This is like a half-formed thought. They can observe that the people on Epstein’s plane had access to power and “tankies” don’t have access to power, and then the thought just stops before they make the connection between the two.
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Has anyone ever told bro that most ‘tankies’ live in the Global South?
The usefulness of the concept of tankies is in part that it’s so poorly defined that the category can shrink and expand at runtime to prove whatever point you want. Global South brown people aren’t tankies (as long as we’re actively entertaining that brown people exist and have their own subjectivity) because if they are, suddenly 95% of brown people who are leftists disagree with me and that’d make me look racist.
Chomsky isn’t a tankie because he’s said a bunch of things I agree with. But also he is a tankie because he defended the Khmer Rouge and was friends with Epstein. (surprised that the OOP didn’t take advantage of some of Chomsky’s uncharacteristic takes to make that point)
Foucault wasn’t a tankie because he had a nuanced take on Israel (read: he was a zionist) and was very critical of AES. But also if his support of pedophilia is brought up he can become a tankie because he supported the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
These are 2 examples who are real people who have written about their political opinions extensively yet it’s definitely possible for someone to find reasons to put them on either side of the “tankie” divide. If you want to do it with a more nebulous entity like a political community, hypothetical people (like the latter part of the OOP), or a whole country, you have infinite wiggle room. Anything can be used as a data point because the word is meaningless.
Donald Trump is a tankie because he visited North KoreaGood post, they should be redirected to this post whenever these chickens cluck their shit
I think it’d become a better post with examples of radlibs labeling specific intellectuals and political parties tankies and not simultaneously, but I don’t know how you’d find that.
That’s far too much work, you said enough already.
Damn I didn’t know Foucoult was so yikes.
Postmodernism is essentially distilled anticommunism and goes against everything we believe tbh
There’s a reason much of the post modern left received funding and support from the three letter agencies, often without even their knowledge or consent.
The declassified CIA document: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp86s00588r000300380001-5
He also was incredibly active in the effort to bring down socialist Poland and was proudly an anticommunist.
If you’re curious and wanna know more about this chapter in history, the following article may help,
The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left
The declassified CIA document: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp86s00588r000300380001-5
Will read. I love learning about CIA projects that, if I tried to explain to a normal person, would make me sound insane.
When I’m on writing forums and “show, don’t tell” comes up all I want is to call that CIA propaganda.
Cuba, Vietnam, DPRK, and Sahel, welcome to the white-o-sphere
If you met with Epstein but you were completely honest about it when questioned and nothing comes out of the files contradicting it, I’ll believe you. He certainly had meetings with non-pedophiles sometimes.
However, if it turns out you lied about a single detail of your relationship with Epstein, as far as I’m concerned that’s enough evidence to put you in prison for child sexual assault. There is no other reason to lie about your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than trying to hide your crimes. Put everyone he’s ever sent an email to on trial, and put anyone found to have lied about it in prison forever.
Noam Chomsky is a pedophile and a child predator. Any mention of him should be “Notorious pedophile Noam Chomsky”
Given more access to power…as if power isn’t actively bargained for by these liberals. Nope they just gave Chomsky the pedophile wealth power like a fucking Green Lantern ring. The fucker just got done talking about how it’s all about reciprocity. Can’t even be consistent in their own narrative.
Also why weren’t tankies given more power in this arrangement? Maybe there is a clue. Because tankies don’t seek power by cuddling up to billionaire pedophiles nor enter into reciprocal exchanges of favors with them.
You can prove anything I guess if you just make shit up. Tankies destroyed
“yeah, you’re right, but have you considered you’re wrong?”
FFS, Epstein was getting around with world leaders of every continent. He was pictured with Castro one or two times yet no evidence exists that Castro even did as much as shake Epstein’s hands since Epstein was only there for other people. He was doing deals in Mongolia.
Isn’t it notable that in all of that he never entrapped anyone from a communist country? It’s likely he was operating as an intelligence asset and it’s obvious how useful it would be to have compromat on leaders of enemy states, or even left wing intellectuals like Chomsky and Parenti. But it appears that no one you could consider a “tankie” was implicated.
Isn’t it notable that in all of that he never entrapped anyone from a communist country?
I mean yeah kinda actually.
Statistically by sheer numbers there would have to be a corrupt pedophile with some kind of power in China.Right, and the closest he got was being the awkward wingman for Larry Summers with Keyu Jin whose dad was vice minister of finance[1] in China but she actually stopped her affair with Larry Summers because… he was friends with Jeffery Epstein who was already known to be a pedophile.
Just statistically that is kind of impressive actually
I don’t even get what their argument is, tankies didn’t fuck around with Epstein cuz they’re white… so they don’t need Epstein’s influence? I legit don’t get the argument.
They’re saying that white men all become Epstein groupies if given power. Tankies weren’t around Epstein only because tankies have no power (implying tankies are white, too? Unless it was specifically about Parenti)
Let me whip out some IdPol.
they think chomsky was a Person of Power
Chomsky has less power than my local dog catcher, which is probably a good thing because Chomsky would ramble out a 45-minute lecture about “but what if the dog consents tho” while somehow managing to punch down on Russian peasants in 1917
The best thing about “tankies” right now is there really isn’t a singular marxist-leninist figurehead. Let’s say, I don’t know, Richard wolff was in the files? Our entire ideology isn’t tied to one old white dude so it wouldn’t matter much.
Dick wolff is nowhere near an ML lol
I was trying to think of an old man Marxist professor analogous to noam Chomsky. He is pretty frequently on Brian beckers show “the socialist program” and isn’t becker on the PSL central committee?
Becker is one of the founders of PSL when they split from WWP. It’s difficult to pinpoint Wolf’s exact ideology, because he seems to present some co-op road to Socialism to a mostly America audience… He did call Mao a great Revolutionary, and seems to have a positive view of modern China.
Our entire ideology isn’t tied to one old white dude
Just because Marx and Lenin are dead doesn’t make them not two old white dudes (with the caveat that alot of tankies love Mao who only met 2 of 3 of those criteria)
Well, they weren’t in the Epstein files at least.
Just because the origins are with Marx, Engels, and Lenin, does not mean that they aren’t continued on by Fanon, Rodney, Mao, Nkrumah, Guevara, Sankara, and more to the modern day.
WRT Marx specifically, most modern Marxist-Leninists subscribe to a pretty different (more advanced) view on colonialism and the national question that were developed later by African and Asian Marxists like Ho Chi Minh, Fanon, Said, and Nkrumah. The criticism of Marx’s eurocentrism has been laid out for a long time and if you find MLs that still subscribe to the exact things Marx laid out in his work with regards to the global south, they’re probably people who are stuck in the 19th century and aren’t reading more modern theory.
“If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed like nudes of underage girls at Epstein’s pedo island.” - Parenti paraphrased
Can someone explain the Parenti haters? I would love to read criticisms of him from the left, even if it’s bad.
The most cogent arguments I have seen is that he supported Milosovic and the Serbs, it’s not a great look but as more level headed people have pointed out it’s not like Parenti was in Yugoslavia helping materially or whatever, his bad take doesn’t make him literally responsible for genocide or whatever they insist. Edit: especially when they say things like “Serb Imperialism” is a thing
I’ve seen him get called a genocide denier over this a couple of times but like… you’re allowed to be wrong in an actively unfolding academic debate about historical events in recent memory, especially when the evidence was still being uncovered. Was every single person in the 90s and early 2000s supposed to be on the same page so suddenly after the civil war and intervention, as if the academic consensus came from Heaven and all the Good People agreed with it instantly, and anyone who disagreed is a Bad Person?
And to kill a nation wasn’t explicitly genocide denial, it was mostly explaining how the ethnic warfare was a result of Western meddling and bombing, for the express purpose of breaking up and controlling Yugoslavia.
Given that most westerners take the word of the us media orgs as if the were their churches, “consensus came from heaven” isn’t too far off.
Poeple calling him like this didn’t even read that book, he never denied the genocide, he pointed out it’s not just all Serbs like western propaganda claimed and that the west and their darling paragons of democracy like Izetbegović or Tudman have been responsible for war in the first place.
He was comically optimistic about Gorby, I’m pretty sure
I haven’t seen much specifically left wing criticisms, but historians and history interested people have been on him for essentially citing vibes in some of his writing.
Imagine invalidating vibes based analysis in this day and age
Where specifically?
I’m too inept at parsing the ancient primary sources to really dig into his (non-)conspiracy theory that Cicero completely fabricated the Catiline conspiracy. The way he portrays it in the book makes it sound like it’s crazy that historians took Cicero at his word, but his version is really quite fringe as far as I can tell. But again, I don’t have the historian skills to figure out if Parenti was torturing the sources or not.
Where I saw the criticism or where he cites vibes? The answer for the first one is basically every time he gets mentioned, including here. The answer for the second one is “The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome” That’s the one I remember the most criticism for.
The premise of historians not liking assassination of Julius Caesar is that Parenti spends most of it debunking the traditional claims of Caesar being assassinated for being a tyrant and instead shows he was assassinated for doing populist reforms that pissed off the landlords and ruling class (I think mainly for societal stability not because he was pro worker or anything)
The traditional historical view is almost entirely informed by the landlords and ruling class pov, and since the historians are drenched in liberalism they never really went out of their way to question the ruling class.
It’s been a while ( years) since I went over it though so this might be off a bit
Bourgeoisie historians criticize the book that proven them to be either at the level of 1st year student or actively engaging in obfuscating history for the benefit of ruling class? No wai!
As I said ive seen the criticism levied here before too. I doubt most of the people criticising him for citing newspaper articles or his dreams or whatever the complaint is are doing so to undermine the left.
It’s just that the main points of that book were never even about Caesar or Rome, those were just illustration to:
- Historians are not using dialectical materialism enough.
- Academia is knowingly or not serving the ruling class, which is really cold take since even the “Father of History” Herodotus straight up took Athenian money to smear Persia but they still don’t like to have it pointed out.
The latter, and thanks. I suppose I’m glad that it seems to be mainly the Caesar book and not his writings on more recent history.
He was wrong about China being capitalist, but i’m not even really surprised he did since it was 1998 and he used almost exclusively western sources.
Well and the reforms did in fact lead to a lot of corruption and liberals entering the halls of power. Xi really did a good job keeping the parts that worked, and reversing the parts that didn’t. He’s still struggling with cleaning up liberal corruption to this day. The good thing was maintaining the dominance of the party through the reforms, so that once an ideologically minded administration got in, they could use that dominance to ensure adherence to the principles of the nation.
Can’t blame Parenti for that since the CPC was under the leadership of the Shanghai clique.
Well yea, re-istening to Black Shirts and Reds he made some comment about China, but I did remind myself it was 1998 when he wrote that.
1998 was Jiang Zemin’s rule, yeah Parenti had plenty of reasons for seeing China as capitalist during that time period.
Liberals have a lot of things to cope for these days. 2022 was the start of a rough period for them
I’ve been led to believe for two and a half years that jewish people are in fact not white but a uniquely special ethnic group that deserve to be able to do colonialism and commit genocide without criticism, never mind being stopped.
Interesting that they revert to being “white dudes” when it’s convenient.
