“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be,” he added.

This is a nazi discussing lebesraum.

That’s a horrifying thought.

Maybe if I read that it would temper my view of him, I mainly know him for writing an anti-Soviet book in the middle of a war with the nazis

Animal Farm

The plot reads like a sunday school scare piece to warn children about the dangers of satanism. It’s so vague and allegorical that you can’t really critique it. The message is basically “if you revolt against the capitalists, a scary bad man will take over and hurt you.” Also pretty disgusting that it portrays workers as farm animals and capitalists as humans. It’s a very “American schools during the Cold War would make kids read that” kind of book.

It’s not surprising that Orwell was a bigoted snitch who ratted leftists out to British intelligence, and was especially keen on turning in jews, black people, homosexuals, and anyone he deemed “anti-white.”

https://bennorton.com/george-orwell-list-leftists-snitch-british-government/

I’ll also throw in Asimov’s review of 1984 while I’m ranting about this creep

http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

framework for statecraft

I kinda give side-eye to anyone really fond of the word statecraft. It’s sort of an “I look up to a lot of neoliberal ghouls” shibboleth.

Europe also benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net wealth extracted from the global south.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

fucking communist countries have killed how many millions of their own citizens

Most of these articles cite the Black Book of Communism, which goes to absurd lengths to inflate the death toll of Communism, for example counting all the millions of nazi and soviet soldiers killed on the eastern front as victims of communism, counting the entire death toll of the Vietnam war, and even counting declining birth rates as deaths due to communism.

Noam Chomsky used the same methodology to argue that, according to Black Book logic, capitalism in India alone, from 1947–1979, could be blamed for more deaths than communism worldwide from 1917–1979.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm

sing praise about Russia

I have never seen a communist claim that the modern Russian government is good or communist, only that it opposes western hegemony, to the occasional benefit of poor nations in the global south.

how old were you when the USSR fell? Did you experience communism, or the capitalist takeover after communism fell?

vote for who you’d rather negotiate with

I’m not saying don’t vote, but is it reasonable to expect that we can negotiate for much of anything?

“If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”

I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

. . .

Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

communism involves the abolition of the government. If you want to know what America does to communist movements undefended by government look at Indonesia in 1965–66

it is a requirement if you want to be a very rich social democracy

Economic liberalization is a defense against the kind of economic warfare that Cuba has been subjected to. Those are really the only two options: play ball with capitalism to some extent, or get strangled by sanctions.

I’ve been speaking with other more informed communists and they’ve told me

Lol this reads like social engineering to shift perception of ingroup mores. I guess I’m paranoid after seeing that Atlantic Council whitepaper calling for greater control of the fediverse.

And there have been multiple successful leftist political victories. You can not get these victories without a considerable amount of leftist and left leaning voting.

The entire conclusion of the study I linked is that this is not happening.

There’s nothing wrong with voting, I vote every two years, but it’s dangerous to convince yourself that voting is enough. You need to also organize. You need to strike. You need to unionize your workplaces. If you really want to push the government into conceding real improvements in our lives, you need to apply direct pressure on a large scale. And when the crackdown comes, you need to collectively organize to help each other. Bail people out of jail. Help people pay rent when they’re fired for trying to unionize. Doing this on a large scale is how you get actual fucking change, and it will never happen if people lie to themselves that voting alone is sufficient.

The point is, you’re not going to hear a thoughtful explanation of what those people actually think or why on an instance where any such explanation gets you immediately banned and your comments removed.

You’re trying to dismiss the criticism by ingroup-outgrouping me. I’m not straight, I’m fucking pan, and numerically speaking I doubt most of the thousands of queer people on here know who you are or the intent of your username.

I’ve said my piece here and in our 1:1 conversation, and the more we talk the more you’ll probably dig your heels in. You got feedback from one person and a few upvoters. Take it or leave it.

The economically motivated NATO intervention in Libya was justified with false claims of a genocide. This was the conclusion reached by the British parliament report. Now Libya is a war-torn failed state with open-air slave markets. That intervention was less than a decade after “Iraq has WMDs,” a lie that has killed over a million people. When we have all witnessed these events in our lifetimes, I think we should be a little skeptical when enemy states are vilified. I don’t know if public backlash could have prevented the intervention in Libya, but I hope we’ll at least try to prevent the next one.

Both situations are bad, but I don’t think oligarchs hinder each other that much. They compete, but in their overall control of society they are fairly unanimous, because they all share the same basic material interest to pay us as little as possible for as much work as possible and to destroy any trace of meaningful working class political power that might challenge them.

what democracy?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[…]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.