Anarcho-Bolshevik
‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970
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For some reason lately I’ve been fretting over something in particular that I said several years ago. I wrote ‘Third Reich analogies are shit and they should not be necessary to get a point across.’ I kind of regret saying that; I feel like it was too harsh and I only said it because I was angry at the time.
While I agree that Reich analogies can be a crude way of getting a point across (being rhetorical shortcuts) and I prefer that nobody overuse them (like the right does), I don’t want anybody to scorn lower‐class people for using them against their oppressors either. In general, I believe that the ways in which we respond to our oppression should preferably not be controlled; that can only make an unpleasant situation worse, and anyway, we have legitimate grievances.
At one point in 2020 I became acquainted with a communist on Twitter who compared the U.S. police force to the Wehrmacht. I found that inaccurate, personally, but given how the police oppress us I didn’t bother nitpicking. In fact, it was a nice opportunity for me to share examples of antisemitic neofascists in the police force.
What pisses me off is when somebody equates the oppressed (e.g., Palestinians, lower‐class communists) with the Reich instead. That is when the analogies go from being mildly questionable to enraging and make me regret the very phenomenon of Godwin’s law. On the other hand, that is probably a slight overreaction on my part.
What do you think? Am I being too hard on myself?
A 2002 report from The Lancet said that the DPRK actually pursued ‘aggressive and unsustainable strategies to maximise the output of its land, only 15% of which is arable’, which blatantly contradicts the ignorant (or willfully dishonest) anticommunists’ claim that the land is ‘underutelized’.
Now, regarding the malnourished millions factoid:
Finally, seeing as how these anticommunists admitted that they ‘don’t want to deal with the population after the Kim’s are gone’, I have a sneaking suspicion that they would resort to something like this so that nobody would have to deal with the population ever again.
Lewis saw how many Angelenos were attracted to colorful yet dangerous demagogues such as Gerald B. Winrod, the far-right Kansas evangelist known as the Jayhawk Nazi, who was later shown to be in the service of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda; Father Charles Coughlin, whose weekly anti-Semitic rants reached 14 million people; and William Dudley Pelley, head of the Silver Legion of America (commonly known as the Silver Shirts), a fascist and anti-Semitic organization whose members donned uniforms much like the ones Brownshirts wore that they sewed themselves so as not to wear anything touched by Jews.
(Emphasis added. Source.)
To any lurkers: you’ll likely have to download a third‐party application to access that video now.
Anyway, that is a good video. It should have been harsher with regards to the scientific inaccuracy, but given the limited length I would say that the response is adequate; it covers some very glaring issues.
In 1907, a peasant uprising erupted across Romania. […] The Conservative government was replaced by a Liberal one on 12 March, which declared a state of emergency. Concerned that infantry regiments might sympathize with the rebels, the Romanian Army primarily relied on cavalry and artillery regiments to fire on peasant crowds, leaving thousands dead and wounded.
[…]
Liberals courting peasant voters, who now made up most of the electorate, blamed social, economic, and political problems on Jews to divert anger away from the party’s failure to deliver on promises of a better life in Greater Romania. The reality that many Jews barely eked out a living in rural towns or working-class slums was irrelevant.
(Source.)
Good video; this is the best critique that I have seen of him. I myself suspect that he was a utopian socialist for a (very brief) period in his life before becoming an ex‐socialist, which is not that unusual of a development among reactionaries. See Karl Popper, & alii.
“All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil‐spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.”
Damn, he was both‐sidesing in life earlier than I thought.
Honestly, Putin is a conservative dick; screw him. The only reasons that I don’t say that more often are A. we all already know that, B. we can easily read and hear that anywhere else, and C. I think that it would only end up drawing attention away from the Western ruling classes that provoked this conflict in the first place. It would be more‐or‐less analogous to repeatedly criticizing Haile Selassie during the reinvasion and occupation of Ethiopia: it wouldn’t exactly be wrong, but it would miss the point.
Which of these is the WORST COUNTRY on EARTH?
- A. America
- B. China
- C. Israel
- D. Japan
TRUE or FALSE: Giving food and shelter to the homeless will not force the enslavement and genocide of middle‐class billionaires.
- True
- False
Which of these countries HAS NOT banned FREEDOM?
- A. Russia
- B. America
- C. North Korea
- D. Africa
I can’t promise that these will persuade them too, but I can speak from personal experience when I say that reading Inventing Reality and Human Rights in the Soviet Union strongly reduced my negativity regarding the people’s republics, even if I was still unsure that state socialism was the best way to go. My view on state socialism (‘state capitalism’, I preferred to call it) evolved from it being an obstacle to it being an acceptable alternative (if not inevitability).
Yes, I know that CrimethInc. is postleftist trash, but that’s beside the point: this is going to set a precedent for cracking down on dozens, if not hundreds of other antifascist accounts in the previsible future, while neofascists like the example that you shared are going to go untouched. Expect Twitter’s audience to undergo further homogenization soon.
That’s not good enough. The reason that the German Reich temporarily arrested him had nothing to do with his antisemitic fascism (pg. 248):
In accordance with an order from Heydrich on 13 September 1941, a number of leading OUN-B members, including Bandera and Stets’ko, were arrested on 15 September, the reason for which was the assassination of [OUN‐M members] Stsibors’kyi and Senyk on 30 August in Zhytomyr.
Furthermore (pg. 286):
The Providnyk was released from Zellenbau on 28 September 1944, and was kept in Berlin under house arrest. Shortly afterwards, the Germans also released Stets’ko, Mel’nyk, Bul’ba-Borovets’, and about 300 other OUN members who had been held in different camps. While under house arrest Bandera could move about the city and meet other people. In a bulletin on 14 November the OUN announced that “the Leader Stepan Bandera is free.” The Nazis had released Bandera and some other special political prisoners from Zellenbau because Germany was losing the war and wanted to organize Russians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans for the last struggle against the Red Army.
Quoting Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, pages 171–2:
In his autobiography from 1959, Bandera also wrote that he demanded that the policies of the OUN should be less dependent on outside factors, by which he meant cooperation with Nazi Germany. This claim from 1959, however, corresponds neither with the OUN-B’s actions in 1940–1941, nor with what Bandera expressed in an undated letter to Mel’nyk, written in August 1940, when he was outraged at the rumor spread by Baranovs’kyi that Bandera was hostile to Nazi Germany.
I honestly believe that most self‐identified anticommunists would agree with that, even for victims who were little children, which many were (NSFL). Despite their repeated mentioning of various body counts that they assign to us, anticommunists not only normalize violence; they openly glorify it.
If you try to show them atrocities that their movement committed, your chances of receiving as little as one concerned response are pretty low. You’ll be lucky if you even get a half‐assed apology like ‘maybe some mistakes were made’, ‘nobody’s perfect’, or ‘sorry if you were offended’.
Their default excuse basically boils down to ‘at least it wasn’t communism’.
Otherwise, they rush as fast as possible to find a single possible ‘flaw’ somewhere in the accusations: usually something that they could have easily understood themselves by being more patient, taking their research seriously.
Whoa whoa whoa, look, just because anticommunists have human rights violations in their own countries doesn’t mean that they’re insincere when they focus on ones thousands of miles away! I’m sure that they care deeply about the recriminalization of abortion in the U.S., just not now, and not here, and not the ones who recriminalized it.
Fascism has surprisingly little stigma in Italy. Fascist statues are left alone, the Mussolini family is politically active and well respected, and very little attention is paid to Italian Fascism’s (atrocious) history in Africa and its complicity in the Shoah.
Yeah, this is not how you draw people in. First of all, the message does not need to be in ALL CAPS. Second, the message either needs to be abbreviated or less noticeable than a larger one that can quickly entice the passer‐by. Finally…a mere flier is unlikely to suffice. Demonstrate yourself doing something good, like giving a sleeping bag or food to a houseless person, explain that you are doing this because you are anarchist/socialist, and if they become curious, then you offer a flier.
I can understand why these anarchists would immediately pick shortcuts like this one—I’ve certainly been there myself—but as they accumulate experience, they’re going to learn the sad truth that these brute‐force tactics rarely work.
Because it was a casual environment (rather than something more formal like a school or a funeral) and the video likely wasn’t addressed to any Fascist officials either (being a mere home video), so there was no ceremonial obligation to perform one. The possibility that they did it mostly to amuse themselves wouldn’t contradict their profascism, of course.
It could be, as @Aru@lemmygrad.ml said, a ‘Roman’ salute, which was already standard in Fascist Italy. (It’s highly unlikely to be a Bellamy salute: a U.S. phenomenon.)
I’ve researched this before and it’s highly likely that it was a heil (albeit maybe done ‘just for fun’ judging from the casual setting).
You may be thinking about this piece by Mike Bedard & al., where at the end they offer some counterpoints to the exaggerations about the Versailles Treaty. The problem is that ‘the reparations burden continued to fall on Germany — and the German ruling classes naturally passed it on to the workers’, as @juchebot88@lemmygrad.ml said.
Simply put: the Versailles Treaty was awful, but not for the reasons that many think.
They call themselves ‘national-anarchists’ and yes, they want to be taken seriously.
deported German settlers from the country
I remember getting into an argument with an antisocialist on Reddit years ago who said elsewhere that I was justifying ‘ethnic cleansing’. I was enraged reading that.
Capitalists have always liked synchronizing class with ethnicity when possible, as we can see in Apartheid South Africa. It isn’t the decolonizers’ fault that it looks like an ethnic issue.
holodomor
Soviet famine (of 1932–3). ‘Holodomor’ is a dysphemism coined by Ukrainian ultranationalists.
Nazis argue that literally no one died during the Holocaust
Not exactly. Most of them prefer to argue that it was ‘only a few’ Jews who died and that they probably died by accident anyway.
Good grief… if the U.S.S.R. was the Reich’s ‘ally’ then so was Poland, France, the United Kingdom, and every other piss bucket in Europe.
To quote my thesis:
— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War
The Kremlin wasn’t staffed with amnesiacs; they had the common sense to know that the capitalists were going to reinvade Soviet Eurasia. The question was when; intelligence reports were often contradictory, which was why Moscow hesitated before fighting back.
See Molotov’s explanation.
(Source.)
Also, that Wikipedia link does not support the Redditor’s claim.