Shit like this always reminds me of how a big watershed moment for my baby leftist journey was finally coming to the understanding that these words have meanings that get warped like a fun house mirror in the U.S.
I just casually referred to Stalin as a fascist once in front of a non Anglo and they called me out for it. They weren’t even an overly ideological person they had just grown up in a non Anglo education system and to their ear calling Stalin a fascist was factually incorrect and sounds kinda idiotic to most non western ears. The self awareness this created was the start of a lot of of layers peeling in retrospect.
They were absolutely correct! Obviously! Whatever criticism you may have of Stalin, and I think we all have them, he was not a fucking fascist! Stalin could easily be one of the most pivotal figures in the DEFEAT of fascism in Europe and yet liberalism and propaganda and the myopic political lens that Americans are given to interpret the world drains all texture and greyness from history and leaves you with this shambling nonsense narrative where everyone who was opposed to the U.S. global hegemony post WW2 in ANY capacity is either a “fascist” or a footnote in the history books because whatever shot they had at the wheel was usurped by the State department.
All this is to say never stop bullying and always remember to remind anglos that the western narrative of history is far from universally accepted and full of gaping holes.
Breaking people out of national chauvinism and into internationalism is in my opinion the key trigger moment between sympathising with some left ideas and becoming a true actual leftist. It is the key that inoculates a person against “the tankies are evil” bullshit and finally rips them out of the hands of liberal propaganda. Once people make that transition into wanting a truly international perspective, learning things at the international level, viewing things from the position of truly seeking international socialism and so on… It is where people finally rid themselves of brainworms that have sometimes been built up for many decades.
Somewhere along that transition from national to international people undergo a personal decision of “I have a huge amount to learn” and go on that learning journey. That personal decision to actually learn is where they discard many things they thought they already knew, built up from billionaire media and propaganda.
I will keep on saying this over and over again here. The biggest thing we should be doing is pushing people to stop being nationalists and to become internationalists. Once they do this they become so much easier for us to engage with.
Sankara’s constant reminder is great but I still don’t quite know what I should be focusing on to break through this. It’s like… What creates an internationalist? What stops someone from only caring about what’s within their own borders? If we figure it out we make this all much easier on ourselves.
Helping the person realising that the international approach makes a lot more sense and is much better at explaining their lives?
So many topics now, if not basically all of them, are international in nature. Their origin, explanation and development is international in nature. Understanding why the economy is shit, why inflation, why war, why your national politics are dependant on international pressures , why ecological topics all require international understanding, etc etc. To me, the realisation that the international point of view was just better and easier to explain and understand the world forced me to learn because I wanted explanations, and on important topics (less aesthetic or cultural ones) the lazy reactionary narratives aren’t enough because they break down, don’t fit or don’t provide good solutions.
Also, interacting with the rest of the world. Talking with non-westerners about politics has always been enlightening and better, in my case. Like, at work, all the colleagues I talk politics with all the time are immigrants in some way, they have an outside look on my country and once I start talking about geopolitics and how insane the westerners are they open up and the conversations are incredibly interesting. The western colleagues sitting next to us at the coffee break always learn a lot, they see people who know what they are talking about, confidently, they see colleagues who are usually superficially shy and not too talkative (gotta be careful what you talk about as an immigrant to westerners) open up and share things about their lives and they realize there is an entire world out there they know nothing about.
I think the majority of people can be reached in some way, the difficult ones are people such as the ones on reddit or Lemmy, they are not casually reactionary, they have been deeply propagandised and have internalised those things, they defend them, they identify culturally and personally with them so its much harder.
I usually just dismiss these goofballs by replying with “Tell me you don’t have a functioning definition of fascism without telling me” and maybe I’ll challenge them to define fascism in their own words without looking it up.
If, by some miracle, they start invoking the trash-tier Umberto Eco definition of fascism then you have two clear routes:
You demonstrate how the US comfortably fits this definition, point by point
You draw upon a Marxist analysis of fascism which centres the importance of materialist analysis of fascism, such as from the works of Georgi Dimitrov
Because it only considers fascism from an aesthetic and cultural angle without any regards to the material basis of it and the conditions that fascism arises from.
It’s a hazy definition that describes the psychology of fascism more than it describes the phenomenon of fascism itself, and I think—like is the case a most pseudo-radical cultural critique—its analysis can be, and has been, misapplied because there’s no solid definition underpinning it.
It’s a bit like how if you ask a SocDem for a definition of socialism they’ll tell you that it’s welfare programs and democracy and restricting corporations and anti-authoritarianism etc.; they’ll give you a laundry list of characteristics which fails to form a cohesive analysis that strictly defines their concept, thus leading to them to miss the fact that Bernie was not campaigning on a socialist platform or that AOC/the Nordic countries etc. aren’t socialist, and if you challenge them on these matters they’ll deny your rebuttal outright because these things just feel socialist to them.
I guess in short, it’s a question of vibes vs material analysis.
Shit like this always reminds me of how a big watershed moment for my baby leftist journey was finally coming to the understanding that these words have meanings that get warped like a fun house mirror in the U.S.
I just casually referred to Stalin as a fascist once in front of a non Anglo and they called me out for it. They weren’t even an overly ideological person they had just grown up in a non Anglo education system and to their ear calling Stalin a fascist was factually incorrect and sounds kinda idiotic to most non western ears. The self awareness this created was the start of a lot of of layers peeling in retrospect.
They were absolutely correct! Obviously! Whatever criticism you may have of Stalin, and I think we all have them, he was not a fucking fascist! Stalin could easily be one of the most pivotal figures in the DEFEAT of fascism in Europe and yet liberalism and propaganda and the myopic political lens that Americans are given to interpret the world drains all texture and greyness from history and leaves you with this shambling nonsense narrative where everyone who was opposed to the U.S. global hegemony post WW2 in ANY capacity is either a “fascist” or a footnote in the history books because whatever shot they had at the wheel was usurped by the State department.
All this is to say never stop bullying and always remember to remind anglos that the western narrative of history is far from universally accepted and full of gaping holes.
Breaking people out of national chauvinism and into internationalism is in my opinion the key trigger moment between sympathising with some left ideas and becoming a true actual leftist. It is the key that inoculates a person against “the tankies are evil” bullshit and finally rips them out of the hands of liberal propaganda. Once people make that transition into wanting a truly international perspective, learning things at the international level, viewing things from the position of truly seeking international socialism and so on… It is where people finally rid themselves of brainworms that have sometimes been built up for many decades.
Somewhere along that transition from national to international people undergo a personal decision of “I have a huge amount to learn” and go on that learning journey. That personal decision to actually learn is where they discard many things they thought they already knew, built up from billionaire media and propaganda.
I will keep on saying this over and over again here. The biggest thing we should be doing is pushing people to stop being nationalists and to become internationalists. Once they do this they become so much easier for us to engage with.
Sankara’s constant reminder is great but I still don’t quite know what I should be focusing on to break through this. It’s like… What creates an internationalist? What stops someone from only caring about what’s within their own borders? If we figure it out we make this all much easier on ourselves.
Helping the person realising that the international approach makes a lot more sense and is much better at explaining their lives?
So many topics now, if not basically all of them, are international in nature. Their origin, explanation and development is international in nature. Understanding why the economy is shit, why inflation, why war, why your national politics are dependant on international pressures , why ecological topics all require international understanding, etc etc. To me, the realisation that the international point of view was just better and easier to explain and understand the world forced me to learn because I wanted explanations, and on important topics (less aesthetic or cultural ones) the lazy reactionary narratives aren’t enough because they break down, don’t fit or don’t provide good solutions.
Also, interacting with the rest of the world. Talking with non-westerners about politics has always been enlightening and better, in my case. Like, at work, all the colleagues I talk politics with all the time are immigrants in some way, they have an outside look on my country and once I start talking about geopolitics and how insane the westerners are they open up and the conversations are incredibly interesting. The western colleagues sitting next to us at the coffee break always learn a lot, they see people who know what they are talking about, confidently, they see colleagues who are usually superficially shy and not too talkative (gotta be careful what you talk about as an immigrant to westerners) open up and share things about their lives and they realize there is an entire world out there they know nothing about.
I think the majority of people can be reached in some way, the difficult ones are people such as the ones on reddit or Lemmy, they are not casually reactionary, they have been deeply propagandised and have internalised those things, they defend them, they identify culturally and personally with them so its much harder.
American high school books usually have a segment about “authoritarianism” which is basically just there to say Hitler and Stalin were the same.
I usually just dismiss these goofballs by replying with “Tell me you don’t have a functioning definition of fascism without telling me” and maybe I’ll challenge them to define fascism in their own words without looking it up.
If, by some miracle, they start invoking the trash-tier Umberto Eco definition of fascism then you have two clear routes:
You demonstrate how the US comfortably fits this definition, point by point
You draw upon a Marxist analysis of fascism which centres the importance of materialist analysis of fascism, such as from the works of Georgi Dimitrov
What makes you think Eco’s definition is trash tier? Ur-fascism is a decent essay that gets frequently misinterpreted.
Because it only considers fascism from an aesthetic and cultural angle without any regards to the material basis of it and the conditions that fascism arises from.
It’s a hazy definition that describes the psychology of fascism more than it describes the phenomenon of fascism itself, and I think—like is the case a most pseudo-radical cultural critique—its analysis can be, and has been, misapplied because there’s no solid definition underpinning it.
It’s a bit like how if you ask a SocDem for a definition of socialism they’ll tell you that it’s welfare programs and democracy and restricting corporations and anti-authoritarianism etc.; they’ll give you a laundry list of characteristics which fails to form a cohesive analysis that strictly defines their concept, thus leading to them to miss the fact that Bernie was not campaigning on a socialist platform or that AOC/the Nordic countries etc. aren’t socialist, and if you challenge them on these matters they’ll deny your rebuttal outright because these things just feel socialist to them.
I guess in short, it’s a question of vibes vs material analysis.