FunkyStuff [he/him]

lol would you prefer for us to lie and say all the countries of the world are horrible, cynicism is the only consistent ideology, and we’re all doomed so nothing matters?

– General Hans Speidel, who participated in the invasions of Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, played a key role in German rearmament and integration into NATO, and in 1957 became Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe.

– Sturmführer Dr. Eberhard Taubert worked with Goebbels in the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda where he was responsible for designing the yellow badge for Jews. After the war, he eventually became an adviser to ex-Nazi Franz Josef Strauss, German Minister of Defence from 1956-62, and was assigned by Strauss to NATO’s “Psychological Warfare Department” which spewed anti-communist propaganda just as Goebbels’ ministry had during the war.

– Nazi Admiral and U-Boat commander Friedrich Guggenberger, whose U-boat sank 17 allied ships, later served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the NATO command Armed Forces North (AFNORTH) 1968-72.

– Johannes Steinhoff, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot, was made Chairman of the NATO Military Committee 1971-74, holding other NATO positions prior to that.

– Johann von Kielmansegg, General Staff officer to the High Command of the Wehrmacht, 1942-44, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe, 1967-68.

– Ernst Ferber, a major in the Wehrmacht, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe, 1973-75.

– Karl Schnell, First General Staff officer of the LXXVI Panzer Corps, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe, 1975-77.

– Franz Joseph Schulze, Chief of the Third Battery of the Flak Storm Regiment 241, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe, 1977-79.

– Ferdinand von Senger und Etterline, Lieutenant of the 24th Panzer Division of the German Sixth Army, was NATO’s Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe, 1979-83.

source: https://cpcml.ca/itn220328-tmld-art4/ (thank you communist party of canada…) (plagiarized this comment from @abc@hexbear.net)

You wanna elaborate on that, or are we supposed to feel convinced when you simply… restate the thing the meme is making fun of, but in an even more cliche sentence?

Do you think there’s people out there joining the PSL or some other communist party who are gonna hear this 7th grade tier criticism and change their minds, or do you say it just for your own comfort?

I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel.

Theodore Roosevelt

From https://archive.is/kHb7V

they WANT to be misinformed.

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

From a recent funny thread:

I usually don’t get bothered by people on the Internet, but holy fucking shit how I was absolutely going crazy over the fact that people unironically shill North Korea.

I’m Korean. We are under constant threat of shit balloons and missiles. They punish people and their family members for trying to leave the country. How can one possibly look at that and say, “Yep, that’s fine”?

Meanwhile the actual, very scary NK apologist rhetoric on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, and Hexbear: the DPRK is just another country and doesn’t deserve to be an outcast and pariah for doing things every country does, like have prisons, a military, and emigration controls.

In the DPRK, they put political dissidents in prison camps.

In the rest of the world, agitators and terrorists are put in prisons that aren’t camps.

You sealed him into the dang crystal and he’s gone now.

steering towards your dogmatic views

He didn’t do anything wrong, though? You’re the one that kept trying to hold China up against the standard of Utopia. You’re the one that called China a “regime” (a meaningless term). You’ve been repeatedly leaving these comments in this thread, acting like you’re gonna leave, but you continue to blather on with your liberal platitudes. If you could write just 1 or 2 substantial comments with good sources for every 5 “Bye!” that you write, maybe the conversation would have come to its natural conclusion by now.

unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.

Where I am, the problem is not that people are too “hypnotised” or propagandized to act. The problem is that every time we have tried to establish our sovereignty the US has violently suppressed us.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponce_massacre
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utuado_uprising
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Coalition_(Fred_Hampton) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Lords
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filiberto_Ojeda_Ríos

Most recently we had a massive protest movement that went absolutely nowhere because it wasn’t organized with anything resembling a coherent leadership; if the various previous attempts at organizing the people hadn’t been destroyed by the US or the colonial government, maybe it could’ve been productive.

Generally, our views on why revolutions haven’t been successful are a lot more nuanced than “people are just too brainwashed.” A lot of us believe that brainwashing itself is not real and it’s just a concept that serves to obscure the real sociological phenomena that prevent class consciousness and revolution.

SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren’t even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as “democratic.” If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that’s democracy.

Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don’t destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called “authoritarian regimes” and this is also true of liberal European countries.

there is an unelected leader, it’s a theocracy

Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.

there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…

Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?

Edit: just to pre-empt the obvious counterargument that in the US you can oppose the government without being arrested: yes, you can, as long as you aren’t speaking out in a dangerous way. The 6 Ferguson organizers who all died under mysterious circumstances should be evidence that if you do speak out in a way that the state deems unacceptable, they’ll just kill you. Hopefully you can see how in Iran, not everyone who ever says anything against their government is jailed (we even have Hexbear users from Iran that have posted things that are critical of their government). The thing that would get you jailed is if you destabilize the country with your speech. Every single state in the world will have you jailed for destabilizing it, the only difference is how hard to destabilize each state is.

Why insist that the US being authoritarian and exploitative of the global South is an unreasonable position? The way I see it, you’re just trying really hard to make this artificial separation between “authoritarian” countries that aren’t even defined in any coherent way, and democratic Western countries. What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?

In this comment you give the reason “it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world.” I’m not going to deny that.^[1] But that has nothing to do with “authoritarianism.” The US could be the wealthiest country in the world where 70% of the population lives much better lives than the vast majority of the rest of the world. That still wouldn’t make the US a country that isn’t authoritarian, so really when you attack countries like Iran or Turkey for being authoritarian but defend the US, you are using a double standard. If you’re authoritarian and rich, that’s fine, but authoritarian and poor is a cautionary tale?

Furthermore, in the case of Europe, you’re failing to appreciate the long arc here. You’re talking about the neo-fascist parties (I assume you mean parties like AfD and Orban’s party in Hungary) as if they were uniquely the problem. But we can all plainly observe that the liberal, so-called “democratic” European parties have no problem at all committing genocide. They have no problem at all beating up protesters who call for an end to military aid to Israel. The ease with which they arrived at this position, of using violence to shut down popular support for ending genocide, should make you question whether one really has to be “blinded by ideology” to say that authoritarianism is just as present in Western “democratic” countries as it is in the developing world. Are you really confident that as climate change gets worse and worse, European “democracies” aren’t going to go fascist and start putting climate refugees in concentration camps, instead of drowning them in the Mediterranean?

Usually the way Marxists analyze the difference between systems like Feudalism and Capitalism, the focus is on how production is carried out, and what kinds of property exist. Under capitalism, generally, industrial capitalists who own private factories transform money into commodities (capital and labor, where labor imparts its value on the capital) which are sold back for more money than the capitalist paid (the surplus coming from labor, which isn’t fully compensated). Feudalism is characterized because instead of the principal mode of production being industrial, it’s agrarian and relies on serfs working on their lord’s land for some period of time, then being allowed to work on their own lands.

The fact that the structure of who owns what kind of property is different is very important. In a lot of ways, this change in how production is carried out (what is called the material base) is more relevant in deciding the direction society is headed than how the government is organized (society’s superstructure). The superstructure is shaped by the social relations in the base, but it can only maintain the base.

My Civ VI games have those foos landing on Mars in the 19th century.

we can’t agree that there are fundamental differences between what is commonly intended as authoritarian government (let’s say Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, …) and the average western country.

Yeah there’s differences. In Western countries, a lot of wealthy white people can just chill while their governments enact tremendous violence against minorities to sustain their quality of life. In Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, and other peripheral or semiperipheral countries, the state has to deal with the contradictions head-on instead of exporting them elsewhere, so they have to be more repressive. That’s a real difference, but it makes me think that the Western countries are worse than the “authoritarian governments” you list.

In fact, the way you choose Trump’s US as the turning point that supposedly shows that authoritarianism just now appeared out of nowhere, shows how one-sided your view of history and politics is. Now the US turned authoritarian. Not when they were literally dousing Mexican immigrants in kerosene in 1916 or doing Jim Crow segregation that inspired the Nazis.

This is so funny lol, what exactly is authoritarianism, then? You’re just short circuiting because the most default liberal argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. You don’t have to run away from the conversation just because you have a different definition of authoritarianism. As much as we may have different definitions, we live in the same reality, we can discuss the same ground truths of what “authoritarianism” means to you and how we conceptualize those things in different ways.

The “not open to debate” part is what gets me. Dude, if you brought me something I hadn’t heard before, I’d have a much more charitable conversation. But as they’re talking right now it’s just an array of thought terminating cliches that I used to hear repeatedly on reddit and when talking with older family members.