Well we could be saved by cowardice.
And Our Flag Was Not There: A History of the Second American Civil War.
- Thread starter Dab master
- Start date
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I am not so optimistic. For one, now even the most moderate of Israelis have a burning desire to wipe Gaza off the map, and even the IDF can't ignore them forever. Also, Bibi is going to fight tooth and nail before going down; if he did all the controversial judiciary changes to prevent himself from being dragged to a trial when his PM term is over, he'll just keep going to protect himself.
Yeah but cowardice may save the day. The IDF last tried a big infantry attack in Lebanon and they sucked at it.
In any case I am forced to ask that this topic end since this is not a thread in News and Politics.
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
LAst time, the IDF went in expecting to slap around a couple of 2000s HAMAS-style militias with AKs and maybe a few RPGs. And find a couple kidnapped soldiers to show they can't be bossed around.
What they got was a network of bunkers, enough AT to give tankers nightmares, and rocket barrages that left ISraeli citizens in the north with PTSD.
What happened now is HUGE. Israel just had its biggest security breach and humiliation this side of the Yom Kippur War. Entire settlements were abducted or wiped out. They're out for blood this time.
Gaza isn't Lebanon. Hezbollah is sitting on one of the roughest terrain in the region, and had years to build up its forces and fortifications after the 2000 IDF "withdrawal" (read: they did an Afghanistan twenty years before the US did).
Gaza's been starved and beaten up on and off for the past few decades, and the embargo's been on since 2004. Plus, while it's insanely treacherous urban terrain, it's still all on flat land, posing less of a threat to an attacker than Hezbollah's mountain retreats did. Yes, they've been buiding up their strength for the past few years, but they lack some of Hezbollah's advantages, like clear unfettered access to weapons and material from the Syrian border (Egypt is not so accommodating)
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I mean, sometimes it seems more like "united against a common anemone" or something.
Seriously, though, when it comes to Israel v Palestine, most of the time, I got nothing. Sorry.
Now, the rest of what I said, I tried to specifically keep on the subject of modern warfare, Western Hemisphere politics, and other things more relevant to the thread's actual topic, rather than Israel v Palestine specifically and implications for Middle Eastern politics. This is because I'm trying to respect Dab Master's wish that we not get focused in on this particular subject.
If this isn't satisfactory to him, I'm sorry; I genuinely misunderstood what his wishes were.
Speaking of anemones...
Also, and this is me condemning the Biden administration for appalling cynicism...
I think that while rhetorically they "want to" "secure the border" which means brute squads whupping refugees in their brains, on some level they actually know that refugee waves the size we get from places like Haiti aren't actually harmful to the US's interests and actively help to offset our problems with a graying population. They're just nasty enough as people to try and get the benefits of immigration without admitting that this is what they're doing in a way that might alienate old white kinda-racist fuckos or leave the military-industrial complex anxiously puckering their butts because their PERIMETER is INSECURE.
The Russians had the kind of forces and weapons that on paper should have been able to do this, but in practice a lot of their best on-paper equipment is overrated, their personnel are undertrained and poorly coordinated, their supply and maintenance situation was patchy, and their overall operational plans and tactical doctrine were based on a lot of bullshit assumptions and underestimation of the enemy, with no real margin for error when things started to go wrong.
And you can't do deep mechanized offensives that way; they fall apart.
While I'm not familiar with the facts of some of the cases there myself, I see what you mean.
The Russians were expected to throw this at Ukraine but they don't have their shit together, as noted above.
But I wouldn't be at all surprised if, say, to make up an example, some time around 2030 the Chinese get into a serious land war somewhere (i.e. not an amphibious crossing of the Taiwan Strait which has its own problems), and prove that it's totally possible for your troops to advance with terrifying speed and break up the enemy's OODA loop and all that good stuff... as long as you have the factories and determination to just make half a million suicidal grenade quadcopters and throw them at the enemy on the first day of the offensive, then throw away another half million on the second, and so on.
Which I think you'd count as "massive attritional superiority," so I'm not really saying you're wrong, I guess.
I mean, I don't think Biden would be doing that anyway. At this point there's essentially nothing in it for the US; funding someone who doesn't personally have a reputation for colonially exploiting Haiti is probably cheaper and definitely better from a PR standpoint.
Also, and this is me condemning the Biden administration for appalling cynicism...
I think that while rhetorically they "want to" "secure the border" which means brute squads whupping refugees in their brains, on some level they actually know that refugee waves the size we get from places like Haiti aren't actually harmful to the US's interests and actively help to offset our problems with a graying population. They're just nasty enough as people to try and get the benefits of immigration without admitting that this is what they're doing in a way that might alienate old white kinda-racist fuckos or leave the military-industrial complex anxiously puckering their butts because their PERIMETER is INSECURE.
Hmmmrm. I'm a bit confused by this passage. One thing I'll note is that the trench warfare aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian War seem to have a lot to do with the inability of the Russians to get their shit together in the early war enough to launch really decisive mechanized 'spearhead' offensives and knock out enemy capabilities in the opening wave.
The Russians had the kind of forces and weapons that on paper should have been able to do this, but in practice a lot of their best on-paper equipment is overrated, their personnel are undertrained and poorly coordinated, their supply and maintenance situation was patchy, and their overall operational plans and tactical doctrine were based on a lot of bullshit assumptions and underestimation of the enemy, with no real margin for error when things started to go wrong.
And you can't do deep mechanized offensives that way; they fall apart.
[nods along slowly]
While I'm not familiar with the facts of some of the cases there myself, I see what you mean.
Hmmm. I'm not sure I agree 100%, or rather, I think that "massive attritional superiority" can sometimes involve "having better shit than your opponent" in a broad sense. This is something we have rarely seen since the Iraq War because nobody who can afford to maintain a large well-equipped, doctrinally prepared combined arms force (including things like aerospace recon and air support) has thrown it against serious opposition in a long time.
The Russians were expected to throw this at Ukraine but they don't have their shit together, as noted above.
But I wouldn't be at all surprised if, say, to make up an example, some time around 2030 the Chinese get into a serious land war somewhere (i.e. not an amphibious crossing of the Taiwan Strait which has its own problems), and prove that it's totally possible for your troops to advance with terrifying speed and break up the enemy's OODA loop and all that good stuff... as long as you have the factories and determination to just make half a million suicidal grenade quadcopters and throw them at the enemy on the first day of the offensive, then throw away another half million on the second, and so on.
Which I think you'd count as "massive attritional superiority," so I'm not really saying you're wrong, I guess.
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Bisexual-Mart
Far from the shallow ground
- Location
- The Great State of Warshington
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Now, I have an idea. How come we haven't heard anything about the United Auto Workers in the RLC during the 2ACW taking over former Ford, GM, and Stellantis plants.
And we haven't heard anything about them building vehicles in these plants for the RLC military.
And we haven't heard anything about them building vehicles in these plants for the RLC military.
Sabertooth
Currently on a road trip with Magnus the Red
- Location
- Portugal
Im curious about the sources about the claims of the US running out of ammo to give to Ukraine or the having to resort to the Strategic Reserves.
I think the US would crush Iran in a war, and that's bc the population no longer supports it like Gazans do Hamas. After the Mahsa Amini murder and protests, the regime has lost even more credibility and can't risk fighting a war with the US, even a war of attrition. Shortages and sanctions have taken a huge toll on them, and now people are very unlikely to put up with wartime against the US. I think a mass popular uprising in Iran would and likely will happen should the US go to war, and it will shorten the war and save countless lives.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A popular uprising in support of the US, as liberators? Or just against the Iranian government, as the shitty people currently in charge? Those are two different things there.
Edit: Stuff
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Against the Iranian government, for starting a war and sending more ppl to die against the US.
- Location
- San Francisco, CA, United States
No it would be incredibly easy for the regime to shore up its support by framing the opposition as helping the US / Israel commit genocide against Muslims in that situation. Because well, unfortunately in that specific context they would be
Iranians aren't fans of Islam anymore, especially since it came from the Arab invasion and many are secular nationalists now. I think a lot of Iranians wouldn't buy that explanation anymore, they dont trust this evil, murderous regime. They're not willing to die for Islam or Palestinians, much less a corrupt regime spending their hard earned money funding insurgencies against Israel and the West. And then starting an unwinnable war against the US(which would only be won if the US committed to an occupation and nation-building, where there is zero political incentive or will in the wake of Afghanistan's fall). Iranians want to live under a government that doesn't kill women for not covering their heads or engaging in extrajudicial assassinations of dissidents, even trying to kill those abroad like Salman Rushdie or Masih Alinejad!
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Sorry, this sentence alone leaves me a bit baffled. Are they going to switch back to Zoroastrism now or something? No matter the attitude Iranians have towards their own government, I fully expect the USA to do absolutely nothing to endear themselves to the locals. Unless you want to say that Ukrainians toppled their government for being corrupt or something while RF bombs started raining.
- Location
- San Francisco, CA, United States
Admittedly it's hard to figure out the truth with how much the regime suppresses non-Muslim religious expression, but most studies I've seen on the matter seem to contradict that
Polling Iran: What do Iranians think?
To be fair, these predate the Mahsa Amini protests, but I find it unlikely they would have shifted the religious views of the population so drastically and so quickly.
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
If that were the case, they would have either brought back Zoroastrianism or become atheists after WW2, and we wouldn't have had the Islamic Revolution if people regarded Islam as just a result of Arab conquest. By this point, many Persians are far more zealous of Islam than their Arab counterparts.
What I can buy, however, is that after 20+ years of ultraconservative mullah rule, passions for Islam have cooled somewhat, especially among the younger generations. The Islamic Revolution itself was the result of a backlash against increasing liberalism and the fall of Iran under foreign influence, basically being divided between British and Russian spheres of influence before becoming more or less a British puppet. The socialists (or social democrats) were defeated and humiliated by Mosseddegh's ouster by Operation Ajax, and as a result, only the mullahs were the last bastion of anti-foreign resistance, especially with the Shah clearly siding with the foreign governments and oil companies. The communist Tudeh party wasn't very popular, and the liberals, while popular, didn't quite have the raw power and determination needed to ouster the Shah. The mullahs came in, kicked out the Shah and the liberals, and set up their own system. Twenty years later, the flaws of the system are more than obvious, and people are sick of them and want reforms. That just means they're sick and tired of mullah rule, not that they dislike Islam.
Admittedly, they would rather get more liberal reforms, more civil rights, and just for the sanctions to go away to enjoy a little more prosperity rather than squander it all on foreign ventures and aggressive politics.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Presumably (assuming for the sake of argument that Manav is correct) they'd do the same thing that plenty of people in other parts of the world do, or have done, over the past several generations: Become less and less religious, and less interested in following the dictates of any religion, including the one that is "traditionally" yours.
It's like looking at a poll that says "Scandinavians are becoming less religious and less concerned about what Christianity tells them to do" and asking "well what are they going to do, go back to Odin-worship?" Sure, in theory a few of them actually might do exactly that! But the majority of them just become atheists, agnostics, or very weakly religious to the point where it no longer controls their political life.
...
There's a mechanism potentially (assuming Manav is right, for the sake of argument) at work here that we've seen in Europe. After generations of the local rulers constantly posturing and screaming about how God demands, consistently, specifically, always that you do things that are clearly contrary to your people's best interests, it sort of wears the shine off your society's religion.
If you use religion as the opiate of the masses and as that alone for long enough, to try to keep them from noticing everything else you do to them... after a while, the masses' drug tolerance starts to climb, and some of them start going into rehab.
...
Now, to be very clear, I'm not saying Manav is factually correct about what's happening in Iran. But there is a process at work that can cause the kind of effect Manav describes, even if things in Iran haven't actually gotten there. There are, after all, many counter-forces at work that can push back against it.
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Our Flag is Black as Coal
AND OUR FLAG WAS NOT
THERE:
Our Flag is Black as Coal
THERE:
Our Flag is Black as Coal
"There is a specter haunting the world's powers. A specter whose visage strikes fear into the hearts of the Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings, Generals, and Chairmen of the world. It is the specter of anarchism, that rough beast that slinks out from under the rubble of societal implosion and then stands to rule the ashes like a Phoenix, tending them into its own garden.
We hear everyday the dangers of anarchists from European and Indian media, they are among the favorite bogeymen of the crowned heads and their petite-bourgeoise hanger-ons, for unlike the communists and socialists it is felt like they can't be controlled. It is because of anarchists that European forces must occupy Greece, the Antilles, and the far northeast of North America. They are a demon under the bed, a viper that bursts from the bosom of its host society, a much graver threat than the anachronistic reds and Jihadis. You can abolish the proletariat, ship them off and divide them, but the product are the lumpenproles and they too will desire to be kings of the earth.
Run pigs! We can smell fear on your breath! Your doom follows behind you! Keep running because your every move brings death closer, and while burning down your world you only ensure that the ashes will fertilize our garden."
- From "A Warning to the Masters of the World from the Trash you Disposed Of" by the French Anarchist Action Federation circa 2035, unknown press.
"…There is a question haunting anarchists around the world as we look upon Cascadia as the largest anarchist experiment in the history of the human race (barring, perhaps, the days of primitive communism before the first wheat seeds were sown by human hands) the question being; but are they the right kind of anarchist. Many would, predictably, say no. These people are often those outside the Free Zones, but also include those inside the Free Zones railing against the deviationism they see all around them, keeping up their neighbors at night and generally being annoying. But then the Free Zone wouldn't have much point if people weren't free to be annoying, now would it?
(Slight chuckles from among the audience)
This of course beggars the question of what kind of anarchism the Free Zone is, for if it is the "wrong kind" of anarchism then it has to a kind or else it could not be wrong. In truth this is the core of the issue, the Free Zone is no specific kind of anarchism because there are too many kinds of anarchism within it, thus it can never satisfy purists because there is no purity.
In order to understand this we have to go back to the origins of anarchism in the Free Zone, and see how Cascadia came about.
This is a question most often asked by those outside North America who see Cascadia as a tragedy and want to understand how it happened, since in there minds it is so inexplicable. One day the US government is unstable, the next day anarchists are taking major cities. This comes from a position of seeing anarchism as, even more than communism or fascism, utterly irrational, not just a bad way to run a society but anti-society. These baffled thinkers would have been totally unconcerned with anarchism before 2025, after all, communism had managed to stick around in the Soviet Union for around seventy years and was still technically the ideology of government in a few states, but anarchism had existed for a few years at most in small areas before the Cascadian Revolution.
(Slight outbreak of whispering from among the audience)
We have to examine where anarchism came from in Cascadia and how it managed to stick instead of dying out like previous experiments such as the Ukrainian Free Territories.
First off, who were the anarchists before Portland rose up shortly before the Q Coup?
We can identify that. Anarchism thrived, as it usually did, not among the people most thoroughly integrated with capitalism, the wage-laboring proletariat, but among those on the periphery. In essence, the lumpenproles and America's serf class, farm laborers. Those who had jobs in what laborists would call unproductive industries, who switched jobs often, who were on-and-off unemployed, indebted, ect. There were a lot of these people in the America of 2025. A huge class of devastated people, those whose labor was surplus to economic requirements, had been produced by deindustrialization in the period from the Oil Shock and Stagflation, up to the aftermath of the signing of NAFTA. The first communities hit hard by this economic apocalypse saw social collapse, which hit Black inner-city communities first, and then rippled out to white industrial workers in the Midwest. The social effects were the same regardless of race, a rise in crime both petty and violent, drug use, alcoholism, disintegration of families, ect. The world had already ended.
(Thoughtful murmurs from among the audience)
Then in 2020s round two hit the class of Americans spared from the first round of apocalypse, those who still had jobs basically running on imperial largesse. An excessive number of office jobs, far beyond requirements, that kept millions in a middle class lifestyle, an economic strata of society basically completely supported by easy global trade and the stability of the American currency, as well as massive amounts of debts and speculation.
The combination of the Iran War, the Second Oil Crisis, the Covid-19 Pandemic, the loss of much of South America to populist leftist Provisional People's Assemblies that formed Pan-America, political instability, the labor shortage from the Trump Administration's mass deportations, and trade wars all served as overkill to this class of people. Cars could not get gas at economic prices, the large class of desperate Hispanic servants was depleted by flight or deportation, agricultural goods rocketed up in expense, houses in suburbs and exurbs lost value, speculative properties lost value, offices were shuttered, call centers and jobs that could be done over Zoom were moved to India or automated with AI when possible, colleges went bankrupt, everything that was certain in life crumbled. It was American carnage, the endless American middle class fear of apocalypse, which had moved from churches to movies and video games, had come true, but worse than that the apocalypse had happened, but people had to keep on living.
Millions, and soon tens of millions, were immiserated. Every possible societal response could take place because so many immiserated people all looked for some meaning, and some deliverance, in any possible avenue. The psychological shock of dead president after dead president and American troops being defeated in the field by people seen as savages, all the horrors that were supposed to stay over in countries inhabited by those with dark colored skin who could be pitied but safely seen as alien, it had all come home. It is then, no surprise that so many people ran to extremist groups or cults, who now recruited people faster than the FBI could destroy groups or set up honey pots. America, as in the promise of America, that being a middle class lifestyle for all, was dead. It could not return despite the fantasies of the DSA and the Zeroists. It was the Texans who had gotten ahead of the curb by throwing out the Stars and Stripes and looking for a break from the American past and towards a consolidation of local power in opposition to an empire that was now a shambling corpse, endlessly hungry like a zombie, but impotent and flailing. Even before the results of the 2024 election America's bourgeoisie were fleeing to Europe and Australia and reconsolidating the empire there. An ironic reversal, as America suborned the European states to its will, now America's elite brought their capital and skills to Europe, giving that Eurasian Peninsula back its crown as the center of a western Empire.
(Groans from among some of the audience)
But I digress from that tangent. What was happening in the Pacific Northwest? Why did that region explode into anarchy and raise the black flag?
Partly this was luck and circumstance. In Portland there was an anarchist "scene" already established even before 2020.
(Doubtful audience murmurs)
Mutual aid societies had set down roots, beginning the construction of a parallel society underneath the dying one. The creation of mutual-aid groups took place alongside the establishment of giveaway shops and anarchist federations, as well community gardens and street-fighting groups like ANTIFA.
(Nervous sounds from Audience)
In 2020 when massive riots broke out around the country these rioters carved out autonomous zones where police daren't set foot. In 2022 these autonomous zones grew, in 2022 they grew again. 2023 was generally a year of counteroffensives by police and allied civic groups in cities like Portland and Seattle and they fought back against the anarchists. The scenes of these fights were often around homeless encampments that were organized by anarchist cadres, or self-organized although the arguments about which form of organization was more important is a good way to start fights in Cascadia. These homeless encampments had their own laws and codes of conduct, but not laws on a piece of paper or defined social contract, but social codes like those of tribal societies. Often there would be ceremonial leaders like the Hobo camps of old, or the idealized "People's Emperor" of the ancient Chinese Agricultural School of thought.
(Speaker sips water)
These camps often served as pit stops for wandering homeless, the nascent Road People who were, as of yet, undefined. These people got their start wandering as agricultural laborers, following the routes of the undocumented migrant laborers who had never had their numbers replenished, meaning local authorities like sheriffs were often willing to let Road People be because local farm owners needed their labor.
All these groups intersected with each other at points, and with those who were more plugged in with the wage economy and still had permanent housing. These groups saw class interest in fooling the plots of police, landlords, and reactionaries, organized around soft power groups like anarchist food kitchens and gardens, and around groups willing to indulge in sub-bullet and kinetic warfare, although these conflicts were usually low-scale.
2024 brought new chaos as domestic insurgencies in the US spiked and the slight renewal of the social peace caused by the defeat of the reactionary Texan Secessionists broke down once more. Violence was accelerated of course by so many Americans having combat skills from the Iran War, Haiti, or being ideological volunteers in the Latin Wars, the Real Virginia Conflict, the Texas Emergency, or the Second Irish Troubles. So many people bouncing around, used to violence, trained for it, and lacking any opportunities except those they could forge on their own, were virtually barrels of gasoline sitting in a shed of dry wood.
Of course in the Pacific Northwest many had cut their teeth fighting the police, the National Guard, and armed reactionary groups. Even mass arrests didn't really stop the burning, it only brought dissidents together and radicalized previously apolitical members of the lumpenproletariat. The Harris Administration very simply put, could either coopt the left to use them as leg breakers against provincial right wing separatists, following that by bringing them into the system and watering down their demand, or it could simply pull the Argentina Option and strike hard and fast with massive sweeping purges to subjugate the nation.
(Gasps from audience)
Not saying that is good obviously, but it has worked for reactionary states in the past, while the previously mentioned model worked for Ireland and several Latin American states that didn't have outright revolutions.
In any case Harris simply dithered until the assassination of Jeff Bezos which forced her to call for a massive crackdown while the US was rapidly sliding into chaos due to the election, the forces she needed to do the killing weren't obedient to her. Wild thrashing ensued as Portland was put under martial law preemptively but the depleted and demoralized National Guard failed to do much, the right wingers who would have been enthused about bathing the city in blood didn't want to do it under the command of a liberal government. There were many Guardsmen who fled, often with their weapons, to join rural and suburban militias, they would fight under their own commanders and even clash outright with state forces who they, rationally, should have been working with.
Violence mainly took place between leftist militants and rightist militias, the National Guard squatted around vital government and corporate buildings and didn't venture out much. In turn the fighting grew more vicious and politicidal on the part of the Black Bloc and the rightist militants. Raids caused more-and-more civilian casualties and flight began to accelerate, but flight hurt the rightists more than it hurt the anarchists because the rightists could flee to the rural areas of Oregon or even the deep interior, but there was nowhere for the leftists to go.
Terror is a weapon, but it only works on those who have things to lose. A few acts of terror were enough to begin putting reactionaries near and within Portland to flight even under the noses of the National Guard. To a less extreme extent similar events took place in other cities like Seattle.
In the run-up to the Q-Coup crucial events would take place with rapidity. Key union leaders, and unions in general, would lead segments of the proletariat into the nascent nationwide general strike, causing a swathe of workers in Portland to ally with the anarchists. This would allow the city to finally be seized in the moment of the Scramble amidst desultory fighting with some National Guard elements still loyal to the state government, although many simply fled the city and others defected, and with remaining police and militias elements who hadn't decided to flee. The Black Terror would begin in Portland against police officers, right wing militia members, landlords, federal agents, and their allies or groups felt to be their allies like Christian clergy.
(Mutters among audience)
The Portland anarchists had gained their victory only a few days after the Q Coup but there was a very real possibility they were going to choke on it, like many anarchist groups before them. They were in alliances with various leftist and some liberal groups in the city who had joined them in opposition to the rightists, and this coalition looked shaky when military victory was actually secured. Furthermore while looting the abundant storehouses and docks in the city would keep the city supplied for a while, supplies would run out if the rightists could create a cordon around the city. And even if farmland could be seized that didn't mean farming could be organized quickly enough. Although winter isn't typically harsh in the Pacific Northwest and the winter of Twenty-Four-to-Twenty-Five was particularly mild, it still wasn't optimal.
Legitimate good planning and plane luck would keep Portland from being surrounded and dying on the vine like several other isolated urban areas in the war from Bloomington to Austin and Orlando.
First, let's address the planning. Anarchists were able to ensure Portland was an anarchist zone, governed under the auspices of Platformism and direct democracy given that the Total Anarchy demanded by some was suicide. This was largely because they formed a coherent faction with the Portland Anarchist Federation and labor factions failed to create their own political vision while communists and socialists were disorganized, smaller in number, and fought among themselves and many liberal leaders simply left to join the state government meaning individual liberals decided to join the anarchists as the anti-rightist force, or flee. In either case they were immobilized as a faction.
The anarchists then followed up on the capture of the city with a swift offensive by the Black Army, which was organized by ANTIFA cells with leaders elected by their men, groups voluntarily submitting to a temporary non-absolute hierarchy. The Black Army included veteran ANTIFA fighters and veterans of leftist volunteer brigades to other wars, as well as Iran War vets. There was a professional core who knew a lot about urban fighting from Portland to the horrors of the Iran War.
The rightist forces in turn were disorganized. There was factional infighting and the RRA-associated groups who were the best organized had decided to fall back further from Portland while some militias and segments of the police decided to make stands in the suburbs.
The result was an incoherent defense when the anarchist forces and their allies pushed hard into the suburbs. The use of heavily armed bulldozers to break barricades was already becoming widespread and the use of some self-driving cars as bombs also helped sunder some of the enemy forces and more decided to cut and run while the remainder were mopped up with extreme prejudice in the harsh early days of the Scramble.
(Audience mutterings)
The Oregon State Government had dissolved in the meantime as an attempt to maintain a coherent government broke down after much of the legislature was wiped out by a bomb planted by Cottonists in the National Guard. Other legislators fled to California, and a rump of DSA and Green Party legislators rallied in Corvallis behind militias formed by local college students that tended towards the DSA or anarchism. They would make an alliance with the Free City and in between them begin to push on the Willamette River Valley.
Once more the Willamette could not have been captured without the local migrant farm laborers, foreign and domestic, although anarchists would spit on the idea of anyone being foreign.
Did these farm workers all decide to be anarchists? No, obviously not. But massacres were launched against them by local police and militias and so some, in desperation, seized their workplaces and allied with local leftists and liberals also under attack in the area, sending the countryside into vicious war. War complicated by occasional clashes between paranoid rightist militias and by some people deciding to simply become bandits or make a go at being warlords.
Thus the drive into the Willamette was not a drive against a coherent enemy, but a clearing out of various factions. The more organized rightists could make powerful stands in small towns but the fact that others were fleeing inland hindered their position and only made them even more outnumbered. Resistance had crumbled within a month, and once more out of mutual necessity the urban ideological anarchists and the rural farm workers were forced together.
Or at least that's the story as some would tell it. Others claim that the idea that the rural farm workers ended up anarchist "on accident" is a mere bit of chauvinistic propaganda by foreign liberals to make the "fall" of the Pacific Northwest look like it was merely the work of urban, overeducated young radicals from middle class backgrounds. The supporters of this interpretation say that there was a conscious adaptation of anarchism among the migrant farm laborers, lured as they were by that ancient creed of freeing the soil for the free use toilers of the earth.
I will take a moderate approach and say it was a bit of both. The migrant laborers would have included among them some political radicals but most people from other countries working in the US weren't interested in radicalism or "making trouble" as it would be seen at the time, they were interested in making money and sending money back home. Anarchism may have been embraced by many groups before Portlanders arrived, but after the initial seizing of ground by self-organized survival groups. It certainly does seem false and paternalistic though that the farm laborers were "converted" to anarchism by traveling missionaries from the cities who needed to show them the way through being secular saints of anarchist virtue, a view pushed by some who can scathingly be called neo-Narodniks.
(Pauses to drink water)
In any case there was the possibility that Portland would simply be deleted by rightist militias blowing the dams further upriver. Some of these dams were nearby Native nations who captured them, and others were maintained by rightist groups who saw hydropower as too useful to be forsaken.
Regardless, victory in Portland and the Willamette did not mean the anarchists had created Cascadia, that took a long process of politically undermining the opposing leftist factions like the DSA and the Trotskyists from within. So how did groups like the Puget Sound Resistance Coalition end up suborned to the black flag?
Well for one thing, although the Trotskyites had led the resistance in Seattle, no one really liked them that much.
(audience chuckles)
Most people very simply found them confusing and alienating. The Trotskyites couldn't enforce any kind of vanguard state on Seattle much less the Pacific Northwest. The anarchist groups reacted quickly to changing circumstances, being the first to embrace Post-Americanism and usually being the first to organize outreach and aid to rural areas, and their message seemed to resonate more with former-Americans. The Free Fleet certainly decided anarchism was, in a word, sexier than Trotskyism. Could the dusty writings of a failed Bolshevik compete with this modern, very 21st century, modern doctrine of freedom without capitalism or the state? Both gods that seemed to have failed? The anarchists had no compunctions about what they were or what they wanted, but the Trotskyites seemed to hem and haw about post-Americanism or Americanism, about how far the revolution should go, and a million other things. Meanwhile the anarchists simply acted, if a thousand ideas were thrown against the wall one would stick, the other anarchists would rally to it, and all of them would claim to have been secretly behind that idea the whole time.
It is ironic then that anarchism was embraced by many among the former US Armed forces. One of the most stratified places in American society! But perhaps that is why it was embraced, such extreme authority brought a reaction by those who had just mutinied, they didn't desire to throw off a yoke painted with the Stars and Stripes in favor of a yoke painted red.
(some angry mutters in the audience)
Then of course came the Canadian Coup and the…
(the video seems to edit out the part of the lecture covering the period from the Brown Storm to the Fall of 2028)
…With the path to Spokane blazed open, however controversially, Cascadia could now go on the offensive.
(audience growling)
We can debate the morality of the use of chemical weapons, and the anarchist argument for it, but the fact remains that in this instance the result was the end of the Siege of Spokane.
(more audience growling, some yelling, the words "terrorist" can be heard)
Ahem, let's move on shall we? As I was saying Black Army forces were on the advance and the Milwaukee Accord gave them a greater ideological guiding light.
This was taking place after the Battle of Fargo, despite many movies and such mixing up the chronology of events and making it seem like the Gas Attack of Moses Lake took place before Fargo.
In September the Bastion State was seeing its fortunes rapidly reverse and advances on multiple fronts by DAFUF forces.
The offensives on the Plains are a different topic so I'll stay focused on the Northwest. What was happening internally in Cascadia at this time?
The result of bringing in Ilaheechuck to the spider web of Cascadian diplomacy was that indigenous power had received a huge boost in the Free Territories. No one was more willing to expropriate landowners than the Black Army which cut its teeth in the Willamette. This was pleasing to those groups interested in the goal of LandBack.
(audience gasps)
Yes yes, I know. In many places people treat that phrase like "Cut the Tall Trees" or "Jews Out" thanks to propaganda in Europe produced by North American exiles.
(angry grumbles from the audience)
But put aside fantasies for a moment, many of these Native Nations had signed on to Ilaheechuck in opposition to the Canadian Junta and when the Junta collapses backwards and the Bastion State exploded across the Prairies and Rockies they were now linked together by the hip in order to survive. In Europe once more there is a vision that Asians and a few radical whites were responsible for the revolutions in the cities and basically "tricked" the Natives in rural areas, or bribed them, into joining a revolution they could not understand. The proponents of this myth think they are the anti-racist ones since they are taking blame away from the aboriginals!
(Some anger from audience members, shouts, and then others yelling for the shouters to shut up)
But this is false, it's pigshit frankly. It is hard to ascertain how widespread anarchism was among the early resistance to the Canadian Junta, in Ilaheechuck, but given that people were already moving weapons across the border? It seems hard to imagine that it wasn't at least the leading ideology from day one. Although once more we have to imagine that most people probably had little ideological education of any sort and were fighting for immediate material reasons, ideology came later when things were more established.
So! By the time things were turning against the Bastion State there was a significant Native presence in Cascadia affecting politics, as well as the growth of the "green" presence that had been there since day one, but now seemed much more serious when there was another Dust Bowl hitting North America. All this influenced the current Cascadia, for what is Cascadia?
(pause and silence)
What type of anarchism is it?
(more silence)
It's every type of anarchism. The overall structure is Platformist, voluntary organizations existing to facilitate the organization of projects, organized along horizontal lines, utilizing direct democracy. Of course many anarchists would say this is far too close to a state even if there aren't taxes and police!
But those anarchists can, potentially, move to communes or zones where things are done differently! There are patches of woods and mountains where people try and eek out a hunter gatherer life, admittedly if you wanted to have a place to play as hunter gatherers you could hardly ask for a better one than the Pacific Northwest, and after a lot of practice some people even stay anarcho-primitivists for more than a year at a time!
(audience laughs)
Or you can be less extreme and try tilling the earth, a little less prim in your anarcho-primitivism. It shouldn't have to be said most people don't live this way of course. Most people still like electricity even if they don't like the state.
Moving into the small townships of the rural areas are the people who decided not to go all murder-suicide when the Black Army showed up. Little direct democracy towns who aren't allowed police or jails but you might still find a Christian church, something hard to find in Portland these days.
(audience grumbles)
You can even find pietist Christian communes and monasteries. Out on the Bend you can find pastoralists as well, some Natives trying a go at restoring nomadism again, as you can guess it's a cohort heavily made up of restless young people.
And in the cities we should discuss the heart of the social revolution in anarchism. The "black heart" as that buffoon Karl Pitt calls it on his dreary video essays lapped up by angry young middle class men here in Europe.
Is it a 24/7 drug orgy in the cities? I'm sorry to disappoint but no.
(audience laughter)
Turns out even if you remove social stigma around group sex most people would rather not. The real change in sexual ethics in the Northwest isn't that they are having decadent Pansexual orgies all the time where they worship Baphomet and Lilith, although there's at least a few of those, I would know. The real change is the breakdown of what the Bolshevik Kollontai would call the bourgeois family.
In the Free Zone genetic parents are generally still important to their children, despite what lurid tales you may have heard, but they have no distinct rights to their child, and there are spaces for children that are under adult supervision but practically self-governed, think community centers.
(disturbed sounds from the audience)
Of course I know what people think when they hear that in Europe: those anarchists must be diddling kids!
(gasps from the audience)
Come on now! I know you were thinking it! But I'll ask you this, do you think adults having less power over children leads to more abuse or less? Especially when there's less opportunities for people to accrue power that they can use to garner protection from consequences.
But like I said most children are born to a mom and dad because most parents are monogamous, although polyamorous families do exist they are still a relatively small minority, like gay people and gay families. They may be growing in number, it is hard to tell in an area without official census keeping. In any case children born outside the womb of a cisgender woman are very rare despite lurid tales on the internet. That inherently ensures that most children are born to heterosexual monogamous couples, but crucially those couples have no more rights to their children than gay or polyamorous couples.
But let's move on from the family and to a less controversial topic! Religion and drugs!
(audience chuckles)
As I said in the core cities of Cascadia it's somewhat hard to find Christian churches after the most…heated part of the Black Terror. This was because of flight and there not being many devout Christians there in the first place, but there also was some iconoclasm and killings of clergy. But that doesn't mean that there isn't religion.
Unlike the orgies, public pagan ceremonies are quite easy to find in Cascadia, whereas you have to really work at finding the orgies. Many of these involve various degrees of Earth worship in shades of Gaianism, intersecting with other pagan mystery cults. One would think the Norse pagans would be hurt by association with the Madison's but the Cascadians fought the Christian Identity militias for most of the war and didn't fight the Wotanists until really late, in any case there was a hard line drawn between the two groups of Norse pagans. It helped that many Wotanists treat Loki as something like a devil figure whereas the pagans in the Northwest treat Loki as an icon of beneficent chaos and free expression.
Adopting Native American spiritual beliefs is less popular among the white Cascadians precisely because there are people who can tell you that you're doing it wrong. Although it still happens.
Others incorporate earth worship into a blend of other paganisms from Celtic to Greco-Roman and even some smaller attempts to revive Etruscan or Indo-European paganisms. General witchiness and Wiccanism are extremely common.
Spins on various Sinitic and Dharmic religions are also popular; from Buddhism to Daoism and Shinto, influenced by some East Asian and Indian anarchists moving to the Northwest. Some Sikhs in the area have interpreted the call to only obey their holy book as the last guru as a call to not obey or deify any state. Some Indian dissidents have come to North America of course, and there has been an attempt among some Dravidians to revive pre-Indo European invasion Dravidian faiths with elements of tree worship.
Drugs are involved in a lot of religions in Cascadia being totally legal, for after all what would be the point of anarchism otherwise?
(audience laughter)
I joke but reversing the American prison system was a very big part of anarchism's pre-war raison d'etre. American prisons were enormously overfilled by the time of the revolution in Portland, a desperate attempt to restore law and order by the state that ran into the problem that they literally lacked the prison space to keep all the people they wanted to jail. Merely financially ruining people just pissed them off more.
However some people weren't in prison for drugs or economic crimes, they were rapists and murderers and abusers. A realist has to deal with that and when anarchy left the minds of theorists and entered the real world it had to address the fact that other people like being safe more than they like an idealized total freedom. There was a real chance Cascadia could collapse under this contradiction via groups like the DSA and the Trotskyites promising to bring back the jails, while pinky-promising to make sure the jails didn't become abusive or get overcrowded.
Ultimately threading the needle was hard and one can say Cascadia has so far failed to find a solution satisfactory to everyone. Generally communities apply social pressure to lesser-wrongdoers who are merely nuisances, stuff like shunning and pressure campaigns. If that doesn't work the perennially violent can be exiled to distant locales, which some anarchists still decry as being "prison without the bars." Other communities may respond occasionally with mob justice but being too indiscriminate or brutal with mob justice can invite reprisal from wider Cascadia via trade embargos or syndicates refusing to visit your community or threatening to disbar members from it. It is not a perfect system but neither has Cascadia collapsed into an orgy of violence. There are some people who are just violent or nasty and sadistic but they are a small minority and most violence stems from the societal level.
(thoughtful audience agreement)
But now let's continue with land tenure…
(recording of lecture stops here)
[Note: This lecture from Doctor Guiness Lexbury was recorded at Dublin University circa November 8th, 2036 and posted by an unnamed individual on FreeTube. The recorder is unknown. Dr. Lexbury is a controversial "adventurer" who goes to areas considered dangerous by his audience of Europeans and Australians and then creates books, lectures, online videos, TV interviews, and podcasts about his experiences. He has gone to see the Tribal Games in Cheyenne, the ruins of Calgary and Colorado Springs, done interviews with rightists die-hards in the Rockies, met Allegiance members in the Papuan War, dined with Russian warlords, and sailed with Malagasy pirates. In 2037 he is planning on making a video series with Inuit pirates/insurgents in Greenland.]
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Finally we get a peek at the black hole (pun) that is Cascadia.
Happy to see that despite LePen's attempts the French left is not dead yet.
I swear, this man is absolutely based. Also, "Russian Warlords"? Oh boi, it's happening, Putin's ship is sinking.
Rise, my fellow lumpens. Rise.
Sabertooth
Currently on a road trip with Magnus the Red
- Location
- Portugal
Can someone make a list of all the acronyms so far and what they mean? I kinda got lost.
Admittedly it's hard to figure out the truth with how much the regime suppresses non-Muslim religious expression, but most studies I've seen on the matter seem to contradict that
Polling Iran: What do Iranians think?
To be fair, these predate the Mahsa Amini protests, but I find it unlikely they would have shifted the religious views of the population so drastically and so quickly.
Iran's secular shift: new survey reveals huge changes in religious beliefs
A huge new online survey of Iranians reveals only 40% identify as Muslim.
theconversation.com
Indeed many are secular and quite pro-Western. I'm a Baha'i and know quite a lot of Iranians that are quite Francophile, to the point where French has been a common second language for rich/elite Persians to learn, France was a popular destination for the elites to send their kids to study abroad and Merci has been incorporated into the language.
Why Does Farsi Have French Words? - Lingalot
This post discusses why Farsi has so many French words, where these words came from and why Iranians say ‘merci’ for ‘thank you’.
www.lingalot.com
And as my family is Punjabi/Hindu speaking, there are many words that are the same or similar enough in Farsi. The Persian language and culture is associated with culture and elegance and nobility, and I would venture to say the Iranians are like the French in their cultural influence on neighboring countries and cultures. Hence why the Shia regime is such an embarrassment to the Iranian people, bc they are not some backwards, conservative Islamic country. Even Balochistan, a part of the country which is conservative, has seen mass protests by women in hijabs and massacres by the regime in cities like Zahedan, bc of how bad and corrupt the regime has become.
- Location
- Back in the 90s (In a very famous TV show)
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Ve/Ver
Isn't direct democracy a form of hierarchy in its own right? Also, "You can move to a commune that doesn't have a state, even though it's inside our totally-not-a-state" kind of sounds questionable to me.
Then again, I'm fairly strongly biased against anarchism, so make of that what you will.
Then again, I'm fairly strongly biased against anarchism, so make of that what you will.
Given that I have individualist leanings, I'd say yes. However, I have a strong suspicion that any anarchist society that arises from the ashes of a liberal democracy will end up retaining some vestiges of what looks like a direct democracy even if the direct democracy doesn't have any formal power to enforce any decisions (you'll note Cascadia has no cops and no prisons), because people are used to that sort of thing being used as a way to gauge how much support an idea has. So the degree to which this hierarchy can actually manifest is rather limited.
Of course, I think it could be the seed around which a state forms, but Cascadia is not without its flaws. Individualist concerns about Cascadia still retaining elements of the state have been repeatedly alluded to in updates; we also saw them in the update about the Battle of Seattle. Unfortunately, reactions have either been to brush these concerns off or say that they prove Cascadia is just a statist society. These are both mistakes. Cascadia is not a state, but still has vulnerabilities and has not completely eliminated every last vestige of hierarchy.
Perhaps in the future, these remnants will take over Cascadia and the most dire warnings of individualists shall be proven true, or perhaps Cascadians will end them entirely. But over the near term, I suspect they will remain stable enough. And if I have concerns, I still have no doubt that I could be very happy there.
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- Location
- San Francisco
Unfortunately hierarchy IMO, is as inevitable as food chains. The human tendency towards categorizing things lends itself to the creation of hierarchy. The best way to combat it is to maintain flexibility of thought. That's why this Platformism we see in cascadia is probably the closest humans can come to "true anarchism".