Well it has to do with the physiological afflictions that affect the skeletal structure of a comprador's body. Per the Cleveland Clinic:

Kyphosis, an excessive forward curve of your spine, is a treatable condition that usually doesn't affect a person's day-to-day activities unless the curve is severe. An early diagnosis and treatment can address this condition before it gets worse.

In seriousness, the current South Korean leadership won its current position from a 0.73% margin in a 2022 election, largely through inflaming the South Korean societal gender antagonism, where they stood on the side of misogyny. Being carried into the Seoul presidency by incels, Yoon then proceeded to spend the majority of his time on foreign affairs, because the internal contradictions of South Korean society are simply insurmountable for President Incel to solve, whereupon he capitulated on all the historical grievances that previously prevented a South Korean junior partnership to Japan, like abandoning comfort women victims and allowing Japanese military stationing in South Korea. The point is to create a fait accompli of irreversible South Korea-Japan ties to bind South Korean foreign policy to the US in the New Cold War that any successor in Seoul would be unable to undo and therefore forced to abide to. Given that it was reported just today that his approval rating is at 20% and the same survey reported that "66 percent said South Korea should only provide nonlethal military assistance, such as medicine and food, to Ukraine," I'd imagine he's leaning all-in on foreign policy compradorism, by flouting the charade of South Korean "democracy," as a means of carving out some semblance of a personal political legacy.

To be honest, this has parallels to the original Cold War. Helmut Kohl of the 1980s in the BRD was exactly this sort of bumblng blowhard. A wannabe Reagan and Thatcher two-for-one in Bonn, yet powerless to do anything for resolving BRD domestic conditions. He turned his attention then to foreign policy, aligning the BRD as a vassal to Reaganite geopolitical interests and tanking Ostpolitik with the DDR, similarly to how the current Seoul regime has destroyed the detente with the DPRK created by the Moon administration. Ineffective - until Gorbachev came along and sold out the DDR so that Kohl got to claim the "honor" of becoming the first chancellor of a "unified" Germany. In that instance, in terms of the narcissistic politician's desire to secure a historical legacy, being a comprador to US geopolitical interests "paid off," as repulsive as it is to admit.

In a larger sense, you could say that everything which the current historically unremarkable generation of leadership in both the West and its vassals like South Korea are doing resolves around clinging to the same hope, which in a macroscopic way helps to explain moves like this. They think they are on the winning team and therefore the only important thing to do is securing their number on this team. It's akin to the doctrine of "proleptic eschatology" in Christian theology, where everything being done in the present is rationalized for the anticipation of the "second coming." In this case, the "second coming" is that of a new Gorbachev figure who will deliver the West the victory to this New Cold War. The lesson they think they've learned from the original Cold War is that material conditions are fundamentally secondary in principle and irrelevant in practice: they don't need to concede anything or "waste their time" resolving immense domestic contradictions or compromise with "the adversary" because a Gorbachev will inevitably come along to hand them the keys to the entire house once again and elevate their names into the history books like what happened to their predecessors.

You don't have to look too far. It's exactly what proponents of that "wunderwaffe economic miracle drug" MMT, unknowingly or otherwise, is advocating whenever it's brought up here.

As I’ve seen it articulated, the problem with MMT is precisely that it’s the modern equivalent of 19th century takes like “This is how you can make the British Empire work to help you!”. It’s the contemporary “FDR New Deal” faustian bargain meant to co-opt the Western left and even the PatSoc chauvinists towards pursuing not any economic alternatives like socialism but an ever more perfect capitalism. There was a struggle session a while back when Roderic Day dunked on the Deprogram co-host JT for a pro-MMT video, which got the latter’s subscribers very upset. I’d actually recommend that JT video for a model representation of how MMT sells itself to the Western left. It’s “rational” and “logical.” All upswing and couched in enough Keynesian economic jargon that the only comprehensible issue with it to the general viewer seems to be just that “the greedy Western political leadership simply don’t want to share the pie,” thus blocking its enactment.

What goes unsaid is that the entire substructure which MMT rests upon is that of American dollar hegemony. The policies of MMT can only function in a jurisdiction where the imposition of such autarkic currency sovereignty can effectively ignore counter-threats of credit ratings downgrade, sanctions, divestment, IMF and World Bank condemnation and all consequential fallout with impunity. The only jurisdiction capable of that, perhaps even in the entire West, is the US alone, through the half century of work it’s done in solidifying its financial hegemony.

When non-imperial core (or wannabe imperial core) countries try to enact it, like Greece under Varoufakis era of the early 2010s, it was condemned by the ECB and the rest of the EU Troika. Greece succumbed to those political pressures, reversed its tracks and instead embarked on typical IMF-proscribed austerity SAPs. The standard of living has subsequently never recovered with current GDP per capita only approaching early 2000s levels.

As such, not only is MMT agnostic of its own basis on the bedrocks of American financial imperialism but it further advocates for the preservation of the current status quo of dollar hegemony through its proposal to trickle down some dividends of that system to the (exclusively American) working class. Therefore, its aim seems to be reeling in those of the tendency in the Western left that drifts towards the “socialism is the best way for gains to be distributed for me personally” in-it-for-myself sentiment rather than those of the anti-imperialist or socio-political bend of Western leftists.

I would say that some part of the Russian experience comes from the Soviet campaign in the aid of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. You captured the major Afghan ring road and more or less all the major cities, but then what? The reactionary mujahideen simply retreated to the countryside in the same way the Taliban did following the later American invasion. Funded by American weapons in the same way that NATO now funds Ukraine, the entire strategic paradigm shifts towards an endless defensive slog against counter-insurgency. You can't abandon your own established holdings, the major cities and its peoples, to consolidate properly for both PR/morale and humanitarian reasons and so the conflict is a long bleed. Once an equilibrium is established, you cannot strike out against the mujahideen-occupied countryside without drawing resources used to defend your established urban holdings. The Soviet and US Afghan Wars are examples of how precisely a long war should not be conducted.

The only long war in contemporary history which brutal attrition was the intention is a war that most ML don't study because it's a miserable inter-fraternal conflict between socialist states, the Sino-Vietnamese War.

The primary literature I'll reference is from a Chinese gusano professor, Xiaoming Zhang, who worked for the US Air War College (and ironically was later recently targetted by the FBI China Initiative and subsequently lost his job): "Zhang, X. 2015. Deng Xiaoping's Long War: The Conflict between China and Vietnam, 1979-1991. University of North Carolina Press." As it was sponsored by the literal US DoD (the first book I've ever read where there's a disclaimer that says: "The views expressed in this book are mine and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government."), it is obviously ideologically reactionary but because it is meant to provide for the US military an account of PLA strategic planning and thus largely focuses on military analysis, that part is therefore worth reading.

The Sino-Vietnamese War is actually the war in all with the most parallels to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Deng's intentions for the war with Vietnam was principally "attitude adjustment." Vietnam had sided with the USSR in the Sino-Soviet Split and this was seen as a betrayal of China's support in the Vietnam War. It started with an initial invasion that was then, by Vietnamese argumentation, repelled. This is what NATOpedia classifies as the "official" Sino-Vietnamese War and in the Vietnamese narrative, it repelled an invader that was planning to sweep their their way through Hanoi all the way down to the Mekong Delta. But then the conflict kept going on.

As the author writes:

The Vietnamese leadership never seemed to comprehend the PRC’s strategy and war objectives, persistently maintaining that the 1979 invasion simply constituted a prelude to Beijing’s long-term scheme of infringing on Vietnamese sovereignty and independence. After China announced its withdrawal on 5 March, Hanoi called for a nationwide general mobilization for the war and began constructing defensive positions in and around Hanoi. By the end of May, the PLA had reverted to its normal alert status. Vietnam, however, remained on guard, stationing a large number of PAVN troops (allegedly 300,000) along border with China at a time when the economy was “in a worse state than at any time since 1975.”

As a result, Hanoi’s attempts to fight simultaneously in Cambodia and on its northern border took a growing national economic and social toll, subsuming Hanoi’s effort to modernize its economy and, more important, undermining its geopolitical ambitions. According to Fred Charles Iklé, “Governments tend to lose sight of the ending of wars and the nation’s interests that lie beyond it,” and many are “blind in failing to perceive that it is the outcome of the war, not the outcome of the campaigns within it” that determines how well their policies serve the nation’s interests. The Vietnamese leadership clearly failed to grasp the gravity of the situation and continued depending on the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor.

By the conclusion of the border war in 1991-93, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, liberated from the US occupation and unified for over 20 years had still been unable to properly focus on its Doi Moi economic reforms, announced in 1986, due to the ongoing conflict:

In the end, only in 1990, after Vietnam’s withdrawal from Cambodia, did the PLA pull its forces back from the occupied Vietnamese hills. Vietnam’s national pride and domestic politics made Hanoi’s leadership unable to tolerate Chinese occupation of any Vietnamese territory, even hills in the remote border region, and it therefore responded to Chinese military pressure with a tit-for-tat strategy. After 1984, Vietnam vigorously resisted Chinese military encroachments, initiating attacks and counterattacks with huge forces even when its economy was weak. Although the fighting took place far from Vietnam’s political and industrial heartland, the conflict encumbered the country’s economy for a long period of time. For China, battlefield costs were fractional at a time of economic prosperity. In this way, China strategically outmaneuvered Vietnam. Since the Hanoi leadership played into Beijing’s hands, China’s military pressure appears to have worked.

In June 1990, during his meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Hanoi, (General Secretary of the CPV) Nguyen Van Linh claimed to have been a student of Mao’s revolutionary theory and stated his great appreciation for China’s aid during Vietnam’s struggles against the French and Americans. He then admitted that Vietnam had wronged China and was willing to correct its mistakes. With respect to Cambodia, the Vietnamese leader expressed confidence that the situation would be resolved peacefully but urged both Vietnam and China to work together to prevent the West and the UN from meddling in Cambodia in the future. The exclusion of the Khmer Rouge from a future Cambodian government, Nguyen Van Linh admitted, was impractical.

The author also makes an allegation of an "agreement" between the two Communist Parties, which is rather interesting in light of the much hyped public Vietnamese antagonism towards China by the West:

A secret deal may have been made regarding how to address the unpleasant thirteen years so that the interlude would not imperil future Sino-Vietnamese relations. The two sides allegedly reached a tacit agreement that prohibited the media from publishing stories and scholars from conducting studies about the border conflict in hopes that the recent hostility would then fade from memory on both sides of the border. Both countries could then concentrate on rejuvenating their relationship. Once again, Vietnam looked to China for direction and guidance, and the relationship was described officially as “good neighbors, good friends, good comrades, good partners” (haolinju, haopengyou, haotongzhi, haohuoban).

Here's an overview of the politics behind Iranian foreign policy from the RTSG substack that they gave in their article on the 2022 protests.

To properly understand the events of late 2022, it is vital to analyze the role of different factions in Iran and their power struggles. Although many analysts in the West portray the political class of the Islamic Republic as a completely unified bloc under the control of a supreme dictator, this is far from the truth. Since the very early days of the Islamic Revolution, many factions have existed in the popular front bloc that formed the Islamic Republic. Although many of these factions, such as non-Islamic Liberal Democrats and Communists, were purged in the 1980s, strong disagreements persisted amongst the clerics and revolutionaries that ultimately consolidated their dominance in the revolutionary period

The issue that most divided this new political class was foreign policy. As opposed to the “hardline” or “principlist” faction that saw sovereignty and opposition to Israel and American imperialism as one of the primary aims of the revolution, a faction also existed that sought to work with the West, and although they saw no harm in ousting the Shah, they still believed that Iran should follow a Liberal economic and political path, albeit under a more Islamic framework. This faction came to be primarily led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and would even engage in negotiations with the US government in the 1980s known as the Iran-Contra Affair

After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or Rafsanjani, as he now preferred to be called, became the first President of Iran under the new post-Khomeini constitution. He and his party, the Executives of Construction, were known as the ‘Moderate’ faction and they began a process of liberalization in the economic and socio-cultural spheres. Rafsanjani’s two terms as President were then followed up by the birth of the closely aligned ‘Reformist’ faction led by President Mohammad Khatami. Khatami’s government pushed a policy of increasing liberalization and attempted a rapprochement with the USA under the framework of a “Dialogue of Civilisations”. In his time, Iran saw his supporters conduct the first attempt at major political change conducted through street protests during the 18 Tir movement

Khatami’s Presidency was then followed up by Ahmadinejad, whose Presidency saw a patchwork of policies and political alignments as well as the largest protest movement in the Islamic Republic’s history as millions protested the outcome of the 2009 Presidential elections under the leadership of the Reformist candidate, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In 2013, the Reformist-Moderate movement won back power as Hassan Rouhani won the presidential elections with the promise to negotiate with the USA and end Iran’s sanctions

To alleviate these sanctions, in 2013, Hassan Rouhani ran for the presidency, with an unprecedented level of advertisement and media excitement around his campaign, to negotiate with the West and get sanctions lifted. Rouhani won and pushed negotiations with the USA into overdrive, resulting in the 2015 ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ or JCPoA, according to which Iran would limit its nuclear program and in return would have certain sanctions lifted. This was supposed to be the first step in a series of negotiations that would then target Iran’s military capabilities and regional network of alliances, finally resulting in the Islamic Republic becoming a Western-aligned nation, aiming to follow the developmental model of nations such as Japan and Germany. One such example was that in 2016, merely one day after US President Barack Obama’s executive order was signed lifting Iran nuclear sanctions as part of the JCPOA, Obama signed new sanctions targeting Iran’s missile/defense programs. Not long after, Reformists such as Rafsanjani hinted at being willing to negotiate away Iran’s missile program, by issuing statements such as “the world of tomorrow is a world of dialogue, not missiles”, which sparked political feuding between Reformists and Principlists

In 2018, however, everything changed when US President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, started his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and Iran’s economy fell into an unprecedented recession. The Reformists, who continued to be the ruling party at the time under Rouhani, did not aid the economic situation. In addition to passing hyper-neoliberal economic policies, they had delayed Iranian trade deals with China that would have alleviated and offset pressures caused by Western sanctions, all in the hopes of returning to an idealistic JCPOA with the West. For instance, Xi Jinping proposed Iranian cooperation/entry into China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as early as 2015 and 2016; Rouhani wouldn’t take him up on his offer until years later in 2021 when Iran finally joined BRI, after mounting pressure from Khamenei and the economic situation. Adding to this, Trump also assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, in early 2020, and destroyed all hopes for the Reformist project within Iran

Following the failure of the JCPOA and the terrible economic decline of Iran, caused by sanctions and the hyper-neoliberal policies of the Rouhani government, the Reformist movement lost all the wind in its sails. By the time of the 2019 parliamentary and 2021 presidential elections, they had no popular candidates who could run in the elections as the grand promises of the last two administrations had proven fruitless. As a result, a Principlist parliament was formed in 2020, and “hardliner” Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi won the 2021 presidential elections. For the first time in decades, the Iranian government seemed unified from top to bottom. However, before things could settle and Raisi could begin to implement his policies, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement suspiciously sprung up, claiming to not only challenge Raisi but also to want an end to the Islamic Republic as a whole.

[...] This new foreign policy has thus far turned Iran into an important node in the new confrontation between Western powers and the non-Western world, with Iran acting as the third power in a triad that has formed with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The derailing of this new foreign policy and the damages it would incur for Iran would weaken the new emerging global system and damage the non-Western world in its confrontation with American unipolarity. This would leave allies such as Russia in a more fragile state and could destroy the new-found confidence of states such as Saudi Arabia in their pursuit of less Western-orientated policies.

In short, it seems like the JCPOA was the darling project of the Iranian "Reformist" faction, the characterization of whom by RTSG immediately brings to mind a Westanbetung capitulationist like Gorbachev. It is rather interesting to read about the Rouhani government's self-sabotaging liberal idealism given that Western coverage through the entirety of the contemporary Iranian period has been just static portrayals of an "unchanging hardliner leadership."

I'd recommend looking at the comparative case of Zimbabwe, where the former settler colony of Rhodesia was liquidated more thoroughly than that of the case of South Africa in dismantling apartheid. This included a process of land reform that, while nowhere as successful and comprehensive as that in socialist states, still managed to touch on, what I'd call, the fundamental bottom line of Western imperialism in a way that was largely unprecedented in the whole African decolonial experience with just a few exceptions like Gaddafi's Libya and Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal.

In South Africa, the end of that obscenely vile system was a victory, but the issue I've come to realize over the years is that Western imperialism is an onion where there's layers and layers of "fluff" as defence before you peel back a layer that really touches the ultimate bottom line. It's like the Ukraine War where the West makes a stand right in the former heartland of the Soviet Union and plays it up as "existential" to them to obfuscate that there are so many layers of their defence that one could peel away before anyone reaches a fundamental bottom line for the Western existence, like the decolonization of Turtle Island. This is the real substance that 500 years of Western imperialism have accomplished.

To put it plainly, South African apartheid was a "nice to have" in terms of sustaining the interests of Afrikaaner settler colonialism but not a genuine "must have." That latter is the multi-generational socioeconomic entitlements they've carved out for themselves during the period of overt settler colonialism that the ANC largely have left untouched but which retains a significant amount of the Afrikaaner asymmetric power in South Africa. The portrayal in the West of the South African experience as an achievement that the Global South should be "satisfied with" to use as a role model serves to obfuscates that there needs to be socioeconomic redistribution and land reform to actually cross a genuine Afrikaaner red line.

In a sense it's like conceding that I can longer beat the shit out of you, but you still have to live out on the street while I occupy your former house. And even if I eventually let you in your former house, you can't go upstairs. And even if I eventually let you go upstairs, I still have the sole name on the property deed. And even if I eventually let you have your name on the property deed, I still control the finances. On and on, etc, until you reach the bottom line of finally being able to kick out the occupier from your house entirely.

Through this, the South African model is that you get to make out giving up some perversely lopsided entitlement like "I can't beat the shit out of you" as some great equalizer when there's still so much more to go before you genuinely are affected. The intent is to pile endless layers of extraneous concessions (and act like each one is existential) so that the real concession is impenetrable to reach. Even if reaching it is impossible, however, it should be still conceptualized in decolonial efforts what is truly the bottom line.

Land Reform in Zimbabwe

"Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myth and Realities" by Ian Scoones et al. (a neoliberal work which, while hilariously playing up the World Bank's support for land reform as "good-intentioned" and not disengenuous, is still overall useful) illustrates how the much maligned Zimbabwe government through its land reform process "highlighted one potential path for countries unable or unwilling to deal with the unequal inheritance of apartheid or colonialism." At first, there was the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement drafted with Britain, lasting for 10 years, which was played up as a "crucial capitulation" even though "no major agrarian reforms was on the cards; this was all going to be 'carefully planned,' designed to increase 'farming efficiency.'"

This was the song and dance of the endlessly layered "onion" of "concessions" put into practice, where there was a "all (i.e. 'including' Britain) acknowledged that land reform had to be a central plank of post-Independence policy, but options were severely constrained" 'c'est la vie-style' shrugging of shoulders skit by Britain. During this period, "the new government played by the rules, keen to gain international confidence and encourage 'reconciliation' with the white farming community" and "white farmers were seen as a 'protected species' for much of the early 1980s." At the end of the 80s when the Lancaster Agreement was set to expire, it was already clear "by the mid-1980s that the great plans for mass resettlement were not going to happen" and that there was "every sign that the British government is striving behind the scenes to perpetuate Lancaster House beyond April 1990 and so prevent significant land reform from taking place."

By 1998, the Mugabe government signed off the acquisition of 2m ha which, despite following 'fair market values' for compensation, "sent shockwaves through the diplomatic and aid communities," who "saw this as an aggressive act" and the typical "IMF threatened to withhold a tranche of new payments due in 1999" gimmick routine. This kicked off the "Jambanja" period of generally spontaneous and largely decentralized "land invasions" in a 2 year period of radical land reform by locals and war veterans, which the West is still unable to pin as either a "peasant-led movement" or "orchestrated by the top."

Even here, however, as of their report in 2010, the process in the large commercial agriculture sector went from, in 1980, "6000 farmers, nearly all of them white" to "2300 white-owned commercial farmers still operating." So, even Zimbabwe's land reform, which has been commonly portrayed as apocalyptic chaos in Western media and scholarship to dissuade other Global South countries from emulating it, still retained a significant legacy of settler colonial control after its most volatile phase. As such, the framing of such a narrative in the West for a country which, after 20 years of the British "we support your struggle, but it's complicated" pantomime act, decided to largely cut through to near the core of the concessional "onion" is therefore deliberate.

As such, the cause of Palestinian liberation is one that will need to contend with the same trap which South Africa was ensnared by and which the Zimbabwe example shows the agonizingly long process of both misdirection and slander involved in combatting it.

Scones, I. et al. 2010. "Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myth and Realities."

Why should they? The resolution is a cynical pantomime act: a "genocide remembrance" proposal co-sponsored by two of the most vicious genocidal states of the 20th century. A Western-backed resolution urging the world to "commemorate genocide" at a moment when there's an active genocide against Palestinians is the height of moral bankruptcy.

The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina are undoubtedly real and Yugoslav/Serbian actors are directly culpable, but the vicious swath of ethnic cleansing that followed the catastrophic disintegration of SFR Yugoslavia were committed from all sides. The tunnel visioning on the Yugoslav/Serbian atrocities against Bosnians (and Kosovans) is a deliberate narrative aimed at absolving NATO and its regional underlings of any fault and pinning the entirety of the blame in the historical "canon" on the remnants of the last socialist state in Europe.

Kate Hudson's work "Breaking the South Slav Dream: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia" quotes a LA Times article covering the 2002 Hague Tribunal which rather remarkably declared at the time that "Milosevic, as a scapegoat in a show trial with a predestined outcome, would be a perfect medium to exorcise the guilt of those who are trying to obliterate their complicity in provoking the Balkan Wars." So it is as well with the Yugoslav/Serbian atrocities whose single-mindedly focus by Western Human Rights scholars and "Genocide Studies" academics for the past decades is meant to whitewash the crimes of all others involved.

The infamous Srebrenica episode itself exemplifies the typical atrocity narrative structure that Western scholars and journalists employ where they blow up a single isolated incident on the big screen and toss out the rest of the film strip with the background context and prelude, the usual "Last Thursdayism" gimmick where history only began, Book of Genesis-style, at the moment the designated adversary committed the act in question. As Hudson writes:

Serbian atrocities in Srebrenica in 1995 – including the alleged massacre of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys – were widely publicized, although it is notable that by the end of the 1990s only a tiny fraction of the anticipated number of bodies had been found. The fact that Serbs had previously been brutally driven out of Srebrenica by the Muslim leader Oric, and had suffered atrocities at Muslim hands – such as the massacre of 500 Serb civilians on the Orthodox Christmas Eve in 1993 – were not widely reported.

Most states don't care enough to challenge this Western narrative, which is why a resolution like this will likely pass, but for those countries which understand the cynical rationale behind this blame-shifting whitewash, where victims and perpetrators are selectively remembered, there's absolutely no reason to play along. If everything in its entirety regarding the collapse of Yugoslavia was commemorated, Clinton, Kohl, Albright and all the Western war criminals would be pinned alongside Milosevic. Their aim is to prevent that so this selective remembrance narrative is the end result.

Meanwhile, the West will happily talk endlessly about Bosnia's past while at the very present, the country is still non-sovereign and governed by a NATO appointed colonial viceroy, the "High Representative," who can toss out election results and depose Bosnian elected officials at will.

Just looked and apparently, there's some really based content uploaded on Google Maps for Karl Marx House.

Chinese tourist sings the Internationale

Abandon Ayn Rand, Embrace Chadism-Leninism

That's the rather common argument amongst many leftists that not only are the Biden regime ghoulish genocide-abetting war criminals but that they also know what they're doing as well.

I would disagree with that assessment because I disagree with the presentivist conceit that the current crop of leadership in the West is anything more than the equivalent of benchwarmer political nobodies like the Coolidge administration exactly one century ago. Neither does making psychotic policy decisions mean ipso facto those decisions are competently made ones for the sake of US empire. The fact that we of the present are stuck confronting the fallout of their actions on a day-to-day basis should not induce people in putting them on a pedestal. Not every generation has an exceptionally competent ghoul like Roosevelt who subsumed the world financial system under the Bretton Woods arrangement or a crook like Nixon who could exploit the Sino-Soviet split through the presence of competent underlings like Kissinger.

That the present ghouls leading the Washington blob are psychologically insecure about the institutional resilience of their subordination of Europe does not mean their decision to ameliorate this anxiety by giving Europe a tighter shackle is the rational call for American empire. The material conditions of modern Europe's entire structure and way of life are derived from the extraction and exploitation of the Global South, in the same sense that the US is. This and the fundamental character of European chauvinism and white supremacist solidarity underlying the European relationship with the US means that we in Europe would never have struck it out from under the American shadow. Until there is ever a moment where such material conditions of the European character and way of life can be made to undergo comprehensive revision and there is a reckoning for the legacy of our historical relationship with the Global South, the idea of a Europe that does not salivate at alignment with imperial aims is a pipe dream.

These are factors that would have always bound Europe to the American imperial project. That the Biden regime doesn't want to admit the basis of the US-Europe relationship is imperialist mutual interest and white supremacy, and thus would always be on the American side when it really matters, by going out of their way to institgate the Ukraine conflict to make Europe explicitly fall in line does not mean the opportunity cost of that decision is worth the cost for US empire.

The fact is that the one cardinal rule of classical geopolitics in the Western world since the time of imperialist thinkers like Mackinder, more profound than NATO Ismay's "Keep the Germans Down and the Russians Out" little quote that Washington seems to have living rent free in their decisions - to never allow the "heartland" of the "world island" to unite together -has been completely broken by the Biden regime's actions.

Not only has he brought Russia and China together again, after the disastrous Sino-Soviet split destroyed the partnership before any benefit of heartland solidarity could be realized, but he has also completely convinced both Putin's faction and Chinese "Peaceful Coexistence" Khruschevites in the Party (rightfully) that Europe in its current state could never be an independent actor. Before Ukraine, Chinese liberals and Putin were mentally masturbating to the idea of a strong EU standing up to the US alongside them. Now, they realize that the only real partners that can uphold a sincere interest in breaking down the US hegemonic structure are in the Global South, not here in Europe. This regime will go down not just for its genocidal psychopathy, but its utter incompetence as a failson of the US imperial project.

Yes it represents the leftist fetish for unilateralist martyrdom.

(I believe it's a conch shell)

The only lesson that people in the West would learn is this:

Except we already have the conclusive natural ontological symbol for "family" right here: ☭

It's nearly impossible to get a factual grounding of the status of LGBT peoples in China through English media, since rainbow imperialism has been fully weaponized against designated enemy regimes. Western media describes China's official policy as "no approval; no disapproval; no promotion." I can't find any literature that actually attests to this as written policy, but even if true, this position has given relatively meager ammunition for atrocity propaganda so far compared to other fronts of propaganda assault against the country. China is the chief designated enemy regime today and the only major thing I've seen thrown is primarily the "muh censorship" shtick. There is an undeniable fact that organized LGBT groups can and have been appropriated by Western interests in terms of NGO collaboration with Western funding and support, however. The chief obstacle to securing LGBT rights in China will never be the allowance of these dubiously affiliated groups, but overall societal reception. With the latter, wholly independent and organic means of collective organization will naturally form.

Through my personal trawling, the current situation as I understand it is that the more conservative elements of Chinese society see it as a foreign intrusion, similarly to how reactionaries in Russia view LGBT there. Uniquely, however, the main hurdles are mainly cognitive however and can be overcome by LGBT allied advocacy:

• LGBT toleration is not against Chinese historical tradition. There are countries where historical tradition is legitimately in opposition with the fight to secure LGBT rights. China is not one of them. The core of heteronormativity doctrine that prevails today across the world is derived from Western Christian dogmatism. However, China has had a long history of homosexual toleration and practice before heteronormativity was imposed at gunpoint by the proliferation of Western Christian missionaries, whose allowance to propagandize the population was a stipulated condition enforced onto China after the First Opium War by the Treaty of Nanjing. Paradoxically, conservative groups intent on defending Chinese tradition are in reality preventing the restoration of China's historical tradition of toleration in favor of the 19th and 20th century Western imposed heteronormative dogmatism.
• The latest concern is that for those who see China's aging population as a national security threat, they consequently therefore see LGBT peoples as abetting this demographic trend. This interpretation of conjoining LGBT liberation with declining demographics is entirely unfounded. Not only is a truly LGBT tolerant society no obstacle to stable demography, this is putting the cart before the horse.
  • The principal impediment worldwide to declining fertility rates is the absurd cost of living for the global Gen Z and Millennial generations, particularly housing costs, and China is not an exception here. As usual with Western coverage of China, if they screech something is going to collapse the country, it's more likely a good policy decision. The recent popping of the real estate bubble is the government's campaign against the skyrocketing housing prices. The fixation on enforcing heteronormativity to "resolve" demographic trends is therefore completely misinterpreting the issue.
  • LGBT peoples are not categorically anti-natalists, the clarification of this point must be fully advocated. In the current medical context, LGBT peoples will only be a contributing drag on demographic conditions if they inhabit a social and legal jurisdiction which inhibits their ability to participate in child rearing. A society that establishes an institutional adoption progress by LGBT parent aspirants would find that they are no more proportionally inclined to anti-natalism than heteronormative peoples.
    • Additionally, the developing medical context in terms of reproductive technological advancements see the real possibility of neutralizing the biological hurdles to LGBT contribution towards birth. The promotion of achieving this technological condition would be entirely synergistic with China's national objective of ensuring the vanguard of a socialist state at the leading edge of human biosciences advancement.
• I've seen it suggested from a geopolitical basis that the calculus of securing the liberation of LGBT peoples would alienate China from its Global South colleagues whose societies face similar objections to advancing LGBT rights as neocolonial assaults on traditionist lines, along with the weird social conservative bedfellows that are currently chummy with China, like reactionary Russia and (wtf) the German AfD. The logic of this cynical argument must be connected to the reality that China, by its nature as a socialist state, alienates the capitalist elites (and therefore the media culture) of Global South and capitalism restoration countries like Russia far more than LGBT rights ever will. If the goal was to make Global South social conservatives happy, the logic of that sort of accomodation followed to its conclusion would lead to the overthrow of socialism in China. Rather, China must remain at the vanguard and set an independent standard for how the Global South can liberate LGBT peoples without resorting to the commercial and imperialist appropriation and two-faced perpetual legal and political semi-toleration of LGBT in the West.