i liked it. i would recommend if you like theme of banality of evil; definitely watch it with headphones or good audio set up

Donetsk and Luhansk are Russian oblasts since 2022

Unreal that there is still no action from universities. How can they not see that its going to keep escalating

Lemmygrad makes a new party, too bad it will be late for EU elections

Will be there as well

Students around Belgium are starting to occupy campuses this week. Hopefully it goes well

Thank you! Very informative write up

Yes. I would say that in the 1980s there was already an understanding formed about the IMF's role in neo-colonial exploitation and also just considering the fact that the US is its most powerful member.

im going to the ptb event in brussels

very hyped for labour day

How shitty are the two parties bigger than you?

Very. Those are both reactionary/nationalist parties

Yeah I totally got that vibe as well

why is settlers a bad book?

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, defined by the dominance of finance capital (over industrial capital) and its export from the imperial core to the periphery.

Neo-colonialism is a specific case of a relationship between an imperial core country and a periphery country, where the periphery country is nominally independent, and the imperial core country uses indirect means of intimidation (instead of direct colonial rule). I would also note that the terms neo-colonialism and colonialism center the colony/periphery, while imperialism centers the imperialist state. So it is still the same phenomenon, the terms just focus on different parts of the relationship.

I love Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft

I don't think it is genocidal, but it is extremely chauvinistic. The main goal outlined in the text is the dismantling of the Ukrainian nation state, replacing it with people's republics under the supervision of Russia. My question relating to this would be, does denying the right to a nation state (without destroying the people) count as genocide? This article sort of draws a parallel with Germany post WW2, where German people were denied a unified nation state because of the crimes of Nazism. So for Russia it would be okay to do the same thing to Ukraine.

Just to share some thoughts on the text, here are the things I find most problematic:

• It refers to the idea of Ukrainian nation as "an artifice created by communists", which I find absurd an ahistorical.
• It advocates for the collective punishment of civilians by making them endure hardships of war. A strange sentence to see but i guess it makes sense within the broader context of dismantling the Ukrainian nation state.
• It claims Russia as the sole nation left that uphold "european values" but at the same time it claims that Russia is a leader of the decolonised world. Apart from the chauvinism, it is quite contradictory to me. Also claims that achievements of the USSR were purely of the Russian peoples. Just pains me to read stuff like this. Russia has the problem that good soviet era foreign policy has a fresh coat of chauvinist paint over it.

It's one of the things where reality is weirder than fiction. It sounded completely fake when I first learned about it

Anyway, he tells us to read the Genocide Handbook Snyder talks about and that he himself read it on the bus, he says there are explicit genocidal language used in it against Ukrainians. I don’t know what handbook he is talking about. When I looked it up just more Snyder stuff came up.

Apparently its what Snyder calls an article published by a Russian news org. The article talks about how a denazification process would be handled in Ukraine. Its a bit dense with Russian chauvinism, but quite clear on what denazification actually entails.

Did NATO ever get in trouble for bombing Yugoslavia?

Nope (https://www.icj-cij.org/case/114)

Did any American politician get an arrest warrant issued for their multiple war crimes?

Because of the Hague invasion act, that's not really possible.

For context: Germany is one of the biggest arms suppliers to Israel, accounting for around 30% of the military equipment imported to Israel (the other 70% being USA).