Absurdly, here is formerly progressive @democracynow and its co-host @nermeendn describing the CIA-backed fascist Afghan Mujahideen (which, with staunch US support, beheaded teachers who taught girls and threw acid in the face of women) as the "resistance" democracynow.org/2020/10/1/jama…
Reminder: Khashoggi was a lifelong defender of the Saudi monarchy who explicitly wrote, "I am not a dissident," and sought $2 million in Saudi funding to make a DC think tank, but got mad when rejected.
To understand the genocide in Gaza, it's important to recognize Zionism's roots in European colonialism.
Israel was not created due to the Nazi Holocaust. The British empire endorsed creating Israel in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when Europe was colonizing the Middle East🧵
It's not a coincidence that the Balfour Declaration came immediately after the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, in which the British and French empires carved up the Ottoman empire's territory and established their own colonies in the Middle East (West Asia).
Zionism was directly modeled after 19th-century European colonialist movements.
Zionist "founding father" Theodor Herzl wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, the genocidal colonizer of Africa, asking for help to colonize Palestine.
Herzl boasted that Zionism was "something colonial".
The neo-feudal corporate landlords at Apple are charging creators on Patreon a 30% fee for all new memberships registered using the iOS app.
It's the perfect symbol of the future of the economy -- neo-feudal rent extraction by corporate monopolies.
🧵This is how the scam works:
It all started with Big Tech corporations first offering supposedly "free" services (which were paid for by selling users' information).
Those "free" platforms soon became monopolies, and were so deeply embedded into the economy that they are now (privatized) digital utilities.
A 20th-century economy needed utilities like an electrical grid, water plants, sewage system, highways, etc.
These natural monopolies should be publicly owned, provided as public goods to prevent rent-seeking by corporate landlords (although neoliberals want them privatized too)
Russia was banned from the Olympics in 2019 due to doping. Now we know that the US has allowed athletes to use steroids (ie cheat) since at least 2011, with no punishment
Also, Russia was banned this year due to the war in Ukraine, but the US invaded Iraq and faced no punishment
What the US government calls the "Rules-Based International Order" is a global imperialist dictatorship, in which the US makes up "rules", and violates them whenever it's in its interests.
But then the US invades or sanctions foreign countries it accuses of breaking the "rules".
Before WWII even ended, the US government recruited genocidal Nazi monsters to launch its cold war on the Soviet Union.
Later, the CIA recruited Nazi spies like infamous criminal Reinhard Gehlen, Third Reich's spy chief on the Eastern Front, to continue Hitler's war on the USSR.
Many US corporations profited from investments in Nazi Germany, such as Chase Bank, Standard Oil, IBM, Ford, GM, Coca-Cola, and Kodak.
Hitler also got help from US Senator Prescott Bush, father of President George H W Bush, grandfather of George W Bush. theguardian.com/world/2004/sep…
Crucial point by prominent Palestinian scholar Joseph Massad:
"The claim that the Israel lobby controls US policy in the Middle East amounts to absolving the US of responsibility for its imperialist policies".
The US empire has always violently opposed anti-colonial struggles.
The US gov't has been an "implacable enemy of all national liberation groups".
"Why the US would then support Palestinian national liberation absent the Israel lobby is something this argument fails to address"
Blaming the Israel lobby for the Iraq War is absurd
The invasion of Iraq follows a consistent US imperial policy since WWII of overthrowing Third World states that control their national resources, land, oil, minerals
See: Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Venezuela & Iran today
Far-right billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel, a CIA-linked FBI informant who has funded Donald Trump and his "MAGA" allies, also funded a spy company that hacked WhatsApp. forbes.com/sites/thomasbr…
Libertarianism nearly always turns into fascism, because libertarians and fascists value private property and capital above human life.
Libertarians eventually realize that, to save capitalism, democracy must be destroyed. Pinochet is the textbook example