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freagle

@ frisbird @lemmy.ml

Posts
3
Comments
686
Joined
3 mo. ago

  • Why do you think so many people on the Marxist left defend Stalinism?

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  • Stalin is indefensible. As are any of the other examples given

    I mean, this is clearly patently false. People defend all of these leaders literally all the time. The OP is asking how it's possible that people could like Stalin. I'm providing what is likely the single largest contributor to his political cache among the people who support him.

    You can say Churchill is indefensible until you're blue in the face, but people will still defend him. Same for Reagan, same for Truman. Just because you believe something doesn't mean other people believe it. Anarchists have no problem with understanding this concept when it comes to affinity groups, but y'all draw the line at people assigning moral valence to specific leadership actions? Y'all are weird.

  • Why do you think so many people on the Marxist left defend Stalinism?

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  • Talk about a purely emotional analysis. You have no idea how it's possible to go from winning to losing? Really? That's just something that's beyond you? I guess that's what the commitment to prefigurative idealism does to a mind.

  • Why do you think so many people on the Marxist left defend Stalinism?

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  • I love this talking point from anarchists and leftcoms because it lays bare their complete commitment to debate perversion and unwillingness to actually think.

    If Stalin didn't defeat the Nazis, then Hitler didn't kill Jews, Blacks, Queer folx, Roma, etc, didn't commit genocide, and didn't invade anyone. Bush didn't invade Iraq. bin Laden didn't attack the US. Truman didn't save 10k Nazis. Trump didn't bomb Iran.

    But even more so, it also means Stalin didn't starve anyone, Stalin didn't imprison anyone, and Stalin didn't relocate anyone.

    This is one of those things that just reveals you for who you are.

  • Why do you think so many people on the Marxist left defend Stalinism?

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  • Again, the question is how could anyone defend it. I think there are some very clear answers. One of those answers is that the paranoid violent and power abusing Stalin was paranoid violent and power abusing but still a) saved the world from the Nazis and b) died penniless with almost zero personal wealth.

    That already puts Stalin above Hitler, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Trump, Chamberlain, Churchill, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, Chiang Kai-Shek, Truman, Franco, Batista, Pinochet, and many many other world historical leaders who still have people who celebrate them.

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  • How do you enforce a lack of magical fairies?

    Again, private property is a socially constructed concept that has only ever existed because it was enforced by a centralized government. If you are a libertarian who seeks to eliminate centralized authority, especially violent centralized authority, the way you "enforce a lack' of private property is by not having private property laws, and by not believing in exceptions to the NAP on the basis of private property concepts.

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  • Private property is a legal and social construct. It's not a natural state of nature. It only exists if it's enforced by violence, which violates the NAP.

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  • OK. So let's start again. Private property is a fundamental problem. Your turn.

  • Why do you think so many people on the Marxist left defend Stalinism?

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  • Could it have anything to do with saving the entire world from the Third Reich by being the leader of the only military that actually stood up and ended the Nazi reign of terror, defeated 80% of the Nazi military, marched all the way to Berlin, and through Berlin, before any allies showed up, and liberated the concentration camps?

    No. It's probably vibes.

  • TIL: The First Red Scare

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  • Straight from wikipedia:

    Geolibertarians recognize the right to private ownership of land, but only if fair recompense is paid to the community for the loss of access to that land.

    So do you believe in ownership of land or not?

  • Why I left Anarchism, and then came back

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  • The first 15 minutes of this video is whining about "other people" committing a No True Scotsman.

    The second 15 minutes of this video is whining about people who are "true anarchists" being "written out of history" as though understanding how people identify themselves is the most important aspect of understanding history and political philosophy.

    I love minute 20, that "Soviet hegemony" is responsible for the rise of "pro-communist alignment" in the West. This is such a laughable claim. The West was fundamentally dominated by anti-communist hegemony long before the October Revolution and that domination was never weakened by this supposed "Soviet hegemony". And the "pro-communist alignment" in the West barely exists at all, and where it does, it is clearly not caused by Soviet hegemony, which had such little influence in the West, and where it did it was literally purged, twice, by the liberal establishment. This fact alone shows that if you believe there is a pro-communist alignment in the West, it's arrived it syncretically, through a wide variety of paths, because there is no hegemonic path towards it.

    From minute 24, they clearly demonstrate that they are anarchists in "goal" only, which is a fundamental difference between anarchists and communists, including MLs. MLism is a HOW. Anarchocommunism is the why. MLism has never argued that the state is legitimate. In fact, MLism is clearly anti-state in its WHY and pro-state in it's HOW. The debate between anarchism and MLism has ALWAYS been a debate about methodology.

    Ooooh, minute 29, great flub. Raising up "permaculture" without mentioning that permaculture is actually a white construction that appropriates indigenous science without giving credit.

    Minute 30 - no one cares that the author is an ideology hopper. The fact that this video took a full 30 minutes to finally say "I've never heard anyone argue effectively for using MLism to achieve the goals of the International Socialist movement" is a why the author likely gets so much grief from their discursive partners.

    What a waste of breath this entire video was.

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  • OK, be more clear. I believe in ownership of land, that is to say, I believe that ownership of land exists today in the social construction of private property. Do you mean to say that you hold the position that ownership of land doesn't exist at all or that it shouldn't exist?

    If it shouldn't exist, then explain what you mean by libertarian, which, in America is deeply tied to private property.

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  • I do own my shirt. I own my shirt in an entirely different way than I own land. This is understood by libertarians and non-libertarians alike. Don't commit the mistake of conflating ownership of a shirt, or a toothbrush, with ownership of land. The different between these two things has been established in law, in philosophy, in politics, and indeed in your own understanding, for a very very long time.

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  • You still have to deal with the concept of ownership, which is a constructed legal fiction that relies on violent authority, even if distributed, to function.

    The entire concept of private property is an exclusionary violent concept of global proportions. Take a single 100-acre ranch. A single person declaring it to be private property means that every single other human being, all 8 billion of them, are now forbidden, on the owner's authority, from access, use, benefit, or governance of those 100 acres. More than that, if the owner holds that land for 70 years, all the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren of all 8 billion on the planet are forbidden, on the owner's authority, from access, use, benefit, or governance of that land.

    And if you can pass private property down to your children, or establish corporate persona that can own land literally forever, the number of people affected by this grows exponentially.

    It doesn't take a lot of math to realize that this is a recipe for a very small group of people to control all of the land in the planet and have authority over everyone else, and that such a minority will always have the ability to bond together, voluntarily, to manage their private property and everyone else will need to engage in conteacts, voluntarily, to provide the owners with benefits in exchange for permission to live on or use that land.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • Yeah. Not a shred of rational thought left in you. Pure righteousness. I'm glad we had this conversation so that other people could see it. You're a lost cause.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • Joint military exercises are WORSE than joining shit. Stop being such an idealist. Signing a piece of paper is meaningless. Actually arming, practicing, and integrating real military battalions and weapons systems is far far worse than being officially recognized. The problem has nothing to do with Ukraine being covered by article 5 and everything to do with the Ukrainian state integrating its military posture with the US via NATO and deploying US weapon systems.

    Poor Putin, your neighbors are practicing war what to do... Invade and murder you fellow countrymen! God you are stupid murder apologist.

    Listen to yourself for just one second. Please. You are literally saying that the people who have killed more people than anyone else are now working with your neighbor and practicing war, specifically war against you, using the same legal framework they used to eventually invade several other countries. And they're doing it on the border with your country that Russia was invaded over twice in invasions that cost them massive military and civilian losses. And you are saying that Russia is a cry baby? That I'm a murder apologist for saying that Russia has legitimate security concerns?

    Like, really reread just the first part of what you wrote.

    1. Yes, American is a bloodthirsty psychotic belligerent
    2. No, Ukraine and the US literally integrating and deploying combined lethal force systems is not a threat

    What do the Nazis have to do with this? We're establishing that the threat to Russia is real.

    Garbage people

    There it is. Your entire argument rests on morality, idealism, vibes, and campism. You think Russia has no legitimate security interests because they are "bad" and you think that acknowledging the US is also "bad" absolves you of having to actually think about anything further. Russia is "bad" and therefore any action they take other than surrender is "bad". The US is "bad" and you don't "support" them but if they do something to Russia you're not going to worry because Russia is "bad".

    There's an old joke where a KGB agent and a CIA agent meet for a friendly drink on neutral territory. The American says to the Soviet:

    One thing I have to say about you Soviets, you have the best propaganda in the world

    To which the Soviet replies:

    Oh, no no no. We have great propaganda, yes, but it could never hold a candle to your propaganda in the US

    To which the American replies:

    What propaganda?

    To which the Soviet replies:

    Exactly.

    You think that because I don't argue from the position of "Russia bad" that I'm the one infected by propaganda, never stopping to analyze your own self-contradictory positions, your emotional reactions signalling your cognitive dissonance, and your lack of shame in founding your entire argument on your belief that they are garbage people and that you have no sympathy for them.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • I really don't understand why this is so difficult for you. The US killed over half a million children in Iraq and Madeline Albright went on national TV and said she'd do it again because it was worth it. Hillary Clinton said "We came! We saw! He died!" Laughing about the sodomization of Gaddafi with a bayonet in a war that the US literally created by funnelling weapons, money, and intelligence to partisans in Libya when it was the most prosperous country in the continent and had the highest living standards for its people. NATO was involved in that war of aggression that was helmed by the US.

    The entire world saw all of that happen and understood what it meant - except Americans. Americans looked at Libya and said "Gaddafi was a bad man who hated his people and made their lives miserable and then when the people rose up he tried to violently repress him so we had to go in there and protect them!" The rest of the world saw that and went "Holy shit the US is just willing to openly start civil wars, destroy entire countries, turn them into open air slave markets, gloat about it on the international stage, and not a single institution is going to challenge their narrative let alone stop them"

    So when NATO and the US show up on Ukraine and start joint military exercises, and then a right wing US friendly movement takes over in a "popular uprising", complete with neo-Nazis, open murder of civilians by neo-Nazis, and US politicians and military personnel on the ground, it's time to take notice.

    When you recognize that the Nazi blitzkrieg and Napoleon's invasion both leveraged the very vulnerable parts of the Russian border, which just so happen to overlap with the Ukraine border, you don't wait to see if the EuroFascists are going to try to invade your country and kill tens of millions of your people.

    Russia made a security-based decision. Was it the right decision? We don't know. We can't know. But to argue that Russia had absolutely zero possible security threats is essentially saying that the only thing Russia is ever allowed to defend itself against is a direct strike.

    You don't believe that for anyone else in the world, except maybe China. You would certainly have a problem with Russian troops in Venezuela, or Chinese troops on Canada, or a collation of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean troops amassing in Cuba. And if the US attacked them because they were clearly amassing in a threatening way, you wouldn't say the US had zero national security concerns.

    But because you have been raised to believe that Russia can have zero legitimate interests in the world, that it is literally impossible for it to act in self defense unless directly attacked, you watch as the US builds base after base, 600+ in countries all over the world, and think this is fine.

    By the way, this whole concept of voluntarily accepting a US or NATO base on your sovereign territory, literally giving up sovereignty over some of your land and putting your country into a position to basically be pre-invaded should you ever come to blows with the US - we've seen this before. It's called appeasement. When the Third Reich first start expanding, it didn't do it by launching wars, it did it through politics. The West appeased Germany, and Germany expanded.

    You recognize the US is a violent fascist country. You recognize that appeasement of the Third Reich was a terrible policy. But you just cannot put two and two together and for whatever reason you believe that allowing the US and NATO to expand "voluntarily" is not appeasement and that Russia finally fighting back to stop the slow march and assert its national security interests makes Russia not only evil but WORSE because they actually sacrifice their people for this mission.

    I mean, it defies reason. I really struggle to understand how you don't feel the emotion driving your argument away from reason and towards contradiction.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • What lies? You admit yourself that NATO is an extension of the most murderous fascist regime in the world. It's bombing of Yugoslavia was a symbolic break from its doctrine of exclusive defense. NATO was not chartered to intervene in civil wars, it was chartered for collective defense. It's intervention in Yugoslavia was literally illegal under international law. But of course you ignored the fact that it was also used Libya and Afghanistan, again at the behest of the USA.

    NATO is a threat to ANY enemy of the US and the evidence is the undeniable pile of bodies.

    So why, when you can literally look up every single joint NATO/Ukraine exercise, do you think it's spreading Russian lies to say that NATO was considered a security threat? Are you saying Russia can never consider NATO to be a security threat? That it's impossible for them to ever make that determination?

    Here's Operation Ocean Shield. https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2013/10/30/nato-and-ukraine-navy-together-in-the-fight-against-piracy

    You can also look up Steadfast Defender 21, the Anakonda exercises, and others. Many involved Ukrainian troops being trained and establishing interop with NATO weapons systems and involved sieging or "denying" Kaliningrad. You can argue that these are "defensive" sieges and "defensive" denials and "defensive" rapid deployment of US and Canadian troops and "defensive" interop programs to enable intermediate range missile systems in Ukrainian operations. But at a certain point - probably the point where NATO just ignores its charter and attacks whoever the US says to - it becomes foolish to just believe the fascists are peacefully expanding their transnational nuclear military originally staffed by literal Nazis and run entirely as a lapdog of the fascist US, don't you think?

    If Russia put its arms down today, NATO would continue to establish its denial capabilities and expand them to create conditions where Russia would not be able to defend itself from any aggression. That's the security issue. You can't just play a chess game and not move any pieces while your opponent moves theirs. Moving the pawn out? Not offensive. Moving the bishop out? Not offensive. No pieces were taken. Moving the queen out? Not offensive. You have nothing to worry about, right?

    Russia is an actual country with an actual military and an actual national security apparatus that assessed the situation as too dangerous to not act. That's the fundamental. We can argue all day long about their assessment and get nowhere because a) we don't have access to it and b) you are so brainwashed by Western propaganda that you think NATO is just a peaceful passive entity for defense in case those hordes decide to attack. But we don't have to argue that. We just have to argue about whether or not you believe Russia is capable of having a national security threat that it can respond to. It seems like you don't think so.

  • What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US?

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  • While it is true that countries have to elect to join NATO, it's obvious how that has been manipulated. NATO attacked Yugoslavia, claiming it was for humanitarian reasons, then dropped depleted uranium bombs on the country. Meanwhile, NATO's decades-long program of cultivating neo-nazi and fascist militias became a good starting point for manipulating the politics of these countries. But then of course the US spent hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the region further manipulating the politics of the region.

    It's true that countries elect to be part of NATO, but that's the grain of truth in the pro-Western propaganda.

    The expansion of NATO into Ukraine is why the Russians took Crimea. The invasion of the Donbas was caused by some intelligence analysis that we don't have access to. In 2013, a few months before Euromaidan, NATO and Ukraine did their first ever fully join exercise. Between 2014 and 2022, NATO and Ukraine ran simulated invasions of Russian territory together. The idea that NATO poses no threat to anyone is propaganda. NATO has violated it's doctrine of defense-only multiple times at the behest of the US in Libya and Afghanistan, two countries completely out of the scope of NATOs remit and purely offensive campaigns run by the US.

    NATO is a transnational nuclear military with supply chain and logistics across all of Europe, led by the USA, the country with the longest track record of consistent offensive wars, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and open support for Nazis and neo-nazis. The same US that saved 10k Nazis from justice through collaboration with the Vatican and moved them all over the Western hemisphere, protecting them, giving them jobs, integrating them into politics and the military. The same US that selected Nazi officers right after WW2 to staff NATO and rebuilt West Germany and watched and even supported former Nazi politicians in running for and attaining office.