Image is of the American military during their occupation of Haiti at the beginning of the 20th century, taken from this NYT article from 2022: Invade Haiti, Wall Street Urged. The U.S. Obliged.
In the aftermath of the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021 and his replacement by Western comprador Ariel Henry, the situation in Haiti is the most dire it has been in decades - by some metrics, even worse than the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake (CW: rape, violence including against children). Millions do not have enough food. Outbreaks of disease are rampant. The government - such that it still exists, which is becoming increasingly debatable - has only a minority control over the capital city, with some estimates putting the influence of armed groups at 80%.
America's search for somebody, anybody, to intervene in Haiti has ended, with Kenya answering the call. President Ruto has announced that he will send 1000 police officers to Haiti. Kenya's Foreign Minister has tried to sell this intervention as pan-Africanism. Other Caribbean states, like the Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda, have offered to send police officers too.
I can't really say it any better than the Black Alliance for Peace's own statement:
Kenya has offered to deploy a contingent of 1,000 police officers to help train and assist Haitian police, ostensibly to “restore order” in the Caribbean republic. Yet, their proposal is nothing more than military occupation by another name; an occupation of Haiti by an African country is not Pan-Africanism, but Western imperialism in Black face. By agreeing to send troops into Haiti, the Kenyan government is assisting in undermining the sovereignty and self-determination of Haitian people, while serving the neocolonial interests of the United States, the Core Group, and the United Nations.
There is an urgent need for clarity on the issue of occupation in Haiti. As described in a recent statement on Haiti and Colonialism, Haiti is under ongoing occupation. No call for foreign intervention into Haiti from the administration of appointed Prime Minister Ariel Henry can be considered legitimate, because the Henry administration itself is illegitimate. BAP has repeatedly pointed out that Haiti’s crisis is a crisis of imperialism. Haiti’s current unpopular and unelected government is propped up only by Haiti’s de facto imperial rulers: the unseemly confederacy of the Core Group countries and organizations, as well as BINUH (the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti), and a loose alliance of foreign corporations and local elites.
Henry and the UN have made a mockery of sovereignty by mouthing the slogan “Haitian solutions to Haitian problems,” yet finding the only solution in violence through foreign military intervention. After repeated failed attempts to organize an occupying force to protect their interests and impose their will on the Haitian people (including appeals to the multinational organization, the Caribbean Community [CARICOM] for troops), they have now found a willing accomplice in Kenya, an east African country with its own set of internal problems.
Indeed, what’s in it for Kenya? An opportunity to both train and enhance the salaries of local police forces and garner a patina of prestige, or at least bootlicking approval, from the West. And for Haiti? White blows from a Black hand and a further erosion of their sovereignty.
And, by the way, here's the Black Alliance for Peace's statement calling for no intervention by ECOWAS in Niger, calling the organization a Western comprador organization similar to CARICOM's role in Haiti.
Welcome to our friends throughout the Lemmyverse!
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
This week's first update is here in the comments.
This week's second update is here in the comments.
This week's third update might not happen because I'm busy dunking.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
man, getting more and more exposure to the libs on here, it's just...
I, too, once thought Castro was a dictator. I, too, once thought that China was a totalitarian hellscape in which people are governed by social credit scores. I, too, once thought that the DPRK was a so-called "hermit kingdom" of its own making with effectively hereditary monarchs. I, too, once thought that the Soviet Union was an abject failure, or at best a highly imperfect project that "proved" that communism cannot work in practice. I, too, thought that liberalism and civility and rational debate and compromise between differing political parties was the only way to really achieve anything, and that you must always take the high road even while your right-wing opposite takes dishonourable stabs at you. I believed that swathes of Africa and Asia were undeveloped - rather than underdeveloped - because of corruption, not exploitation. The war in Iraq might have been bad in retrospect and we shouldn't have gone in based on a lie, but somebody had to be the world police. That's obvious, right? The police are what keeps us safe!
These were all beliefs I had when I was young and sheltered from the world, when the hard edge of economic consequences hadn't yet really hit me. When those consequences and problems did hit me, I didn't have the classic experience of going from a dreamy liberal living in fantasies of equality to a hardened conservative who understood that things have to be unfair because that's just life. I realized, through personal experiences and also through exposure to ideas from the left, including some of the people on here, that most of what I knew about other countries and history was tainted with misinformation, or twisted beyond recognition, or just flatly not true. I wasn't brainwashed. I haven't been turned into an agent for a foreign government. I'm certainly not in an echo chamber - I'm literally surrounded by contrary ideas every day because other people play the radio or watch the television around me and expose me to the latest and greatest of liberal arguments for X and Y.
Others have expressed this point before, what strikes me about all the libs on here is that they seem totally unaware that the vast majority of us once held the exact same positions that they once did and have moved past them. That we might have been in their shoes. We all know the arguments, we've not only seen them, many of us were previously convinced by them.
This comment fucking rules. 72trill is the chosen one to lead the vanguard party.
I, like apparently many others here, was exactly like this. I went to university to study economics and work hard and get a good job and invest in stocks like a big boy and blah blah fucking blah. My cousin started working at a big kind of national-level bank during that time, and I really looked up to him. Then, the absolutely legend, posted a thing on instagram congratulating Lenin on his birthday and thanking him for his service to humanity. I could almost physically feel my world view getting fucking obliterated. The entire Finnish national identity is built around resisting the soviet union, so this kind of take was incredibly spicy. W-w-w-what?! Lenin?! It has to be some kind of ironic joke. Lenin was Bad™ because that's what They™ said. That's what They™'ve always said. The Soviet Union four hundred million billion starved to death state owned exile to Siberia by the KGB winter and continuation wars plus Stalin personally confiscating their toothbrush, haven't you heard?
I, of course, went full denial and tried to not think about by leaning into chuddery, but the seed was planted. Then Libya happened and I made the terrible mistake of actually considering the geopolitical and material factors that might have played into it. What about Yugoslavia then? Iraq? Turns out that this is exactly what the communists have been trying to tell my stubborn idiot ass for the past 150 years. It was unironically one of the more difficult crises of identity and self-reflection I've god through. I remember the culmination rather clearly: I am having an existential crisis and staring into the bathroom mirror. The suspenseful music builds up while the undeniable realisation slowly but surely creeps in. Music stops. Closeup shot of face. "Jesus Christ, Lenin was right about everything." Roll credits.
But then again, "But what about human nature? Don't you want to own things? Who would ever work again? Who would empty the trash?" Of course. I cannot argue with this logic and I have never heard of these arguments. Marx & gang never thought of that either. You are too rational and logical to be wrong. Four guys should own everything, while a third of my time goes to doing some menial bullshit no one cares about and a solid third of my income should go to some random fucking idiot who in the eighties bought the apartment I live in.
I'm so fucking angry
For me, it's the intense contradictions that kept getting worse year after year that eventually made me realize something was up.
The breaking point wasn't even that long ago -- it was when liberals started largely ignoring Nazi symbolism in Ukraine when they made a big stink about it domestically just before the war started.
I didn't have a problem with the latter, but it completely threw me off when it suddenly wasn't a problem anymore. Like, how do you just nonchalantly betray your own principles like that, and not see a problem with it?
In fact, I think visually and factually demonstrating irreconcilable contradictions in the ideology of liberalism like this might be the way to convince people in masses.
I too once thought visually and factually demonstrating irreconcilable contradictions in the ideology of liberalism like this might be the way to convince people in masses
And they never, ever, ever read. Like I've read Locke, Smith, Mills, Rawls, and all the rest of the lib shit. Hell, I've read a little Strasser and Evola even. Show me one lib who has, in good faith, read State and Revolution.
for most liberals, books are something to look nice on a shelf
Also, for anyone interested in my drunken opinion: Adam Smith was a genius, JS Mill was a lib but tbh a fairly smart guy, Locke was a colossal dumbass and possibly the worst philosopher of all time, and Rawls is sooooooo fucking tedious and shitty. Hobbes was based and actually pretty rigorous philosophically, Blackstone literally made me want to blow my brains out. Robespierre was the one really actually cool lib.
Most fash philosophers have nothing interesting at all to say, and are just like a muddle of bad interpretations of Nietzsche (himself, ofc, NOT a fascist) and nonsense. The one exception being Heidegger, who is incredibly interesting.
I'd also like to add that like 90% of the lib theory I've read (Mill, Locke, etc.) was for classes in university, while 90% of the non-lib stuff I've read was fully on my own time. Like WHERE are these fucking university profs supposedly obsessed with "postmodernism" or whatever the fuck. Like forget actual Marxism, I'm out here having to read Derrida, Foucault and shit on my own time. I thought my proffs were supposed to be shoving that down my throat????
I'd actually enjoy hearing more discussions and examinations of lib theory from a marxist perspective - or from a marxist dunking session - as a means of helping people develop a more rounded understanding of the world we live in with all of the underpinnings that it's built upon. Also because I thoroughly enjoyed reading your drunken dunkin and think a little more of that sort of merriness would really help brighten up the place.
Huh, thanks! I'll have to do some effort posting on lib theory when I have the time and energy
I kind of hate continental philosophy. It’s so complicated and it’s all like, to understand X you first need to read Y which requires this nuanced reading of Z etc
The complexity and opacity of continental philosophy is because it’s fucking bullshit. The complexity and closely and strictly defined “nuance” of it allows so many bad ideas to be smuggled in with the good.
I really feel the truest continental idea is when Focault tells us all this opacity and intellectual rigor is to make philosophy the domain of the well educated and wealthy elite, an aspect and tool of social status and rigid social hierarchy, and not much more than that.
Which isn’t quite the same as saying it has nothing to say because it does, but it renders itself meaningless through it's deeply referential pseudo-logical rigor.
Forget State and Revolution, they haven’t even read any of the liberal shit. You know more about the basis of their own ideology than they do. They don’t have a language to describe their own beliefs to themselves, let alone the means to test those beliefs against literally anything. It’s absurd. I don’t know how to have a conversation with someone about a topic that they insist they understand through pure osmosis.
The Harry Potter jokes are there for a reason. Most US folk never read a book of their own volition past their school years. You don't need to read a lot, or even read theory at all, but even a nominal amount of personal reading will lend a lot to deprogramming the propaganda.
I usually just suggest the Jakarta method and Manufacturing Consent and if someone won't read those then talking is pointless
Liberals will say they advocate for the free market then support landlords and rent
Daily Adam Smith was actually based and would have been a communist had he been born later post. (Also him and Hume were gay and I cannot be convinced otherwise)
I empathize and understand these libs, but I really enjoyed Hexbear.net being a lib free zone
Thanks for the write-up (and the news). Yeah, it's weird how people believe the only reason we don't agree with their political positions is because we never heard the before. Reminds me of how some Christians believe the only reason people aren't going to church is because they never received the good news. We live in America (at least I do), these things are nigh unavoidable!
It's the same in most of Europe.
I literally heard the phrase "Capitalism and Democracy are the worst options until you tried all others" in school here.
Obviously, I've now realized that the problem with that statement is that 99.9% of all people saying that never tried anything else.
“You’ll become more conservative when you get a job”
Democrats take in taxes and fund the war machine. Republicans let you keep a little bit more of your paycheck at the expense of letting billionaires avoid contributing to society and strip what little there is contributed to fund the war machine and the police.
I’m supposed to become more conservative because I get to have more money while the world around me crumbles. Very epic
I've talked to enough people with new money to see that the general reason they choose to entrench themselves in conservative or just classical liberal ideals is that they want to protect their own status. Generally, they desperately want to feel like what they have is earned or is because they deserve it. Often they understand, on some base level, that it's all very fucked but their beliefs are not really concretely based on thinking that the system as a whole is correct.
It's honestly very sad to see people I know that struggled early in their lives with poverty switch to this kind of self defense, knowing that all it will actually take is conditions declining enough that they too feel the pain for them to flip back into some kind of class contiousness. What I do know is that I'm never going to date someone again who cries at Elizabeth Warren losing the primary.
Didn’t Sinema used to sleep in abandoned houses as a child? Now she’s the most annoying ghoul on the dem’s side lol
working 9-12 hour days for aprox. 1k€ a month, no overtime pay turned me into someone who would make Stalin look like a succdem
They keep repeating the same broken arguments over and over again, ones addressed by Marx himself over a century and a half ago, and critique Marxism from a position of authority despite not having even a basic understanding of the most fundamental tenets. If you can even call it a critique, considering it’s just a dozen buzzwords tossed into a blender. Smugly lecturing others on your moral righteousness and correctness with a less-than-infantile understanding of the issues at hand is truly the epitome of liberalism.
I was there too once.
I remember doing a presentation when I was 14 about the Ukraine war in which I did a "Holodomor 69 million Ukrainian children eaten by Stalin's giant spoon", "Bandera actually opposed the Nazis once he saw they weren't better than the Soviets", and "the DPR/LPR separatists are fanatics comparable to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS (then a major threat to Syria and Iraq)".
I remember being a firm believer in Russiagate and even made a video in which the Russians were secret bad guys conspiring to use a virus to destroy the US. (Video since deleted.)
I also wrote a scholarship essay where I called for US military intervention in Somalia to combat the refugee crisis in Kenya (this was in 2017, rediscovered now while looking for the aforementioned Ukraine paper.)
Oh, I also once told a Chinese student in class to his face that HK is its own country (this was during the 2019 riots.)
yeah, it's feeling old time
lol I was a russiagate guy too. Reading the headlines every day while taking my morning dump thinking today’s the day that they’ll finally get him. The true patriots in the FBI will surely prevail over this crooked perversion of democracy. What a sap! The fucking FBI. I already knew about the Palmer raids, J Edgar Hoover’s rabid anticommunism, the MLK assasination, etc. But this time it’ll be different. Any day now they’re going to blow the lid off this thing!
I was there. I had moved into my pure American liberal bluemaga phase believing in the evil Russian interference. I guess one of the things that helped dispell that was that I came from a conservative background and I knew that Hillary was a shit candidate on so many levels that eventually the Russia shit just stopped making much sense.
I am in this comment.
I cringe when I think about myself a couple years ago arguing on
against a "ccp bot" or saying "its not the people of China its their tyrannical government" "They are communist in name only"
Its good to remember being there. Its good to tell libs that you were there and that the way out was reading non western sources and seeing things from multiple viewpoints and making judgements for yourself.
I don’t even see it as cringe. It’s like when children believe in Santa Clause. There’s a point where you put the clues together and figure it out, but it’s not embarrassing to admit that you believed in Santa when everyone you love and trust and rely on tells you that Santa is real your entire life. Imagine how many people would never stop believing in Santa if the vast majority of the media and political and academic apparatus were tripping over their own dicks every day competing with one another over who can more vigorously insist that Santa is real.
Cope harder. I bet you think storks don’t deliver babies, either.
Babies come from a cabbage patch, storkcel
I think of it more like that bad haircut or favorite shirt you had in highschool. Its ok to cringe at past you. Understanding why you were that way helps you not hate yourself but the action/style/mindset itself is still cringe worthy.
It’s defintiely okay to cringe at your past self. We are all in a constant cycle of being cringe and then growing past it into a new form of cringe. It’s a natural part of life, is all I’m saying.
Self crit is an incredibly valuable skill
Almost every cultural element of the west deploys soft power to make you think that everything is fine, it's always been this way, and if it's not fine then that's unavoidable.
to be fair, i had to spend a lot of time actually reading things before i could back my arguments up with something other than news article headlines. literacy and application thereof tends to be a luxury for a lot of people these days.
Literacy is obviously a luxury many people don't have, but you don't need to be literate to put a very clear material view of something, like:
On one level, it's that fucking simple and it's clearly an insane system.
another banger