Real title: US interventionism, the Third World, and the USSR
Never stops being relevant, thought new users might enjoy it. Reposting it as the US is yet again considering sending its sons to kill and die to enrich a handful of rich families.
[T]he Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich.
[…] Only the people are poor, but there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out, to be taken. There’s been billions for four hundred years. The capitalist European and North American powers have carved it out and taken it.
Assassination of Julius Caesar fucking rules, everybody should check it out.
Not only does it deconstruct older, bourgeois historiographies about Rome and explain why it is that Rome is mythologized the way it is in the west, it uses ancient Rome as a model to understand how the interests of oligarchs converge with those of the (oligarch-run) state. Comparing the US with Rome is cliche at this point but Parenti uses historical materialism to make it actually useful. Once you read it you’ll understand why reformism is a dead end; Caesar was a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist oligarch who understood that the contradictions in Roman society needed to be eased by some minor wealth redistribution and even that was so repulsive to his colleagues that they personally killed him with their own hands. What chance do AOCIA or Bernie or whomever the radlib flavour of the month stand?
I particularly love how he upends the standard view of Cicero for the establishment bullshit artist he was.
FUCK Cicero. And especially fuck Pompey “teh great”. Just another Job Creator who wasted his life fucking over the proletariat and hoarding gold and enslaved people. Hmm I wonder why it is that subsequent Enlightenment thinkers idolized him? 🤔
The molten gold thing is unfortunately likely just a legend but it’s what he deserved.
It was Crassus (the third wheel of the first triumvirate) that may have been killed by molten gold. Cicero was killed on the orders of Mark Antony, 21 months after the assassination of Julius Caesar. His head and hands were nailed to the senate doors.
Yeah I was wondering if I had mixed up my crazy Roman oligarch deaths lol my bad.
Glad Cicero got was was coming.
Pompey is the one who got unceremoniously beheaded on the Nile cuz Ptolemy was told Caesar would be into it. He was not into it.
💯