this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2021
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I wonder if they support ALL activists, or take sides, or if they choose which ideologies should be cancelled or supported. The last thing I want is to support technocrats.
You can't be entirely sure, but their plain outward support for these nationalist movements means they're at odds with their opposition, Hong Kong/China & Belarus/Russia. For the former, the Hong Kong protestors were clearly a guise to attempt to destabilize China. The latter is slightly less obvious as Belarus isn't socialist and Lukashenko isn't a communist, and the protests weren't entirely nationalist, but it was co-opted in an effort to further Western imperialism given Lukashenko's dismissal of giving into neoliberal measures that benefit the US et. al..
And given everything I've seen from them is also in English, it means they cater entirely to Western audiences and obviously hyper-focused on English speakers, who will all fall under the umbrella of US hegemony more so than most. Yet they were incredibly quiet during the BLM protests in the US last year, making zero effort to proclaim they're on the side of activists that aren't funded by the US. There's no mention of siding with the activists fighting the continued attempts to destabilize China, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, etc. - and that's all recent.
Overall it's very suspicious. They cannot be trusted to provide encryption and security given their agenda easily made clear.
To be clear, this is not speculation. Protonmail actively collaborated with EUROPOL in a clear case of political repression against anarchists in Paris. It appears they were the ones suggesting to the french police that they make the request via EUROPOL, and that they did not try to delay/protest the request.
To be fair, Proton's hands were tied. It was either give up the customer data for a few customers or their business would have to be shut down for all the users relying on it.
In reality the activists made a crucial mistake of not using a VPN. If they used the Proton VPN in conjunction with Proton Mail they would have been safe.
No, not really. I know you mean it as a metaphor, but i think it's important to point out in some countries as a sysadmin you could literally have your hands tied and cops beating the shit out of you. Avoiding this is a privilege european sysadmins have and can use.
That's definitely not so clear cut. Usually and to my knowledge the worst you can get for failing to keep logs (data retention laws) is a fine, which for a business like Proton is not really a problem as we're not talking about a small hosting non-profit, and i'm sure people would be happy to take part in a crowdfunding for that.
And they could have just gotten away with it. As you can learn from other hosting collectives like njalla (or weirder "offshore hosting" companies) not answering to the cops is always an option, or even answering that you don't have the information they requested.
Why always blame the victim? I agree it was preventable, but that's no excuse for the way some of us tech people collaborate with those fucking fascists from the police who will do anything to protect the status quo.
Also worth noting, from what i gathered, Protonmail in fact setup IP logging just for this user specifically. So in this setup, Proton VPN would not have been safe either.
This is the PR version of Protonmail. While this could theoretically been a worst case outcome, they could have taken this to court and I believe the Swiss legal system might have ruled in their favor as using terrorism laws against non-violent activists is IMHO a clear legal over-reach of the French police.
That said, yes hiding their IP would have been better, but why do you think using the VPN by the same company would have helped at all? The VPN provider also knows the IP of the connecting users.
Commercial VPN providers have proven time and time again to not be trustworthy. From VPNs handing over IPs they swore they didn't have, to that one VPN getting hacked and the hacker leaking data they pinky promised they didn't log, to the very real possibility of some VPNs being government surveillance honeypots. Using a VPN would very likely not have saved the environmental activist in question. Tor/Tails/Whonix might have, but when the Western State is this hellbent on ruining you because you undermined their capitalism/imperialism, you're likely screwed no matter what/
Now if only they spent this much effort to catch rich sex offenders and not people who simply give a shit about the future of humanity on this planet.
To be fair, if they shut down it would be better because you'd have one less Western white knight funding terrorists on Hong Kong and Belarus.
Wait, what? How is Protonmail a white knight if they're not standing up for anything? How are comrades struggling against injustice and domination in Hong Kong and Belarus terrorism? Sorry to be a little harsh, but you sound just like the nazis calling the French resistance, or the French calling the Algerian independence movement terrorists.
Here's a short read about Hong Kong, and an entire anarchist blog from Belarus.
Dude, come on lmao. Don't call rioters comrades and comrades nazis.
If your comrades are the riot cops and the intelligence services, i'm happy to call you a nazi even if that's a stretch of the original definition. Fuck that shit! If you call yourself a socialist, think about it: which side are you on? Are you on the side of the people fighting against the elite? Or secret police detaining, torturing and disappearing them?
This is what no class analysis leads to. Your whole world is upside down lol. Other communists are nazis, but rioters that killed innocent workers deserve "socialist" solidarity? (Rioters, that literally waved UK flags and called for trump to annex them lol. Rioters that called for independence for HK, despite independence only having around 20% support. Rioters that returned to their luxury houses with their house staff afterwards lmao).
What do you want me to say lol. You instantly think I'm a nazi as well for... going against the state department line? Not thinking the same as you? idek. I didn't even say anything lol, just that there is 0 point calling comrades nazis. In your benevolence you leave me with two choices: either I accept your point of view and thus purify myself (stop being a nazi) and then I can be considered a proper socialist, or I don't and I will be your enemy. And thus I ask myself: how can you speak for all socialists?
No matter what the reasoning is, State power is always unjust and unjustified. If you find yourself building prisons and a police force, you're on the wrong side of history. Socialism/Communism needs an armed population, not an armed Nation State. Like i said it's a stretch to call you a nazi for supporting the State, because nazis had racial hierarchies deeply embedded into their worldview.
Also, i do have a class analysis. It's precisely because i have a class analysis that i know that cops are always on the side of the powerful and the privileged. The only exception i know to this rule being the "community police" of the zapatistas movement, because they're not a centralized power and don't pretend to have legitimate violence for them.
Seriously, if as a socialist you cheer for cops beating up or murdering certain people, you'll cry soon when they go after you. Communism is about dismantling capitalist structures which of course includes the police which as an institution was created by the bourgeoisie to maintain its privileges. Think about it: if there were no police, there would be no homeless and no hungry people. The police are the armed psychopaths making sure homeless people stay homeless when there's millions of empty apartments. Are you really defending them?
You haven't seen the difference between HK police and US police, that's all I can say lol.
What makes you think your "community police" will not harass homeless people? What about an anarchist commune makes it Inherently good, impervious to gentrifying and petit bourgeois elements?
If you want police to be better in HK then support the city's reintegration into China, which started with the bill to get a murderer tried for his crimes. HK police might have issues due to how HK is structured. In the PRC police does not intervene when workers kidnap their bosses due to unpaid wages. They don't intervene to break up strikes. This is the class character of the state; seeing that capitalist police act like capitalist thugs and theorizing a constant truth out of this is not a class analysis.
The implication that all of history is on its own wrong side (because all of history is the class struggle and all of history has had prisons and police in some capacity) is a very large claim.
No indeed, i've never been to either of these places. Although i've had plenty of occasions over the years to talk with people who had first-hand bad experiences with the institutions in both regions.
Because homelessness does not exist at all in the zapatistas caracoles (communes). And because their police does not have any form of monopoly on violence: they derive their power from the community, not from a centralized authority. If for some reason (which i've never heard of since the 1994 insurrection) their police committed crimes against the population, there would instantly be a response from the population and the situation would be fixed.
We stay critical of power structures and domination scheme. Emancipation is not a theoretical milestone but an everyday struggle. Having a popular background does not make you inherently good/empathetic (cops aren't exactly bourgeois to say the least) like having a bourgeois background does not make you inherently bad/sociopathic (Kropotkin is a good example of that: he chose to live in misery according to his ideals rather than bow to the bolshevik State). What matters is structures: if you take a Nation State and replace its government/parliament with workers, you still have a Nation State with the same factories and prisons.
So first, by abolishing money and private property as part of free communes, we're developing some relative immunity to gentrification. Of course people still have personal possessions (it's my house/room because i live in it, not because a piece of paper says so), and as long as we have to deal with capitalist society we need some money to trade with the outside world. But you won't ever see someone billing someone else for goods and services in a free commune (or with another free commune), so wealth accumulation becomes almost impossible which makes the project really unappealing to capitalist/gentrifying types.
That's a pretty lie. Were Lenin and Trotsky proles? No, they were elites who used proletarian rhetoric to rebuild the same structures of oppression (wage slavery, police, prison) which the soviet movement was aiming (and starting) to abolish. For the workers, is there much difference between stakhanovism and neoliberal managerialism? (no) Is there much difference between a goulag and a capitalist prison? (no) You have to analyze the situation materially to understand what a society is about: in so-called "communist" States, power and resources were not distributed equally: the bolsheviks actively slaughtered the actual communists (whether anarchists or libertarian marxists) the people who advocated for distributing power and resources.
I agree with your sentiment that the western media portrayal of chinese society as docile is strongly biased. Of course there's popular uprisings in China and there is room for direct action. That doesn't do away with the question of political repression which is very much of a problem in China as in the western world.
That is provably false. Many societies throughout history (and some to this day) don't have either prisons or police. I recommend you read some anthropology like Graeber's or Kropotkin's works.
I've read Graeber and Kropotkin. Debt was interesting, Conquest of Bread was just an old man writing down his thoughts on papers -- he figured people will spontaneously turn to anarchism once his revolution starts coming together lol.
The societies they describe were and are classless. But history and pre-history are two different things, and primitive communism was only widespread in prehistory. Changes in our material conditions (probably agriculture) naturally led to class distinctions once you had people whose job was not to produce tangible goods like food or clay pots, but to keep track of them and allocate them -- administrators.
I know anarchists love the Hadza people and I think it's great they have their way of life (though it has led them to many problems in the 21st century, as they have to turn to wage work without knowing their rights or having any) but let me tell you right now: nobody wants to live like the Hadza. I want antibiotics, I want electricity, I want food security, and you have millions of people who need this like me. We're not going to go back
So they still have the monopoly on violence, they just exercise it differently. Which means there is a class character to the state and it's not the tool itself that's a problem, but how you use it -- and why you would use it in one way and not another. So then we can theorise that the state represents the interests of a certain class. Capitalist police is going to enforce the laws of the capitalists, and proletarian police like with the Zapatistas is going to enforce the laws of the proletariat. I'm reminded of Engels' words: "[anarchists] think that when they have changed the name of things they have changed the things themselves".
Until people in the commune decide they don't want to live with black people. Though I've heard the undesirables will just be able to form their own commune in this somehow anarchist world that I still haven't heard how will come to exist lol. Most answers I get is that it's for the people that will be fighting the revolution to figure out.
Yeah, and who won the revolution? Would Kropotkin's anarchist Russia have held on for more than a few months? I can't think of any anarchist experiment that survived past months.
I'm sorry but get some perspective. Read some Marx, Engels and Lenin and at least then you'll have heard of another point of view that looks like yours and you can sill not like it if you want.
French police: uses explosive tear gas grenades that maim people, then the gov refuses them compensation for it. Defends the use of these explosives.
HK police: does not draw their guns even after being shot at with arrows, shows incredible restraint against violence even as their cars are surrounded or they are beaten to the ground, only got their weapons out in rare cases when rioters were trying to steal them from their belt.
You: these are exactly the same thing because they both have the name police.
Where is that the case? Here in the Netherlands there is an actual shortage of living accommodation. The shortage is even more severe in places like Hong Kong (look up cage and coffin homes, please). Abolishing police won't do jack sh*t to fix that issue, but building more homes where they are most severely needed will. Yes, I get that police officers are often thinking they are better than other people (esp. in nations like the USA or Nigeria) but that does not mean that your comment was keeping it real.
That is definitely the case in France (3116000, source INSEE) and USA (17019726, source Census Bureau 2018) : empty dwellings outnumber homeless people >5 to 1). I don't know about stats for UK but i believe the situation is the same. In the Netherlands i don't know about officially-recognized dwellings, but there were some official studies of the squat ban that found that vacant office space significantly increased, unsurprisingly. Of course these studies do not account for office/industrial space, rarely-used secondary housing or for anti-squat practices (letting someone live here so they guard the place for free, but have no right to do what they want), so the actual number is much much higher.
I believe exactly the opposite. In France and USA we have been giving billions of euros to decades to the construction mafia to build more housing, yet prices keep rising as fast as the number of homeless people. I mean considering that the laws of supply and demand apply to some extent, it makes sense: if millions of landowners voluntarily withdraw their property from the market, you create a speculative bubble where prices cannot go down despite new constructions. If you add to this the fact that any social policies our respective governments had after WWII are actively being dismantled, and social housing in France is now managed like a mafia (where in many places you either pay up under the desk, or wait ~5y on a list) and prioritizing luxury "social" housing in new construction for middle classes, we're in deep shit. Who profits from "build more"? Big companies and corrupt officials, as always. It will just damage the environment and keep making more people homeless, if those constructions are not tied to an actual social policy.
However, what prevents us from housing people right now? The fucking cops. Because by law in France since 1945, the city and/or the préfet (regional police overlord) can requisition unused dwellings to apply the constitutional right to housing. This was very common right after WWII when many owners went missing and couldn't be asked for permission: it's mostly no longer applied today. So that's how the squatting scene was born: why wait for permission when we the people can organize and take what we need from those who stole it from us?! So when you crack a squat, you have two enemies who want to evict you: the owners and the cops. Both may or may not (depending on local context and circumstances) attack you, beat you up, evict you. The police additionally may detain you under bullshit reasons [0] and get you sent to prison for trying to find a home, applying by yourself the spirit of the law they, as agents of the bourgeois Nation-State, are refusing to apply because it does not suit their interests.
It's important to note that as always, the cops are an armed militia for the powerful, not a neutral and just armed band applying the law. For example, the law in France explicitly says if there is no proof of breaking in, and you reside there for >48h, then it's your primary housing and you should benefit all protections related to this such as the right to a trial before being evicted. However, cops will almost systematically ignore proof that you've been residing there for a while (sometimes for months) and just kick you out pretending they saw you just break in. Some times, they will themselves break the windows, electricity/pipes so that they make it unlikely to be squatted again, and can tell the landlord it's a shame that such punks are allowed to breathe at all.
How would it work without police? If we didn't have a police, we could just find justice without obstacles. Without an armed militia of psychopaths to enforce injustice, private property would be a pipe dream. We would only have to defend ourselves against owners, and we're up to that. The issue we face today is if we defend ourselves against an owner attacking us, they will claim we attacked them and we will be condemned by the class justice to prison sentences or fines, despite being the victims (just like victims of police abuse are condemned for "violence" and "insults" against the cops despite being the only ones suffering physical injuries). The police having a monopoly on "legitimate" violence is the reason why the elites and their police get to decide the fate of everyone without suffering any kind of consequences.
As a conclusion, i think it's important to note that squatting is widespread and part of human history. It's probably as old as "oooh, i just found a nice abandoned cavern with a fire pit") and these issues for land reclamation by the people are worldwide (and not, as some misinformed marxist-leninists imply, a privileged european punk fun park). From South African squatted slums evicted by cops and for-profit militias, to indigenous peoples of Mexico/Columbia reclaiming the land that was stolen from them, it's an issue that should matter to all. Housing belongs to those who inhabit it; the land belongs to whoever works it. Such is an old anarchist principle by which we should, in my humble opinion, strive to live a better live.
[0] "Cambriolage" or "violation de domicile" are often invoked, although they should in theory only apply to non-vacant housing being squatted or robbed.
Let me start my reply with a small apology. The way I phrased my question ("where is that the case?") I might have come across as inconsiderate. I may also have initially misread what you wrote, taking the comment on empty homes a tad too literal. That is, if we count for e.g. unused office space than you are certainly on point.
First of all, when I wrote "build more" I meant to include initiatives such as transforming office space into residential buildings. Sorry if this was not sufficiently implied in my comment. Secondly, I can agree to the notion that the construction mafia needs to be dealt with somehow (i.e. curbing corruption etc.). On your supply and demand remark: many nations in Europe that have housing issues have countrysides that are massively aging and depopulating. Cities in same countries often are growing, but formerly used homes from the smaller places aren't exactly going to transplant themselves into areas where they would be more needed. So, unless jobs etc. are at least partly going back to the smaller towns (to curb urbanization and "spread the load" more evenly across the country), retrofitting existing (office/industrial/retail) buildings and constructing new ones will be the only workable solution. Obviously in conjunction with good social policies. BTW, the building of "social" housing for (lower) middle classes is sometimes done because actual social housing is something they are obviously to rich for. Yet they cannot afford private (either bought or rented) housing and obviously the demand would drive those prices up. So while an imperfect solution, I can see why some regions/cities have chosen to expand the "social" part of social housing (as long as they don't replace actual social housing with it). Especially if at least some of the demand for housing in larger (>200.000) cities is coming from people with a middle income. Not everybody who has difficulties keeping a roof over their head is destitute.
Even when nobody (organised enough to do so) is going to stop thieves, rapists and murderers?
Sorry for asking an ignorant question, but do you mean "property" as in buildings or property in a more literal, broader sense?
I still believe that with good rewrites of the laws and good social policy, many of such issues can be mitigated. I mean, at least half the demonstrations/riots in Europe are organised because of the lack of the former. I think "we" have to start somewhere, but how to reduce police violence further I do not know.
Hong Kong is already free, and became free when the Brits were driven out of it. The recent Hong Kong protests were nationalist/separatist. See here: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/6d22ace49a8605ff1915577f9d992b37315e7618/socialism_faq.md#what-about-the-hong-kong-protests Some protesters were literally begging Trump to annex them.
I know less about Belarus, but https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7328 and @[email protected]'s answers in this comment thread https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10554/comment/18109 seem to be pretty useful resources.
Also see @[email protected]'s comment in this very thread for more info on both: https://lemmy.ml/post/90607/comment/93083
Oh well if the ministry of truth said so then i guess there's no alternative interpretation?! I'd still like to point out that just because a country has some level of administrative autonomy doesn't mean people are free: nationalist independence is not popular freedom.
That link you gave lists a lot of broken resources. First they assume China is a communist government, which is factually false: have you seen a classless society in China? Abolition of work and State? Then they assume just because some corrupt imperialist US media gave voice to one or two "leaders" (a figure they probably fabricated themselves) that all people supporting the movement are like them. It's such a strawman argument that reeks of political police propaganda it's a shame: it's just like when the french government tried to paint the whole gilets jaunes movement as an antisemitic or royalist movement because you could find one or two of these in the demos, despite them being in the minority and getting kicked out of demos when they were spotted.
Also, i think it's important to point out that just because some people appealed to the US and "international scene" doesn't mean they actually support US imperialism. For example, the Kurdish revolutionary movement strongly relied on military/diplomatic intervention from USA and France to resist ISIS and Turkey... which of course failed to some extent when the interests of our respective empires were not aligned with the kurdish interests anymore. But as a strategy it has taken them so far (instead of being wiped out in the aftermath of the siege of Kobane back in 2014). Today the Kurdish liberation movement has strong(er) ties to the Zapatistas and other liberation movements across the planets: we can't really say the Zapatistas are really friends with the USA. It's easy for you to judge from your armchair that asking for help from this or that person is wrong: the day you face extermination by a government we'll see how you react.
The linked mastodon post has been deleted. But according to other links, it seems on lemmygrad.ml it brings you upvotes to advocate for death penalty for people you disagree with, and to say the people being detained and tortured by political police are liars. Then to say because one nazi paraded a flag (where?) the entire uprising is a neonazi movement. Oh, and that the government of Belarus is leftist somehow? This sentence especially makes me laugh:
So you've got "socialized institutions" yet people living in misery and you need permission from the chief supreme to establish trade unions? Is that what you call socialism? Does that sound like a compelling argument to you as a leftist?
OK so a few hundred thousand dollars thrown in by an imperialist org, and suddenly an entire popular movement has been bought? This makes no sense. When the US wants to fund a coup, they spend millions if not billions, and their PR machine works a lot better: just look at what happened in Venezuela, or back in the day with the Contras movement in Nicaragua. Or with the "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan (hello Ben Laden).
As a leftist, think about it: which side are you on? Are you on the side of the riot police and secret police? Or on the side of the people? Are you on the side of the Cheka or the Cronstadt soviet and Makhnovtchina peasants? Are you defending the established order of economic privileges of the ruling class, or siding up with the people burning shit down?
Seeing I wrote the comment you are responding to, I'll allow myself to bring a clarification about this point:
In 2020, Lukashenko met with the chairman of the Federations of Trade Unions of Belarus and said the federation should put forward requests to all businesses (or as many as possible) to have a union represent their sector. He then added that all businesses that did not comply with this request would be shut down.
Source: https://eng.belta.by/president/view/lukashenko-urges-to-set-up-trade-unions-at-all-private-enterprises-by-year-end-134890-2020/
The context in which I wrote this was soon after he said this, and iirc it was a popular topic on lemmygrad at the time.
So no, you don't need approval from Lukashenko to be unionised or form a union lol. He even said workers don't have to join it if they don't want to.
In case of that French activist, it was not for the political position made (on ecology) but because of having squatted in private property (as far as I remember reading). So there is some need for nuance here.