There is horror in understanding the way capitalism functions to create and reinforce so much deprivation and violence, no doubt.

Having comrades helps, though! And there is some value in revolutionary optimism and seeing where revolution worked, how the struggle evolved, and what we can build together. It took nearly a millenium for capitalism to dominate production, and yet look at how many victories have been won in such short time. Life expectancy in China alone is incredible and was wrought from, at minimum, a coherent anti-imperialist project that (partially) shields the people there from the cold sociopathy of global capital.

I also want to validate the frustrations you’ve shared about hegemonic capitalist psychology, of the power of propaganda so pervasive that it’s simply accepted as fact and common knowledge that is rarely investigated, but is still raised in contradiction to better-informed views. I don’t know if it makes you feel better, but this is something commies have recognized, highlighted, and battled against since at least Marx, and in the imperial core it’s certainly gotten worst as we have reached much more advanced stages of capitalism. On the other hand, revolutions still succeeded, revolutions that succeed occurred in countries where there was substantial liberal resistance and these same tired (and usually implicitly racist) capitalist arguments were everywhere, and we will accomplish the same through prolonged struggle, just as they did. Not that it will be easy or fast - just that the system itself breeds its own primary contradiction (a self-liberating working class) that can only be resolved resolved through revolution or fascism, and fascism will increasingly run out of frontiers to exploit.

Solidarity, comrade.

Be a nerd and read theory! It helps give pattern and language to our shared struggles and is an invaluable tool for recognizing and correcting our own internalized liberalism.

Nice! You can go at yout own pace, of course, and glad to see the lib-to-left pipeline is chugging along!

If you’re interested in recommendations, there are 3 that I recommend to folks, and in no particular order (really, whatever sounds best to you):

• Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. It does an efficient and readable deconstruction of the opposing forces of socialists and reactionaries, with a particular emphasis on a (more accurate) rundown of socialism in the 20th century. I end uo recommendinf this book to the largest number of people regardless of how left they are.

• State and Revolution by Lenin. While it is very much embedded in its time, it is still quite relevant and also surprisingly readable. Most folks are surprised to learn that Lenin talked about so many things still relevant (or at least with corrolaries) today. It’s also very useful for understanding where a lot of people around here are coming from, and can be particularly handy for understanding Trotskyists, which you will likely run into in any Western irl organizing context.

• Capital Volumes 1-3, Karl Marx (hey that’s me). This is… not incredibly approachable, but can be tackled by anyone given a little dedication. It is also a product of its time, an earlier stage of capitalism when it was still stamping out outright feudalism (Lenin was also in that context in Tsarist Russia), but it is a work that, if you really get on top of it, will give you something like superpowers when it comes to recogning features of capitalism and reaching reasonable conclusions about it - and what to do about it. It is also invaluable for understanding what Marxists are talking about. Also, a little secret: most self-proclaimed Marxists have never read these books and make mistakes about them in the regular. And even if they read Capital, they usually stop after Volume 1. Even big names, like David Harvey, tend to reveal substantial misunderstandinfs of the work. Unfortunately the best thing to do is still to slog through the original works. It does pay off, though, I promise. As a bonus, you can dunk on every lib that ever criticizes Marx, as they are wrong 99% of the time and you’ll have receipts.

In communist Beehaw, the unelected strong men admins censor political content, keeping their people from knowing what true freedom looks like. I once talked to a Beehaw user and they told me that the people in Beehaw don’t even know how to read news articles, they just believe whatever is written in the title of a post from their ruler-sanctioned media sources. The people of Beehaw yearn for freedom, if only we could break through their authoritarian governance and brainwashing.

Uncritical support for liberals deleting theit accounts at the first quiver of cognitive dissonance.

Love to see the immediate certainty that Russia did it based on… UA saying so. Impressive media criticism. I’m sure Iraq’s WMDs will turn up any day now, too.

I sometimes think about euphemisms for things that operate to negate their true nature and make them palatable for populaces that need their consentanufactured.

“Defense” used to describe all military expenditures and structures, particularly for the United States, which has spent nearly all of its “defense” efforts on aggression and territorial domination thousands of miles from its borders. It is conspicuous in how diligently it is used by certain groups, particularly large corporate media orgs, think tanks, and bourgeois politicians. There is, at minimum, an unconscious recognition that (the “good guys’”) war must always be framed in the language of defense. For them to describe, for example, the wars on Iraq or Afghanistan as wars of aggresson, which they absolutely were even by liberal definitions, is almost unthinkable. No, the “bunker busters” used exclusively on foreign countries must be “defense”.

“Heritage” to describe a white supremacist pining for chattel slavery in the South. Goes hand in hand with, “the peculiar institution” and “states’ rights”.

The (very deep, usually unconscious nowadays) allusions to vast “natural” spaces that were actually occupied by indigenous people for millennia. Indigenous people that faced a genocide by the same institutions that designate the spaces as official wilderness for its own members. Spinning a deep fiction around the meaning and history of these spaces.

A lot of language is like this. Whitewashed to avoid the horror of what they really mean.

It also “made sense” to most Americans that Iraq had WMDs. Colin Powell even said so, and he was greatly respected despite his participation in covering up the My Lai Massacre.

Accusations of whataboutism are a thought-terminating cliché that, ironically, usually just help the accuser avoid engaging with a critical argument.

The relevance here is that using “it sounds right to me” to decide whether a media narrative is true will lead a person to make big mistakes. And I am criticizing the general lack of media criticism in this thread.

A thought experiment: how do you think the US would react if China couped Mexico and supported a prolonged civil war near its border with Texas?

The reality and history is even starker in Ukraine, where fueling the civil war meant ethnic cleansing of ethnic Russians by funding fascists and those adjascent to them. Also, it should be mentioned, significant fossil fuel resources were recently discovered in the area.

Consider how the US has responded to much less proximal and extreme situations and still gets rationalized as the leader of the democratic “free world”.

A final thought: sure, Russia is imperialist, as in how Lenin approached the term, but the difference in degree compared to US-centered global capital makes it have a qualitatively different position. The driving factors here do not make this simply imperialist vs. imperialist. A better (simplistic) phrasing would be imperialist vs. regional capitalist that undermines a unipolar world order, with the latter in a much weaker and comparatively defensive position.

And as always, no war but the class war. The common people of Ukraine are the primary victims of this war and the people in peripheral countries forced into precarity by the sanctions are a close second.