Should Hexbear MLs tone down their admiration for AES so we’re not scaring potential leftists away?
Should Hexbear MLs tone down their admiration for AES so we’re not scaring potential leftists away?
Inspired by recent discussions, I think Hexbear has a lot of good information about socialism but I wonder if the relentless defense of AES on Hexbear means shooting ourselves in the foot, since many potential leftists have been thoroughly primed to react negatively to AES states?
We’re not getting our messages out when progressive instances have already pre-emptively blocked us and calling us “tankies”.
People are being turned away without even taking the opportunity to read some of the stuff here, because they already have a pre-conceived notion about Hexbear being filled with “crazy tankies who defend totalitarianism”.
I know there have been a lot of propaganda and fabrication being perpetuated about socialist countries, and it feels “right” to defend them against these false accusations, but I wonder if this is doing more harm than good for the present day nascent socialist movement, at least in the Western countries?
We can remain on the current course and feel indignant about the tankie accusations, but will forever remain as a niche “tankie” community.
Or, we can open ourselves up, by toning down the admiration for the socialist states so we are not being treated as hostile by the other instances, and thus opening up the opportunities to have productive interactions with users (and potential leftists) from other instances?
(I do have my own position, you probably know which one it is, but I’m willing to hear from others and reevaluate my own opinions if needed).
EDIT: Thanks to everyone who responded. All points are well taken. Thank you.
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You should admire The Good ThingsTM that they do, and not admire The Bad ThingsTM that they do, and not let the fact they did good things shroud them from any criticism of The Bad ThingsTM.
If you can reasonably and through a common framework show that The Bad ThingsTM are made up, go for that, but maybe leave the 1500 word justification for why the Katyn Massacre was actually based and a good thing unspoken.
The reason is people don't actually care about the historical details of the Holodomor or the Katyn massacre or the Cultural Revolution as such, they just want to make sure that you future political aspirations don't involve re-creations of the common portrayals of those events.
We must agree with them on fictitious accusations from the past in the hopes that they won't accuse us of wanting to do those same fictitious crimes in the future? Insanity. Simulacra of the highest order. Going back into plato's cave and dedicating your life to making shadow puppets.
We must agree with them on fictitious accusations from the past
Except I said the opposite of that.
If you can reasonably and through a common framework show that The Bad ThingsTM are made up, go for that
they just want to make sure that you future political aspirations don't involve re-creations of the common portrayals of those events.
The common fictitious portrayals of those events. You made the distinction between portrayal and reality yourself. Either you debunk the fiction or you have to agree with the lies. If you debunk then that's what we already do, you seem to prefer the latter though, which is fucking stupid because why would anyone listen to someone who thinks holodomor was real but still supports the USSR. The only people you'd be able to convince with that line of logic would be Orthodox Georgian dudes who worship Stalin as a saint or some other variety of patsoc.
This user doesn’t think they are lies. They are a social-chauvinist who believes all the lies and slander and thinks we are the ones who are mistaken.
Once again, you're just making stuff up.
I also love how you seamless pivot from "criticisms of AES are all lies and slander" to "actually, I don't given a shit about that massacre that did in fact actually happen" to "The CCP is naive and incompetent", depending on the thread in question and like those aren't mutually incompatible positions.
Either you debunk the fiction or you have to agree with the lies.
That's a false dichotomy. When someone asks a communist organizer about Cuba's previous treatment of LGBT people or the Khmer Rouge, you don't have to launch into some 3000 word defense of it based on the historical context of the time. You don't have to play on their terms and on the defensive.
You can just say that LGBT rights or Human Rights are a cornerstone of the world that you you're seeking to build, and if that's a legitimate concern of yours, they have nothing to worry about. And you back that up by having a flawless record actually working toward that yourself, putting your money where your mouth is.
This need to re-litigate historical socialism anytime someone brings up the Soviet Union is super reminiscent of "the republicans are the party of Lincoln nonsense." We're not Stalin, or Mao, we have absolutely zero responsibility or accountability for any of their mistakes, real or imagined, and that's the point you hammer home.
Psh, you’re just naive and don’t understand that communism devolves into mass murder and starvation every single time that it’s tried because it goes against human nature. It’s literally NEVER worked, checkmate commies.
We also, as an addendum, get zero credit for their successes.
but maybe leave the 1500 word justification for why the Katyn Massacre was actually based and a good thing unspoken.
I think it was weird to try to blame it on the Nazis, but summarily executing a particular collection of Polish military officers during wartime is -- considering the level of Holocaust collaboration in the Polish government and the Soviets being subjected to Nazi genocide -- something requiring much more justification to establish as actually bad than I have ever seen someone bother with.
Yeah I can’t say I really give a shit about a bunch of polish military officers in WW2 whatsoever
You know it's easy, cheap, and free to say "it's a bad thing to summarily execute 20,000 prisoners."
No one is saying that others didn't do much worse contemporaneously, and no one is asking you to care at some deep level about these crimes. It's about establishing socialists as people trying to build a better world and not just bloodlusting psychopaths.
When your own population is decimated by genocide and you are actively fighting a war against the perpetrators of the genocide, killing a few thousand cops and military who were enthusiastic collaborators in and perpetrators of that genocidal project seems to me like a perfectly reasonable security measure. Conversely, staffing prison camps adequately to contain those thousands of trained and highly murderous people while you are already running ragged trying to fight the Nazis seems like it would be a strategic error. Frankly, if there were people among their number who were interested in opposing genocide, they should have defected.
I'm curious what the actual number is, incidentally, since looking it up it seems like ~5k corpses were found. I won't say that I've done an exhaustive search, but I'm inclined to believe 22 thousand is a theological number more than anything at this point, as notoriously happens with any socialist or socialist-like project, including ones that I strongly condemn like decolonized Khmer Rouge, who were clearly unjust butchers once they removed colonial forces and yet their killings are still exaggerated by an order of magnitude.
When your own population is decimated by genocide and you are actively fighting a war against the perpetrators of the genocide, killing a few thousand cops and military who were enthusiastic collaborators in and perpetrators of that genocidal project seems to me like a perfectly reasonable security measure
These people were captured in September 1939 and executed by May 1940. You don't get to lay the Holocaust and German crimes in Barbarossa at their feet; the timeline doesn't work out.
but I'm inclined to believe 22 thousand is a theological number more than anything at this point,
I mean it was constructed out of declassified Soviet documents. You can try to debunk those as forgeries and haggle on whether or not it was the Nazis that did it or if it was only 7,000 summary executions or what not, but I think the easier and much more valuable thing to do is to argue that you're not the Soviet Union and that their predilection for summary executions has absolutely no relevance to your own political aspirations.
You don't get to lay the Holocaust and German crimes in Barbarossa at their feet; the timeline doesn't work out.
You're correct on this, I forgot how early it happened. Then there is merely the impending threat of annihilation that the Nazis were open about seeking for the East, further substantiated by the slaughter of ethnic minorities in German-occupied Poland, which many Polish municipal politicians, etc. were party to, to say nothing of the killing in Germany and its other occupied territories.
I mean it was constructed out of declassified Soviet documents. You can try to debunk those as forgeries
Come now, don't speak to me like I'm a Holocaust denier. If it's in the archives, it's in the archives, but what specifically is in the archives? How was it constructed? Furthermore, what got the officers imprisoned where they were and were all of those kept at those sites killed? If the prisons were just emptied, what happened to the personnel who worked there, were they just reassigned or did the prisons begin to be refilled immediately?
As I said before, it's possible that it was terrible, but I've never seen someone seriously engage with why it was done in order to establish why it should not have been done.
In any revolution, to say nothing of such an existential conflict as the Soviets in WWII, there are going to be summary executions. They are not an aspiration -- we all admire the rehabilitation accomplished by the CPC -- but if what is logistically keeping you from succeeding is the human rights of fascists, success is much more important.
As I said before, it's possible that it was terrible
I mean they were summary executions; those are prima facie terrible absent some pretty some massively compelling evidence (member of the Waffen-SS), right? Isn't that what the whole "abolish the police" thing is about? Isn't that what the whole George Floyd protests were predicated on?
Like if were going to come out and say "It's fine to summarily execute thousands of people, many of whom are civilians, purely on the basis of logistic and political convenience", then it doesn't matter what actual historical crimes any AES regime committed; we're openly giving ourselves permission to carry out repression like that in the future, and these potential future crimes are the only ones anyone we're talking to actually cares about. That's my point.
All I'm saying is, if our political platform has a massive undercurrent of "were are going to shoot a whole lot of you once we get power", we don't get to act surprised when we have absolutely 0 political success, electoral or otherwise. Like it's funny that Chris Matthews has brainworms that Bernie is going to be running death camps in central park. On the flip side it's absolutely soul-crushing that 70% of the population shares those brainworms. And that's for Bernie Sanders, much less an actual socialist candidate.
And to your last point, if you actually find yourself in some do or die position as part of some revolution, having to make some incredibly difficult choice, you still can. Having a platform of peace land and bread doesn't preclude you from doing anything in the future as necessary.
I mean they were summary executions; those are prima facie terrible absent some pretty some massively compelling evidence (member of the Waffen-SS), right?
Did you miss the part where Polish fascists under Nazi occupation were already rounding up and slaughtering Jews and other minorities? What makes a Nazi collaborator better than SS?
Isn't that what the whole "abolish the police" thing is about?
The principle element of "abolish the police" from the standpoint of an anti-imperialist looking at America is that the police function as a sort of colonial occupation apparatus within minority communities that does virtually nothing else in those communities but maintain a brutal oppression for the purpose of economic extraction and the maintainance of a white supremacist ideology. The fact that cops effectively engage in the summary execution of, at minimum, over a thousand people a year in this country is principally bad because it is to support that project.
In a hypothetical American Social Revolution, a portion of the people who are now cops probably would need to be killed for simple logistical and threat-mitigation reasons, though of course rehabilitation is the goal and detaining most of them safely would probably be possible in most cases. Cops [and deputies], more than military or any other group that isn't a private gang (like the Klan) are the group that this is true for than any other, since they do in some places operate as rightwing death squads and are a self-selection for the most malignant personalities that can maintain an organized group and do violence themselves.
Isn't that what the whole George Floyd protests were predicated on?
If you think killing a Polish mayor who rallied his town to immolate Jews (or killing a soldier who did the immolating) is similar to the killing of George Floyd, I have nothing to say to you.
Did you miss the part where Polish fascists under Nazi occupation were already rounding up and slaughtering Jews and other minorities? What makes a Nazi collaborator better than SS?
So shoot those Polish fascists. Don't shoot the Polish liberal college professor you've got in your custody as a proxy.
engage in the summary execution of, at minimum, over a thousand people a year in this country is principally bad because it is to support that project.
So if it were random, unaligned summary executions, that would be okay? Cause from my point of view summary executions of innocent people is intrinsically bad, regardless of what theoretical framework we decide to explain them with.
If you think killing a Polish mayor who rallied his town to immolate Jews (or killing a soldier who did the immolating) is similar to the killing of George Floyd, I have nothing to say to you.
Is there a particular Polish mayor the Soviets killed in Katyn that you had in mind, or are you constructing a contra-factual counter-example out of whole cloth?
In a hypothetical American Social Revolution, a portion of the people who are now cops probably would need to be killed for simple logistical and threat-mitigation reasons,
Maybe, maybe not! Like you said it's not certain. Just a probability. It'll depend on the material conditions on the ground at the time.
So don't put it on your fuckin platform like it's something you hope to do.
So shoot those Polish fascists. Don't shoot the Polish liberal college professor you've got in your custody as a proxy.
Is that what happened? I've been asking questions towards that end that you ignored.
So if it were random, unaligned summary executions, that would be okay? Cause from my point of view summary executions of innocent people is intrinsically bad, regardless of what theoretical framework we decide to explain them with.
You say "innocent" but we haven't established that they were innocent or even that that was more probable than them siding with fascists.
Is there a particular Polish mayor the Soviets killed in Katyn that you had in mind, or are you constructing a contra-factual counter-example out of whole cloth?
There was an infamous case of a Polish mayor that I was alluding to (actually I think there were a couple), but they were on the German side of the border because the point is that there were natively Polish pogroms and we know that even after the war, sections of the Polish population were taking any excuse to commit genocide on any minority (e.g. Germans during the postwar relocations). I know some claims about demographic information, but I know of only like one or two individual identities of people killed in Katyn.
Maybe, maybe not! Like you said it's not certain. Just a probability. It'll depend on the material conditions on the ground at the time.
So don't put it on your fuckin platform like it's something you hope to do.
I've only seen that put on an ML platform in anarcho-bidenist memes and that one tasteless and self-deprecating joke about communists in Disco Elysium. No one is saying "Let us aspire to kill as many people without trial as possible", you are battling a phantom in your brain that I can do little to help you overcome, unless you are just finding a way to concern troll about atrocity propaganda
Is that what happened? I've been asking questions towards that end that you ignored.
Isn't it?
As far as I can tell, none of these people were executed for any particular crimes; they were executed for being members of counter-revolutionary parties and things like that. And shooting some doctor solely because he's a liberal shithead is a bad thing.
Like if we're so eager to strip the smallest modicum of value to human life, what's the fucking point of fighting for a better future? I'm a communist because capitalism as an ideology attaches absolutely 0 value to human life and has absolutely no compunctions of squeezing out life for 'value' across the globe. And so when we go to people and tell them a better future is possible, I don't know why we're so quick to add "yes that better future does feature a whole lot of firing squads, and we're not altogether too picky about who ends up in front of one".
I'm not even saying you need to condemn the Katyn massacre or the like. I'm just saying you don't need to defend it. We're not Lavrenty Beria, so the Katyn massacre isn't our problem unless we decide to make it our problem. And what possibly benefit could we gain from taking on it's defense?
Are the horrors of capitalism orders of magnitude worse? Sure, but for a lot of people they're baked into the cake, and they don't even see them, and when they do they're nearly always portrayed as regrettable, accidental, or unavoidable. The fact that we're letting capitalism seem more humane than communism to the general populous because we can't muster anything beyond a "idk, they probably would have sided with the fascists or something, too bad and git gud" is an absolute travesty.
You say "innocent" but we haven't established that they were innocent or even that that was more probable than them siding with fascists.
Well given they were in Soviet custody as prisoners of war, I'd say the probability of them siding with the fascists was approaching 0%. No one is saying release them all immediately. But liquidating 20,000 people based on vibes about what they might do is a bad thing.
No one is saying "Let us aspire to kill as many people without trial as possible"
Well, here's a hexbear search for "excuses terror"! There's only about 20 pages of results, but luckily about half of those are some variation of "we might having to start making excuses".
If you're gonna follow me from thread to thread with a bit you might at least try a funny one.
I mean I could send you a DM with a link to both comments and these gifs instead next time you show up to vague post in a way designed to push chauvinism informed by nothing more than a desire not to disturb the status quo or offend those who believe in it. You started out actually making arguments and responding to them. I didn't send you nipple rubbing gifs then.
OP asked a question and I outlined my answer. If you have questions about what that looks like in practice let them rip, but I was neither talking about you or to you.
I can only follow your train of thought about 70% of the time so I can't even begin to characterize your position, much less criticize it.
I don't have questions about what it looks like in practice, you're perfectly fine with articles that criticize Cuba and the DPRK through a state dept-approved lens as long as it's labelled "socialist".
state dept-approved lens
I could give two shits what the state department thinks about a particular criticism. I care if it's a valid criticism of actual problems, and treated proportionately to how important it actually is.
You'd be honored to be among the vetted members of the US media class in order to get people like Grimes to read the Communist Manifesto.
This is one of those 30% times.
Inability to understand Voight-thought is the 13th type of Liberalism
Mods using the removal tool as a super downvote button again smdh you hate to see it.
Liberalism is against site rules
If saying that criticism of AES constitutes liberalism, you'd better go delete your comments about CCP Foreign Policy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
you can critique AES from the left, for not being aggressive enough. You can critique specific policies. I want the CPC to start acting like DPRK in their foreign policy, IE I want them to become more communist.
What you can't do is repeat "red fascism" crap or ally yourself with social democrats and repeat their attacks on AES. You want DPRK to become more like Norway.
You can critique specific policies.
That's what I've been doing.
You want DPRK to become more like Norway.
Yeah, and I'd like Norway to become more like the DRPK. Kim Jong Un agrees, which is why he's building waterparks and ski resorts.
What you can't do is repeat "red fascism" crap
Haven't done that, if you've been paying attention, my whole point here has been to say "we don't have to play those games".
No you have been defending liberals slandering AES as “red fascist authoritarian dictatorships”. You are a bad faith liar
No you have been defending liberals slandering AES as “red fascist authoritarian dictatorships”.
Nope, I think Cuba's pretty cool actually.
Your friend and fellow travelers NJR, AOC, Bernie Sanders don’t. They all play the “denounce all AES as red fascists” game as you say, and you like it and defend them.
You defended DPRK being called red fascists in American socialist publications. Stop lying. Stop derailing. Stop being a bad faith liberal.
Only NJR knows who I am, I challenge you to dig up a single positive word I've ever said about AOC, and Big Dicked Bernie will go out of his way to publicly espouse support for Cuba.