Pretty momentous occasion as far as UNSC affairs go. This is the infamous March resolution that has been renewing the sanctions supervisory regime that was first implemented in 2014 and renewed every spring since. This year's would have been the 10 year anniversary of it and having it squashed by Russia and abstained by China is a positive step towards drawing back from a long cooperation with the West on this matter and a necessary preliminary move to re-legitimize any re-establishment of economic relations with the DPRK.
Her biggest accomplishment is paying homage to Mao with a kowtow when she fell down the stairs of the Great Hall of the People. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Evr9IJCUUAEbGzR.jpg
That there is, but there is also no rule that denies the capacity of any non-ML struggle from achieving good or combating imperialism and the philosophical distinction I gave above were made precisely for those groups.
Personally, I view those groups as fellow travellers and not as comrades. For me, the only distinction between those two terms being that we can both talk about the destination down the road we're heading to, but I will tune you out if you start talking about how we should be riding donkeys rather than driving the EV.
Until world communism has been achieved, there’s no simple “choice” between nationalism or internationalism, even then there will be new problems in the new world order.
Fair enough.
I'll also add that "nationalism" is one of those spooky words the West likes to trot out to beat the Global South with simply on the premise that because Western nationalism was an absolute clusterfuck (and here they'll usually point to the "nationalism as reason for WWI and WWII so it must be bad" gimmick which is agnostic of the Marxist discourse on the role of capital and imperialism in those wars), it must mean that Global South nationalism must transitively be bad as well.
Similar to how Western sexpats post pictures on Reddit of Buddhist swastikas trinkets in Asian flea markets and the comments use it as a sign that Asians don't care about the Holocaust. Yes, places like Modi's India show that Global South currents of nationalism can be warped into profound fascism and cultural chauvinism, but this should not be seen as the prima facie character of Global South nationalism, particularly for AES states.
In essence, nationalism in the Global South operates on a different register from how it is seen in the West and this distinction should not fail to be appreciated. The reason why the West itself downplays nationalism is because the entire bloc is now more or less subordinated to American hegemony not unlike how their propaganda once portrayed Comintern/Cominform Internationalism. Countries with flare-ups of nationalistic (or "patriotic") state character like right-wing Hungary interfere with the ease of coordination to Washington directives and thus are a distinctly problem child for US state interests, which is why nationalist currents are generally suppressed today in the West.
The truth is that there's some straight up freaks that pose as MLs and the unfortunate thing about the marginalization of the left in the non-AES world and the need for leftist "unity" is that we have to suffer their presence in our discourse. It's been the state of things back when the USSR still endured and it's still the case today as seen with "ML" takes on China.
I remember reading Keeran and Kenny's work on the dissolution of the USSR, how the capitalist restoration led the greatest humanitarian disaster since the Second World War, still ongoing today through legacy conflicts like Ukraine. K&K observed how some sociopathic Western "MLs" actually celebrated its collapse at the time because "now that the USSR was gone, real socialism could finally begin."
Deeply disappointing, as an outsider to the Murdoch island's internal discourse narratives, to see Australian members (both here and elsewhere) drink the kool-aid on the propaganda against this referendum and bending over backwards to do online global opinion damage control for their settler colonial state's latest collective act of ethnic repression.
The conditions of this referendum are completely performative, yes, but it institutionalizes a recognition of the indigenous peoples these settlers have genocided. This would have been a first step. A very small step, but a step still. Voting down the referendum because there should have been better conditions is a hilariously optimistic expectation for the land of White Australia. It's been two centuries since the establishment of this genocidal settler state, this referendum is the best first step that's going to be ever condoned from such a population, and apparently even this was a first step too far for these islanders.
The propaganda excuse that the indigenous peoples opposed this themselves, from a cursory search myself, even seems wrong give how the overwhelmingly indigenous districts apparently voted for it.
The only valid reason for opposing this performative first step is that it deprives the Australian state from weaponizing this as self-image propaganda like New Zealand does with its "cutsey" Haka performances to pretend like its some decolonized country for the world. Instead, this referendum further confirms this island is still in the collective grip of the failsons of White Australia.
"the London Economist, the European organ of the aristocracy of finance, described most strikingly the attitude of this class.” - Karl Marx
"The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires." - Vladimir Lenin
Having both Marx and Lenin speak out against a publication shows how this rag has been consistently on the wrong side of any struggle for the past two centuries. Their modern flashy r/designporn-bait cover designs and tidy site UI hides the sociopathy of their publication history.
For starters, the modern day sinophobia of the Economist is no surprise. They're the original China haters, and I mean that with zero exaggeration. They've been calling for war and imperialism against China for two centuries now. They lobbied in the UK for the Second Opium War using sociopathic mercantilist justifications:
"We may regret war … but we cannot deny that great advantages have followed in its wake"
It's an unsurprising stance when their founder literally earned his fortune from the forced opium trade imposed against China following the First Opium War.
The British capital-centric profit driven agenda they've followed puts them even on the wrong side of a "liberal" perspective of history. They've historically opposed the UK abolitionist movement, protesting that "the boycott they proposed of all goods made using slave labour would hurt British consumers and punish slaves."
They were the only British publication to support the Confederacy, arguing that:
"It is in the independence of the South, and not in her defeat, that we can alone look with confidence for the early amelioration and the ultimate extinction of the slavery we abhor."
In a mask-off moment, they said that the slavery issue was secondary compared to the lucratively low cotton tariffs the Confederacy could offer, which made Marx himself ridicule the rag when he wrote for the New York Daily Tribune, saying that the Economist was finally: ‘honest enough to confess at last that with it and its followers sympathy (for American emancipation) is a mere question of tariff’
Their chief editor at the time, the Confederacy apologist Bagehot, still has a "cutesy" little column named after him to this day.
Showing that they've learnt nothing in the centuries since, in a 2014 book review on a book about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, they unironically complained without a shred of self-awareness that:
"Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy."
For more further reading, the Citations Needed podcast had an episode on "The Refined Sociopathy of The Economist." https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-98-the-refined-sociopathy-of-the-economist-4966767e1688
American biotechnology companies commercially exploit genetic resources obtained at low cost from developing countries and apply for patent protection, so as to gain huge profits.
Meanwhile on CNN today: "China’s sitting on a goldmine of genetic data – and it doesn’t want to share" https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/11/china/china-human-genetic-resources-regulations-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
@ComradeEd@lemmygrad.ml @satori@hexbear.net Having gone through my own reading rabbit-hole on UN diplomacy in the past, I can clarify: The vote was on passing the "important question" scheme that the US first devised in 1961. Every time a motion in the UNGA was put forth to restore the UN seat to China, the US inserted a preliminary amendment to have the motion considered a "important question," which would require a supermajority rather than a simple majority for it to then pass. This blocked China's membership for 10 years until 1971. This is why the vote in the video has the US and its underlings voting in the affirmative and why the Assembly laughed, because by the US' turn to vote, it was already clear that the UNGA majority would reject the supermajority amendment and thus be able to restore China's membership.
The end came abruptly for the Taiwanese delegation. On October 26, 1971, the General Assembly narrowly rejected the “important question” resolution, which would have required a two-thirds majority to replace Taiwan with the Communist government. Anticipating the inevitable next step, the Taiwanese delegation walked out of the General Assembly moments before the lopsided vote that formally evicted them. In that instant, Chiang Kai-shek’s government lost all rights at the United Nations, including the coveted council seat. It was just as well that the Taiwanese had left. Many delegations broke into wild applause—and even dancing—as the results were announced. Finally, after twenty-five years of exclusion. Communist China would be in the inner sanctum.
Bosco, D. 2009. Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World. Oxford.