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?
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 was torn between calling out the Dutch or Belgians…Thanks for the alley oop!
posh british accents are literally shorthand for ‘imperialism’ lol. this is one thing an american lib can sometimes parse but will usually still hand-wring about that being ‘in the past’
Aristocrat’s have to die*, as they openly call for the murder and worse! of people slightly left of liberals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNGIyUnLX_0&t=192s
*: (or give away their titles/ill gotten wealth/have their power taken away)
“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.
Everything bad the USSR was accused of doing, the United States and it’s allies actually did, and usually 1000x worse. And surprise! It wasn’t for the “good of democracy”, it was because some American business tyrant wants to build a mine somewhere.
ACAB is another one libs don’t like but less offensive I think than the above.
You actually need to have some deeply ingrained racism to accept at face value basically everything negative you hear about the DPRK from Western news media. I’ve had people irl relate to me that “you know the people of North Korea believe their leader doesn’t poop”, -buddy, who’s the fool here?
oh yeah, and my god the history of Ukraine did not start with the 2022 invasion by Russia - idk how many times I’ve heard irl and on this federated site “oh no, actually I’ve followed the conflict since 2014, actually! and here’s why we need to kill every ruzzian ork on site”
and when asked about “ok, so what about the objective fact of ousting the elected president for a fair right wing candidate that immediately tries to make the russian language illegal? what about nazi marches in the streets, mysterious snipers that shot both protestors AND police, the RECORDED PHONE CALL OF US OFFICIALS PICKING THE NEW GOV, uh the nazis who boarded up the trade unionists and burned them alive, uh and on and on” and their response is just SILENCE or just picking a different (often single-line) response to comment on instead
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.
Was the WTC where the actual execs and shit were working though? From what I understood I thought it was mostly middle management and lower type employees in those buildings. This makes a lot of sense, though - I never really connected the contents of the WTC building with its selection as a target for the attack. Still, as much as we collectively deserved 9/11, it’s hard for me to lean in and say ‘those guys ESPECIALLY deserved it’ if they were just middle of the rung 9-5ers. If that was the case, they’re like… a degree or two closer to the imperial core, but this country basically forces you to work for those assholes if you want to be even lower-middle class. Unless I’m totally wrong, in which case forget everything I just said. But I prefer to think along the lines of how Chomsky described our collective guilt via our indifference during the Vietnam war era, namely that we were all equally culpable for not doing everything in our power to stop this project. Every American (us included) should be doing more.
dont fall far this shit , this position reqires every american to have an Impact on Policy , You dont . Its a Psy Op by witch the rulingclas spreads its guilt onto you . dont let them ,… same Psy Op currently runns in regards to Climate Change , were it is framed as beeing a issue of “individual Responsibility” , So you are suddenly just as guilty as a factoryowner , even more ! he eats only Organic meat ,and his Servers sort the Waste …
Chomsky Btw is precisly “Allowed” in puplic discorse because he preaches this “Classless Guilt” shit…
its a “Divide et Imperia” thingy …
Chomsky was a bit more culpable than the average for being a “left” opposition to the more serious protestors:
