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6·2 months agoWho liberated the concentration camps?
There is no such thing as a “free and neutral net”. It would be nice if there were but sadly that’s just a fairly tale for children. Someone is always in control.
Humility is key to learning. Admitting that you can be wrong and don’t know everything. Unfortunately in capitalist society the opposite behavior is encouraged and rewarded.
Definitely. I have liked the attitude i have seen so far from this person a lot. I think the most important thing is being curious and open to learning. Ignorance is only a sin if it’s willful. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, some other people choose go to great efforts to remain ignorant.
Poland was never part of the Soviet Union. Unless they lived in the USSR and later moved to Poland, they did not “grow up under Soviet rule”.
It’s probably healthy for them to take a step away from social media and go touch grass for a while.
It only seemed that way because we were not as aware of the extent of western information warfare operations. In reality the firewall has always been justified.
111·2 months agoThe Nazi regime in Kiev which came to power in a US orchestrated coup attacked Russian speaking regions of Ukraine and has pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing since 2014. Sources here: https://lemmy.ml/post/26654686
Your German example is legit, but you are completely dismissing their cultural guilt related to WWII; there are signs of them shifting.
They have no guilt, else they would not be supporting another genocide or giving money and weapons to help Nazis kill Russians again. Their pretense of feeling guilt is purely performative and self-aggrandizing. The only signs are of them getting worse, more self-righteous, more racist, more authoritarian toward any dissenters, more detached from reality.
but you are completely dismissing the existential threat of Russia.
Is their deranged paranoia supposed to justify their revisionist history portraying SS butchers as the good guys and the liberators of the death camps as the bad guys?
You are also trying to be subtle in shifting to mainstream media
Where have i mentioned mainstream media? And why are you shifting the goalposts? The topic was freedom of speech, regardless on which media. And social media has replaced mainstream media for most people nowadays anyway.
when the thread was about internet control and social media
Yes, social media is being censored and controlled across Europe and the broader West. Let’s not even mention how often Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter have banned anti-imperialist channels, deleted pro-Palestinian or pro-Russian content. The governments themselves are legally persecuting social media based news outlets, forcing them to shut down
Both in Britain and in Germany you can get arrested and prosecuted for social media posts. There have been plenty such cases.
In Germany you get sued and even arrested for simply insulting politicians on social media. It is enough to simply call a politician stupid (what else can you call someone who doesn’t know what doing a 360° turn means?) and you can get charged and taken to court. One particularly ghoulish politician has levied over 2000 defamation charges at people for insulting her.
They are also very racist.
Lol. If we didn’t do that then we would get accused of not including our sources. But i get your point, sometimes we can tend to be overly thorough.
I view this as being a bit like mathematics. The things we say make sense to someone who is already versed in the subject but for someone who doesn’t already understand or agree with certain concepts or ideas we don’t necessarily want to rehash arguments that were already laid out in works a hundred years prior so we just refer back to those in the same way that when you do modern mathematics you don’t need to repeat proofs that were already done in the 19th century. You can just take those theorems as given and if you are really interested in how they were derived you can still go back to the original literature and read up on it.
Of course you can still engage with and understand the more advanced arguments even without going all the way back to the basics but then you need to accept certain things as axiomatic, because it would take too much time to go back and explain them every time.
Let’s say for instance that we are talking about imperialism. To clarify what exactly we mean when we talk about imperialism we may briefly give the Leninist definition of imperialism. You can either accept that this is the definition or you can ask why. Why is it defined that way and why does it make sense? Well for that you would have to go and read Lenin’s work on Imperialism. Which in turn references but does not necessarily thoroughly explain certain concepts about the nature of capitalism that were worked out earlier by Marx.
You see, you can either choose to go down this rabbit hole and invest the time it takes to really go to the basics and build up from there, or you can take it as given that this has already been worked out and you can try and understand how we apply it to the modern day, which saves time and is more practical. Neither is wrong, it just depends on your personal interest.
The US government already does that. It controls US based social media. If you don’t live in the US you should want your government to control the social media you use because at least that way you can have a say in that control via the (nominally) democratic control you exert over your own government. Either way someone controls it. By not having digital sovereignty your country is just handing the control over your information space to a foreign government which can then use it to shape your opinions and views to their advantage instead of yours.
but you won’t get censored for criticising the Government… I guess unless you are an American criticizing Israel
Or if you are a British journalist speaking out against genocide, in which case you get arrested on terrorism charges
Or if you are in Germany and hold a conference discussing said genocide, in which case the police raids you and shuts you down
Or if you are a European journalist documenting an inconvenient truth from the “wrong side”, in which case you get your bank account seized and face criminal charges and are banned from entering the EU
Or if you are in the Baltics celebrating Europe’s victory over the Nazis and singing songs the government doesn’t like, in which case you get arrested, fined and possibly jailed
Freedom of speech in the West amounts to you being free to shout into the void, and only so long as it doesn’t change anything or threaten the ruling establishment and its political agenda. As long as your speech is entirely ineffectual and can be ignored by those in power then you can scream as loud as you want. As soon as your speech is a real threat to the agenda of the ruling class you are quickly shut down and made an example of with extreme prejudice.
You are functionally not allowed to challenge the official government position in the West either. In European countries the government outright bans candidates from standing in elections if they are anti-EU or anti-NATO, and you are threatened with fines or even jail time for disagreeing with the official narrative on Ukraine conflict. On certain issues, namely those that actually matter, there is only one accepted position, and deviation results in you being branded a terrorist, traitor, Hamas sympathizer, Russian agent, etc.
The West is just as if not more authoritarian than China. China is just more honest about their censorship.
“We’re coming home!” Crimea celebrates after 97% vote for joining Russia
“We came back home to Mother Russia. We came back home, Russia is our home”
96.77% of Crimeans vote to re-unite with Russia
“We are going home, Crimea is going to Russia”, said the republic’s prime minister
Majority of Crimea citizens one year after referendum do not regret joining Russia
Crimea celebrates 2 years since historic referendum to rejoin Russia
Return to Russia: Crimeans Tell the Real Story of the 2014 Referendum and Their Lives Since
The Majority of Crimeans Are Still Glad for Their Annexation:
“it is incontrovertible that most […] Crimean residents welcomed joining Russia. Numerous polls at the time of the annexation and in its immediate aftermath revealed broad support for joining Russia”
“Crimea’s annexation in 2014 gave residents grounds for optimism, with a majority of Crimeans hopeful that their lives would change for the better.”
“The majority of Crimeans do not experience Russian rule as oppressive, alien, or unwelcome. Instead, based on the evidence of our surveys, they are reasonably happy to be living in Putin’s Russia.”
—Foreign Affairs Magazine, official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, arch-imperialist US neocon think tank
3·4 months agoGermany, Finland, Netherlands for sure. Also Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Not to mention the Butthurt Belt states: Poland and the three Baltic villages. Romania too.
It’s better to ask who in Europe is not fascist. The number of European countries that are not yet already there or well on their way can be counted on one hand.
They do when they feel like it and they don’t when they don’t. Just like every other western country.
131·4 months agoA reminder that both AOC and Bernie Sanders are genocidal, lying, Zionist warmongers:
https://xcancel.com/zei_squirrel/status/1870599903812198837
https://xcancel.com/zei_squirrel/status/1892488386096615846
They are usually a niche demographic, but present in any country.
The difference is that in the Baltics and Ukraine this is not a niche demographic anymore. Pro-Nazi views are either the norm or they appear to be because the state has been legitimizing and endorsing pro-Nazi views while suppressing the opposite viewpoint.
You see, most other countries do not officially celebrate SS regiments with parades, they don’t name their streets after or erect monuments to Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust and brutally butchered hundreds of thousands of people, and they don’t teach children in schools to hate people of a certain ethnicity while teaching that Nazi collaborators were actually national heroes and freedom fighters, all while monuments and graves of the real liberators and anti-fascist fighters are destroyed.
If you feel nazis are your main baddie, it might be better to understand what makes them tick.
Are you implying that Nazis are not “baddies”?
What makes Nazis tick is hate and sadism. There is nothing deeper to understand there. And as long as that hate continues to be taught and endorsed by a country’s institutions, from the state to the educational system to media and NGOs, as is happening in Ukraine and the Baltics, the problem will only get worse.
Sounds great until you remember that the current governments of Romania, Germany, France, Britain, etc. are all arming and funding Nazis in Ukraine and enabling ethnic cleansing by a genocidal apartheid occupation regime in Palestine.
it can not be allowed for groups that espouse extreme ideologies to even gather the smallest of support
but it can be allowed to give billions of Euros and tons upon tons of weaponry to swastika-tatooed Hitler worshippers bent on ethnic cleansing. It can be allowed to prop up a corrupt, kleptocratic, dictatorial regime that has cancelled elections, placed all media under state control, declared WW2 Nazi collaborators to be their national heroes, imprisons, tortures and brutally murders journalists, political opposition, people who make online posts against the government or the war, and people who just don’t want themselves or their relatives be forcibly drafted into a war against their own brothers. That can be allowed, right?
Personally i just find it extremely hypocritical to constantly talk about how much Europe loves democracy and at the same time steal an election from the candidate who was about to win it and then go on to ban that candidate, who is clearly polling far ahead of all others, from standing in the repeat elections.
The reality is that these right wingers are not being banned from elections for their extremist views (which they undoubtedly hold, i’m not saying they don’t), they are banned because they are anti-EU and want peace with Russia instead of war. That is the “extremism” that is intolerable to the Brussels bureaucrats and their comprador lackeys in the Romanian state. A leftist candidate with the same popularity and the same views toward the tyrannical EU and the self-destructive European drive to war against Russia would be treated exactly the same, if not worse.
Democracy as been shown, countless times, it is a very fragile system, vulnerable to players willing to manipulate and distort it in order to achieve personal gains, at the detriment of a large majority.
This has always been happening for as long as “liberal democracy” has existed. The worst offenders of manipulation and distortion of democracy are the mainstream media, who constantly manipulate public opinion in favor of the so-called “moderate” and “centrist” parties that have been getting elected for decades in Europe. This is also to the detriment of a large majority.
Or do you seriously believe that the policies of either the Tories or the Labor party in the UK have benefited the large majority in Britain? How about Macron in France, has he not been a detriment to the large majority of his citizens? So much so that the French voters overwhelmingly rejected his party (yet he somehow is still in charge…)? How about the SPD, CDU and Greens in Germany? How is it not to my detriment as a German citizen for them to cut social spending in favor of massive rearmament? How is it not a detriment to the large majority of Europeans for these parties to push us into a war with Russia? Why is that still allowed?
Why is it that it is not allowed to democratically vote for candidates who oppose the EU (which is a fundamentally neoliberal and highly undemocratic institution that makes it impossible for countries to have left wing economic policies and is now led by unhinged warmongering lunatics who want to pump hundreds of billons of Euros to their friends in the arms industry) and who want peace instead of war?
Giorgia Meloni in Italy is just as much a fascist sympathizer as these right wingers in Romania, but the reason why she was not treated this way is because she was willing to bend the knee to Brussels.
But they did. For a long time they still believed that they could do achieve their goals in China via a slower more subversive approach than the overt 1989 color revolution attempt, via gradual elite corruption and infection with liberal ideology.
This is why up until the “pivot to Asia” happened you still had fairly positive coverage of China in the Western media and cultural sphere. In the 90s and 00s China was portrayed relatively positively in the media. The war propaganda faucet to demonize and dehumanize Chinese people in the eyes of Westerners was only turned on relatively recently.
If they really thought there was no hope of regime change after 1989 they would have started this much earlier when China was much weaker. They didn’t because they didn’t understand China (they still don’t) and they deluded themselves into thinking things were still going their way.
Well, that is how they think. But that’s not the point that was being made. The point is that the logic of capitalism made it impossible for them to resist outsourcing to China, because the profits were too juicy to pass up. China understood this and took full advantage of it.
By the time the western elites noticed their catastrophic strategic mistake it was too late. Now they are panicking and for the last decade or so have been scrambling to try and find a way to reverse what has happened before the window of opportunity permanently closes.
Hence their increasingly reckless and self-harming escalations, with Ukraine, Taiwan, now Iran… They feel they are out of time and nothing is working anymore so they have to constantly take crazier and crazier gambles in hopes of digging themselves out of the hole.