If all it takes to cause famine is one country no longer sending aid, you are extremely vulnerable to that country. The desirable alternative is food sovereignty - under conditions of international pressure there may be scarcity but not starvation.

US whiteness is a social construct that serves to justify and reproduce marginalization: white supremacy. It started out excluding the Irish, Italians, the Spanish, Slavs, etc and shifted over time in order to maintain anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity. So it is far from just one thing and is simultaneously very recent. It would be best described as a culture of domination and capitalism, being a product of the US’ industrialization and then economic subjugation of the planet. Whiteness is about who you are better than and how entitled you are to a good life, or at least one better than non-whites. White culture is tolerating and even engaging in genocide so long as it is against non-whites. White culture is trying to pretend oppressions don’t need justice on any timeline that might inconvenience a white person. White culture is jingoist. The image of a warlike America has a white face.

As white people were largely drawn from European immigrants, they sometimes have watered-down elements of culture from “the old country”, Americanized to the point of being unrecognizable. Those elements were usually watered down because their immigrant ancestors were not considered white at the time so they tried to hide or erase identifiable cultural elements. Name changes. Modifications to food. Going to the whiter church. Skipping traditional holidays.

And of course, much is just white supremacy under capitalism. Processed industrialized foods. Commercialized holidays and events. Workaholic myths of paths to success. Everything cheaper or subsidized to their benefit and treated as an entitlement. National chauvinism and racist warmongering. Colonizer mindsets.

The purpose of these aid programs is cynical: they are to create exactly this kind of dependency. It is why food sovereignty is considered a threat and is actively undermined by the IMF.

What we are seeing is what threat is being made when a country is made dependent on “aid”: starvation. Same as in Gaza. This is the calculus the US and its cronies force upon the global south: submit to insecurity and become a dependency or try to go your own path and become villified and a target to be destroyed.

The former path is guaranteed death and suffering, which is why nations led by those with a coherent political program choose the latter and invest in food sovereignty as an anti-imperialist measure.

Thanks!

I would say that if a word has been misused for a century it actually just has a new meaning. And I’m not aware of it ever being used consistently.

I didn’t conflate antizionism and antisemitism - you conflated Zionism and Judaism and I criticized you doing so.

You should read what I wrote again.

Fun fact that runs parallel to your point: it’s not terrorism if you only destroy property.

Terrorism is defined as using violence (or the threat of violence), against civilians, in pursuit of a political goal. All 3 requirements must be met for it to be terrorism: violence, civilians, politics.

Many people who only damage property are still labeled as terrorists by the powers that be. The dictionary can be quite misleading, as it does not really analyze inconsistent usage, particularly for political or propaganda purposes.

For example, “ecoterrorists”. Classically labeled as such even when just destroying property. Or even sometimes just for slowing down logistics. Predominately First Nations protesters and activists were labelled “ecoterrorists” by Rick Orman, citing examples like chaining themselves to equipment.

The inconsistent usage has at least two means of biased use. I’ve already mentioned one, which is using the term for those damaging private property or slowing down enterprise, i.e. equating damage to private property as violence (when private enterprise seizes land or destroys water this is never called ecoterrorism). The other is in inconsistent application: it is a label only routinely used by the targets of capitalist-run states. When their states destroy entire cities and target civilians, it is not called terrorism. When their targets go after a politician insteas of strictly military installations, suddenly they are terrorists. Hell, they can be called terrorists even when going after only military targets. The actusl use of the term corresponds to the means used and the political and ethnic background of those engaging in the acts more than whether the acts are violence for political (isn’t everything political?) ends. Terrorism is when a car bomb and not a JDAM.

The real meaning of terrorism must be understood through describing its actual mainstream use. Descriptivism not prescriptivism, lest we miss the reality of propaganda. This is important because the term will continue to be used as I described and to justify rounding up protesters that occupy buildings or block highways or burn down a Tesla dealership. It doesn’t really matter ehat the dictionary says, tge law will say enough, the cops will arrest on orders of preventing “terrorism”, the judge will convict and sentence based on calling a dumpster fire terrorism, and one might even get sent to a black site to contain such “dangerous” people, “terrorists”.

And this is not new. Anarchists and other cool people were lazily labelled exactly the same way over a century ago for the same types of acts.

lmao trying to pretend that trying to leave a building you’ve been locked in by force, by cops, is protester violence.

You are, to put it mildly, full of shit. The only violence was the police beating and hurting protesters.

Please try to be more honest going forward.

lmao did you even read what I wrote about conflating private property damage and violence?

Sure, but let’s step back and analyze it a little more.

Protest itself does not achieve political change. Its usefulness is in direct action or in recruiting those present into further action, education, and organizations. Liberal protests are state-sanctioned parades. Real protests tend to have an actual action to take, demands to be met, people to impact, costs to incur on others.

The terminology of “peaceful protest” is already poisoned and should be questioned. The media and politicians - and those propagandized downstream, all conflate private property destruction and violence. If a protest breaks windows, suddenly it is no longer “peaceful” and can be rejected by the propagandized as invalid and not to be supported. The US is full of such good little piggies, happy to align with the ruling class picking their pocket and doing actual violence because they exist exclusively in a world of capitalist propaganda.

Under these auspices, all direct action that the capitalist system wants to crush is, will, and has been labelled terrorism. It’s already done this for private property destruction by environmentalists, peace activists during all major wars (except WWII, where American Nazis were coddled and of course did not damage private property), labor organizers, anti-segregation organizers, socialists, communists, Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans, etc. They happily do it again against anti-genocide protesters, particularly because they can play on the islamophobic use of the terrorism label at the same time. Like all fascistic logic, they must frame themselves as the true victims, so they also happily call every critic of Israel an antisemite.

All of this bombards the US population 24/7. Americans exist in a haze of accusations and terms they barely understand, trying to slot it into what could only charitably called an ideology - the naked reactionaries in red and the obfuscated reactionaries in blue.

All of this is to say that the greatest barrier in the US is education, and education begins with agitation, e.g. these protests in any form. Get as many people as possible to show up to the next thing, to organize the next thing, and spread knowledge.

A stunningly ignorant and antisemitic comment.

Jewish leaders? I assume you mean Israel, which despite that entity’s propaganda, cannot be conflated with Judaism.

Russia does not have a dictator. It is a capitalist oligarchy much like other counties, and they keep Putin as their face because he is good at what he does. With the support of the bourgeoisie and lsrge teams of bureaucrats and oligarchical functionaries, he can and will be replaced and there will be a full continuity of policy. Russia also has little historu of “trying to Annex Ukraine”. The area now known as Ukraine has been occupied by a number of nations (the territory was much smaller and constantly bullied by Poles and Lithuanians), but Ukrainian national identity, and its current borders, is something largely created within the last century at the behest of the USSR. Ukrainian national identity and independence was created by the inheritors of the Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks.

China, like any state, engages in “population control”, but this highlighting it as such - including the telltale sign of a Redditor brain Winnie the Pooh reference that nobody else actually cares about - is ignorant chauvinist orientalism. China is also not engaging in minority segregation. Quite the opposite.

The US, similarly, does not have a monarch. It is also run by the bourgeoisie, it is the global epicenter of the global haute bourgeoisie. Everything there happens with the consent and often prodding of that class and most political “change” is the result of fights between its members. The legislative branch could toss out, e.g., Trump, whenever it pleased, legally. Does it refuse to do so because Trump will send his knights to kill them? Because they hold land titles only at his pleasure? No, it is because they are all beholden to the same masters, the people who actually sign all of the checks, produce all of the media, and control production.

The “spats” in the Middle East are a continued Western-backed genocidal bombing campaign on Yemen, the only country in the region outside of Iran doing anything in solidarity witg Palestine, and a Western-backed Daesh/HTS takeover of Syria that makes Assad look like a kitten. Also very friendly with Israel, antagonistic to ethnic minorities, and belligerent towards Hezbollah.

India is trying to start a war. It already occupies Kashmir with massive troop levels. Taking land may be part of the plan, but their goal is really to weaken Pakistan and feed into Hindutvas via kneejerk nationalism.

The US was already the old Reich, history just whitewashes it. The US was the Third Reich’s biggest political influence. The US is premised on genocide, chattel slavery, and shifting tides of racism and marginalization to scapegoat and exclude to serve capital. Terrorizing Latines has a long history, this is a revival. The US bourgeoisie creates a contradiction, which is that it creates an economic underclass of largely latine immigrant workers of precarious legal status in order to hyperexploit their labor but then scapegoats them when eveyone else inevitably hits an economic diwnturn. Marginalization has always been used for this dual purpose in the US. Eugenics has been here, it is just whitewashed with racialized poverty being treated as “normal”. Death camps and work camps have been here, slowly ramping up over decades. The current volume actually isn’t that high compared to the last decade. It has been this bad, they just don’t put the spotlight on it.

Please educate yourself before speaking.

The country in question never denazified, it just banned Nazi aesthetics. The underlying practice of scapegoating and war and anticommunism were never dealt with. Nazis were kept and promoted in positions of power. There, the holocaust is taught as something focused solely on Jewish people, ignoring the systematic killing of communists, Roma, LGBTQ+, and slavs. Germans are taught to feel proud of their shame towards Jewish people and that are now experts at it, gladly admonishing anyone that, say, does not conflate Judaism with the genocidal apartheid settler colonial ethnic supremacist project known as Israel. This, of course, means that Germans remain deeply antisemitic, just with new aesthetics that, rather than scapegoat Jewish people, pigeonholes them into a violent project against brown people that must be supported at all costs.

Of course, there are Germans that do properly reckon with this history and are coherently against antisemitism and settler colonial genocide. They are the subject of this state crackdown, the state itself being an eager lapdog for US empire, happily complicit in yet another genocide.

Monarchy and fascism share some characteristics but the things that make fascism what it is don’t originate from Monarchism or a revanchism for monarchy in any sense. When fascism qua fascism arose in Europe it was a separate formation from monarchists, for example, who still existed in substantial numbers in those countries back then. Instead, fascism arose from declining material conditions in countries that were losing imperialist status, such as losing colonies or having large foreign debts after World War I, and this situation - and “solution” - were both highly capitalistic. Fascism recruits from the petty bourgeoisie for its foot soldiers at the behest of factions of the haute bourgeoisie.

Capitalism is proto-fascism. Fascism, to the extent that it exists beyond World War II, has often been reinvented for crises of capitalism, whether domestic or imposed through imperialism. And who did the fascists take so much inspuration? For the Nazis, it was the United States, a bourgeoisie democracy (capitalist) premised on genocide and slavery.

Im a migrant to Australia. It’s true Australia has loads of issues involving racism. That said I DO have the right to protest

You are often permitted to stand around ineffectually or be in a parade that has no impact - though not always, of course. Once your action becomes actually disruptive to capital or related institutions, they lean on their own rules and the law to arrest, punish, expel, and/or deport those involved. As a migrant, I recommend that you familiarize yourself with this reality but avoid participation unless you are ready to accept those outcomes (and do not tell anyone your legal status, including me).

The only resistance allowed under liberalism is that which has no real impact on the greater schemes. Capitalist media tells fairy tales about how politics works, but they are falsehoods that whitewash history and try to make us complacent.

and vote towards a better future.

There is rarely much alignment between what you can vote for and what you actually want. Capitalist politics places emphasis on fights and reforms around problems that it itself creates and exacerbates, making you focus on undoing various injustices while doing nothing about the major ones. It provides the illusion of control and bastardizes the term, “democracy”, distilling it down to occasional votes for controlled parties and not rejecting the will and needs of the people. Again, your country is premised on genocide and the theft of the land and practices of indigenous Australians. You are participating in that, you are extolling the virtues of voting for people who engage in that theft and disposession to this day, like making indigenous Australians afraid of speaking to social workers lest the white supremacist institutions take away their children using anti-indigenous bias.

Ask yourself what control you have over various political parties’ positions, how they function, and why some parties enjoy popularity and favorable media coverage and others struggle and are wrongly vilified. Is it democracy in action?

And I can, and do, get involved with my community to do what I can regarding those topics.

It is of course good to be in community.

Importantly though I can live in the country and not face racism daily nor often get treated differently because of the way I look.

I think you are more likely just unfamiliar with what Australian white supremacy looks like because there is absolutely zero chance that you don’t encounter such people on a daily basis. Like I said, try following beauty standards associated with your ethnicity(ies) and engaging in disruptive action and you will immediately and viscerally learn what is often unstated but nevertheless present and impacting interactions. Or do the opposite and model whiteness and see what hapoens. Even just having a white sounding nane will consistently give you an advantage on job applications, including by people who say they are not racist. The racism is deep and pervasive, baked into the everyday.

Regardless I’m obviously going to take the word of the actual Chinese migrants I know of, and the people I know living in China, over strangers on the internet

You don’t have to take my word. Just go to China yourself. Assuming any amount of your stories are true, you should remember that you are negatively stereotyping 1.4 billion people based on a handful of accounts of people of unstated age who decided to leave the country. As an immigrant you should be familiar with the pressure to praise the country you move to and denigrate the one you came from. Immigrants in my country say absolute 100% bullshit things about the countries they came from. It seems to help them fit in. Particularly with white people. Also do not forget that immigrants are often a highly biased sample of the people from a given country. For example, in OECD countries, Indian immigrants are disproportionately upper caste and professionals forwarding petty bourgeois ideals. They will tell you absolute bullshit about conditions in India, they will be disproportionately Hindu supremacists, islamophobic, casteist, and praise light skin. You must dig deepee to understand a large and multifaceted country.

You’re allowed to have your own opinions on it, I just don’t think it’s a great idea to hand wave the racism issues in China, particularly for people who are black or brown.

I haven’t hand-waved any racism, full stop.

The way you speak of these things is so vague and unqualified that you yourself are basically dancing around the fringes of racism. Do you not know what racist logic looks like, e.g. denigrating entire ethnic groups or nationalities based on rumors, anecdotes from “a friend”, and half-remembered guesswork?

As I have consistently stated, racism exists in China but it is a low racism country overall. As you have admitted, the racism you will tend to encounter in China is naivete and not something deeper and malicious, which is what Anglos project from the white supremacy they are familiar with and help maintain in the countries they live in. You are in Australia. Australia is an Anglo settler colonial project premised on the genocide of indigenous Australians. You say you prefer to live there rather than experience rumored racism in China from a vague host of Han people (Han Chinese can refer to people from many countries, regions, ages, etc). Presumably you don’t really care about indigenous Australians and are somewhat naive about what most white Australians think of you, and you are trying to get by as “one of the good ones”, i.e. the subtly white supremacist liberal approach to race and ethnic background. If not, I’d be curious about your perception of how you are treated when adopting beauty standards drawn from your ethnic background(s) and when you politically challenge the violent liberal status quo. When the cops come to break up your direct action on Palestine (do you do anything remotely challenging white supremacy?), who stands with you?

But contrary to what you’re thinking, you can get by just fine in China and advance. But you might not be in a society propped up by imperialism and genocide and therefore need to work longer hours on top of learning a new culture.

Re: my familiarity with China, I am completely confident in what I’m saying and don’t need to tell internet stories about friends or rumors I heard to pretend at knowledge to broad brush countries and ethnic groups. If you don’t believe me, just go yourself. It is very inexpensive for Australians and you can spend a week or two in advance finding people who actually integrated locally and traveled to show you the ropes.

Cool you have a friend and used it to broad brush 1.4 billion people.

Anglo settler ass logic.

Well you obviously haven’t been to or lived in China for any period of time and most likely have an idealistic view of the countr

Please do yourself a favor and depend a bit less on making things up about other people.

Chinas a great place but being ignorant to its rampant racism is just silly.

I am not ignorant of racism in China, I have already described what form it comes in. You have a chauvinistic view based on a lack of understanding and investigation.

Because you’re certainly wrong. Waste of time comment.

I am correct, actually. But you are behaving quite childishly, letting anyone still reading clock the insecurity.

That’s correct, it is effectively nonexistent. You’re projecting the pattern of white supremacy onto a culture you know nothing about.

Sounds good!

That it, generally speaking, false.