If all it takes to cause famine is one country no longer sending aid, you are extremely vulnerable to that country. The desirable alternative is food sovereignty - under conditions of international pressure there may be scarcity but not starvation.

The purpose of these aid programs is cynical: they are to create exactly this kind of dependency. It is why food sovereignty is considered a threat and is actively undermined by the IMF.

What we are seeing is what threat is being made when a country is made dependent on “aid”: starvation. Same as in Gaza. This is the calculus the US and its cronies force upon the global south: submit to insecurity and become a dependency or try to go your own path and become villified and a target to be destroyed.

The former path is guaranteed death and suffering, which is why nations led by those with a coherent political program choose the latter and invest in food sovereignty as an anti-imperialist measure.

Thanks!

I would say that if a word has been misused for a century it actually just has a new meaning. And I’m not aware of it ever being used consistently.

Fun fact that runs parallel to your point: it’s not terrorism if you only destroy property.

Terrorism is defined as using violence (or the threat of violence), against civilians, in pursuit of a political goal. All 3 requirements must be met for it to be terrorism: violence, civilians, politics.

Many people who only damage property are still labeled as terrorists by the powers that be. The dictionary can be quite misleading, as it does not really analyze inconsistent usage, particularly for political or propaganda purposes.

For example, “ecoterrorists”. Classically labeled as such even when just destroying property. Or even sometimes just for slowing down logistics. Predominately First Nations protesters and activists were labelled “ecoterrorists” by Rick Orman, citing examples like chaining themselves to equipment.

The inconsistent usage has at least two means of biased use. I’ve already mentioned one, which is using the term for those damaging private property or slowing down enterprise, i.e. equating damage to private property as violence (when private enterprise seizes land or destroys water this is never called ecoterrorism). The other is in inconsistent application: it is a label only routinely used by the targets of capitalist-run states. When their states destroy entire cities and target civilians, it is not called terrorism. When their targets go after a politician insteas of strictly military installations, suddenly they are terrorists. Hell, they can be called terrorists even when going after only military targets. The actusl use of the term corresponds to the means used and the political and ethnic background of those engaging in the acts more than whether the acts are violence for political (isn’t everything political?) ends. Terrorism is when a car bomb and not a JDAM.

The real meaning of terrorism must be understood through describing its actual mainstream use. Descriptivism not prescriptivism, lest we miss the reality of propaganda. This is important because the term will continue to be used as I described and to justify rounding up protesters that occupy buildings or block highways or burn down a Tesla dealership. It doesn’t really matter ehat the dictionary says, tge law will say enough, the cops will arrest on orders of preventing “terrorism”, the judge will convict and sentence based on calling a dumpster fire terrorism, and one might even get sent to a black site to contain such “dangerous” people, “terrorists”.

And this is not new. Anarchists and other cool people were lazily labelled exactly the same way over a century ago for the same types of acts.

lmao trying to pretend that trying to leave a building you’ve been locked in by force, by cops, is protester violence.

You are, to put it mildly, full of shit. The only violence was the police beating and hurting protesters.

Please try to be more honest going forward.

lmao did you even read what I wrote about conflating private property damage and violence?

Sure, but let’s step back and analyze it a little more.

Protest itself does not achieve political change. Its usefulness is in direct action or in recruiting those present into further action, education, and organizations. Liberal protests are state-sanctioned parades. Real protests tend to have an actual action to take, demands to be met, people to impact, costs to incur on others.

The terminology of “peaceful protest” is already poisoned and should be questioned. The media and politicians - and those propagandized downstream, all conflate private property destruction and violence. If a protest breaks windows, suddenly it is no longer “peaceful” and can be rejected by the propagandized as invalid and not to be supported. The US is full of such good little piggies, happy to align with the ruling class picking their pocket and doing actual violence because they exist exclusively in a world of capitalist propaganda.

Under these auspices, all direct action that the capitalist system wants to crush is, will, and has been labelled terrorism. It’s already done this for private property destruction by environmentalists, peace activists during all major wars (except WWII, where American Nazis were coddled and of course did not damage private property), labor organizers, anti-segregation organizers, socialists, communists, Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans, etc. They happily do it again against anti-genocide protesters, particularly because they can play on the islamophobic use of the terrorism label at the same time. Like all fascistic logic, they must frame themselves as the true victims, so they also happily call every critic of Israel an antisemite.

All of this bombards the US population 24/7. Americans exist in a haze of accusations and terms they barely understand, trying to slot it into what could only charitably called an ideology - the naked reactionaries in red and the obfuscated reactionaries in blue.

All of this is to say that the greatest barrier in the US is education, and education begins with agitation, e.g. these protests in any form. Get as many people as possible to show up to the next thing, to organize the next thing, and spread knowledge.

Anti-environmentalist state actions are an extension of red scare actions. The bridge between them was policies against “terrorists”, i.e. people who use the weapons of poor people and not jets and aircraft carriers. Environmentalist organizations, from the state perspective, are now “environmental terrorists” when they obstruct or destroy property in addition to civil lawsuits intended to bankrupt them that have an absurdly easy path moving forward. The case of Steven Donzinger is an example of this, where Chevron lost a large civil case and decided to openly punish the lawyer who represented poor Ecuadorians that had been impacted. The court system was nakedly abused (usually they give themselves more cover and false pretenses) to harass and punish Donzinger by a series or judges beholden to industry and capital.

“Domestic terrorism” is also applied to protesters for black lives and Palestine and will increasingly be used to do so. The intent is to crush left organizing and to conflate private property and humsn life. You may already recognize this latter tendency when a protest that breaks windows is deemed violent, as if the windows have families and needed to visit a hospital to feel better. Meanwhile, police or jailer or proud boy violence against the protestors is described in neutral cop speak, seemingly without agency or human impact.

:)

To clarify I only meant the attacks on civilians.

The ANC also attacked civilians. Though you should note how dramatically more the Israelis (and the SA government and white South Africans) target civilians.

There will never be a way to justify the senseless killing of those.

When under occupation, any means necessary is not only sanctioned by international law, it is necessary. Note that the kibbutzim in the area had armories and shot at the al Aqsa flood participants, which included a wide coalition as well as whoever simply went past the walls of their own volition.

How is it senseless, by the way? Do you actually know what happened on the ground? Who did what? What was going in in their heads? What their lives were? There is an implicit chauvinism in the use of clichés and guesses rather than become educated.

There are other ways than violence to get rid of them.

No there aren’t. You apparently know nothing about the history here, the many movements that attempted peaceful means, even as recent as the Great March of Return in 2018. And the repeated lies and violence that Palestinians have faced following every diplomatic agreement.

As you can see, the Israelis will speed up and openly embrace genocide at the mere perception that they are not totally dominant over those that they occupy. Israelis march not for peace or justice, but for harsher violence and getting rapists out of jail. They are an ethnic supremacist culture that embrace the genocide they are committing. You cannot “peace” your way out of that. You would condemn Palestinians to extinction.

For concentration camp victims, they are far more restrained than virtually anyone. Would you also condemn the Sioux for killing settlers occupying their land? Why not instead materially oppose the settler colonists? Your tut-tutting is just tacit both-sidesing of a decidedly imbalanced situation.

Ofc the whole situation in Gaza is fucked beyond comparison but there has to be another way on the world political stage to resolve this instead of letting it cook like we now do.

There is not. You have an unrealistic idea about how geopolitics and imperialist violence function. It is not like the movies or the 1 or 2 examples of allegedly nonviolent movements recuperated by capitalism. You’re not going to win just because you are right or empathetic. You will not convince your captors and child murderers with a good speech and some protests. Most of the states, i.e. the major sourcea of military power in the world, will not step in to help you unless it serves their self interest - and most capitalist countries see subverting themselves to the US and therefore Israel as in their self interest.

And when states or similar forces do step up, you get tacit genocide apologetic PR campaigns against them. Such as, “do you condemn Hamas?”

The historical and realistic source of liberation is organized armed struggle.

Condemn? I commend freedom fighters taking military action against settler colonial ethnocentric apartheid genociders.

Do you also condemn the ANC?

Ah. I don’t have a list but I know that lemmy.world does its very best to emulate the worst parts of Reddit, including this.

What do you mean by censored?

On no you can’t say slurs. Truly the most oppressed.

lmao there are already very good “which programming language is this?” guessers but ratger than just use one they throw it at an incompetent black box.

Abolish with prejudice

I am correcting your false claims and am getting amused by the fact that you abandoned any pretense of reading or responding to explanations in the previous thread, even making excuses for not having the time to do so, even though now that you clearly do have time you are using it to instead double down on your misconceptions while still lashing out at “the tankies” (me).

You lobbed insults and denigration and now plead victimhood when receiving mild criticism of your claims and behavior.

It is very funny that they’re back here complaining about “the tankies” and rehashing the same talking points they couldn’t defend a few days ago. It’s like they are trying to embody the stereotype of the “Western leftist”.

There is ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang in which China has piggy-backed on the US “war on terror” as an excuse to repress muslim population.

There is not. There are no hallmarks of an ethnic cleansing nor evidence for one. The think tank propagandists behind these claims - they are all in the same funding networks connected to the NED/USAID - spent ages just trying to shoehorn what was actually happening into a wishy washy definition of “cultural genocide”, which is to say, there is no mass death, no mass expulsions, no attempt to eradicate the population in any way.

Re: “cultural genocide”, even with a wishy washy definition, that is also specious, as Uyghur culture has not been disrupted or banned. The exact opposite is the case, it is lifted up culturally, promoted materially. What is oppressed is anything in the neighborhood of salafism, which has never been part of Uyghur culture, but in their infinite (islamophobic) wisdom, the western pro-think tank critics have conflated it with Uyghur culture simply because they are largely muslims.

And you have, yet again, uncritically accepted the liberal propaganda narrative against the designated enemies of the US state. Are you noticing the pattern? It seems you are more interested in living in a fantastical liberal bubble than ever acknowledging that “the tankies” actually can defend their ideas while you cannot.

This is officially called “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism”. Do I really need to say more?

Yes, you do. You can of course understand almost nothing about this from that title. I would challenge you to tell me what you think it means and what is going on in your thought process.

Taiwan has its own democracy and wants to be independent, yet China claims it as its own.

A few days ago I broke this down for you and you ignored it entirely. If you deigned to read what others told you, you might understand the basics of the detente with Taiwan.

Yes there’s asterisks and details and questionable involvement from the West in all of this, but these aren’t “myths”.

The content of both claims are, in fact, mythological. In the first case it is very literally the propaganda outfits of CIA cutouts and the promotion of some expat grifters working together in an absurdly lazy information war. In the latter case it is a false pretense of having no idea or way of knowing what the tension is over Taiwan and opting to present it in an intentionally vague way to put it in a worse light while also using a liberal framing re: praising it as democratoc, whereas any anarchist will not uncritically celebrate bourgeois electoralism, and certainly not in defense of an ethnocentric state. Taiwan did actually do an ethnic cleansing, which is ironic for your case.

Sinologists from various countries have stated that they or their colleagues have been barred from entry or held by authorities for weeks because of what they’ve said about China. For example I just heard Weigelin-Schwiedrzik say this on a marxist podcast.

Literally who cares.