Tootfinder

As I listen to the Revolutions podcast mini series on 1848, it's hard not to fixate in the ways in which the Liberal obsession with nationalism and national borders planted the seed for the genocides that followed. Liberals are still confused by why genocide is a persistent problem, as though liberalism itself should have fixed it. "We must establish more liberal institutions," they believe, "like the ICC, so that we can hold people accountable."
But genocide is simply a property of nations and borders. Nations have always be arbitrarily drawn and diverse groups of people have always lived together. I grew up with the balkanization of post-soviet Russia and post colonial Wars in Africa. Conservatives (that is, classical Liberals) would talk about how these people were simply uncivilized or somehow genetically predisposed to conflict. But the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides were similar to the Liberal violence implicit in nationalism from the beginning. The Bosnian Genocide was quite specifically a product of the Liberal nationalism of 1848.
There are still people in the world whose culture is defined by migration. These cultures do not recognize the legitimacy of borders because borders make their culture impossible. The very existence of these lines, and their necessary enforcement, is genocidal to pastoralists and other migratory people.
You literally cannot have borders and not be committing genocide. Concepts of national identity just add to the genocidal push, targeting ethnic minorities. Ethnicities defined by not having a nation of their own, such as Roma and non-zionist Jews, are, like pastoralists, permanently threatened by these imaginary lines.
And now, people look at the genocide ICE is carrying out, at the terror and murder, and they blame Trump. But Trump is simply the avatar of forces far beyond his comprehension.
Every liberal needs to look at their beliefs and realize that these murderous policies are implicit in the very concept of a nation.

It's exasperating.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
TV Star:
🎵 "Two Revolutions"
#TVStar
https://tvstar.bandcamp.com/track/two-revolutions
https://open.spotify.com/track/4mWFXbjxooPqIoBxz92fqa

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Audioasis
TV Star:
🎵 Two Revolutions
#TVStar
https://tvstar.bandcamp.com/track/two-revolutions
https://open.spotify.com/track/4mWFXbjxooPqIoBxz92fqa

Perversely, Trump is doing rather a lot to speed up the clean energy transition. See also the Straits of Hormuz.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/article/as-the-us-starves-it-of-oil-cuba-is-pulling-off-one-of-the-fastest-solar-revolutions-on-the-planet-with-chinas-help/

I want Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" but covering the Spanish Civil War, China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, and the various anti-colonial struggles, then come back to France for May 1968, and a few others, maybe ending with the Zapatistas, Rojava/DAANES, the Gen Z uprisings, and maybe introducing Myanmar.

RE: https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUS/117301177720795183
Mutiny in the Army and Navy has been a key element of historical revolutions, most notably the Russian and German ones.
The military is largely drawn from marginalized people but largely commanded by privileged people who could go to officer school. Upward mobility, or at least the illusion of it, has been a critical part of maintaining control in militaries around the world.
This, on top of everything else, is a pretty bold move. We'll see how it plays out.

And the answer will be "fine" as long as "the military" is thought of as a block that is treated as an enemy of the left. In the Russian case, leftists intentionally joined the military to radicalize units. In the German case, conscription meant that leftists ended up in the military radicalizing people.
The US is different, intentionally. Vietnam changed a lot. While some people resisted the draft, others rolled hand grenades into their officers' tents. Fragging commanders was a huge problem. After the end of the war, the US military adapted by ending the draft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
The US military works hard to brain wash recruits, yes. There are *a lot* of controls in place to minimize the probability of the type of revolt that has been part of other revolutions. One of those is "merit based" promotion. But, as we know from the Vietnam War, evrn that breaks down.
And it's easy to forget, or ignore, but the military *does* sometimes radicalize people or people radicalize themselves in response to their experiences in service. Smedley Butler is perhaps one of the more interesting examples, but there have been plenty. Aaron Bushnell should be at the top of your mind, as should Chelsea Manning (and perhaps others like Reality Winner).
Lots of people join the military for reasons other than patriotism, and some of those who join because of patriotism see what the US really is as part of their service. Support our vet comrades. Support those doing the work of trying to radicalize service members. Keep an open mind when talking to folks in the military today. Welcome comrades who are still in the military and have come to realize what's happened. And, most importantly, listen to those who have served to understand other things you can do to support service members who are in the process of rejecting their indoctrination.

As I continue to work my way through the Revolutions podcast, I just got through the Russo-Japanese war and I had some things to think about. Basically, Tsar Nicholas was super racist and incompetent. He figured a war would be super easy, so he bumbled his way into it. Meanwhile, Japan had been preparing so they just kicked the shit out of the Russian Empire. Russia thought it was vastly superior, and they definitely looked like it on paper. But when it actually came down to it, Japan was able to hold its own and actually win the war (at a huge cost, mind you, but they still forced some concessions).
The whole war was wildly unpopular, but the Tsar was in such a bubble that he couldn't actually understand it. He just kept pouring resources in as his people kept demanding he withdraw, until there was basically nothing left and no way to win.
Oh, yeah, and around this time there was also a mutiny on one of the remaining navy ships (one of the few that hadn't been sunk) because sailors were being fed rotten meat.
Nicholas was really just incompetent and flailing, but also ruthlessly oppressive. The war was really the thing that revealed to everyone, without a doubt, how incompetent they were.
So that's where I'm at in the story.

If you want to know what Rubio is trying to do, go listen to the Revolutions podcast on 1848. Metternich built a conspiracy of kings that persecuted Liberals in order to protect European empires against revolution. It failed, of course, but he was able to hold things down (right until it all blew up in his face). The strategy was essentially mass surveillance, censorship, and general Draconian repressieve bullshit.
Rubio is trying to slap together an actual international conspiracy of governments to stomp on the face of humanity forever, and his opening offer is off-brand 70's fear mongering that no one takes seriously.
He may well be right, in some ways. The thing he calls "civilization" is white supremacist patriarchal Christian nationalism, modeled loosely on Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain, Mussolini's Italy, and Putin's Russia. Yeah, "the left" is a *huge* threat to that type of shit. In fact, we always win.
But Rubio is Dollar Tree Metternich, and he's not trying to stop a liberal revolution near the birth of liberalism. He's trying to stop a leftist revolution that's been refining itself now against these same tactics for hundreds of years.
We already have the playbook he's using (poorly). It's just funny that the famous Marx quote about history repeating, "the first as tragedy, then as farce," is so applicable to this Rubio as he rails against the laughable boogyman of "Marxism."