons, and also why they try to portray Fidel and Ches relationship as negative when in fact they were friends.

To sum up the answer: Che died a revolutionary, Fidel lived as a head of state

That is a reductive summary, but it is at the core of why Che is popularised and Fidel is not. I'm not even talking about the commodification of Che's image and reputation, because this issue goes beyond ignorant tourists who buy t-shirts with his face on it

It is very easy to relate to the ideals that both Che and Fidel fought for, it would be a challenge trying to find someone that says it's a bad thing to feed and house a people who have been brutalised by a dictator

But Che was a martyr, he died in the early years of the revolution and he was never a head of state like Fidel. The repressive measures taken to protect the Cuban revolution and the collective rights it gave to the Cuban people were never assigned to him, he never had to face that

But Fidel? He was the one who lived, who authorised the imprisonment of dissidents; he oversaw crackdowns like the Black Spring, he kept a tight control over the press and the media. When people see Fidel, they see policies. When they see Che, they see ideals

And most people do not want to confront what it takes to protect the ideals that Che died for. It's a pretty horrible world that we live in, because it is true that expansive political plurality is incompatible with workers' liberation. A common thing I've noticed is a tendency to criticise Fidel's "human rights record" without ever offering alternatives to his policies. The principle I abide by is that if you cannot suggest a feasible alternative, you don't have the right to condemn the decision that was made, although most people aren't quite that reflective or harsh (whichever way you see it)

If Che had lived, if he was head of state instead, I do believe he would have been as harsh, if not harsher, than Fidel. He was not cruel, in fact I do love him and look up to him as one of my biggest role models, but he openly admired Stalin. He always advocated for press control, he was determined that political opposition be banned, and he was upset when Fidel ended the revolutionary executions to appease the US. But the memory of Che is not that, the memory of Che is one of romantic sacrifice and heroism

The survivor (in this case, Fidel) does not have that same privilege. The good of the revolution is assigned to Che because it allows people to avoid a reality that is violently contrary to what they've grown up with, whereas all the bad is assigned to Fidel

Plus a part of it is just indicative of a very reductive way of viewing history. The Cuban revolution is often represented as if it was "corrupted" by communism, by Fidel. That is a much more simplistic version of history, and thus easier to teach people. It's also more compatible with the individualism of the capitalist world, great man theory and all that

The reason their relationship is portrayed as negative is similar I think, but there's probably several reasons for it. A big one is that it helps to reinforce the aforementioned "Che good, Fidel bad" binary that dominates discourse about the revolution. But there were also rumours at the time of Che's death, and even before, about Fidel betraying Che. Maybe they were propagated by the US? I don't know, but they existed either way. A similar thing happened with Camilo's death, where the revolutionary government was blamed. Anti-communist rhetoric certainly had a lot to do with it, and the demonisation of Fidel

I hope this answer was sufficient :)

[angrytranspossum]

I see so much defense for Che but not enough for Fidel, and it upsets me, because Fidel wasn't this cruel, heartless leader like people love to portray him as. He was just as human as Che was and yet gets simplified to an irredeemable monster. It sucks to see the reputation of an honorable man get slandered by ignorance

[thepeoplescommiequotes]

[komsomolka]

On May 13th, French outlet RTL published an explosive report, entirely unremarked upon by English language media. It exposed how Ukrainian military and intelligence units are covertly operating in Mali on France’s behalf, “in coordination” with both ethnic Tuareg rebels and Al Qaeda-linked forces determined to crush the country’s revolutionary government. Furthermore, Kiev is keen to expand and escalate its African operations yet further, and destabilise neighbouring countries. Ukrainian militancy, long-encouraged by the CIA and MI6, has now decisively developed into an independent international threat.

In August 2020, elements of Mali’s military staged a coup, overthrowing Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta. Ever since, its government has sought to neutralise Western influence locally, while pursuing radical economic policies for the good of the population. French forces were booted out in 2022 after almost a decade of occupation. Mali has instead looked to China and Russia for economic, military and political assistance, while founding the revolutionary Alliance of Sahel States (AES) with neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Polling shows Malians almost universally embrace their government, and its close alliance with Moscow. However, Bamako’s military administration has throughout its lifetime battled incursions from ethnic Tuareg rebels, backed by murderous extremist groups. Since late April, they have conducted combined offensives, capturing several towns, executing deadly strikes on major cities, attacking state buildings, and murdering Defense Minister Sadio Camara via car bomb. Moreover, government forces backed by Russia’s Africa Corps have been ejected from several key areas.

Bamako and Moscow characterise the bloody upheaval as a thwarted coup attempt. Nonetheless, the situation remains volatile, and potentially grave. RTL now reveals the Al-Qaeda-linked unrest has been orchestrated and practically supported all along by “Ukrainian soldiers on the ground, who are cooperating with the Tuareg rebels.” In turn, France can “continue to operate” in Mali “indirectly”. Through Kiev’s cutouts, Paris provides “operational support” to the unpopular and savage local counter-revolutionary insurgency, in the absence of her own occupying army.

Per RTL, “France relies in particular on numerous French-speaking Ukrainian soldiers who served in the Foreign Legion.” It’s not just French-sponsored Ukrainian soldiers attempting to foment civil war and regime change via brute force in Mali. Units of Kiev’s fearsome CIA and MI6-constructed military intelligence agency, the GUR, are also present in profusion. By “limiting its operational support to these Ukrainian proxies, France is thus avoiding direct cooperation with jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda” into the bargain:

“The Tuareg separatist rebels are seeking to weaken the junta in power in Bamako, while France and Ukraine want to overthrow the junta’s Russian backers, the former Wagner militia members (renamed the Afrika Korps) who did everything they could to drive France out of Africa. A sharing of interests…the Tuareg rebels have a longstanding relationship with French intelligence services in the Sahel.”

RTL reports how “a Franco-Ukrainian alliance” to crush anti-imperial governments in Africa has been long in the making. Strikingly, Kiev took the lead. At the start of 2025, Ukrainian intelligence proposed a “detailed plan” to their French counterparts, “to dislodge the juntas from the Sahel region, and push back the Russian enemy” from the continent altogether. Paris reportedly “did not follow up on this proposal, particularly due to security concerns.” Yet, “the lock has now been lifted.”

To date, a fusion of battle strategies “seems to favor the extremists, who are currently allied with Tuareg separatists” - not merely in Mali, but potentially wherever in the region Russian forces are present. As RTL notes, several Sahel countries harshly condemned Ukraine’s involvement in a brutal July 2024 rebel ambush, which allegedly killed 84 Wagner fighters and 47 Malian soldiers. At the time, a GUR spokesperson boasted how Kiev’s support to the rebels “enabled a successful military operation against Russian war criminals.”

Such was Ukraine’s openly advertised centrality to the bloodshed, West African governments issued statements making clear Kiev’s local “interference” was highly unwelcome. Several summoned their respective Ukrainian ambassadors for verbal drubbings. Such was the opprobrium, the BBC contemporaneously enquired whether the operation represented an “own goal in Africa,” threatening to wreck “peaceful Ukrainian diplomacy.” Undeterred, Kiev’s military and intelligence conniving in the Sahel has only ratcheted since. RTL records how this activity is “proving its worth in the region.” [...]

A lengthy essay published April 29th by Militarnyi, Ukraine’s most prominent military news site, lays bare Kiev’s brutal cloak-and-dagger strategy in Mali and beyond. Headlined Islamist Offensive in Mali: The Prospect of a Syrian Scenario, it details how the successes of Ukraine’s Al Qaeda army in Mali - including Camara’s assassination - are part of a wider military and intelligence operation concerned with “dislodging Russian-Chinese influence from the region” altogether. Damascus being overwhelmed by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in mere days in December 2024 was cited as inspiration. (It’s been publicly confirmed Kiev’s clandestine assistance was instrumental in toppling Assad.) [...]

Kiev’s alliance with Al-Qaeda in the Sahel amply demonstrates how it's CIA and MI6-assisted military and intelligence capabilities definitively represent a “growing danger”, to average citizens the world over. Kiev is openly plotting to replicate HTS’ violent takeover of Damascus, first in Mali, then in Burkina Faso and Niger. Militarised, extremist-occupied territories are to multiply, while economic warfare impoverishes and enfeebles the military governments, damaging their domestic popularity. Then, they can be brought to heel via forced capitulation, or outright regime change.

[captain-price-returns]

Zionists:

Actual Israeli history:

[captain-price-returns]

If anyone else has some Israeli history tidbits, feel free to share!

[prolet-kultist]

[mesetacadre]

In 1920, Ukrainian Nationalists looked to interventionist Poland and its invasion of Soviet Ukraine as the vehicle for gaining power. From the mid-1930s through World War II, Nazi Germany was seen as the means to the Nationalists' end. In the post-war period, the.United States has been seen as holding the promise of realizing the goal of a Nationalist-ruled Ukraine. U.S. policies based on hostility and distrust toward the USSR and nuclear war are seen as necessary for this purpose. The following statement from the Ukrainian Nationalist paper Homin Ukrainy, would indicate that some Nationalists are pinning their last hopes for a return to Ukraine, or rather to her ashes, on a nuclear strike against the USSR: "We regard the threat of a third world war, as it approaches humanity, as our last, perhaps the aptest chance... Even if one half, or more of humanity were to perish in this war, we wouldn't consider it too exorbitant a price in order to gain our freedom." In a similar fit of madness, the Ukrainian Nationalist paper Svoboda declared: "In several years from now the American president will have only two things to choose between either to start a nuclear war against the USSR, or to yield to Moscow". In support of American Plans to deploy neutron bombs in Europe, former Nazi collaborator and exiled OUN leader Yaroslav Stetsko stated: "In a war against the Warsaw Treaty countries NATO hasn't a chance of winning victory by conventional weapons unless it deploys neutron weapons in Europe… Among all the different types of nuclear weapons, it is the most humane… The use of tactical nuclear weapons does not mean a universal nuclear war." Not to be outdone, Vyzvolnyi Sbliakb stated: "The USSR's existing any further poses a greater threat to the world than a nuclear cataclysm." Outside of the Nationalist movement, in a broader context, the famine-genocide campaign is one cog of the wheel of psychological warfare against the USSR in the U.S.military machine. Declassified U.S. documents of the late 1940s and 1950s clearly link an offensive policy against the Soviet Union and its defeat, with the perceived interests of the United States. In the 1980s, the U.S. administration has re-emphasized official policy legitimizing first-use of nuclear weapons, "pre-emptive' nuclear attack, and theories of "limited" and "winnable" nuclear war. An atmosphere of direct confrontation with the USSR has been promoted, using the language of blackmail and threats characteristic of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's "crusade against communism."

Unlike many famine-genocide theorists who discount kulak sabotage, some Ukrainian Nationalists offer enthusiastic descriptions of sabotage and terrorism. Isaac Mazepa, former Premier of Petliura's Nationalist government in Ukraine and a die-hard Nationalist til his death, admitted frankly that the crop failures, and logically much of the resulting famine, were largely due to these causes: "At first there were disturbances in the kolkhosi [collective farms] or else the communist officials and their agents were killed, but later a system of passive resistance was favored which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolsheviks' plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest… The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that Soviet Ukraine had to face since the famine of 1921-1922. The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracts were left unsown, in addition when the crop was being gathered… in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50 per cent was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing." One doubts that the Nationalists' heroes - those propertied groups who committed great destruction of agricultural resources were charitably received by the rest of society which suffered as a result. The destruction of the means of life must have been regarded as criminal.

Former fascists, Nazi collaborators and SS-men are to be found throughout the ethnic and political associations dominated by certainNationalist tendencies. Some prominent Ukrainian Nationalists openly brag of the influence wielded by former SS members in Ukrainian right-wing organizations. Former Ukrainian SS-man Mykola Stepanenko, who reportedly has done work for both Radio Liberty and Radio Canada, addressed a banquet celebrating an anniversary of the 14th Waffen SS Division in Toronto. Speaking as a representative of "the government center of the Ukrainian National Republic,"' he boasted: "I share your conviction that former members of the First Ukrainian Division are today found: in all Ukrainian organizations, societies and institutions, that they are among the leaders of every such organization They hold responsible posts at private enterprises, functioning in a variety of government and public capacities, in the education system from public schools to universities. All of them went through the school of life in the Division…and they are not ashamed of it." While Stepanenko and others may not be "ashamed" of their former membership in the SS, the general trend in the Ukrainian Nationalist movement has been to cover up Nationalist complicity in Nazi Germany's crimes. A new image and clean clothes were collectively required which would obscure past collaboration with the Nazis and enable them to pick up the shattered pieces of their anti-communist struggle from new bases in the West.

Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, Douglas Tottle (1987).

[thebasedmarxist]

Fraud, famine, and fascism: the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard pdf @ Z Library

[arctic-hands]

I don't see people talking about this so today is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in where the factory owners locked working women and girls inside to "eliminate the risk of theft" (in reality it was too keep them from taking breaks), which resulted in the gruesome deaths of 123 mostly immigrant women and girls and 23 men, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor either in a panicked attempt to escape or in order to die quickly. There were reports that some of the workers were on fire already as they jumped.

The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.

The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.

This tragedy is a reminder that has been forgotten in the 110 years since: every safety regulation-- every scrap of paperwork contributing to the hundreds of pages of red tape people like to complain about--every word of it was written in the blood of a laborer.

[grahminradarin]

111th anniversary

[aimmyarrowshigh]

They were discouraged from breaks because they were actively trying to unionize, and bosses felt that keeping them from unsupervised contact would prevent them from joining the garment workers' union.

This is why unions are important. This is why today, right now, the biggest companies in America are trying to squash unionization of their laborers and why those workers are fighting so hard to unionize.

@tikkunolamorgtfo did a great write-up a few years ago about the aftermath of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and I highly recommend reading it (and anything else you can about the fire). It is painfully relevant still and it's incredibly important women's, Jewish, immigrants', and workers' history.

[conniecorleone]

#most of the girls working there were either jewish immmigrants or southern italian immigrants #two of the more exploited immigrant groups at the turn of the century particularly in nyc but elsewhere too #the labor history element of it can't be overemphasized tbh (x)

[ramblingandpie]

This event directly influenced Workers' Comp law nationwide.

NY had passed a Workers' Comp law, but it was overturned by our highest state court literally the day before the fire. That means that each and every injured worker, and each and every next-of-kin of deceased workers, had to go through the traditional court system. It overwhelmed the courts so cases took ages and results were all over the map. In some cases, juries were horrified and awarded large amounts of money to the survivors. In others? You had avowed eugenicists on the jury who said things like it was survival of the fittest because the women who died should have been smart enough to learn English and have better education and jobs if they didn't want to die in a horrific fire, and that they *did* die in an industrial fire, that meant they never deserved to live in the first place. I'm paraphrasing bc I don't have my primary sources at hand but not exaggerating because, uh, some of the juror interviews are pretty fucking terrible.

NY amended our state constitution to allow compulsory Workers' Comp, and it was re-implemented a few years later. A few other states implemented it in the meantime. Now, all 50 states except Texas have some form of compulsory Workers' Comp (in Texas it's optional for the employer, *but* if the employer opts out of insurance, there are other resources for workers through traditional courts. Because WC insurance also does protect employers by things like having insurance coverage and more reliable outcomes.)