Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her] @ Zuzak @hexbear.net

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5 yr. ago

Replace the word race with party

That's a pretty significant difference, don't you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.

:::spoiler Excerpt from Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds

Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power hungry Reds who pursue power for powers sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.

For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.

Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they "weaken their credibility" (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in cold war condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters.

Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being "smeared" as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.

The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by "communist subversives" or "loyal American liberals." All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.

Even when attacking the Right, left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that "when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts." While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism "both of the Right and Left," individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a "willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous" (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.

Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela's African National Congress in South Africa.

Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for "the poor little children who got fed under communism" (his words).

Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as "Soviet apologists" and "Stalinists," even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did.

Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.

We can vibe and hate America at the same time, actually

Ukrainians are dying too, including ones drafted against their will. Maybe you should fight in their place before asking them to die on your behalf.

Oh! Well then we see eye-to-eye in that case. I think Western support to Ukraine should be limited to accepting refugees and providing humanitarian aid, not weapons. I think Ukraine should be open to ceding territory in negotiations in order to end the war and prevent further loss of life. There's always another way besides war and violence. I'm all about peace, glad we're in agreement.

Which one(s)? There were so many from 2014 onwards that I lost track. I'm always skeptical anytime one side gets all the blame for violating a ceasefire.

Minsk II was the one I was referring to, but it's a fair point.

If it really is about the people of Donbas and not annexing the land itself, they could have done what every country is supposed to do when the safety of people in a region is jeopardized – open their borders to refugees and asylum seekers. It would piss off Ukraine, but they could have just been like "Come across the border and we'll set you up with a Russian passport".

Ok, let me rephrase that then. Do you believe that the people have Donbas have a right to self-determination and representation in government, and that that right would include having some possible roadmap to joining Russia, or should they be forced to either go along with whatever the new government wanted or abandon their homes and flee the country? Because I think that a lot of this mess could've be avoided if Ukraine had simply given them a referendum, but instead they banned opposition parties, which says to me that they knew how the people there would vote.

I'm not sure what that has to do with shelling cities, are you suggesting he was hiding in one of the buildings or what?

Ukraine escalated by violating the ceasefire. Russia escalated further by sending in troops. I didn't say it's "okay," but the blame isn't just on their side.

If Russia wanted to ensure the safety of the people of Donbas (which is a big if tbf), what should they have done differently, at any point leading up to the conflict? Because I'd like to condemn Russian escalation, but it's a little hard for me to do so if I don't have an answer to that question.

"Fighting corruption" is an interesting way to describe sustained artillery bombardments of civilian targets.

The war was already going on before Russia sent troops in.

It's not supporting Russia to be critical of one-sided narratives or to call for peace for the sake of minimizing loss of life.

That's what Lenin did and it saved countless lives. The Tsar kept feeding people into a meat grinder and the communists took power of the promise that they'd end the war, and they had to accept heavy concessions but they did it. Which position do you agree with, Lenin's or the Tsar's?

Go out and fight Russia yourself and after that you can propose that Ukrainians should keep being drafted against their will on your behalf, coward.

Just "but go off" would work perfectly well.

Are you sure you're not thinking of Atlantis? Or uhh I guess the US if you go far enough.

The Ukrainians could stop this war anytime they want

The Ukrainian government could, the same government that banned every political party that wasn't sufficiently anti-Russia. And the last time the people got to vote, they elected Zelensky who ran as a peace candidate. So no, the people of Ukraine, the ones being drafted and sent to the front lines, have very little say over whether Ukraine negotiates for peace.

Yeah, but like, they are their worst countrymen. Nazis and such.

Regular people are being drafted, it's not just Nazis dying.

Enough debate about whether the persecution is true. I don't want this post about Hexbear to devolve into an argument about whether the Uyghurs in China are being oppressed.

This is a pretty ridiculous thing to say, right after relitigating the whole discussion. You deny the genocide being carried out by Denmark against the Danes (which I just made up), but I don't want this to devolve into a discussion about that so let's just close it there. See how unfair that is?

That's not how it works. You don't get to lob accusations at us and then say we're not allowed to defend ourselves from your allegations. This post is very much acting in bad faith and engaging in crybullying.

The fact is that you can plainly see in this user's post how we've caused them to walk back their claims by raising legitimate criticisms. They're now admitting that their primary (afaik only) source alledging genocide is a Nazi sympathizer, and now the criticism has changed from "Denying a genocide that is definitely happening" to "Being overly skeptical about the possibility that a genocide may be happening. This to me proves that we've raised valid points and don't deserve to be deplatformed.

If I were debating someone who was denying the Holocaust, I would not have to move one inch, because the Holocaust is very well documented and well established. The homework has been done, the case indisputably proven, and the only people who deny it are Nazis and Anti-semites. But what OP is trying to do is to skip past the part where they actually have to collect that kind of evidence. The world they're trying to build, whether they realize it or not, is one in which politicians need only say the magic word of "genocide" to rally everyone to support aggression - just like they did in Iraq. And we at Hexbear consider that to be an extremely dangerous norm to set.

Additionally, equating claims with dubious evidence to something well established as the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust trivialization, for which OP has been correctly called out for. Once again engaging in crybully tactics, they came to our instance and accused us of being equivalent to Nazis, and then when we turned it back around on them, they run off to teacher to whine about how it's "a very serious allegation." Don't dish it out if you can't take it.

I fully expect that posts like mine will be used as evidence that we're hijacking the thread with political discussion. But this discussion is the primary reason why OP is calling for defederation. But despite this, they "don't want this post about Hexbear to devolve into an argument about the Uyghurs." Once again, they want to jump straight to the matter being settled without discussion or consideration of evidence.

I figure the engineers just inflate their estimates in anticipation of the captain telling them to cut it down, and then the captain expects the engineers to do that and it's a vicious cycle.

I'll just leave this here