Shattering the mirror doesn’t change what is reflected.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2024

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  • I look at how after a generation or few, if material conditions aren’t choked by natural weather patterns or artificially, from embargos, war, or what have you, after farming and solid infrastructure takes root and evolves, treats can still be had, in addition to social services, hopefully with more fair exchange and cooperation with other states. The standard of living in China seems greatly improved, for example. Of course we’ve done terrible injustice to our habitat, so conditions are shifting and will be challenging, but I’m fairly confident if we include our habitat in our plans, we can mitigate a good bit of the damage already done.




  • Do you live in the paradise that you were promised in exchange for betraying your country?

    And that’s a part of naivety. The trailblazer knows it’s going to take hard work, diligence, and vigilance to get and keep us where we want to be, or at least from erosion of that we fight for, the fruit of which the first (or new) generation of thinkers, fighters, laborers may never see. Each generation that comes after gets more comfortable, more complacent. I feel that’s one of the things Castro got right, but also that the continued embargo and other Western pressures and aggressions definitely helped reinforce. A pity other socialist states didn’t look to the Cuban and Korean people for strength and resilience, and took bait after bait of aid and deals from modern imperialist states.

    I really have it in my mind to dig into the juche philosophy at some point.


  • As legal scholar Samuel Moyn has extensively documented, the Accords played a pivotal role in decisively shifting mainstream rights discourse away from any and all economic or social considerations. More gravely, per Moyn, “the idea of human rights” was converted “into a warrant for shaming state oppressors.” Resultantly, Western imperialist brutality against purported foreign rights abusers - including sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention - could be justified, frequently assisted by the ostensibly neutral findings of organisations such as Amnesty International, and HRW…

    Go figure.

    In 1981, Czechoslovak playwright and Charter 77 spokesperson Zdena Tominová conducted a tour of the West. In a speech in Dublin, Ireland, she spoke of how she’d witnessed first-hand how her country’s population had benefited enormously from the state’s Communist policies. Tominová made clear she sought to fully maintain all its public-wide economic and social benefits, while adopting Western-style political freedoms only. It was a shocking statement to make for a woman who’d risked imprisonment to oppose her government with foreign help so publicly: “All of a sudden, I was not underprivileged and could do everything…I think that, if this world has a future, it is as a socialist society, which I understand to mean a society where nobody has priorities just because he happens to come from a rich family,” Tominová declared. She moreover made clear her vision was global in nature - “the world of social justice for all people has to come about.” But this was not to be. Instead, Eastern Bloc countries suffered deeply ravaging transitions to capitalism via “shock therapy”, eradicating much of what citizens held dear about the systems under which they’d previously lived. They were thrust into a wholly new world, where hitherto unknown homelessness, hunger, inequality, unemployment, and other societal ills became commonplace, rather than prevented by basic state guarantee. After all, as decreed by the Helsinki Accords, such phenomena didn’t constitute egregious breaches of “human rights”, but instead were the unavoidable product of the very political “freedom” for which they had fought.

    As the fruits of Western labor go more to the owner class, Western workers will see through the illusion. The longer that takes, the more difficult extraction from the Web will be.