dexm

Equity, future, Bitcoin, environment, energy, socialism, digital rights, privacy

[New Direction AFRICA @Its_ereko]

China became a superpower because of:

1. The 1949 revolution that ended foreign domination
2. Land reform that broke the old landlord class
3. Industrialization driven by Chinese planning, not foreign aid
4. Massive investment in education and healthcare in the 1950s-70s
5. Strategic opening on China's own terms post-1978

The US never "invested" in China to make it strong. American companies came to China to make themselves richer, not China powerful. Cheap labor. Weak environmental rules. Tax breaks. That was the deal.

China took those crumbs and built its own banks, its own supply chains, its own technology. Huawei. BYD. TSMC. High-speed rail. Beidou satellites. None of that came from US charity.

Meanwhile, look at countries that actually relied on US "investment" as the main strategy. The Philippines. Mexico. Egypt. Where are their superpower statuses?

The revolution created the foundation. Chinese discipline built the rest. The US was just an accidental landlord collecting rent until the tenant bought the building.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

"South Vietnam requested America for help."

Who created South Vietnam, Daniel?

Tell me. Take your time. Go look it up. I'll wait.

South Vietnam was not a country.

It was a administrative line drawn at the 17th parallel by the 1954 Geneva Accords as a temporary demarcation pending a national reunification election in 1956.

It was never intended to be a permanent border.

It was never intended to be two countries.

Every party at Geneva understood this. The documents say this explicitly.

The United States prevented that election from happening.

Why? Eisenhower wrote it himself, in his own memoir: American intelligence estimated Hồ Ch�� Minh would win roughly 80 percent of the vote.

So Washington cancelled the election, installed Ngô Đình Diệm, a Catholic mandarin who had spent years living in New Jersey, as the leader of a "country" that had been invented specifically to prevent the Vietnamese people from choosing their own government.

Then that invented country, run by an American-installed leader, "requested American help."

Do you understand what you just said? You used a puppet requesting help from its puppeteer as your moral justification.

That's not sovereignty. That's a ventriloquist act. And you're applauding the dummy for having opinions.

And Hồ Chí Minh "started this war with Chinese communist help"?

Hồ Chí Minh was writing to Woodrow Wilson in 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, appealing for Vietnamese independence based on Wilson's own Fourteen Points.

Wilson never responded.

The man believed in American ideals before most Americans were willing to apply them to non-white people.

In 1945, when he declared Vietnamese independence, he opened the declaration with direct quotes from the American Declaration of Independence.

He reached out to the United States for support.

The OSS, the precursor to the CIA, had officers working alongside the Việt Minh against the Japanese. They liked Hồ Chí Minh. Their field reports described him as a nationalist first.

But Washington made a choice.

France was a European ally that needed to be kept stable for NATO.

So America funded France's attempt to re-colonize Vietnam.

Eighty percent of the cost of the French Indochina War was paid by U.S. taxpayers.

The CIA was operating in Vietnam before most Americans had ever heard of the place. Edward Lansdale was running psychological operations and building paramilitary networks in the early 1950s.

The Phoenix Program, which systematically tortured and assassinated tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, was a CIA operation.

So when you say Hồ Chí Minh started it with outside help, you are describing America's role more accurately than his.

"You should be grateful your enemies were Americans."

This is the single most revealing sentence in your reply. Genuinely. Frame it out and look at it.

You are telling the Vietnamese people to be grateful for how they were destroyed.

Grateful for 3 million dead.

Grateful for Agent Orange that is still producing disabled children in 2026.

Grateful for Mỹ Lai.

Grateful for the bombing of hospitals.

Grateful for the embargo that strangled reconstruction for nineteen years after the war ended.

Because it could have been worse.

This is the logic of the abuser who says "you should be grateful I didn't hit you harder."

No. We are not grateful.

We won.

Gratitude goes in the other direction.

If anyone should be reflecting quietly on how things went, it is not the Vietnamese.

You said "don't start a war with Americans."

We didn't start anything.

We were a colonized people who wanted our country back.

First from the French, who had occupied us for nearly a century.

Then from the Americans, who funded the French, then replaced them when the French lost.

We didn't come to America. America came to us.

We didn't choose this. We chose to survive it.

And we did.

That's not a threat. That's not aggression. That's just history.

History that already happened.

History that ended one way and not the other.

You can look up which way on April 30, 1975.

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

America…?

A moral compass…?

*clears throat*

The United States was built on genocide and ethnic cleansing

In 1898 it declared itself a ‘global power’ by crushing independence movements in the Philippines, killing at least 200k Filipino civilians

From 1912 to 1933 it occupied Nicaragua, violently suppressing nationalist movements

From 1915 to 1934 it invaded and occupied Haiti, essentially legalising slave labour

From 1916 to 1924 it done the same to the Dominican Republic

In 1945 it needlessly dropped two atomic bombs on civilians days before they knew Japan was to surrender, in a ‘display of strength’ to the Soviets

In 1953 it overthrew Iran’s democracy in an act of pure self-interest

In 1954 it overthrew Guatemala’s democracy leading to decades of violence

In 1965 it backed mass killings in Indonesia, enabling the murder of up to a million people

In the 1960’s and 1970’s it carpet-bombed Vietnam, killed millions, and poisoned the land

From 1969 to 1973 it also carpet-bombed Cambodia with similar effects

In 1973 it installed a dictatorship in Chile through a military coup

From 1979 to 1989 it armed and funded Afghan militias, destabilising the country for decades

In the 1990s it strangled Iraq with sanctions, devastating millions

In 2003 it invaded Iraq on a lie, leading to a million dead

In 2011 it destroyed Libya, turning a functioning state into a failed one where slave markets now exist

In the 2020s it continues unabated, funding and arming the Gaza genocide and more atrocities across the Middle East

This is not even close to an exhaustive list of US crimes

So, what’s very, very important to understand is not that the United States has lost its ‘moral compass’ — it’s that it’s lost its ability to rewrite history in real time because the internet exists

It has lost total control of the narrative

Or, in short, now we’re able to see what it really is, and always has been

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

There is something deeply grotesque about a society that calls itself "the land of the free"
while operating the largest prison system on Earth.

That calls itself "defender of democracy"
while sabotaging elections abroad.

That cries about "terror"
while dropping bombs on schools and weddings.

You try to point this out,
and somehow you become the extremist.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

Russia is sending Oil to Cuba.

China is donating solar panels to Cuba.

China is delivering aid to the countries (Iran and Lebanon) the US & Israel are bombing.

They conditioned you to hate the countries who believe in a multipolar world because a multipolar world undermines the US’s ability to control and exploit the world.

[Chen Weihua （陈卫华） @chenweihua]

Age of No Shame. Assassinating and kidnapping foreign leaders, which are both acts of terrorism, is normalized. Bombing and invading countries and violating sovereignty and territorial integrity and defying UN Charter and international law is normalized. Targeting civilians and bombing schools and hospitals is normalized. Embargo on a small island neighbor to starve and impoverish Cuban people normalized. Gaza genocide is normalized. We are living in a fucking dark age of barbarism.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

My enemies are not in Iran. My enemies are in Washington and Tel Aviv. In London and Canberra.

My enemies are the western oligarchs and empire managers who are poisoning my society and making everything awful while slaughtering human beings with the help of my tax dollars.

My enemies are the tyrants who are turning our civilization into a mind-controlled dystopia where it is increasingly illegal to criticize the abuses of my government and its allies, and increasingly difficult to find information which runs counter to the imperial narrative.

My enemies are the empire apologists and the hasbarists. The propagandists and spinmeisters. Those who side with Israel and the United States against basic human interests.

Imperial bootlickers always accuse me of writing “propaganda” for the “enemy”, with “enemy” meaning whoever the US-centralized empire happens to be attacking or preparing to attack on any given day. I always want to tell them “Motherfucker YOU are my enemy. YOU. You and the empire you simp for.”

The Iranians have never done anything to me. The Iranians pose no threat to me. They didn’t bring war to my country. The empire I live under brought war to theirs.

The Iranians haven’t robbed me and my fellow westerners of all democratic political agency to create an oligarchy run by megalomaniacal plutocrats and psychopathic government agencies.

The Iranians haven’t locked down all political systems throughout western society making it impossible to vote our way into peace, economic justice, and government transparency.

The Iranians aren’t working tirelessly to brainwash and manipulate everyone in my society to turn us all into apathetic flag-waving morons who care more about sports and celebrities than the fact that their government is committing horrifying war crimes.

The Iranians aren’t trying to make it illegal for me to criticize Israel and its abuses, or working to imprison my countrymen for uttering normal political slogans in opposition to a genocidal apartheid state.

The Iranians aren’t making my society crazy, stupid and evil while we hurtle toward ecological disaster, nuclear armageddon and AI tech dystopia.

I haven’t spent years watching a live-streamed genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the Iranians.

I��m not frightened that the Iranians will try to draft my son to fight and die in a crazy, evil war.

The Iranians are not doing any of these things to me. These are things the western power structure is doing.

I have no loyalty to that power structure. I have loyalty to my species, to my family, and to the values I hold sacred in my heart of hearts.

The US empire can get fucked.

[Demetrius Remmiegius 🇰🇪 @DemetriusRO6]

The U.S. is starving 11 million people in Cuba.

Right now.

Power is out.

Food is rotting.

Water pumps are shut down.

Sewage is overflowing into the streets.

Russia tried to send humanitarian aid.

The US Navy blocked them. American news isn't covering this.

[Sasha Meets Russia @sashameetsrus]

The way we divide nations into “first” and “third” world is long outdated. A country where a young woman can’t ride a bus without fearing for her life cannot be called “first world.”

[Alan Watson @DietHeartNews]

Vladimir Putin did not wake up on 24 February 2022 and decide, “I think I’ll invade eastern Ukraine today,” nor was the US campaign to expand NATO into Ukraine a last-minute maneuver. (US State Department documents show Ukraine’s future membership was discussed as early as 1994.)

The Road to War in the Russian Borderlands:

9 Feb 1990: In a deal approved by Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the Soviet Union, as a quid pro quo for accepting German reunification in NATO, Secretary of State James Baker pledged that #NATO would not expand “one inch to the east.”

Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs and Chicago professor John Mearsheimer argue that during the lengthy negotiations on German unification, US, European and German leaders made explicit assurances to Gorbachev against any future eastward NATO expansion.

Even if not in a formal treaty, Gorbachev understood the assurances as a “binding agreement.” Subsequently, Soviet leaders made decisions on that basis and acted on them - withdrawing the Red Army from Germany and dissolving the Warsaw Pact.

1996 Election Year: With an eye on the Eastern European vote in northern Illinois, Bill Clinton campaigned on enlarging NATO into Eastern Europe. (As we all know, Bill Clinton won the election against Bob Dole.)

12 March 1999: The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland became NATO members. A weakened post-Soviet Russia, led by Boris Yeltsin, controlled by a bevy of Oligarchs, could do nothing to prevent it. Boris Yeltsin was said to be “infuriated” with his friend Bill Clinton for breaking with the past US assurances on NATO expansion.

31 Dec 1999: After years of heavy drinking and suffering from myriad health problems, Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Vladimir Putin becomes Prime Minister of Russia. Yeltsin’s last words to Putin: “Take care of Russia.”

29 March 2004: With George W. Bush president, seven more Eastern European countries join NATO: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia - largest wave of NATO enlargement ever.

April 2008: At the NATO summit in Bucharest, George W. Bush announces that Ukraine and Georgia are on an “immediate path to NATO.” German Chancellor Angela Merkel recalled in 2022: “I was very sure that Putin was not going to just let that happen. From his perspective, this would be a declaration of war.”

2008: William Burns, ambassador to Russia, sent a memo to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: Across the board, he wrote, the Russian political class told him, “Ukraine is the reddest of red lines” – “Nyet means nyet.”

22 Feb 2014: Just as the Sochi Winter Olympics got underway, the “Maidan” coup in Kyiv erupted in violence. State Department official Virginia Nuland boasted that since the 2004-2005 “Orange Revolution,” the US had spent $5 billion on regime change in Ukraine.

NATO rooftop snipers killed both protestors and police, forcing Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych to flee. In response to Yanukovych’s downfall, Putin stepped up Russian support for Russian-speaking separatist rebels in the Donbass, while the US accelerated its efforts to arm and train Ukraine’s army.

2 May 2014: The Donbass crisis point of no return: Bussed to Odessa from Kiev, Right Sector thugs carrying baseball bats confront ethnic Russians protesting the coup. When protestors fled into the city's Trade Unions House, the building was set on fire. Forty-eight people were burned or bludgeoned to death.

11 Feb 2015: Putin and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko meet with French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Minsk, Belarus and negotiated the Minsk ceasefire accords.

The leaders agreed to a deal that would have ended fighting in eastern Ukraine - granted autonomy to the Russian-speaking Donbass. Successive Ukrainian governments, however, refused to implement the accord. German Chancellor Merkel later admitted that Minsk was a stall tactic to allow the West to build Ukraine’s army up to NATO standards.

31 Dec 2016, New Year’s Eve, twenty days before the incoming Trump admin, Lindsey Graham, with a bi-partisan group of US Senators, visited Ukrainian troops on the civil war Line of Contact, encouraging them to take the war to Russia: "Your war is our war…"

17 Dec 2021: Team Biden rejects Putin’s proposed mutual security accords that would have left “neutral” Ukraine intact. Russia had tried to convince successive US administrations that Ukraine was off-limits to NATO membership, but Russian concerns were brushed aside. In December 2021, Team Biden insisted, “Russia doesn’t say who can join NATO.”

18 Feb 2022: During the Winter Olympics in China, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) documented that Ukraine had ramped up artillery attacks along the Line of Contact. (Since the 2014 coup, the Armed forces of Ukraine, including the Neo-Nazi Banderites, had killed thousands of Donbass Russian civilians.

19 Feb 2022: Invited to speak at the Munich Security Conference, Ukrainian President Zelensky said. “Ukraine will get and deploy nuclear missiles.”

20 Feb 2022: On CBS’ 60 Minutes, the final day of the Olympics in China, Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba said, “Ukraine will never honor the Minsk cease fire.”

21 Feb 2022: Russia captured a Ukrainian soldier, killed five others as they crossed over the border into Rostov. Russia learned the invasion of Donetsk city was imminent and recognized the breakaway Donbass and Luhansk oblasts as independent republics.

24 Feb 2022: With 90,000 troops, Russia launched what it called a “Special Military Operation” - not a "full scale invasion." Citing the UN principle, “Responsibility to Protect,” Russia intervened in the eight-year Donbass civil war after all prospects for diplomacy had failed.

March-April 2022, week six of the war, Russia and Ukraine convene peace talks in Istanbul. Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chalyi said the two sides “managed to find a compromise and were very close to finalizing the war with a peaceful settlement.”

Later, Chalyi recalled, “Putin tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with #Ukraine.” But Joe Biden and then Boris Johnson, who flew to Kiev, urged Zelensky to “keep fighting; we have your back.” Zelensky, not Putin, chose to walk away from peace.

The US gambit to expand NATO into Eastern Europe and destabilize Russia provoked the war in #Ukraine. As former German chancellor Merkel said, "We deceived Putin with the Minsk agreement, while the US built a Ukrainian army." The longer the war continues, the greater the risk of WW III.

If the US, UK and EU continue rejecting Russian proposals for a long term, European wide peace accord - going back to December 2021 – the Russian army will continue advancing toward Kharkiv in the north to Odessa on the Black Sea.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have repeated and emphasized on many occasions, there will be no Minsk III.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

People keep saying Francesca Albanese deserves the Nobel Prize.

But the truth is, the Nobel Prize doesn’t deserve her.

Not in an age where peace prizes are handed to men who order drone strikes on civilians, then give televised lectures on democracy.

Not in a system where genocide is debated politely and the only crime is telling the truth too early.

Not when the institutions that once claimed moral authority now bow to power, mute the facts, and criminalize memory.

Francesca Albanese did what international law was written to do.

She documented the crime.

She protected the victim.

She called the murderer by name while the blood was still wet.

And for that, she was blacklisted.

Not by the criminal court, but by the criminals.

Not for breaking the law, but for upholding it.

Not for bias, but for refusing to be blind.

The Nobel Prize was meant to honor people like her.

But the world it lives in is no longer built for people like her.

A world that rewards silence, decorum, and complicity will never understand the courage it takes to speak plainly in the middle of a genocide.

A world that still calls Israel "a democracy" and calls the children under rubble "human shields" cannot comprehend the dignity of naming the crime before the verdict is safe.

Francesca Albanese does not need the Nobel Prize.

The Nobel Prize needs her.

It needs her clarity.

Her conscience.

Her refusal to play the game while everyone else begged for a seat at the table covered in blood.

They say she deserves recognition.

But history is already watching.

And it knows the difference between those who upheld the law

And those who used it as cover.

Let the prize rot in its own irrelevance.

Let the institutions that failed Palestine choke on their neutrality.

Let the rules-based order collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.

Francesca Albanese is not waiting for medals.

She is documenting the crime while the rest of the world looks away.

And no prize will ever be weighty enough to measure the moral force of that.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is beyond shameful, and a terrifying sign.

Albanese is as close to a political saint as we're likely to see, and watching her be persecuted for her very virtues reveals just how morally collapsed the West has become.

She literally personifies the highest ideals of public service: profound integrity, intelligence, graceful eloquence, and an almost sacred commitment to the voiceless and defenseless.

The fact that we're in an era where we persecute figures like her who advocate for murdered children and civilians in order to protect (and keep arming) their killers proves we've abandoned any pretense of civilization. We are not much more than a nihilistic death cult now.

[George Galloway @georgegalloway]

It's nothing at all to do with Judaism

The founders of Zionism were all atheists. They didn't believe in God, let alone that he promised them the Holy Land. They would have settled anywhere

Follow #MOATS 460 #Zionism #atheists #TheodorHerzl #Patagonia

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I'm seeing so many bad takes on Iran that completely ignore basic historical facts, and believe that the West would genuinely like the country to have "freedom and democracy".

When actually the very founding story of today's Iran is that it used to be a democracy, overthrown by the CIA and the British for daring to nationalize their own oil reserves, controlled at the time by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later renamed British Petroleum - yes, that BP).

Back then, as in today, the last thing on the West's mind was the interests of the Iranian people.

It was all, as it always is, about corporate profits and imperial control. And people who believe and spread the "freedom" rhetoric are unfortunately - often unbeknownst to them - just useful idiots serving those interests. As always, ignorance serves power.

Because you cannot understand a country's current events without knowing their history, I just wrote an article summarizing what happened back then.

It's based on David Talbot's excellent book "The Devil's Chessboard", the authoritative biography of Allen Dulles, the longest-serving Director of the CIA to date.

All Iranians know this story. It's time more Westerners learned it too.

Link to the article in the next tweet.

[Patrick in China @PatrickZhengCHN]

This is exactly why some politicians in the West desperately want to contain China:
How could a "Communist" country be so economically vibrant?

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

New: Pavel Durov blows Tucker Carlson’s mind by exposing U.S. law that forces engineers to install back doors—and bans them from telling their own company

This is why Telegram didn’t set up shop in America.

“You know what’s interesting, in the U.S., you have a process that allows the government to actually force any engineer in any tech company to implement a back door and not tell anyone about it.”

“Using this process called the gag-order, you know there are certain legal procedures.”

Carlson, stunned, asked: “Not tell his own employer about it?”

Durov confirmed: “Yes, exactly. If you tell your own boss, you can end up in jail. Like, gag order.”

Carlson: “Actually?!”

Durov: “Yeah.”

Carlson: “So your employees have a legal obligation to act as fifth column spies? Saboteurs against you, your employees?”

Durov didn’t hesitate: “That’s one of the reasons I didn’t move to the U.S. with my team.”

[Max Keiser @maxkeiser]

The rioting in Los Angeles is problematic on many levels.

Superficially, it’s about immigration, but when you dig down into the problem it’s also about political betrayal of the ruling elite in California - on all levels - who have sold out to nefarious interests both domestic & foreign.

The corruption is systemic and deep rooted. Eradicating the problem means tearing up the whole playbook and starting over, which is near impossible at this point.

And the civil unrest is spreading nationally. The problem is getting worse. In this context, we can appreciate the miracle President Bukele has pulled off in El Salvador.

He took on the entire system, root and branch, to remake the country to truly reflect an enlightened social contract between government & the people to achieve a safe, egalitarian playing field where anyone can succeed based on merit.

This is the plan, anyway.

How far into the transformation are we in El Salvador?

Crucially & remarkably, the President has wiped murder off the map.

And the people are loving it. He’s got a 91% approval rating.

The natural, meritocratic instincts of a free and entrepreneurial people are rising up to lift everyone’s aspirations toward an ever more safe, productive & fun future.

The critics are disingenuously cherry picking bits and piece of the Big Picture out of context and painting a sad picture of an electorate struggling under the weight of a disengaged, unfair government. 🙁😫

This is intellectually dishonest propaganda from paid shills working for the very people who profited from the pre-Bukele chaos to begin with.

Fortunately, Salvadorans aren’t fooled. They know foreign meddling when they see it. They’re not about to let go of their miraculous liberation from gangs, civil wars & foreign tyrants based on dimwitted accusations and the mindless blather of sleeper NGO’s seething in the shadows. No sir, we won’t cow to your skylarking nonsense.

[Ben Pennings @BenPennings]

Magda Szubanski, one of the most loved Australians, today announced she is battling aggressive cancer. All the more reason to display her best performance, parodying one of the most disliked Australians.

[dexm @dexm]

Perfect way to motivate China to innovate their commercial jet engine manufacturing, same as has happened for chips and AI. No longer a buyer, an indomitable competitor instead. Self-own for US. No doubt China anticipated this and is already a long way toward independence.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸🇨🇳 U.S BLOCKS SALES TO CHINA’S COMAC OVER MINERAL FIGHT

The U.S has iced tech sales to China’s jetmaker COMAC - no more LEAP engines for your C919 - after Beijing pulled a “no minerals for you” move.

The plane was supposed to challenge Boeing and Airbus. Now it’s stuck playing domestic duty with a parts shortage.

Trump once said, “I want China to buy our jet engines.” Guess that love story’s over.

Source: Reuters

[ShanghaiPanda （ Account deactivation） @thinking_panda]

Relax, Americans.
Don't be nervous.
We Chinese love peace.
We only care about our own territory.
We're not interested in the land on the other side of the Pacific.
We two countries can live in complete harmony.🤝