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Reposting this from the Hexbear news mega because i think that it deserves more attention and it may not be entirely clear to people outside of Germany exactly what this means. I made the following comment there:

He’s wrong of course. Poland is not as great a threat as Russia, it’s actually a way bigger threat to Germany than Russia.

Russia keeps asking for a thorough investigation into the Nordstream terrorist attack. Poland keeps justifying the attack and defending the (alleged) perpetrators. Their FM even celebrated it on Twitter and thanked the USA for it. Poland lobbied hard against Nordstream from the very start. Why? Because Poland is an aggressive competitor whose long term strategy is replacing Germany as the EU’s industrial powerhouse.

Russia doesn’t view Germany as a competitor in the same way Poland does. Russia has much more global interests and is not interested in these European power struggles. For decades Russia always had a symbiotic relationship with Germany, subsidizing German industry with cheap energy. Destroying German energy supplies is tantamout to destroying German industry. And who benefits? USA of course but also Poland. Not Russia.

The AfD are fascist scum but they are also politically savvy. They are not wrong to point at how Poland is damaging German interests. They will absolutely win support with this from people who are sick and tired of this German government acting against German national interests to please their Washington masters. I don’t think people here realize just how popular the AfD is in Germany, simply because it is often the only real opposition to the “Systemparteien” (establishment parties).

The more that the establishment continues to destroy Germany’s economy for the sake of this insane anti-Russia crusade that is being now waged by the European elites, the more ground the AfD will gain from disaffected German citizens. Despite the overwhelming propaganda in the establishment media a lot of Germans are not stupid and they can see that the current government’s policies are actively hurting the German economy.

The German left needs to undercut this maneuver by the far right by coming out clearly in favor of a much more transparent Nordstream investigation, and pushing back strongly against continuing down this suicidal path of confrontation with Russia! Else we are just giving the far right a free win when we allow them to monopolize the “sane” (in the eyes of many Germans) position of standing up for German interests against the insane, warmongering EU elites.

Another thing to add is that in the broader picture we should expect to see more of this kind of European infighting. As the overall economic and political situation in Europe deteriorates, the contradictions between EU countries' national interests will become more pronounced.

Whereas when times are good you can paper over these mutually antagonistic interests and keep some kind of "EU consensus" by distributing the wealth, when the overall pie shrinks and competition increases over scarce resources we see more and more nationalistic animosities emerge in Europe.

Whether or not the iron fist of Brussels alone, as the US is now disengaging, is strong enough to repress these national interests and keep the whole artificial construct together is questionable. Already for years we've been seeing the perennial dissenter Hungary at odds with the bloc. Now you can probably add Slovakia and Czechia.

As conditions continue to deteriorate, more and more countries, including eventually also Germany, will inevitably start to reassert their national interests against their neighbors. The crumbling establishment will not be able to keep the lid on the boiling fascist pot down for much longer.

The social democratic consensus is dead. The neoliberal path is a dead end. It is up to the socialist left to present a real alternative to the fascist vision for Europe.

"In recent weeks, a subtle shift has become increasingly apparent. Speculation has been stirring for months that low-cost, open-source Chinese AI models could lure global users away from US offerings. But now it appears they are also quietly winning over Silicon Valley."

If you are on this platform you will be familiar already with everything in this video, but the reason i'm posting it is because this is a masterclass in how to communicate to "normies" about socialism, communism, China, imperialism, the global south, etc. Textbook example of how it's done.

This is exactly how we should talk about these topics with people who know virtually nothing about them. Clear, simple, concise, using language anyone can understand, and in a very disciplined way staying on message and talking about what really matters, not getting lost in tangents, details, jargon, etc.

One of the primary tasks of a revolutionary is to go among the masses precisely at those times when the masses begin to understand spontaneously that the system is not working for them and are therefore looking for solutions. However, not all workers reach that spontaneous understanding at the same time - there will always be some advanced workers who start looking for solutions much sooner than others.

And it is our responsibility to attract these advanced workers to our communist parties, to train them as revolutionaries in as great a number as possible, so that when as a result of deteriorating living standards and involvement in imperialist wars broader sections of the working class begin to look for solutions, we have a large and well-trained enough organization to be able to meet their needs, both for knowledge and for revolutionary organization.

In imperialist countries, with the wealth they've hijacked from oppressed countries, the ruling class has been able to buy social peace by providing a "middle-class" standard of life to a privileged segment of the working class, and offering certain benefits to the broad masses of the people (though in insufficient quantities and now increasingly being scaled back, but still enough to limit the level of popular discontent such as to prevent too frequent riots).

At the same time workers' unions, heavily linked to the bourgeois "labor" parties, have over the years sometimes been able successfully to fight for slightly better pay or working conditions, which the ruling class has only conceded - albeit reluctantly - because its imperialist interests enable it to do so without bankrupting itself (this is now also changing).

Although the illusions in social democracy are rapidly fading as social democratic parties remold themselves more and more in the image of the neoliberal right in order to reassure the ruling class that capitalism is safe in their hands, nevertheless the illusions in parliamentarism still persist. The unions, which have become very passive at the behest of their class collaborationist bosses, must become more active in organizing working class resistance in the face of the abrupt decline in living standards that has hit the working masses because of the capitalist economic crisis, aggravated by the costs of war.

And the situation is going to get much worse. It's to be expected in these circumstances that workers who previously saw no point in joining a union - leading in the past to massive declines in membership - will now join and take part in the resistance taking place. In so doing these workers become advanced workers, workers actively looking for a solution to the problems faced by their class. In other words, the pool of people who can be expected to be receptive to communist ideas is starting to increase.

It's up to us to bring them to the understanding that trade unionism just isn't enough, and to try to recruit them to become revolutionaries. We will be vehemently opposed in this endeavor by most of the trade union leadership which will devote itself to keeping the movement within the bounds of capitalism.

We often hear about "victims of communism", but rarely about the colossal and continuous death toll imposed by capitalism.

The historic mortality crisis that capitalist restoration caused in Eastern Europe — unprecedented in peace time — tells a very different story.

After the fall of socialism, states across the Eastern Bloc experienced the largest mortality crisis outside of war or famine in human history.

Previous figures published in @TheLancet put the number at roughly seven million. But more recent research carried out by @jasonhickel and his colleagues identified 16.9 million excess deaths between 1991 and 2019.

The figures fundamentally reorient our understanding of 20th century political economy.

Rather than "rescuing" the people of Eastern Europe, capitalism systematically killed them. It caused more than twice as many deaths as the 1930s famine that swept Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — a period often summoned in attempts to discredit the socialist horizon as a whole.

And it claimed almost as many casualties as the total WWII civilian death toll in Russia.

These deaths were not accidental.

They were the deliberate product of structural adjustment policies imposed under the guidance of the Harvard Boys and implemented — with no democratic mandate — at the behest of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

These policies decimated both economic sovereignty and the conditions for social reproduction.

They destroyed entire industries and the infrastructures that kept a large industrial workforce afloat — from daycare and healthcare to housing and leisure. This caused not only a spike in mortality, but also a collapse in fertility and a mass exodus of labor to the West.

The policies served a clear purpose: to reinsert these territories into the system of imperialist accumulation, transforming industrial economies into rent-seeking ones that siphoned resources upwards to a new and rapacious capitalist class, and outwards to Wall Street and the City of London.

Research published in The Lancet showed a direct connection between mortality and privatization. Across the region, rapid privatization caused a 13-21% spike in death rates. Countries that privatized more slowly — like Belarus — saw far fewer deaths.

One study observed that the “age distribution and the upstream role of stress, inability to cope with stress, and despair are comparable to the North American deaths of despair epidemic.”

The collapse of socialism brought the sicknesses of US capitalism to Eastern Europe.

This was combined with an unprecedented propaganda assault designed to entrench capitalist ideology, normalize the catastrophe, and undermine the socialist alternative.

After West Germany annexed the German Democratic Republic, for example, one of the first "transition measures" was the dissolution of every Marxist-Leninist institute and university department, expelling or reassigning their staff — a move justified as the "enforcement of freedom" and "de-ideologization."

Across the Eastern Bloc, USAID-backed institutions, Soros foundations and other Western NGOs systematically reoriented universities toward Western liberalism, colonizing intellectual production.

The contrast is starkest when we look at countries that retained the socialist path. Despite the deep crisis following the USSR's collapse, Cuban men saw life expectancy rise from 72.2 to 74.2 years, while Russia's declined from 63.8 to 57.7 over roughly the same period.

Other countries were not so lucky. The collapse of the USSR, as a counterweight to imperialism, had a devastating impact on structures of accumulation globally. After 1991, wages fell, access to food declined, labor reserves exploded all around the world, and the forces of resistance faced a historic and multi-generational setback.

As I argue in 'The Neoliberal Holocaust', an essay for @plbmagazine, it is essential that we rescue the story of Eastern European socialism from the triumphalist, bourgeois framing in which it has been trapped. A sober look at the consequences of capitalist restoration in the region is one step in that direction.

Read more in "Peace, Land and Bread" Issue 6: https://www.iskrabooks.org/plb6

An incredible piece not only confessing to but proudly bragging about the West's historic lies during the Cold War that are still repeated and taught to this day!

Think of the Berlin Airlift as a big-budget movie sold as a true story. Now one of its loudest fans finally admits it was staged.

For decades, the Berlin Airlift has been told as a fairy tale. Stalin blockaded the city: cruel and heartless, while heroic Western pilots fed starving Berliners with flour and chocolate from the sky.

The perfect moral script: light against darkness, liberty against tyranny, good vs evil. Exactly the same moral wiring that still fuels the superhero industry today, cultural programming as moral training.

The same Guardian now admits what Soviet and Eastern historians said all along: there was no full blockade. In Britain’s own National Archives, the Foreign Office wrote in 1948:

“The blockade of Berlin is NOT a siege… movement in and out of Germany is possible all the time.”

Do you want to know what really happened? Washington and London imposed a new currency in their occupation zones, breaking prior agreements with Moscow.

The Soviets responded with limited restrictions on Western transport: not starvation, not tanks, just a border dispute over sovereignty. But the West needed a story and it created one.

A three-billion-dollar media performance named The Berlin Airlift complete with cameras, pathos, and heroic speeches about “freedom.”

As The Guardian now concedes, the entire operation was “a massive and sensational story of air power applied to humanitarian ends.” In other words, propaganda. It even helped re-elect Harry Truman that same year.

By the way, the article doesn’t condemn this psychological manipulation but actually celebrates it. The author writes with longing for the era when the West “lied effectively,” calling for a revival of those tactics. But he got it wrong: the tactics never changed, the Western media keeps lying at the same speed and volume. The only thing that changed is that people recognize the pattern, and the spell weakens.

When liberal newspapers begin revealing their own disinformation with nostalgia, recalling the days when it worked and lamenting that it no longer does, they’re mourning the decay of their own illusion, fully aware of it, and desperate to keep the echo alive.

An incredible piece not only confessing to but proudly bragging about the West's historic lies during the Cold War that are still repeated and taught to this day!

Think of the Berlin Airlift as a big-budget movie sold as a true story. Now one of its loudest fans finally admits it was staged.

For decades, the Berlin Airlift has been told as a fairy tale. Stalin blockaded the city: cruel and heartless, while heroic Western pilots fed starving Berliners with flour and chocolate from the sky.

The perfect moral script: light against darkness, liberty against tyranny, good vs evil. Exactly the same moral wiring that still fuels the superhero industry today, cultural programming as moral training.

The same Guardian now admits what Soviet and Eastern historians said all along: there was no full blockade. In Britain’s own National Archives, the Foreign Office wrote in 1948:

“The blockade of Berlin is NOT a siege… movement in and out of Germany is possible all the time.”

Do you want to know what really happened? Washington and London imposed a new currency in their occupation zones, breaking prior agreements with Moscow.

The Soviets responded with limited restrictions on Western transport: not starvation, not tanks, just a border dispute over sovereignty. But the West needed a story and it created one.

A three-billion-dollar media performance named The Berlin Airlift complete with cameras, pathos, and heroic speeches about “freedom.”

As The Guardian now concedes, the entire operation was “a massive and sensational story of air power applied to humanitarian ends.” In other words, propaganda. It even helped re-elect Harry Truman that same year.

By the way, the article doesn’t condemn this psychological manipulation but actually celebrates it. The author writes with longing for the era when the West “lied effectively,” calling for a revival of those tactics. But he got it wrong: the tactics never changed, the Western media keeps lying at the same speed and volume. The only thing that changed is that people recognize the pattern, and the spell weakens.

When liberal newspapers begin revealing their own disinformation with nostalgia, recalling the days when it worked and lamenting that it no longer does, they’re mourning the decay of their own illusion, fully aware of it, and desperate to keep the echo alive.

From: https://xcancel.com/rinalu_/status/1986071152964579730

The Qinghai-Tibet railway is a high-elevation railway line in China between Xining, Qinghai Province, and Lhasa, Tibet. With over 960 km of track being more than 4,000 m above sea level, it is the highest railway line in the world.

The 1,142 km segment from Golmud to Lhasa started construction in 2001 and opened in 2006, making it the first railway line in Tibet, facing extreme altitudes with half the oxygen of sea level and temperatures plummeting to -40°C.

In addition to it being the world's highest railway, the line is also the holder of numerous other records:

The line includes the Tanggula Pass, the highest point on a railway in the world at 5,072 m above sea level, and Tanggula railway station at 5,068 m is the world's highest railway station. The 1,338 m long Fenghuoshan tunnel is the highest rail tunnel in the world at 4,905 m above sea level.

The Xining-Golmud section of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway has been upgraded to High Speed Rail since 2023.

The first High Speed Rail connection to Tibet proper is now under construction on the Sichuan-Tibet Railway with the high-speed rail link from Chengdu to Lhasa planned for completion in 2030, with smaller segments at both ends already completed.

The high-speed segment from Chengdu to Ya’an officially opened in 2018.

The Lhasa to Nyingchi segment was the first high-speed train in Tibet and completed construction in 2021

Once fully completed the 36-hour Chengdu to Lhasa train journey will be shortened to merely 13 hours.

The Beipanjiang Bridge was the highest in the world, with the road deck sitting over 565 metres above the floor of the gorge, from 2016 until 2025, when it was surpassed by the Huajiang Canyon Bridge, which crosses the Beipan river some 200 kilometres downstream. The bridge is part of the G56 Hangzhou-Ruili Expressway between Qujing and Liupanshui. The eastern tower measures 269 m, making it one of the tallest in the world.

Construction began in 2011 and the bridge was completed on 10 September 2016. It was opened to the public on 29 December 2016. It cost a total of ¥1.023 billion. It was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's highest bridge in 2018.

"Yesterday’s elections in Georgia have put an end, once again, to all speculations about who the Georgian people are, where the Georgian people stand, how many Georgians there are, and who can speak on their behalf.

Georgian people went to the polls yesterday, which was definitely more than just local self-government elections.

Yesterday, Georgian people supported the Georgian state, the country's constitution, law and order, democracy, and national interests.

I thank every voter who came to the polls, regardless of who they voted for. I thank every one of our supporters who strengthened our government. And a special thanks to each candidate involved in Georgian Dream’s election campaign, members of our electoral headquarters, who brought our main message to the voters.

Yesterday, all alternative agendas, fabricated and false realities were put to an end.

At the same time, yesterday, Georgia escaped Maidanization, bloodshed, chaos, and a return to the dark past. We survived not because some extremists or their foreign instructors came to their senses. We survived because law enforcement officers defended their country.

I thank every police officer, special forces officer, security service officer, and government security officer who yesterday, at the risk of their own lives and health, prevented internal and external enemies from disrupting peaceful development of our country.

Internal and external forces, which have been trying to destabilize Georgia for years, attempted to stage a decisive battle against the Georgian people and suffered a bitter defeat.

Yesterday, we saw people led from abroad who were ready, driven by their ambitions, hatred, and revenge, to overthrow the legitimately elected government and, along with it, to overthrow the future of Georgia, our people, and our children.

Today, it is no longer worth talking about the few adventurers who led the attempt to overthrow the government. Their crimes have been weighed, their guilt has been measured, and they will be given the appropriate punishment.

Today, it is the most shameful, cowardly, and shameless participants of yesterday’s events who must be held accountable for what they had sewn and what they tried to reap. I am talking about those leaders of the radicals who actively participated in planning the crime, mobilizing the people, promoting hatred. When they saw that their attempt to overthrow the government failed, they fled and are now trying to shift the blame to the perpetrators who directly resorted to violence.

We must also not allow anyone to distract us from the nature of yesterday's gathering. Society will not tolerate this naivety anymore neither from Georgians nor from foreigners. Each participant of yesterday's gathering knew very well that at 4 pm, on October 4th, they were going to overthrow the government. The time, place, plan, and the goal were precisely set. Several thousand people who gathered yesterday knew very well where they were going and what they were doing.

These are those several thousand people angry about their lives and their country who, in March 2022, from the same place, demanded Georgia's involvement in the war in Ukraine; those who, in June 2022, from the same place, called for the government to transfer power to foreign NGOs; those who in March 2023, from the same place, threw a Molotov cocktail for the first time; those who lost elections in October 2024, and instead of accepting the defeat, launched another unsuccessful attempt to destabilize the country. These are a few thousand people flying the flag for someone else, and who would trade our country's independence for the obedience to someone else.

It is symbolic that yesterday, these several thousand rioters, flying the flag for someone else, were defeated right on the Freedom Square.

After yesterday's failed coup attempt, we should not lose sight of the foreign propaganda support that yesterday's attempt to overthrow the government mustered.

Throughout the day, a constant stream of disinformation flowed from Georgia to international media platforms, while inciting calls were heard from abroad by people who, no one doubts, were rubbing their hands with glee in anticipation of bloodshed. We saw the culmination of this external support during the storming of the Georgian President's residence, when coordinated statements by people, already well-known to our society, appeared, claiming to be external supporters of Maidanization.

Pay attention to the fact that neither during the preparation of the crime, nor during its course, nor after, not a single foreigner, not a single Brussels bureaucrat, nor an official from an individual country, not even distanced oneself from violence and crime, let alone condemned it.

We heard only the slogans supporting the crime and, also, general, empty phrases about democracy and freedom, which seemed even more cynical against the backdrop of the massive crime that the entire world was watching live.

Moreover, a few days ago, we heard a statement from the European Commission spokesperson expressing solidarity with the anti-government rally announced for October 4. We have repeatedly pointed out the harmful nature of this statement. However, no one has distanced oneself from it. Of course, the society will not forget this open support, and expects an explanation.

Their deafening silence on the failed violent overthrow by the extremists embraced by foreign funders and patrons, clearly demonstrates how much real value they place on democracy, human rights, and peaceful development of the Georgian people.

The failed coup d'état of October 4 should serve as a final warning to everyone, both inside and outside the country. There are already calls made to pretend that yesterday's attempt to overthrow the government was only a temporary setback, and that there is a need to change the tactic, continue provocations and they will definitely achieve their goal. It is unimaginable to chronicle greater cynicism, contempt, and outright betrayal of the homeland than these people are doing. However, the lesson of October 4 has been learned.

Within the framework of the Constitution and the law, the Georgian government will do everything possible to ensure that the country is protected, the people have peace, and Georgia and our children have a future.

With calmness, strength, dignity, loyalty, and love, good has triumphed over evil."

Feels like this has become a regular thing that is just going to happen every few months. The EU is not content with having stolen the Romanian and Moldovan elections, they want to overturn the result of the Georgian elections too.

"Masked rioters waving EU and Ukrainian flags torch chairs and tables near Georgia’s Presidential Palace in Tbilisi"

"Tbilisi police have arrested five protest organizers for calling for the overthrow of the government, they face up to nine years in prison, Deputy Interior Minister Alexander Darakhvelidze said at a briefing.

"Interior Ministry officers detained Paata Burchuladze, Murtaza Zodelava, Irakli Nadiradze, Paata Manjgaladze, and Lasha Beridze. They are accused of calling for a violent change of the constitutional order of Georgia or the overthrow of state power, as well as organizing, leading, or participating in violence. These crimes carry a prison sentence of up to nine years," the deputy minister said."

"The protesters who attempted to storm the presidential palace committed a crime, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said.

He added that foreign agents in Georgia would be fully neutralized following today’s riots."

"EU-backed rioters caught on camera attacking journalists in Tbilisi, Georgia"

"Weapons and explosives for Oct 4th sabotage seized — Georgia's Security Service

Sabotage planned along with storming of Presidential palace

Weapons bought by Georgian rep of armed group operating in Ukraine"

"Participants in Tbilisi unrest were controlled by foreign intel – President of Georgia"