This article is indistinguishable from satire. I know that's cliche, but this is honest-to-god something someone here would have banged out in an afternoon as a niche joke. I don't have anything clever to say, you just have to read it.

Oh God, my eyes.

This article, written by a Taiwan-based "sinologist," has been copied and pasted over several major outlets and a dozen other Christian clickbait news sites. The pastor in question is John Sanqiang Cao, and was charged with human trafficking upon returning from a mission trip to Myanmar.

I don't know anything about the validity of the charges he's facing, and I'm quite certain that IF the events alleged by the article are true, then this is a clear miscarriage of justice.

There is something very funny about this story appearing all over American media, though. As if ex-convicts in the US don't deal with very similar problems...

At risk of beating the dead horse…

These god damn liberals keep harping over how Joe Biden is the “lesser evil” compared to Donald Trump, necessitating that we go out and vote for him come November lest our flawless democratic system give way to fascism. “Something something incrementalism purity test push him left do you want Trump to win???”

In 2020, it could be feasibly argued, if poorly, that Joe Biden was, in fact, the “lesser evil.” Donald Trump was the president, and Joe Biden was not. Given the dual assumption that Donald Trump was a “substandard” president and that Biden would likely be at least “standard” quality, this made some sense. But the cards are on the table now. All of our most fearful suspicions about a Biden presidency have been utterly validated, and that’s not even counting all the atrocities people scarcely imagined him committing or lacked the capacity to predict altogether. He is more evil than we could have possibly known.

All these same libs are now in a bind. Apparently, Biden HAS to be the Democratic ticket, so he HAS to be elected president, because otherwise Trump would win, and that would be bad, wouldn’t it? The only problem is that Biden, the Anointed One, quite literally has no redeeming qualities. So what do you do to convince people to vote for Biden in spite of literally every crime he has committed and every promise he neglected to fulfill?

The most popular strategy is seemingly to just insist, with zero supporting evidence or even reasoning, that Trump’s America is just an objectively worse version of Biden’s America. Everything will be worse under Trump. Everything. Yes, Biden has failed in almost every respect and has actively worked against what he promised to his constituents, and yes, nothing has improved under Biden and in fact almost everything has generally become worse, but Trump will do all those bad things even harder! So you have to vote for Biden. Or you’re making the world worse. You fascist.

At risk of being the Russian troll living inside everyone’s walls, can we take a moment to appreciate the degree to which the discourse has degenerated? “Vote for the lesser evil” used to mean that we were expected to make “compromises” with politicians we didn’t completely agree with or even took some issues with to avoid aggressive fragmentation within the Democratic Party, a sacrosanct institution representing all that is good in the world. This is perhaps the first election I’ve ever seen where we are not even being promised marginal progress. We are not even being offered different poisons to pick. The same toxic politics of the fascist right have been watered down by the “adults in the room,” and we are expected to not only drink but be thankful it’s not even more concentrated than it is.

Vote Biden 2024: It could be worse!

Anyone else noticing that the Zionists tend to be a bit hasty in taking a victory lap?

I try my best to be considerate and sensitive about criticizing Israel so as to not paint Jews in a negative light, but my patience is wearing so, so thin. I am extremely tired of having our sentiments and language policed by bad faith actors. The Zionists who won't shut up about how and when we're allowed to criticize and oppose apartheid, what words we're allowed to use and what arguments we're allowed to make, are not even remotely interested in protecting Jews from bigotry. They are just trying to deflect righteous anger away from Israel and onto the people who won't fall in line and support the colonial project, as evidenced by their itchy trigger fingers for calling everyone and anyone, including Jews themselves, rabid antisemites for opposing the indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza.

Do you describe Israeli settlers as violent? That's blood libel. Please ignore the definition of blood libel and please ignore the violent bigotry of Israeli settlers. Just shut up and listen to what I tell you to say and think.

Do you want to decolonize Palestine "from the river to the sea"? You're literally calling for another Shoah. How dare you. Shut up and allow the settler regime to complete its genocide and don't ever try to make me feel guilty for supporting it.

Do you liken the genocidal policies of Israel to the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany? That's so offensive. How dare you. Please ignore all the ways I am behaving like a fascist, genocidal lunatic. You're hurting my feelings. By the way, you're a Nazi for opposing Israel.

Oh, you called me a Zionist just because I'm a self-described Zionist? You're such a bigot. That's an antisemitic dogwhistle. You are never allowed to use the word Zionist. Please don't ask me what I call Israeli nationalism.

Oh, you're NOT a Zionist? How dare you. Half of all Jews live in Israel. Are you saying you don't support all Jews unconditionally regardless of their actions? You're halfway to hating every Jew, and that makes you fifty percent Hitler. If there's two of you, that's one whole Hitler! Unacceptable.

And around and around we go. There is no end to it. I am thoroughly unimpressed by what they consider bigotry and what they fail to consider bigotry. I do not care anymore if they hiss and spit and curse when I refuse to cater to their settler-colonial sensibilities. I have seem what makes them cheer. I have seen the horrors which bring smiles to their faces. I know I don't hate Jews, and that's good enough for me.

I'm planning to attend the march in DC on January 13, and I need some advice both on what to expect and how to prepare.

I am not a stranger to protests. I attended a few during the George Floyd uprising, some of which were quite large, but I have a feeling this one will be more massive than any I've participated in before. With that in mind...

What are the most common threats protestors will face? What steps should I take to ensure the safety of myself and others? How do we defend ourselves from cops, counter-protesters and other aggressors? Are there essential supplies or tools I should bring to this end? Is there anything I should not bring under any circumstances?

Are there any environmental hazards I should be aware of? How do we avoid them?

Are there conventions and strategies employed in very large protests that I should be aware of, so as to more effectively coordinate my efforts with those around me?

What are the tactics and methods of disruption used by cops and others looking to disrupt the march? How do we counter them?

How do I identify plants, saboteurs, and other state operatives? What steps, if any, should I take to expose them?

Will my ability to reach the protest be hampered deliberately or incidentally if I need to drive several hours to the site of the protest? Are there any legal ramifications to moving out of state to join a march?

Is there anything I have failed to consider?

Thank you, comrades, for any advice you can muster.

I'm interested in the transcript, preferably in both Arabic and English, due to a comment Assad made about the Holocaust and who died in it. Namely, he allegedly says "there is no evidence that six million Jews died in the Holocaust." I'd like to see his words in black and white and verify this statement myself. If any Arabic-speaking comrades could assist me in the endeavor of obtaining a literal translation of this comment, that would be greatly appreciated as well.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3035303

> We've all expressed immense frustration over being lumped in with Nazis and other rabid bigots over our opposition to apartheid and settler colonialism. The cynical attempts to crush opposition to Zionism by browbeating anyone who opposes the American empire with accusations of secret antisemitism can be seen both before and since October 7. It is somewhat ironic that Zionism, especially among evangelical Christians, is itself an unconscious expression of toxic and deleterious antisemitism from which they have failed to liberate themselves. > > Among Evangelical Americans, a popular belief posits white Israelis as not only being indigenous to Palestine, a bizarre contortion of reality in itself, but as being the "chosen people" with a separate covenant with their god which guarantees a Jewish ethnostate in the "Holy Land." In the same way that their god promised the New World to white European settlers from coast to coast, he has promised Jews all the land in Palestine from the river to the sea. > > On its face, this belief seems to be pointedly not antisemitic, but a clean inversion of the idea that Jews are inferior. But this inversion of antisemitism is not the same thing as the abolition of antisemitism. > > Importantly, "chosen people" is not and has never before been an expression of supremacist thinking, at least not traditionally among Jews. The true meaning of the phrase "chosen people" refers to the special obligations, or "mitzvot," which Jews observe in obedience to their god. They are the "chosen people" because, unlike in Christian doctrine, these laws are not universally applicable. No Jew in their right mind will claim eating pork, for instance, is an offense to God independently of one's own religious identity precisely because non-Jews do not have the same obligations to God. We gentiles have no mitzvot to follow. That is what actually makes Jews "chosen." > > The insistence that Jews' unique relationship to the divine reflects a supremacist worldview is, in fact, an antisemitic contortion of Jewish doctrine to justify the oppression and extermination of Jews. Antisemites are very fond of invoking this imaginary Jewish doctrine to claim that Jews are the originators of the ideology of racial hierarchy. It is a bold-faced lie engineered to justify genocide. "If we don't do it to them, they will do it to us." > > Rather than parting with this bigoted idea, non-Jewish Zionists have preserved their erroneous antisemitic belief with the additional caveat that Jews are, in fact, "chosen" in the sense that they have not just special obligations, but special rights, namely the right to all the land in Palestine. They have not parted with antisemitism whatsoever, but have merely inverted it to justify yet another genocide. > > When these same people accuse us of antisemitism, it is wholesale projection which suggests since that they are the self-appointed opposite of antisemites, and since we oppose their Zionist regime, we must be antisemitic. In reality, in agreement with true Jewish doctrine, we reject all claims of racial supremacy. > > So don't let anyone tell you that you're antisemitic for not being a Zionist. Zionism is antisemitism. Do not forget this for a second.

From an early age, even during primary education, Americans are told that their country is exceptional. It's not clear what is meant when we are told this, since no explanation is given as to how we are exceptional.

In fact, most of American propaganda makes endless excuses for itself. "American slavery and genocide isn't all that bad, especially considering everyone else does it too. All land is stolen. You have to keep 'historical context' in mind when criticizing the United States. It's not fair to judge our actions by modern standards."

Without even deconstructing this argument, how it is filled with deception and misdirection, we can see a glaring hypocrisy. I thought we were supposed to be exceptional. Now you're saying we aren't?

This kind of self-destructive argumentation always emerges in regards to America's colonial underclass. When people discuss the annexation of Indian land or the enslavement of Africans, we are always told that the conquered and enslaved peoples were underdeveloped economically and had little in the way of sociopolitical organization, infrastructure, or wealth before we so charitably brought them under our heel and gave them everything worth having.

Of course, we know this isn't true. Indigenous peoples had quite a bit to steal. Otherwise, we wouldn't have stolen their land, their human labor, their natural resources, or have dissolved their existing polities to facilitate our theft. People with no riches have nothing to plunder.

Even concerning our annexation of Hawaii and the enslavement of indigenous Hawaiians, people have argued that Hawaii would have been "a poor fishing nation in the middle of nowhere" without our gracious intervention, that we built Hawaii's wealth and worth. Another obvious lie. If Hawaii was truly what they claim it was, which is in itself a lie, there would be no point in annexing it, dissolving its government, and plundering its resources. If Hawaii is poor, how did it come to be that American capitalists profited from it? Similarly, people argue that if we hadn't annexed Hawaii, some other country would have. Why, if it's so unimportant, would any country bother to do so?

On the one hand, colonizers and settlers love to say that they are doing nothing wrong because the people they exploit are so infantile and helpless that our aggression and theft is counterintuitively an overall benefit for the people we brutalize. On the other hand, they sure seem to want what indigenous people have, which is why they steal it.

This is the white savior complex brought into clear focus. The belief that the colonized must be colonized to save them from themselves isn't merely a delusion borne of believing the wrong facts. It is a rationalization. They must believe they are superior to justify their theft, but if they truly were superior to the people they exploit, as they claim they are, the exploitation itself would not only be unnecessary, but a total waste of time.

Do not let liberals get away with arguing like this. Who knows, if someone spells it out for them, they might realize the errors of their ways.

But is it clear to anyone else that the same racism used against American Blacks is being used against the Gazans? On what level is the Israeli lie of "that hospital was a Hamas weapons depot" different from the American lie of "that Black teenager had a gun"? Certainly in scale, it's different, but qualitatively? Maybe not. They are both oppressed by white supremacist colonial forces within the borders of their settler states, after all.

And having two points of reference where the same lie is employed ineffectively gives interesting insights. One might suspect that it's the same lie every time. Perhaps whenever white people insist that "this group is violent, so they must face our violence" is not so much a reflection of reality, and merely indicative of the speaker's colonial mindset.

Because this is not the way revolutionaries think. They understand the necessity of violence, but not in the sense of "an eye for an eye," but with an understanding that violence is a tool that can be employed to the ends of liberation. They do not say "We are killing for retribution," but instead say "we will capture more until the jails are emptied."

Any discourse about the terror state of Israel is going to draw in strange characters, including express antisemites, and I've been noticing a sparse but present range of bigoted language and sentiment in response to Israel's invasion of Gaza. I can't tell if people are merely erroneously equating the state of Israel with Jews broadly (as Israel itself does), or this is a cynical hijacking of the anti-imperialist movement by right-wingers and other bad actors. Either way, it's not too uncommon to hear people express inappropriate hatred of Jewish people in general when criticizing Israel specifically.

I want to be absolutely clear that I have not seen a single instance of such behavior on this site, but it does exist elsewhere, even if in small amounts. Obviously, the problem of imperialist genocide goes far beyond, and does not necessarily encompass, Jews or Judaism, and it's clear that communists understand this far better than most.

With all that in mind, is there a way to educate these folks? When you see antisemitic remarks like I've described, what do you say?

I'm going to skip over a lot of the preliminary discussion concerning this text. The fact that the essay contains antisemitic language and ideas is not news, and hardly needs mentioning. I am also going to presuppose that whoever engages with this post is at least passingly familiar with the central thesis of the work, because this post doesn't need to be any longer than it already is.

There is one major flaw I see in the piece. The work is dependent on the idea that Jews are an underclass, hence the need for Jews to "liberate" themselves from Judaism, not unlike how the Proletarian class must seek to abolish itself, and not just the Bourgeoisie.

I have never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. Yeah, Jews are oppressed, but unlike the black/white racial hierarchy, Jewishness is not an identity conferred on one through oppression. It's an ethno-religious group which has existed for thousands of years in a variety of contexts where oppression may or may not be present. This simple fact makes Karl's dialectical approach seem absurd on its face. Christianity and Judaism are not in a dialectical relationship. It makes no sense.

Perhaps it's cruel of me, but I can't help but wonder if this is a manifestation of Marx's insecurity over being Jewish himself. He never had much connection with the cultural or religious aspects of his ethnic heritage, given that his father converted to Christianity during Karl's childhood to practice law. And yet, I have read that he was bullied for being Jewish, that it showed on his face and in the color of his skin. Perhaps it's not unreasonable to suspect that Marx himself desired to erase the Jewish aspects of himself to escape the bigotry he experienced, and simply projected that onto all Jews.

I know this isn't his most cherished work, but given that the anti-imperialist left is "antisemitic" in the minds of people brainwashed by cable news, the mere existence of this essay is a powder keg. How easy would it be for someone to merely reference the title and author of the essay and devise a convincing argument that we hate Jews. Such an argument would depend upon not listening to actual Marxists and not understanding the history of socialism, but liberals being incurious and ignorant as they are, the ball might be in our court to disabuse people of these ideas.

These "people" are so off-the-wall genocidal that even calling them liberals feels somehow misleading. I know that liberalism is the moderate wing of fascism, but it feels as though there is no moderate wing left. I know this is not so much a departure from there normal mode of thinking as a particularly ugly contextual manifestation of the white supremacy they hold so dear. But my God, things are rapidly getting out of hand.

Best case scenario, I see them frame the conflict in Palestine as a conflict between religious extremists. How far up your own ass do you have to be to make such a claim? Pushing back on this idea, insisting instead that the operative identities here are colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, and that the conflict will only end when the oppression ends, someone was more than happy to call me a "terrorist sympathizer" (lol) and told me that I should be gassed.

"Israel's right to exist" is a thinly veiled dogwhistle for genocide apologia. "Terrorist" is functionally a racial slur, now more than ever. "It's a complex situation" is a lazy yet effective strategy for muddying the waters long enough for their Final Solution to be enacted yet again. Shaking liberals awake causes them to lash out violently and retreat into the dark crevices of racism and profound ignorance. It feels so hopeless.

I feel like I am in some kind of nightmare, where all of these people I previously thought could be reached have gone fully mask off and revealed themselves to be monsters with scarcely a soul to share. They are subhuman, blood-sucking fiends who need to be eradicated like one might eradicate cancer.

The worst thing, as I've already revealed, is that it makes me into the worse fucking person imaginable. I genuinely wish all these people would be shot. I find myself regularly thinking that the population needs to be culled, decimated until these psychopaths no longer disgust me with their breathing. Surely, if we just get rid of the bad people, everything will improve! Now look who's Hitler.

I just don't know what to do anymore.

Was in a conversation with someone who argued that slaves don't produce surplus value, that surplus value is unique to a worker-owner relation as in liberalism. Is anyone familiar with this idea? It didn't make a great deal of sense to me. One would think that slaves would give you as much if not more surplus value than workers you have to pay.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/7/sirens-warn-of-rockets-launched-towards-israel-from-gaza-news-reports

I find that no one, and I do mean no one, really enjoys living under capitalism. Every liberal is aware that things have not shaken out in an optimal manner for the majority of people. Rather than offering alternative ways of organizing society and a plan for how to build said society, the vast, vast majority of liberal sophistry amounts to justifications for why things must be this way, why there are no alternatives. It is nothing but a long list of excuses for a system which works only for bastards and thugs, and sometimes fails to work at all.

Part and parcel to this hasty defense is that capitalism has always necessarily existed, that it must exist in all contexts. Liberals, taking this absurdity to its logical conclusion, tell us stories about neanderthals trading coconuts and fish around in what apparently constitutes primitive capitalism. It is an utterly laughable conception of human history and pre-history driven by an idealist worldview. They are reciting fairy tales.

This thinking has consequences. Since communism is the opposite of capitalism, and capitalism must exist, communism cannot exist. There is no ideological struggle, no competing interests, and no dialectics. Defying capitalism is like defying gravity. This is what is meant when it is said that "communism only works in theory." People who pursue the abolition of class, a social construct, are in fact struggling vainly against not just human nature, but natural law.

The irony, of course, is that all of liberal thinking is dominated by a purely theoretical understanding of capitalism. Thankfully, we live under capitalism, and can directly observe its injustices. There is no need to speculate about the unforeseen problems that capitalism might cause. We've been doing this for over two hundred years.

This is a lot for liberals to deal with. Thankfully, the cognitive dissonance produced by the asynchrony between the promises of capitalism and what has actually happened under capitalism is alleviated when one remembers that since capitalism must exist, and that every social system is necessarily capitalism, there is no point of reference for what the world would look like without capitalism. Therefore, everything unpalatable can be dismissed as either a necessary outcome of a necessary system, or a purely distinct phenomenon entirely.

Consequently, when a communist says something along the lines of:

"The fact that European and American capitalism are made possible by the exploitation of the third world through slavery, genocide and other violence, as well as having produced the most massive inequality in human history, not to mention the climate crisis it also created, may indicate that it's worth considering how we might abolish this system rooted in the social fictions of class and private property."

A liberal's first impulse is to immediately fall back on theoretical frameworks:

"Capitalism is unrelated to the bad things you said because capitalism is based on voluntary transaction and consent."

But there is a problem here. It goes something like this:

1.) Capitalism must exist; everything is capitalism; anything opposed to or contradictory to capitalism is impossible. 2.) Slavery happened, so either slavery is capitalism, or the above statement is incorrect.

Oops.

This is the drawback casting such a wide net causes. The knife cuts both ways. It works really well for claiming credit for the PRCs poverty alleviation programs, but it does a terrible job of pretending that slavery is a completely extant phenomenon in relation to capitalism. If capitalism is so simple and basic as to encompass all trade, why is it suddenly not capitalism when the traded commodity is a human life?

Capitalism cannot be so necessarily and so conditional at the same time. Someone should really tell them this.