No liberals America wasn't a "beacon of liberty" until Trump changed it. America has always been an oppressive colonialist imperialist empire that oppresses as many as it can reach.
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#imperialism
14 posts14 participants1 post today
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I don't want to go *too* far in praising this article, because there are still a large number of problems with the way it minimizes the danger of Trump literally annexing Canada, but its existence demonstrates that at least one US media outlet (NBC) understands that Trump is not joking, or playing the angles here, and is in fact dead serious about taking over Canada:
Trump's quest to conquer Canada is confusing everyone
"Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump first mentioned his love for Canadians, including his “many friends” like hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. Then he riffed about how Canada shouldn’t exist as a sovereign country before getting to what has increasingly become a fixation: wholesale annexation of Canada as a U.S. state.
"Canada only works as a state," Trump said Thursday. "We don’t need anything they have. As a state, it would be one of the great states anywhere. This would be the most incredible country, visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense. It’s so perfect as a great and cherished state."
"But why should we subsidize another country for $200 billion?" Trump continued, adding, "And again, we don’t need their lumber, we don’t need their energy. We have more than they do. We don’t need anything. We don’t need their cars. I’d much rather make the cars here. And there’s not a thing that we need. Now, there will be a little disruption, but it won’t be very long. But they need us. We really don’t need them. And we have to do this. I’m sorry."
As I said at the top of this post, this is by no means a perfect article; NBC spends far too much ink focusing on Trump's personal animus towards Justin Trudeau (who is no longer even the Canadian Prime Minister) and allowing named GOP officials to pretend they're confused by Trump's annexation plan even as they enact his orders to try and make that plan a reality. Crucially however, this report *does* make it abundantly clear that Trump is dead serious and his minions know full well that he's not joking:
"Trump has been unapologetic in his quest to conquer the Canadians — an effort he said in January would be conducted by “economic force.” The result has been a disintegration of the relationship between the U.S. and one of its closest allies, and a stock market plunge over fears of ever-increasing escalation of a trade war. Both Canadian officials and Republicans initially thought the president was merely joking, ribbing Trudeau — a longtime foil — after they met at Mar-a-Lago in November. It was after that visit that Trump first publicly floated the notion of absorbing Canada. Few think he’s joking now, and the Canadians have stopped laughing.
A source with direct knowledge of the discussions told NBC News that Trump is heavily focused on Canada in conversations with aides, who believe he is completely serious about making the country the 51st state — even with Trudeau out of power and a new prime minister in place."
Unfortunately, and despite this refreshing frankness, I have some problems with the sloppy journalism and credulous naivety with which NBC states that nobody knows where Trump is getting the idea to annex Canada from, including Republicans in his government. The fact is that MAGA-connected fascist propagandists like Candice Owens (and others) have been advocating for taking over, or even invading Canada since at least 2021-2022 for a variety of reasons; including natural resources, water rights, climate imperialism (although they don't use that term,) and even to protect their ideological brethren in the larger Canadian fascist movement from legal repercussions for their own slow-moving coup attempt in Canada, the so-called "Trucker Convoy." I genuinely have no idea if US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has any clue what Trump is thinking, but fascist media personalities in Trump's orbit certainly do, and this regime has already shown a willingness to outsource official policy from raving nazi dipshits on YouTube, so I don't think "where Trump is getting this idea from" is the kind of puzzle you need Scotland Yard's finest detectives to solve.
NBC News · Trump's quest to conquer Canada is confusing everyone
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@ alexlunaview
Please boost.
"....other countries keep asking why Americans aren't protesting, but we are & have been - the media isn't covering it...."
Protesters! Keep posting everything to social media. Over and over. Everyone, on every platform should be boosting it to help. Hopefully media from other countries will pick it up and we'll hear about it.
Communism in theory vs in practice
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Beyond foreign malign influence, #Serbia’s #nationalist-revisionist regime – rooted in the 1990s – has aligned with #Russia’s aggressive, anti-liberal nationalist bloc. Serbian far-right groups are also well-known supporters of Russian #imperialism.
3/18
OpenA proposes that the US government "take steps to ensure that our copyright system continues to support American AI leadership," and that it shapes international policy discussions around copyright and AI, "to prevent less innovative countries from imposing their legal regimes on American AI firms and slowing our rate of progress."
1 / 3 
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/openai_data_copyright/
The Register · OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining
"""
World War III has already been avoided and it was during the Cold War when the United States had a massive adversary in the Soviet Union and a massive nuclear arms race. At that time World War III was avoided not because the United States backed down but because the United States stood up and unified with its European partners creating something called NATO. (...) NATO is a very important institution that kept the world out of war through strength.
"""
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>Heyman was due at an Austin City Hall meeting about the HOME initiative. Officers did not detain him that day, even as they arrested students and piled them into police vans for transport to jail. The campus overflowed with outrage. Dozens of young people blocked the vans from leaving, until police deployed flashbangs and pepper spray to clear their path.
>
>Heyman said he planned on filing a complaint against the officer. More than a week later, several police vehicles surrounded him while he was driving near his home. Troopers took him into custody; Heyman spent the day in Travis County Jail.
>
>“When I got home later that night and checked my email,” he said, “that was when I learned that I had also been fired that same day.”
>
>UT officials declined my request for comment.
We call this "collaboration." UT Austin collaborated with APD in firing a professor.
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@randahl …here we are, have difficulties at home? invade some other country
How long have we been forced into narrow copyright regimes to benefit a few powerful companies, and now all data suddenly belongs to the new "AI" lords?
Everyone should read this!
#imperialism #ai #copyright #theft
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/13/openai_data_copyright/
The Register · OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining
Today in Labor History March 13, 1979: The Marxist New Jewel movement, led by Maurice Bishop, overthrew the prime minister of Grenada. Bishop led the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada until 1983, when he was overthrown and executed in a coup supported by the U.S. Bishop supported anti-racist struggles around the world and the fight to end Apartheid. Under his leadership, Granada gave women equal pay to men and provided paid maternity leave. They also banned sexual discrimination and introduced free public health and literacy programs that brought the national illiteracy rate from 35% down to 5%. In 1983, the U.S. invaded Granada. 19 U.S. soldiers and 45 Grenadian soldiers died in the fighting that ensued. The invasion effectively ended the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome,” where U.S. leaders feared that overt regime change, with U.S. boots on the ground, would spark large antiwar protests, like those that rocked the nation in the 1960s and early 70s. The Grenada invasion paved the way for much more aggressive interventions like Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
Zelensky has been discarded!
Speaking of the fun house mirror that is internal American political discourse; while our media class is busy trying to figure out how serious the fascist president is when he announces his plans to do fascist things, Israel's Finance Minister is busy bragging that Trump's plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is "taking shape" while revealing that the US administration and the Netanyahu government are working together to quickly make it a reality:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/smotrich-trump-plan-gaza
As Israel Pulls Plug on Gaza, Smotrich Says Trump's Ethnic Cleansing Plan 'Taking Shape'
"Israel's finance minister said Sunday that U.S. President Donald Trump's plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is proceeding, remarks that came on the same day as Israel completely cut off electricity from the last receiving facility in the obliterated Palestinian enclave.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the far-right Religious Zionism party told fellow Knesset lawmakers that "this plan is taking shape, with ongoing actions in coordination" with the Trump administration.
Smotrich said that he is working with Cabinet members including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz to establish a "migration administration" that will oversee the removal of an indeterminate number of Gaza's approximately 2.1 million people, most of whom are descendants of Palestinians who fled or were ethnically cleansed from what is now Israel during the modern Jewish state's founding in 1948."
Folks, just because two fascist governments don't call removing a population based on ethnicity so you can build luxury condos on the ashes of their homes, "ethnic cleansing," does not in fact mean it isn't ethnic cleansing. In fact, if I'm being honest the term ethnic cleansing itself is a bullshit cop-out; the fact is forcingly removing a population based on ethnicity is in fact part of a process legally recognized as genocide; which is pretty on brand for an Israeli government credibly accused of genocide by international courts and a US government that's been actively arming, funding, and enabling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza across multiple presidencies now, particularly the last two. Furthermore, while Smotrich claims the removals will be "voluntary" there is very little reason for anyone but the most credulous rubes to believe him. First of all, Israel has already engaged in an ongoing attempt to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and they just cut off electrical power to an area that is essentially always in a state of humanitarian crisis even though they know that action will kill innocent Palestinians. Additionally, there is no reason to believe Palestinians who have fought to keep their homes in Gaza intend to leave "voluntarily" and every single country the US and Israel have said would be happy to accept "voluntary" Palestinian "refugees' is stridently opposed to the plan because they recognize it as ethnic cleansing. Finally, this very same fascist government in Israel has repeatedly and publicly made no bones about their intentions to remove every Palestinian from Gaza, by lethal force or otherwise.
Friends, say what you will about Russian ministers bragging that Trump owes them one for political points, but Israel is not a geopolitical rival of the United States; they're allied with the US government and we send them billions of dollars worth of military and financial aid. Smotrich has no reason to lie about Trump's intentions and cooperation; in fact, he clearly couldn't be happier to have an American president working to accomplish the Netanyahu regime's odious intentions. Just don't expect a pro-genocide American media and political establishment to explain all this to you; they would after all much rather debate whether or not Trump is "serious" about getting rid of all the Palestinians and turning Gaza into a luxury resort complex for all his rich friends, until it's already a genocidal reality.
Common Dreams · As Israel Pulls Plug on Gaza, Smotrich Says Trump's Ethnic Cleansing Plan 'Taking Shape' | Common Dreams"By openly trying to starve and freeze an entire civilian population to death, the far-right government of indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has once again clearly demonstrated its genocidal intent in Gaza," said CAIR.
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@andrewstroehlein The ☭
Chinese colonizer regime closing access to Tibet is *only part of the reason* the plight of the Tibetan people has been all but forgotten in the Free World.
The forgetting fully correlates — over the years and decades — with the volume of democracies' business entanglement with the CCP dictatorship.
Foreign business missions queueing up for audition at CCP's Beijing headquarters *only months* after the Tiananmen massacre of June 4th 1989.
US bi-partisan decision to grant the Chinese dictatorship the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trading priviledges in 1994 against all ethical considerations.
The entire Free World agreeing to grant the Chinese dictatorship full membership rights (to manipulate at will) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001... and what predictably happened to world trade thereafter...
Mirroring this appeasement and empowering of the CCP regime, critical media coverage of CCP's domestic and colonial repression and exploitation began vanishing from the coverage of media organizations owned by foreign billionaires and state broadcasters alike.
Notice how trump and maga has been *normalized* in much of media? Same principle. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Perhaps one day after Ukraine is secure and free we might consider offering at least *moral* support for the nation that was entirely overrun and enslaved by an unrepentingly imperialist neighbour, back in 1950.
It is worth noting that one key reason putin felt emboldened to attack Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022 was that the Chinese dictatorship was allowed to avoid any real consequences for its own genocidal expansionism for all these decades.
Maybe we should try *NOT REWARDING* repressive and military-expansionst regimes and see if that works out better for humanity?
#Tibet #Ukraine #CCP #china #PRC #colonialism #imperialism #appeasement
10 March 1959
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_Uprising_Day
en.wikipedia.orgTibetan Uprising Day - Wikipedia
Look, I'm not psychic. I can't tell you whether or not Donald Trump is going to *successfully* annex or invade Canada; although I will say that given the *vast* disparity between Canadian and US military capabilities, it's highly unlikely Canadian leaders would risk letting it get far enough to see "U.S. Marines marching on Quebec," so folks waiting for that before they deign to take this seriously are more or less promising to do nothing to prevent this. What I can tell you is these nazis do *not* have a sense of humor, the establishment portion of the America First fascist movement has been openly building the ideological arguments to seize Canada and trying them out in public settings for several years, and watching everyday Americans fall right back into a pattern of ignorant nationalism because they're pissed off at Canadians for booing our anthem in response to Trump's threats, doesn't give me faith in the idea that this is just another doomed-to-fail Trump fever dream. This is real, and it *is* a scandal that the Very Serious PeopleTM in America are not only failing to oppose it, but not even taking it seriously enough to discuss it.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-threat-over-canada-scandal-172715816.html
Trump’s Threat to Take Over Canada Is a Scandal
"There are numerous reasons why Trump and his government’s pervasive blathering about turning Canada into the “51st state” shouldn’t be dismissed as a “Madman Theory”-negotiating tactic, or as performative MAGA trolling. During a private phone call last month, according to a Friday New York Times report, Trump “told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation.”
Lately, Trump — a man who would never try to do anything world-historically rash like ending democracy in America — has told every news camera that would listen and broadcast his message to the world that he would like to rule Canada, one of the U.S.’s most vital allies. It’s not just Trump blurting it out: This has become the position of the United States federal government; his White House press secretary and his Homeland Security secretary are now, too, calling Canada “the 51st state.”
“Canada could do a lot more. Canada has been taken over, Bret, by Mexican cartels,” top Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, bizarrely, told Fox News host Bret Baier on Wednesday, attempting to justify Trump’s tariffs. (At least Trump White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt practically admitted the tariffs are about forcing Canada’s annexation.)"
As I've mentioned elsewhere, over the course of the past ten years I've spent warning people that the American establishment right has become an full-blown, openly fascist movement full of people who literally admire the Nazis, I've received a tremendous amount of pushback from too-clever-by-half people with college degrees insisting that I can't call what has now become the America First movement "fascist" because "they're not pursing an aggressively expansionist nationalist policy." Setting aside the fact that Americans are so drunk on bipartisan nationalism that I strongly question whether or not these folks would recognize it in the wild (a fact borne out by watching our establishment largely laugh off Trump's threats to annex Canada, seize Greenland, and carve up Ukrainian resource rights with Russia) there can be little question that the Trump regime is in fact "pursuing an aggressively expansionist nationalist policy" now that he's back in power; which stands to reason - after all, by necessity the Nazis didn't start invading Europe until they'd already seized political control of Germany because that's how wars work. Furthermore, the idea that Trump is not doing so until there are "boots on the ground" in Toronto is absurd; America has long been proficient in exercising soft power and flexing our economic might to transform other countries into puppet states and colonial extraction zones for American corporations - we just don't *usually* do it to countries full of white people, so the American media complex gives it little notice.
Finally, for those still clinging to the idea that there is no *reason* for these Nazis to want to invade Canada, let me be blunt. Climate crisis is real, as the entire planet burns the Pig Empire is openly entering a phase of rampant climate imperialism, and Canada is not only predicted to be less affected than the US by climate change in the short term, but they also have vast supplies of fresh water, heavily forested land, and natural resources extremely valuable to the billionaire tech company fascists actually running the Trump administration. Of course, a US discourse that ignores climate crisis and pretends corporate power doesn't control US politics, probably isn't going to mention that and would prefer to stick with "Trump cray tho."
Yahoo News · Trump’s Threat to Take Over Canada Is a Scandal
“Keith Kellogg, the White House’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, characterised the US decision to cut off intelligence sharing and military aid to Kyiv as like beating a farm animal with a piece of wood.
…
‘I think the best way I can describe it is sort of like hitting a mule with a two-by-four across the nose’”
Despicable. How dare they treat white Europeans the exact same way they (and we) have always treated Brown and Black people? What are we, fucking Palestinians?
Something about panthers. Something about faces.
The Guardian · ‘They brought it on themselves’: a new low in US-Ukraine relations
European Empires From Conquest to Collapse, 1815-1960 by V.G. Kiernan, 2024
New edition of a trail-blazing history of imperial warfare.
Victor Kiernan offers a ground-breaking, truly global history of the violence of empire. European Empires from Conquest to Collapse deftly surveys the fighting forces and military engagements of the Great Powers, from the British in India to the scramble for Africa.
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Fuck patriarchy, another world is possible.
Women's day march in Helsinki had a big #antifa - #Palestine block.
#Israel is killing women in #Gaza,
#zionism is a #racist cancer in the planet,
#imperialism #colonialism and #patriarchy are intertwined.
One White South-African billionaire did what years and years of racism, genocide, military coups and torture schools couldn't: people are finally realising the USA is a criminal state.