emizeko

Poland is just invading everyone circa 1918-1922 or so. And they love the victim complex, from the whole miracle on that one river when they fended off a Soviet counter offensive following Poland literally invading Ukraine, to the war with the newly formed Czechoslovakia, to the siege of Lwow/Lemberg which kicked off the first Polish-Ukrainian war and is just dripping in hagiography. For real read about it, the amount of open maturation of Polish nationalism is intense.

Like this line:

Because of their heroism and mass participation in the fights, they are commonly referred to as Lwów Eaglets. The Polish defenders also included a significant component of petty criminals, who, nevertheless, were valued for their heroism

Or mentioning the pogroms carried out by Poles in the most passive voice way ever and then unlike the rest of the paragraph, giving no citation for “once the Poles had order they totes punished the people who did this thing”. And looking into the pogrom you get a list of Polish “historians” making insane claims that no Ukrainians died in the pogrom, or that more Christians died than Jews so it totally wasn’t a pogrom despite said Christians being Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Ukrainians. And a longstanding tradition of Polish claims that it cant be a pogrom if it happens during war.

Poland LOVES its victim complex and the double holocaust shit because they need it in order to avoid the serious questions that arise when one looks even surface level at Polish history in the 20th century. The fact that people use the fact that Poland got blowback after being a vulture on Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belarus, and Lithuania, as a means of dissing the USSR is gross.

—@[email protected]

The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

from https://redsails.org/false-witnesses/

Every government is authoritarian. You only consider it not to be "authoritarian" when you support its use of authority. Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People who always justify the use of authoritarian means by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn't "authoritarian".

Is the US "authoritarian" when it bombed Vietnam back into the stone age and Eisenhower himself said they refused to hold elections because they knew the US occupiers would only get 20% of the vote? The Vietnam war, the Afghanistan war, the destruction of Libya, or the US prosecution of Julian Assange, or the Smith Act Trials, Operation Earnest Voice, Operation Condor, Operation PBSUCCESS, Operation Ajax, Operation Mockingbird, etc, etc, were not "authoritarian"?

Maybe you'd agree these things are "authoritarian", but either way it proves my point. Plenty of people like to insist the US isn't "authoritarian" not because it actually isn't but because they support what it does.

If you never desire to leave your cage, you might feel incredibly free. Liberals who never genuinely try to challenge the authority of the liberal state they live under have a tendency to believe that it isn't authoritarian, because they have never once even desired to challenge that state's authority. (Yet, ironically, they will always support the state's authority when they see it used against those who do try to challenge it.)

credit to zhenli真理

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported -- what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

—Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method

Grimes NEVER said I had a “weird dick” and “smelled like nachos” and if you repost this you will be arrested

Colonists steal native land and rename it Massachusetts. Centuries of exploitation, slavery, and war go by to establish white supremacist authority in the region. Henry David Thoreau is born. He goes to live in a shack his friend helped him build and his sister and mom helped him finance. The property is owned and controlled privately and administered by an evil slave-owning empire. His mom visits twice per week to give him pies and clean his socks. He regularly goes into town to buy food grown by exploited farm labor and probably slaves too.

Thoreau: "Ah, untapped, unspoiled nature. Living off the land and writing fancy boy essays. I'm truly the master of my own destiny."

IQ demolished. Definitively. Goodbye IQ. You’re not real. Brain numbers are a foolish undertaking, tied to unimaginable suffering and horror. You are not science. Bye bye.

https://srslywrong.com/podcast/253-why-iq-is-bullshit/

I've been reading 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, and my god EVERYONE knew Poland was happy to work with Hitler. Churchill spoke of it himself:

How quickly time would pass: the Polish victim of 1939 was only months following the Polish aggressor. "Groveling in villainy," said Churchill, the Polish vulture picked at left-over carrion.

A bit earlier:

The war scare prompted the French government to sound out Poland about its support, though the Poles had already offered numerous indications of their intent. On May 22 Bonnet called in the Polish ambassador in Paris, Juliusz Lukasiewicz, to ask what the Polish policy would be. "We'll not move," replied Lukasiewicz. The Franco-Polish defense treaty included no obligation in the event of war over Czechoslovakia, if France attacked Germany to support the Czech government, then France would be the aggressor. Not apparently overreacting to this extraordinary statement, Bonnet then inquired about the Polish attitude toward the Soviet Union, stressing the importance of Soviet support, given Polish "passiveness." Lukasiewicz was equally categorical: "the Poles consider the Russians to be enemies....[we] will oppose by force, if necessary, any Russian entry onto [our] territory including overflights by Russian aircraft." Czechoslovakia, Lukasiewicz added, was unworthy of French support.

If Bonnet had any doubts that the Polish ambassador was not accurately representing his government's views, these were quickly put to rest by Field Marshal Edward Smigly-Rydz. He told the French ambassador in Warsaw, Leon Noel, that the Poles considered Russia, no matter who governed it, to be "Enemy No. 1" "If the German remains an adversary, he is not less a European and a man of order. For Poles, the Russian is a barbarian, an Asiatic, a corrupt and poisonous element, with which any contact is perilous and any compromise, lethal." According to the Polish government, aggressive action by France, or movement of Soviet troops, say even across Romania, could prompt the Poles to side with Nazi Germany. This would suit many Poles, reported Noel: they "dream of conquests at the expense of the USSR, exaggerating its difficulties and counting on its collapse." France had better not force Poland to choose between Russian and Germany, because their choice, according to Noel, could easily be guessed. As Daladier put it to the Soviet ambassador, "Not only can we not count on Polish support, but we have no faith that Poland will not strike [us] in the back." Polish loyalty was in doubt even in the event of direct German aggression against France.

Colonel Jozef Beck was the Polish foreign minister and a key subordinate of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, the Polish nationalist leader who had died in 1935.....like Pilsudski, Beck was a Polish nationalist who hoped to reestablish Poland as a great power, as it had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and this failure left Polish nationalists sour and quick to take offence. Yet they tended to carry on the business of state as though Poland was a great power— dangerous conduct in the 1930s as Nazi Germany grew stronger and more predatory......

....Beck said that Poland would not "tie its hands" regarding Tesche, "it did not have belligerent intentions but it could not agree that German demands being satisfied, Poland should receive nothing." Put another way, Beck said that he did not intend to leave Germany the exclusive benefits of a dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.

Suffice to say, Poland was a fucking vulture here, actively working to not only invade Czechoslovakia, but threatening to join the Nazis fully if attempts to work with the USSR to save Czechoslovakia or perhaps even France occurred.

—@[email protected]

for free?

not many people know this, but Salvador Allende was almost six hundred feet tall

Sic volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. (I will it, I command it; my will is reason enough)

—Susan Wojcicki's undead corpse

lived through many painful elections but this one is off the charts