Soriek
11mo ago
You probably remember the recent political crisis in Peru, but to recap:
In 2021 Peru had an election between two deeply unsavory individuals: the left wing Pedro Castillo and the right wing Keiko Fujimori (daughter of the more famous Alberto Fujimori, now in prison for human rights abuses). Castillo won with less than a percentage point and a minority in the legislature. Fujimori’s Popular Forces claimed the election was rigged and started trying to impeach him pretty much immediately (you don’t actually need a crime or anything to impeach a President in Peru, you can just say they’re unfit to rule). After several attempts of this he decided to launch a “self-coup,” dissolve Congress, and create a new government. Needless to say this did not work, he was finally actually impeached, arrested, and his Vice President Dina Boularte came to power.
The year following was a weird one. Castillo’s most ardent supporters took to the streets in mass protest against what they saw as a concerted attempt to violate the democratic results of the election at all costs (which to be fair is basically accurate). The institutionalists on the left, however, saw Castillo’s self-coup as simply going too far. While a member of the Peruvian Marxist left herself, current President Boularte found herself working with the center left and the conservatives against some members of her own party and the popular uprising. In the months that followed she deployed the security state against the protestors pretty brutally, which seemingly only encouraged them to fight harder. Things have calmed down now but the scars are there to stay. Boularte remains in power but her hold is fragile; her most recent opinion poll put her popularity at an abysmal 8%.
And apparently it’s not over yet. Attorney General Patricia Benavides (who spent a fair amount of time trying to get Castillo impeached) launched an eleven month investigation into police brutality and has now announced she is officially blaming President Boularte for the deaths of protestors. This is a pretty plausible outcome for the investigation, though it should be say there are some complications:
The attorney-general filed the complaint against the president just hours after she herself had been accused of leading a corruption ring, which allegedly dropped investigations against lawmakers in exchange for them appointing allies of Ms Benavides to key posts in the judiciary.
Ms Benavides has denied any wrongdoing, has fired the prosecutor who made the allegations against her team, and has so far resisted calls for her resignation.
What happens now? Congress will review the allegations, and since they backed putting down the protests, it is unlikely they will attempt to impeach her (unless the right wing is feeling particularly opportunistic, which they may be). A criminal trial wouldn’t happen until after Boularte leaves office, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a former President has been charged for crimes that Congress supported after they left office (see: Fujimori). Given the weak institutions in Peru, hopefully this doesn’t encourage Boularte to stay in power specifically to avoid prosecution.
Soriek
11mo ago
India & the West
Reportedly the United States apparently stopped India from assassinating another Sikh separatist in June, this time not in Canada but actually on US soil.
An Indian government employee who described himself as a “senior field officer” responsible for intelligence ordered the assassination of a Sikh separatist in New York City in May, U.S. prosecutors alleged Wednesday.
The government employee, who was not named in the indictment filed in a federal court in Manhattan, recruited an Indian national named Nikhil Gupta to hire a hit man to carry out the assassination, which was foiled by U.S. authorities, according to prosecutors.
The court filing did not name the victim, but senior Biden administration officials say the target was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikhs for Justice, a group that advocates the creation of an independent Sikh state called Khalistan within India.
I remain wildly uncertain of how to think about all this. It seems so out of character for the Modi government to be placing hits in allied countries, but I can’t think of much reason why the US would lie here. In every other sense the US has bent over backwards to pull India into its orbits, giving them no strings attached weapons, GE engines, and so on, without even a promise to shift position towards Russia at all. Why jettison all that now? (a question for both sides).
Soriek
11mo ago
Philippines
During the Japanese occupation of the Phillipines, communist rebels called the Hukbalahaps played a large role in fighting off the occupiers. When the conflict ended they expected to have a large say in the newly decolonized country, which was naive of them considering independence was being granted by not just any colonial master, but the United States of America. Instead, the US empowered Manuel Quezon on a deal that partially included him completely marginalized the Hukbalahap. Well communist insurgency didn’t stop there, it came back in the 68 (on Mao’s 75th Birthday) and spread until the 72 when Fernando Marcos (at America’s encouragement) put the country under martial law for fourteen years. There have been various attempts at reconciliation in the successive administrations but nothing concrete.
Marcos’ son Bongbong (no, seriously) is in power now. So it is some irony that his government is finally meeting with the Communists to sit down in Norway and try to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict. If successful, this would end one of the longest insurgencies in the world (I believe the Naxalites in India are longer, but probably not much else), one that has cost over 150,000 lives.
Soriek
11mo ago
Sierra Leone
A confusing series of events took place this past Sunday. A group of soldiers seemingly went rogue and attacked an armory. They were driven off but headed to a nearby prison and let out all the prisoners (including, reportedly, a famous rapper LAJ who was booted from the US for various crimes). After a shootout that left over 20 people dead, the government seemingly has control of the situation. Still, dozens of the assailants are at large and the government has imposed mandatory national curfew still.
It’s still quite unclear what happened but everyone has been using the dreaded word “coup”. There have of course been a series of coups across West Africa recently and Sierra Leone itself is no stranger to coups - actually the current President even led two coups himself and has signaled willingness to do it again in the future. He won a second term recently in what was most certainly an illegitimate election, so there are plenty of people upset with the status quo, but details on the motivations of the participants and whether this was even a real coup attempt are still to be forthcoming.
Soriek
11mo ago
Azerbaijan
Last week the US Senate unanimously passed the Armenian Protection Act blocking military assistance from Azerbaijan. It will now need to go through the fractuous House, which can hopefully at least agree on giving less funding.
The UN International Court of Justice has also now ruled that Azerbaijan must allow ethnic Armenians to return to Nagorno-Karabakh. This leaves things in a kind of weird place. Azerbaijan didn’t actually kick ethnic Armenians out, they self-evacuated because of credible fears of violence. Just because they’re allowed back will they feel safe?
Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it “is committed to upholding the human rights of the Armenian residents of Karabakh on an equal basis with other citizens of Azerbaijan”.
But many ethnic Armenians who fled have expressed doubts that they will be safe if they return to the enclave, if they are allowed back at all, under the rule of what they see as a hostile power.
No new word on the details of the ongoing negotiations between the two countries, except Armenian PM Pashinyan saying that two countries “are speaking ‘different diplomatic languages’ even though they were able to agree on the basic principles for a peace treaty.”
As for America - large-scale Irish Catholic (and later German) migration was the proximate cause of the collapse of the sort of agrarian yeoman republic that most of that American rebel leaders had envisioned.
Having America remain an undeveloped, agrarian country that exported raw materials and imported manufactured goods was much more the vision of Britain than America, and was basically the relationship of dependency that most empires af the time practiced with their colonies. Some American founders did want an agrarian yeoman republic. Others, famously, didn't, and the most influential British-American founders were pushing policy to leave that dream behind and usher in an industrial future from the moment the country was founded, without any input from the poor, huddled masses of Ireland and Germany. Ironically, Jefferson, face of the whole agrarian-yeoman fad, probably did even more than Hamilton to encourage our infant industries:
The embargo had the dual effect of severely curtailing American overseas trade, while forcing industrial concerns to invest new capital into domestic manufacturing in the United States. In commercial New England and the Middle Atlantic, ships sat idle. In agricultural areas, particularly the South, farmers and planters could not sell crops internationally. The scarcity of European goods stimulated American manufacturing, particularly in the North, and textile manufacturers began to make massive investments in cotton mills
Soriek
11mo ago
I see your claim that "unlike the woke we need to actually try to separate legitimate victimization with illegimate" and raise you. We need to reject the entire victimhood narrative/framing device wholesale. It's all illegitimate.
I didn't read OP's comment and have no interest in alt-right talking points, but isn't this an un-Christian take? Imo concern for victims is a much more ancient, Christian idea than a Hegelian one. My main problem with the current victimhood stuff very much is that I see it used by people who are already well off and privledged to look down on others. Figuring out the people in society who are actually struggling and uplifting them seems like a very reasonable Christian project - certainly that was the kind of thing I was taught in church at least.
Soriek
11mo ago
At Waterloo, too, he had no interesting strategy, he just seemed to hope to overwhelm the British and their allies through an incoherent sequence of frontal assaults. I don't know whether it is more that his enemies caught up to him in skill or that he just became less consistently brilliant as time passed.
It may be true that he was older and had lost his touch by then, but he was also buffetted by health issues. Reportedly at Waterloo he had stomach issues and hemorrhoids so severe he struggled to sit on his horse. Maybe more importantly, he had lost most of his top commanders and advisors by then and overall machine of his military wasn't going to function the same. Even still, he came closer to winning than I think most realize.
I do not think that he was so vastly outmatched by his enemies that victory was impossible for him.
I think this is definitely true before his first exile, but after he returned he was pretty vastly outmatched. The combined forces of the four armies against him were huge; Waterloo was less than half their total men, which imo likely means even if he had won there it's hard to imagine him losing in the long run.
Soriek
11mo ago
Netherlands
Our users @Nantafiria and @MartianNight have covered the results of the Dutch election in detail in last week’s roundup. Among the possible coalitions @Nantafiria floated included an alliance between the ruling VVD (24 seats), the NSC (a splinter of the former Christian Democrat opposition party, 20 seats), and the far right PVV (37 seats). Nanta also mentioned that the former two have expressed skepticism in the latter, and this week that seems to have materialized, with VVD announcing they will not join a government with PVV. The other big winner of the election, GL/Pvda (Green Left-Labor) will not be lending their 25 votes to the PVV either. It remains unclear for now which way NSC will swing, it seems contingent on PVV toning things down a bit, which they’ve signaled some willingness to do:
[Wilder’s] party's election platform states that the Netherlands “is not an Islamic country. No Islamic schools, Qurans and mosques.”...
[NSC’s] centrist leader, Pieter Omtzigt, said he couldn't accept “unconstitutional” policies.
Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution outlaws discrimination “on grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race, gender, disability, sexual orientation or on any other grounds.”
In an election-night victory speech, Wilders pledged not to push any policies that would breach Dutch law or the constitution.
A coalition between PVV and NSC would still leave them with 57 votes, several shy of the 76 needed for a majority. The farmer party BBB might also throw their 7 seats on board. Also contentious are PVV’s stance against sending aid to Ukraine; it’ll be interesting if they moderate on this as well to attract smaller parties. Hopefully our locals can provide more detail!
Soriek
11mo ago
Poland
A month and a half after the election Poland has finally kinda sorta formed a government, or as Politico rather impolitely puts it:
“Poland’s zombie government shuffles into being: One former PM joked that the new Cabinet led by Mateusz Morawiecki would have a lifespan shorter than that of a house fly.”
Polish President Andrzej Duda on Monday swore in a new government headed by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki — whose term in office is likely to be only a maximum of 14 days.
Why so short? Well, because they lost, of course. PiS was still the biggest winner in terms of overall votes so they get the first chance to form a government, but they wouldn’t have a majority even with the far right Confederation, who has refused to work with them anyway. It seems weird, but I guess Morawiecki has two weeks to appoint ministers and run a normal government before a vote of confidence happens, which he will lose.
in a sign of the real import of the ceremony, the speakers of both the parliament and the upper chamber Senate didn’t bother showing up.
After that two weeks then Donald Tusk’s Civic Coalition gets its chance to form a coalition, which for now is hammered out:
Tusk’s Civic Coalition is an electoral alliance of four parties led by his centrist Civic Platform party which also includes the Greens.
A new political group called the Third Way includes the long-established agrarian party, the Polish People’s Party, and Poland 2050, a relatively new party led by Szymon Holownia, a conservative Catholic who had trained to be a Dominican friar but became a journalist and was co-host of Poland’s Got Talent reality show.
Another coalition partner, the New Left, includes some former members of the pre-1989 Communist party but increasingly a new generation of younger progressives. It stresses support for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and for fighting climate change.
Soriek
11mo ago
Spain
I’ve covered the seemingly stillwater results of the Spanish election that happened all the way back in July. With both the left and right deadlocked and competing for third parties, things looked dangerously close to going to yet another election. However, incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has finally managed to secure another term. He did it by finally relenting to the demands of the Catalan separatist party Junts to grant amnesty for people who participated in the referendum, including the Junts leader in exile, Carles Puigdemont. This is a significantly unpopular move, even within Sanchez’ own party. Reportedly about 70% of Spanish citizens oppose amnesty and if another election was held the left would likely do much worse. However, it was the only way Sanchez stood a chance at staying in power. Jacobin adds more detail on what to expect:
this will be a minority government formed by the PSOE (121 seats) and Sumar (31 seats), the radical-left coalition led by Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz. Yet this executive will also depend for its survival on the votes of so-called peripheral Spain, i.e., the various regionalist and nationalist parties from Catalonia (Junts per Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), who hold seven seats each), the Basque Country (Partido Nacionalista Vasco, five seats, and EH Bildu, six), Galicia (Bloque Nacionalista Galego, one seat) and the Canary Islands (Coalición Canaria, one seat)...
the road ahead is not easy. With such a broad and composite majority, every vote in parliament may turn into a quagmire, with a real risk that Sánchez’s new cabinet may not last. The parties that backed Sánchez know that letting this government fail would mean handing Spain over to the Right. Yet goodwill often isn’t enough. How will it be possible to reconcile radical-left Sumar’s agenda on social policies, progressive taxation, or housing, with right-wingers in the Partido Nacionalista Vasco, Junts per Catalunya, or Coalición Canaria?
Peru
You probably remember the recent political crisis in Peru, but to recap:
In 2021 Peru had an election between two deeply unsavory individuals: the left wing Pedro Castillo and the right wing Keiko Fujimori (daughter of the more famous Alberto Fujimori, now in prison for human rights abuses). Castillo won with less than a percentage point and a minority in the legislature. Fujimori’s Popular Forces claimed the election was rigged and started trying to impeach him pretty much immediately (you don’t actually need a crime or anything to impeach a President in Peru, you can just say they’re unfit to rule). After several attempts of this he decided to launch a “self-coup,” dissolve Congress, and create a new government. Needless to say this did not work, he was finally actually impeached, arrested, and his Vice President Dina Boularte came to power.
The year following was a weird one. Castillo’s most ardent supporters took to the streets in mass protest against what they saw as a concerted attempt to violate the democratic results of the election at all costs (which to be fair is basically accurate). The institutionalists on the left, however, saw Castillo’s self-coup as simply going too far. While a member of the Peruvian Marxist left herself, current President Boularte found herself working with the center left and the conservatives against some members of her own party and the popular uprising. In the months that followed she deployed the security state against the protestors pretty brutally, which seemingly only encouraged them to fight harder. Things have calmed down now but the scars are there to stay. Boularte remains in power but her hold is fragile; her most recent opinion poll put her popularity at an abysmal 8%.
And apparently it’s not over yet. Attorney General Patricia Benavides (who spent a fair amount of time trying to get Castillo impeached) launched an eleven month investigation into police brutality and has now announced she is officially blaming President Boularte for the deaths of protestors. This is a pretty plausible outcome for the investigation, though it should be say there are some complications:
The attorney-general filed the complaint against the president just hours after she herself had been accused of leading a corruption ring, which allegedly dropped investigations against lawmakers in exchange for them appointing allies of Ms Benavides to key posts in the judiciary.
Ms Benavides has denied any wrongdoing, has fired the prosecutor who made the allegations against her team, and has so far resisted calls for her resignation.
What happens now? Congress will review the allegations, and since they backed putting down the protests, it is unlikely they will attempt to impeach her (unless the right wing is feeling particularly opportunistic, which they may be). A criminal trial wouldn’t happen until after Boularte leaves office, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first time a former President has been charged for crimes that Congress supported after they left office (see: Fujimori). Given the weak institutions in Peru, hopefully this doesn’t encourage Boularte to stay in power specifically to avoid prosecution.
India & the West
Reportedly the United States apparently stopped India from assassinating another Sikh separatist in June, this time not in Canada but actually on US soil.
An Indian government employee who described himself as a “senior field officer” responsible for intelligence ordered the assassination of a Sikh separatist in New York City in May, U.S. prosecutors alleged Wednesday.
The government employee, who was not named in the indictment filed in a federal court in Manhattan, recruited an Indian national named Nikhil Gupta to hire a hit man to carry out the assassination, which was foiled by U.S. authorities, according to prosecutors.
The court filing did not name the victim, but senior Biden administration officials say the target was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikhs for Justice, a group that advocates the creation of an independent Sikh state called Khalistan within India.
I remain wildly uncertain of how to think about all this. It seems so out of character for the Modi government to be placing hits in allied countries, but I can’t think of much reason why the US would lie here. In every other sense the US has bent over backwards to pull India into its orbit, giving them no strings attached weapons, GE engines, and so on, without even a promise to shift position towards Russia at all. Why jettison all that now? (a question for both sides).
Philippines
During the Japanese occupation of the Philipines, communist rebels called the Hukbalahaps played a large role in fighting off the occupiers. When the conflict ended they expected to have a large say in the newly decolonized country, which was naive of them considering independence was being granted by not just any colonial master, but the United States of America. Instead, the US empowered Manuel Quezon on a deal that partially included him completely marginalized the Hukbalahap. Well communist insurgency didn’t stop there, it came back in the 68 (on Mao’s 75th Birthday) and spread until the 72 when Fernando Marcos, at America’s encouragement, put the country under martial law for fourteen years. There have been various attempts at reconciliation in the successive administrations but nothing concrete.
Marcos’ son Bongbong (no, seriously) is in power now. So it is some irony that his government is finally meeting with the Communists to sit down in Norway and try to negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict. If successful, this would end one of the longest insurgencies in the world (I believe the Naxalites in India are longer, but probably not much else), one that has cost over 150,000 lives.
Soriek
11mo ago
Sierra Leone
A confusing series of events took place this past Sunday. A group of soldiers seemingly went rogue and attacked an armory. They were driven off but headed to a nearby prison and let out all the prisoners (including, reportedly, a famous rapper LAJ who was booted from the US for various crimes). After a shootout that left over 20 people dead, the government seemingly has control of the situation. Still, dozens of the assailants are at large and the government has imposed mandatory national curfew still.
It’s still quite unclear what happened but everyone has been using the dreaded word “coup”. There have of course been a series of coups across West Africa recently and Sierra Leone itself is no stranger to coups - actually the current President even led two coups himself and has signaled willingness to do it again in the future. He won a second term recently in what was most certainly an illegitimate election, so there are plenty of people upset with the status quo, but details on the motivations of the participants and whether this was even a real coup attempt are still to be forthcoming.
Soriek
11mo ago
Azerbaijan
Last week the US Senate unanimously passed the Armenian Protection Act blocking military assistance from Azerbaijan. It will now need to go through the fractuous House, which can hopefully at least agree on giving less funding.
The UN International Court of Justice has also now ruled that Azerbaijan must allow ethnic Armenians to return to Nagorno-Karabakh. This leaves things in a kind of weird place. Azerbaijan didn’t actually kick ethnic Armenians out, they self-evacuated because of credible fears of violence. Just because they’re allowed back will they feel safe?
Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said in a statement that it “is committed to upholding the human rights of the Armenian residents of Karabakh on an equal basis with other citizens of Azerbaijan”.
But many ethnic Armenians who fled have expressed doubts that they will be safe if they return to the enclave, if they are allowed back at all, under the rule of what they see as a hostile power.
No new word on the details of the ongoing negotiations between the two countries, except Armenian PM Pashinyan saying that two countries “are speaking ‘different diplomatic languages’ even though they were able to agree on the basic principles for a peace treaty.”
I'm almost inclined to view Napolean as a force of nature rather than as "good" or "bad."
This is much how I feel as well. I can't bring myself to particularly like or dislike him, or take a side between his followers and detractors, it's more of a feeling of being very impressed from a far distance.
I'll say I think it was still a decent enough movie, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it after reading angry reviews like the one linked. Certainly not an incredible movie, and one that'll drive hardcore fans mad, but a decent enough way to spend a few hours.
Pseudoerasmus made a somewhat adjacent argument that in the broad sweep of things the revolution and Napoleon mostly ended up recreating what we think of as conservative institutions. Or at least that we underrate the extent of the revolutionary nature by which other countries achieved similar reforms:
The French Revolution was seen as 'radical' at the time, only because much of Europe undre 1789 was feudal
From a modern perspective, the French Revolution should be seen as conservative. The Directory & Napoleon, both conservative reactions. Even under the Terror, principle of private property was never under threat. Confiscated lands were privatized. Feudal land redistributed to market relations.
Modern pseudo-Burkeans decry the French revolution in part because they believe England could gradually reform its institutions without violence, without destroying aristocracy & monarchy - except these people overlook England's entire 17th century ;-)
Soriek
11mo ago
It was a disapointment that the movie didn't touch upon the North American / Carribean stuff at all, it would have been a cool way to connect him to events people acrossNorth America feel grounded in, but it really wouldn't have fit anywhere in an already very long movie.
What do you think of Napoleon's Legacy?
I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night. By terrible mistake I related to a friend who loves the Emperor that I enjoyed the movie, and was informed that the entire film was a piece of British propaganda. I objected that the British were hardly in the movie at all, only to be explained that the things Scott chose to highlight or ignore mostly followed the contours of the British perspective on the conflict. For instance, Waterloo is emphasized because the British played a decisive role, even though Napoleon stood no real chance of victory during his return, whereas the larger Battle of Leipzig which really ended Napoleon's bid for domination wasn't even mentioned because the British weren't there. And of course what about the fact that Napoleon only ever declared war twice while Britain was actively funding other countries to oppose France, and so on and so on.
My friend's counter-narrative of perfidious Albion being the real villain behind the Napoleonic wars is likely no more straightforwardly true than the narrative that France alone was at fault, but it's a helpful reminder that even today there remain vastly diverging perspectives on the immense impact of the man, the myth, and the legend of Napoleon Bonaparte.
For instance, there's also of course his political reforms, which are the part I found myself missing the most in the movie, even though they would have been impractical to include. A while back Scott touched upon a study by Daron Acemoglu claiming that long run growth was much higher in the areas that Napoleon conquered, due to him abolishing guilds, monopolies, and other rent seeking institutions. Rebuttals included people arguing that Acemoglu et al forgot to control for access to coal, after which you supposedly see no impact from Napoleonic conquest remaining.
Or military reforms. Was Napoleon a genius for coming up with military reforms like how to mobilize national resources and break armies down into self-sustaining units that could live on the land and rely less on supply trains? I've heard people argue these were really mostly Ancien Regime ideas crafted after their loss in the Seven Years War. Napoleon only took advantage of the flux of the revolution to be the one to ram them through.
And what about Republicanism and liberalism in general? Did he hasten them along by spreading their ideas farther and faster than they ever would on their own, or did he doom them for decades by encouraging the conservative monarchs to see liberals as a threat to be immediately stamped out, rather than a nuissance that could be tolerated?
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy? Was he an expansionist warmonger or a peacemaker driven to conflict by other powers? Was he a brilliant military reformer or mostly an opportunist riding off others' inventions? Did he leave a legacy of economic and political dynamism or barely make a dent? What's your take?
Soriek
11mo ago
How many Marxists do you think are in the Democrat party? This is an extremely tiny group of people who consider the Democrats just as right wing as Republicans.
Soriek
11mo ago
Republicans are usually much less supportive of intervening into other countries - even tyrannical ones - when they don't mess with us.
This is a highly dubious claim to begin with, and largely belies your broader point about Democrats being the ones soft on foreign tyrants.
If you look from proclamations to actual actions, though, you see that the policy towards tyrannical regimes is always softened - that happened with Obama, and that is also happening with whoever pulls Biden's strings, which some say is the same Obama. Be it Iran, be it Cuba, be it China - beyond some perfunctory words, it's never any serious action. In fact, it's plenty of the actions in the opposite directions.
This is not true. Both parties have launched waves of targeted sanctions on ML countries, overseen covert and cyop warfare agaimst them, and found ways to support their opposition (Obama backed Capriles against Chavez before anyone had heard of Guaidó). Likewise, both parties have considered softening their stance for progress on things we care about: Obama considered rapproachment with a neutered, non-threat Cuba; Trump considered rapproachment with a nuclear armed North Korea regularly threatening us and our allies.
I don't know what these NGOs have in their files, deep in their computer drives, but if you look on their public stance, the impression one gets is that there's about two countries that ever commit human rights crimes worth discussing - one of them is the US, and you can easily guess the second one.
Human Rights Watch, Amnsety International, etc, write about human rights abuses in Marxist countries regularly on their public websites.
Well, if we talk about the whole century, the Democrat party wasn't as thoroughly infiltrated by the Marxists as they are now.
Spain
I’ve covered the seemingly stillwater results of the Spanish election that happened all the way back in July. With both the left and right deadlocked and competing for third parties, things looked dangerously close to going to yet another election. However, incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has finally managed to secure another term. He did it by finally relenting to the demands of the Catalan separatist party Junts to grant amnesty for people who participated in the referendum, including the Junts leader in exile, Carles Puigdemont. This is a significantly unpopular move, even within Sanchez’ own party. Reportedly about 70% of Spanish citizens oppose amnesty and if another election was held the left would likely do much worse. However, it was the only way Sanchez stood a chance at staying in power. Jacobin adds more detail on what to expect:
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