BLU_Raze
This might sound awful, or maybe not, but have you ever seen a white American that didn’t really have any awareness of their whiteness? Like, they had one or two good friends that were black while growing up and took the time to study Malcom X and MLK as they got older, but they never really considered what it’s like to be considered different? No matter what, they just don’t have the ability to just live their life as a black person growing up in a low-income neighborhood, and they’re completey clueless about the situation, but they try to read about struggles out of curiosity with hopes that they can do something to help out a bit.
This is how it’s like when I compare myself to people in the LGBT community as a whole, and especially trans/nonbinary people. It’s just not who I am. I try to be well-intentioned when bringing this stuff up, but it’s just not based on an experience I actually had. Still, I support the rights movement more than the average person around where I live, just because I think it’s one of those things that benefits everyone. I have the belief that there’s been a lot of historical events that show people taking on the role of the gender opposing their assigned sex, and I think such a small minority actually need surgery to address that discrepency that it’s a non-issue to let these people live how they need to live. It’s pretty much harmless, cheap, and makes people feel better about themselves. It’s already rare enough to find someone who isn’t transphobic around my place, so it’s unheard of that someone like me would really care that much. The people around here who do, they usually just talk about how they voted for Biden, how drunk they got at pride, and how much they like insulting Trump in the privacy of their own homes. No offensive to them, but it’s about as performative as black people who cheered on Obama and laugh at racist comments about NBA players on Twitter. To educate myself, these people aren’t so reliable. They’re dismissive and just assume that if you aren’t LGBT (or black in the second case) that there’s nothing to worry about and that I should just keep my opinions to myself, as if it’s better to just let things be. Like I’m the bad guy for thinking Jay-Z and Caitlyn Jenner aren’t good examples of liberation, ignoring that I spend time finding actual non-capitalist and non-individualist solutions to struggles.
I have flipped through the first book and will be taking the time to actually read it, though, so I’m trying to catch up a little bit.
I mean, there is a long documented list of crimes that make China look like a Muslim paradise compared to anything in Europe or North America, and Ukraine has every problem that Russia does. Again, why are we all trying to compare sides? Of course, with Russian suppression, it will soon be just as repressive as Ukraine, and China has a bunch of “war on terror” laws just like the US, so there’s nothing to be proud of there.
Who is trying to establish communism here? Even socialism as a whole was already abandonded by both Russia and Ukraine in the 1960s, maybe even earlier. If two sides are verifiably fighting for capitalist interests, with a single country caught between choosing to pawn themselves off to one major capitalist power or another, and both sides have been confirmed to commit war crimes far beyond what could be passed off as incidental,
why do we have to support a side?
We’re caught in the middle of a third world war, with many similarities to the first one: namely, inter-imperialist/inter-capitalist. Saying something bad about “your team” (the one you’re supposed to praise as supreme and glorious with a clear display of patriotism) is seen as traitor behavior worthy of prison. The US and UK would dehumanize Germans back during WWI, and send labor activists to jail over claims of German interference. You’re right to avoid the trap of dehumanizing “the other” for the sake of trying to pick the lesser of two evils. Never pick sides in an inter-imperialist conflict. At best you get an FDR to avert revolution, at worst you get a bunch of Mussolinis walking around.
You need to research some info on LaRouche and Dugin. They sound like complete jokes and everyone downplays their influence, but it’s very real. That’s where this comes from.
Also, Stalin was supported at that time in the US because of major wins in labor disputes and the fact that we were allied during WWII. The USSR was defeating Germany under Stalin, and we (the US) decided to finish off the losing team (luckily Germany). He was considered a hero, and a genuine revolutionary Communist for his work, and the fight against Nazism is how he went down in history. Ironically, wrt. your comment, it was the de-Stalinizing USSR under Khrushchev that were the “tankies”, it had nothing to do with Stalin at all.
Like many other impoverished, war-torn, or underdeveloped countries, socialism failed to be fully achieved in the USSR and ended up getting stuck. We could recognize the good and move on to build something better.
