#imperialism
A Special Kind Of Stupid
The US military establishment will breathe a sigh of relief at Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election. Nearly 800 former high-ranking military and security officials penned an open letter in support of the Democratic candidate during the campaign. A who’s who of former generals, ambassadors, admirals and senior national security advisers—from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright to four-star admiral and Bush-era Deputy Homeland Security Advisor Steve Abbot—backed Biden as the best bet to revive US power. A month earlier, 70 national security officials who served in Republican administrations threw their weight behind Biden (the list soon grew to 130), arguing that, on foreign policy, Trump “has failed our country”.
Why was Biden the war criminals’ candidate of choice? The foreign policy chaos and controversy of the Trump years were a symptom of a global superpower in relative decline, with no real strategy out of the quagmire.
READ MORE: Why the military establishment backed Biden
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Reality television is bad enough at the best of times. Channel Seven’s bizarre new show SAS Australia, however, really plumbs the depths. Those behind the show are apparently unconcerned that their celebration of the culture of the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) comes hot on the heels of a string of revelations about war crimes committed by the SAS in Afghanistan. It’s as if a US network had launched a program during the Vietnam War in which B-grade celebrities were trained in the use of napalm.
A four-year inquiry into the SAS’s crimes in Afghanistan is nearing completion. It’s likely limited findings will be released to the public, but several disturbing accounts have already come to light. The incidents vary in their details, but reports of torture, execution and cover-up surface again and again, with one special forces insider telling the Age of a culture of “sanctioned psychopathic behaviour”.
A confidential 2016 report by defence consultant Samantha Crompvoets, leaked to the media in 2018, is the source of many of the revelations. Crompvoets related countless stories of human rights abuses carried out by SAS troops.
READ MORE: SAS Australia: TV’s celebration of war criminals
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Today is the anniversary of the Qissa Khwaani Bazaar massacre. On April 23, 1930, British troops opened fire on hundreds of non-violent Pashtun protestors at Qissa Khwaani Bazaar in Peshawar, British India (now in Pakistan). Between 200 and 400 people were killed.
The protestors belonged to the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, who fought for social reforms and Pashtun self-determination through non-violent means. Activists and workers from the movement had experienced massacres earlier – in Takkar and Hathikhel. Their last massacre took place in 1948 in Babbra, where around 600 people were fired upon and killed by the newly-formed Pakistani government.
The atrocities of the British empire and the early Pakistani government have long been forgotten by most. Still, every year, elders and students in northwestern Pakistan gather to honor the sacrifices of the Khudai Khidmatgar activists. As the saying goes: never forgive and never forget.
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leftists in euro-amerika should be fundamentally opposed to euro-amerikan imperialism (that is, both economic exploitation of the global south, political and military intervention in any capacity, etc), and talk about who’s good and who’s bad in the global south can only ever be talk becase we aren’t in the global south & cant act on it. If you aren’t buying and sending guns to foreign militias it doesn’t matter what you think of Assad or DPRK or whatever. We need to oppose imperialism regardless. Even leninists & anarchists should have no cause for ideological or strategic disagreement in this dimension
the united states is responsible for the denial of the armenian genocide. to be clear, turkey is the mostto blame for the systematic revision of history, but the united states is entirely complicit in that revision. the armenian cause–that is, the violent persecution of armenians, which began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth, culminating in the armenian genocide–was wildly popular in the united states and much of the christian west. if you’re american, your grandparents or great-grandparents may remember the “starving armenians” whose infamous, ongoing tragedy became dinnertime encouragement to clean their plates. you can read about america’s overwhelming response to overseas armenian persecution as it happened in peter balakian’s the burning tigris(available here in full, for free). you’ll also find an interesting breakdown of the movement to deny the armenian genocide and america’s participation in that movement in the epilogue, “turkish denial of the armenian genocide and america’s complicity” (372).
the u.s. government (“turkey is not endeavoring to undermine our institutions, to penetrate our labor organizations by pernicious propaganda, and to foment disorder and conspiracies against our domestic peace in the interest of a world revolution” (376) – secretary of state charles evans hughes, “[anticipating america’s] cold war alliance with turkey” several decades in advance); u.s. corporate community (“the armenians were moved from the inhospitable regions where they were not welcome and could not actually prosper but to the most delightful parts of syria [well, if the der zor desert counts as such]…where the climate is as benign as in florida and california whither new york millionaires journey each year for health and recreation…. and all this was done at great expense of money and effort” (376) – retired u.s. admiral colby chester, his eyes fixed on promised turkish oil); and even hollywood (“after a series of exchanges between the two governments, the state department yielded to turkey’s demand and got MGM to drop the project [a movie based on the forty days of musa dagh, a novel about the armenian genocide]” (377)); enabled the denial of the armenian genocide, such that by the 1930s the armenian genocide, once an important part of american public discourse, “was a narrative lost to the public” (377).
a global armenian consciousness emerged in the 1960s, one dedicated to the memory of the armenian genocide. in the united states, “armenians came out en masse to remember and to educate the world” (378). in response, the turkish government and turkish diaspora organizations kicked off their own campaign, one designed to counter “armenian nationalist propaganda” supposedly invented by “aged armenians…most of them already aged eighty or more” whose “[coached] statements are of no use whatever for historical research,” according to one turkish pamphlet. american academics like princeton professors bernard lewis and norman itzkowitz and ucla professor stanford j. shaw and his wife, ezel kural shaw, authors of the ottoman empire and modern turkey famously joined the movement, rewriting history (sometimes even rewriting themselves, like bernard lewis). an infamous instance of turkish state-sponsored denial was exposed in the 1990s, when heath lowry (also a princeton professor) was revealed to be on the turkish government’s payroll while writing “articles and op-ed columns denying the genocide…[and lobbying] in congress to defeat successive armenian genocide commemorative resolutions” (383). you can read the full (and much more complicated) story in the burning tigris, pages 383-385.
turkey’s strategic importance during the cold war (and armenians’ irrelevance, especially because the armenian soviet socialist republic was hardly america’s cold wartime ally) meant that the united states was unwilling to officially recognize the armenian genocide. a 1984 armenian genocide commemoration resolution was defeated with president ronald reagan’s help when “the turkish government threatened to close down u.s. military bases in turkey and to terminate defense contracts with u.s. firms” (387). even after the end of the cold war, turkish influence on american politics with respect to the armenian genocide was significant. in 2000, when the house of representatives subcommittee on international relations and human rights passed a nonbinding resolution asking then-president bill clinton to refer to the mass murder of armenians as “genocide” in his annual april 24 statement, the turkish government “warned the united states that it would close its air bases to u.s. planes, including those near the iraqi border, and cancel weapons contracts with the united states” and “told the united states that the passage of such a resolution would ruin u.s. relations with turkey” (389). do i even need to spell out what happened next?
the denial of the armenian genocide, like the genocide itself, was and issystematic. the turkish government (with the help of the united states government) has done its absolute best to quash recognition of the mass murder of 1.5 million armenians as genocide. this is a fight in which american citizens have a stake, and a say. (which is not to suggest that non-americans don’t. you are part of this, too.) please, please use your voice for the better of an unremembered people and their unremembered genocide. read a book, or three. talk to people about what you’ve learned, and demand that it become part of your state or district’s social studies curriculum. counter denialism where you come across it. do not allow armenians’ narrative to be once more lost to the public.
“Historically, the British nation has only ever existed with colonies and has therefore constructed a national identity through a triumphalist sense of its own imperial greatness, in which the British national character is defined in opposition to the uncivilised nature of colonial subjects. British nationalism necessarily relies on the structured and purposeful forgetting of the violence and domination that characterised empire, while simultaneously lamenting the loss of global power and prestige when Britannia ruled the waves.”—Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State
this is a very frivolous take on this quote but i feel like in the current climate of surface-level representation there’s been an explosion of tv shows and other media (both austen-adjacent things like bridgerton and sanditon, and other semi-period pieces like our flag means death and gilded age) that nominally “include characters of color” and “provide representation” but in no way grapples with the reality that the white protags are slaveholders and arms of empire. I mean stede bonnet is a wealthy plantation holder in barbados ffs. and there’s like a little bit of lowkey racism from the bad guys so we can tell that they’re the bad guys, but that’s its only presence and there’s no actual impact on the psyches of the characters of color from having to hang out with the “good guys” who are nonetheless instrumental in the oppression of etc etc. like of course people of color were everywhere in historical places and reality which before the “representation explosion” were depicted in media as pure white, but this explosion I’m conceiving of puts a greater diversity of people of color in those spaces WHILE STILL avoiding the topic of the tension and excruciating struggle for the right to even live that people of color have to experience when such a social power imbalance exists, and making them all friends on equal footing instead. kerry sinanan addresses this much more smartly in her paper on “eroticizing men of empire”
“THE WHITE MAN’S WORLD.” By Daniel Carter “Uncle Dan” Beard, from Mark Twain’s travelogue Following the Equator (1867)
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thinking about how the burning of the library of alexandria is remembered as the most prominent historical symbol of the destruction of knowledge…but that’s nothing compared to the thousands of entire languages killed in America and Australia by the colonialists…
To put an extremely fine point on this excellent paragraph: language is knowledge in non-literate cultures. This is why language reclamation is always at the top of the list for where to spend our limited resources in Native America.
Fascism is corporatism; public resources are used by private enterprise to advance some objective of that private enterprise. Neoliberalism and Conservatism are both fascist or corporatist economic systems. Neoliberalism is when the government proactively gives power to private enterprise and conservatism is when the government intentionally fails to regulate private enterprise
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Anti-communism is undeniably rooted in racism and colonialism. For what other reason would a reactionary oppose the liberation of the colonized proletariat and the natural progression of humanity? What funny logic do these bigoted white folks use to justify the forced captivity and migration of the African people to America, only to somehow act against the invisible hand of social progression of racial integration? A 21st century example of this photo are all the white republicans opposing the Asian and Chinese community in the United States as suspected agents of the Communist Party of China while happily accepting investments, commerce, and other economic benefits. At its core, the white anglo-saxon protestant is rotten, and must be reeducated in the upcoming proletarian revolution to build a successful multicultural society, similar to the USSR. Even the most exotic looking ethnic Mongolian was able to be treated as an equal to a Russian native in the glorious socialist republic.It is safe to say that the current ethnic relations in China are more progressive than the one of the stagnating American empire.
In the same exact year, fidel castro stated (as he always has throughout the entirety of his life and career) racism to be one of central and most important issues the new revolutionary government would tackle. even whilst he was in the partido ortodoxo (his political ideas were still pretty raw at that point), one of the key believes he held and campaigned for was racial equality.
“Castro’s government promised to get rid of racism in three years, despite Cuba’s violent history of colonialism. Though Cuba never had formal, state sanctioned segregation, privatization disenfranchised Cubans of color specifically.[12] Previously white only private pools, beaches, and schools were made public, free, and opened up to Cubans of all races and classes. Because much of the Afro-Cuban population on the island was impoverished before the revolution, they benefited widely from the policies for affordable housing, the literacy program, universal free education in general, and healthcare.[14] But above all, Castro insisted that the greatest obstacle for Cubans of color was access to employment. By the mid 1980s racial inequality on paper was virtually nonexistent. Cubans of color graduated at the same (or higher) rate as white Cubans. The races had an equal life expectancy and were equally represented in the professional arena.[12][15] Cuba, by 1980, had equal life expectancy rates of Black and white people, a stark contrast from the United States and Brazil who had large inequalities in terms of life expectancies. “
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This 1970s Black Panther news paper shows Kim Il Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong, honored for their work against imperialism and showing respect towards african americans. When the liberal white Americans were indifferent to the oppression of the african americans, the comrades in Asia were willing to fund the black panther party to liberate the colonized proletariat.
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The US invaded Korea first by setting up a collaborationist government against the popular will of the Korean people that forcibly kept alive the horrors, tactics, and even the command of the Japanese occupation. Compare this to North Korea, which not only was given free reign by the USSR to organize their own councils and organization, but which also used land reform and state planning to end landlordism and almost quadruple industry within a few years. Had almost every building in city not been completely bombed and millions murdered, the DPRK would be at an incredible level of development today. It is also important to remember that 20% of the North Korean population were slain by the imperialist lapdogs and that most infrastructure and living areas were firebombed to ashes. It is hard for the imperialist lapdogs such as MacArthur and those who believe in western propaganda to empathize with the North Korean model of democratic centralism, when the possibility of nuking the North Korean people were considered by the US authorities all in the name of neoliberal imperialism. Liberals will praise the United States for devising security laws such as the PATRIOT Act while berating North Korea for its democratic centralism after facing brutal oppression from the imperialist Japanese and the exploitaion by the imperialist Americans.
TLDR: Asians are seen as subhumans by white liberal Americans. They nuked Japan’s civilians. Twice. Still justify both bombings to this day. They wanted to nuke Korea’s civilians. They wanted to nuke Vietnam’s civilians. And people wonder why China is so “aggressive” about protecting itself? Maybe they’ve seen a pattern in history? When will the abhorrent Western imperialism and chauvinism end?
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“Brazilian president Bolsonaro coming from another successful trip to the U.S.”
-Carlos Latluff
#imperialism
#puppet #donaldtrump
https://www.instagram.com/p/BxkDNzHFNmf/?igshid=t7qoxbyvsilv
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“Much like the US and the western European nations, the standards of living in the Nordic countries are based not on having invented a wonderful system that can provide for everyone’s needs, but based on the exploitation of resources and labor of the global south. Lenin described one of the key tendencies of imperialism as ‘the exploitation of oppressed nations—which is inseparably connected with annexations—and especially the exploitation of colonies by a handful of 'Great’ Powers, increasingly transforms the 'civilised’ world into a parasite on the body of hundreds of millions in the uncivilised nations.’ While the large colonial empires of Lenin’s time have largely dispersed, the relationships have not so much disappeared as they have changed form. The global south is exploited, and the western powers profit.”
Pavillion des Tabacs. 1931. P. Bosse.
78 3/8 x 57 ¼ in./199 x 145.4 cm
An electric-pink neon glow surrounds a stylized bust of a smoking African woman in a convergence of modern and traditional aesthetics. The Exposition Coloniale of Paris, held in 1931, attempted to paint France’s colonial empire in a positive light by demonstrating mutually beneficial cultural exchange. The expo attracted between 7 and 9 million visitors from around the world.
Available at auction June 26. Learn More>>
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imperialist doing a democracy ranking: “hmm Cuba which has the closest thing to a direct democracy right now should go in the ‘dictatorship’ ranking. the UK which has a monarch, a state church and unelected nobles and priests in their government should go very high on the ranking”
Christopher Columbus did nothing wrong.
~ @KaitMarieox
He was criticized, arrested, and imprisoned for brutality *in his own lifetime*
~ @silvergelpen
