‘At present the proletariat has urgent need for self‐defense against fascism, and this self‐protection against fascist terror must not be neglected for a single moment. At stake is the proletarians’ personal safety and very existence; at stake is the survival of their organizations. Proletarian self‐defense is the need of the hour.
We must not combat fascism in the way of the reformists in Italy, who beseeched them to “leave me alone, and then I’ll leave you alone.” On the contrary! Meet violence with violence. But not violence in the form of individual terror—that will surely fail. But rather violence as the power of the revolutionary organized proletarian class struggle.’
— Clara Zetkin, 1923
I guess i’m reading all her works now.
“We will be cruel to the [fascists], and through our cruelty they will know who we are. And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the [fascists] won’t be able to help themselves but to imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the [fascists] will be sickened by us, and the [fascists] will talk about us, and the [fascists] will fear us. And when the [fascists] closes their eyes at night and they’re tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us they are tortured with. Sound good?”
Fascists obviously need to be killed, but I don’t see why they should be tortured. Torture takes valuable time from our soldiers in which they could otherwise rest, replenish their resources, or contemplate tactics. If our soldiers just take five minutes torturing one fascist - not allowing for lunch, coffee breaks, restroom time, rotations, briefings, and other logistical issues - by the time they finish 480 of them you wasted a whole workweek. Even with miss rates that necessitate ~1.5 bullets per fascist, it is more economical to just shoot them in the long run, and more importantly it makes us faster than them.
Bro literally developing lean manufacturing theory but for killing fascists. 🗿
Communists shouldn’t torture anyway. The Chinese revolutionaries literally rehabilitated and re-educated royalty. It’s worth trying for most, I think. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not torture yanks, they worked to convince their “POWs” (captive invaders) that they were fighting an evil war. Beria worked to have the torturer Yezhov executed.
Obviously it is more complicated than that when it comes to the willfully ignorant and the opaquely malicious. We should hold no qualms with fascists eating lead in revolutionary self-defense.
Yes 🗿
These moral arguments are just dumb. It’s what i call the Batman paradox, the thought that killing a killer makes you a killer.
When our time comes we will not make excuses for terror. Edit: other comments expressed this better.
All ideologies express political violence toward someone.
The political violence of fascists/liberals is directed at people of color, poor folk, non-cis folk, non-straight folk, etc etc super long list.
The political violence of communists is directed at capitalists, landlords, and fascists.
Notice the difference? People of color, non-cis folk, non-straight folk, etc can’t stop being those things.
Capitalists, landlords, and fascists can stop being those things and thus won’t be “”“oppressed”“” anymore.
💯
the liberals are either so aligned with the fascists or somehow stupid enough to perceive the only bad thing about them to be “well they oppress other people”
smartest liberal political scientist be like
a great read on the relationship between liberalism and fascism https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/liberalism-the-two-faced-tyranny-of-wealth/
White people.
