Let’s check out the field. Our competitors come from all corners of the West and they’re here to cope. Especially after losing to an African or Asian competitor, they've resorted to verbal abuse, accusing their opponents of being a man, or alleging that their opponents were doping. Who gets the gold in white tears?

Angela Carini, Italy

Her public freakout and tears of anger have captured the world’s attention. The Italian cop surrendered after just 46 seconds of combat and accused her Algerian opponent Imane Khelif of being a man in disguise. Despite her near-instant forfeit, Italy will pay her the prize money as if she podiumed anyway.

Luca Hamori, Hungary

Before her scheduled match with Khelif, the Hungarian neo-Nazi reposted an AI-generated image of a grotesque monster facing a young woman. Talk about accepting defeat before the match even starts. None of us are surprised that Khelif solidly defeated her and still graciously shook her hand after Hamori called her a freak and other racial slurs online. The world truly does not deserve Imane’s greatness.

“Yes, this issue involves the dignity and honor of every woman and female.”
-Imane Khelif

Svetlana Staneva, Bulgaria

Another boxer enters the ring and this time it’s Svetlana Staneva accusing Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting of secretly being a man. Staneva raised her hands in an “xx” shape after getting stomped 5–0, implying that Lin did not have the right chromosomes to be a woman. Lin has stated in interviews that she picked up boxing in order to defend her mother from domestic violence. No matter what color her medal is, Lin is already a champion outside the ring.

Emma Navarro, USA

The spoiled daughter of billionaire Ben Navarro trash talking the would-be gold medallist after losing women’s singles tennis is not a good look. At the net, Navarro told Zheng Qinwen that she did not respect her because of her “cutthroat attitude”, and wondered how Zheng had any fans at all. Zheng would go on to make history as China’s very first gold medallist in women’s singles tennis.

Brett Hawke, Australia

Even the coaches are getting into this sport. Hawke accused China’s Pan Zhanle of doping, calling his gold medal race “not humanly possible” and “too good to be true”. After he and his athlete Chalmers treated Pan and his coaches rudely throughout the competition, losing to Pan must come as a tough pill to swallow. Ironically, two of Hawke’s own swimmers (Cielo and Bousquet) have been punished for doping in the same event Pan swam in. Every accusation westerners make comes around as an admission of guilt.

Adam Peaty, Great Britain

After a disappointing fourth place in the men’s 4x100m relay, Peaty lashes out at team China for cheating and plans to retire from the Olympics as a sore loser. A great legacy, innit?

After Chinese athletes have gotten drug tested over three times more than athletes from any other nation, how they could have managed to cheat anyway is hard to believe. Western media has framed the event as a “doping scandal” despite none of Team China being found guilty so far, and selectively chosen to ignore cases where white athletes have been found guilty of doping and banned.

Meanwhile, women of color are cheering each other on and showing the world what true sportsmanship looks like.

Who will win the medal for White Tears? My bets are on Carini. That public freakout was too much.

When white athletes win, it’s talent. When Chinese athletes win, it’s doping.

It’s like a throwback to when pools were whites-only spaces. Swimming at the Olympics continues to struggle with a small problem of believing only whites can swim. Dare to win while being Chinese? Clearly you’re cheating.

When Pan Zhanle broke the world record for men’s 100m freestyle and Zhang Yufei took bronze in women’s 200m fly, the west was quick to accuse them both of doping. Australian coach Brett Hawke, clearly upset that his own athlete took home a disappointing silver, blasted Pan’s win as “not humanly possible” and “too good to be true”. Statements like this reveal that only white swimmers are seen as legitimate. When Chinese swimmers win, this deviation from the norm is met with denialism and accusations of cheating.

Zhang, competing while feeling sick and tired, managed to take home a bronze medal anyway. Team China has actually been underperforming at Paris 2024 compared to previous Olympics like Rio or Tokyo. But even the few wins they have secured were immediately cast with suspicion from both authorities and the western press.

Why are Chinese athletes questioned when they swim fast, but no one dares to question [Michael] Phelps or [Katie] Ledecky previously?
-Zhang Yufei, women’s 200m fly bronze medalist speaking out about the double standard

Swimmers from China were the most tested athletes of the Paris Olympics, averaging 21 tests per athlete compared to just four times for Australians and six times for Americans over the same period of time. For the US which has had plenty of athletes banned over doping, the disparity in drug test frequency for Americans truly seems unfair.

But first, let’s bully them before they compete

Several Chinese athletes have reported instances of bullying, disrespect, and verbal abuse from white competitors before the match. This unsportsmanlike behavior is clearly meant to unsettle Chinese athletes and prevent them from performing at their best.

Pan Zhanle’s woes did not start after he topped the podium with a gold medal. During training and warmups, he reported that the American and Australian competitors disrespected him and splashed water on his coaches. This lack of sportsmanship only increased Pan’s resolve to win the medal.

Zheng Qiwen experienced verbal abuse from American athlete Emma Navarro in women’s singles tennis. During the tense post-match handshake, Navarro told Zheng she does not know how Zheng has any fans. The trash talk continued as Navarro gave a seething admission to reporters after losing to Zheng:

I just told her I didn’t respect her as a competitor. I think she goes about things in a pretty cut-throat way. It makes for a locker room that doesn’t have a lot of camaraderie, so it’s tough to face an opponent like that, who I really don’t respect.
-Emma Navarro, another sore loser and spoiled rich kid from team USA

When Olympians experience rudeness and disrespect from competitors, they might feel imposter syndrome and play less confidently than in a supportive environment. With extremely high stakes and pressure, young athletes must now handle the additional nerves that come with being treated poorly by their peers. Thankfully, Pan and Zheng showed that they were just better. But how many other Asian athletes have missed out on a medal they deserved because of abuse and racism before the match?

They’re just so mysterious

Where did they come from? Nobody knows!

Another form of denialism by the western press is claiming that countries like North Korea or China are shrouded in secrecy and utterly mysterious. Who know what athletes might come from there? How can we in the west prepare to face them? We’re all just so shocked when they are good players who train and win like athletes from the rest of the world! This is some centuries old racism that invokes 18th century levels of orientalism about the denizens of the mysterious East. They’re strange, unknown, and most importantly, not quite as human as whites. How long will it take the west to discover that North Koreans live in a modern world and they love sports?

As the Olympics progress, we’re sure to see more of this. In past Olympics, Asian athletes were constantly under doubt and scrutiny. Outlandish claims that North Koreans were “forced” to compete, that Chinese gymnasts were lying about their age, and that shady Asian governments were bribing the judges have all tainted the experience for Asian competitors. Even Asian Olympians representing white nations aren’t spared from racism. Snowboarding champion Chloe Kim has spoken out about racist abuse from peers in her sport. American-born skiing prodigy Eileen Gu now represents China and surely does not regret the choice despite American racists calling her a traitor.

Asian athletes are crushers and they’re bravely representing their countries (or themselves) in front of the world. To do it in the face of racism, and win anyway, is proof that the white establishment can stay mad or learn to lose graciously.

Writer’s note: As you can see, this is my very first article about sports. The rest of my blog is full of very much non-sporting content. I am a very casual follower of sporting events and I may be missing loads of in-depth knowledge of the sports mentioned in this article. I strive for accuracy above all else, so please feel free to correct me by commenting or messaging me. As always, thanks for reading!
-braised

Let’s start by defining “Passport Bros”. They are men from global north countries who travel to global south countries for sex tourism. Many of them already have a spouse and children at home.

For the sake of this article, I will focus on the case of sex tourists who travel to poor countries in the global south to exploit local women. I would argue that this polygamy dynamic also applies to the trafficking of women out of their home countries, such as the case of Ukrainian women and girls being used as prostitutes and “mail order brides” in wealthy countries like the US and the Netherlands. But I will leave you with this video from creators far more knowledgeable than myself.

While outlawed in most countries, polygamy has never truly gone away. Up to 40% of male tourists visit the Philippines to cheat on their spouses, and they father multiple “secret” families with women far younger than themselves. Like the wives and concubines of feudal polygamist men, these women are forced to beg for support from the fathers of their children. These fathers have the power of international travel and immunity from local laws when they return to the imperial core. They have no obligation to provide for the children conceived from their rape of colonized women. This international form of polygamy entraps women in the sex industry because they must provide for the children conceived from their work to survive. Many of those children then repeat the cycle of poverty in places like Angeles City, Philippines when they grow up in the slums and have no options but to enter the sex industry that their own mothers worked in.

But men cheat all the time, you might say. What makes a passport bro’s actions more akin to polygamy than any other man who cheats on his partner? It all goes to the power of his passport and nationality, and the fact that his partners have no legal rights to hold him accountable for his actions. A man who cheats in his own country can be legally required to provide child support for children who result from his actions. His domestic partners can hold him accountable for abusing them in an (admittedly flawed) system where they are at least theoretically equals under the law.

There are no such protections for global south women who were victimized by foreign men. Even when they are arrested by local authorities, western imperialists are treated like gods on earth. Leftist and LGBTQ+ groups were outraged when the Duterte regime pardoned the American colonizer who murdered Jennifer Laude, a transgender Filipino woman. Countless cases like this demonstrate the impunity with which foreign passport bros can harm local women and girls. This further reinforces the power dynamic of the foreign man over local men and the rest of the global south community he has chosen to exploit.

Let’s be clear that polygamy is not the same thing as polyamory. Polyamory between consenting adults in a liberated space was encouraged by Marxist feminists like Alexandra Kollontai. Free love, she argued, was an act of liberation and solidarity for people of the working class. Compulsory monogamy was the work of the bourgeois state to industrialize everything, including the family. Kollontai also vocally opposed prostitution and wrote that it was an oppressive structure that kept women subservient to men through the commodification of their bodies. Comrades, we must not conflate polyamory with feudal structures like polygamy.

In contrast to polyamory, polygamy is a feudalist, exploitative system in which women and children are reduced to the possessions of powerful men. In some forms of polygamy, the women are even expected to marry their husband’s brother in the event of his death because they are merely an asset to be passed along to the next owner. Systems of polygamy force women to compete with each other for the attention of their children’s shared father. The children also feel the power dynamic because they are treated based on the hierarchy of their mother among the other wives. This alienation turns the wives against each other and half-siblings into enemies because they are competitors. Polygamy is vital to maintaining patriarchy and class because men who have many wives can display it as a sign of wealth and power over other men who are less privileged.

In the modern age, the dynamic of passport bro polygamy not only deprives women of the right to be an equal in a committed relationship, it also deprives their children of the right to have a father like their half-siblings in the global north. Starved of economic and educational opportunities, these children experience further dehumanization when they are forced to beg their foreign fathers for support.

“I am hurting right now, hurting and angry. I say to him, I will try to forgive you but please communicate with us and be a father to us… we want you in our lives.”
-Madeline, 18

Polygamy reproduces feudal power structures that keep women degraded and dependent. Sexual servitude was a tool of imperialists like the conquistadors who received Nahuatl women as payment. These women were then forced to live their lives in shame by the Catholic church which condemned them for living in mortal sin. In China, the polygamy that lasted until liberation in 1949 was a system that considered women and children as part of a man’s possessions. A struggling family could sell a daughter to a wealthy man. Landlords could demand that their tenant peasants offer them a daughter if they could not pay rent. Wealthy men facing financial ruin could sell their wives and children. In an age where women could not seek divorce and the majority of marriages were arranged, they truly had no way out. This system is what the Nationalists, the Japanese, and the Americans fought so hard to preserve. It’s no surprise to me that Mao Zedong included the law banning polygamy in the party’s Land Reforms. Polygamy was a key component to maintaining the systems of patriarchy and feudalism.

“But sex work is real work! sex workers have agency”. Nah, miss me with that shit. What agency does a woman have in Angeles City, where there are no economic opportunities outside of the sex industry? Where she can be abused and even murdered with no consequences for the perpetrator? I don’t need imperialist western radfems on this thread whitesplaining what “agency” means for colonized people. I’m no stranger to imperialist westerners trying to co-opt feminism to further their colonial agenda. If you are genuinely wondering why prostitution is so harmful to colonized and BIPOC people, this article by Proletarian Feminist should answer your questions.

Marxist comrades and other readers from the left, what do you think? In our modern age of capitalist hyper-exploitation, bodies in the global south are more commodified than ever. Meanwhile, the comprador-bourgeoisie and global capitalist class grow ever richer from endless wars and resource extraction. Passport bros see women’s bodies as another resource they can extract — the byproducts of that extraction are the unwanted children born into poverty, women too sick or old to keep working as prostitutes, and the continuation of feudalist suffering into the next generation.

Orientalism about SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) countries

Disney’s Aladdin

Comparing real Middle Eastern and SWANA music to popular “desert” soundtracks produced by non-MENA composers who haven’t researched musical theories from that region

Orientalism about East Asian countries

Cyberpunk and techno-orientalism

You will never be un-foreign

A case study of why orientalist depictions fail among audiences from those countries: Avatar the Last Airbender

Orientalism about Slavic, Balkan, and Eastern European people

Even though they’re white, they are subjected to orientalist tropes

The “evil slav” who is devoid of humanity and the go-to villain in many movies

Slavic women and fetishism

Orientalism about Latin American countries

The 'Mexican' Movie Filter Is Worse Than We Thought

Orientalism about African countries

Hollywood thinks Africans are nothing without a white savior

Hollywood Depicts Africans Poorly in "Blood Diamond"

Casting American actors to (badly) play African characters and butcher their accents

Hollywood's Strange Addiction To Bad African Accents

Orientalism about South Asia as a lawless hub of crime and violence

Opinion: Everything the Netflix film 'Extraction' gets wrong about Bangladesh

Orientalism about Indigenous people living on occupied land within the imperial core

• Disney’s Racist History of Native American Caricatures
• Racism Against Native Peoples is Not Dead; It's Not Even Sleeping | American Indian College Fund

Busted Bernie

He tried to convince us he was cool in 2016 but his record proves that he’s never been an ally of the left. He’s always been Zionist but you might be surprised to learn that Bernie also supported the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1992. He’s just fine supporting violence as long as it comes from the Gringo side.

Cringe Cornel

Vicious empire? Check. Open air prisons? Check. Daily bombings of schools and hospitals? Check. Cornel West telling both sides to stop it right now? Check.

More Wars Mark

Between supporting Ukrainian Nazis and defending ethnic cleansing, this stupid Jedi just can’t stop. There’s a reason the Empire loves him so much.

Of course Hamill tweeted about Indigenous People’s Day immediately after his Zionist tweet. It all makes sense in his head I guess.

He’s the exact kind of liberal who thinks it’s “progressive” to have a #BLM next to a flag of Ukraine, Israel, and the USA.

Oh please Ilhan, not you too

We had so much faith in Ilhan only for her to be just as washed up as the rest of them. Did she change the system or did the system change her?

The Result

As dumb as they look, the liberal hivemind is as sinister as any shady CIA agent plotting a coup. People look up to these goofs and see their role models siding with the Pentagon as they always have. All it takes is the mainstream media telling them to, and they will do it without a question. And that’s all the empire needs from them.

And like clockwork, another massive military aid package is on its way over. Stocks are soaring and weapons execs are eating steak dinner. All this publicity means more Israeli weapons, more violence against Palestinians, and more profits for the war machine. The regime knows exactly how to manipulate its messengers to promote its goals. As always, it’s the liberal hivemind that most eagerly repeats the Empire’s propaganda.

How does the phrase “sex work is work” harm our comrades? Does the slogan erase the violence inherent to an industry as patriarchal, imperialist, and classist as the sex industry?

• A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work”
• The problem with the phrase “sex work is work”

How does Sex Trade Expansionary Feminism harm women? Does legalizing the sex trade really reduce trafficking and other forms of violence toward sex workers? Or does it uphold the rights of those who profit from the industry at the expense of the exploited laborers?

The Problem with Sex Trade Expansionary Feminism, A Response to Kate Zen

Slavic women and the sex trade: what does the fetishism and commodification of Slavic and Eastern European women’s bodies have to do with the destruction of the Soviet Union by global capitalism?

Sex tourism, the Philippines, and the neocolonial order: The case of Angeles City tells the infuriating and tragic story of how an entire city provides no economic opportunities to women outside of the sex trade. As always, this is deeply tied to US imperialism and the comprador ruling class of the Philippines.

“Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession” and other imperialist lies from Rudyard Kipling: a thread.

AF3IRM on Twitter: "White supremacist and imperialism's poet Rudyard Kipling coined the term "Prostitution is the world's oldest profession" (1909). Reinforcing colonial systems of oppression like the sex trade leads to more exploitation, not liberation. #WorldsOldestOPPRESSION pic.twitter.com/LC7sUFpy6H / Twitter"

White supremacist and imperialism's poet Rudyard Kipling coined the term "Prostitution is the world's oldest profession" (1909). Reinforcing colonial systems of oppression like the sex trade leads to more exploitation, not liberation. #WorldsOldestOPPRESSION pic.twitter.com/LC7sUFpy6H

An immense number of those defending the sex trade from the left use this quote mindlessly, without any idea of its origins and intentions of justifying British colonialism over India. Kipling was also the author of The White Man’s Burden and a lifelong white supremacist who knew exactly how prostitution could be used as a weapon of genocide toward those under colonial subjugation. Even the quote used by these well-meaning “liberationists” is a misquote. Kipling writes instead:

“Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith was her very-great-grandmamma, and that was before the days of Eve as every one knows. In the West, people say rude things about Lalun’s profession, and write lectures about it, and distribute the lectures to young persons in order that Morality may be preserved. In the East where the profession is hereditary, descending from mother to daughter, nobody writes lectures or takes any notice; and that is a distinct proof of the inability of the East to manage its own affairs.”

Nothing is clearer than Kipling’s intention of using the “hereditary nature” of prostitution to argue that the East is morally bankrupt, primitive, and fit only for colonial domination by the Europeans. Would self-described feminists really use such an intensely misogynistic quote if they were aware of its origins?

Is sex work liberating for the majority of sex workers? J Moufawad Paul examines the western chauvinism in the idea that prostitution is liberating for women. White, privileged women living in the imperial core are not representative of the workers who overwhelmingly come from the most colonized parts of the world.

On Privileged Engagements with the Sex Industry

How did Soviet feminists like Alexandra Kollontai address the sex trade? Did they advocate for any sort of punishment on prostitutes and others who were clearly victims of capitalist exploitation? Or does Kollontai address social factors like poverty, hunger, and the patriarchy that forced these women and children into the sex trade?

Prostitution and ways of fighting it

How has existing socialism dealt with the sex trade? As revolutionaries trapped in the empire or in the rest of the colonized world, there is no better example than the successful revolutions. Set aside the chauvinism and learn from our comrades who have resisted imperialism over their land and their bodies.

Comrade Luna Oi and her comrades at the Nonla Collective debunk lies about Viet Nam. Read the section of this piece that starts with “Ironically, it is the nationalists that claim” for a detailed analysis of why decriminalizing sex work would not help Vietnamese socialism.

Debunking Meo Mun’s Lies About Vietnam

The sex trade has no place in a socialist world. Existing socialist countries have proven that stark changes in the position of women can be achieved not through criminalization of the workers but through uplifting women as equals in socialist construction, such that women and girls are never forced into sex work at all.

Comrades, I am still adding to this list! Please link any helpful articles or resources and I will add them here! Thank you to the comrades who have already contributed to the resource list 😊

But every time, I’m disappointed by what these institutions tell us WE can do to protect these species. I come across yet another info poster at the zoo talking about the horrors of poaching and what can be done to stop poachers. At the aquarium, a sign reminds us that turtles choke on plastic and we can solve this problem by refusing to litter. The worst was an orangutan exhibit that told us we should buy “ethical palm oil” and that the best way to save wild orangutans is to “vote with our wallet”. Millions of tons of carbon are pumped into the atmosphere daily by mega corporations, habitats suffocate in massive ecological disasters that are never cleaned up by the oil companies, and they’re telling us to buy greener products? Give me a break.

I love zoos and aquariums. I don’t love their eco-fascism.

Scary brown people with guns or nets, coming after your favorite animal! They’re so scary and bad! They’re the reason the Birds of Paradise and the Kenyan White Rhino are going extinct, not habitat destruction, climate change, or the whims of the wealthy. Don’t blame capitalism for animal suffering, blame poachers! Let’s all refuse to talk about why poachers are mostly from poor countries and their clients are mostly from rich countries. It would be outrageous to claim that poachers might just be doing this because their countries have been bombed, robbed, and exploited by colonizers for centuries, and they need to survive just like anyone else in a country that is poor and lacks basic necessities for the people. Instead, let’s fearmonger about these scary brown people and argue that their cultures don’t care about animals, unlike the white saviors from rich countries teaming up to stop them.

Countries all over the world are constantly kept poor by neo-colonialism. Rare species lose far more of their members to habitat loss, climate change, and introduced species than any poacher can kill. Countries kept poor in colonial relations to their former masters, like many African countries are bound to France, cannot enforce laws in their own territories. It’s time to put the blame on capital, not poachers.

Littering isn’t the reason there will soon be more plastic in the seas than fish.

Telling individual people not to litter means blaming the individual for the abuses of the system. It also implies that countries with a chronic buildup of toxic waste, plastic, and other litter have gotten themselves into these situations because of littering by individual people. Come on, are we really supposed to believe that Indians are just so much worse at picking up after themselves than Americans are? Or might there be something else at play, related to how wealthy each country is? Pick up a piece of that trash and read the label. Is it English, French, or German? How much of it is in Hindi or Arabic? Rich countries don’t want you to know that your trash goes to poor countries after you carelessly toss it in the bin. It travels for thousands of miles and ends up on beaches like this one. It is sorted through by workers making cents per hour, many of whom are children. Waste accumulates not because they feel like littering over in India. It accumulates because of poverty and the fact that these peoples’ health does not matter to the capitalists in power.

Zoos and aquariums know this too. They just don’t want YOU, individual viewer, to know better. They want you to continue blaming your brown comrades in the Global South for littering, rather than the multinational corporations that turned poor countries into a trash dump.

Green Consumerism is capitalism rebranded.

Oh, shut up about “ethical” palm oil already! We know capitalism is the true reason the orangutans are losing their habitat, and buying “ethical” won’t fix that. “Ethical consumerism” is even more nefarious than openly consuming shit products in my opinion. It convinces the buyer that capitalism can work for the environment if only we just chose to buy ethical. It hides the true environmental cost of these “green” products in a distant, poor country where the damage inflicted by global capitalism is out of sight, out of mind. Now imagine telling this to little kids. Imagine deprogramming adults who have held these harmful ideas their whole lives. A visit to a zoo or an aquarium at such a young, impressionable age can shape your ideology for years. When I was eight and my entire worldview was based around saving my favorite animal the sea turtle, I would have been absolutely convinced that buying green was the solution. The zoo and the aquarium told me this! They wouldn’t lie, right?

It turns out our trusted institutions do lie. Money speaks louder than words and many zoos and aquariums rely on donations from the very same wealthy individuals and corporations who are responsible for environmental destruction. They literally cannot afford to tell the truth because they cannot alienate the people they depend on for existence. If it’s frustrating for me, a layperson visiting to reignite some of my childhood passion for animals and nature, I can’t imagine how it must feel to be a zoologist or a marine biologist who studies these animals for a living and have to put up with these blatant lies at work every day. Just more alienation of the worker under capitalism, I suppose.

Scrolling through the Board of Directors at any aquarium in the US will give you exactly the reason they can’t be honest about what the cause of climate change really is. The image is small but the names sure aren’t. The Board members at the Seattle Aquarium represents some of the biggest polluters on earth — Goldman Sachs, Nordstrom, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, eBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Zillow, and Facebook. These mega corporations are hardly friends of the environment, they’re in it for the tax breaks from charitable donations and for the PR boost of having supported a nonprofit. They also would love it if you bought some green products on their shopping platforms or clicked on environmental ads from their social feeds. At the aquarium, never forget who calls the shots. Corporations get two things at once: an institution of science that is dishonest about why these species are dying out, and a new generation of consumers who think clicking “Add to cart” means they’re doing the right thing for the environment.

Our institutions of learning are held hostage by capitalists. The same goes for our universities, museums, and public libraries. As long as the majority of their funding comes from the same people who are so rapidly eating up our natural resources, we cannot expect them to be honest about where this destruction is coming from, and what can be done to stop it. They rely on the culprits to keep their own doors open. Amazon, Microsoft, and Nestle sure aren’t going to want us knowing the truth about their environmental devastation. They just want us buying “ethical”, preferably off their platforms. They just want us blaming our comrades in the Global South, even as their countries are hit hardest by climate change. They just want us thinking that if we used one less paper cup, if we pick up one more piece of styrofoam, the planet could be saved. It’s a farce for children who will grow up from their years of innocence and realize how much they’ve been lied to. Some of these children will become Communists who ache for the overthrow of the system and the dismantling of the capitalists who have done so much damage to the planet.

Note: If it sounds like I was picking on Seattle for this article, it’s because Seattle is home to some multinational corporations whose wealthy executives donated exactly where I expected them to. That, and the fact that the Seattle Zoo and the Seattle Aquarium both have fantastic websites full of useful propaganda that took me 30 seconds to debunk. Go anywhere in the US, check any zoo or aquarium, and you’ll surely find the same thing.

When Marxist Leninists think of Falun Gong, usually a couple things come to mind. It’s a right-wing cult backed by the CIA, it originates in the 1990s but claims it represents 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, and it is led by a self-described “alien” named Li Hongzhi who is now exiled in upstate New York. While they are absolutely right that this is what Falun Gong is like today, many MLs don’t know that Falun Gong began as a peaceful qigong movement alongside many others just like it. Falun Gong enjoyed support from the Communist Party of China when it began in the 1990s, and this support was ruthlessly exploited by the US State Department. Indeed, China’s policies protecting religious diversity have left Chinese people vulnerable to CIA-backed religious extremism from the 1950s well into the 21st century. However, Falun Gong was not just a result of foreign sabotage. It is also the product of Chinese socialism’s support for religious diversity.

A brief anecdote from my parents

What was Falun Gong like in the years from its founding in the early 1990s leading up to its ban in 1999? Let me take you back to the year 1994, in Beijing.

A young medical student makes her way to the classroom for a film viewing. Her professor had invited the entire molecular biology department to watch a video she had recorded of a popular new Qigong movement that was taking the Chinese cities by storm. Qigong revivalism was big in the 1990s and many groups existed, but Professor Wang claimed this one was different. Falun Gong was led by the charismatic Li Hongzhi from Changchun, northeastern China. In the video, Li addressed a packed basketball stadium of both curious locals and devoted followers. He told his followers that he knew of the power of Falun Gong to cure illnesses like cancer. All they had to do was have faith, practice Falun Gong, and believe in his words. As he spoke, he began making grabbing motions at the audience, as if to pick up invisible tumors and toss them onto the floor in front of him. Audience members in the direction of each grab appeared to convulse and shudder, which Li explained was the impact of the tumors leaving their bodies. Only he possessed this power, he said.

The student shook her head and left the viewing along with some of her friends. How could a molecular biology professor believe such ludicrous nonsense? This was even more ridiculous than the evangelical megachurch pastor who slapped himself on the other cheek and told his audience to do the same. As a scientist and an aspiring doctor, she knew how dangerous these words could be for scientifically illiterate people in China. How many people would believe in his antics rather than the medical students and hospital staff who dedicated their lives to their health? This medical student was my mother, who understood from her very first experience with Falun Gong that it was a dangerous, anti-science cult. But would my father agree?

To answer that question, we need to go just one year earlier to 1993, in Shanghai. My father remembers a starkly different Falun Gong, a peaceful qigong practiced by mostly older people in the city’s parks and public areas. My father was also a medical student with ailing parents in a poor rural village, and he loved seeing that the local elders were getting outside, staying active, and meeting each other instead of being isolated in their homes. It would be so nice to introduce this new practice to his stressed-out loved ones who were struggling to make ends meet in China’s increasingly capitalist society. To him, it was so strange to see a popular movement for health and spirituality transform into something monstrous. What happened to it?

As the 1990s became the 2000s, they witnessed the cult grow ever more extreme among its devout following of “dissidents”. The cult was banned in 1999, because its staunchly anti-science beliefs have caused members to refuse medical care and die of preventable illnesses. But Falun Gong did not stop there. My parents would immigrate to the US and find members of the Chinese diaspora tormented by the cult, their own lives or the lives of their loved ones consumed by the excessive demands of Falun Gong. With each passing year, the cult has become ever more reactionary, adopting anti-miscegenation, anti-feminism, and a wild cosmology in which aliens conspire to turn everyone communist. When I explained these new beliefs from my own research to my parents, they were shocked. Falun Gong wasn’t like this in 1994. It’s clear that these new additions were the result of at least 50 million dollars of US State Department funding. Western sabotage destroyed what was once a peaceful, positive and healthy movement by turning it deadly and forcing China’s hand in banning it. All this was perfectly convenient to craft the narrative of a religiously oppressive China.

Echoes of the past

This isn’t the first time China’s religious tolerance has left it vulnerable to western sabotage. After the Red Army liberated Tibet in 1953, Mao Zedong and the party gave many special privileges and exemptions to Tibet’s priestly class along the principle of minority and religious protections. They were exempted from the same land collectivization policies that were required of Han people in the rest of the country, and were originally granted a high degree of autonomous rule in accordance with Yellow Hat Tibetan Buddhism. It was through the CPC’s commitment to religious freedom and preserving minority ways of life that the CIA found the perfect opportunity to strike. By covertly arming and training Tibetan operatives, the CIA manufactured the 1959 rebellion which caused hundreds of deaths. Formerly welcomed and given a significant amount of power by the Communist party, the Dalai Lama and the rest of Tibet’s former feudal class who were responsible for the violence fled for India and remained in exile ever since.

Was China wrong to be so tolerant?

Obviously a keen observer would begin to wonder why China hadn’t learned its lesson. This happened in 1959 with the CIA-backed Tibetan uprising, in the 1990s with Falun Gong, and again in 2009 with the deadly Ürümqi riots in which ETIM separatists murdered nearly 200 Han and Hui residents. Again and again, China has left itself and Chinese people vulnerable to attacks from US-backed religious extremists. China has been forced to ban these groups and arrest their members. Even after they are banned, these religious groups target Chinese diaspora people abroad, taking their anti-China activism from the marbled steps of the UN in Geneva to the tiniest cafes of New York Chinatown. It seems that China’s created a whole army of its own enemies that blast clueless westerners 24/7 with endless propaganda. As a result, most people outside of China believe that it is a horrible place for religious people.

Is so much religious freedom and tolerance too much of a good thing? Why put Chinese lives at risk just to end up banning these groups and then suffer such slander on China’s image abroad?

While religious tolerance may come at a price, I support China’s unwavering commitment to minority rights.

Chinese socialists understand that the benefits of religious tolerance outweigh the risks. Unlike some of the staunchly atheist left, I am an atheist who supports the potential of religions to be revolutionary and class conscious. Every religion, except for the ones explicitly meant to be anti-communist, can further the goals of Communism. It all depends on the ability of the state’s socialist education and construction to build up the positive, community-facing aspects of these religions and denounce the aspects that are patriarchal, racist, or elitist. For all of the criticism endured by China’s Cultural Revolution, rooting out these reactionary tendencies was one of its most well-intentioned goals. All you have to do is look at the ways our revolutionary comrades have used religions as different as Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Indigenous religions to achieve their revolutionary goals. Socialism has never been incompatible with religion.

As far as China’s policies on religious tolerance go, sadly there is no perfect solution. It would be more harmful to Chinese people if China were to take a hardline stance on new religious movements, and potentially more exploitable too. It was surely the US State Department’s intention to force China into a situation of either having to tolerate a dangerous cult or cracking down on religious freedoms. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But China had other plans and has thwarted the imperialist attempt to cause social unrest. Chinese socialists understand that it is unfair and unethical to punish all of the religious communities of China for the actions of a few US-backed cults. The west will always find ways to target existing socialism, whether it’s through religious extremists, coups, sanctions, or all-out war. Even though Falun Gong has harmed many people, the policies that enabled its existence are ones I am firmly committed to and I am glad China does the same.

The only thing the party may have done differently would be investigating and cracking down on abuses within these cults earlier. The damage would have been vastly reduced if Falun Gong had been designated a cult in 1994 by the time my mother and millions of others were already watching Li’s clearly anti-science preaching. I believe they could have acted sooner once they had all of the information and potentially saved many Chinese lives.

Thankfully for Chinese people, their society has enjoyed the benefits of qigong with Falun Gong safely banned and sent outside of Chinese soil. Unlike what western media claims, qigong, Chinese religions, and martial arts are more popular than ever. When I visited in 2017, I saw exactly what made my father love the qigong movement in the 1990s. Elderly people coordinated their taiji and dance meetups via WeChat, danced in the squares and parks until nearly midnight, and exchanged homemade pastries after practice. Qigong is alive and well, and strengthening communities without the nefarious influence of Falun Gong.

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1. Shinzo Abe was a prominent member of the ethnonationalist, fascist cult Nippon Kaigi. The cult pursues the goal of returning Japan to its former imperialist glory by abolishing gender equality, reinstating Japan’s military by striking down the pacifist post-war constitution, and kicking out foreigners like those pesky zainichi Chinese and Koreans. True to its stance against women’s and children’s rights, the cult also opposes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Nippon Kaigi denies the war crimes of Japan and aggressively lobbies to teach altered versions of history that erase Japan’s genocidal acts in World War II and glorify Japan’s imperialist days. Japan’s political elite dominate Nippon Kaigi, whose 38,000 members include many direct descendants of war criminals who were responsible for Japan’s imperialist expansion in the first place. 15 out of the 18 members of Shinzo Abe’s 2014 cabinet were also members of Nippon Kaigi.

2. Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie were implicated in a scandal about Moritomo Gakuen, a private fascist Kindergarten that instills ultra-nationalist pride and imperialist patriotism in children aged 3 to 5. Akie Abe had diverted state funds to purchase government land at 14% of the appraisal price to build her Nazi Kindergarten. The fascist parents of the Moritomo Gakuen kindergarteners were also sent a letter denigrating Chinese and Korean people in Japan. It was later revealed that the finance ministry had engaged in a cover-up, falsifying documents to remove 14 different passages implicating Abe in the scandal and his use of his wife’s connections to obtain the astonishingly low price of the property. No one should be surprised that Akie Abe (honorary principal), Yasunori Kagoike (school president), and Shinzo Abe himself are all members of, you guessed it, Nippon Kaigi.

3. Shinzo Abe posed in a jet labeled “731” while whitewashing his grandfather’s legacy as a war criminal.

The number 731 reminds us of the chemical and biological warfare experiments his grandfather’s infamous Unit 731 conducted on human prisoners. After the war, the United States helped cover up these crimes and protect every single one of the perpetrators from prosecution.

Abe’s maternal grandfather was Nobusuke Kishi, a Class A war criminal who oversaw Japan’s colonial occupation of Manchuria. From 1935 to 1945, Kishi commanded his forces in atrocities like the Three Alls Policy, the enslavement of comfort women, and Unit 731. His rule was so brutal that he was known as the “Monster of Showa Era”. Instead of being punished for his atrocities, Kishi and other war criminals were handpicked by the CIA to lead Japan’s postwar government. When asked about his grandfather, Abe had this to say.

Clearly, the war criminal charges against Kishi were what made Abe a conservative instead of showing any remorse for his grandfather’s war crimes. Abe maintained his stance that Japan’s imperialism in Asia was “liberating” it, and denied that there was anything wrong with Unit 731, comfort women, or other crimes his grandfather oversaw in Manchuria. Abe also takes active part in promoting the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform which aims to remove Japan’s wartime atrocities from school textbooks.

4. Shinzo Abe showed his feminist side when he declared that the comfort women were actually prostitutes who were not coerced. Others in his party added that the sexual enslavement of captured women and girls was “necessary” for maintaining order in the Japanese armed forces. During Japan’s brutal expansion and occupation of Asia, Imperial Japanese forces enslaved around 200,000 women and girls from Korea, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia in rape camps and euphemistically called them “comfort women”. Three out of four women didn’t make it, and the few who survived spent their lives being shamed, silenced, and discredited by genocide deniers like Nippon Kaigi. The survivors, many of whom are in their 90s, continue to fight for the recognition of the sexual violence they endured under Japanese enslavement.

Abused and permanently scarred, and many speaking out for the first time in their lives, former comfort women like Kil Un-ock have lived through extreme trauma at the hands of the Japanese. They were imprisoned in tents or small rooms, raped by up to 30 men every day, and subjected to constant beatings and violence. Death rates at the camps were high, as women suffered injuries from rough sex and unsanitary conditions. Supply shortages meant sick and dying women were never treated. Starving and injured, women too weak to move were raped until they died. The women who died were thrown in ditches or tossed into the sea, never to be found again. According to Abe and his goons at Nippon Kaigi, these so-called “prostitutes” chose to sleep with Japanese soldiers to make a quick buck. When Abe crossed the gate in July, he met these women and begged them for forgiveness.

5. Shinzo Abe’s unfortunate selfie with a Yakuza gangster and a senator from Arkansas was published on the media, forcing Abe to deny any ties to the Yakuza. Abe was seen at a party with Mike Huckabee and Icchu Nagamoto, who is also known as “the Blackmarket King” and had recently been arrested for lending fraud, loan sharking, and fabricating capital increases. Classic mobster stuff.

There have been Yakuza at the highest levels of Japan’s government for decades. Abe’s own grandfather Nobusuke Kishi caused controversy when Indonesian President Sukarno visited Japan in 1958 and Tokyo’s police force refused to provide security. In response, Kishi asked his close friend and Yakuza gangster Yoshio Kodama to provide some thugs from Japan’s criminal underworld as Sukarno’s secret service instead.

6. Shinzo Abe loved visiting his granddad at Yasukuni Shrine, probably because he was preparing to move in himself. Abe visited the shrine in 2013, 2020, and 2021, causing sparking protests in China and Korea each time. Yasukuni Shrine honors Japan’s war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals like Nobusuke Kishi. The Shrine has also been visited by such honorable and respected groups as the Hitler Youth, colonial France, and the US Navy. Real nice guys.

Little did Abe know, he’d soon be joining his dead buddies in Yasukuni Shrine. Did he make Granddad proud?

7. Shinzo Abe declared a trade war on South Korea because they asked for reparations from Japanese companies that used Korean slave labor. In 2018, South Korea’s supreme court ruled that Japanese corporations that used Korean slave labor during World War II must pay $89,000 in reparations to each survivor or their family. Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi Corporation, and Nachi-Fujikoshi were among the companies that enslaved Korean laborers and forced them to build ships and aircraft for Japan under harsh conditions with no pay.

8. Shinzo Abe showed his allyship to Indigenous people when he moved the US military base to Okinawa against the wishes of the Okinawan people. In 2019, Abe decided to relocate a US military base to Okinawa despite over 70% of Okinawans opposing it in a referendum.

US military presence in Okinawa has a dark history riddled with rapes, murders, and assaults of the local people. Most violent crime, as well as outbreaks of COVID-19, can be traced to these military bases. American offenders commit crimes against locals and evade the law by escaping back to the immunity of their military bases. Names like Yumiko-chan, Katsuyama, the 1995 Okinawa Rape, and the 2002 rape incident are chilling accounts of American war crimes that are rarely heard outside of Okinawa. Okinawans continue to suffer under double colonialism and the erasure of their history, both by the Americans and the Japanese.

9. Shinzo Abe defunded North Korean refugee schools, showing those pesky zainichi their place. Abe slashed funding for over 70 Joseon schools in Japan, forcing schools such as Higashiosaka Chosen Chukyu Gakko junior high to close due to lack of funds. To add to the hardship, the schools have been targeted by right-wing nationalist organizations accusing them of being North Korean spies. The students feel safe at these schools which form an integral part of their cultural identity and connection to their home, whereas Abe’s far-right took every opportunity to dismantle these academies.

10. Shinzo Abe wanted to strike down the pacifist constitution in favor of broadening Japan’s military for operations abroad. A war hawk like his granddad, Abe pushed for the revision of Article 9 in the Japanese constitution to broaden Japanese military and defense capabilities from the pacifist version adopted after Japan’s surrender in WWII. Abe’s reason was hardly to defend against American invasions or to secure Japan’s own sovereignty against imperialism. Abe only intended his revisions to make Japan an even better running dog of American imperialism, to increase the amount of support Japan could provide for the Americans to invade countries like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.

Thankfully he didn’t get his way. Japanese people are anti-war nowadays, even given the level of hawkish news coverage about China and North Korea in their media. Most of his citizens were united in opposition to his proposed changes. Even among other right-wingers in the LDP, revising the constitution to enable overseas military operations was extremely unpopular.

Further reading on Japan’s war crimes and modern cover-up supported by the United States:

War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesia: Unraveling the Persecution of Achmad Mochtar

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The 2022 SCOTUS ruling on abortion rights

A cartoon depicts a blonde woman in a red dress as a lone protestor blocking a column of tanks driven by the justices of the US Supreme Court. This is in clear reference to the 1989 Tank Man photo, an iconic moment misrepresented in the western press to depict China as a ruthless and authoritarian state. If this cartoon is anywhere near the reality of women losing their rights to the oppressive justices of the US Supreme Court, it would also imply that the tanks ran over the protestor, which did not happen in the 1989 protests. If the cartoonist had any clue what happened in 1989, they’d realize that their cartoon is actually arguing that the woman got what she wanted, just like the Tank Man did. But the reality for millions of American women is that they got run over by the capitalists and patriarchs in the Supreme Court. Tank Man lived; he left the scene peacefully with his friends. Many American women will die as a result of this ruling.

In 1989 and today, China had free abortions, for all pregnancy-capable people, no questions asked. Abortions have been available to Chinese women since the 1950s, albeit with some more restrictions such as requiring the consent of relatives or limiting abortions to pregnancies impacting the health of the mother. Today, Chinese women enjoy some of the best reproductive freedoms of any country on earth. Very few westerners know about the extensive protections China has for transgender people and the rest of the LGBTQ+ community, which are being expanded while the US is busy taking these rights away. But how could the liberal establishment be bothered by things as tedious as facts and evidence? True to their racist selves, American liberals are comforted by their belief that China is such a savage, horrible place to be a woman. At least we’re not as bad as those damn Chinese, are we? To liberals, it’s always the racial stereotypes of oppressive and culturally backward Asian dictatorships that steal the show.

The right does this too. Anything they consider bad is automatically something they associate with the cruel, oppressive East. Just look at the way the Supreme Court justifies its own humanity against the cruel nature of “a handful of countries” which grant women the right to choose in all circumstances.

It’s always a great time to be wagging a finger at America’s favorite boogeymen from the Orient: China and North Korea. You know late-term abortions are evil because these soulless Asians do them, right? Count yourselves owned, libs!

Take abortion rights away, and the liberals will compare you to a misrepresentation of the 1989 Tiananmen tank photo. Advocate for abortion rights, and the reactionaries will accuse you of being baby-killing Asians. Americans truly cannot see the oppression that comes from within their own damn country. There’s always some country out there that we can fearmonger about becoming. Given how little the average American knows about other countries, they will believe anything you tell them.

The liberal mainstream press is using the suffering of American women as a thinly veiled attempt to spread more anti-communist rhetoric. And it’s working. Americans will have an even more negative view of countries that had nothing to do with their own government taking their rights away. They will associate their oppression with Communism, and they will eagerly support whatever sanctions, coups, and military aggression their oppressors have in store for the future. An old dirty trick of the Capitalists is blaming the problems they created on socialism. How much longer until the American masses realize their government is full of shit?

Even after Muslim countries and Muslim people who live in the USA have been ravaged with bombs, sanctions, coups, racist attacks, and xenophobic profiling, they can’t catch a break here either. Some genius is always waiting to call America’s rightwing government “Yall’Qaeda” or the “American Taliban”.

As bad as these religious extremist groups are, they had absolutely nothing to do with the decision by an unaccountable, deeply reactionary Supreme Court of the Americans. That was your own country, not the Muslims, taking rights away from women.

Meanwhile Iran, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Albania, Bosnia, Turkmenistan, Tunisia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kyrgyzstan, and the Maldives are majority-Muslim countries where abortions are protected for women. You know, that same religion the American war hawks are always demonizing for “human rights” abuses, the ones the Americans need to invade for being horrifically oppressive to women. Women in these Muslim countries now enjoy more reproductive freedoms than Americans have.

No matter what the issue is, someone always thinks we’re “becoming just like X country”

This is part of a broader trend. Libs have been comparing problems unique to the Imperialist World to poor and colonized countries since…well forever.

And of course, how could we forget how awful it is that empires like the USA and the UK are declining and would possibly be replaced by China which is absolutely worse in every way…definitely no false equivalency to be found here. I wouldn’t expect anything different from a writer who’s constantly spreading lies about Vietnam so he can be platformed by the most reactionary media sources in existence.

As it turns out, Americans who tortured people on behalf of American agencies can’t even talk about their American torture programs without reminding us that Asian countries are somehow worse.

Get a load of this article by a guy who literally worked for the CIA. My man. You joined the biggest terror organization on the planet. Probably in all of history too. I don’t see how you can write about waterboarding in an agency that you chose to work for, and then compare it to countries that had nothing to do with the USA’s imperialism. Imagine the audacity. Americans truly have no shame. In another universe, Mr. Kiriakou is probably being tried for war crimes along with all of the other ghouls that worked for the CIA, yet somehow we’re forced to listen to his shit opinion on why he and his torturer friends need to avoid becoming like North Korea, China, and Iran. Mr. Kiriakou doesn’t feel bad about torture at all. He’s using it as an opportunity to spread negative propaganda on behalf of the State Department, proving just as useful now as he was back when he was torturing people himself.

Being Asian in the US is hard enough. With hate crimes on the rise and Americans suffering more than they have in decades, I’m not looking forward to seeing what the future has in store for people who look like me. Nothing good, I promise you.

What’s so bad about this all this xenophobia? So what if Americans can’t talk about their own issues without bringing up countries that had nothing to do with them?

This form of propaganda convinces the masses that once again, nothing their own ruling class does to them can come remotely close to the oppression suffered by those living in China, North Korea, or Muslim countries. Clearly America is still better. America cares about their rights. It convinces them that anything bad happening to them is a deviation from the norm, rather than the norm itself. It also directs their focus, once again, to enemies overseas. They’d better be on board the next time their Empire chooses to drop bombs, impose sanctions, or launch a coup to overthrow a Socialist leader. It reinforces their belief that bad things come from abroad, that foreigners like the Muslims, the Asians, or other immigrants are the ones to blame.

These countries are not the enemy. In fact, these countries have rights that many Americans can only dream of. Even as the US ruling class is taking away the meager protections Americans had, all they can think of is demonizing countries that guarantee free healthcare, parental leave, education, and housing for their citizens. All rights that Americans will probably never have under their current system.

The ruling class loves to use America’s own social issues as a tool to spread negative propaganda about other countries, playing directly into the hands of the imperialists at the CIA and the State Department. They created these problems, and now they benefit from directing the anger of the masses at US enemies. These xenophobic lies keep the masses trusting that their Empire is good, and that rotten ideas surely cannot originate from their own elected leaders or unaccountable justices serving the whims of Capital. The ruling class hits two birds with one stone by distracting us from their own crimes against the people, and also fueling support for the military industrial complex.

While the masses are distracted, it’s time to ramp up the message that this election is the most important one of their lifetimes!

The same people who created this oppression will now reap the benefits of a population manipulated and abused into voting them back in, just so they can do nothing to protect what dwindling rights Americans still have. Behind closed doors, the military contractors prepare for another war. A racist prepares his AR-15 for hate crimes against his chosen minority. A woman dies of pregnancy complications because she was denied an abortion that would have saved her life. Rinse and repeat. At the end of all this, someone will surely compare all this suffering to a socialist country instead of their own ruling class.

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