Muh white people š
I'd be really interested in reading that
World Health Organization: Evacuation orders by Israel to hospitals in northern Gaza are a death sentence for the sick and injured
UN expert warns of new instance of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, calls for immediate ceasefire
All this week I keep thinking about/looking up Haitian revolution images too...
As a former senior economist of the IMF once said:
Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medicine and your bag of tricks to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind's eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples. Mr. Camdessus, the blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up too; it cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the whole world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name and in the names of your predecessors, and under your official seal.
You know, when all the evidence is in, there are two types of questions that you and me and others like us will have to answer. The first is this: - will the world be content merely to brand our institution as among the most insidious enemies of humankind? Will our fellow men condemn us thus and let the matter rest? Or will the heirs of those whom we have dismembered in our own peculiar Holocaust clamor for another Nuremberg?
(Davison Budhoo's IMF resignation letter. PDF, archive.org)
In America there are signs posted all over residential zones reminding citizens that they are being spied on by their neighbors who will immediately report all "suspicious persons and activities" to the authorities š± Some signs even mention the people have been "trained" to report/spy on each other's family members š¢
āWe have many interesting projects,ā Putin promised, naming as one example the plan to develop Russian railroad connectivity through North Korea. (Source)
Really interested to see if this is pursued.
This is an old article (2018) but it outlines the kinds of projects that have been discussed before concerning Russia-DPRK-ROK:
One such project could be a railway that will be able deliver goods from Russia to South Korea through North Korea. "Once the Trans-Korean Main Line is built, it may be connected to the Trans-Siberian Railway. In this case, it will be possible to deliver goods from South Korea to Europe, which would be economically beneficial not only to South and North Korea but to Russia as well," Moon Jae-in said in an interview with Russian media ahead of his state visit to Moscow.
A gas pipeline coming from Russia to North Korea to be extended to the South is another possibility, he said. "We can also build a gas pipeline via North Korea, so that not only South Korea will receive Russian gas but we will also be able to deliver it to Japan," the South Korean president said.
The project to unite the Korean Peninsula with a gas pipeline has been discussed for a long time, but official talks started in 2011. The negotiations were frozen after relations between Seoul and Pyongyang deteriorated. Last week, Russian energy major Gazprom announced it resumed talks with Seoul over the construction of a gas pipeline connecting Russia with North and South Korea.
The countries could also connect their electricity grids, Moon Jae-in said. "We can also establish a powerline that would allow us to receive electricity from Russia. It could also be delivered not only to South and North Korea but also to Japan.ā
Unfortunately I don't know enough about that to speak on it
I don't recall the exact details as I believe it was the usual UN demands about DPRK's missile launches, but basically China went along with a round of security council sanctions adopted in 2017, which meant that petroleum exports become more restricted and thousands of people from DPRK who were working in China had to go home and a bunch of joint ventures were forced to shut down as well. However, in 2022, China and Russia vetoed a new round of US-sponsored UN sanctions on DPRK, and recommended lifting some of the earlier sanctions, as they felt the US had failed to engage in its end of diplomacy with DPRK, and therefore the earlier sanctions should be reduced and no further ones should be imposed.
Maybe the ProleWiki article about him could give you some jumping off points, if you haven't checked it out already.
Listened to ep. 1.
tl;dr: Thank you for your service o7o7o7o7 9/11 never forget Soldier Protecting Sleeping Child Meme
Their first guest was the current CIA director. Basically they all just talked about how the CIA has made countless hidden sacrifices for the American people and that while their failures are widely publicized, the dedicated sacrifices they make and the danger they face is hardly known, they talked about the CIA gender neutral bathroom CIA Memorial Wall of their fallen comrades and got excited about how its the CIA's 75th birthday and how Biden came to their birthday party, then congratulated themselves for saying "Russia bad" before this year and for doing the Ayman al-Zawahiri drone strike and how it brings justice for 9/11 victims etc. and said how "generations" of CIA personnel have been keeping Americans safe, thanked the CIA director for his service, oohed and aahed at his life story, etc. Talked about how they are now recruiting Mandarin speakers for their new China department. They also praised the CIA for its dedication to protecting America and stressed in particular that the CIA is "apolitical".
I'm impressed you remained so calm.
Discussions like this are extremely frustrating. Atrocity propaganda can be created with virtually no effort, and it proliferates easily once set in to motion. Countering it with facts requires you to have seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of history and politics on hand at all times.
A (slightly edited) quote on war-time lies: "Man's habit of lying is not nearly so extraordinary as his amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish."
Anyway, here's a quote from a guy who worked for the CIA for 25 years. I hope it can help you if you get into another conversation like this.
I want to reveal to those who still believe in the myths of the CIA what it is and what it actually does. My explanation will not include the usual pap fed to us by Agency spokesmen. My view backed by 25 years of experience is, quite simply, that the CIA is the covert action arm of the Presidency. [...] The CIA is not an intelligence agency. In fact, it acts largely as an anti-intelligence agency, producing only that information wanted by policymakers to support their plans and suppressing information that does not support those plans. As the covert action arm of the President, the CIA uses disinformation, much of it aimed at the U.S. public, to mold opinion. It employs the gamut of disinformation techniques from forging documents to planting and discovering "communistā weapons caches. But the major weapon in its arsenal of disinformation is the "intelligence" it feeds to policymakers. Instead of gathering genuine intelligence that could serve as the basis for reasonable policies, the CIA often ends up distorting reality, creating out of whole cloth "intelligence" to justify policies that have already been decided upon. Policymakers then leak this "intelligence" to the media to deceive us all and gain our support. (Ralph W. McGehee, "Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA", p. 15)
Aa shorter quote of his with the same essence: "The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. [...] Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies." (Deadly Deceits, p. 192).
You may also find this useful: Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere - he talks about how the CIA gives false stories to reporters, some reporters know this and purposely publish false stories planted by the CIA and some don't know that they are planting CIA stories.
In my war, the Angola war, that I helped to manage, 1/3 of my staff was propaganda. [...] I had propagandists all over the world, principally in London, Kinshasa, and Zambia. We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia Times, and then pulled them out and sent them to journalists on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be what he would've gotten from his stringer in Lusaka, who had gotten them from the Zambia Times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists, Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now, our contact man in Europe was. And we pumped just dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities [...] We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans, it was pure raw false propaganda to to create a an illusion of communists, you know, eating babies for breakfast and so forth, totally false propaganda.
More from him:
Another thing [the CIA does] is to disseminate propaganda to influence people's minds, and this is a major function of the CIA. And unfortunately, of course, it overlaps into the gathering of information. You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories. [...] You buy his confidence and set him up. We've seen this happen recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he's been set up by them, every fifth story just simply being false. You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent, so that you can control what they do so you don't have to set them up. Sort of, you know, by putting one over on them so you can say, "Here, plant this one next Tuesday." [...] The Church Committee brought it out in 1975, and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple of years later. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.
Good luck talking with people in the future about things like this. Often, there is not much hope in a conversation like this with a person who is not poised to listen. But on the off chance you have some favorable conversation conditions sometime, I hope these quotes can help.
Here's a documentary about it that leaves out most of the blood and gore that you could easily find if you looked: Donbass (2016). You will see a bit of people being burned to death in this documentary and some other injuries but not to the extent you could find in other videos of the time.
Here's a scene of the burning of the trade union building in 2014. Russian speakers were protesting regarding the repeal of a law which protected Russian as a minority language (or as the Ukrainian former soldier in the video states, they were "contesting a ban on the Russian language in Ukraine.") The protestors hid in the trade union building when Ukrainian right wing nationalists showed up. Eventually, the Ukrainian nationalists set fire to the building and many of the protesters burned to death, with those who jumped out of the windows getting beaten to death by the Ukrainian nationalists. (See also: "Burnt Alive in Odessa").
If you can stomach seeing bodies blown up in the streets, limbs removed, dead babies, and footage of people dying, there are other documentaries around which show it. It's not hard to find footage like this from 2014 onwards. E.g., Result of a 2014 shelling by Ukrainian military (CW: Numerous dead bodies); More aftermath of a shelling (CW: Extremely graphic, numerous mutilated bodies, and footage of a person dying).
You can make up your own mind about the conflict's particulars as you learn about it, but it's a mistake to ignore events happening before 2022 or treat them as insignificant.