• AFineWayToDie [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

      • MLK, Letter from a Birmingham Jail
          • citrussy_capybara [ze/hir]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            mostly, he also had some bad takes

            I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.

            What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              3 months ago

              What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.

              centrist NOOOOO

              • Postletarian [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                3 months ago

                Cornel West is the same. You sometimes hear him talk and you think “what a wonderful human being” and then he says something that makes you want to poke your eyes out…

                I’ll stick to Lenin for inspiration, thank you very much.

                • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  3 months ago

                  I’ll stick to Lenin for inspiration, thank you very much.

                  Lenin used to have struggle sessions with his own wife where he argued (a bit like a modern STEMbro) that librarians and teachers weren’t legitimate workers and should be somehow phased out of society. His wife changed his mind over time.

                  I never forgot that once I learned about that.

            • He was literally a professional theologian and his beliefs were instrumental to his activist work. And when was this quote from? He became more and more fervently anti-capitalist as time went on and he realized that the United States was a “burning house” due to its broken economic system.

              He spoke a few times saying that Communist states hadn’t aligned themselves to the same freedoms as America is supposed to, etc. etc. It’s pretty bread and butter appealing to red scare America rhetoric, and it’s much less anti Communist than almost anything else that was remotely mainstream from the time. So I say he gets a pass.

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                3 months ago

                The fact that they had to water him down, and couldn’t just disappear him from mainstream historiography like they did with Huey Newton, is a big part of what makes him a legend.

                Typical liberal: “Malcolm X was basically MLK except bad!smuglord

      • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        (CW gross shit) its Political Nice Guyism. They wanna pretend they care soo much, and things will be better under them I promise, and how could we not want to vote for such nice progressive people like them??

        But then when you tell them you won’t support genocide? They take the mask off. “That’s fine that you’re too stupid to know what’s good for you, I hope Trump throws you in a camp you ugly bitch”

        • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          And when they do get in, they’re all jumping over themselves to libsplain to you why they’re doing Jack shit about those progressive noises they made during the campaign: “now is not the time”, “but the national credit card”, “but the terror threat”, “but their legitimate concerns” or they pull out some teeny-tiny little token improvement, the 1% that separates 99% Hitler from 100% Hitler, and want you to be impressed that they made a plan for making 20% of the food served to children in concentration camps organic by 2075.

    • D61 [any]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      The enemy that tells you to your face they want to kill you is better than the enemy that smiles at you while sliding a knife into your back.

    • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      One is the obvious enemy, the other is cynically occupying the space of progressive. A parasite sucking up radical potential and dissipating it or redirecting it into nonthreatening outlets (like bourgeois electoralism)