a_party_german [comrade/them]

  • 0 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: May 16th, 2021
  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 16th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Straits Are Not OkayEnglish
    95·
    27 days ago

    You radical tankies love to paint pictures of economic doom and gloom - and yeah okay, 20% of oil and gas production might be gone for years, and it will hit the less fortunate the hardest.

    But there is a sort of bright side - and I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere so far - which is, global CO2 emissions are almost guaranteed to go down his year (because of shortages) and will also almost certainly stay lower over the next 3-5 years, as many countries will actively search for renewables to replace at least part of their existing fossil fuel infrastructure; again mostly out of necessity. Right?

    It’s quite possible that this war did more to switch societies around the globe to renewable energies than any other measure (save for China, of course) at a time when it really mattered.

    Iran may have just just locked in a double victory for us and our Queen - less Zionazi influence AND less CO2!

  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 6th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Third Iran VS US+Zionists War MegathreadEnglish
    41·
    1 month ago

    rat-salute Oh it was just a coincidence, I just really had to write that down. Hope no-one was offended by the, uhm, crass language! These thoughts were lingering in my head since June last year. Thanks for mentioning it again though!

    However on the topic, I find it hard to imagine that anyone would do the 5-6 hours trip from Israel to Iran more than once a day. Seems like bad propaganda. Twice maybe, if you really want to push yourself, but over several days…? Come on. There are physical limits to a human body, right?

    By the way if anyone here wants to read more serious work on the topic of Nazis and drugs, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book:

    It’s quite recent (came out in 2015), not too long (250+ easy pages) and even though it’s a translation from the original German, the unconventional writing style of the author comes through well enough. If you’ve read Rob Citino’s works on the Wehrmacht - where he often writes like a sports reporter would write about the Battle of Kursk - it’s not quite the same style, but in a similar league. The author often tries to evoke a deeper psychological connection between war, drugs, and aspects of imagined Nazi superiority and whatnot. I was entirely surprised by just how common meth use was in WW2 Germany, how all the big Nazi figures were absolutely aware that drugs gave Germany an edge over its enemies (at least in the first couple years of the war), and just how many Nazi leaders were doing rather large amounts of the stuff (or other drugs lol). If you liked Breaking Bad, have done any kind of upper drugs, or just enjoy discovering aspects of WW2 history you had not thought about yet…pretty good book then, yeah. Can post some example pages if anybody’s curious.

  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 6th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Third Iran VS US+Zionists War MegathreadEnglish
    55·
    1 month ago

    Sorry for the somewhat offtopic non-Iran content, but I just have to share this funny video with my fellow newsheads.

    Remember how folks back in 2020 were trying their best to do these Trump impersonations? I think Chapo had some guy on who was doing some almost perfect, nonsensical Trump ramblings on his Twitter. Well, in 2026 there is a challenger in town - and it’s the big guy, German chancellor Friedrich Merz himself!

    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/57NDD2y0dPk <- this is a 30 seconds youtube short, you should be able to watch it without any ads.

    Freddy Fucknuts - as we call him in Germany - is talking about immigrant numbers or something, and then he accidentally drops what I would consider at least a 6/10 Donald Trump imitation. Pretty good accent for a German, too, I was completely surprised. Probably all those years at BlackRock senior management that taught him that.

    In everyday German politics, Merz comes off more like an oafish buffoon most of the time, he’s tall and lanky and often blurts out inappropriate stuff without thinking - you wouldn’t think him capable of imitating Trump like that.

    Enjoy!

  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from March 6th to Whenever We Reach About 3000 Comments - The Third Iran VS US+Zionists War MegathreadEnglish
    37·
    1 month ago

    Excellent analysis, this is spot on.

    Just wanted to do a little elaboration on a couple of points, mainly from my experience - I was 19 at the time and had just started to read The War Nerd column in the eXile (ah, those were the days!).

    First of all, you have to remember the context. In '91 Iraq had just fought a bloody years-long war with Iran, they had a lot of hardware and some experience using that equuipment, even though command was very top-heavy and centralized - the old Soviet model (at least that’s what many people said back then and since, always seemed plausible to me). So yeah, at least theoretically they were in a somewhat good starting position. But then again the US onslaught was just insane and much bigger in numbers and mass then today. I won’t look up the numbers, but it was 500+ US aircraft at least, and like Tervell said, the distances involved where much shorter. You could take off and bomb Iraqi targets within a hour as a US pilot.

    Fighting in '91 was quite rough at times. Iraq had Mig-25s and SAMs that actually engaged and shot down US aircraft. Iraq fired Scuds into Saudi and Israel - much smaller than what we saw last week, but it was a factor to consider for US planning and weapons use (much like today, interceptors failed and bombing launchers was much harder than imagined at first). The coalition had to do weeks of preparatory bombing, with 100s of aircraft. There is a YT channel that does these map-based visualizations and they have several videos on the air war, with representative aircraft counts (just search “operations room gulf air war” and skip through the videos to get an idea) - it’s just insane seeing the sheer mass of US strike packages flying into southern Iraq and Baghdad, like dozens of aircraft flying in from three different directions and on a very small part of the Iraqi map, so to speak. I’m not gonna link it because they tend to be on the US propaganda side a bit too much for my taste - but I guarantee you they can’t do that in Iran now. Too much distance, too much territory to cover, just not enough aircraft.

    Terrain was different, too. Kuwait and southern Iraq is mostly just desert, and all these US weapon systems never, ever found a better environment to work in than the Arabian desert. Anytime the war moved to cities, Iraqis might put up a fight and US forces had a much more difficult time (e.g. Battle of Khafji in '91, Battle of Nasiriyah in '03). At the same time, these desert actions featured a lot of friendly fire - totally not unlike today. Back then people joked that the biggest enemy of British combat troops was the USAF/the US Army missile defence corps. Compare that to Iran - endless mountains, endless distance, and all these nice IRGC tunnels; Iraq had no tunnels at all.

    Couple thoughts on the ground effort: You have to remember that the US Armed forces were at their absolute peak, maybe ever. You had all that cold war equipment, a huge standing army, and constant training for that Fulda Gap tank action everybody assumed for decades back then. There was probably never a better time for coordinated air campaign-ground warfare pushes from a US perspective, and it showed. Even though, they still took months dismantling the Iraqi Army from the air first. The ground package in '03 was smaller - like Tervell said, they mostly just did a tank rush straight to Baghdad, shooting up everything along the way - and the US forces still needed like 3 weeks for basically 400 miles of desert highway.

    A little graph on US troop strength to illustrate my point:

    And finally, speaking of distances, one thing I haven’t seen talked about a lot is just how far away Iran is from Israel. Imagine you’re flying an F-35 mission out of Eilat AFB or whereever. You take off, refuel over Iraq, and then you fly towards Tehran or central Iran - roundabout two hours until you’re even on station (!). You have to piss your pants around that point - no toilet in an F-35 - and now you have to fly around two more hours playing whack-a-mole with Iranian targets. Oh, and then it’s two more hours back to Israel, piss yourself again on the way, and those go-pills you just popped to stay awake really make you want to poop like, soon-ish. But nooo, you still gotta refuel first, and then the landing part…are we really to believe that every American pilots performs flawlessly under these circumstances? I’d rather believe that like at least half of them fly into Iran, try to shoot their load ASAP to fly home again and take a well-deserved dump in a real toilet. Who cares if you just hit 5 tractor-trailers, half of whom are out of service anyway. Just get the fuck home, you have to do it again tomorrow anyway because there’s not enough planes. Add to that the duress of flying over a hostile country, at night, with alarms and warnings from all you super-duper F-35 EOTS going off constantly, and whatever dozen subsystems you have to watch all by yourself… six hours of pure stress in a cramped F-35 cockpit. Yeah no, I fully believe this air campaign is completely different from '91 and '03.

    In '91 you take off from a carrier, fly into southern Iraq for 30 minutes tops, do your 1-2 hours on station and fly back again. Might not even have to piss your fly-diaper once, and the biggest challenge is keeping your head straight from all the talk you hear on the 10+ radio nets coordinating 200 coalition aircraft covering 100 square miles or something. And even back then you had plenty of evidence that US pilots just wanted to over-bomb any target they saw and fly the fuck back ASAP.

    So yeah, hope I could offer some additional points to your excellent question. Iraq had a solid military in '91 but they just couldn’t go up against the US empire at its all-time power peak. 2003 was a smaller war, and an exhausted Iraq faltered under a somewhat comparable air onslaught, and he US still managed to fumble the overall war effort. Iran is different, the US empire is visibly panting, and the geographic aspect of a war that at this point is entirely waged from the air is quite possibly as disadvantageous for an US air campaign as it ever was.

  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from January 19th to January 25th, 2026 - Squaring the Arctic CircleEnglish
    7·
    3 months ago

    Thanks for the exhaustive reply, it is always appeciated. My post was not nearly as analytical, I mostly would like to know - why didn’t Trump just seize Greenland outright, like he seemed to allude to in so many ways? Is this just to keep the appearance of a sort-of-unified West?

    The militarization of Europe is going to break the EU apart. The Maastricht criteria simply does not allow the EU to increase their deficit spending on military while maintaining its current economic advantage. So it will be austerity and recession, which will further push the region towards militarism (think 1930s Germany).

    Mostly agree here. While declining, the US seems to be bent on expanding power within its sphere of influence, and Europe will be squeezed further. This has been going on for years at this point, i.e. EU GDP remaining pretty much flat since 2008, while US GDP doubled it that time. (the usual caveats of GDP as economic power always apply of course)

    Following that, Europe will be coerced to de-industrialize itself and play the role of a net importer for American goods - essentially reversing the position between the US and the EU. Trump will get to boast about reducing trade deficit, dollar depreciation against the euro, and the partial re-industrialization will allow the US to placate the growing dissent and suppress the rise of populist sentiment against the establishment, all while maintaining its global financial hegemony.

    Seems plausible as well, just these points: US exports are pretty much just oil/gas and weapons right now, aren’t they? So far, we have seen very little of any re-industrialization going on. The tariffs have achieved almost nothing here. And all these US policies are beginning to alienate Europeans - surely this cannot continue forever without breaking some links, however much Washington wants to push this line? Is this part of the reason why they didn’t go 100% all out for Greenland? And of course I can easily see Europe fall in line after another Democrat takes power. They loved Biden more than anyone and happily let themselves be sleepwalked into the Ukraine disaster.

    Feel free to elaborate, like I said it’s appreciated.

    To understand history, we must start with class analysis. The root of all these problems came from the contradictions of the American capitalism itself - which is to maintain its global hegemony while years of de-industrialization have exacerbated wealth inequality and worse, the entrenchment of social class. The dream of “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” is evaporating right in front of most Americans, especially after the 2008 crash.

    Probably good to always keep in mind, yes.

  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from January 19th to January 25th, 2026 - Squaring the Arctic CircleEnglish
    15·
    3 months ago

    he was 100% clear over and over that he wanted to annex Greenland outright.

    Yes I’m also very surprised by this turn of events. Is this all just old man dementia, is it the years of burger sauce catching up where he can’t focus on any issue for more than a week?

    Why all the noise on Truth Social, all the frenied announcements by so many officials, only to back down now? Why did thousands of Twitter chuds post all these Greenland AI memes for weeks, are they just satisfied like so?

    I realize again that going by Alexander Mercouris analysis in this case might not have been too smart on my part - after all, this guy predicted the fall of Siversk basically from July 2022 onward, any week now! - but it really seemed as if Trump and half his cabinet wanted to annex Greenland and the Euros would not have been able to stop it, right?

    Or maybe this compromise is just like the Gaza ceasefire and will be exploited much more by one side, ie Trump.

  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from December 15th to December 21st, 2025 - Never Trust A Western Peace Deal - COTW: Democratic Republic of the CongoEnglish
    85·
    4 months ago

    Victor Grossman died in Berlin yesterday at age 97. He was one of a handful of humans who grew up in capitalism in America as Stephen Wechsler, escaped to socialism in the GDR, and then was forced to submit to capitalism in united Germany again.

    From Junge Welt:

    spoiler

    Victor Grossman has died. The journalist, author, and translator passed away on Wednesday in Berlin at the age of 97. This was reported by junge Welt, citing his family. Grossman was born Stephen Wechsler in New York City in 1928. As a teenager, he joined the youth organization of the Communist Party of the USA in 1942 and, while studying at Harvard, also joined the party itself. While serving as a US soldier stationed in Bavaria, he deserted in 1952 after receiving a summons to appear before the military tribunal in Nuremberg. Because he had not disclosed his Communist Party membership, he faced imprisonment. Near Linz, he swam across the Danube to reach the Soviet occupation zone of Austria. From there, he went to the young GDR, where, on the advice of a Soviet officer, he adopted the name Victor Grossman.

    Grossman studied journalism in Leipzig between 1954 and 1958, subsequently working in Berlin as an editor and proofreader, where he established the Paul Robeson Archive at the Academy of Arts. From 1968 onward, he worked as a freelance writer, translator, and public speaker. He recognized the decline of the GDR early on and, as he stated in a 2023 jW interview, was “despairing” of it. After 1990, he joined the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism), remained active in publishing, and took an active part in political life well into old age. An obituary will follow.

    If you want to read the obituary from the same source:

    spoiler

    When you joined the Army, you had to sign a list. It contained about 25 organizations, and by signing, you confirmed that you weren’t a member of any of them, Victor Grossman told us when we spent three hours talking about his life in his apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, which he had moved into in 1961, in 2023, just before his 95th birthday. “I was definitely in a dozen,” he said, smiling, with the strong American accent he still used to speak the language of the country he had come to in 1952, even after more than seven decades.

    Why hadn’t he simply disclosed his membership when he was drafted? “Because I was afraid,” he said without hesitation. In the US, since 1950, every member of the Communist Party or an affiliated organization had to register individually as a “foreign agent.” Failure to do so could result in severe prison sentences. Victor hadn’t done it. Much later, he met a comrade who had refused to sign the list back then. After some time, he had been “dishonorably” discharged, but without punishment. The price: He ended up on a blacklist that was kept everywhere he applied for jobs.

    Stephen Wechsler, as Victor was then known, had signed the contract and came to Bavaria as a soldier in the US Army. The soldiers who had reported physical injuries during basic training to avoid overseas service were sent to Korea. When Victor recounted this, his horror at such cynicism was still evident.

    It only took a few months before Private Wechsler was caught in some kind of check. When he returned from leave and received a summons from the military court in Nuremberg, he immediately decided to defect. So determined, in fact, that he walked into the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) headquarters in Nuremberg in his uniform and asked the astonished comrades there – unsuccessfully, of course – to smuggle him into East Germany. Determination and resolve were Victor’s most striking qualities.

    When I gave him the edited interview to review, he wasn’t satisfied with one aspect: the day he swam across the Danube in Linz had been the most important day of his life—and now it was only mentioned in one sentence. Given the sheer volume of material, this was unavoidable, but the criticism was certainly justified. As he swam across the river, Stephen Wechsler became Victor Grossman. The 24-year-old deserter had been advised to change his name for security reasons by a Soviet officer.

    That’s how he came to the young GDR. He studied journalism in Leipzig and met “my Renate,” to whom he was married until her death in 2009. He worked as an editor and proofreader for the Democratic German Report and the foreign broadcasting service, and he established the Paul Robeson Archive at the Academy of Arts. However, this self-assured and direct man never got along with his superiors. He called his work as a freelance writer since 1968 “life-extending.” It was clear that, without ever accepting citizenship or joining the SED (Socialist Unity Party), he had made the GDR more “his” country than many who held office or positions there. When we talked about its decline and demise, he used words like “despair” and “bitterness.” “The party was practically gone,” he said of the second half of the 1980s.

    He joined the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) and became involved in anti-fascist organizations. Even in his later years, he was a familiar face at events large and small in Berlin. As the Left Party slid deeper into crisis, Victor couldn’t rest easy. The leadership, he said, only wanted to conduct politics in parliaments and governments, no longer on the streets. But it was on the streets, in concrete struggles, as the young communist had learned in the 1940s and never forgotten, that a party’s true “alive” nature became apparent. The word was important to him in this context: he longed for a “living,” militant left-wing party that spoke to people in their everyday lives—not one that merely greeted them from posters every four years just before an election. When we spoke in 2023, he said he didn’t even know if he was still listed as a member. The comrade who had always collected the dues had died.

    Victor Grossman died in Berlin on Wednesday at the age of 97. Another person has passed away who will be missed. “We did what we could,” he told me. With him, it was true.

    I only learned of him last year, though the name must have crossed my eyes before. The quote I read went something like, “in the GDR you never had to despair that you needed to find a job. You never had to worry about losing income. You have no idea how good that feeling was. […] If you didn’t like your job, they tried to find something else for you, anything you wanted to do, you could do somehow…”

    I think about that a lot. Hate my job, and just signed on for the money and because I have to pay child support. Fuck Germany, personally I think it’s more neoliberal than even the UK (by European standard I mean)

    So long, Victor…

  • a_party_german [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and International News Discussion from October 13th to October 19th, 2025 - Escalating Against The Bolivarian RevolutionEnglish
    22·
    6 months ago

    I genuinely do not understand how they can see German humiliation as a victory for their side, but the liberal NAFO mind is an enigma.

    Don’t forget Germany ruined like half of Europe in the 2012-2015 period. A lot of people all over the EU like to see some payback for that, and if the thick-headed Germans go along with their own humiliation, rationalizing in for some greater good as they always like to do, then all the better. I’m a firm believer in the Mark Ames theory of bloodythirsty Europeans and their eternal inner conflicts at this point. Everybody rearming like crazy right now makes for very little hope in the future. Who know, maybe those insane Europeans really need to wipe each other out every 80 years or so, it’s just how they choose to exist?

    It’s all so insane. German petit-bourgeoisie had to subjugate the EU into their crazy barely 10 years ago (Obama told Merkel, “please just bail out Greece, this is in your interest too you know”, and Merkel just said “I’m sorry my voters wouldn’t like that…”). Now the Ukraine war has been going on for years with no end in sight, Germany has lost its only source of cheap energy and they just pretend like they didn’t really need that. The German economy has not had a single quarter of growth for 3 years, the car industry is hemorrhaging 50-100,000 jobs each year, competitive industries are going out one by one, and the idiotic Merz government talks about endless rearmament and more austerity and never making peace with Russia, and nobody is calling them out on all this BS.

    All the lib Germans used to laugh at the AfD prophesizing the downfall of Germany over the last couple of years, but at some point it really is too late you know.