In Western discourse, it is claimed that democracy and liberal market capitalism are linked together as conjoined twins. However, liberal capitalism thrives when linked with fascism, as we have seen in Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and Pinochet’s Chile. If the development of liberal democracy is linked to something, then it is linked to colonialism… The Eurocentric universalization of multiparty liberal parliamentarism as the essence of democracy not only overlooks its historical roots and how it is exercised on the global level, but it also fails to question the rule of capital in liberal democracy. It presents democracy as a purely procedural phenomenon and masks the underlying political and economic content—the exploitation needed for capitalist production and environmental destruction. However, you cannot isolate the political form of management from the laws of the economic sphere.
Sheila Bawar photographed by Rafael Pavarotti for W Magazine Volume Three: The Pop Issue. Styled by Katie Grand. Hair by Mustafa Yanaz for Dyson at Art+Commerce; makeup by Lucy Bridge at Streeters; manicure by Lauren Michelle Pires for CND at Future Rep. Model: Sheila Bawar at Ford Models. Casting by Piergiorgio Del Moro and Samuel Ellis Scheinman at DM Casting. Set design by Ibby Njoya at New School.
and while we’re on the subject of luigi mangione, FREE NATHAN MAHONEY (who stabbed his company’s ceo during a meeting)! the reason you may not have heard this name is because the police clearly do not want to make the same mistake they did with Mangione by allowing him to become a symbol. let’s show our support for Nathan Mahoney, who looks exactly how he should in his mugshot— proud of himself
edit: the stabbed was the company’s president* not ceo, and the company (Anderson Express) manufactures vehicles for the US military
edit 2: to add on, the US military at this time sends much of its supplies to apartheid Israel in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their country. this company was indirectly but most certainly harming and killing Palestinians.
Snake: Otacon, this lady dropped a piece of intel in regards to herself, do you know what “trans” means
Otacon: Snake, that’s short for the term “transgender” a phrase used for those who’s identity doesn’t align with their asigned sex, some use hormones or surgery to better fit their lifestyle
Snake: Chemical and Surgical modification huh? they’re like supersoldiers but they choose to change to fight for their own spirits rather than a nation…
Otacon: Remember snake, being “trans” is an umbrella label, many in the community identify beyond our common gender binary, including traditional cultural gender roles or wholly new ones
Snake: A wide variety of genders, such diversity not only make them unpredictable but increases practical versatility, impressive stuff
Otacon: oh this is just like Lily Hoshikawa from my Japanese animes
Snake leaves the box
Snake: You’re pretty good huh? this trans stuff sounds intense, you have my support as a fellow soldier
if i see another liberal yapping about “listening to koreans” on the “north korea issue” im going to kms. south koreans are heavily propagandised from birth to view the dprk as an existential threat and their alignment with the u.s as a necessary safeguard. this propaganda isn’t just state-driven; it’s embedded in our education system, media, and culture. for decadesssss, south koreans have been told that their prosperity and “democracy” are thanks to u.s intervention. one of the many reasons the north is painted as a failed state ruled by a dictatorship is to create a “well you don’t want to be that guy” argument for south koreans in favour of u.s military occupation.
south korea’s economic success comes at massive cost: hyper-exploitation of workers, neoliberal conservative policies, and total subservience to u.s military and economic interests ect. but many south koreans are comfortable with this setup because they see themselves as benefitting from it, south koreans see themselves as both momentarily embarrassed millionaires and a momentarily embarrassed independent nation. it is a cultural problem and with every passing generation it gets worse, south korean elders who experienced the war and the dictatorships are treated as nutty demented boomers with no knowledge of the modern world as the youth of the samsung republic hurdle at full speed towards fascism.
Between the end of the Korean War and the early 1990s, more than one million Korean women were caught up in a state-controlled prostitution industry that was blessed at the highest levels by the U.S. military. They worked in special zones surrounding U.S. bases—areas licensed by the South Korean government, reserved exclusively for American troops, and monitored and policed by the U.S. Army. These camp towns were known to the Koreans as kijichon.
The system was designed to strengthen the U.S.-South Korean alliance, which was formalized in a 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty; its less formal mission was to boost morale for the thousands of U.S. military personnel stationed on the peninsula after the Korean War. It was the same for South Korea, where prostitution was encouraged as a woman’s patriotic duty to the state. Dongducheon, with some 7,000 registered prostitutes at its height, was the largest of the kijichon, and the strip of camp towns stretching from the DMZ down to Seoul was known as “GI Heaven.” For the Korean women in the camp towns, though, it was hell.
The Monkey House was a virtual prison for sex workers. It was built during a series of camp-town “cleanup” campaigns first launched by the South Korean government and the Pentagon in the 1960s. Their object was to ensure the sexual hygiene of American troops; rates of venereal disease among the GIs in South Korea were then far above the norm for American military installations in Japan and Europe. (In June 1971, a U.S. Army study found that 568 out of every 1,000 soldiers in Korea were infected with VD, compared to 111 per 1,000 worldwide.) Korean and U.S. security forces combed through the towns searching for women suspected of carrying STDs. Once in custody at the Monkey House, the women were inspected, shot up with penicillin supplied by the U.S. military, and confined inside its walls until they were “cured.” Then they were sent back to service their American customers.
Choi Hee-shin, a 49-year-old community organizer who grew up in Dongducheon, explained how the building got its name. The bar girls and prostitutes were pumped so full of antibiotics that “their arms hung down, and they walked like this, like monkeys in a cage,” she told me, as she let her thin shoulders sag and her wrists dangle down near her knees. Many of the women overdosed, and some of them died, she said; a few of them are buried in a nearby graveyard built especially for sex workers.
When the US arrived in Korea after Japan’s surrender, their priority was to collude with Japanese colonialists and Korean elites and landlords to oppose the workers revolution. The abuse of these women was not a gap in the South Korean system that the government begrudgingly hushed up. The South Korean government’s whole point of existence has been to perpetuate the exploitation and subjugation of Koreans in their own land. It has from its inception been a government by and for the US capitalists.
