Which begs the question then of what use is killing the prisoners if it doesn’t stop them and prevents their future use in barter for Palestinians held by Israel.

One could say showing they mean it but the zionist regime already knows they mean it and don’t care. Casualties are a part of settler operations and programs and they know and accept this and such casualties are used to manufacture consent for further brutality against the victims of the settlers and the organizers of this program know and understand this even if their people do not and would actually want to negotiate in order to save the lives of their fellow settlers (and that’s important, if the regime is seen as having settler blood on their hands it causes discontent and anger at it from other settlers who in the western sense do have an expectation their government goes above and beyond to save them and protect them).

I do wonder if the Palestinian cause wouldn’t at this point better be served by backing down on the threats of killing hostages and simply letting Israel kill them in bombings and ground operations. There are enough sympathetic voices in the west that I don’t think they could entirely cover it up as being stuff the Palestinians did and it would further tar the zionist regime in parts of the international community.

Materially speaking, killing the hostages they have might feel good, might even be just, but it won’t advance their cause as much IMO as letting Israel kill them or failing that retaining them alive to barter in future.

One might object that solidarity with the Palestinian people is impotent, that it doesn’t stop the genocide or get them their land back so far. And fair point. But I guess I’m saying I think there is a value to being seen as morally superior. You can’t ever be seen as clean as revolutionaries using violence by the west but you can be seen as understood by many other countries and peoples without much understanding of the situation, it can in the long-run perhaps make it harder for the zionist occupation of Palestine to gain normal relations with Arab countries, can increase pressure and the threat Israel feels of intervention. And making it so that the Israeli hands are bloodied not just with Palestinian blood but with Jewish settler blood as well does give them a certain position diplomatically. It does give certain countries more room to maneuver and say hey there’s some nuance here.

I don’t know though. I really don’t. Obviously if Gaza begins to fall things shift very much back in favor of the stated plan. I just hope against hopes the IDF fails badly. I don’t think they’re going to get any help. The US has sent their military there to assure of that and Syria is in no position to do anything, Iran knows Israel already is itching for an excuse to destroy them and honestly could use nuclear weapons to do so with the excuse their existence was being threatened. I just don’t know that anyone can help the people of Gaza. It feels awful watching this.

Oh and of course solidarity with Palestine! Solidarity with the people of Gaza!

Yeah part of me thinks they want all the hostages dead so they can better play up the Palestinians are barbarians who must be eradicated angle domestically and internationally. If they should have to help with that via bombing, being unreasonable, etc, I think the vile government there might consider that a small price to pay to finally get to carry out its genocide to the final stage.

The more dead white people the more CNN can sob about “monsters”. If you think liberals went crazy over relatively white looking Russians attacking honorary white Ukrainians you haven’t seen anything yet once the media whips people into a frenzy over the evil brown savage hordes massacring the innocent, beautiful whites. They could see a real opportunity here to create a power play where they can steamroll over decades of organizing against Israeli apartheid and in one emotional swoop push repressive laws into place criminalizing and clamping down hard on support of Palestine and basically driving the western consensus to no longer care about it, to label any support of Palestinians as antisemitism.

I mean you have to look for education at the US and things like operation Northwoods, strategy of tension, gladio, terrorism in Europe post WW2 and realize Israel received their education from these people. Their existing strategy we must remember includes things like inciting hatred of Jews by tying them to zionism to drive more Jews to Israel to increase their own legitimacy. That Jews die as part of that process is not a problem to them.

They’re already masters at spin, have numerous orgs aside from the bourgeois press set up for manipulation of opinions, spreading out of context photos, etc. So the blowback on them upping the ante by “refusing to give in to demands of terrorists” as they’ll put it will likely be very minimal, the dead hostages will be lionized, their deaths used to justify further atrocities and if any of their families deviate from that line and try to blame the regime in Tel Aviv, well, they’ll be silenced in short order, deplatformed.

The situation does not look great for an ideal resolution. The Palestinian people at this point just need to resist ferociously enough that the IDF is thrown back and can only engage in air strikes rather than actually succeeding in a ground operation.

Also a sad reminder the US gave Israel nuclear weapons and it is the known ‘unofficial’ but stated policy of that regime to use their nuclear weapons in revenge strikes should their regime fall or be in significant danger of falling.

Isn’trael is a US fortress state for projecting power in the region and they will not allow it to fall. When it comes right down to it yes they would put US boots on the ground, NATO troops and shoot and bomb Palestinians to save it themselves. So, sadly as long as the US has strength and the ability to project military power there will be an occupied Palestine. Oh you might be able to bully them into a two-state thing, maybe even the original UN declaration borders but as long as the US has the ability to fight for it they will fight to preserve their loyal fascist outpost there.

Not saying they want to do this though btw. Things would have to get pretty dire or the zionist occupiers would have to directly request involvement as right now they’re just likely to be there to discourage arab states from becoming involved and showing solidarity with the implicit threat they’ll punish them if they do get involved.

Relevant related reading: Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat.

Of course this isn’t just relegated to Marxism though the article focuses on it. There is broadly across the west this myth of peaceful resistance, of the noble peaceful resistor, of the noble martyr whose death brought about change without ever lowering or debasing themselves to shedding blood or engaging in violence themselves. This broadly connects back to the Christ mythos, Christ a figure who was martyred so the Christian religion says to save all of humanity. He died nobly we are told because he did not call upon all the powers of heaven to smite the oppressors, because even in his dying throes of agony he screamed “father forgive them” to stall the wrath of heaven. And through his glorious, noble, peaceful, pacifist sacrifice we are told all may have eternal life through belief rather than perishing.

So the west is very obsessed with this idea and it stems from I believe this and of course is actually propagated in school teaching and so on with figures like MLK and Ghandi because it supports the hegemonic domination of the west, the submission of the proletariat, perpetuates ineffectual tactics which are handily beaten down with laughs and hands the participants trophies while regaling them with revisionist tales of how it didn’t work this time but it did this other time as long as you ignore all the violence and other pressures that actually led to the victory falsely claimed in the name of non-violent, peaceful, and non-disruptive protest.

It did. But it existed so long it’s like a ghost that will be haunting thoughts and answers for a long time. Even dead it looms large in what it was.

It doesn’t have NSA backdoors in the design so it’s unacceptable for domestic use and they don’t want it to take off for foreign use because then they can’t spy on other countries. (Same rationale behind banning Huawei, never was about Chinese backdoors, was about lack of NATO backdoors that was the issue and always will be with any Chinese products).

Even assuming a lack of built in backdoors, the west controlling the companies responsible for these things mean they can sit in the pipe of their security disclosures and pick out zero days disclosed to the company, exploit them against enemies first before those enemies even know it. If they’re Chinese companies they can’t do that.

There’s zero evidence China behaves like the western bandits and hoodlums and plenty pointing to the fact China keeps business (selling you good working products) and spying (gathering intelligence) separate. They won’t sell you a trojan horse, they’ll just hack you, having no particular advantage because of secret knowledge or back-doors. Which is the way things should be in the type of world the west claims to be for in their alleged desire for free markets and free trade.

Rutracker dot org has a massive selection of albums in flac quality. Many artists have whole discography uploaded. Use tools like cuetools to convert single album flac to individual tracks and/or to convert to mp3’s or other preferred format (I like aac).

True but they aren’t unwise to do so. Yes it helps some communists but on a practical level Vietnam is too small in population, geography, resources, etc to ever pose a threat to the US order writ large on a global scale. At most they can disrupt their plans regionally. They don’t have the scale to project power in the way the USSR or China can/could and to upend the US led imperialist block, international finance system, international lawfare regime, and international military hegemony. Like Cuba they don’t like it existing but if push came to shove if China fell to capitalism and reaction Vietnam, Cuba, DPRK could be safely embargoed and cut off from the rest of the world, their ability to influence it made minimal without any big waves for global capital.

Also Vietnam’s ideological education from what I’ve heard is not as good. I’m not aware of if they have a comprehensive great firewall like China but there seems to be some real westernization there and much liberalism. The party holds power but do they truly still hold the loyalty of the people? It’s one thing to say the people would join them in repelling the US if it invaded again given their proud history of defeating the US before and a desire for independence. It’s another to ask whether they’re susceptible to propaganda, color revolution messaging and whether Vietnam can succeed where China has in rooting out corruption, because the corruption in China got quite deep, it was a cancer that could have absolutely killed the party and the revolution given a few strokes of luck for the west and another decade.

But they are doing it.

Many leftists years ago optimistically said the west would not. Could not decouple from China. And while it’s broadly true you still need Chinese inputs, the west can and is removing the higher value, higher paying, higher tech manufacturing from China while leaving menial, low profit, low tech stuff. Decoupling is happening.

The new Cold War is going ahead. Consumers, aka workers and their lessened experiences and higher costs are not a problem. They’re not a problem because they don’t control things and simply have to live with what the bourgeoisie choose. And profits can be maintained by moving production to Vietnam or India or so on. Costs passed onto consumers go up but they won’t be so high as to make it impossible for people to buy a laptop so much as meaning they’ll delay upgrading it. So quality goes down, so? All the better. Means people upgrade more.

China will still rise but within 5-10 years we may find ourselves in a world where by pressure from the US/trans-Atlantic imperialists countries and thus markets can either choose to buy Chinese phones and electronics and be cut off from western ones or buy western by agreeing not to buy Chinese. The problem for the west of course is Chinese quality invariably surpassing theirs. Hence the next step which will be trying to cut China off from raw materials. Russia is a thorn in this plan of course which is why attacks and color revolutions around it will continue.

It really depends on the terms of the loss. There’s the potential for stabbed in the back anger from the Nazis there that turns violent against Western Europe, there’s also the possibility that’s avoided and instead they conduct decades of terrorist attacks against Russia with the west’s continued support.

I’m somewhat doubtful Zelensky will be reasonable, so Russia may have to choose between a costly offensive that takes Kiev and chases the government to the west while degrading it or a frozen conflict with Donbas and other newly Russian regions under Russian control but disputed and not recognized as such in the west or by Ukraine. Because Zelensky knows he’ll have a chopper and a plane waiting for him even if Kiev falls whereas if he negotiates the Nazis there or the CIA will kill him.

We’re already seeing fascists in the European Union and NATO calling for more expansion eastward and calling it imperative and a necessity. So I suspect color revolution attempts in CIS countries like Georgia, the -stans. They’ve already pulled shit in Armenia. The goal being to distract and overcome Russia by pushing up to their borders in too many places for them to militarily defend at once with their limited troops.

Long-term I think they want enlargement to indoctrinate the peoples there with anti-Russia sentiment and eventually throw them into a grand conflict with Russia to cause enough internal trouble, instability and profit loss to allow a coup to replace Putin with someone more pliant to the west. They’re not giving up, there are degrees of success for the US and though Ukraine hasn’t succeeded as much as they hoped they’ve in some way’s strengthened their hand by pulling Europe inescapably into their orbit it seems (reactionary populism though could undo that in the next decade or two).

Edit The west is very guileful, very dangerous. They suspect they’re not strong enough to pin and hold down Russia and China, let alone defeat them. So instead they implement a short-medium-term plan to create armies against Russia, to put down propaganda and create a sea of hostility around them that can be used to pin them while leaving all of the imperial core and NATO resources free to go after China. They are not bad strategists.

“Anyone radicalized by a propaganda poster left up in public is extremely unlikely to be someone serious enough to or later join the communist party or become a revolutionary” - Some fool in 1912 Russia shitting on efforts to spread awareness by postering.

What are memes? Propaganda. They’re digital versions of posters plastered in public places, in this case the digital commons. Is someone who sees a communist poster and agrees with guaranteed to join the party or even inquire further? Of course not. But some percentage will, for some percentage of people seeing these things lights something up in their heads, they realize for the first time there might be people who can put into words and explanation things they’ve felt all or most of their life. They realize they’re not alone. That alone is powerful.

It is not an end unto itself but it is far from useless. Memes spread ideas. In an age and place where the mass media is controlled by the bourgeoisie, where art is funded by the CIA, the ability for anyone to spread an image with an idea is dangerous to the bourgeoisie.

It displeases me extremely to see such an awfully incorrect, dangerously incorrect take. Like really, this is extremely, extremely wrong. This is the lazy take of someone who sees online as laziness and therefore bad.

People are more likely to see and meaningfully engage in this age with memes than street posters. If Lenin were alive today he would be sure the Bolsheviks had good memes. To reject these facts, this proven experience of successful past communists is irresponsible.

Like no shit memes won’t cause or win a revolution but neither did postering and yet that was done, as was printing newspapers, pontificating online in posts also won’t do that yet we do so, we must. It’s all part of a process, it’s all parts of the same machinery. To say it is irrelevant or meaningless is to say the street sweeper is worthless as a human because they don’t do as much as the central planner or surgeon. It’s frankly ignorance.

It all helps. It all helps spread the message. Sure some people aren’t affected but that’s because they’re disinclined to be by material interests anyways. Saying that your communist meme debunking American atrocities was ignored and downvoted without rebuttal by liberals and didn’t instantly create a dozen new communists is not a knock of the meme but of the larger situation. Yet we must keep trying. We must keep spreading class consciousness, we must keep inveighing against empire and this is the way we do it. Some small amount see them, some small amount begin to question. Some small amount who were questioning question further and realize for the first time there is another perspective.

We don’t own mass communication, television, radio stations, major news sites. But we do have this.

Thanks for this very insightful perspective. You’re probably right and though awful it makes sense in the less than ideal situation the world exists in presently.

Still. I think they need to seize the first chance they get to reverse this on the west, call for a UN vote for one of them or their friends to go in and stop a color revolution at the behest of the legit government. The US and other western powers will obviously veto it with wicked prejudice and force and at that point I think China and Russia can safely refuse to stand on the sidelines again by highlighting the double standard next time the west tries to utilize it.

If by socialist policies you mean ruled by a communist party then hell yes. It would be a dream come true to live in for example China.

Happy Birthday Frippa!

Genzedong on Reddit is also sadly being infiltrated by reactionaries though they aren’t making posts just comments and upvoting each other while downvoting Marxists. Unlike Juche gang though GZD is well and pretty much dead with maybe a post a day.

IMO thought should be given to whether it doesn’t make more sense to lock certain low volume subs and direct people to come to lemmy.

No unity with the distorters of Marxism. Down with them.

Feds don’t give a fuck about you having anti-capitalist thoughts or feelings. They care about real threats. Ergo it is in their direct interest and past playbooks to divert people down false paths, into Maoism, into Anarchism, into Trotskyism, even into Pat-Soc-ism. All of these are effectively anti-communists with a veneer or being progressive and anti-capitalist. It allows them to put wolves in sheep’s clothing among the workers to wreck, divert, instigate and direct most people back to supporting or being ambivalent about US imperialism and policy and being therefore ineffective at addressing capitalism or weakening it.

There’s a liberal lurker here who I can see on my alt account on another instance but not from here (weird).

They said they hope we know Russia isn’t even nominally socialist anymore, here’s my reply.

We know. News to no one but dementia addled US politicians.

But we support Russia obviously. Because it’s fighting the evil empire. Because it’s on our side. We didn’t choose that, we have no power to make it so. Russia didn’t even want to choose that. They tried to buddy up with the capitalist west but were rejected multiple times, they’re too big and can’t be subjugated and exploited so they’re a threat that must be fragmented into manageable pieces or isolated. The west chose that. They beat them and backed them into our corner and chained them to us and after the west stabbed them in the back a few times with lies about peace (Minsk agreements, Merkel and Sarkozy admitted they were lies all along) they’ve gotten the message.

Not that Russia ever really left friendship with the oppressed peoples of the global south. Bucking the US empire and trading goods, cooperation, weapons when the west refused. Call it opportunism or realpolitik, the result not intent is what matters.

But Russia will just become an evil imperialist empire and replace the US you scream. And that’s why you’re a liberal. They can’t. Idealism, wants, dreams, propaganda do not manifest into reality. The US didn’t will itself into its place by magic. It ascended to it as the result of material and historical forces going back centuries, specifically occupying and subjugating Western European colonial empires after WW2, it took on their power, assumed the reins over them and agreed to share the spoils. Various forces and reasons assure us the US will not hand over its crown to Russia peacefully as Europe did to the US. In fact even now Russia’s resistance, heroic, is inspiring Africans to push the French out. When all is done there will be nothing the west is left holding onto to barter with or hand to Russia, no colonial holdings. Russia cannot simply re-subjugate Africa or Asia or Latin America in a decade once they stand up. The original conditions which led to it don’t exist.

See, I look at this and then I look at crying liberals (including many so-called leftists) talking about how Trump winning again will bring mask off fascism or whatever to the US and for that reason they claim Biden/Kamala has to win again.

And well uh it’s here, the Dems are bringing it, and this is the type of proof you should rub their noses in (not that they’ll care because fascism is when support whatever countries US State dept deems authoritarian in their addled heads).

I’d point to the people in China awaiting execution or already executed for corruption.

You do that in the west you get a slap on the wrist fine, at absolute most if you’re like Jack Abramoff you go to prison for a few years.