Yeah they just haven’t been the same since Ben Norton left. He really was keeping the whole thing sane and grounded.

On the plus side though, Ben is apparently doing really well and is just living his best life in China. I’m happy for him.

Nothing. Nothing substantial would change. It would be mildly amusing to see the reaction of the media and anti-China hawks in the US and Europe but that’s about it. We’d have a few weeks of entertaining content and then the news cycle would move on.

🫡

One thing that i forgot to mention is that a lot of this is closely related to the Kosovo issue. The EU wants to expand until it includes every European country, but Serbia is a thorn in their side and can’t be accepted into the EU until they accept the theft of their Kosovo province.

The EU is pushing extremely hard to try and get them to renounce their claims to Kosovo but so far this has been a step too far even for this semi-comprador government. It would incur massive backlash from the Serbian population, so the EU need a Serbian government that would be totally and exclusively subservient to Brussels and not their own people. That’s what this is really about.

It would take a government like the one they imposed on Ukraine after the Maidan coup that would be willing to deploy brutal force against their own people to crush any protests, labeling them “Russian funded”, “nationalist extremists”, “terrorists”, etc. for not accepting to have their country being sold out like that. The European media would all work in complete alignment to legitimize this national betrayal and to demonize the opposition, telling everyone that this is the only way into “Serbia’s European future” and that anyone against it is “working for Putin” and “trying to hold Serbia back”. This is in my opinion the real ulterior agenda of those behind funding the protests, even though most of the protestors are not aware of it.

Here’s an article about this very issue: https://consortiumnews.com/2025/05/27/diana-johnstone-serbias-organized-chaos/

Come to think of it, i’m gonna make this its own post because i think it’s important that people read this.

There is a lot of corruption in Serbia, just like there is in every country in a similar position. Many of the protesters have genuine grievances while others have simply been brainwashed, much like the Ukrainians and Georgians, into buying the whole “we must become part of liberal Europe and join the EU, then we will all live rich and comfortable like the western Europeans” lie.

But that is basically irrelevant because corruption doesn’t go away if there is a regime change and an even more EU aligned government takes over. If anything that just entrenches the corruption, makes it systemic and integrated into the much bigger network of corruption emanating out from Brussels like a spider web.

The questions to ask are: who is actually behind these protests, who is financing them (because no protest of this magnitude is ever really grassroots, there is always some NGO with money, organization and logistics behind them) and what is their real agenda?

There are certain things you can keep an eye out for, if you see such names as Open Society Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy or any of their subsidiaries, USAID, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Germany’s version of the NED and an arm of the Green party), Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, any of these are an immediate red flag. Many of these were also extremely active in Ukraine prior to the Maidan coup.

Some of the lesser known ones that are frequently active in this region include European Fund for the Balkans, Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, The German Marshall Fund, The Balkan Trust for Democracy, and the Robert Bosch Foundation.

There are dozens if not hundreds of these things and it’s very hard to keep track of. Oftentimes they work like shell companies trying to maintain an illusion of autonomy but if you can follow the money it usually goes back to the same sources. Here’s a handy list for reference: https://swprs.org/organizations-funded-by-the-ned/

Also anything that leads back to the EU and Brussels, European governments, EU parliamentarians suddenly showing up, etc., same as if you see US politicians suddenly taking about the protests, another huge indicator that the protests have been or are about to be hijacked. Also if you hear keywords like “European values”, “civil society”, “freedom and democracy”… The usual cliches.

EU politicians and technocrats are aggressively pursuing EU enlargement by any means, the EU has official positions where this is basically the job description, and when it comes to these sorts of protests and the NGOs behind them they openly admit that most of these NGOs, and i quote “could not survive without EU funding” (said by the “European commissioner for enlargement” in 2024). This essentially makes them openly declared foreign interference vectors.

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: there is always an unbelievable amount of EU and NATO fuckery going on in Serbia, has been going on for years if not decades at this point. The government is already semi-comprador and basically capitulates to the West on every issue that matters.

But that’s still not enough for the imperialists. They have to stamp out even the token lip service that the Serbian government offers to Serbia’s historic affinity with Russia, which they only do to placate their generally russophile population. Much the same as how Turkey pays lip service to Palestine because their population is largely anti-Zionist but behind the scenes they are aiding and abetting the genocide.

That is how insecure the Anglo-European elites are and how desperate they are for total control in Europe. It’s the modern incarnation of the Nazi concept of “Gleichschaltung”. Same reason they are constantly trying to take down Orban in Hungary (who is a piece of shit for a multitude of different reasons…anti-communist, islamophobe, Zionist…all usually a plus with the EU elite, but again, nothing but total compliance and absolute alignment with everything Brussels says will satisfy the Euro-Atlanticists) and why they tried to assassinate Fico in Slovakia.

Neither of which are really a threat to the EU or NATO in any way, but they still pursue too much of an independent policy so they have to be taken out. Serbia is a microcosm of that same phenomenon. It has a weak government and a very unstable socio-economic situation, so they do 99% of everything the EU and NATO demand, but the EU and NATO won’t tolerate anything less than 100%.

At this point there is a fanatical obsession in the European elite with the idea of uniting all of Europe under the Brussels diktat (just like the Nazis dreamed of uniting all of Europe under their banner…it’s no coincidence that many of the Eurocrat elites have Nazi ancestry), establishing complete ideological and systemic uniformity across Europe, and ideally propagandizing every single European into hating Russia. They are investing a huge amount of effort into squashing any and all dissent no matter how small. The more cracks that appear in NATO and the EU the more desperate they are to accelerate EU and NATO expansion, believing that if they manage to pull every single country in Europe into these organizations that this will solve or postpone their problems.

And yes there is also a material motivation to this because this is how they justify pumping more billions of Euros into the military, which is a huge opportunity for most of these elites to get very wealthy, but a significant number of these people are really ideological true believers. Their fanaticism should not be underestimated.

As I said, I don’t think the poster was intending to promote them in any way.

Neutrality Studies is not a communist outlet and i hope that everyone here is aware of that and approaches any content that they put out with an awareness of the possibility that their guests are going to be people with some reactionary views.

Everything you wrote about Joti Brar and CPGB-ML is true and it is important that people are aware of this, but i don’t see how that is grounds for reporting this post.

I don’t think the intention of the poster was promoting either the CPGB-ML nor Joti Brar. I haven’t watched the video yet but from the title it doesn’t seem like it’s promoting those reactionary views which you mentioned but rather providing a geopolitical perspective on the Ukraine proxy war and the West’s larger obsession with Russia.

In that sense I think it is acceptable so long as the poster adds a content warning that the speaker being platformed has reactionary views on LGBT issues. People share articles and videos from much more reactionary sources than the CPGB-ML. Or do you think that every military or geopolitical analysis that has ever been shared here has always been strictly by pro-LGBT communists?

Good point.

a) fines that do not scale with at least income if not net wealth are only really punishing for the poor and a mere nuisance for the rich

b) poor people are much more likely to be stopped and charged by police than rich and influential people; poor people also have to drive themselves more as they can’t afford to have others do the driving for them

c) when a charge goes to court only the well off can really engage in a legal battle; poor people have neither the means nor the time to engage with the justice system, so they very often end up not even fighting the charges

Unless you solve these issues first no amount of reform is going to fix the underlying problem.

Yemen really might just be the most based country on earth…after the DPRK.

No Mao either. Makes me sad…

You can ease them into it by first going on holiday in China. Once they see how full of shit western propaganda is about communist states it’s not as big of a leap to suggest visiting the DPRK one day.

What is insane about this is that this is not total wealth, it’s per capita. So you can’t even argue that it’s because China’s population is over four times larger. And a lot of this is because of debt. Americans are crazy indebted.

Some of the stuff you see happening in China is just unthinkable by western standards. Working class families can actually afford to save up enough money to buy their young adult children their own home. Imagine that!

Just typical imperial core socdem things…

I definitely agree with your message.

do you have any idea how to improve?

Sorry, i’m not good with memes. I’m a bit of a boomer in regards to this online culture stuff. I leave the meme production to the youngins.

I get what you’re trying to say, but i’m not sure the meme format fits the message. We’re not rejecting the above in favor of communism, because all those things come with communism. You said as much in the title but the meme itself could still be misleading to someone who doesn’t read the title.

I think that’s a sensible red line to draw. You have to draw a line somewhere. It’s not like that person couldn’t find another job elsewhere.

We always say that other countries cannot simply one-to-one copy everything China does, but this is one case where it is absolutely the right move to copy China’s anti-desertification campaign. I hope that they either send people to China to observe and learn China’s techniques or ask China to send a few experts over to teach them. This is not just an environmental initiative, it has very positive long term impacts on the local economy and agriculture.