It’s one thing for Europeans to think that way, i expect it of them, the racism and the cultural superiority complex, but what makes me really mad is when non-Europeans internalize that shit, looking down on and denigrating their own cultures while idolizing and worshiping the culture of the colonizers. And it’s not just the arts, i mean worshiping in the literal sense too. So many colonized peoples have literally adopted even the religion of the colonizers, and now hold on to it as an integral part of their own identity even though it was forced on their ancestors by the sword, with mass genocide, torture and brainwashing camps (the so called “mission schools”). I mean just think about how twisted it is that in the US the overwhelming majority of the descendants of slaves abducted from Africa now worship the god of the slavers…

Except that there is one crucial difference between Lula and Bernie which is that Lula is not an imperialist. That makes all the difference and why despite his lackluster domestic policies he is infinitely more valuable and more aligned with us than Bernie is.

And but for the flags and the Nazi slogans they still can’t tell the difference. To anyone but themselves Ukrainians and Russians look and sound identical, have almost identical culture and share the same religion. This is for all intents and purposes a civil war.

Oh yeah, the “free world” “protected” Africa like an abductor “protects” the victim they have tied up in their basement.

“You’re trying to kidnap what i’ve rightfully stolen!”

Let’s see how Italy does under the same kind of sanctions…or better yet let’s not because that would essentially amount to genocide. It’s only thanks to the fact that Russia is one of the most self-sufficient countries on the planet, second to only the DPRK, that they have managed to essentially shake off this attempt at a second genocide via economic warfare (because apparently the first one in the 90s wasn’t enough for the neoliberal imperial death cult). Showing yet again that the way that western “economists” measure economies is fundamentally wrong and does not actually reflect their real size and strength.

12th time’s the charm?

At the moment he is not one yet, but i think there is good reason for optimism. He is still quite young, and after all, Fidel started out as just a nationalist too and eventually came to embrace socialism and specifically Marxism-Leninism because it was (and still is) objectively the best path to national liberation and to uplifting his country’s people out of poverty and underdevelopment. It is only natural that someone who starts out as a genuine patriot of a colonized country would sooner or later recognize that ML is the ideology of liberation with a worldwide anti-colonial, anti-imperialist track record.

What bothers me the most is that there seem to be a number of farms already built around the server which i would consider quite essential and to which i’m sure most people would like to have access, yet many of them are very difficult to find. They are either built very far from spawn with no information on how to get there and oftentimes lackluster nether infrastructure leading there, or they are buried underground and you almost have to stumble on them by accident when you decide to go down a random hole or staircase. At the very least they should be clearly marked as what they are and how to use them, better still would be if there was a central ledger or map where the locations of all the farms that are available for public use are noted.

I could not have said it better myself. We need to be much more critical especially of media that purports to have some kind of “radical” or “subversive” message because i guarantee you, if it’s made it to the mainstream it most certainly does not. Products made by big corporations may carry superficially anti-corporate messages but in reality they just serve to reinforce consumerism by getting people to believe that by consuming they are doing something radical.

He is not a socialist or a principled anti-imperialist and he is definitely not going to win, but he has the potential to split the Democrat vote enough that they could lose which would piss off a lot of liberals and create a lot of chaos in the upper ranks of the empire. That is a good thing for us as anti-imperialists. So yeah, critical support for him, i think leftist orgs definitely should champion him under the condition that when/if he drops out they do not endorse that his supporters switch their vote to the Democrats. Voting third party is good for destabilizing the control that the entrenched neolib/neocon duopoly has in the US.

I’m not aware of any major interventions, so far i think it’s just been minor deployments to a handful of conflict hotspots for combating militants and such.

More or less, yes, as is all mainstream media made under the ideological superstructure of capitalism. Liberalism infects everything in mass media whether the creators intend it to or not. That being said it’s probably not the worst either, the biggest issue with it is that it overemphasizes his personal story and glosses over the consequences of what he did. For instance there is no time devoted to actually showing the horrific results of the atomic bombings and their human toll. People should be coming out of a movie that is about the atomic bombs being horrified by such weapons and convinced that they should never be used again. Instead all they come out with is sympathy for one of the people who contributed to their creation. It’s another example of the tendency to individualize every conflict and view history through the lens of individual person’s struggles. As Marxists we are not so much interested in the character of one invidual, who i’m sure had his merits and his flaws as any human does, but rather in the bigger systemic picture, in the far reaching political and material consequences for society.

It’s the West African equivalent of the EEC, the precursor to the EU. It’s a thoroughly neoliberal institution staffed at the highest levels almost exclusively by people who are there to do the West’s bidding either because they have been bought off or because they are “true believers” (just look up the backgrounds of who the people in charge are, they tend to be dyed in the wool liberals educated in western universities or trained by western NGOs). It functions as a vehicle through which the West can control the region’s economic policies. Every time a country in the region tries to assert its independence from the Anglo-European neo-colonial system they immediately get condemned by the ECOWAS and have their membership suspended, from Mali to Guinea and Burkina Faso, and now Niger. Usually they only apply sanctions but sometimes military intervention is thereatened too since the organization has grown to have basically its own army. They are big on upholding “liberal democracy” through which the imperialists can exert maximum control since they usually fund both the ruling party and the opposition and can decide the outcome of elections whichever way suits them because they have so much influence through media and election financing. Nigeria is the leading state in ECOWAS and their current president is notoriously one of the biggest stooges of the US in all of Africa.

I mean the town.

The operational range of any combat air craft is limited by how far their fuel will take them, and for France to launch sorties 3000km away (and also come back!) is already a significant challenge even without having to fly a massive detour. It’s why the US puts up bases everywhere. And who else is going to let them through? Morocco is a NATO ally but they would still need to go through Mali if they go that way, and Mali is very anti-French at the moment. Libya? With how destabilized that country is would it even be safe to go that route? And the Libyan government, or what exists that calls itself that, has already made some comments that hint at them not being exactly supportive of any more European interventions in Africa, afaik there were even rumors that they asked the Russians to help them get rid of the rest of the Western presence in Libya.

The only real path to Western intervention in this region is doing air strikes, since they are neither willing nor able to get involved with ground troops in any meaningful quantity. Those strikes would be used to support African proxies like ECOWAS, most likely from Nigeria, who would be the ones going in with boots on the ground doing the fighting and dying on behalf of the West, just like the Ukrainians are. Without that air support which needs to come from a significant air base most likely somewhere in Europe and which can be blocked if enough North African countries decide not to cooperate, an intervention attempt is pretty much going to turn into a debacle, especially if a significant number of regional countries refuse to participate or outright oppose it.

The US has some pretty large drone bases in the region but if they get directly involved they lose the degree of separation that they would have if they let France do the dirty work for them, and it would alienate them even further with the countries in this region which risks them eventually losing their bases and thereby whatever leverage they currently still have. Plus, it’s France’s immediate financial interests that are the most under threat from losing access to the resources and the effective colonial tax they rake in by controlling the currencies of francophone West Africa.

Right now their best hope of undoing the coup while still in the narrow window of opportunity when that is possible is to exert enough economic pressure with sanctions and threats of sanctions on neighboring countries to fall in line and then hope that they can organize some kind of color revolution scenario using whatever network of CIA backed NGOs they have in Niger that can mobilize enough people in support of the ousted government. Their hope is that this would create a possible fracture in the military itself such that the coup government is intimidated and willingly steps down. Because if they have to launch an all out war it will not go well, the best they can do is turn it into another destabilized mess full of lawless extremist strongholds and a new wave refugees heading for Europe.

And an additional problem to intervention from regional proxies is that these are themselves not completely stable either, for instance they still haven’t solved the problem of Boko Haram and if a regional conflict starts that could exacerbate problems in Nigeria. The West purposely keeps all of these sorts of low intensity conflicts going in Africa because the threat of withdrawing military support and unleashing this precariously pent up chaos on these countries gives them significant leverage. But it also is a downside because it makes their proxies much less able to act from a position of strength.

There are auto-generated captions but only in Russian, so if someone could translate or provide the basic jist of what is being said in each of the segments of this documentary that would be much appreciated!

If Algeria closes its airspace to the French air force an intervention in Niger becomes all but impossible.

Additionally, Mali, Burkina Faso and Algeria announced they would defend Niger in case of invasion by western colonial powers or their ECOWAS puppets in the region.

I’ll go ahead and say something that may not be well received but needs to be said: It’s time for some cleanup and proper organization around spawn, it’s become a chaotic mess. It is increasingly hard to know what is where and there are too many unfinished projects that seem to have been abandoned. Someone needs to take the lead on the whole project, draw up a plan and delegate tasks. Anarchy is not working out.

What’s important is that you’ve outgrown that phase and hopefully not just over the last year or so like some who are just now apparently waking up.