From the Civ 3 tech tree:

We’re discussing this same thing over on Hexbear and my contention is that it’s actually Tito because he’s wearing a Yugoslavian partisan’s cap. I’m used to seeing older portraits of Tito but the artwork seems to have a pretty close resemblance to the younger Tito:

Neocolonialism in the streets, social welfare in the sheets. Social democracy is neither democratic nor social (except if we’re talking about socialising the rampant exploitation of the developing world, I guess?)

I’m not the person who you responded to.

I’m talking about the targeting of ethnically Russian Ukrainians in the eastern part of Ukraine (the Donbas region.)

There has been attacks against these people going on since 2014. Thousands upon thousands have died and more have been wounded in this low-grade civil war that became the prelude to the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Here’s a western article filtered through western intelligence describing the situation with some glaring oversights, namely that there has been ultranationalist paramilitary forces operating in the Donbas (Azov, Right Sector, C14, National Militia, OUN et al.) with tacit approval from the Ukrainian government since 2014 and that civilian targets have been routinely been used by the military and the paramilitary groups.

Here’s a short article written by a former USAID officer (!) published by The Atlantic Council (!!) that describes the problem with far-right militias in Ukraine, just so there’s no accusations of bias from me in this discussion.

They’ve literally been targeting civilians who are of the “wrong” ethnicity for nearly a decade now. If that doesn’t count as an attempted genocide, I don’t know what would.

Also that’s some cheap framing of the discussion btw. Fascism isn’t “don’t play defence”. I take it that you have gotten your picture of fascism from a particular, well-known YouTube series. If so, that series is critically flawed and it does a bad job of defining fascism and how it functions. But that’s a different discussion altogether.

I tried to read this article but I teared up too much and I couldn’t see to be able to keep on reading.

If Yoko Ono were still alive she’d write an song with an odious, racially-charged comparison between Hillary and black people and everyone around the world would come together every year on November 9th to listen to this song and to mourn our collective loss.

This isn’t a colloquialism. This is a basic definition used within political science.

If you’re going to talk politics on a serious level then using the terminology of political science matters and, if that’s too much of a stretch, then at least avoid colloquial terms which contradict the terms used in political science.

Taiwan doesn’t recognise Taiwanese independence. Let that sink in.

If you want information about Tibet, let me know.

I am a westerner who was raised Tibetan Buddhist so I’m pretty familiar with Tibetan history and… it’s really not the country which gets painted as this peaceful utopia free from political intrigue or human rights abuses that was all about enacting and embodying compassion.

There’s contemporary examples of this, and perhaps the most obvious example is the Karmapa controversy (try figuring that little doozy on your own without being steeped in Tibetan history lol) which often overlooks significant issues such as the struggle over who would hold the seat of Rumtek monastery in Sikkim and lay claim to the considerable amount held in trust for the Karmapa (which featured a wealthy patron, at one point, stationing a small private military to prevent one of the Karmapas from entering the monastery) along with suspicious death of Jamgon Kongtrol Rinpoche and his delegation in a car accident when he was instructed to “test the brakes” on a newly serviced car (BMW? Mercedes? I forget…) or the historical significance of the then-Dalai Lama outlawing the recognition of the Tai Situpa lineage (and liquidating his monastic holdings and forcibly converting the Kagyu monks under his tutelage to the Gelug school) and the current Dalai Lama lifting this centuries-long ban and the implications this would have on the recognition of the current Karmapa(s).

Then there’s historical examples of this, like the famous example of the politically-influential polymath Lungshar, whose son was considered for being a reincarnation of the next Karmapa (this process of recognising reincarnations, strangely enough, tended to exclusively occur to children within wealthy and politically influential families such as Lungshar’s) who was sent as part of a delegation to Europe by the British who were courting Tibet at the time as they sought to expand their colonial holdings from India up into Tibet. Lungshar was smitten by western political systems and he sought to bring about reforms to democratise the Tibetan theocracy.

Unfortunately for Lungshar, his son died under suspicious circumstances around the time that his agenda for political reforms was running into direct opposition by the conservative political powerbrokers in Tibet (monks/lamas and aristocrats) and, in a surprising turn of events, Lungshar was “discovered” to have been practising black magic (they found a piece of paper with someone’s name on it inside his shoe which was considered black magic - this name happened to be of the aristocrat Timon who held high offices in the Tibetan theocracy and who happened to be a conservative and the main figure who openly opposed Lungshar’s reform agenda. How they knew to check Lungshar’s shoes is a matter for speculation…) and so, as punishment, Lungshar had his eyes gouged out on Timon’s order and Lungshar lost his political influence and the movement supporting the liberalisation of the Tibetan theocracy was effectively extinguished by this act.

There’s this extremely romanticised, idyllic notion that westerners tend to have about Tibet (and the fact that Avatar: The Last Airbender is something treasured by westerners rather than being looked at with a skeptical eye for all of its overt orientalism, to me, speaks volumes about just how canonised this notion is) but history paints a markedly different picture than the one we tend to have.

And occasionally the “We make the rules, you take the orders” rules-based order.

Bro, this war is totally different to every other war, bro!

Trust me, bro! I know we got duped into supporting:

The Korean War

The Vietnam War

The war in Iraq

The other war in Iraq

The war in Afghanistan

The war in the Philippines

The war in Guatemala

The war on Cuba

The war in Laos

The war in Cambodia

The war in Somalia

The war in Yemen

The war in Libya

The war in Grenada

The war in Yugoslavia

…but this time it’s an existential threat!! Trust me, bro!

Hey, it’s made a lot of money for the military-industrial complex too!

You can’t call it a wash like that when, back home, the almighty line is going up.

*brings up an odious historical comparison in a hamfisted attempt at an analogy*

*someone else brings up history relevant to the country in question*

“How dare you!?”

What ethnic cleansing?

Whoop, there it is! I’m quoting that for posterity before you delete this comment.

You’re literally denying an attempted genocide right now, y’know that?

It was a low-key civil war, make no mistake about it.

Your government doesn’t just allow armed, organised (largely ultranationalist) paramilitary groups to conduct ethnically-motivated attacks on its own soil without their tacit approval, especially not when those same paramilitary groups tended to get absorbed into the state military forces later on.

This isn’t the wild west were talking here.

Fuck, if a protest action in your own country can deploy the pointy end of the state against you immediately then the civil war against the easternmost part of Ukraine could have had a police/military response within days rather than leaving it to play out over literal years.

Hell yeah I’m a genocide denier.

I deny white genocide without any remorse 😎

Removed by mod

And you realise that watermelons originated in Africa, right?

You realise that the origin of something doesn’t determine the depictions of it supporting racist stereotypes, such as a vast array of disgustingly racist caricatures of black people eating watermelons isn’t absolved by the fact that watermelons originated in Africa, right?

Just posting an image of a man who stood in front of an actively moving tank, crawled all over it, then walked away unscathed doesn’t prove anything that you think it proves.

Go do that on one of your own military’s tanks today. You’d be doing me, yourself, and frankly the entire world a favour if you had the courage to try it.

Go to Albania!!

There’s a good article on the mythologyising of Orwell here although it does its own historical whitewashing by calling it a “botched seduction” which is, frankly, really fucking gross.

You can also read Jacintha Buddicom’s book Eric & Us for more info about this event.