Coming of age in the mid-2000s, I remember dozens of long drawn out debates around torture and its efficacy. Despite the reams of academia pointing out its practical and ethical flaws, and while the US is arguably doing more torture than ever before, nobody's debating anymore. Torture has become normalized.

Why the change? Presenting exhibit A: the TV show 24, which has done more to normalize torture than any other piece of media in the history of America.

I never watched 24 because I could tell at the time that it was propaganda for US imperialism.

The people behind Lula’s army, who on WhatsApp [defeated Bolsonaro] wrote a manual.

The answer, they say, is not to escape the [corporate social media] platforms but to hijack their logic with a coordinated mass of users to exercise brute informational force.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/nikos-smyrnaios/blog/291026/de-quoi-le-janonisme-est-il-le-nom-la-recette-pour-faire-gagner-la-gauche

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Janones

The media is doing the most to get the public to support eugenics and manufacture consent for the state’s organized abandonment of disabled people. This video goes over some case studies of this eugenicist propaganda and discusses the necessity of disability justice and health communism.

How the New Thought and Positive Thinking movements helped create Neil Gaiman and Donald Trump and undermined our economy and lives

Anti Communism Is Class Warfare

The anti-communist regimes in the East of Europe are waging war upon the organised working class and anti-communism is their weapon

In this special edition of the programme we look at the usage of anti-communism since the counter revolutions of 1989-1991. We examine the mythology of Ukrainian fascism and how this fictional version of history is used to mask attacks on the Ukrainian working class by the gangsterist oligarchy of Kiev.

We then turn to a report published recently that chronicles the usage of “anti totalitarian” laws in Ukraine and in places like Romania. We find, unsurprisingly, that the great bulk of the prosecutions under such laws are against working class people who are either wearing a soviet symbol or are commemorating the socialist past.

We conclude that anti-communism is a weapon that is used to mask the enormous failures of capitalist restoration and to attack the very idea of a different system being possible. It is an attempt to stop the working class drawing revolutionary conclusions.

Why do liberal democracies repeatedly collapse into military dictatorships? The secret lies in the 170-year-old political current of Bonapartism.

In this deep dive, we break down how Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin analyzed the rise of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte after the Revolutions of 1848, and how their 19th century observations predicted the exact blueprint that would be used by every modern authoritarian dictator up to this day.

Many liberals treat figures like Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump as unprecedented anomalies. But when we examine the historical development of the capitalist state, from the French Revolution to the "Party of Order," a clear pattern emerges: when parliamentary gridlock threatens capitalist profits and working-class resistance grows, the ruling class willingly hands power to a dictator.

Part 2

RIP Michael Parenti, 1933–2026.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/41469678

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40864173

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/40061643

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39824629

One of the better critiques I've seen of the Right Wing Backlash against criticism of Charlie Kirk after his assassination.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38392350