As for the sentiment for USSR - of course it is strong inside brainwashed russia
If the citizens of Bad Country agree with my propaganda, that’s proof of how bad their country is.
If the citizens of Bad Country reject my propaganda, they’re brainwashed, which is proof of how bad their country is.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/strong-anna-louise/1959/tibet/index.htm
From an American journalist who are multiple trips to China during the middle of the 20th century. Was originally published as a book; bonus points if you can snag a copy of that.
Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 goes into a lot of fascinating detail about the colonial history of the U.S., particularly on the points of how settlers were attracted to the colonies, how the concept of whiteness was created to unite disparate European groups against natives and enslaved Africans, and how the settler-driven desire for more land created friction between the colonies and the metropole. Highly recommend.
Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism where the empire displaces or eradicates the natives in order to offer the natives’ land to settlers. This gives settlers a strong material incentive to migrate there (free land), as well as a common enemy to rally against (the natives).
Classic examples of settler colonies are the British American colonies (later the U.S.) and Israel. Contrast with a colonial project like British India. Nazi Germany undertook a settler colonial project in Eastern Europe (that was directly inspired by the U.S. treatment of natives) that was stopped before it could be completed.
Do you mean inheritance laws?
It will not take a long time before [neo]imperialism will stop seeing [Zionism] as a strategic asset
Seems like this will take a very long time. Israel is America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the region, and Biden himself once said if it didn’t exist, the U.S. would have to invent it.
In fact, with the proliferation of hypersonic missiles designed to kill aircraft carriers, the strategic importance of Israel has increased significantly.
Agitation and education are examples of praxis one can do without an organization. Ideally they should put people on the path to organizing, or directly be part of an organization effort, but even in isolation they at least sow the seeds for people to move in the right direction.
No political group is more overrepresented in media than libertarians.
When people flee a poor capitalist country, they are economic migrants, not refugees from capitalism. When people flee a poor communist country, they’re fleeing communism.
Would be interesting to filter out the U.S. (and maybe other imperial powers) from the “world” line.
A big part of the reason no one has used nukes in any of the post-WWII conflicts is sheer dumb luck since the 50s there’s been a real threat of out-of-control escalation, if not complete global annihilation. You think twice about nuking someone if it means you’ll get nuked back.
If Israel nukes Syria or Iran, who would retaliate in kind? It’s a fundamentally different scenario than the Cold War, or the India-Pakistan situation, etc.
We need more people to take us seriously, they get taken seriously by default.
A second technical issue has hit the Hexbear
Where these wars happened anyway, they either weren’t between states (but civil wars or insurgencies instead), they were so lopsided in numerical or technological terms that they were over before they really began (e.g. Desert Storm) or they happened in Africa where it’s easy not to notice them for the rest of the world. There were a few exceptions, e.g. Iran-Iraq, but they don’t really change the general picture.
Some terrible history right here. Writes off a ton of “total war”-style conflicts (presumably the post-WWII phase of the Chinese Civil War, plus the entire Korean War, plus the independence struggle of Vietnam from 1945-1975) because… if they’re civil wars or insurgencies (extremely fuzzy categories to begin with) they don’t count? Doesn’t address a few peer conflicts between India and Pakistan that thankfully stopped soon after they began. Doesn’t address the wars Vietnam fought against China and Cambodia in the late 70s/early 80s. Writes off another whole category of lopsided wars that are still incredibly destructive, especially when you look at the effects of long-term destabilization (Yugoslavia and Libya come to mind). Handwaves Africa for no good reason, and recognizes a glaring example of exactly what they’re talking about (Iran-Iraq) but ignores it as an exception (it’s really not!). Doesn’t even think of comparing the damage done by industrialized warfare to mass killings in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Latin America.
Blaming Kiev for breaking some non-existent taboo against total war is a stretch, too. There are many times Kiev could have defused the situation (from 2014 all the way to the aborted ceasefire agreement soon after the war began), but fighting a whole-ass army the only way one can fight a whole-ass army is a response you’d expect from basically any country in Ukraine’s situation (it was a prerequisite to getting a deal as good as they had right after the start of the war, too).
I was surprised (somehow I am also surprised I can still be surprised at maoists) that many of them upheld the GPCR but didn’t really know much about it. How can you claim to support something you haven’t investigated yourself?
Huh, wonder if Mao himself ever said anything about speaking on subjects one has not investigated.
they have violence fantasies and being communists allows them to live these out
A huge problem to guard against. Frothing at the mouth about revenge fantasies is purely an aesthetic choice, and not a good one. Righteous anger is understandable, as are occasional jokes, but too many people go well beyond that. And they’ll double and triple down when you try to have a more sober discussion about the role of violence in society.
You compare a country to what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.
Michael Parenti, On the Cuban Revolution
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… 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 Reds
There is a much broader mass of people out there who are not liberal, most of them are just apolitical or only very superficially political in one direction or the other
Reaching out to these people is good, too, but I’m not sold that they’re easier/more worthwhile to bring around than more committed libs (let’s define that as regular Democratic Party voters):
Some people complained about hexbear and i thought let me check out what they’re complaining about. I went through a few posts and i was honestly thunderstruck. Here are people that feel exactly the way i feel and can actually explain to me why I’m feeling that way and exactly what’s wrong with everything around us.
Exactly my experience with the old Chapo Trap House subreddit
Yeah, look at your slop right-wing propaganda today.