Unitary state with autonomous regions but not regional parties. The formation of regional ruling cliques must be prevented to avoid a disintegration scenario like Yugoslavia or USSR where separatism can be stoked by compromised regional elites, because if that happens then imperialists will take advantage of it and create puppet regimes and devastating fratricidal conflicts like we have seen in Yugoslavia and between former Soviet republics.
Obviously he was for a long time a brutal and useful tool of the West against communism and against the Islamic Revolution in Iran, so in no way an ally of progressive causes. But objectively it is also true that Iraq was better off before 2003 and especially before 1991. It was more stable, more united, militarily and economically stronger, and most importantly more independent than it is today. To some degree it represented a regional counter-balance against the Zionist entity, alongside Assad’s Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya and (much earlier) Nasser’s Egypt. It is not a coincidence that all of the regional powers that were able to mount a real defense against the Zionist entity’s regional ambitions were targeted and destroyed (by the way this is also why Yemen, South Sudan and Somalia were targeted), regardless whether their governments and leaders were progressive or reactionary. Saddam in particular became more an inconvenience than an asset for the empire once he began to try to trade oil in a currency other than the dollar. Therefore i think it is less important what we think of Saddam himself and more how we should view the existence of any strong and stable regional power that is not fully subservient to the Anglo-Zionist imperialists.
I have a very similar opinion. It’s no secret that i do not like Hasan Piker. I’ve harshly criticized him before for his entryism and his parroting of anti-Russia narratives. I fundamentally think his entire strategy is wrong, and some of his views (for instance on sex work) are downright immoral. Nonetheless it is appalling to see certain online personalities who ostensibly portray themselves as leftist or anti-imperialist cheer for his persecution, for bringing supplies to Cuba of all things, which every leftist should be unanimously in support of. If they come after someone like him who is so aligned with the liberal-left and who has a lot of money and connections to defend himself, what makes you think they won’t come after you even harder? Even the ACP, who Hasan has been extremely hostile toward, have taken his side and defended him, yet “leftier-than-thou” Bad Empanada gloats about his persecution, along with so-called “anti-tankie” leftists. This shows who is just out for online clout and who is actually serious.
After all these years, still an absolute banger.
I like how the only two arguments they ever have are either “it’s just Russian propaganda” or when they can’t deny it anymore there’s “it’s just to trigger the Russians”, as if Nazis only ever harmed Russians so therefore glorifying them is ok because Russia is being naughty and this is a good way to stick it to them.
I say this as a western leftist, Western Leftists™ are ignorant and chauvinist.
A very good beginner recommendation but i would just preface that with a warning that some of its anthropology is outdated. Engels was working with the information that was available to Europeans at the time, so there are some misunderstandings of native American cultures. The broader framework he presents is still solid though.
Yeah, meats in gelatine are…hm…not the greatest aspect of Eastern European food culture (though to be fair there are worse things you could eat…these gelatine dishes just tend to be somewhat bland). But you know this isn’t exclusive to Slavic cuisine. In the mid 20th century all sorts of gelatine dishes were fairly popular in the US and Western Europe as well.
Very informative, thank you. I can only observe this topic from the outside and as a history enthusiast, since i am not religious myself.
Hong Kong was also an attempt at utilizing this same playbook. Ultimately it was a very stupid attempt because China already learned this playbook when it was used against them in Beijing 1989. In the end it backfired on the plotters behind the color revolution attempt because it gave China the opportunity and political justification it needed to finally pass the National Security Law in Hong Kong. A similar failure (though the color revolutionists came much closer to success there because their government is much weaker than China’s) occured in Georgia, which now also as a result finally has appropriate laws to defend itself against this type of foreign interference.
the practice of the religion is at it’s core fundamentalist, any deviation from it would make you excluded from the religion (in theory), at best it makes you a bad muslim
This would seem to be contradicted by the diversity of ways in which Islam is practiced around the world, adapted to local cultural conditions, and merged with local pre-existing traditions. In Asia for instance it is not uncommon for certain Muslim groups to have a tradition of drinking alcohol. In Africa Islam frequently coexists with indigenous traditions. Fundamentalism certainly exists and is in fierce opposition to all of this, but fundamentalism exists in every religion, no?
And to the point that it is supposed to be eternally unchanging, that doesn’t sufficiently explain how various denominations and sects emerged throughout history that reinterpreted the doctrine sometimes in quite radically different ways. Or am i wrong?
Agreed. Small language corrections: India is technically South Asia. Central Asia will probably fare a bit better since it is a drier climate; it’s already largely a desert. Also, it’s “uninhabitable”. I know logically you would think that the in- is already a negation of habitable, but English is weird so habitable and inhabitable basically mean the same thing.
Damn. That was like reading a Jiu-Jitsu master of comebacks.
Unfortunately not new. This was already being reported on three years ago and as predicted it’s only getting worse.
Naturally India can’t solve this alone, because it’s a global problem, but it definitely couldn’t hurt to start taking pollution more seriously.
If India started taking the China path toward switching to electric and cleaning up its environment, the two of them combined would already make a big dent in the problem.
And even if the rest of the world doesn’t reduce its carbon output, at least cleaning up the smog over the cities, as China did, can help mitigate some of the worst effects of climate change.
If American leftists really want to inflict a second Vietnam on the empire, they should start at home, start on the territory of the US. They have plenty of guns after all. That would have the greatest beneficial impact in terms of reducing the harm the empire does abroad.
It’s nonsense. For one thing Russia is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state. If anything it is the other eastern European states that are much closer to being ethnostates and therefore much more inclined to exhibit socially acceptable white supremacy, especially countries like Poland, Hungary and of course (western) Ukraine.
Russia still has a deeply engrained remembrance culture of their victory over Nazism and one of the consequences of this is to associate manifestations of racism with Nazism and therefore historical enemies of Russia.
Of course racism exists in Russia as it exists in every other Western country, but due to historical and demographic reasons the Russian state is more motivated than most to suppress it as it would pose a danger to the social stability of the Russian Federation with its many minorities. If they were to tolerate too much of it, that would result in ethnic strife which would destabilize the state.
Now, if we’re talking about reactionary anti-LGBT views, that’s another story. The Russian state actively supports those. But the other eastern European countries hardly need Russia’s interference to be anti-LGBT, they are already deeply reactionary on these issues themselves.
Blaming this on Russia is just convenient to take advantage of already existing Russophobia and anti-Russia paranoia to deflect from the contradiction between their claimed adherence to “western liberal values” and the reactionary culture their own ruling class has fostered since the fall of socialism in order to combat socialist and progressive tendencies.
Isn’t it possible to be culturally part of a religion without necessarily believing in the supernatural parts of it? In the sense of looking at the religion as a historically constituted shared social and moral framework rather than a metaphysical statement about the nature of reality?
I’m pretty sure some of the famous Islamic philosophers and writers of the Islamic golden age were probably somewhere on the spectrum between materialist atheism and metaphysical theism. It didn’t make them any less important to Islamic history and culture.
People, especially intellectuals, tend to privately hold very heterogenous beliefs, even when outwardly they perform the appropriate rituals of their respective culture. I suspect a lot of Christian monks in the Middle Ages were skeptics too.
At the end of the day this is just a Zionist on Zionist fight. Both sides support the genocidal settler-colonial project. The “liberal” ones just want to do the ethnic cleansing more gradually and make the fascism less obvious.
Because Europe has a history of murdering or forcibly sterilizing disabled and mentally ill people. Because the capitalist state wants to spend as little as possible on welfare. Because just killing people who cannot generate a profit for capitalists is the cheaper option. Because we can see what is already happening with “assisted suicide” in countries like Canada.
China is still whole. USSR is not. Yugoslavia is not. Ergo they must have done something right in how they structured their state that the other two did wrong. A state must be able to survive without disintegrating at the first economic or social crisis. Because no system will be perfect, no economy will grow forever, no state will avoid crises forever. It just has to be robust enough to stay together even when crises hit.
There is also a lot to learn from Chinese history about what causes dissolution of states, as China has broken up many times before, and it was almost always due to regional elites becoming too independently powerful vs a weakened central government. It always got particularly unstable when hereditary regional ruling elites began to form and develop their own networks of patronage and parallel loyalty.
It was always much more stable when the central government controlled the appointment of bureaucrats.
Of course i’m talking about diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural states. It is much easier if you are just an ethnostate, as most European states ended up settling on that model to guarantee stability (it’s why France for example heavily and forcibly uniformized its language and culture). But that is not something that we as socialists should aspire to or look to as the only possible model of state-building.
(Sadly some self-proclaimed socialists seem to think that any state that is not an ethno-state is imperialist and should be broken up but i vehemently disagree.)
Iran is another example of a stable multi-ethnic state by the way. The Russian Federation so far also seems stable. India, for all its many issues, is another that managed to remain intact. So we should be asking what do all these states have in common and what can we learn from them?