Only if Taiwan pursues any unilateral moves. It’s up to the CPC to determine whether those moves, whether allowing US military occupation, pursuing nuclear proliferation or outright secession, meets its “red line” for action.

Personally, I’ve always held the view that Taiwan is a big kabuki theater. Talking to geopolitically minded Chinese comrades about it gives you the impression that “Taiwan reunification” is the biggest case of inter-generational blue balls in modern history. Akin to the highly anticipated and fear-mongered, but ultimately merely rhetorical, liberation of West Berlin in the original Cold War.

Pragmatically speaking, China (or rather, socialist China) benefits from the contrast that Taiwan brings. It’s the fabled, fantasized alternate “democratic free” China pursuing electoralism and all the Western hurrah words, manifested dialectically in reality. Yet all of that only evidently amounting to a population where a large portion simply wishes they were Japanese instead. All the while being poorer nowadays than many of the likes of their Shanghai or Shenzhen counterparts. It could be said that it’s perhaps preferable for the CPC to maintain Taiwan as a reverse East German-style foil and that the CPC ultimately found a way to make lemonade out of lemons through the present state of the Taiwan status quo.

Geopolitically speaking, Taiwan has been relatively “worthless” historically. It says quite a lot that in spite of being a strait away from one of the oldest polities in human history, the first group to formally incorporate the island was Spain. The only use of the island is as a base against mainland China, which is why the Ming retreated to the island following the establishment of the Qing (later indeed using the island as an attack vector during the Revolt of the Three Feudatories) and the KMT followed in the Ming’s footsteps. In a purely geopolitical stance, China doesn’t need to necessarily possess the island itself, only merely prevent any hostile actors (the ROC itself, the West, Japan, etc.) from weaponizing the island as a dagger against the mainland.

The way that the Japanese/American-occupied Ryukyus and the Philippines’ Batanes islands juts toward Taiwan like pincers means that possessing Taiwan itself without addressing the former would not fundamentally solve the issue of China’s access beyond the “First Island Chain.” As such, any war for Taiwan without addressing the wider regional status quo of American control would merely be kicking the can down the road from a geopolitical standpoint.

I’d personally argue this is the biggest reversal, bar none other, in terms of the contrast between the first Cold War and this new cold war. The more ascetic leftists may be rather put off by this dynamic but it is a paradigm shift that places the West in the dilemma the 20th century socialist bloc was held under, which the (now late) Michael Parenti articulated in “Blackshirts and Reds.”

The human capacity for discontent should not be underestimated. People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have. Leading professionals who had attained relatively good living standards wanted to dress better, travel abroad, and enjoy the more abundant life styles available to people of means in the capitalist world.

It was this desire for greater affluence rather than the quest for political freedom that motivated most of those who emigrated to the West. Material wants were mentioned far more often than the lack of democracy. […]

[…] In 1989, I asked the GDR ambassador in Washington, D.C. why his country made such junky two-cylinder cars. He said the goal was to develop good public transportation and discourage the use of costly private vehicles. But when asked to choose between a rational, efficient, economically sound and ecologically sane mass transportation system or an automobile with its instant mobility, special status, privacy, and personal empowerment, the East Germans went for the latter, as do most people in the world. The ambassador added ruefully: “We thought building a good society would make good people. That’s not always true.” Whether or not it was a good society, at least he was belatedly recognizing the discrepancy between public ideology and private desire.

I think after nearly a month now, the dust has settled enough to try at some material analysis of the consequences of Maduro and Cilia Flores’ abduction. This will not be a very “bloomer” ‘el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido’ post, but I’ll try not to unnecessarily stress any grim pronouncements.

The point (or rather, benefit) of the episode for American objectives isn’t necessarily regime change (though this has, of course, been technically accomplished with the abduction of the elected executive), but to personalize geopolitics. There exist contradictions between the interests of a nation (including but not exclusively its collective people), its state apparatus, and its individual leadership. For the most part, these interests are generally aligned, but there will always exist gaps and material differences. This can be (and historically has been) exploited.

The consequences of this range from a complete (though generally temporary) disorientation of an adversary’s leadership dynamic (such as the Romans kidnapping/eliminating Germanic chieftains like the famous Arminius and his family or Armenian/Parthian kings), to engendering shifts in grand strategy and geopolitical policy (such as the Ming becoming insular and defensive after the capture of the emperor Yingzong), to creating interpersonal compromises that would not otherwise be possible (Churchill allegedly working out the European balance of power with Stalin, including the abandonment of the Italian and Greek communists, over “a napkin paper”).

This latter point is why Trump insists on person-to-person meetings with top leadership from designated adversaries like Xi or Putin (or Kim during his first term). This is also how the USSR was brought down by the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl; the personal rapport they built with Gorbachev manifested an intense anxiety within the latter not to “disappoint” his “friends,” which limited his scope of actions (not just feasibly but even cognitively) in response to the secession of the SSRs and the likes of Yeltsin (who himself would fall under a similar snare with Bush and Clinton). Analyses ranging from liberals like Zubok to Marxist-Leninists like Keeran & Kenny have all commented on this relationship dilemma as a reason why Gorbachev (deliberately and consciously) did not follow in Deng’s footsteps (noting that the Chinese response to the Tiananmen counter-revolution, and the subsequent Western propaganda backlash, actually preceded most of the counter-revolutions that would follow in other socialist states, which is a chronological relationship not often fully appreciated).

This does not imply the “Great Man of History” thesis is actually valid, but rather that the influences of the individual and the collective exist in a dialectical relationship instead of a zero-sum state.

With a month’s distance, it can be argued that Maduro’s abduction successfully serves as an example to cow the rest of the world, but this statement requires further nuance. Yes, Venezuela still largely endures and the PSUV hasn’t yet become compradors, but those would have been secondary benefits. The message isn’t to the Venezuelan people but to political leadership in especially (but not limited to) the Global South: the taboo of the personalization of geopolitics not only no longer exists as a deterrence, but that there are also no true consequences to breaches of that taboo against them and their loved ones.

It shows that the country doesn’t necessarily need its particular leadership to endure, but this fact serves to isolate that particular leadership from its people and government, by driving a cognitive and material wedge between the alignment of their interests. This fact has been repeatedly pointed out by leftists since the episode as a way to bolster morale, but without appreciation that the particular leadership being personally captured, humiliated, and treated as a criminal (alongside their partner) won’t share that view. Overall, there has been zero real blowback in general, but also none whatsoever to the benefit of Maduro’s rescue and liberation. It shows that the US could walk in, remove the top leadership, and yet leave the country alone; the country moves on, but the leadership is effectively abandoned to the whims of the United States. This exerts a moderating and coercive influence on any successors.

This abduction takes advantage of the contradictions between the interests of a political leadership and the country’s own interests by honing in on and weaponizing the gap. People are obviously loath to give Trump and his minions any credit, but this doesn’t even need to be the Trump administration’s original intent. The important thing is that these consequences are always retrospectively self-rationalizing, and this is an inevitable perception that will manifest particularly within the leadership of any designated adversaries vulnerable to what was done in Venezuela.

This may provide a material basis to explain any future actions by political leadership not just in Venezuela, but also elsewhere in the Global South that appear to go against the interests of their country, even and especially if that particular leadership has seemingly demonstrated their “bona fides” to certain principled positions in the past.

It’s the “They killed someone, but they did it for a good reason” versus “They did it for a good reason, but they killed someone” sleight of hand.

You can adopt any concept and so long as you have total discourse, media and educational dominance like the modern West does, which prevents any serious counter-narratives from spreading, it will still serve your interests as long as you frame it correctly.

I haven’t watched this latest instalment but I bet eventually, one of the dramatic narrative arcs will be that, caught up by the atrocities that the humans commit against the indigenous people, one of the protagonist’s children/friends/loved one will allow their “emotions to understandably get the better of them” and start to “fight fire with fire” beyond the protagonist’s moral comfort level. They’ll have a conflict. The plot will then contrive its way to affirm that the character who took things too far was wrong and that the protagonist was right to be conflicted. Nia Frome coined this trope as “The Swerve”

Here’s another on: I bet at the end of this box office revenue milk farm of a series, the indigenous population will either work out an understanding with the humans so that the latter can continue to exploit the land under an “equal partnership” or the last scene will be the humans realizing their fault, and one of them nodding to the protagonist before embarking on the departing ship, without the fight ever being taken to Earth itself.

No revenge, no reparations, no reprisals, no blowback. You don’t need to forgive, but you must forget. Peace is contingent on the victim unilaterally promising everything that’s happened is water under the bridge and the colonizer walking away in confidence that this chapter has been closed and a new leaf imposed (which is to say, the colonizer will get to enjoy the position of “victim” if the victim ever wants to unilaterally revisit the issue). That would be one of many ways in how to create a pro-colonial “anti-colonial” narrative.

Slowly but surely, their gaming industry will work their way into ushering in the Korean War/Fatherland Liberation War/War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea anti-American FPS gaming era that leftists have long been waiting for.

Millennial and Gen Z gamers/redditors will then finally contribute their part to propping up Western GDP growth through the dentures industry once they’ve gnashed their teeth to stubs at the anti-American FPS “overcapacity” while clutching their grimy CD copies of Battlefield 4 (the last major anti-Chinese FPS before Western execs figured they’d need to ditch the overt sinophobia for some access to the massive Chinese gaming market).

Yesterday was Mao’s birthday and Chinese game developer Hoothanes released a new gameplay trailer for their game “The Defiant” set in WW2 China.

Pretty “Internationale” news worthy because this might actually make it the first time ever (at 5:00 in the video) I think the song has been used in a game trailer (I can’t recall any games in general that used it at all either).

These so-called “verbatim” memoranda add further indication onto the pile that the West fundamentally doesn’t respect Russia through the entire post-Cold War period and why should they? The USSR was locked in a near half-century confrontation with the West. The inevitable battle lines were expected for decades to cut through the middle of Germany and then suddenly, without any concessions or sacrifice whatsoever, socialist Europe collapsed through Gorbachev’s actions and the frontier of NATO moved from central Europe into the USSR itself.

As Putin puts it, “Soviet power changed the world, voluntarily. And Russians gave up thousands of square kilometers of territory, voluntarily. Unheard of. Ukraine, part of Russia for centuries, given away. Kazakhstan, given away. The Caucasus, too. Hard to imagine, and done by party bosses.”

But the truth is that of Mao’s: political power grows from the barrel of a gun. You have nothing if you gave away the gun. The West knows exactly what Russia sacrificed, and the unspoken reality whenever they hear Putin bring this up is that they couldn’t be happier with what Russia did. Because now, rather than fighting it out in West Berlin, the West gets to pitch the two largest former SSRs against each other. Even the junior partners of the first Cold War are validated in their vassalage because the battlefields are now safely far away from even these original sacrificial pawns.

Why would anyone bargain or cooperate with an adversary that might get hijacked by a comprador and give away the whole house to you without having to negotiate anything in return, so long as you be patient and wait? This has been the operating geopolitical mentality of the West since the Cold War, which is to say that they only have to squeeze their eyes shut and hold out for the escalating nightmare to end. This is the true psychological source of all those endless “[insert adversary here] collapse” fantasies and makes the West incapable of respecting or acknowledging any contemporary counterparts.

You can see Putin begging to join the West without Russia being reduced to a junior US partner. In response to Bush stating (both amusingly underestimating the speed of change and also echoing the current Trump rhetoric about Russia): “Russia belongs to the West; it is not an enemy. In 50 years, China could become a big problem. Russia’s interests lie with the West. And you should be like the West,” Putin apparently cautioned (which has now completely come to pass): “What you said about 50 years in the future is important. Russia is European and multi-ethnic, like the United States. I can imagine us becoming allies. Only dire need could make us allied with others. But we feel left out of NATO.”

Having observed this for a while now, I’m uncertain whether all these imposed “cancel Japan” decisions at a grassroots level will produce any positive effects if the CPC itself is unwilling to make any substantive governmental responses, aside from diplomatically scolding Japan at the MoFA level, citing the UN Charter and cancelling some random seafood imports. It’s been a month since the threat of war by the fascistic Japanese PM and there doesn’t seem to have been a real governmental inclination to do anything in response.

This presently just seems to be leading to overzealous low-level government officials trying to show off by (allegedly) tearing away the mic from Japanese performers in China mid-performance and all these “bona fides” demonstrating acts like video game devs cancelling Japanese-themed content expansions, cancelling flights to Japan and (purportedly here) discouraging Japanese media at conventions.

Even though it’s all been done in a fairly heavy-handed way, there’s nothing wrong with these things per se. The West certainly lost any moral high ground given the far more ridiculous Western censorship and banning of Russian content following the Ukraine escalation in 2022. Still, I don’t see the practical value in trimming down the weeb population or supporting these individual-level restrictions if the government itself isn’t going to leverage the shift in public sentiment for any geopolitical use.

The well has likely been poisoned in our generation due to the ongoing Palestinian genocide, which not only shows what a modern-day genocide looks like but also reflects the West’s current contradictory desire to downplay the term “genocide” so that no one can say “what about Gaza.” Incidentally, this is when natopedia changed its article title about Xinjiang from “cultural genocide of the …” to “repression of the …” I’d imagine it’s hard to sustain a “muslim genocide” gimmick against the designated adversary when you’re simultaneously pumping out actual depraved genocide denial articles like “Is there a genocide in Gaza? Why legal experts are split” or “Abusing the word ‘genocide’ about Israel is dangerous and spectacularly ignorant”.

That doesn’t mean they won’t eventually reuse their propaganda. I was recently surprised to discover that the concept of the Xinjiang predecessor, the so-called “Holodomor” and “Ukrainian famine,” was set in motion in the 1930s but only truly gained momentum in the 80s when Reagan launched a focused propaganda campaign, which can be seen in this Google ngrams. After the fall of the USSR, the newly independent Ukrainian state was compelled to adopt it as a national myth, using it to shame and later persecute political groups that sought to maintain ties with Russia which inevitably contributed to the present conflict. They aren’t just targeting the current generation with this propaganda but also preserving a set of atrocity myth lore that can be dusted off and brought out if the timing becomes more opportune.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I wrote a comment a while ago with my own thoughts on this phenomenon.

In a sense, most of it is intentional and every leftist from formerly socialist Europe can attest to the reactionary overcompensation of regional cognition, where the only way to become “white” and “European” and “Western” is to prove one’s anti-communist bona fides with the zeal of a new convert. These are societies where an entire past half century has been completely repudiated and hollowed out in collective memory, leaving a vacuum that people searching for national pride and identity generally fill by looking back to the reactionary, often monarchical or fascist, regimes before socialism. These sentiments are of course encouraged by the political and educational regimes, where communism has been made an illegal thought-crime across most of formerly socialist Europe and it is openly seen as much more preferable for the population to swing towards fascism than socialism.

I think to further refine @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml’s comment, one important skill as a leftist is to build on one’s ability to think dialectically. One way to overcome liberal propaganda is to engage with it, process its arguments and still come out saying “No.” The failure to do this is why you have all those “Why I left the Left” grifters where their origin story is that they were once the “model Marxist Leninist” but then were enlightened because some redditor one day spammed them with the NATOpedia article on Tiananmen.

If everyone could do that, there would be no need for AES to protect themselves from the modern West’s propaganda system, the most comprehensive discourse hegemony in history.

This is why, if you read Marx and Lenin, they sound at times like they would be the most terminally online debate bros today because a bulk of their writings are just constantly dunking on Bakunin, Kautsky, The Economist or various other political talking heads. Yet in spite of their obsession in exposing themselves to slop, they maintained the integrity of their beliefs.

On the other hand, the alternate side of dialectics entails that this does not mean you need to spend your day reading just NYT or FT articles. Some “leftists” do this, where they have clearly never heard of Parenti/Losurdo/Amin or even the 20th century heavyweights like Fanon, Rodney, and Sakai. We need to support leftist information and content, especially because in the West, they are suppressed and leftist authors/platforms are suffocated of support like African Stream was. That’s why it’s also just as disappointing to see leftists who get all their information from liberal media and academic materials.

The renowned Mexican historian Miguel León-Portilla’s 1962 book “Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico” compiles Aztec primary source documents where the trauma of what Spain inflicted really reaches across the centuries to agonizing parallels with modern day Palestinian accounts of suffering.

I remember, I will establish a little temple where we will place the new god that the men from Castile have given us. Truly this new god wants us to worship him. What will we do, my sons? Let us receive the water on our heads [be baptized], let us give ourselves to the men of Castile, perhaps in this way they will not kill us.

Let us remain here. Do not trespass [by] going on another’s land, perhaps in this way they will not kill us. Let us follow them; thus, perhaps we will awaken their compassion. It will be good if we surrender entirely to them. Oh, that the true god who resides in heaven will help us [coexist] close to the men of Castile.

And in order that they will not kill us, we will not claim all our lands. We will reduce in length the extension of our lands, and that which remains, our fathers will defend.

Now I declare that, in order for them not to kill us, . . . we accept to have water poured on our heads, that we worship the new god, as I declare he is the same as the one we had.

Now I reduce in length our lands. Thus it will be. Their limits will begin in the direction from which the sun rises and continue . . . [he mentions each of the limits].

I presume that for this small piece of land they will not kill us. It does not matter that it was much larger. This is my decision because I do not want my sons to be killed.

Therefore, we will work only this little piece of land, and thus our sons will do so. Let us hope in this manner they will not kill us.

Edit: Here’s an old comment of mine sharing more excerpts from this book, with accounts of the Fiesta of Toxatl Massacre committed by the Spanish and the suffering endured during the Spanish siege of the city.

There’s no such thing as “Bosnian sovereignty” given that, under the Dayton Accords, the country is a colony ruled by a viceroy dubbed the “High Representative.” The current viceroy is an ex-CSU Merkel-era cabinet minister from Germany, Christian Schmidt. As is the case with all these washed up political low-rungers across the history of colonialism getting newfound authority under a colonial role, they turn into power-tripping freaks that would make subreddit moderators swoon.

In 2023, Schmidt used the “Bonn powers” proscribed under Dayton to amend the Bosnian criminal code to literally criminalize, in the actual legal header of the new article, the “Failure to Implement Decisions of the High Representative,” which sets out a criminal charge for any “responsible person” that fails to:

implement, enforce or otherwise comply with a decision of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or who prevents or otherwise obstructs its application, implementation or enforcement, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term between six months and five years.

The present Republika Srpska issue arises because, in 2023, the autonomous region’s president, Milorad Dodik, (the “Bosnian Serb leader”) issued legislation blocking entry of the colonial viceroy’s decrees into the autonomous region’s gazette recording published acts and passed laws on defamation that had been previously annulled by Schmidt.

The colonial regime’s legal appendage then acted to use the newly amended Criminal Code against Dodik. In February of this year, he was stripped of his presidential office and sentenced to a year in prison and banned from political office for six years. The sentence was appealed to the “Constitutional Court,” a court of final appeal where three of the nine judges are foreigners appointed by the President of the “European Court of Human Rights,” which upheld the sentence for “non-compliance with the decisions of Christian Schmidt” early this month.

Bosnia is a good case example of the Western liberal “rules-based order’s” depravity, its utter moral bankruptcy and its innate talent for projection. On the one hand, you have them screaming bloody murder every time they see Chinese takeout food as “Chinese foreign interference” or “Beijing’s growing influence,” on the other hand, framing any resistance to literal modern day colonial projects as “Dodik’s defiance, echoed by Serbia, Hungary, and Russia, reveals an illiberal axis wielding sovereignty rhetoric to undercut EU authority”. Incidentally, on the exact same day as this judgment, the European Council for Foreign Relations published an article about “Reading China’s Playbook in the Western Balkans” where they congratulate themselves for rescuing “Montenegro from falling into debt bondage with China” and “raising fears that new member states could act as promoters of Chinese interests” in the region, which reads as satire when juxtaposed with what they’ve been doing with their actual colonial fiefdom in Bosnia.

If you remove the context, the legal argument Dodik used in his appeal, which was that “Schmidt had no authority to intervene in the criminal code, saying only the national parliament was empowered to do so,” could easily be mistaken for one of those Western international law journal editorials railing against the “erosion of democracy” by strongmen in designated adversary countries like Venezuela. In case anyone feels an excess of individual sympathy for Dodik, he’s one of those generic right-wing Eastern European Orban clones, down to his Israeli sycophancy, visiting the site of the October 7 “Nova Music Festival Massacre” to try to drum up support, so this is moreso one of those “worst person you know just made a great point” situations.

The case of Bosnia today really drives home that there’s no meaningful difference between the openly imperialist depravity of the West a century ago and the West today. The only real change since then is that, externally as a limiting factor, a few other nations nowadays have the military capabilities to deter Western expressions of our sociopathy from being directed them, because it really is just like Fanon said: “colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Nothing really exceptional in these leaked transcripts in terms of tone. This is just how diplomats typically talk, it’s a sort of “casual formality,” equally candid and duplicitous, when they aren’t performing for their domestic audiences. It’s only the Reddit and Twitter NATO shitlibs who would be surprised by the tenor of these kind of conversations because they think diplomats talk to each other like they do screaming against designated tankies in r/worldnews threads.

If people here want to see some really interesting historical diplomatic transcripts, I’d recommend reading through the declassified portions of the top secret Kissinger transcripts with adversary diplomatic interlocutors like Zhou Enlai and Brezhnev along with Gerald Ford’s meetings with Mao himself. Him talking to Zhou Enlai about the CIA’s “innocence” in culpability for the Chilean 9/11 reactionary coup and Allende’s murder gives quite the Christian Bale talking to Willem Dafoe’s detective character from American Psycho vibes with the asymmetry of information at play in retrospect.

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/publications/DOC_readers/kissinger/docs/index.html

Right on the 100th anniversary of Gitlow v New York. History rhymes right on time.

Gitlow, who had been arrested in the raids, would be charged under New York’s post–McKinley assassination legislation, the criminal anarchy law.

Gitlow’s crime, such as it was, was distributing something called the “Left Wing Manifesto,” a document that emerged out of contention within the then-dominant Socialist Party.

According to that manifesto, “The old order is in decay. Civilization is in collapse. The proletarian revolution and the Communist reconstruction of society—the struggle for these—is now indispensable. This is the message of the Communist International to the workers of the world.” For the New York criminal justice system, such writing was a clear example of flagrant violation of their legislation.

At his trial in January 1920, Gitlow was convicted and sentenced to five to ten years in prison. After appealing all the way to the Supreme Court, the conviction was upheld. The opinion delivered in 1925 by Justice Edward Sanford was ominous: “A State may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means. These imperil its own existence as a constitutional State. Freedom of speech and press . . . does not protect disturbances to the public peace or the attempt to subvert the government.”

Leonard, Aaron J. 2025. Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism.

This rag, where the editors all hide behind anonymous bylines (and when they do reveal themselves, they predictably turn out to be ghouls like the failson of a MI6 director), has been consistently on the wrong side of history since its inception. Its founder got his wealth from the opium trade and the Economist defended and advocated for both Opium Wars along with vocally supporting the Confederacy. And those are just merely listing the things that Marx himself denounced them for. Proving their talent of writing cowardly anonymized depraved trash transcend both time and genre, their book review section includes shamelessly scolding scholars for writing books about the history of slavery where, for some reason, “almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.”

“What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself without anybody being aware of it? This society is no society, it is as Rousseau says, a desert inhabited by wild animals.” - Peuchet, quoted by Marx

Most major US bases have a long history of atrocity complicity and imperialist utility, like the Kadena AFB and other bases in the occupied Ryukus or Guam or the joint UK/US Diego Garcia base in Chagos. You’ll probably be able to better orient yourself with a more general overview, however.

David Vine is a notable author and subject matter expert on the topic. He’s a soc dem rather than a leftist, but this just means you can reference his work to a general audience without them flinching in terror or cite it in an academic paper if you need to write one since they’re published by university presses. I recommend his 2020 book “The United States of war: a global history of America’s endless conflicts, from Columbus to the Islamic State,” which you can find on various online repositories like Anna’s Archive/Z-Library. His website has a great deal of US base world maps and he has an excel spreadsheet where he tries to track all publicly known US bases worldwide.

He also wrote a 2009 book “Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia” specifically on the occupation of Mauritius’ Chagos (which incidentally was just recently compelled to sign an unequal treaty with the UK to convert the base into a Hong Kong-style colonial leasehold).

Is it really? I don’t think so.

This seems like “what if ‘Birth of a Nation’ could be narratively reclaimed somehow as a film celebrating black liberation and condemning white supremacy” territory of discourse. I’m not interested in it because it’s plainly not how the majority of people would reasonably see it and that’s the only thing that matters in a consequentialist media analysis. The author’s intention, whether they somehow actually intended this to be a 500 IQ veiled critique against the bourgeoisie, are irrelevant. Most people see the “demons” in the same uncritical and unambiguous light as they see every DnD “ontologically evil,” which DnD itself lifted from Tolkien.

This confusion seems to appear because people hardly ever actually take a look at the rhetorical structure of that kind of racial and intercultural discourse. There’s two levels. There’s the level at ontology, which is that “this external group is weak and inferior and deserves to be taken advantage of by us.” Then there’s the level at epistemology, which that “this external group is a bunch of bloodthirsty savages because they only know violence and are the actual aggressors.” This is actually the definition of fascism as laid out by Umberto Eco, which is that “the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” In real terms, they are weak (which justifies attacking them on a material basis), but in cognitive terms, they are strong (which justifies attacking them on a ideological basis, as it would be an act of bravery and heroism).

Take a look at the American Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t say “the ‘Indians’ are weak and therefore their inferiority justifies our conquest of their lands,” it frames the case against them in the exact precise terms you’ve laid out, where all the characteristics and qualities of the aggressor are projected upon their victim: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Never get between online leftists and their treats. Scratch a lib and a fascist bleeds; scratch a online leftist’s favorite media and a lib bleeds.

This fictional concept of a “ontological evil” species is obviously not supported by any real-world “ontological” basis. The application of “evil” as an exonym to appellate against external cultures or races has had monstrous historical and present-day consequences. The unfalsifiable idea that a certain race or culture is merely pretending to be civilized and sentient “while in reality, as we all know wink wink they are actually evil and un-persons” has such an abundance of parallels to historical racial discourse, genocide and prejudice that it’s comical and unsettling in equal measure that people would use it as apologia for their fictional media.

I said this years ago in a discussion about Tolkien (a racist POS) and his characterization of the orcs:

It’s very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkien in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization (that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples, as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving “other” peoples), simply continued it within the confines of “fictionalized” races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkien admitted).