Libs will never forgive Joey Steel for saving the world from fascism 
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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I sincerely don't understand how anyone can think they are helping the left by doing anticommunism. It doesn't stand up to any critical thought at all, it functions solely to move things rightwards and reinforce the status quo.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug, especially when you desperately want to believe that you're with the Good Guys
I come back to this over and over again. It's nationalism.
Once they take the position of being citizens of the world, they know longer see it in this baby-brained good vs bad shit, where the good is the US (they're all americans) or the general western empire. Once they're internationalists they stop this shit and they gain intellectual curiosity to learn.
There are a lot of anarcho-bidenist types (like @boredtortoise@lemm.ee ) who consider themselves to oppose all the evil states including their own, declaring that they cannot be chauvinists because they disavow the US, while uncritically parroting State Department views on its enemies. That doesn't matter to them because they are calling all entities involved "bad," while some nebulous people are what is "good," and these people must exist as a third camp to the feuds between the bad empires (don't think too hard about what constitutes an empire, btw).
Perhaps I am just free-associating, but I remember Engels talking about the Enlightenment (from the viewpoint of a liberal):
Engels is speaking in a somewhat different context, but you can see over and over a refusal to examine these "bad" entities more closely, to understand how they work and why they have survived except by the most generic gestures towards tyranny.
These ones are just liars.
It is again a rather religious behaviour. One that seems more like faith in a coming salvation rather than making salvation for themselves. Anyone actually trying to make salvation is to be rejected as not having the correct faith.
How do you know?
For this reason.
Ultimately they are either self-aware liars or oblivious to the nationalism that lies within them. One way or another this is nationalist behaviour. The internationalists don't have such blatantly obvious national loyalties.
The key to unlocking these people is breaking the religious faith, and breaking the national loyalty that they lack consciousness of. They have a false consciousness.
Fair enough. How would you say that one could break such a person's religious faith, as you put it?
If I had that answer we'd be well on the way to revolution. If we break this wall the sheer numbers that marxists gain as allies skyrocket, you've seen how it is.
I don't know about the religious faith part yet, but we don't do much at all to promote internationalism or break this nationalist mindset. I think it's a prerequisite to further advancing this crowd of people.
I know a fair few people like this. Some are "Freinds" that I dont discuss geopolitics with to avoid arguments. My experience with them is that its a pretty sincerely held belief. Not cynical at all.
Yeah I don't believe the descriptioned types either.
Yeah, good take on those kinds
Lol at the mention. Biden is a useless American right winger. Disawowing that and chauvinism is a long way to suddenly frame me into a bidenist 😉
I don't give a shit what you say about him when you repeat what he says about his enemies. You're the very definition of a useful idiot, the kind the state has made an effort to foster.
(The mention wasn't for you but so that people could see a recent example on this website of a certain type of
)
Hey I get it. It's hard to find a stereotype to someone who doesn't fit. Send an honest dm some day if a person is more valuable than that show. In the meantime, I'm not the subject of this
We have those who you speak of as well and they're not that tough to spot or to mistake me as one.
"I'm not like other leftcoms!" I don't care, you aren't special and I've heard your dogshit opinions a thousand times before from other ultras who also thought they were special. Your opinions on the enemies of the imperial core are still inherited from its mouthpieces. Disavowing the state while repeating its lies does not actually give you a pass.
Here's a fun game: What do you think about Xinjiang?
Now you're getting it! I'm not special. I'm just a nobody and I don't need anyone's imagination going wild about me.
Go on and comment on things on a random board. Let the people be.
It's ironic that all the monikers you are trying to slur me with are actually groups I've seen in the past want to exterminate the likes of me. You're registered on an instance which is described to oppose our oppressors so I've given you the benefit of the doubt for long.
I guess it's just human tribalism. Your imperialists and such despise the likes of me who are not. It's just a cognitive mistake. I don't hold it against anyone as humans have the capability of not following that urge if they want.
As I recall, it was you who went on a communist instance and after the slightest provocation on another topic, went and insisted on your imagining of subjects, people, and places of which you know nothing, refusing all reasoning and evidence to the contrary.
Thanks for admitting provoking. Consider also that anticommunists try to provoke the likes of me with ad hominems, pejoratives and baseless assumptions. I don't see that being a behavioral path someone else would want to take.
What a silly thing to say
Realizing that America, NATO, Europe, and all the other imperial states and settler colonial states and all their cronies and hatchetmen weren't just the badguys, but were staggeringly evil in a way that cannot be completely encompassed by one person in one lifetime was a gradual process that took me like 8 years, and even then I'm still a lib sometimes.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2021/10/15/cointelpro-fbi-anarchism-disrupt-left/
I have the same experience as you. I think the difference is Trump and the increased polarization that started about when Obama was first elected. Liberals and demsocs felt safer to challenge the status quo when the status quo was ostensibly already leaning “left”. But then Trump got elected, and in the face of the extreme unity within the Republican Party behind Trump, the Democrats also had to push for extreme unity. And what this meant was severe rejection of anything other than the party line.
Hence “scratch a liberal and and a fascist bleeds.” Only the slightest inconvenience reveals fake leftists. Turns out leftism isn’t just rounding up tips for food drives.
That’s a great point. The strength of leftist theory is seeing the commonality between disparate struggles. Not just because they are struggles in general, but because they are essentially capitalist struggles. I try not to be too reductionist — as a physics graduate I am all too used to physicists/STEMlords trying to interpret every field of study in terms of their own — but capitalism permeates nearly every aspect of our lives. It is nearly impossible to be a leftist without acknowledging the essentially capitalist character of our world and the problems in it. And when this happens, there is little to prevent someone with a big heart from missing the point. One can want to solve homelessness and hunger but be utterly misguided as to the causes and solutions. So as leftists interacting with baby leftists, the most important thing is to break that illusion which separates all of these things as independent spheres. Not least of which is the separation of politics and economics.
Those Democrat tankies and their democratic centralism smh.
It makes logical sense to me.
They still believe all of the atrocity propaganda. To them, socialism is this pure thing that deserves defending, but if they were required to defend socialist states, they would also have to disprove all of the stuff that they still believe.
So, in their minds, they are defending against tankies who just want to make the same "mistakes" as previous attempts at socialism. they are keeping socialism modern and adapting it to new circumstances with the power of hindsight. It's also easier to convert other people to socialism if you can convince them it won't be anything like those "evil authoritarian" socialist states.
In fact, if all the shit the state department said about socialist states was true, then I think it would probably be the right approach. But it's not, so it isn't.
You are right regarding some types of soicalists, but the Trots and other so-called Marxists who say "real Marxism has never been tried [or was immediately thwarted]" are the ones who have a completely incoherent position. "Yeah, I follow the principal of historical materialism, which means supporting an ideology that, in my own view, has 150 year history of uninterrupted failure and deceit."
But that's why it doesn't make sense. That's why it doesn't stand up to the most basic of critical thinking, any conversation with literally any marxist-leninist starts with acknowledging mistakes were made but refusing to completely disavow them, taking a measured approach to their successes and their errors.
They don't allow ANY critical thought on the topic, because they are wholly committed to their nationalist and anticommunist position. If they weren't nationalists they wouldn't feel committed to defending the propaganda of the US, and would be far more interested in a balanced and nuanced take on the socialist states, just as balanced takes on capitalist states are deserved. They are committed to emotionally reacting and sticking to their trained response of "no thought allowed" on these topics instead of pursuing a proper understanding.
And the "tankie" that they describe publicly as a person who wholly defends everything with a red flag is a cartoon caricature that does not exist. Simply a demon used to make people treat communists as heretics before they've said a word that might sway them. It's almost religious in a way, like the way that the church of the middle-ages used to keep "believers" from listening to anyone outside of the faith.
Tankie at this point just means anyone who has said anything even mildly positive about the USSR or China. I was called a tankie for saying that Gorbachev's shock doctrine dissolution of the Soviet Union was a disaster for the standard of living for the average person - soon as I said it I had people asking about the Hungarian Revolution, like that shit mattered in any way
Because they think it'll get people raised on cold war bullshit to go left.
Not saying everyone should immediately go into how Joe Steel was correct, but it's not convincing to say "yeah all those other socialist projects were either not socialist or stupid, but we will get it right this time" because it plays more into people smugly thinking free healthcare will result in banning blue jeans or whatever.
Meh. Americans are Americans, and it takes a hell of a lot of deprogramming to shake that off.
Deprogramming:
No, we can't just shoot 330 million people, as tempting as that is sometimes.
You clearly have not read the Black Book of Communism
No no you see we can't shoot 330 million people because Stalin shot them all and then Mao no food so there's no one left!