History Major. Cripple. Vaguely Left-Wing. In pain and constantly irritable.
The people have armed themselves to protect themselves from people like you.
The People’s Stick, I see.
They are more free than you can possibly imagine, and that idea terrifies you.
Maybe the post-1950s PR campaign was unnecessary all along.
They’ve literally hosted international conferences this year.
tightly restricted entry to and interaction with their territory from outsiders, with journalists only allowed to ask questions when accompanied by EZLN guards?
You wanna point out to me where that contradicts “holding a conference”?
I literally cannot with you people.
Yeah, sorry that you haven’t been following anything except the endless glazing of Subcommandante Marcos. I understand that PR of the internet age is much more compelling to our generation than the staid 1950s-level PR of former ML states, but I would suggest that you learn to think for yourself nonetheless.
Please disengage, I’m sick of the bad faith bullshit.
“Bad faith is when I’m contradicted”
Okay.
Do you have any actual objections to life under the Zapatistas, or are you just going to continue vagueposting about how it must be bad because you decided it must be?
You do realize that the Zapatistas, before this recent trouble with “Blaming the government (that they don’t need) for not controlling the cartels” tightly restricted entry to and interaction with their territory from outsiders, with journalists only allowed to ask questions when accompanied by EZLN guards?
There’s a long laundry-list of problems with how the Zapatistas have ‘settled in’ to their role since the turn of the century.
Is there even a word for such brazen, naked duplicity?
Fascism.
Removed by mod
Jorpers is still alive? I thought he shriveled and died from his exclusive water-steak-salt diet.
Yes. The Taliban was a faction (well, a couple of factions) of the Mujahideen that then fought a civil war against various other factions of the Mujahideen.
Again, ignoring that the Taliban was formed largely by Pashtun religious students from Pakistan who were too young to have been involved in the Mujahideen.
Genocidal? Taraki and Karmak were not perfect. They tried to change things too quickly, and angered many traditionalists and rural groups. But there’s a bit of a difference between ‘repressive’ or ‘harsh’ and genocidal. It’s the difference between, say, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Anyway, back to my criticism:
Fucking lmao. Killing 10% of Afghanistan’s population is just ‘harsh’.
The US funded and armed a bunch of ultra-religious nutjobs to fight a government which, while far from perfect, had enacted reforms, protected the rights of women, and maintained a balance between the various tribes. It is not hard to predict what would result if that government collapsed, and, in fact, that is exactly what happened. Are all US military experts dumb? Or did they simply not care? Either way, they destroyed a country.
Did you forget that US aid to Afghanistan didn’t even start until the Soviets invaded to prop up their puppet government, which had failed of its own accord, not ‘maintained a balance between the various tribes’?
Fuck off, tankie.
But that would also remove the initial Libya strikes, most of the Somali strikes, most of the non-Trump post-2012 Iraq strikes, and some of the Syria strikes.
And at that point, it might look like Republicans are demonstrably worse than Dems, and we can’t have that.
The Nigerian government requested US assistance due to an ongoing insurgency by an ISIS-affiliated group.
Do you think the Taliban ‘fell out of a coconut tree’, as one of your politicians used to say? It is a successor to the Hezbi Islami, Haraqat Inqilab Islami and other factions of the Mujahideen.
“Um, aktually, the Taliban is the successor to the Islamist groups it literally fought a brutal civil war against.”
Your intellect is truly frightening.
These were funded and armed by the US to destabilise the Soviets, with zero thought going into what would happen if a country’s government is weakened and religious zealots let loose with weapons and cash.
“if a country’s government is weakened”
I love how casually you gloss over the genocidal Soviet occupation as implicitly some form of harmless stability, but what should one expect from campist bootlickers?
The Taliban was a part of the Mujahideen.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The Taliban that was formed primary out of Pashtun religious students from Pakistan who were largely too young to have participated in the anti-Soviet Mujahideen? The Taliban that was formed in 1994? Half a decade after the Soviet invasion was over?
I know the US govt is incapable of thinking about the consequences of their actions, but you can try to do better.
Tell me more about how the Taliban are consequences of not being genocided by the Soviets.
Americans rarely know the history of what they’re fucking talking about, but you can do better than most of my countrymen.
Or maybe you can’t, and this is the best you’ll ever do.
Unfortunately, the damage will long outlive the orange rapist.
The Taliban that fought the Mujahideen we supported in the 80s? The Taliban that wasn’t even formed until after US interest in Afghanistan was long-over? The Taliban that started a literal civil war against the Mujahideen? Those Taliban?
Listen, I’m no tankie but the thought that blowing up shit in a country wouldn’t destabilize that country is pretty laughable.
And if shit is already blowing up?
What is ‘destabilizing’ about supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, for example? Walk me through it. I’m apparently a moron.
You’re absolutely right, I can’t believe that the US forced Pakistan to found the Taliban half a decade after the end of the Afghanistan War. I can’t believe we forced Gaddafi to be a horrific dictator and serial rapist. I can’t believe we forced Somalia to go through the past what, 55 years of chaos? I can’t believe we forced Assad to inherit the ‘socialist’ state of his father, and like a good little monarchist stooge, continue his father’s repressive policies. God, it’s so terrible how the West is behind everything, working the world like a puppetmaster, except when anything improves, at which point we are curiously absent.
Or perhaps we should be blamed for arming the mujahideen - after all, it would have been much more moral if the Afghans just rolled over and let the Soviets massacre them, just like the Soviet-aligned forces massacred literal hundreds-of-thousands of unarmed civilians in the course of their occupation.
Interventionism is typically a fool’s game without winners; that doesn’t equate to any of the fucking conclusions being proposed here, except that we should be intervening a lot fucking less.
Man, I am not saying we “Had to” do any of it, as I said, whether they’re justified, I would say not in most cases. We did not have to do any of it, but I also won’t pretend that running sorties on fucking ISIS to defend Iraq is the same as invading Iran - or pulling a drone strike on Iraqi soil without Iraqi permission, for that matter.
My point is that these largely aren’t destabilization as the title suggests, and trying to pretend that they are is disingenuous at best and, considering how heavily it ignores the actual difference with Republican administrations, intentionally misleading at worst.
Yes, as we all know, the ongoing civil war in Afghanistan that Pakistan was deeply involved with was entirely peaceful before US intervention, Somalia and Syria (I note you use the anti-Assadist flag, lmao) likewise, we are definitely not present in Nigeria at request of the fucking Nigerian government, and our involvement post-2012 with Iraq was DEFINITELY not at request of the Iraqi government in dealing with fucking ISIS. Of course, I’m sure any number of people here would parrot critical support for ISIS under anti-imperialist grounds.
I also note that excluded in the graph is the assassination of Soleimani during Trump’s first term, presumably counted instead as an Iraqi strike since it was on Iraqi soil, even though it was an attack on a high-ranking Iranian military officer. I guess that would make Trump’s warmongering too apparent.
But that might contradict the “BOTHSIDES” narrative, so we can’t have any of those inconvenient facts.
Also, a FUCKTON of countries are left out of both Republican presidents’ laundry lists of bombed countries.
How curious and totally unexpected. /s
Go ahead. Tell me that supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was ‘destabilizing’ a country already in civil war. Tell me that strikes in Somalia were ‘destabilizing’ a country already in civil war. Tell me strikes in Syria were ‘destabilizing’ a country already in civil war. Hell, tell me post-2014 strikes in Yemen were ‘destabilizing’ a country in civil war. Tell me strikes in post-2012 Iraq were destabilizing a country struggling with an external invasion.
I would love to hear your justifications.
Whether you think they’re justified or not - and I would hazard ‘not’ in most cases, personally - the idea that they were ‘destabilization’ of the world is fucking nonsense, and Very Serious Leftists like you are just loathe to admit that you’re useful idiots for literal Nazis. But hey, if you useful idiots didn’t support maximizing Zionist aims, who would?
Explanation: Marx, one of the foundational thinkers for modern socialist thought, has spawned a very… wide variety of claimants to his ideology and legacy.
First are socialists Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg quarreling over whether general strikes can be used ‘offensively’ or only ‘defensively’ - with Luxemburg (rightly) finding the distinction asinine and counterproductive.
Second is Stalin, who ran a red fascist regime without any redeeming features, other than, I suppose, not being the Nazis. Small mercies?
Third, Maoist China, which hasn’t had a full decade of ideological coherence since its consolidation over the mainland.
Fourth, the Shining Path in Peru, who thought that communism would totally be possible if only they killed enough fellow communists and civilians for being ‘revisionist’.
Fifth is a popular online commentator, Vaush, whose opinions are… not always well-founded in leftist thinking, regardless of whether one pushes for harm reduction, and tend towards a rather lukewarm reformism.
And sixth are the online tankies we all know and love, frothing at their keyboards over how being descended from the wrong people means you are not REALLY one of the Proletariat™.
Yes? I’m arguing that the United States set a precedent for what wealthy, nuclear-armed states can get away with. We started using the “right of self-defense” as pretext to invade other countries.
The use of ‘self-defense’ as an excuse to invade other countries long predates Article 51.
Article 51 was invoked several times in blatantly unjustified wars by other states before the US invoked it in '64.
I don’t see the contradiction you seem to see?
Because you have no understanding of the history you purport to parrot.
I’m sorry I don’t follow the rules of the Fae, or whichever arcane code you’re following?
If you want to disengage, feel free to disengage. No one is forcing you to respond to me. If you want to get the last word in and then say “Disengage” thinking it’s a “Now my points can’t be responded to :3” card, feel free to go fuck yourself.