Has more to do with playing it smart and not getting assassinated. Anyone too far left often gets offed before they can take power. Once they do, it’s hard for the CIA to overthrow them (see Venezuela)
No, everything has to be serious at all times and we cannot find any humor in the absurdity of hell world. The last time I smiled was on August 19th, 1991. I wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence.
Every day at exactly noon I have the same meal of an expired Maoist MRE I store in a pit covered in old issues of a revolutionary newspaper. I sleep in a bed made of flags from every failed revolution so that they are never forgotten. In the evenings I stare at a picture of vodka by candlelight, but I do not allow myself to drink because there is nothing to celebrate. Every local org has banned me after I attempted to split it by assassinating the leadership.
There is no plumbing in my house I shit in a brass bucket with a picture of Gonzalo and Deng french kissing in the bottom of it. My house is actually an overturned T34 in an abandoned junkyard in Wisconsin.
I have a single friend in this world and it is a tapeworm named Bordiga that I met after ingesting spoiled borscht on 9/11 in the ruins of building 7 (I blew it up after finding that a nominally leftist NGO inside of it wasn’t sufficiently anti-imperialist, the attacks on the world trade center were a perfect revolutionary moment for me to enact direct praxis against liberalism). My sole source of income is various MLM schemes in the former soviet bloc that have been running for so long no one remembers who I am, they just keep sending money.
I have not paid taxes since McGovern lost the Democratic nomination for president and my faith in electoralism died more brutally than my childhood dog after it got into an entire jar of tylenol.
I own 29 fully automatic rusted kalashnikovs and three crates of ammunition entirely incompatible with them or any other firearms I own. My double PHD in marxist economics and 18th century Swiss philosophy (required to understand Engels) sits over the fireplace of my home, my fireplace is a salvaged drum from a 1950s washing machine that was recalled for locking children inside of it. I chose that washing machine model on purpose because I am anti-natalist.
During the latest BLM protests I firebombed a Nikes outlet in the middle of a peaceful candlelit vigil. William F Buckley and I wrote hatemail to one another for 47 years until my final letter gave him an aneurysm. The only water I drink is from puddles. George Lucas and I dropped acid together during an MKULTRA southern baptist summer camp and he went on to write the movie Willow about our time together.
The best way to test whether an electrical wire is live is to drool on it and shrimp salad is racist. You can make an IED out of potassium and the instructions are online thanks to Timothy McVey, who was actually a committed antifascist communist slandered by the deep state as part of operation condor.
Every time a liberal files a restraining order against me, I carve a mark into the wall. I am running out of walls. When Amerika finally collapses I will be ready to lead the revolution. I am very smart and people like being around me.
A comparison between the governments of The GDR vs West Germany:
Otto Grotowohl became the first prime minister of the GDR and an active proponent of a long-lasting peace settlement in Europe. He was the former leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. He had been imprisoned by the Nazis several times.
Walter Ulbricht, became the first general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED - formed by a merger between the Communist and the Social Democratic Parties in the Soviet Zone in 1946). He was a former joiner, and spent his years of exile in the USSR.
Ulbricht was replaced by Erich Honecker, a former roofer, who became party and state leader after Ulbricht. Honecker had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 and spent the following 10 years in a Nazi prison.
Wilhelm Pieck became the first president of the GDR. He had spent the Nazi period and war years in exile in the USSR together with Walter Ulbricht.
Albert Norden, a member of the SED Central Committee, was the son of a Rabbi and had been arrested for political activities during the Weimar Republic, escaping before the Nazis could arrest him, was to spend his exile years in the USA.
Herman Axen, a member of the Central Committee, came from a Jewish family and survived internment in both Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Klaus Gysi, later Minister of Culture, also came from a Jewish family background and escaped the Nazis to spend his exile working with the resistance in France and Britain.
Markus Wolf, who became the GDR's head of counter espionage, came from a Jewish background. He was the son of the renowned playwright and medical doctor Friedrich Wolf . He was also in the Soviet Union during the Nazi period.
Rudolph Herrnstadt came from a Jewish family and spent the Nazi and war years in Soviet exile. He became the first chief editor of Neues Deutschland, the national daily newspaper of the SED.
Alexander Abusch, the first Minister of Culture, was born to a Jewish family in Cracow and spent the war years in French exile.
Hilde Benjamin, also from a Jewish background, became the GDR's first female minister and its second Minister of Justice. Under the Nazis she had been banned from practising law because of her Jewish background. She was the wife of Dr. Georg Benjamin (brother of the writer and cultural critic Walter Benjamin) who was murdered in Mauthausen concentration camp. She was instrumental in bringing in a whole raft of legislation favouring gender equality in the GDR.
In West Germany, Konrad Adenauer became the first post-war Chancellor. He was an arch-conservative, ardent Catholic and pre- war mayor of Cologne as well as President of the Prussian State Council. Before the war he had called for a coalition government with the Nazis, and although never a member of that party himself, he was certainly no anti-fascist.
His first post-war government was packed with other right-wing and Catholic figures as well as high-ranking former Nazis.
Hans Globke was Adenauer's personal advisor. He had been an active member of the Nazi party, and had served as chief legal advisor to the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, the section headed by Adolf Eichmann that was responsible for the administrative logistics of the Holocaust. It was he who co-wrote the official annotation explaining the implementation of the race laws which legalised the discrimination against the Jews.
West Germany's second Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the man credited with the country's post-war “economic miracle” and dubbed the “father of the social market economy” had previously occupied a leading position in the Nazi Reichsgruppe Industrie and the Institute for Industrial Research financed by the chemical conglomerate IG Farben that supplied Zyklon-B for the gas chambers.
Kurt Kiesinger, who followed Erhard as Chancellor in 1966, joined the Nazi Party in 1933, a few weeks after Hitler came to power. In 1940, he was employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' radio propaganda department, rising to become deputy head from 1943 to 1945 and was liaison officer with Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda.
Heinrich Lübke, who became President of the Federal Republic in 1959, was another controversial figure. His signature (which he disputed) was found on the building plans for a concentration camp. He was involved in the setting up of an aircraft factory in an underground chamber and, under his direction, barracks were built to house concentration camp inmates who worked as slave labourers. Lübke was also involved in setting up the army research station at Peenemunde (where the V2 rockets were developed under Werner von Braun) as building director of the Schlemp Group. From 1943-45 he was responsible for the employment of concentration camp inmates as slave labour.
Hans Seidel, Commander-in-Chief of the allied ground forces in Central Europe from 1957 to 1963, served in the Nazi army's French campaign of 1940 and became Chief of Staff of the military commander in France. In April 1944, Seidel was appointed Chief of Staff to Field Marshall Rommel.
Reinhard Gehlen, President of the BND, the West German secret service until 1968, had been chief of Hitler's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front. He had been officially released from American captivity in 1946 and flown back to Germany, where he began his intelligence work once again by setting up an organization of former nazi intelligence officers.
Only when Willi Brandt, who first became Mayor of West Berlin (1957-66), became German Chancellor (1969-74), was there a genuine anti-fascist at the helm of the Federal Republic. He had spent the exile years in Norway working as a journalist and hiding from the Nazis. For many years he was ostracised by establishment figures in West Germany as a 'traitor', just as Marlene Dietrich and others who left Germany during the Hitler years were. It was perhaps not surprising that it was only under Brandt's Chancellorship that a thaw in East-West relations began to take place with a tentative rapprochement between the GDR and FRG (West Germany).
Meanwhile the GDR purged the absolute fuck out of anyone attached to the nazi government.
For more info, read page from 10 on here:
In the 1950s more than 77% of all West German judges and justice ministry officials were "former" nazis, which is an even higher percentage than during the actual Third Reich itself:
During Adenauer’s tenure he:
1- knowingly appointed multitudes of "former" nazis into government positions such as ministers, ambassadors, judges, police, secretaries, etc.
2- banned all socialists / communists from public service
3- outlawed the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the Free German Youth organisation (FDJ), the Federation of Victims of Fascism (VVN) and the German-Soviet Friendship Society(DSFS)
4- passed a special amendment to the constitution (Ausfuhrungs-Gesetz zu Artikel 131 des Grundgesetzes) that gave all former nazis, apart from the few top culpable individuals, the right to return to their posts in the public service. This effectively ended West Germany’s pursuit of prosecuting Nazis.
5- remilitarized West Germany by having it join NATO.
6- opposed and prevented the reunification of Germany.
7- reinstated and continued the Nazi’s persecution of communists with arrests and imprisonment. By the mid-1960s, around 250,000 judicial investigations had been undertaken against suspected communists. Of these, around 10,000 were actually imprisoned.
8- extended this program to include socialists, those opposed to a remilitarisation of Germany, and members of organisations working to promote diplomatic ties with the GDR.
9- funded the Schnez-Truppe, an illegal clandestine paramilitary organisation formed by veterans of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. Growing it from 2,000 members initially to at least 40,000 at its peak
These are just some highlights, there is so much more.
Concrete examples of this + sources in the comments.
Congrats on the new job and welcome back!
China has plenty of its own social issues with queer / LGBTQ+ rights (eg gay marriage still being illegal) and is not always going to line up with our own cultural indicators either.
Understanding the context involved with a policy like this allows us to critique it more clearly than the very generalized take on it we’re seeing from most western press.
Given our media’s vested interest in attacking China from any angle they can, I think it’s healthy to not take these stories at face value when they’re first presented to us.
Our country is trying very hard to manufacture consent for this latest cold war and none of us are immune to propaganda.
Use this on your OC and let’s get the word out!
Updated version from @wtypstanaccount04.
at least dead people can’t do anything more to disappoint you.
(monkey paw curls)
!labour@hexbear.net is a union / labour organizing specific comm.
Any syndicalist comrades who want to work with me on this comm are also welcome. DM me and we’ll figure it out.
Hexers, what kind of content / resources do you want to see in c/labour? I'm thinking guides, news, pro-union art, propaganda, and memes.
Let's make one big comm for one big union.
It’s less wanting it to balkanize and more that I don’t believe the contradictions of the American empire will allow it to stay united once it reaches a breaking point sufficient for revolution.
Someone has to drive towards balkanization and also organize mutual aid groups to support those in need. I get that feeling of helplessness, but thankfully there is very real work to be done in the core.
I would simply not become a fascist like my grandfather