It's quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They're not.

"Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you're the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying."

This is where the moronic "maybe the curtains are just blue" reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn't a racist caricature, it's just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they're less intelligent; that they're inherently subservient to men; that they "belong in the kitchen"; that they should be "barefoot and pregnant"; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said "Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they're the real sexists, not conservatives?" then you would, hopefully (though I'm not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible "Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!" analysis.

Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it's allowed to be the exception is because it's a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world's oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it's also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you're not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).

Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there's a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it's extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase "... has a right to exist", it's always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this "right" in the West's eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn't. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.

There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it's one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas' victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of "X hates Y and so they're fighting" obfuscates a lot of what's actually going on geopolitically. It's extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn't mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.

This isn't to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn't just some inherently religious war.

A lot of the western "left" has a fetish with defeat and struggle. The moment the oppressed take things into their own hands, make advances never seen before, overthrow their oppressor, and start rebuilding post-war, the western left tends to stop giving a shit and abandon what's now has "lost its charm".

I imagine for many western "leftists" in these last few days, you can see the moment that they turned from "Poor Palestinians :( being oppressed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, I support their struggles and protests, we need to find a solution, let's go BDS!" defeat fetishism, looking on with concealed glee as Palestinians martyred themselves in relatively non-violent protests, and turned to "Okay, the unspeakable violence of Gazans towards Israeli civilians has GOT TO STOP. We need a ceasefire now, or the Gazans will get what's coming to them!"

An evergreen quote from MLK: "First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."

Key Events in the timeline of X Bad Communist Country:

• Previous government which had some issues but could have been worked out through dialogue, debate, and reforms, is brutally overthrown by violent ideological communist terrorists
• Those terrorists evilly steal and pillage the institutions of that previous government and brutally loot the businesses of hard-working citizens, giving them to the lazy, inferior, unwashed masses
• As a consequence of this, the country falls into abject poverty, with breadlines and freedom of speech brutally repressed for decades.
• We put sanctions on them AFTER this. ABSOLUTELY 100% AFTER. I cannot stress enough that the sanctions did NOT cause the former thing to happen, it was only AFTERWARDS. But it's also fine if they did cause suffering because those people are bad and inferior anyway.
• Protests from people yearning for freedom in this brutal communist regime occur and are brutally crushed, brutally. Thousan-- tens of tho-- HUNDREDS of thousands of people are murdered by state forces and their bodies washed into sewers so there's no evidence of this happening, but it did definitely occur. Five million people are killed in this genocide, which claimed twenty million lives over a 20 year period; this truly awful crime of humanity killed fifty million people, and-- ah, this just in, that genocide actually killed seventy million, more than previous estimates from seven seconds ago, and-- did I hear eighty million from the gentleman in the back? 85 mil-- 90 million! Going, going-- a HUNDRED MILLION, to the fine person in row 5, going, going, and... SOLD!
• Eventually, the communist regime collapses due to corruption, mismanagement, and a lack of respect for basic human nature. We help them institute democracy in the aftermath and restore those hard-working businessowners to their rightful position above the masses who destroyed their country out of lack of work ethic / This communist country is a mere 5 days from complete collapse because none of the people in charge have any knowledge of even Economics 101, and are too stupid to figure out how to save their economies via privatization.

perhaps North Korea might be in a better condition if the United States didn't murder a fifth of their entire population and raze every single building to the ground

North Korea’s considerable economic achievements since liberation were all but completely wiped out by the war. By 1949, after two years of a planned economy, North Korea had recovery from the post-liberation chaos, and economic output had reached the level of the colonial period. Plans for 1950 were to increase output again by a third in the North, and the DPRK leadership had expected further economic gains following integration with the agriculturally more productive South after unification. According to DPRK figures, the war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes. Most of the destruction occurred in 1950 and 1951. To escape the bombing, entire factories were moved underground, along with schools, hospitals, government offices, and much of the population. Agriculture was devastated, and famine loomed. Peasants hid underground during the day and came out to farm at night. Destruction of livestock, shortages of seed, farm tools, and fertilizer, and loss of manpower reduced agricultural production to the level of bare subsistence at best. The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referred to 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials,” a phrase revived in the famine years of the 1990s. Worse was yet to come. By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans. Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine.

you don't really have to support Putin per se, many of us including myself would feel glee watching him be put up against a wall by communist revolutionaries, but supporting NATO is a pretty big dealbreaker given NATO's imperialist and fascist history. e.g. Several Nazi German officials being put into NATO's government. Gladio and funding of fascist stay-behind groups in the event of Soviet invasion. Yugoslavia. Libya. I certainly want NATO to be destroyed, hopefully from within rather than without to prevent nuclear war, and unfortunately for us, the reactionary state of Russia seems to be the best bet to maybe have that eventually occur.

also, stop calling things "wars of aggression" unless you're going to call everything a war of aggression, my god. what an annoying thought-terminating cliche.

the only people trivializing fascism are those who see fascism symbology like the swastika, Black Sun, various nordic runes, etc on the soldiers they're egging on and go "doesn't look like anything to me!" while advocating for the double genocide theory

Apologies, the Hexbear motto is usually to be Polite, Precise, and Brief (our writeup of our PPB motto can be found here, only a hundred words or so) so I went a little overboard!

I think a way to do this without supporting oppressive regimes is to specifically support the people, and not the government.

On Hexbear we have seen this line of reasoning a hundred thousand times and so we just laugh now whenever we see it; I thought you were making a joke until I saw your instance.

The cause of so much of the suffering of "repressive regimes" like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, the DPRK, etc is specifically because of the sanctions that the West puts on it that are designed to impoverish the people and try and make them overthrow their government, because they refuse to engage in the global economy according to the United States's rules, and not really because of those "regimes" themselves. Of course, it's taken for granted that what the United States wants is what everybody should want, but considering the billions being exploited abroad for tiny wages in hostile working environments for the West's benefit, perhaps America's "international rules-based order" isn't the best for anybody except for the West themselves! Of course, America has all the military bases, and those countries do not, and bullets and bombs tend to be quite persuasive.

For liberals, which I assume you are, these sanctions exist in a weird doublethink space. Working through it, liberals basically end up saying something contradictory like "The suffering that the people here are experiencing is because those countries are Bad. We need to put sanctions on Bad Countries. The sanctions aren't what's causing the suffering, it's the Bad Countries' fault (which thus implies sanctions don't work and have little to no effect), but we still need to put sanctions on them to punish them (thus implying that sanctions do have some negative, disciplinary function)."

Sanctions both do and do not function depending on the rhetorical frame you're taking at any particular time. When you're talking about the repression that Iranian women feel and why that sparked the protests, the sanctions will never be mentioned - this is purely Iran. When you're talking about the fact that Cubans struggle with food insecurity and don't have enough fuel and sometimes some of them protest or complain, then what caused those shortages is, again, never mentioned - it's purely the Cuban regime. If, on the other hand, you're talking about how repressive regimes must be punished in general, then westerners online clamour and shout for sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.

This is why we laugh about such "support the people, not the government" rhetoric a lot of the time. Of course, in the case of Iran and similar countries, they aren't left-wing and so we only really have critical support (in the sense of "they are better than those they are opposing, but they are not good in a vacuum") and there is genuinely nuance about how the Iranian bourgeoisie are worsening conditions by exploiting the people, and repressive religious institutions, etc, but by and large American sanctions are the larger factor. In the case of Cuba, or the DPRK, such a line about supporting the people, not the government is quite ridiculous. Liberals (usually of the chud variety) who just come right out and say what they really mean - that, yes, the sanctions are explicitly designed to make the population overthrow the government so that Western compradors and corporations can loot it of its resources and exploit its people - are horrific monsters, but at least slightly refreshing compared to the mental knots that most liberals tie themselves in to not say that line explicitly, invoking "restoring democracy" and "fighting authoritarianism" and other such meaningless cliches instead.

"What if they invaded, pillaged, and coup'd the countries WE were going to invade, pillage, and coup! Can you imagine the tragedy?! Better that us, The Good Guys, exploit these countries than The Bad Guys!"

the unspoken (hell, sometimes spoken) assumption is that China would be doing a lot better with a Western-style neoliberal economy, which is an extremely funny assertion when all these economies are doing even worse than China is

there's a manufacturing and possibly soon-to-be services recession everywhere. hyperfocussing on China while everybody else metaphorically (and literally) burns around them is just silly.

and, as others have said, the US is literally declaring economic war against China! again, it's Schrodinger's Sanctions! They both exist and are good, but also aren't doing anything and it's all that country's fault! "Ooo, Russia is experiencing a fall in GDP in 2022, this proves that Putin's war machine isn't sustaina--" no, it proves that you've put sanctions on them! "Aha, Cuba and Venezuela's economies are collapsing and they can't afford enough basic necessities, this just shows how socialism is--" No, it proves that the sanctions that you actively boast about putting on them are working! "See, China's economy is now not doing so hot (defined as "only" growing by like 5-6% or whatever), this is really a lesson in how Marxist econo--" Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you're putting sanctions on their industries instead, the thing you, again, boast about doing?

"See, this patient is blacking out when we put pressure on his carotid artery, this shows how their vascular system is simply inferior to our own which isn't being actively strangled!"

I literally have this link bookmarked for dipshits like you.

Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries

We have long been told a compelling story about the relationship between rich countries and poor countries. The story holds that the rich nations of the OECD give generously of their wealth to the poorer nations of the global south, to help them eradicate poverty and push them up the development ladder. Yes, during colonialism western powers may have enriched themselves by extracting resources and slave labour from their colonies – but that’s all in the past. These days, they give more than $125bn (£102bn) in aid each year – solid evidence of their benevolent goodwill.

This story is so widely propagated by the aid industry and the governments of the rich world that we have come to take it for granted. But it may not be as simple as it appears.

The US-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics recently published some fascinating data. They tallied up all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor countries each year: not just aid, foreign investment and trade flows (as previous studies have done) but also non-financial transfers such as debt cancellation, unrequited transfers like workers’ remittances, and unrecorded capital flight (more of this later). As far as I am aware, it is the most comprehensive assessment of resource transfers ever undertaken.

What they discovered is that the flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.

In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States.

What this means is that the usual development narrative has it backwards. Aid is effectively flowing in reverse. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.

Foreign aid from the West is literally a scam to cover up vast flows of money and resources away from the developing world and towards developed countries. It is the equivalent of the Gates' of the world donating 0.00000001% of their daily income to charity and the media getting on their knees and fellating them for it. And, as others have said, even the absolutely paltry sums of money donated in foreign aid by the West merely ends up back in the hands of their own investors, because developing countries exist merely as debt peons to be endlessly harvested, without meaningfully developing them.

This is the face of modern imperialism.