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196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone

BartsBigBugBag @lemmy.tf

1y ago

Fuck French Imperialism Rule

That means fuck ECOWAS as a tool of the oppressors also. Critical support for every coup in Africa, and for the rights of Africans to demand the French and US militaries leave their country.

Critical Readings:

Neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney.
Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa by T.D. Harper-Shipman.

Recommended readings:

Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawaii Statehood by Dean Itsugi Saranillio.
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl.

46 comments

Critical support for every coup in Africa
Hurr durr Western imperialism bad Russian imperialism good
Why don't we get France (a democracy) to pressure their leaders to set up free and fair elections then get the fuck out after they're done (simplifying things here as it's a slow process to not create a power vacuum) rather than supporting a like-for-like swap of France for Russia or Chinese control of the country through debt?
I'm not against the premise of the post, just the caption which reads like mindless Russophilia
- Your comment about Chinese debt is uninformed - China holds a small percentage of total African debt and there's only 1 country (Zambia, iirc) where Chinese debt is even close to half of the debt.
  Eurobond debt is far greater in almost every debt distressed African nation and is the debt that African leaders and bankers commonly cite as the problem.
  The Chinese debt-trap story keeps being repeated by the US state department, but it does not reflect in any way the reality of African debt.
  https://chinaglobalsouth.com/2023/07/13/graph-of-the-day-chinas-real-share-of-african-debt/
  
  This article from the same source suggests China is at 54% of Zambia's debt, which is massive for a single country based off the other graphs: https://chinaglobalsouth.com/2023/05/31/how-zambias-debt-mix-is-forecast-to-evolve/
- Nice strawman you’ve constructed there. Be a shame if someone set it on fire…
  
  Oh no, are you having hallucinations? Because last I checked the majority of coups in former French Africa were Russia/Wagner backed so there's no strawman in sight.

Critical support for every coup in Africa, and for the rights of Africans to demand the French and US militaries leave their country.
No critical support for the rights of Africans to demand the Russian and Wagner militaries leave their country? Because you're replacing one colonialism with another colonialism. Should I point out that Wagner is paid with African natural resources like diamonds? What is the difference between the exploitation from France and the exploitation from Russia?
- I’ve yet to see any evidence of Wagner interference in these coups, and in fact, the countries they’ve been taking place in most recently have been countries with heavy western military presence, not Wagner. Not to mention, the suggestion that Africans are not capable of performing a coup themselves to me smells of paternalism, but that may not be your implication and I’m sorry if I misinterpreted it.
  
  I'm not talking about them performing a coup. Although I don't like coups, they're property of nobody but themselves, and eventually democracy will return.
  But French troops doing bad stuff, or doing neither bad nor good stuff (that's doing nothing at all), that doesn't mean they should be replaced by another foreign nation troops, being either private or not. If we agree that African nations are sovereign enough to decide their own future, they're also sovereign enough to defend themselves, or to ask for help to neighbouring countries in exchange of nothing. But in the countries we're talking about, they asked for help to another potential colonial nation in exchange of natural resources, that could be manufactured in place, thus creating employment, wealth and other benefits.
  
  https://archive.ph/0xLUh
  Not a successful coup but rather the planning of a coup. About the recent coups, there's somewhat of a lack of information. Time will tell whether Wagner was influencing the coups. What is obvious is Wagner is certainly supported by a large portion of the population, seeing as there's Wagner flags everywhere.
  Then there's also Russia + Wagner attempting to gain control over Moldova

I'm trying to track down a list of the leaders.
As far as I can tell this goes back to a Reddit post that has been removed. The top-voted comment goes through a list and says why those leaders weren't assassinated by France.
Anyone have a list?

what is tankie propaganda doing on my tankie-free community, go away to lemmygrad with this shit
- Tankie is when you oppose french neocolonialism
- Supporting popular uprisings against neocolonial compradore regimes is tankie propaganda now? I’ll be sure to tell my entire Food Not Bombs group they’re all tankies, and that we can no longer practice anarchism anymore because some guy on lemmy says we’re tankies because we support the right of the African people to self-determine.
  What praxis groups are you a member of that support the ousted government despite the popular support for the coups? I’d be interested in knowing, so I can be sure to never give material support to such a reactionary organization.
  Edit: Also, two comments in three months, only one of which (this one) in 196. For being your community, you sure contribute a lot less than I and many others do.
  
  you sound like you're in dire need of a shower and a grass touching session
  as per your edit, i'm shy and also have better things to do than having twitter level discourse with annoying anarchists that whine about western imperialism while suspiciously getting defensive about russian influence in recent military coups (not popular uprisings) :^)
- Acknowledging the bad things that Western nations have done doesn't mean that you think it's alright for Russia/China to do the same bad things

Bold claim, mind backing it up with a source?

Support for coups from the people. Not every coup

Colonialism bad, but this post sets off too many red flags. Critical support to all coups? Critical support too often means silencing of valid criticisms. I've only ever seen people using that term unironically if they believe things like democratic centralism are a good idea. Some coups make things better, some make thingd worse. Some could even allow reactionaries to gain power or result in neocolonialists gaining more control.
Also, that Radical Markets book is fishy. Posner seems like a sleazy neoliberal and while Weyl has a point with quadratic voting, I don't want that applied to the government. I think that we should redistribute excess capital held by private individuals to the people evenly so that no single individuals can wield power without having it given willingly.
Edit: grammar
Edit 2: God I'm tired.

You belong on hexbear lol
- C'mon now. You may find BartsBigBugBag annoying, and "critical support" is kind of sus, but they're not anywhere near hexbear's level:
  There's been no assertions here that anyone should end up "against the wall".
  From what I've seen BBBB tends to argue mostly alone against a larger audience. Hexbears intentionally show up en masse to overwhelm their opposition.
  BBBB's arguments appear to be genuine. At the very least, they're not flooding the thread with annoying image macros and pictures of pig shit.
- I’ve been here (3 days) longer than you lol.
  
  Yes but tankies go on Hexbear. It's the Lemmy Law.

Source? For fact checking reasons and stuff
- Why would you want to check that? Just trust me bro.

For those asking for lists/sources, I did a quick duckduckgo search and here is the first thing I got. Just taking a quick glance and seeing Gaddafi on the list leads me to believe the claim is at least slightly dubious. Yeah, sure, France was involved in that revolution, but his death at the hands of his own countrymen was immortalized in a snuff film you don't wanna watch.
https://www.africanexponent.com/post/10487-france-has-always-carried-evil-imperialism-with-it
- People need to have a bad guy to point their finger at. And trust me, as a French-Israeli citizen I know what I'm talking about 😬 Folks will give a lot of moral and life lessons before sweeping their front door first, as we say in french.
  
  So uuuh.. are you implying that France shouldn't sweep their dirty front door? Or what's your point?
  I feel like the post is very clear that the French are being negligent with their front door.

Wow! I never learned about this!
France and the US... Murdering our neighbors... Destabilizing foreign countries... All learning from the lessons from the UK.

Thank you for the reading recommendations!

top tier post

Enjoying unprecedented stretches of world peace while simultaneously denigrating the nations which enforce it.
Imagine being so privileged.
- When has there been world peace? Or do people in places like Yemen just not count as people to you?

46 comments