Komunitas
sopuli.xyz
Oh, absolutely not. And this is kind of touching on the bigger topic of algorithmic bubbles and self-selection. And you are absolutely correct. Algorithms do shape what we see. They reward us for outrage and not necessarily for nuance or for trying to see new perspectives. It is true that platforms, be they Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook, they reward or prioritize engagements of clicks and reactions, not accuracy, not real factual information. But oftentimes, it’s a lot more boring than the really explosive stuff. And this creates polarization. Now on what is being done to tackle this, I’ll be honest with you, not much. Social media companies, at some point for a very short period, let’s say, mid 2020s, were willing to rein themselves in. We had codes of practice on misinformation. We had stronger moderation, we had human moderation—so actual people looking at content. And we had, let’s say, actual attempts at limiting the spread of false narratives and trying to balance out perspectives. This has essentially stopped being the case. Human moderation is almost non-existent because of the advent of AI. So we use AI to moderate everything, which is good and bad. And most media platforms have decided that we care more for free speech, we care more for expression. So moderation should be light touch. And obviously, you have, to some extent, political voices driving this. We saw that President Trump has pushed more for a light touch towards moderation. We saw this in the case of Elon Musk and X, now Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. It is YOUR job if you love the Fediverse and/or the potential it represents to be LOUD about the above bolded statement being seriously, offensively wrong. We are building this space to tackle that specific problem among others and it should enrage you that the immense amount of our communities’ blood, sweat, tears, money and most of all time that has been put into making the Fediverse actually work as a practical thing rather than just being a cool nerdy concept project is being ignored because people are being intellectually lazy about their speculation of alternatives when they haven’t actually bothered to check what the existing alternatives are. I am going to say it, most progressives are hypocritical as shit about social media, they understand why it is so toxic, they see the structural issues with centralized control over it, with distorting corporate forces dehumanizing the basic interactions on the platform in favor of endless monetization and/or spreading of hate speech and yet many still ignore the fact that the Fediverse actually exists right now as a working alternative that addresses most of those core issues at least imperfectly.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
Reading by Tim Foley: Subscribe now The empire’s war on activism and journalism continues to escalate as the Trump administration targets left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and antiwar activist Medea Benjamin for the crime of bringing humanitarian aid to Cuba. This is yet another act of aggression in the same onslaught that has seen inconvenient truth-telling and expressions of moral clarity attacked and undermined throughout the western world at every juncture in recent years. It is not separate from the persecution of Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes. It is not separate from the steadily increasing escalations of internet censorship we’ve seen in the wake of Gaza, Ukraine, Covid, January 6, the 2016 US presidential election, and any other excuse the imperial narrative managers could find. It is not separate from the Trump administration’s efforts to deport non-citizens for criticizing the state of Israel. It is not separate from the efforts to stomp out pro-Palestine protests and university campus demonstrations. It is not separate from the arrests of activists in the UK on terrorism charges for saying the words “I support Palestine Action”. It is not separate from activists facing criminal charges for saying “From the river to the sea” in parts of Australia and Germany. It is not separate from imperial efforts to crack down on BDS activism and outlaw boycotts of Israeli products. It is not separate from Israel’s ban on foreign press from entering Gaza, nor is it separate from Israel’s systematic extermination of Palestinian journalists within Gaza. It is not separate from the artificially manufactured hysteria about “antisemitism” in western society and the efforts of western governments to silence criticism of Israel in the name of protecting Jews. It is not separate from Israel’s massive increase in its hasbara budget this year and the armies of paid trolls we’ve seen swarming online discourse. It is not separate from the nonstop barrage of imperial propaganda we see every day from the plutocratic press justifying every war and slandering every dissident. It is not separate from the way imperial oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Larry Ellison buy up news outlets like The Washington Post and CBS and social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter in order to manipulate the way the public thinks, acts, and votes. It is not separate from the way tech platforms have been manipulating algorithms to hide dissident sources of information from the public and using bogus “fact checking” firms to suppress unauthorized facts. It is not separate from government secrecy measures which forbid the public from knowing what their rulers are doing, and which aggressively punish anyone who tries to reveal inconvenient facts. The empire is waging a relentless war on intellectual clarity and on moral clarity, because truth and morality are its enemies. They do not want us to have unobstructed vision, lucid minds, functioning empathy centers and well-formed consciences, because if we did, we would instantly dismantle the empire brick by brick. This is why they go after anyone who tries to expand the consciousness of western society using activism and journalism. In an empire built on lies and fueled by human blood, telling the truth is seen as treason and doing the right thing is seen as insurrection. The only sane response to such a dystopian situation is to join in the revolution. Help spread unauthorized ideas and information. Take action to spread awareness of the abusive nature of the empire. They’re trying to keep it all in the dark, so we need to bring it all into the light. They wouldn’t be fighting so hard to suppress truth and compassion if it didn’t present an immediate existential threat to their power structure. ___________________ Caitlin’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The best way to make sure you see everything I publish is to get on my free mailing list. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 From Caitlin’s Newsletter via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11672611 “External funding for these civic campaigns is critical. Without external support, they wouldn’t happen.” Walk through a square. Any square. From Belgrade in 2000 to Bucharest in 2025. You will see the same things in the photographs. Young people. Clean visual branding in a single color. A simple symbol you can paint with a stencil. A name in two or three words that means “resistance” or “enough” or “it’s time.” Posters everywhere. Stickers everywhere. T-shirts with the same logo, often handed out for free. The crowd is large but disciplined. Music. Theatre. Humor that mocks the regime rather than confronting it head-on. Foreign journalists are abundant. Foreign observers are abundant. Western politicians arrive with cookies or speeches and the cameras find them. Then the crisis trigger. A disputed election. A contested verdict. A tragedy that becomes a symbol. A claim of fraud that must be answered immediately, on the street, by occupation, not in the courts and not at the ballot box. You have seen this picture before. The faces change. The slogans change. The branding stays surprisingly consistent. This is not coincidence. It is a method. The method has a name in Western academic literature. It is called “nonviolent civic resistance” or “people power” or sometimes just “civil society.” In the literature of the targeted governments it is called “color revolution” or “hybrid warfare.” Both descriptions point at the same observable phenomenon. This article is not about whether the method is good or bad. That question depends on whose side you are on, which is exactly the question the method tries to make you stop asking. This article is about the method itself. The mechanics. The seven recurring elements. Where they came from. How they have been applied. And why they are starting to fail. The Source Code The method has an origin. It is not hidden. Gene Sharp was an American political scientist who studied Mohandas Gandhi for decades. In 1973 he published a three-volume work called The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The second volume contains a numbered list of 198 methods of nonviolent action, classified into three categories: protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and intervention. The list is the closest thing to a manual that exists. It is in print. It is on the website of the Albert Einstein Institution, the organization Sharp founded. It has been translated into more than thirty languages. The full PDF is one click away. In 1993 Sharp wrote a shorter, more applied work called From Dictatorship to Democracy, originally for Burmese dissidents. This second book is the operational handbook. It explains how to identify the “pillars of support” that keep an authoritarian government in power and how to systematically remove them one by one without armed force. Both books are publicly available. They are not what is hidden. What is hidden is the recognition that they have been used, in a deliberate sequence, in country after country, with similar branding, similar funding, and similar timing. In 2004 a former leader of the Serbian student movement that brought down Milosevic, Srdja Popovic, founded an organization called CANVAS in Belgrade. The Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies. CANVAS exists openly. Its website is online. Its mission, by its own description, is to train activists in nonviolent struggle around the world. Popovic has been profiled in The New York Times and other Western media as a hero. The most thorough Western documentation of the Otpor playbook is the Peabody Award-winning PBS documentary “Bringing Down a Dictator,” narrated by Martin Sheen. It walks through the entire 1998 to 2000 operation in detail, the branding, the training, the Hungarian seminars, the financing, the synchronization with foreign embassies. Western media presented it as a triumph of “people power.” Watched from a different angle today, it is the clearest available training manual. According to multiple sources, CANVAS has trained activists from more than fifty countries. Ukraine. Georgia. Egypt. Tunisia. Venezuela. Iran. Belarus. Hong Kong. Russia. Zimbabwe. The training is the same training that worked against Milosevic. The handbook is From Dictatorship to Democracy. The Iranian government in 2009 charged protesters with following “over 100 stages of the 198 steps of Gene Sharp.” Whatever one thinks of the Iranian government, the recognition of the method by the targeted state is itself evidence that the method is identifiable. This is the source code. Open. Documented. Reproducible. If the source code is open, why are the regimes that get targeted by it always surprised? Who Pays For It The method is free. The mobilization is not. Posters need printing. Stickers need printing. T-shirts need printing and distribution. Trainers need salaries and airfare. Translators need salaries. Independent media outlets that broadcast the message need staff, equipment, satellite uplinks. Election monitors need salaries, accreditation, hotels. Lawyers need fees. Tents and field hospitals on the square need supplies. International press conferences need locations and translators. Lobbyists in Washington and Brussels need retainers. Srdja Popovic of CANVAS, in a candid 2011 statement, was direct about this: “External funding for these civic campaigns is critical. Without external support, they wouldn’t happen.” Where does that external support come from? It is documented. The same names appear case after case, decade after decade. Six are doing most of the work. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Founded in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. A 501©(3) private nonprofit on paper. Nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress. Reagan himself said in 1983 the program “will not be hidden in the shadows.” The decisive admission came from NED’s own first acting president Allen Weinstein in a 1991 interview with The Washington Post: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” This is not a critic’s framing. This is the man who helped found the organization, describing in plain language what the organization is. NED disbursed roughly $1.2 billion in grants between 2011 and 2020. It issues over 2,000 grants per year through four “core institutes.” The National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute fund political party building. The American Center for International Labor Solidarity funds trade unions. The Center for International Private Enterprise funds business associations. In Ukraine alone, NED funded sixty-five NGOs around the 2013-2014 events. According to RIA Novosti citing NED’s own pre-deletion records, $14 million was invested specifically in Ukraine projects. NED later deleted the public records of its Ukraine grants from its searchable database in 2022. Researchers had archived the older records before the deletion. The grants were real. NED has been sanctioned or banned by Russia, China, and named as foreign interference by the governments of Belarus, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Egypt, and Thailand. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Founded 1961. A US government agency, not a nonprofit. Annual budget roughly $50 billion before the partial dismantling in early 2025. Its “democracy and governance” program funds the same NGO ecosystem as NED, often through subgrants via groups like Pact Inc., Counterpart International, Internews, Freedom House. The USAID money is the iceberg. NED is the visible tip. In Ukraine in 2013 alone, USAID funded Center UA, a “civil society” group run by Oleh Rybachuk, the former chief of staff to Orange Revolution President Yushchenko. The Kyiv Post reported that USAID gave Center UA over $500,000 in 2012 through Pact Inc. In December 2013, three weeks before the Maidan turned violent, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland publicly told the US-Ukraine Foundation in Washington that the US had “invested more than $5 billion” in Ukraine’s “European aspirations” since 1991. The figure was not denied. The speech is on the record at the State Department website. The recording is on the record on YouTube. The Open Society Foundations (OSF). Founded by George Soros in 1979 in its earliest form. As of 2025, OSF has reported expenditures of over $24.2 billion since establishment. The largest private philanthropic foundation operating in this space. In Ukraine, the OSF presence is the International Renaissance Foundation, founded by Soros in April 1990 before Ukraine became independent. In Georgia, the Open Society Georgia Foundation. In Hungary, where the foundation originated, OSF was expelled in 2018 after years of conflict with the Orban government. In May 2014, three months after the Maidan, Soros himself confirmed his foundation’s role to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: “I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia. And the foundation has been functioning ever since.” The International Renaissance Foundation explicitly took credit for “supporting civil society during the Euromaidan protests,” including legal aid for “activists, protesters and journalists” as well as medical care and assistance to Hromadske TV and other pro-Maidan media outlets. OSF has been banned in Russia (2015), placed on watch lists in India (2016), and is the subject of investigations in Hungary, Bulgaria, and other countries. The German political foundations. Each major German party operates a state-funded foundation that runs international democracy promotion programs. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation (CDU). The Friedrich Ebert Foundation (SPD). The Heinrich Boll Foundation (Greens). The Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FDP). The Hanns Seidel Foundation (CSU). The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Die Linke). Each operates offices in dozens of countries. Each funds local partners. Each is funded primarily by the German federal budget through the development ministry (BMZ) and the foreign office (AA). Combined, they receive roughly 500 million euros per year from German taxpayers and disburse it globally. In Eastern Europe, in the Balkans, in the post-Soviet states, the German foundations are a parallel and sometimes larger funding stream than the American sources. They are less visible because they wear the language of party-to-party cooperation rather than democracy promotion. The European Endowment for Democracy (EED). Established 2013 by the European Union, modeled explicitly on the American NED. Based in Brussels. Funded by EU member states. Its mandate is the “Eastern Neighborhood” and “Southern Neighborhood” of the EU, which includes Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Caucasus, the Western Balkans, and North Africa. EED grants are smaller than NED’s but equally targeted. They go to “emerging democracy supporters” in countries where the EU wishes to see political change. The private oligarch networks. A newer addition. The most documented case is Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. His Omidyar Network donated $335,000 to Center UA in 2011 alone. The Kyiv Post reported that 36% of Center UA’s funding around the time of Maidan came from Omidyar Network. Other named private donors who have appeared repeatedly: Bill Gates’ Gates Foundation in education and health-related programs that overlap with the political networks. Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media network. The Skoll Foundation. Various tech philanthropy structures associated with Silicon Valley. The combined annual flow from these six sources, into the democracy promotion ecosystem, is conservatively estimated at $4-6 billion per year. That is the working budget for the playbook. When Donald Trump in early 2025 paused NED and USAID funding for a month, mainstream Western media reacted with what was, in plain reading, panic. The Associated Press wrote that “the beacon of freedom dims.” Within weeks, most funding was restored. The Trump pause did, however, reveal the dependency. The infrastructure of “civil society” in dozens of countries had been quietly running on US Congressional appropriations. If the protests are organic expressions of popular will, why do they collapse when the appropriations stop? The Seven Recurring Elements The playbook is not a single sequence executed identically every time. It is more like a set of seven repeating elements that get recombined depending on the local terrain. Some elements appear in every case. Others appear when the local conditions permit them. Walk through them in turn. Element 1. The youth movement with branded identity. Otpor in Serbia, 1998 to 2000. Black clenched fist on white background. Designed by a 23-year-old. Otpor means “resistance” in Serbian. Kmara in Georgia, 2003. The name means “enough.” Pora in Ukraine, 2004. The name means “it’s time.” Wore yellow. Pora founder Oleh Kyriyenko said publicly that the Pora handbook was From Dictatorship to Democracy. KelKel in Kyrgyzstan, 2005. The name means “renaissance” or “rebirth.” Pink and yellow. Zubr in Belarus, 2006. The name means “bison.” April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, 2008 onward. Trained by CANVAS. Every case has a youth movement. Every movement has a single name in two or three syllables, a single logo simple enough to stencil, and a single color or color pair that becomes the visual identity of the campaign. This is not folk culture. This is graphic design from a brief. Element 2. The crisis trigger. The playbook needs a moment around which to mobilize. The moment is usually one of three types. A disputed election in which the targeted government is accused of fraud. A constitutional crisis around the removal or extension of a leader. A tragedy or scandal that becomes the symbolic justification. Serbia 2000: contested presidential election with both sides claiming victory. Georgia 2003: contested parliamentary election with monitoring claims of fraud. Ukraine 2004: contested presidential runoff with monitoring claims of fraud. Ukraine 2014: the government’s last-minute refusal to sign an EU Association Agreement. Georgia 2024: contested parliamentary election. Romania 2024: a presidential first round won by an outsider candidate that the Constitutional Court then annulled. Serbia 2024 to 2025: the collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad that killed fifteen people. In each case the trigger is real. The question the playbook does not allow is whether the trigger justifies the response. The response is the goal. The trigger is the occasion. Element 3. The square. A central public space in the capital is selected and occupied indefinitely. Tents are erected. Food, medical care, security, performance, and information are organized inside the occupied space. The square becomes a “city within the city.” Belgrade 2000: in front of the Federal Parliament. Tbilisi 2003: Freedom Square and Rustaveli Avenue. Kiev 2004: Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Kiev 2014: Maidan again, occupied for three months. Cairo 2011: Tahrir Square. Bucharest 2024 to 2025: Victory Square and University Square. The square is not a venue. It is a strategic instrument. Once the occupation reaches a critical mass, the government has only two choices: clear the square by force, generating images of state violence that energize the movement and split the security forces, or tolerate the occupation, conceding effective dual sovereignty in the capital. Both options favor the movement. That is the design. Element 4. The election or court verdict as the inflection point. The playbook does not seek to win by occupation alone. It seeks to use the occupation to invalidate or override a specific institutional outcome. An election result. A court verdict. A presidential signature. A parliamentary vote. The pattern. The institutional outcome goes against the movement. The movement claims the outcome was fraudulent or unconstitutional. The square mobilizes around that claim. Western governments and Western-aligned NGOs declare the outcome illegitimate. Domestic institutions are then placed under pressure to validate the movement’s claim, by re-running the vote, by removing the official, or by ruling the outcome invalid. The Romanian case in 2024 is the cleanest example of the judicial variant of this element. The first-round winner of the presidential election was an outsider candidate the establishment did not want. The Constitutional Court annulled the election. New elections were ordered. The original winner was barred from running. The replacement candidate of the same political tendency was beaten in the runoff. The institutional system survived. The voters who had backed the original winner are still on the streets two years later, asking what their vote was for. Element 5. The Western chorus. Throughout the events, a synchronized Western response amplifies the movement and delegitimizes the targeted government. Embassies issue statements. Ambassadors visit the square. State Department officials hand out cookies, as Victoria Nuland did at Maidan in December 2013. Senators arrive and speak. Editorials in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Welt describe the events in identical language. The targeted government is “increasingly authoritarian.” The protesters are “the people.” The Western chorus is not necessarily coordinated by a central authority. It does not need to be. The networks that produce it have been built over decades. The National Endowment for Democracy. USAID. Freedom House. The Open Society Foundations. The German political foundations. The European Endowment for Democracy. The Konrad Adenauer, Friedrich Ebert, Heinrich Boll, Friedrich Naumann, and Hanns Seidel foundations. These organizations have local partners in every country where the playbook operates. The partners have been receiving the training and the grants for years before the trigger happens. When the trigger happens, the chorus sings without rehearsal. Everyone knows their part. Element 6. The neutralization of the security forces. The playbook requires that the security forces either refuse to use violence or use violence in a way that backfires. Sharp’s theory of power is the foundation. Power is not monolithic. Power depends on the obedience of its agents. Withdraw the obedience and the regime falls. The methods to neutralize security forces are multiple. Flowers in gun barrels. Direct appeals from protesters to soldiers by name. Songs that include the police as fellow citizens. Public statements that the movement does not blame the rank and file. Defection rewards for officers who switch sides. Foreign pressure on the security ministry to refrain. When the security forces hold, the playbook stalls. When the security forces use violence, the playbook reaches its decisive phase. The images are broadcast. The Western chorus intensifies. International pressure on the government becomes overwhelming. Maidan 2014 produced the most extreme example of this dynamic. Snipers fired on both protesters and police on February 20, 2014. Over fifty people were killed within hours. To this day, eleven years later, the question of who fired those shots and on whose orders has never been resolved by an internationally accepted investigation. What is not in dispute is what happened next. Within forty-eight hours President Yanukovych had fled to Russia and the playbook reached its conclusion. Element 7. The choreographed handover. The final element is the moment the targeted leader leaves. It is rarely a chaotic moment in the way revolutions are romantically imagined. It is a negotiated handover, often involving European or American mediators, with replacement leadership already on the bench and ready to be installed. The 2014 leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt is the textbook documentation of this element. Two American officials discuss, three weeks before the actual fall of the Yanukovych government, who specifically should be in the next Ukrainian government. “Yats is the guy.” Arseniy Yatsenyuk was Prime Minister of Ukraine within four weeks. The phone call was leaked, presumably by Russian intelligence. The substance of the call has never been disputed by either Nuland or the State Department. In Serbia in 2000, the replacement leader Vojislav Kostunica was chosen by US Ambassador Richard Miles, working with what Western diplomats themselves called the “midwifed” Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition. In Ukraine in 2004, the Orange Revolution placed Viktor Yushchenko in the presidency. His wife was Katherine Chumachenko, a US citizen, former employee of the Reagan State Department, with a long career in Ukrainian diaspora politics in the United States. The choreographed handover is not a defect of the playbook. It is the point of the playbook. The square is not a venue for democracy. The square is a venue for transition. If the transition is to “the people,” why does the next government keep arriving from the diaspora or from the Embassy? Three Cases, One Pattern Walk through three cases briefly. Watch the seven elements appear. Serbia 2000. The youth movement: Otpor, founded 1998. Color: black and white. Symbol: clenched fist. Funded through National Endowment for Democracy channels and US Embassy programs. Training sessions in Hungary run by NED contractors. “Suitcases of cash” smuggled across the border per multiple later memoirs. The trigger: presidential election of September 24, 2000. Both Milosevic and the opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica claimed victory in the first round. The Federal Election Commission called for a runoff. The opposition refused to participate, framing it as fraud. The square: central Belgrade, occupied beginning October 5. The election as inflection point: the runoff that was never held. The square’s purpose was to make the runoff impossible. The Western chorus: synchronized. The Guardian of London wrote that the operation of “engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience” was now “so slick” that the methods had matured into a template. The security forces: police largely stood aside. A bulldozer driver drove through the perimeter of the state television building. The day is still called the Bulldozer Revolution. The handover: Milosevic stepped down peacefully. The Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition took power. Vojislav Kostunica was president. The seven elements were all present. The playbook was new. It worked. Ukraine 2014. The youth movement: not a single named organization this time, but a coalition including AutoMaidan, Right Sector, and the established opposition parties. The branding was more diffuse than Otpor but the visual identity, the orange and the blue, the Ukrainian flag and EU flag side by side, was uniform across the square. The trigger: President Yanukovych refused to sign the EU Association Agreement on November 21, 2013, choosing instead a Russian loan package. The trigger was not a contested election. It was a contested foreign policy decision. The playbook adapted. The square: Maidan Nezalezhnosti, occupied for ninety-three days. A “city within a city” with field hospitals, security, food distribution, sound stage, library. The election as inflection point: in this case the inflection point was not a vote but the moment of violence. February 18 to 20, 2014. Snipers fired on protesters and police alike. Over a hundred people died in seventy-two hours. The Western chorus: senators visited. Nuland visited and handed out cookies. The Embassy was actively involved in selecting the next government, as the leaked call documents. The security forces: the Berkut riot police were used and the use generated the images that drove the climax. Within forty-eight hours of the sniper killings the government had fallen. The handover: Yanukovych fled to Russia on February 22. Parliament voted his removal on the same day. Yatsenyuk was Prime Minister within days. Petro Poroshenko was elected President in May. The seven elements were all present. The playbook was older. It worked, but at a higher human cost than Serbia. Romania 2024 to 2025. This is the most recent case and the most interesting variant. The playbook applied not by an external power to overthrow a government, but by the existing establishment to override a vote. The youth movement: not the lead actor this time. The movement against the annulment of the election was not a CANVAS-trained color revolution. It was a grassroots reaction by voters who felt their ballots had been stolen. The trigger: Calin Georgescu, a nationalist outsider candidate, won the first round of the presidential election on November 24, 2024. He had not been polling near the top. His campaign had run heavily on TikTok. The institutional move: on December 6, 2024, two days before the scheduled runoff, the Constitutional Court annulled the entire election. The justification was alleged Russian interference in the TikTok campaign. The evidence presented in public for that interference was thin. The decision was unprecedented in Romanian post-communist history. The square: protests appeared spontaneously in Bucharest and other cities. They were not organized through CANVAS-style networks. They lacked the visual branding of the classic color revolution. The protesters were heterogeneous, from far-right Georgescu supporters to civic libertarians outraged by the precedent. The election as inflection point: the rerun in May 2025. Georgescu was barred from running. The far-right vote consolidated around George Simion of AUR, who won the first round with forty percent. He lost the runoff to the centrist Nicusor Dan, who became president. The Western chorus: synchronized but in the opposite direction. Western governments and media largely supported the annulment, on the grounds that Romania had defended itself against Russian interference. The same Western network that had been the chorus of color revolutions for two decades was now the chorus of an anti-color-revolution. The Romanian Constitutional Court was praised for its decisiveness in defending democracy. The handover: there was no handover. The establishment held. The vote was annulled, the original winner was barred, a substitute was beaten, and the centrist coalition continued. The Romanian case introduces a new variant. The institutional power that has been the target of color revolutions for twenty-five years has now learned the playbook. It can pre-emptively use the language of “defending democracy from foreign interference” to annul electoral outcomes it does not like. The legal infrastructure for this. The Constitutional Court precedent, the foreign-interference framing, the social-media-as-vector argument. These will be available in every future case. What does it mean when the same legal and rhetorical infrastructure that was built to overthrow inconvenient elections is now being used to overturn them by the institutions instead of the streets? What Has Changed The playbook is no longer working as reliably as it did between 2000 and 2014. Several things have changed. The targeted governments have studied it. Russia spent the years after the Orange Revolution building a counter-color-revolution doctrine. China studied the Soviet collapse for thirty years and applied lessons systematically after 2003. Belarus, after the 2010 protests, restructured its security services and information environment around the recognition that the playbook was an external strategy. Venezuela survived multiple attempts. Iran survived 2009. Even Serbia, ironically, learned. Aleksandar Vucic, the president since 2017, has held his ground through multiple waves of street pressure including the 2024 to 2025 wave. The funding has been disrupted. The USAID restructuring in early 2025 removed a major funding stream for the NGO network. National Endowment for Democracy budgets have been challenged. The Open Society Foundations remain active but more visible than before, which is a problem for an operation that depends on appearing local. The legitimacy has been damaged. After Ukraine 2014, after Libya, after Syria, after the Arab Spring’s wreckage, the global South has become widely skeptical of the “democracy promotion” frame. The same techniques that were celebrated in Belgrade and Tbilisi are now suspected on first sight. The information environment has changed. The narrative monopoly the Western media enjoyed in 2003 no longer exists. RT, CGTN, Al Jazeera, TeleSUR, and a vast ecosystem of independent and adversarial outlets now provide parallel accounts of what is happening on the ground. Targeted governments can document what they see as foreign interference and reach a global audience without needing Western platforms. And, ironically, the playbook itself has become so familiar that simply pointing at it disarms it. Vucic in Serbia openly calls the protests a “color revolution.” That framing alone has been enough to keep half the Serbian population uncertain about the motives of the protesters, regardless of whether the protests are genuinely organic or not. The playbook has not disappeared. It is still being deployed. Belarus 2020 was a classic attempt. Hong Kong 2019 to 2020 was a classic attempt. The 2024 to 2025 wave in Serbia and Georgia were attempts. But the success rate has dropped sharply. If the playbook is failing, why is it still being used? What This Means For You This article does not argue that every street protest is a foreign operation. Most street protests are organic. Most people who go to a square are there because they are genuinely angry about something real. The playbook does not invent grievances. It harvests them. The question of who the removed leaders were is not the question this article asks. The question is what was done, by whom, with what method, and with what funding. Regime change is regime change. The label “color revolution” is the label given to it when the West likes the outcome. The label “coup” or “foreign interference” is the label given to the same operation when the West does not. The mechanics are the same. The funders are the same. The trainers are the same. The only thing that changes is which side wins the narrative battle for what the operation is called. What the article argues is something narrower. The method exists. It is documented. It is reproducible. It has been applied across a quarter-century with a consistency that is statistically improbable for organic phenomena. And it has been treated by Western media, throughout that period, as if each case were unrelated to the others. For the reader, the question is not whether to support or oppose a given protest movement. The question is whether the language being used to describe the movement, in the moment it happens, will turn out to map cleanly onto the seven elements of the playbook. If the youth movement appeared on cue, with full branding, three months before the trigger. If the square was occupied within hours of the trigger, with infrastructure that took weeks to plan. If foreign embassies were visibly engaged within days. If the Western media narrative was synchronized across outlets within hours. If the security forces became the subject of psychological operations designed to demobilize them. If a replacement government was being discussed in foreign capitals before the existing one had finished resigning. If all six of those things appear together, the playbook is being run. Whether you support the outcome it is trying to produce is a separate question. Closing The method is open. It has been documented for half a century. The handbook is online. The training centers operate publicly. The funding flows can be traced. What is hidden is not the method. What is hidden is the recognition that the method is being used. The hardest part of breaking a magic trick is not learning what the magician did. It is accepting that the trick was a trick at all. People resist that step because acceptance feels like a kind of self-criticism. If the trick fooled me, what does that say about me? Nothing. It says the trick was good. Pull the camera back. The frame around the frame is the actual story. What does the frame around your next protest look like, from there? Sources Bringing Down a Dictator (PBS documentary, 2002, narrated Martin Sheen, Peabody Award winner): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7dNLt5mC1A Nuland-Pyatt leaked phone conversation, complete with subtitles, February 4, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k Victoria Nuland confirms US has invested $5 billion in Ukraine, US-Ukraine Foundation, December 13, 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPVs5VuI8XI The method itself: Gene Sharp, “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” Albert Einstein Institution: https://commonslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/GeneSharp_198Tactics.pdf The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Nonviolent_Action Gene Sharp profile, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp Nonviolence, Power, and Possibility: The Life of Gene Sharp, Progressive Magazine, 2018: https://progressive.org/magazine/nonviolence-power-and-possibility-the-life-of-gene-sharp/ CANVAS, the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies: https://canvasopedia.org/ Colour revolution, Wikipedia overview with documented cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution The financiers: National Endowment for Democracy, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy Allen Weinstein 1991 Washington Post quote, documented: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-responds-to-our-burma-nuclear-story NED goes dark: new “duty of care” policy concealing recipients, The Grayzone, May 2025: https://thegrayzone.com/2025/05/01/ned-goes-dark/ Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy, William Blum: https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/trojan-horse-the-national-endowment-for-democracy Should We Celebrate the Demise of USAID and NED?, Antiwar.com, Scott Horton excerpt from Provoked, February 2025: https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2025/02/23/should-we-celebrate-the-demise-of-usaid-and-ned/ US Reinstates Funding to Propaganda Outlet NED, Antiwar.com, May 2025: https://original.antiwar.com/Roger_Harris/2025/05/22/us-reinstates-funding-to-propaganda-outlet-ned/ Fact Sheet on the National Endowment for Democracy, Chinese Consulate Penang: https://penang.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/zt_19/zgwj/202205/t20220511_10684485.htm Open Society Foundations, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Society_Foundations Open Society Foundations in Ukraine, official statement: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/the-open-society-foundations-in-ukraine International Renaissance Foundation (Soros, Ukraine), Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Renaissance_Foundation What George Soros said about Ukraine in 2014 CNN interview, PolitiFact: https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/sep/20/what-george-soros-said-about-ukraine-2014-cnn-inte/ Assessing the International Influence of Private Philanthropy: The Case of Open Society Foundations, Global Studies Quarterly, Oxford Academic: https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/1/4/ksab039/6460388 Serbia 2000: Otpor, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor Otpor and the Struggle for Democracy in Serbia (1998-2000), International Center on Nonviolent Conflict: https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/otpor-struggle-democracy-serbia-1998-2000/ How Color Revolution Was Born and Died in Serbia, Compact Magazine, September 2025: https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-color-revolution-was-born-and-died-in-serbia/ October 5, 2000: Flashback to Yugoslavia, the West’s first color revolution victim, RT op-ed: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/405771-october-2000-remembering-yugoslavia-nato/ Red Hand Revolt in Serbia, Antiwar.com, February 2025: https://original.antiwar.com/malic/2025/02/04/red-hand-revolt-in-serbia-people-power-or-color-revolution/ Ukraine 2004 and 2014: Revolution of Dignity, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity Euromaidan, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan When Ukraine set course for Europe, Brookings, February 2024: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/when-ukraine-set-course-for-europe/ What Really Happened in Ukraine in 2014, The Bulwark, April 2022: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-really-happened-in-ukraine-in-2014-and-since-then The Ukraine Mess That Nuland Made, Truthout, July 2015: https://truthout.org/articles/the-ukraine-mess-that-nuland-made/ Ukraine 2014 Revolution of Dignity, RBC-Ukraine: https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/analytics/key-episodes-of-ukraine-s-2014-revolution-1764502055.html EuroMaidan was not a coup, Kyiv Independent, February 2025: https://kyivindependent.com/explainer-ukraines-euromaidan-was-not-a-coup-despite-russian-disinfo-pushed-by-musk/ Romania 2024 to 2025: 2024 to 2025 Romanian election annulment protests, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%932025_Romanian_election_annulment_protests Romania’s democracy in turmoil, CIVICUS Lens, May 2025: https://lens.civicus.org/romanias-democracy-in-turmoil/ Romania ultra-nationalists gain momentum amid election controversy, Balkan Insight: https://balkaninsight.com/2025/02/24/romanias-ultra-nationalists-gain-momentum-amid-election-controversy/ Fault lines in the East: Romania’s political transformation, Real Instituto Elcano: https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/fault-lines-in-the-east-romania-political-transformation-and-europe-future/ Elections, Austerity and Public Discontent Marked Romania in 2025, Balkan Insight: https://balkaninsight.com/2025/12/23/elections-austerity-and-public-discontent-marked-romania-in-2025/ Romania in crisis ahead of presidential election rerun, Civicus Monitor: https://monitor.civicus.org/explore/romania-in-crisis-ahead-of-presidential-election-rerun-protests-become-violent/ Targeted Disruption: Russian Interference in 2024 Elections of Moldova, Romania and Georgia, GEOpolitics, September 2025: https://politicsgeo.com/targeted-disruption-russian-interference-in-the-2024-elections-of-moldova-romania-and-georgia/
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If this was forwarded to you, sign up for future news here. Dear Friend, Wars have many costs. People are going hungry far from Iran because of the war there. Some costs gain attention, such as the price of the fossil fuels that are so damaging to our world even apart from the wars waged over them. Keep reading for something you can do to open people’s minds to all the many costs of wars. —David Swanson, Executive Director, World BEYOND War Online Actions Palestinians are being criminally deprived of food, water, and medicine. Those attempting to come to their aid should be assisted, not attacked. Add Your Name Sign Here More Online Actions: Nominate the 2026 War Abolisher of the Year Ban Military Air Shows End Deadly Violence in Cameroon Upcoming Events Visit WBW’s Global Events Calendar to find events and add your own events! The Fifth Annual 24-Hour Peace Wave remains a 24-hour-long Zoom featuring peace actions in the streets and squares of the world, moving around the globe with the sun. But participants will have until November 1, 2026, to submit videos of peace activism, filmed at any time in the first 10 months of 2026. We will then compile the videos into 24 videos of 40 minutes each. We will then announce the date of a Zoom webinar that will have 40 minutes of video and 20 of introduction and live discussion (including your questions) every hour for 24 hours. Make Sure Your Video Is Included Go Here More Upcoming Events: Book Club: Across Mountains, Land and Sea Online Discussion: End the 500-Year War Against Africa Now! Soberanía en Venta en Paraguay: El Fracaso de las Alianzas Militares en la Región In Pursuit of Peace: Afghans promoting peace and social justice in new lands Resistance Studies Conference War, Peace, and the Arts: An Online Course #NoWar2026 Conference: Beyond Borders In Canada: Shut Down CANSEC Videos of Recent Events: Is NATO Still Going Global? Women Peacemakers: Building a World of Peace and Justice News from Around the World How to Help End War at a Gas Station or Grocery Store Here’s something you can do in this teachable moment. Go to a gas station or market with soaring prices. Print out and bring these three pages. Or print the first page as a big poster and the next two double-sided on one sheet. Hand them out and talk to people. Invite media. Or print the first two pages double-sided on a single sheet and the third one as a sticker that can be stuck to appropriate surfaces. Get the Pages Here More Articles from Around the Globe: WORLD: Governments Love Secrecy, But the World’s Major Problems Are Not Secret EUROPE: 2026 Gaza Flotilla Intercepted by Israeli Military Neutrality, Morality, War, Peace, and the Abuse of Power New Phase of Gaza Flotilla Mission Launched Today Appeal for a European and World Peace Congress in 2026 ASIA: Never Again Means Never Again for Everyone Could Trump’s Iran Fiasco Be the United States’ Suez Crisis? NORTH AMERICA: If We Had No Military Academies, Who Would Train the Sadists? World War Trump: In the Trumpian Age, Every Accusation Is Also a Confession We Need Children’s Peace Fairs Everywhere The Regular Army Talk World Radio: Abolish the Police How a Student WBW Group Is Advancing the Cause of Peace Talk World Radio: Scott Langley on Abolishing the Death Penalty World BEYOND War is a global network of volunteers, chapters, and affiliated organizations advocating for the abolition of war. Donate to support our people-powered movement for peace. Privacy policy. World BEYOND War 513 E Main St #1484 | Charlottesville, VA 22902 | USA PO Box 871 | Campbellford PO, ON, K0L 1L0 | Canada CC Unicentro Bógota, Local 2-222 | Postal Code (Apartado Postal): 358646 | Colombia The post WBW News & Action: Iran War Costs Everyone appeared first on World BEYOND War. From World BEYOND War via This RSS Feed.
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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/51814 Originally published in Spanish, we present an English translation of an interview with Emilio Albamonte on the prospects of the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS) and the socialist Left in Argentina. Albamonte is a leader and founder of the Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International, today the Permanent Revolution Current – Fourth International, and of Argentina’s Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS, Socialist Workers Party). He is coauthor of the books Socialist Strategy and Military Art and Debates and Foundations on the Struggle for Socialism Today. You may be interested in: “How to Fight (and Win) against the Right: Lessons from the Workers’ Movement in Milei’s Argentina” *** How would you characterize the political phenomenon developing around Myriam Bregman and the Left? Why is it happening, and what are its roots in Argentina’s political reality? The first thing to say is that the phenomenon is not essentially electoral — although several polls give Myriam between 9 and 14 percent voting support as a presidential candidate — but above all one of political sympathy, or what pollsters call “image.” You may be interested in: “Meet Myriam Bregman, the Revolutionary Congresswoman in Argentina More Popular Than Milei” This phenomenon cannot be understood without starting from the class struggle under Milei’s government, which recently included the battle against the labor reform, in the context of which we carried out an enormous agitation campaign, the biggest I can remember of any left-wing organization here outside an electoral period. The struggle against the reform was an important experience. We could say that the political phenomenon now developing is a political expression of the conclusions that broad sectors of the working class — young people, the feminist movement, as well as sectors of culture and intellectuals — have been drawing from these two years of struggle against this government, during which they saw Myriam and the PTS on the front lines, while much of Peronism and the trade union bureaucracy maintained the balance that allowed Milei to advance. One of the most commented-on facts was the poll by the Brazilian consulting firm Atlas Intel — the same firm that anticipated Milei’s rise — in which Myriam has a 47 percent approval rating and 46 disapproval rating, making her the only figure in Argentinean politics with a net positive image. She ranks above Buenos Aires governor Axel Kicillof, former president Cristina Kirchner, Senator and former minister Patricia Bullrich, and President Milei himself. The University of San Andrés poll also places Myriam among the four political leaders with the best image in the country. But it’s not only about the polls, right? No, what the polls reflect is something we had already been seeing in the streets for quite some time: the sympathy generated by Myriam and Nicolás “Nico” del Caño heading the Workers’ Left Front (FIT-U) tickets. It goes beyond Myriam herself as an individual political figure. She is the main expression of a broader phenomenon. For example, in the University of San Andrés poll you mentioned, Nico appears fifth among opposition political figures with the highest positive image. What is new here, even though these are “image” measurements, is that this is now a national phenomenon. We had already seen in Jujuy that Alejandro Vilca won 25 percent for national deputy in that province in 2021; later, even though he was not reelected, he maintained a high vote share of around 10 percent. We should also mention Christian Castillo, Luca Bonfante among the youth, and our comrades who are leaders in their workplaces, universities, and workers’ struggles — all of them are part of the same broader fabric. We have every right to think that this phenomenon — which is also a continuation of what happened in 2025, when the Buenos Aires Province list headed by Nico won two national deputies and Myriam reached 9 percent in the City of Buenos Aires — will also express itself in the class struggle. How do you situate this phenomenon in the international context, and how would you define the particularity of the Left in Argentina? Since the 2008 crisis we have seen political phenomena emerging not only on the right but also on the left, although unfortunately the overwhelming majority ended up being channeled through neoreformism. There is a constant we can observe in the history of the workers’ movement: many times, when it cannot find an outlet through direct action in the class struggle, it expresses itself politically. For example, at the end of the 19th century, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, the European workers’ movement created the great social-democratic workers’ parties and trade unions. The paradigmatic case was German social democracy, which first developed as an enormous semi-clandestine organization under Bismarck’s “anti-socialist” laws. Dick Geary, in an interesting book on workers’ and socialist movements in Europe before 1914, explains very well how harsh the struggle against employers at the factory level was — lockouts, factory closures. In that context, political organization also responded to the impossibility of advancing solely through workplace struggles, to the need to fight collectively. It is what Rosa Luxemburg summarized by saying that trade union struggle was a kind of Sisyphean task. The bourgeois regime’s response to this process of organization — which also had an international extension — was to modify the political structure of state domination. We have studied Antonio Gramsci, among other reasons, because he best analyzed this process. The bourgeoisie created an “expanded state” — what Gramsci calls the integral state, meaning dictatorship plus hegemony — in order to go beyond passively awaiting consent, and developed a whole series of mechanisms to organize it, with the institutionalization of mass organizations and the expansion of bureaucracies within them being one of the fundamental elements, with the dual function of “integration” into the state and fragmentation of the working class. In Argentina this process took place under the first Peronist government. This is not just history. Over the last decade and a half, we have seen dozens of generalized class struggle processes in different countries, most of which took the form of revolts, as well as processes of political mobilization, especially among the youth (Occupy Wall Street, the indignados in the Spanish State, the Tahrir Square movement in Egypt, etc.). There is a relationship between these movements and the development of neoreformist political phenomena because, as I said before, when the workers’ and popular movements cannot find an outlet through direct class struggle, this expresses itself as political action. Neoreformism tries precisely to separate politics from class struggle. We saw this with Podemos in the Spanish State, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, and Syriza in Greece. Something similar happened here after the December 2001 uprising, when a diversion began with President Duhalde’s mega-devaluation and ended up being capitalized on by Kirchnerism, which incorporated much of the social and human rights movements into the state. It was part of a post-neoliberal cycle that developed across the region from Venezuela to Argentina. If we take the period from 2008 to today, we see, in the heat of mobilizations and revolts, the emergence of these neoreformist projects or “left populisms” that end up betraying the expectations of the mass movement. Cyclical processes of mobilization and institutionalization emerge, in which the energy unleashed by revolts is dissipated or assimilated by established powers without giving rise to new revolutions. The particularity of what is happening in Argentina is that it has a Trotskyist Left as its reference point. And this did not emerge out of nowhere. Fifteen years ago, the political Left created the Workers’ Left Front (FIT-U) in Argentina in order to overcome the fragmented stage that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. The FIT-U is an achievement insofar as it established a pole of class independence within the national situation after years marked by the collapse of the MAS (Movement toward Socialism) party in the 1990s. What is happening today is, in a certain sense, the culmination of a long process. In 2011, the PTS (Socialist Workers Party), the PO (Labor Party), and IS (Socialist Left) formed the Workers’ Left Front with a program culminating in the struggle for a workers’ government (before the PO accepted, we had formed a front with IS and Nuevo MAS). Never before had the Trotskyist Left in Argentina maintained such a continuous presence on the national political scene. But the example of the Workers’ Left Front cannot be understood without its correlation with the class struggle: for example, the major confrontations on the Pan-American Highway, with struggles such as Kraft in 2009 and Donnelley and Lear in 2014 under Kirchnerist governments. How did the PTS and its leading figures build the political presence they have today? What elements would you highlight? There are three terrains which for us are interconnected: economic struggle, political struggle, and theoretical struggle — the three levels proposed by Engels. To begin somewhere, let’s take the moment when the PTS came to lead the FIT-U. In 2015, after the PO refused to accept Nicolás del Caño as Altamira’s vice presidential candidate, we went to primaries and del Caño won those elections. This cannot be understood without taking into account the enormous participation of the PTS in the very hard struggles taking place at that time, around which del Caño emerged as a left-wing leader. Nor can it be understood without the launch and development of La Izquierda Diario as the first digital newspaper of the Left, using all the possibilities offered by the new technologies available at the time. Specifically, in 2014 there was a wave of conflicts, whose emblem was the Lear struggle, which struck at the heart of the alliance between the trade union bureaucracy and the government. The conflict included 21 blockades of the Pan-American Highway, 16 national days of struggle with pickets throughout the country, five instances of brutal repression by the police, two weeks of employer lockout, and the government organizing the importation of wiring to break the strike. Also in 2014, workers occupied and restarted production at the Donnelley printshop, now Madygraf, following the example of Zanon. That is why we laugh when some ultra-leftists say we are electoralists … At the same time, in 2014 we launched La Izquierda Diario, establishing the first digital newspaper of the Left in order to have our own voice on the national scene, competing with the bourgeois media. But this was not only a national initiative. We launched it together with our international current, today the Permanent Revolution Current — Fourth International. We built a network of 14 newspapers in seven languages. Unfortunately, to this day, it remains unique among the revolutionary Left internationally. Let me give some figures our comrades from La Izquierda Diario passed on to me. Today, LID in Argentina alone gets around 1 million page views and more than 500,000 unique users per month. On Instagram, in February for example, it reached more than 3 million followers and achieved 27 million views. On TikTok it has nearly 200,000 followers and more than 5 million likes. On X, nearly 100,000 followers. We also have a radio program, El Círculo Rojo, hosted by Fernando Rosso on a commercial radio station (Radio con Vos), listened to by thousands every week. And for the past two years we have built LID+, with several weekly political and cultural programs, national and international. The LID+ YouTube channel alone had 327,000 views in February of this year. But it’s not only that. There are also theoretical journals such as Ideas de Izquierda, where all kinds of theoretical questions are discussed and debated, with many intellectuals contributing beyond the PTS itself, and the youth ideological monthly Armas de la Crítica. There is the CEIP León Trotsky, which is a reference point on Trotsky’s work throughout Latin America. We established Ediciones IPS, a publishing house with more than 100 titles, publishing not only Marxist classics but also works on current debates across various subjects — labor history, political theory, ecology, feminism, economics, and philosophy. One of the latest works published is Paula Bach’s book addressing the principal debates around new technologies. I do not want to go on too long, but the concept I want to stress is that for us, this is not only about political figures, nor only struggle, nor only political agitation, nor only ideological struggle, but all of it together. We reject electoralism, crude trade-unionism, or student politics detached from a broader perspective. The objective is far more ambitious: to educate the workers’ and youth vanguard, to shape the vanguard through revolutionary Marxism. This is the great task we face, with all the difficulties implied since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For us, it is precisely this work that is beginning to achieve some success and show results now. It is strange that some intellectuals or journalists impressed by the Myriam phenomenon treat it as something new that the Argentinean Left is Trotskyist. This did not fall from the sky but demonstrates the enormous revolutionary determination of Trotskyists not to yield to all those who denigrated and still denigrate the Leninist tradition of party building. The phrase often attributed to the great American Marxist Fredric Jameson — that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — has penetrated so deeply into the minds and attitudes of the Left that it has liquidated the will to revolutionize society and even to build a revolutionary party. In the discussion over how to take advantage of the Left’s new situation, several intellectuals have participated, and we received a letter from comrades proposing “committees of struggle for a workers’ government: Myriam Bregman for president.” In her May Day speech, Myriam proposed creating committees throughout the country to organize the support we are receiving. Based on what Myriam said there, how do you concretely imagine these committees? What kind of activity should they develop? I’ll tell you how I imagine them, but what these committees actually become will depend on the comrades who join them, the proposals they bring, whether we succeed in attracting many people, the ideas they contribute, and the synthesis we manage to achieve. What I can give you is, of course, a partial version — my own and the PTS’s. It is an initial response, but then we have to see what discussions emerge. The synthesis of what we ultimately do will arise from that exchange with those who join the committees. I think it is very important that several left-wing intellectuals, faced with this new situation, have proposed actively collaborating in building something that advances the Left. With many of them, we are discussing launching the committees together. It is a process that is only beginning. These are the first steps. An exciting period of discussion is opening up to see what kind of synthesis we can achieve. Returning to the question: the situation of passivity promoted by Peronism, the trade union bureaucracy, the student bureaucracy in universities, etc., is very serious. Milei is deteriorating, but every day he continues to go on the offensive. Take the university question, where the government not only has the luxury of refusing to comply with the law but, worse still, announces new cuts. Faced with this, the various bureaucracies do not organize assemblies or encourage organization but instead stage peaceful and orderly marches every so often. Meanwhile, teachers have already lost nearly 40 percent of their wages. That is the legacy of passivity strengthened by Kirchnerism and, above all, by the experience of Alberto Fernández’s government. That is why our discussion with every comrade who joins a committee has to begin there: explaining the role of the parties and organizations that have been betraying people, and arguing that we must build organizations capable of transforming the skepticism and demoralization created by the bureaucracies into our own institutions capable of promoting direct action to stop Milei. The committees we propose have nothing to do with meetings aimed at waiting for the 2027 elections. If people trust Myriam Bregman, Nicolás del Caño, the Left, and join the committees, then our task is to persuade them to create fighting organizations that drive the government crazy and prevent the trade union or student bureaucracies from betraying struggles the way they are doing now — organizations that make life impossible for the traitors supporting the right wing’s plans of attack. Either we become a ferment for creating confidence and developing mobilization against the government’s permanent attacks, or we will not even live up to the current standing of the Left. If pacifism without action prevails, or actions that change nothing, then even electorally the “lesser evil” could advance, represented by anyone promising to remove Milei. That does not mean falling into sectarianism — quite the opposite. We have to take advantage of the new situation and integrate many comrades who are enthusiastic about the Left’s current standing, even if at first they think of their support in purely electoral terms. We have to be patient with them, but without abandoning our political line. The committees must be anything except meetings devoted merely to propaganda. They must make concrete decisions for action. And where there are no open struggles, we have to think hard about what kind of activity can inspire more comrades, what activity can politicize people, advance organization, and mobilize them. They do not necessarily have to be struggles in the strict sense. They can involve ideological discussion or social activities. How does the perspective of the committees connect with the proposal for a party of the new working class? We believe an important part of the committees’ activity should be discussion of program and strategy. We are going to publish a manifesto in which we develop some axes that we consider fundamental for discussing a program and a strategy capable of advancing the cause of the working class. In addition to action, the committees must devote time to debating a program that responds to the needs of the working class, against the dictatorship of big business and the right wing. Alongside the committees, within the PTS we have begun discussing concrete proposals for spaces of programmatic and strategic elaboration in which we want to invite comrades who wish to collaborate, beginning with the intellectuals already participating in the discussion on how to take advantage of the Left’s current position in the national situation. Through all this programmatic and strategic discussion, and through the shared experience we develop in the committees, we will see to what extent we converge in a common party. For us, this would be the relationship between the proposal for committees and the proposal for a party of the new working class. The development of the committees, their expansion, and shared practice in the class struggle, in addition to programmatic elaboration, will pose the next steps. In Myriam’s speech she also proposed another way to make use of the phenomenon, linked to promoting different levels of united fronts. Could you elaborate on that and explain how it connects to the proposal for committees? Of course. The key, if we do everything I described earlier with the committees, is to channel it toward united fronts capable of breaking the passivity of the bureaucratic organizations. That is the real test for a committee: whether it serves to promote concrete struggles and advance the united front. In this regard, there are indeed different levels. A starting point is that the vanguard of the working class needs its own centers of gravity, its bastions — places where militant accumulation and vanguard organization make it possible to truly influence the balance of forces within political and social struggles. The classic historical example is the Putilov factory in the Russian Revolution, the largest concentration of metalworkers in Petrograd, which became a stronghold of the Bolshevik Party and proved decisive for the victory of the October Revolution in 1917. Allowing for all the differences, without these kinds of centers of gravity — among teachers, health workers, industrial sectors, universities — there is no way to intervene in the class struggle beyond propaganda. That is why we attach so much importance to building bastions, and why we say the committees should pay particular attention to strengthening these places. A second level involves united front institutions: struggle committees, regional coordinating bodies, assemblies of self-organized activists, coordinating tables with trade union, student, feminist, environmental, disability rights, neighborhood organizations, etc. In other words, organizations that constantly articulate sectors in struggle and working-class political organizations. Here we draw inspiration from Trotsky’s idea of “action committees”: institutions of unification and coordination capable of preventing the energy unleashed by the movement from being dissipated in isolated and discontinuous battles, and serving as a lever to blow apart the bureaucratic structure that weighs down the workers’ and mass movements. In other words, it is not only about “fighting together” but also about establishing permanent organizations that bypass the bureaucracy. At this level, there are also anti-bureaucratic fronts, such as the Multicolor coalition, which allowed the Left to win SUTEBA Matanza [a teachers’ union] and maintain key positions in the cities of Tigre and Bahía, even while including agreements with more conciliatory tendencies such as Azul y Blanca in Matanza. There is a major struggle underway to recover the unions, whether from within, as we have been doing among teachers, or by striking from outside, where that is not possible. We have to revolutionize the unions so they stop being empty shells for administering healthcare funds. We also have to recover student centers so they stop functioning as support-service structures for university deans. A third level is using all this to effectively fight to impose the workers’ united front on the major unions, or make them pay the full political cost of their complicity with the government. This is properly the tactic summarized by the Third International in the formula “march separately, strike together.” But imposing the united front requires forces. That is why the three levels I mentioned are completely interconnected. The bastions are the starting point for concentrating forces. The coordinating bodies and action committees serve to articulate the strength of the vanguard and the most active sectors of the masses, and this force becomes the lever for imposing the united front in every major struggle, such as the fight against the labor reform, where, despite everything we did, we still lacked the strength to impose a united front capable of defeating it. Without that linkage, the current phenomenon of sympathy toward us will remain trapped in electoralism. But with that articulation, we can transform it into a lever allowing the Left to play a qualitatively different role in the class struggle. In an interview you did a few months ago with Fernando Rosso, you raised the problem of “creating community.” What does that mean, and why do you think it is such an important issue today? In Trotsky’s time, revolutionaries had to contest the spaces of socialization that already existed within the working class itself — trade unions, cultural spaces, etc. — which in most cases were dominated by the trade union bureaucracy and the social-democratic and Stalinist apparatuses, expressions of bourgeois ideology within the proletariat. Today, we could say we are one step further back. Workers’ and student organizations have been hollowed out as institutions of socialization. Those spaces have been replaced by social networks, streaming platforms, and so on, in relation to which the working class is atomized and placed, as a collection of isolated individuals, under the constant influence of the ideology of the ruling classes. At the same time, capitalism has rooted the idea of individual fulfillment through consumption. Today, however, the consumerist ideal — unlike what might have existed during the Fordist era — has become practically unattainable for the majority. Faced with this situation, we raise the need to “create community” on the basis of the enormous power of cooperation as the distinctive force of the working class, which makes the world move but is expropriated by capital. “Creating community” ranges from developing spaces of sociability to building every form of solidarity against the atomization of the proletariat, promoted both by bourgeois ideology and by the trade union bureaucracy itself. When I say “communities,” I also mean forging centers of gravity for the class struggle — linking together bastions that bring together teachers, industrial workers, students, etc. If we do not wage this battle at the grassroots level, the Left will have very shallow roots. It is part of developing a critical culture against the bourgeois order. When we argue for promoting coordinating bodies, grassroots assemblies, and institutions of self-organization, we are thinking about this as well: places where different sectors of the working class, youth, the student movement, the feminist movement, intellectuals, and so on, can come together from below. Peronism will never tell you that self-organization is necessary, or that this self-organization grows out of the cooperation that already exists in workplaces but has been expropriated by capital, and that this cooperation must become conscious cooperation so that the working class can take the country’s major problems into its own hands. This is what Marx meant when he said that the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves. If we do not proceed this way, the Left will become not an organic phenomenon but a purely conjunctural one. What role does the FIT-U play in all this? First of all, we have always been promoters of the FIT-U and consider it, as I said earlier, a decisive political achievement insofar as it allowed the Left to overcome the fragmented stage into which it had been trapped as a result of accumulated defeats, and ended up constituting a space for combative left politics in Argentina. Today, the political landscape is made up of the Right, with Milei’s Far Right and Macrism, and Peronism. A center-left of the old FREPASO type no longer exists. Against all predictions, what has emerged is something nobody expected: a clear sector of the combative Left. In that sense, we view the development of the FIT-U very positively. From an electoral standpoint, we have to consider how to integrate comrades who agree with the program to ensure it doesn’t remain a closed preserve of the four parties that compose it, provided there’s programmatic agreement. Our position, however, is that the FIT-U, as a coalition of organizations carrying out agitation and propaganda around a combative and socialist program, was and remains very positive — but it isn’t enough. We can’t be satisfied with a coalition of four relatively small groups that often disagree even in the class struggle and that carry out electoral agitation once every two years. Our central point is that the Left’s new position raises the need both to advance toward a revolutionary vanguard party — making qualitative leaps in that terrain — and furthering class struggle. And that is our proposal to the FIT-U as well. Some comrades within the FIT-U propose holding a congress of the front as the horizon. For us, that would amount to marking time in the same place. Either we transform sympathy for our leading figures into organization — as we’ve argued throughout this interview — or we won’t rise to the level required for the combative left to decisively influence reality. On the other hand, it would never occur to us to conceive of building a revolutionary party in Argentina separately from an international party. This is a very important debate within the FIT-U, which also includes significant differences, for example over the war in Ukraine, on which we have publicly argued on repeated occasions. Within the discussions over how to take advantage of the Left’s current standing, there has been debate over the hypothesis that several revolutionary parties might simultaneously lead a revolution. What would you say about that? Salvador Dalí once said he was a monarchist because monarchy was the only regime that solved the problem of succession. Paraphrasing Dalí a bit jokingly, we could say that to this day no organization has emerged capable of fulfilling the role of a vanguard party directing revolutionary processes — a party organizing the most perceptive and intelligent sectors of the working class and aiming to lead millions. As Nahuel Moreno pointed out, in the 20th century, beyond the Russian experience of a Leninist party governed by democratic centralism, we also saw other “party-army” type organizations — bureaucratic organizations that led revolutionary processes, as in China or Vietnam. But what we have never seen anywhere is the resolution of the immense tasks involved in taking power and organizing revolutionary power without some form of centralization — bureaucratic or democratic. We, of course, defend democratic centralization. There are no victorious revolutions that have expropriated the bourgeoisie without a party, simply because the problem cannot be solved any other way. The bourgeois apparatus is centralized, and if you don’t have a centralized organization confronting it, it crushes you. That’s the material issue at stake. The Russian Revolution was led by the Bolshevik Party, which was precisely the organization capable of attracting groups such as Trotsky’s Interdistrict Organization and other revolutionary fractions. Here, we need to distinguish between two levels in order to avoid confusion. We defend multiparty democracy within institutions of workers’ democracy, such as soviets or councils in the framework of a revolutionary transition. We support multipartyism because we recognize that there are class fractions that the vanguard party of the working class does not reflect — for example, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, with whom the Bolsheviks formed an alliance that later broke down after they assassinated the German ambassador. What we do not believe, however, is that there is anything justifying the fragmentation of the workers’ vanguard rather than forging a great party. Here, I refer back to the conclusion Trotsky drew in the theory of permanent revolution: that the realization of the revolutionary alliance is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletarian vanguard organized in a revolutionary party. We are proposing a movement for a party of the new working class. When we speak of a working-class party, we mean a party that reflects the historical interests of the working class, not one pretending to sociologically represent the class as a whole — that would be a complete fiction. As Trotsky said, classes are heterogeneous. They are made up of different layers, some looking forward and others backward. That is why, for us, the discussion of the program such a party would have is crucial. We are proposing the FIT-U program as a starting point for debate — a program of class independence that raises the struggle for a workers’ government. Within that movement for a party of the new working class, we fight for the party that emerges to truly become the party of the working-class vanguard, engaging with and seeking to influence the working class as it exists today, engaging with different sectors through institutions of self-organization, in the struggle to recover the unions, promoting the united front, and fighting in perspective for institutions of workers’ democracy like soviets or councils. A party that engages, organizes, influences, and seeks to lead the whole. Is there anything else you would like to add? We will see in the coming weeks and months whether we can bring many of Myriam’s sympathizers into the committees that, as I said, we are discussing launching jointly from the outset with many comrades, intellectuals, cultural figures, and so on. The question is whether we can open a new situation for the Left, not only electorally but so that the Left becomes decisive in the class struggle itself. As I said earlier, these are some of my own views and the product of an initial discussion we have held within the PTS. The final form all this takes will depend greatly on the debates we have, the ideas brought by the comrades who join the committees, and the syntheses we can reach. Our aim is to give these committees — beyond the electoral arena, which will of course be a major task — an integral revolutionary content. I think an exciting discussion is opening up over how to take advantage of the current situation in order to win decisive influence, surpass Peronism and its politics of class collaboration, and open up a revolutionary perspective. This article was originally published in Spanish on May 17 in Ideas de Izquierda. The post Making the Most of the Left’s Position in Argentina: An Interview with Emilio Albamonte appeared first on Left Voice. From Left Voice via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
lemmy.sdf.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/53763707 Archived Chongqing, a futuristic Chinese city, has caught the eye of influencers and bloggers. Beijing, meanwhile, welcomes new visitors, often unaware of the geopolitical and ideological currents running beneath their social media posts. […] Chongqing has recently become a social media sensation. Its online popularity has spread like wildfire [and] is helping to shape the country’s image among Generation Z, a demographic that gets its information via TikTok and Instagram rather than through traditional media. TikTok, in particular, has succeeded at making short, looping videos and endless scroll the norm – a format that competing platforms later tried to adopt. Influencers know they have to grab viewers’ attention in just a fraction of a second, and the skylines of Dubai and Manhattan were already familiar. “You need a shock effect on the viewer for the influencer to be promoted by the algorithm,” noted Jackson Lu, a local influencer. “New York doesn’t surprise anyone anymore, whereas Chongqing offers a new and visually striking backdrop with its verticality and its lights at night.” Every week, Lu receives at least one or two requests from influencers planning to come to the city from abroad, eager to find the most unusual places to shoot their photos and videos. […] In the hearts and minds of digital natives, the stunning images of major Chinese achievements – massive bridges, train stations and airports – have begun to replace prior negative perceptions of the country: Wuhan’s central market at the start of the Covid-19 years, Uyghurs kneeling in handcuffs during transfers to indoctrination camps and crackdowns against protesters in Hong Kong. “There is a sense of disillusionment; young people tell themselves that Western governments have condemned the human rights situation in China in the past, but that they have not, however, prevented what is happening in Gaza. This is helping people forget the criticism aimed at China, in favor of a narrative focused on its development,” observed Paulina Oveckova, a China specialist at the Pragu […] In this context, President Xi Jinping and the entire Chinese diplomatic corps have been hammering home a message aimed at presenting China as a force for stability, in contrast to the US, which they accuse of having upended global energy supplies by attacking Iran with little regard for the consequences. The parade of foreign leaders through the Chinese capital, all of them eager to secure a smooth relationship with Beijing while grappling with the “Donald Trump problem,” has further contributed to this image-building effort. […] During his official visit in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the warming of relations with China “put [Canada] in a good position for the new world order.” Even Annalena Baerbock, a critical voice regarding China when she served as Germany’s foreign minister from 2021 to 2025, has changed her tone since becoming president of the United Nations General Assembly. During her visit to Beijing on April 29, she praised China’s “unwavering commitment to the multilateral system,” seemingly forgetting the economic and diplomatic support that Beijing has offered Moscow despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. […] Even though relations between China and Europe remain weighed down by two major issues – the Chinese trade surplus and close ties between China and Russia – Beijing believes in its capacity to win over Europe’s digitally connected youth through social media, regardless of the reticence of their governments. […] The turning point for international interest came in the spring of 2025, when an American from Cincinnati, Ohio, Darren Watkins, arrived in China. This 20-year-old, known to his followers as “IShowSpeed,” embarked on a two-week livestreamed tour across China, broadcasting for hours each day. He has 54 million followers on Youtube, 51 million on TikTok and 47.9 million on Instagram. Internet users from around the world watched him marvel at Shenzhen’s robots in the south, learn lessons from Kung Fu masters at the Shaolin Monastery in the east, and, of course, take in the spectacle of Chongqing. […] The Italian-Senegalese influencer Khaby Lame, who has 161 million followers on TikTok, traveled there in September 2025. YouTuber Drew Binsky, known for having visited every country in the world and followed by 6.9 million people for his videos on unusual places, also visited. […] The Chinese themselves often have a much more nuanced view of their own country. Though they admire the development of infrastructure, street safety and technological progress, they worry about the lack of economic opportunities for younger generations and the lack of sufficient social reforms to address low birth rates. […] By virtue of sheer clicks and views, these influencers serve as a convenient vessel for hiding the topics Beijing doesn’t want to be seen. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has welcomed anyone who avoids complicated issues and sticks solely to cultural subjects – kung fu, spicy cuisine, etc. – or who focus only on the positive side of Chinese modernity. “Depoliticizing is in itself a very political act,” said Emma Belmonte, host of the China Observers podcast and analyst at the Association for International Affairs, a French foreign policy think tank. “The effort to depoliticize the debate and the representation of China is a strategy. The flood of footage is meant to drown out the narrative that Beijing dislikes.” In other words, images of achievements alone are often enough to convince people of the merits of the Chinese political system that made them possible. […] The effort is particularly visible with Taiwanese youth, whom Beijing has sought to win over by bypassing the much-disliked government in Taipei. Two Taiwanese students told Le Monde that they were invited, with all expenses paid, to visit Hangzhou, an ultramodern city that has boomed thanks to artificial intelligence, and travel through northeastern regions of China where, for the first time, they saw snow-capped mountains. “In some ways, they are more modern than we are,” said one of them, Mei, age 21. “In hotels, when you order dinner online, robots take the elevator and deliver the meals left at reception by delivery drivers to the rooms.” They were encouraged, but not required, to share what they had done and their impressions of the trip on social media. At no point were they bothered with pressing political questions; instead, the organizers simply allowed the magic of modernity to do its work. […]
Komunitas
lemmy.sdf.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/53763707 Archived Chongqing, a futuristic Chinese city, has caught the eye of influencers and bloggers. Beijing, meanwhile, welcomes new visitors, often unaware of the geopolitical and ideological currents running beneath their social media posts. […] Chongqing has recently become a social media sensation. Its online popularity has spread like wildfire [and] is helping to shape the country’s image among Generation Z, a demographic that gets its information via TikTok and Instagram rather than through traditional media. TikTok, in particular, has succeeded at making short, looping videos and endless scroll the norm – a format that competing platforms later tried to adopt. Influencers know they have to grab viewers’ attention in just a fraction of a second, and the skylines of Dubai and Manhattan were already familiar. “You need a shock effect on the viewer for the influencer to be promoted by the algorithm,” noted Jackson Lu, a local influencer. “New York doesn’t surprise anyone anymore, whereas Chongqing offers a new and visually striking backdrop with its verticality and its lights at night.” Every week, Lu receives at least one or two requests from influencers planning to come to the city from abroad, eager to find the most unusual places to shoot their photos and videos. […] In the hearts and minds of digital natives, the stunning images of major Chinese achievements – massive bridges, train stations and airports – have begun to replace prior negative perceptions of the country: Wuhan’s central market at the start of the Covid-19 years, Uyghurs kneeling in handcuffs during transfers to indoctrination camps and crackdowns against protesters in Hong Kong. “There is a sense of disillusionment; young people tell themselves that Western governments have condemned the human rights situation in China in the past, but that they have not, however, prevented what is happening in Gaza. This is helping people forget the criticism aimed at China, in favor of a narrative focused on its development,” observed Paulina Oveckova, a China specialist at the Pragu […] In this context, President Xi Jinping and the entire Chinese diplomatic corps have been hammering home a message aimed at presenting China as a force for stability, in contrast to the US, which they accuse of having upended global energy supplies by attacking Iran with little regard for the consequences. The parade of foreign leaders through the Chinese capital, all of them eager to secure a smooth relationship with Beijing while grappling with the “Donald Trump problem,” has further contributed to this image-building effort. […] During his official visit in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the warming of relations with China “put [Canada] in a good position for the new world order.” Even Annalena Baerbock, a critical voice regarding China when she served as Germany’s foreign minister from 2021 to 2025, has changed her tone since becoming president of the United Nations General Assembly. During her visit to Beijing on April 29, she praised China’s “unwavering commitment to the multilateral system,” seemingly forgetting the economic and diplomatic support that Beijing has offered Moscow despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. […] Even though relations between China and Europe remain weighed down by two major issues – the Chinese trade surplus and close ties between China and Russia – Beijing believes in its capacity to win over Europe’s digitally connected youth through social media, regardless of the reticence of their governments. […] The turning point for international interest came in the spring of 2025, when an American from Cincinnati, Ohio, Darren Watkins, arrived in China. This 20-year-old, known to his followers as “IShowSpeed,” embarked on a two-week livestreamed tour across China, broadcasting for hours each day. He has 54 million followers on Youtube, 51 million on TikTok and 47.9 million on Instagram. Internet users from around the world watched him marvel at Shenzhen’s robots in the south, learn lessons from Kung Fu masters at the Shaolin Monastery in the east, and, of course, take in the spectacle of Chongqing. […] The Italian-Senegalese influencer Khaby Lame, who has 161 million followers on TikTok, traveled there in September 2025. YouTuber Drew Binsky, known for having visited every country in the world and followed by 6.9 million people for his videos on unusual places, also visited. […] The Chinese themselves often have a much more nuanced view of their own country. Though they admire the development of infrastructure, street safety and technological progress, they worry about the lack of economic opportunities for younger generations and the lack of sufficient social reforms to address low birth rates. […] By virtue of sheer clicks and views, these influencers serve as a convenient vessel for hiding the topics Beijing doesn’t want to be seen. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has welcomed anyone who avoids complicated issues and sticks solely to cultural subjects – kung fu, spicy cuisine, etc. – or who focus only on the positive side of Chinese modernity. “Depoliticizing is in itself a very political act,” said Emma Belmonte, host of the China Observers podcast and analyst at the Association for International Affairs, a French foreign policy think tank. “The effort to depoliticize the debate and the representation of China is a strategy. The flood of footage is meant to drown out the narrative that Beijing dislikes.” In other words, images of achievements alone are often enough to convince people of the merits of the Chinese political system that made them possible. […] The effort is particularly visible with Taiwanese youth, whom Beijing has sought to win over by bypassing the much-disliked government in Taipei. Two Taiwanese students told Le Monde that they were invited, with all expenses paid, to visit Hangzhou, an ultramodern city that has boomed thanks to artificial intelligence, and travel through northeastern regions of China where, for the first time, they saw snow-capped mountains. “In some ways, they are more modern than we are,” said one of them, Mei, age 21. “In hotels, when you order dinner online, robots take the elevator and deliver the meals left at reception by delivery drivers to the rooms.” They were encouraged, but not required, to share what they had done and their impressions of the trip on social media. At no point were they bothered with pressing political questions; instead, the organizers simply allowed the magic of modernity to do its work. […]
Komunitas
lemmy.sdf.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/53763707 Archived Chongqing, a futuristic Chinese city, has caught the eye of influencers and bloggers. Beijing, meanwhile, welcomes new visitors, often unaware of the geopolitical and ideological currents running beneath their social media posts. […] Chongqing has recently become a social media sensation. Its online popularity has spread like wildfire [and] is helping to shape the country’s image among Generation Z, a demographic that gets its information via TikTok and Instagram rather than through traditional media. TikTok, in particular, has succeeded at making short, looping videos and endless scroll the norm – a format that competing platforms later tried to adopt. Influencers know they have to grab viewers’ attention in just a fraction of a second, and the skylines of Dubai and Manhattan were already familiar. “You need a shock effect on the viewer for the influencer to be promoted by the algorithm,” noted Jackson Lu, a local influencer. “New York doesn’t surprise anyone anymore, whereas Chongqing offers a new and visually striking backdrop with its verticality and its lights at night.” Every week, Lu receives at least one or two requests from influencers planning to come to the city from abroad, eager to find the most unusual places to shoot their photos and videos. […] In the hearts and minds of digital natives, the stunning images of major Chinese achievements – massive bridges, train stations and airports – have begun to replace prior negative perceptions of the country: Wuhan’s central market at the start of the Covid-19 years, Uyghurs kneeling in handcuffs during transfers to indoctrination camps and crackdowns against protesters in Hong Kong. “There is a sense of disillusionment; young people tell themselves that Western governments have condemned the human rights situation in China in the past, but that they have not, however, prevented what is happening in Gaza. This is helping people forget the criticism aimed at China, in favor of a narrative focused on its development,” observed Paulina Oveckova, a China specialist at the Pragu […] In this context, President Xi Jinping and the entire Chinese diplomatic corps have been hammering home a message aimed at presenting China as a force for stability, in contrast to the US, which they accuse of having upended global energy supplies by attacking Iran with little regard for the consequences. The parade of foreign leaders through the Chinese capital, all of them eager to secure a smooth relationship with Beijing while grappling with the “Donald Trump problem,” has further contributed to this image-building effort. […] During his official visit in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the warming of relations with China “put [Canada] in a good position for the new world order.” Even Annalena Baerbock, a critical voice regarding China when she served as Germany’s foreign minister from 2021 to 2025, has changed her tone since becoming president of the United Nations General Assembly. During her visit to Beijing on April 29, she praised China’s “unwavering commitment to the multilateral system,” seemingly forgetting the economic and diplomatic support that Beijing has offered Moscow despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. […] Even though relations between China and Europe remain weighed down by two major issues – the Chinese trade surplus and close ties between China and Russia – Beijing believes in its capacity to win over Europe’s digitally connected youth through social media, regardless of the reticence of their governments. […] The turning point for international interest came in the spring of 2025, when an American from Cincinnati, Ohio, Darren Watkins, arrived in China. This 20-year-old, known to his followers as “IShowSpeed,” embarked on a two-week livestreamed tour across China, broadcasting for hours each day. He has 54 million followers on Youtube, 51 million on TikTok and 47.9 million on Instagram. Internet users from around the world watched him marvel at Shenzhen’s robots in the south, learn lessons from Kung Fu masters at the Shaolin Monastery in the east, and, of course, take in the spectacle of Chongqing. […] The Italian-Senegalese influencer Khaby Lame, who has 161 million followers on TikTok, traveled there in September 2025. YouTuber Drew Binsky, known for having visited every country in the world and followed by 6.9 million people for his videos on unusual places, also visited. […] The Chinese themselves often have a much more nuanced view of their own country. Though they admire the development of infrastructure, street safety and technological progress, they worry about the lack of economic opportunities for younger generations and the lack of sufficient social reforms to address low birth rates. […] By virtue of sheer clicks and views, these influencers serve as a convenient vessel for hiding the topics Beijing doesn’t want to be seen. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has welcomed anyone who avoids complicated issues and sticks solely to cultural subjects – kung fu, spicy cuisine, etc. – or who focus only on the positive side of Chinese modernity. “Depoliticizing is in itself a very political act,” said Emma Belmonte, host of the China Observers podcast and analyst at the Association for International Affairs, a French foreign policy think tank. “The effort to depoliticize the debate and the representation of China is a strategy. The flood of footage is meant to drown out the narrative that Beijing dislikes.” In other words, images of achievements alone are often enough to convince people of the merits of the Chinese political system that made them possible. […] The effort is particularly visible with Taiwanese youth, whom Beijing has sought to win over by bypassing the much-disliked government in Taipei. Two Taiwanese students told Le Monde that they were invited, with all expenses paid, to visit Hangzhou, an ultramodern city that has boomed thanks to artificial intelligence, and travel through northeastern regions of China where, for the first time, they saw snow-capped mountains. “In some ways, they are more modern than we are,” said one of them, Mei, age 21. “In hotels, when you order dinner online, robots take the elevator and deliver the meals left at reception by delivery drivers to the rooms.” They were encouraged, but not required, to share what they had done and their impressions of the trip on social media. At no point were they bothered with pressing political questions; instead, the organizers simply allowed the magic of modernity to do its work. […]
Komunitas
lemmy.sdf.org
Archived Chongqing, a futuristic Chinese city, has caught the eye of influencers and bloggers. Beijing, meanwhile, welcomes new visitors, often unaware of the geopolitical and ideological currents running beneath their social media posts. […] Chongqing has recently become a social media sensation. Its online popularity has spread like wildfire [and] is helping to shape the country’s image among Generation Z, a demographic that gets its information via TikTok and Instagram rather than through traditional media. TikTok, in particular, has succeeded at making short, looping videos and endless scroll the norm – a format that competing platforms later tried to adopt. Influencers know they have to grab viewers’ attention in just a fraction of a second, and the skylines of Dubai and Manhattan were already familiar. “You need a shock effect on the viewer for the influencer to be promoted by the algorithm,” noted Jackson Lu, a local influencer. “New York doesn’t surprise anyone anymore, whereas Chongqing offers a new and visually striking backdrop with its verticality and its lights at night.” Every week, Lu receives at least one or two requests from influencers planning to come to the city from abroad, eager to find the most unusual places to shoot their photos and videos. […] In the hearts and minds of digital natives, the stunning images of major Chinese achievements – massive bridges, train stations and airports – have begun to replace prior negative perceptions of the country: Wuhan’s central market at the start of the Covid-19 years, Uyghurs kneeling in handcuffs during transfers to indoctrination camps and crackdowns against protesters in Hong Kong. “There is a sense of disillusionment; young people tell themselves that Western governments have condemned the human rights situation in China in the past, but that they have not, however, prevented what is happening in Gaza. This is helping people forget the criticism aimed at China, in favor of a narrative focused on its development,” observed Paulina Oveckova, a China specialist at the Pragu […] In this context, President Xi Jinping and the entire Chinese diplomatic corps have been hammering home a message aimed at presenting China as a force for stability, in contrast to the US, which they accuse of having upended global energy supplies by attacking Iran with little regard for the consequences. The parade of foreign leaders through the Chinese capital, all of them eager to secure a smooth relationship with Beijing while grappling with the “Donald Trump problem,” has further contributed to this image-building effort. […] During his official visit in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that the warming of relations with China “put [Canada] in a good position for the new world order.” Even Annalena Baerbock, a critical voice regarding China when she served as Germany’s foreign minister from 2021 to 2025, has changed her tone since becoming president of the United Nations General Assembly. During her visit to Beijing on April 29, she praised China’s “unwavering commitment to the multilateral system,” seemingly forgetting the economic and diplomatic support that Beijing has offered Moscow despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. […] Even though relations between China and Europe remain weighed down by two major issues – the Chinese trade surplus and close ties between China and Russia – Beijing believes in its capacity to win over Europe’s digitally connected youth through social media, regardless of the reticence of their governments. […] The turning point for international interest came in the spring of 2025, when an American from Cincinnati, Ohio, Darren Watkins, arrived in China. This 20-year-old, known to his followers as “IShowSpeed,” embarked on a two-week livestreamed tour across China, broadcasting for hours each day. He has 54 million followers on Youtube, 51 million on TikTok and 47.9 million on Instagram. Internet users from around the world watched him marvel at Shenzhen’s robots in the south, learn lessons from Kung Fu masters at the Shaolin Monastery in the east, and, of course, take in the spectacle of Chongqing. […] The Italian-Senegalese influencer Khaby Lame, who has 161 million followers on TikTok, traveled there in September 2025. YouTuber Drew Binsky, known for having visited every country in the world and followed by 6.9 million people for his videos on unusual places, also visited. […] The Chinese themselves often have a much more nuanced view of their own country. Though they admire the development of infrastructure, street safety and technological progress, they worry about the lack of economic opportunities for younger generations and the lack of sufficient social reforms to address low birth rates. […] By virtue of sheer clicks and views, these influencers serve as a convenient vessel for hiding the topics Beijing doesn’t want to be seen. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has welcomed anyone who avoids complicated issues and sticks solely to cultural subjects – kung fu, spicy cuisine, etc. – or who focus only on the positive side of Chinese modernity. “Depoliticizing is in itself a very political act,” said Emma Belmonte, host of the China Observers podcast and analyst at the Association for International Affairs, a French foreign policy think tank. “The effort to depoliticize the debate and the representation of China is a strategy. The flood of footage is meant to drown out the narrative that Beijing dislikes.” In other words, images of achievements alone are often enough to convince people of the merits of the Chinese political system that made them possible. […] The effort is particularly visible with Taiwanese youth, whom Beijing has sought to win over by bypassing the much-disliked government in Taipei. Two Taiwanese students told Le Monde that they were invited, with all expenses paid, to visit Hangzhou, an ultramodern city that has boomed thanks to artificial intelligence, and travel through northeastern regions of China where, for the first time, they saw snow-capped mountains. “In some ways, they are more modern than we are,” said one of them, Mei, age 21. “In hotels, when you order dinner online, robots take the elevator and deliver the meals left at reception by delivery drivers to the rooms.” They were encouraged, but not required, to share what they had done and their impressions of the trip on social media. At no point were they bothered with pressing political questions; instead, the organizers simply allowed the magic of modernity to do its work. […]
Komunitas
sh.itjust.works
The promise of technology was to expand our horizons. In many ways, it kinda did. We got a lot of awesome shit. But we also got {waves hands vaguely at everything} this dystopia. I love tech! But I hate techno-surveilance. There are things I don’t do b/c of it. Or things I do less now. For example. I wanted to volunteer on a trail maintaining crew. But they’re all TF over FB and Tiktok. They put everyone’s photos on there. Vids of ppl working. They coordinate on FB groups. I give up conveniences like google maps. Esp when those conveniences come with baked in surveilance. My friends mock my paper map. But w/e. I take less road trips than I want. I hate having all my travel logged by ALPR. Even driving an old ass car without onboard GPS. Are there things you would do, but you don’t, b/c of techno-dystopia? Or you do them less?