Marandi is probably one of the best English speaking propagandists of our time. I’ve seen other people push imperialist talking heads into a corner before but nobody does it so consistently and still get invited onto shows for more. He’s like a dominatrix for westoid news anchors who want to be humiliated. They invite him to their show to be demeaned and degraded in front of their audience and he never fails to deliver.
He is such a good example to look to for how to handle the bullshit that imperialist media peddles. Notice that he doesn’t take the questions of interviewers at face value as neutral and try to answer them in a neutral way. Instead, he understands the narrative being peddled, he calls attention to it, and he brings a counter narrative of his own.
Some people get tripped up in the kind of dynamic like, “Do you condemn Hamas” style bullshit. He counters rather than answering on their terms. Imagine if a guy like Mamdani was like this instead of folding so easy on imperialist narratives. He’d probably gain even more traction among the populace because of the fire behind it. By contrast, you can tell Marandi understands that he isn’t here to make friends with the empire and its mouthpieces; the empire treats himself and so many others as subhuman, so why would he? It’s probably easier for him to grasp this vs. a person who lives in the empire and wants to believe in reform.
to be fair to mamdani, if he were more like that he’d be dead
I think that’s exaggerating a fair bit / losing sight of the complexity of how repression has tended to work. As far as I can tell, assassination is usually not the go to for rhetoric alone, within the US itself. Most likely, in the scenario of electoralism and from the starting point of trying to get elected, he’d get shut out of interviews more, like what happened with Bernie Sanders. But if he was polarizing and charismatic enough, and utilized his own media to help gain popularity, they’d be tempted to bring him on shows anyway for the views because $$$. If he started gaining too much traction, they might go for imprisonment, like with Eugene Debs of old (but this could also be leveraged to radicalize more people). If he was openly organizing in a militant way, like the Black Panther Party of old, then I’d more expect him to need to have bodyguards and such (but then electoralism would be more a vehicle for education than a serious goal to get elected).
So yes, there is varying degrees of risk involved in being openly opposed to the empire’s narratives, but people should not be paranoid that any word said against it is going to have a sniper trained on their position. The empire is a) not that powerful and b) not (yet) stupid enough to think that’s necessary to hold onto power.
There isn’t that much risk to killing someone relatively obscure. People die in the USA every day. Either from murders or from accidents. Point a might have been true in the past, but the modern NSA can distinguish rising internet celebrities with unwanted politics early.
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This is just another reason to be organized, so others can look out for you and call attention to it if weird shit happens to one of you.
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There is always risk to attempting to kill anyone. And there isn’t much benefit to it if all they’re doing is talking. Even the most repressive of states are usually going to go for imprisonment more than assassination.
The bourgeoisie haven’t gotten this far with pushing the legitimacy of “liberal democracy” by assassinating everyone who has an annoying opinion. Do not fall prey to paranoid thinking and exaggeration of what the state is capable of. Instead, consider it from the standpoint of logistics, precedent, and perceived material benefit. Expect that they will tend to put the most violent resources toward what appears the most immediately threatening and expect that they will also be calculating for what it looks like publicly to do so.
For example, one of the things they did to the Black Panther Party was slander their breakfast program for schoolkids. They didn’t just immediately start trying to kill every member.
Also consider what this train of thought is legitimizing: The argument here is essentially saying that someone can’t even run for political office in the US as anti-imperialist without getting assassinated. In the end, it seems to come out as a sideways way of excusing people like Mamdani for throwing the international working class under the bus. If it were proven to be actually that bad, then the criticism of someone like Mamdani should not be how he capitulated in order to win, but that he chose to run for office at all in spite of there being no way to meaningfully support the broader cause from that position, even as lip service.
I disagree with it being a defense for Mamdani. Mamdani is not unknown, and his rhetoric is getting less radical as he’s increasing in fame-derived protection. Rather you should take what Truly said to mean that he was vetted as this type of person before he was allowed to become influential.
In the USA, liberal democracy was legitimised on a framework apartheid, following public lynchings, following a genocide and cattle slavery. The optics in the USA have always been vile, and yet their PR is able to dictate the narrative. Even right now they have more political prisoners than anywhere else, yet the average liberal wouldn’t label the governance as “oppressive”.
There has been a period of fewer political assassinations in the USA. (Or they’re better at hiding them). We can safely presume they found lower risk and higher return strategies, but that doesn’t mean we can infer the risk was ever high.
I mean, people can judge for themselves, and as organizations, what kind of risk they want to take and how they want to present what they’re doing. But people got vilified just for bringing aid to Cuba. Unless you’re just going to go full underground, you have to take a stand in public view sometimes. If one’s goal is to make a career as a politician for themself within the system, then they aren’t a revolutionary to begin with. But if they are trying to get elected for now and use it as a platform to elevate consciousness and move things closer to liberation, capitulating on everything that matters is not the way.
Maybe Mamdani is nothing more than an opportunist. But for those who are sincere and look at the lane someone like him takes, my insistence is, learn from the lane someone like Marandi takes instead. Yes, the conditions are not identical, but the tactic of bringing your own narrative, rather than treating an interview like an attempt to keep the peace with family members during the holidays, is applicable anywhere in the world where liberation is an ongoing fight.
This is what brings me into full agreement. He threw his wife under the bus, ffs.
I mean, “centrist” Dem judges’ houses have been set alright, and had their doors knocked and families’ shot when answered, and this is regular citizens amped up on stochastic terrorism and G-d only knows what else. Why would the feds do it when they can coerce regular citizens to do it, or join fake da’esh cells or anything else?
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The Democratic leadership will just put pressure on Kathy Hochul to under fund or pull funding for Mamdani’s projects. They can just financially nueter him. While Adams was allowed to run up a $50B deficit despite a city balanced budget law, Mamdani will suddenly be pressured to follow it. He could use the deficit as an excuse to slash the fascist NYPD budget, but his wee testicles won’t allow him to go that far.
jfc this lady makes me sick. Genuinely. Good for him for calling her what she is: a propagandist.
“Erm Donald Trump can go to a golf course but your leader can’t??? Pretty suspicious! 🤓”
I used to see the treatlerite thing as a meme but now I see that it’s literally true, whoever has the most luxuries and freedoms is morally the best in their eyes.“Iran has created a few monsters of it’s own hasn’t it? 🤓”
…coming from the British fucking empire???Fucking infuriating, even more so how she tries to cut into his sentences all the time. These fucks are trained & think that they are in the right and can’t fathom when the mirror is shown.
Western propagandists are such shameless fucking ghouls. You really cannot hate them enough.
It’s a bit surprising to me that these shows keep inviting him given how well he defends Iran. They try so hard to catch him but never succeed
Every time I see and hear Professor Marandi, the interviewer is utterly helpless. They lose complete control of their own interview and the voice of reason is allowed to cut through, past all of the Western, bourgeois censorship. The whole world knows how complicit every single Western vassal is to the crimes of the American regime and its satellite colony. There’s nothing they could possibly say anymore–no more moralist posturing is sufficient in bringing back that veil of propaganda that has been thoroughly shredded.
Less Mamdani more Marandi
Yes, you’re a propagandist!
So too with Hotzenplotz, cm002, Sepia, pugjesus, Philipthebucket and the rest of the dirty Lemmy zionazis.
Rightwing outlets, probably financed by Erdogan, are now pushing the online narrative that Marandi is actually a Mossad agent to try and discredit him.
“why do you call them epstein class?”
“because…they’re all in the epstein files? literally?”
slavery ended…it’s illegal to “own” people like that mr. marandi
Well done, that ghoul had the nerve to push those ridiculous talking points, I hope more and more people keep waking up with this sorta thing. And fuck the west for its endless crimes even now.
