"Soft Eyes" Cha Cha 🇵🇸

The rub with this squishy claptrap is they can never define what they mean by a “Palestinian state”. Ilan, tell us: - Does this Palestinian state get a military? - Can it enter bilateral alliances with Russia or China? - what mechanism prevents further Israeli expansionism?

How to talk to such a person? Only for the purpose of providing information that will help any human in earshot realize there are two sides in the struggle, and decide which side to be on. Even the liberal can switch. But only if he is exposed, not accepted into peace talks.

@JamesSurowiecki @EricLevitz James, are you familiar with the PFLP?

@its_chacha_ @EricLevitz But Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are not anti-capitalists.

“Opposing the US stopped making sense after it successfully wound down the primary obstacle to its geopolitical program” is so breathtakingly stupid, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just not reading this right

@EricLevitz One could retain the (themselves propagandistic) characterizations of China, Russia, and Iran and still operate on the coherent internal logic that the US was and remains the single greatest enemy of and threat to anti-capitalist revolutionary projects

No. I'm saying that leftists rationalizing the crimes of Soviet bloc countries -- while morally deranged -- at least had a coherent internal logic: These countries were ostensibly part of anti-capitalist revolutionary project. By contrast, even if one believes that it is good to run interference for oppressive foreign actors -- in service of the communist cause -- it still makes little sense to propagandize for China (a deeply inegalitarian, state capitalist regime), Russia (a kleptocracy) or far-right Islamist movements. It is always good to oppose America's violations of human rights, however

This analysis deeply misunderstands how deterrence works on the strategic scale, and deeply misunderstands the necessary, if painful, logic of anti-imperialist war. Squirrel is trapped within a Eurocentric frame, and ignores how Iran and the axis have, informed by the Shia tradition, wrestled the signification of death away from the zionist-imperialist bloc. And forgets the lessons of Ho Chi Minh and Basel al-Araj, that the revolutionary intellectual should never compare casualties between colonizer and colonized, imperialist and anti-imperialist, for they will always be skewed. What matters is how the resistant society demonstrates the capacity to reproduce itself while absorbing these costs (or what Amal Saad might call "deterrence by regeneration") More fundamentally, Squirrel seems to only be capable of apprehending deterrence on a very narrow tactical scale - in terms of counting casualties on each side. In this sense, it is true that the US-Zionist bloc killed more people and visited more destruction upon Iran and Lebanon. And, yes, it retains the ability to strike Iran at will without experiencing a commensurate counter-response. However, the zionist-imperialist bloc has not been able to translate their tactical strikes into strategic gains, which is the scale at which Iran has sought to establish deterrence. For example, the US-zionist assassinations did not lead to institutional fracturing, as was the strategic aim of the attackers, but instead was responded to with institutional and governance continuity and coherence. The attacks on civilian infrastructure and civilian life did not lead to social fracturing, as was the strategic expectation, but rather was responded to with national and social cohesion, a renewal of the popular sovereign basis of the Republic. The attacks on core economic infrastructure did not succeed in de-industrializing Iran, as it instead responded with rapid repair and replenishment where necessary in the short term, and preserving of capabilities so restoration could happen in the medium term. And, most significant, Iran responded to the tactical blows, as a whole, by establishing permanent escalation dominance through its demonstration of its sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz. Iran's "escalation dominance", or its moving of deterrence to the strategic scale, had the effect of demonstrating that while the enemy could inflict casualties and destruction, it would fail to achieve any strategic advance. In fact, it would experience strategic reversals - rising costs in the form of revenue drain (US was spending 2 billion/day), munitions attrition, and an internal social fracturing (growing opposition to war in US). The US has permanently lost its standing as a security guarantor for the GCC. Perhaps, most significant, when Trump and Hegseth threaten Iran with death, the response they receive is: "we do not fear death, we choose dignity over humiliation." This has the impact of disarming the imperialist power - it can spend billions inflicting death, but it achieves nothing strategically. Now, see where we find ourselves. It is no longer up to the US to either uphold or undermine the ceasefire - the initiative is in the hands of Iran. The strait of Hormuz is a counter-sanctions enforcement mechanism, this is a reality the US must now accept. Iran has further demonstrated that the US can spend 65 billion dollars per month and achieve no strategic gains, and lose strategically in the sense that the Gulf no longer has a security guarantor. Certainly, war can break out again, but what has been revealed is that it is the US, not Iran, that is increasingly moving out of weakness and panic, and a realization that its projection of power in the region is in irreversible decline at the strategic scale.

Ppl living in imperial core benefit from imperialism — cheap goods for those w/ earnings, ease of travel for those w/ passport etc. —but “development” + “democracy” capped to favor capitalists, so there is no situation of better welfare / redistribution without a class struggle

The revolutionary's public duty is to act as an amplifier for the global anti-imperialist movement. This involves articulating why principled opposition to US hegemony necessitates solidarity with its primary targets be it Iran, North Korea, or Hezbollah. Furthermore, it

Liberals like this are thisclose to getting it, but they still can't let themselves take the next step. They still can't let themselves understand how turning hope & change into more of the same was a key moment of demoralization that catalyzed the subsequent disaster.

I always find this framing strange. You call Iran’s system "illiberal and brutal," and then in the next breath admit that the ones bombing it are also "illiberal and brutal" in Palestine. So why is one a "regime" and the other a "leader" or an "ally"? Why does one get described as a problem for humanity and the other as an overzealous cop that sometimes goes too far? I am not Iranian. I am not here to grade every law in Tehran or romanticize anyone’s security apparatus. What I genuinely do not understand is people who know, in detail, what the U.S. and Israel have done to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, and still talk about Iran using the same vocabulary, the same tones, the same categories those two powers spent decades manufacturing. You say the Iranian people "deserve the freedom they have long fought for." Fine. But who strangled their economy with sanctions? Who blew up their generals on foreign soil and hunted their scientists in the streets? Who backed the Shah’s secret police for decades and crushed every attempt at a different path? The same capitals that now claim to cry for Iranian "freedom." So when you repeat "illiberal and brutal regime" in the same sentence as you condemn U.S. and Israeli strikes, you are trying to have it both ways: You reject the bombing, but you swallow almost all of the narrative that makes the bombing sellable to Western publics. If Washington and Tel Aviv are so obviously brutal in Palestine and everywhere else, why is your baseline assumption that their descriptions of Iran are basically correct, only "taken too far"? Maybe the problem is not just escalation. Maybe the problem is that the West spends years turning a country into a cartoon demon, then pretends to be shocked when its own public demands an exorcism by cruise missile. I support Iran’s right to exist without being strangled, sabotaged, and bombed by the same empires that turned half the region into a graveyard. I do not need to believe Iran is perfect to say that. I only need to recognize that the worst, most systematic violence in this story does not come from Tehran. So yes, condemn U.S. and Israeli strikes. But do not pretend you are outside their propaganda when you describe Iran with the exact script they wrote. If you really believe all three are "illiberal and brutal," start with the two that built the sanctions regime, the drone bases, and the regional wars. The rest of us have lived long enough under their "concern for freedom" to know which brutality actually threatens the planet.

The issue is that the Chinese govt is aware of the problems that China has and is dealing with them. So lets take youth unemployment, this is a problem both in China and the United States. China is dealing with this by pushing down

🇩🇪 German official: “The number of Chinese people living here […] is 4 times higher than the German community.” 🇳🇦 Namibia’s president: “Why does it become your problem? […] We will handle our own country.”

The aim of the ruling class over the last fifty years has been to make the working class lose all awareness of itself as a class. This is behind the relentless propaganda to declare that everyone was "middle class" in the 1990s and 2000s. The ruling class will promote all manner of distractions and divisions in order to prevent the working class becoming conscious of itself and its historic role. The capitalists need to do this because they are faced with an ever growing proletarianisation of the population and thus need to make sure that these workers remain mired in ideological backwardness as much as possible. It is the historic duty of communists to help the working class understand the war that is being waged upon our class every day by the ruling class and that we have no choice but to fight them.

The most prestigious type of argument in our culture is that things are the way they are because that’s just the way they are and even if we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars and using force to make them that way it’s irrelevant because they’d be that way anyway.

Here Dave I’ll explain it to you because it can genuinely be confusing: Neoliberalism (d/b/a “abundance”) and its billionaire backers understand they need a hook to get you to embrace their privatization and deregulation agenda so they focus on its perceived cartoon excesses 🧵

The kind of liberal scoundrels who act as the loudspeakers of NATO and Western powers, cloaking themselves behind the facade of human rights and a 'free press' in the Global South, to make you believe that economic sanctions are a 'civilized' tool for the U.S empire to achieve democracy.

Many Global South nations develop authoritarian tendencies as a result of constant attack and infiltration by the West. If you truly cared for them & their civil liberties you would support them in their revolutionary struggles instead of repeating CIA regime change propaganda.

@rk__upadhya Recommendations for where we should study the full story?

the full story of this should be studied by every socialist. Emancipation was forced on Lincoln by 1) enslaved people defecting en masse and creating a major social-economic crisis in the South, and 2) abolitionists soldiers and officers forcing the issue in the places they held

“Free Iran” means exactly what “Free Iraq,” “Free Libya,” and “Free Syria” meant. That is the material reality, however you try to spin it. Either you’re calling for another U.S.-engineered destruction, or you’re so politically naive your opinion can be automatically disregarded

Everyone praising Mark Carney’s speech as “bold,” “brave,” or “eloquent,” and treating it as evidence that the West can still rescue itself, is still misunderstanding the nature of the crisis. The “rules-based international order” didn’t erode gradually or mysteriously; it collapsed the moment Western governments showed that the rules don’t apply when the violator is an ally. Gaza didn’t expose a weakness in the system that could be patched or repaired; it revealed what the system actually is. For two years, the Western world didn’t merely fail to restrain Israel; it funded it, armed it, vetoed accountability, rewrote legal standards in real time, and criminalized dissent at home. International law was selectively suspended, not overwhelmed like some people want to say, and once legality becomes conditional, the concept itself ceases to exist. That was the real point of no return in 2023. Not because Donald Trump violating the sovereignty of Greenland broke the order, but because the precedent was set in full view of the world: mass killing can be lawful if it’s committed by the right state, against the right people, with the right patrons. After that, no appeal to “norms” or “institutions” can be taken seriously again. Don’t gaslight yourselves into thinking that Carney is offering a path to renewal here; he’s delivering a sophisticated obituary. You can’t rebuild credibility with speeches after showing that the law is optional. Anyone treating this as a hopeful turning point is as delusional as a person watching their house burn and believing better fire alarms will restore the structure. It’s already over. And as the Western order fractures under the weight of its own contradictions, Gaza won’t be a footnote to its collapse. It’ll be remembered as the moment the world finally understood that the system had died long before anyone admitted it.