It’s unfair to imply that Islam has been stagnant for a millennia, when in reality numerous scholars from across the globe have contributed so much to Islamic jurisprudence and still do. “Islam” is a very wide notion and cannot be reduced to a historically and spacially specific vision thereof. You cannot find the same Sharia law in two Muslim countries. Some countries even accomodate different Islamic rites by providing them with parallel legal systems.
Historically, reaction to queerness in the Global South has been relative to the imperial core’s stance on it.
Homophobia is largely (though not always) a colonial legacy. Many premodern nations, to different extents, were either accepting or tolerant of queer relationships. The colonial authorities criminalized same-sex relationships (e.g. British Raj, French African colonies, etc.). Some postcolonial nations after they achieved their independence, retracted these laws, but the majority didn’t. So for a certain period in the 20th century, queerness was a symbol of anticolonial struggle, because it meant defying the West.
However, as the imperial core and its neoliberal institutions absorbed queer activism into their agenda of foreign affairs, queerness began to be depicted as the face of imperialism.
The struggle of being a bourgeois, liberal state.
He massacred and tortured members of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Don’t love your job, job your love.
I dislike it because of my metaphysical fear of transcending my human condition.
I have family in adjacent, politically similar countries
I got my answer, thank you very much.
Naturally? God forbid a country considers the welfare of its workers.
The rule of law isn’t an exclusively Western concept. But since you’re speaking so confidently you must be an expert in the Chinese legal system.
This is tantamount to victim blaming and only serves (regardless of intentionss) to justify settler colonialism. Anticolonial resistance is what has been keeping the south of Lebanon safe from occupation, unlike the Syrian Golan Heights. I recommend you read about Israel’s puppet state in southern Lebanon back in the eighties.
Not even that. They evacuated their posts a week before the Israeli invasion and left the villagers to defend themselves on their own.
Max Blumenthal’s “Killing Gaza” film documentary was recorded before the Gaza genocide, in 2014, when the IDF had been sieging the strip. It’s a foreshadowing of what was to come a few years later.
I’m almost done with For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. I’ve quite enjoyed reading it and was surprised by the complaints of some people online regarding Hemingway’s writing style. The book indeed reads like it was literally translated from Spanish, but it was a creative choice given that the plot is set in the Spanish civil war. Hemingway navigated censorship of profanity in a humorous way by replacing slurs like “fuck” and “shit” with “muck,” “obscenity” and “unprintable.” Also, the protagonist’s inner dialogues are insightful.
All of a sudden, Europe now cares about international law?
They’ve been playing this sectarian card for decades now. They only care about dividing Syria and weakening it regardless of who’s in charge.
With boredom comes dedication and commitment. I recommend The Count of Monte Cristo. Long but very captivating.
Again, you’re ignoring the fact that socialism is not a defined set of policies that gets to be uniformly applied in a vaccum. The trajectory even has historically varied from one socialist state to another. To attribute the accomplishments of the PRC to “capitalism” is inaccurate. What there is in China is a market economy that is predominated by public ownership and state-owned enterprises, which is nowhere close to capitalism.
You condemn the consequences of the early Maoist policies, and then equally condemn Dengist reforms. What’s the point of critiquing for the sake of critiquing, whem there is no constructive effort on your part to properly assess and understand the material and historical circumstances that have led to China’s development into what it is now, only being guided by emotions and a confident lack of theory. One recent book on the matter that I recommend is Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer.
China has always and will always be imperialist
This is ahistorical and untheoretical thinking on your part. Imperialism is an advanced form of capitalism. An imperialist state is one that has saturated its domestic markets and as a consequence seeks to expand its markets and the reproduction of private capital overseas, by all means possible and most notably by force. China simply does not possess the features of imperialism. Prolewiki has a very informative article that explains the concept.
Until now, you’ve only indiscriminately sprinkled terms like imperialism and capitalism and fascism without much thought in the process, and so we’ve reached an impasse.
As to the Xinjiang matter, your views reflect those of the western propaganda machine. I’ve already mentioned above a FAQ compiled by Dessalines (yes, Lemmy’s lead dev) which contains many articles and documents that may at the very least give a different perspective on this matter.
Why did the Chinese lose so many citizens fighting fascist just to adopt capitalism and produce more billionaires than the US this and last year while also being an obvious oligarchy. Why did all these innocents need to die just for China to become fascist themselves?
Capitalism and socialism are not some clear cut systems or categories that can be merely “adopted.” They are modes of production that are dictated by the material and social relations of production in a given space at a given time. For instance, the transition from feudalism to capitalism did not occur neither swiftly, nor neatly nor universally; rather, capitalist bubbles existed at the epitome of feudal rule and did not expand until the favourable material circumstances emerged — abrupt demographic changes in the 14th century, colonialist ventures by private companies in American continent, and so forth. And even after capitalism became the dominant mode of production, feudalist relations of production still existed at the peripheries.
A similar perspective should be adopted in China. The existence of markets is not a core aspsct of capitalism; and regarding billionaires, the PRC prosecutes even more of them, in addition to the tens of thousands of millionaires who emigrate every year.
This is exactly what socialism looks like, a transitional stage that will bring forth a post-capitalist society once the international contradictions (Chinese millionaires) as well as external (US imperialist encroachment) are extinguished. Some policies may succeed, while others may fail and become lessons for future policymaking. But to call this anything close to fascism is treason to the working classes of the Global South.
Now they are openly committing genocide against Muslims.
Just ask yourself a simple yet important question: what does the PRC stand to gain from indiscriminately persecuting its own citizens and making them suffer aimlessly?
You can travel right now to Xinjiang and visit all of its towns and cities freely with total access and ease (as many tourists do every year), and you would see people openly speaking Uyghur, rituals and local events practiced publicly, and mosques operating normally. If you’re adamant on believing what some white journalist from NYT or WSJ has to say instead of the locals and residents as well as tourists and independent, on-ground reporters, then this conversation should stop right here.
That’s a correct observation.