Except that it literally does???

The modern notion of nation States, with clearly defined borders, and mechanisms of violence to enforce them, only arose around the 17th century.

Wolves don’t build border walls, have customs checkpoints, or leave refugees to drown in the Mediterranean.

This isn’t a “science meme”, it’s a falacious attempt to cloak reactionary rhetoric in the aesthetic garb of scientific rigor.

The person you responded to was talking about the United States’ war in Korea:

They utterly destroyed the North of Korea during their genocidal anti-communist war, for example

You responded with:

“This is just like what the US did to my favourite monarchy 75 years ago” - a totally normal leftist response to a war crime happening today

The DPRK, in no way, resembled a monarchy prior to the Korean war, like you implied. The DPRK developing such a centralized cult of personality, and took up it’s particular foreign policy positions, as a direct result of US war and occupation.

The US and Israel indiscriminately bombing civilian targets in Iran with the explicit intention of inducing some sort of societal collapse is absolutely comparable to the Korean war.

The response of Iran to dig in its heels, appoint the previous Supreme Leader’s son as his successor, and take up such an aggressive posture, is also a direct result of US intervention, and has clear parallels to the DPRK example.

These countries, like Iran and North Korea, are the way that they are, not in a vacuum. Not because They’re ontologically evil. But because they’re responding to genuinely horrific conditions imposed upon them by the United States.

Whatever we might feel about them. Even if I don’t like that the DPRK has developed this cult of personality around the Kims, that fact is secondary to the material reality of what has caused this state of affairs in the first place.

You’re not getting dragged in this thread because “Le Stoopid Takies Luv Teh Commie Monarchy!1!” But because you’re missing the forest for the trees.

If you actually care about the People of the DPRK, and ending the Kim’s cult of personality, then you should want a formal end to the Korean War, the withdrawal of all US military assets from the peninsula, and for there to be UN mediated talks between North and South Korea about how they might be able to integrate, politically, socially, and economically.

Similarly, if you actually care about the people of Iran, and the wider middle east, you should want an end to this war, withdrawl of all US military bases from the region, the dissolution of Israel, in favor of a multi-ethnic Palestine with right of return and reparations for all Palestinians, and a laying down of arms for all Iranian-backed non-state actors who would no longer need to fight in the absence of Israel.

Complaining about Tankies online does none of this

This is just like what the US did to my favourite monarchy 75 years ago

Are you referring to North Korea? The DPRK has a cult of personality thing going on, for sure. But that hadn’t developed yet, by the time of the Korean war. Rather the DPRK was a really quite vibrant multi-party Socialist democracy.

The overwhelming dominance of the WPK, and the ostensible sidelining of other parties and organizations in the Supreme People’s Assembly only starts to occur after the war. With the genocidal bombing of the Korean peninsula by the United States, and subsequent economic and diplomatic isolation, being the primary engine which drove political centralization.

Compare the results of 1948 SPA election results with those of 1957.

I have a copy of this little pamphlet called Fugitive Gardens, which is all about gardening in small spaces, such as a fire escape.

So, there were indigenous societies that were highly class stratified, or did bad things to the environment. No one is denying that.

But generally speaking, indigenous peoples in say, the Americas, developed methods of agriculture and other forms of production that were more ecologically sustainable for their respective continent, than the European methods that settlers brought, and then revised to be more extractive.

The dust bowl, for example, didn’t just happen. It was a product of Colonialism. A region which was relatively recently colonized, had its forests and grasslands ripped up, in favor of shallow rooted monocultures that couldn’t sustain drought conditions.

There weren’t dustbowls for the millennia prior to colonization, but a sudden shift in the mode of production, to a highly extractive one, artificially produced an ecological disaster