https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1732627752162095512
add a new one to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
“During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”
-Michael Parenti Blackshirts and the reds
We use this one enough around here that we have a bot that gets triggered by “Parenti quοte”. This comment shouldn’t trigger the bot though
I forgot about the bot, but I remembered having this quote saved on my phone.
Excellent quote but it’s far too sophisticated for Zenz who doesn’t seem to have the wit to properly turn the facts on their head. He’s like the IKEA flat-pack version of good, handcrafted cold war propaganda.
If you can stand the Text-To-Speech voice, then this may be helpful:
It’s gonna be a hoot when all the Sinophobes start getting riled up about the evils of wage slavery, but exclusively in the context of what evil China is doing to the Uyghurs
The neat part is they already are, but they convince themselves it’s better in the US because they don’t see the New Jim Crow or have a clue about prisons they think the U.S. pays its workers more…
It does, but everything also costs more and PPP-wise the average US worker is worse off than the average Chinese worker
Well shit, i was send to job fairs multiple times by the employment office and also get mandatory offers (mandatory because i would lose health insurance if i didn’t go). And not only me, millions of people were in the same situation at some point.
Adrian please write about this ongoing Polish genocide of Poles.
If it’s against someone’s will, it’s problematic. Making everyone into good worker drones may be desirable for the higher ups, but not for the individual.
I have never applied to a job because I wanted to work. I have never consented to live in a society where I must pay most of my money each month to someone who does absolutely no work. Suicide rates have never been higher in the US. I’m not saying this to do an epic own online, but to point out that we should stop being selective with these valid criticisms, because doing so creates a false dichotomy that only benefits our own exploiters here at home.
Those who were imprisoned were in for being East Turkistan Separatists, a terrorist org that had been killing hundreds in various knife attack sprees and mowing random people down with cars in major East-Coast cities. Would it problematic to remove the poverty from their lives to remove the main source of radicalism and train them for careers so that they’re now able to have a job instead of needing to join a fascist organization?
Main problem about those job fairs and mandatory offers was that it never resulted in actual employment. Those “fairs” had 20 job posts ranging from Amazon work camp through shady mining job in some forsaken hole up to wiping asses of old fash in Germany, and those mandatory offers were also either scam jobs or telemarketing and the real purpose of it was to make you lose time and money and make you pissed off so you write off yourself from the office list so they can report lowering unemployment.
Strong “learning to read is a communist plot” energy.
Let’s be fair to zenz here, having a job is a form of torture.
