emizeko

the bits about that agressively liberal puppet whose name I can't recall always send me. the one who says he can smell Cody's blood

EDIT: Warmbo! his name is Warmbo

The Acapulco crash that left her left leg shorter than her right, was to be the first of many for Walton. Five years later, while speeding in Fayetteville, Ark., she struck and killed Oleta Hardin, a 50-year-old cannery worker. She never received so much as a ticket.

Walton managed to keep her fender clean for nearly a decade after the deadly collision but, in 1998, she got wasted and totaled an SUV in Springdale, Ark.

"Do you know who I am?" She asked responding officers who charged her with a DWI. "Do you know my last name?" It was a rhetorical question.

from https://www.mic.com/articles/79039/the-untold-story-of-alice-walton-s-dwi-incident

Reagan invited the Taliban to the White House in the 1980s and called them the moral equivalent of the founding fathers. The CIA under Eisenhower approved the killing of Patrice Lumumba by Mobutu and shielded Stepan Bandera from the KGB. This is who America has always been. America is a country run by Nazi death squad killers. The American private sector injected billions into the third reich’s military to use it as a genocidal bludgeon against the USSR, and then swooped in and took the credit for the the victory after the Soviets did all the fighting and dying for everyone.

In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

—James Madison

Why do you hate our cops so much?

Let me help your shit out. When I was in high school I used to play poker with some older guys, two of whom were cops. They supplied the pot, cocaine and beer that they had taken from people they busted and high school kids. They busted a lot of kids I knew and were always fucking assholes. No big deal.

When I was in college, there was a celebration after a college basketball game. People were going crazy. Some drunk guy ran off the cliffs in Isla Vista. My friend ran to tell the cops and in return, they beat the living shit out of him and broke his arm and clavicle. He won $125,000.

When I was in college in Isla Vista, someone broke into our apartment and stole a bunch of small shit. The cops said they caught the guy, a black guy, and all we had to do was lie and say we had seen him casing out our place. We didn't.

Another time in college, there was a small riot going on in Isla Vista. My friends decided the best thing to do was to stay inside and watch tv. One of my friends was putting peanut butter on a piece of toast when three cops crashed in the door, ran in, and beat the living shit out of my two friends. In their apartment.

When I was going to school in San Luis Obispo, everyone would congregate at a Taco Bell starting at midnight to eat shitty food. The guy in line in front of me was drunk. He thought he was owed more in change, so he grabbed the glass windows and pulled on them, shattering them. The cops were called and the taco bell shut down. I saw the asshole getting into his car while the employees were talking to the cops. At 18, this was the last time I would ever initiate speaking to a cop. I walked over and said, "Hey, the guy who did it..." The cop responded, "Shut up I will get to you when it is time." The guy then got into his car and drove off. At which point I said, "He's gone now." And walked away. I was then hit in the back, dragged across a parking lot by my hair and slammed agains a car. My friends, who were climbing into the car, were also hit and attacked. One suffered permanent back damage because he was slammed into the side of a car door. They charged me with swearing at a police officer and disturbing the peace. The judge admonished them.

When I was living in San Luis Obispo, we had a crazy guy living across the street. He had a crush on one of my roommates girlfriends. We had to order him out of the house during a get together. He went across the street and pulled out a revolver and stood looking at our house on the sidewalk. We called the cops. He turned out to be one of those volunteer dickheads who rides around with cops. They allowed him to stand outside of our house day after day, night after night, whenever in the fuck he wanted, holding his revolver.

At that same house, we had a party. The cops came and broke it up. My friend Jesse was too drunk to drive. The cops asked if he lived there and he said no but he was staying the night. They ordered him to leave. He said he was too drunk. They physically put him in the car and told him to turn on the engine. They then arrested him for drunk driving.

When I was living in LA, a neighbor punched a woman who lived in our building in the face outside on the street. The cops arrived. The puncher was an ex Iraq vet. The woman had done nothing and I had seen the entire thing. The guy explained he was a vet. They arrested the woman for assault.

So, why do people hate cops? Because a shit load of them are fucking assholes.

And these stories make a judge shake her or his head everytime I'm up for jury duty and dismiss me.

—Dave Anthony

• Chapo Trap House 245 - Inebriated Past: The Monster Fash (9/13/18)

• addendum Fascism II: Legend of Adolf's Gold

everyone on this site should have cleared the prerequisite Blowback listen and therefore know brainwashing was invented by the USA to claim soldiers confessing to dropping germ bombs did it bc sissy hypno

Stalin was a violent revolutionary who absolutely did see violence as a tool for political change and he was right about that judging by how much change he achieved.

He was also the leader of the fight against Nazism, he stood against Nazism in Spain in the civil war and he attempted to form a coalition against Nazism during the Czechoslovakian crisis, then finally he led the final defeat of Nazi Germany.

And while leading a country from a wracking civil war, through world war 2, and straight into the hostility of the Cold War, he also transformed the USSR from a still basically semi-feudal agricultural society into the second most powerful industrial power and an almost entirely self contained economy, the greatest raising of the standard of living for such a large group thats only surpassed by China.

And while doing all this he supported countless anti-imperial struggles in the colonial British, French, and American empires with communist support for anti-colonial insurgencies being the major reason why those European colonial empires finally collapsed.

He was one of the greatest men of the 20th century, arguably one of the most significant men of all history. He’s far too complex a character to reduce to a thumbs up or a thumbs down that’s just inane. It’s not possible to cause as much change as Stalin caused without creating a lot of losers alongside all those winners, but at most you can criticize him for the ruthlessness of his pursuit of a greater world for all.

The negatives of his rule exist but they have been greatly exaggerated. Exaggerated and overemphasized. This is a kind of narrative emphasis, a choice of perspective chosen by pro-capitalist and pro-western or anti-communist historians to immediately frame Stalin for you.

For example, when we talk about Churchill the framing is on his resistance to Hitler. We don’t emphasize the many crimes against humanity this colonial imperialist committed. No, the framing we receive of Churchill is the dogged resistance of the English character. Not millions of starving Bengalis or the victims of colonial police massacres, we don’t get that framing.

For Stalin, he’s never framed as the man who lifted about 200 million people out of poverty while fighting off Hitler and politically sponsoring the invention space travel, all while supporting the end of 19th century European colonialism in Africa and Asia. We don’t get that framing.

Instead we get an effort to equate him with Hitler.

The claim is made that the holodomor was a genocide which is a lie that began with WW2 Nazi propaganda that’s been debunked repeatedly in academia but keeps being asserted as an unquestionable fact.

Or the invasion of the Baltics or Finland is decontextualized from these nations de facto alliance and collaboration with Nazi Germany, frequently also the ideological affinity of their political leaders with Nazi Germany, which was openly hostile to the existence of the USSR and indeed hostility to the existence of the Slavic peoples and other minorities. Stalin was a hard man getting ready for what he could see would be a titanic clash. Sorry for your borders that is regrettable but maybe you shouldn’t haven’t chosen to host German military units so close to Leningrad. What’s gonna happen?

Or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The dozen or so pacts the western allies made with Hitler are just ignored or framed as “that was just Chamberlain”. The pact Stalin made is framed as the betrayal that allowed WW2 to happen. In reality Stalin saw what Nazism was early in the 1930s and actively pushed for the treaty of Versailles to be enforced. It was the western powers that bank rolled the German reindustrialization and remilitarization. Stalin was sending tanks and fighter planes to Spain while Britain was writing loans for Hitler and preventing France from intervening for the republic. Only Stalin stood against fascism in Spain.

And again with Czechoslovakia. Stalin made an alliance with France specifically to protect Czechoslovakia against German aggression. When the Nazis claimed the Sudetenland it was Stalin that pushed to fight back. Britain pushed France not to act, meaning the German-Polish pact to subjugate Czechoslovakia was effective.

Or the occupation of Poland, leaving out the fact Poland had its own expansionistic and fascistic government, was taking pieces of its neighbors, and the part of Poland that was occupied by the USSR was the part of Ukrainian and Belorussian populated USSR that Poland had taken by force in the 1920s. That recent history is actually highly relevant to the conflict but it is simply erased from history.

You see it wasn’t just “peace in our times”. Lords Halifax and Chamberlain were trying to forge a German-Polish alliance against the USSR and were perfectly happy for Nazi militarism to go to war with the USSR. That was their plan to fight communism, a threat to their colonial empires. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was Stalin breaking this anti-Soviet alliance. The betrayal wasn’t the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the betrayal was the western support for the Nazis in Spain and the betrayal was the subjugation of Czechoslovakia.

Or they will emphasize the truly regrettable policies such as the forced population transfers eg the tartars but they’ll just leave out that these highly offensive policies were unfortunately commonplace throughout the world including the USA, Canada, and Australia with reservation systems or the population transfers of the British empire or of the post-WW1 and post-WW2 settlements. Most of the time there is a Stalinist policy that’s truly horrendous you’ll find that while we can and should criticize Stalin for that policy, it was unfortunately common for the era meaning it’s not a reason to criticize Stalin in particular in a way we wouldn’t also have criticized the other leaders of the era but historians seem to reserve these criticisms for Stalin while ignoring them for FDR.

The framing they wish to create is to frame you to think of Stalin in the same thought as Hitler. They want you to equate these two figures. So they pick and choose and cherry pick from history. The occupation of the Baltics is decontextualized from WW2 and their collaboration with the Nazi regime from their far right governments is just quietly ignored, and bam, territorial aggression. The holodomor is exaggerated as a genocide by relying on WW2 Nazi propaganda and an extremely notable reliance on unreliable anecdote instead of data and bam you’ve got his Holocaust. The death rate of the gulag being high during times of extreme famine or by including all MIA German soldiers in WW2 and in the 1950s being less than twice that of the US prison system and those are your death camps.

Stalin was one of the greatest men of the 20th century. It’s just silly to reduce him to the essentialist idea of “he was a good guy” or “he was a bad guy”. The fact is he was an extremely impactful person far too complex to reduce to a single judgement.

Having said all of that, he receives very little praise when actually he deserves a lot, and he receives endless and extreme condemnation when in reality he only deserves criticism and critique.

—@420stalin69

for like 8 months i thought covid was one of those joke diseases where you ask ‘what’s covid’ and the other guy tells you to suck his nuts

The entire British establishment supported Nazism.

When anticommunists whine about Soviets signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact they ignore that the British spent the entire 1930s claiming that Britain and Nazi Germany will be a bulwark against communism and signed three pacts with Hitler which were all directly against the Soviet Union: the Four Powers Pact meant to exclude and isolate the Soviets, the Naval Agreement meant Germany could have a navy up 35% of the British navy meaning it wouldn't threaten British empire but every country on the Baltic sea... i.e. the Soviet Union, and finally the Munich Betrayal which was understood to be a gesture of a "free hand" (British diplomat's words not mine) for Hitler to go east.

In spite of these difficulties he (Lord Halifax) and other members of the British Government were fully aware that the Fuhrer had not only achieved a great deal inside Germany herself, but that, by destroying Communism in his country, he had barred its road to Western Europe, and that Germany therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against Bolshevism

and

In spite of these difficulties he (Lord Halifax) recognised that the Chancellor had not only performed great services in Germany, but also, as he would no doubt feel, had been able by preventing the entry of Communism into his own country, to bar Its passage further West. The Prime Minister held the view that it should be possible to find a solution of out differences by an open exchange of views

Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War Vol. 1

When the Soviets liberated Germany they were able to get a huge cache of British diplomatic documents. The Soviets released the above book and Documents And Materials Relating To The Eve Of The Second World War Vol. 2 full to the brim of diplomats praising Nazi Germany as a twin pillar alongside Britain stopping communism.

Lenin pointed this out in Imperialism: The Highest Stage Of Capitalism and dug a quote out from Cecil Rhodes (a disgusting colonial piece of shit) who said:

I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

The imperialists have understood for a long time to prevent socialist revolution they must by all means have new lands, new markets, new pools of cheap labour to rinse to placate the workers in imperialist nations.

The only real difference between someone like Churchill and Hitler was Hitler waged this violence against Europeans for his Lebensraum.

credit to u/JoeysStainlessSteel

The Crimes of Winston Churchill

“I’d rather see them have a good civil war”. – Churchill wishing partition on India

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilized tribes… it would spread a lively terror.” – Churchill on the use of gas in the Middle East and India

“100,000 removed Britons should be forcibly sterilised/others put in labour camps to halt decline of British race”. He also went on to suggest that “for tramps and wastrels there ought to be proper labour colonies where they could be sent”.

There's a documentary from 1972 called Winter Soldier, where veterans of the US invasion of Vietnam testified to their war crimes. Here are a few excerpts of the transcript: http://links.org.au/node/3343

Consider the following recollection of Vietnam-style “counter-insurgency” warfare, provided by Scott Camil, a former member of the 1st Marines:

Anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" and the general reply would be, "He's dead," and that was sufficient. When we went through the villages and searched people the women would have all their clothes taken off and the men would use their penises to probe them to make sure they didn't have anything hidden anywhere and this was raping but it was done as searching… The main thing was that if an operation was covered by the press there were certain things we weren't supposed to do, but if there was no press there, it was okay. I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. When we got up to her she was asking for water. And the Lt. said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread-eagled her and shoved an E- tool up her vagina, an entrenching tool, and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out and they used a tree limb and then she was shot.

An ex-machine gunner with the 1st Air Cavalry detailed the routine violence that accompanied cargo runs on his CH-47 “Chinook” helicopter:

It was quite usual that there would be a sniper outside a village in the foliage, in the trees, and if we took fire from one sniper we'd return fire on that sniper and then continue to spray the entire village with machine gun fire and M-16 ammunition until we either ran out of ammunition or we had flown so far away from the village that we could no longer reach them with the weapons…The free fire zones were posted on the operation map in the operations tent and this gave us a policy to kill anything that moved within that area.

Sadistic games at the expense of civilians were used to spice up the day:

Rotor wash was also used to blow down the huts, literally blow down the villages….So we'd come in and flair on a ship and just blow away a person's house. Also, the Vietnamese, when they've harvested a crop of rice, put it out on these large pans to dry and that harvest is what is supposed to maintain them for that season— what they're supposed to live on. We'd come in to flair the ship, and let the rotor wash blow the rice, blow their entire supply of food for that harvest over a large area. And then laugh, as we'd watch them running around trying to pick up individual pieces of rice out of a rice paddy.

While it was unusual for hundreds to be gunned down in a single location (as occurred infamously at My Lai in April 1968), the Winter Soldier testimony confirms that it was nothing out of the ordinary for dozens or scores of civilians to be slaughtered in “search and destroy” missions:

We moved into a small hamlet, 19 women and children were rounded up as VCS— Viet Cong Suspects— and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them. The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it… I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that.