Howie Abel

[Orel Beilinson @BeilinsonOrel]

Unfortunately, the full class isn't on YouTube, but I highly recommend these four lectures from Tristan Brown's class on Dynastic China at MIT. I'll be assigning the lecture on the Ming Dynasty in my World History survey next year --

[WW2 The Eastern Front @ShoahUkraine]

This video is just so dumb ! I don't even know where to begin !

First of all !

The Russian Empire banned Ukrainian. The Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876 criminalized Ukrainian publishing and schooling outright.

The Bolsheviks inherited that ban and tore it up. The USSR did not find a thriving Ukrainian culture and destroy it. It found a language the tsars had outlawed and put it into the schools, the courts, and the press.

From 1923, Moscow ordered the construction of national languages. By 1929, roughly 80 percent of primary schools in Soviet Ukraine taught in Ukrainian. Most newspapers were Ukrainian. Officials learned the language or lost their posts. The 1928 Kharkiv orthography standardized it.

Terry Martin's standard academic history titles the whole system the "Affirmative Action Empire," the first state in history to manufacture minority national consciousness on purpose.

Yiddish was an official state language of the Byelorussian SSR, printed on the republic's coat of arms. Soviet Ukraine ran Yiddish courts, Yiddish village soviets, and entire Jewish national districts.

State money funded Yiddish theatre, Yiddish publishing, and a Yiddish academic institute in Kyiv. No other government on earth did any of it. Not Poland. Not Britain. Not the United States.

The USSR gave alphabets to languages that had never been written.
Chukchi, Nenets, Evenki, Kabardian, Abkhaz. Central Asian literacy climbed from single digits to near universal, in native languages.

You do not kill a language by inventing its alphabet.

Ukraine exists in its present borders because the USSR built the Ukrainian SSR as a national republic: its own territory, capital, academy of sciences, UN seat in 1945, and a constitutional right of secession. That clause was the legal instrument actually used to walk out in 1991.

[USSR Pictures @PicturesUssr]

Soviet Marshal Rokossovsky in Mongolian national costume with the Minister of Defense of the Mongolian People's Republic, Colonel-General Jamiyangiin Lkhagvasuren. Mongolian People's Republic, 1958.

[The New Statesman @NewStatesman]

It is not decent to lie. It is not decent to indulge warmongers. It is not decent to, as happened to Faiza Shaheen, abandon a mother who has devoted her life to beating former Tory leaders in safe seats because she is too left-wing. It is not decent to humiliate a predecessor because it’s expedient to do so. It is not decent to refuse to lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, then scrap the two-child benefit cap after caving to internal pressure and to try to take the credit in a resignation speech.

Left Hook by @OliDugmore: Stop calling Keir Starmer a good man

https://t.co/Xq1lYCP3fw

[Resolute Reader @resolutereader]

This is a very interesting book for those interested in radical peasant movements.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

[neil kinnock shady facts @pgflophouse]

I rlly hate this yankification of British politics man

[Gerardo L. Munck @GerardoMunck]

Una Historia del Mundo

Esta obra de 6 volúmenes, editada por Osterhammel y Iriye, abarca la historia desde los primeros asentamientos humanos hasta la actualidad. Escrita por historiadores, enfatiza las conexiones y los intercambios

Para más información https://t.co/AFhUN30e52

[Gabe Gottlieb @xgabegottliebx]

Just got my paperback of this really important set of translations that will help contextualize Fichte's "Addresses to the German Nation" for English readers. His 1812 "Doctrine of Right" also expands on his egalitarianism to include a defense of the right to leisure time.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Right to buy was one of the most insane, deeply damaging policies in Britain’s history. Perhaps the triple lock, in time, will get a strong second place.

It speaks volumes that Labour was still in favour of it until 10 minutes ago.

[Sami Gold @souljagoyteller]

No one actually “loves their country”. You don’t love a border regime, a legalistic formulation of state sovereignty. You love something abstract about that formulation which you project onto it. Which is normal. I just wish more people understood this and acted accordingly

[New Left EViews @NewLeftEViews]

The United States of America were founded by wealthy slave owners and arch-Stuart reactionaries who rejected their monarch because he couldn’t prevent Parliament from taxing their colony, whose violent settler peasantry just wanted to continue murderously expanding their frontier.

They were one of the last countries to abolish slavery and didn’t become a formal democracy until the 1960s. Their advantage of being a freer and more open society was short-lived and their attempt to build anything resembling a social state crumbled. Instead of a society of mass affluence, they ended up with a barbaric carceral system of historically unprecedented proportions, a top-heavy rapaciously extractive economy, a state thoroughly captured by oligarchic interests.

The last decades have been marked by America’s centrality to nearly every damaging social, cultural and ideological trend. It continues to export its accelerating domestic psychoses to the world. It has become the ultimate destabilising hegemon, blundering around like dying ogre, ever swelling a mountain of rotting corpses.

American isn’t the cause of all ill in the world, but the increasingly nihilistic, zero-sum social culture of contemporary capitalism, that has ramified into every corner of society, is fundamentally American, and the umbilical chord is very much still attached. There is no Post-American world—but with a little luck there will be one day.

Happy 4th of July

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Starmer will be remembered as the human rights lawyer who did more than anyone else to consolidate authoritarianism
"UK state threats bill could pull British journalists into terror prosecutions, experts say"
https://t.co/9NIHpxQMeo

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Crazy statistic.

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

There are many insane things about Starmer's local govt reforms.

But perhaps the best is a *mayor* for the whole of Suffolk and Norfolk (9,200 sq kilometres).

That's the size of Cyprus, and about 6 times bigger than GREATER LONDON.

A 'mayor'.

🤣

[josh! @queersocialism]

been (re)reading a ton about oil, maritime trade, and nation-states over the past year or so. some stand outs if you’re interested:

[Aaron Bastani @AaronBastani]

Starmer blocked a heavily pregnant Faiza Shaheen from standing for parliament - after she was democratically selected - for entirely bullshit, factional reasons.

But he nearly cried after resigning so a woman’s magazine says he’s a great feminist hero 💩

[David Edgerton @DEHEdgerton]

'I inherited a Labour party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt' said Keir Starmer. It shows he has hated not just the Left, but the whole party. Far from saving it, he has led it to its worst results for more than one hundred years.

[Arsov oreol @notbourgeois]

Just finished reading this - it is really brilliant! Relying on Albanian, Yugoslav and Russian archives, it puts together a sober picture of Yugoslav-Albania relations, a topic subject to a lot of manipulation. After all, Dedijer's version was more or less accepted in the West.

[Cosmonaut ☭ @CosmonautMag]

"The Soviet Red Banner fluttered on the high rock of Venus"

Illustration from Soviet-Ukrainian sci-fi author's Volodymyr Vladko's novel Argonauts of the Universe