west west bad big bad very bad stalin good lenin good ignore starvation ignore deaths ignore everything just read state and revolution bro
1 month
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- freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
Well, let’s see. Western imperialism is an unbroken phenomenon of the last 600 years that, at its height, dominated 80% of the world’s population and today kills about 800k people in the developing world through trade sanctions alone. Since the fall of the USSR, the USA has made serious attacks on 14 countries, not including Venezuela and Cuba. Russia has attacked 3. China has attacked 0. China hasn’t dropped a bomb in conflict or fired upon an ocean vessel in almost 40 years.
So, sure. All imperialism is bad. But Western imperialism is the imperialism that needs to be resisted because it actually exists.
- neidu3@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 month
Tankies gonna tank. And those two instances constitute two thirds of the tankie triad.
“US bad, so every enemy of US must be good”
Basically it’s a lot of that, plus a bunch of authoritarian and contrarian bootlickers who think they’re leftists.
- 1 month
It seems to me like they take the wrong lesson from leftism, which is that the US is usually the bad guy in most situations and they represent oligarchy interests by default, then extrapolate that to other countries opposed to the US being the good guys by default. Nuance and taking the facts at face value for every situation is much harder to explain to others as an ideology.
They’ve also been infected with a cynicism that makes them open to grifts similar to the right. Our best fighters can’t be perfect, so they try and rip support off of them. Jimmy Dore, the Aussie green party, Jackson Hinkel, the Caleb sex pest dude, they all have criticism of everyone else while providing no real ideas of their own and how to get there. They’re just propped up as a distraction rather than a movement.
- freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
It’s the opposite. Most MLs in the West were raised to believe in the West inherent superiority and developed all the socialized habits of minimizing or excusing atrocities as errors in judgment or outright denying them as anti-West propaganda. We have spent many years dismantling this, and each step of the way we are faced with contradictions and nuance.
What eventually happens is that people need to find a worldview, a framework, a set of theories that can situate the facts as they discover them into a coherent picture. Marxism-Leninism is one such framework. Under that framework, we start to see that while nuance is critical and cannot be ignored, there are indeed overarching patterns that guide things and staying stuck in small scope details is insufficient.
For example, let’s take the nuance of the embargo on Cuba. First, I think everyone is now clear that the US is starving Cuba. This was not clear to many people until recently. Some still deny it. But it is also true that until recently the greatest amount of aid to Cuba was also provided by the US, particularly through Catholic Charities. We can stay mired in these nuances for a long time - did Cuba make bad decisions with their investment in their economy, why don’t other countries trade more with Cuba, how much does the US actually provide to Cuba, how much US wealth was appropriated by the revolution…
But the nuance, while real, is not important to communicating and articulating a position on what’s happening. The US is killing children, sick, and elderly all over Cuba through modern-day siege warfare and it needs to stop, it needed to stop 60 years ago, it was never justifiable, it was never reasonable.
We have to deal with nuance all the time, because we are constantly bombarded with specially crafted narratives that pull out all sorts of specifics that feed into the US State Dept narrative and we have to constantly research, analyze, situate, and integrate all sorts of phenomena into the world view. It’s exhausting just dealing with the constant stream of propaganda, but then on top of that we have the propaganda amplification done by true believers and by unexamined believers. We are constantly confronted with nuance and contradictions that are real or imaginary or exaggerated or understated and we process it. Becoming an ML in the West is a huge exercise in nuance. Nuance is how we get to the place where we are willing to be open-minded about potentially having our beliefs about the world changed. And then eventually some of us determine that we need a unifying theory and the MLism fits the bill. And then we turn around and try to communicate the overarching theory and conclusions and get told we don’t understand nuance.
- 1 month
Because social media is where nuance goes to die - and that applies to both MLs and us.
A lot of them overcorrect from falling for capitalist propaganda into falling for USSR propaganda
For example, about North Korea. Claims about it are probably exaggerated to some degree, but I sincerely doubt it’s secretly the success story at least one ML I had the displeasure of talking to seems to believe it to be.
The truth is nuanced. Nuance is hard. Blaming everything on the West is easy.
On the other hand, MLs themselves are also more nuanced than we often give them credit.
Unfortunately, like nuance, communication is also hard. Especially in hot-headed situations like this.
1 monthI think the defense of Stalin comes at the end of a particular path that can be very appealing to people for various reasons.
One potential driver of it is that ML/Stalinist groups are not too dissimilar from a secular religion; it has a group of people ready to welcome you as a friend and ally as long as you agree to a certain worldview and a very specific reading of history from approved texts that always pose historical Maxrist-Leninists as righteous figures who didn’t really do anything that bad, and if they did, it was for the greater good, and justified.
Those texts can even make a certain amount of sense if you’re disillusioned with the status quo, and distrust western media. It’s also likely extremely comforting to believe that while the western world is fucked up and exploitative, there are at the same time powerful allies elsewhere in the form of the AES states, which in their view are making steady progress towards the promised socialist utopia.
So ML groups can offer a feeling of belonging, friendship, a comforting worldview, and the belief that if we just follow the directions of long dead prophet-like historical figures (like Lenin or Stalin), then we will someday have heaven on earth. These are extremely appealing aspects to someone who may be very lonely, or who may have suffered a severe trauma and may not have their basic needs met (which may also be what leads to some people being attracted to the MAGA cult)
To someone well versed in history and a desire to find multiple viewpoints for a historical event to avoid propaganda bubbles, the true nature of ML/Stalinism and its authoritarianism becomes self-evident. But for those who never went down that path and are in a vulnerable state, a ‘scientific’ cult offering you hope, meaning, and companionship is very easy to fall into, and thus willingly self-delude themselves to attain in-group status.
Just like with normal religions/cults, once they are deep inside it, they are heavily encouraged by the in-group to suspect any outside information that challenges their narratives or isn’t approved by the group, and thus the cognitive dissonance they could create if looked at more objectively can mostly be avoided.
Also similar to religions; a ML member is strongly encouraged not to have doubts about the validity of the approved sources/texts/history. If doubts are voiced, the group will attempt to re-affirm the validity of the texts (keep the faith). But if that fails and the member continues to voice doubts, they are likely to be ejected from the group, which is very traumatic for most people, but especially so if there is no other support groups to lean on. This likely results in many keeping doubts to themselves, or convincing themselves those doubts are just CIA lies, similar to how Christians try to reject their own doubts with the concept of Satan spreading lies to tempt a Christian from their faith through logic or archeology.
- freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish1 month
a ML member is strongly encouraged not to have doubts about the validity of the approved sources/texts/history
Source: it is known
I’m an ML. I have NEVER been encouraged to not have doubts about the validity of texts and there is no such things a list of approved sources. The entire foundation of the philosophy is evidence-based systems analysis. The approach is so thorough it’s been used for a century in academic contexts for analyzing everything from economics and politics to art and literature. It’s not a dogma. It’s a theoretical framework of analysis.
If you did start to voice that maybe the CCP did unnecessarily massacre some people at Tienanmen Square, or that maybe Lenin and Trotsky really didn’t need to slaughter all the Kronstadt sailors, or that maybe Lenin did betray Makhno just to consolidate power, or that the Stalinists who killed the Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War might have been making up reasons to again take power…
Then you’ll be assured by any ML friends you have, that all those things are either CIA propaganda or justified, and if you don’t follow that line, and if you bring it up regularly to others as a reason to suggest maybe this stuff isn’t so scientific despite the name, instead of keeping that to yourself, you will eventually be regarded as a ‘shitlib’.
