Does it hurt to be this much of a rube

That nice thing is that friends may not be a good source of revolutionaries, but revolutionaries tend to be a good source of friends

Every time this happens we gain new comrades while filtering out the worst of the insufferable reddit stereotypes to the reddit instances, thus keeping the rest of the fediverse clean. We are like mussel colonies filtering out fedora behavior. You’re welcome.

That’s true in general but in our specific case, the worst people to have nukes were the first to get them and now it’s up to everyone else to ensure their own safety

“Fight back against the murderer? But that would make me as bad as them!”

If the communists didn’t get rid of him, it was because communism bad corrupt. But when in fact they actually did get rid of him, it was “for political reasons.”

Unfalsifiable orthodoxy

On the constant lies:

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-lies-get-so-tedious

Im gonna start replacing “relevant XKCD” with “relevant Caitlin Johnstone”

This is just a liar thinking that everyone else must also be lying

Yooo bespoke meme thank you

Um yikes sweaty, how cute

“We have bad intent so everyone else does too”

The USA, along with the rest of NATO, wants Ukraine to remain independent,

That must be why they did that coup, because of how much they value Ukraine’s independence

I am once again pointing impatiently to the first several sentences of the 1956 internal CIA memo entitled “Comments on the change in Soviet leadership”, which says, verbatim:

Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The western idea of a dictator within the communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the communist power structure. Stalin, though holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team

The arrogance it takes to assume what people who have studied more than you think when you yourself are operating in complete ignorance of the facts. Perfectly liberal of you.

Uh, nah

Hell yeah my 12 year old buddy

Quick question, what’s this?

Look man, I’m gonna tell you something you’re probably gonna write off as Bad Guy Villain dialogue or an attempt to “brainwash” you:

Good People and Bad People don’t exist in real life. They exist in movies and comic books written by people who grew up in societies less than a century out of the domination of various religions. These are magical, religious ideas about the nature of reality you’ve unquestionably accepted because that’s what was in the entertainment you grew up on, same as the rest of us. But it’s not real life. In real life, there’s just People.

People are animals who seek comfort and propserity by making decisions within a predetermined range of possibilities, and that’s it. No angels, no demons, no omnipoten god watching in judgement. The terms these religions use have no scientific wight or meaning, and Marxism is scientific. We are concerned with what can be observed and measured. Good and Evil don’t mean shit when you’re talking about observable reality, any more than Karma or Sin or any of the other mystical ways in which people have tried to make sense of the world in the past. Your way of analyzing reality and human beings is fundamentally mystical, hypocritical and disconnected from reality.

There is no person on earth who couldn’t be classified as a “bad person”. It’s less than meaningless: it actually impairs understanding and paralyzes decision making, because there is no “Good” choice. All the hallowed saints of liberal civic religion were “Bad” people. MLK cheated on his wife. Ghandi was a fucking creep to his niece. Lincoln committed indigenous genocide. But they are venerated anyway because they were either effective at advancing the interests of those who are now powerful enough to culturally mandate their veneration, or were coopted by the powers they opposed in order to make harmless sanitized icons of their messy human existence. That’s it. That’s the entire calculus behind who you hold in esteem and who you hold in contempt. You like who you were told to like, and you hate who you were told to hate, without ever really considering why. If you were born in Soviet Russia, you would have the exact opposite opinion, as millions of Russians did and still do. The difference would be that approval of Stalin is much, much easier to make an evidence-based case for than mystical condemnation is.

It’s like how liberals think that communist theory has some magical eldritch power that will instantly turn you into a communist if you read and understand it. It doesn’t. It just presents a well-reasoned case, grounded in observable reality, for the abolition of the world-drstroying system of omni-exploitation we all suffer under. It starts with facts and works it’s way towards a conclusion, rather than starting from a conclusion and working it’s way backwards with carefully curated facts. And to a liberal, that might as well be magic. That’s why you have all these cute little phrases like whataboutism that in practice simply mean “I refuse to consider what you are saying for longer than it takes to dismiss it out of hand with a gesture at some social rule built just for this purpose.”

Your entire worldview has been constructed by bourgeois high priests not for the function of understanding the world, but crippling your ability to understand anything. It’s a hermetically sealed library of pre-existing, neatly labeled boxes for messy realities to be roughly shoved into and examined no further. This is Idealism: the belief that there are eternal, ironclad categories that reality comports itself to. This is wrong: reality comports itself however it wants, and we invent the categories after the fact. The categories of Good and Bad people are as invented as the categories of Good and Bad music. People and music simply are, formed and determined by their relationship with the world around them. It is reality that determines itself, not our post-hoc ideas about it, and certainly not ideas from the medieval era.

Does anyone have that Wolfenstein meme of the two klansmen and a nazi soldier talking, and the caption is something like “two American liberals talking before being interrupted by a european social democrat?” I can’t find it

orchestrated famine

Utterly incorrect, as even “cold warrior” historians like Robert Conquest were forced to attest after the opening of the Soviet archives. And again, no motivation. Just “because evil”.

He enacted paranoid political purges of engineers, scientists, academics, etc

Getting rid of monarchist figureheads is Good, Actually. Unkess you want to argue that people like Nick Fuentes should just be left alone to spread fascism during the fragile birth of a revolution? Utterly unserious. And again: “He”. As if the Soviet union was ruled by one guy. An utterly historically illiterate take, you are simply repeating lazy mythology.

people he didn’t like

This is like when fascists say “you can’t just call people you disagree with nazis.” Oh really? Whats the disagreement? Who were these people the Soviet union didn’t like? Might it have something to do with the genocide that was perpetrated on them, and the massive US invasion perpetrated before that? The fact that you cannot be specific at all is a dead giveaway that you’re just regurgitating childlike mythology, on the level of “Hamas hates Jews”.

And your defense is: nuh uh/Whataboutism.

Oh no, this is not a defense. History has shown that the actions of the Soviet union need very little defending. This is an attack on your Mormon-level incuriosity and refusal to engage with anything that challenges your mythology.

At no point did I defend capitalism

You did. You do. You pretend to oppose everyone while uncritically swallowing the most ridiculous capitalist propaganda about the people they fear. You guys are doing it right now with the “Free Iran” shit. You’re a german in 1939 saying “Fuck the nazis of course, but how can you possibly support the baby-eating Bolsheviks??” In 70 years there will be another version of you talking about Mandani’s communist genocide of new yorkers, unaware or unconcered with the fact that they are repeating wholesale fabrications from fascist sources.

Stalin was a monster. And that’s an indisputable fact.

This is you wishcasting. You very badly wish for it to be an indisputable fact, because you’ve built so much of your identity around it but fundamentally lack the knowledge to back it up. That’s why you fall back on religious truisms. In the end, your only defense for your willful ignorance is “it is known”: the chorus of the scared and incurious throughout history. And yet again, you frame him the The One Guy in charge when he was absolutely, unequivocally not. You have zero understanding of the subject and are desperately throwing out cold war cliches.

By the way, who did you vote for this past election?

Ableism is a bad look dude, find a better phrase

See this is what we’re talking about, you correctly see through some lazy capitalist mythologies (such as anarchists being mindless drug-addled destruction junkies with no political goals other than chaos) but fail to see through others, such as “Stalin was The Guy in charge of the USSR and he killed eighty bazillion people through nonspecific means, for no reason other than he was The Joker”.

Like with Hitler we all know the story, we can be specific. He came to power with bourgeois support on the back of a wave of fascist resentment following an economic crash caused by the sudden contraction of Germany’s colonial empire. He was an effective mouthpiece for capitalist interests, who instituted mass privatization and applied colonial doctrine to other Europeans with a war of conquest and extermination externally and a war of antocommunist and racial liquidation internally, as a way of shoring up profits. The methods used were bombs, bullets, starvation and gas, and there is ample firsthand documentation of both action and motive, a million papers that say “we are killing all the jews because they are part of a communist plot to undermine us, plus all the slavs, roma and disabled while were at it.”

Meanwhile, “the story” we all “know” about Stalin and the soviet union is uhh…revolution against the king bad for some reason, new boss same as old boss, something something power corrupts, one guy in charge of everything, George Orwell 1984, communism no food 100 morbillion dead. It’s a loosely strung together list of unsubstantiated cliches peddled by the biggest propaganda machine in human history, usually with the intent of building up to “so that’s why we prop up fascists all over the world, because communists worse, and maybe actually fascists not that bad?👉👈”

This form of propaganda, this smearing of the historical lens until one smudge can be said to look like another, is a mainstay of liberal propaganda. They can’t justify themselves or their actions, can’t make themselves look good, so they equivocate, stretch facts and outright fabricate things in order to claim that everybody is “equally bad”, a position that conveniently justifies them continuing to support their “equally bad” side over anyone who stands up to then. It’s supremacist thinking wrapped in the faux-modesty of Chruchill, the notion that “ho ho, ours is the worst system, except for all the others”. Ain’t we stinkers, but you should see the other guys. Israel bad, but how can you support Hamas? USA bad, but how can you support Iran? Nazi Germany bad, but how can you support the Soviet Union? Don’t you know these things are all equivalent to each other, somehow, conveniently, and the only smart position is to ride the fance so hard you get splinters in your crack?

In reality of course, yours is simply the worst system. Your insistence on supporting the lesser evil every four years when it comes time to yell at people that they have to vote for genocide mysteriously vanishes when it’s time to extend that critical support to factions fighting the most wretched empire on earth: ours. It’s the last hurdle before you become a member of the global human community: abandoning the nationalism, exceptionalism and impotent chauvinist supremacism that we were raised in, that tells us to sit in judgement of the way our victims breathe even as we choke them, and tell ourselves we would do a better job even as we do nothing. That’s why I have endless arguments with liberals who still, after centuries of lies and warmongering, still believe what the US fascist empire says about the people it’s wants to kill, still believe western corporate news media: because deep down, you want to, because it’s hard to accept that we’re the bad guys and always have been. But I promise you that acceptance is the necessary first step towards beginning to understand the world as it actually is: not as the static child’s diorama of heroes and villains that we’ve been taught by a fundamentally childish society, but as the wonderfully complex and eternally moving machine that it is.