Men vanish from earth leaving behind them the furrows they have ploughed. I see the furrow Lenin left sown with the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind, and cast deep below the rolling tides of storm and lightning, mighty crops for the ages to reap.
—Helen Keller, The Spirit of Lenin
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit— and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate— died of malnutrition— because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
As much as the erasure of the Soviet involvement in WW2, and more importantly, them being the primary reason the fascists were defeated is terrible, China's equivalent is so much worse. The primary reason Japan was able to be defeated when they were, and possibly at all, and the primary driving force of their defeat, was absolutely China.
"75-80% of Japan's military was trapped in China for most of the war. Nationalist Chinese resistance to these Japanese advances was ineffective, primarily because the Nationalist leadership was still more interested in holding their forces in reserve for a future struggle with the Communists than in repelling the Japanese. By contrast, the Communists, from their base in north-central China, began an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in Manchuria and North China. The Japanese needed large numbers of troops to maintain their hold on the immense Chinese territories and populations they controlled. Of the 51 infantry divisions making up the Japanese Army in 1941, 38 of them, comprising about 750,000 men, were stationed in China (including Manchuria). Including the strong Japanese Kwantung Army stationed in Northeast China, were pinned down. Thus Japan was able to employ only 10 or 11 divisions in the Pacific theatre, with the other five divisions stationed on Japanese islands." (Britannica)
"The scale of China's resistance destroyed Japan's strategy. At the time of Pearl Harbour 80% of Japan's troops were in China. They could never be released to form the Pacific perimeter against the US due to China's resistance. Japan launched repeated attacks in China including in 1944 using 500,000 troops in the Ichi-Go offensive. This was almost twenty five times the 21,000 Japanese troops that fought the US at Iwo-Jima or more than six times the 76,000 regular Japanese troops that defended Okinawa. Given appalling US casualties in both battles if Japan had been able to release hundreds of thousands of troops from China to defend its Pacific perimeter the total Allied victory in Asia's war at worst might not have been achieved, and at best would have involved far greater US causalities.
Unlike Hollywood China is not seeking any pre-eminent position. It states every country that participated in the greatest military conflict in human history, the World War to defeat Japanese aggression and Nazism, played a vital role. The sole reason the present generation enjoys relative peace and prosperity, and are not called upon to show the same courage as the generation of 1931-45, is because of that gigantic earlier sacrifice. But regarding such immense events there are two great truths. Individually the courage of combatants of every country participating in the great defeat of aggression and fascism was equal, and that in that struggle no country played a greater role than China." (China daily)
Japan sustained losses and casualties totalling 1.5 million in China and at the end of the war, China accepted the surrender of 1.28 million Japanese soldiers.
By comparison, the allied American, British, and Canadian forces killed, wounded and captured a total of 1.25 million of the Japanese forces. Which would mean 70% of Japanese forces were killed and captured by China. While the other allies combined only eliminated 30%. (WW2 database) (China daily) (Wikipedia)
The Soviets were the sword that decapitated the Nazis, (and to an extent the Japanese) while the China was the shield that held back/trapped the Japanese. 35,000,000+ Chinese and Soviets died holding back/crushing the fascist hordes. We owe everything to their sacrifices.
from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/o3q9yl/i_found_it_the_worst_post/h2egiyx/
Korea was fully liberated in 1945 with the birth of the Peoples Republic of Korea (Unified Korea) following the defeat of Japan who had treated Korea like a colony.
The US proceeded, in 1945, to cut the country in half and it was run under a "US Military Government" with the US flying in Syngman Rhee, who between 1905 and 1945 had spent only a few years living in Korea and the most of his time living in United States. So a literal comprador stooge flown in to run America's new colony.
As the communists had been the most ardent fighters against Japanese colonialism they had garnered great respect and began demanding elections for March 1946:
The Korean People’s Republic released political prisoners, organized the distribution of food, and called for national elections as early as March 1946. It announced the confiscation of lands held by the Japanese occupiers and Korean collaborators; an agrarian reform on these and other lands; nationalization of mining, major industries, banking, and transportation; universal suffrage; and a minimum wage and eight-hour day.
from https://www.themilitant.com/2017/8118/811890.html
In response to the overwhelming backing of the communists in Sept 1945, a US military general, declared that the official language of Korea would now be English and Korea would be under US Military control and began putting the Japanese colonizers back into positions of power:
So on Sept. 7, the day before U.S. occupation forces landed on Korean soil, their commander, General MacArthur, decreed that the entire administrative power in Korea south of parallel 38 was under his jurisdiction. The U.S. general warned that, “All persons will obey promptly all my orders and orders issued under my authority. Acts of resistance to the occupying forces or any acts which may disturb public peace and safety will be punished severely.” During the period of military occupation, he said, Korea’s official language would be English.
The U.S. military government refused to acknowledge the Korean People’s Republic and continued enforcing the laws of the hated Japanese colonial administration. The U.S. occupiers even kept in place Tokyo’s officials, including Gov. Gen. Abe Nobuyuki.
from https://www.themilitant.com/2017/8118/811890.html
So given that the Koreans had just fought the Japanese off their soil why should they have allowed the Americans on their soil?
And during the war the DPRK rofl-stomped the south and it took the greatest, most murderous empire this world has ever seen to fight them to a standstill back to the 38th parallel where they had started.
The DPRK didn't have to use child soldiers during that war, but the US-owned South did:
Of the 60, 46 of them were of various ages under 30, including some under 20, and one was a 9-year-old child. The oldest was 51. Forty-eight of the people were described as staff at U.S. military bases in Japan, 12 of whom were minors. The occupations of the other 12 people are unknown, though it is known that six of them were minors.
from https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200622/p2a/00m/0na/020000c
And despite the US committing a genocide in Korea by killing 20 percent of the population in the North, they were still unable to beat them.
The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.
Even committing such crimes against humanity as using biological warfare against them:
And the only reason Korea isn't unified today is because the USA needs a foothold against China. But the USA will be pushed out of Korea in the next 20 years.
America will pay for its crimes against humanity.
credit to u/JoeysStainlessSteel
Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.
This is from a mother whose 14-month-old child was separated from her and from the father. They were reunited after 85 days. She wrote- "The child continued to cry when we got home and would hold on to my leg and would not let me go. When I took off his clothes, he was full of dirt and lice. It seemed like they had not bathed him the 85 days he was away from us."
She went on to say that she had thought, her child being so young, he wouldn't have really significant effects from the separation. But when she was reunited with him, she's worried that now actually he is really feeling and has changed because of the separation.
Neoliberalism is the right-wing reaction to the post-war Keynesian social democracy. It advocates that every problem is best solved by a laissez-faire market-based solution, and since computers, it’s been accelerated by the financialization of those markets, where products and services become traded assets like stocks, instead of, like, used.
This continues until universities are real estate companies that, by accident of birth, also have an unprofitable education business on the side that they’d rather shed if they could.
WILL: By the way, Bret Stephens was once on stage at a synagogue in New York City at some big sponsored event, uh, I forget... probably some institution that he works for as a fellow for, where they interviewed Sheldon Adelson on stage, and Sheldon Adelson said— on stage— that we should preemptively nuke Iran! They said like "well, wouldn't that be a massive war crime?"— of course Bret Stephens didn't say that, he clammed up real fucking quick. He didn't say shit... and Sheldon Adelson said "well, just bomb the desert as a warning. No one lives there."
FELIX: <laughing> Oh my god, what a great country.
MATT: There's nothing like a warning shot of massive radiation just going into your fucking town.
WILL: Stephens sat there like a mute and said nothing, because guess what— he agrees with him!
MATT: Of course. The only thing that's good about Sheldon Adelson and his horrible influence on politics, is that— when I want to feel better about how horrible everything is, I just think back to 2016, and I just think of how many sponge baths Ted Cruz gave him. Thinking the whole time, "it's worth it, you're gonna be president." Getting under the crevices, getting under the tit meat, thinking "it's gonna be ok, you're gonna be president". Going under those gargoyle-taloned feet of his, going between each one with the sponge, and thinking "you're gonna be president, this is all gonna be fine when you're taking that fucking oath of office."
FELIX: Don't you love when you're giving Sheldon Adelson a bath and like a— you know, make sort of an oval between your index finger and your thumb— uhh, a flake of skin that size comes off, and his wife looks at you, and without saying anything you know that she wants you to eat it like a chip?
MATT: Just the moment when you're spit-shining a mole the size of a hubcap, and thinking about being president.
FELIX: I love when you're washing his big mole and you scrub hard enough that you see eyes and a mouth come out, and it looks at you and it says "Jerusalem is the capital."
UN report called Israel an apartheid state (the report can be read here) but Israel was able to apply enough pressure to get the report withdrawn
http://opiniojuris.org/2017/03/19/the-disappearing-un-report-on-israeli-apartheid/
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.
—Woodrow Wilson in an unpublished paper of 1907, as quoted in The Rising American Empire (1960) by Richard Warner Van Alstyne, p. 201
In the 1860s, The Economist stood nearly alone among liberal opinion in Britain in supporting the Confederacy against the Union, all in the name of access to cheap Southern “Blood Cotton” [...] and fear of higher tariffs if the North triumphed. “The Economist was unusual,” writes an historian of English public opinion at the time; “Other journals still regarded slavery as a greater evil than restrictive trade practices.”
from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/economist-has-slavery-problem/
from a timeline where Sanders is left of Corbyn on Palestine
EDIT: URL changed because I found a higher-resolution version of the image at Haaretz, title changed to reflect the article date
Haaretz article that includes this image
caption is "A Palestinian woman whose house has been occupied by Jewish settlers arguing with Israelis who came to celebrate Jerusalem Day in front of her disputed house in East Jerusalem Credit: AFP"
—Michael Parenti, Left Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cut