Jan Bakken

[Patrick Henningsen @21WIRE]

💥 Norway seized Russia’s ship for Ukraine as NATO tightened its Arctic frontier

🟠 A Warrant in Arctic Waters: The Hunt for Russia’s Svalbard Assets - READ MORE: https://t.co/JgntjYNkvM

[Jan Bakken @JanBakken5]

@HeleneTveit1 https://t.co/URIfCjQ8pq

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

There is so much misinformation being spread about what’s actually happening in Spain:

1) Migrants are not swimming or taking boats to Spain’s mainland. Ceuta is a Spanish enclave on Morocco’s northern coast.

2) This is a coordinated effort by Morocco’s government, seen in the video below transporting migrants in trucks to Ceuta.

Morocco’s government aligns with Israel and the US, so these efforts most likely aim to punish Spain for supporting Palestine and opposing the US and Israel’s war against Iran.

[Jan Bakken @JanBakken5]

@gregorymconway https://t.co/5syMSakzjn

[Carl Zha @CarlZha]

That's an eunuch!

[Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez @DiazCanelB]

Somos #Cuba en el Día Internacional de los Trabajadores y en el Año del Centenario de #Fidel.

¡Vivan los trabajadores!

¡Viva la paz!

#LaPatriaSeDefiende

[Richard @ricwe123]

All the time we are told the war in Ukraine is "unprovoked"

But then i see this report, indicating that the CIA established 12 secret “forward operating bases” along Ukraine’s border with Russia in the decade leading up to the 2022 invasion.
Also British MI6 was involved....

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

Thank God we have John Mearsheimer.

[Jan Bakken @JanBakken5]

@HenrikFrenrik Jamaicansk er norsk:

[Jan Bakken @JanBakken5]

@AudunBraten @dagiulstein Svalbardtraktaten art. 9: Norge forplikter sig til ikke å oprette eller tillate oprettet nogen flåtebasis i de egner som er nevnt i artikkel 1 eller anlegge nogen befestning i de nevnte egner som aldri må nyttes i krigsøiemed.

[Amir @AmirAminiMD]

“Please bomb my country”

“No, bomb my country and have its oil”

“No, first bomb my country and have its oil”

[Jan Bakken @JanBakken5]

@sopjap This year’s Nobel peace price winner

[David Ramírez Álvarez 🇨🇺 @DvidTwit]

🖤Right now in Havana.

The sorrow of a child who lost his father in a brutal attack by US Delta Forces.

Our people congregated in a March of hundreds of thousands remember their loved heroes and pay respect to their families.

[Brian Berletic @BrianJBerletic]

Read the US' own policy papers - "Which Path to Persia?" is all about the US starving Iran to death, funding and arming terrorists to destroy it from the inside, making fake deals to frame Iran as the bad guys, and duping the public into accepting repeated US-Israeli strikes on it from abroad.

They admit all throughout the document that they need to lie to the public to build consent for regime change and that the opposition groups they back are not even popular and couldn't exist without constant US support.

And if you have no time to read the whole thing, just read the table of contents in the image I provided you below so you don't even have to open the document.

Who funds Brookings - big-oil, pharma, the arms industry, big-tech etc. - people you will have a hard time convincing yourself or anyone else that they have our or the Iranian people's "best interests" or "freedom" at heart.

How can people say they oppose Trump then spend their time online supporting US regime change Trump himself is openly and loudly promoting?

And if you don't read what the US itself says it is really doing in Iran - if you don't have the time, energy, or interest - then why talk about it at all?

If you really care, you'll put the time in to learn ALL of the facts.

Read it here: https://t.co/CgmfG5Tfrz

[Syrian Girl @Partisangirl]

Brave woman torches photo of Netanyahu on Elon Musks free speech X platform!!!

Shall I do this for real? Let’s start a trend but be fire safe and do this outdoors.

[Jan Bakken @JanBakken5]

@27khv

[Jan Bakken @JanBakken5]

@SalihTorgeir Vi er allerede okkupert
https://t.co/SJGLZBrhxG

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

The entire purpose of the “Nobel Peace Prize” was to legitimize war crimes and it is now being fulfilled

[ℹ️ Not The Torygraph 💚 #SaveOurNHS #ScrapNHSBill @TweetForTheMany]

Every red dot 🔴 is a bomb dropped in Palestine in the last few years - this is more than 2 Hiroshima nuclear bombs - it is 36 Kilograms of explosive for every man, woman and child.

[鍾翔宇 Xiangyu @notXiangyu]

Working in DPRK travel, I'm in regular contact with north Koreans.

That means navigating hospitality norms, cultural sensitivities, hierarchy, etc. The same kinds of things you deal with in any cross-cultural relationship.

I'm fully aware that I only ever catch a partial glimpse of how day-to-day life and the system function. But here's the reality: most loud commentators on both the pro- and anti-DPRK sides have had zero interaction with north Koreans at all.

Instead of encountering the DPRK as a real society, they consume it as symbolism, treating it like projection screen rather than a country with real people.

For the anti-DPRK camp, it's a pure dystopia, endlessly invoked as the ultimate example of scary totalitarianism.
For many "pro-DPRK" Westerners, it's upheld not for what it actually is, but as an edgy, counter-cultural symbol, in a way that is, frankly, disrespectful to the Koreans.

Verification is genuinely difficult for most: there is a language barrier, travel is structured, and south Koreans who don't have the language barrier cannot travel north. The result is that people who watch documentaries, treat defector testimonies as universal, read think-tank reports, and binge YouTube "explainers" end up convinced they know everything.

In practice, they have far less experience with the country than someone like me, and yet they internalize this bizarre logic: "Because I can't verify that what I’m saying is false, it must be true."

That's how you get Western redlibs claiming Pyongyang residents are pro-LGBT (they're absolutely not), or anti-DPRK commentators insisting the word "love" doesn't exist in north Korea because some compulsive liar from Hyesan that got too much plastic surgery said so.

What's funny is people with no direct experience speak with absolute certainty, while those of us with actual experience speak far more cautiously simply because we understand that the more you learn about the DPRK, the more you realize how much you don't know. And this is true of any country if we're being honest with ourselves.

The reality is simple but inconvenient to losers on the internet: these are people with agency, constraints, dignity, and contradictions. Most are ordinary people navigating their unique circumstances with pragmatism, compromise, and a full range of human emotion.

To ideologues, this reality is boring because now the Koreans are no longer a population to fetishize, pity, or vilify.

What I'm trying to say is most western commentary on the DPRK isn't just wrong, but also laughably careless.