This is incredible. I feel like maybe people don't understand how world-historic this is. Not only did the United States of America lose this war, there's a strong argument to be made that this is the worst the USA has ever lost a war. The only other war that's even in the conversation is Vietnam, but the consequences of that loss were entirely domestic. The US wasn't forced to make any geopolitical concessions at all^[1] despite losing soundly.

In fact, the USA has never in history had to make major strategic concessions after a war^[2]. Every single goal it had going into this conflict—forcing regime change, further hobbling the economy, eliminating the nuclear program, bolstering Israel's expansionism—is explicitly disclaimed by this treaty. Not only that, but the latter three ended up in a substantially better place for Iran than the status quo ante bellum.

This is a world-historic event. This is the USA's Suez canal moment^[3]. I don't see how the country can go on enforcing its hegemonic will globally after so thoroughly failing to do so in Iran, especially when the domestic appetite for war has been obliterated after decades of quagmires even before this spectacular loss. Maybe the US will be able to fall back to Monroe doctrine lines and continue to coup the Americas at will, but illegally abducting Maduro already failed to produce regime change (although it did prompt meaningful concessions) and it's hard to imagine the US having more leverage now than it did at the beginning of the year.

And just to be very clear: this is a resoundingly positive development. Since World War II, the United State of America has been far and away the greatest force for evil in the world. It has done everything in its power to prevent the development of real sovereignty, democracy, and prosperity of the masses, and to destroy those anywhere they've managed to take root. It has and continues to enact genocide and slavery as matters of policy, and props up fascists and ethnostates to force its will across the globe. Every loss for the US is a victory for the…

no yeah the british royal family should totally be abolished but so should the peerage. strip them of their lands, too. you wanna make sure they don't just weasel their way out of it by diversifying so just strip them of all their capital. actually while you're at it do that to the bourgeoisie as well. and not just in britain either, it everywhere. now we're cooking

when asked to explain the whole of Capital while standing on one foot, Marx replied "the rate of profit tends to fall. the rest is commentary; go and study"

I've noticed myself becoming more interested in the course of the Roman empire recently. But surely there's no deeper reason for that.

describing art as "degenerate" because it expresses sexuality is not just classic American Puritanism, it is full-on Nazi shit

It's also quietly racist (as Nazi stuff tends to be when it's not being loudly racist) to frame an archetypically Japanese genre as intrinsically icky. I know present-day Kotaku is even more of a rag than it was historically, but this is particularly disgusting.

Zionism accepts anti-Semitism as the natural, normal attitude of the non-Jewish world towards the Jew. It does not consider it as a distorted, perverted phenomenon, it is a response to anti-Semitism but not a continuation, denunciation or fight against it.

From a Matzpen pamphlet, quoted in Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany by Faris Yahya. One of the most concise ways to put a point on how and why Zionism ends up so tightly intertwined with fascism.

The thing about making the world a better place is that all you have to do is make the world a better place. You don't have to dismantle capitalism, you don't have to stop every atrocity you've ever heard of, you just have to wake up most days with the intention to leave things better than you found them. There's so much that needs doing, and even if you just do a bit of it you're helping.

(loosely inspired by this post)

I've been reading Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, a fascinating book that makes an extremely compelling argument^[1] that the Zionist cause as well as many individual Zionists threw European Jewry as a whole under the bus during the Nazi years and particularly during the holocaust in order to eke out the highest possible number of Jews emigrating to Palestine in particular. The book emphasizes the solidarity between Palestinian and Jewish liberation, by framing the Zionist philosophy as collaborationist not just in practice but at its roots: Zionism is fundamentally the agreement with the antisemitic trope that Jews are a separate nation who do not belong in solidarity with the other inhabitants of the countries they have made their diasporic homes.

What the book doesn't point out explicitly, but I've realized while reading it, is another aspect to why Zionists seemed so blasé about averting or mitigating the murder of six million Jews^[2]. Because who were the six million Jews who died in Europe? They were specifically those Jews who did not immigrate to Palestine. The holocaust was, by and large, a slaughtering of one of the most potent threats to Zionist ideology: non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. And Zionists demonstrated (and stated outright) again and again that their first priority was establishing a Jewish state, not the welfare of actual Jews, so of course they didn't lift a finger to stop it. The Nazis were doing them a favor.

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1. Pointedly using only Jewish-authored sources to avoid charges of antisemitism! ↩︎

2. This is abundantly clear in both their actions and in Zionist primary sources during and immediately after the holocaust. Zionists only started accurately portraying it as the massive culture-defining tragedy that it is once it was safely ensconced in the past—and even then, actual survivors were reportedly look down on in Israel as weak and pathetic. ↩︎

This past Saturday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, dedicated to self-reflection and atonement for the harms—both individual and collective—done over the past year. It may has also have been the single year in which Jews, as a collective, have done the most gruesome harm across all our thousands of years of history. This is bitterly painful to reckon with, but now is the time we must reckon with the things that are the hardest.

Shel's post dives into this pain by imagining how Jews will be seen after the war is concluded, once the die has been cast and the world must sit with the outcome. None of the hypotheticals are rosey, because the Jews inescapably have blood on our hands. But it's also worth taking this as a reminder that the future is not yet set in stone, and that we may still work to see the best future that's possible from the imperfect now. We may still perform actions we will be proud of, and our children will be proud of, in the years and centuries down the line.

Next year, in a free Jerusalem.