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?

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

  • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    “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.

  • Goadstool [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • jabrd [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    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

  • slabber@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      11 months ago

      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

      • slabber@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • ZoomeristLeninist [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          11 months ago

          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

          • slabber@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            11 months ago

            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.

            https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f0HPqd8dPeE&pp=ygU2YmJjIHJlcG9ydCBvZiBmYWxsZW4gd3RjIDcgYmVmb3JlIGl0IGFjdHVhbGx5IGhhcHBlbmVk

            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.

    • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      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.

      • ElChapoDeChapo [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        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

      • slabber@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        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?

      • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        11 months ago

        To be fair (reddit-logo smuglord ) 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

    • JuneFall [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • slabber@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        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?

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • slabber@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        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.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    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.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      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.

  • ChairmanSpongebob [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    11 months ago

    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