I agree with that, there is certainly an element that the material abundance from superexploitation allows the liberal middle classes to be completely ignorant and incurious about the world and geopolitics, in a way that they treat it as an optional interest or almost a personality trait, unlike those suffering under the boot who have no choice but to be confronted by imperialism.
(Erk, that does make sense, and there’s no way to disprove it…)
(Wait a minute… the burden of proof is on the person making a claim! I don’t need to prove anything, they do!)
So you claim to have another account just for commenting, whose posts have been downvoted by communists… if that’s the case, then why not show it to the court!
After all, in the words of Chairman Mao, “a criticism is specific, or it is meaningless!”
You say “whenever I post or comment anything”, and yet the record shows your account is 9 days old and this is your only post!
Would you like to revise your testimony to explain this contradiction?
about it you ignorant racist imperial peon.
Chinese people feel both that their country is more democratic, and that democracy is more important than USians do.
Because in the US, the average person’s support for a policy has NO EFFECT on how likely it is to be passed, whereas the opinions of the ultra-wealthy are basically already law.
Violence is the only thing that has ever destroyed oppression.
Violence, and the threat of violence, is the only way to make someone who is persecuting you for their own material benefit stop.
Oh man, what did the US and UK have that the USSR didn’t? That’s right, a giant fucking empire grinding hundreds of millions of third world slaves into the dirt.
And yet, even without that the USSR was growing so much faster it would have caught up to and surpassed them eventually - until they couped it, destroyed it and ravaged its people and economy.
In fact it’s just state Capitalism and always devolves into Capitalism
I will reply with a meme
I’m not going to go do homework just to argue to you
Then that’s the end of our conversation. I’ve pointed out a direction in which you can expand your knowledge, even if it’s just knowledge of what your “enemy” thinks - you can have some intellectual curiosity, or you can not, but in the latter case there’s no reason for me to spend further effort trying to force it upon you.
“Totalitarian” is a totally made-up, meaningless distinction. There is no conceivable metric by which you could call any socialist state “totalitarian” that wouldn’t apply a hundredfold to the US Empire. Seriously, this conversation cannot continue unless you read Blackshirts and Reds, it sums up every point I could make to argue with you with much more depth and eloquence. If you have the slightest pretention to intellectual seriousness, go and read that. Then, once you have, message me and I’ll send you a link to season 3 of a podcast called Blowback, covering the Korean war. I think you’ll find it informative.
I’ve taken a harsh tone with you, because you need to be jolted out of this fundamentally incorrect mindset. But if you read what I’ve suggested and actually process the information, if you try to understand the societies you harshly criticize in the depth and richness of their actual existence and not the literal Saturday morning cartoon evil version you’ve had ingrained in you by a multi-trillion dollar propaganda campaign, you’ll arrive at the same opinions I have now - including feeling the way I do about people espousing the views you have done. Until you understand that no “western” country has EVER come closer to socialism than the USSR, China, Cuba or the DPRK (or even had the merest potential to) you are not only useless to the international cause of the workers but an active detriment, a stooge of the Empire that is currently enslaving humanity. That might only manifest as irritating, trivial anticommunist memes on a backwater internet forum, but it still might as well be fought against, and if there’s the slightest chance you can be educated into a helpful comrade then I might as well try.
Ukraine Free Territory
Literally bandit kingdom under an absolute leader
Stalin vs Spanish Leftists
The USSR was the only nation to provide any support to the Republic, and it was the anarchists that fucked up by being unable to organize any kind of national army and just letting the fascists roll up their ‘independent’ cities one by one. Saying “it was Stalin’s fault” is the anarchist stab-in-the-back myth.
Mao
I’ve never heard of the ‘Manchurian communes’ and neither has wikipedia (which would never miss the chance to play up a supposed communist atrocity) and ah yes, that famous leftist tendency “intellectuals”. Not saying the Cultural Revolution was correct, but you also can’t just blame one person for it.
Hungarian Worker’s Councils
A fascist counterrevolution, Hungary was an Axis power and it was a mere eleven years after WW2 - for “”“worker’s councils”“” they sure lynched a lot of Jewish people! Read this.
Futhermore, did even a single one of these leaders claim to support an abstract “left unity”? Lenin sure didn’t:
“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”
Nor did all the millions and millions of workers who supported each of these leaders. How unfathomably arrogant to think that the millions of committed revolutionaries that worked tirelessly to build socialism in these places were too fucking stupid to see they were working for the ‘wrong’ ideology, that they should have rejected their leadership organization and just slotted in your preferred coterie of “libertarian socialists & anarchists” and that would have simply solved all their murderous authoritarian ways. A nice horizontal, non-hierarchical, non-coercive network of free-organizing collectives would definitely have stood up in the face of the Wehrmacht, wouldn’t it!
Now, ironically the “tankie” instances in this federation actually have rules about sectarianism so I wouldn’t post this on there, but I have no qualms saying it here (you can feel free to ban me though, if you want to indulge in the ultimate irony). So I can say that I am sectarian, because revolution is a problem that has a correct answer - there’s the answer that saved hundreds of millions of lives from fascism, and then there’s the ‘answer’ that lets online “”“leftists”“” living eighty years after the fact feel smugly superior to the people who actually fought and bled for a better world. Further reading on this matter:
Edit: I was kinda pissed off when I wrote this so my dismissals of those points were definitely sloppy - though in hindsight with this guy “more nuance” would probably have been a waste - but I absolutely can’t tolerate such ignorant attacks against the projects that actually came the closest to human emancipation anywhere in history. Regardless, I don’t want any anarchist comrades to feel like I’m attacking them, and although I obviously believe MLism (and the collected work of its offshoot branches) is the best basis for the theory and practice of revolution, the good work of anarchist groups that were able to keep fighting in the imperial core when Marxist groups were stamped out can’t be ignored. If you punched a fascist then you’re a comrade of mine.
I think Eliezer Yudkowsky could probably ask in words not to be killed, but that doesn’t mean he contains a spark of awareness like a chicken does.
The UK reddit thread thread is predictably filled with seething rage, mainly about the cop
that got hit by a sledgehammerwhose spine just did that.Can’t believe a British jury understood that when you defend the genocide factory, you not only deserve to get bonked, but the person who did it is innocent.