Tachanka

I would be thrilled if the Goths sacked DC

Being a nazi makes you a loser, not being an internet historian. Anything that exists for enough time is going to have a field of history associated with it and I don't think people are losers for being interested in the history of the internet. It's unrelated to the problem.

apparently the Brtish royals are trying to regain lost power

• Legislation effectively outlawing protests.
• Arrests of people attempting to raise republican placards on the 6th of May.
• His Majesty's Ministers overruling Parliament in introducing the above.
• Future move to digital currency asserts Crown power against the old bourgeois financial order.
• Partial restoration of the Crown Estate to the person of the Monarch
• The Royal family is entitled to 25% of the revenue of the Crown Estate; Basically publicly owned land and mineral rights.
• This is a huge retrogression even from the early days of bourgeois power.
• In 1793 the Crown had given up the estate to the treasury in return for a Civil List grant.
• The Cameron gov. reversed this by handing 25% back to the monarchy.
• The King receives an annual income (in kind) of about 209 million pounds.
• The King controls, uses, or derives revenue from around 9.6 billion in assets.
• The king's top 9 palaces are worth about 3.5billion pounds, for which he and his family pay no rent, and all of which is maintained at the public's expense.
• The King receives from the public, in exchange for nothing, as much as 8,500 average subjects earn per year.
• The tourism that the monarchy supposedly brings in to the UK is maintained by the working class and still brings in less revenue than the tourism in Republican France.

he's a loser because he's a nazi, not because he calls himself a historian of the internet.

America doesn't need to build housing. There's enough housing for everyone already. It's just that they're being rented held onto as speculative financial assets by parasites instead of being lived in. Most cities have more empty homes than homeless people.

there's very little to be happy about, comrade. I agree. Between all these escalating conflicts and climate change, I have my doubts about the future of the human species.

i just respond directly to what people say almost never look at usernames unless I suspect trolling

I still don't see this ending well but perhaps I'm wrong.

Neither do I. I'm just not going to not act surprised when people are so fed up with the US's shit that they start behaving atrociously to make it stop.

At the end of the day I'm just some asshole on the internet so it's not like I have any power to influence any player's decision here.

Agreed. (not that you're an asshole, but that we don't have power here)

The alternative to doing something about it is just to sit there and have reasons to be angry but nevertheless allow a US-backed corporation take the oil, which they will then use later on in their own war machines when they decide it's time to invade venezuela. Which means giving Amerikkka leverage for its future atrocities in order to have a moral high ground in the present. Amerikkka is never going to take the moral high ground and not meddle in a region. Kuwait slant drilled into Iraq before desert storm. People imply the embattled underdogs are obligated to performatively adhere to whatever morally palatable option has the best optics, while the overdog is assumed to always behave ruthless sociopath who will take advantage of any mercy it is given. It's not like Venezuela is going to get good boy points for not doing anything. Amerikkka would still have screeched to the high heavens that Venezuela is an authoritarian regime even if they did nothing about this. Because that's what the US has been doing since Hugo Chavez.

I think the US is opening too many proxy wars at once and can't afford to juggle them all. Guyana, Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel. How many client regimes can the US juggle at once? If they fight back instead of just letting it happen, America might actually drop the ball. Its imperial positions can be lost by overextending itself and receiving more resistance than it reckoned it would. That's part of the reason for centering the anti-imperialist conversation on morality and not strategy. Because if the underdog adheres to a moral code that the overdog has no intention of obeying, then the overdog can always corner the underdog into a losing strategy, by taking advantage of the fact that the underdog's options are limited and more predictable due to its moral code.

Here's the PCV's statement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2_VAJqfPc0

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), as a revolutionary party of the working class, acting with total independence with respect to the factors of capital and the bourgeois State, guided by the principles of Marxism-Leninism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and internationalism proletarian, protecting the peace and sovereignty of the people and inspired by the emancipatory, Latin American and unifying ideal of the liberator Simón Bolívar, addresses the working class of the city and the countryside and, in general, the Venezuelan people, to present our position regarding the call made by the National Government for a Consultative Referendum on the Essequibo territory:

1. We ratify our historical position in favor of a peaceful and negotiated solution to the border dispute between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Cooperative Republic of Guyana; without interference from monopolies and foreign powers, for the good of our people and not of the local and foreign oligarchies; respecting the sovereign rights of both countries and under the principles of mutual cooperation, unity and solidarity between peoples.

2. Recognizing the justice of Venezuela's historical claim against the dispossession carried out by the British Empire at the end of the 19th century, we reject the path of escalation of diplomatic, political and military tensions assumed by the bourgeois governments of both nations and promoted by the oil companies after the discovery of large oil and gas deposits in the disputed area, particularly by ExxonMobil, whose direct intervention in the conflict coincides with the appointment of its Executive Director, Rex Tillerson, as US Secretary of State in 2017. The oil transnationals that benefit from the concessions illegally granted by the Guyana government play a decisive role in the actions aimed at radicalizing the binational conflict in search of a quick decision that ensures their interests, while opening the way to the possibility of a clash … with unpredictable consequences.

3. We call on the working people of Venezuela and Guyana to remain alert and strongly condemn, on each side of the border, these maneuvers that only benefit capital and the local bourgeoisies. Likewise, we call on both peoples to reject any attempt to install military enclaves of the United States or any other foreign power in Essequibo, which would be a threat to peace in the region and an attack on the sovereignty of the two nations.

4. The Government of President Nicolás Maduro, in desperation due to the growing popular rejection of his neoliberal management and to ignore the just demands made daily by Venezuelan workers, has resorted to the old strategy of the bourgeoisie on the issue of Essequibo: trying to instill patriotic and chauvinist feelings in a large part of the population through a million-dollar advertising campaign. We denounce that this strategy adopted by the Government, which seeks to deceive, manipulate and dominate the Venezuelan people, making them believe that in our country there is no more important problem to solve, has only electoral, opportunist and reactionary purposes; There could even be a scenario in which - as a result of the escalation of tensions - the government of President Nicolás Maduro imposes a state of exception with which to justify the suspension of the presidential elections scheduled for next year. We warn about the consequences that this policy can have, in a strategic defeat of Venezuela's legitimate aspirations over the Essequibo territory and an advance in the positioning of transnational capitals and the interests of imperialist powers in the region.

5. For the PCV it does not have the moral or political authority to call for a false “national unity in defense of the homeland”, a Government that restricts and violates the labor, human, social and political rights of the Venezuelan working class; that judicializes and proscribes parties, as it recently did against the Communist Party of Venezuela; that applies a policy of confiscation of the constitutional rights of working people and restriction of democratic freedoms, with the criminal freezing of salaries and pensions, the dismantling of collective agreements, restrictions on freedom of association, the imprisonment and judicialization of workers who fight or who denounce corrupt people, the deterioration of public education and health, the extreme precariousness of essential public services such as electricity, water and domestic gas.

6. The PCV calls on the people of Venezuela to reflect, with critical thinking and class consciousness, on what position to take before the Consultative Referendum called by the Government on the issue of Essequibo, without getting carried away by the noisy campaign with which they intend to show to the anti-worker, anti-popular and anti-democratic government of Maduro as “the most patriotic”, when in reality he is willing to give everything to transnational companies in order to stay in power, such as the cases of the oil companies Chevron, Repsol and ENI; the concessions in the Orinoco Mining Arc and the Special Economic Zones, in which they offer large extensions of the national territory to foreign companies.

7. The PCV also denounces the coercive mechanisms and undue pressures that are being exerted by those in power to force citizens to participate in this referendum, which is not binding and therefore does not resolve the dispute with Guyana. The threats of unjustified dismissal or suspension of social benefits (including the withdrawal of food products) and the practices of harassment and persecution under the accusation of "treason to the country", which both Public Administration workers are receiving, are unacceptable, as inhabitants of popular sectors. In this regard, we must be clear that participation in any popular consultation is a right and not an obligation. Participating or not participating, voting yes or no, is a free and voluntary decision of each Venezuelan and must be respected; We demand an end to abusive government authoritarianism.

8. We warn the Venezuelan people that those who speak today about the defense of the country against the advance of ExxonMobil in Essequibo territory, are the same ones who a few days ago signed a secret agreement with the United States government to allow the handover of the oil industry and Venezuelan gas company to the same US companies that operate illegally in the Essequibo territory. The Venezuelan working class must preserve its independence from the dominant classes, act according to its own interests and not allow itself to be used by the bosses' elites, the bourgeoisie and their politicians in the Government and the opposition who, by the way, have never interested them. The Essequibo, because the national oil income has been enough for the accumulation of capital and their gross private enrichment. The PCV will do everything in its power to unite the working class and other exploited sectors of Venezuela and Guyana, with the aim of achieving a common strategy for the benefit of the people and against the desires of monopolies and the warlike adventures of the bourgeois governments here and there; objectives that will be fully achieved when the working classes and people of Venezuela and Guyana assume power and begin processes of building societies without exploitation or social oppression.

Not justifying anything or asserting that Venezuela is based for this, just saying maybe it's important to consider these as motivating factors:

• In September 2020, in a joint statement with the US sec. of state and former head of the CIA Mike Pompeo, Ali said the two countries would begin joint maritime patrols aimed at drug interdiction near Guyana's disputed border with sanction-stricken Venezuela.
• The agreement came as US oil major Exxon Mobil Corp, as part of a consortium with Hess Corp, ramped up crude output from Guyana's massive offshore Stabroek Block, a large portion of which is in waters claimed by Venezuela.

If Guyana's bourgeoisie are US-backed and extracting natural resources claimed by Venezuela as part of their territorial, why wouldn't this escalate into a full blown conflict? This reminds me of how Kuwait was slant drilling under the Iraqi border in the leadup to the Gulf War. Too often I see people taking the "parental" logic, and saying "I don't care who started it!" like it's two siblings fighting over a toy. Well, I think, as with so many other conflicts, these are ripple effects of US imperialism deliberately sowing chaos and dividing regions against themselves for its own benefit. This isn't to say bourgeois nationalism is based when it's BRICS, nor is it to say that the difference between "comprador" and "national" bourgeoisie overrides the difference between bourgeoisie and proletariat, just saying we should come up with a systems-based materialist explanation for why this is happening, just like we did with Ukraine and Taiwan, instead of buying into the simplified demonization narrative of a US enemy.

i'm on my yummy soul gem arc