CascadeOfLight [he/him]

Yeah having just said that, after two days of shouting at an entire clan of brick walls I am starting to flag a little, but still, from time to time it’s good practice to sharpen your arguments against the bluntest whetstones you can find.

I YET HUNGER FOR BATTLE, FEED ME LIBERALS

Calling into question the functioning of someone’s brain is pretty neuronormative.

I’m not being that serious though, because I also can’t find any example of someone being ableist to you beyond calling you stupid (it was me, I did that).

Hexbear has probably the lowest tolerance for ableism of any place I’ve seen on the internet. The raiding parties you see coming into your instance to bash liberals on the internet and correct their disinformation are not really representative of the tone of conversation on the actual instance itself between people who aren’t spoiling for a rumble, not that I would expect ableism even then. The mods of Hexbear are very strict about that kind of thing, so watching clown-to-clown communication between you and your buddy as you just outright lie on the internet about the nature of another online community, in a farcical echo to how your forebears fabricated lies about socialist states, demanded comment.

Clearly the tankie brain cannot comprehend criticism from the left…

Not ableism

Why would there need to be an alternative? It was already the best possible version of what could have happened, within the bounds of a crushing siege by the entire capitalist world on one hand, and basic human fallibility on the other. There is no other political leader in history with a higher proportion of correct decisions to mistakes than Stalin, and they were mistakes, as in consequences not intended from actions taken earnestly to protect the people of the USSR - unlike the actual unspeakable atrocities being committed constantly by every single imperialist nation at the time, as well as before and since.

Even just on its own terms, the USSR was unimaginably more humane than what came before:

what existed outside of it:

and what came after:

This is called the “Eastern Cross” by the way, a demographic phenomenon unique to former nations of the USSR, where the death rate and birth rate suddenly cross over each other in the 90s. It’s way better that this happened, of course, than the USSR being run by “”“authoritarians”“” who would protect their people from sabotage and murder using the necessary amount of violence (that is, still less than their enemies).

But I forgot, we’re comparing an actual nation that had to actually exist in the dirt and blood of the real world, to the geometrically perfect platonic anarchist society that lives in your head, so I guess I have to concede. I’ll go tell all the communists in the third world to pack it up and disband their organizations and scratch out all the hammers and sickles so you can go tell them how to avoid being assassinated by the CIA the right way.

You’re so right, it would have been way better for everyone in the territory of the USSR to be illiterate and poor and starving, so they wouldn’t have cared so much when the Nazis effortlessly murdered everyone from western Poland to eastern Siberia. Who even needs industrial output when you could have a “”“horizontally-organized”“” bandit kingdom named after its unelected leader?

In fact it’s just state Capitalism and always devolves into Capitalism

I will reply with a meme

I’m not going to go do homework just to argue to you

Then that’s the end of our conversation. I’ve pointed out a direction in which you can expand your knowledge, even if it’s just knowledge of what your “enemy” thinks - you can have some intellectual curiosity, or you can not, but in the latter case there’s no reason for me to spend further effort trying to force it upon you.

“Totalitarian” is a totally made-up, meaningless distinction. There is no conceivable metric by which you could call any socialist state “totalitarian” that wouldn’t apply a hundredfold to the US Empire. Seriously, this conversation cannot continue unless you read Blackshirts and Reds, it sums up every point I could make to argue with you with much more depth and eloquence. If you have the slightest pretention to intellectual seriousness, go and read that. Then, once you have, message me and I’ll send you a link to season 3 of a podcast called Blowback, covering the Korean war. I think you’ll find it informative.

I’ve taken a harsh tone with you, because you need to be jolted out of this fundamentally incorrect mindset. But if you read what I’ve suggested and actually process the information, if you try to understand the societies you harshly criticize in the depth and richness of their actual existence and not the literal Saturday morning cartoon evil version you’ve had ingrained in you by a multi-trillion dollar propaganda campaign, you’ll arrive at the same opinions I have now - including feeling the way I do about people espousing the views you have done. Until you understand that no “western” country has EVER come closer to socialism than the USSR, China, Cuba or the DPRK (or even had the merest potential to) you are not only useless to the international cause of the workers but an active detriment, a stooge of the Empire that is currently enslaving humanity. That might only manifest as irritating, trivial anticommunist memes on a backwater internet forum, but it still might as well be fought against, and if there’s the slightest chance you can be educated into a helpful comrade then I might as well try.

Ukraine Free Territory

Literally bandit kingdom under an absolute leader

Stalin vs Spanish Leftists

The USSR was the only nation to provide any support to the Republic, and it was the anarchists that fucked up by being unable to organize any kind of national army and just letting the fascists roll up their ‘independent’ cities one by one. Saying “it was Stalin’s fault” is the anarchist stab-in-the-back myth.

Mao

I’ve never heard of the ‘Manchurian communes’ and neither has wikipedia (which would never miss the chance to play up a supposed communist atrocity) and ah yes, that famous leftist tendency “intellectuals”. Not saying the Cultural Revolution was correct, but you also can’t just blame one person for it.

Hungarian Worker’s Councils

A fascist counterrevolution, Hungary was an Axis power and it was a mere eleven years after WW2 - for “”“worker’s councils”“” they sure lynched a lot of Jewish people! Read this.

Futhermore, did even a single one of these leaders claim to support an abstract “left unity”? Lenin sure didn’t:

“Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.”

Nor did all the millions and millions of workers who supported each of these leaders. How unfathomably arrogant to think that the millions of committed revolutionaries that worked tirelessly to build socialism in these places were too fucking stupid to see they were working for the ‘wrong’ ideology, that they should have rejected their leadership organization and just slotted in your preferred coterie of “libertarian socialists & anarchists” and that would have simply solved all their murderous authoritarian ways. A nice horizontal, non-hierarchical, non-coercive network of free-organizing collectives would definitely have stood up in the face of the Wehrmacht, wouldn’t it!

Now, ironically the “tankie” instances in this federation actually have rules about sectarianism so I wouldn’t post this on there, but I have no qualms saying it here (you can feel free to ban me though, if you want to indulge in the ultimate irony). So I can say that I am sectarian, because revolution is a problem that has a correct answer - there’s the answer that saved hundreds of millions of lives from fascism, and then there’s the ‘answer’ that lets online “”“leftists”“” living eighty years after the fact feel smugly superior to the people who actually fought and bled for a better world. Further reading on this matter:

• “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder - Lenin
• A Critical Read of Animal Farm - Jones Manoel
• Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism - Michael Parenti (<- especially this)

Edit: I was kinda pissed off when I wrote this so my dismissals of those points were definitely sloppy - though in hindsight with this guy “more nuance” would probably have been a waste - but I absolutely can’t tolerate such ignorant attacks against the projects that actually came the closest to human emancipation anywhere in history. Regardless, I don’t want any anarchist comrades to feel like I’m attacking them, and although I obviously believe MLism (and the collected work of its offshoot branches) is the best basis for the theory and practice of revolution, the good work of anarchist groups that were able to keep fighting in the imperial core when Marxist groups were stamped out can’t be ignored. If you punched a fascist then you’re a comrade of mine.