I was talking to a colleague of mine, granted, he's an economics guy, but he seems really progressive and thoughtful. However, something about communism, and he went full on dummy brain.
Like, talking about the communist party of China, was uncritically saying the violence and body count speak for themselves, and how awful and repressive the authoritarian government is. I didn't push him on it, but I am sure he would uncritically recite us propaganda - after fully agreeing with me that the US media is the most successful propaganda machine in history.
Anyway, I shouldn't be surprised, but it is still insane to me.
:zizek-joy: Pure ideology. Americans are the most propagandized people on earth, so they start with a conclusion and warp reality to fit it.
There was an instance once where my cousin was freaking out about a defecting DPRK soldier who was found to have anthrax antibodies. He was sharing some FoxNews story with me that had the implication the DPRK was preparing a biological warfare attack. I told him soldiers getting anthrax vaccines was pretty normal for soldiers and in fact American military members also get it. So I tried leading him to the conclusion that the Koreans probably weren't planning an attack simply based on this one story, that FoxNews was wrong, ok? He then said "Maybe Fox is wrong about the facts, but their message is right."
absolute pure concentrated ideology brainworms
I used to work with a guy who had a whole rehearsed speech about how communism creates a new monarchy and he'd use Xi Jinping as an example of a "modern king." He'd talk about it in flowery, academic language and most people thought he sounded knowledgeable about the subject. It was an elaborately constructed stance and he'd throw in a few references to Cuban or Chinese history. He'd mention the Kim family and Hugo Chavez. He was a liberal too, the reddit kind who would say words like hecking and "much awesome" in everyday situations. He was pretty good at doing long speeches about stuff and never actually saying anything.
Anyway, most liberals consider themselves to know the history they think is real and they believe themselves to be inherently good people because they're liberals. Most liberals seem to have a weird aversion to hearing or seeing anything they believe belongs to the bad people, so they never actually read anything that challenges them.
Like my coworker from earlier, I asked him once if his stance meant Deng Xiaoping was a monarch when he was chairman. The response I got was "Who's that?"
He was pretty good at doing long speeches about stuff and never actually saying anything.
Let me guess, white straight dude with too many college degrees?
Because they don't actually read history they just think their high school education + mainstream propaganda is enough.
I just watched that old Carl Zha / Noah Smith debate (I was doing housework for hours…) and had to suffer through yet another lib morphing into an ultraleftist when discussing China—criticizing everything that’s done there while readily admitting that America also does bad things. On the face of it, this seems like principled opposition—until we apply it to other contexts. If I were a centrist living in Nazi Germany, and if someone said that life for Jews in America is better, I could easily say, factually, that life for Jews may be hard in Germany, but it’s no picnic in America, either. Whom does this kind of argument serve? All it does is deflate criticism of the status quo. It’s actually just an insidious and underhanded method of maintaining the status quo. “Things in the imperial core may suck, but it’s impossible for anyone to do better, so you might as well make the best of it.”
For me it was a nightly routine of self-bullying and Hakim videos
Operation Osoaviakhim
From the Wikipedia article:
Between midnight and 3am, when everybody was asleep. They knew exactly where I lived, first of all: a few days before I was captured, a fellow came. They had a key – they had everything to the apartment, to the door. There was one interpreter who told me [in German]: "Get up! You are being mobilized to work in Russia", and there were about half a dozen soldiers with machine guns, who surrounded me. When I wanted to get to the toilet, they checked it out first to make sure there was no escape hatch. It was a very tight operation. They did that with every family. Many families came, while I was alone.
lol
Reading that paragraph had me :sicko-yes: :sicko-blur: :sicko-hyper: .
These are good points but I have yet to meet an actual anti-communist liberal who's read history. I think they're few and far between.
Tl;dr: in the words of another poster in this thread, it’s all ideology shniff.
This long post is going to have a “new guy just dropped” vibe to it, but I can’t resist. I have to paint this portrait of someone who is about as close as you can get to being a socialist, but just refuses to take that final leap of faith. Be warned, it’s basically just a long description and doesn’t really go anywhere.
It’s about one of my closest friends. He visited me a few months ago and talked with me for hours about China, Russia, Marxism, etcetera. He fully admitted that everything is fucked under capitalism, but refused to endorse anything to the left of Bernie, and basically maintained that Marxism = everyone must work in slave labor camps forever, and also millions of people will just randomly die for no reason if communists ever take control of anything. He became extremely angry when we discussed this because thanks to being terminally online I was ready for every point he made.
This guy is a big fan of Noam Chomsky. He’s also said too many positive things about Jordan Peterson and has probably spent hours watching his videos, although he said he stuck to like the Joseph Campbell / Jung-related monomyth stuff that Peterson focused on earlier in his career before the guy started grifting the fuck out of incels. To my friend’s credit he hasn’t brought up Peterson in years and laughs whenever I crack jokes at Peterson’s expense. My friend was also really into Ralph Nader back in the 2000s when I was still a lib and arguably more rightwing than him.
Some random relevant facts about my friend:
He grew up with me in rural / coastal New England.
His mom inherited basically infinite money from god knows where, his dad was a restaurant owner but by far the best one I’ve ever met, and I also washed dishes for him. He cooked free meals for kitchen staff every night and always paid in full and on time; his restaurants were widely regarded as among the best in the state. This means, of course, that he went out of business.
My friend’s parents divorced when he was a teenager. He despises his mother, claims she abused him, and barely discusses his father but seems to hold him in high esteem. Both parents have always been nice to me. His mom failed the asshole test, however; going out to eat with her was pretty embarrassing because she treated the wait staff like shit. My friend maintains that his mother’s abuse was the most spectacular his therapist has ever encountered, although so far as I know it was never physical. The worst story he told me was that she would make him read like classical literature and then reward him with a toy when he summarized books for her. I could be completely wrong, but my suspicion is that he unconsciously blames his mother for the divorce and wants to destroy her.
My friend is really into film and acting and is actually an extremely talented actor and filmmaker, regularly landing lead roles in high school drama and making short films that everyone loved. (I acted alongside him in many plays and movies.) We wound up going to the same college. I studied literature there and loved it; he studied film, hated it, and transferred to a different school like five minutes from home. Then he tried to “make it” in Hollywood and went absolutely nowhere, getting stuck editing footage for cooking shows for several years. He has given up on this dream and is now studying to become a therapist.
I’ve known him for almost twenty years, this guy was almost never without a girlfriend. Women loved him. He was (and still is) kind, smart, and hilarious. All kinds of people gravitated toward him. He’s just generally a good guy. I actually had almost no friends in elementary school and met him on the first day of high school, and meeting him and becoming close with him led to all kinds of other friendships. I met his last long-term girlfriend a few years ago and thought she was great. I believe they broke up because she wanted to get married and he didn’t, but I don’t know this for sure.
Although my friend has been cis all his life, within the last few years he came out as trans. He uses he/him pronouns and has been single since then, to my knowledge. He has never mentioned being sexually attracted to anyone except people who identify as women and would frequently make pretty lewd comments about them when we were teenagers. (Sometimes I would think like this but never actually say these kinds of things out loud.) He would also make homophobic comments and call me the n-word when we were teenagers, although thankfully that phase only lasted for a few months. We’re both basically white. I have never spoken the n-word aloud.
He’s pretty well-traveled but has never actually stayed in a foreign country for more than a few weeks.
When we hung out a few months ago, I hadn’t seen my friend in person in years. His appearance had radically changed. He was just way too fucking thin, like to an unhealthy extent. It honestly looked like he was just falling apart. He also wasn’t taking care of himself. He hadn’t eaten anything but a protein bar in 24 hours—because he had been traveling, he said—and was starving by the time he got to my place. In high school he did wrestling and has always been either kind of chubby or in good shape.
I believe my friend has inherited around six figures, maybe less, but he’s still living fairly frugally because that money actually isn’t going to last for long. (If you spend $2000/month and make no money, you’ll run out of $100,000 in about four years.) He’s basically investing the money in his education to become a therapist. He lives in a major city right now in an apartment with a bunch of roommates. He complains that they’re all communists, but I don’t know if that means they’re actually communists or, like, Warren supporters. (I’m recycling this last sentence from another post, sorry!)
This is just supposed to be a portrait of someone who is good, intelligent, and a victim of capitalism—someone who has been twisted into despising universal human liberation. He knows all about Noam Chomsky, he knows corporate media is nonsense, but he trusts them when they talk about China and Russia because communism ultimately threatens his status as a petite bourgeois.
I think that as capitalism collapses, and the contradictions intensify, people whom we believed all our lives to be relatively decent human beings will ultimately show that they have always been on the side of reaction—they just did a better job of hiding it than your average chud. I maintain that my friend is a good guy, and he’s still my friend, but it won’t shock me that much, I guess, if he starts marching with the proud boys or something within the next few years.
my friend is a good guy, and he’s still my friend, but it won’t shock me that much, I guess, if he starts marching with the proud boys or something within the next few years.
:yea:
This hit me hard. We’ve got a lot of work and a lot of educating to do.
people whom we believed all our lives to be relatively decent human beings will ultimately show that they have always been on the side of reaction—they just did a better job of hiding it than your average chud
My older brother had a phase where he wore an SS officers hat around the house as a "joke" for a few months. It still makes me sad that I'm probably going to have to kill the guy I buttboarded down the stairs as a kid with, even if he turned out to be an asshole.
I feel that way about war a lot, and those images of Nazis in WW2 joking around in their bunkers after or before battle always makes me sad because most of those guys were probably relatively normal and decent (as in, they were probably inclined to Nazism but they weren't ready to genocide you) before everything went to mondoshit and the conditions for the rise of Nazism came about
they will probably be happy to have a handful for propaganda purposes
I don't think so. Your "normal" trumpers / fascists, sure, they like their token gay or trans or black or whatever friend. But Proud Boys are a legit gang, they have actual beliefs, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want to be around any trans people.
