nobodyownsland

[nobodyownsland]

2020 summed up in a single song.

#grandaddy #music #2020 #i unironically love this song tho. idk why #Spotify

[nobodyownsland]

[nobodyownsland]

On the note of China and the Uighurs, here's a big old masterpost debunking shit one-by-one:

1. The original “evidence” of 1 million Uyghurs being sent to concentration camps original stems from US propaganda outlets,Washington-backed NGO claims millions detained after interviewing eight people,While CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals: https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-problems-claims-us-ngo-researcher/

2. The Keriya Aitika Mosque that was claimed in 2018 to be demolished is actually still there. They were merely renovating, albeit most buildings surrounding the mosque was replaced with newer/bigger ones as Xinjiang is developing incredibly fast. https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/the-case-of-the-keriya-aitika-mosque-efa29e456339

3. The often used picture of Uyghurs dressed uniformly lined up sitting in a re-education camp actually comes from an early 2017 picture of regular prisoners in Xinjiang listening to a public speech in a regular jail. It wasn't just prisoners who listened to the speech. https://web.archive.org/web/20180820154817/https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1564669932542581&wfr=spider&for=pc (scroll down to the middle to see the picture).

4. The video of a supposed Uyghur being beaten for having a copy of a Quaran, was actually an Indonesian police beating a pickpocket. The police was discharged afterwards. https://factcheck.afp.com/no-not-video-chinese-soldier-beating-uighur-muslim-having-copy-koran

5. Some pictures of Uyghurs in Chinese detention camps, including that of a crying child, are pictures edited from protests, people rescued from human trafficking, and Uyghurs protesting outside in 2009 as a result of a riot that killed 156 people. https://factcheck.afp.com/these-photos-show-protests-istanbul-and-xinjiang-and-migrant-shelter-thailand

6. Claim of a Chinese police officer strangling a Uyghur woman caught praying is actually a video of the police officer restraining a violent drunk woman in 2018. https://factcheck.afp.com/video-shows-police-officer-pinning-down-drunk-chinese-woman-his-knee-hotel-shenzhen

7. Picture of “forced labor” of Uyghurs, first published by Forbes, originally came from a factory in 2010 Brazil. Forbes later changed the picture without announcing their error. https://i.redd.it/20mzu89zo1d51.jpg

8. Picture of an “uyghur” with his eyes/mouth/ears sewn shut, is actually a picture of Abas Amini protesting the UK’s treatment of asylum seekers in 2003 https://i.redd.it/9zixb3ukmad51.png http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/nottinghamshire/2941780.stm

9. Rushan Abbas, who claimed that her sister/friends are locked in Chinese concentration camps, is actually a participator of Guantanamo Bay in 2003 with CIA ties, which has verifiable human rights violations against Muslim prisoners. When confronted she claimed she was only a translator, but also justified Guantanamo Bay. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/e9ad4n/i_am_rushan_abbas_uyghur_activist_and_survivor_of/

10. Much of BBC’s visit to a Uyghur re-education center have words mistranslated or taken out of context by BBC in order to fit a certain narrative. Nevertheless, BBC did make a second unannounced “surprise” visit late at night, only to see Uyghurs leaving the center, supposedly for the weekend. https://medium.com/@sunfeiyang/breaking-down-the-bbcs-visit-to-hotan-xinjiang-e284934a7aab

11. Sayragul Sauytbay first claimed that she did not see any violence, only hunger and that they never had any meat. However, later her story changed, claiming that they were forced to eat pork. She also added a new story that she saw police raping prisoners in public, and anyone who showed facial expressions or couldn’t watch was taken away and disappeared. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/world/article-everyone-was-silent-endlessly-mute-former-chinese-re-education/ https://www.haaretz.com/amp/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-a-million-people-are-jailed-at-china-s-gulags-i-escaped-here-s-what-goes-on-inside-1.7994216

12. Adrian Zenz claimed that according to 2015 and 2019’s Health and Hygeine Statistical Yearbook, 80% of all new UIDs in China were performed in Xinjiang. A check of the source (pg 228) shows that it’s actually 8.7% not 80%. UIDs are also reversable and is the preferred method for most people in Xinjiang, while more extreme, non-reversable methods for birth control are relatively more preferred in other areas of China (most notably Henan). https://web.archive.org/web/20200712091001/https://s2.51cto.com/oss/201912/05/1822362d5f7ccc8ff5d87ecdba23e64c.pdf

13. Uyghur models for 'concentration camp' video?Is there a concentration camp that's so lax? Security won't know if you have a cell phone. There are New Year's decorations hanging at the door. Security guards with their heads down playing with their phones and no weapons. There's a grandmother in a sweater outside the door. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eetc6DPUwAIIPZv?format=jpg&name=large

Real Uyghur Life(Xinjiang travel, Uyghur vlogs, etc.):

【According to Western propaganda departments, the following video and pictures show the streets of Xinjiang with millions of Uyghur actors performing their good lives 24X7.】

1. Uighurs in TikTok： https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oODY5BJ5d9M

2. Centennial Tea House in Kashi, Xinjiang https://youtu.be/mpct5lXg7Wo?t=288

3. Xinjiang Uygur market photo https://twitter.com/peacefulmind314/status/1281455452161630209

4. Xinjiang Girl and Family Vlog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2ujg8YxS8A

5. Xinjiang Uyghur Wedding https://youtu.be/TCvrGlZ2-UQ?t=109

6. Malaysian Muslim girl travels to Xinjiang https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqiW1GrmMj0

7. I went to XINJIANG. Day 1 | Free from Quarantine, Let's walk about Urumqi! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oKvulTU8oU

8. Uyghur girl with... "Concentration Camps"? https://twitter.com/AsianBot2000/status/1291108118261268483

9. Chinese Muslim community celebrates Gulshan Day https://twitter.com/MRiazshah2898/status/1289358999008055296

10. More travel videos from Xinjiang（Chinese and foreigners）：

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%E6%96%B0%E7%96%86+%E6%97%85%E6%B8%B8

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Xinjiang++travel

[nobodyownsland]

I’d love to see what “sources” this person is claiming to have seen. I’d love to see them name one that isn’t by Adrian Zenz (an evangelical christian on a self-proclaimed crusade from god to destroy China), cites Adrian Zenz, or from a US-backed NGO. I’m sick of hearing this “ governments can do good and bad things at the same time” horseshit in relation to the United States. The United States is not good, it has never been good, and there isn’t a fucking inch of its territory or a cent of its wealth that wasn’t gained through genocide and forced labor. If you claim to be progressive or “leftist”, the United States is your enemy, end of story. We are hearing the exact same lies told about China that we heard about Iraq and Afghanistan 30 and 20 years ago. Babies being dumped from incubators, fantastical and sensational testimonies of torture coming from strangely well-groomed and marketable “fugitives”, impossible bodycount estimates, all of this is shit we’ve heard before.

Remember 1990, when the United States was accusing the Iraqi government of committing genocide in Kuwait? There were stories pasted all over the news of the brutality of the Iraqi assault on the people of Kuwait. A brave 15 year old girl named Nayirah even testified publicly before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, emotionally describing the horrific atrocities she’d seen at the hands of the Iraqi military, such as dumping babies out of incubators in hospitals and leaving them to die. This testimony was cited and corroborated by countless groups like Amnesty International, pasted all over the news, President George H. W. Bush even cited it as the US entered the first Gulf War.

Such a shame it was entirely fabricated.

That 15 year old girl’s full name was Nayirah Al-Ṣabaḥ, and she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, not just some brave refugee as was initially implied. Her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait PR campaign by an American advertising firm, Hill & Knowlton, with her identity as the daughter of a government official knowingly concealed from the public. On top of that, later historical and academic studies would conclusively prove that her testimony was, at best, massively and intentionally exaggerated. But there was nothing to be done, the intended effect of her testimony had been achieved. The US had all the justification it needed in the eyes of the public to intervene in the Middle East, and no “conspiracy theories” about the US fabricating evidence could stop it. The United States killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East (and still does) and justified it with false testimonies and evidence. Even so-called western “progressives” and “leftists” believed their horseshit. Not only that, but everyone involved in it got away with it without a shred of accountability. Well I suppose, why punish those who have helped accomplish the goals of settler neo-colonialism?

i have no earthly idea why you feel like genocide denial is a good look but there's sources for this, from more than just White countries, and 'Vocational Re-Education Camps that muslims are being rounded up into' isn't great no matter how you look at this, and also governments can do good and bad things at the same time, wow

I'm not denying anything. All I'm saying is we ALL (including me, esp) need to do more research on this situation and what's really going on than a tumblr post that only sources a pop culture news outlet (Wired) and fucking Bold British Colonisers (BBC). We especially need to know EXACTLY what we're going into if what we, as the imperialist core (US & Europe), want to fucking INVADE a nation with the same fucking landmass as the US!

We need to be CAREFUL, and know who we're getting our information from, why they're saying this, and if they're reputable sources. Bc I swear to fuck, BOTH Biden AND Trump are more than eager to invade and go to fucking war with China.

If this is something that's really happening on the level Western media is saying it is, then yes OF COURSE we hold China accountable, all entire nations have their fucking flaws, of fucking course. That's something called "critical support." You support a nation's overarching goals, but still make room to criticize it.

I'm saying that we all need to do better research than a Wired OpEd, a BBC article, and John Oliver *war propaganda* before we choose to invade a nation that (arguably) has not provoked a literal war.

#And you morons are going to go to war again over false testimony #how many will be slaughtered this time? #Thousands? #Millions?

[nobodyownsland]

[nobodyownsland]

#leftism #trans rights #lgbtq #fuck terfs #communism #USA #United States #government

[nobodyownsland]

“______ literally wears black face to market her products” really shouldn’t be a thing we have to inform people of in a society that many claim to be “post-racial”

#racism #Kylie Jenner #blackface

[nobodyownsland]

the smartest things the prison industrial complex ever did were

1) convincing American society that prisoners are all “rapists and murderers” despite the fact that: a) most prisoners are drug offenders, b) even most violent offenders are just victims of class society and could very easily be turned into non-violent people, and c) our country seems to be run by people who are either rapists or murderers and no one seems to care.

2) using that bad reputation to not only make people apathetic to any kind of brutality or atrocity committed against prisoners who don’t deserve any of it (see a and b) but using it as an excuse to increase the power the carceral state has over EVERYONE, all while smearing those who disagree as supporting rapists and murderers.

when talking about prison abolition, it’s important to note that most people, including most leftists, have internalized these ideas to a huge extent.

[nobodyownsland]

“Thought (or desires more properly) being heredetary—it is difficult to imagine it anything but structure of brain heredetary… oh you Materialist!” -Charles Darwin, Notebook C

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the gay scientist energy emanating from this Darwin quote?

(For context, at the time this was written, Materialism was a very taboo philosophy, as it was seen as atheistic and therefore heretical. Darwin here is playfully chastising himself as he ponders his developing theory of natural selection, as his reasoning behind it is extremely Materialist in nature.)

#science #gay science #darwin #evolution #materialism

[nobodyownsland]

I haven’t done a non-political video in a while, so this was a fun thing to do. If any of you haven’t seen Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex yet, you absolutely need to. It is incredible and I could gush for hours about it.

#video #Space Thing #Ghost in the Shell #Stand Alone Complex #Funny #Comedy #music #soundtrack

[nobodyownsland]

What is the problem with Trotsky? Would the USSR have been better off with him instead of Stalin?

I was asked this recently on another website, and wrote a whole-ass wall of text addressing it. I figure it might be a good idea to post it here too, for all you comrades out there (and Trots who are hopefully willing to listen):

So, for starters, Stalin wasn't authoritarian. Lets get that out of the way right now. Democracy very much existed in the Soviet Union and would have been even more expansive if Stalin had his way. I'd go so far as to argue that the Soviet Union was more Democratic, even during its decline after Brezhnev, than the United States has ever been. If you doubt this, then I encourage you to read the literature I just linked, because if you want to debunk me, you’ll have to debunk them.

When it comes to Trotsky, the problems with him and his ideas run a lot deeper than being simply "domineering" or “aggressive”. He had a nasty tendency to hold no real solid positions on anything, with Lenin once exclaiming:

"The obliging Trotsky is more dangerous than an enemy! ... Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other. At the present moment he is in the company of the Bundists and the liquidators."

One moment Trotsky would be calling Social Democrats "fascist" allies of the Communist International, and then next he would be criticizing the Comintern for not forming a united front with them. One moment he'd say "Comrade Lenin has not left any “Testament”... All talk with regard to a concealed or mutilated “Testament” is nothing but a despicable lie, directed against the real will of Comrade Lenin" and the next he'd be saying "Stalinist censorship had placed a ban on Lenin’s Testament as well as upon hundreds of his other works". The dude was all over the place, to put it mildly, and really couldn’t be said to be a trustworthy ally of any revolutionary group.

But wait, it gets worse. In his book Black Bolshevik, Harry Haywood sums up the issues with Trotsky's theories themselves, from the perspective of someone who was physically present to witness the power struggle between him and Stalin:

"Trotsky's theories were thoroughly defeatist and class-collaborationist...

At the base of this defeatism was Trotsky's view that the peasantry would be hostile to socialism, since the proletariat would "have to make extremely deep inroads not only into feudal but also into bourgeois property relations." Thus Trotksy contended that the working class would:

"... come into hostile collision not only with all the bourgeois groupings which supported the proletariat during the first stages of its revolutionary struggle, but also with the broad masses of the peasantry with whose assistance it came into power. The contradictions in the position of a workers' government in a backward country with an overwhelmingly peasant population could be solved only ...in the arena of the world proletarian revolution."

Therefore, it would not be possible to build socialism in a backward, peasant country like Russia. The mass of peasants would exhaust their revolutionary potential even before the revolution had completed its bourgeois democratic tasks-the breakup of the feudal landed estates and the redistribution of the land among the peasantry. This line, which underestimated the role of the peasantry, had been put forward by Trotsky as early as l 915 in his article "The Struggle for Power." There he claimed that imperialism was causing the revolutionary role of the peasantry to decline and downgraded the importance of the slogan "Confiscate the Landed Estates."

Trotsky portrayed the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass. He made no distinction between the masses of peasants who worked their own land (the muzhiks) and the exploiting strata who hired labor (the kulaks). His conclusions openly contradicted the strategy of the Bolsheviks, developed by Lenin, of building the worker-peasant alliance as the basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Further, they were at complete variance with any realistic economic or social analysis.

Trotsky's entire position reflected a lack of faith in the strength and resources of the Soviet people, the vast majority of whom were peasants. Since it denied the revolutionary potential of the peasantry, the success of the revolution could not come from internal forces, but had to depend on the success of proletarian revolutions in the advanced nations of Western Europe. In the absence of such revolutions, the revolutionary process within the Soviet Union itself would have to be held in abeyance, and the proletariat, which had seized power with the help of the peasantry, would have to hold state power in conflict, with all other classes.

Behind Trotsky's revolutionary rhetoric was a simplistic social democratic view which regarded the class struggle for socialism as solely labor against capital. This concept of class struggle did not regard the struggle of peasant against landlord, or peasant against the Czar, as a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. This was reflected as early as 1905, in Trotsky's slogan, "No Czar, but a Workers' Government" which, as Stalin had said, was "the slogan of revolution without the peasantry."

So basically, Trotsky believed that it would be impossible for socialism to be achieved in a "backwards" nation and instead it had to arise specifically within Western Europe or the United States before spreading to other "less developed" nations. As Haywood states this is inherently defeatist, as he's literally saying that the entire revolution that the Soviet people had just fought for was essentially for nothing so long as western Europeans remained capitalist and didn't come to fight their battles for them. This idea of "We need white developed nations to come fight the revolution for us and give us socialism" is especially problematic when applied to colonized nations and oppressed peoples. It's dangerously close to the "white man's burden" ideology that dominated western Europe and North America at the time. As Haywood later says in this chapter:

"Trotsky's scheme of permanent revolution downgraded not only the peasantry as a revolutionary force, but also the national liberation movements of oppressed peoples"

Knowing this, it's not surprising to learn that Trotsky was a massive racist, looking down on Stalin as "of Mongolian blood", basically calling him the equivalent of "white trash" in his 1940 biography of Stalin. Like seriously, the first thing he does in that book is go out of his way to paint Stalin as anything but white, or at least not European. Thing is, he considered all of Europe to be a unified "nation", both racially and culturally, similarly to today's European "identitarians". Yet, despite this, he mysteriously doesn't consider Black people in the Americas or Africa to have the same nationhood, expecting Black people in the United States to develop leaders for Africa:

"The Negroes are a race and not a nation. Nations grow out of racial material under definite conditions. The Negroes in Africa are not yet a nation but they are in the process of forming a nation. The American Negroes are on a higher cultural level. But since they are under the pressure of the Americans they become interested in the development of the Negroes in Africa. The American Negro will develop leaders for Africa, that one can say with certainty, and that in turn will influence the development of political consciousness in America."

This is an incredibly eurocentric (or at least ignorant) view of Africa, as there are and have been countless African nations that were all either destroyed or attacked by Europeans. Many parts of Africa had established cultural identities that were systematically destroyed. His view completely lacks any kind of consideration for Africans as historical actors, instead clearly seeing them as a people for whom "civilization" is just beginning, and who aren't ready to have their own indigenous leadership, instead having to import it from the more “culturally advanced” Black people in the US. Also "Nations grow out of racial material under definite conditions" seems to imply that national and cultural identities cannot cross racial lines, and I hope I don't have to explain why that's a really scary and problematic view.

Now, to be clear, that last quote is the view of Trotsky himself, and not all Trotskyists. So I am not calling all Trotskyists racist, I'm simply saying that Trotsky was a racist, chauvinistic ass-hat, and his supporters need to be doubly vigilant of that attitude persisting within their ranks. Trotskyists do have a history of promoting problematic people and views (See: Marcyism), and had Trotsky and Trotskyists risen to power in the USSR instead of Stalin, it's doubtful that the USSR would have remained socialist for so long. Trotsky's thinly-veiled bourgeois and social democratic ideas, and the contradictions therein, would have inevitably led to a capitalist resurgence and the eventual collapse of the entire Soviet bloc. Should it really be any surprise then, that this is exactly what happened when Soviet leaders such as Brezhnev, Gorbachev, and to a lesser extent Khrushchev started parroting his ideas again? (See: Khrushchev Lied)

#Communism #Marxism #Socialism #Trotskyism #Trotsky #Trot #Trots #Stalin #USSR #Lenin #Racism #Black Nationalism #Soviet Union #fascism #social democrats #Marcyism #Black Liberation #Harry Haywood #Black Bolshevik #Brezhnev #Gorbachev #Khrushchev #Khrushchev Lied #identitarianism #white people #eurocentrism #authoritarianism #anti-communism #Leninism #marxism-leninism

[nobodyownsland]

Daily reminder that Henry Kissinger is still alive

this is so evil

[nobodyownsland]

[nobodyownsland]

Alright kiddos settle down in your seats. Bernie Sanders is gone and now it's time to move on. Where, you ask?

Your assigned reading this week is The ABCs of Communism by Nikolai Bukharin. It's a decent introduction to communist thought and ideas, before you move on to your Leninist vegetables and Maoist MAIN COURSE.

#leftism #communism #Bernie Sanders #Sanders for President #BernieSanders #Bernie #Sanders #socialism #democratic socialism #left-wing #election #2020 #Where did that bring you? #back to me

[nobodyownsland]

#shaggy #socialism #communism #leftism #joke #scooby doo

[nobodyownsland]

😍😍😍

Who dis?

Dis TDOV, bb!

#belated but still #trans day of visibility #sorry for taking so long to see this babyyyyyy

[nobodyownsland]

Steven Universe is a breadtuber that’ll probably end up defending fascist beliefs because he doesn’t read any theory