This is a terrible way of persuading people. Better to not respond at all than to say something like this.

Yes, thank you for being understanding. I think it’s better to avoid calling people brainwashed because – as one liberal in this thread pointed out – it denies agency which our interlocutors plainly do have which makes them much more responsible for their bad epistemology than the theory of “brainwashing” allows for.

If we want to persuade people – and I’ve seen that you have incredible enthusiasm for that cause! – we must do our best to meet them where they actually are rather than where we imagine them to be.

I’ll get off my soapbox here, I just wanted to mention it. I wish you all the best in your efforts!

My friend, I would like to remind you as gently as possible that brainwashing does not exist and was in fact an orientalist lie popularized to explain away why US soldiers would support China.

It’s proof of your integrity that you admit good things about China . . . Because surely you will eventually, right?

Mostly they got banned wherever they congregated on Reddit. Not knowing they existed seems like a significant oversight, but to be expected with the way that China is depicted to you.

Because you need to get to imperialism via capitalism. There is definitively no other way.

You have more than zero point, but this is an excessively modernist way of viewing development that Marx explicitly refutes in his later writings after facing spurious accusations of supporting such views.

If Taiwan is its own nation, they should really specify that in their constitution instead of claiming to be the rightful government of all of China and Mongolia.

And the person I responded to is arguing they’re all the same because, well, Journalism Bad I guess!

If you only consider corporate media and western state-run and state-sponsored outlets to be purveyors of “Journalism,” then let me emphatically say yes, Journalism Bad.

“Actually being state-run is okay when our guys do it”

Before you whine, let me add that RT is a rag, though every now and then it has a good article and sometimes covering things western outlets refuse to is a good thing (like the recent-ish stuff with Seymour Hersh), but to say that VoA isn’t notoriously propaganda or that BBC articles aren’t mostly rightwing drivel is unhinged neoliberal bullshit.

(BBC does have some good TV programs, but those are fiction and documentaries, the news is awful)

You’d be better off without them, they (the runners of the instance, not the userbase) are a bunch of absolutely cowardly little liars. They were more than happy to accept the massive boon this instance gave them and at the same time agitate and concern troll here to try to drive a wedge in the userbase. I find that shit deeply irritating, especially since they claim to be apolitical and merely blocking instances for “hate speech” which (aside from being a political concept) was seemingly the false pretext they have for also blocking hexbear.net, which is currently forked but is the only instance with substantial usership to mandate pronouns and has much more aggressive anti-racist moderation.

If you simper enough, I’m sure they’ll be happy to have you back since they seem the type to feel they are never receiving enough sycophantic flattery, but that’s a bad trade for you.

The thing that irritates me about this comment and the ideology your subreddit represents (well, the pertinent thing) is that the popular world “polarization” obfuscates the massive difference there is between radicalism and dogmatism. That is to say, when two people disagree politically, some people like to imagine for various reasons that their level of animosity is a function of how different their political views are plus some ability to compartmentalize. These things are factors, but ones that lead to political illiteracy on their own.

Dogmatism is the common word for having a circumscribed set of “correct beliefs” and being hostile to any deviation from that set. Radicalism is the sheer extremity of one’s views. It’s entirely possible to be a radical and to be accepting of people, and it’s quite easy to be both a centrist and a dogmatist. We know that second one because that describes a huge portion of the Democratic base! They are people with very little commitment to progressivism who nonetheless are deeply hostile to people on both their left as well as their right.

Of course, sometimes the two traits coincide, like in the Republicans, which have a massive portion of their base that is both pretty radical and pretty dogmatic – though ironically they could be said to be accepting in an extraordinarily cynical way, what with how Evangelicals supported Trump, who is literally the fakest Christian to ever be President (“Two Corinthians”).

Anyway, my point for saying this is that hucksters, useful idiots, and some who I’m sure are good people like to characterize American politics as a situation where there has been a sizable shift towards radicalism. There are new radical (QAnon) and “radical” (Bernie socdem) movements today as there are in any age, but overwhelmingly the Democrats have been getting more conservative if you look past their lip-service, while the Republicans have mostly also become more conservative. The world doesn’t need more centrists, the Democratic Party has plenty! When Obama said he’s “less liberal in a lot of ways” than Richard Nixon, that wasn’t his attempt at absurdist humor!

What would actually be useful is functional empathy and – god forbid – a political ideology that has some ability to explain why people have political differences beyond some puritanical insinuation about moral failings. That does not mean we need to be nihilistic or appeasing with our actual political ideology as though nothing is true or else the truth is the median of whatever everyone happens to believe right now.

Paraphrasing Lafayette, “If the world is divided between people who say 2 + 2 is 6 and those who say 2 + 2 is 4, that does not make it the most reasonable position that 2 + 2 is 5.”

If I was writing it, I’d probably say that the camps in America are “4+4 is 44” and “4+4 is 64”, with “4+4 is 54” being the Enlightened Centrist answer (and ironically perhaps the most deeply irrational).

Whatever “Marxists” tell you that they are anarchists are fucking morons (or Maoists, which could legitimately be said to be a type of anarchism in a loose sense, but then there’s still a 90% chance they are fucking morons). Actually read Marx or Engels or Lenin, I beg you, this isn’t a “he said, she said” situation.

People quote this too often, but yours is a rare case where it is justified:

All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

This is the conclusion of “On Authority” by Engels.

The position of anarchists is the immediate and total lateralization of society, or else whatever government structure they handwave away as being “not real authority”. The position of Marxists, as I already explained at length and you ignored without so much as a comment on its content, is that the matter of achieving such a society requires the creation of a transitional state which must be protected, and socialism brought to the rest of the world to avoid capitalist encirclement.

“State Communism,” again, is something some sniveling “anti-authoritarian” useful idiots made up. Marxists see a current necessity of the state but not an essential or an eternal one. To call their ideology “state communism” is absurd.

That said, in the struggle against western imperialism, anarchists are widely regarded by Marxists within liberal capitalist states as allies (and that view is mostly reciprocated). Perhaps this was your mistake, since I would never reject someone for being an anarchist so long as they weren’t one of those “I disavow the US but believe everything the State Department says about its enemies” types like the internet is fucking filled with for some reason.

And I guess that means Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao were all Marxists?

Do you see what you are doing here? By trotting out major historical figures in this ridiculous and presumptuous manner, you are essentially arguing with the weight of chauvinism and an endless litany of mostly-bullshit accusations. It would take a book to answer about any of these figures in a half-decent way.

The short answers in order:

Stalin: Yes, though he was human and had both errors of judgement and in some cases deep-seated personal chauvinism; Before you ask, Khrushchev was anti-marxist but still seemingly some kind of leftist that I frankly don’t care enough to diagnose.

Pol Pot: Absolutely not, he was an ultra-leftist and one of the most catastrophic leaders for one’s country in human history, even worse than Gonzalo;

Mao: Yes, though he was human and had both errors in judgement and – especially as he aged – an odd propensity for utopian error which caused serious problems.

But how does conversation advance from me saying this? I feel no shame in endorsing the person who lead the destruction of Nazi Germany, or the one who fought of the colonizers and genociders who subjugated the people of China. You, on the other hand, are unlikely to retain a single new thing about them because whatever I say is just going to be “taboo noise” to you. My guess is that it’s just to reassure yourself that I have nothing worthwhile to say, but that feels a little disingenuous compared to contesting the matter directly.

Here’s an essay I like. Maybe consider reading it. I don’t 100% agree, but it has definitely changed the way I thought about things.

This seems like a non-sequitur. Anyway, since audiobooks are still too much, let me just give a basic summary:

Marxists are not anarchists or communalists. Marx saw the failure of the Paris Commune and of the Utopian socialists and sought to create a theoretical framework that could be used in conjunction with practical political programs to resolve class struggle over time, which he predicted would ultimately produce a stateless society. This transitional society, to contrast with Marx’s name for liberal capitalism – the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie – is referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

“State communism” is, uh, just made-up as far as I can tell. Marxists support the destruction of dictatorships of the bourgeoisie and their replacement with dictatorships of the proletariat. Generally they would like to see a stateless society one day, but they understand that a simple commune would get steamrolled the instant it became politically important enough, so they are principally concerned with making states democratic in a truer sense of the word than liberal democracy – which is de facto controlled by the rich – in order to end “capitalist encirclement” and make things like communes more viable.

I would strongly recommend researching . Marxism before declaring self-proclaimed Marxists to not be Marxists.

Now do “State Communism”

I am generally pro-NATO with the understanding that NATO isn’t perfect.

I’m terminally-online enough that I am used to the paths of most arguments that have appeared on this website about politics, but – and I say this to be transparent – this one baffles me and I don’t know how to respond to it. I’ve seen people say it but, well, it gets hard to explain within rule 1.

Maybe if we agree that “NATO is an extension of US foreign policy” we can sidestep the issue for now.

I just worry way more about a world with China/Russia at the helm given their propensity for censoring opinions that oppose their majority parties.

This one I am much more used to. Remembering that NATO is a military organization and not, you know, “who controls the internet,” I’d like to just present you with a simple pair of questions:

1. How many of the past thirty years has the US been at war?

2. How many of the past thirty years has China been at war?

Beyond that, for all the fearmongering people do, China is remarkably less interested in unilaterally dictating relations than you might think, so explaining things in terms of “which country is the master of the unipolar world order” is not justified. Unipolarity has only been the state of things for a little over 30 years (and only obvious for a little over 40) and was unheard of before that. There is no reason to suppose that the future can only be unipolar, especially if the country that ushered in unipolarity and viciously guards it with world-historic levels of violence (the US) is no longer the strongest force.

China has shown every indication of seeking bilateral development and cooperation. An example in severe microcosm is the US banning China from the International Space Station and China responding by making its own space station which the US isn’t banned from, nor most other countries (though I think it is still a finite list and not totally open, owing in part to being a new program). Stories like “debt traps” from China are grotesque projection, as China doesn’t do things like forced restructuring or asset seizure, unlike the IMF.

I truly think this sort of “US is the least of the available evils” ideology has a hard time existing except in a subcultural bubble where it meets no challenge at all, because it is an astoundingly flimsy position.

majority State Communist,

Is there any reason you don’t say Marxist?

legitimate western media articles

anti-NATO bullshit

Out of idle curiosity, do you self-identify as a leftist?

I think the point is that he’s a “symbol” of domestic terror in a way that is disproportionate to his crimes and importance due to being pretty isolated, while death squads and terrorist organizations that act as extensions of the state are not regarded with the negativity they really merit.

It’s not a great comparison, but there’s not nothing there.

That people were killed in Tiananmen Square itself, that the soldiers were the first ones to kill, and that the death toll was something like 10,000. It gets played up on Reddit because of red scare propaganda and plain old chauvinism.

I wasn’t going to say that at first [simply because it’s a bit obnoxious] but since other people are courting drama and I was collecting links from another conversation so it’s convenient to do, so I’ll repost them here:

There was a great deal of violence and many students (along with other protestors, as well as the militants and soldiers) died, so I’ll mark each link with an appropriate content warning, though that’s mostly because the last one is rough, while the ones before it are unlikely to cause people issues.

First, here are video interviews with some of the former student leaders, the first one with Chai Ling actually being before the incident took place. There is some gunfire and yelling that a western news program uses for “ambience”, but nothing is shown. Chai Ling describes a bloody scene, though that specific scene is patently fictional (this is established by the others who are interviewed).

Next is an article which discusses the subject, partly quoting student leaders above. It describes violence in broad strokes but doesn’t have any pictures. It also talks about statements made by a British reporter who was there.

Third, here is secondary reporting leaked on documents from the US Embassy in Beijing and the actual report from a Latin American diplomat that was leaked. The latter revealing contains in its summary: “ALTHOUGH THEIR ACCOUNT GENERALLY FOLLOWS THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED, THEIR UNIQUE EXPERIENCES PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSIGHT AND CORROBORATION OF EVENTS IN THE SQUARE.” (source text is all caps). There is very little description of violence, just mention of gunfire being present, people being wounded, etc.

{Caution} Lastly, here’s an article written arguing that the event is misrepresented in mass media. I link it mainly because it includes photographic evidence that is very difficult to argue with for reasons beyond it being difficult to look at. Graphic depiction of stripped corpses of soldiers that were strung up after death.

Obviously there’s more than this, but these were the links I collected recently. Chai Ling says things that are even more unhinged in footage I think they excluded from that excerpt of the interview.

Go set up your own instance and never raise this subject here again