gonna be posting a bunch of quotes in this thread that I want to preserve. you are welcome to post critiques of a given pasta, just remember I don’t 100% agree with all of these (only most) but consider them information worth saving. proposed edits will be considered
CONTENT WARNING: there’s going to be mentions of imperial atrocities in here, including SA and torture.
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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”
whataboutism 
True
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.
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!
This reads like the opener to a chapter of God Emperor of Dune.
[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?
“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!”
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.
“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.
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
Liberal conception of “human rights” is just so stupid.
You have the “right” to own things, but you don’t have the right to the means to actually own things, so in practice you might own nothing, but who cares? This piece of paper says it’s your “right” to do so!
You have the “right” to free speech, but you don’t have the right to an actual platform, i.e. the right for your speech to actually be heard. If the system doesn’t like what you say, they can just kick you from all platforms. You have the “right” to shout as loud as you want as long as it’s in a place no one can hear you, so you don’t actually have the right for your speech to actually mean anything.
That’s how all liberal “rights” are. They’re in practice useless, because you have the right to something in principle, but don’t have the right to actually use that right, you just have the right in some vague, ethereal, almost magical sense, disconnected from reality, and many indeed view it as magic, saying these “rights” are handed down by God almighty and not social constructions.
Because you can’t actually use these “rights” in practice, then in the real world, they only serve as justification for restricting people’s freedoms. Why does this corporate giant get to censor dissenters? Because they have the “right” to do what they want with their platform! Why do billionaires get the “right” to control hoards of wealth and other people’s labor? Because they have the “right” to do so! Why does this landlord get to tell me how I should live when I’m the one taking care of the actual apartment and living here? Because they have the “right”!
It’s a funny thing, because it is very reminiscent of divine right of kings. Since many people genuinely believe these rights come from God almighty, then suddenly, Jeff Bezos’s rule becomes sanctioned by God almighty. It’s not much different than saying, the king has the authority to control the nation’s wealth and its people, because the “right” was given to them from on high!
I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-56, p. 372
“Left unity” is pointless. If you have a total of 5 leftists in your country, it doesn’t matter if they all unify, they’re still powerless. People seem to have this delusion that if only Marxists and anarchists stopped fighting, they could come together in countries like the US and take power, but in reality, this is more likely to be the result.
It’s also completely backwards. No revolution has been carried out by only class conscious communists. Communists have to learn how to appeal to the masses, and the masses then have to support it. This is the problem, the highly class conscious communists will always be in small numbers, and will never have the numbers on their own, even if they all unify together.
Historically, the socialists and communists that come to power are rarely even the result of “unity”, but it’s always one specific section overtakes everyone else by storm. That’s because some organization figures out a way to rally the masses, and once you get the masses on your side, all other organizations get in line or get destroyed.
The problem is not lack of left unity, but lack of any organizations that have figured out a way to rally the masses. Nobody has figured out how to overcome all the anti-communist brainwashing and to have a message that appeals. It’s only been successful in colonized countries but not in the colonizer countries.
People who act like there’s some simple solution that we’re just all too stupid to see, like, “if we just all stopped fighting we’d win the revolution!” are not appreciating just how difficult the problem is. The reason communists have not succeeded in colonizer countries is not because they’re all missing something “so simple”, but because the problem is fucking hard, and they have a mountain to climb.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists managed to sneak his work past a censor that banishes the likes of Karl Marx and Malcolm X.
The less complicated reading is the correct one: it’s an anti-communist book that the establishment pushes, and the right adores and cites constantly, because it is effective anti-communist propaganda.
Let’s part from a very basic fact: The CIA loves Orwell.
Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down. [1]
The movie adaptation of Animal Farm was the UK’s first animated feature film, and it was entirely funded by the CIA. This fact was kept secret for 20 years, and only revealed in 1974, to no cultural impact. [2]
Orwell enthusiasts insist that he would be horrified by this turn of events, that he was trying to preserve a genuine and humane socialism from the clutches of “Stalinism”. They insist Orwell was against all empires, not just the one he lived in. However, his life and his work rather undermine this interpretation.
