Also I thought the Americans who were starved and put into camps were white not indigenous?
http://www.pravdareport.com/world/americas/19-05-2008/105255-famine-0/
shriekingviolet posted:I feel like it's a huge insult to the memory of actual, real indigenous genocide to psych out liberals with something that didn't actually happen (deliberate dustbowl.) Like I get the point of your comparative irony, but... when an actual real strategy was to relocate nomadic indigenous communities into "farms" that they weren't allowed to leave at gunpoint, then giving them broken equipment rotten grain and unbroken fields full of unsuitable soil, and leaving them to starve... maybe don't go with the fake farming genocide joke?
i dunno, if you're using it as a lead-in to talk about or at least reference the real deal in detail, particularly the fact that genocidal practices were ongoing well into the 1900s instead of just being an Andrew Jackson kinda thing like most Americans think, I don't think it's problematic (altho aren't you Canadian? I do get the impression that the sensitivities are different up there)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TBY_aDd5knE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NHl5nU5WYn8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NrrDMyAz1SU
This article claims the 100 million figure originated in a translation error from the original french
https://www.reddit.com/r/SolidarityNews/comments/3ms13g/the_black_book_of_bad_data_bias_lies_and/
10 million "killed by communism" is much more in line with Snyder types.
Pretty embarrassing that movements (made up of Conservatives Nazis anarchists socialists etc) can be built around arbitrary made up numbers with no one doing any investigations
Anyway most of these "10/100 million victims" are from famine so one can simply x10 that to get the number victims of capitalism
xipe posted:Watching these videos about the history and context of the Moscow Trials made me nostalgic for the 4 page debate we had about limiti and how that really means 'quota' in this age of kompromat and disinformatsia
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TBY_aDd5knE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NHl5nU5WYn8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NrrDMyAz1SU
after watching this great series i saw a related vid where TheFinnishBolshevik and 2 other socialists debated with 3 capitalists and it surprised me how they barely talked about imperialism. i mean how can you talk about the destructive nature of capitalism without in-depth discussion of war, regime change, sanctions, etc? it just seemed really odd to me how unprepared they were. too many vague accusations and not enough statistics or historical events referenced
if you got 4 hours to burn:
Synergy posted:i mean how can you talk about the destructive nature of capitalism without in-depth discussion of war, regime change, sanctions, etc?
It's like the thing I posted above where people pick out a few elements of the country's history that make socialism less alien-seeming, which I have come to agree with getfiscal is a worthwhile project in a lot of different places after not being fond of that idea for a long time, but then it turns into pretending that practicing socialism, but not calling it that, is the secret key to U.S. power in the world, which is absurd and reveals itself to be absurd when practice follows that line.
More importantly, it ignores how a lot more people in the country are moving toward socialism because they can detect their own lives becoming more and more unstable and feel less and less interested in offering lip service to a system they rightly suspect is moving as quickly as it can toward a (likely impossible) contemporary capitalist ideal of luxury items and services as the only necessary path for capital to make more capital, so that other people can't buy anything, because even white-collar professions linked to many years in secondary education have been automated, and the companies trying to ensure those people can buy their products right now stop altogether and are glad to do it. That makes people disaffected in a way that can't be fixed quickly, because economic upturns don't do a thing to change the unpleasant numbers they're seeing at the end of every month in their personal lives and the cumulative effects of those numbers over years of their "working"-age lives. So they're more likely to entertain the idea that the state that's a direct representation of the capitalists in closest proximity to them is just plain bad for the world altogether.
But when I talked about it recently Offline, someone who is very patient with my low level of knowledge took it to 102 level for my benefit and brought up that it's maybe important for socialists to understand it in more detail than that, and pointed out that a lot of shushing people about imperialism among socialist intellectuals has to do with the perception, or the second- or third-order effects of the previous perception, that a lot of the New Left being blatantly anti-U.S., and against the war "too soon", during the war on Vietnam was some sort of magic spell that sealed away the supposed chances for mainstream U.S. socialist politics in a genie's lamp for forty years.
It's pretty hard for a lot of people in the U.S., even in bad economic times, to muster the courage to support political positions in a way that doesn't try to assert that most people in the country support their positions and always have, in part because of the enforced blindness to rifts between the classes and their interests in discussion even among left-liberals who like to talk about poverty a lot. That's understandable when it comes to newer socialists, or those with a bad taste in their mouths from earlier decades who don't want to believe the U.S. left was largely wiped out by successful and violent campaigns by domestic police. It's also a likely route to repeat failure because it takes one of the few resilient parts of a historically shaky, impotent left in the country, the recognition that underlying conditions can change and change quickly in ways that make unpopular ideas into popular ones, and throws that out the window.
The foreign policy / imperialism skittishness is probably one symptom of the extreme success of the propagandist's point of view represented by people like Robert Novak and William Safire, where once it was unarguably clear the war was lost, the military-industrial right wing pivoted the very next day to explaining that the U.S. war effort failed because the government caved to pressure from insidious hippies and didn't "allow" its military to win, that a hands-off policy that spent even more on hot-rod weapons and vehicles with even less oversight would put wars in the hands of people who are equipped to make the right decisions to win wars. What it really does in terms of the U.S. is put those decisions in the hands of self-important drunks whose idea of history is a bunch of other self-important drunks dressing up as Confederate soldiers for a day and getting drunk with other drunks pretending to be the Union, but that's not a popular position among many people who read the news in the U.S. now much more than it was then.
The "let them win" thing is still enough of a dominant and pitch-friendly position that it's the public propaganda right now for why Trump's administration doing all the same things in the same places as Obama's around the world will somehow end up with more victories or even in a clear definition of victory that seems to have slipped away long ago, though if putting the U.S. military in charge of its own policy objectives even happens in any real way, it's more likely to further erode the ability of the U.S. state to wage war effectively, because it will alienate support-staff governments in other countries and fracture planning and spending across command centers in different regions vying for attention. Usually that idea, the military being allowed to paddle its own canoe to decisive victory, was farmed out to Republican-supporting writers in the press, while people like Nixon's, Reagan's or W. Bush's administrations projected the idea, however hard to believe, that the guys in the White House were natural-born strategy experts who bent everyone in the military to their will. The Democrats really only did one thing differently, which was to not spread that line in the press about the military running things.
I think it's a good idea to recognize that domestic socialists avoiding criticisms of the overall role of the U.S. in the world, or really, promoting a U.S.-Europe joint imperialist project of enforcing "human rights" following Democratic Party ideology, acted as the explicit position of the older DSA leadership in very recent years when it was much smaller than it's become, for the specific reason that they thought the New Left destroyed socialist politics in the country through vehement anti-imperialism, and the newer leaders can't shake it off and don't really want to try. It's still embedded, in an explicit way, in the text of the group's official platform, and it's still what guides the organization as the demsoc intellectuals too bashful to form a party, where it serves as reassurance to the current, younger leadership that they're not crazy and maybe have in their futures mainstream careers in electoral politics or long-delayed recognition as serious pundits by figures in the current news media. I'm kind of cynical about that but it's moot anyway as they couldn't extract it if they tried from my point of view, and since that's the sort of nebulous cloud in which all the Jacobin-type public figures of CNN-friendly socialism drift, it's their position too whether or not they occasionally grumble in Democrat-friendly ways about U.S. policy, the Iraq War, etc. in articles they write.
But again, a big problem I see for those leaders' ideas and plans is how a lot of the growing numbers of rank-and-file socialist sympathizers and "anti-capitalists" in the U.S. are a lot less optimistic about their futures living in the country as citizens or residents, especially a lot of the younger unemployed and underemployed who want to stay busy doing something and will continue to define what the term "socialism" means in the country for years to come. That already makes them a lot less interested in avoiding sound critiques of foreign policy that were allowed by Democrats to flourish under Bush and only applying them to Republicans, because those rank-and-file know, especially after the Clinton debacle in 2016, that the Democratic leadership is as unlike them and unable to speak to them as the Republican leadership, and is trying to decouple completely from them and people like them in fund-raising, including even the few lucky workers to still find themselves in trade unions with strong financial ties to the party, so the party leadership doesn't have to spend money trying to raise money anymore from dissatisfied people who don't want to donate in small sums in the fashion that supposedly helped Obama win twice in some surprising places around the country according to current horse-race Democratic strategy. That's a better line for the press than it is a long-term strategy to compete with your rivals in terms of fundraising under the U.S. legal regime, because if it becomes a big part of the strategy, it means that bad economic times cut into your funding significantly, as opposed to wealthy donors and donation bundlers who donate by reflex year after year to maintain personal social ties to state power.
Those rank-and-file disillusioned don't really give a fuck about maintaining the illusion of a future flag-waving U.S. socialist-imperialist state as their goal, because the flag means nothing to them except to indicate that the person waving it is probably a threat to their ability to pay their rent next month, and they don't care much about becoming proud of it ever again, that being to my ears the most tone-deaf message the DSA leadership is trying to spread right now because a lot of their newer members who don't have bylines don't see that outcome as likely or personally uplifting. To me that's pretty good news, in the sense that unchaining patriotism from its current modes of expression would likely be necessary for any bright political future for anti-imperialist socialist politics in the U.S., and it's happening because of stark recognition of personal, material self-interest among those doing it. It makes me optimistic for the future of real socialist politics in the imperial core for like, the first time ever.
Now back to this thread about how Stalin was Actually Good
Edited by cars ()
Synergy posted:if you got 4 hours to burn:
i do not
cars posted:Internet truename
x_X_BONGBOY_X_x~420~ BY YOUR SECRET NAME I CONJURE AND ABJURE THEE, APPEAR BEFORE US AND GRANT A MEASURE OF YOUR POWER
cars posted:I think it's a good idea to recognize that domestic socialists avoiding criticisms of the overall role of the U.S. in the world, or really, promoting a U.S.-Europe joint imperialist project of enforcing "human rights" following Democratic Party ideology, acted as the explicit position of the older DSA leadership in very recent years when it was much smaller than it's become, for the specific reason that they thought the New Left destroyed socialist politics in the country through vehement anti-imperialism, and the newer leaders can't shake it off and don't really want to try. It's still embedded, in an explicit way, in the text of the group's official platform, and it's still what guides the organization as the demsoc intellectuals too bashful to form a party, where it serves as reassurance to the current, younger leadership that they're not crazy and maybe have in their futures mainstream careers in electoral politics or long-delayed recognition as serious pundits by figures in the current news media.
I think it's not even so much a worry about past failures or strategy but that a lot of the Jacobin types and old guard Harringtonites genuinely and deeply believe in intervention and anticommunism. If anything, they seem to struggle with wearing a big tent mask. Sankara and some DSAers shitting on MLs right before the convention, the anti-Telesur article right before the NA vote--the timing of them was very unstrategic and got them a lot of flack from newer seemingly still demsoc people, and it felt more like outbursts they couldn't keep in any longer.
I share your same optimism. There was a recent medium post about one DSA chapter having some sort of pseudo schism with newer members who were communist and way more radical than some people expected and I'm pretty sure it was all a bunch of misguided larping and shit but still it seems that the new recruits radicalization has rapidly outstripped what the Jacobinites were expecting. Even just seeing "ironic" pro Stalin/USSR memes are heartening, because it will at least decouple the hammer and sickle from being a world historic boogey man for teens nowadays. I don't think I was exposed to any Marxist thought or even imagery growing up or even in college outside of Animal Farm level shit but now you can find Thomas Sankara quotes all over social media.
Then again I'm probably in a bubble, and in particular I'm worried DSA at least is too pro-troop. There's a troop on the NPC that nobody gave a shit about and people got super defensive when it was brought up. The GI bill is insanely robust and I could see enlistment rising the more and more untenable higher ed becomes.
Go to 18m 48sec or so for a funny and accurate depiction of anarchists
https://youtu.be/t-hjbIQQ2lo
xipe posted:https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/on-russia-todays-liberals/amp/
fuck this was so good
Caesura109 posted:someone here with all the sources should go fix wikipedia. that site is the pseudo-factual toilet of the internet, in that it feeds shit into the large system of forums and social media sites that become widely cited 'facts' from 'academics' like Snyder
iirc some posters here have done stuff like that before and you'll basically get into a massive edit war and debate with the head nerds that run things and its unlikely they'll change the articles in any substantial way.
Caesura109 posted:someone here with all the sources should go fix wikipedia. that site is the pseudo-factual toilet of the internet, in that it feeds shit into the large system of forums and social media sites that circulate widely cited 'facts' from 'academics' like Snyder
sorry but im too busy trying to change CNN from the inside
Gibbonstrength posted:im going to make socialism as vacuous as possible, so that everything counts as socialism. that rock is socilaism. that bird is socialism. being gay is socialism. thank you.
*putting on my controversial hat* China? you better believe thats socialism
Caesura109 posted:someone here with all the sources should go fix wikipedia. that site is the pseudo-factual toilet of the internet, in that it feeds shit into the large system of forums and social media sites that circulate widely cited 'facts' from 'academics' like Snyder
I vandalize it to make people ask celebrities funny questions so *little Trooper voice* I'm doing my part
Gibbonstrength posted:im going to make socialism as vacuous as possible, so that everything counts as socialism. that rock is socilaism. that bird is socialism. being gay is socialism. thank you.
Seal Team Six? Socialism. The cops? Socialism. The USSR? State capita
rolaids posted:fuck this was so good
Edited by neckwattle ()
https://youtu.be/I1iIz93kpmo