[flagged]
People don't understand that it takes generations to train a populace to work in a functioning economy. Sudan would probably need 25 years of colonization before you had competent Sudanese to run all parts of a modern economy. You can't just go in, stop the fighting, and then walk away. People just revert to the same conditions that led to war in the first place. So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population), for every single bump in the totally mangled war-torn road to recovery. No thanks.
I think it's possible to imagine a way in which a country could be delivered money and expertise to develop with no expectation of return on investment. (One needs only read conquest of bread to see I'm not alone in believing such a thing is mechanically possible.)
But I also agree it's vanishingly unlikely.
So if the people of Sudan wanted to buy "country rebuilding service", the only way they could finance the loan to pay for that would be by offering their resources to skilled foreign enterprises to convert to usable resources. Then run the risk numbers and you get a crazy interest rate, that will last decades.
If all goes well, Sudan gets a functioning society with a skilled workforce, the foreign players get a nice ROI and made whole for the service they performed, and everyone comes away happy.
The problem is, that places like this are so chronically unstable, and the people so in tune with living in unstable, that it is practically guaranteed to go sideways.
Who would invest in facilities, develop workforces, etc, without a payoff?
One of the underpinning core beliefs of anarchist theory is "wellbeing for all". Every human deserves the best conditions we can collectively give each other, and we should all be working not for our individual enrichment, but for the enrichment of us all.
Some people genuinely believe that helping others get bigger quality of life is more important than helping themselves get rich. It's not impossible to believe that such a community, if it grew large enough, would extend that belief to spaces like factories and workforces.
You can have pockets of like minded individuals who understand the give and take, happy communes (which also seem to inevitably collapse, but I digress), however it is comically naive and foolish to think that it can scale to a societal default. Unless you start killing all the detractors and dead weights. Which is where it often goes...I'll stick with an economic democracy based system (people independently vote with their dollars for what they like/want).
> Inevitably you end up with people who do the absolute bare minimum to qualify for "the communal take" and a small cadre of power players who carry many multiples of their weight. Eventually the strong players get sick of carrying, and the whole thing collapses.
What are you citing from? It seems like you're just describing our current model of society rather than the one you say you're criticizing
Most people want to contribute, pay it forward, or give in their own way. Almost no one wants to do nothing to give back. (Usually, the people who do are the people who have been stepped on their whole lives, and by receiving aid it buys them a chance to rest. Once they've rested, they tend to help out where they can.)
I guess I'm going to believe my decades of lived experience with mutual aid over some stranger telling me things I've observed sustaining themselves are impossible.
But you don't address the core problem which is "How do you handle the people faking (often even faking out themselves!) the need for selfish gain?" and "How do you handle the people who see others lying for gain, and they themselves convert from the helpers to the helped"?
Most people just sweep this under the rug, because it is an obvious and fatal flaw in the system. It's also ideologically uncomfortable that powerless people (have nots) can be just as shitty and morally awry as powerful people (haves).
The world shouldn't be a place devoid of charity and helping out those who need it. In fact it's critical to maximizing society for everyone. But building a system with those ideals being the center pillar is backwards, because it puts the rewards before the work. A side spoke of support? Sure. But the center framework? Doesn't work, and there are ample examples, because every kid votes to get cookies first with the promise of eating their veggies later.
Mutual aid is about building community and then sharing your excess with that community. My extra food is not going to random humans, but rather to people I know. Maybe not well, but we know each other. Charity goes out to strangers. You are giving something away, but not building community. Charity doesn't build resiliency, imo, the same way mutual aid does.
I eat the same food I'm serving alongside the people I'm feeding. This is precisely to build that community - I'm not just a faceless person, I'm someone they know.
And how do I cope with people taking more than their fair share? You accept inefficiency. I cannot tell you how many times I've watched someone take food, and immediately walk to the trash and throw it away. Feels bad, but I've got more to share, and because that's a member of my community and not a stranger I can ask them, "Hey, what's up, bud? Didn't like the food, or...?"
And when someone goes to take a huge pile of food, they often look around and realize, "Wait, all the other folks nearby need this food too. Maybe I'll just take a few, because I know who I'm leaving an empty table for."
But you know what? It's really pretty rare. I've seen it, usually when new people show up, or when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, but whats much more common is people looking at each other and going, "You got enough, brother? Can you share? Sure, let me grab one for you."
You are accurately describing difficulties with charity, imo, though others might disagree with me on that of that. Add community to it, and the calculus changes quite substantially.
Look at what happened when big box stores came to local communities. "We are a community" goes out the window when walmart milk is 30% cheaper than Mom and Pop milk. Why? Because massive centralized operations are inherently more efficient, and they can leverage that efficiency to offer the lowest prices. And people on the whole will always, always, always, shop for the best deal.
Look, I'm someone who spends weeks every year in Vermont, which is the last place in the US that still has "community" focused living (if you have never been, it would be magical for you). No big box stores, no strip malls, no franchise chains, all local farms, local businesses.
But you know what the truth is? They are all dead broke with stagnant industry and a total dependence on outsiders bringing in money to keep their "community living" theme park alive.
One of my communities is farmers. Farmers get paid ~$7 for a bushel of grain (~50lbs). Those same grains can cost $5/lb at the grocery store. When I buy from the farmer, we've settled on a rate of $18/bushel, or <$0.50 per pound. I turn around and feed people for free with this. 50lbs of barley or wheat or whatever is an enormous amount of food, and $20 is a cost I can absorb every few months.
So, now two communities that I'm a part of benefit - the farmers earn more for their product, the hungry eat for free. The farmer community doesn't have to know the hungry community. And the only financial input is purchasing the grain for FAR less than retail, and without every middleman taking a cut.
Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread hypothesizes that if we gave the farmer everything they needed to farm and live comfortably, the farmer would give away the grain. If the grain was free, we'd have people make bread and feed others for free. (This part is at least partially true, because I know I do it, and I'm not the only one who does.)
People like making stuff. People like sharing.
I'm trying to find an in to a biodiesel community, to see if I cannot connect them as well, benefiting the farmer community and giving food and material to the biodiesel community. Haven't connected there yet.
Don't think of this as small town isolationism, but rather a distributed system of syndicates producing and sharing their excess with others who have a use for the excess. Makerspaces on a grand scale, with the resources of many, many people.
We discovered long ago that farmers in Brazil have much much lower standards for "live comfortably", because they don't have first world neighbors swimming in a first world life.
Most people aren't aware that Bernie (once again back at Vermont, heh) was/is (I'm sure he still is, but definitely hides it for obvious reasons) an ardent supporter of tariffs. Knee cap the Brazilian farmers so American farmers can charge more and "live comfortably".
Which is nice, but ultimately is just nationalistic hypocrisy. People are forced to pay more for food so that they can artificially hold up farmers in the US. That might feel good, but on a humanitarian level, it's crippling to Brazilian farmers who are just as human as American ones. Export the economic loss to poorer countries...how first world
Well, ok so we can erase the hypocrisy and flatten the global economic terrain. But then we are all living like the farmers in Brazil, an upgrade for many billions and a massive downgrade for maybe a billion.
Very noble, but good luck getting anyone in the first world to actually vote for that.
But you are also right, the people with power aren't ever going to vote for that.
So I focus on my scale. I'm not here to change the world, I'm not here to run a campaign to change the world. I help a few dozen people, I talk about it openly but don't judge others for disagreeing.
And over time, people sometimes decide to get involved in their communities. I stopped charging rent because I read about someone else stopping charging rent. N-count of 2, but maybe someone will read what I did and stop charging rent and we'll go to n-count 3.
That's how it's supposed to work, when it works. I'm sure it's gotten better with time.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/486/992/0f8...
Like 99.99% of this continent, Sudan was under colonial rule. And it lasted nearly sixty years if you only count the British one (The Ottomans had a sting earlier).
Now I do fancy myself anti-imperialist, but even I cannot deny that the Brits did all that. They established systems, trained generations of locals, and left a decent seed for a competent state and economy. But still, here we are!
One could argue that this “intervention” was itself a cause of this civil war. Stitching a country out of completely different -and perhaps even incompatible- racial and ethnic elements a great deal of which don’t even recognise any political borders, leave one dictated by an outsider, wasn’t exactly going to end any other way.
Personally, while I do believe the Brits share the blame, I don’t assign them much of it. This hellhole had been ruled by its people for 68 years now, during which we’ve repeated the same weak democracy-junta cycle three times (four if you count the last transitional gov). The ability to notice patterns is like entry-level human skill…
And are you seriously claiming that this was a good thing? Is this some crazy new neo-conservative take about the West being the only block that can be "civilized"?
Scholarly article for reference if you want to learn more: https://www.jstor.org/stable/827888
And no it's not because they handled locals differently. They didn't care about locals. Colonialism is about exploiting territory, not population - locals, for colonialists, just "happen to be there" and are usually an obstacle or annoyance rather than a resource to exploit.
Maybe it's because locals were different.
I hope you can see that Greece is the key differentiating factor here. Any other argument is disingenuous. Not to mention the racist attitudes of the British empire, that saw Greek Cypriots as a "civilized" nation compared to Sudan.
The reason why there are no competent Sudanese to run the country is specifically because colonizers went in and destroyed all of the home-grown institutions Sudan had and replaced them with ones locals didn't trust, but were more legible to the colonizers. This is why decolonization has been a failure in some countries: removing the boot doesn't help after you've smashed someone's face in.
The countries that did benefit from decolonization had a unique pattern to them: they all had lacking or inadequate institutions before they were colonized. But colonizers don't build infrastructure for free, and the people being colonized know that. Colonial infrastructure tends to only be good for the needs of the colonizers' resource extraction industries. That's what puts distrust into the heart of the people in those countries in the first place, and why the success stories are rare.
You are correct that some sort of political force needs to be put in place to serve as a functioning institution in Sudan. However, colonial powers are very bad at doing that, because it's easier and cheaper to just smash and grab.
> So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population)
As they should.
I am not sure that this statement is completely true in all cases.
Take for example the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. Romans tended to win their wars because they had superior organization - they could field more armies, and equip those armies, better than their adversaries, even if their adversaries had better commanders (eg Hannibal).
Once conquered by the Romans, the indigenous population got access to all the benefits of being part of Rome's 'empire' - access to what was then one of the largest trade network, the roads, the aqueducts, the Roman legal system...
I do believe, although, not being a professional historian I have the humility to admit my belief could be wrong, than overall being conquered by the Romans led to an overall increase in living standards for the local population.
Or consider the brutal conquest of what is now Mexico by the Spanish. We rightly remember the conquistadors as being incredibly violent and oppressive, but if large swaths of the local population chose to join them in their assault on the Aztec empire, it may have been because the Aztecs were even more violent - indeed, if my understanding of Aztec culture is correct, the Aztec religion required a human sacrifice every day to ensure that the sun would rise. Compared to that, arguably even the Spanish Inquisition is a step up.
Finally, consider that the practice of slavery in what is now Algeria ended only in 1830, when the French colonized it. Now you can accuse the French colonizers of being vicious brutes (and you'd have a lot of evidence to support that claim), but... at least they weren't enslaving anyone. Of course, this last point makes a value judgement that basically boils down to "slavery is always bad", if you have a value system where "some things, including colonization/colonial/imperialist violence are worse than slavery, then you can safely discount it ^_^
This makes sense. But the Palestinian diaspora is tiny. Did it really kickstart the economics for new content?
Only a tiny fraction of people in Europe or North America could point to Sudan on the map. And even fewer could explain the differences between the factions involved. There’s no simple good-guys-vs-bad-guys rhetoric that’s easy to join.
What western governments exactly? Isn't Israel capable of funding itself through its own economy?
That’s one government though. I can’t think of any other western government funding Israel in a similar way.
My point, exactly!
They are purchasing military equipment from Israel, funding their development. Many European institutions also have investments in Israel. And arms used in the Palestinian genocide are being produced in European countries.
Effectively Europes stance is funding the genocide. Whether a lawyer would consider this funding is besides the point. I think there are very concrete ways to argue that what Europe does would constitute funding, but I don't particularly care about that semantic argument. The main point is that Europes actions support the genocide.
Which has much clearer properties of "genocide" than the I/P war, and killed 3 times as many people in the same timeframe despite having far more primitive and less powerful weaponry involved.
>> In the first three days of the capture, at least 6,000 killings were documented. 4,400 inside the city. 1,600 more along escape routes. The UN writes explicitly that the actual death toll from the week-long offensive was “undoubtedly significantly higher”. The governor of Darfur spoke of 27,000 killed in the first three days alone. The Khartoum-based think tank Confluence Advisory estimated 100,000. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab assessed that of the 250,000 civilians remaining in the city, nearly all had been killed, died, been displaced, or were in hiding.
>> RSF fighters, according to survivor testimony, said things like “Is there anyone Zaghawa here? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur”. Men and boys under 50 were specifically targeted, killed or abducted. Women and girls of the Zaghawa and Fur communities were systematically raped, often in groups, sometimes for hours or days. Those perceived as Arab were often spared.”
Israel and its MSM media outlets in the west are the only people “raising the profile” of the colonization of Palestine. Every US politician promotes Israel to the point where they can hardly be said to represent American citizens. That is why people in the west stand against Zionism. It has nothing to do with Qatari boogeymen.
And the thing that motivated so much grassroot support for Palestinians was the West's total material and moral support to the Zionist project, while the genocide in Sudan is much more indirectly related to the West.
Has anyone actually measured this? If I were to create two sock-puppet AI-content accounts and let them loose on social media, I'd guess I'd be monetising at a multiple with the pro-Palestinian one. It's just the more-mainstream position in today's media environment across the aisle.
Based on platform revenue though, certainly pro-Palestinian content must be generating more organic clicks and views, seeing how this conflict has become a 90-10 issue among liberals. But that's not where the lion share of profits are made. Certainly, if I was a morally bankrupt influencer/politician/journalist, I know which side I'd pick to maximize my income.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/us/politics/trump-iran-wa...