cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/766438
Some of the replies and reposts have me chuckling.
Eh, Settlers is kinda a bad book, has been done better since 1979, and includes stuff you learn in history class in school anyway.
The problem with the people supporting Blumenthal in the comments is that Twitter is filled with PatSocs and LaRouchites.
So fuck 'em
includes stuff you learn in history class in school anyway.
dog what, did you go to school on the moon or something?
Uh, I was in a southern state. I learned a lof of what it talked about in several history classes before reaching college (which definitely did talk about this stuff as well).
PSL is doing activism against imperialism. It’s just not talked about because the media likes that anti-war stuff is only coming from the right, and RAtWM can be used as evidence for horseshoe theory.
They didn’t cover next to anything that Sakai covered in Settlers in my history classes; for damned sure. Let’s hear about why you find it to be ‘a bad book’; because the only ‘critique’ I ever hear about it seems to be coming from aggrieved settlers who don’t like what they’re reading from an accountability standpoint; and I want to see if you’re any different to that trend.
Been there, argued that, not wasting the electrons again. Go away.
I’m non-white. The person misquotes several people and attacks several orgs I know in-person for being. We don’t even know the person’s credentials or whether they are a “Sakai” to begin with. Prove to me the credentials of the person and maybe I’ll take what the person says at face-value; until then, read it critically and maybe consider the other side of the story when it comes to documenting the labor movement.
Man, I told you I’d been there and done that with you already. With all due respect, please fuck off. We’ve been here before, and I’m utterly disinterested in the anti-accountability horseshit you peddle. “Buh buh buh we don’t know who he really is” like we don’t have a LONG FUCKING HISTORY of pseudonymous publishing. For someone who’s non-white, you sure as shit argue like a white man. Fuck outta here.
I liked settlers. It’s thesis was a little extreme, but I learned a lot of new stuff from it (probably because it’s old). Which parts did you learn in history class? In a way I don’t want patsocs to be able to group us in the Sakai stans, but I’d also like to promote it to spite them. Yes, there are better books now.
We are communists, we don’t automatically refuse extreme just because. Problem with it that it was undialectical and thus unmarxist.
I don’t mean too extreme as in “extremism=bad” like libs. I mean he lays out evidence that USian crackers are part of an oppressor nation and have historically benefited from imperialism, but goes as far as to say that we cannot be working class and nothing good can ever come from us or from working with us because we are inherently opportunistic and bourgeois or something like that. I agree he failed to use dialectical and historical materialism as a mode of study.
The Filipino War, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the ethnic cleansing of the “civilized tribes,” New Deal and the inherent racism of it, etc. I’m, err, not exactly sure what I’m missing, but there you go.
But hey, if you want to spite PatSocs, you do you. As you yourself said, there are better books now since 1979.
