/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

i did see that argument online lol, normies were doomer mode about it

The apache is an overpriced piece of crap and the Iraqi insurgency regularly downed them with improvised weapons and kalashnikovs. Don't buy into the military-industrial complex propaganda.

>In 2003, the AH-64 participated in the invasion of Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. On 24 March 2003, 31 Apaches were damaged; one was shot down in an unsuccessful attack on an Iraqi Republican Guard armored brigade near Karbala. Iraqi tank crews had set up a "flak trap" among terrain and effectively employed their guns. Iraqi officials claimed a farmer with a Brno rifle shot down the Apache, but the farmer denied involvement. The AH-64 came down intact and the crew were captured; it was destroyed via air strike the following day. This incident had significant consequences for the AH-64 helicopter because it revealed an important vulnerability. Despite being considered by army aviators as flying tanks at the time, it became clear that the AH-64 was actually highly susceptible to rifle fire. As a result, the army quietly disclosed in early 2006 that AH-64s would no longer have a major role in carrying out attacks deep inside enemy lines.

>By the end of U.S. military operations in Iraq in December 2011, several Apaches had been shot down by enemy fire and lost in accidents. In 2006, an Apache was downed by a Soviet-made Strela 2 (SA-7) in Iraq, despite it being typically able to avoid such missiles. In 2007, four Apaches were destroyed on the ground by insurgent mortar fire using web-published geotagged photographs taken by soldiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_AH-64_Apache#21st_century

>>481509
I've heard that online and IRL over and over again. I think at least a sizeable portion of the US believes this and in their minds a violent revolution is a non-starter.

So they waste their time desperately finding non-violent ways of doing it. Which like, if that somehow magically works, more power to them, but that's not how it happened any other time in history and time is running out.

>>481512
Based Iraqis. However, what I wanna know is: does revolution in the US entail its citizens defeating the US military?

My history sucks but according to AI the Russian imperialist army was dissolved before the white army was formed following the revolution.

>What do you have to say to those people?

By the tone of your post, I'm not sure. I was honestly under the impression that this is true, at least partially. Using the heaviest possible weapons on a civilian uprising in the US would probably be kind of a stupid decision, at least immediately resorting to it would, but there's no guarantee whatsoever, that I'm aware of, that you'd be spared having to fight against weapons like that, so I'm not going to offer any such guarantee. If I'm wrong not to offer such an assurance, then I'm wrong.

What I will say, to anyone who will listen, is that it does not matter. Not one bit. I tell you this: the American state is very powerful. It is powerful technologically, it is powerful economically, it has a huge army, it has a massive surveillance state, etc. It has the advantages, and I'll tell you that whether you are a revolutionary in the US, or the UK, or Russia, or Germany, or France, or Saudi Arabia, your government has the advantages. In all likelihood, if you take part actively in a revolution, you will die doing so. Chances are high, even now, that you will fail. This is only the truth, and it's a truth which anyone who is serious must look right in the eye so that, rather than cowering in fear or proceeding to failure in denial, they can take what measures they can to best prevent the most likely outcome, which is failure.

Another truth which I cannot deny is this: the power of these states, the US in particular, is largely matched by their evil. The American state, its once-thinly-veiled oligarchs, its military industrial complex, its political class and enforcers, kills millions. Whether or not you participate in revolution, the American state will fuck you over. Whether or not it kills you, you are likely to know someone who it kills, whether in its idiotic wars, its violent suppression of the populace, its extractive real estate schemes, its rolling recessions, or its allowance of the very-rich to kill millions in the name of profit and get off with fines, as did the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma fame. Abroad, its wars and war profiteering cause great chaos, killing many more, and inflaming tensions which return to America in the form of mass-migration and impotent terror attacks. The American state's divide-and-conquer political tactic, by which it separates people into marginalized identity groups and sics them on eachother to prevent a united workforce, likewise results in blind, idiotic violence and grave dehumanization of the inhabitants of an incredibly diverse nation. Petty differences are used to coax people into committing senseless acts of brutality upon one another while they are all robbed more and more by the landlords and capitalists, who grow constantly more greedy and more eager to stir up great violence to consolidate their power and crush any potential for opposition.

For a great many Americans, there is no "up" side, and that number grows larger every minute. For those of whom I am writing, the truth is that they will most likely die crushed under the wheels of this machine whether or not they rise against it. The difference, then, is that they will either rise, and have a slim chance of dismantling this machine and creating something better, or they will lie down and have no chance. They will either organize, and find a common purpose, or they will try desperately to live without purpose, and die miserable, atomized deaths for a lost illusion of comfort. For those who know what I'm talking about, I want them to understand that even though the odds are stacked against them, the way things are is still a decision. It doesn't have to be this way, people don't have to live like you've lived, but my position is that changing it won't be a cakewalk.

The necessity of what must be done is entirely unrelated to the level of ease of the task; if you've faced the truth of the situation, then you are at an obligation to either do what must be done or to die trying to reconcile the contradictions without action.
I know a lot of people are trying that second option. Through suicide, recreational drugs, useless consumption, psychiatry, crime, identitarianism, hate, they seek to escape or obfuscate, to themselves, the role they are playing in their own disenfranchisement, as obedient accomplices to a state which is taking every opportunity to rob them blind of every right, opportunity, and dignity. This is an important thing to me, because there are so many people who, in the pointless destitution of their lonely lives, have fully embraced their desire to die, but have not yet come to understand the real power which this affords them. The disenfranchised, conditioned to always blame themselves for circumstances beyond their control, who wake up every day to the most terrible humiliation of not yet having killed themselves, whose every moment of their life is an insult to their being, have the greatest latent power in the world: they do not fear death. This is the power which is spreading, now, as more and more people realize the scope of the evil being done.

So, in my view, it is true that the state is very powerful, and odds are stacked in its favor against the populace, and Apache helicopters can never protect the state from them. Nor can tanks. Nor can the police, nor the national guard, nor the marines. Nor can the CIA, nor the NSA, nor the DHS, nor the FBI. Nothing in this world can protect the state from reconciliation at the hands of an organized populace who are not afraid of death, even if many things can make it extremely difficult for said populace to win.

I am a pessimist, and I feel that to be a pessimist is realistic, and this is very different from being a defeatist. Defeatism is an idiocy peddled to people who have not yet accepted how bad it really is.

pic unrelated

>>481507
In the Russian revolution the Navy joined the revolutionaries, because they felt betrayed by the old ruling class who had send them against Japan where they suffered a bad defeat in the battle of Tsushima. Something like that could repeat if the US started a war against China.

>the people would have to fight picrel.
Helicopters are fuel guzzlers and require a lot of maintenance, their achilles heal is their enormous logistic tail. They don't have to be engaged head on, just baited to go in the air too many times. Helis are really effective against tanks, but they're not suitable for terrorizing a population. Worry about the CIA's drone program, those have really long range and can be operated from outside bases.

>What do you have to say to those people?
get enough of the military on your side.

>I think at least a sizeable portion of the US believes this and in their minds a violent revolution is a non-starter.
Most people have a erroneous mental image of revolution, that is like storming mount Olympus to oust the gods. When in reality revolutions hardly go on the offensive. Revolutions have a pre-revolutionary phase where the old structures begin failing people. In that phase some people begin setting up mutual aid networks while others attempt to fix the failing structures. When those things become impossible people create parallel structures. The good part of the old structure joins the parallel people's structures, while the rotten part goes on the attack to destroy the new stuff that was erected in parallel. That's when revolutions become violent, but the people usually are on the defensive.

>So they waste their time desperately finding non-violent ways of doing it. Which like, if that somehow magically works, more power to them, but that's not how it happened any other time in history and time is running out.
To be fair it should be possible to do this. I some times wonder if it could be something passive and simple like make everybody get months worth of supplies and then everybody goes into hiding to wait for the ruling class to undoo it self.

If you want my prediction: the imperial bourgoisie is going to drag the world into WW3. It's going to be very different than previous world wars. A lot more technical and less obvious fronts. Many of the mechanisms for keeping people subjugated will get destroyed by the warring. Once the subjugation systems fall by the wayside people get the chance to interrupt WW3.

>>481516
>>481513
forgot to link
check last 2 paragraphs

>>481516
>>What do you have to say to those people?
>get enough of the military on your side.

Yeah I think this is really the sane answer.

>>481516
I agree that the possibility of military defection from the ruling class in the event of revolution is a very real consideration. We do see discontentment right now over Gaza/Yemen/etc. in particular, and this is a good sign, I'll note.

I do think that we should be concerned that there has been a sustained campaign among reactionary bourgeois forces to siphon the discontentment of the military class into neo-Fascism, though. This obviously doesn't negate the imperative to pursue this avenue at all, but it complicates it, and I believe that things are already in motion to implement mask-off military-backed dictatorship.

>Most people have a erroneous mental image of revolution, that is like storming mount Olympus to oust the gods. When in reality revolutions hardly go on the offensive. Revolutions have a pre-revolutionary phase where the old structures begin failing people. In that phase some people begin setting up mutual aid networks while others attempt to fix the failing structures. When those things become impossible people create parallel structures. The good part of the old structure joins the parallel people's structures, while the rotten part goes on the attack to destroy the new stuff that was erected in parallel. That's when revolutions become violent, but the people usually are on the defensive.

Yes! And best case scenario, workers get enough organizational power that they can get rid of the bad without it becoming a massive, bloody civil war.

>>481514
>does revolution in the US entail its citizens defeating the US military?
That would depend on if the federal government stayed intact or simply imploded once the US descended into civil war. Anyone hoping to seize power in the US would have to fight the US military in some capacity, but probably not all of it.

>My history sucks but according to AI the Russian imperialist army was dissolved before the white army was formed following the revolution.
By October 1917 the Russian Army had been getting curbstomped by the Germans for the past 3 years, and most soldiers were sick of being used as cannon fodder by their gay aristocratic officers in doomed counter-offensives. Many deserted, the rest had mixed loyalties between the whites, republicans and bolsheviks. It was not much of a fighting force and totally incapable of putting down a rebellion. For instance, when Kornilov (a White General) tried to lead an army into Petrograd to oust the provisional government (liberals/bolsheviks) in September 1917, most of his army had deserted by the time he reached the city and it was a complete disaster.

This was very different to the 1905 revolution when the Tsar's Army was still intact, and crushed the socialist uprising with relative ease. Or the countless peasant rebellions that happened in Russia during the 19th century which were routinely put down by the military.

If the Russian example highlights anything it's that the best time for a revolution to happen is when the army is in the process of being ravaged by a foreign military, and are too distracted to effectively impose martial law across the country. This is why Lenin had such high hopes for Germany in 1919. I guess Mao did something similar with how he completely turned the tide on the chinese nationalists in aftermath of WWII as well.

>>481521
>That would depend on if the federal government stayed intact or simply imploded once the US descended into civil war.
No, you don't want to wait for that.
You wanna prevent a civil war and go for a bloodless coup before total collapse.

I would say they are completely right, and on top of that, revolution doesn't work the way some extremely online internet tards think it does. The weapons aren't there as a defensive measure against revolution. They are an offensive measure to threaten the people to make them comply with anything, worse than any slavery hitherto known.

The only way it would have been prevented would be to plead with the great powers to destroy those democidal weapons - weapons whose only purpose is democide. You won't convince them, but you could have raised holy hell as they were built all around you, and continued to be built for the most spurious purposes lying assholes ever invented to get poor people killed. Believing that you would have anything like arms parity against that is a fools' errand and you know it. But, wars are not about who has the shiniest weapon platform. They are always about people and their morale, and cannibalizing morale with the stupidest ideologies didn't help anyone.

That said, it's not the jets and helicopters that really scare the people or give the rulers their muscle. Those were weapons when the ruling elite were besieged by the large numbers of people and their disgust towards everything that was done to them - disgust that influencers told the people to normalize and accept no matter how ridiculous the demands. The most lethal weapons are poisons that can spread quickly due to command of supply chains and stripping out any independence from that command, which has been the big project of neoliberalism. The best weapon the Israelis have against Gaza was to simply cut off the water and electricity. Imagine such monsters with lethal poisons slipped into the water supply, with compromised leaders who would tell them they're not allowed to stop the poison as it culls the "useless eaters". That's the world we are coming to.

The info/computation war stuff is a ruse - intended as a gambit in neoliberalism to "prepare" the populace for democide, by finding fearful enablers who will be useful as Einsatzgruppen for the coming wars. The drones are fairly useful if you operated with conventional war laws, but the greatest use of computers and communication tech is to place the officers in safe locations where their troops can't frag them, while making punishment for disobedience quick. Otherwise, they would have to relay orders through human subordinates who have no reason to go along with such madness. The mystification is that communication and symbols are interpreted as magickal workings rather than in any analytical way. Those with independent analytical ability were declared "retarded" unless they kept their opinions to themselves or were in a position where they were allowed to think, within the purview assigned to them. Because there was simply too much "state" for any one person to realistically command, it was easy to make the mystification stick. The few who operated over multiple domains and were tasked with the role of "guiding brain" don't really know everything - they just know how to command subordinates whose loyalty is ensured through fairly extensive mind control / behavioral conditioning and a lot of threats for noncompliance, with a lot of examples of what happens if the grunts disobey. If you're important enough to be worth keeping, you will never be put through the HR rigamarole - they have jobs lined up and brag about how easy it is, because they are always assigned to something so long as they're good little technicians. They're among the few who will "love their slavery" - at least while the rewards were offered to mollify them. Those rewards are thinner gruel now that the critical period has passed.

The greatest difficulty with revolution though is not any great secret tech or unanswerable force, but a simple one - revolutions require a political crisis that allows an interest to contest high politics, and that interest will have to be able to fend off those who would prevent this from happening. Usually revolutionary crises were about the money - the king was bankrupt, or interests had built up a sufficient share of the national wealth that they were the superior partners, and old interests couldn't say they did anything at all. When your most capable officers were commoners who were advancing science and shit and the system promoted some inbred aristos who suck at fighting, it's pretty obvious where the balance of power would go.

Today there is a similar problem, in that the "old money" can only live off superstitions of holding mere information. The old money people are smarter than that, and knew from the outset that their rule was only possible through technology rather than any merit of their business skills or being great scientists themselves. But, they run the risk of being overthrown by their underlings, and that is what will happen presently. The new leadership are the most ghoulish intellectuals and scientists, those who specialize in management and controlling political reality through a novel approach. The past century has been that leadership steadily feeding their employers enough poison to weaken them, with the smartest of the old money oligarchs embracing the "revolution" when the time comes to clear out their deadweight rivals. Said intellectuals are themselves suffering from the same problem of being inbred and trapped by their own thinking, but there is enough talent in them to keep pushing the torture and reward button for another 40-50 years. After that though, they will suffer terminal mental failure. Without anything new, the "best and brightest", the people who think they're going to win the coming struggle, will either go completely insane, or the world will truly end. Their aim, should nothing new be possible, will be to ensure that no one can have the world but them. This isn't really a "capitalist" conceit. It's a technocratic one, and a conceit of the middle class.

Long story short - middle class is no good, and revolution is middle class. The lower classes did not want revolution in that sense. They wanted the beast out of their life, to take back their land and tools, so they would never have to speak of these social experiments again. Then, the former ruling orders - all of them - would have to beg the people who took back their world to stay relevant. At this point, the lower orders would, if they had such a thing, refuse all such offers out of necessity. So, the "best case scenario" - which won't happen - would be if the laborers simply exterminated the upper class. The purge machine of eugenics would be reversed, and it would not be allowed to be co-opted by the usual intrigues. Class traitors will be class traitors for life, turning away from this technocratic idea forever. Because no alternative has been proposed, this leads nowhere, and it has no muscle. But, there is one thing that will happen - eventually the ruling interest will be a smaller group who, seeing what the world has become, will see that the shortest route to effective mind control would be by simply taking the tortured lower classes, giving them revenge and security, and turning them against those believed they were a lockstep republican body. In other words, what they've always feared, and what they spend exorbitant effort preventing, is a Caesar or a Diocletian - and it would be more likely to resemble the latter, since a radical restructuring of society at the base is what would have to happen.

It's difficult to make historical parallels, because the change that happened in the 20th century is way bigger than anything in prior history itself - but all of those changes occurred within the ruling interests. The "revolution" you're thinking about happened in the 1930s, and it installed fascism and things like it as the new normal.

>>481526
I used AI (llama3) to discern your post:
The author argues that:

> The idea of revolution is often misunderstood, and the focus on weapons and military strength is misguided.

> The real threat to the people is not military hardware, but rather the control of supply chains and the ability to poison the water supply.

> The ruling elite use fear and mystification to maintain control, and the population is conditioned to accept this through neoliberalism.

> The key to revolution is not military strength, but rather a political crisis that allows an interest to contest high politics.

> The current ruling class is facing a crisis, and a new leadership of intellectuals and scientists is emerging, but they are also trapped by their own thinking and will eventually face terminal mental failure.

> The only solution is for the lower classes to take back their world, and the best-case scenario would be for the laborers to exterminate the upper class and establish a new order.

Overall, the author is presenting a complex and nuanced view of revolution, power, and control, and arguing that the focus on military strength and weapons is misguided. Instead, the key to change is a political crisis and a new leadership that can challenge the ruling elite.

Okay I agree with this, this is actually a good point.

>>481531
The AI cannot understand things because it is trained to be "ethical" and not call bullshit on any ruling idea. The whole point is that there is no realistic challenge to the present ruling elite, and the ruling elite knows it. So, they act accordingly.

Leadership needs something real to lead, rather than good ideas or a will to rule them all. Everything of substance is on the side that has been winning, and goaded/encouraged the rest of the world to rise up so they'd crush the useless eaters and cut a deal with the "good ones". The mismatch is so great that the "revolutionaries" are trained to fear the names of their enemies, while the names of the revolutionaries are mocked, ridiculed, and made into parodies. It's pretty easy, and by now the revolutionaries are so feeble and sad that they're worth mocking.

>>481520
>I agree that the possibility of military defection from the ruling class in the event of revolution is a very real consideration.
I would not call it defection, if the military sides with the people, that's true patriotism.
>We do see discontentment right now over Gaza/Yemen/etc. in particular, and this is a good sign, I'll note.
Yeah that guy that set him self on fire, that probably spooked some warmongers. He Chose excruciatingly painfully death over doing their bidding.

>I do think that we should be concerned that there has been a sustained campaign among reactionary bourgeois forces to siphon the discontentment of the military class into neo-Fascism, though.
Not sure what you mean. The recent Neocon wars must have created discontent because it probably felt pretty pointless to soldiers who fought them. But that would create a general war-fatigue. How would they siphon that into neo-fascism ?

>This obviously doesn't negate the imperative to pursue this avenue at all, but it complicates it, and I believe that things are already in motion to implement mask-off military-backed dictatorship.
Chris Hedges has been warning about the methods of empire coming home. You think it'll be like that ?
It's always risky to order soldiers to open fire on their fellow country men. It splits the military in 2 because such an order will always be refused by many.

You appear to be hinting at the Zionist collaborator faction conspiring to get peace protesters mass murdered by state terror. Wouldn't that spark a civil war and be a case of friends being worse than enemies ?

>>481534
>a case of friends being worse than enemies
Somewhat related, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was renewed in the midst of a near-total media blackout a couple weeks ago. One of the new powers it's handed to spook agencies is the ability to compel anyone with even the most tangential access to telecommications hardware, such as a landlord or cable maintenance worker, to hand over surveillance data to spook agencies without a warrant.

Reminder that the military police and military surveillance measures pioneered by Israel on Palestinians are being adopted in the US against its own citizens.

>>481538
With their actions in Gaza the Zionists have taught us that the right to approximately perfect privacy is the same as the right to life. The Palestinians have defeated this thing with tunnels, there has to be a lesson that can be learned from that as well.

>>481534
>I would not call it defection, if the military sides with the people, that's true patriotism.
It's defection from allegiance to Mammon.
>Not sure what you mean. The recent Neocon wars must have created discontent because it probably felt pretty pointless to soldiers who fought them. But that would create a general war-fatigue. How would they siphon that into neo-fascism ?
Blame it on a group of "elites," pretend not to be a part of said group, and rally veterans who have been conditioned to accept violence as their skillset into a coup in opposition to "those elites." Basically what the Trumpists (and with them, a substantial amount of the neocons-incognito) are doing.
>Chris Hedges has been warning about the methods of empire coming home. You think it'll be like that ?
Yes. It's already been going like that. The IDF trains American police, American police have become increasingly militaristic over my lifetime, etc. The mass surveillance of the Bush era never went away entirely and keeps getting reinvigorated with less and less pretext, too.
>You appear to be hinting at the Zionist collaborator faction conspiring to get peace protesters mass murdered by state terror. Wouldn't that spark a civil war and be a case of friends being worse than enemies ?
It likely would, yes.

>>481538
>Somewhat related, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was renewed in the midst of a near-total media blackout a couple weeks ago.
Meant to post an article about that weeks ago, fuck.

>>481557
>allegiance to Mammon.
allegiance to what ?

>Blame it on a group of "elites," pretend not to be a part of said group, and rally veterans who have been conditioned to accept violence as their skillset into a coup in opposition to "those elites." Basically what the Trumpists (and with them, a substantial amount of the neocons-incognito) are doing.
This went over my head. I've been avoiding anything mainstream for years, 'cause it feels like getting your brain eroded by a cheese-grater, so don't assume i know recent terminology. I'm assuming that a trumpist doesn't refer to a musician playing the trumpet. What i know about veterans is from interviews i've seen online. My impression is that veterans are rather based and think
<war = old men getting young men killed/crippled.
While that isn't anything revolutionary, it's not like this is an ideology fomenting a coup or anything like that. I'm not sure why you worry about othering a group of "elites". It doesn't sound like that would direct hate towards regular people. It's not attacking the proletariat or precariat. It's not a racist scapegoat or anything like that either. Could you translate "elites" to Marxist terminology perhaps ?
>The IDF trains police
So sadism school ?
>The mass surveillance of the Bush era never went away entirely and keeps getting reinvigorated with less and less pretext, too.
The Neocons want to go to war a lot, and they think society has to be "securitized" like making a military battle formation "combat ready". They have this fantasy of society uniting behind them as leaders of a grand crusade, when in reality most people don't give a shit and just want a comfy life. Their bullshit has done more to weaken the US empire in the last 25 years than the collective efforts of all the Soviet Block states in the entire 20th century combined. They didn't just squander lives and treasure on fruitless military campaigns, their stupid panopticon and all the surveillance capitalism destroyed the ideological "freedom-advantage" that the west arguably had. If you compare the US to it's main rival today. China also has too much surveillance, but they have a booming economy and rising living standards.
>It likely would, yes.
If the Zionist interference is leading into the direction of civil war, why aren't they being stopped ?
You can't tell me that the massive state bureaucracy looked at Gaza and said
<yes we want to replicate that.
Gaza has resisted for decades, survival out of spite, it's even building it's own weapons.
Everybody can see that Israel is self-destructing over this. They're digging two graves one for Gaza and one for Israel.


>>481558
If you have a good analysis, you can still post it.
I just saw Snowdens Tweet, he seemed to be rather worried.

>>481563
>allegiance to what ?
https://www.occultopedia.com/m/mammon.htm

>This went over my head. I've been avoiding anything mainstream for years, 'cause it feels like getting your brain eroded by a cheese-grater, so don't assume i know recent terminology. I'm assuming that a trumpist doesn't refer to a musician playing the trumpet. What i know about veterans is from interviews i've seen online. My impression is that veterans are rather based and think
Reading this made me turn my head sideways like a dog.

>While that isn't anything revolutionary, it's not like this is an ideology fomenting a coup or anything like that. I'm not sure why you worry about othering a group of "elites". It doesn't sound like that would direct hate towards regular people. It's not attacking the proletariat or precariat. It's not a racist scapegoat or anything like that either. Could you translate "elites" to Marxist terminology perhaps ?
It's bizarre to me that you haven't encountered veterans in real life. There are an awful lot of them. There are many strictly anti-war veterans, but there are also a great deal of them who are critical of previous wars, like Iraq & Afghanistan, but who are generally very reactionary and not broadly opposed to violence necessarily. They aren't a monolith, there are many opinions among them, but these are also very common outlooks.

"Elite" is just English. Who do you think that it's referring to?
An "anti-elite" rallying cry, being used by certain elites to distract from the evils of capitalism, rentseeking, their own "eliteness," etc. is not really a good thing.
And it does often direct hate towards regular people, it just does it by blaming certain groups of regular people on "elites." Gays? The fault of elites! Socialists? An elite conspiracy! Immigrants? Elites are flooding our country with them! Blacks? The problems they claim to have are all propaganda put in their impressionable heads by elites to destroy America from within!
"Elites," in reactionary lingo, has very vague meaning, and is ironically utilized by certain elites themselves to attack certain policies and individuals they dislike or want others to dislike. In this context, attacks on "elites" are usually a cynical, false appeal to populism.

>So sadism school ?
Yep.

>The Neocons want to go to war a lot, and they think society has to be "securitized" like making a military battle formation "combat ready". They have this fantasy of society uniting behind them as leaders of a grand crusade, when in reality most people don't give a shit and just want a comfy life. Their bullshit has done more to weaken the US empire in the last 25 years than the collective efforts of all the Soviet Block states in the entire 20th century combined. They didn't just squander lives and treasure on fruitless military campaigns, their stupid panopticon and all the surveillance capitalism destroyed the ideological "freedom-advantage" that the west arguably had. If you compare the US to it's main rival today. China also has too much surveillance, but they have a booming economy and rising living standards.
Yep!

>If the Zionist interference is leading into the direction of civil war, why aren't they being stopped ?
Opportunism & hubris. Some people want to rule over a war torn, fascistic America, others don't care or, perhaps, are too stupid to admit that's where it's heading.

>>481563
>If you have a good analysis, you can still post it.
Cool, will make a thread when I get a chance.

>>481571
>"Elite" is just English. Who do you think that it's referring to?
Assuming people use the correct dictionary definition of words often leads to confusion and bad communication.

>An "anti-elite" rallying cry, being used by certain elites to distract from the evils of capitalism, rentseeking, their own "eliteness," etc. is not really a good thing.
>And it does often direct hate towards regular people, it just does it by blaming certain groups of regular people on "elites." Gays? The fault of elites! Socialists? An elite conspiracy! Immigrants? Elites are flooding our country with them! Blacks?
So scapegoating ?
If you want to scapegoat people it is strange to say they are elite. Because that also can be understood as exceptionally capable people.

>The problems they claim to have are all propaganda put in their impressionable heads by elites to destroy America from within!
While propaganda is not the root of problems. Ruling classes do conspire to put propaganda into the heads of impressionable people, which everybody is to an extend. They seek to shape the world view of society in such a manor that they can rule uncontested by any influence of the masses. So the anti-democracy conspiracy is real. This sentiment is not entirely wrong.

"Elites," in reactionary lingo, has very vague meaning, and is ironically utilized by certain elites themselves to attack certain policies and individuals they dislike or want others to dislike. In this context, attacks on "elites" are usually a cynical, false appeal to populism.
idk, maybe we should co-opt the term "Elites" and then give it a precise definition, along marxist and socialist lines. Vague words can have a definition vacuum, and we might be able to fill that.

>Opportunism & hubris. Some people want to rule over a war torn, fascistic America, others don't care or, perhaps, are too stupid to admit that's where it's heading.
I can see your argument for Opportunism & hubris and they were indeed fumbling around like bafoons.
Their attempts at cracking down on democratic expression of opposition to the genocide in Palestine backfired on them because the people aren't just motivated by the injustice of the genocide in a foreign land. It's also self-preservation, people worry that if the Zionists can get away with the horror in Gaza they will try to apply this against western populations as well. By using police violence to attack democratic rights, these worries have been confirmed, as well as triggering more solidarity. Hence the unwavering growing opposition. The decision makers were disconnected from the masses so it can be attributed to ignorance (stupidity is to strong of a word)

However the Zionist lobby that is one of the driving forces behind this, they must know that what they are doing will cause irreparable fractures in Western societies, and at minimum a political stalemate that will break off material support by the west. They might not care about inflicting critical damage to the credibility of the institutions of western states, but Israel can't survive without the west unless it becomes a normal country that seeks peaceful coexistence with its neighbors.

I'm even more perplexed that the US ruling class would risk setting off a civil war, because they are not in a position to hold on to their empire if that happens. Also the Gaza war has a huge diplomatic cost, and it's uniting the Arab world against the US, making it a strategic blunder.

Nobody gets to be a warlord ruling over a fascistic wasteland. Look at Nazi Germany they went the fascist route and ended up getting carved up by other powers. Ukraine went partially fascist by empowering groups like azov and Bandera, and they'll likely end up carved up as well.

>Cool, will make a thread when I get a chance.
looking forward to that

>>481507
As >>481515 said, "they're gonna kill you anyway, even if just to make a show out of your behaviour for everyone to see, so either you're going with us or else".
Red armies (yes I'm including n@libers) had to deal with such shit too. Look @ kurds @ least for a modern xample.

T U N N E L S
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all your imperialist wunderwaffen can't do shit against tunnels. this debate is dead and buried. the IOF hasn't even managed to dent the capabilities of Hamas, PIJ, PFLP and DFLP in over 7 months of scorched-earth genocidal warfare. the most technologically-advanced military on earth aside from the USA, and they can't do shit against tunnels.

>>481657
>can't do shit against tunnels.
The Vietcong also used tunnels during the Vietnam war, to similar effect.

Makes one wonder if putting most of civilization underground would make war so inefficient that it would fade away.

>>481657
"The tunnels", oh that old trope. Who controls the tunnels? Do you have a tunnel or bunker that will take you in? If you do, you're going to think very differently. Typical eugenist drivel.

The people of Gaza are dead, and the war was planned with those selected to die in advance - a test of what is to come. You fags will only have yourselves, and soon enough you won't even have that as you will compromise more and more and tell yourself it was your own idea.

What fucks the Israelis is that they see themselves correctly at war with Iran, and Iran has become the favored "chess piece" - has been for a long time. Israel played factions in the US off each other so politicians would continue to prop up an enterprise that was always a liability. This is fairly basic knowledge that most in Gaza are aware of, and that's why they fight. It's not out of some essentialist faggotry. It's because they know that letting Israel get its narrative would just make this go on for more countries. Israel would love the narrative of fools stuck in their imaginary tunnels to have an excuse to continually besiege an enemy population.

All of that said, the weapons platforms have always been overpriced showpieces. One drone or anti-tank missile makes that expensive tank on parade into a death trap for its operator. This was a fear of introducing these weapons platforms. Obviously they weren't very effective for the Germans. Soviets beat them with quantity and a determination to survive against a Satanic horde. They were far too lenient to such a filthy race out of misplaced sentiment and necessity of the time. It's really a wonder that the Germans could present as such a menace, since they were more preoccupied with their eugenics projects and Harry Potter business than fighting a war. The German MO was always that the war will be quick because an aristocratic fifth column hands the country to them.

The tactics of a resistance can easily be used by an empire. Israel can be rooted out, but Israel is there to smash and grab then repeat the process in another country. That's why they're moving back to the US, to loot the next thing, the much bigger thing. That's always what they want to do. I doubt the Israeli project "ends" - just the current phase of it. The imperial handlers would like a unitary state in the area that does what the masters really want it to do, and isn't barking about stupid shit.

>>481682
>The German MO was always that the war will be quick because an aristocratic fifth column hands the country to them.
I don't know what to make about your tunnel-related thoughts, but this is an interesting line. Do you suppose history is repeating itself in this regard?

>>481689
History never repeats despite the efforts of so many to make it so. Israel is fighting an internal enemy and can't seem to win, largely because of the political goals set by Netanyahu. If the goal was actually "dismantle Hamas" they have won - but why on Earth would they dismantle a client? The client betrayed their patron and went with bigger patrons, and Netanyahu got burned by being stupid.

What's happening now is not a repeat of the German strategy at all. It's a whole new era, where the nation-state is no longer a relevant actor. We're seeing now just what the end of nations really meant, and it will be an ugly thing. The German way is dumb and obviously it didn't work then.

>>481719
>History never repeats despite the efforts of so many to make it so.
Ah, but do you suppose that Israel hopes to rely on aristocratic fifth columns in, say, the US and UK?

>>481720
Wholly different program in force. The US is going to be wholly privatized and no longer exist as a unit to be exchanged. They don't want America to be a thing at all. Israel isn't a real country and is itself getting overthrown. The real power is global corporate government - the new East India Company (or rather, they never went away).

>>481726
>The US is going to be wholly privatized
As much as they might want to, they can't get by without public governance, people don't grant authority to a privatized corporate bureaucracy, and without that voluntarily given compliance there is no governance.
>the new East India Company
That comparison feels apt, however lets not forget that in the end the public Indian state displaced the private East India company.

>>481726
What do you actually mean by this?

My expectation is that the intention is to press ahead with "neoliberalism," but what this actually amounts to is Fascism, a doubling-down on the state as an oppressive force in order to extract more labor, resources, etc. while organs of state are removed from accountability through 'privatization,' but functionally still operate as a state. Israel actually seems to be sort of crucial in this process, at least for now.

>>481730
People have already granted to the private bureaucracy everything it needs. When the public has been made this unseemly and you're not allowed a single shred of decency, what choice do you have? You're going to go with the people who pay you, even if they hold a knife at your throat.

The corporate government has been steadily restored - not as it was before, but with the same aims and philosophy ruling over it. They do not need any public facade and have gamed public opinion enough to turn people against each other. They will always kick down because to speak against the ruling ideas is not merely death. The concept doesn't compute if anyone is at all serious. This fucking website is pure performative politics and shitposting.

>>481734
Neoliberalism was fascism - or another stage of it, anyway. What they're doing now is something very different, something that hasn't been done before because no one thought humanity was this Satanic… until they were, just as they were trained to be. I knew when people my age became the elders, this world was fucked, but I didn't think they were this given over to self-abasement. I didn't think humans were this cowardly and shameless, mostly because I used to comparing against myself as an obviously bad and deformed person with flaws I knew well. It turns out the other humans really were just jabbering Satanic apes, which was my first impression, but I couldn't believe that such people would go on, knowing what this turns into. They know, of course, and they love it. They're a sick and perverse monstrosity, so I can't say I'm too sad or think it's going to stop, not at this point. The saddest thing is that so many of them tried to be decent out of some sense that this would make the world tolerable, but they were afraid to even name their enemies let alone act in any way consistently opposed to them. It's a wonder the past 30 years have been as decent as they were, given what the world was up against. It was almost entirely the inertia of the world preventing this, and some begrudging endurance of people to keep the machines running since the Great Plan sucked balls.

I don't know why you people keep inventing a decency of nature that does not exist. Only humans can be decent, and they aren't going to be decent in a society designed to humiliate decency and make it unseemly and "retarded". The world is not decent or caring about human feelings, but unlike the eugenist dogma, the world and life are completely fair. The world did so much to make my situation better, despite humanity's curse upon me. It still works in a way to mitigate humanity's malice and ugliness, against the orders of the eugenic creed. Its fairness does not regard our lives at all, but there are limits to what this torture cult can actually do and inexorable consequences of what was set in motion. The only thing I see in the near future is for these events to play out, and for the damned to never stop cursing this failed race.

One thing I have come to accept in the past couple of years is that there is absolutely nothing in humans that can change this, no invention or aspiration humans hold that will change the course of history significantly. Any such change would require a confluence of many strands that would appear without any grand plan or working, and they would have to be able to survive against a humanity that always crushes anything that would be a stain on history like anything decent. But, the world itself is loaded with potential to change this. None of it can be "captured" by humanity or any one of us for a good purpose, but we would recognize that in the world which works against the human menace (and it's not their fake ecofascist faggotry). We would live on knowing that this entire enterprise of creating reality through torture is pointless, stupid, won't work, and won't be as glorious as the retards doing it think it is. But, the true believers will never, ever change, and they will continue to rewrite history long after they're used up and replaced with a less retarded cult of power.

>>481749
>I have come to accept
>absolutely nothing
>can change

Nah you just got infected with a defeatist attitude

>>481748
>What they're doing now is something very different,
I don't know that I agree. It's broader, maybe, but I don't see it as so different. Perhaps it will be. I will say that, like the original Fascism itself, it enjoys a degree of technology and civilization which previous tyrannies lacked, which makes it considerably more tyrannical simply in that it has the capacity to be so. Fascism+.

Not wasting my time on the schizo, but neoliberalism is absolutely not to be conflated with fascism. Neoliberalism at its core is about getting the government out of the way of capitalists so that idealized market forces can allow the formation of monopolies and domestic capitalists can benefit from global reach at the expense of local economies; fascism on the other hand is bringing a state in to resuscitate a domestic economy by forcefully suppressing revolutionary fervor and workers' movements. While both ideologies ultimately operate in the favorite of private capitalists, they do it with practically opposite methods. Another way to think of it is this: neoliberalism is the ideology imposed on post-industrial financialized economies; fascism is the ideology imposed on third-world economies where the labor has been outsourced.

>>481765
In theory, sure. My belief is that, in practice, neoliberalism is effectively a sneaky way of reintroducing fascism. It's only "small government" in rhetoric, because it inevitably reaches the same contradiction that ancap does: large-scale corporate capitalism, rentierism, etc. rely entirely on a state to define & protect certain property rights & monopolies against those who are harmed by these things. Neoliberalism is when the state does the work to define and protect the rights of capitalists, but removes checks from corporate power and sells off infrastructure which was publicly funded, and then, in practice, socializes the damage with a kind of periodic mock-Keynesian crisis capitalism. This inevitably was paired with massive union busting, because there isn't any other way to actually achieve this - the state is absolutely necessary in all this, and it plainly used its power to enrich and favor one group while suppressing another.

While this didn't generate fascist conditions (in first world countries) immediately, it's inevitably crept towards that. Privatizing the organs of state, while they still essentially operate as organs of state, essentially just functions to remove them from democratic accountability. It was only about 20-something years after the rise of neoliberalism in America that the same country was passing the PATRIOT Act, and now we're at a point where even many of the modern, socially liberal rights which existed back then have actually been scaled back.

I think, and maybe I'm mistaken, that a lot of the neoliberal "thinkers" probably don't believe the shit they say to make it sound palatable. Even early proponents of capitalism understood that corporate power would act like states' power if unchecked.

>>481765
QUICK SHUT IT DOWN STEER BACK TO APPROVED HARBARA NARRATIVES!

>>481758
Fascism implied a level of cooperation and lack of division that the coming setup no longer needs nor wants. Basically, everyone who wanted fascism would be told that the only way to the "light" is to embrace what appears to be fascist ideology, and it will be switched out with this new thing - and has been. The Rightoid has already been primed to accept anything, any self-abasement. Trump and the Eurotrash Right are proof of how retarded they are.

The fascist idea was purely about running into the ground any country's institutions and replacing them with screaming faggotry. What they're bringing in is the result of fascism not really being answered in the past 100 years, except by people fighting for their lives and refusing to die any more. The fascist ideas were rehabilitated after they became so unpopular that overt fascism in most of the world would have led to the rulers and their front groups being lynched. The true believers got to work as soon as the war ended, but it wasn't until the 1960s that it started to "work" - almost entirely on people who were too young to remember the war and what it really was. A law against serious discussion about the war events produced enough chilling effect in the academy, all of whom were exempt from the death cull that the world wars brought - just as they planned for the world. They laugh at you for lying to yourself about what fascism was. Laugh at you. Laugh at anyone who believes in this fag pablum sold to them, because they've been too afraid to even name their enemies, too eager to lick boot. Fags, pure fags.

>>481768
Why do you believe there is such a thing as "small government"? The very idea of capitalism will tell you the state and commanding heights will regulate economic life for the first time, in a way that was not known in the past nor workable. The idea that the government would be small is tripe sold to the dumber of the proprietors with a wink that they'll keep getting payola as their rivals are killed first for not being Nazi enough. There's some more fags for you, the "small government" cult that pretends a monopoly firm controlling all information will totally honor a pinky swear to not look. It's so fucking retarded if you think for five minutes, but fags do not think and insist everyone else must be as retarded as they are. Fucking fags.

If you look at the actually non-retarded neolibearals, they are not under any illusion that their government is small. They stripped down bureaucratic largesse and replaced it with private, imperial largesse, because one liability of the liberal order was its reliance on very large bureaucracies to maintain private property in a world where the conditions of socialism were met and became too obvious. So much wealth and effort was spent destroying anything that worked, because they simply did not want the people to live, and would pay exorbitant energy to uphold elitism - an elite that long ago ceased to have any justification, that has grown more incompetent at actually doing anything. They only need to poison the people faster than they succumb to their own crapulence, and that is the "safe" and "smart" strategy for elites. Aristocracies go far out of their way to not produce anything as a rule, because this puts them in a situation where they will have to keep producing and find a way to destroy any product so it doesn't reach the hands of commoners. Any product or value aristocracy wants is little more than the value of human suffering itself. Its chief commodities are opium, pornography, and all forms of rot that accelerate the death rate. That IS value now. That is what will replace capitalism, what will replace the remnants of the liberal order, and already has to a large extent. There is no "off button" for this. We're locked into it for at least 40 years, probably 50.

>>481779
>A law against serious discussion about the war events produced enough chilling effect in the academy
Interesting, elaborate?

>>481765
>neoliberalism is absolutely not to be conflated with fascism.
There are similarities tho, like both fascists and neoliberals steal from the public via privatization. They both serve the most reactionary chauvinistic imperial finance bourgoisie.

>fascism on the other hand is bringing a state in to resuscitate a domestic economy by forcefully suppressing revolutionary fervor and workers' movements.
Marget thatcher ordered death squats to break up miners strikes so…

Fascism distinguishes it self by committing national suicide on behalf of capital. That certainly is what Nazi Germany did in ww2.

>Neoliberalism at its core is about getting the government out of the way of capitalists so that idealized market forces can allow the formation of monopolies
Some neo-liberals are genuine free marketeers, but many neo-libs are not principled, they just side with monopolies, they toot the free market when it benefits monopolies, but they will seek government intervention to uphold monopolies when the market forces don't go their way.