CascadeOfLight [he/him]

Violence is the only thing that has ever destroyed oppression.

Violence, and the threat of violence, is the only way to make someone who is persecuting you for their own material benefit stop.

They joined a civil war in progress on the morally correct side

Oh man, what did the US and UK have that the USSR didn’t? That’s right, a giant fucking empire grinding hundreds of millions of third world slaves into the dirt.

And yet, even without that the USSR was growing so much faster it would have caught up to and surpassed them eventually - until they couped it, destroyed it and ravaged its people and economy.

Firstly, Budapest?? That’s a wild first example, either way here’s a book about it.

Secondly, I hope you understand the different between the USSR and the Russian Federation, but regardless

It doesn’t “make me feel better”, it’s the objective historical truth.

There is a true sequence of events that actually happened in real life. That sequence can only be determined by the evidence left behind, the collecting and interpreting of which is a painstaking and fallible process - but through rigorous investigation the true history of the world CAN be reconstructed.

However, if you’re not the one investigating, then you have to assess the reconstructions presented by those who do. What biases do they have? Who is funding their research? In what context have they chosen to present it? Who disagrees with them, what are their alternative conclusions, what is the difference in quality of evidence and analysis?

And so I have to ask you, how did you come to your understanding of history? How many books have you read? By who? What have you heard and where? Who was telling you? What evidence did they present?

WHY ARE YOU SO SURE YOU’RE RIGHT?

What evidence have you personally been presented that gives you absolute confidence in your worldview? I can show you why I believe what I believe about history, can you show me why you do? For western anticommunist leftists, the answer is usually “No”, because your understanding of the history of existing socialism has been carried over whole-cloth from your lifelong capitalist indoctrination.

If any of this jogs you into a realization that your historical understanding is not based on any kind of solid evidence or research, I’d be happy to recommend some sources. More than happy in fact, I’d be thrilled! Read! You have to read history! If you don’t, your attempts to change the world will fail! Would you try to build a house without reading about the properties of wood, steel and concrete? How can you try to build a movement to improve the world without investigating those who went before you? Do you think you can just ‘freestyle’ it?!

Anyway, I’ll leave one book here in case it piques your interest - Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti - which was crucial to developing my personal understanding of the actual place of the USSR in world history, as well as understanding the material basis of fascism in capitalist society and why it is the direst mortal enemy of communism. You can take my suggestion to read it or you can ignore it, but either way at least be honest and don’t lie to yourself about the sources of your beliefs.

Okay, regardless of what political tendency you end up at, you really have to understand that none of those things are true. This is just a matter of history.

The USSR was not fascist, it was as far from fascism as any political system can possibly be. It was fundamentally anti-imperialist and was by far the most important actor in the defeat of European fascism in the 20th century, as well as in supporting national liberation movements across the world afterwards. Its collapse was devastating to workers’ and indigenous peoples’ rights globally.

Similarly, the USSR not only did not commit any genocides, not only was not antisemitic, but was essentially the only thing standing in the way of the total extermination of every single person from west Poland to Siberia by the German Nazis’ genocidal colonial expedition. Red Army prisoners of war were the first to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and Red Army soldiers liberated it and stopped the Holocaust. The idea that the USSR committed genocide, whether by ‘intentionally causing famine’ or by any other means you may have heard, is a lie that provably originated with Joseph Goebbels himself, and was amplified by the media empire of US fascist William Randolph Hearst.

If you want any books or articles to read about any of this then I’ll happily provide them, but understanding the real history of the first socialist nation is absolutely crucial to both understanding the world as it is now and imagining how it can be changed for the better in the future.

Okay, so where’s your proof of this? Reports? Graphs? Photos?

Of course you don’t have any because you’re just asserting an absolutely, totally ridiculous narrative. The growth rate was frighteningly low?? It was the fastest rate of economic growth in human history! The people became poorer??? China is basically the only place in the world that lifted anyone out of poverty in the last thirty years! Without China, global poverty reduction is a net negative. 800 million people joined the middle class! These are not achievements you can have “in name only”. Like, you can’t fake the fact that China produced ONE BILLION TONS of steel last year, or that it installed four times as much green energy as the entire G7 combined. These facts require an enormous, highly advanced industrial base, which requires an enormous, highly skilled body of workers.

So what, exactly, is your personal experience of China that contradicts these provable facts then?

Would you say Ukraine was “preparing for a possibly (sic)” when its Nazi special forces were creating Hitlerjugend-style child soldier training camps?

Yes. China is controlled by the Communist Party of China, who maintain an unbreakable grip on the commanding heights of the economy - energy, utilities, infrastructure, steel, finance etc. State-owned enterprises are some of the largest companies in the country, and hence also some of the largest in the world.

Foreign capitalists were invited to invest in China starting in the 80s, in order to bring in the technology and capital (tools, machines and money) that China was sorely lacking. This unfortunately led to several of the problems typical to capitalist economies - uneven development between the cities and countryside, increases in wealth inequality, the strengthening of the national capitalist class and the spread of liberal (pro-capitalist) ideas - but through the whole process, and unlike in the USSR, the CPC maintained total political control and didn’t allow the capitalists to dictate policy.

It’s true that China appeared to go quite far in a liberal direction, including by joining the WTO; around the turn of the millennium, the US and the rest of the capitalist world assumed that China would soon liberalize completely, both economically and politically, and they’d be able to break it open and feast on the insides like they did with the USSR. Instead, since then, and especially since the appointment of Xi Jinping as President, China has been moving, more or less rapidly but seemingly inexorably, towards more outright socialist policies. The result of the swing to the right and now back to the left is that China has had one of the longest and fastest sustained periods of economic development in human history.

In short, no capitalist economy run by and for the capitalist class could ever have made these achievements. Only an ideologically committed and politically dominant communist party would be able to manage an economy this way, wielding the capitalists as tools to improve the productive forces and raise their people out of poverty while setting the stage for the transition to socialism.

Edit: here is a long essay, China Has Billionaires, on the same subject, which is well worth the read

Their “determined to dominate”

Our “determined to ensure we lead the world”

Not quite, MMT states that money is just a unit of accounting and the government can print as much money as it wants as long as it’s used to mobilize workers and resources that are currently underutilized - likewise the government doesn’t need to tax in order to amass ‘enough money’ to pay for things, only to regulate the amount of currency in circulation and ensure a demand for currency that will mean their ‘orders’ are carried out.

Under neoliberalism, money is seen as a magic substance that cannot be fully controlled or understood and so it has to be left to the invisible hand of the market. Money printing in the US is controlled by the Federal Reserve, a private entity directed by a board of governors appointed by the President for 14 year (!) terms, but with no oversight beyond that - the Fed can print money, but ONLY to lend it to private banks, who then lend it on again. (Except that, thanks to the wonderful innovation of “fractional reserve banking”, those banks don’t even need enough money to cover the total loans they give out, only a certain fraction of those loans, so the private banks get to effectively print money as well!) This money is then lent out however the bank managers decree, which as it turns out is about 80% real estate loans, 15% financing hostile corporate takeovers, and less than 5% investment in actual business loans that might develop the means of production.

The result of this privatization of money creation and its funnelling into the financial sector is exactly the cause of economic crashes like 2008, as this huge influx of money inflates the price of financial assets - most importantly real estate - far beyond the prices of real economic commodities. This is a huge problem because paying the interest payments on the enormous loans needed to buy real estate to e.g. live in or run your business from, drains money out of circulation in the real economy and into circulation in the mumbo-jumbo financial economy, weakening the real economy’s ability to pay further interest. The bankers who made these loans then sell them on to others, with the ‘price’ of the loan - theoretically determined by its value when paid back in full plus interest - also being wildly inflated due to how much money the financial markets have swilling around them!

Of course, eventually, these untenably large loans are defaulted on by the businesses and homeowners that took them out, in no small part because of the economic slowdown caused by making interest payments, and it’s revealed that huge swathes of the portfolios of certain investment banks, in which they were ‘saving’ their customers’ money, are actually worthless. At this point there are two options - write the debts down to levels that can actually be paid (or even write them off entirely) and watch the price of real estate and ‘financial instruments’ plummet OR print an enormous amount of money, give it directly to the banks who ‘lost’ their gambles, and maintain the debts at exactly the level they were before, and if the debtors default on their mortgage: tough, the bank owns your house now. The latter is what the Obama administration did - gave Wall Street trillions of dollars and oversaw the largest wave of evictions and home repossessions in US history.

Meanwhile, a government running on MMT (aside from not being in this situation in the first place) would have let the lenders get owned, written the debts down (or off) and pumped money into the real economy to mobilize the unemployed, perhaps through a federal jobs program of some sort or by hiring into nationalized industries.

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.

Rahile Dawut’s sentence was confirmed after she appealed against a 2018, according to the US-based Dui Hua Foundation rights group.

A 2018 what BBC? A 2018 what? Forget to invent that part of the story?

The only source of names, details, quotes and photos in the entire article is the Dui Hua Foundation, an NGO headquartered in San Francisco and funded by, firstly a random bunch of Scandinavian foreign affairs offices, but more importantly the Smith Richardson Foundation, a front for pouring money into dozens of classic US policy ghoul think-tanks. Like, the fucking Jamestown Foundation, Volcker Alliance, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Center for Advanced Defense Studies, even the University of Chicago. This thing is clearly just yet another little goad for China, and I don’t trust a single thing coming out of it.

Furthermore, based on the supposed “Xinjiang police files” (more about it here), I feel confident saying that woman’s face is AI generated.