Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.

—Ernest Hemingway

“whataboutism” means “you’re absolutely fucking 100% right and I am a big liberal baby who shidded his doodoo ass”

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We cut them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.

―Kahlil Gibran

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!

—Xi Jinping, 2013

the number one form of theft in the United States is wage theft, which annually dwarfs outright robberies by almost 3 to 1

My great grandfather had the monopoly of eggs in all of China and my grandmother was super rich living in a mansion when the cultural revolution happened and communism took everything away.

“authoritarian” is the worst libertarian meme of all time. The important difference between governments is who they work for— all states are class dictatorships, either ownership class or working class. Putting them on an “authority” scale implies that all governments are somehow separate from the people, and in the same degree.

—@licensed_che_shirt@hexbear.net

Sipping on a gin and tonic as I castigate my son for wearing long pants before the age of twenty. He asks me when he can see his mother— who is also my cousin— again, and I remind him not to ask about her, because I don't know how to say that my uncle and I had her lobotomized and put in a hospital for crying too much. I send him back to boarding school for another six months as I head to my job as an executive for a large chemical company that my grandfather got me, overseeing South American mining operations. Upon hearing that a newly-elected government wants to levy a tax on our mining profits and institute an eight hour work day, I call up my old Skull and Bones chums who work for Zapata Oil and Air America, ask if there's anything they can do to help, and they promise they'll look into it. I will drink nine more gin and tonics throughout the day before switching to bourbon. Old Money Life.

from https://hexbear.net/comment/1605227

“I don’t know why you’re complaining,” I say to my fellow scavenger as I pull a shabby jacket off a frozen corpse in the alley behind an abandoned Applebee’s, “the economy is doing great!”

He explains it well. It is so frustrating to argue with libs who make arguments so old that literally Marx himself responded to them. I get the impression that Marxists already won the debate back in the 19th century and the liberal tactic has just been to pretend the debate has never happened, to continue repeating centuries-old arguments over and over again as if they've never been responded to, and to discourage anyone from looking into Marxism or reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.

—zhenli真理 comments on Why we say Read Theory; From A Marxist-Leninist Perspective

Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.

from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

Westerners are the most propagandized people on the planet. While, yes, something like CCTV is clearly biased, people who watch CCTV can at least tell you it is biased and admit they are getting info from a particular point of view. Westerners have a tendency to not view their propaganda as biased at all, but merely as "facts" and "common sense". They don't even see the BBC, PBS, RFA, VOCMF, CNN, MSNBC, etc, as a particular point of view with its own agenda. They just gobble it up as the unbiased truth.

It's why there are so many subreddits, Discord servers, etc, which have a rule that bans "talking about politics", but then somehow this rule never seems to apply to western media propaganda. They will randomly start China bashing and if you disagree they will accuse you of talking about politics and ban you. Because to them, these absurd headlines about China are not a particular point of view pushed by their media for geopolitical reasons but is simply a "fact" with no political content.

It's why they will accept tons of media being filled with western propaganda, like movies and games that include modern military equipment often working directly with the US military to make them and being required to depict the US military positively and to allow the US military to edit and remove anything from the movie or game, they see this as not "political" but if a game removes something because of outcry from Chinese fans or there is some leftist message put in a game, they will decry it as "bringing politics into my video games!"

The word "propaganda" in and of itself has a bit of a foreign connotation in English, by that I mean that it's often associated with things from foreign countries and not from your own. People tend to see "propaganda" as "something foreign countries have" and not something they have to worry about.

No matter how hard you try, for the vast majority, you cannot even get them to consider the possibility that maybe a media organization created directly by the US government through an act of Congress with an explicitly stated purpose of pushing ideas to disparage countries like China might be an incredibly biased source and might have be inclined to push narratives to further a geopolitical agenda, and when his only citation is an "anonymous" source maybe you shouldn't take it too seriously.

This is pretty much impossible to even get them to consider. It's like they have some blocker in their brain that makes it nearly impossible for them to even entertain this idea in their head.

It's also why they call us things like "wumao" and "Russian bot", because since they believe their media is simply "fact", they legitimately believe it's not even possible to actually disagree with it. That means if you claim to disagree with it, in their mind, you must be lying. And why would you lie? Because you must be paid to do it!

It's even further the reason why they are so ready to support invasions, sanctioning, bombing, etc of other countries, because in their mind, since no one can truly disagree with western propaganda except those who are paid for it, they genuinely believe the people of these countries all themselves agree with western propaganda. They think while the Chinese government, for example, pushes one narrative, in reality, all the citizens of China secretly believe the western narrative and are begging for their white saviors to "liberate" them.

It's why they say "I support the people but not the government of China", because they genuinely think they are saviors of the Chinese people from their evil government and the Chinese people secretly want to be "liberated" by them. But I have seen this façade break down very quickly in the rare instances that they actually talk to a Chinese person, they don't agree with their beliefs, and then the yankee accuses the Chinese person of being a "brainwashed ultranationalist" simply for not hating their own country and its achievements.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/uwwvqn/interesting_i_wonder_what_that_source_is/i9usz08/

It's content for poor people to tell poor people they are responsible for their own circumstances.

If communists are trying to tell the poor that the wealthy are responsible for their circumstances that can not go unopposed, they create propaganda sources that exist solely to provide the opposite narrative.

Like a true abuser, the capitalist makes the victim blame themselves in order to get them to reject help from those around them that want to help the abused.

—@Awoo@hexbear.net

[on a blind date] You listen to a lot of NPR? That's cool, I hear the tiny desk concert things are pretty good. What do I listen to? Well there's this thing called Cum Town and today I caught an extended segment where an adolescent Ben Shapiro gets his prepubescent testicles crushed inside the ass of child sex predator Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World and that's the backstory to why Ben Shapiro's voice is so shrill in the voiceovers for those Nissan car commercials. Wait, why are you leaving? I thought this was going well?

It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

—Georgian philosopher Ioseb dzе Jugashvili