I really hope you’re right and Venezuela can withstand the onslaught. I’m worried that the US is basically planning to do what they did in Iraq and raze a chunk of the country to the ground.

yeah I agree with that

Because they failed to control capitalist forces that the US will leverage to overthrow socialism. Go read up on Chile and how Allende was overthrown and Pinochet installed after. This is basically the same scenario.

Right, and hence why the whole project might now be destroyed. You really have to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to guard a socialist project from aggression.

Bolivarian revolution is a socialist project.

the fash seeing this post over on lemmy.ml are already getting rankled 🤣 https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9553904/7209791

🤣

thanks, glad it’s helpful

There is much to be optimistic about once you realize that the West is just 13% of the human population, and what happens here is not representative of what’s happening in the rest of the world. In fact, I’d argue this is one of the most optimistic times because Western hegemony is now crumbling, and neoliberalism is becoming a discredited ideology. Meanwhile, China is going from strength to strength, and the global majority is aligning with a socialist state that has emerged as a global superpower. I’d go as far as to argue that we may witness the reverse of the 1991 moment when the USSR collapsed and ushered in the unipolar era of US dominance. This time, it is the capitalist world that is crumbling, and a socialist power is poised to become a global leader.

These are turbulent times to be sure, and we will face monumental challenges like the climate crisis ahead of us. However, these may also force us to become more cooperative and abandon Western individualist ideologies. Watching the developments in China has been a huge source of optimism for me.

My recommendation is to actively follow the news outside the imperial core, and you’ll see that there is a lot of human progress happening in the developing world.

When the end of this nightmare comes, you’ll suddenly have to remember what normal feels like. Till then, don’t lose hope.

I wouldn’t lose hope regarding the war ending. It’s hard to predict of course, but it seems that Russian advance has accelerated significantly in the past few months. There are a lot of signs that the AFU isn’t able to hold things together now, and that could mean that a general collapse could happen in the near future. There is also a financial crisis unfolding in Europe which could affect material support from the west. I don’t want to give you false hope here, but it’s not going to be slow incremental progress happening indefinitely. Eventually an inflection point is reached when the army is no longer able to put up organized resistance. This happened with the Germans in WW2 as well. The front was relatively static for years, but once the collapse started, Red Army made it to Berlin in a matter of months.

For sure, the leadership in Germany is already full of fascist ghouls. I do expect whenever the government falls, AfD is going to win by a landslide. In fact, seems that the longer they keep the circus going the more popular AfD will get in the end.

I mean they were literally fighting US sponsored terrorism in the region. The approach they chose to combat it was to educate people and provide them with jobs improving their standard of living. This led to mass deradicalization leading to Xinjiang we see today. BadEmpenada video has absolutely terrible framing of the whole thing in my opinion.

The whole thing is particularly absurd in face of what we’re seeing in Gaza.

That’s a good point, cause synthesis simply evolves the dialectic further. It doesn’t become a stasis. That’s the whole negation of negation business. Once a new state is reached, then new contradictions emerge and the system continues to evolve. The concept of entropy being continuously reframed as out understanding of the universe deepens kind of acts as a nice allegory here. :)

Yup, natural world is full of examples. I find i can be useful to contrast material dialectics with thermodynamics as well. Both describe dynamic systems that are in constant flux, where change is governed by the rules that emerge from the resolution of internal imbalances.

In thermodynamics, energy gradients act as the engine of change. Heat flows from a hot object to a cold one, pressurized gas expands into a vacuum, and so on. The flow is driven by a difference in energy potential, and continues until the system reaches equilibrium. In material dialectics, it’s the opposing forces that act as energy gradients within the system. The contradictions between them create a state of tension and acting as selection pressures, pushing the system to evolve into a new state where the tension is resolved.

In both frameworks, gradual, quantitative changes accumulate until they trigger a qualitative transformation. Classic examples like water reaching a tipping point of turning into steam when heated are an intuitive way to explain transformation of quantity into quality. It’s a clear case of an old system being negated, and a new one with a different qualitative character emerging.

The whole conspiracy theory started with a claim of millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”.

However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let’s just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.

This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City’s biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.

According to Wikipedia, “The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000.” Let’s assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?

Let’s do some math:

In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.

For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You’d literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It’d be like looking at a map of California. There’s Los Angeles. There’s San Diego. And look, there’s San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.

Literally visible to the naked eye from space.

CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, but their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals. Based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million, CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.” Furthermore, it doesn’t even make sense from logistics perspective.

Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he’s the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I’m talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.

Zenz is a born-again Christian who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible to be the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.”

Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”.

Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.

Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.

The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it’s clear that the methodology of his “research” doesn’t pass any kind of muster when examined closely.

It’s also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here’s George Bush’s chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:

US has been stoking terrorism in the region while they’ve been running a propaganda campaign against China in the west. In fact, US even classified Uyghur separatists as a terrorist group at one point https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-was-at-war-uyghur-terrorists-now-claims-etim-doesnt-exist/276916/

Here’s an interview with a son of imam killed in Xinjiang https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-19/Son-of-imam-assassinated-in-Kashgar-s-2014-mosque-attack-speaks-out-RqNiyrcRuo/index.html

Here’s an account from a Pakistani journalist who has been all over Xinjiang (which borders Pakistan) claims that western media reports on “atrocities” are lies. https://dailytimes.com.pk/723317/exposing-the-occidents-baseless-lies-about-xinjiang/

It’s also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.

• https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/on-eid-xinjiang-imams-defend-china-against-u-s-criticism-1.5425967
• https://www.bolnews.com/latest/2023/07/pak-religious-leaders-nurture-bonds-of-cooperation-with-xinjiang/
• https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/islamic-envoys-say-china-is-protecting-minorities-in-xinjiang-after-five-day-visit

Also notable that whenever western media actually deigns to visit Xinjiang, which is not often, they’re unable to produce support for any of their claims of mass imprisonment and oppression, so they opt for insinuations instead https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9

There’s a further list of debunking here https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

The whole thing is very clearly a propaganda blitz that US is cynically using to manipulate impressionable people in the west.

xinhua and people’s daily are both great I find

Now that the US is putting economic pressure on them, things are going to get a lot worse. The regime might actually collapse at this rate.