literally doing the thing in the picture

Wouldn’t be a liberal without the homophobia

“Fun Fact: You can be for socialism and still denounce every historical socialist revolution and every historical or existing socialist state. This is totally the way to convince people that your movement is one they should join. Be like the anarchists who have gotten so much done over the past two hundred years.”

The same meme was posted in a meme community here on Lemmy and the reaction was a liberal sh*tshow. I’m a communist person from the global south, and it’s kinda sad and enraging that the west only support the left if it is Scandinavian “socialism” or under the global North standards.

deleted by creator

People who uncritically, or unironically, use tankie will get the wall.

Either they’re a LeftCom or the milquetoast “socialist”/“DemSoc” version of the same ultraleft tendency which is simply filtered through liberal indoctrination or they’re an anarchist.

What really gets me is that I’ve had plenty of discussions with anarchists about how “authoritarian” the Spanish Republic and Makhnovia were and they will either denounce my sources as Bolshevik propaganda out of hand (the sources I refer to are either liberals who were openly sympathetic towards the anarchists/POUM or who were anarchists themselves [including eyewitnesses]) or they will literally engage in apologism for the authoritarian measures that these projects resorted to due to the necessity of the conditions and for the atrocities and the acts of “authoritarianism” that were absolutely not a necessity (e.g. the Makhnovist secret police establishing terror cells within the USSR.)

Now, don’t get me wrong I’m no idealist. A large part of why I broke from anarchism is exactly for this reason - the fact that there is an absolute necessity for authoritarian measures and history absolves this necessity.

What rings true is Engel’s quote from On Authority:

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

Engels didn’t have the fortune of being able to access a century and a half’s additional historical scholarship at his fingertips the way that I do but I am absolutely convinced that he’d be using the examples of the authoritarianism inherent in Revolutionary Catalonia and Makhnovia as real-world examples rather than the hypothetical of a ship on the high seas if he could have.

And he’s right that the most dogged anti-authoritarians will simply redefine their terms with the idealistic belief that changing the name of something changes its nature.

I’ve literally have anarchists/LibSocs tell me that the Makhnovist secret police, the Kontrrazvedka, was a counterintelligence force and this fact, somehow, justifies their existence to an anarchist.

How the Kontrrazvedka was engaging in acts of counterintelligence when they lined up and shot some of their most competent military officers who also happened to be Bolshevik sympathisers in a summary execution without the authorisation of the Military Revolutionary Council, the so-called democratic organ overseeing the Makhnovist military, you might ask, happens to go entirely unexplained. Shocking.

Or how Makhno was acting in an “anti-authoritarian” capacity when he pulled out his pistol but failed to execute Grigoriev, the commander of an army who had eventually defected to the Black Army after a series of prior defections, because Makhno’s commander Chubenko beat him to pulling the trigger also goes unexplained. (I’m no Grigoriev sympathiser and he got exactly what he deserved and not a moment too soon but this is not something which squares with anarchist principles.)

There’s also the Makhnovist ethno-religious persecution of Mennonites in particular but also of German settlers in Ukraine that gets completely ignored. These were mostly kulaks, although kulaks that were liquidated, slaughtered, and ethnically cleansed before they could act in direct sabotage of food production as seen in the USSR, so again I’m not losing sleep crying over this (although the acts of war against the Mennonites absolutely do deserve to be denounced because they resorted to committing atrocities but I’ll leave that for the people who uphold Makhnovia as an example of anarchism to do that without holding my breath) but it’s fascinating that an anarchist would say “How come the USSR wouldn’t just leave Makhnovia to its own devices to run its own society within the USSR (and to operate their own terror cells in the USSR)?” when the Makhnovists didn’t extend that same consideration to the Mennonites, some of whom actually took up arms and fought alongside the Black Army and the Red Army, no less.

There’s an entire effortpost on Revolutionary Catalonia that I have been drafting in my head but in the vain attempt at brevity, I’ll spare going into it.

The fact of the matter is that these people will run defence for what is in all respects “siege anarchism” but for name and yet they’ll take any opportunity to denounce communists to reinforce the paper-thin distinction between the authoritarianism of socialism in practice and the authoritarianism of anarchism in practice. And I mean that quite literally - the only real distinction between the two that exists is words on pages.

At my worst, especially when people have prefaced their anti-tankie screeds with terms like RedFash, I have taken to the habit of turning their own discourse against them and I make the accusation that they are BlackFash and that they’ll excuse any form of atrocities or authoritarianism as long as it comes draped in a black flag.

Turnabout play is fair, after all.

Libcuck spotted in libcuck central? Say it ain’t so!

I read this with sped up Ben Shapiro voice

R*ddit itself is LibKKKuck Central

-lib spotted in a lib platform

such surprise!

Hating Ho Chi Minh is the most lib shit ever. Like you can bash Mao and Stalin, lots of false propaganda on them but also a lots of actual fuck ups they made. Ho Chi Minh simply did not make mistakes. Vietnam was the nation that came to stop Pol Pot even when they literally had to go to war with China over it.

Someone on here could explain to me why they don’t like China/Mao. Probably wouldn’t agree, but it’s not an impossible case to make. Vietnam is so near perfect that I couldn’t find any decent western propaganda on it, it was the nation that showed me just how much I had been lied to over the years. I kept looking at their history and learned that they were pretty much just always in the right. Vietnam being the nation to stop Pol Pot when both China and America were backing them, right after the Vietnam war is just a testament to the revolutionary spirit of Ho Chi Minh’s movement.

There is no justification for not liking Ho Chi Minh. Vietnam should be the example everybody uses to convince people.