More the second one, that the image of a centralised hierarchy led by an individual or small group of individuals is a product of US media. In reality the book argues cartels work more as independent groups in each region that aren't really beholden to a single boss like we'd see in something like Narcos or Sicario
Kaputnik
joined 5 years ago
In the spirit of the country of the week discussion, I'll talk a bit about Italian Libya.
Generally when people think about Italian colonialism in Africa they think about the Italian-Ethiopian Wars and the occupation of Ethiopia, but the Italian occupation of Libya lasted much longer, starting in 1911 after Italy defeated the Ottoman Empire and gained control over the area. Something I hear often in revisionist history is that a defining feature of Fascism is not the ethnic cleansing of an out group because Italy wasn't involved in the Holocaust until Germany pushed it. Which obviously is bullshit on its own, but it completely ignores Italy's colonial crimes because those don't count according to liberals.
Under the fascist government, Italy pursued mass scale ethnic cleansing in Libya. This including expelling over 100,000 people in Cyrenaica from their lands to move in Italian settlers and moving these displaced Libyan people into concentration camps between 1930 and 1931, notably this happened before beginning of the Holocaust in Europe. Out of the 100,000 Libyans moved to concentration camps, 40,000 of them would be dead by 1933. The Italian government would also undertake large pacification campaigns against the Indigenous Libyan population, one of these included the mass killing of civilians in the Cyrenaica province that led to the deaths of over one quarter of the entire population.
Overall this is a similar story to many colonial ventures in Africa but one that is rarely talked about. After WW2 the colony would be passed to British and French administration and these crimes would never be addressed. Most likely because addressing these crimes would also implicate the British and French governments genocides in their own occupations of Africa.
I just started reading it, but the book "Drug Cartels Do Not Exist" by Oswaldo Zavala would be pretty good for this. It's about how American news and entertainment media creates the image of coherent and organized drug cartels as a enemy to rally around in order to support capitalist interests in Latin America and Mexico more specifically. People here might have heard of Zavala before because he appeared on an episode of Trueanon. I don't know if it's available for free anywhere but here's a link to the description and the book itself: https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/9780826504661/drug-cartels-do-not-exist/
If you look on our side when open the comment box there's a little smiley face button that has all our emojis. We can also type a colon and search for the emojis 
Like for that one I typed ":themo" and it popped up since the full name is : the-more-you-know :
I agree, I understand why some people enjoy federation but I've been double thinking a lot of the things I'd normally want to post here because I'm worried about getting some ignorant comment from an outside instance
I'm being dragged in my comments section
He was one of the best parts, he killed it
I like that this thread and the other megathread don't seem to get much traffic from other instances. It's refreshing to come in here and read conversations about world news without having to argue with random libs
New Chairman Beast video: I gave 500 homes to 500 bonded peasants, what happened next to the landlords will shock you 
Don't let the robots see this comment when they gain sentience
I'm empathetic enough to feel bad for the robots. If they programmed it to look sad and cry when you stole from it, I could never go through with it
Yes! That's the one I listened to as well that turned me onto the book. Hearing Zavala speak about the topic really made me realize how much of what I assumed to be truth about the drug trade was coming straight from US media