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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • Anyone could argue that “my people deserve this” is a similar ideology.

    “My people deserve this land at the expense of its current inhabitants” is fascism, or at least the underpinning thereof, so you’re not wrong there. Nazism, Zionism, Manifest Destiny, it is literally the same thing manifesting in different ways. Look up “blood and soil” and “Lebensraum”. Ben Gurion is literally on record saying “we must remove the Arabs and take their place”. The Nakba started before the founding of Israel. If you have an argument for how the Nakba was anything but fascism, let’s hear it, but so far you’re not saying anything of substance.

    But to claim in started out with that intent is just angry jaw flapping.

    Okay let’s try this. Try this online quiz and see if you can get more than 15/21.



  • The Jewish people began by buying the land legally in the late 1800s as a way to escape persecution.

    This is completely ignoring the boycott and parallel society angle. What Zionists did in pre-mandate Palestine was also forced expulsion of Palestinians; the forcing part was simply delegated to the state. Had they simply wanted to settle in Palestine nobody would’ve minded, but that was fundamentally not what the Zionist project was.

    According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, Zionism was inherently expansionist and always had the goal of turning the entirety of Palestine into a Jewish state. In addition, Morris describes the Zionists as intent on politically and physically dispossessing the Arabs.

    The World Zionist Organization established the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1901, with the stated goal “to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people.” The notion of land “redemption” entailed that the land could not be sold and could not be leased to a non-Jew nor should the land be worked by Arabs.[145] The land purchased was primarily from absentee landlords, and upon purchase of the land, the tenant farmers who traditionally had rights of usufruct were often expelled.

    -Wikipedia

    Nazis had nothing to do with the Jewish people establishing a homeland in Palestine.

    Nazism had a lot to do with the German people expanding their homeland to Eastern Europe and Russia and murdering the inhabitants. Starting to see the similarities now? Nazism and Zionism are sister ideologies, both fruits from the same rotten tree that is European settler colonialism.





  • This isn’t going anywhere, so I’ll clarify my position one final time before I disengage.

    Your entire fucking point is predicated on the idea that fascism is inevitable because change wasn’t happening fast enough, so harm reduction was functional worthless to pursue.

    Harm reduction alone was functionally worthless to pursue, yes. Harm reduction is fine, desirable even, but not at the expense of antagonistic action. Prioritizing harm reduction over the antagonistic action that’s supposed to be facilitated by that harm reduction is putting the cart before the horse and self-defeating. By antagonistic action I’m mostly thinking of protests, civil disobedience, strikes and whatever Uncommitted was here, but for an easy example I’ll use the early to mid-2024 calls for Biden to step down. Doubling down on hard reduction entailed shutting down calls for Biden to step down to not jeopardize the anti-fascist united front, but I believe that to have been a mistake. The play was to jump on and amplify these calls so that Biden would step down sooner and open the way for a real primary, because it’s these sort of actions that give harm reduction meaning, otherwise it becomes simply kicking the can down the road. Harm reduction is necessary but not sufficient for fighting fascism, so it cannot happen at the expense of other necessary actions, such as coercing the Democrats into providing a viable unity platform. That’s why I called it farcical (which, yeah, I still stand by that characterization); it’s like filling a bowl with eggs and trying to make cake.








  • that still doesn’t explain why the west should get involved here.

    For humanitarian reasons and because most of the origins of this crisis are Western-caused.

    What would we even do?

    for starters suspend sanctions, at least partially, so international aid, funding and expertise can enter the country. Then fund projects that could help avert the crisis.

    “Several planned initiatives, including projects for artificial groundwater recharge, were suspended following the Taliban takeover,” Mayar pointed out. “Sanctions continue to restrict organisations and donors from funding and implementing essential water-related projects in Afghanistan,” he said.

    Sadid pointed out one example: An Awater supply project -funded by the German Development bank KfW, along with European agencies – could have supplied 44 billion litres (11 billion gallons) of water annually to parts of Kabul from Logar aquifers.

    “But currently this project has been suspended,” he said, even though two-thirds of the initiative was already completed when the government of former President Ashraf Ghani collapsed in 2021.

    “Sanctions restrict Afghanistan’s access to essential resources, technology, and funding needed for water infrastructure development and maintenance,” he said. This, in turn, reduces agricultural productivity, and increases hunger and economic hardship, forcing communities to migrate, he warned.

    In the first place the sanctions on Afghanistan are only going to be counterproductive. The people of Afghanistan need to develop economically before they can have political ambitions; the longer they’re kept in poverty the longer the Taliban will remain in power.


  • Reading the article, it seems capitalism is the cause rather than imperialism past or present.

    Can you quote the part of the article that made you think so? Edit: Found it, but that’s presented in the article as a secondary cause. Because the main causes cited in the article are climate change, the impact of the war and sanctions, but that aside;

    As we’ve seen these past few years, the Taliban obviously have no idea how to run a country. They would’ve never lasted as long as they have in peacetime; it was the US invasion that sustained them all these years. Without that they’d have either grown into a competent-ish government in time to tackle the current crisis or been overthrown by a more competent faction. They also had real military opposition in the form of the North Afghanistan Alliance, which was coopted and ran into the ground by the West following the invasion, so now the Taliban are governing unopposed during a time of crisis that requires a competent and timely response. The US invasion stole 20 years from Afghanistan where they could’ve otherwise started to get their bearings as a modern state. And also, as the article states, Kabul’s population only got this big as a result of the war making the countryside less safe.