You wouldn’t be tankies if you knew any history, if you’d ever heard about holodomor 1984 animal farm tienanmen communism only works on paper. Yeah, sorry to present some new ideas and some novel knowledge to you like that. Bet you feel dumb now, huh?
Yeah sorry to burst your echo chamber like that, bet you’ve never heard “china bad” before, huh? I’m the smartest boy in the world and if you disagree with me then it’s because you don’t know what I know, because I know everything. I’m not in an echo chamber, now if you’ll excuse me I gotta go back to my subreddit where we call everyone CCP bots if they suggest we shouldn’t nuke Beijing, then I’m gonna go outside where I’m not at all surrounded by all sorts of mind viruses and tonight I’m gonna educate myself by rewatching John Olivers Last Week Tonight about Venezuela and then probably a little bit of Fair and Balanced CNN to stay informed. It’s so hard to avoid the tankie echochamber these days.edit: Forgot to add if anyone disagrees with me then it’s because they’re either an unthinking machine or a filthy devious foreigner. I am as far left as they come.
also have y’all hear about le authoritarian dictatorism? Bet you haven’t. Bet you haven’t heard about molotov-ribbentrop which is the only treaty anybody signed with the nazis
edit: Forgot to add if anyone disagrees with me then it’s because they’re either an unthinking machine or a filthy devious foreigner…
– or a bot. lol
I have heard about Chinese spies and Russian bots, what are these Chinese bots?
Smh you’re obviously one of them
BEGONE
NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE KENT STATE KENT STATE UNI CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY DAVID MISCAVIGE 佔領華爾街 MAY 4 1970 MASSACRE 肯特州立大学枪击事件 MAY 13 1985 MOVE BOMBING「MOVE」組織轰炸 RED SUMMER 1919 HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE 众议院非美活动调查委员会 TRAIL OF TEARS 美国本地人种族灭绝 JIM CROW SEGREGATION 吉姆·克勞法 HUMAN RIGHTS 人權 CITIZENS UNITED 联合公民诉联邦选举委员会案 SAFETY 安全 HIGH SPEED RAIL 人民共和国高速铁路 STRONG MASS LINE 群众路线 REPUBLIC OF HAWAII 夏威夷共和国 THIRTEEN COLONIES 十三殖民地 VIETNAM AFGHANISTAN IRAQ 伊拉克 EDWARD SNOWDEN 爱德华·斯诺登 SCIENTOLOGY 山達基教會 GUANTANAMO BAY DETENTION CAMP 关塔那摩湾拘押中心 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE 諾貝爾和平獎 BARACK OBAMA 贝拉克·奥巴马 COMMUNISM SOLIDARITY LABOUR ACTION ANTI-CAPITALIST PRO-REVOLUTION PROTEST MOVEMENT ANTIFA RIOT POLICE BRUTAILITY POLICE OCCUPATION PAID SUSPENSION LEFTIST COUNTER PROTEST CHARLES MANSON MANSON FAMILY JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES BORDER CONCENTRATION CAMPS MKULTRA ASSASINATE FRED HAMPTON JANE FONDA EUGENE DEBS MALCOLM X EAT THE RICH THE CRUMBLING OF AMERICA REAGANOMICS INFOWARS MANUFACTURING CONSENT FASCIST OLIGARCHY FBI HONEYPOT NSA SPYING ICE DEPORTATIONS WAR ON DRUGS PRISON SLAVERY CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE ENHANCED INTERROGATION MY LAI PRISONremoved DEPORTATION MS13 PIZZAGATE LOLIHENTAI PURCHASING KINDER EGG LOTTERY OPERATION SEA SPRAY PATRIOT ACT AMWAY 21 SAVAGE 奇多贝尼托 SCOTT WARREN NET NEUTRALITY LOVEINT EGLIN AIRFORCE BASE COINTELPRO OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD OPERATION EARNEST VOICE OPERATION AURORAGOLD 1999 BELGRADE EMBASSY BOMBING IRAN AIR FLIGHT 655 QASEM SOLEIMANI JEFFREY EPSTEIN MASS PEDOPHILIA ABROAD AND DOMESTIC OPERATION SNOW WHITE HARVEY WEINSTEIN OPERATION CONDOR AARON SWARTZ WACO SIEGE RUBY RIDGE SIEGE 1998 CAVALESE CABLE CAR DISASTER PROJECT ELDEST SON GUNS FOR ANTIGUA GARY WEBB FREE BURMA RANGERS STRONGHOLD RESCUE & RELIEF MCNAMARA’S MORONS PROJECT APPLE PROJECT MIRROR PROJECT WITCH GEORGE PELL ACQUITTAL FORT DETRICK KILLING OF HUEY LONG BLAIR MOUNTAIN ERIC HARROUN MIRACLE VALLEY JINGMING BUILDING INCIDENT YANGJU HIGHWAY INCIDENT 16754432 JAPANESE WARCRIMES OPERATION ASIAN TOUCH OPERATION FREEDOM DEAL CHILEAN COUP D’ETAT TULSA MASSACRE MERE removed RULE MORO CRATER CUBANA FLIGHT 455 OPIOID EPIDEMIC SACKLER FAMILY JADE HELM 15 NO GUN RI RYAN WHITAKER PROJECT SUNSHINE WECH BAGHTU DASANI FAKE WATER ICE CONCENTRATION CAMPS ICE HYSTERECTOMIES OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX OPERATION MONGOOSE JULIAN ASSANGE EMMETT TILL ANDRE VITCHEK NIKOLA MOTORS FORT HOOD MISSING SOLDIERS AGRICULTURAL ABCD AARON SWARTZ KENTUCKY POLICE HITLER RUSHAN ABBAS GITMO US MILITARY BUYS APP DATA ELAINE MASSACRE LITTLE HIROSHIMA LYSOL INJECTION US RACTOPAMINE MEAT PIKETON WASTE BONUS ARMY DANNY CHEN NORTH DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE PROTESTS 北达科他州接入管道抗议 FERGUSON PROTESTS 弗格森暴动 ST. LOUIS PROTESTS 2017 年圣路易斯抗议活动 NUCLEAR TESTING BIKINI ATOLL 比基尼环礁的核试验 UNITE THE RIGHT RALLY 团结右集会 CHARLOTTE PROTESTS 夏洛特暴动 ATTACK ON SUI-HO DAM 袭击穗河水坝 MILWAUKEE PROTESTS 密尔沃基骚乱 Shooting of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile 奥尔顿·斯特林和菲兰多·卡斯蒂利亚的射击 Occupation of the Malheur NationalWildlife Refuge Malheur国家野生动物保护区的占领 death of Freddie Gray 弗雷迪·格雷的死 Shooting of Michael Brown迈克尔·布朗的拍摄 death of Eric Garner, Oakland California 奥克兰奥克兰市埃里克·加纳（Eric Garner）逝世 Operation Condor 神鹰行动 Occupy WallStreet 占领华尔街 My Lai Massacre 我的大屠杀 St. Petersburg, Florida 佛罗里达州圣彼得堡 Kandahar Massacre 坎大哈屠杀 1992Washington Heights riots 1992年华盛顿高地暴动 No Gun Ri Massacre 无枪杀案 L.A. Rodney King riots 洛杉矶罗德尼·金暴动 1979 Greensboro Massacre 1979年格林斯伯勒大屠杀 Vietnam War 越南战争 Kent State shootings肯特州枪击案 Bombing of Tokyo 轰炸东京 San Francisco Police Department Park Station bombing 旧金山警察局公园站爆炸案 Assassination of MartinLuther King, Jr. 小马丁·路德·金遭暗杀。 Long Hot Summer of 1967 1967年炎热的夏天 Bagram 巴格拉姆 Selma to Montgomery marches 塞尔玛到蒙哥马利游行 Highway of Death 死亡之路 Ax Handle Saturday 星期六斧头 Battle of Evarts 埃瓦茨战役 Battle ofBlair Mountain 布莱尔山战役 McCarthyism 麦卡锡主义 Red Summer 红色夏天 Rock Springs massacre 岩泉大屠杀 Pottawatomie massacre 盆大屠杀 Jeju uprising 济州起义 Colfaxmassacre 科尔法克斯大屠杀 Reading Railroad massacre 阅读铁路大屠杀 Rock Springs massacre 岩泉大屠杀 Bay viewMassacre 湾景大屠杀 Lattimer massacre 拉蒂默大屠杀 Ludlow massacre 拉德洛屠杀 Everett massacre 埃弗里特屠杀Centralia Massacre 中部大屠杀 Ocoee massacre Ocoee大屠杀 Herrin Massacre 赫林大屠杀 Redwood Massacre红木大屠杀 Columbine Mine Massacre 哥伦拜恩矿难 Guantanamo Bay 关塔那摩湾 extraordinary rendition 非凡的演绎 Abu Ghraib torture and prison abuse 阿布格莱布的酷刑和监狱虐待 Henry Kissinger 亨利·基辛格 TIMBER SYCAMORE DANNY CHEN PROJECT ICEWORM CHINESE EXLCUSION ACT BIKINI ATOLL GUANO ACT LOVE CANAL JIM JONES PEOPLE’S TEMPEL PARENT’S CHOICE HEAVY METALS OPERATION BROTHER SAM 2021 TEXAS BLACKOUTNSA MASS SURVEILLANCE KENT STATE KENT STATE UNI CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY DAVID MISCAVIGE 佔領華爾街 MAY 4 1970 MASSACRE 肯特州立大学枪击事件 MAY 13 1985 MOVE BOMBING「MOVE」組織轰炸 RED SUMMER 1919 HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE 众议院非美活动调查委员会 TRAIL OF TEARS 美国本地人种族灭绝 JIM CROW SEGREGATION 吉姆·克勞法 HUMAN RIGHTS 人權 CITIZENS UNITED 联合公民诉联邦选举委员会案 SAFETY 安全 HIGH SPEED RAIL 人民共和国高速铁路 STRONG MASS LINE 群众路线 REPUBLIC OF HAWAII 夏威夷共和国 THIRTEEN COLONIES 十三殖民地 VIETNAM AFGHANISTAN IRAQ 伊拉克 EDWARD SNOWDEN 爱德华·斯诺登 SCIENTOLOGY 山達基教會 GUANTANAMO BAY DETENTION CAMP 关塔那摩湾拘押中心 NOBEL PEACE PRIZE 諾貝爾和平獎 BARACK OBAMA 贝拉克·奥巴马 COMMUNISM SOLIDARITY LABOUR ACTION ANTI-CAPITALIST PRO-REVOLUTION PROTEST MOVEMENT ANTIFA RIOT POLICE BRUTAILITY POLICE OCCUPATION PAID SUSPENSION LEFTIST COUNTER PROTEST CHARLES MANSON MANSON FAMILY JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES BORDER CONCENTRATION CAMPS MKULTRA ASSASINATE FRED HAMPTON JANE FONDA EUGENE DEBS MALCOLM X EAT THE RICH THE CRUMBLING OF AMERICA REAGANOMICS INFOWARS MANUFACTURING CONSENT FASCIST OLIGARCHY FBI HONEYPOT NSA SPYING ICE DEPORTATIONS WAR ON DRUGS PRISON SLAVERY CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE ENHANCED INTERROGATION MY LAI PRISONremoved DEPORTATION MS13 PIZZAGATE LOLIHENTAI PURCHASING KINDER EGG LOTTERY OPERATION SEA SPRAY PATRIOT ACT AMWAY 21 SAVAGE 奇多贝尼托 SCOTT WARREN NET NEUTRALITY LOVEINT EGLIN AIRFORCE BASE COINTELPRO OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD OPERATION EARNEST VOICE OPERATION AURORAGOLD 1999 BELGRADE EMBASSY BOMBING IRAN AIR FLIGHT 655 QASEM SOLEIMANI JEFFREY EPSTEIN MASS PEDOPHILIA ABROAD AND DOMESTIC OPERATION SNOW WHITE HARVEY WEINSTEIN OPERATION CONDOR AARON SWARTZ WACO SIEGE RUBY RIDGE SIEGE 1998 CAVALESE CABLE CAR DISASTER PROJECT ELDEST SON GUNS FOR ANTIGUA GARY WEBB FREE BURMA RANGERS STRONGHOLD RESCUE & RELIEF MCNAMARA’S MORONS PROJECT APPLE PROJECT MIRROR PROJECT WITCH GEORGE PELL ACQUITTAL FORT DETRICK KILLING OF HUEY LONG BLAIR MOUNTAIN ERIC HARROUN MIRACLE VALLEY JINGMING BUILDING INCIDENT YANGJU HIGHWAY INCIDENT 16754432 JAPANESE WARCRIMES OPERATION ASIAN TOUCH OPERATION FREEDOM DEAL CHILEAN COUP D’ETAT TULSA MASSACRE MERE removed RULE MORO CRATER CUBANA FLIGHT 455 OPIOID EPIDEMIC SACKLER FAMILY JADE HELM 15 NO GUN RI RYAN WHITAKER PROJECT SUNSHINE WECH BAGHTU DASANI FAKE WATER ICE CONCENTRATION CAMPS ICE HYSTERECTOMIES OPERATION MIDNIGHT CLIMAX OPERATION MONGOOSE JULIAN ASSANGE EMMETT TILL ANDRE VITCHEK NIKOLA MOTORS FORT HOOD MISSING SOLDIERS AGRICULTURAL ABCD AARON SWARTZ KENTUCKY POLICE HITLER RUSHAN ABBAS GITMO US MILITARY BUYS APP DATA ELAINE MASSACRE LITTLE HIROSHIMA LYSOL INJECTION US RACTOPAMINE MEAT PIKETON WASTE BONUS ARMY DANNY CHEN NORTH DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE PROTESTS 北达科他州接入管道抗议 FERGUSON PROTESTS 弗格森暴动 ST. LOUIS PROTESTS 2017 年圣路易斯抗议活动 NUCLEAR TESTING BIKINI ATOLL 比基尼环礁的核试验 UNITE THE RIGHT RALLY 团结右集会 CHARLOTTE PROTESTS 夏洛特暴动 ATTACK ON SUI-HO DAM 袭击穗河水坝 MILWAUKEE PROTESTS 密尔沃基骚乱 Shooting of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile 奥尔顿·斯特林和菲兰多·卡斯蒂利亚的射击 Occupation of the Malheur NationalWildlife Refuge Malheur国家野生动物保护区的占领 death of Freddie Gray 弗雷迪·格雷的死 Shooting of Michael Brown迈克尔·布朗的拍摄 death of Eric Garner, Oakland California 奥克兰奥克兰市埃里克·加纳（Eric Garner）逝世 Operation Condor 神鹰行动 Occupy WallStreet 占领华尔街 My Lai Massacre 我的大屠杀 St. Petersburg, Florida 佛罗里达州圣彼得堡 Kandahar Massacre 坎大哈屠杀 1992Washington Heights riots 1992年华盛顿高地暴动 No Gun Ri Massacre 无枪杀案 L.A. Rodney King riots 洛杉矶罗德尼·金暴动 1979 Greensboro Massacre 1979年格林斯伯勒大屠杀 Vietnam War 越南战争 Kent State shootings肯特州枪击案 Bombing of Tokyo 轰炸东京 San Francisco Police Department Park Station bombing 旧金山警察局公园站爆炸案 Assassination of MartinLuther King, Jr. 小马丁·路德·金遭暗杀。 Long Hot Summer of 1967 1967年炎热的夏天 Bagram 巴格拉姆 Selma to Montgomery marches 塞尔玛到蒙哥马利游行 Highway of Death 死亡之路 Ax Handle Saturday 星期六斧头 Battle of Evarts 埃瓦茨战役 Battle ofBlair Mountain 布莱尔山战役 McCarthyism 麦卡锡主义 Red Summer 红色夏天 Rock Springs massacre 岩泉大屠杀 Pottawatomie massacre 盆大屠杀 Jeju uprising 济州起义 Colfaxmassacre 科尔法克斯大屠杀 Reading Railroad massacre 阅读铁路大屠杀 Rock Springs massacre 岩泉大屠杀 Bay viewMassacre 湾景大屠杀 Lattimer massacre 拉蒂默大屠杀 Ludlow massacre 拉德洛屠杀 Everett massacre 埃弗里特屠杀Centralia Massacre 中部大屠杀 Ocoee massacre Ocoee大屠杀 Herrin Massacre 赫林大屠杀 Redwood Massacre红木大屠杀 Columbine Mine Massacre 哥伦拜恩矿难 Guantanamo Bay 关塔那摩湾 extraordinary rendition 非凡的演绎 Abu Ghraib torture and prison abuse 阿布格莱布的酷刑和监狱虐待 Henry Kissinger 亨利·基辛格 TIMBER SYCAMORE PROJECT ICEWORM CHINESE EXLCUSION ACT BIKINI ATOLL GUANO ACT LOVE CANAL JIM JONES PEOPLE’S TEMPEL PARENT’S CHOICE HEAVY METALS OPERATION BROTHER SAM 2021 TEXAS BLACKOUT
Am I supposed to understand something from this Great wall of text?
AHHH The firewall activation spell doesn’t work anymore! They’ve cracked the code!
/s no, I was just continuing the bit where liberals believe saying forbidden words makes chinese people get disappeared, but I used a variant of the copypasta where it’s all western atrocities
Great wall of text?
😂
My genocidal government is morally superior to your genocidal government because reasons
Liberalism’s last line of defense is “Trust me, everyone else is just as bad as us”
Tankies [1] don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism” [2], but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism [3], specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way — it’s not tankies but normies [4] who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, defeating the Nazis, raising life expectancy, ending illiteracy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), which scared the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state. These were greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist.” The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists.” This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). [5] We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different.” Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy.” And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism — tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD. [6] Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts — couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, North Korea, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.
- “Tankies” by Nia Frome
This was really helpful, thank you.
No problem! I find it to be the best and most concise explanation for the “tankie” perspective.
Claiming people unironically say Mao did nothing wrong is specially funny to me cause the official stance of the CPC is that he made a lot of mistakes
Yep, people rarely seek truth from facts and as a consequence seek to convert the ideas of their perceived enemies into irrational, self-contradicting falsehoods. It’s the easiest way to dismiss Marxism-Leninism.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don’t care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, North Korea, etc
This point is especially important. I’m in the middle of reading (and recording) Philip Agee - Inside the company, a CIA diary. He was a former CIA case officer who defected and escaped to Cuba. In Ecuador, he ran several of the 15+ operations the CIA was running in that country. These programs included everything from running US-friendly assets in the government, infiltrations of labor unions, control of religious institutions, control of youth orgs (especially catholic and conservative ones), journalists (especially getting them to put out anti-communist agitprop), leftist-org penetration agents, witting and unwitting police captains. They ran both ultra-conservative and social democratic / center-left media and political orgs.
These campaigns destabilized and divided the country, and the CIA was laughing while people on the streets were killing each other.
Their #1 goal: to get the Ecuadorian government to cut ties with Cuba and denounce communism, expel Cuban diplomats, and alienate them from Cuba and the USSR. If any org was even vaguely pro-Cuba, regardless of how left it was, the goal was to either take it over from the inside, or if that proved impossible, then make a new org friendly to US interests.
The US knows that the greatest threat to capitalist-imperialism and its overall power, is the threat of a good example, in the form of nations who reject its dominance. Anti-communism becomes the new witch-hunting campaign to unite all these disparate groups, to act on behalf of US interests.
Well said! That’s an interesting book, I’ll have to give it a look. The US knows its enemies very well, it isn’t irrational, it follows a concrete set of interests, the interests of profit and accumulation.
“Tankie” is often used by MAGA and their allies…
I can spend all day saying that that US capitalism is the biggest global threat to all forms of democracy but I squint my eyes at Putin once and (some!) people here will call me a star-spangled liberal. Frankly it’s frustrating.
I totally see why tankies are pissed off with some of the people who criticize you, because many of those people are indeed absolute idiots, just like most people on the internet. But if you throw everyone you disagree with into the liberal basket, you’ve taken the easy way out.
I give lip service about imperialism being bad but then support it anyway. It’s so frustrating when people compare me to others I agree with but don’t have the aesthetic I hope to project.
The biggest struggle Marxist-Leninists have right now is often getting people to understand imperialism as a material process and stage in capitalism, rather than a whim of this or that state. That’s often why many of us react rather sharply when someone uses a clearly less developed understanding of imperialism and mechanically applies it to Russia. Most people are on board with socialism. Most people at the moment are not on board with truly understanding that existing socialist states are heavily propagandized against, and this applies doubly to non-socialist states that align themselves against the imperialist powers out of a sense of self-preservation, which includes Russia and Iran.
But if you throw everyone you disagree with into the liberal basket, you’ve taken the easy way out.
Okay, but we’re not doing that. We’re not calling anarchists or other socialists liberals.
We are however calling social democrats liberals, because welfare capitalism is still capitalism.
That’s fair and I agree with you. I have made different experiences as well, unfortunately, but if I throw you in the same basket, I’m not exactly practicing what I preach lol
I think we should admit that there is some oversensitivity with regard to perceived liberal agendas and that sometimes this gives way to reductionist characterisation and dismissal of opposition in our communities.
I also do not think that admitting as such is anything tantamount to confirmation of the tankie critique by the liberals (see what I did there?), which is also arguably even worse on this exact issue.
but I squint my eyes at Putin once
I would be curious to know what exactly this entailed, because if past events are anything to go by it may have been a less than tactful approach.
When I think about all the problems in the world and the best possible use of my time the number one priority must be pushing back against tankies on small network of open source servers. The biggest threat to life on earth are leftists who don’t agree with what is obvious and right, the neutral and objectively correct US centric world view. Should I organize my workplace or go outside and enjoy life? No, I will sit at my computer and harass open source developers with all my free time so I can mitigate this clear and present danger to myself and others.
thank you for this comment! sometimes I feel alone with my thoughts, but right now I don’t.
But enough about rimu, AdmiralPatrick, TanteRegenbogen, PugJesus, and cm0002.
Jordanlund?
Also rest in piss PugJesus lol
This is great, lol
Also rest in piss PugJesus
what happened?
I can’t remember off the top of my head, I think he was just burnt out from constantly sharting out anti-left propaganda.
I remember he made a goodbye post somewhere and all the liberals were crying in the comments lol.
i wouldn’t be surprised if they retired/transferred from the cyberspace squadrons at elgin air force base.
link in cas you didn’t already know (and someone the only one that still works) https://www.kucoin.com/zh-hant/news/insight/BTC/6a3c92aa38c88c0007a5f159
and the reddit link if you’re willing to wade into the cesspool: https://www.reddit.com/r/AirForce/comments/13szb8f/introducing_my_lovely_sponsor_to_cannon_air_force/
What am I lookin at here?
someone discovered back in 2013 that the cyberspace task forces at elgin air force base uses reddit considerably higher rates that most municipalities despite being a fraction of their size – in other words the parts of the us military tasked with cyberspace warfare is actively using reddit at significantly higher rates than most cities.
the mashable link that broke this story originally is now gone, so i shared links to the reddit post itself as well as another source.
He’s gone? I blocked him and his comms months ago, not even because he’s an annoying liberal, more that it was low effort spam
I unblocked a community (Roman memes) to see if he was still posting : gone!
Did somebody who doesn’t like me die?
I think he’s still alive but taking a lemmy break. Hopefully he just fucked off back to reddit.
Excuse you OP, don’t you understand that I am NOT aligned with US imperialism.
Must I tap the sign for you all AGAIN
Or the Ukraine flag alongside Palestine flag
like, those two are explicitly incompatible
I used to be social darwinist before I was an ML. I’m glad I came out of adolescence.
I’ll take top left while also pointing quite a bit of blame on the USA for being generally shit for at least many decades.
isn’t it better to fully understand what you are talking about?
Ukraine is explicitly modeling itself after Israel. Zelensky publicly stated this intention.
Why?
Anti-war
damn quick trigger, i had JUST edited mine.
why would you say something so uncontroversial yet so
bravesafeI want to ask a personal question, direct and no sarcasm, if that’s OK. A question to you and to @Dessalines.
Do you rather support Russia or Ukraine? Do you rather support Palestine or Israel?
I stand with the Palestinians without reservation and against the state of Israel.
As for Russia & Ukraine, here’s an info dump.
Honest question from a non-communist, based on your reply here. Does one need to support Putin to be a Marxist?
In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.
Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.
- Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
- Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
- Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
- BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
- Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
- Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
- The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
- The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
- WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
- Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
- The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
- openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
- Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
- Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
- Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
- Internationalist 360°, 2022–2024: History of Fascism in Ukraine: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
- NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide
- Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
- WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
- openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
- NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide
- https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/40th-periodic-report-human-rights-situation-ukraine-treatment-prisoners
- https://www.npr.org/2023/01/31/1152743054/human-rights-watch-ukraine-landmines
- CNN coverage of Donbas in 2014 https://xcancel.com/paulius60/status/1611148483859255296
- https://mronline.org/2023/07/30/russia-donbass-and-the-reality-of-the-conflict-in-ukraine/
- https://www.kanekoa.news/p/osce-reports-reveal-ukraine-started
- HRW https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions
- Donbas documentary 2016 https://youtube.com/watch?v=bN68OfFKaWs
- Ukraine in Donbas https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2022/08/10/what-ive-seen-of-ukraines-war-crimes-against-civilians-in-the-donbass-over-the-years/
- Poroshenko saying the quiet part out loud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHWHqj8g7Bk
NATO expansion:
- George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
- Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
- Al Mayadeen, 2023: Zelensky admits he never intended to implement Minsk agreements
- Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
- Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine
NATO in general:- The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
- CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
- Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
- Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
- Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
Would you say that you’re wearing imperialist clothes then for the tactical benefit, like a soldier on a secret mission disguised as the enemy?
Everyone understands Russia is correct to invade because NATO can’t be a neighbor, and that NATO is correct to “take” Ukraine because it’s possible and useful in keeping Russia in check. The problem is that this is imperialist logic. The common sense that runs the world of zero sum capitalists. The “think of the shareholders” of geopolitics.
Imperialism isn’t just “when a country invades another country” it is an actual mode of capitalism wherein capital, in the need to extract as much wealth as possible, is driven to subjugate other nations. That’s not why Russia invaded and you’re not seeing those processes occur now - Or at least not on the russian side. Do you know who has signed extortionate deals with Ukraine to extract its natural resources for pennies on the dollar? That’s right, the west!
If you’re gonna use big words, learn what they mean. Here’s a good text
Thank you for the answer.
I wholeheartedly agree with you on the topic of Palestine and Israel, with strong support for the freedom and independence of Palestine and against the state of Israel.
I’m very thrown aback by your stance on the topic of Ukraine and Russia. In particular:
In a few more words, support for Russia … is only a partial, temporary, tactical one
To me, that is atrocious. It’s a bit like you see a bully beating another person to a pulp on the street, and you say you support this action as a partial, temporary, tactical support. Whichever great cause is set on a pedestal (such as supporting the bully in order for later to overthrow them, what could possibly go wrong), it is a crime to support it.
Right now, the best thing that can happen to Russia, I believe, is stopping the war. That is possible only if Russia as an aggressor country is stopped, and a peace treaty is forced on Russia, whether with Putin alive or not does not matter.
I have trouble processing this world view from an admin of lemmy.ml. I will need to take my time to process this information.
I don’t think it’s possible to look at the Russia-Ukraine war without considering the role of NATO. I care about ending this war which is devastating to working class people. I don’t think it’s a truthful analysis to say that Russia is just a big bully here who holds all the cards. If you look at Russia’s actions, most escalations on Russia’s side have been a reaction to actions from NATO. To think that more escalation from NATO will lead to a quicker end to the war is contrary to this historic pattern. Russia sees NATO as an existential threat, so it has a lot of motivation to keep fighting Ukraine to prevent NATO from spreading further to Russia’s border. NATO’s actions, to increase aggression towards Russia, only increase Russia’s motivation to keep fighting. If NATO were to pull back from Ukraine, make concessions to Russia that it will not expand further, and will allow Russia to trade and collaborate with European countries, then Russia has very little incentive to keep fighting Ukraine because they no longer see an existential threat. For Ukrainians it is devastating to be in the middle in this conflict, while not having any influence on the course of the war. But it’s a reality that I cannot change. All I can do is pressure my own government to work towards peace instead of continued aggression.
If you look at Russia’s actions, most escalations on Russia’s side have been a reaction to actions from NATO.
Is your argument reallly that Russia’s invasion is justified because Russia was provoked? So a good country that should be supported, totally has the right to invade another one if the other one is doing something not to your liking?
Russia sees NATO as an existential threat, so it has a lot of motivation
Who cares? I mean, it is a lie as the head of Russian state only really cares for money and power. But even if that would be true, that Russia would see NATO as an existential threat. Who cares? You should support Ukraine in its fight for existence and independence even if that pisses Russia. NATO or Ukraine have no obligation to please Russia.
On the contrary, Europe and other countries should take concrete actions to protect themselves. There is an obvious aggressor. If the aggressor sees your safety as their existential threat, and the aggressor is invading other countries, your only reasonable option is to be prepared to defend yourself and help others who are fighting for their existence and their independence. There’s no other choice unless your argument is “just give the aggressor what it wants, surely it’s gonna fix the problem”. And that in particular is very, very, very well studied to be wrong. An aggressor like that never stops given reduced resistance.
NATO expansion against Russia’s borders has been one of their red lines for over 40 years at this point. The West knew exactly how Russia would respond, and pushed Ukraine to join deliberately. This is a proxy war, and one the West appears to be tiring of; eventually they will lose interest altogether and Ukraine will be forced to surrender.
I’m not making any moral judgements. I care about ending the suffering that came from this war, and I think your analysis is based on wishful thinking and fantasy stories that you have been told about Ukraine and NATO. There’s too much for me to dissect to continue this conversation.
You seem to be completely oblivious to NATO expansionism:
And the atrocities NATO and the US has committed in Europe, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.
Your street bully analogy fails spectacularly at really understanding the conflict on a basic level. It treats a complex geopolitical struggle as a random act of individual malice, ignoring the historical trajectory and objective forces at play.
In 2014, the legitimately elected government of Ukraine was overthrown in a US-backed coup. The subsequent regime empowered nationalist elements as their virulent Russophobia made them a useful proxy for Western capital and NATO expansion.
This war is many things but it is categorically not an unprovoked assault on an innocent bystander. The new Kyiv government almost immediately launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the predominantly Russian-speaking population in the Donbass. The Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 expose this dynamic entirely. Kyiv repeatedly violated the terms, refusing to implement the political provisions regarding Donbass autonomy. Ceasefire violations were routine and the shelling of civilian infrastructure in the east continued for close to a decade.
This material reality forced the populations of Donetsk and Luhansk to organize their own defense. This led to the formation of the LPR and DPR, alongside Crimea moving to reunify with Russia. This civil conflict is the direct precursor to the current war.
Kyiv was deliberately cultivated as a geopolitical spearhead against Russia. To evaluate Russia’s response through the lens of abstract morality is to ignore objective conditions. Russia’s actions were a logical and foreseeable reaction to a hostile military infrastructure constructed on its border by a hegemonic power. You cannot isolate a single event from the chain of material cause and effect that produced it.
So you support Russia going to war on the territory of another country ~“because other countries did not leave it any choice” or so? The NATO that was mostly forgotten and dormant before Russian’s invasion and received a small fraction of its attention and funding now, that same NATO, just did not leave Russia any choice but to attack at all? And Russia absolutely could not avoid invading Ukraine, it just had to do it, in attempts to fix internal Ukranian problems, as perceived by Russia. Oh and the poor populations of Donetsk, legally and otherwise belonging to Ukraine, had to be invaded too and their lives are now improving?
What you’re saying is shameful. You’re not even giving Ukraine autonomy in your explanation of the “geopolitical struggle”. You’re saying “US” and “Russia”, but not “Ukranian people chose to _”.
I very specifically did not declare support or condemnation. Subjective moralizing is irrelevant to analyzing historical reality. Explaining the material causes of an event is not the same as endorsing it. My point was that Russia’s actions were a logical and foreseeable reaction to objective conditions, not that they operated with some metaphysical lack of choice.
Your claim that NATO was dormant or forgotten is historically illiterate. In the decade preceding this conflict, that same alliance bombed and destabilized multiple sovereign nations, including Libya and Afghanistan. It is not a defensive pact that suddenly woke up. It is an expanding military bloc.
Any state would perceive a foreign-backed coup and a hostile military buildup on its border as a direct threat. This is basic geopolitical reality, exactly as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Expecting a major power to passively accept its border being turned into a staging ground for a rival hegemon is naive.
You speak of Ukrainian self-determination while offering blatant apologetics for the eight-year shelling of the Donbas and the suppression of Crimea. True autonomy was discarded in 2014. The majority of the Ukrainian population did not choose the current path of perpetual war and subordination to Western interests. That is precisely why a forceful coup was required to install the current regime, sparking the civil war that escalated into the current conflict.
Analyzing how and why events happen requires looking at material reality, not retreating into abstract ravings about street bullies and metaphysical musts.
Wow, first day using analogies?
I’m actually most concerned about Germans still defending “Israel”'s actions in Gaza (of which at least a part was payed using their taxes). I don’t even know how to label it. Delusion? Stupidity? Hypocrisy? Whatever the correct term is, their way of coming clean with the genocide they commited in the past by supporting a genocide in the present is simply beyond me.
It seems the lesson they learned wasn’t “don’t do genocide” so much as “get someone else to do your dirty work to avoid being held accountable for genocide.”
Neoliberalism loves outsourcing what used to be government work
I don’t think they’ve learned any lesson at all tbh.
They learned that Jews were Aryans
If I’m not mistaken, some of the original reasoning behind targeting the Jews in particular is because the “Aryan” idealogues thought that the Jewish race was the only real competition.
Like they were jealous lol
I always figured it was a sort of stand-in for hating muslims, since Europe didn’t have a lot of muslims at that point (The whole anti-semitism what with most semites being muslim) but the ottomans are a big cultural memory
Well I’m sure they didn’t like muslims but hating Jews in Europe is literally as old as Judaism lol. I think they borrowed heavily from the Thule society and weirdo German conspiracy theories, as well as the “stabbed in the back” myth. Very interesting stuff if you don’t mind actively making yourself dumber lol.
It’s the same thing happening today with the focus shifted to Muslims, trans people, and immigrants in general. There always needs to be an out group.
The term you’re looking for is “USA occupation”
Certainly wasn’t on my geopolitical Bingo card
Aren’t tankies traditionally still generally authoritarian? You could oppose both.
Is there a more pavlovian duo than tankie and authoritarian?
In the mind of the heavily indoctrinated anti-communist those 2 words pop up like clockwork.What do you mean by “authoritarian?” Just having a state, or is there a specific metric?
Authoritarian is a completely useless descriptor made up by an anti-semite who believed the jews deserved the holocaust because they didn’t resist enough.
The work was quickly, if not from the beginning, picked up by the CIA and used as propganda.Any definition of authoritarian is either so broad as to describe any hierarchy or so specific you might just use the proper noun for whatever group you want to scaremonger about. There is no state that is not authoritarian and (pulling a number out of my ass here) 99% of all organisations are “authoritarian” as well. Every state uses the monopoly on violence to enforce itself.
You get different amounts of personal freedom though. Can you own a gun. Is it legal to carry bladed tools. Can you grow weed. Can you make your own rum.
If there is a better term to use I’m all for it.
Sure, but in the USA, we imprison more people per capita than the Soviet GULAG system did at its height. In the present day, only Cuba and El Salvador beat the USA in prison population, but only just barely and only in the last couple of years. China’s prison population is a tiny fraction of the US’s (again per capita).
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that the USA also has a large parole system and a probation system, and most other countries do not. The probation and parole systems are systems by which the criminal justice system (court, police officers, state actors) surveil, monitor, audit, and direct the lives of citizens. And there are twice as many people on parole/probation in the USA as there are in prison.
Do that math for a second. El Salvador is running torture prisons for the USA and we are deporting people there. And our criminal justice system is managing 300% more of our citizens than El Salvador is.
What definition of authoritarianism allows you to say “I can own a gun and smoke weed” while state authorities manage literally 1200% more people than China does?
It’s non-sensical to me.
First of all:
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible
- Stalin
Secondly: Arbitrary allowances isn’t what determines whether something is “authoritarian”. Everyone in China is guaranteed a home, yet I have an inkling suspicion you’d still call that place “authoritarian”.
Thirdly: I would encourage you to actually read Hannah Arendts work and engage in it with a critical mind.
“What is Authority” is about as obviously slimy as the rest of her work, and a decent place to go. I would encourage you to read Engels “On authority” as a pre- or postface. Engels’ text is quite short.
In an ideal world you would read Blackshirts & reds but I doubt that’s going to happen, so here’s a neat video
Honestly the video goes to the point of another reason why freaking out about “authoritarian” leftists is just the result of indoctrination as well.
That short text of Hannahs does a wonderful job of showcasing her lack of academic rigor, her lack of historical knowledge and her process of starting from a conclusion and working backwards from there. Or in the case of this text, starting from “oh shit gotta cover my ass” and going backwards from there.
It comes at a point where “authoritarianism” is a known concept and, rightfully, one a bunch of people are shitting on. So she has to scramble to explain herself, which is how she makes up a NEW concept: Totalitarianism. (I’m being reductive here, she isn’t introducing totalitarianism, but she’s trying to make a distincition because people shit on her.)You see, since authoritarianism is actually all states, that means she has to do work to explain how it’s actually okay to be authoritarian (never mind how she used this conecpt to explain how Hitler and Stalin were totally the same) and it’s TOTALITARIANISM that’s the real badguyism.
Authoritarianism is a pyramid and authority exists outside the pyramid, so authority isn’t real actually because it’s law or polis or the feeling of ancestors being cool, that’s where authority comes from. So that means when we use authority that’s okay because we are bound by the law or some shared sense of civic duty or whatever(which is some supernatural force and not just a social contract which the very same pyramid exists to enforce, let’s not talk about that), while the real bad guys they don’t have the law at all! (I mean they do, the bad guys have laws too, but it’s not at all the same because the bad guys make the laws, we just enforce them. The difference is whether it feels like they have no influence on the making of laws) you see totalitarianism is an onion, it’s just a guy making decisions however he feels like.Now how do we determine whether some country is authoritarian (like us, she agrees there, but authoritarianism is actually cool and good it’s just vibes about founding fathers and loving liberty) or totalitarian? Glad you asked! We have completely arbitrary definitions and absolutely no functional criteria! (By the way she pisses on others for making arbitrary terms grounded in nothing). And the things she comes up with she still has to admit suck shit.
Here’s a goodie:
All those who call modern dictatorships “authoritarian,” or mistake totalitarianism for an authoritarian structure, have implicitly equated violence with authority, and this includes those conservatives who explain the rise of dictatorships in our century by the need to find a surrogate for authority. The crux of the argument is always the same: everything is related to a functional context, and the use of violence is taken to demonstrate that no society can exist except in an authoritarian framework
Basically: We can have a state monopoly on violence and not be authoritarian and if you disagree then you’re a cuck.
Here’s another goodie:
Authority as the one, if not the decisive, factor in human communities did not always exist, though it can look back on a long history, and the experiences on which this concept is based are not necessarily present in all bodies politic. The word and the concept are roman in origin. Neither the Greek language nor the varied political experiences of Greek history shows any knowledge of authority and the kind of rule it implies. This is expressed most clearly in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, who, in quite different ways but from the same political experiences, tried to introduce something akin to authority into the public life of the Greek polis.
She argues antique GREECE had no concept of authority, the romans invented it and (later on she goes into how) Macciavelli rediscovered it. Three nations filled to the brim with slaves, yet somehow authority is a foreign concept. These things were handled “prepolitically”. You see, these people had to own slaves, so that means it’s not authoritarian. Yeah sure we just get to make up shit. Soviet gulags had a higher quality of life than the US prison system from 1952 onwards, yet one of those is authoritarian in her eyes, the other is just prepolitical.
By the way the “authority comes from ancestors” is something she brings up about romans.I take it back, don’t read Hannah, I forgot how fucking dogshit she is. Reading her to understand how much shit she sucks is just not worth it, let it be a massive gap in your education and instead just learn to understand why people are authoritarian - Even though the word, as Hannah here herself admits by omission - is completely pointless, since it describes all nations and almost all organisations.
She sets up no functional criteria, because if she did then she’d be fucked. What she does set up is metaphors that still fuck her, because in her view “authority” is some higher concept existing above the “pyramid” of ruling, yet when you have things that - in her view - is outside rulership and acting upon the pyramid of rulership, that’s actually not it at all.
The founding of america happened without violence by the way, and the colonization of the Americas that was just hunky dory.
THIS is the academic work which lies beneath the concept of authoritarianism. It’s nothing.
I would say the CIA is not sending their best, but she really was one of their best, which is bleak.
There is no other “better term” because the term is useless. It’s synonymous with “badguyism” it’s just a descriptor used for designated enemies, like calling a government a “regime” or a deputy a “hand picked successor”.
So china is less authoritarian than the US. I’d prefer the personal freedom to not starve, to be able to afford and maintain housing regardless of employment than I would to own a gun and become homeless and starve if I lose my job in the US.
All possible states are authoritarian, otherwise they couldn’t exist.
As I’ve grown older I’ve found people need to be told what to do because they’re mostly idiots
How much of that telling people what to do comes from racism though? Planning laws here which are often intentionally oppressive towards Romani and Irish travellers. Anyone who is interested in any kind of alternative lifestyle may also end up being targeted by it.
urban planning is a spook. Fuck urban planners (I used to be one)
le corbusier should have been drowned, revived, drowned again, revived again and so on in perpetuity. Piece of shit idiot asshole. Two centuries of urban planning and all we have to show for it is “Don’t do what those guys did, but you still gotta give the piggies their money and you still have to pretend this is apolitical even though the entire job is incredibly political” fucking dogshit branch of work, only people worse are architects. And lawyers. And cops. And politicians. And factory farmers. And prison guards. And soldiers. But otherw- and record executives. All executives really. Some academicians as well. But then it’s urban planners, fucking pigshit rubberstamping bureaucrats just existing to ram through whatever dogshit idea the local bourgeoisie has making things nice is impossible making shit is easy and if you make anything nice then you gotta fuck over at least two marginalised groups and we’re making a commission to figure out how we can fuck up the nice part
We do not need urban planning we did not have urban planners for centuries and it was fine. It’s technocratic bullshit that came around in the 1880’s, it’s dumb and it should be relegated to the dustbin of history.feel like shit, just want radical planning back
🤡
Devastating critique, I have no choice but to support nazi torture dungeons
It must take incredible bravery to agree with a country with over 700 military bases outside its borders.
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bold of you to assume I align with anyone
YOu’re so cool, such an awesome lone wolf chilling in the corner of the tavern fucking rad
Thank you!
Neither axis nor allies, neither washington nor moscow, neither g7 nor brics, neither israel nor palestine, etc. You’re staying very pure and uncontaminated by the major conflicts of our times.
Truly brave!
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everyone has their bias. the hard part is recognizing and owning whatever it is.
Facts
