3 lessons from two books: Weimar Germany and Berlin In Lights
Germany faced a Nazi coup in 1923, tried to move on, and ended up completely decapitated by 1933. America has reacted to its coup even less than Weimar Germany and is somehow expecting different results. I say this not as a prediction but a warning. America today is in the calm before Der Stürmer.
It’s important to remember how much time passed between Adolf Hitler’s failed putsch and Germany’s failed democracy. Ten long years, some of them good. American is in those strange twilight years now. The fascists seem gone, the government seem good enough, things seem stable. But things…
The way to Acid Communism
I will criticize capitalism here… then ask you to sign up for my newsletter. You can read Marx all you want… on your Amazon Kindle. In this way, capitalism is like the Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. It’s like a room full of doors that all lead back to the same place.
Capitalism — more than any ideology — devours its rebellions. Kings would kill you for criticizing them, but capitalism takes nothing personally. It’s strictly business. Capitalism will take your rebellion, print it on a t-shirt, and sell it…
Are we stupid enough to believe in American ‘intelligence’ again?
America is making a big show about looking for a ‘lab leak’ in China like they made a big show about inspecting Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. Are we really going to fall for this shit again? Haven’t we seen this movie before? Didn’t it suck?
There’s no evidence for COVID-19 being created in a lab, but there doesn’t have to be. America doesn’t have to manufacture consent. They just have to manufacture doubt. They don’t need to prove anything, they just need to sow doubt. …
Climate debt makes means the US, Europe, and Australia have negative net worth
The US, Europe, Australia, et al call themselves rich but, well, that’s rich. These countries are so broke that they broke the Earth. The west is driving a leased Bentley, wearing layaway Gucci, all of it acquired by fraud. They might look rich, but their balance sheet looks like shit. In comparison, Sri Lanka or Ghana are rich because we’re at least not underwater. I mean, we will be, but not morally.
Once you subtract their climate liabilities, the colonizers have a negative net worth. Hence they’re at the bottom of climate-weighted rankings like the Sustainable Development Index, where they…
Palestinian apartheid and vaccine apartheid are the same map
We are all Palestinian. The entire global majority* lives under western oppression — their patents, their borders, their bombs — Palestine just gets it the worst. Nowhere is it more clear than with COVID-19. If you look at the map of actual apartheid and vaccine apartheid it’s the same map.
Just look.
Who blocks Palestine statehood? The US, the UK, the EU, Australia, and Japan. Who blocks patent-free vaccines? It’s the same people. The arms dealers and the drug dealers, they’re all backed by the same evil empire. The symptom is COVID-19, but the disease is western hegemony. …
The oldest trick in democracy is deciding that certain people aren’t people at all
Imagine a playground. Some bullies walk in, beat-up the other kids and take over. They kick out the kids that were there, stealing their stuff. Any new kids get trapped under the jungle gym, forced to do their bidding, to join the cool kids. Anyone that resists gets a bloody nose for not ‘playing by the rules’.
Now wake up. This is where you live. This is what we call modern democracy.
Israel
I’ll start with the worst democracy in the world, because it’s the most obvious. Here’s Hagai El-Ad describing Israel:
The evolutionary origins of not sharing
To really understand human inequality, watch Monkey Kingdom. In that Disney documentary, some monkeys sit on top of the tree, eating the best fruit. The rest get trickle-down fruitanomics. I judged them for being dicks, but then it hit me. Human beings are so much worse. If human wealth inequality was a tree, the top would be in outer space (precisely where billionaires are trying to go).
In truth, human governance is not significantly different from a troop of toque macaques, a species we last shared a common ancestor with maybe 30 million years ago. We’re both male-dominated, violent societes…
His deeply Christian take on slavery in our times
Leo Tolstoy is an amazing writer, known mostly for his epic War and Peace, but don’t worry, The Slavery Of Our Times is only 90 pages long. It quickly and beautifully upends basic assumptions about economics, law, and the need for government at all. Tolstoy is the anarchist philosopher poet, trying to make peasants into philosopher kings.
Tolstoy starts the book visiting the horrors of then-modern capitalism. Men working 36 hour shifts at the train station, women giving away their children to work at the garment factory. He sees this suffering and asks why. Why must we live like this…
China, Russia, and India are helping people like me, while the west is just killing us for profit
In western media, they’ve made up this term called ‘vaccine diplomacy’, and made it sound real scary. Russia and China are doing terrible things by giving people vaccines.
I live in a country that benefits from vaccine diplomacy, and let me tell you what it means. It’s just means they give us vaccines. It just means they help us make vaccines. This is what every country is supposed to be doing, but the west is trying to start Cold War 2, in the middle of a pandemic.
For all the propaganda about ‘vaccine diplomacy’, you have to ask what the…
They’re just agreeing to talk, not actually doing anything
America has just gotten a big PR boost from supporting patent-free vaccines. But they haven’t done anything. They’ve just agreed to talk about it. It’s bullshit.
America could have approved the India/South Africa proposal on the table and that would be news. Instead they’re just agreed to negotiate. This is just PR. They’ll be having meetings while the virus rips through millions of lungs. Hundreds of thousands will die while they delay and distract, and we’re praising them for it. We should not. We still have to fight America like our lives depend on it, because it’s true.
indi.ca
Indi Samarajiva is a writer living in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sign up for my newsletter at www.indi.ca, and you can reach me at indi@indi.ca.
