It wasn’t a hostile discussion or anything, i didn’t even go full “the kulaks deserved it” (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full “the kulaks did not deserve it”). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said “the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary” and that there’s one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: “If the October Revolution hadn’t succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini’s March on Rome”. Basically the whole “Jakarta Method” train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.
Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went “disengage” on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that’s apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no “sis, you’re talking to me as a mod here”, not even a notification that i got banned.
The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she’s now completely going off about “authoritarians”. The nerve some people have.
Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.
I am going to be honest with you, the root cause of the problem lies deeper.
There currently exists a lot of anxiety among the so-called Western left, who has for the past century secretly enjoyed the benefits of imperialism (while ostensibly critiquing it) and wanted the status quo to persist (while advocating for gradual, incremental change as a peaceful/non-violent means of reform to achieve progress).
However, it is increasingly difficult to sustain this fantasy as the limits of neoliberal capitalism is being exposed across all fronts, both domestically (working class becoming disillusioned by electoral reforms and ditching left-leaning parties as their political platform) and externally (Western imperialism being challenged by the third world pushing for multipolarity and a parity of treatment between nations; accelerating climate disasters exposing the limits of gradual reformism).
This is why you are seeing the behavior as manifested by these leftists, who are desperate to equate anything that provides an alternative to the status quo to be just as bad. The USSR? Authoritarian regime that was far worse than liberal democracy. Multipolar world? That’s just Chinese and Russian imperialism. The list goes on but you see the pattern here.
beyond the material aspect of, i there’s also something very appealing to westerns about the ‘end of history’ line of thinking - the way that it obfuscate capitalism and its ideology. it’s a self-made mythos. western liberals saw the fall of the soviet union as liberalism’s final triumph over communism, cementing the neoliberal idea the that there can be no alternative. admiting that they’re wrong - that there is an alternative - now also means conceding that they’ve bought into, and is guilty of upholding, a system that is more monsterious than any communist boogeyman that could dream up
it’s far more comfortable to just tear down any alternative; to find some reason to exorcise the spectre of marx. that’s probably why western academia, so self-assured in its own skepticism, became enamoured with deconstructionalism following the decline/fall of the soviet union