Too many people here just blindly hating on Bernie and nitpicking how “Stalinism is technically incorrect”. Where’s the Trump hate? Bring some of that shit out. I’ll start.
Fuck Trump, MAGA, and their entire cult of personality.
Because turbo libbing is not the solution to defeating Trump. It is similar to saying Israel has the right to defend itself before each statement. Bernie is actively antagonizing commies by repeating US imperialist propaganda and applying it to someone he does not like.
If you feel antagonised when someone criticise Stalin then that’s a you problem though.
Staline’s Image Cult isn’t “imperialist propaganda”
Quite frankly, I think that the voters who would be put off by Bernie stating that MAGA and support for Stalin share similarities are both worthless and minuscule.
You have to make bridge statements in order to reach a broader audience
The GOP has become a Stalinist Party
They haven’t killed remotely enough fascists to earn this distinction.
They have deported enough people.
I’d argue it’s a satanist party as well. They’re doing all the shit that was prophesized that the devil would make dumb people do, worshipping false idols, worshipping money, getting the mark of the beast, that sort of shit
This is coming from an staunch atheist who just notices the irony
I was confused on what was Satanic until I realized you were talking about the Christian version on Satanic and not the Church of Satan.
I was super surprised by the irony after I saw all those golden idols of trump. If I was a Christian I would be highly offended at these people trying to align with me. Those are $100 bills with trumps face on it, that they covered the goat idol. 2 separate events. 1 was a CPAC and 1 was at Mara Lago. 🙄
Satanists are cooler than these assholes.
I cannot imagine being enough of a sycophant to wear a hat that says “Trump was right about everything”. Nobody’s right about everything, and Trump is less right about things than most people because he’s incredibly stupid.
So much of the last 30 years of Republicanism (maybe 60 years, if you’re a Nixonian) boils down to Owning The Libs.
The guy with the “Trump was right…” hat will happily bitch about all the things Trump is doing wrong. He just won’t do it in earshot of anyone he thinks is to his Left.
Trump is less right about things than most people
Trump is turning the rhetoric of the Reagan Era into reality. He’s taking the orthodoxy of the party seriously, rather than using it as bait to gull the rubes into another round of tax cuts and privatizations.
It’s this commitment to orthodoxy that his base loves. Also what makes him look stupid.
This rhetoric adds nothing of subtance to the political understanding of either contemporary Trumpism or the history of Stalinism. Sanders only serves to obscure the meaning of this critically important understanding. Fascism and Stalinism are not the same.
To be clear, Stalinism took hold in the Soviet Union as a result of its historic backwardness and international isolation. The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution. That is Stalinism. This political form was responsible for mass murder of the old cadres of the revolution who opposed it, systematic betrayal of the workers movement internationally, collaboration with imperialism allowing for the restabilization of capitalism during its repeated periods of crisis, and ultimately the destruction of Soviet Union union and the restoration of capitalism in 1991. A detailed and correct historical understanding of this history is critically important for the working class as it enters into a new period of revolutionary struggle.
Sanders use of the term as a political slur wrongly directed at Trump confuses the issue, and ultimately gives capitalism a pass for its own crisis. Trump is not simply an evil individual responsible for wrecking America. He is the product of the terminal crisis of capitalism at the center of world imperialism. He represents a financial oligarchy whose wealth and influence has grown increasingly disconnected from social development and the process of production. The historic content of Trumpism has a stronger relationship to the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler than the national labor bureaucraticism of Stalin.
This is no small error by Sanders. This is a deliberate falsification that is calculated to confuse political consciousness and hinder the development of revolutionary conclusions. It should be clear to anyone who takes more than a second to think about it that the comparison to Stalinism is shallow. The historic content of Trumpism is its own.
One is fascism, the other is red fascism. Different ideologies but same cheeks from the same arse as one might put it.
I reject this analysis as unscientific and ahistoric. The similarities are entirely superficial. Its not a matter of different ideology, but different historic content of the regimes themselves.
You may reject, but the empirical basis is there. Different cheeks from the same authoritarian arse.
stalin also evetuanlly purged his own loyalists after becoming paranoid.
I mean a less harsh version of that has been going on. Trump has ejected many people that used to be in his inner circle, and has, or has tried, to fire almost the whole federal government, too many people who got there without him to trust
Oh don’t worry, he’s still trying to get feds to quit, and they’re drooling at adding sycophantic bullshit to the hiring process. All while eroding union protections, benefits, and pay.
All while the Democrats vote down attempts to combat Trump, but have all the time in the world to sabotage the primary resultant nominee in NYC. Why have a primary if you’re not going to go with the results? That’s not a primary - that’s just bullshit.
This country is a fucking joke.
Why have a primary if you’re not going to go with the results? That’s not a primary - that’s just bullshit.
Welcome to the DNC. Their primaries (at least the bigger ones) have been bullshit for a long time. Like, they’re notorious for bullshit regarding primaries. I like to point to my own state in 2016 as an example, where Clinton won the primary despite getting around 35% of the vote while Sanders won in every county and Clinton didn’t even manage second in every county.
The main difference is that this time the “wrong” candidate won despite the bullshit, so now he needs to lose the general, whatever that requires. Again, welcome to the DNC.
here’s hoping
Not exactly. While I understand the satisfaction of seeing these asshats getting their faces eaten by the leopard, the ones being purged are the ones that are most likely to keep him somewhat in check, leaving only scared little yes men behind.
In a one party system that would be a problem. In a two party system, it just drives the ex-communicated into the arms of their past enemy. (Whilst weakening any progressive thought within that party as they bend over backwards to appease the new influx of political support…)
You misunderstand the nature of the US right now. It is not a two-party system anymore.
well I was hinting at the partisan ratchet effect in the last part of my comment there, but fair
Hah use their communist rhetoric back at them
It turns out the Red Scare was about the wrong Reds the whole time.
Been saying it for a while, better dead than red.
I voted for him in the primary, then in the general as a write in and I would fucking do it again. Bern the billionaire’s faces off.
I fucking love that he chose to call them stalinists. In addition to it being true, it send a fuck you to the alt-right and the alt-left (who love to talk up stalin as of late)
Who in the alt left is talking about Stalin lol maybe some whackos online
Stalin took the Russian state from an agricultural backwater to a Space Age superpower in a matter of twenty years.
If he’d started out a Virginia plantation owner instead of a Georgian bank robber, capitalists would have loved him. He’d be bigger than Churchill.
American liberals love (the whitewashed version of) FDR because they see the quasi-socialism of the mid-20th century as the morally correct path. Eastern Europeans - who came through two world wars and repeated genocides on every front - have a lot more of an appetite for Iron Fisted Dictator[Communist] after enduring generations of Iron Fisted Dictator[Monarchist]
But the way in which he did it was very costly. Stalin is comparable to Musk in that sense. In love with technology and factories, but too focussed on advancement no matter the human cost. Everything was about efficiency.
Stalin is comparable to Musk in that sense.
Christ. Musk is, if anything, more comparable to Henry Ford.
Billionaire car magnet with whole municipal governments in his pocket who wrecked public transit and spread antisemitism all over Europe? That’s not the editor and chief at Pravda.
If you were to put Stalin anywhere in contemporary US politics, I’d say he’s comparable to Shyam Sankar - the Palantir CTO who was recently granted the rank of Lt. Colonel in the US military. Or, perhaps, just straight up comparing him to Peter Thiel minus all the buggery.
In love with technology and factories, but too focussed on advancement no matter the human cost. Everything was about efficiency.
Silicon Valley has swarms of these guys. Most of them aren’t constantly pissing themselves from too much Ketamine.
From someone who has gone to more than a few political protests and rallies in Boston:
Every fucking time Socialist Alternative shows up, it’s fine until some edgelord dipshit unfurls the fucking huge Soviet flag with Stalin and Mao silk screened on it. It’s like they’re trying to alienate reasonable people as well as historically-informed people. I consider myself a staunch socialist. I also outright detest Stalin and Mao because they were fucking authoritarian despots who wrapped their regimes in “communism” banners.
Sure, some of the systems at lower levels were socialistic, but at the end of the day, it was all in service to the cult of personality in charge of the whole gig. And yes, that’s what the US has devolved into (and arguably had done so quite a while ago, just not so overtly), but that doesn’t excuse Stalin or Mao, nor does it justify being an apologist for them.
I also outright detest Stalin and Mao because they were fucking authoritarian despots
You could easily say the same of Washington or Eisenhower or Churchill or DeGualle.
Hell, Lincoln got got by a guy who was literally shouting “Sic Semper Tyrantus”.
The thing that sets Stalin and Mao apart from the Francos and Mussolinis and Tojos and Chang Kai-Sheks and Churchills was their break from the old line aristocracy. The thing westerners hate more than anything was their overthrow of the local monarchies.
That’s why you have folks weeping big crocodile tears over Anastasia and Puyi, while they whistle past the graveyard of the countless Chinese and Russian victims of Romanov/Qing Dynasty misrule.
Why is it always Mao or Stalin? Can’t they at least go with folks who shed the blood of fascists like Tito or Castro? They werent particularly good either but at least they were doing the best with their dealt decks. Mind you I fucking loathe elevating folks to positions of respect unless they were my ancestors or damned well earned it via death and glory.
From that perspective, any thoughts on Ho Chi Minh?
Of all the leaders good, bad, and, ugly over the last century, he doesn’t seem to be brought up as much by propaganda machines.
Mostly the tankies on .ml
maybe some whackos online
Checks out.
Who, you know, MIGHT be real people but probably aren’t for the most part…
I just assume any .ml account is a propaganda bot. Because even if they are real people… they are propaganda bots.
Lemmy is far too small to bot.
lemmy.ml is just friendly to those people, so it attracts them.lemmy.ml was built by those people, sometimes it feels for the express purpose of spreading their bullshit.
Yeah, that’s plausible.
Lemmy.ml only has ~2100 monthly active users. I would guess that likely at least half of them are randos who just joined what they thought was the default instance.
That leaves about 1000 or so (likely even less) active tankies. That’s not a lot of people. I’m pretty sure you could find more than that amount of tankies in pretty much every single metropolis worldwide.
If its only a thousand people, can we just ignore them then.
Currently, Lemmy only has 46 000 monthly active accounts in total, so 1 000 is quite a significant share of that. Especially considering that these 1000 are very vocal.
Remember, this is not Reddit or Facebook with billions of active users. Lemmy in its entirety is smaller than some phpbb forums used to be.
I mean, ~3500 of these monthly active accounts are from lemmynsfw.com alone, and these are most likely double accounts for people who have accounts on a non-nsfw instance. And in general it’s quite likely the the amount of monthly active accounts is much larger than the number of actual monthly active users, considering that a significant portion of users will have more than one lemmy account and that there are some moderation bots and stuff like that around.
dude what the fuck
They’re robots, Morty, I don’t respect them
Aw I thought he called the sanatists but I think either would work
Shame they’re not santanists
Great guitarist
We worship that tone amirite?
Modern Satanists are actually extremely progressive. The Satanic Temple makes a point of using legislation intended to promote Christianity to promote their own religious organization.
It pisses off the reactionary religious zealots and shows them to be hypocrites, and there’s nothing legislators can do about it without blatantly giving preferential treatment to the “correct” religion.
I’m talking about their version of satanists not the real people
To be fair, the Satanic Temple isn’t exactly satanic per se. It’s more of a parody religion to point out the unfair law exceptions churches get. They are more anti-church (or maybe even anti-religion) than actually satanic.
I’d be very surprised if a significant portion of members of the Satanic Temple actually seriously believe in the existence of satan.
It’s about the same as e.g. the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
sanatists
Ah yes. Sanat, Satan’s lesser known brother.
Who would win, Sanat or Craig?
Spot fucking on
Oh, libs. When will you learn that the right is immune to these sorts of accusations? Nobody is swayed by this “Trump is a communist” rhetoric, the only people who agree with it are people who already hate Trump and would clap along with any comparison or accusation as long as it’s negative. Trump has “Only Nixon could go to China” powers.
It’s the same sort of thing as the Dems trying to attack Trump as weak on immigration and pass themselves off as border hawks. Liberals can’t help but to concede this whole moral framework to the right and argue purely along technical lines of efficiency.
Of course the liberals clap along because it owns the “tankies,” and in their minds, if they just punch left enough they’ll convince everyone that they’re “one of the good ones” on the left, as if they’re not going to be labelled Stalinists anyway, like they did with Obama.
It’s bad enough that it’s not true, but even worse is that nobody buys it (who wasn’t already “vote blue no matter who”).
he said “stalinist”; not communist… one of the primary things that differentiates stalin from marx and lenin (afaik; i’ll freely admit i’m not reading books on the subject, but that’s also the perspective of the mainstream and thus afaik the communication he’s going for) is the authoritarianism, purges, etc: he’s trying to say that trump is a cult of personality of equal substance to the mainstream understanding of stalin
Cowards driving by and downvoting without addressing any arguments: where is the lie?
I take drive by downvotes as a compliment, the meaning I get from them is, “I don’t like this because it challenged my beliefs in a way I can’t answer.” Great! That’s what I was going for.
if you say “libs” it instantly puts people in the headspace of “own the libs”, “everything i don’t like is woke”… it’s a dog whistle, and thus sets people up to think the rest of what’s being said is tainted
the ideologies in the group are not a cohesive block
