Grrrr
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: April 10th, 2022
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You should study North Korean politics and political structures.
The standard you are using, which is that there should be constant changes in leadership, is an attempt to use your existing liberal democracy as the only possible model for liberatory politics.
Think about it. Is the ONLY way you would ever accept a political system when it has constant leadership churn? Ok, grant that. Then ask, what causes constant leadership churn?
The answers will be either constant fighting between major ideologically opposed factions OR constant disapproval by the people being governed.
Neither of those conditions are good healthy conditions.
Now instead imagine if there were no competing ideologies, the capitalists have been purged and domestically the entire population has a shares collective trauma from the massive bombing campaign by the psychopathic US.
What’s the behavior gonna be? Well, if any leader is capable of leading them out of the caves and to safety from napalm, kidnapping, fire bombing, and famine - that leader is either very lucky and when their luck runs out they will be ousted, or that leader is actually very effective, responsive to the needs of the people, and is capable of adapting to changing times. In that case, the people will have absolutely no desire to put another leader in place.
When that happens, especially in a culture that puts huge importance on multi-generational families, the children of that leader are likely going to be the best equipped to carry in the program. Not necessarily though. They would have to remain constantly engaged, constantly proving that they are capable.
What would that require? It would require a system where by existing leadership cabinets were capable of selecting and assigning those descendants to specific posts. And guess what… That’s exactly what DPRK has.
Your insistence that freedom is defined exclusively by multi-party systems that give “equal” voice to capitalist and working class interests is a form of chauvinism.
31·10 days agoThat not at all how it works. The point is that dropping bombs for the purposes of imperialism is different than dropping bombs for the purpose of anti-imperialism. The USA is the torch bearer of the globe spanning empire that they took over from Western Europe. That empire at its height dominated 80% of the world’s population and to this day that empire continues to cause more death and destruction than any other movement in the world. We are now in the fifth century of this empire’s existence.
The Russian Federation is not an empire and it is not imperialist. Just a few decades ago it’s entire system of government and economics was completely ended and rebuilt under the dominance of the empire (described above). The Russian Federation does not occupy any colonies or subjugated territories, as the US does (Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, etc). The Russian Federation is not the continuation of a settler colonial state like the US is. The Russian Federation does not have 600 military bases all over the world where it operates without legal oversight.
Russia has done lots of bad things. All worthy of criticism. But that criticism needs to be contextualized, because while those bad things are worth analyzing and discussing, they can in no way ever be used to justify the actions of the global spanning baby killing family starving genocidal eugenicist world destroying empire.
A lot of reading, listening, arguing with people I disagreed with, forcing myself to contend with discomfort, to reexamine by beliefs, trying to disprove what others were saying or writing, and lots and lots of time.
I was already a relatively well-read kid by the time I hit college, and I had some counter cultura approaches to political beliefs (like taking care of people being more important than raw profit), but I was fully invested in the American project and had a ton of unexamined racism, mysoginy, classism, and cultural appropriation that I just replicated without question.
I studied philosophy and my particular path through that degree forced me to develop not only the ability but the respect for the process of arguing something from multiple perspectives equally well (or aspiring to that as best we can). So by the end of college I was committed to taking up the best version of anything I disagreed with so I could understand it better but also to boost my ego so I could defeat it more soundly.
But “no go” zones always bothered me. For example, we studied the classic skeptics Descartes and Hume, but never responded to them once. We simply examined how their skepticism led to the impossibility of knowledge and then just never solved it. Worse, whenever someone used an argument that was sufficiently skeptical, it was met with “well that just leads to solipsism”. That bothers me as it’s not a refutation. What bothered me more was the position that if anyone used arguments from solipsism that we could just dismiss them as bad faith and ignore what they had to say.
That particular aspect of my path built this sort of vigiliance for these “no go” zones of thought and I saw them popping up all over the place. If a Republican said something, some people would immediately dismiss it without examining it at all, and the same would be true for different people if a Democrat said something. The same was true if a Chinese or Russian report made a claim. The same was true about satanists, communists, addicts, and many others.
These were far more numerous than people arguing strong skepticism. And the positions being discussed didn’t threaten all possible knowledge or the existence of reality, but they did threaten deeply held personal beliefs.
So, overtime, when I witnessed someone else saying “well, that’s pro-China so it can’t be trusted at all”, I slowly started to examine these things. And then I found myself saying the same thing - “oh you’re a communist, you can’t be trusted with anything you say”.
That’s when I realized I had some built-in problems. And it was about that time I started to question my long held beliefs that I wasn’t racist, that I wasn’t sexist, that I wasn’t mysoginst. And that was really hard. It took years of stop and start, years of resisting the evidence, years of not paying attention because it made me uncomfortable.
But eventually 2020 happened, I was forced to slow down, I had far fewer social connections reinforcing my behavior and beliefs, and the national discourse at the time gave me huge opportunities to “argue it from the other side” and examine what was really going on. And that was a hell of a ride. Anger, depression, rage, resentment, just everything came up but my commitment to earnest engagement with ideas and reality and facts and history forced me through the process.
There were distinct periods where (1) I believed the USA was the greatest country in the world and also I and most of the people I knew were not racist, mysoginst, and white supremacist, and then (2) the USA was the greatest country in the world with some problems and I can see how I have unconscious racism but I can fix that and I’m not mysoginst or white supremacist and most of the people I know are not either, and then (3) the USA is a pretty bad actor but at least it’s better than Russia, China, DPRK, Cuba, Iran, etc and racism is actually a system not a personal moral failing and while I can work against it I have been raised in this way and also wow ok I realize now that mysoginy is insidious and embedded in so many of my ways of relating to the world but I can work on that and then (4) oh wow the US is the evil empire and racism and mysoginy and white supremacy are actually these massive historical processes that I haven’t even begun to wrestle with and I actually can’t really say anything about them until I really dig in and am willing to be wrong in ways that makes me sick to my stomach…
And my process is still ongoing now, but, this is maybe a long winded story about how I escaped the matrix.
Have you ever seen a super cut on YouTube of 50 US news stations literally repeating the exact same line over and over and over again?
Do you really think you could propagandize a billion people with 55 distinct and recognized cultural groups speaking different languages after having nearly every single communication appartus totally destroyed in a civil war 75 years ago while England and the US, who have uninterrupted propaganda operations that go back centuries have been deploying their empire’s propaganda against China since the Opium Wars?
No. Absolutely not. You imagine that China has deep propaganda control over a billion lemmings because your propaganda system is so strong it’s convinced you of something so ridiculous.
You don’t even understand the social credit thing. You have no idea what it is, how much of it is real versus propaganda, and how it differs from the credit score system in the US.
Democracy: China is constantly evolving it’s democratic mechanisms, currently referred to as whole process democracy. In the West you can change the party but not the policies. In China you can change the policies but not the party.
Free Speech: defending the KKK with arguments for free speech is not the high minded position you think it is. Free speech includes fascism, cultism, chauvinism, and neoliberalism. Working against those things is a perennial obligation of any liberatory movement.
The US has done this pretty deliberately as part of their genocide of the indigenous peoples. China and India are in peer conversations as sovereigns and negotiating their differences as equals.
China doesn’t spend that much time on political dissidents in comparison to the US. The US has been chasing Assange and Snowden for decades now, they have Manning in prison probably for life, they had Peltier in prison until he was basically at deaths door. And they constantly renew and redouble their efforts to attack these dissidents. Meanwhile in China they spend way more effort on reducing the number of billionaires than they do reducing the number of political dissidents.
Democracy: China is constantly evolving it’s democratic mechanisms, currently referred to as whole process democracy. In the West you can change the party but not the policies. In China you can change the policies but not the party.
Incorrect Thought: yes defending the KKK with arguments for free speech is not the high minded position you think it is. Incorrect Thought includes fascism, cultism, chauvinism, and neoliberalism. Working against those things is a perennial obligation of any liberatory movement.
Taiwan: China does not see Taiwan as a threat at all. They see the US and UK as a threat and they see Taiwan as a vulnerability. Not the least of which because the US has openly published strategy documents detailing the Pacific Kill Chain which projects lethal nuclear force at China and it uses Taiwan as the key component of that kill chain.
Uyghurs: Uyghurs aren’t a threat, Uyghur terrorists trained by the US as part of their never ending program of training terrorists and radicalizing people - that’s the threat. Uyghurs in China who are not connected to the terrorist trainings are for the most part completely unaffected by China’s de-escalation program. And China’s de-escalation program has worked incredibly well when you look at the raw numbers of terrorist attacks Xinjiang over the last decade.
It’s generally not true. What is true is that every single person in a society organized to kill you through neglect is motivated to find some way to making a lot of money and escaping their plight. The way you do this in a capitalist society is you make some rich people much richer. So you try to come up with ways to make them richer.
Sometimes that means solving problems that the masses will pay you for, if only you could scale it (investors show up to scale it, take 70% of the value, you become a millionaire).
Sometimes that means solving a problem for industry that reduces their costs, if I only you could overcome the upfront costs (investors show up to build it, take 70% of the value, you become a millionaire).
However, what people who have never done this don’t realize is that the real problem being solved is the problem of making rich people more money. Literally anything that makes them richer will get there investment, regardless of it solves social problems or creates social problems. Inversely, if you solve social problems for the masses but it can’t make the rich richer, then your solution never gets any traction.
The selection criteria is fundamentally whether or not it makes the rich richer. That’s why in the US such a massive percentage of GDP is artificial markets - copyrighted art and media, digital rights management, digital locks on tractors and machinery, digital locks on printer ink and Keurig cups - or total wastes of time - billions in rebranding, billions in consulting to merge and then divest - or in terribly damaging social engineering - billions in pink taxes, boys vs girls branding, manipulating beauty standards, manipulating children, sugary cereals, endless plastic toys, chemical engineering to create food cravings and suppress satiety, etc.
So yes, competition creates a frenzy of activity, but the activity is poorly directed, often negative value, innovative and novel ways to harm people, and ultimately not geared towards anything useful.
Meanwhile, look at socialism and compare where it actually matters - the Soviets dominated space exploration compared to the West. During COVID, the US spent billions racing for a vaccine and Cuba developed one on the same timeline without the massive grift while under the most brutal and long-term collective punishment regime in the history of the world.
At the end of the day, purposeful, intentional, directed effort will always beat the mass chaos of random actors all frenzily trying to save themselves out of desperation.
This sounds like the DreamWorks remake of Boondock Saints
I never said the USSR didn’t do anything bad. They did tons that was bad, many things that communists today study from both the perspective of “this was wrong headed and should not be repeated” like wholesale banning religion and from the perspective of “the conditions at the time were so severe, this is the best they could come up and we need to learn so we can do better” like the relocation of Koreans.
But we don’t have to argue about that because what you have presented shows a lot of misunderstandings of history and political analysis that needs to be corrected before we can proceed on making judgements on any country or leader.
First off, falsifying documents is not imperialism. Banning political parties is not imperialism. Imperialism is a process value extraction by nations over nations that allows one nation to continuous acquire the value produced by another nation through structural force and use that value to maintain this exploitative structure.
Second off, “after the war” is a really critical important time period. For some reason, all the Russophobes seem to think that when the war is over then everyone should just pick up their jerseys and head home and leave the field to its own devices. War has never worked like that. The reason the USSR turned a free country into its satellite is because that free country no longer had a functioning military to defend itself and the region from further fascist/capitalist incursions. That includes lacking a counter-intelligence capacity.
And now we get to Nazis. There was absolutely a fascist movement in Czechoslovakia that lasted basically until the Nazis came in and occupied the country. And when they came in and occupied the country, they were the fascist movement in Czechoslovakia. At that point, Czechoslovakia ceased being a free country.
The Soviet liberation of Czechoslovakia has to contend with multiple threats. First, the Third Reich had purged the government and as much of society as possible of anyone with communist, trade unionist, and anti-fascist sentiments. Then they installed fascists in the administration of the country and elevated and armed pro-fascists throughout the country. This is the first problem. The Soviets couldn’t just liberate and leave because they would be leaving behind a fascist power structure that would never stop trying to find ways of destroying them.
The second problem is after the war. It was clear even before the war started that the Western powers would rather have fascism than communism. Multiple attempts by Stalin to get the Western powers to stop the spread of fascism failed because the West understood fascism as an extension of capitalism and communism as the antithesis of capitalism. By the time the war is ending, the West is making this abundantly clear with their show of force nuking Japan, their occupation of Korea, the creation of the Western European Union and ultimate NATO. NATO was staffed by hand picked Nazi officers, a clear signal to the Soviets that there was no chance for real peace. Then those Nazi officers in collaboration with Western leadership planned and executed Operation Gladio which set about to connect with all the pro-fascists groups across all of Europe in an effort to organize a non-state militia movement to continue the fight against the USSR that the Nazis had advanced.
Under these conditions, the USSR could not simply leave all of the countries it has liberated as it matched to Berlin. The countries were economically devastated, their administrations had been purged of anyone remotely friendly to the USSR and violently populated with Nazis, ultranationalists, and fascists, and every country had fascists in them that were now being organized and armed by the West to continue fighting the USSR. At this point, the only option the USSR has is to take on the task of rebuilding all of these nations at every level: social, economic, and political. Anything less than this would create the conditions for violent fascist uprisings and continued war and bloodshed.
So what is there to do but use the political tools available. The USSR is a union of socialist states, with political structures for how each member state could express its own culture and localized needs and development. Unfortunately, this had never been tried at such distances and the Soviet leadership needed to come up with a way of achieving the goals of peaceful codevelopment without having the Western-most states being formally SSRs. Their solution was to ensure these states were independent but that they were heavily managed by the USSR in the social, political, economic, and military domains to prevent the emergence of fascist militias and fascist movements - things that were not only possible but were literally being actively cultivated by the West.
Religion was not banned in Czechoslovakia nor was all of Western culture. The Catholic Church was particularly targeted by the Soviets for purging from their sphere of influence and with good reason, the Vatican was the core actor in helping Nazi leadership escape the Soviet sacking of Berlin. The Vatican was relocating Nazis all over the world and the US joined them through Operation Paperclip. As the Soviets, it would be obviously suicidal to allow the unfettered operation of the vestiges of the Holy Roman Empire who were actively supporting the Third Reich and deliberately relocation their ranks with obscured histories and names. Can you imagine anyone leaving that alone on the basis of “well it’s religion”?
As for C.S. Lewis, have you read his work? It’s all pretty out and out Christian Nationalism. I don’t blame the USSR for banning it. But all Western work was not banned. Plenty of French and Italian media was widely popular in the Soviet bloc. What you’re mainly referring to is the fact that much of Anglo media was banned. And again, for good reason. The UK was the largest must brutal empire on the face of the planet. They weaponized culture in ways no one has ever done before. But they were already being ecclipsed by the USA who continued that tradition and amplified it to it’s most extreme. The US was literally manipulating the art market via dark money under the direction of the CIA. Nothing is sacred to the anglosphere. They corrupted everything they touched for political purposes - religion, parenting, education, journalism, literature, music, art, theater, technology, language, politics at all levels, community organizing, etc.
The Soviets were very clear that they did not want war. But the Americans were very clear that they would do anything it took to create the conditions for more war. The Soviets were trying to build a never-before-seen society and they needed peacetime to rebuild after the devastation caused by the West. Meanwhile, the USA had been untouched by the war and was taken the post war period as a major opportunity to expand its empire. It launched a massive campaign in Korea that made Blitzkrieg look like a walk in the park. Korea, by the way, shares a border with Russia. Watching the US completely level half of an entire country after WW2 is over while the Soviets are dealing with millions dead and war-induced famine makes it very clear that the US has every intention of creating conditions for a war of devastation with the USSR.
Did the Soviet leadership do bad things? Absolutely. But were they just an evil imperialist regime that made up lies and punished people for sheer control? Absolutely not. Everything they did was based on the structure of conflict with the West and the realities of Western empire, including the thorough integration of fascism, faith, culture, economics, and politics.
Why is it your belief that Russia doesn’t care about the victims? Do you believe Russia is driven without any sense of humanity and empathy?
Besides, as far as we know, nation-states don’t have the mechanisms for emotions. It’s the people in the nation-states that have them. I assure you that many people in Russia have empathy for the victims of the neo-nazis in Ukraine.
No, Russia’s state actions are not primarily driven by empathy but not a single nation-state has ever met that standard, so why is that the lens you are using here?
The fact that the neo-nazi angle is useful in the legal and legitimacy spaces is sufficient for it to be a valid position.
Read Engels
Thanks for reposting. The commenter appears to be a member of the semi-conscious liberation army.