Howard X

In a world where truths are masked in smoke and mirrors, the challenge is to search, from Cape Town, South Africa.

[Iran Embassy SA @IraninSA]

They used to claim they respect international law. Now the truth is coming to light. Neither human lives matter to them, nor international law.

The United States has formally withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, one day after a UN fact-finding mission said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe US forces committed war crimes in two strikes on civilian sites in Iran. https://t.co/pIq48kc54L

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

September 11 is a date in the American calendar that requires no explanation.

Every American knows what it means. Every American knows where they were. Every American understands the reference when a politician invokes it.

July 3, 1988.

Do you know that date?

That is the date the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf.

Killed 290 people. Including 66 children.

The U.S. government later awarded the Vincennes crew commendation medals.

Iran has not forgotten that date.

The United States has not remembered it.

This is about a country that memorializes its own grief while turning the grief it inflicts on others into a footnote.

That asymmetry has consequences.

And they accumulate over decades in the people whose dead never make it onto the American calendar.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

And these same people call Iran a theocratic regime 😐

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They have a word for every form of resistance.

Terrorist. Insurgent. Extremist. Militant. Radical. Rogue state. Axis of evil.

They do not have a word, not one that sticks, not one that lands in the history books with the same weight, for what they do.

"Collateral damage" is not a word. It is an erasure dressed as terminology.

"Enhanced interrogation" is not a description. It is torture with a law firm's help.

"Regime change" is not a policy. It is the overthrow of governments that their own populations chose, performed by a country that lectures the world about democracy.

"Pacification", this was the actual military term used in Vietnam, is not a strategy. It is the burning of villages and the killing of civilians described in the language of calming a child.

The naming is the mechanism.

Control the word and you control the moral reality.

Call your violence "operations" and their resistance "terrorism" and you have written the history before the bodies are cold.

This is not propaganda in the crude sense.

It is something more sophisticated: the architecture of legitimate reality.

They built it over centuries.

It is the most load-bearing structure in Western power.

And the first act of resistance is refusing to live inside their language.

[Fifty Shades of Whey @davenewworld_2]

Incarcerated people in Oklahoma are working in call centers... and sometimes they make calls on behalf of conservative super PACs.

They described doing as many as 800 calls a day, facing performance quotas, and delivering conservative scripts they didn't fully understand.

All they make is $2/hour, while the Department of Corrections gets $10/hour. We need to close the slavery loophole in the 13th amendment.

Aside from the fact that it's immoral to exploit incarcerated people for what's basically slave labor, these call centers generate a lot of profit.

There are plenty of Americans who can do those jobs for a living wage. They shouldn't have to compete with a captive population who's coerced to take a small fraction of what the labor is really worth.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You want to know what actual toughness looks like?

It looks like a Vietnamese woman in a tunnel, three meters underground, while B-52s try to collapse the earth above her, continuing to work.

It looks like a Cuban doctor going to West Africa during an Ebola outbreak when Western governments were still arguing about who should go.

It looks like a Chilean socialist, Salvador Allende, broadcasting on the radio as the coup closes in, telling his people that he will not resign, that he will not flee, that history is on their side, and then dying at his post.

It looks like the people of Gaza continuing to document their own deaths so the world cannot say it did not know.

It does not look like a man in a bunker giving the order for an airstrike on people who cannot reach him.

It does not look like a government that tortures prisoners and then classifies the evidence.

It does not look like an empire that can destroy a country from 30,000 feet and calls the distance from the consequences "strategic."

The people with the most weapons in the room are almost never the toughest people in the room.

The toughest people in the room are almost always the ones who had no weapons and remained standing anyway.

History is extremely consistent on this point.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

You want to know what actual free speech looks like in the American context?

Edward Snowden told the truth about what the government was doing to its own citizens.

He is in exile.

Chelsea Manning told the truth about what the military was doing in Iraq, including footage of a helicopter crew killing journalists and laughing.

She was imprisoned.

Julian Assange published documents showing the gap between what Western governments said and what they did.

He spent years in an embassy and then a prison, and the country that lectures the world about press freedom led the effort to destroy him.

Meanwhile the people who lied about weapons of mass destruction and launched a war that killed hundreds of thousands:

They are on the speaking circuit.

They are on television as analysts.

They have libraries named after them.

This is not a paradox. This is the system working correctly.

Free speech, in the empire's operating definition, means you can say anything that doesn't threaten the machine.

The moment the speech has real consequences for real power:

You discover exactly how free it is.

[Iran Embassy in Zimbabwe @IRANinZIMBABWE]

American democracy every four years.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

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.

[SlavicPatriot @infantserbian]

American YouTubers are flooding Cuba right now. Filming the poverty. Shocked by the conditions. No electricity. Empty shelves. Crumbling buildings.

And every single one blames the Cuban government.

Not one mentions the US embargo. 64 years. Since 1962.

Let me explain what that means in simple terms.

Cuba can't trade with the US. Can't buy American goods. Can't sell to American markets. That's expected.

But here's the real damage: any company that does business with Cuba gets sanctioned by the US. Any bank that processes Cuban transactions gets cut off from the American financial system. Any ship that docks in Cuba can't enter a US port for 6 months.

The US didn't just embargo Cuba. They forced the entire world to embargo Cuba.

For 64 years.

No access to international banking. Can't import medical equipment. Can't buy spare parts for machinery. Can't trade freely with 90% of the global economy.

I watched sanctions destroy Serbia in the 90s. We got 8 years of full economic isolation. Cancer patients died waiting for medicine we couldn't import. Inflation hit 300 million percent. Our economy collapsed.

That was 8 years. Cuba has endured 64.

And now American YouTubers show up, film the poverty their own government created, and blame the victims.

Why am I bringing this up now? Because the media campaign is starting. Marco Rubio just said "all options are on the table" for Cuba. American influencers are suddenly very interested in Cuban suffering.

This is the setup. Film the crisis. Blame the government. Build public support. Then invade.

I've seen this playbook before. Serbia. Iraq. Libya. Venezuela last week.

Watch. Cuba is next.

Cuba is poor because America strangled them for 64 years and won't let anyone else help. That's the answer. Everything else is propaganda.

[Lyth ♠️ @Lytherian]

seeing the “dog eating” joke being backfired, it’s so satisfying to see

[Rina Lu🇷🇺 @rinalu_]

Russia spent the 1990s watching foreigners - Americans and Europeans - extract its wealth on their own terms - until Putin.

Under Yeltsin, Russia’s vast natural resources on Sakhalin were handed to foreign investors - literally, for pennies on the dollar. Production-sharing agreements gave foreign companies such as the American ExxonMobil or British Shell extraordinarily favorable terms: Russia received as little as 10 cents from every dollar of oil profits while investors enjoyed sweeping tax exemptions - even as ordinary people on the island froze in the cold.

Putin later called these deals “a colonial practice that had absolutely nothing to do with Russia’s interests,” and said the officials who signed them in the 1990s should have been jailed.

Immediately after taking power in 2000, Putin began dismantling the system. By 2004, 260 of 262 agreements had been terminated. The remaining projects were gradually returned to Russian control - Sakhalin-2 in 2006 and Sakhalin-1 in 2022.

Yet Western narratives still insist Yeltsin was the decolonizer.

Watch the video. This is what real decolonization looks like.

[Tong Bingxue 仝冰雪 @tongbingxue]

Xu Jiayin (许家印), founder of China Evergrande Group and former China’s richest man, was sentenced to life in prison by a Shenzhen court today.

He was convicted of fundraising fraud, illegal deposit-taking, securities fraud and embezzlement.

Evergrande Group was fined RMB 8.82 billion; Evergrande Real Estate RMB 7 billion. All his personal assets are seized.

[Killa @Goldenb0ykilla]

they deadass all stopped clapping & got quiet when she said that 😭🤣🤣

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Heads up: They've invented a new word for "vacation".

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The most misunderstood thing about Chinese foreign policy is what it is optimizing for.

It is not optimizing for ideological satisfaction.

It is not optimizing for the approval of the Western left or the Western right or the Global South intellectual class or anyone else whose primary mode of political engagement is evaluation and commentary.

It is optimizing for the construction of a world in which China, and, as a structural byproduct, other countries that plug into the same alternative architecture, cannot be strangled by the control systems that American power has spent eighty years building into the plumbing of the global economy.

That goal requires:

Not triggering the military response that would set the project back by a generation.

Not giving the United States a clean pretext to organize its alliance system into active containment.

Not moving so fast on any single front that the empire has to choose between accepting the change or going to war to reverse it.

It requires patience that reads, to people who want confrontation, like cowardice.

It requires restraint that reads, to people who want declarations, like complicity.

It requires accepting the accusation of insufficient radicalism from people who have never had to think about what happens the morning after the dramatic confrontation they're demanding.

The people building the alternative world are not building it for the approval of people who assess foreign policy the way sports fans assess a game.

They are building it for the countries that will still be here in fifty years and need the architecture to be different.

The critics will move on to the next outrage.

The architecture will remain.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

The capitalist empire blames all systemic problems on the individual.

The problem isn't billionaire megacorporations polluting the planet, it's that you drive a car.

The problem isn't that it's getting harder and harder to afford to live as the ruling class extracts more and more value from labor, it's that you're not working hard enough and you're making bad decisions.

Soaring police brutality isn't a problem, the problem is that the guy in the current viral police brutality video didn't obey orders correctly.

Israel's not an irredeemably racist endeavor dependent on nonstop violence and apartheid, it's just some naughty settlers and a few bad apples in the IDF.

We don't live in a highly controlled oligarchy where both parties inflict war, ecocide, injustice and tyranny upon the rest of humanity on behalf of their wealthy donors, the problem is that you haven't been voting for the correct candidates.

We don't live under an evil empire that feeds on human blood, it only looks that way because some individuals in charge made some unwise foreign policy decisions at certain points in history.

The blame always lands on the individual, not the system, and you can recognize this as the cynical manipulation that it is because the blame only ever goes one way:

• The individual business executives whose decisions are destroying our ecosystem are never held to account.

• The individual government officials whose depraved foreign policy decisions destroy countless lives are never imprisoned for war crimes.

• The oligarchs who are reaping massive profits expanding the surveillance state and profiteering off war, tyranny and sickness are allowed to keep buying politicians and private islands without suffering any consequences.

Notice how "blame the individual" never applies to these people. If you want THESE individuals to be treated like a problem, then you're a radical. You're an extremist. You need to be put on a terrorist watch list. You and your friends need to be monitored and infiltrated by federal police. When it comes to those who prop up and profit from the system, blaming the individual is strictly prohibited.

Jailing an impoverished man for periodically shoplifting to survive? That's fine; he should have behaved himself. Jailing a billionaire for buying elections and poisoning our planet? That's evil. Shame on you for even thinking that.

Jailing a worker for stealing from her employer? That's as it should be; thieves should be punished. Jailing a wealthy business owner for stealing wages from thousands of employees? Get outta here, Stalin, that's a civil case. They can have their paychecks when they've won their class action lawsuit.

Under the capitalist empire, we are taught that all we can do is make sure we're not a part of the giant permanent underclass who must suffer and toil for meager wages while always one mistake away from destitution. It is taken as a given that the underclass must always exist, and that all we can do is make wise decisions as individuals to ensure that we're not among the unfortunate riff raff our society is built on top of.

It's like we've all been trapped in a crowded room by some psycho who is flooding the room with water, and he's telling us over the loudspeaker "Now you'd better make sure you climb on top of the others, or you'll drown!" In that scenario the psycho is clearly the problem, but we've been trained to see the individuals who can't get their heads above water as the problem.

Whenever anyone goes online to complain about how hard it is to keep their bills paid or buy a house under the current system, they are swarmed by capitalism apologists telling them to work harder, spend less, and try to get a better job. Which is a lot like calling the fire department when a crowded building is burning and being told "Well I guess you'd better stay away from the flames then." No matter how well I as an individual stay away from the flames, there are still people trapped in the burning building who need help. Making the conversation about my actions as an individual is just an excuse to avoid addressing the large-scale nature of the problem.

People consent to this nonsense because we've been indoctrinated into it our entire lives. Propaganda isn't just there to get us to consent to wars, it's there to get us buying into the entire system.

The pop music is about owning stuff and having a good time.

The TV shows are about people who are thriving so much under the current system that they have time and energy to get into hilarious hijinks.

The movies are about protagonists applying their willpower and working hard over musical montages to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals as individuals.

The news stories fixate on the latest attention-grabbing controversy while ignoring terrible things like homelessness and industrial ecocide.

Our schooling tells us that communist countries have always been oppressive totalitarian wastelands and that capitalism offers us freedom and happiness.

At no time are we ever offered the suggestion that things could be better than they are. Over and over again in innumerable ways throughout our lives, we are told that the current order is the only way things could ever be.

Our minds have been carefully groomed to accept the imperial status quo as normal and healthy, and to see every failure of the system as a failure of the individual. We need to reclaim our minds from the social engineers who have conditioned us to think this way and begin cultivating unorthodox, unauthorized worldviews. We need to stop blaming each other for the failures of the system, stop scrambling to climb on top of each other to keep our heads above water, and start working together to eliminate the psychos who have trapped us in this room.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

NSSM-200. National Security Study Memorandum 200. 1974. Written under Henry Kissinger.

Classified until 1989.

Its subject: world population growth and its implications for American national security.

Its argument: population growth in the developing world, specifically in thirteen countries identified by name, including Nigeria, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, represented a strategic threat to the United States.

Not because overpopulation causes humanitarian crisis.

Because large, young populations in resource-rich countries create political pressure for those countries to control their own resources.

The memo was explicit: if developing countries develop politically conscious, resource-nationalist governments responding to their own populations' needs, they will demand control of their oil, their minerals, their agricultural land.

And that control would come at the expense of American access.

The solution proposed was population control programs, funded through USAID and international organizations, targeting those specific countries.

Not as humanitarian aid.

As strategic intervention to reduce the political pressure that large populations place on governments to actually serve their people.

This document exists. It is declassified. You can read it.

And then you can look at fifty years of American-funded population programs in the Global South with the full knowledge of what the architects said, privately, in 1974, about what those programs were actually for.

The aid was real.

The stated purpose was false.

The document says so.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

Number of Chinese coups in Latin America: 0
Number of US coups in Latin America: 526,810