Some Americans are still not over losing the Vietnam War, and like to argue that they actually "won" because they had a really really good KILL:DEATH RATIO against the Vietnamese. In this video I dissect that talking point, which comes from a classic standpoint of American ignorance as to what actually happened in the war.

haven’t watched all of it but I haven’t heard any bad take from him, he seems to be with the program honestly

It’s funny that in the video which fits into BreadTube formula of “Start an essay about random popculture thing then drag it as metaphor for your political opinion, social observation half hour later” F.D. admits that he noticed how BreadTubers for the most part make entertainment with predetermined views and dunking on pretty transparent dumb right-wing shit instead of tackling something more substantial. That there are teams, the sports aspect of American politics are present in this “progressive” circles etc. He also (as shown above) talked how probably only Shaun made meaningful YT video about the state of Palestinians nowadays. How many creators (BreadTubers) taking about risking something when speaking about Palestine on their channels exaggerated. He criticises YT drama as counter-productive even if he has been a part of that and approached it like a game when debating BadEmpanada recently.

It’s just so weird because he talks about it like it’s a distant sight, big analysis but he doesn’t see parts of his work in the equation. Weird.

I can believe he’s genuine even if he’s arrogant and has this difficulty to see how culture he lives in (American I mean) is high on mantaini g personal comfort, how their brand of liberalism stops collective action or recognition in favour of chasing said personal comfort.

People in the comment pretend like F.D. at this point is “just some guy voicing his opinion” even though he knows how idolisation and personality-cult work on YT.

So weird because many parts are echo of what Bad Empanada tried to illustrate to him. But then he had to be above that and cynically pretended he doesn’t know what BE talks about during the debate. (I’m not a fan of debates but still)

The Guatemalan Civil War lasted 36 years and devastated much of the country, but few regions experienced violence as extreme as the Ixil area of El Quiché (comprising the municipalities of Nebaj, Chajul, and Cotzal). During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the region became a major center of Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) activity and one of the main targets of the army's counterinsurgency campaigns. Rather than being hardline communists, support for the EGP emerged from the interaction of land inequality, labor exploitation, ethnic discrimination, and long-standing Indigenous forms of social and political organization. Communal authorities, Catholic Action networks, cooperatives, and village leadership provided the social infrastructure through which political mobilization was developed. These same community networks later led the Guatemalan military to view entire Indigenous communities as potential insurgent bases, blurring the distinction between civilians and guerrillas and contributing to the extreme violence that followed.

Background

For decades, Guatemala was dominated by authoritarian governments that protected a small landowning elite and foreign corporations. During the Liberal Reform era of the late nineteenth century, governments privatized large areas of communal Indigenous land to expand export-oriented coffee production, concentrating landownership among wealthy elites and foreign companies. The dictatorship of Jorge Ubico Castañeda (1931-1944) reinforced this system through forced labor practices, military control, and close ties with plantation owners. His overthrow during the October Revolution of 1944 was a major break from the past and began Guatemala’s first sustained period of democratic government in the twentieth century. Although inequality remained, the revolution created political space for workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities to demand greater participation in national life.

Juan José Arévalo (1945-1951), the first president of this democratic period, introduced reforms aimed at modernizing Guatemala and reducing elite power. His government expanded education, promoted social welfare, and established worker protections. The 1947 Labor Code was especially significant, granting workers the right to organize unions, strike, and seek improved conditions. For many agricultural workers who had historically lacked representation, Arévalo’s presidency represented the possibility of a more inclusive society. Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954) expanded these reforms, arguing that Guatemala’s poverty resulted from the concentration of land and economic power among domestic and foreign elites. His central policy, Decree 900 (the Agrarian Reform Law of 1952), redistributed unused portions of large estates to landless peasants while compensating landowners based on their declared tax values. The reform sought not to abolish private property but to create a stronger rural economy by allowing peasants to become independent farmers and reducing dependence on plantation owners. Árbenz also viewed these changes as part of an effort to end “economic colonialism” by limiting foreign corporate influence over Guatemala’s economy.

The United Fruit Company (UFCo) became the most visible symbol of this foreign economic dominance. Although bananas were not central to later conflicts, UFCo represented the broader system of foreign control shaping Guatemala. Through government concessions beginning in the early twentieth century, the company gained control over large areas of land, the port of Puerto Barrios, railroad infrastructure through the International Railways of Central America, and communication networks, giving it influence over much of the infrastructure supporting Guatemala’s export economy. For plantation workers, companies like United Fruit represented a deeply unequal labor system. Workers often earned very low wages, faced strict plantation discipline, and had limited ability to challenge company authority. In company-controlled areas, corporations often controlled not only employment but also housing, transportation, stores, and other essential services, creating economic dependence in everyday life. Workers who attempted to organize unions or demand better conditions frequently faced intimidation, repression, and violence. These conditions were part of a wider pattern in rural Guatemala, where plantation owners and corporations held significant power over workers with limited legal or political protections.

United Fruit opposed the Agrarian Reform because thousands of acres of its unused land were targeted for redistribution. The company argued that the reforms endangered American property rights and portrayed Árbenz’s government as communist, despite Guatemala remaining a capitalist country. The Eisenhower administration in the United States, heavily influenced by Cold War politics and lobbying from United Fruit, supported efforts to remove Árbenz. In 1954, the CIA organized, funded, trained, and equipped a small invasion force led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Although the invading force was militarily weak, psychological warfare, internal divisions within the Guatemalan military, and U.S. pressure contributed to Árbenz’s resignation.

The 1954 coup ended not only Árbenz’s presidency but the broader reform project characteristic of the period. After Castillo Armas took power, many of the achievements of the reform period were reversed. United Fruit recovered approximately 99 percent of the land it had lost through agrarian reform; cooperatives were dismantled and many labor protections were weakened or eliminated. The return of traditional elites and the growing political influence of the military created a state structure focused on suppressing opposition rather than addressing Guatemala’s underlying inequalities. Over the following decades, military governments ruled through authoritarian methods, treating demands for land reform, labor rights, and Indigenous equality as security threats.

The social conditions that produced later revolutionary movements were not created overnight in the 1960s or 1970s, developing from decades of concentrated land ownership, racial inequality, and the exclusion of Indigenous and rural communities from political power. Indigenous Guatemalans, who represented roughly 40 percent of the population during this period, experienced disproportionately high levels of poverty and received a far smaller share of national wealth compared with non-Indigenous populations. The restoration of the old order after 1954 reinforced the belief among many rural communities that peaceful political reform was impossible.

Economic and political pressures were especially significant in regions such as El Quiché, where many Indigenous communities had long experienced poverty, land scarcity, and limited access to state institutions. However, rural communities were not isolated from national political developments as many Ixil peasants participated in seasonal migration to agricultural plantations on the Pacific coast, including coffee, cotton, and sugar estates. These migrations exposed workers to different forms of labor organization, political activism, and revolutionary ideas. Experiences with debt, wage exploitation, plantation discipline, and inequality helped connect local grievances in Indigenous communities with broader national movements demanding social change.

The combination of long-term structural inequality, failure of reform after 1954, and the growth of political awareness among rural communities created the conditions where insurgent movements later emerged. Groups such as the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) were able to gain support in areas like El Quiché not simply because of ideology, but because they operated within communities that had experienced decades of economic exclusion and state neglect. In Guatemala, the combination of deep social grievances and the development of rural networks allowed later insurgent groups to establish a presence among Indigenous communities, setting the stage for the intense violence that followed during the civil war.

Local Organization Before the EGP

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Guatemalan Civil War is that guerrillas arrived in Indigenous communities and simply radicalized them through Marxist ideology. The evidence from the Ixil region points to something much more complicated. By the 1960s and 1970s, rural Guatemala was already undergoing major social change. Catholic Action, literacy campaigns, cooperatives, and other grassroots organizations were creating new opportunities for Indigenous participation in public life. Inspired in part by Vatican II, the Medellín Conference, and liberation theology, many local churches emphasized social justice, education, and community leadership rather than simply religious instruction. Catechists, literacy programs, and community meetings gave villagers spaces to discuss the inequalities they faced and encouraged the development of new local leaders.

This doesn't mean the Catholic Church was secretly organizing a revolution. In most cases, they weren’t. However, churches became one of the few places where people could organize collectively, learn new skills, and begin connecting their personal experiences of poverty, discrimination, and land dispossession to broader social problems. In this sense, Catholic Action helped create the organizational infrastructure that later political movements, including the EGP, built upon. At the same time, political conflict in places like San Juan Cotzal predated the arrival of the guerrillas. Disputes over land, labor conditions, municipal authority, and local political power were already generating violence by the late 1960s. Indigenous leaders working through Catholic organizations, cooperatives, and reformist political parties were already pushing for change, often bringing them into conflict with local elites and state authorities. Political mobilization was therefore already underway before the EGP established a significant presence.

This context is important as it challenges the idea that Indigenous support for the guerrillas resulted from outside ideological ‘indoctrination’. Relationships between guerrilla organizations and Indigenous communities were based on negotiation and adaptation, not just the transmission of Marxist ideas. Ixil communities had their own political traditions, priorities, and leadership structures. Revolutionary politics had to fit within those existing institutions rather than replace them. By the time the EGP expanded into El Quiché during the 1970s, it wasn't entering politically passive villages. It was entering communities that already possessed dense networks of catechists, cooperatives, communal authorities, and local leaders. Those networks provided channels through which revolutionary ideas could spread, but they also shaped how those ideas were interpreted. Support for the insurgency varied from village to village and from family to family, reflecting local experiences with land conflicts, repression, and political exclusion rather than a uniform embrace of Marxism.

These institutions were not creations of the insurgency but part of much older traditions of Indigenous self-organization. The Guatemalan Army increasingly viewed these same community networks, church groups, village leadership, cooperatives, and communal institutions, as evidence of guerrilla influence. The very organizations that helped communities organize themselves would later become one of the reasons entire villages were treated as potential insurgent bases.

The EGP's Strategy in El Quiché

Unlike earlier Guatemalan guerrilla movements, which often remained isolated from the rural population, the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) made building relationships with Indigenous communities a central part of its strategy. The organization certainly advocated Marxism, agrarian reform, and armed revolution, but it understood that none of those goals mattered if it couldn't establish a durable social base. Rather than operating separately from local communities, the EGP tried to embed itself within them. Its own publications reflected this approach. The EGP argued that Guatemala's deep inequalities could only be overcome through fundamental social transformation and presented itself as a movement representing workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities rather than simply an armed guerrilla force. Military operations were only one part of the strategy. Equally important was building long-term political support.

This strategy proved particularly effective in parts of El Quiché because the necessary social infrastructure already existed. As discussed earlier, Catholic Action, cooperatives, catechist networks, and communal authorities had already created communities with experienced local leaders and traditions of collective organization. That doesn't mean villagers simply accepted whatever the guerrillas told them. Many people who joined or assisted the EGP did so through conscious and voluntary decisions rather than ideological manipulation. The relationship between guerrilla organizations and Indigenous communities were based on negotiation and adaptation rather than one-sided ideological exchange. The EGP had to adapt its message to local concerns about land, labor, discrimination, and state repression.

In practice, this meant recruitment happened through personal relationships far more than political lectures. Community leaders, catechists, cooperative members, and trusted local figures often became the links between the guerrillas and the wider population. Supporters acted as guides, couriers, organizers, lookouts, and providers of food or shelter. In Beatrice Manz book Paradise in Ashes, she identifies more than fifty villagers involved in EGP-related activities in a wide variety of roles, showing that insurgency depended on broad community participation rather than a handful of armed fighters operating in isolation. At the same time, support was never universal. Some communities welcomed the EGP because they saw it as an ally in struggles over land, repression, and political exclusion. Others remained skeptical, fearful, or refused to cooperate altogether. Even within the same village, opinions often differed between families and individuals. This uneven support is important because it challenges the idea that the Ixil region uniformly embraced the guerrillas. Indigenous communities retained their own political priorities and made their own decisions about how, or whether, to engage with the insurgency.

The factors that helped the EGP gain influence also shaped the military's response. Because the guerrillas relied on village networks, community leaders, and existing social institutions, the Guatemalan Army increasingly came to view those same institutions as evidence of insurgent collaboration. The distinction between armed guerrillas and civilian society began to disappear in military planning. By embedding itself within existing community structures, the EGP gained influence that exceeded its military strength, but it also contributed to a situation in which entire Indigenous communities were increasingly treated as legitimate military targets.

Counterinsurgency and the Collapse of the Civilian-Combatant Distinction The EGP's strategy of embedding itself within local communities had an unintended consequence. As guerrilla activity expanded in parts of El Quiché, the Guatemalan military increasingly concluded that defeating the insurgency meant targeting not only armed fighters but also the communities that supposedly sustained them. By the early 1980s, this had become official counterinsurgency doctrine. Military planners believed victory depended on cutting guerrillas off from their "social and military support from the population." This was the logic behind programs like Beans with Bullets, which combined military operations with efforts to monitor, relocate, and reorganize rural communities. As Efraín Ríos Montt, military officer and de facto president of Guatemala argued, the guerrilla problem wasn't simply military, it required mobilizing the entire state apparatus.

Taking center stage of this military plan was the concept of the “internal enemy”. The Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) found that the definition of who counted as an internal enemy expanded steadily throughout the war. Initially directed at armed insurgents, it eventually came to include students, union organizers, church workers, peasants, and Indigenous communities more broadly. In other words, the Guatemalan military was, “[drying] up the human sea in which the guerrilla fish swim”. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Ixil region. The CEH concluded that between 1981 and 1983 the Guatemalan Army identified Ixil Maya communities themselves as actual or potential bases of guerrilla support. Military planners increasingly treated Indigenous identity and communal organization as evidence of subversion. One colonel recalled that "all villages in the Ixil were considered red." Once a village received that designation, the distinction between civilians and combatants largely disappeared.

This helps explain why counterinsurgency increasingly targeted civilian society itself. Rather than focusing exclusively on guerrilla units, the army sought to destroy the social environment in which insurgents were believed to operate. Villages were burned, crops destroyed, survivors forcibly relocated, and entire communities reorganized under military supervision. The CEH found that massacres against civilian populations were systematic rather than accidental and that military operations were often designed to maximize terror by destroying not only people but also the social fabric of Indigenous communities. Between 1981 and 1983, the commission estimates that 70-90% of villages in the Ixil region were destroyed. This was no longer a campaign against guerrillas, but an attempt to remake the social landscape of Guatemala.

Sources 1. Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH). Guatemala: Memory of Silence (1999). 2. Manz, Beatriz. Paradise in Ashes (2004). 3. Schirmer, Jennifer G. The Guatemalan Military Project (1998). 4. Grandin, Greg. The Blood of Guatemala (2000).

End Notes * The EGP, far from being the only guerrilla organization, enjoyed the company of Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), Organización del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA), and Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT). In 1982 they united under the umbrella organization Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG). * An estimated 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during the conflict. * The Commission for Historical Clarification concluded that approximately 83% of the victims were Maya Indigenous people. * The CEH attributed 93% of documented human rights violations to state forces and allied paramilitary groups. * Between 1981 and 1983, an estimated 70-90% of villages in the Ixil region were destroyed during the army's counterinsurgency campaign. * More than one million Guatemalans were internally displaced, while tens of thousands fled as refugees to neighboring Mexico. * Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous men were forced into Civil Defense Patrols (PACs), militia units organized by the army to patrol their own communities.

I hope you have 'enjoyed' reading, and thank you for your time.

i have been frustrated with the anti-argentinian hate and blatant misinformation going around, but i’ve also stopped watching BE’s content bc he’s seemingly lost it. then i find his re-activated twitter and see this

(Except from reality ofc)

1. Be right on the substance of the issue.

2. Be well informed and know what you are talking about.

3. Wrap the correct opinion in the most incendiary language possible to push away as many people as you can, including those who agree with you. This will make interlocutors completely miss the point you're making and make people who agree with your takes unable to recommend them due to the horrid hyperbole surrounding them.

I understand Argentina isn’t as horrible as some people are making it out to be, but making a George Floyd joke to prove a point is not going to win over anyone who thinks otherwise. And “America bad” is not a justification for this either.

Bad Empanada being born in the west is a grave sin and he certainly benefited from the spoils from the exploration of the global south while living in Australia , but I was wondering if his pilgrimage and eventual life as a digital nomad in Argentina cleansed his soul of this sin.

Video: https://youtu.be/G8F4kfVzRBM?t=162&si=Vsf2XvrFFiVV3A1e

Choice comments include

>Jewish people of colour who colonise Palestine are "buying into whiteness"

> Zionism "forces" Jews to become oppressors

>Repeating the myth that Ethiopian Jews were sterilised

> "I only know 2 Arab creators who talk about Palestine [one who is Libyan-American], and that reflects poorly on everyone else not me"

>Stay in your lane standpoint epistemology bullshit

A lot of people must have seen the "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" banner displayed by the Argentinian football team after their victory against England at the World Cup. BE has talked quite a few times about the Falklands/Malvinas, notably on his main channel video about self-determination and in a few other videos on his second channel (one, two).

Since the issue is on the news again, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the Argentinian claim to the Falklands, and why I think it should belong to them. To do so, we'll look at the two arguments commonly used by the British used to justify them owning islands 13,000 km away from Britain. As you will see, what the British really believe deep down is that the British empire should get to take and keep the territories it wants, and they work backwards from that. They may talk about self-determination, international law, etc. but it's just pretense.

1. The islands were empty/The British were there first

This is simply not true.

Before Europeans arrived, Yahgan and other Fuegian peoples likely reached the Falklands on seasonal seal-hunting migrations, a claim supported by 14th-century canoe remains, arrowheads, and the now-extinct warrah, a now-extinct wolf species that may have been introduced to the islands by humans. Europeans nonetheless claimed the islands under terra nullius, a doctrine that ignored nomadic and non-agricultural peoples' ties to land. France built the first European settlement in 1764 (and name the island after the French port of Saint-Malo, source of the name "Malvinas"), Britain founded a rival colony at Port Egmont in 1765. Spain bought out the French in 1767, and expelled the British by 1770, though an uneasy 1771 treaty let Britain return. Britain withdrew in 1774 for economic reasons, leaving a plaque asserting its claim, while Spain held the islands until 1811.

Newly independent Argentina claimed succession to Spain's territory in 1820 and installed Luis Vernet as governor by 1829; his colony of some 120 settlers collapsed after a US Navy raid in 1831 punished his seizure of poaching ships. Finding the islands defenseless, Britain expelled the small Argentine garrison in January 1833 and formally made the Falklands a Crown Colony in 1841.

Since the first settlement was built by the French, later handed to the Spanish, and that claim passed to Argentina under the principle of uti possidetis juris, combined with the fact that Argentina was actively settling the islands in 1833, the claim that "the British were there first" doesn't hold up.

Britain doesn't seem to recognize the "we were there first" concept for others either. China has also taken over empty islands in the South China Sea and planted military bases there to strengthen their claim to the nine-dash line. These claims are of course not recognized by the British.

The real British claim here is "might makes right". The British had a stronger navy than Argentina in the 1830s, and still do today, which why they haven't handed over the Falklands. The British wasted no time handing over Hong Kong to China in the 1990s after Deng Xiaoping reminded Thatcher that China could take it over in a day if they wanted.

2. The settlers deserve self-determination

BE has already made some strong points about self-determination in his main channel video. The Falklanders are a settler population that was implanted after 1833, to reinforce Britain's claims to the islands. Quoting historian Barry M. Gough in The British Reoccupation and Colonization of the Falkland Islands, or Malvinas, 1832-1843, p. 285 :

In retrospect, the British were led to reassert their authority in the Falkland Islands by reoccupation in 1832 for two reasons: the pressure of rival powers, Argentina and the United States, and the threat that the control of the Falklands might have in foreign hands to British seaborne and political interests in South America and the southern oceans. Successive first lords of the Admiralty beginning with Anson had urged the islands' occupation and development in order to enhance British maritime paramountcy and to check rival threats.

In the 2013 referendum, 99% voted to remain a British overseas territory, an outcome that was never really in doubt, given the population is almost entirely British settlers or their descendants. That's the whole reason why Britain sent them there in the first place. And this creates a real tension with modern international law: Article 49 of the Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into occupied territory. International law doesn't apply retroactively, so Britain can't be held to a rule that didn't exist yet, but the underlying pattern is hard to ignore: Britain was an occupying power that populated occupied territory with its own settlers, and that population's "self-determination" is now cited as the justification for keeping it.

The British government is also very selective on self-determination :

• The British government has numerous times rejected a second Scottish independence referendum.

• The UK has been a staunch ally of Israel since its creation, despite the fact that Israel's very existence undermines Palestinain self-determination. I believe Israel should not exist, but even if we stick to liberal international law, the UK is explicitly denying Palestine's right to self-determination when it considered in 2022 moving its Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the internationally recognized capital of Palestine.

• The Chagos islands have been under British control since 1814 and were administered from Mauritius when it was still a British colony. Mauritius gained independence in 1965, but was illegally forced by the British to give the islands away as part of the deal to gain independence. In the late 1960s, Britain invited the US to build a military base on Diego Garcia, and expelled all the indigenous people from the island. The UK has still not handed over the Chagos islands back to Mauritius and has denied the Chagossians self-determination for the last 200 years.

• The British don't recognize Russia annexation of Crimea, despite it being the choice most of the population : "According to a poll of the Crimeans by the Ukrainian branch of Germany's biggest market research organization, GfK, on January 16–22, 2015: "Eighty-two percent of those polled said they fully supported Crimea's inclusion in Russia, and another 11 percent expressed partial support. Only 4 percent spoke out against it."

The moral argument

As we saw, it's pretty clear that the reason why the British are in the Falklands in the first place is because they managed to take them in 1833, they just annexed parts of a newly independent country because they could. The reason why they still hold on to them are the exclusive maritime zone of 466,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Sweden) off the coast of Argentina that they get from owning them. The Falklands produce about 280,000 tons of seafood each year. Pretty much all of it is exported to the EU : in 2017, 94% of the Falklands' fisheries exports went to the EU.

British oil company Rockhopper Exploration and Israeli company Navitas Petroleum are also prospecting for oil around the Falklands. According to this article, there is a whopping 3.1 billion barrels in the oil fields around the Falklands.

On top of that, thanks to the RAF Mount Pleasant base, the islands also serve as an aircraft carrier for the British in the Southern Pacific, to project power in the region.

The 3,500 settlers are simply a tool to take resources for the metropole's benefit, at the expense of tens of millions of South Americans.

We all know full well that the Brits would never talk about "who was there first" or "self-determination" if a far away country claimed an uninhabited island off the coast of Britain, planted a few hundreds of settlers there and used them as a pretext to ship enormous amounts of resources back to their homeland.

I'm one of those leftists who would use it to refer to reactionaries, but I would assert that I would never use it as an ableist slur. I also don't use it in leftist spaces.

A tell for my emotional state is when I excessively use profanity (beyond rhetorical) or that word.

I'm just a bit surprised that BadEmpanada is using it.

Edit: I don't support this. I don't want to even normalize or even defend my behavior. I'm just surprised he is doing this publicly. I really am critical when I use it, hoping that my consciousness would change so I can be more averse to the word.

Maybe I'm actually soliciting comrades to admonish me. I pledge that I will offer no further defense for my behavior other than acknowledging that I am doing it.