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chaos0pikachu · 2 months

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Hi Pika, I don't know if you've been following gmmtv's take over of wabi sabi, I just want to ask you: given that so many companies are part of TBLC which is like a Thai BL content association, do you have any idea why gmmtv isn't a part of it? BOC, DMD, Star Hunter, Copy A Bangkok, Channel 3 are all part of it, I'm just wondering why gmmtv isn't even thought it's the biggest bl company? Wabi Sabi was/is a part of it. (idk exactly)

I can't emphasize enough that I am NOT an expert on this snaps lmao so anything I say that isn't like a direct link to an article or further reading source is speculation on my part. You're a sweetheart Anon but I just wanna let you know that like if you wanna know about the American publishing or entertainment industry but I don't wanna present myself as like ~an expert~ when my ass ain't ya know?

So my short answer is fuck if I know lol I hadn't even heard of the TBLC till this ask

For folks interested in it, here's the livestream they hosted for it (it's 45ish minutes) and it doesn't have subs though. But it seems to be connected to Thailand's soft power committee, here's an article on that:

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who chairs the committee, tasked deputy chairwoman Paetongtarn Shinawatra with leading two national initiatives: One Family One Soft Power (OFOS) and the Thailand Creative Content Agency (THACCA). The goal of the initiatives is skills training to create 20 million jobs that will generate annual income of 4 trillion baht. OFOS and THACCA will be implemented in three phases: First, to boost human resources, 20 million children, adults, and seniors in under village and community funds will get free training in fields such as food, Muay Thai, arts, performance, singing, design, fashion, e-sports, and more, free of charge.

For folks who may not know, soft power is a term coined by political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. in his article Soft Power published by Foreign Policy magazine.

"In the 1980s, political scientist Joseph Nye Jr. coined the term soft power, defining it as a country’s ability to influence others without resorting to coercive pressure. In practice, that process entails countries projecting their values, ideals, and culture across borders to foster goodwill and strengthen partnerships." (source)

Soft power is a form of governmental influence internationally, and works conjunction with "hard power".

Examples of "soft power" are the American space program, athletes performing at the Olympics, and on the media side, military propaganda films like Captain Marvel, (yes I consider Captain Marvel a military propaganda film the film opens with a freaking air force ad lmao).

You see other countries using similar tactics as well, for every Top Gun there's China's Wolf Warrior 2 or Hidden Blade. For South Korea, BTS and k-pop is most definitely used as a source of soft power. This is just something governments do.

Okay so like, gmmtv and BL we've been hearing for a minute now that BL and GL are part of the Thai governments plans for soft power.

Mile and Apo have spoken about this specifically when promoting Man Suang and here's a recent video of them working in conjunction with the government on Shine:

(source)

Even Mew's talked about Thailand's soft power in interviews before (context, Mew was the first Thai musician to break into the American Billboard charts):

(source)

It's not just BL either, Idol Factory's Freen and Becky of The Gap fame got in on this too:

So like, it sounds like this meeting/committee in general is just an extension of the Thai governments plans for expanding their soft power which includes how to better support this now highly in demand industry (BL/GL shows) b/c the government sees its international value.

I can only assume that like, gmmtv feels it doesn't need~ government support as a production company? They're the biggest BL studio in the game and have an annoying stranglehold on territories like America and Latin America already. It doesn't really matter what the quality of the shows even are, gmmtv have that sweet parasocial grip on audiences.

[my forever frustrations with gmmtv and how they sell idols and parasocial relationships not BL/GL shows is a totally different post so lemme stop]

Other companies don't really have that same hold on international audiences. At least not consistently? And the biggest concern is funding.

I think anyone with eyeballs can see Kinnporsche is the best well produced BL that's come out of Thailand (argue with the wall) in terms of overall technical quality. But that level of quality is expensive, the CGI in The Sign is freaking expensive, The Next Prince's pilot is so obviously pricey as all fuck you can tell the studio is banking on it selling.

Which is why studios like Idol Factory, Domandi or BOC only come out with a one or two shows a year in comparison to gmmtv's like 16. They need funding, not just for filming the show but also marketing. Filmmaking is hella expensive.

[I'm not talking about whether y'all liked this show or that show, I'm talking about technical quality, shows like Kinnporsche, The Sign, Pit Babe are all better on a technical level than stuff like 1000 Stars, Only Friends or Cooking Crush.]

Why didn't gmmtv attend the event or participate, baby I legit do not know. I can't answer that with any sort of certainty only their execs could answer that, I can only guess.

And my best guess is b/c the company feels confident they're fine on their own. They don't need funding assistance, nor assistance reaching an international market (tho maybe some assistance in getting their contracts straight hope Ossan's Love doesn't face the same distribution issues as Cherry Magic lmao).

For more information on the event itself I really liked this post on reddit that I felt broke everything down very well.

Anyway sorry this got so long Anon but I hope it at least provided some interesting information!

#chaos pikachu speaks #asks #anon ask #gmmtv #be on cloud #thai bl

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good-old-gossip · 28 days

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Gaza: Israeli army storms UNRWA schools and kills more civilians in Jabalia

Palestinian Territory - The Israeli army has stormed UNRWA-run schools sheltering hundreds of displaced families in Jabalia, northern Gaza Strip, killing and arresting dozens of them. Israel has also forced thousands of civilians to evacuate under non-stop air and artillery bombardment.

The Euro-Med Monitor field team is monitoring the escalation and acceleration of the Israeli assault on the civilian population in Jabalia and its refugee camp. The assault started on Saturday evening (11 May), just a few hours after the Israeli army issued new evacuation orders against 10s of thousands of people, amid heavy air and artillery strikes.

Euro-Med Monitor’s field team has reported that aresidential square in the Jabalia camp was bombed by Israeli aircraft; the square was home to the Nayrab,Abu Lahiya, Khalil, and Atta Allah families. Multiplevictims remain under the rubble at the time of this publication.

Six UNRWA schools on Schools Street in the Jabalia camp, which housed thousands of displaced people, have been besieged by Israeli army forces. The schools and their surroundings were targeted by artillery shelling and gunfire, including from quadcopter aircraft. Thousands had to escape under artillery fireand shelling before Israeli forces reached the schools, taking nothing with them but the clothes on their backs.

Thirty-two civilians in Jabalia and its camp are confirmed to have been killed, along with a number of additional victims who had been sheltering inside thecentres that Israeli forces stormed. Dozens more were arrested, forced to remove their clothes, and tortured. Preliminary evidence suggests that at least one civilian, identified as Issa Hamouda from Jabalia al-Balad, was tortured to death after his arrest.

As Israeli forces continue to target ambulance and rescue crews, preventing them from reaching casualties in schools functioning as shelters and in the surrounding streets, as well as those trapped near or under targeted homes, the number of victims and people reported missing is expected to rise.

All of Jabalia’s streets and neighbourhoods are being subjected to intense air and artillery bombardment and fire belts in an attempt to force out the local population. In a systematic and collective way, the Israeli military is creating a coercive environment and repeatedly, violently, and directly bombing homes, residential neighbourhoods, and shelter centres.

The Israeli escalation in the northern Gaza Strip is part of a wider, more extensive escalation across the wholeof the Strip, particularly in the Zaytoun neighbourhoodin southeast Gaza City and in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, where a week-long ground invasion has resulted in forced relocation orders and increased bombing along the Egyptian border and in the city’s west.

As the crossings remain closed and aid, including fuel, is stopped, the Strip’s health and humanitarian systems have started to collapse, while hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate to Khan Yunis’s water- and resource-poor neighbourhoods.

The international community must intervene swiftlyand decisively to stop all Israeli military attacks on various parts of the Gaza Strip that target civilians and civilian objects directly, systematically, on a large scale, and in a recurring pattern; and to stop Israel’s crime of genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which is entering its eighth month. Israel must beforced to stop all its crimes, including killing civilians, forced displacement, preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, and targeting medical and relief teams, all of which constitute different forms of full-fledged international crimes. Israel must also be pressured to comply with the rules of international law and the decisions of the International Court of Justice to protect Palestinian civilians in the Strip from genocide.

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dailyanarchistposts · 3 months

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Chapter 4. Environment

What about global environmental problems, like climate change?

Anarchists do not yet have experience dealing with global problems because our successes so far have only been local and temporary. Stateless, anarchic societies once covered the world, but this was long before the existence of global environmental problems like those created by capitalism. Today, members of many of these indigenous societies are at the forefront of global resistance to the ecological destruction caused by governments and corporations.

Anarchists also coordinate resistance globally. They organize international protests against major polluters and their state backers, such as the mobilizations during the G8 summits that have convened hundreds of thousands of people from dozens of countries to demonstrate against the states most responsible for global warming and other problems. In response to the global activity of transnational corporations, ecologically-minded anarchists share information globally. In this manner, activists around the world can coordinate simultaneous actions against corporations, targeting a polluting factory or mine on one continent, retail stores on another continent, and an international headquarters or shareholders’ meeting on another continent.

For example, major protests, boycotts, and acts of sabotage against Shell Oil were coordinated among people in Nigeria, Europe, and the North America throughout the 1980s and ’90s. In 1986, autonomists in Denmark carried out multiple simultaneous fire bombings of Shell stations across the country during a worldwide boycott to punish Shell for supporting the government responsible for apartheid in South Africa. In the Netherlands, the clandestine anti-authoritarian group RARA (Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action) carried out a campaign of nonlethal bombings against Shell Oil, playing a crucial role in forcing Shell to pull out of South Africa. In 1995, when Shell wanted to dump an old oil rig in the North Sea, it was forced to abandon its plans by protests in Denmark and the UK, an occupation of the oil rig by Greenpeace activists, and a fire bombing and a shooting attack against Shell stations in two different cities in Germany as well as a boycott that lowered sales by ten percent in that country.[67] Efforts such as these prefigure the decentralized global networks that could protect the environment in an anarchist future. If we succeed in abolishing capitalism and the state, we will have removed the greatest systemic ravagers of the environment as well as the structural barriers that currently impede popular action in defense of nature.

There are historical examples of stateless societies responding to large scale, collective environmental problems through decentralized networks. Though the problems were not global, the relative distances they faced — with information traveling at a pedestrian’s pace — were perhaps greater than the distances that mark today’s world, in which people can communicate instantaneously even if they live on opposite sides of the planet.

Tonga is a Pacific archipelago settled by Polynesian peoples. Before colonization, it had a centralized political system with a hereditary leader, but the system was far less centralized than a state, and the leader’s coercive powers were limited. For 3,200 years, the people of Tonga were able to maintain sustainable practices over an archipelago of 288 square miles with tens of thousands of inhabitants.[68] There was no communications technology, so information travelled slowly. Tonga is too large for a single farmer to have knowledge of all the islands or even all of any of its large islands. The leader was traditionally able to guide and ensure sustainable practices not through recourse to force, but because he had access to information from the entire territory, just as a federation or general assembly would if the islanders organized themselves in that way. It was up to the individuals who made up the society to implement particular practices and support the idea of sustainability.

The fact that a large population can protect the environment in a diffuse or decentralized manner, without leadership, is amply demonstrated by the aforementioned New Guinea highlanders. Agriculture usually leads to deforestation as land is cleared for fields, and deforestation can kill the soil. Many societies respond by clearing more land to compensate for lower soil productivity, thus aggravating the problem. Numerous civilizations have collapsed because they destroyed their soil through deforestation. The danger of soil erosion is accentuated in mountainous terrain, such as the New Guinea highlands, where heavy rains can wash away denuded soil en masse. A more intelligent practice, which the farmers in New Guinea perfected, is silvaculture: integrating trees with the other crops, combining orchard, field, and forest to protect the soil and create symbiotic chemical cycles between the various cultivated plants.

The people of the highlands developed special anti-erosion techniques to keep from losing the soil of their steep mountain valleys. Any particular farmer might have gained a quick advantage by taking shortcuts that would eventually cause erosion and rob future generations of healthy soil, yet sustainable techniques were used universally at the time of colonization. Anti-erosion techniques were spread and reinforced using exclusively collective and decentralized means. The highlanders did not need experts to come up with these environmental and gardening technologies and they did not need bureaucrats to ensure that everyone was using them. Instead, they relied on a culture that valued experimentation, individual freedom, social responsibility, collective stewardship of the land, and free communication. Effective innovations developed in one area spread quickly and freely from valley to valley. Lacking telephones, radio, or internet, and separated by steep mountains, each valley community was like a country unto itself. Hundreds of languages are spoken within the New Guinea highlands, changing from one community to the next. Within this miniature world, no one community could make sure that other communities were not destroying their environment — yet their decentralized approach to protecting the environment worked. Over thousands of years, they protected their soil and supported a population of millions of people living at such a high population density that the first Europeans to fly overhead saw a country they likened to the Netherlands.

Water management in that lowland northern country in the 12th and 13th centuries provides another example of bottom-up solutions to environmental problems. Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level and nearly all of it is in danger of flooding, farmers had to work constantly to maintain and improve the water management system. The protections against flooding were a common infrastructure that benefited everybody, yet they also required everyone to invest in the good of the collective to maintain them: an individual farmer stood to gain by shirking water management duties, but the entire society would lose if there were a flood. This example is especially significant because Dutch society lacked the anarchistic values common in indigenous societies. The area had long been converted to Christianity and indoctrinated in its ecocidal, hierarchical values; for hundreds of years it had been under the control of a state, though the empire had fallen apart and in the 12th and 13th centuries the Netherlands were effectively stateless. Central authority in the form of church officials, feudal lords, and guilds remained strong in Holland and Zeeland, where capitalism would eventually originate, but in northern regions such as Friesland society was largely decentralized and horizontal.

At that time, contact between towns dozens of miles apart — several days’ travel — could be more challenging than global communication in the present day. Despite this difficulty, farming communities, towns, and villages managed to build and maintain extensive infrastructure to reclaim land from the sea and protect against flooding amid fluctuating sea levels. Neighborhood councils, by organizing cooperative work bands or dividing duties between communities, built and maintained the dykes, canals, sluices, and drainage systems necessary to protect the entire society; it was “a joint approach from the bottom-up, from the local communities, that found their protection through organizing themselves in such a way.”[69] Spontaneous horizontal organizing even played a major role in the feudal areas such as Holland and Zeeland, and it is doubtful that the weak authorities who did exist in those parts could have managed the necessary water works by themselves, given their limited power. Though the authorities always take credit for the creativity of the masses, spontaneous self-organization persists even in the shadow of the state.

#environmentalism #environment #solarpunk #anti colonialism #anarchism #daily posts #communism #anti capitalist #anti capitalism #late stage capitalism #anarchy #anarchists #libraries #leftism #social issues #economy #economics #climate change #anarchy works

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drsonnet · 7 months

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Gaza: UN experts call on international community to prevent genocide against the Palestinian people

16 November 2023

GENEVA (16 November 2023) – Grave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians in the aftermath of 7 October, particularly in Gaza, point to a genocide in the making, UN experts said today. They illustrated evidence of increasing genocidal incitement, overt intent to “destroy the Palestinian people under occupation”, loud calls for a ‘second Nakba’ in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory, and the use of powerful weaponry with inherently indiscriminate impacts, resulting in a colossal death toll and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

“Many of us already raised the alarm about the risk of genocide in Gaza,” the experts said. “We are deeply disturbed by the failure of governments to heed our call and to achieve an immediate ceasefire. We are also profoundly concerned about the support of certain governments for Israel's strategy of warfare against the besieged population of Gaza, and the failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide,” they said.

The bombardment and siege of Gaza have reportedly killed over 11,000 people, injured more than 27,000 and displaced 1.6 million persons since 7 October 2023, while thousands are still under the rubble. Of those killed, about 41 per cent are children and 25 percent are women. On average, one child is killed and two are injured every 10 minutes during the war, turning Gaza into a “graveyard for children,” according to the UN Secretary-General. Almost 200 medics, 102 UN staff, 41 journalists, frontline and human rights defenders, have also been killed, while dozens of families over five generations have been wiped out.

“This occurs amidst Israel’s tightening of its 16-year unlawful blockade of Gaza, which has prevented people from escaping and left them without food, water, medicine and fuel for weeks now, despite international appeals to provide access for critical humanitarian aid. As we previously said, intentional starvation amounts to a war crime,” the experts said.

They noted that half of the civilian infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed, including more than 40,000 housing units, as well as hospitals, schools, mosques, bakeries, water pipes, sewage and electricity networks, in a way that threatens to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.

“The reality in Gaza, with its unbearable pain and trauma on the survivors, is a catastrophe of enormous proportions,” the experts said.

“Such egregious violations cannot be justified in the name of self-defense after attacks by Hamas on 7 October, which we have condemned in the strongest possible terms,” the experts said. “Israel remains the occupying power in the occupied Palestinian territory, which also includes the Gaza Strip, and therefore cannot wage a war against the population under its belligerent occupation,” they said.

“In order to be legitimate, Israel’s response must be strictly within the framework of international humanitarian law,” the UN experts said. “The presence of underground tunnels in parts of Gaza does not eliminate the civilian status of individuals and infrastructure that cannot be directly targeted nor suffer disproportionately,” they said.

The experts also raised the alarm about the escalation of violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, by soldiers and armed settlers. Since 7 October 2023, at least 190 Palestinians have been killed, more than 2,700 injured, and over 1,100 individuals displaced in the occupied West Bank. On 9 November, Israeli forces also bombed, for the second time, the Jenin refugee camp with heavy artillery and airstrikes, killing at least 14 Palestinians. The increasingly coercive environment has also led to forcible displacement of several communities of pastoralists and Bedouin People in the Jordan Valley and south of the Hebron Hills.

“We are deeply distressed at the failure of Israel to agree to – and the unwillingness of the international community to press more decisively for – an immediate ceasefire. The failure to urgently implement a ceasefire risks this situation spiralling towards a genocide conducted with 21st century means and methods of warfare,” the experts warned.

They also expressed alarm over discernibly genocidal and dehumanising rhetoric coming from senior Israeli government officials, as well as some professional groups and public figures, calling for the “total destruction”, and “erasure” of Gaza, the need to “finish them all” and force Palestinians from the West Bank and east Jerusalem into Jordan. The experts warned that Israel has demonstrated it has the military capacity to implement such criminal intentions.

“That is why our early warning must not be ignored,” the experts said.

“The international community has an obligation to prevent atrocity crimes, including genocide, and should immediately consider all diplomatic, political and economic measures to that end,” the experts said. They urged immediate action by UN Member States and the UN system as a whole.

In the short-term, the experts reiterated their call to Israel and Hamas to implement an immediate ceasefire, and:

Allow unimpeded delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people in Gaza;

Ensure the unconditional, safe and secure release of the hostages taken by Hamas;

Ensure that Palestinians arbitrarily detained by Israel are released immediately;

Open humanitarian corridors toward the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Israel, especially for those that have been most affected by this war, the sick, persons with disabilities, older persons, pregnant women and children;

They also recommended:

The deployment of an international protective presence in the occupied Palestinian territory under the supervision of the UN;

Collaboration of all parties with the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on the investigation opened in March 2021, as well as crimes arising from the recent events, underlining that the crimes committed today are partly due to a lack of deterrence and continued impunity;

Implement an arms embargo on all warring parties;

Address the underlying causes of the conflict by ending the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory.

“The international community, including not only States but also non-State actors such as businesses, must do everything it can to immediately end the risk of genocide against the Palestinian people, and ultimately end Israeli apartheid and occupation of the Palestinian territory,” the experts said.

“We remind Member States that what is at stake is not only the fate of Israelis and Palestinians, but a serious conflagration of the conflict in the region, leading to more human rights violations and suffering of innocent civilians,” they said.

* The experts: Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967; Margaret Satterthwaite, Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers; Dorothy Estrada Tanck (Chair), Claudia Flores, Ivana Krstić, Haina Lu, and Laura Nyirinkindi, Working group on discrimination against women and girls; Surya Deva, Special Rapporteur on the right to development; Ravindran Daniel (Chair-Rapporteur), Sorcha MacLeod, Chris Kwaja, Jovana Jezdimirovic Ranito, Carlos Salazar Couto, Working Group on the use of mercenaries; Barbara G. Reynolds (Chair), Bina D’Costa, Dominique Day, Catherine Namakula, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, Special Rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation; Olivier De Schutter, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights; Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education; Damilola Olawuyi (Chairperson), Robert McCorquodale (Vice-Chairperson), Elżbieta Karska, Fernanda Hopenhaym, and Pichamon Yeophantong, Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises; Siobhán Mullally, Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children; Livingstone Sewanyana, Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order; Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing; Ashwini K.P. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons; Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Claudia Mahler, Independent Expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons; Ben Saul, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism; Irene Khan Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression; Ms Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences; Tomoya Obokata, Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences.

The Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN human rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms. Special Procedures mandate-holders are independent human rights experts appointed by the Human Rights Council to address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent of any government or organisation and serve in their individual capacity.

#gaza #un #free palestine #genocide #palestine #crimes against humanity #the united kingdom #ukraine #russia #war #ceasefire #gaza genocide #palestinian genocide #colonialism #ethnic cleansing #occupation #current events

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naturalrights-retard · 2 months

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25 years commemoration of NATO’s military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the FRY) in March−June 1999 once again opened the question of the Western foundation for Kosovo’s secession from Serbia and its unilateral proclamation of a quasi-independence in February 2008. Kosovo became the first and only European state today that is ruled by the terroristic warlords as a party’s possession – the (Albanian) Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA). This article aims to investigate the nature of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia in 1999 which has as an outcome the creation of the first terroristic state in Europe – the Republic of Kosovo.

Terrorism and Kosovo Independence

The KLA terrorists with support from the US and the EU’s administrations launched full-scale violence in December 1998 for the sole purpose of provoking NATO’s military intervention against the FRY as a precondition for Kosovo secession from Serbia hopefully followed by internationally recognized independence. To finally resolve the “Kosovo Question” in the favor of the Albanians, the US Clinton administration brought two confronting sides to formally negotiate in the French castle of Rambouillet in France in February 1999 but in fact to impose an ultimatum to Serbia to accept de facto secession of Kosovo. Even though the Rambouillet ultimatum de iure recognized Serbia’s territorial integrity, the disarmament of terroristic KLA and did not mention Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, as the conditions of the final agreement were in essence highly favorable to the KLA and its secessionist project towards independent Kosovo, Serbia simply rejected them. The US’s answer was a military action led by NATO as a “humanitarian intervention” in order to directly support the Kosovo Albanian separatism. Therefore, on March 24th, 1999 NATO started its military operation against the FRY which lasted till June 10th, 1999. Why the UN’s Security Council was not asked for the approval of the operation is clear from the following explanation:

“Knowing that Russia would veto any effort to get UN backing for military action, NATO launched air strikes against Serbian forces in 1999, effectually supporting the Kosovar Albanian rebels”.[1]

The crucial feature of this operation was a barbarian, coercive, inhuman, illegal, and above all merciless bombing of Serbia for almost three months. Nevertheless, NATO’s military intervention against the FRY – Operation Allied Force, was propagated by its proponents as a purely humanitarian operation, it is recognized by many Western and other scholars that the US and its client states of NATO had mainly political and geostrategic aims that led them to this military action.

The legitimacy of the intervention in the brutal coercive bombing of both military and civilian targets in Kosovo province and the rest of Serbia became immediately controversial as the UN’s Security Council did not authorize the action. Surely, the action was illegal according to international law but it was formally justified by the US administration and the NATO’s spokesman as legitimate for the reason that it was unavoidable as all diplomatic options were exhausted to stop the war. However, a continuation of the military conflict in Kosovo between the KLA and Serbia’s state security forces would threaten to produce a humanitarian catastrophe and generate political instability in the region of the Balkans. Therefore, “in the context of fears about the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Albanian population, a campaign of air strikes, conducted by US-led NATO forces”[2] was executed with a final result of the withdrawal of Serbia’s forces and administration from the province: that was exactly the main requirement of the Rambouillet ultimatum.

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cultml · 4 months

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mariacallous · 9 months

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For more than 50 years, and especially since the Iranian revolution of 1979, U.S. policies and initiatives in the Middle East rested on a complex network of relations with four diverse regional pillars: Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and Egypt. At one time or another the United States worked with one or more of these states to contain the perennial fires ravaging the region (even when these same states ignited the fires in the first place, whether Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Israel in Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, or Turkey in Iraq and Syria).

Over the years, the U.S. achieved some notable victories in the region, alone or with these erstwhile allies. But the world that gave rise to these relationships is undergoing changes that require a serious, even radical, reevaluation. There is no longer a Soviet threat to the Gulf region, and the U.S. has become the largest oil producer in the world. Meanwhile, the last U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis collapsed almost a decade ago, the two-state solution has long been dead, and the extremists in charge of Israel today are on a messianic mission to formally annex all the Palestinian territories under their control.

The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and Egypt have been charting their own paths, flagrantly disregarding Washington’s core interests. They believe that closer political, economic, and military relations with Russia, China, India, or each other—openly or clandestinely—will provide them with suitable alternatives to the United States. To put it bluntly, America’s four traditional pillars in the Middle East are now too brittle to be relied upon.

Much has been written recently about how the Turks, Israelis, and Arabs have been involved in dialogue with one another, exploring ways to revive regional diplomacy, cooperation, and investment. Some analysts went as far as to proclaim the dawn of a new era in the Middle East. But these de-escalations should be welcomed with much caution. The men who today sing the virtues of reconciliation were the same ones who ravaged Yemen; laid siege to Qatar; rampaged in Syria and Libya; and shunned Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s despot, after a popular uprising, only to welcome him after he committed war crimes and turned his country into a narcostate.

In reality, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and Egypt have all been pursuing various forms of aggressive nationalism. Israel has already codified religious chauvinism and exclusivism, and some of its leaders regularly incite terrorism and call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. In Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has fostered a new culture of hyper-nationalism in an attempt to diminish the influence of the religious establishment and build by coercive means a Saudi national identity revolving around his authoritarian persona.

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is known for stirring up a version of aggressive Turkish nationalism, laced with religious overtones and mixed with Ottoman revivalism in his frequent campaigns of grievances and intimidation against the West. Erdogan projects himself as the embodiment of these corrosive values. And in Egypt, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s decade-long reign has been the most autocratic and disastrous in modern Egyptian history.

Moreover, these countries have mostly stopped cooperating with the United States on its regional priorities. Sisi was planning to provide rockets and artillery rounds to Russia to use against Ukraine before he was caught by U.S. intelligence agencies earlier this year. Erdogan only barely managed to maneuver his way out of a major crisis with U.S. President Joe Biden and other NATO powers at the recent Vilnius summit, when he seemed to drop his opposition to Sweden’s accession to NATO after a year of obstruction. But his blackmailing of Europe by threatening to unleash waves of Syrian refugees continues. And Erdogan’s earlier purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system should have warranted harsher sanctions than it received.

The historical factors that once cemented ties to the United States have also dissipated. The Soviet Union, which posed a threat to the countries of the region, is no more. (Ironically, Russian President Vladimir Putin today enjoys warmer personal relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, and Erdogan than these leaders enjoy with Biden.) There are no longer any foreign threats to the Gulf.

The role played by oil has also changed dramatically. Oil had fueled America’s relations with Saudi Arabia dating back to World War II, with the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia coming to rely on imported oil and gas from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf states in exchange for the U.S. military guaranteeing the safety of these transactions. But the United States is no longer the lone outside power with an economic stake in the Gulf region. Asian powers such as China, India, and others have established or reestablished complex economic and trade relations with the Gulf. And it is only natural that higher economic Asian activity will bring with it a higher political and military profile.

And, in truth, this marks the return of a deeper history for the region. Long before the onset of large oil revenues, Gulf port cities resembled Indian Ocean port cities. The economies of these small port cities were dominated by merchant families: Arab, Persian, African, Baluch, Indian, and others, with Sunnis and Shiites living on both sides of the Gulf. Over the centuries, these families developed a rich maritime culture that created a complex exchange of people and goods across the Gulf cities, East Africa, and the port cities of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. These renowned traders with their ubiquitous dhows traversed these waters long before Western powers controlled them. For the new Gulf states to look eastward is nothing more than to reestablish the old maritime lanes.

Seen in this context, the hyperventilation in some official quarters in Washington and among the commentariat class over China’s limited role in reestablishing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran is both unwarranted and exaggerated. Most of the initial hard work was achieved earlier in quiet talks in Baghdad and Oman, until the Saudi leadership, with an eye on catching Washington’s attention, brought in China to produce and direct the last scene, giving Beijing credit for the whole production. The Biden administration responded as expected, which explains, in part at least, its current unseemly scramble to make peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

For the foreseeable future, no state or combination of states could seriously undermine America’s strategic, economic, and technical edge in the Gulf region, and the U.S. should make it clear to the Arab Gulf states that reckless cavorting with China at the expense of the United States will have consequences. (We should note that the Saudis made their first clandestine purchase of medium-range missile systems from China in the 1980s.) Riyadh is not about to halt its long Western orientation. American technology and expertise will continue to be essential for the Saudi energy sector, which remains the kingdom’s main source of income; we are not about to witness thousands of young Saudi students flocking to Beijing and Shanghai to study Mandarin.

The Biden administration’s seeming obsession with mediating a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel to formalize their existing de facto normalization is a Sisyphean labor—one that, even if it is partially successful, will not benefit the U.S. politically or strategically in the long run. Its primary political result will be to strengthen the authoritarian rule of Mohammed bin Salman and embolden Netanyahu in his establishment of a more fundamentalist Israel. And such a deal, regardless of any assurances given to the Palestinians, will hardly change their fundamental lived reality—that of occupation and the denial of basic rights.

The price Saudi Arabia is trying to extract from the Biden administration—including more extensive security guarantees that would elevate the kingdom to the status of other U.S. formal allies, nuclear technology for a civilian energy program, and freer access to U.S. arms—is a burden too much to bear. Saudi Arabia, given Mohammed bin Salman’s character and aggressive history, is not a partner worthy of the price. The crown prince is exploiting Washington’s exaggerated fears of an assertive China in the Gulf region to gain concessions the U.S. will live to regret. A Saudi-Israeli peace deal, if it materializes, will at best be a deal among the existing elites of both countries, and accelerate the regional drift toward more autocracy and authoritarianism. Such a deal will not guarantee at all that Mohammed bin Salman or Netanyahu will not continue to pursue policies, such as the de facto support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, that either violate U.S. interests or negate its values.

The United States’ reassessment of relations with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and Egypt should take place in the context of reducing its military footprint in the region. There are U.S. troops deployed throughout the region, from Turkey and Syria, to Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman. This is in addition to the periodic flights of U.S. strategic bombers on roundtrip missions to the Persian Gulf, along with frequent deployments of aircraft carriers to the Arabian Sea.

Are large U.S. air bases really necessary in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE? The U.S. could defend its interests in the Gulf (namely, deterring Iran and terrorist groups in the region) by maintaining the crucial naval base at Bahrain, the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, and supplementing it with more concentrated air power. This force can be further buttressed by aircraft carriers sailing in nearby waters. Before the string of recent wars in the Gulf, beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, this was the non-overbearing way that American power was felt in the region. A wise Arab Gulf leader told an American diplomat at the time, “We want you to be like the wind, we want to feel you, but we don’t want to see you.” That was sound advice then and would be mostly sound advice now.

Once upon a time, there existed a great reservoir of good will in the Middle East toward the United States. America was seen by the people of the region as the educator that built the American University of Beirut (1866) and the American University in Cairo (1919), among other educational institutions from Turkey to the Gulf. America was hailed as the promoter of self-determination after World War I. America was the refuge of choice for the first wave of immigrants beginning in the late 1880s, fleeing the harsh conditions in Ottoman Syria (today’s Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) and seeking the promise of freedom in the United States. Most importantly, America was a major Western power with no colonial legacy in the Middle East. America did not rule over Arabs and Muslims, unlike the European powers. The caption of a picture taken in 1878 of the Syrian family of the professor Yusif Arbili says it all: “here (at last) I am with the children exulting in freedom.”

That reservoir of good will began to dwindle with the growing U.S. support for repressive autocratic regimes in the quest to check local communists and the Soviet Union. America’s embrace of Israel following its conquest of more Arab lands during the 1967 Six-Day War deepened and widened the alienation of many Arabs from the U.S. Opinion polls throughout the region today confirm the negative views of U.S. policies in the Middle East and of America itself. Lowering Washington’s military profile and elevating its defense of human rights in a consistent, explicit, and universal fashion would go a long way toward restoring its credibility with the people of the region. It would also help them fend off autocracy, repression, and aggressive nationalism at home.

At a time when America’s democratic system of governance, its liberal open society, and its cherished concepts of inclusive patriotism and political pluralism are being challenged and eroded, it is folly to further undermine those values and the institutions that undergird them by seeking closer ties with indefensible regimes in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and Egypt may be Washington’s traditional allies in the region, but they do not deserve that status today.

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eretzyisrael · 2 years

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Anti-colonialism can distort Jewish history

By bataween on 1 November 2022

Young academics in the US project their anti-colonialism onto the pre-colonial history of Jews in Arab countries, minimising the oppression of the dhimmi rules. Lyn Julius writes in JNS News:

The history of Jews in Arab countries has long been an obscure or “niche” field of study in Western universities. Lately, however, a crop of pioneering young academics have made it their specialty. Books have popped up on such varied subjects as Jewish communists in Morocco, Baghdadi Jews and Jewish musicians in North Africa.

All these forays into comparatively virgin territory are to be welcomed. But young academics in the U.S. are also products of their education and environment. The current climate is one of fashionable post-modernist anti-colonialism—and this is reflected in works on Jews in Arab countries.

Take, for example, Joshua Schreier’s book Arabs of the Jewish Faith. Schreier has done impressive research on France’s “civilizing mission” to the Jews of Algeria. The book takes its title from a statement by a former prefect of Oran, Charles du Bouzet, a year after French citizenship was imposed, for domestic electoral reasons, on “native” Jews by the 1870 Décret Crémieux. (Native Muslims were excluded.)

Du Bouzet did not see any real difference between Arabs and Jews. For example, colonial archives abound with references to Jews being corrupt and immoral, such as the claim that Oran’s prostitutes could all be found in the Jewish quarter.

In practice, however, Jews were considered more suitable for “civilizing” than Muslims. The French colonizers believed the Jews could be useful, because Jews supposedly dominated important trade networks and might even provide loyal cannon fodder for the French military.

As part of its “civilizing mission,” France sought to make inroads into Jewish homes, schools, family relations and synagogues. Schreier tries to show that the Jews did not submit without resistance. They were not passive victims of colonialism.

Schreier’s thesis clearly views colonialism as coercive, intrusive and largely unwelcome. He implies, furthermore, that such things as state intrusion in family life persists into the 21st century. French citizenship is conditional on the right French values, he claims. He produces a contemporary case: Faiza, a Moroccan woman living in France, who was denied French citizenship because she wore a head-to-toe burqa.

Claims have also been made that, following the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, unequal treatment “separated” Jews from Muslims, creating unnecessary resentment and friction between the two groups, ending in conflict and exile. This distancing of Jews from Arabic culture and society is the “first exile” described by the influential historian of Algerian Jewry, Benjamin Stora, in his book The Three Exiles of Algerian Jewry.

Missing from the context of this discussion is any in-depth examination of how Jews were treated before the colonial era, when Muslim sharia law was in place under Ottoman rule: The Jews were dhimmis, institutionally inferior to Muslims, with few legal rights.

Schreier acknowledges that Jews were not immune from humiliations, additional taxes and sumptuary laws during this period. If they enjoyed important posts, it was not as decision-makers. They could only execute orders. Jews could be assassinated by rivals and targeted by waves of mob violence.

However, Schreier claims, “a literal interpretation of dhimmi status should not stand in for social history,” which “suggests that Jews were relatively secure and an integral component of late Ottoman and early colonial Algerian society.” He points to the powerful Jewish mercantile elite, which traded in cereal, crops, wool and livestock—though he does not say that several of these successful merchants enjoyed the protection of foreign nationality. He also produces examples of semi-nomadic Jews “who were armed and dressed like Arabs,” particularly in southern Algeria.

Other scholars, often born in Arab countries, have argued that colonial emancipation was a liberation from dhimmi status. As far as most Jews were concerned, colonialism has much to recommend it. It gave Jews greater security, equality and legal rights for the first time in centuries. It introduced basic standards of health care and hygiene and put a stop to corporal punishment in schools. It gave Jews a Western education that permitted them to thrive in the modern world.

To downplay dhimmi status is to ignore the substantial corpus of testimony from European travelers describing the exactions and abuses suffered by Jews in the pre-colonial era. Schreier dismisses these reports as “exaggerated.” He holds that they should be treated with skepticism because they were written to serve a colonial agenda that promoted emancipation and assimilation to French values. Schreier’s suspicions extend to scholars like the late respected Algerian-born French professor Richard Ayoun, whose work Schreier calls “an example of scholarship echoing the colonial model of emancipation from an Oriental state of abasement.”

In fact, it was primarily to equip the Jewish communities of Muslim countries with the wherewithal to fight for their rights as emancipated citizens that a group of French Jews set up the Alliance Israelite Universelle in 1860. This institution was not just a Jewish version of the French “civilizing mission.” It was a response to the very real abasement observed and chronicled in the pre-colonial era, ranging from blood libels and forced conversions to beatings and synagogue burnings. The book Exile in the Maghreb by David Littman and Paul Fenton provides ample evidence of this—not just from European, but also Jewish and Muslim sources.

Yet the Alliance’s efforts to combat Muslim anti-Semitism barely rate a mention in Arabs of the Jewish Faith, ostensibly because the first Alliance school in Algeria was only set up in the early 20th century.

All too often, modern scholars’ anti-colonialism blinds them to or causes them to minimize Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism. “Social history” should not be an excuse for wishful thinking.

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#Dhimmitude #Jews of Algeria

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blood-bound · 1 year

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I wanted to send in an ask for the in-character ask meme for mark but i couldnt think of anything, so instead i ask you to ramble about one of the things regarding mark that makes you lose it! Stuff you're totally so Normal about in a Lying way!! It's so fun hearing about that stuff as well as WHY it makes you lose it, yknow?? does this make sense??? hope it does lmao

k im breaking out this ask cause im doin bad. if you dont know or care about mark dont bother reading htis - i found that sometimes my mark tag shows in the general vtm tag and im sorry.

im so normal about how vampires live forever but also live in constant danger (usually)

on the one hand Mark knows he has eternity

on the other hand he knows that in a few nights it could be his last

but the man lives off denial and so he focuses on the first one.

this intersects w some of his... motivations in interesting ways

for example a main one is who he considers it his responsibility to protect sampson. but ok 1: he is a ghoul, so he'll live forever but does he want to? 2: its a dangerous world so protecting him is a big task and can he do that forever? and 3: what happens if sampson does want to live longer but turns against him either emotionally or in a deeper way? what then.

like basically the situation he's in... can it last forever? probably not. will mark grapple with that fact? No <3 its fine for now cause he isn't even a year in yet but it will be a problem at some point...

another one is serving Julius. so far julius has not asked anything too heinous of him but if there truly is eternity that's not gonna last forever. also, mark doesnt know this, but I Do, that when the pyramid falls, the blood bond may traumatically break but that does NOT mean Julius is gonna let go - only become more coercive, with mark more aware of the shit spot he is in. i am going to go absolutely insane when that happens. mark is gonna have a mc'freakin breakdown and if sampson isnt his friend at this point idk what he will do cause thats the only person in his life who could possibly understand.

Ok and finally just how literally like. ok so. mark struggles against the beast like every kindred does and GENRALLY does well because of a promise to himself after he murdered a guy in hunger frenzy, that once he gets That Hungry (mechanically hunger 4) his top goal will be reducing it and at hunger 3 its one of his highest goals. Like he has to believe he can keep it in check. but with eternity... mistakes happen. like there isnt any way he could prevent himself from ever making a mistake like that again. he is in such denial about it though. and when he fucks up again he'll be forced to accept that it will happen Another time, and Again. itll be so delicious <3 (like the blood i mean what)

Anyways.

mark believes he is taking a long view of things but he truly is NOT. he's just using that idea to Cope. he tells himself he has to settle things in his territory, w sampson, w such and such julius task, then he can sit down, study like he wants to, keep things in check ; but here is the thing. vampire society isnt like that. things are gonna shake up eventually. because you either die fast in one of those shake ups, or you live forever always long enough to see another one.

he is telling himself to just go a little longer, push a little harder, and then he can rest. then itll be ok.

but that might not ever come.

he has to learn some coping mechanisms soon... or have friends. hes not in a place where he could actually step away and get a break.

he's getting there on the friends bit w his coterie mate rose cause she agreed to stop dating Lucky (LOTS OF CONTEXT NEEDED WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT BUT IT IS ) and that meant a lot to him and he'll be more willing to open up to her in the future- but i think that will still require some sort of come-to-jesus moment where hes like. Oh shit im doing really bad actually.

which he is

but if you ask him, he will just say theres a lot going on and he's somewhat stressed <3 omg

anyway thanks @eric-the-bmo for my life

#mark vtm oc

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ukrainenews · 2 years

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Daily Wrap Up October 4, 2022

Under the cut:

U.S. President Joe Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said

Ukraine advances 30 kilometers in Kherson Oblast, Arkhangelske, Starosillia, Velyka Oleksandrivka, Davydiv Brid, and Dudchany settlements liberated

Russian defence ministry maps presented on Tuesday appeared to show rapid withdrawals of Russian invasion forces from areas in eastern and southern Ukraine where they have been under severe pressure from a Ukrainian counteroffensive

Volodymyr Zelenskiy has signed a decree formally declaring the prospect of any Ukrainian talks with Vladimir Putin “impossible”

The operators of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea that had major leaks last week said that restrictions imposed by Danish and Swedish officials had prevented them from inspecting the damaged sections

“U.S. President Joe Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Tuesday that Washington will provide Kyiv with $625 million in new security assistance, including High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launchers, the White House said.

Biden was joined in the call by Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House said in a statement. The president underscored that Washington will never recognize Russia's annexation of Ukrainian territory, it added.

Biden "pledged to continue supporting Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression for as long as it takes," the statement said.

This package is the first aid package since Russia's most recent declared annexation of Ukrainian territory and the second Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) since Ukraine made large battlefield gains in mid-September.

Russia's declared annexations last week followed what it called referendums in occupied areas of Ukraine. Western governments and Kyiv said the votes breached international law and were coercive and non-representative.

The State Department said in a release the package includes four HIMARS launchers and associated rockets, 32 Howitzers with 75,000 rounds of ammunition, 200 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, and Claymore anti-personnel mines.

Made by Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N), the HIMARS launchers' accuracy and longer range have allowed Kyiv to reduce Russia's artillery advantage.”-via Reuters

“Ukrainian forces continue to make substantial gains in Kherson Oblast, occupied by Russia since March.

Ukrainian soldiers have published videos from previously occupied settlements – Arkhangelske, Starosillia, Velyka Oleksandrivka, Davydiv Brid, and Dudchany.

The Russian Defense Ministry officially confirmed a significant retreat in the northeastern part of Kherson Oblast over the past 24 hours, which spans around 30 kilometers.

The map also suggests that Russian forces were pushed out of the northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.

As Russian forces were retreating in several regions, Russia's parliament on Oct. 4 unanimously ratified the illegal annex of four Ukrainian regions it doesn't control.

Moscow is yet to formally draw its own borders.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, on Oct. 4, signed a decree to rule out negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing talks with the current Russian leader as "impossible."

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also said peace talks with Russia are impossible, warning that Putin's proposal was – "we will rob your country, enslave your citizens, and then you can sign peace."

"Putin is lonely and isolated like never before," Baerbock said in an interview with the German newspaper Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung published on Oct. 4.

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the President's Office, reported on Oct. 4 that Ukraine had liberated 483 settlements in Kharkiv Oblast so far.

In neighboring Luhansk Oblast, authorities may soon ask remaining residents to evacuate as Ukraine is planning to enter the occupied region, Luhansk Oblast Governor Serhiy Haidai said.

The Russians are trying to strengthen their defense near Sievierodonetsk – in Kreminna, Luhansk Oblast – Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesman of the Eastern Operational Command of Ukraine's Armed Forces, told Channel 24.

Ukrainian forces appear to be pushing east of Lyman, Donetsk Oblast, and "may have broken through the Luhansk Oblast (administrative) border in the direction of Kreminna," the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S. defense think-tank, said on Oct. 3.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC News that Ukrainian forces are pushing into the Luhansk Oblast while also advancing in the south.

"And like you've heard President (Joe) Biden saying, we're going to continue to make sure we can give them the weapons and capabilities so they can continue that sign of progress," Kirby said.

On Oct. 4, Biden announced a new $625 million security assistance package to Ukraine, following a call with Zelensky. The security assistance package includes four HIMARS, and additional artillery systems, ammunition, and armored vehicles.”-via Kyiv Independent

“Russian defence ministry maps presented on Tuesday appeared to show rapid withdrawals of Russian invasion forces from areas in eastern and southern Ukraine where they have been under severe pressure from a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The ministry's daily video briefing made no mention of any pullbacks, but on maps used to show the location of purported Russian strikes, the shaded area designating Russian military control was much smaller than the day before.

In northeast Ukraine, where Russia suffered a rout last month, its forces along a frontline running some 70 km southward from Kupiansk along the River Oskil appeared to have retreated some 20 km to the east, as far as the border of Luhansk province.

This would mean they had vacated the last remnants of Ukraine's Kharkiv province - where Russia for several months maintained an occupation administration - but for a small patch between the town of Dvorichna and the Russian border.

In southern Ukraine's Kherson province, Russia's line of control on the right bank of the Dnipro river had shifted 25 km southward on the map, to a line running westward from the riverside town of Dudchany.

Both areas are battlefields where Ukraine has been reporting advances, albeit without giving full details.

It would not be the first time that Moscow had acknowledged a withdrawal so obliquely. On Sept. 11, a map presented by the defence ministry showed that Russian forces had abandoned most of the parts of Kharkiv that they had controlled, as far east as the Oskil, after a lightning Ukrainian offensive.”-via Reuters

“Volodymyr Zelenskiy has signed a decree formally declaring the prospect of any Ukrainian talks with Vladimir Putin “impossible”.

The decree formalised comments made by Zelenskiy on Friday after the Russian president proclaimed four occupied regions of Ukraine to be a part of Russia.

“He [Putin] does not know what dignity and honesty are. Therefore, we are ready for a dialogue with Russia, but with another president of Russia,” Zelenskiy said on Friday.

Clause one of the decree, which was prepared by the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine on 30 September, reads “[Ukraine decided] to state the impossibility of conducting negotiations with the president of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.””-via The Guardian

“The operators of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea that had major leaks last week said that restrictions imposed by Danish and Swedish officials had prevented them from inspecting the damaged sections, Reuters reports.

Europe is continuing to investigate the cause of the leak of the gas pipelines near Swedish and Danish waters. Denmark and Sweden have said the leaks were caused by blasts equivalent to “several hundred kilograms of explosive”, with the UN environment programme saying the ruptures likely caused the biggest single release on record of climate-damaging methane.

Reuters has the latest developments:

Nord Stream 2 AG, Switzerland-based operator of that gas pipeline, said on Tuesday it will examine the condition of the leaking pipelines once a police investigation of the “crime scene” is completed and a cordon is lifted.

Later on Tuesday, Nord Stream AG, operator of the older Nord Stream 1 pipeline, said they had been told by Danish authorities that receiving the necessary permits to carry out an inspection could take over 20 working days.

Nord Stream AG also said that the Norwegian ministry of foreign affairs had not given permission for a ship to depart to investigate the damage, CNN reported.”-via The Guardian

#Daily Update #Ukraine #Russia #War in Ukraine #kherson #kharkiv #luhansk #donetsk #nordstream #US

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outof-thepast · 2 years

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The Metaphysics of Cyborg Labor

“There was no subjective evil in their life, just the invisible background of the systemic violence.”

Slavoj Zizek

The rituals of our everyday lives are preconditioned activities imposed on us. Not imposed coercively, as in by someone holding a gun to our heads, but in a much more sinister way. The threat underlying our daily decisions, a threat that lives in our unconscious, consistently reminds us that we can either submit to exploitation or starve to death. The current system does not allow for a third option. You either submit to work or good luck trying to survive in the streets. What makes this threat even more sinister is the way it is presented as if it comes from nature itself: whether it was God, human nature, the selfish gene, the naked ape, the bell curve and all the other pseudo-science developed by the rich to justify treating us like machines.

“The poor are poor because they want to. That’s what I heard her saying. It made me angry but I didn’t know how to dispute that,” said my roommate Eva as we sat around the table. She was visibly distressed.

“The sayings and cliches of the rich are meant to rationalize our poverty. They say stuff like that, mostly to themselves though sometimes in public, to make themselves feel better about the miseries of the world that they created,” I responded.

“Hmmm. Yeah, I guess I buy that… I don’t know, Rosa, sometimes I can’t tell what you mean..”

I got up and picked up the dishes from our table. I had the intention of washing them but my exhaustion pushed me towards my bed in the living room. I live with six other women maquila workers in a small one-bedroom apartment intended for two people. All of us are from the small town of Tecoanapa, Guerrero. The border hellspace we are in makes me have visions and dreams of the miserably poor Tecoanapa as a utopian territory existing centuries in the past, in a realm other than the one of the factory system, a territory where time, space and identities are corroded and eventually erased, throwing us into an empty space designed for machines rather than humans. People become something other than humans after years of being here, and once you were here it was hard to leave because of the system of traps in place to keep us in. The system of credit, debt, wages, loans and always looming the threat of unemployment trapped us.

During my first years in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, now renamed Maquila City by the ruling elites in an attempt to sell it as a megalopolis completely subservient to the international masters, I talked about my dream to everyone. I had the simple aspiration of saving enough money to build a house back home and to never have to work again. “I’d rather be poor and not have to work as long as I have a roof and some food,” I used to say, attempting to convince myself and others that there was a way out of the hell. The dream eventually evaporated or was exported to China along with the commodities I produce sixty hours a week. About the time my ability to desire was deflated I read about the rise of the class struggle in China, so logically i knew that’s where my desire was to be found, in the barracks amongst the Chinese workers and students who held banners denouncing the world of work which I also hated. One of the things about our work at the factory was its way of reducing your capacity to desire and messing with our heads. Karl Marx wrote about the effects machinery under capitalism has on our minds in one of his books. I wrote down his quote when one of my friends read it to me.

“Labor is replaced by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back into barbarous types of labor and it turns the other section into a machine. It produces intelligence - but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.”

The view from my bed consisted of three crumbling white walls with no paintings or pictures and a window that offered a view of the Pan American Transnational Highway and its endless waves of truckers, traffic, border-enforcement drones and police robots. The sound of commerce and repression came swiftly through our tiny walls and windows, a vomit of highway noises and drone sirens and decomposing truck motors. It created an unacknowledged sense of eeriness that went unperceived most of the time due to its pervasiveness. Sometimes I believed that the people responsible for designing Maquila City wanted to make us feel like machines ourselves. Everything about the city pushed you to behave and think like a machine- automatically, lacking consciousness and a sense of being. Every move you made had already been decided by someone else, there was no reason to think for yourself.

The living room window opened up a view of the city at night and I liked staring at it. Eventually it became a daily reminder of the MegaMachine that had trapped me and all those out there being worked to death throughout and beyond the night. That’s what I started calling Maquila City a few years ago, the MegaMachine. I knew that there were better words to describe it, I just didn’t know them, at least not yet. Sometimes I would feel a sense of unity and solidarity with the people and things I saw through the window, including the drones and the killing robots that had been created and coded to become enemies of humanity. Most of the time I stared at the highway because I became transfixed by the show of lights - mostly white, red, green, and blue - coming from all directions, altitudes, moving through space like sinister mechanical fireflies. After all these years I still wasn’t used to the cheap spectacles offered by the city, yet there was nothing else to do or observe.

Every day was the same thing. Walking to work with my roommates, who were still not quite my friends, I’d stare at the hallucinatory desert sand blowing around dead fields and the alien buildings and factories. There was nothing beyond them but more desert, death and the dehydrated visions of those that have tried to escape and the joy of those that had made it. I had gotten used to the way the area around the maquila made us forgot everything about ourselves - our real serves, the selves under the superficial identities of name, age, sex, gender, and nationality. The nearer you got to it, the more disoriented you felt, the more ready you became to become one with the machine.

Twelve guards stood outside the prison-like gates. They carried machine guns, bombs, and death technologies that we couldn’t name. Five stood inside the gate, five outside, and the other two guarded a war tower in the middle of the artificial court yard. The bosses told us to not be intimidated by their private military as they were just there to protect the commodities we were producing from narcos, bandits, emancipated cyborgs and other groups that pledge alliance to laziness or what they called tortuguismo. It had taken decades but the subversion against the factory system and the tyranny of work were finally appearing again.

One of the union organizers I met years ago, at some point in 2098, told me about why the bosses hired mostly girls and women. She said it was because of the mythology of femininity: the soft-hands, passive behavior and submissive character that is attributed to us made us attractive to those that want to exploit without encountering resistance. In their eyes, we were the equivalent of cyborgs. They believe that we are the nearest they have to access their utopia of a world without workers.

Everyday was the same at my workstation, as well. I stood in front of a machine that will force me to repeat the same act over and over again for at least the next 12 hours. I entered a particular frame of thought as I turn on the machine: I concentrate on the repetitive task until it becomes a compulsive act, until I become an appendix of the machine, both in a phenomenological and ontological sense. Then my mind breaks free and I regain a sense of self. I usually thought about work, workers and their hands, legs, limbs and other body parts they had brutally lost for the sake of the bosses profits, about the nature of time in the maquila, where each passing second injures your body and mind. I thought about the dialectic of friends and solitude, the unnecessarily hour-long walks home, and the threatening shadow of the sons of the elite that roamed around the MegaMachine abusing and killing the women that produced their families wealth. The devil comes to mind as he represents both the evil banality of the shadow beasts of the elite, as well as the spirit of revenge growing in China and in the maquilas of the border and I’m sure in other parts of the world, too.

“Last night a group of gachupines stopped in front of me. They were driving a BMW. When they lowered their windows I saw the driver pointing a gun at me. I remember him smiling - it was nightmarish. I froze as they laughed, some hysterically. The driver was telling them to imagine if he’d shoot me, they continued laughing and then drove away.” My friend spoke about her experience during breakfast and we stood there quietly. These where the usual stories that we told each other every morning, so no one really felt like saying anything. There was nothing left to say. All we could do was accept that reality and confront the devil when we encountered him along the desert roads.

The savages came from various social backgrounds, some had been born into it while others arrived seeking to convert death into money. They all adopted to their families, to their assigned microscopic world and their (anti)social role. They were the agents in training of the MegaMachine. In today’s world, the state and the economy depend on the alliance between legal and illegal forms of commodity production. This alliance created a social world for this parasitic strata that were known as the members of respectable society. As kids, they were all sent to the same U.S. military schools - “they’ll teach them how to become men!” their fathers would say -, they owned property in the same cities across the U.S. - Aspen, Colorado, Austin, Texas, New York City. They were also united by a shared cultural code, a shared sense of ritual, folklore, fashion and aesthetics. For any outsider, their shared cultural world would be indistinguishable from a society of cannibals. But, in our world, they were the members of respectable society.

The threat of violence and exploitation constituted our days and nights. It made us nonexistent. Before leaving to work, we tried to dedicate 10 minutes to drinking coffee and doing nothing. It was our daily confirmation that we still held some autonomy over our lives, and if we did then maybe we could have more, somehow. The walk to work started while it was still dark and we arrived at the maquila at day break. This morning we received news from the dictators that ruled over maquilas. They announced their reports over a series of megaphones placed around the dirt roads:

“We are going to be growing and generating 50 thousand new jobs in the IMMEX sector. In 2064 we closed with 270 billion dollars and we think that we can easily achieve the rounding of 300 billion driven by the elimination of the uncertainty of the T-MEC. We have every confidence that it will be implemented in the second half of the year - and for that, we need you all to do your best in terms of productivity and please remember that we will be keeping tabs on your levels of input. We need to keep this up and we must have confidence in ourselves and, if foreigners are trusting in investment in Mexico, then we should too.”

The walk to the factory was a terror in itself. Those we called the savages, the gachupines, the sons of the local caciques, roamed the area searching for whatever form of aggression and violence would satisfy them temporarily and we were usually their target. The savages, the sons of narcos, politicians, businessmen and bankers and all other kinds of criminals saw MegaMachine as their playground and the women workers as their property, just like their fathers saws the city and the country. I knew this. The hundreds of thousands of women maquila workers knew it, too. They believed there was little they could do about it. They lived in misery and prayed to God for another day. My coworker Marina, an elderly woman in her late seventies, once told me that religion offered her a will to life that carried within it a hatred for all the anti-life forces that currently dominate society. I later realized that most Maquila workers knew this, they just didn’t talk about it, nor had they had the time to think about it in decades.

We knew that they called us carne de monte. It was one of the ways they used language to dehumanize us in order to rationalize their demented behavior towards us. It probably also helped them make their barbarism more bearable in their minds. The new generation of savages are the heirs of Juan Guines Sepúlveda, the Spanish philosopher that defended the right of the Spanish crown to enslave, torture and kill the masses of the Americas on the grounds that they were not human beings. Sepulveda’s colonial worldview has persisted since the 15th century, now manifesting in the ideology of the sons of the local elites at a time of social decay and failing economies. He expressed the worldview and innermost beliefs of the savages back in the 16th century:

“Those who surpass the rest in prudence and intelligence, although not in physical strength, are by nature the masters. On the other hand, those who are dim-witted and mentally lazy, although they may be physically strong enough to fulfill all the necessary tasks, are by nature slaves. It is just and useful that it be this way. He who is stupid will serve the wise man. And so it is with the barbarous and inhumane people - the Indians - who have no civil life and peaceful customs. It will always be just and in conformity with natural law that such people submit to the rule of more cultured and humane princes’ and nations.”

Their delusion of having being born masters is what grounds them in the world and defines their sense of self worth, their pseudo-humanity. If they weren’t the masters ruling over slaves, who where they? This was a question that never crossed their minds. Their dogma was established: “It is just and useful that it be this way.” This is the creed they are raised with, they had been told they were the masters by their families, the church and the state until it was engraved in their unconscious. The savages owned nightclubs, produced cocaine and heroine, controlled the political establishment, the maquiladoras, construction companies, parking lots, and basically everything else that exists in modern cities. They owned the jails and the judges and the local police force. They also owned us. Sepúlveda absolved them of their sins. If the poor had a hole where their soul should be, they were free to treat us worse than animals, like objects.

At six minutes before midnight, Vicente Niebla was doing lines of coke as he sat in his Porsche GT6 next to an OXXO. He was with three… allies, or business-partners.

“Pass that shit, jefe.”

“We all need it. I can’t do this shit without being high. It helps me bring out the monster.”

Vicente gave them the bag of coke to shut them up. He looked down at his new Rolex watch, feeling proud of how far he had gotten, how much farther than his father on whose shoulders he stood. In recent years he had turned his body into a shrine to his father. It was covered in tattoos of the spectral symbols surrounding him and his death: the names of ranches, horse saddles, machine guns, and a hyperrealist portrait of him on his chest. He began to think about the respect he was shown in his circles as being entirely due to the achievements of his father - something that kept him awake at nights - but he shook off the thought quickly. He had to concentrate on locating and abducting the next unfortunate woman that crossed his path. It’s what the boss wants, he told himself.

The old ladies staring through their windows at midnight, hoping to catch a glimpse of love, sentiment, affection, things which they could only access through their implanted memory systems or movies, took notice of the out of place car. They knew why it was there. They prayed to God and told each other stories of the Devil over the phone. “The devil is loose and its brigade of ghouls and monsters have even taken over the souls of our poor sons. Even the sons of the poor have been taken by the beast. So I pray, I spend most of the day praying for compassion.” “Amen.” It was typical for the older generation of factory workers to have shrines dedicated to Our Lady of Sacrifice Santa Carmela. She had become a deity after leading the last wave of union struggles in the maquiladoras that led to the massacre of 2038. Carmela had been decapitated in the central plaza and her decomposing head exhibited for weeks. For the crushed maquila workers she became a ghost and a deity. They talked with her to give some meaning to their lonely lives. They prayed to her because they believed in the magical cosmovision opened up by the mysticism of religion: they believed in ghosts and spirits and angels because of their capacity to intervene in the world on behalf of those lacking any power over their lives.

The Porsche was still parked on the corner of Ixtepec and Ponciano Arriaga. Vicente turned on the new military technology he had recently installed in his vehicle in order to search for his prey. The technology allowed you to see and track anyone within a two mile radius by tapping into the extensive camera system installed throughout the city to spy on the population. Vicente moved a play stick around the screen until a group of women appeared. His mechanical eye began to follow them. “It’s time. It’s what the boss wants. Did I tell you guys he needs eight a week now? Business is looking good. That’s all it is, it’s business. Remember that.”

The last thing Rosa saw that night was a black car creeping up on her and someone coming at her. Before her world went black she caught a glimpse of the savages: Rolex watch, gold-plated gun, foreign car, diamonds and a crazy-eyed and strung-out kid with no desire other than to kill for money. She then realized these were the last snapshots las desaparecidas see before being taken to be stripped of their dignity and their short lives.

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good-old-gossip · 22 days

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Return of hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced people to Gaza City and North Gaza must be secured, not used as blackmail card

Palestinian Territory - The international community must take swift and serious action to force Israel to stop committing its crime of forced displacement against the people of the Gaza Strip. Israel has forcibly displaced over 1.2 million residents of the Strip in a systematic, widespread, and repetitive manner since the start of its genocidal war on 7 October 2023.

After being forced to travel and shelter south of the Gaza Valley in recent months, thousands of people must be allowed to return to their homes in the Gaza and North Gaza governorates. This is especially important since the Israeli military attack on Rafah has effectively ended the existence of the so-called “safe zone”, which served as a relative haven for those who were forcibly displaced from various parts of the Gaza Strip and had no other place to stay.

Since the Israeli army issued the final orders for forced displacement on 6 May, more than 700,000 people have left Rafah. The forced displacement is still occurring despite extremely difficult circumstances, with families struggling to find tents large enough to house them, arrange for transportation, and pay costs associated with their evacuation.

The orders to leave Rafah come eight months into the genocide, which has destroyed most families’ sources of livelihood and left the majority of them jobless. These families have not only endured repeated forced evacuation and expulsion, but have also lost a great deal of their belongings, including the meagre food supplies they started out with.

Given the numerous Israeli threats to invade the border city, Euro-Med Monitor estimates that roughly 150,000 people were forcibly removed from Rafah in the weeks prior to the official orders of forced evacuation.

Most of these are displaced people who were forcibly evacuated from Gaza City and North Gaza last October after the Israeli army issued widespread orders for forced displacement on 13 October 2023, stating that all residents of the two governorates were subject to the following warning: “Urgent warning to residents of the Gaza Strip: Your presence north of the Gaza Valley puts your lives in danger. Anyone who refuses to flee from the northern part of the Gaza Strip to the southern part of the Gaza Valley might be linked to terrorist groups.”

Over the course of several months, the Israeli forces have taken various measures to forcefully displace more than 900 thousand Palestinians. These measures have included direct evacuation orders and the creation of a coercive environment that has resulted in a mass exodus due to Israel’s violent bombing, intimidation, storming of homes and shelter centres, and its forcing those sheltering inside to leave and travel south. Nearly 400,000 people have remained internally displaced in the Gaza City and North Gaza governorates.

Since there is no longer any area in the Strip that is even relatively safe following Israel’s invasion of Rafah and forced evacuation of its residents about two weeks ago, Israel’s argument that those displaced from Gaza City must stay in the Strip’s south for safety purposes is rendered invalid.

Due to their large numbers and lack of access to basic amenities, hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been forced to take refuge in the streets and on the coast, west of Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah in the southern and central sections of the Strip.

According to statements made by Israeli and international media, Israel stated during the cease-fire negotiations that it was willing to return displaced people to their areas of residence in Gaza City and North Gaza. This means that, in defiance of all international legal regulations, the international community is currently permitting Israel to use the possibility of the cessation of this serious crime as a tool of negotiation and blackmail.

Forced displacement is a grave crime that is negatively impacting the lives of over a million civilians, most of whom are women and children. As it is being carried out methodically and extensively, it is considered a crime against humanity and a war crime, and is included in the crime of genocide that Israel is committing in the Gaza Strip.

After nearly eight months of Israeli aggression and forced displacement, which has left over a million people in tents and inadequate shelter centres without access to basic necessities, and in light of the end of combat operations in most residential areas in the north, their right to return home must be granted immediately.

Even though Israeli bombing and bulldozing operations have destroyed about 70% of the Strip’s residential areas, going back to their homes and living next to them is still an obligatory right that needs to be fulfilled right away. This must be supported by an international commitment to immediately provide water, basic necessities for survival, health care, and other temporary housing needs, as well as to compensate the victims for all of their losses in compliance with international law and hold Israel accountable for all of its crimes, including the crime of forced displacement.

Denying this right leaves 1.2 million forcibly displaced people homeless, without any guarantee of return, amid a lack of basic necessities or adequate shelter. Further, Israel’s closure of border crossings, plus its blocking of aid entry and cash into the Gaza Strip, amount to an Israeli decision to impose a new catastrophe on the Palestinian people and continue to cause famine and use starvation as a weapon of war in order to complete its genocide against the Palestinian people.

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