"Soft Eyes" Cha Cha 🇵🇸

Millennial movie idiot

[chimera @chimeraxmachina]

You're a worker. You don't have to agree with every decision of the communist movement or of the socialist states throughout history, but to disavow them in their entirety means you disavow your own right to imperfectly fight for liberation. This is your history, too.

["Soft Eyes" Cha Cha 🇵🇸 @its_chacha_]

@tuliptippytoe What's this from?

[Amina 💌 @fawnn404]

western realism always seems to mean: adjust your humanity downward until it fits inside imperial constraints

never: question why the constraints themselves are treated as untouchable

[Aidan Simardone @AidanSimardone]

“The American left” and it’s just imperialists who want a bit of healthcare

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

The EU claims that the “Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939” enabled WWII. It omits ten crucial facts:

- The Soviet Union was not even among the first ten countries to enter into treaties and non-aggression pacts with Nazi Germany. In 1939 alone, Lithuania, Romania, Denmark, Italy, Estonia and Latvia all signed non-aggression pacts with Hitler. Poland entered into one as far back as 1934.

- The Soviet Union tried to form an anti-fascist alliance throughout the 1930s, and was repeatedly rebuffed by European powers.

- Despite that, the Soviet Union was the most powerful bulwark against fascism before the war. The International Brigades in Spain represent the most concrete example of organised antifascist military resistance before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. These Brigades were led by communist parties armed by the Soviet Union, who were abandoned by Western “democracies” and their policies of "non-intervention” which simply left German and Italian intervention uncontested.

- In that same tradition, Stalin offered to send one million troops to deter Hitler’s aggression during the 1938 Sudetenland crisis. Poland and Romania objected, while France and Britain decided to pursue appeasement. That appeasement aimed in part at ensuring that Germany’s energies were directed eastwards, against communism.

- The Soviet Union was the primary target of German imperialism. The USSR’s leadership was aware of this from the early 1930s — and Germany’s leadership did not hide the fact. Hitler had repeatedly promised that Germany would be the “bulwark" of the West against “Bolshevism”, a position that found broad sympathies among the Western ruling classes. Auschwitz was first built to house Soviet POWs, 3.5 million of whom were exterminated during the war.

- Nazi Germany was simply the turning inwards of Western European colonialism. It was in modern-day Namibia that Germany’s Imperial Chancery recorded perhaps the first use of the term Konzentrationslager — the concentration camp — to describe an instrument of mass extermination.

- Adolf Hitler drew particular inspiration from the US settler-colonial model. He remarked approvingly how the US settlers had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand and now keep the modest remnants under observation in a cage”. He sent jurists to study the US Jim Crow laws, which formed the basis of the infamous Nuremberg Laws.

- The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, then liberated Europe. If not for the US, which moved quickly to suffocate the rising communist movements on the continent, we might have seen socialism rise at least in Greece, Italy, France and, eventually, Portugal.

- After the war, West Germany quickly reneged on the Potsdam Agreement, filled its security services with former Nazis. NATO, also filled with former Nazis, was founded to wage war on socialism and anti-colonial struggles. In the process it resuscitated the Wehrmacht and paved the way for the German revanchism we are seeing today.

- As a result, we have endured decades of US-led imperial hegemony, whose effects are a dying planet and tens of millions of lives stolen by imperialist wars and sanctions alone. That hegemony has absorbed and expanded the historical mission of fascism, carrying it forward into a new century. Gaza is the clearest expression of that process today — but it is by no means the only one.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

The rub with this squishy claptrap is they can never define what they mean by a “Palestinian state”. Ilan, tell us:

- Does this Palestinian state get a military?
- Can it enter bilateral alliances with Russia or China?
- what mechanism prevents further Israeli expansionism?

[Crixiv 2 🇵🇸 @solzhenidiot]

How to talk to such a person? Only for the purpose of providing information that will help any human in earshot realize there are two sides in the struggle, and decide which side to be on. Even the liberal can switch. But only if he is exposed, not accepted into peace talks.

["Soft Eyes" Cha Cha 🇵🇸 @its_chacha_]

@JamesSurowiecki @EricLevitz James, are you familiar with the PFLP?

["Soft Eyes" Cha Cha 🇵🇸 @its_chacha_]

“Opposing the US stopped making sense after it successfully wound down the primary obstacle to its geopolitical program” is so breathtakingly stupid, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m just not reading this right

[Eric Levitz @EricLevitz]

The problem with Hasan Piker isn't that he's an anti-Zionist. It's that he's a campist.

Too often, his commentary is a mirror image of what it claims to oppose: If Washington’s jingoists downplay or rationalize the crimes of America and Israel, Piker does their adversaries the same favor.
https://t.co/HPfqyPdxSq

["Soft Eyes" Cha Cha 🇵🇸 @its_chacha_]

@EricLevitz One could retain the (themselves propagandistic) characterizations of China, Russia, and Iran and still operate on the coherent internal logic that the US was and remains the single greatest enemy of and threat to anti-capitalist revolutionary projects

[Bikrum Gill @bikrumsinghgill]

This analysis deeply misunderstands how deterrence works on the strategic scale, and deeply misunderstands the necessary, if painful, logic of anti-imperialist war.

Squirrel is trapped within a Eurocentric frame, and ignores how Iran and the axis have, informed by the Shia tradition, wrestled the signification of death away from the zionist-imperialist bloc. And forgets the lessons of Ho Chi Minh and Basel al-Araj, that the revolutionary intellectual should never compare casualties between colonizer and colonized, imperialist and anti-imperialist, for they will always be skewed. What matters is how the resistant society demonstrates the capacity to reproduce itself while absorbing these costs (or what Amal Saad might call "deterrence by regeneration")

More fundamentally, Squirrel seems to only be capable of apprehending deterrence on a very narrow tactical scale - in terms of counting casualties on each side. In this sense, it is true that the US-Zionist bloc killed more people and visited more destruction upon Iran and Lebanon. And, yes, it retains the ability to strike Iran at will without experiencing a commensurate counter-response.

However, the zionist-imperialist bloc has not been able to translate their tactical strikes into strategic gains, which is the scale at which Iran has sought to establish deterrence.

For example, the US-zionist assassinations did not lead to institutional fracturing, as was the strategic aim of the attackers, but instead was responded to with institutional and governance continuity and coherence.

The attacks on civilian infrastructure and civilian life did not lead to social fracturing, as was the strategic expectation, but rather was responded to with national and social cohesion, a renewal of the popular sovereign basis of the Republic.

The attacks on core economic infrastructure did not succeed in de-industrializing Iran, as it instead responded with rapid repair and replenishment where necessary in the short term, and preserving of capabilities so restoration could happen in the medium term. And, most significant, Iran responded to the tactical blows, as a whole, by establishing permanent escalation dominance through its demonstration of its sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz.

Iran's "escalation dominance", or its moving of deterrence to the strategic scale, had the effect of demonstrating that while the enemy could inflict casualties and destruction, it would fail to achieve any strategic advance. In fact, it would experience strategic reversals - rising costs in the form of revenue drain (US was spending 2 billion/day), munitions attrition, and an internal social fracturing (growing opposition to war in US). The US has permanently lost its standing as a security guarantor for the GCC.

Perhaps, most significant, when Trump and Hegseth threaten Iran with death, the response they receive is: "we do not fear death, we choose dignity over humiliation." This has the impact of disarming the imperialist power - it can spend billions inflicting death, but it achieves nothing strategically.

Now, see where we find ourselves. It is no longer up to the US to either uphold or undermine the ceasefire - the initiative is in the hands of Iran. The strait of Hormuz is a counter-sanctions enforcement mechanism, this is a reality the US must now accept. Iran has further demonstrated that the US can spend 65 billion dollars per month and achieve no strategic gains, and lose strategically in the sense that the Gulf no longer has a security guarantor.

Certainly, war can break out again, but what has been revealed is that it is the US, not Iran, that is increasingly moving out of weakness and panic, and a realization that its projection of power in the region is in irreversible decline at the strategic scale.

[Tamanisha J John @TamanishaJohn]

Ppl living in imperial core benefit from imperialism — cheap goods for those w/ earnings, ease of travel for those w/ passport etc. —but “development” + “democracy” capped to favor capitalists, so there is no situation of better welfare / redistribution without a class struggle

[Isha @revgirlisha]

The revolutionary's public duty is to act as an amplifier for the global anti-imperialist movement. This involves articulating why principled opposition to US hegemony necessitates solidarity with its primary targets be it Iran, North Korea, or Hezbollah. Furthermore, it

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

Liberals like this are thisclose to getting it, but they still can't let themselves take the next step.

They still can't let themselves understand how turning hope & change into more of the same was a key moment of demoralization that catalyzed the subsequent disaster.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

I always find this framing strange.

You call Iran’s system "illiberal and brutal," and then in the next breath admit that the ones bombing it are also "illiberal and brutal" in Palestine.

So why is one a "regime" and the other a "leader" or an "ally"?

Why does one get described as a problem for humanity and the other as an overzealous cop that sometimes goes too far?

I am not Iranian.

I am not here to grade every law in Tehran or romanticize anyone’s security apparatus.

What I genuinely do not understand is people who know, in detail, what the U.S. and Israel have done to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Yemen, Lebanon, and still talk about Iran using the same vocabulary, the same tones, the same categories those two powers spent decades manufacturing.

You say the Iranian people "deserve the freedom they have long fought for."

Fine.

But who strangled their economy with sanctions?

Who blew up their generals on foreign soil and hunted their scientists in the streets?

Who backed the Shah’s secret police for decades and crushed every attempt at a different path?

The same capitals that now claim to cry for Iranian "freedom."

So when you repeat "illiberal and brutal regime" in the same sentence as you condemn U.S. and Israeli strikes, you are trying to have it both ways:

You reject the bombing, but you swallow almost all of the narrative that makes the bombing sellable to Western publics.

If Washington and Tel Aviv are so obviously brutal in Palestine and everywhere else, why is your baseline assumption that their descriptions of Iran are basically correct, only "taken too far"?

Maybe the problem is not just escalation.

Maybe the problem is that the West spends years turning a country into a cartoon demon, then pretends to be shocked when its own public demands an exorcism by cruise missile.

I support Iran’s right to exist without being strangled, sabotaged, and bombed by the same empires that turned half the region into a graveyard.

I do not need to believe Iran is perfect to say that.

I only need to recognize that the worst, most systematic violence in this story does not come from Tehran.

So yes, condemn U.S. and Israeli strikes.

But do not pretend you are outside their propaganda when you describe Iran with the exact script they wrote.

If you really believe all three are "illiberal and brutal," start with the two that built the sanctions regime, the drone bases, and the regional wars.

The rest of us have lived long enough under their "concern for freedom" to know which brutality actually threatens the planet.

[Joequant @joequant]

The issue is that the Chinese govt is aware of the problems that China has and is dealing with them. So lets take youth unemployment, this is a problem both in China and the United States. China is dealing with this by pushing down

[Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo]

🇩🇪 German official: “The number of Chinese people living here […] is 4 times higher than the German community.”

🇳🇦 Namibia’s president: “Why does it become your problem? […] We will handle our own country.”

[Class Consciousness Project @Class_C_Project]

The aim of the ruling class over the last fifty years has been to make the working class lose all awareness of itself as a class. This is behind the relentless propaganda to declare that everyone was "middle class" in the 1990s and 2000s. The ruling class will promote all manner of distractions and divisions in order to prevent the working class becoming conscious of itself and its historic role. The capitalists need to do this because they are faced with an ever growing proletarianisation of the population and thus need to make sure that these workers remain mired in ideological backwardness as much as possible. It is the historic duty of communists to help the working class understand the war that is being waged upon our class every day by the ruling class and that we have no choice but to fight them.

[scientism @mr_scientism]

The most prestigious type of argument in our culture is that things are the way they are because that’s just the way they are and even if we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars and using force to make them that way it’s irrelevant because they’d be that way anyway.

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

Here Dave I’ll explain it to you because it can genuinely be confusing: Neoliberalism (d/b/a “abundance”) and its billionaire backers understand they need a hook to get you to embrace their privatization and deregulation agenda so they focus on its perceived cartoon excesses 🧵