Even though we had a little bit of warning about federation, I think we’re off to a rocky start. Maybe we should have compiled a list of things we think that may make other people very upset. That way they can quickly get to know what we’re about and go hide in a social media bubble if it scares them.
I figure I’d start with a good one. America deserved 9/11. I’m burying the lede a bit with that one. I don’t think random acts of violence really accomplish much and I don’t think randos, albeit imperial core randos, should die. But this wasn’t a random act of violence, was it?
There’s a little something called Foucault’s Boomerang. Basically it’s the tools, means, and experiments carried out by imperial countries tend to make their way back home one way or another. Military gear gets tried out on the battlefield then next thing you know cops at home have the same equipment. It also works for cause and effect. America did 9/11 to itself.
After WWII America courted the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, who had some really “interesting” religious ideas at the time, to ensure a source of oil. Oil was very important to American manufacturing and the war effort. Our domestic reserves helped us get through WWII. We needed more. So the US decided to look the other way on Saudi foreign policy while they ensured us first dibs on the oil. The UK also made deals on building their infrastructure and finance needs, to which the US eventually pushed them of the back rooms where such deals were made. But that’s another story.
The US also backed anti-Soviet/anti-Communist groups in the Middle-East as they had in other parts of the world. This meant giving aide and weapons and training to those groups. In exchange they would beat up all the communists and pro-soviet people in their country and keep the borders open for US trade.
Not to “yadda yadda yadda” through a lot of interesting history but the US made a lot of enemies and ruined former alliances in these places because we valued the exploitation of their resources more than the actual relationships formed. Once the Soviets were gone, we could just do what we wanted to them and there was nobody left to oppose us.
So our former (and some current) friends stabbed us in the back. The imperialism boomeranged back home and we got a terrorist attack on US soil.
The people who died didn’t particularly deserve it but people die when an imperial power does imperialism. That’s part of why it’s bad. Imperialism will never benefit the common person, it will only hurt us in the end. You best believe all this funding, weapons, and shit going into Ukraine will come back on us too.
What are some other real-ass takes for our visitors who need disillusioning?
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GOOD post. glad you are here
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“Social democracy is objectively the left-wing of fascism.”
I’m not going to elaborate too far into this, but this Stalin quote is timeless and really shows how much more he understood the processes of socio-economics and history than anyone around him. Time and again, Social Democrats prove themselves to be absolutely spineless in the face of capitalist opposition, with their only effective political purpose being punching to the left and preserving core imperialism. They have no internationalism, and they are a political dead-end, simply being the left-wing shepherds of the apocalypse. When Gorbachev wanted to bring Russia into a European social-democratic (euro-communism) model, all he ended up doing was absolutely blasting the Russian economy and setting up the tragedy of Yeltsin and Putin.
I could go in further, really getting into the nitty-gritty of the racism and colonialism that powers the Nordic models, but that is another post for another day. It’s something to remember that Bernie was the compromise for many of us. Not a good compromise, but an acceptable one.
Jumping in to add, the social democrats helped found the Freikorps, a paramilitary organization that engaged in the mass murder of European communists and later became Hitler’s SA.
Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.
Capitalism requires endless growth, endless expansion: the economic engine that drives it is profit. It must constantly take more. But the world is not infinite. Once capital has nowhere else to expand, the only way it can increase profits is by intensifying exploitation within its territories: unions are busted, wages are depressed, costs of living rise. The working class must give more and get less. To facilitate this, capital funnels money into police, passes ever more draconian laws, restricts franchise, defunds public services, and redirects working class anger against suitable scapegoats - minorities who do not have the population, money, or political power to fight back. The result is widespread political persecution, pogroms, impoverishment, decay of infrastructure except the tools of oppression: features characteristic of imperial periphery countries arising in the imperial core.
Aime Cesaire describes this process aptly in his brilliant work Discourse on Colonialism:
CW for descriptions of colonial violence, including sexual violence
Each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and interrogated, all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the [slur]s of India, and the [n-word]s of Africa.
Michael Novick likewise explains this in Fascism And What Is Coming:
In general, fascism can best be understood as bringing the methods of imperial rule in the colonies into the metropole. In the colonies, genocide has been the rule, not the exception, of imperial rule. Democracy is only for a select few of settlers; dictatorship and slave labor applies to the indigenous and other colonized people. The corporate model developed in colonial enterprise. The first corporations were the colonizing corporations—British East India Company, Hudson’s Bay Company, etc.— who could bear the costs and risks of colonization because of shared and limited liability, and exercised state power directly over the colonized territories and populations. The mass base of participation in colonial rule came via the settler population, who participated actively and often independently in land grabs and extermination without waiting for bourgeois legitimacy.
All this was translated to the metropole by Hitler, however he may have defined or proclaimed his system. Except that the mechanisms— dictatorship, slave labor, corporatization of the state and society, mass participation in militarism, looting and oppression independently of the bourgeoisie—were seen operating directly within the German population at large, including against its racially and ethnically defined minorities, and its European neighbors.
https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/
I don’t know how often I can link this, but I genuinely just find it the most encapsulating and important take on fascism since Cesaire. (Might be exaggerating, but it’s so digestible and very thorough).
This process of blowback is exactly why I think arming Ukraine is going to result in nightmare scenarios in the future, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the new reboot of 24 but about Slavs this time
IIRC some neo-nazis in I want to say Germany got raided last year and were found to have weapons from Ukraine, but I can’t find the link.
You’re probably thinking of this event in Italy.
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/11/15/blowback-italian-azov-tied-nazi-terror/
Ah, that’s probably it. No weapons yet, then, just neo-nazi terrorists.
It’s understandable as there’s been a number of high profile neo-Nazi weapons caches seized in the last few years.
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I think the US embargo on Cuba is a genocide. No really, it fits the UN definition of a genocide
Based take and should be added to the rotating header message list.
“It’s not a genocide when WE do it!” Is all the USA has to say about it.
I’m pretty sure blockades are also illegal under international law. I think unilateral sanction regimes are, too.
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The sovereign is he who decides the exception- Carl SchmittThe term in the German original is not exception, but Ausnahmezustand, which means “state of emergency” or “martial law”. Schmitt is ultimately going for what you are implying there, but the translation still seems off to me.
Sorry for being the smug asshole doing the “in the original German” bit, just felt it’s kinda worth mentioning.
True. Thanks for the correction comrade, tho in my head I was indeed understanding it as ‘state of exception’ being synonymous with ‘state of emergency’. But yes thanks for noting the better translation.
The difference really isn’t that huge, ultimately declaring martial law is just a codified way of saying “i just altered the deal, pray i do not alter it further.” The sovereign is the one who can force anybody to play by the rules while declaring the very same rules to be void when they see fit.
the German original is not exception, but Ausnahmezustand
Man these Germans really have a word for anything.
In typical German fashion, that word for “martial law” literally translates to “state of exception”
There hasn’t been a blockade since the Cuban missile crisis.
I should explain what I mean. I was using the terminology in a way that’s somewhat of a stretch.
There’s an argument to be made that economic embargo serves the same purpose as blockade, and that the only meaningful difference is not having actual warships present. And moreover that it should be treated as similar to blockade because it inflicts many of the same harms.
I’m not American but I lived in Manhattan in 2001 about three blocks away from the World Trade Center I got to experience it in real time and I still think the US deserved it.
running angrily at the burning towers screaming “WHY DIDN’T YOU GUYS INVITE ME!”
I don’t think randos, albeit imperial core randos
I think it’s worth correcting this. The people of the WTC were not just randos. The tenants list of the towers was:
WTC1(North)
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey - Randos
Marsh & McLennan Companies - Huge finance capitalist firm
Bank of America
Cantor Fitzgerald - Huge finance capitalist firm
Dai-Ichi Kangyo Group - A japanese Keiretsu (monopoly group) (more bastards)
Sidley Austin Brown & Wood - Law firm, primarily serving finance capitalists
Restaurant “Windows on the World” - Randos
WTC2(South)
Verizon - Randos
New York Stock Exchange - Finance capitalists
Morgan Stanley - Finance capitalists
Xerox Corporation - Randos
Keefe, Bruyette & Woods - Finance capitalists
Aon Corporation - Finance capitalist advisory firm
Fiduciary Trust Company International - Finance capitalists
WTC7
Salomon Smith Barney - Finance capitalists
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission - Finance capitalist regulator
Standard Chartered Bank - Finance capitalists
U.S. Secret Service - Ghouls
My point here is that these were not “randos” that were attacked. This was a direct and targeted attack on the bourgeoisie. This was targeted directly at the ruling class of america and the response that occurred posing it as an “attack on america” was because the bourgeoisie consider themselves to be america and that any attack on them is an attack on the nation. Had this been a bombing against randos it would have been largely ignored, as you see with most bombings of random shopping centres etc. It was because it was an attack on the ruling class that it created such an extensive response from them.
Xerox Corporation
Tech companies, especially tech companies that are as old as Xerox, definitely are at least finance capital adjacent. Old school mainframes were almost exclusively catered towards financial institutions like banks because they’re the only place where you would simultaneously need computers and could afford computers, in this case for number-crunching financial transactions. Mainframes were also used by the military and the feds as a counter-insurgent weapon, in this case as a means of handling massive amounts of data gathered by informants and general surveillance. The origins of tech as an industry that caters to the military and finance explains the general reactionary character of subcultures that have origins in tech like gaming as well as entirely predict how social media companies would be entirely incorporated within the surveillance apparatus.
Recycling this from a recent post of mine but: structural violence is still violence. Colonialism and slavery never ended. Your treats are funded with murder.
There’s no such thing as a good capitalist / landlord / business owner.
Democracy has never existed in the USA, at least where euros were in control.
Because the Democrats embrace imperialism and privatization, they would be considered a far-right party in any other country. This includes progressive Democrats and local Democrats (who almost universally pretend to care about LGBTQ+ issues while dumping endless piles of money onto the police).
All the land in the USA should be returned to indigenous sovereignty. Workers who are onboard with this should work with indigenous people and descendants of slaves to make it happen. This might be a hot take for some of my fellow hexbears but colonialism is the primary contradiction, capitalism cannot exist without colonialism, it never would have gotten off the ground in England without Columbus’s “discovery” of “America” and the subsequent runaway inflation that occurred with regard to the 16th century’s religious wars. Higher prices = it’s more profitable to raise sheep = capitalism takes over the planet.
China should find a way to disable amerikkka’s entire nuclear arsenal ASAP.
One day the concept of private property will look as absurd and barbaric as the concept of chattel slavery.
2/3 of covid deaths in the USA took place under Biden. Biden has signed more drilling permits than Trump, and continues to cage children. He is also attempting to start a nuclear war with Russia, and is 100% responsible for recent tensions regarding Taiwan. He is not just Blue Trump; Biden is the more competent fascist that many people were warning us about.
Cats belong indoors, they live longer and are generally more healthy. They murder less birds that way.
So you still believe that 16 terrorists hijacked planes a flew into WTC and Pentagon? This was clearly an inside job to justify war. I still can’t get that image out of my head about the way the towers collapsed. Controlled demolition looks exactly like that.
Please don’t. Just don’t do this. People used to hijack planes constantly. Like shockingly often. And the vast majority of the time they just demanded the release of some political prisoners or money and it was fine. The 9/11 attack worked because up until that point no one in the general public had considered the idea of using planes as improvised cruise missiles. If someone hijacks your plane you comply with them, they fly to cuba or whatever, there’s some diplomatic hijinks, and eventually everyone goes home. The 9/11 attacks were almost totally unprecedented, which is pretty much the only reason they worked.
And I will repeat my question to you. How was it possible that the towers collapsed with that speed? Free fall, no resistance. Due to a plane hitting them? Sorry, but I cannot believe this. On top comes the Pentagon and WTC 7. The whole story is a big lie.
People used to hijack planes constantly. Like shockingly often.
Yup, I’m friends with enough boomers and genxers that I know multiple people who were on hijacked flights. Anecdata, but still, it used to be kind of common. The List of notable hijackings makes it pretty clear, and even that is scoped to “notable.”
the WTC? yeah planes definitely crashed into them causing their collapse. the Pentagon? no, i dont think a plane hit the Pentagon, there isnt enough evidence and the timing and location of the “crash” is too convenient for the US
I’m not arguing that planes actually hit the WTC but I would argue that they where comercial planes.
So, if the Pentagon story seems a lie to you, why do you believe the WTC story?
I remember watching the documentary of those 2 french guys, following a fireman rookie. Nothing special at the beginning until 9/11 happened. One of them was the one filming the first impact with some firemen. Anyhow, these firemen were convinced that the towers came down by controlled demolition and I believe them because they may have seen a few.
And then WTC 7, collapsing due to fire. Come on!!! This was planned and could only have been done internally.
WTC 7 seems a bit sus, but idk. what i do know is that it took years for the FBI to release the pentagon footage. and they initially only released footage from CCTV that was recording at what appears to be 1 fps, so there is only 1 frame where the “plane” appears, and it only shows the very tip of the nose. could easily be a missile from that footage. its reasonable that theres only 1 frame as the Boeing 757-223 allegedly used has a max speed of 238 m/s, and the FOV of the video could easily cover less than 238 meters, but they also had plenty of time to doctor any footage.
also the strike happened to hit a day after an investigation was initiated into the military. and the wing of the pentagon hit contained important documents and personnel related to that investigation.
not to mention the angle and altitude at which the “plane” hit the pentagon is near impossible even for expert pilots. the plane appears to be no more than 10 meters off the ground, flying parallel to the ground. any pilot will tell you that is a maneuver even the best pilots would consider impossible.
and there was no airplane debris found, and the damage to the pentagon was more consistent with a cylindrical missile rather than a plane with a wide wingspan
Here another bit of proof that something was way off. Not sure if you have ever seen this video from BBC. I did, live as I was in Spain at the time and the bar I was at had BBC on all day. In a few words, the collapse of WTC 7 was announced before it actually happened. So, that day you just see it and believe what is said. How should I know that WTC 7 is actually in the background. I’m not from New York. But you see that video later again with comments that in fact it is still standing and you ask yourself, what else is a lie in that whole story.
Please watch and ignore the comments as they do not add any value to it but it’s the only one I could find straight away.
Anyhow, this and all other stories, articles and analysis I have been reading over the years make me believe that the whole story is a big lie and it was in fact an inside job.
Some call me a believer of conspiracy theories but I just think this is my truth. It does not change my life nor does it impact me deeply beside all new laws and rules that have been passed due to it which I have to life with but we all have to. It is the past and I only brought it up due to reading this post.
I don’t think it was a “controlled demolition,” but I do think that the Bush administration did know about it in advance and let it happen because it was a useful justification for what they already wanted to do. I like showing people this picture. Because this picture is what’s really important to me: The fact that 9/11 was used as a flimsy justification for a “war on terror” but none of the countries the USA attacked had anything to do with 9/11 and the countries that the hijackers were supposedly from got left entirely alone.
We know the names of the people who died on the flights, so I think that part is very hard to fake. I think planes really were flown into the Pentagon and the WTC buildings.
Yes, we know the names of the people that died and we found the passport of one of the hijackers on the ground close to the towers. How convenient. As I asked others, explain me how the towers came down so fast. Free fall, no resistance. Buildings only collapse like this with a controlled demolition which confirmes to me that the story they gave us is not true. Pentagon, WTC 7 collapse due to fire?
we found the passport of one of the hijackers on the ground close to the towers. How convenient.
That is weird, and I have always found that weird, but what has yet to be explained is if the passport was just a plant to justify attacking the middle east, why did the USA not actually attack the countries the hijackers were “from” according to the “fake passports”? Why didn’t “they” plant passports from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen? Why did “they” plant passports from Saudi Arabia (US ally), UAE, Egypt, and Lebanon? Why aren’t Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, and Lebanon invaded in the “War on Terror” if the passports were just plants to justify the invasion? This is why, rather than embracing controlled demolition and fake passports, I embrace something a little different. The US government knew it was gonna happen, let it happen, then used it as an excuse to do what they were already going to do, which is attack nations that had nothing to do with it.
I think there’s a lot more fishy stuff if you actually buy into the fact that Osama Bin Laden did it. Like for example his family’s wealth, their ties with the Saudi Royal Family, their business dealings with the Bush family, their ties to the petrodollar scheme that allowed the USA to easily maintain global dollar hegemony in that era because the Saudis would artificially glut the oil market on purpose on behalf of the USA private sector interests, in order to keep their theocratic absolute monarchy untouched.
There were also some guys who were convicted of insider trading they did the week before 9/11
They couldn’t have made that profit if they didn’t have advanced knowledge of what was going to happen, so at the very least there were some members of the ruling class who knew
Lastly one of Epstein’s victims claimed that he was talking about 9/11 before it happened, don’t know it if it’s true but I’m inclined to believe her
To be fair (
) I don’t get the impression that the controlled demolition conspiracy guys think the planes didn’t exist or anything. Just that the planes were used as props in the show, and that the actual main event was a controlled demolition.I think this is a silly view for the record, planes slamming really hard into a building which then starts a bunch of fires seems like plenty to cause that building to go down
Eh, we are not so much a fan of that conspiracy on this site. Imperial governments don’t have to control all the things, they can just use bs to justify invasions in any case.
If you like it or not, this is my believe after seeing countless videos and reading about it. Planes hit the WTC? True. Commercial planes? Maybe not. What nobody seems to be able to explain is the speed of the collapse. Nearly free fall, no resistance. Can you explain it to me?
If it weren’t for the Nazis, the British empire would have been the big baddies of history, because they did some real bad shit, just spread out over a much longer time period
I think the Dutch skated on a lot of terrible shit, because they convinced the world they were all about tulips and clogs.
The Belgians too. My God the Belgians.
“But Leopold personally-” shut the fuck up and pay your reparations to the Congo.
I just like pointing out how much the National Guard and Army are responsible for fucking over labor rights in the US. It’s not even over, either. Arizona used the troops as scabs when the teachers were largely chased off, or how the troops were used as intimidation when the rail workers were on strike. That they rape and slaughter women and children overseas is hardly a hot take.
Daily reminder that the first bombs on US soil were not dropped in Pearl Harbour, but the US bombing itself to kill communists and labour unionists.
I always heard it was the fire bombing of Black Wall Street in Tulsa. That wasn’t US military though, just racists with an aeroplane.
Yeah, Tulsa happened about 3 months before Blair Mountain.
Also, I always dispute the fact that it was “just racists” in Tulsa, because we know cops and national guard were on some of the “private planes” and where did the bombs come from?
