America Deserved 9/11 and Other Real-Ass Takes: A Visitor's Guide
America Deserved 9/11 and Other Real-Ass Takes: A Visitor's Guide
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?
"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?
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.
South Korea is, by all meaningful measures, an occupied puppet state of the USA. The largest foreign military base in the world is the US base centered in SK's capital city. If SK goes to war, it is the US who has final control over its military, not SK.
The US intervention in the Korean civil war was a complete and total undermining of democratic processes within Korea, whose people overwhelmingly supported a communist government at the time the US drew an arbitrary line on a map and split the country in half. Communists in South Korea during the period leading up to the war, and during the war itself, were arrested, beaten, and killed by US-appointed puppets in an active effort to suppress the Korean people's ability to determine their own future. While intervening, the US inflicted so much damage through bombings in northern Korea that hardly any buildings were left standing.
Keep that in mind next time you hear some (totally legit and not made-up or exaggerated in any way) story about how oppressive and evil the DPRK is - as if anything they could do to their own citizens could be such a horrifically violent and merciless denial of self-determination as what the USA did to the people of Korea.
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.
Nazis and fascism were an extension of the USA, due to it being the fortress of capitalism itself, fascists are the soldiers of capitalism
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.
Haiti is shit upon by the world because the slaves didn't follow the rules for order and await white emancipation... making the French look like goons
The United States is the single greatest threat to LGBT+ people in the world. Not only are many parts of the country actively trying to deny trans people life saving medicine, they are helping to fund draconian anti-LGBT+ laws in various African and South American countries. They also helped and are probably still helping Saudi Arabia displace the indigenous Islamic traditions in favor of their more inhumane version, leading to queer people in Islamic countries to be even more at risk.
On top of that, because the US kills so many people, both directly through military action, and through sanctions, that statistically more LGBT+ people are killed yearly by America than all of the countries with the death penalty for homosexuality combined.
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.
Permanently Deleted
Sex Work is Work
Idk how truly controversial that is anymore though.
I've got hot takes about ageism that upset a lot of my age-peers and people older; I think kids and teens should be empowered and consulted more, and I think we need age maximums for things just as surely as we need age minimums. Sure, not every 95yo is incapable of driving, but also some 13yo kids are and we still don't let them have licenses. Fine, a 25yo shouldn't be President, but also maybe neither should anyone over 65.
i don't have any Real Ass Takes to add bc a lot of good stuff has already been covered, but i just wanted to say i think this is a super valuable topic, not just for educating lemmy libs but for reference in general. im gonna use this to convince libs IRL that my insane-sounding opinions are actually decidedly sane
Death to America
no more half measures walter
America did 9/11 to itself.
That's way too many words.
9/11 was used as a justification for wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people. We've had days where more people were dying every day from covid than from 9/11. The US armed and supported Al Qaida, Rambo II said "This film is dedicated to the brave mujaheddin of Afghanistan."
We, like a lot of people, got sick and tired of it being blown out of proportion so we joke about it.
Like how did you stretch it out that far, adding that much text just makes it weird.
We probably need big effortpost stickied somewhere, one about the Ukraine war and one about China. Like I know the news mega crew wrote some stuff pre-federation but it's buried at the bottom of an announcement post somewhere
"THEOTHERPROMO"
Cringe.