Cuba has been on the State Sponsors of Terror list, on and off, for decades.
Cuba.
A country that has not invaded anyone.
A country that has sent doctors to disaster zones, not soldiers to oil fields.
A country that has been the target of hundreds of documented assassination attempts and sabotage operations organized by the American government.
Meanwhile the designation exists.
The designated country is Cuba.
The country doing the designating organized, by its own declassified records, a genuine campaign of terror against the designated country.
This is not a paradox.
It is the system working exactly as it was designed to.
Iran is not fighting this war only for Iran.
Understand that first. Absorb it. Because until you understand it, nothing else about this conflict makes sense.
Iran is fighting for the right of any nation on earth to exist outside the permission structure of Washington and Tel Aviv.
It is fighting for the principle that sovereignty is not something granted by empire, it is something inherent. And if it must be defended with blood, then blood is what gets spent.
Every country that has been sanctioned into poverty for daring to disagree.
Every government that has been coup'd out of existence for nationalizing its own resources.
Every leader who has been assassinated by a drone because he refused to make himself useful to someone else's agenda.
Every people told that their choices are submission or destruction.
Iran is fighting for all of them.
You don't have to like the Iranian government to understand what's at stake.
You don't have to agree with every policy, every ideology, every internal decision.
That's not the point.
The point is that a country of 90 million people has looked at the most powerful military and financial empire in human history, and said: no.
Said it for forty-seven years.
Said it under sanctions that would have broken most nations.
Said it while being threatened with annihilation on a weekly basis by countries with actual nuclear weapons.
The question this war is really asking is not whether Iran survives.
The question is whether any country is allowed to survive on its own terms.
That question belongs to all of us.
Ask yourself a specific question.
Not abstract. Specific.
If a foreign country:
Funded opposition movements in your country.
Ran a covert program to assassinate your political leaders.
Imposed sanctions that targeted your civilian economy.
Backed a coup against your elected government.
Trained a replacement government to serve its interests.
Stationed its military in countries surrounding yours.
Conducted surveillance operations inside your borders.
Vetoed international agreements that would have benefited you.
If a foreign country did all of that to the United States:
What would Americans call that country?
They would call it an enemy.
They would call it an aggressor.
They would say it threatened their way of life, their freedom, their very existence.
They would say resistance to it was not just justified but sacred.
Now look at the list of countries America has done exactly those things to.
And then look at the list of countries America calls its enemies.
Notice anything?
One of the most compelling pieces of propaganda produced by the US state was the “totalitarian” and “authoritarian” discourse that conflated communism and fascism, starting in the late 1930s. Its purpose was to construe anything other than Western “democracy” as dangerous and in need of eradication.
He brought up a great point. So many Black communities across the global south didn’t have the geographical/political advantages that allowed their revolutions to be documented, televised, or widely recorded. So much history is lost and that loss shapes identity.
They will say: but the West has also done good. Ended slavery. Built international institutions. Developed medicine. Produced science. Democracy. Human rights law.
Yes.
Slavery was ended, in most cases, by enslaved people making it untenable and by abolitionists fighting the established order, not by the spontaneous moral awakening of those who profited from it.
The international institutions were built in a way that preserved Western dominance.
The medicine and science developed in Western universities often used knowledge extracted from colonized peoples without acknowledgment or compensation, conducted experiments on colonized bodies without consent, and was initially distributed in ways that prioritized Western lives.
Democracy was practiced at home while denied abroad, sometimes violently denied, as in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and dozens of other countries where democratic outcomes were reversed because they produced governments that would not comply.
Human rights law was written with exceptions built in for the conduct of its authors.
None of this erases the genuine achievements.
It locates them.
It asks: who were these achievements for? Who was included in the definition of humanity that human rights law was designed to protect?
The answer, historically, was partial.
The West did not invent civilization.
It invented a story about civilization in which it was always the protagonist, always the standard, always the measure against which everyone else was found wanting, while the evidence of what it actually built, across five continents and six centuries, was buried in archives, in unmarked graves, in the broken genetics of children whose grandparents were sprayed with chemicals, in the foreign debt of nations that were rich before the ships arrived.
The evidence is not gone.
It is just waiting for everyone to stop being polite about it.
The American ruling class refused to acknowledge Haiti as a country for nearly a year after the Revolution bc slaveholders were terrified that the revolt would spread to the US
I keep thinking about whether Black excellence is actually safe in a society that has built so much institutional protection around white mediocrity.
Because Black excellence creates visibility, and visibility without equal protection can become surveillance.
The media calls Nolan a man while calling his white friends “teens,” because protecting whiteness often starts with deciding who gets treated like an adult, who gets afforded innocence, and who doesn’t.
Northwestern University is reportedly shuttering its 80-year-old Program of African Studies, laying off staff and keeping students in the dark
It is the "first formal academic program focused on Africa in the United States."
https://t.co/3NrBBV8DHQ
Exactly. True equity exists when the average BIPOC is as respected and has as much political leverage as any member of the ruling class, white or otherwise.
"When people talk about the need for Black Excellence I counter with an insistence on Black mediocrity: the right for black people to be as average, flawed, compromised & mistaken as any other group of people. The right, ultimately, to be human." R.I.P. Jason Arday
Michael Parenti (1933-2026):
"A client state is a state which is run by a comprador class. A comprador class is a ruling class that is in total collusion with foreign investors.”
This is what the US’ revived Monroe Doctrine seeks for Latin America, an entire continent of client states essentially ruled by the interests of US oligarchs.
Americans invented a word for their corruption so that it wouldn't sound like corruption.
They called it lobbying.
In most of the world, if a corporation hands a politician money and the politician then votes in that corporation's interest, we have a name for that.
The name is bribery.
The person goes to prison, or is supposed to, or at least has to conduct the transaction in a parking garage at midnight with an envelope.
In America, the transaction happens in broad daylight. It is filed with the Federal Election Commission. It is legal. It is protected, since 2010, by a Supreme Court ruling that defined the exchange of money for political access as free speech.
They looked at bribery and called it speech.
They looked at corruption and called it democracy.
And then they sent ambassadors to other countries to lecture those governments about transparency and rule of law.
The audacity is not incidental to the system.
The audacity is the system.
I do respect Yanis Varoufakis’s efforts to unite the left and capitalists alike against the “cloud capital” companies like Amazon who thrive under the umbrella of techno-feudalism.
I don’t agree that techno-feudalism is essentially different from capitalism.