MelianPretext

Spoilers for the source novel plotline here.

It's a fictionalized account which seems to be based on Beevor and Alexievich, so definitely junk food.

The reality is that we still exist in the nightmare pangs of a world where the failsons of the past 500 years of imperialism and genocide strut around acting like the moral leaders of the planet. You enter into a sort of mental paralysis despair spiral when you read about the atrocities committed by those who built this western "civilization" through the genocide of the New World, the subjugation of the entire planet and see the chauvinism and nonchalance of how this west conducts itself today.

There has never been such a degree of inhumanity as what followed when the west got its grubby little hands on gunpowder and the compass and to have them now hide the butcher's knife behind their back and act the saint today, gloatingly prancing about like peacocks about being the "first world," one built with the inherited loot of 5 centuries of imperialism, gives you a wrenching dissonance at the Kafkaesque parody of a world "order" we now inhabit.

The most farcical aspect of this is that we of the West are the most filial children this species has ever produced. The institutional propaganda purpose of western academia and all those prestigious University Presses in terms of the humanities is to print out endless slop degrading the historical past of designated enemy nations and lionizing our own. It's viewed as a great triumph to see designated enemy nations so self-conscious in casting down their forefathers as Khruschev did to Stalin and as feckless diaspora reactionaries fantasize about doing to Fidel and Mao.

Meanwhile, the 2020 BLM protests showed how the west would fight tooth and nail to defend every single inch of the historical pantheon of slave owning founding fathers and colonizers. A few like Robert E Lee were (grudgingly) cast down (sporadically) as a concession, but any wider challenge against the likes of Washington, Jefferson, the 19th century Oxbridge imperialism-abbetting dons and even a freak like Rhodes were slapped down. This is what all the pearl-clutching around the statues and the paintings and the named buildings were really about at its core.

This cognitive battle for historical memory is the bedrock of contemporary western chauvinism. The aim is to ensure that only the history of the west is worth being proud of. In the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the educational curriculum drills in the historical shame of the socialist half-century, ensuring that the people will always feel wretched about their socialist past while the west still gets to parade around Cold War war criminal Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors as their heroes "with flaws." The end result is that the past of former socialist states today is a blank nihilistic void with nothing of dignity to draw upon except going back centuries to fawn over inbred royalty or those Nazi-collaborationist freaks who terrorized their forefathers for their choice of socialism or just outright Westanbetung.

In the former DDR, it's no surprise that the choice has become the far-right AfD. In this societal self-flagellation where the "Stasi" past is denounced, there's not even some "post-Nazism redemption story" to grasp, like the fiction which the BRD parades around, because the socialist past is consigned to oblivion, equated almost on par with Hitler-fascism. Consequently, the only source of historical self-worth for many then can only inevitably come from LARPing as generic white people and importing American far-right and neo-Nazism as mimicry, vicariously associating with "Europe" and "the West" for that sense of post-socialist Europe pride that comes from being patted on the shoulder as being "semi-white" and "semi-European," which has become the principal aspiration for those people.

The mental colonization that this represents is so pervasive that MLs are no exception to falling into this trap of helping to aggrandize western memory and denounce that of the designated enemies. In the nihilistic despair of the 90s and early 00s, Michael Parenti would praise Julius Caesar as a "hero for his time" for his cynical appropriation of Roman populism and yet condemned Deng Xiaoping in a fit of western Marxist paranoia. His example shows how easy it is for absolutely anyone to fall into this well worn groove and "cognitive comfort" that comes from accepting the western narrative of all things.

This is the cognitive dimension of why western hegemony is the primary contradiction of the contemporary world and must be recognized as such. Such a recognition accepts, and will never let go, of the historical fact of the west's 500 year past of savagery. It steadfastly refuses the west's song and dance at propagating historical nihilism (as Chinese comrades have fittingly coined) to the populace of its designated enemies while simultaneously patting itself on the back for being the failsons of war criminals and colonizing butchers. To awaken to this truth is a form of cognitive liberation, a moment of clarity that pulls the wool from one's eyes. Even within the fragmented landscape of contemporary western "Marxism," individuals in the suffocating midst of the imperial core can contribute to this principled stance.

Here's an overview of the politics behind Iranian foreign policy from the RTSG substack that they gave in their article on the 2022 protests.

To properly understand the events of late 2022, it is vital to analyze the role of different factions in Iran and their power struggles. Although many analysts in the West portray the political class of the Islamic Republic as a completely unified bloc under the control of a supreme dictator, this is far from the truth. Since the very early days of the Islamic Revolution, many factions have existed in the popular front bloc that formed the Islamic Republic. Although many of these factions, such as non-Islamic Liberal Democrats and Communists, were purged in the 1980s, strong disagreements persisted amongst the clerics and revolutionaries that ultimately consolidated their dominance in the revolutionary period

The issue that most divided this new political class was foreign policy. As opposed to the “hardline” or “principlist” faction that saw sovereignty and opposition to Israel and American imperialism as one of the primary aims of the revolution, a faction also existed that sought to work with the West, and although they saw no harm in ousting the Shah, they still believed that Iran should follow a Liberal economic and political path, albeit under a more Islamic framework. This faction came to be primarily led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and would even engage in negotiations with the US government in the 1980s known as the Iran-Contra Affair

After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or Rafsanjani, as he now preferred to be called, became the first President of Iran under the new post-Khomeini constitution. He and his party, the Executives of Construction, were known as the ‘Moderate’ faction and they began a process of liberalization in the economic and socio-cultural spheres. Rafsanjani’s two terms as President were then followed up by the birth of the closely aligned ‘Reformist’ faction led by President Mohammad Khatami. Khatami’s government pushed a policy of increasing liberalization and attempted a rapprochement with the USA under the framework of a “Dialogue of Civilisations”. In his time, Iran saw his supporters conduct the first attempt at major political change conducted through street protests during the 18 Tir movement

Khatami’s Presidency was then followed up by Ahmadinejad, whose Presidency saw a patchwork of policies and political alignments as well as the largest protest movement in the Islamic Republic’s history as millions protested the outcome of the 2009 Presidential elections under the leadership of the Reformist candidate, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In 2013, the Reformist-Moderate movement won back power as Hassan Rouhani won the presidential elections with the promise to negotiate with the USA and end Iran’s sanctions

To alleviate these sanctions, in 2013, Hassan Rouhani ran for the presidency, with an unprecedented level of advertisement and media excitement around his campaign, to negotiate with the West and get sanctions lifted. Rouhani won and pushed negotiations with the USA into overdrive, resulting in the 2015 ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ or JCPoA, according to which Iran would limit its nuclear program and in return would have certain sanctions lifted. This was supposed to be the first step in a series of negotiations that would then target Iran’s military capabilities and regional network of alliances, finally resulting in the Islamic Republic becoming a Western-aligned nation, aiming to follow the developmental model of nations such as Japan and Germany. One such example was that in 2016, merely one day after US President Barack Obama’s executive order was signed lifting Iran nuclear sanctions as part of the JCPOA, Obama signed new sanctions targeting Iran’s missile/defense programs. Not long after, Reformists such as Rafsanjani hinted at being willing to negotiate away Iran’s missile program, by issuing statements such as “the world of tomorrow is a world of dialogue, not missiles”, which sparked political feuding between Reformists and Principlists

In 2018, however, everything changed when US President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, started his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and Iran’s economy fell into an unprecedented recession. The Reformists, who continued to be the ruling party at the time under Rouhani, did not aid the economic situation. In addition to passing hyper-neoliberal economic policies, they had delayed Iranian trade deals with China that would have alleviated and offset pressures caused by Western sanctions, all in the hopes of returning to an idealistic JCPOA with the West. For instance, Xi Jinping proposed Iranian cooperation/entry into China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as early as 2015 and 2016; Rouhani wouldn’t take him up on his offer until years later in 2021 when Iran finally joined BRI, after mounting pressure from Khamenei and the economic situation. Adding to this, Trump also assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, in early 2020, and destroyed all hopes for the Reformist project within Iran

Following the failure of the JCPOA and the terrible economic decline of Iran, caused by sanctions and the hyper-neoliberal policies of the Rouhani government, the Reformist movement lost all the wind in its sails. By the time of the 2019 parliamentary and 2021 presidential elections, they had no popular candidates who could run in the elections as the grand promises of the last two administrations had proven fruitless. As a result, a Principlist parliament was formed in 2020, and “hardliner” Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi won the 2021 presidential elections. For the first time in decades, the Iranian government seemed unified from top to bottom. However, before things could settle and Raisi could begin to implement his policies, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement suspiciously sprung up, claiming to not only challenge Raisi but also to want an end to the Islamic Republic as a whole.

[...] This new foreign policy has thus far turned Iran into an important node in the new confrontation between Western powers and the non-Western world, with Iran acting as the third power in a triad that has formed with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The derailing of this new foreign policy and the damages it would incur for Iran would weaken the new emerging global system and damage the non-Western world in its confrontation with American unipolarity. This would leave allies such as Russia in a more fragile state and could destroy the new-found confidence of states such as Saudi Arabia in their pursuit of less Western-orientated policies.

In short, it seems like the JCPOA was the darling project of the Iranian "Reformist" faction, the characterization of whom by RTSG immediately brings to mind a Westanbetung capitulationist like Gorbachev. It is rather interesting to read about the Rouhani government's self-sabotaging liberal idealism given that Western coverage through the entirety of the contemporary Iranian period has been just static portrayals of an "unchanging hardliner leadership."

No need to apologize between comrades. I get your point: the Zimbabwean land reform is flawed, in various aspects, and the economic conditions of the country are not exactly great despite having gone through these reforms. Your first response construed Zimbabwe's land reforms to its current economic woes, which is a perspective I took issue with, as it puts the cart before the horse. It is misleading and does not invalidate the choice to undergo through its reforms as there is no cause to believe land reform alone guarantees economic prosperity or that the failings of Zimbabwe's reforms are solely due to its own mishandling rather than the reprisals it received from global imperialism. Even the comprehensive socialist land reforms of Czechoslovakia led to an economic slump that was used as a pretext for the infamous reactionary uprising. This does not mean that Czechoslovak land reforms caused its later economic underperformance.

The important thing I've been emphasizing is the material conditions underpinning Zimbabwe's land reforms. Zimbabwe is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the Maoist guerilla forces of the fascist Rhodesian occupation era were subsumed, akin to the acquiescing of the communists to the ANC in the South African experience, under what eventually became the Mugabe government. Furthermore, the goal of land reform in a non-socialist context is principally the redistribution of market power. This is the difference from socialist landform which is aimed at the eradiction of rentier and landlord classes, the equal distribution of wealth and dissolution of landed class privileges to create the material conditions for establishing collective and public land ownership. In terms of Zimbabwe, the intent was to break the hold of the settler colonial commercial landowners and to atomize 1 large farm into 50 smaller farms. The intent was not any of those that propel a socialist reform.

To expect a non-socialist state to conduct a more socialist manner of land reform is unrealistic. Post colonial governments across the Global South which have had their socialist revolutions suppressed are led by national bourgeoisie. The outcomes of socialist land reform is against their class interests.

The question then turns to whether market-based land reform like Zimbabwe is worth pursuing nonetheless. Zimbabwe's example proves such a program form is possible so is the answer that it should be rejected and that the populace must wait for a socialist revolution in order to do a much more genuine and comprehensive land reform like those of the USSR, China and Cuba? This is the question that pertains most immediately to countries like South Africa but also in the miraculous but inevitable event of a liberated Palestine as Al_Sham had inquired about. My answer is to this is no and that Zimbabwe's example does still serve as a model. Of course it goes without saying that it should obviously not be followed to the letter as the internal flaw of the Zimbabawe example is that this was a popular movement under the Jambanja that co-opted governmental inertia and forced the governent to go along with it but such is the nature of non-socialist land reforms where the national bourgeoisie will always be unwilling to accept the cost-benefit analysis of such a program, a dilemma that Zimbabwe's case highlights very clearly.

The First Congress of the Communist International once famously said: "We say: In the colonial and semi-colonial countries the first phase of the revolutionary movement must inevitably be a national-democratic movement." This must apply to the pursuit of land reform as well if a non-socialist state of the Global South embarks on the program. It is important and momentous enough for the working classes that even an imperfect rendition can be critically supported, particularly in the circumstances of decolonizing states like Zimbabwe that must contend with resolving settler colonial residual control which even market-based land reforms can ameliorate.

This is not a great argument. Land reform is a necessary step towards socioeconomic sovereignty but it does not guarantee economic prosperity. This is akin to blaming the hardships of Cuba's heroic revolutionary struggle to its own decision of committing to socialist land reform rather than the economic blockade by American imperialism in response to its national liberation. Ian Scoones et al.'s work, in fact, explicitly challenges the "myth" that "Zimbabwean land reform has been a total failure."

I don't disagree that such a line of argumentation is definitely the predominant narrative regarding Zimbabwe nor with the depiction of its current socioeconomic conditions, but such an assessment needs to contend with the question of the chicken and the egg.

It's a question of whether Zimbabwe's contemporary problems (as much as it can be attributed to its land reforms) dialectically come principally from its non-socialist and rather haphazard land reform process and the Mugabe government's mishandling or whether there is a predominant issue of the Western sanctions, foreign and IMF/World Bank divestment and economic ostracization that Zimbabwe faced following its decision to uphold the Jambanja period 'land invasions' which are the primary contradiction in determining its contemporary struggles.

The historical and contemporary severe poverty of Haiti is also not "a myth," but the source of its material conditions principally stemmed from the counter-revolutionary reaction from Europe who sought to punish and make an example of the first independent black state in the New World and the only successful enslaved uprising in recorded history. The Haitian state was not recognized by any 19th century world power and France, following the Bourbon Restoration, imposed a huge indemnity that made destitute any possibility of Haitian prosperity.

This is what happened to Zimbabwe, which was punished just as Haiti was two centuries ago, for demonstrating a model towards sovereignty by an independent black state:

As in any land reform program, newly settled farmers needed timely inputs, such as seeds, fertilizer, tools, irrigation, mechanization, and financing to get established. Unfortunately, the state’s ability to provide that support was hampered from the start after the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act was enacted in the United States. The law instructed U.S. members of international financial institutions to vote against “any loan, credit, or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” Since the United States wields decisive influence in those organizations, the effect was to severely curtail Zimbabwe’s access to credit and foreign exchange, without which no modern economy can effectively function. https://monthlyreview.org/2023/06/01/the-dynamics-of-rural-capitalist-accumulation-in-post-land-reform-zimbabwe/

The concluding tangent about China is wildly off the mark, however. China's own socialist land reform process was the largest redistribution of wealth in human history and the foundation of China's success stems from its near total eradication of imperialist influence under Mao, which was imperative to the success of Deng's Reform and Opening Up. As Zhou Enlai famously articulated:

The imperialists still want to retain some privileges in China in the hope of sneaking back in. A few countries intend to negotiate with us about establishing relations, but we prefer to wait for a time. The remaining imperialist influence in China must be eradicated first, or the imperialists will have room to continue their activities. Although their military forces have been driven out, the economic power they have built up over the past century is still strong, and their cultural influence in particular is deep-rooted. All this will undermine our independence. We should therefore clean up the house before entertaining guests, that is, before establishing relations with them.

As such, the outcome of Zimbabwe's national process does not invalidate the example it demonstrated, as Ian Scoones et al. note, which was that it "highlighted one potential path for countries unable or unwilling to deal with the unequal inheritance of apartheid or colonialism" in the form of settler expropriation and land reform. There is no world where you can have your cake and eat it too in the context of land reform: no settler is going to shake your hand and give you a smile when you kick them off your land and write a glowing letter back to the European metropole about you.

Thus, by nature of the Western reaction, this could not be a clean or thorough process and it did not end in economic success, but such is precisely the "fait accompli" which committing the ultimate form of property re-appropriation from legacy settler colonialism is made to perform and designed to suffer under in the contemporary global conditions of Western hegemony.

I'd recommend looking at the comparative case of Zimbabwe, where the former settler colony of Rhodesia was liquidated more thoroughly than that of the case of South Africa in dismantling apartheid. This included a process of land reform that, while nowhere as successful and comprehensive as that in socialist states, still managed to touch on, what I'd call, the fundamental bottom line of Western imperialism in a way that was largely unprecedented in the whole African decolonial experience with just a few exceptions like Gaddafi's Libya and Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal.

In South Africa, the end of that obscenely vile system was a victory, but the issue I've come to realize over the years is that Western imperialism is an onion where there's layers and layers of "fluff" as defence before you peel back a layer that really touches the ultimate bottom line. It's like the Ukraine War where the West makes a stand right in the former heartland of the Soviet Union and plays it up as "existential" to them to obfuscate that there are so many layers of their defence that one could peel away before anyone reaches a fundamental bottom line for the Western existence, like the decolonization of Turtle Island. This is the real substance that 500 years of Western imperialism have accomplished.

To put it plainly, South African apartheid was a "nice to have" in terms of sustaining the interests of Afrikaaner settler colonialism but not a genuine "must have." That latter is the multi-generational socioeconomic entitlements they've carved out for themselves during the period of overt settler colonialism that the ANC largely have left untouched but which retains a significant amount of the Afrikaaner asymmetric power in South Africa. The portrayal in the West of the South African experience as an achievement that the Global South should be "satisfied with" to use as a role model serves to obfuscates that there needs to be socioeconomic redistribution and land reform to actually cross a genuine Afrikaaner red line.

In a sense it's like conceding that I can longer beat the shit out of you, but you still have to live out on the street while I occupy your former house. And even if I eventually let you in your former house, you can't go upstairs. And even if I eventually let you go upstairs, I still have the sole name on the property deed. And even if I eventually let you have your name on the property deed, I still control the finances. On and on, etc, until you reach the bottom line of finally being able to kick out the occupier from your house entirely.

Through this, the South African model is that you get to make out giving up some perversely lopsided entitlement like "I can't beat the shit out of you" as some great equalizer when there's still so much more to go before you genuinely are affected. The intent is to pile endless layers of extraneous concessions (and act like each one is existential) so that the real concession is impenetrable to reach. Even if reaching it is impossible, however, it should be still conceptualized in decolonial efforts what is truly the bottom line.

Land Reform in Zimbabwe

"Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myth and Realities" by Ian Scoones et al. (a neoliberal work which, while hilariously playing up the World Bank's support for land reform as "good-intentioned" and not disengenuous, is still overall useful) illustrates how the much maligned Zimbabwe government through its land reform process "highlighted one potential path for countries unable or unwilling to deal with the unequal inheritance of apartheid or colonialism." At first, there was the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement drafted with Britain, lasting for 10 years, which was played up as a "crucial capitulation" even though "no major agrarian reforms was on the cards; this was all going to be 'carefully planned,' designed to increase 'farming efficiency.'"

This was the song and dance of the endlessly layered "onion" of "concessions" put into practice, where there was a "all (i.e. 'including' Britain) acknowledged that land reform had to be a central plank of post-Independence policy, but options were severely constrained" 'c'est la vie-style' shrugging of shoulders skit by Britain. During this period, "the new government played by the rules, keen to gain international confidence and encourage 'reconciliation' with the white farming community" and "white farmers were seen as a 'protected species' for much of the early 1980s." At the end of the 80s when the Lancaster Agreement was set to expire, it was already clear "by the mid-1980s that the great plans for mass resettlement were not going to happen" and that there was "every sign that the British government is striving behind the scenes to perpetuate Lancaster House beyond April 1990 and so prevent significant land reform from taking place."

By 1998, the Mugabe government signed off the acquisition of 2m ha which, despite following 'fair market values' for compensation, "sent shockwaves through the diplomatic and aid communities," who "saw this as an aggressive act" and the typical "IMF threatened to withhold a tranche of new payments due in 1999" gimmick routine. This kicked off the "Jambanja" period of generally spontaneous and largely decentralized "land invasions" in a 2 year period of radical land reform by locals and war veterans, which the West is still unable to pin as either a "peasant-led movement" or "orchestrated by the top."

Even here, however, as of their report in 2010, the process in the large commercial agriculture sector went from, in 1980, "6000 farmers, nearly all of them white" to "2300 white-owned commercial farmers still operating." So, even Zimbabwe's land reform, which has been commonly portrayed as apocalyptic chaos in Western media and scholarship to dissuade other Global South countries from emulating it, still retained a significant legacy of settler colonial control after its most volatile phase. As such, the framing of such a narrative in the West for a country which, after 20 years of the British "we support your struggle, but it's complicated" pantomime act, decided to largely cut through to near the core of the concessional "onion" is therefore deliberate.

As such, the cause of Palestinian liberation is one that will need to contend with the same trap which South Africa was ensnared by and which the Zimbabwe example shows the agonizingly long process of both misdirection and slander involved in combatting it.

Scones, I. et al. 2010. "Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myth and Realities."

Why should they? The resolution is a cynical pantomime act: a "genocide remembrance" proposal co-sponsored by two of the most vicious genocidal states of the 20th century. A Western-backed resolution urging the world to "commemorate genocide" at a moment when there's an active genocide against Palestinians is the height of moral bankruptcy.

The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina are undoubtedly real and Yugoslav/Serbian actors are directly culpable, but the vicious swath of ethnic cleansing that followed the catastrophic disintegration of SFR Yugoslavia were committed from all sides. The tunnel visioning on the Yugoslav/Serbian atrocities against Bosnians (and Kosovans) is a deliberate narrative aimed at absolving NATO and its regional underlings of any fault and pinning the entirety of the blame in the historical "canon" on the remnants of the last socialist state in Europe.

Kate Hudson's work "Breaking the South Slav Dream: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia" quotes a LA Times article covering the 2002 Hague Tribunal which rather remarkably declared at the time that "Milosevic, as a scapegoat in a show trial with a predestined outcome, would be a perfect medium to exorcise the guilt of those who are trying to obliterate their complicity in provoking the Balkan Wars." So it is as well with the Yugoslav/Serbian atrocities whose single-mindedly focus by Western Human Rights scholars and "Genocide Studies" academics for the past decades is meant to whitewash the crimes of all others involved.

The infamous Srebrenica episode itself exemplifies the typical atrocity narrative structure that Western scholars and journalists employ where they blow up a single isolated incident on the big screen and toss out the rest of the film strip with the background context and prelude, the usual "Last Thursdayism" gimmick where history only began, Book of Genesis-style, at the moment the designated adversary committed the act in question. As Hudson writes:

Serbian atrocities in Srebrenica in 1995 – including the alleged massacre of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys – were widely publicized, although it is notable that by the end of the 1990s only a tiny fraction of the anticipated number of bodies had been found. The fact that Serbs had previously been brutally driven out of Srebrenica by the Muslim leader Oric, and had suffered atrocities at Muslim hands – such as the massacre of 500 Serb civilians on the Orthodox Christmas Eve in 1993 – were not widely reported.

Most states don't care enough to challenge this Western narrative, which is why a resolution like this will likely pass, but for those countries which understand the cynical rationale behind this blame-shifting whitewash, where victims and perpetrators are selectively remembered, there's absolutely no reason to play along. If everything in its entirety regarding the collapse of Yugoslavia was commemorated, Clinton, Kohl, Albright and all the Western war criminals would be pinned alongside Milosevic. Their aim is to prevent that so this selective remembrance narrative is the end result.

Meanwhile, the West will happily talk endlessly about Bosnia's past while at the very present, the country is still non-sovereign and governed by a NATO appointed colonial viceroy, the "High Representative," who can toss out election results and depose Bosnian elected officials at will.

Just looked and apparently, there's some really based content uploaded on Google Maps for Karl Marx House.

Chinese tourist sings the Internationale

Abandon Ayn Rand, Embrace Chadism-Leninism

That's how it usually goes, either the outer circuit of the circus and amphitheaters are used as support walls for housing, the entire thing is turned into a ramshackle fortress for a feudal petty noble or the flat space is used for farming by local peasantry who don't need to clear any rubble.

Here's a visual reconstruction for comparison of the city during Roman times by archaeologist Jean Claude Golvin

Also, for an interesting historical sweep of where things turned out, here's a pictoral map made of the city in 1953, still largely bombed out following WWII.

That's the rather common argument amongst many leftists that not only are the Biden regime ghoulish genocide-abetting war criminals but that they also know what they're doing as well.

I would disagree with that assessment because I disagree with the presentivist conceit that the current crop of leadership in the West is anything more than the equivalent of benchwarmer political nobodies like the Coolidge administration exactly one century ago. Neither does making psychotic policy decisions mean ipso facto those decisions are competently made ones for the sake of US empire. The fact that we of the present are stuck confronting the fallout of their actions on a day-to-day basis should not induce people in putting them on a pedestal. Not every generation has an exceptionally competent ghoul like Roosevelt who subsumed the world financial system under the Bretton Woods arrangement or a crook like Nixon who could exploit the Sino-Soviet split through the presence of competent underlings like Kissinger.

That the present ghouls leading the Washington blob are psychologically insecure about the institutional resilience of their subordination of Europe does not mean their decision to ameliorate this anxiety by giving Europe a tighter shackle is the rational call for American empire. The material conditions of modern Europe's entire structure and way of life are derived from the extraction and exploitation of the Global South, in the same sense that the US is. This and the fundamental character of European chauvinism and white supremacist solidarity underlying the European relationship with the US means that we in Europe would never have struck it out from under the American shadow. Until there is ever a moment where such material conditions of the European character and way of life can be made to undergo comprehensive revision and there is a reckoning for the legacy of our historical relationship with the Global South, the idea of a Europe that does not salivate at alignment with imperial aims is a pipe dream.

These are factors that would have always bound Europe to the American imperial project. That the Biden regime doesn't want to admit the basis of the US-Europe relationship is imperialist mutual interest and white supremacy, and thus would always be on the American side when it really matters, by going out of their way to institgate the Ukraine conflict to make Europe explicitly fall in line does not mean the opportunity cost of that decision is worth the cost for US empire.

The fact is that the one cardinal rule of classical geopolitics in the Western world since the time of imperialist thinkers like Mackinder, more profound than NATO Ismay's "Keep the Germans Down and the Russians Out" little quote that Washington seems to have living rent free in their decisions - to never allow the "heartland" of the "world island" to unite together -has been completely broken by the Biden regime's actions.

Not only has he brought Russia and China together again, after the disastrous Sino-Soviet split destroyed the partnership before any benefit of heartland solidarity could be realized, but he has also completely convinced both Putin's faction and Chinese "Peaceful Coexistence" Khruschevites in the Party (rightfully) that Europe in its current state could never be an independent actor. Before Ukraine, Chinese liberals and Putin were mentally masturbating to the idea of a strong EU standing up to the US alongside them. Now, they realize that the only real partners that can uphold a sincere interest in breaking down the US hegemonic structure are in the Global South, not here in Europe. This regime will go down not just for its genocidal psychopathy, but its utter incompetence as a failson of the US imperial project.

The absolute funniest thing is that whenever something like this happens, including the literal day after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in Feb 2022, there's the current crop of "realist" Kissinger/Brzezinski wannabes like that Meerswhatever freak screaming in ghoulish rags like Foreign Affairs "not to forget about China!" and waving around RAND Corp PDFs trying to remind the Washington blob that "China is still the real long term adversary!"

They've been getting completely sidelined for the past two years in every subsequent geopolitical moment since Ukraine because they don't understand that the irrational greed inherent of US hegemony can't stand getting challenged on a single inch of its imperial sway anywhere on the planet.

The 90s were one of the blackest eras of reaction, with no exaggeration, in all of human history. The entirety of former USSR societies fell into a highly publicized humanitarian disaster of spiraling mass poverty. The fact that the DPRK suffered in this time is undeniable but it should be emphasized that the DPRK's 1990s famine is to the anticommunist mythology of Western propaganda what the pre-WWII famines, including that infamous Stalin's Giant Spoon-domor, were for the USSR and the Great Leap Forward coinciding famine was for China; appropriated by endless hordes of payrolled academics to outwrite any alternative accounts with their word vomit, with the intended agenda of establishing a discourse hegemony that wholly pins the disaster squarely on the man-made decisions of socialist leadership and the socialist system. This is all to say that, due to this slathering of Western propaganda and the hijacking of the narrative airwaves, so to speak, it's difficult to ascertain the material conditions of the food scarcity circumstances of the 90s DPRK, including its extent and the particular catalysts and aggrievating factors.

I had a look at Steve Gowans' "Patriots, Traitors and Empires," and this is what he interpreted:

"the inevitability of a North Korean collapse, appeared, from Washington’s point of view, to be beyond question. North Korea was reeling from the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the concomitant loss of important trading partners, and had been wracked by a series of natural disasters which left it food-insecure. Its economy was shrinking and its people were hungry."

It is true that under the allegations of an uranium enrichment program in 1994, the US put significant pressure on the DPRK right at the height of its unipolar hubris moment, which undoubtedly exacerbated conditions. The US would later, under Bush Jr., explicitly place food export licensing sanctions on the DPRK.

As for Chinese responses to this moment, here's what the US-based so-called "Genocide Studies and Prevention International Journal" in a 2012 article alleged were the conditions of China-DPRK and Russia-DPRK relations in the 1990s:

... in the early 1990s, both Russia and China cut their food and fuel aid to North Korea. Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, had no interest in subsidizing Communist states abroad. Chinese exports of maize to North Korea declined by 80% from 1993 to 1994, in part because of a poor harvest in China itself and in part as punishment to North Korea for having opened up diplomatic relations with Taiwan (I have no clue what 90s lore this is referring to here). Both Russia and China informed North Korea that it would have to start paying market prices in hard currency for their exports.

One thing to keep in mind while miring through all this is that it's clear that the DPRK weathered through its food-scarcity conditions of the 90s. This indicates that either 1) its systems of autarkic food self-sufficiency could be sustained and that those conditions were derived from principally natural causes, contrary to Western narratives of "inherent flaws of its system" or that 2) it was able to supply food imports despite the semi-public estranged relations with China (I agree with the cited ghouls above that it's unlikely Yeltsin's Russia would have stepped in). For the avenues in which foreign (i.e. Chinese) aid could have been made, as can be seen from the current circumstances of the Ukraine War, where while Chinese support is undeniable, the extent of it is still unknown and deliberately obfuscated and clandestine, I would argue that, in the midst of American 1990s triumphalism, any actions by China to support AES states, particularly the DPRK which fell under US crosshairs following the 1994 uranium enrichment allegations, would have been conducted through similar degrees of inconspicuousness and inherently contradictory to publicly stated positions.

There is some discernible evidence of this from the Jiang Zemin era China. For example, Adrian Hearn's "Diaspora of Trust: Cuba, Mexico and the Rise of China" argues that Cuba's painful Special Period sustained the survival of the Cuban revolution in a large degree through China's substitution of former Soviet assistance: "China played an important but little-known role in seeing Cuba through this tumultuous period" and that with regards to Jiang's private agenda:

According to a Chinese diplomat I interviewed in Beijing (who requested anonymity), Jiang conducted the visit to “save Cuba’s revolutionary project,” expressly against the advice of China’s increasingly pragmatic Communist Party.