place of gathering

then, the (incomplete) victory over european fascism (don't look at Spain and Portugal and Greece) was methodically distanced from the true victors, the soviet people. They suffered an invasion and destruction of the majority of their industrial base, save for the industry relocated to the east, more than 20 million dead soviet workers who pushed the fascists from Moscow to Berlin, ending in an artillery barrage the magnitudes of which had never been seen, the symbolic raising of the red banner over the Reichstag and an enveloping of the city that forced many nazi officials to commit suicide. It was also forgotten how the Yugoslavs liberated themselves, managing to keep fascist forces constantly tied up during the war, how the Italian partisans captured Mussolini and hung him in public, the many uprisings throughout Europe and the concentration camps before the frontline reached them, the exiled brigadiers and republicans who first fought fascism in Spain and was later forced to fight fascism again, unable to return to their homes and under threat of being imprisoned. The indigenous resistance against colonialism in east and north Africa and southwest Asia, and the tens of millions Chinese, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Malaysians, Indonesians, Papuans, Thais, Bengalese, Indians, Filipinos, etc, who suffered both Japanese and western occupation. All of these struggles forgotten and erased, reduced to the USamerican, British, and sometimes French armies. Armies who advanced to witness a fraction of the suffering enabled and financed by their own states barely a decade prior. Even minor members of the western allies, such as Brazil, are often forgotten.

After the Holocaust was reduced to an unexpected and unprecedented event with no connection to reality, and after the struggle against fascism was reduced to the involvement of two or three countries, barely any fascists were punished. Anyone who wasn't a top official could claim to be simply following orders, even someone as important like Speer used this defence, he was allowed to live free and publish an autobiography in which he paints himself as the good Nazi, the mere architect caught up in a madman's rise. As if he ignored the plans for a future Berlin would be built by slave labor from the concentration camps, as if the minister of armaments from 1942 to the end did not know about the reliance companies like Krupp or Volkswagen had on slave labor. As if he didn't listen to Goebbels' speeches about total war and extermination and did not understand his armaments would be used. Some fascists were even integrated into the scientific and military spheres of the western allies, others given citizenship and a cushy home in places like Canada. Japanese fascists who had experimented on and tortured countless Chinese and Korean civilians and POWs to research chemical warfare were offered amnesty in exchange for the knowledge they gained doing these experiments. After German reunification, more eastern queer people were imprisoned than fascists were incarcerated or executed at the Nürnberg trials.

After fascists were exonerated and shamelessly integrated into the western states, and after some time passed, the war was turned into a cultural product. Countless war movies were produced, almost always showing usamerican soldiers in the European or Pacific front fighting a mindless horde with hakenkrauzs on their armbands all lead by a single man, or group of men, ontologically evil. It was too complex to examine the actual reasons for the war. Hitler was simply a charismatic devil who had duped Germany into following him (crucially, he was only charismatic for germans. No true American patriot fell for his tricks). Gradually, the figure of Hitler was transformed into a devil in human form who had appeared in München in 1932 to cause evil and fight freedom.

As a result, German fascism and the Holocaust are nothing more but a historical fact you look at with morbid curiosity, to feel disgust, maybe anger, and sigh in relief that it would never happen again. There is no reflection on how it was allowed to happen, how antisemitism was used, like it had commonly been used throughout history, to blame for economic downturn and how the expropriation of jewish property, the enslavement of other minorities alongside them (Slavs, non-jewish poles, homosexuals, roma, communists...) and the rapid stimulation of a military industry was used to save an recessing economy. No examination of how the Nazi party appealed to the German petit-bourgeoisie and monopolies like the aforementioned Krupp, Volkswagen, or IG Farben, by attacking communists and trade unionists, who were beginning to organize at a bigger scale and actually threaten german capitalists. Instead, some even try to paint the nazis as communists or as similar to them, through terms like totalitarianism, which was popularized by Hannah Arendt, a fascist sympathiser who also saw fit to label decolonial struggles as totalitarian.

Even more insidious than this is how Hitler has been mutated into a shorthand for evil, an entity beyond a single man who personifies the collective hatred of minorities by Europeans, a condensation of centuries of hatred and exploitation into an angry man between 1932 and 1945. By doing this we can rest easy knowing there will never be another Hitler because we are so civil now. It was Hitler's speeches that guided every SS member's hand to execute tens of thousands. It was Goebbels' propaganda that clouded the judgment of the millions of Wehrmacht soldiers who looted and massacred their way through Europe. It was Himmler's threat that coerced countless germans to spy and tattle on their neighbors. It was Göring who convinced the Luftwaffe pilots to bomb and terrorize civilians. It was Dönitz who made the Kriegsmarine target civilian ships and ruthlessly pursue trade convoys. And it was ultimately Hitler who controlled these men, and no German had free will or political conviction between 1932 and 1945.

1. The United States creates dollars, which costs them essentially nothing.

2. Over time, US military power compelled the biggest oil producers (starting with Saudi Arabia in 1974) to trade exclusively in dollars.

3. When a company needs oil, it needs dollars to buy it. You can obtain dollars in a number of ways: you can take a loan or you can sell shoes to the US or teacups to Europe. Notice that the factory has to ship actual shoes to the US or to third markets in order to obtain, basically, a bookkeeping entry that took the US microseconds to create.

4. The oil company receives the shoe factory's dollars in exchange for oil. It invests these dollars into US treasury bonds or securities, which is really the only sensible thing they can do --cash deprecates in value over time, and there are virtually no other risk-free places to park your billions of dollars worth of oil earnings.

5. The US puts part of the investment it received into military use, so that it can keep anyone who would dare to detach from this dollar hegemony in check. The rest goes to enrich the US. Return to step 1.

Note that this mechanism is essentially an obfuscated tax on the rest of the world. An Iranian shoe factory has to obtain dollars if it wants to buy oil, and the oil company is incentivized to store its dollars in the US treasury. This means that part of the value that foreign capitalists would otherwise pocket actually ends up in the United States.

To obtain a million dollars, the US government pushes a button; to obtain the same million a Bangladeshi factory has to sew 500 000 T-shirts.

Because the oil bill comes in dollars and the only deep, liquid, politically safe asset is a US Treasury bond, value flows to Wall Street.

In other words: The US creates money, manufactures a need for everyone to hold some of that money, and then incentivizes them to return that money to the US.

The petrodollar was only ever the beginning. Many things are gated behind the dollar: Shipping, aviation, SWIFT transactions, etc. Everyone needs dollars; if you can't get any you're going to struggle in the global capitalist economy. This is why the US gets to create seemingly endless dollars and have them still hold value, it's why the US can bend anyone reliant on the dollar to their will via sanctions; the dollar itself acts as a weapon. Of course, the status quo is maintained at gunpoint, and the dollar's value is ultimately backed by US military might. The United States exports death.

Because of all of this, the US has an enormous material incentive to keep oil flowing, to keep its military spending high, and to topple any and all projects that would endanger this system. To stop the flow of unequal exchange, to stop the coercive taxation over the rest of the world, would be to destabilize the US empire. Anyone who would provide an alternative must necessarily be seen as an adversary.

Want to nationalize your oil? Want to deal in another currency? Are you another military superpower? No? Too bad, here's one million drone strikes and a new *democratic* government for you.

The Resistance Front in West Asia (Iran, the Palestinian Resistance, the Lebanese Resistance, Syria pre-December 2024, Ansar Allah-led Yemen, and the Iraqi Resistance) shares some important principles or assumptions which are NOT shared by many of its friends and allies. These include: (1) "Israel" is a cancer in the region which must be excised or dismantled, (2) the Palestinian Resistance guarantees the future of Palestine and the Palestinian Authority has become a corrupt traitor; (3) the PLO-PA supported “two state solution” is cruel myth which sustains the occupation (4) the regional Resistance, led by Iran, is the essential core of an independent West Asia.

Very few outside the Resistance Front subscribe to all these ideas, yet many still become allies, at times, supporting or at least having normal relations with the Resistance, bypassing Washington’s unilateral coercive measures (UCMs or “sanctions”). We should not suggest that such allies have ‘betrayed’ principles to which they have never subscribed. Better to understand their interests and the limitations of their assistance.

In recent times, only two states, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Cuba, have pursued longer-term foreign policies with substantial elements of altruism - that is, they did not materially gain from their contributions and often suffered from it. All other states look to their own interests and engage where they see common interests. This is normal for states that must remain accountable to their own people. [...]

Even strong friends of Palestine and the Resistance Front, like Cuba and Venezuela, both of which broke relations with "Israel" (in 1974 and 2009, respectively) and both of which provide medical training and other support to the Palestinian people, have distinct compromises. Both continue to support the PLO-PA and the “two-state” solution, while refusing (so far) to recognize the revolutionary Yemeni government in Sanaa. Cuba, for its own economic survival, also pursues economic relations (through medical cooperation) with Gulf monarchies, which oppose the Resistance Front. That might place some constraints on Cuba’s political options. Yet, both Cuba and Venezuela are also committed to the rise of BRICS and multipolarity.

The widespread historical support for the PLO and the PA, and therefore also the “two-state” notion promoted up to now by the PLO, is largely a consequence of Palestinian disunity and the failure of Resistance factions to be properly represented in the PLO, the only Palestinian body that has UN status. This is a problem for the Resistance. It is hard to expect allies in other continents to contradict the PLO-PA on this and opt for (without Palestinian leadership) a single democratic state in Palestine.

Those who have worked successfully with Russia and China appeal to common interests, a totally normal process. Back in 2015, IRGC's Quds Force Commander General Qassem Soleimani convinced Russia to intervene in favour of Syria against the Washington-backed terrorism imposed on the region. This argument prevailed because it addressed Russian interests (a) to help prevent the resurgence of Takfiri terrorism into southern Russia (as had already happened in Chechnya) and (b) to build a strategic position for Russia in West Asia. Yet, President Putin was keenly aware of the trap into which the USSR had fallen back in the 1970s, moving from support for the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (1978-1987) into a substitute for its army. The Soviet Union was successfully portrayed as an occupation force and was eventually driven out by CIA-mujahideen forces. That experience helps explain why Russia limited its ground commitment to Syria and could not “save” Syria after the command of the SAA collapsed in late 2024. Even Iran (the core of the Resistance Front) came to the same conclusion, that they could not “save” Syria if Syrians would not fight for their own survival. [...] Similarly, China did not invest much in Syria during the dirty war, as Beijing looked for greater stability. That was a reasonable calculation in China’s own interests, even if many wanted more. This recognition of distinct national interests is an important element of ‘realism’ for our understanding, and not just some dirty compromise.

It is true that critical realist analysts (like Mearsheimer and McGregor) often ignore the importance of resistance in their calculations, but it is also true that resistance idealists often misunderstand or dismiss the real interests of friends and allies. These considerations are important when we look at the ongoing relationship between the Resistance Front and the main agency of multipolarity in the world today, the BRICS. Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Iran all need the medium-term support being developed by the BRICS and an escape from the dollar dictatorship, even while there may be important differences.[...]

Neither Russia nor China felt able to oppose Trump’s Palestine ‘peace plan’ at the UNSC, although they did present an alternative motion. They criticized and then abstained, rather than oppose, as they did not see any regional allies. They surrendered the field to the US, possibly even hoping to let Washington fall further into a Palestinian quagmire, while they address matters closer to their own interests. Even Algeria joined the regional collaborators. The US had the Gulf Arab regimes plus the PLO-Palestinian Authority in its pocket. Russia and China had no allies and would have had to oppose the PLO and bear the blame for blocking a PLO-supported end to the bombing. In the past, Russia has invited the resistance (led by Hamas) alongside the PA to Moscow for talks, yet at the UN, only the PLO has official status. [...]

1. Most important government sites and base resources by Siwolism

2. Documentaries

3. Debunking common myths by Dr. Suzy Kim. Her book*** (most important resource here for beginners) about the North Korean revolution in 1945-50.

4. Atrocity Fab

5. Historical context about Juche (you can also read more about Juche from the works of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un in naenara)

6. Cities in the DPRK

If you are a beginner, you should check these resources out and make it a priority to get a good understanding of the material conditions leading to and after the Korean War, which is the focal point of Korean history.

Most basic things you should aim to get at least a rudimentary understanding of (Suzy Kim's book is a great resource to learn about most of the historical stuff and present stuff can be learned from kcna and other .kp sites):

Japanese occupation of Korea

Korean resistance. Kim Il Sung came from a family of independence fighters and was a guerrilla leader in the struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Events after Korean de facto independence after the surrender of Japan in 1945.

US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) & the creation of the colony called ROK. And then soon, the creation of Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Events and Outcomes of Korean War.

Adoption of Juche. Reconstruction. How DPRK became a leader among the third world.

UN sanctions and how they led to the Arduous March.

Here's the full transcript and an unedited video or her speech. Also, don't forget in your transcript that she spoke through boo's and jeers and that's why she had to tell them to quiet down to start. Those boo's died down as her speech continued and the crowd felt shame.

Sylvia: "Y’all better quiet down. I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help and you all don’t do a goddamn thing for them.

Have you ever been beaten up and raped and jailed? Now think about it. They’ve been beaten up and raped after they’ve had to spend much of their money in jail to get their [inaudible], and try to get their sex changes. The women have tried to fight for their sex changes or to become women. On the women’s liberation and they write ‘STAR,’ not to the women’s groups, they do not write women, they do not write men, they write ‘STAR’ because we’re trying to do something for them.

I have been to jail. I have been raped. And beaten. Many times! By men, heterosexual men that do not belong in the homosexual shelter. But, do you do anything for me? No. You tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs. I will not put up with this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with you all? Think about that!

I do not believe in a revolution, but you all do. I believe in the gay power. I believe in us getting our rights, or else I would not be out there fighting for our rights. That’s all I wanted to say to you people. If you all want to know about the people in jail and do not forget Bambi L’amour, and Dora Mark, Kenny Metzner, and other gay people in jail, come and see the people at Star House on Twelfth Street on 640 East Twelfth Street between B and C apartment 14.

The people are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and women that belong to a white middle class white club. And that’s what you all belong to! "

The reservation system that Amerikkka has to-day is the outcome of treaties signed by the bourgeois government with tribes (and tribal coalitions) who spent centuries fighting against extermination. On one end they are administered in a genocidal manner by the bourgeois government, but that's only half of the picture—the reason that, despite everything, indigenous tribes do still have relative autonomy over their (underfunded) education and (underfunded) healthcare systems, as well as their (legally constrained) law enforcement is because for 400 years they have continued to fight for every scrap of sovereignty possible. Do you think that reservations function with a relatively high level of democracy within the limited sectors they are capable of running themselves because that's all part of the bourgeoisie's plan?? It's the bourgeoisie who wants to do away with the reservation system in the immediate moment, because that would give them access to dwindling reserves of land and bodies to exploit (remember Standing Rock?); whereas the indigenous peoples have fought for their sovereignty within the reservations because that's the space that they curdently have to exercise sovereignty within.

Whilst there are certainly comparisons to be made between the institutions on another level, likening the defense of tribal sovereignty within existing reservations to the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto is fucking grotesque.

So, just out of curiosity a few years back I clicked on a headline for like an annual day of remembrance for tiannemen square, and it included a video so I wanted to see if they would play the full clip.

That clip stopped at the same point that the clip is always stopped when used in news stories, but the article linked a source about tiannemen square for further reading.

I clicked on that source, and it was very similar to the first article, roughly 2-3 short paragraphs of declarative statements, the same clip edited to cut off before it shows "tank man" climbing on top of the tank shortly before walking away unharmed, and another link to a source for further reading about the events at tiannemen square.

At that point I wanted to see if I would ever get through this chain of an attribution of an attribution down to any primary sources or even a single article that just showed the full, unedited clip at the very least.

Every link I clicked on had the same exact structure. It was an article from a major publication, they all featured either the singular famous still frame of Tank Man standing in front of the tank or they showed the edited clip that is cut before the clip shows him walking away safe and unharmed in order to imply that the tank ran him over, they all had a short summary of events and then the "source" provided if a reader wanted to verify the facts of the article was just another article repeating the same thing which linked to another article repeating the same thing which linked to... and so on and so on.

I probably went a few dozen links deep and never found a single article that used any primary source documents or historical analysis or investigative reports as a source for any of the claims made in the article. The only primary source to be found was the singular video that every article refused to show in full.

And to be clear, this isn't just some odd quirk of this specific event. This pattern is exactly how most modern propaganda makes its way into the public consciousness. When a claim or accusation is made and the source making the claim is of dubious veracity (such as when the US state department, intelligence agencies, and various affiliated NGOs make claims about states or groups that are targets of US aggression and intervention), then going through this process of publishing hundreds of articles that amount to little more substance than saying "BBC reported that NYT reported that The Sun reported that WaPo reported that The Guardian reported that an anonymous state department official said something happened" serves two purposes.

The first purpose that this process serves is that the original source that is of dubious or sometimes completely discredited veracity is now buried from scrutiny under and attribution of an attribution of an attribution of an attribution.

The second purpose this process serves is that it creates the appearance of academic, journalistic, and/or scholarly consensus even though this large volume of reporting ultimately traces back to a singular source.

This might sound defeatist given that I spend a great deal of time trying to communicate things of that nature to fence-sitters, but if someone is so instinctively anti-Russia that they perceive even clear attempts at de-escalation which would've ensured the people of the DPR and LPR retained their sovereignty and democratic rights alongside a cessation of the violence as some inherently untrustworthy and duplicitous act, then they are frankly too far gone to reel back in.

Like the terms of the Minsk agreements are not a secret. You can argue about much regarding them, but not about the fact that they clearly prioritise the safety and sovereignty of donchane people. So my most honest answer is that there is probably literally nothing you can say that will move someone who is already familiar with Minsk yet nonetheless chooses to believe Russia had 0 intention of helping the Russian-speaking minority in the border regions and was actually the bad-faith actor in this equation. Ultimately someone like that is not animated by some great love or empathy for Ukraine, they’re animated by a deep-seated hatred and distrust of Russia, first and foremost. You cannot easily reason someone out of what is essentially racism, prejudice is not housed in the chamber of the mind governed by reason. You can sway them on many things. You can waver their support for the Maidanist Ukrainian regime. With enough evidence you might even get them to begrudgingly acknowledge that a genocide is taking place in Donbass(<- immensely difficult, but not impossible). But it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it would be to convince them that Russia is not forever and always acting in evil, subversive ways for evil, subversive self-serving ends. And if those are the terms of the discussion it will always be fruitless imo.

But if you wanna try nonetheless it’s good to keep in mind that what they're usually actually asking you to do is prove something that is ultimately impossible to prove: the purity of a state’s motivations. Like. Unless you can just... call Vladimir Putin up and have him personally relay to us his innermost thoughts at the time while twirling the phone cable and kicking his feeties, if we’re talking intentions we’re all just making inferences at the end of the day. The heart is the domain of Allah, not I, nor you. You cannot intuit intentions, and I don’t have vovochka’s number :(

What we can instead look at(and redirect them to) is what was materially taking place;

Millions of people in the Donbass region rejected the post-Maidan order and organised politically around demands for autonomy, federalisation, or outright independence from Kiev. And that opposition was not unfounded or unprovoked. For people in the east things like the massacre of activists in Odessa+the growing influence and acceptance of open fascists+the increasingly genocidal rhetoric toward Russian-speaking populations by those in power, to name a few, were taken as clear signs of what the new western-aligned political order had in store for them.

Like The DPR and LPR were not beamed down from the Kremlin one morning fully formed like Aphrodite from the sea foam. They emerged from a real political constituency with real grievances and fears and had real popular support. And the new Ukrainian government’s answer to that popular demand for sovereignty was military force; eight years of genocidal warfare, shelling, and displacement aimed at destroying a population that had made it very clear it no longer consented to being governed by the new regime.

So when people try to frame the conflict as though it began and escalated alone with Russian interference, they’re hoping u will just sidestep the accounts and fears and political aspirations of the millions of people who actually live in Donbass and whose, again, popular support made the republics even possible in the first place. That’s why the burden is always on proving Russia's ‘sincerity.’ Because if it was on explaining away the existence of a population that spent years resisting the post-Maidan Ukrainian state and were routinely violently denied their sovereignty, they would sound ghoulish. Because it is a ghoulish position to defend.

Like my support for the DPR and LPR, for the sovereignty of the people of Donbass, and for Russia’s role does not hinge on my believing that Russia is somehow the one state in the world that never acts according to its interests, because it isn’t and even if it was it would be impossible to prove. It hinges on the fact that there comes a point where u have to decide whether self-determination is a universal principle or one that only applies to populations whose humanity has been cosigned by the west+the fact Russia, regardless of intentions, was the only major state actor in this conflict materially supporting the people of Donbass while NATO states armed and politically backed the far-right regime massacring them.

As for Minsk, the terms of the agreements were literally structured around guarantees of Donbass’s autonomy, self-government, amnesty for resistance fighters, right to elections, constitutional reform, and a cessation of violence. Like I’d imagine it would be very difficult to argue that Donbass was an afterthought in an agreement whose central premise is very obvious upon reading was about resolving the status of Donbass😭

In other words within four years of Treuhand operations 860 billion Deutsch Marks were spent on privatising and destroying GDR industry. Even if not admitted publicly, the Teuhand, once in Western hands, saw its task as overseeing the rapid dismantling of GDR state assets so that no potential competition with West German companies would arise. This was legitimised by the allegation that GDR industry was ‘marode’ i.e. rotten, and could not be rescued anyway. Apart from the fact that UN statistics contradict that claim, during the 1980s, the GDR had bought over 700 top-of-therange industrial complexes to help modernise some of its key industries.

These are still productive today and are bringing in profits for their new owners – so a description of the whole GDR economy as ‘rotten’ is hardly accurate. The Treuhand set about eradicating any legacy of GDR socialism with alacrity: 3,400 factories, 520 large construction companies, 465 state farms and thousands of other smaller companies were privatised, and soon thereafter many were closed. In the countryside 1.7 million hectares of agricultural and forest land were sold off. Privatisation (in reality straightforward asset-stripping) was seen as an ideological imperative. And all this took place within only four years. A few ‘cherries’, though, were successfully privatised and kept going; they have since brought their new owners big profits: the Zeiss optical instrument factory in Jena, the largest East German steel works (EKO) and most of the Baltic ship yards. They became successful enterprises, albeit with severely reduced staffing levels – Zeiss, for instance, had 20,000 employees in GDR times but today a mere 2,000.

As an interesting aside, the last historical incidence of the German government setting up a ‘Treuhand’ institution had been when the Nazis used them to expropriate Jewish and Polish properties and ‘legalise’ their transference to new ‘Aryan’ owners.

Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? (2015)

The Trump administration never disclosed this mission to the Congress committees tasked with overseeing military and intelligence operations. The article also points out that many of those involved in that mission were promoted.

Like, yes that mission was deplorable. No those civilans didnt deserve to die. But acting like North Korea is not a brutal warmongering dictatorship ruled by martial law is dangerously ignorant. We know what life is like, we have testimonies from refugees and from South Korean/our own monitering.