gonna be posting a bunch of quotes in this thread that I want to preserve. you are welcome to post critiques of a given pasta, just remember I don't 100% agree with all of these (only most) but consider them information worth saving. proposed edits will be considered
CONTENT WARNING: there's going to be mentions of imperial atrocities in here, including SA and torture.
Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.
—Ernest Hemingway
“whataboutism” means “you’re absolutely fucking 100% right and I am a big liberal baby who shidded his doodoo ass”
whataboutism 
True
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We cut them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
―Kahlil Gibran
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
This reads like the opener to a chapter of God Emperor of Dune.
“authoritarian” is the worst libertarian meme of all time. The important difference between governments is who they work for— all states are class dictatorships, either ownership class or working class. Putting them on an “authority” scale implies that all governments are somehow separate from the people, and in the same degree.
My great grandfather had the monopoly of eggs in all of China and my grandmother was super rich living in a mansion when the cultural revolution happened and communism took everything away.
Sipping on a gin and tonic as I castigate my son for wearing long pants before the age of twenty. He asks me when he can see his mother— who is also my cousin— again, and I remind him not to ask about her, because I don't know how to say that my uncle and I had her lobotomized and put in a hospital for crying too much. I send him back to boarding school for another six months as I head to my job as an executive for a large chemical company that my grandfather got me, overseeing South American mining operations. Upon hearing that a newly-elected government wants to levy a tax on our mining profits and institute an eight hour work day, I call up my old Skull and Bones chums who work for Zapata Oil and Air America, ask if there's anything they can do to help, and they promise they'll look into it. I will drink nine more gin and tonics throughout the day before switching to bourbon. Old Money Life.
“I don’t know why you’re complaining,” I say to my fellow scavenger as I pull a shabby jacket off a frozen corpse in the alley behind an abandoned Applebee’s, “the economy is doing great!”
Marxists do not claim people should just work for society because of some selfless feelings, Marx was personally annoyed with people who constantly said this and commented on it himself:
Communists do not oppose egoism...The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc...the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.
—Marx, The German Ideology
The reason Marx saw a post-capitalist society as having socialized production, where people work for society, is because they have to. But, I know what you're thinking, "that's authoritarian!" But you'd be misunderstanding, he did not believe people would work socially because the government would tell them to at gunpoint or that owning a private business would be against the law.
No, he thought they would work socially because any other sort of economic arrangement would simply not be possible. Even if you changed the laws to allow for starting a private business, you still could not start one, because it would just not be something feasible people could do.
Why? Because Marx observed that in all capitalist societies, private enterprises always grow in scale, and the proportion of small businesses to big is continually shrinking. The more this goes on, the smaller the proportion of businesses owners to workers in a society becomes, the more and more small businesses go bankrupt and people the business owners then become regular workers.
Why does this happen? Because the government outlawed private businesses? No, because as businesses grow in size, the smaller businesses that can't keep up eventually just can't compete and are less efficient and go bankrupt.
Not only this, but as businesses get bigger, the barrier of entry constantly rises. Can you start a small business in your basement to compete with Samsung? Of course not, you need hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to even begin to compete!
Again, it's not the government making it illegal to own a business. It's the physical conditions of everyday life making it simply impossible to own one no matter what the laws say.
It is a misunderstanding of Marxism to think that what Marx had in mind was just to make all private businesses illegal. Rather, the vision he had was to nationalize the "big industry" which has already grown so large that there is hardly much competition anymore anyways, and then to use it to try and speed up economic development, because this will make more of the small business sector grow into big businesses, and then eventually they too can be nationalized.
Hence, Marx argued for a gradual, "by degree" nationalization process, alongside encouraging rapid economic development, "the development of the productive forces." Not just making all private enterprise illegal.
People would work for this big industry because there would simply be no other industry to work for and it would not be physically possible for them to start a small business even if the laws allowed them to.
from https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/v5p1pe/forcing_people_to_work/ibjupi2/
the USA deployed backpack nuclear weapons in Europe for decades as part of a stay-behind operation in the style of Operation Gladio
The Littlest Boy | Foreign Policy
The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists managed to sneak his work past a censor that banishes the likes of Karl Marx and Malcolm X.
The less complicated reading is the correct one: it’s an anti-communist book that the establishment pushes, and the right adores and cites constantly, because it is effective anti-communist propaganda.
Let’s part from a very basic fact: The CIA loves Orwell.
Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down. [1]
The movie adaptation of Animal Farm was the UK’s first animated feature film, and it was entirely funded by the CIA. This fact was kept secret for 20 years, and only revealed in 1974, to no cultural impact. [2]
Orwell enthusiasts insist that he would be horrified by this turn of events, that he was trying to preserve a genuine and humane socialism from the clutches of “Stalinism”. They insist Orwell was against all empires, not just the one he lived in. However, his life and his work rather undermine this interpretation.
Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.
Westerners are the most propagandized people on the planet. While, yes, something like CCTV is clearly biased, people who watch CCTV can at least tell you it is biased and admit they are getting info from a particular point of view. Westerners have a tendency to not view their propaganda as biased at all, but merely as "facts" and "common sense". They don't even see the BBC, PBS, RFA, VOCMF, CNN, MSNBC, etc, as a particular point of view with its own agenda. They just gobble it up as the unbiased truth.
It's why there are so many subreddits, Discord servers, etc, which have a rule that bans "talking about politics", but then somehow this rule never seems to apply to western media propaganda. They will randomly start China bashing and if you disagree they will accuse you of talking about politics and ban you. Because to them, these absurd headlines about China are not a particular point of view pushed by their media for geopolitical reasons but is simply a "fact" with no political content.
It's why they will accept tons of media being filled with western propaganda, like movies and games that include modern military equipment often working directly with the US military to make them and being required to depict the US military positively and to allow the US military to edit and remove anything from the movie or game, they see this as not "political" but if a game removes something because of outcry from Chinese fans or there is some leftist message put in a game, they will decry it as "bringing politics into my video games!"
The word "propaganda" in and of itself has a bit of a foreign connotation in English, by that I mean that it's often associated with things from foreign countries and not from your own. People tend to see "propaganda" as "something foreign countries have" and not something they have to worry about.
No matter how hard you try, for the vast majority, you cannot even get them to consider the possibility that maybe a media organization created directly by the US government through an act of Congress with an explicitly stated purpose of pushing ideas to disparage countries like China might be an incredibly biased source and might have be inclined to push narratives to further a geopolitical agenda, and when his only citation is an "anonymous" source maybe you shouldn't take it too seriously.
This is pretty much impossible to even get them to consider. It's like they have some blocker in their brain that makes it nearly impossible for them to even entertain this idea in their head.
It's also why they call us things like "wumao" and "Russian bot", because since they believe their media is simply "fact", they legitimately believe it's not even possible to actually disagree with it. That means if you claim to disagree with it, in their mind, you must be lying. And why would you lie? Because you must be paid to do it!
It's even further the reason why they are so ready to support invasions, sanctioning, bombing, etc of other countries, because in their mind, since no one can truly disagree with western propaganda except those who are paid for it, they genuinely believe the people of these countries all themselves agree with western propaganda. They think while the Chinese government, for example, pushes one narrative, in reality, all the citizens of China secretly believe the western narrative and are begging for their white saviors to "liberate" them.
It's why they say "I support the people but not the government of China", because they genuinely think they are saviors of the Chinese people from their evil government and the Chinese people secretly want to be "liberated" by them. But I have seen this façade break down very quickly in the rare instances that they actually talk to a Chinese person, they don't agree with their beliefs, and then the yankee accuses the Chinese person of being a "brainwashed ultranationalist" simply for not hating their own country and its achievements.
from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/uwwvqn/interesting_i_wonder_what_that_source_is/i9usz08/
Liberal conception of "human rights" is just so stupid.
You have the "right" to own things, but you don't have the right to the means to actually own things, so in practice you might own nothing, but who cares? This piece of paper says it's your "right" to do so!
You have the "right" to free speech, but you don't have the right to an actual platform, i.e. the right for your speech to actually be heard. If the system doesn't like what you say, they can just kick you from all platforms. You have the "right" to shout as loud as you want as long as it's in a place no one can hear you, so you don't actually have the right for your speech to actually mean anything.
That's how all liberal "rights" are. They're in practice useless, because you have the right to something in principle, but don't have the right to actually use that right, you just have the right in some vague, ethereal, almost magical sense, disconnected from reality, and many indeed view it as magic, saying these "rights" are handed down by God almighty and not social constructions.
Because you can't actually use these "rights" in practice, then in the real world, they only serve as justification for restricting people's freedoms. Why does this corporate giant get to censor dissenters? Because they have the "right" to do what they want with their platform! Why do billionaires get the "right" to control hoards of wealth and other people's labor? Because they have the "right" to do so! Why does this landlord get to tell me how I should live when I'm the one taking care of the actual apartment and living here? Because they have the "right"!
It's a funny thing, because it is very reminiscent of divine right of kings. Since many people genuinely believe these rights come from God almighty, then suddenly, Jeff Bezos's rule becomes sanctioned by God almighty. It's not much different than saying, the king has the authority to control the nation's wealth and its people, because the "right" was given to them from on high!
I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-56, p. 372
Libs don't know any basic history. They claim Hitler "allied" with the USSR because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, ignoring that:
- Hitler openly declared his intention to invade the USSR in Mein Kampf and the Soviet archives show us Soviet leadership was well aware of this. It's absurd to suggest they ever had any sort of mutual trust that could be considered an "alliance" since the Soviets were convinced Germany was planning to invade them. Only a year after the pact which is supposedly an "alliance," the Soviet government declared the Wehrmacht as "the most dangerous threat to the Soviet Union." Soviet spies also repeatedly even reported on potential invasions, with Richard Sorge even reporting the exact date of the invasion. Western media likes to portray this 1939-1941 period as an "alliance" where the Hitler breaking the pact was a "sudden shock" to the Soviets, when in reality, the Soviets were paranoid of being invaded, they all were convinced they were going to be invaded, and historians universally agree they were trying to militarily prepare for an invasion.
- The Munich Agreement signed by western powers such as France and UK also agreed to partition Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler. Was this an alliance? No, it was appeasement. In hindsight, appeasement was the wrong decision, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20. The Holocaust did not begin until 1941, years after both these agreements, and you can't know if someone will break the agreement until they already broke it. In other words, knowing this was a bad decision required seeing into the future. If Hitler never carried out a Holocaust, and WW2 was completely avoided, then we wouldn't be looking back on history with things like Molotov-Ribbontrop pact and the Munich Agreement so poorly.
- Appeasement could have been avoided in its entirety if UK and France agreed to have a mutual defense treaty with the USSR to contain Germany. The USSR proposed this to the UK and France, but were ignored (source). If you are a weakened country from war, your powerful neighbor has openly stated they wish to invade you, and no one wants to form a military alliance with you, how do you possibly defend yourself? Through appeasement of course.
- Appeasement did at least delay WW2. The Soviets were very weak from WW1 and their civil war. They needed time to build up their industry, and this should not be understated. You can see a graph here of how fast they were industrializing. Given how close the war between Germany and the Soviets were, without delaying the war, the Soviets might have lost, meaning that this pact delaying the war is arguably one of the most humanitarian political decisions ever carried out, since it prevented the Holocaust from spreading to all of eastern Europe. To quote Stalin, "What did we gain by concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany? We secured our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing our forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack on our country despite the pact. This was a definite advantage for us and a disadvantage for fascist Germany."
- Some will say the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is worse than the Munich Agreement because the partition of Poland also included a joint invasion. But nothing in the agreement actually calls for an invasion. The Soviets could've not entered de facto Polish territory at all and still the agreement would not have been voided. It only called for "spheres of influence," meaning that both powers would not try to stretch any of their political influence beyond certain defined boundaries. So the Soviet entry into Polish de facto territory should be treated as a separate question to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact itself.
- Indeed, the Soviets did end up militarily entering de facto Polish territory in response to seeing the Germans invade Poland. But what you aren't told is that much of this territory either belonged to Soviet Russia or Ukraine prior, and that Poland took this territory after embarking on an imperialistic conquest, viewing themselves as the rightful inheritors of the Polish empire that existed some centuries prior, so they tried to expand their borders to take land that was the same as that empire.
- What cities did the Soviets invade? If you name them, you quickly find none of them are actually part of Poland today. They were only held by Poland for an incredibly brief period of time, after Poland's invasion of Ukraine and Russia, and prior to the Soviets taking the land back, not even 2 decades, about 18 years. The only exception is Bialystok and a few small towns around it, which did go beyond what the Poles originally took, but the Soviets restored this land pretty quickly after the Poles complained. The Soviets had no intent to "conquer" or "occupy" Poland, but just took their land back which rightfully belonged to them in the first place.
- Take Lviv for example. Lviv was controlled by Ukraine, and the declared capitol of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Poland invaded and the government retreated into exile, and then held this land for 18 years until Soviet Ukraine with the rest of the Soviet Union took it back. It seems to set a weird precedence to insist a country invading another to restore its empire from centuries ago is justified, but that one country using its military to take back land stolen not even a quarter of a lifetime ago is actually the evil one.
- Poland was settling large amounts of Poles into the territory it took and oppressing the Ukrainians there, rounding them up and putting them into concentration camps. Naturally, this made Poland take interest in Nazi ideology, and came under heavy influence of Nazi Germany. To quote Boris Shaposhnikov from the time, "Poland is already [drawn] into the orbit of the Fascist bloc while seeking to demonstrate supposed independence of its foreign policy."
- Soviet entry into Polish occupied territory also provided a pathway for Soviets to begin evacuating Jews from the Holocaust. To quote James Rosenberg, "of some 1,750,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping the Axis since the outbreak of hostilities, about 1,600,000 were evacuated by the Soviet Government from Eastern Poland and subsequently occupied Soviet territory and transported far into the Russian interior."
- While the Soviets eventually did cross into actually rightfully Polish land, this was only when Germany had already taken it over and attacked the USSR, and Germany was carrying out the Holocaust at this point. Meaning, the Soviets liberating Poland from the Nazis is a good thing, and they should be grateful for it, and owe a debt to the Soviet army.
- Even some western powers were in agreement that the Soviets were right in the expanding in order to contain Hitler. Churchill, for example, would even admit that the Soviet entry into the Baltics was a positive thing because it could help contain Hitler (source). So it's really a new-age historical revisionism to act like nobody knew Hitler had expansionist tendencies and that the Soviets were not in the right trying to contain it.
To summarize: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was one of the most humanitarian political decisions in human history. Soviets were trapped in a corner with no allies willing to help them and knowing German expansionism was coming, which would spread the Holocaust throughout all of Eureasia, and they made the hard decisions necessary to stop it, as well as liberating territory unrightfully occupied by Poland that rightfully belonged to several other republics, notably Ukraine. There are millions of people's lives we can point to who were directly saved by this, but potentially tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, who would've died if the Germans managed to defeat the Soviet Union.
It's content for poor people to tell poor people they are responsible for their own circumstances.
If communists are trying to tell the poor that the wealthy are responsible for their circumstances that can not go unopposed, they create propaganda sources that exist solely to provide the opposite narrative.
Like a true abuser, the capitalist makes the victim blame themselves in order to get them to reject help from those around them that want to help the abused.
Kelseyville, CA is named after Andrew Kelsey, who enslaved natives, starved them and worked them to death, and whipped natives who would not bring him their teenage daughters to be raped
https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/Bloody-Island-massacre-Pomo-history-Clear-Lake-15325476.php
[on a blind date] You listen to a lot of NPR? That's cool, I hear the tiny desk concert things are pretty good. What do I listen to? Well there's this thing called Cum Town and today I caught an extended segment where an adolescent Ben Shapiro gets his prepubescent testicles crushed inside the ass of child sex predator Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World and that's the backstory to why Ben Shapiro's voice is so shrill in the voiceovers for those Nissan car commercials. Wait, why are you leaving? I thought this was going well?
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.
—Georgian philosopher Ioseb dzе Jugashvili
Meanwhile, despite these attacks from the Left and despite his own considerable misgivings about Soviet Communism, Hemingway himself remained steadfast. It was the Russians, after all, not anyone else, who were killing German soldiers in significant numbers. It was partly that awareness that led him to appear in Pravda one more time— with a New Year's greeting published on page four of the 3 January 1943, issue. Under the heading "New Year's Greetings to the Soviet Union from Foreign Writers," Pravda's back page issues statements by Dreiser, Hemingway, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Thomas Mann. Hemingway's statement may be translated as follows:
In 1942 you saved the world from the forces of barbarity, offering resistance alone, almost without help.
At the end of the year our first efforts in Africa were launched. This is a symbol of a promise. Every able man in America will work and fight, together with the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, for our common cause— the complete obliteration of fascism from the world and the guarantee of freedom, peace, and justice for all people.
These three contributions to Soviet publications— in 1941, 1942, and 1943— suggest that if Hemingway said farewell to the Comintern in 1940, as Kenneth Lynn claims, it was a very long goodbye indeed.(7) In fact Hemingway stayed in contact with Communists he met in Spain still longer than that; his last letter to Rolfe was written in 1953, the year before Rolfe died. For too long, evaluations of Hemingway's politics have been dominated by the cold war ideologies of a number of his biographers. That has led to ignoring friendships Hemingway chose to maintain and even to ignorance about several of his political statements. It is time we assess his politics in the light of all his relevant actions. We need to ask what cultural forces led Hemingway to believe and act as he did and to consider both as potentially reasonable, not to assume that conformity to our beliefs would have been his only reasonable course.
He explains it well. It is so frustrating to argue with libs who make arguments so old that literally Marx himself responded to them. I get the impression that Marxists already won the debate back in the 19th century and the liberal tactic has just been to pretend the debate has never happened, to continue repeating centuries-old arguments over and over again as if they've never been responded to, and to discourage anyone from looking into Marxism or reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.
—zhenli真理 comments on Why we say Read Theory; From A Marxist-Leninist Perspective
Prison is when a man is behind bars and the things of life are outside. But there is another kind of prison, where the things are behind bars and the man is outside.
There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.
D-Day happened not because of some altruistic desire to liberate France but because the remaining capitalist states saw that Germany was neither salvageable nor willing to work with them, and something need to be done to stop the Soviets from liberating all of continental Europe and building a socialist bloc with abundant year round naval ports in the open Atlantic.
Prior to the war Nazi Germany was chomping at the bit to destroy the Soviet Union, and the Soviets wanted to take a wrecking ball to Germany, both for the sake of destroying the political epicenter of European fascism, and so they could keep pushing the revolution westward and take the entirety of the continent.
The Western alliance with Poland was an attempt at managing this rivalry, so that they could try to force this nearly inevitable conflict to happen on their terms, not Germany nor Russia’s. The West must have seen that if Germany won this fight and had their pick of whatever they wanted in Eastern Europe, France would end up with a monstrous neighbor that occupied the entire rest of the European mainland, and although Communism would have been uprooted from Russia, Germany could easily use its newly acquired land/resources/industrial capacity to double back and take on France. The goal of destroying the Soviets is achieved, but the Fascist bloc becomes the dominant faction of the imperial core and the anglo-Liberal forces are forced to either submit or try to hold out as just the UK and US against the rest of the world.
Now, if Russia were to win this impending Russo-German war, there was no way in hell Stalin slows his roll after beating Germany and stops at the French border— France and possibly Franco’s Spain would be next, and where does this leave the West? Unlike a German victory, the anglo-Liberal faction of the imperial core is all that’s left and they are stuck with the entire European mainland controlled by communists, an outcome they’ll do anything to avoid. With the shipyard of Germany and France and access to the open Atlantic, they can threaten anglo naval superiority and even plan an invasion of the British isles— and unlike Hitler, who represents just another faction of capitalism, Stalin and the communists are far less likely to give the remaining Western countries the option to accept subservience if they lay down their arms.
So the West find themselves in a position where if they do nothing in this coming Russo-German war, they are screwed either way, and although a Nazi victory is preferable, they figure that through geopolitical fuckery they can get involved and alter the tides. If they side with the communists, which god knows the Western governments broadly speaking do not want to do, they can at least manage the fall of Germany, and hopefully negotiate a post-war European order where the Soviets do not have access to the open Atlantic (i.e., ports that aren’t in an inland sea or the hard to navigate Arctic). D-Day was of course an attempt at taking back territory in France but more importantly it was the first step toward securing a foothold in Germany and making sure that there was a mobilised, battle-hardened force waiting to meet the Soviets so that a hard limit could be put on their Western advance. I don’t mean to say that no one wanted France back under a French government, or that there weren’t people in the anglo military commands and governments who were genuinely disgusted by the Nazis and the crimes committed continent-wide during their occupations, but to the cold, realistic, realpolitiking minds of the people at the top like Eisenhower, the primary goal was setting up the board for the next fight— the Anglosphere versus the Soviet Union.
US General George Patton was adamant that if he was allowed to, he could have taken American troops to Prague and secured Czechia for the West in the post-war order well in advance of the Red Army’s arrival. He was promptly informed by Eisenhower that he would be doing no such thing. The post-war order had already been negotiated behind the scenes, and through strategically supporting their mortal enemies against a foe that really wasn’t much different than themselves politically or economically, the intact West had made sure that they also held at least part of Central Europe, instead of either Germany or the Soviet Union controlling the entire continent. So D-Day wasn't purely an anti-communist action, but was also crucial to the Western grand strategy of making sure the Soviets didn’t just keep steaming onward, and setting the stage for the Cold War in terms more favorable to the West.
credit to @FLAMING_AUBURN_LOCKS@hexbear.net
itll be interesting to see who "hates the cops" when they get robbed and need someone to show up 7 hours later and shrug their shoulders
Richard Wolff made a great point when he said that capitalism has two college departments dedicated to teaching about it: One is called economics, whose purpose is to train people on how to cheerlead the system using purely hypothetical concepts. The other is called business school, and it exists because economics departments don't actually teach somebody how to administrate capitalist enterprise, so they have to educate different people on how to actually make the system function.
Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen’s hand at the pump. At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made on Keller’s life. Each yields its version of the same cliché. A McGraw-Hill educational film concludes: “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those who taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make us is to help another reach true potential.”
To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to learn from it. Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by history. The result is that we really don’t know much about her.
Over the past twenty years, I have asked hundreds of college students who Helen Keller was and what she did. All know that she was a blind and deaf girl. Most remember that she was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and learned to read and write and even to speak. Some can recall rather minute details of Keller’s early life: that she lived in Alabama, that she was unruly and without manners before Sullivan came along, and so forth. A few know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next, about the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant. A few students venture that Keller became a “public figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf of the blind or deaf. “She wrote, didn’t she?” or “she spoke”— conjectures without content. Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968. To ignore the 64 years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.
The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: “In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!”
Keller hung a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist Party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.
Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps. She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realize that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause. Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness. Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see. Keller’s research was not just book learning: “I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it.”
At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity—this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.”
Keller recalled having met this editor: “At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him.” She went on, “Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blindand deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”
Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis— a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!”'
from Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
"Left unity" is pointless. If you have a total of 5 leftists in your country, it doesn't matter if they all unify, they're still powerless. People seem to have this delusion that if only Marxists and anarchists stopped fighting, they could come together in countries like the US and take power, but in reality, this is more likely to be the result.
It's also completely backwards. No revolution has been carried out by only class conscious communists. Communists have to learn how to appeal to the masses, and the masses then have to support it. This is the problem, the highly class conscious communists will always be in small numbers, and will never have the numbers on their own, even if they all unify together.
Historically, the socialists and communists that come to power are rarely even the result of "unity", but it's always one specific section overtakes everyone else by storm. That's because some organization figures out a way to rally the masses, and once you get the masses on your side, all other organizations get in line or get destroyed.
The problem is not lack of left unity, but lack of any organizations that have figured out a way to rally the masses. Nobody has figured out how to overcome all the anti-communist brainwashing and to have a message that appeals. It's only been successful in colonized countries but not in the colonizer countries.
People who act like there's some simple solution that we're just all too stupid to see, like, "if we just all stopped fighting we'd win the revolution!" are not appreciating just how difficult the problem is. The reason communists have not succeeded in colonizer countries is not because they're all missing something "so simple", but because the problem is fucking hard, and they have a mountain to climb.
Revolutionary anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists should all be learning from effective conservative tactics, and particularly the loathsome but extremely effective Roger Stone— whose philosophy is "never defend. attack, attack, attack."
Some clown brings up the wildly discredited black book of communism "100 million dead under gommies" bring up the fact that British capitalism is responsible for 1.8 billion indian deaths alone so surely 100 million dead from every communist country in the 20th century is a million times better than 1 capitalist nation? If they change tack point out under the metrics of that defined "100 million dead" India achieves that every 20 years.
Another clown brings up Xinjiang (a recent topic) point out that the US has starved 27 million Yemenis in a completely manmade famine which is over double the population of Xinjiang so why don't they shut their fucking mouth and focus on a problem they can at least pressure their government about.
They bring up the falsified "slaves picking cotton in Xinjiang" (an obviously emotionally charged call to USians given US particular history) point out how come they have no problem with slave children farming chocolate in the Ivory Coast, the fact that Thai slaves are pumped full of amphetamines and tied to the prows of boats and pulled apart if they disobey orders, or how come they have no problem with the child slaves of the Congo mining coltan for their mobile phones and laptops?
Bring up the fact that only 2 years ago the US army was bombing the Uyghurs in the East Turkestan Islamic Movement which the US designated as terrorists up until this year.
You can adjust your honesty, disingenuous, vitriol and disgust at liberals and conservatives with depending on how dishonest and disingenuous they're being but leftists should understand that even the "well meaning liberals" that at least pretend to be based in reality are in fact disingenuous, disgusting gaslighting pieces of shit and you should have no moral qualm about being as disingenuous, flexible with reality or gaslighting in return.
In for a penny in for a pound.
These lib and conservative disgusting pieces of shit that now pretend to care about muslim lives in Xinjiang (definitely the human rights they care about and not the geopolitical rivalry opening up between West and China) remind them that they said nothing whilst the US sanctioned Iraq to the point half a million children died in Iraq and the US secretary of state went on TV to tell people "it was worth it" and that they have literally murdered millions of muslims since they began funding the head chopping jihadis in the 80s where Osama Bin Laden built up his networks in the Muhajadeen.
You don't owe these people anything and you should start viewing how you interact with them as a game for your entertainment.
credit to u/JoeysStainlessSteel
Neoliberalism is the right-wing reaction to the post-war Keynesian social democracy. It advocates that every problem is best solved by a laissez-faire market-based solution, and since computers, it’s been accelerated by the financialization of those markets, where products and services become traded assets like stocks, instead of, like, used.
This continues until universities are real estate companies that, by accident of birth, also have an unprofitable education business on the side that they’d rather shed if they could.
summary of the account maxwellhill:
one of the first moderators of default subreddits like r/worldnews, r/politics, r/technology
moderator of r/environment and made many environmental posts particularly focusing on the ocean, which ghislane maxwell also focused on that with her charity
interest in british politics, israeli politics, very neoliberal takes
said they were born in december (ghislaine maxwell's birthday is on christmas)
a redditor since 2006 and the first account to get 1 million karma (currently at nearly 15 million), one of the first members to buy reddit gold before it did anything
stopped posting after arrest, stopped posting for 3 days during the time of the holiday party with former reddit CEO, and stopped posting during the disappearance of madeleine mccann
typed like a boomer with constant ellipsis
posted a blog called "3 strong reasons why child porn must be re-legalized in the coming decade"
made thousands of posts on r/worldnews and r/politics but avoided posting about epstein
article from 2011: The Story of the Most Successful Man/Woman??? on Reddit
The amazing thing about the emails we've been trading back and forth is that Maxwellhill has revealed almost no personal details.
That's actually awesome. The magic of anonymized Internet identity is that Maxwellhill could be anyone. Your drinking buddy. Your business partner. Your math teacher. Your math student. Your cab driver or car salesman or senator.
mods!! mods! one of those obscene low follower count boys stole a lick from the delicious lolly that Father bought me!! ah! how dreadful!
When I moved out on my own I never bothered getting a cable subscription. It's been several years now. On my PC or my phone, I use ad blockers. On the TV we pass around account credentials for streaming services. I almost never even see advertisements any more (in media, anyway), aside from when Mike Duncan is hawking razor blades or mattresses at me for the first minute of his podcast.
On rare occasions my wife turns on a stream of CNN, John Oliver, the Super Bowl, the Olympics or whatever, or when I go to see family or somewhere in public where cable news is playing, I begin to feel physically ill. It is all just so fucking slimy and duplicitous. They literally cannot go a minute without reinforcing some sort of big lie about American exceptionalism, empire, or the innate benevolence of American institutions, the global free market, or their new favorite term, the American led "rules based international order."
It is, as Zizek would say, pure ideology. It is nothing but ideology. Doesn't matter if it is MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR, local broadcast TV. It is always like fucking astrology. It is always working backwards from the assumption that the United States is legitimate and justified in all circumstances to explaining how domestic and world events uphold that assumption. It is never an investigation into how or why crises take place, what the root causes are, or how they might be avoided or mitigated. It is never about holding powerful people accountable.
Then after 6 minutes of that slop, it is time to cut to the advertisements so you can learn about what new Tide Pod flavors just dropped, some new TV series about being Black in America which frames all problems of living in the inner cities on a bunch of yokels in the hills and prescribes unity as the solution, how the newest Ford pickup is bigger and stronger than all previous iterations but we care about the environment, or some patriotic spiel from Bruce Springsteen about how great America is, followed by a sales pitch for the new Jeep Wrangler, and then three or four ads about the newest prescription psyciacric drugs with animations of sad bumblebees turning into happy bumblebees while someone reads an entire page of disclaimer copy.
It is fucking bleak. It is worse than any picture they try to paint about the conditions of propaganda in our Official Enemies(TM) like China or DPRK. It is like a very bad methamphetamine-enhanced acid trip.
PPI has been around since 1989 and views itself as Bill Clinton's "idea mill" aka think tank. Why I call them a fossil fuel think tank is detailed here. They oppose climate action, defend fracking, and receive donations from Exxon Mobil.
it's safe to say that their upvotes are farmed, and their organic support is mostly bourgeois economists and political science majors and interns who hope to work for PPI or a similar think tank one day. It's basically a Neera Tanden farm.
The creator of r/neoliberal, Colin Mortimer, is the Director of the Center for New Liberalism at PPI, which seeks to "develop a salient identity around the center-left values that have increasingly come under fire in this age of populism."
Never be surprised when an r/neoliberal poster seems "out of touch" as that is likely part of their job description.
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.
—Woodrow Wilson in an unpublished paper of 1907, as quoted in The Rising American Empire (1960) by Richard Warner Van Alstyne, p. 201
In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest— that we take one of theirs now that they've got one of ours— who should we consider to take out in the context of America?
Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn't have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters— they're all fictional.
Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. People necessarily wield military and economic power.
—Mao Zedong, On Protracted War (May 1958), Selected Works, Vol. II, pp. 143-44.
Settlers always know what they are doing, of course; it was why they worked so hard to slaughter the buffalo: they wanted to kill indigeneity, not just individual indigenous people. A people who marked time and history by the buffalo could not survive in their collectivity without it. And so, as “Plenty Coups” of the Crow nation put it,
“When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”
His point was that without the buffalo—the object on and through which his people existed and made collective meaning—their history could not continue. Individuals could survive, as he had, but the people had (arguably) come to an end.
How has China maintained their revolution as opposed to the Soviet Union?
Fact is, taking a poor country and nearly fully centralizing the whole thing in a short period of time is incredibly disconnected from Marxian theory. You could argue it was necessary under Stalin to prepare for the war with Germany, but it inevitably meant that post-Stalin there would need to be a period of de-centralization to bring the country back in line with the amount of centralization its level of productive forces could actually support, and then they could begin to centralize again gradually after the fact as Marxian theory actually predicts.
The problem, though, is that having to undergo a process of de-centralization is easy to be co-opted by corrupt actors who want to go all the way back to capitalism. The Soviet Union struggled with extreme levels of corruption and politicians used the de-centralization trend, which mostly started under Brezhnev although there was a little under Khrushchev, in order to push for full capitalist restoration so that they could suddenly become billionaire oligarchs overnight by privatizing state monopolies and selling them off to their brings for pennies.
One of the reasons this was so successful for the oligarchs is because Gorbachev had started to unravel the Soviet political system by adopting western liberal ideas and implementing them in the Soviet Union through his demokratizatsiya and glasnost, such as introducing competitive elections for president, which effectively separated the powers of the executive branch from the legislative, making the Supreme Soviet no longer a "working body" as described by Marx but a parliamentary body, and then led to the constitutional crisis between Yeltsin and the parliament resulting in the complete collapse of whatever was left of the dying DOTP.
Both the Soviet Union and China had to go through a transition period since both Stalin and Mao centralized the economy far more than what their level of industry could actually support. The difference, though, is that Deng realized this transition period could cause a return to capitalism, so he made an effort to centralize the political system and oppose any attempts to implement liberal ideas into the political superstructure, in order to keep the DOTP strong during this period. For example, Zhao Ziyang was removed from his position and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life because he expressed sympathy with liberal democratic ideas.
Deng introduced the "Four Cardinal Principles" to the country's constitution, requiring that the country always remains on the socialist path, upholds Marxism-Leninism, and upholds the leadership of the Communist Party, making all of these legally not up for debate as they are constitutional law. He also introduced the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to promote the study and education of Marxism (which also played a role in the development of that recent Marx anime). Included in the Four Cardinal Principles was also to uphold Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng also refused to remove Mao's portrait from Tiananmen Gate, because he viewed Khrushchev's "de-Stalinization" as introducing a sort of political nihilism into the country, i.e. making people feel ashamed for the socialist country's past, and thus giving ammunition to capitalist roaders.
Ultimately, the point is, both China and the USSR had to go through a period of transition that could easily lead to capitalist restoration if not done carefully, and doing it carefully required strengthening the DOTP, while the USSR instead weakened it and restored bourgeois elements into the political structure, causing the DOTP to collapse.
Clearly, though, the Soviets did not do this merely due to a bad theoretical understanding of Marxism. Gorbachev is not even a Marxist, he's openly anti-communist saying the only mistake he made was not outlawing the communist party sooner. How the hell does an anti-communist become general secretary of the communist party in the first place? Clearly the Soviet Union had a much bigger problem with corruption and deep problems in its political system.
Because Gorbachev was not a Marxist, not only did he dismantle the DOTP, but his economic reforms made little sense as well. From a Marxian perspective, yes, the Soviets needed to decentralize a bit, but only in underdeveloped sectors of the economy, what Deng Xiaoping called, "grasping the big, letting go of the small". Gorbachev just tried to introduce markets for markets' sake, a bit like how Sears when bankrupt after trying to introduce internal competition for no reason, leading to increased inefficiency and, well, under Gorbachev, a recession.
Ultimately, the difference between Deng and Gorbachev is that Deng was actually a Marxist who wanted to preserve socialism and the DOTP and made efforts to do so, as well as implemented his economic reforms based in Marxian political economy, while Gorbachev was not a Marxist, but because he was raised in a socialist country, he didn't even understand liberal ideas much at all, either, so he was just a know-nothing buffoon who blindly copied things from the west without any regards for his own country's conditions or how they might play out in practice.
The concept of "totalitarianism" was popularized by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 right at the start of the heated phase of the Cold War.
Inside it, you can see her contradict herself within the bounds of her own concepts, but the main issue is: it attempted to create a false parallel between what she calls "Stalinism" (supposedly the ideology of the Soviet Union at the time) and Nazism, as if they're two sides of the same coin. When, of course, they aren't. This is what we call "making up a concept, pointing to two things in the world, and saying those are the same."
The book also says that totalitarianism is novel in that it attempts to terrorise whole populations instead of only political adversaries, so as to whip the people into shape, when in material terms, we know that isn't what happened in the Soviet Union, and neither in Nazi Germany honestly.
Supposedly, totalitarian movements would attempt to control every single aspect of the life of their subject, and this would be why Hitler and Stalin were totalitarians and Mussolini isn't, because Mussolini would 'just be an autocrat' who wants to subjugate their political opposition.
Many people would mention that she forgets a spooky thing called slavery, that did the same thing. Capitalism could be argued to do it too, colonialism also, etc.
All that aside, a lot of people criticised her for just not understanding certain events correctly. For instance, she mentions that the Nazis weren't really interested in murdering all Jews; instead, those were simply a convenient proxy— a 2-minute hate, if you will— to whip up your population. Therefore it'd be comparable to any famine from the USSR, since intent would be similar, according to her. This fundamentally misunderstands the Nazi project in a futile attempt to draw a line between two different things for political purposes, and ignores historical documentation of intent like the Wannsee conference and Generalplan Ost.
Bottom line: Hannah Arendt created Cold War propaganda to try and equate the old enemy (Nazi Germany) with the new one that was finding itself in the Korean War (Soviet Union). Liberals gobbled this up because they're scared of big words like "authoritarianism", and therefore she had a ton of success. Her theories ignore the political violence of the state and of capitalism because, in her liberal mindset, these weren't actual violence, but instead just the way the world works. This flies in the face of everything the Third World ever tries to accomplish, because our revolutionary violence wouldn't be justified.
It's almost like a "big-tent" propaganda, you can take a million conclusions out of this, and it's been deeply influential.
As a final note, Hannah Arendt was extremely racist in defense of colonialism.
credit to u/Logan_Maddox
What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]
This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.
The Nazis were not socialists. Their entire goal was to latch onto a popular political movement and redefine it to fit their needs(as all fascists typically do).
They did not support worker ownership of the means of production and the right for workers to work for themselves. Hitler repealed legislation that nationalized industry in Germany, and oversaw the expansion of private industry. The first modern implementation of privatization on a grand scale took place under the supervision of the Nazis. The word "privatization" was coined to describe a central tenet of Nazi economic policy. The Nazis raided and imprisoned union leaders and broke up trade unions. They repealed worker rights.
Behold Hitler's own words:
"There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction - to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power - that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago."
—Hitler, explaining that he vehemently opposes the Left, and believes only Rightists like himself can make Germany great again.
"Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true socialism is not."
—Hitler, literally admitting his "socialism" is a whole new thing and has nothing to do with the usual definition of the word.
"The ideology that dominates us is in diametrical contradiction to that of Soviet Russia. National Socialism is a doctrine that has reference exclusively to the German people. Bolshevism lays stress on international mission. We National Socialists believe a man can, in the long run, be happy only among his own people."
—Hitler, trying so hard to explain that he isn't a socialist, that he opposes socialism, and that the term National Socialist is something he made up and only has meaning within the context of its own paradigm.
"We National Socialists see in private property a higher level of human economic development that according to the differences in performance controls the management of what has been accomplished enabling and guaranteeing the advantage of a higher standard of living for everyone. Bolshevism destroys not only private property but also private initiative and the readiness to shoulder responsibility."
—Hitler, spelling it out in very clear terms that he wholeheartedly supports private ownership of property, i.e. capitalism, and opposes worker ownership of property, which he calls "Bolshevism", i.e. real, actual socialism.
"What right do these people have to demand a share of property or even in administration?... The employer who accepts the responsibility for production also gives the workpeople their means of livelihood. Our greatest industrialists are not concerned with the acquisition of wealth or with good living, but, above all else, with responsibility and power. They have worked their way to the top by their own abilities, and this proof of their capacity – a capacity only displayed by a higher race – gives them the right to lead."
—Hitler, attacking the notion of worker ownership of property and licking capitalist boot.
in 2016 before the Xinjiang disinformation campaign, western media was praising France for their new program of sending muslims to "deradicalization centers": https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-to-open-first-of-12-deradicalization-centers-for-at-risk-youths/2016/09/14/d596d7fe-7a78-11e6-8064-c1ddc8a724bb_story.html [archive]
it was a big failure by the fall of 2017: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/france-jihad-deradicalization-macron/540699/
another article on it: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/france-fights-terror-with-re-education-camps-plan-7wg9vrrgd
According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.
—Stafford Beer
A place for preserving our history. 😤