https://nitter.net/RichardHanania/status/1672631878770368513
Old gem:
![](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/0f19d06d-05ec-41af-b3af-69c6bc3eac77.png)
Desire of identity groups for recognition is a threat to liberalism? Thats his reasoning!? Stupidest lib thinker got even dumber
The demand for recognition, Fukuyama says, is the “master concept” that explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, isis, Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump. It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir.
That is... quite a list
Article here for free brainworms
That is the most insane list i have ever seen. Good things and bad things are the same, akshually. Also, he's claiming to be a liberal and in defense of liberalism, yet puts the French Revolution which was a liberal revolution on the list? He doesn't even know actual history of these events, so no wonder he thinks history can end. Totally context free and smooth, a perfectly aerodynamic take
I had a teacher that condemned the french revolution because it was violent.
Liberals are even willing to shit on their own past, because who's gonna challenge them anyway?
<(They should have worked within the law of the monarchies if they wanted change)
Pretty much. And that's in fucking Germany - a country that had an anti-monarchist revolution of its own - and it did use violence. Against Communists.
Oh and there was a counter-coup attempt in 1923 by the Monarchists. A significant reason why it failed was the very same communists they were shooting at in 1918.
That's very true, and that is the standard lib take, but I've never seen a "serious liberal writing seriously about liberalism" be so blatant about not understanding basic history. Not that its surprising. A context free understanding of everything is the ultimate liberal project
From: Gegenstandpunkt, Winter 1992 [translated from German]
Context: Fall of the Soviet Bloc
Immediately after the failed coup by Soviet leaders against the dissolution of the state, in time for the ban and disintegration of the CPSU, the high-class German press came out with obituaries of communism. The demise of the system alternative did not appear as an object in need of explanation, but as evidence and explanation: Communism not only went under, but was thereby refuted and therefore deserved to go under. Now the success of power establishes historical truth, failure is refutation and proof of injustice. Liberal commentators, who always found Ronald Reagan's phrase about the "evil empire" terribly primitive, drop the last excuses for the "big social experiment" and fully agree with the wisdom of the "cowboy in the president's office": Socialism was nothing from the start as a crime committed by criminal minorities. The facts, the definitions of values and laws against which the Bolsheviks had violated, become an unbridled acknowledgement of all the disgusting qualities of our superior system, for which Marx recommended its abolition.
Yesterday's system comparators of course already knew then what they had to make of business and government on the other side of the Iron Curtain: there they had a different – material, non-formal – understanding of human rights than our main Western one; the one-party state with its social organizations was never a parliamentary democracy in our sense; Although the planned economy was able to concentrate scarce resources on major national projects, it did not react spontaneously to external changes like our market does. Comparative insights of this kind proved sufficiently clearly - for anyone who took the Western view - that the other system was not like ours, that it could not be used. Social studies teachers and Eastern Bloc experts have always said it. Now they hail the end of the Soviet Union as proof: They got it right - and got it right from history itself. "Didn't we tell you so?" - their articles sound triumphant. As if they ever, and even always, said that! They found the other system undemocratic, illiberal, their wealth a poor egalitarian mass supply, but it always worked too well for them with all its abnormalities: The East was too stable and effective for them in involving the population, it still produced too much wealth, particularly in the form of armaments, and was too attractive to a few labor parties in the West and whole blocs of states in the 3rd world. The condemnation of the other system always knew a side of respect for the hostile world power that stood with armies of millions on the Elbe. That this socialism was "actually existing" impressed its Western critics as much as it did the proud inventors of this peculiar system name. That it's finally become unreal in the last year is welcomed by them as proof of all the comparative disparagemental judgments they've made about it, although the two aren't at all the same thing. Because history agrees with their value judgments, they agree with history, abandon their comparative, democratic-moral values and propagate the pure law of power: what asserts itself is good, what goes under must go under and should therefore also do so. Anti-communist journalists become reversed but outspoken supporters of the “Historical Materialism” and propagate the “historical automatism” they had always accused their communist opponents of.
Not the best times for the left, but fascinating texts came from it.
History's over, we don't need to study old stuff because nothing will happen that might require its lessons
I'll be generous and give 1/10 for at least getting the first half of the first paragraph right. Russian capitalism was not working and if you remember many posts from good old @granit you'll remember things are only changing now because of the necessary restructuring for the war economy.
The Russian leadership was forced to change not out of good will or anything, but because there was no other alternative and while they are not moving to socialism or even Chinese economic model they're nevertheless distancing from western neoliberalism, Russian Ministry of Finance BS handling of inflation notwithstanding.
You may call the forced divorce/decoupling or whatever between Russian and western economies a pretty big blessing in disguise.
Historically low unemployment, de-dolarization, even stronger economic ties with other emerging countries, OPEC+ reigns supreme etc, I see very few downsides since 2022. None of this would've been achieved given the pre-war status quo.
I don't hate libs because they're dumb and wrong, I hate them because they are so smug in their wrongness.