Given the scale of what took place and the response from the West not just to dismiss it but to justify and even celebrate it; given that this act of terrorism occurred exactly a week from 9/11, I think it’s time to finally talk about 9/11 and though, yes, while inserting the two decade boilerplate about condemning terrorism and recognizing the innocent lives lost, to assess what it really meant.

Who “won” after 9/11?

It has been said endlessly in the two decades since 9/11 that the attacks that day permanently ended the unipolar euphoria of the US Cold War victory: it derailed the consolidation of US unipolarity by diverting it into two decade-long West Asian entanglements. Especially nowadays with the US unipolar status in complete disarray, you frequently see US policy makers and the Washington think tank blob cry crocodile tears about what a “gift” 9/11 was to China. This is not necessarily untrue, Bush had been priming for a confrontation with China even as he allowed its entry into the WTO. Then 9/11 happened and it wasn’t until Obama, exactly ten years later, that finally formalized the policy shift of the "Pivot to Asia,” which due the innumerable contradictions of US hegemony forcing it to react to Europe and (once again) West Asia, is still a “work in progress” in the present day.

The US fixation with its West Asian conflicts did allow China a breathing space for much of an additional decade until Trump finally took the US jumping with both feet into the New Cold War. Though there was always the Washington think tank cope as the US got bogged down that the puppet Afghanistan project was actually a 5D chess move that would allow a US presence right on the doorstep of Western China and meant the two decade occupation would allow the US to have its cake and eat it too, the total rout of the US with its 2021 Saigon moment nullified even that.

There used to be rather infamous op-eds from NYT and what-not, once the 9/11 self-censorship taboo faded a little, asking rhetorically if “Bin Laden won?” From the perspective of US unipolar hegemony, it does look like the attack did an incalculable damage not through the event itself but the US outsized reaction to it. However, is US hegemony really what matters most to the US political ruling class, “über alles?”

The specific attacks of 9/11 didn’t attack the elementary schools, they didn’t attack LGBT clubs, they didn’t attack parades; Americans would target those places themselves. They attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. If the other plane didn’t crash land in Pennsylvania, the consensus based on its DC bound flight path after two decades is still that It would have likely been flown into the White House or the US Capitol building. As such the targets were principally the financial elite, the military elite and the political elite.

There was supposed to have been a precedent set with Pearl Harbor that the United States was never to be attacked, or in Roosevelt’s own words in his “Day of Infamy” speech: “will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” The consequence for Pearl Harbor was the two nuclear bombs and the permanent semi-occupation and vassalage of the perpetrating Japan to the present day.

Pearl Harbor: the previous attack on “America”

As Daniel Immerwehr wrote in “How to Hide an Empire,” in the eyes of the US political elite like Roosevelt, an attack on Hawaii, nearly 5000 miles from Washington DC, was more of an opportunity than a threat to themselves. Not only that, in the just recently forcibly annexed settler-colonial holding of Hawaii (still not a state) far from the continental US, there was a chance that the average American also would fail to see it as a threat. As such, Roosevelt’s draft edits allude to an anxiety that the American people wouldn’t get it at all:

[…] when it came to Hawai‘i, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. Though the territory had a substantial white population, nearly three quarters of its inhabitants were Asians or Pacific Islanders. Roosevelt clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawai‘i as foreign. So on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu,” but the “American island of Oahu.” Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces,” and “very many American lives” had been lost. An American island, where American lives were lost—that was the point he was trying to make.

Roosevelt insisted: “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.” Yet taken from the eyes of the American ruling class, Pearl Harbor, in comparison to 9/11, is respectively akin to someone setting your front lawn (which you just expanded in size by forcibly seizing from a neighbor) on fire compared to literally coming for your jugular with a knife. You can see someone setting your lawn on fire as the greatest possible threat to you only if you can never even conceive the possibility of someone being able to take a blade to your throat. The greatest threat to the ruling class was supposed to be just to their way of life, not to their very lives themselves.

The Unthinkable becomes Thinkable and the Impossible is actually Done

9/11 not only negated the historical meme that Americans propagandized themselves with that “they were geographically gifted” on their stolen continent and “untouchable,” buried under lines of defence from enemies with territorial meat-shields like Hawaii, Guam, Japan, Britain, Western Europe and West Berlin that would-be adversaries would be forced to chew through first like layers on an onion; it also struck at not principally the working class masses but the literal elite themselves. Generations of American imperialism was supposed to have created an utterly vast breathing space and this “lebenstraum” was meant to make the continental US on which the US ruling class inhabit untouchable.

Even in the scenario of “World War 3,” so long as it remains conventional, in the geo-strategic calculus of the US ruling class, those immense territorial meat shields that it set up (for China: the first island chain, then the second, then the third; for Russia: the former USSR territories like Ukraine, then the former Warsaw Pact NATO, then Western Europe) mean that it would take a “World War 4” for a conflict to conceivably reach the continental US, let alone threaten the elite themselves who could scurry into their bunkers in Cheyenne mountain if things get too hot.

9/11 cut past all of this calculus like a hot knife through butter and brought the truly utterly unthinkable to realization, not only was the US squatter state on occupied Turtle Island subject to attack but the ruling class themselves were the ones specifically targeted. It’s like the hierarchy of needs where you never realized, through your privileged material conditions, there was an even lower base on the pyramid of your needs that you had been always standing on and which could be pulled out from under you.

This is the reason for the overwhelming and psychopathic US military response and the two decade commitment to devastate West Asia. The lesson needed to be taught that that what was make thinkable and possible must be made unthinkable and impossible again. Of course, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, but though the emperor was revealed to have no clothes, the world needed to be made to pretend he was still fully clothed - at gunpoint.

Through this, it didn’t really matter whether Iraq and Afghanistan could be built into stable client regimes to service US hegemonic interests, but that as much devastation as possible should be done so that every time someone glances at the misery of contemporary Iraq and Afghanistan, they would link it to the US and think that “this all happened because 9/11 attacked the US.” By such aims, the bigger the bloodbath, the better. Through this, the US ruling class really did achieve their goals, despite the ultimate failure of both invasions and occupations.

The Contradiction of Life and Way of Life

Does all this mean that the much bemoaned “wasted decade” for the US is actually a rare species of camouflaged victory if you look further into it? No, that would stretch the provided thesis too far. What the US reaction to 9/11 shows that there is a contradiction between the interests of US hegemony, which benefits all Americans through the dividends of its financial imperialism and the interests of the US ruling class, which benefit only itself and its preservation, which 9/11 was experienced as a startling reminder to them.

That there exists a distinction between the two, though in normal times both are aligned and in near perfect sync, is what 9/11 exploited and the US response has shown to exist more clearly than in any other moment in American history. The outsized retaliation by the ruling class to reassert their “untouchability” through the “counterterrorism decade” was actually a net negative for both normal Americans and for the system of US hegemony, but the ruling class did not care because 9/11 was what shown them that - when forced to choose - their individual life were more important than their way of life.

To put it in analogy, this is akin to a business owner unhesitatingly sacrificing the profitability of their own business, making it far less competitive to rivals, by a fire sale of assets and diverting earnings to pay for their own emergency surgical procedure. At that point, to that individual, there are bigger things at stake when made to realize they are forced to choose, even though what normally matters is their business and it suffers through this opportunity cost. Becoming cognizant of this contradiction is the most revealing lesson of the US response to 9/11.

I’d say this sort of ouroboros-esque argumentation that MMT proponents throw out arguing that people who disagree simply “don’t get it” and need to “read MMT theory” to “enlighten” themselves on the “logical” nature of it is certainly one aspect that propels me to the skeptic position towards the pitch. I have indeed read Hudson and actually I went out of my way to search for his ex cathedra comments about it. He seems personally supportive, from what I gather, and if so, you could ring that up as a right-hand constituent of his 70%/30%. Given his anti-Stalinist asides, I’m satisfied with having some disagreements with him.

His assessment of the global subsidization of US dollar hegemony shows that no currency is an island and this is something maintained by geopolitical coercion. This is the primary contradiction that makes a Gordian knot of any US currency sovereigntist schemes like MMT and the overall condition of US dollar hegemony. As it turns out, dollar hegemony is turning out to be a two way street turned single-way only by the traffic cop’s gun, and the implementation of domestic MMT-derived monetary policies will press upon further necessity for the US state to preserve the external status quo and coerce its involuntary creditors to further subsidize the American “monetary sovereignty.” To assert otherwise, that one can print as much as they want for the domestic market without external spillover is rather laughable as it maintains idealism over the materialist outlook, as this scheme under other names has taken place before. Reaganomics at home to rescue the domestic economy was ultimately paid by those economies abroad, to disastrous consequence for the likes of Japan.

However, the technical feasibility of MMT is secondary to my rejection of the pitch. It is, in plain terms, it is a new FDR style New Deal. Appetizing for your progressive liberals and your social democrats, but something entirely objectionable as a ML. It is to put a lipstick on a pig and to, once again, claim that an ever more perfect capitalism is preferable than socialism, suppressing the latter through material financial appeasement. This is why MMT proponents range from Trots like Hudson all the way to mainstream US economists like Kelton. The etiological base of support for an economic policy, the people that proponents stand beside and their fellow travelers says rather a lot. As for Marxists, I recommend reading “Modern Monetary Theory: A Marxist Critique.”

How MMT compares contra to neoclassical slop is something I care not for, as to that end, why not go one more step and compare how superior MMT is to feudal monetary economics or the currency price controls of Diocletian in the 4th century? How non-Marxist economics incestuously iterates upon itself to spit out its newest take is immaterial and in that sense, MMT is plainly the new rendition of Keynesianism, meant to plagiarize socialist theory to plaster onto a model of a “reformed, more humane and egalitarian” capitalism. Socialism is the alternative to which MMT must be compared to and in such a comparison, it’s the two century old Proudhon argument dusted off and brought out from the museum display: that the only real problem with capitalism is the monetary dynamics.

One thing I will concede is that I have no doubt that if exigent pressures, similar to that during the post-Depression era, were to resurface, this MMT would absolutely be very likely enacted as a concession to curb the winds of support for socialism. It would follow in those footsteps of FDR just as the New Deal followed that of Wilson’s “every American a homeowner” concession to sabotage the SPA of Eugene Debs.

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.

Here’s a translation of the actual statute, which I would rather sift through than read the Western coverage take on this:

Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on the Implementation of a Gradual Delay in the Statutory Retirement Age

(Adopted on September 13, 2024, at the 11th Meeting of the 14th Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress)

In order to thoroughly implement the Central Committee’s decision on the gradual delay of the statutory retirement age, adapt to the new demographic situation in China, and make full use of human resources, the 11th Meeting of the 14th Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress decides as follows:

Gradual Adjustment of Retirement Age:

Men and Women: The statutory retirement age for male employees will be gradually extended from the current 60 years to 63 years over a period of 15 years. For female employees, the retirement age will be extended from the current 50 and 55 years to 55 and 58 years, respectively, over the same period.

Principles for Implementation: The gradual delay in the statutory retirement age will adhere to principles of incremental adjustment, flexible implementation, differentiated progress, and overall coordination.

Government Responsibilities: Local governments at all levels should actively respond to aging demographics, encourage and support employment and entrepreneurship, safeguard workers’ rights, and coordinate efforts related to pension and childcare services.

Approval of Detailed Measures:

The “Measures for the Gradual Delay of the Statutory Retirement Age” issued by the State Council are hereby approved. The State Council may supplement and refine these measures as needed.

Effective Date and Previous Regulations:

This decision will come into effect on January 1, 2025. The provisions regarding retirement age in the “Interim Measures on the Placement of Elderly, Disabled, and Sick Cadres” and the “Interim Measures on the Retirement and Resignation of Workers” approved by the 5th National People’s Congress Standing Committee at its 2nd meeting will no longer apply.

Measures for the Gradual Delay of the Statutory Retirement Age

Guided by Xi Jinping’s Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, and in deep implementation of the spirit of the 20th National Congress and the 2nd and 3rd Plenaries of the 20th Central Committee, and considering factors such as life expectancy, health levels, population structure, educational attainment, and labor supply, the following measures are enacted for the gradual delay of the statutory retirement age:

Article 1: Starting January 1, 2025:

For male employees and female employees whose statutory retirement age is 55 years, the retirement age will be gradually extended by one month every four months until it reaches 63 years and 58 years, respectively.

For female employees whose statutory retirement age is 50 years, the retirement age will be gradually extended by one month every two months until it reaches 55 years. National regulations will take precedence where applicable.

Article 2:

Starting January 1, 2030, the minimum contribution period for receiving basic pensions will be gradually increased from 15 years to 20 years, with an annual increment of six months. Employees reaching the statutory retirement age but not meeting the minimum contribution period may extend their contributions or make a lump-sum payment to meet the minimum requirement and receive monthly pensions.

Article 3:

Employees meeting the minimum contribution period may voluntarily choose flexible early retirement, up to three years before the statutory retirement age, provided that the retirement age is not lower than the original statutory age of 50 or 55 for women and 60 for men. Employees reaching the statutory retirement age may also choose flexible delayed retirement, up to three years, with mutual agreement from their employer. The implementation must respect employees’ wishes and cannot involve compulsory or disguised compulsory retirement.

Article 4:

The country will improve the pension insurance incentive mechanism, encouraging longer, higher, and later contributions for higher benefits. The calculation of basic pensions will be linked to individual contribution years and actual contributions, and personal account pensions will be determined based on retirement age and account balance.

Article 5:

The country will implement a priority employment strategy, promoting high-quality and full employment. The employment public service system will be improved, and lifelong vocational training will be enhanced. Support for youth employment and entrepreneurship will be provided, and job development for older workers and assistance for disadvantaged individuals will be strengthened. Measures against age discrimination in employment will be enhanced, and incentives for employers to hire older workers will be introduced.

Article 6:

Employers hiring workers beyond the statutory retirement age must ensure that workers receive fair wages, rest, labor safety and hygiene, and work injury protection. The rights of flexible employment and new employment form workers will be protected, and paid annual leave systems will be improved.

Article 7:

For individuals receiving unemployment benefits with less than one year until statutory retirement age, the duration of benefits will be extended to the statutory retirement age. During the period of gradual delay, the unemployment insurance fund will pay pension insurance contributions for these individuals as required.

Article 8:

The country will standardize and improve policies on early retirement for special occupations. Workers engaged in underground, high-altitude, high-temperature, or especially strenuous physical labor, as well as those working in high-altitude areas, may apply for early retirement if they meet the conditions.

Article 9:

The country will establish a coordinated pension service system combining home, community, and institutional care, and develop an inclusive childcare service system.

Obviously, the 60-55 retirement age has been one of the policies the goons at places like The Economist have long crocodile teared China on and that tantrum had been greatly memed on by leftists. Most 20th century socialist states maintained a retirement age around 55-60. This is a fairly sizeable clawback of a major worker’s concession, there’s no really denying it. The age increases to numbers like 63 and 58 for men and women respectively seem to be anticipating a further second increase to 65 and 60, whereupon the statutory age for white and blue collar working women might be even equalized at that stage (i.e. 55 to 60 for the latter). That is the game played in the West, where they seem to be gradually working their way to establishing the full pension retirement age at 70 with current “stretch-goal” numbers like 67 (US, Germany), 68 (UK).

The immediate one-two punch is the basic pension contribution period increase from 15 to 20 years (5 years) when retirement age increased only 3 years. Beyond the policy measures themselves, I would say that the promulgation of this statute indicates that the CPC believes that the demographic issue, and specifically, the decline in the overall working age population are real and rather serious if they would adjust the retirement age like this, a policy that affects the entire population and thus will have inevitable knock-on effects.

Of course, it’s arguable that this would merely be a bandage solution to artificially boost the working population numbers rather than addressing the root of the problem. If the CPC weren’t currently undergoing through the planned demolition of the real estate sector bubble, I would be seriously concerned at a lack of willingness in addressing, or even identifying, the base causes of the contemporary Chinese demographic issue.

Now this is character development.

I wanted to make a joke about that, but in seriousness, I would guess that the term “Long March” in contemporary Chinese culture, through the legendary status of that heroic campaign, has become rhetorically synonymous with a personal journey of perseverance and struggle basically akin to how Western cultures use the term “odyssey” from “The Odyssey.” It’s (justifiably) become one of those culturally enmeshed figurative terms, like how TERF island likes to append Dunkirk to the end of everything: “financial Dunkirk, political Dunkirk, etc.”

The title likely is an allusion to that or maybe laconically pointing out just that the protagonist absolutely gets their daily steps in because they’ve meandered all around Tang China.

Since this is being asked on Hexbear and not r/manga, I’d recommend “Sensou wa Onna no Kao wo Shiteinai,” the manga adaptation of Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War.” That book is a collection of interviews with female soldiers of the Red Army that fought in the Eastern Front of WWII. As with all things USSR that see the light of day in the English speaking world, the author is an anti-communist, which is why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. However, the work is still worth reading because the interviewees are all Soviet war heroes and their deeply personal stories are the focus. Alexievich’s “capital T Truth” fetishist shtick means that she doesn’t often editorialize or interject, for example, every time Stalin is mentioned with “By the way, dear reader, remember that he ate all the grain” like Western accounts of socialist history do (though there are a billion footnotes crammed in the book version that “clarify” the interviewees’ narratives with the anticommunist correct-think “fact checks”). The illustrations really bring to life the stories of the interviewees in a vivid way and so it’s worth checking out.

Some great historical fiction include “A Bride’s Story,” set in 19th century Central and West Asia, with a great cultural anthropology-lite style narrative, and “Song of the Long March,” which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period. I actually came across that work before all the Western atrocity propaganda started clogging the airwaves in the late 2010s and I’m personal grateful to it for pre-emptively being my first impression to the Uyghur Chinese people rather than having some shoddy copycat Holodomor 2.0 plagiarized slop become the introduction to that culture.

As a purely personal aside favorite, I’d also recommend “Fire Punch.” It has a lot of the typical anime genre nonsense and really, the only reason I’d recommend it is that it has one of the best portrayals of an LGBT character in manga and anime. I was deeply struck by it personally and I’ve also seen heteronormative responses to the manga remark that the character humanized “LGBT individuals” as something beyond a “concept” for them.

If this doesn’t end up as a typical memorandum nothing burger, this could potentially lead to levels of basedness in gaming unseen since Disco Elysium. There’s already collaboration between the two industries, Atomic Heart apparently only secured funding through principally an investment from Tencent according to its devs.

China’s biggest cultural export issue is the (understandable) restrictions against political and ideological products, especially in gaming where most historical settings then are only wuxia or classical literature-derived like ROTK games or Black Myth Wukong. This is understandable given the absolutely justifable concerns of loose restrictions causing historical nihilism and under the current conditions of siege socialism, treats like video game are frankly irrelevant in that context of the preservation of AES. Additionally, any “red” cultural product released for an international audience would be immediately cast as “communist propaganda” by the West, who are still desperately trying to plagiarize their old Cold War playbook and find a way to convince Global South capitalist ruling classes that China is “out to get them” just like the USSR “was.” Incidentally, I saw a transcript of a Chinese MOFA press conference from a couple days ago where Reuters tried to entrap the spokesperson into saying that the recent wildly financially successful Wukong game was “supported by the government” so that likely they could immediately put out a press release framing the game as a “government-sponsored cultural invasion” like they’ve done with the Confucious Institutes. Instead, the spokesperson deftly deflected with “haven’t heard of it but sounds neat.”

Russia’s biggest cultural export issue is that they have plenty of developers with leftist leanings, like the Atomic Heart team, but the current neoliberal governance in Russia is nervous of overly promoting Soviet and Communist nostalgia and the current Western cancellation frenzy on Russian works means that there is no significant infrastructure and financial support to promote and protect those leftist devs. Atomic Heart developer Mundfish had to relocate to Cyprus and if you read their interviews, they don’t mention “Russia” even once. Isolated devs in the worst case end up as ZA/UM did.

I might be now completely on hopium, but if this can amount to genuine collaboration, both sides could have their cake and eat it too: we could finally get a proper game about Stalingrad without the “Enemy at the Gates” million man rush propaganda and a grand strategy game where the devs don’t nerf Communism because it’s too efficient (Victoria 3). Chinese devs could excuse the presence of socialist political themes on the Russian side and the Russians could vice versa blame shift to prevent Western media from effectively pinning it as “Chinese red propaganda” or “funding the Russian invasion.”

Or this could be just a pretext to pumping out endless remakes of Tetris.

That period of the medieval Roman Empire would cover a great deal of epochs, going from the end of Iconoclasm and the long recovery from the 7th century, to regional hegemony under the Macedonian dynasty, to the arrival of the Seljuks, to the entire Crusades debacle and the rise of the Ottomans. There’s a great deal of literature that focuses on each one of these specific periods which you can refer to once you’ve familiarized yourself with the overall chronology.

There’s an in-depth narrative history of the 800-1100 period with an audiobook as well: Kaldellis, A. 2017. Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantine, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade. Oxford University Press. Kaldellis also recently published 2023. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium which has become the latest authoritative survey history on the entire Eastern Roman period.

For a much more abridged pop history work, there’s Brownsworth, L. 2010. Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization. Crown., which also has an audiobook version.

Some notable historical fiction includes “Baudolino,” written by the Italian novellist Umberto Eco of “Ur-Fascism” fame, on an Italian man adopted as the son of Holy Roman/German Emperor Frederick II that set during the Fourth Crusade.

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).

“Everyman his own historian journalist”

The opening ceremony was mediocre though obviously not for the reasons the chuds gnash their teeth. I’ve binged all the ceremonies back during the pandemic. London 2012 was more of a spectacle even with its typical amnesia of the role of colonialism during its industrial revolution performance, Rio 2016 had much more soul and character, Beijing 2008 is still the unbeatable standard; all of them had a more organized structure than Paris’ “tourism ad skit” of Haussmann’s old buildings along the Seine. The Parade of Nations is typically meant to give full attention to the athletes and so the constant interruptions to splice in perfomances were obnoxious. I will say that the hot air balloon flame cauldron, reminiscent of those balloons in the old Paris World Fair posters, is a rather unique idea that was also executed fairly well, unlike the boat parade.

The LGBT representation was just one part of Macron’s overall rebranding campaign of France’s image as an “progressive nation boldly confronting its past” as a theme that permeated the entire ceremony. Seeing that Louise Michel statue description on how she was “exiled to New Caledonia and fought against French colonialism” was quite a satirical display of how superficial Macron’s “Brand France” is given the current French colonial occupation and the military troops stationed to squash the still ongoing New Caledonian indigenous protests taking place since May.

The issue with studying the collapse of the USSR is that everyone has an opinion on it and very few are principled Marxist-Leninist assessments, as K&K describe in the first chapter.

I’d recommend Carlos Martinez’s Why Doesn’t the Soviet Union Exist Anymore? for a brief but updated synthesis of K&K’s work once you’re finished, it helps in hammering in the main points.

Everything that has been said against suicide goes round and round in the same circle of ideas. People cite against it the decrees of Providence, but the existence of suicide is itself an open protest against her indecipherable decrees. They talk to us of our duties to this society without explaining or implementing our own claims on society, and finally they exalt the thousand times greater merit of overcoming pain rather than succumbing to it, a merit as sad as the prospects it opens up. In short, they make of suicide an act of cowardice, a crime against the law, [society] and honour.

“Why is it that in spite of so many anathemas people kill themselves? Because the blood of men in despair does not run through their veins in the same way as that of the cold beings who take the time to coin all those fruitless phrases. Man seems to be a mystery to man; he can only be blamed, he is not known. When we see how light-mindedly the institutions under whose domination Europe lives dispose of the blood and life of the nations, how civilised justice surrounds itself lavishly with prisons, chastisements and instruments of death so as to sanction its insecure decisions; when we see the numerical immensity of the classes which on all sides are left in misery, and the social pariahs who are battered by brutal contempt, meant to be preventive, perhaps to save the trouble of lifting them out of their squalor; when we see all this, we fail to understand what entitles us to command the individual to respect in himself an existence which our customs, our prejudices, our laws and our morals generally trample underfoot.

“It was thought that it would be possible to prevent suicide by degrading punishments and by branding the memory of the culprit with infamy. What can one say of the unworthiness of such branding of people who are no longer there to plead their case? The unfortunates, by the way, are little worried by that; and if suicide accuses anybody, it accuses above all the people who are left behind, because there is not one in this multitude who deserves that anyone should stay alive for him. Have the childish and cruel means devised been victorious against the whisperings of despair? What does he who wants to flee the world care about the insults which the world promises to his corpse? He only sees in them yet another act of cowardice on the part of the living. What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself wthout anybody being aware of it? This society is no society, it is as Rousseau says, a desert inhabited by wild animals. In the positions which I held in the police administration suicides were part of my responsibility; I wished to learn whether among the causes motivating them there were any whose effect could be obviated. I undertook extensive work on the subject.” I found that any attempts short of a total reform of the present order of society would be in vain.

• “On Suicide” by Jacques Peuchet; collated by Karl Marx, 1845.

You’ve posed a very pertinent question. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is the dilemma that encapsulates the entire project of “Western Marxism” in general and it’s a fair question that deserves more than ridicule or dismissal.

We are long past the era of Eugene Debbs where the Western left had a sliver of actionable material power, so even beyond the question of what the Western left can do for AES states, what is the point to being a Marxist at all? In practical terms, if you consider the things you can materially accomplish in the midst of the imperial core, is there really a point to being a ML and not simply submitting yourself to the Democrats or Labour or the SPD where you can at least organize to defend those few select social progressive interests permissible in this bourgeoisie system?

When you’re powerless, fragmented, isolated and sociopolitically ostracized, what’s the point to all of this, holding all those “geopolitics understander” positions and these “principally correct” Marxist stances at all if you can’t achieve anything real with them and, to most people looking at you from the outside, based on your accomplishable praxis inside the heartlands of anticommunism, you just look like a weird but generic liberal anyways?

Is the Western leftist doomed to be that soyjak meme, standing alone in the corner of a party, with that thought bubble thinking “Heh, they don’t know that Stalin = actually good.” Does it come down to that eternal philosophical question of “If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound at all?”

Marx lived during the apogee of imperialism, the cruelty of the American slave state and a bleak era where that meager revolutionary flicker within 1848 was subverted by the bourgeoisie and where the only successful proletariat uprising, the Paris Commune, was brutally squashed with ease. And yet, he persevered in his writings, which, of course, became the bedrock of what we stand for today. His writings where he railed against the hypocrisy of the Second Opium War against China and the British tyranny over India was meaningless in his own time, this was the height of European colonial despotism, after all, and the tirades of one lone individual was to scream against the void. Was there no point to his opposition towards imperialism and his solidarity, against his own class, with the oppressed then?

For someone in that time, in the midst of all the chauvinism and racism societally designed to socialize and induce the European individual to become a cheerleader for the imperialist cause, for him to reject all those narratives and to see things clear eyed for what they are, now means everything. That was an utterly hopeless time, yet he perserved in spite of it and gave so much to the cause of socialism in retrospect. This is the same with the likes of Michael Parenti, during the nihilism of the 1990s, where socialism was subverted everywhere and even the surviving socialist states like China, Vietnam and Cuba were eyed with paranoia. People like Parenti and Losurdo could have sold out like the rest of western “Marxism,” got a cushy tenure and professorship chair at Oxbridge or the Ivys, but they continued to defend the legacies and memory of Stalin and Mao.

This is not to say that your average Hexbear user will become the next Parenti or that the sequel to Das Kapital will be penned by a News Megathread regular, but to emphasize the important point that those Marxist figures understood. They understood that the imperialist West is a culture obsessed with discourse control and narrative purity. To stand in front of its propaganda and to say “no” in its face is a powerful thing, in of itself. This is why the liberals get so upset when they encounter MLs, why there was two Red Scare campaigns, why Communist Parties in many countries are outright banned, why they’ve legislated criminal charges against those who support designated enemy nations. If it’s all meaningless, the adversaries of the genuine Western left would have never put in so much effort to counter genuine leftist voices. If it’s all pointless, they would not be so livid at seeing ML counter-argumentation and have banned communities like r/genzedong such that the Western left is ostracized to isolated places like Hexbear and Lemmygrad.

As such, yes, the Western left does not have the capacity for its own liberation, but upholding internationalist solidarity and maintaining principled Marxist-Leninist lines has meaning. It’s true that this meaning is not as materially valuable as being the one who fired the October shot on the Aurora, or striding into the Chinese countryside to manage New China’s land reform and this can be demoralizing to many who want more actionable and material gains.

Over the past century, many people on the Western left, not just ultra chauvinists or Trots or sellouts but well meaning people, have allowed themselves to suppress their own socialist beliefs in order to join liberal ranks and push for “change from within” or to achieve acceptable goals within the confines of the imperial core because the capabilities of the Western left, reduced to just providing internationalist solidarity, are such intangible things. This is understandable but one point that must be emphasized is that while the things the Western left can achieve are principally ideological rather than material, however, does not mean those things are meaningless.

Though it understandably can be demoralizing that this is the crux of what we can contribute, principled Western Marxist-Leninists who have a clear eye of how things are represent a slap in the face to the West and its self-image of whitewash and apologia, its modern narrative of LARPing moral sainthood while kicking its 500 years of imperialism under the bed, which I’ve talked about in a previous post. At this point in time, they earnestly believe they’ve gotten away with it and an ML’s principled stance, refusing to play along, threatens that. There’s a reason why Hitler personally ordered the execution of Ernst Thälmann, despite the latter having been imprisoned for eleven years, during the collapse of the fascist reich in 1944 while those like SPD collaborationists were left unscathed. Though western Marxism has almost always been utterly impotent, they nonetheless have a genuine fear of what we stand for.

Above all, our principled stance, though it might seem “immaterial” and feckless, is the continuation of the memory of those comrades of the past, those who built the planks in the house of western Marxism, ramshackle shack though it may be. Those like Thälmann were never able to achieve anything material either, does that mean he should have disbanded the KPD, joining the SPD in hopes of “changing things from within” or that his existence and martyrdom was meaningless? If that was true, then fascist written popular media has a better sense of duty to their predecessors than us western Marxists do.

Ultimately, I think there’s a dialectical dialogue in Disco Elysium, of all things, that encapsulates all of the understandable nihilism inherent to western Marxism quite poignantly.

Rhetoric: The question you mean to ask is both very complicated and incredibly simple…

Endurance: Take a deep breath. Best to go one piece at a time.

You: If communism keeps failing every time we try it…

Steban: (he waits patiently for you to finish)

You: …And the rest of the world keep killing us for our beliefs…

Steban: Yes?

Volition: Say it.

You: …What’s the point?

Steban: (he considers your words for a minute)

Composure: You’re witnessing his ironic armour melt before you. This is his true self you’re seeing now.

Empathy: He’s thinking about someone…

You: Wait, who is he thinking about?

Empathy: Hard to say. Someone dear to him.

Visual Calculus: Track his gaze. He’s looking out past the broken wall, toward the opposite side of the Bay…

You: Toward the skyscrapers of La Delta.

Visual Calculus: They rise like electric obelisks in the night.

Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity’s future… I have to say, I’ve never entirely understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.

You: Wait, you’re saying communism is some kind of religion?

Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn’t dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we’re willing to work and fight and die for it.

You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?

Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat’s historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn’t mean we can simply give up.

You: Even when they ignore us?

Steban: Even then.

Ulixes: Mazov says it’s the arrogance of capital that will be its ultimate undoing. It does not believe it can fail, which is why it must fail.

Volition: So young. So unbearably young…

Half Light: Why do you see the two of them with their backs against a bullet-pocked wall, all of a sudden?

Inland Empire: Their faces, blurred yet frozen as though in ambrotype. You were never that young, were you?

Steban: I guess you could say we believe it because it’s impossible. (he looks at the scattered matchboxes on the ground) It’s our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain… like this…

Spoilers for the source novel plotline here.

It’s a fictionalized account which seems to be based on Beevor and Alexievich, so definitely junk food.

The reality is that we still exist in the nightmare pangs of a world where the failsons of the past 500 years of imperialism and genocide strut around acting like the moral leaders of the planet. You enter into a sort of mental paralysis despair spiral when you read about the atrocities committed by those who built this western “civilization” through the genocide of the New World, the subjugation of the entire planet and see the chauvinism and nonchalance of how this west conducts itself today.

There has never been such a degree of inhumanity as what followed when the west got its grubby little hands on gunpowder and the compass and to have them now hide the butcher’s knife behind their back and act the saint today, gloatingly prancing about like peacocks about being the “first world,” one built with the inherited loot of 5 centuries of imperialism, gives you a wrenching dissonance at the Kafkaesque parody of a world “order” we now inhabit.

The most farcical aspect of this is that we of the West are the most filial children this species has ever produced. The institutional propaganda purpose of western academia and all those prestigious University Presses in terms of the humanities is to print out endless slop degrading the historical past of designated enemy nations and lionizing our own. It’s viewed as a great triumph to see designated enemy nations so self-conscious in casting down their forefathers as Khruschev did to Stalin and as feckless diaspora reactionaries fantasize about doing to Fidel and Mao.

Meanwhile, the 2020 BLM protests showed how the west would fight tooth and nail to defend every single inch of the historical pantheon of slave owning founding fathers and colonizers. A few like Robert E Lee were (grudgingly) cast down (sporadically) as a concession, but any wider challenge against the likes of Washington, Jefferson, the 19th century Oxbridge imperialism-abbetting dons and even a freak like Rhodes were slapped down. This is what all the pearl-clutching around the statues and the paintings and the named buildings were really about at its core.

This cognitive battle for historical memory is the bedrock of contemporary western chauvinism. The aim is to ensure that only the history of the west is worth being proud of. In the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the educational curriculum drills in the historical shame of the socialist half-century, ensuring that the people will always feel wretched about their socialist past while the west still gets to parade around Cold War war criminal Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors as their heroes “with flaws.” The end result is that the past of former socialist states today is a blank nihilistic void with nothing of dignity to draw upon except going back centuries to fawn over inbred royalty or those Nazi-collaborationist freaks who terrorized their forefathers for their choice of socialism or just outright Westanbetung.

In the former DDR, it’s no surprise that the choice has become the far-right AfD. In this societal self-flagellation where the “Stasi” past is denounced, there’s not even some “post-Nazism redemption story” to grasp, like the fiction which the BRD parades around, because the socialist past is consigned to oblivion, equated almost on par with Hitler-fascism. Consequently, the only source of historical self-worth for many then can only inevitably come from LARPing as generic white people and importing American far-right and neo-Nazism as mimicry, vicariously associating with “Europe” and “the West” for that sense of post-socialist Europe pride that comes from being patted on the shoulder as being “semi-white” and “semi-European,” which has become the principal aspiration for those people.

The mental colonization that this represents is so pervasive that MLs are no exception to falling into this trap of helping to aggrandize western memory and denounce that of the designated enemies. In the nihilistic despair of the 90s and early 00s, Michael Parenti would praise Julius Caesar as a “hero for his time” for his cynical appropriation of Roman populism and yet condemned Deng Xiaoping in a fit of western Marxist paranoia. His example shows how easy it is for absolutely anyone to fall into this well worn groove and “cognitive comfort” that comes from accepting the western narrative of all things.

This is the cognitive dimension of why western hegemony is the primary contradiction of the contemporary world and must be recognized as such. Such a recognition accepts, and will never let go, of the historical fact of the west’s 500 year past of savagery. It steadfastly refuses the west’s song and dance at propagating historical nihilism (as Chinese comrades have fittingly coined) to the populace of its designated enemies while simultaneously patting itself on the back for being the failsons of war criminals and colonizing butchers. To awaken to this truth is a form of cognitive liberation, a moment of clarity that pulls the wool from one’s eyes. Even within the fragmented landscape of contemporary western “Marxism,” individuals in the suffocating midst of the imperial core can contribute to this principled stance.

Alright, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. In a world where Western “Marxists” are largely ultra LARP freaks who sell out to Western academia and University Presses to publish anticommunist propaganda, Roderic is a comrade and is a genuine AES-upholding ML.

His work on RedSails is an invaluable compendium of literature given how other leftist writing repository like Marxists.org are hijacked by Trots.

People need to understand that just because someone is a proper ML doesn’t mean you’ll be best friends with them. Expecting that is the fastest way to being disillusioned in real world organizing and praxis, when you inevitably meet some ideological comrade you don’t necessarily vibe with. The history of socialism in praxis is filled with people who both learned, and failed to learn, to acknowledge others who are near entirely ideologically aligned yet clash with on a personal and social level.

Roderic has an abrasive online personality and has made L takes on frankly tangential subjects through his Twitter debatebro addiction. This just makes him another case of the 70%/30%.

Additionally, his thesis on Redsails that emphasizes the buy-in nature of Western propaganda, if that is what you are referring to, is an absolutely cogent interpretation of the dynamics between propaganda and its recipients in the Western paradigm.

The Soviets continue to outdo us with their version of this.

Your issue made me realize how land acknowledgments are basically the equivalent of those little provenance placards in every Western museum: “This masterful example of 17th West African jewellery is from Mali.” The way people puff up their chests from making those little land acknowledgment declarations compared to that.

Okay, cool story, so how did it get here then, to where it is now? Crickets, of course, from the curators. And sure, if you consider it better than the alternative of them straight up claiming it materialized out of thin air and rendered corporeal form inside the glass case or them lying that the West African jewellery was actually made in Birmingham, thus making it their national property, it is “better” than those things.

But there’s no acknowledgment of the process; the nature of now things ended up as they are now; whether maybe, just maybe, there should be more sharing with the descendants of its original owners rather than hoarded by the failsons of Western imperialism, let alone reparation and repatriation.

Through this, it also reveals the fundamental conceit of land acknowledgments. They’ll never get away with declaring some random Anglo-Europeans autochthonously sprung out of the dirt, making them indigenous to their stolen lands. They’re too proud of the claim to heritage to old Europe and their perception of the settler-colonial story, in any case. As such, these land acknowledgments are no concessions at all for them to make. There’s no threat of cognitive dissonance to their settler narrative when they spout such acknowledgments. All the thorns of the real flower have been trimmed away, leaving just the plastic rose petals representing their modern narrative of “reconciliation” glued on top.