Also known as “Foucault’s boomerang” or the “imperial boomerang”.
Image is of a sniper on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana State University, overlooking a student protest.
The Imperial Boomerang is the observation that the tactics of mass oppression and totalitarianism used by Western countries in their colonies and neocolonies will, sooner or later, return home to be used against the citizens of those Western countries. While the people living at the time of WW2 were, rightfully, in deep shock of the concentration camps used by Nazi Germany, those paying attention to what was occurring in Africa would not have been terribly surprised. Concentration camps were used in several countries in order to separate out ethnic groups and place them in more easily controlled environments which aimed to prevent them from rising up and fighting back against the Western governments which exploited them. There is the additional factor of governments taking notes from each other - Hitler was inspired by America’s racial segregation and genocide of indigenous groups, which author Carroll Kakel among others have written books on.
Today, the totalitarian strategies used by the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine are being brought home to Western countries as the American Reich and its global influence accelerate in their decline. Gaza was and is a cyber-concentration camp, with digital surveillance taking place alongside old-fashioned techniques of paying informants. Aside from being an unsinkable aircraft carrier and disrupting the entire Middle East, Israel’s primary role appears to be to generate new ways to monitor entire populations. Propaganda about China being an authoritarian police state with social credit scores and AI which knows where everybody is at all times was probably created, at least in part, to deflect attention from Israel doing those exact things. The paranoid and flimsy American regime with its gerontocratic upper circles now use these tactics at home: cracking down on any and all protestors with political views left of Mussolini; placing snipers on roofs ready to fire at the slightest provocation; and arresting organization leaders. Pegasus has wormed its way around the world, with a notable recent example in Poland, in which the previous conservative government used the spyware to monitor the current liberal ruling party. The Israeli military, experts only in killing children and not actual warfare, have trained the police of other nations.
It would be easy to end the preamble there, on a gloomy note about the brick wall - or, indeed, iron curtain - that upstart left-wing groups are up against. What history has shown is that these regimes are, in fact, beatable. Liberation movements around the world have found ways to counter imperialism, even if they required wars in which millions of their countrymen were murdered. The legacy of Israeli propaganda psyops and digital tracking is not victory, as Hamas demonstrated on October 7th and continues to show with every ambush executed and every Merkava destroyed. The legacy of Western military defence equipment is not success, demonstrated by every missile fired by Hezbollah and Iran which hits Israel. The legacy of the American Navy is not competence, with a naval blockade of the Red Sea still maintained after months by one of the poorest countries on the planet.
The protests of at least the last couple decades have been marked by failure to produce material results: from those against the Iraq War, to Occupy Wall Street, to the BLM protests of 2020. Of course, it would be silly to tell American protestors to start digging tunnels. But sooner or later, the failure of Western protest movements will be overcome, and a more effective strategy will be devised, in order to deflect the boomerang.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is the United States! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
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Keir Starmer: I agree with the Americans’ plan for transsexual genocide, but they’re not going fast enough. We must ensure they don’t receive any medical care whatsoever.
I visit a variety of lib subreddits to keep on an eye on what the libs are thinking and feeling. With a doubt, the smartest of them are r/neoliberal users. They are the theory readers of the liberals, their theory being Milton Friedland speeches, the FT, and German GDP reports. They view the world through an ideological framework, have mostly consistent politics in their heads, and are the mostly likely to criticize Brandon and US economic and foreign policy. They are still Democrat partisans, but more level headed than most other libs. They are also the most willing to read criticism of Israel as long as it comes from mainstream, “credible” news sources since they are all news junkies. They are the most rational about China of all libs, but this is by the standards of libs
The hogs of liberals are r/destiny. Slop addicts whos only driving force is to make marvel quips about palestinians being murdered and being terminally online about getting mad at streamers. They are blue chuds who’s only interested is seeing their enemies getting owned. There is no discussion of value on r/destiny, there is no news coverage of Israel, good or bad, at best their is brief twitter clips. they consume no news or information, only pure streamer slop. They are the id of liberal reddit
r/neoliberal is full of lazy PMC nerds whose entire identities are feeling smart because they occasionally ready the NYT or The Economist but are actually allergic to reading even the liberal theory you mention. They are constantly surprised at how events unfold and make big, dumb posts asking questions about those events and getting 37 different, highly-upvoted responses that are mostly armchair psychologizing Great Man Theory, i.e. what all liberals pick up from their entertainment media. Most of them don’t even know what the word defining their subreddit means. They just love to lick boots and discovered their compatriots.
Even with all that in mind they are still smarter than your average reddit lib
Neoliberal are all idiot ghouls who want to nuke Tehran you have severely misread the room
They read the the room correctly they’re just saying thats the smartest form of liberal they’ve seen.
As far as I can tell, what brings the Destiny viewership together is a hatred of Hasan and not actually anything Destiny does.
why do you do this to yourself
Death to America
I am deranged
Who are their equivalent of Jimmy Dore leftists proving fishhook theory by buying into weirdo conspiracies and hating on DEI
carlson interviewing dugin. Russian right figures are too thick to realise you can’t make alliance out of conservatism with prime imperial power, they want your resources not your tradcathorth values. Its fucking astonishing to see how marxist education failed in late ussrIt’s even funnier that dipshit said he grew up hating Lenin until he saw firsthand how dogshit the west is, and then how they went apeshit pillaging the Soviet Union during perestroika and the collapse and went “damn this fucking sucks, might as well call for rebuilding bolshevism but on a national level”
Fucking clown, only as a union of Soviet socialist states did any of these countries truly shine.
After the counterrevolution and annexation in 1992 there was this joke circulating in the former democratic Germany: “We knew the government was lying to us about communism but we didn’t know they were telling the truth about capitalism.”
Western propaganda worked and people under actually existing socialism took a lot of their achievements for granted and were often had a naive rose-tinted idea of what capitalism was.
I’ve heard that a bunch of times, often phrased "everything they told us about communism was a lie, but everything they told us about capitalsim was the truth.
I seriously believe that for people who haven’t lived in the grim cruelty of capitalism it’s just to preposterous to believe.
these dipshits will be so surprised when half of the europe elect meloni/le pen/afd and immediately become nato strongest soldiers friendly to usa
The following is a comment left by user Emma under the Naked Capitalism story about Türkiye cutting off trade to Israel. Sharing it because it makes me hopeful, and I think we all appreciate having some hope:
I will say that I don’t think there’s going to be a real day after for Israel or the West, even if they ethnically cleanse all of Gaza or put it under some sort of PA led Vichy regime.
Ilan Pappe said that he thought the next 12 to 24 months will be very hard, but then Israel will break from its internal contradictions. People will leave, the struggles in the West Bank and with Hezbollah will intensify, and there won’t be a sustainable Jewish entity on the other end.
The external factors will also be very harsh on Israel. Once Russia is done in Ukraine, it and China will look to help Syria recover its territory and economy. Iran and China will also want to bring Iraq fully into the BRICS system and out of American domination. The salvo from this new Bahraini resistance organization suggests that Iran’s Axis of Resistance is spreading into places ruled by Western placed emirs and kings. The actual positions of ISIS and other regional players has been unveiled by their actions. All in all, an Israel that is now clearly intolerable to basically all Arabs is not going to last in a sea of Arabs.
Yes there are the nukes and the Samson option, but I don’t think Israelis have it in them to die for the land. Look how quickly the fanatical settlers in the north and around the Gaza envelop abandoned their homes. Look at how quickly the ultra orthodox deeply implicated in pogroms in the West Bank and lies of Zaka, threatened to leave the country if they’re called up for conscription. Look at the desertions of reservists in the latest call ups.
Would any of these people, who can still have comfortable lives in the Levant or in the West, really give up their lives for a land that they’re only willing to kill for (and in many cases, brainwash the young into killing for them)?
Especially now that their finally waking up somewhat from their October 7 freakout and are confronting the fact that Mass Hannibal was likely responsible for the majority of civilian deaths, and that their ‘most moral army in the world’ shot 3 white flag waving defenseless hostages in cold blood.
The Afrikaans didn’t use their nukes, even though their ties to the land go back centuries and their ancestors did die in large numbers in the Boer War. So while the chances of the Israelis using nukes is not zero, I hope and think its quite unlikely
God I hope this comes to pass
Once Russia is done in Ukraine, it and China will look to help Syria recover its territory and economy
lefty copium tbh, china under xi has never shown any predilection for foreign policy that does good things at the expense of pissing off the US as much as this would
Death to America
This has basically been my viewpoint for months now. And honestly, if the Resistance can effectively extend the blockade to the Meditterranean, then I think there’s a solid chance that Israel as we currently know it will cease to exist by the end of this year. The road transport route isn’t going to be able to replace naval shipping, and airlift campaigns are, despite what propaganda schools tell us about 1948 Berlin, not capable of supplying entire populations. Not only that, but Israeli society can be paralyzed by relatively few strikes on offshore gas and various power stations and desalination plants, and Hezbollah retains the capability to perform these strikes without even needing to invoke Iran directly. Israel is completely stuck. They cannot give up, or the entire core point of their ideology - providing a safe space for the Zionist ubermensch - is forever destroyed, and the ideology will crumble around it. They also cannot escalate, or they will be physically destroyed. They are now world pariahs for everybody who isn’t a rabid, frothing, fascist dog which gets shaky with withdrawals if they don’t see some mutiliated child corpses every 12 hours (which still constitutes like half a billion people in the West but alas). Being a pariah can be mended over time with some dedicated propaganda campaigns but I don’t think Israel has that long.
The Israeli intelligence agencies can bleat all day long about how Hezbollah must be destroyed, or how Hamas is burrowing under American campuses; people cannot eat or drink ideology.
We’re all shocked at the psychotic rage displayed by so many people in Israeli leadership (like their UN rep talking about how college kids protesting are actually Hamas). On some level that was always there, sure. But I think what we are seeing now in all levels of Israeli society is something new. It’s like a society-wide mass psychosis. What they are displaying is not normal behavior and is beyond just fascism. I was in college when 9/11 happened. In the immediate aftermath, yeah some people expressed some bravado “let’s turn the Middle East into glass” attitudes but that was extremely rare. I think the social fabric of Israeli society is ripping apart, and in the grand scheme of things Oct 7 was basically a paper cut. The Israelis are out of their goddamn minds and I don’t see how bringing the current genocide to a conclusion will change that.
Now contrast that with the social fabric of the Palestinian people. I cannot imagine what it is like to live in Gaza right now. The Gazans who survive will be scarred for life, no doubt, both physically and mentally. And yet, all I see are attitudes of hope and defiance. They are living through hell on earth, and in the face of it all they are expressing a strength and revolve that is almost super human.
So take those two different mental states, and tell which society you have more hope for in the long run?
The amount of times I have seen these people mock dead children is horrifying. And not just on those telegram channels, pretty much any medium with a comment section that shows suffering from Gaza will attract a handful of these people saying the most disgusting things. That, or they’ll claim it’s fake when it clearly couldn’t be, or even worse that the parents are mutilating their own children just to make “Jews look bad”.
These types of images existed during Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit not in nearly the same volume. When CNN had a comments section, I can’t remember a time when Americans were saying things like that to footage of dead and dying children, on the rare occasion we’d see it.
They will also do some of the most insane mental gymnastics to justify war crimes. When the Julian Assange leaks came out, or stories of weddings being droned, Americans might have said something about “bad apples” or “honest mistakes”.
I got into an argument with some Hasbot over a video of an older male civilization being killed. They claimed that the soldier murdering the civilian lost family on Oct 7. When I asked the soldier’s name and the name of the family member lost, since such records exist, the response was literally “Well I don’t know for sure the soldier lost family on Oct 7, but he could have, why don’t you have any empathy for him?” They literally conceive of killing non combatants in cold blood the same way you might think of punching a wall when angry.
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cool, though how do they travel to Iran?
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is dead lolHenry Cuellar, an anti-abortion Democrat that Pelosi and other party leadership worked hard to defend from a primary challenge by progressive Jessica Cisneros (which he won by only 300 votes), has been indicted on taking $600,000 in bribes from Azerbaijan (the country that recently ethnically cleansed an entire country out of existence). lmao get fucked.
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Tony Blair and His Associates Are Waiting in the Wings to Take Back Power in UK
Blair will probably have no official role in the resulting Starmer government, but he will wield plenty of power from behind the scenes. The beauty of such an arrangement (for Blair) is that he will have zero public accountability or responsibility while at the same time being able to continue serving his corporate clients and expanding his global political consulting empire.
ID cards for everybody.
According to my dad who just came back from China, entrepreneurs in China are getting scared because of Xi’s strong left position
The socialist in me wants to see the Chinese project succeed in order to further socialism.
The shit stirrer in me wants to see it succeed so that it forces a big struggle session on Dengism lol.
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There is an old Soviet poster I know I’ve seen before but for the life of me I can’t find it. It has a sort of Nazi ghost/skeleton pinning a medal on a US soldier in Vietnam, with Nazi ghost saying something like “job well done”. I want to see if I can photoshop it to make it look like IOF. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
Is this it? Closest I could find for you.
I’ve got my first dentist appointment in like 5 years in an hour, I’m so nervous fuck shit fuck I hope they’re nice
I once went 12 years. The hygienist cringed when she heard this, and then sighed with relief when she saw my mouth, which had some plaque but wasn’t a horror show.
I’m envious as hell. One of my ex-partners also had zero cavities despite sometimes going a week without brushing. I have a rigorous-bordering-on-self-flagellating teeth-cleaning-and-dental-visit regimen (not to mention trying everything they recommend including various toothpastes and vitamins, etc.) and my teeth are fucking continuously falling apart. All they can do at this point is shrug and say there’s probably some genetic component.
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Newspilled historychads are just racking up those Ws. Pick up my historical materialism, idealismmoder!
I love this so much
what’s it from?
CW: hitler
Do you need a content warning for hitler? Idk man, it’s hitler
Didn’t the show famously not do this to it’s own Hitler or am I misremembering?
Yeah cause it’s a kid show from the US, but also the diamonds didn’t commit a genocide analagous to the Holocaust. There isn’t a hitler analogue, simply a brutal colonizing empire who’s been colonizing worlds that have been (until earth) devoid of sapient life. The gem empire has not, in the canon of the show, committed a genocide against another sapient species; but it was involved in essentially a form of brutal fascism. Not hitler, but not far.
