Fascist on fascist violence. You love to see it.

I’m about a decade older than you and i can remember growing up when Romania’s factories didn’t look like ancient ruins yet, when the streets weren’t overcrowded with cars, when the apartment buildings weren’t falling apart, and when people still thought they were about to usher in a paradise of freedom and prosperity because they had just gotten rid of those nasty evil communists.

The moment i became a committed believer was the moment when being in Romania started to feel like i’m walking through the ruins of a once great civilization…seeing the crumbling monuments and great works that these advanced people were once capable of building but whose skills have long since been forgotten, as if an apocalyptic event has wiped out all knowledge and society had been forced to return to a more primitive stage - one in which the only things we knew how to build anymore were advertisement billboards, shopping malls and gaudy mansions for corrupt politicians and their oligarch friends.

what this shows is that there is broad societal support for open fascism and it’s no longer taboo to identify as a fascist

Yup. The significance of this should not be understated. This is exactly what we saw happen in Ukraine where Nazi symbols and slogans were openly normalized and look where they are now. When fascists are no longer afraid to hide even their most overtly fascist aesthetics, you have a huge problem.

Back when we had socialism, people in Romania complained about not being able to travel outside the country. Now that Romania is in the EU and the borders are open for anyone to leave, i constantly hear people complaining that too many are choosing to leave the country. Can Romanians make up their mind already?

Yeah it’s not looking good for Romania, but at least there is a little bit of a buffer there. I mean Bucharest alone has more inhabitants than all of Estonia.

One interesting thing to point out is that some of the red you see on the “with migration” map amounts to a net internal population movement. Ilfov county is noticeably blue in the migration scenario which to me indicates a transfer in population from the rural/smaller cities to the capital.

But that’s not a good thing either as it means that the country has policies that really neglect most parts of the country except for the capital. And you see this disparity when you are travelling around the country. Meanwhile Bucharest is becoming increasingly overcrowded as well as gentrified, and the traffic with so many commuters into the city from the outskirts is horrible, especially since the infrastructure has been neglected for so long.

There are two parts to the European far right. One is the so-called “populist” right (a purposely misleading label, as their “populism” is just a mask for neoliberal and pro-corporate economic policies like tax cuts for the rich), which tends to be pro-Russia in most European countries because of their shared anti-liberal, socially conservative views (though not always… in Poland for instance the right wing is just as Russophobic as the liberal centrists are).

The other are the outright Neonazis who have ties to Ukraine’s Neonazi scene and who are anti-Russian because they view the Russians as Asiatic non-Europeans and a threat to their vision of a racially pure Europe. The Ukrainian Neonazi movement has been busy over the past ten years building up connections with their counterparts in the rest of Europe, trafficking weapons and organizing para-military training camps.

They have had substantial resources to establish their networks in Europe thanks to state backing by the Kiev regime, and European governments have tolerated and turned a blind eye to these groups and their activities because of their usefulness against the Russians.

This latter group, from what i can tell, has never had a hugely positive view of Trump (in part also because of his ties to Jewish oligarchs) - though they of course welcomed his normalization of xenophobia and racism - and now if Trump ends up ditching the Ukraine project they may even turn outright hostile toward him.

I think unfortunately that both of these parts of the European right will be strengthened as a result of the Ukraine conflict. The first because it will have been validated in their skepticism toward the Ukraine project, and the second because there will be huge resentment in the Neonazi ranks over what they will perceive as the West’s betrayal of their cause.

And that second group is especially concerning, as with the end of the war we will suddenly have a large number of hardcore ideological Nazis, with ample combat experience and severe PTSD, flood into Europe as Ukraine is either taken over by the Russians or is left as an economically devastated rump state where they will be unable to find jobs after the war.

Not to mention that the black market for all kinds of very dangerous weapons, which has already been thriving thanks to the monumental levels of corruption in Ukraine, will become an order of magnitude worse as tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers with no economic prospects and no war to fight anymore try to sell whatever they have left to whoever will buy it. In practice that means organized crime and militant Neonazi networks (these two often have significant overlap in Eastern Europe btw).

That’s how i feel right now sitting in the EU about Ne Zha 2. It’s like, here’s one movie that i actually don’t want to pirate, but i can’t pay to see it…it’s beyond stupid.

There are systemic barriers for China in this regard that occupied Korea doesn’t have to deal with. If Chinese media gets too big western countries can just decide to shut them out, ban them from entering the western media space, and they can apply pressure on non-Western countries to do so as well under the pretext that Chinese cinema is a vehicle for “CCP propaganda” (which is pure projection considering the incestuous relationship that Hollywood has with the US military industrial complex and its involvement with the liberal regime change industry).

I haven’t seen the second one yet, and i’m not sure when i will be able to since there is no announcement of it being released in Europe any time soon (thanks EU censorship!), but i have seen the first and i thought it was pretty good.

Some parts of the humor didn’t translate for me, perhaps it was targeted towards younger audiences, but the visuals were pretty cool for 2019 and they did some things in that regard that i don’t think i’ve seen western animation do so far.

That’s just a function of their proximity to the US. When you’re that close you don’t have much of a choice. I don’t think Japan wanted their main trading partner to be China either, but they are where they are and they have to deal with it.

I think it’s more interesting to notice where there are outliers who are close to the US but still have more trade with China. Cuba is noticeable but not surprising, that’s just a result of the embargo. Panama is the intriguing one.

The US is now trying very hard re-assert dominance at least in their most immediate sphere of influence by forcing Panama out of the BRI. Long term they probably won’t be able to reverse the trend, but in the short term they can bully a few countries into submission.

Other interesting outliers are Paraguay and Jordan, as fairly isolated blue spots in otherwise red regions. Jordan of course is basically a US neocolony, their regime is one of the biggest Arab enablers of the Zionist entity.

It’s Paraguay that surprises me. I know a little about their history but i will admit i’m not very familiar with the current political and economic situation over there, so i would have to learn more about them to understand why they are still so closely tied to the US.

Edit: Also, i think we could see Argentina flip back to the US at some point with the way things are going there. It’s not something that can happen overnight just because the current administration is pro-US, but with the kind of deindustrialization policies that are being implemented there now to turn it into a resource colony, the material basis for meaningful trade with China may just disappear. Where most of the rest of the global south is moving in a developmental direction, Argentina is one of the few going the opposite way at the moment. It’s sad but that’s what seems to be happening.

I have serious doubts about this resurgence. I just don’t see it around me here in Germany. I will admit i don’t talk much to many younger people anymore, so i might have a false impression on this, but i am still skeptical whether Die Linke will even make it past the 5% barrier. I don’t think that Linke’s complicity in the suppression of pro-Palestinian voices did them any favors with the youth. I guess we’ll see in a couple of days when we go to vote.

“Surprisingly sober” only in that it recognizes what Trump is likely trying to do…the author still continues to repeat the same tired old mainstream tropes about the “unprovoked full-scale invasion”, lies about Zelensky’s popularity, the usual hand-waving away of the demand for elections in Ukraine, and of course complete denial of the Nazism and dictatorial nature of the Kiev regime. The piece continues to foster the delusion that there was a “better deal” Kiev could have gotten if only the West continued to go all-in on war.

BRI is the opposite of doing nothing. China has been proactively building up south-south economic ties and building up infrastructure and productive forces to enable the global south to break free of neocolonialism. We shouldn’t make it seem like the Chinese are just sitting on their asses doing nothing because that is not at all the case. They just haven’t been going to war, funding terrorists or overthrowing governments like the West does. This can look like “doing nothing” if you are used to the imperialist MO, but actually it’s far more productive than the conflict strategy.

Biggest takeaway from this is that with or without migration, the Baltics are fucked. For all their paranoia of Russian invasion, they are emptying their own countries to a point where the Russians can just walk in and find no one is there anymore.

This. The map just shows where China overtook the US, not whether China is number one in all of those countries. Depending on the region some of these countries may have a local regional power (e.g. Germany for many EU countries, perhaps Brazil for South America?) as their largest trading partner, but even in those cases the US and China will still likely be very highly placed.

I truly doubt they’d be stupid enough to try it, but i’d like to see the complete political chaos that would ensure if they did.

First of all Ukraine doesn’t have anywhere near that amount or the capacity to produce anywhere near enough every year to fulfil an obligation of that magnitude in a hundred years. So this was a pipe dream from the very beginning. This is Ukraine bargaining with cards it doesn’t have.

Secondly, Trump doesn’t see this as a deal for further additional aid, let alone a military commitment. He sees it as demanding back some of the money that the US has already invested. And Zelensky has absolutely no leverage whatsoever to demand anything.

And finally, who is going to deploy soldiers to Ukraine? It would be political suicide for a US president to do it, at the moment that is completely out of the question. And Europe? They are a joke. Even if they had anyone to send, no one in Europe wants to do that, especially not if the US refuses to get involved.

I think that’s a quite astute analysis. Thank you for elaborating.

I agree. I think this take gives them altogether too much credit. We’ll see what happens, but for now my gut instinct is to think that the extent to which the Trump administration is actually embracing “realism” is being overestimated by many commentators. A tiger doesn’t change its stripes…not this quickly.

Still…some very interesting things are happening, and we see the US is at least trying to adapt to changing realities…Europe is still hopelessly delusional and will get left further and further behind by every other major player.

The article was published this month. When it was drafted, i don’t know.

The Moscow terrorist attacks certainly fit into the framework of the plan that the article exposes. They’re exactly the kind of operation the people who write these strategy papers like to fantasize about and think will score some kind of “psychological victory”. And we know that the CIA and MI6 have essentially been running the SBU (at this point indistinguishable from a terrorist organization) since 2014.