Libs will never forgive Joey Steel for saving the world from fascism
Straight from The Man himself.
I sincerely don’t understand how anyone can think they are helping the left by doing anticommunism. It doesn’t stand up to any critical thought at all, it functions solely to move things rightwards and reinforce the status quo.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug, especially when you desperately want to believe that you’re with the Good Guys
especially when you desperately want to believe that you’re with the Good Guys
I come back to this over and over again. It’s nationalism.
Once they take the position of being citizens of the world, they know longer see it in this baby-brained good vs bad shit, where the good is the US (they’re all americans) or the general western empire. Once they’re internationalists they stop this shit and they gain intellectual curiosity to learn.
Once they take the position of being citizens of the world, they know longer see it in this baby-brained good vs bad shit, where the good is the US (they’re all americans) or the general western empire. Once they’re internationalists they stop this shit and they gain intellectual curiosity to learn.
There are a lot of anarcho-bidenist types (like @boredtortoise@lemm.ee ) who consider themselves to oppose all the evil states including their own, declaring that they cannot be chauvinists because they disavow the US, while uncritically parroting State Department views on its enemies. That doesn’t matter to them because they are calling all entities involved “bad,” while some nebulous people are what is “good,” and these people must exist as a third camp to the feuds between the bad empires (don’t think too hard about what constitutes an empire, btw).
Perhaps I am just free-associating, but I remember Engels talking about the Enlightenment (from the viewpoint of a liberal):
Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.
Engels is speaking in a somewhat different context, but you can see over and over a refusal to examine these “bad” entities more closely, to understand how they work and why they have survived except by the most generic gestures towards tyranny.
Realizing that America, NATO, Europe, and all the other imperial states and settler colonial states and all their cronies and hatchetmen weren’t just the badguys, but were staggeringly evil in a way that cannot be completely encompassed by one person in one lifetime was a gradual process that took me like 8 years, and even then I’m still a lib sometimes.
Like, I have my criticism of the anarchist movement back then but “NATO-Anarchism” wouldn’t have been a thing back then.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/
I have the same experience as you. I think the difference is Trump and the increased polarization that started about when Obama was first elected. Liberals and demsocs felt safer to challenge the status quo when the status quo was ostensibly already leaning “left”. But then Trump got elected, and in the face of the extreme unity within the Republican Party behind Trump, the Democrats also had to push for extreme unity. And what this meant was severe rejection of anything other than the party line.
It makes logical sense to me.
They still believe all of the atrocity propaganda. To them, socialism is this pure thing that deserves defending, but if they were required to defend socialist states, they would also have to disprove all of the stuff that they still believe.
So, in their minds, they are defending against tankies who just want to make the same “mistakes” as previous attempts at socialism. they are keeping socialism modern and adapting it to new circumstances with the power of hindsight. It’s also easier to convert other people to socialism if you can convince them it won’t be anything like those “evil authoritarian” socialist states.
In fact, if all the shit the state department said about socialist states was true, then I think it would probably be the right approach. But it’s not, so it isn’t.
You are right regarding some types of soicalists, but the Trots and other so-called Marxists who say “real Marxism has never been tried [or was immediately thwarted]” are the ones who have a completely incoherent position. “Yeah, I follow the principal of historical materialism, which means supporting an ideology that, in my own view, has 150 year history of uninterrupted failure and deceit.”
They still believe all of the atrocity propaganda. To them, socialism is this pure thing that deserves defending, but if they were required to defend socialist states, they would also have to disprove all of the stuff that they still believe.
So, in their minds, they are defending against tankies who just want to make the same “mistakes” as previous attempts at socialism.
But that’s why it doesn’t make sense. That’s why it doesn’t stand up to the most basic of critical thinking, any conversation with literally any marxist-leninist starts with acknowledging mistakes were made but refusing to completely disavow them, taking a measured approach to their successes and their errors.
They don’t allow ANY critical thought on the topic, because they are wholly committed to their nationalist and anticommunist position. If they weren’t nationalists they wouldn’t feel committed to defending the propaganda of the US, and would be far more interested in a balanced and nuanced take on the socialist states, just as balanced takes on capitalist states are deserved. They are committed to emotionally reacting and sticking to their trained response of “no thought allowed” on these topics instead of pursuing a proper understanding.
And the “tankie” that they describe publicly as a person who wholly defends everything with a red flag is a cartoon caricature that does not exist. Simply a demon used to make people treat communists as heretics before they’ve said a word that might sway them. It’s almost religious in a way, like the way that the church of the middle-ages used to keep “believers” from listening to anyone outside of the faith.
Tankie at this point just means anyone who has said anything even mildly positive about the USSR or China. I was called a tankie for saying that Gorbachev’s shock doctrine dissolution of the Soviet Union was a disaster for the standard of living for the average person - soon as I said it I had people asking about the Hungarian Revolution, like that shit mattered in any way
Because they think it’ll get people raised on cold war bullshit to go left.
Not saying everyone should immediately go into how Joe Steel was correct, but it’s not convincing to say “yeah all those other socialist projects were either not socialist or stupid, but we will get it right this time” because it plays more into people smugly thinking free healthcare will result in banning blue jeans or whatever.
Meh. Americans are Americans, and it takes a hell of a lot of deprogramming to shake that off.
No, we can’t just shoot 330 million people, as tempting as that is sometimes.
As our beloved CARCOSA would say
Suck off a liberal and a fascist cums
Remind a liberal of a well known but somehow constantly ignored fact and a fascist bans you
reminder that Andor S1 was partially inspired by young Stalin’s life
i was wondering if there was a lenin or trotsky analog or is it a part of his life before he knew them? the young dude with the manifesto about political economy and the empire seemed like star wars karl marx (if marx died during paris commune)
