It’s like I argued back in September 2020: ‘richest country’ does not mean ‘ordinary people are living pretty good’. That’s another oversimplification that anticommies push repeatedly because it’s so much easier than coming up with an actually good argument.

Don’t forget Hans Speidel, an Axis general who betrayed the Chancellery only because it was screwing up the war effort (and not because it was committing atrocities). Coincidentally, both Speidel and Heusinger were involved in the Schnez Truppe, an illegal “secret army” set up in 1949 and composed of thousands of Wehrmacht and SS veteran officers.

Also coincidentally, for a while Ukrainian ultranationalists were happy to assist the western Axis when it invaded the U.S.S.R. in 1941. The Soviets suppressed, but did not successfully eliminate, the ultranationalists, who now hold substantial political power in modern Ukraine.

Poetic, isn’t it? The Axis and the Ukraine’s ultranationalists collaborated in the 1940s to conquer the Soviets. Now a terrorist organization cofounded by former Axis personnel, and the ultranationalists of modern Ukraine, want to collaborate today to subjugate or terrorize the Russian Federation.

I sometimes wonder if I’m spending my time poorly by studying old school fascism because it’s too historically specific. Then I find parallels like these today… maybe I should keep studying it.

Finnish government’s 1947 confession to allying with the Third Reich.

Cringetopia is just the sequel to CringeAnarchy, a subcommunity that was home to thousands of neofascists and other antisocialist dullards before the Reddit wizards shut it down. It used to featured LateStageCapitalism content frequently back when that subcommunity was Reddit’s favourite whipping boy. Now that antiwork has substituted LSC in that rôle, the cringelets are obsessing over that instead.

The fact that they’re realizing systematic environmentalist projects like this kind of supports my argument that, unlike the Anglosphere, the People’s Republic of China actually has a strong socialist movement. A capitalist class would be highly unlikely to pursue something like this on its own, since that would involve prioritizing use‐value over exchange‐value, but communism can easily do this when it has a significant amount of political power in society. That’s why dismissing the PRC as ‘capitalist’ is crude analysis and deeply misleading.

It seems that dozens of socialists have intervened, so the comment section was not as dreadful as I was expecting. Of course, there were still a few of those ‘typical’ replies:

Bro this is prison. Not even close to a concentration camp

This may be one of the most annoying comments that you can find beside outright applause, because although it is technically true (not all prisons or work camps are concentration camps), it only misses the point. They should be more worried about the thousands of harmless people being treated almost exactly like slaves than they should be about a slight miscaption, and working for the upper classes is unlikely to help them much in terms of rehabilitation.

I’ve noticed that a lot of other poor people have a tendency to call their oppressors fascists. I usually find that inaccurate, personally, but I’m not gonna interrupt them every time they do that just to give them a terminology lesson. That’d be obnoxious.

I can imagine the anticommie reactions already:

1. gov source; le fake news
2. ’Sall about the social credits, my homies
3. Spying on an enemy state’s citizens is good, actually

If all else fails:

4. Who gives a shit? Xi is massacring millions of white cishet capitalist men daily that’s WAAAAAAAAAY more important!!!

In all seriousness, it’s good that Chinese citizens are doing this. I wish that we could do the same for the unwanted surveillance in the U.S.

/r/antiwork, like /r/anarchism, would almost certainly classify me as a ‘tankie’ and ban me on sight regardless of the nuances in my politics. I know for a fact that most MLs would roll their eyes or groan painfully if they knew about my relatively positive views on the Makhnovshchina, the NES, the Fourth International, and Amadeo Bordiga, and my ‘ultraleft’ conception of socialism, but none of those saved me from anarchist subcommunities banning me. On the other hand, I can’t remember any state‐socialist subcommunities banning me for those reasons.

I guess that, due to my good work here and elsewhere, users such as @Farmer_Heck@lemmygrad.ml assume good faith and treat the ‘ultraleftism’ in my politics like a case of the runs. You know that it’s painful, but you have to allow it.

Like a boomerang.

Hopefully this signals the beginning of the end for European economic dominance. With Europe and the Anglosphere reduced to shells of their former selves, it’ll be amazingly easier for us to liberate ourselves from capitalism.

Big mask‐off moment:

‘Seriously. Let them pull out. Encourage it. Rip the bandage off quickly instead of drawing it out. Better for them to pull back and fuck right off. I’m not exaggerating when I say they literally ruined Vancouver. Seeing a pro Chinese communist rally in Vancouver is shameful, and there are a large number of Chinese living in Canada who are not the least bit loyal to Canada. I speak of the CCP loyalists who came to Canada in the last decade or so, the ones who profited immensely by having family in the CCP. The influx of Chinese immigrants who came here from the 60s to the 80s were running away from the people whose children are now making Vancouver a shitty place to live. Might I suggest that if we are their least favourite country, that they have overstayed their welcome and can fuck off to whatever tofu tower city they came from. We’ll eventually be better off without their schemes, lies, money laundering, and drugs.’ [+353]

That’s some spicy pasta!

By the way, check out the users blaming the source’s low quality on the CPC.

This is good news. Euro‐American culture is hyperindividualistic, homogeneous, neopatriarchal, and artificial to the core, and the Chinese won’t miss out on much by ignoring it. The film industry is a good example; Michael Parenti brilliantly analysed it in his book Make‐Believe Media and found that it regularly buries or heavily censors films about class struggle. In fact, the Pentagon itself is responsible for directing about nine hundred films in some way and modifying them to make them less critical of Imperial America and its military. They wouldn’t even let James Bond assault a U.S. official in Goldeneye.

“(But) it’s not like we don’t do that in our own culture – how many people have Che Guevara t-shirts or Mao Zedong hats?” he said.

LEL

No, anticommies. A sensible analogy would have been the Confederates or the American ‘Revolutionaries’, not people who made concerted efforts to help the lower classes. The Yank ‘Revolutionaries’ in particular often resorted to tactics that neoliberals would easily decry as ‘totalitarian’ if a state inimical to Imperial America committed them. But I guess that as long as it’s Yankees committing the atrocities and not foreigners, then they’re no big deal.

Frankly, though, I doubt that wearing Axis uniforms, even the Hugo Boss varieties, would inspire that much outrage in the Anglosphere.

Perhaps you should amend it.

Mate… reread the thread’s title. Carefully.

What’s a first problem problem?

A few years ago I was frequenting a Subway restaurant and I slowly became acquainted with the employés there. One of the workers told me that he got a call back when he was working at Taco John’s, learned that his son was either dying or already dead (I can’t remember which), and he was getting ready to leave until his boss threatened to fire him if he walked out the door. He told his boss something like, ‘You can go ahead and fire me because I’m not gonna miss my son for you.’ and never looked back.

I am sure that I got a detail or two wrong in this story, but the crux of the matter—a boss fired somebody for leaving early to attend a family emergency—is something that I definitely remember.

W E W. Lemme tell ya, it takes either real audacity—or the density comparable to that of a black hole—to summarize the history of your own country’s foreign policy perfectly, yet incriminate somebody else for it. My guess is that the authors of this are so out of touch with reality that they think that this generation of U.S. citizens is just as ignorant and gullible as the ones that preceded it, despite having more access to the Internet. Unfortunately for them, their own comment section indicates otherwise!

Yep, it’s hard to make a collaborative effort to stop a virus sound scary, i’n’t it?

Luckily for anticommunists, none of them need to be good writers for their ideology. I’d go so far as to argue that they don’t even need to offer a good reason for having it at all.

I don’t get it.

Is it confusing because of the similarities between the pluperfect and future tenses?

It’s no secret that outright hostility (not simply good‐faith criticism) towards anarchism, left communism, Trotskyism, and oftentimes Maoism are perfectly permissible on this website. Do you need me to provide examples of the blatant sectarian shitposting?

I myself am willing to tolerate the potshots at other socialists, but let’s not pretend that this is, or is even trying to be, a pansocialist community like RevLeft. It’s a Marxist‐Leninist community first and foremost, and having a formal rule against sectarianism (uncritical or otherwise) does nothing but confuse newcomers and waste their time. (And by the way, no, declaring the other tendencies that I’ve mentioned to be ‘nonsocialist’ isn’t going to fix anything.)