gonna be posting a bunch of quotes in this thread that I want to preserve. you are welcome to post critiques of a given pasta, just remember I don’t 100% agree with all of these (only most) but consider them information worth saving. proposed edits will be considered
CONTENT WARNING: there’s going to be mentions of imperial atrocities in here, including SA and torture.
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Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.
—Ernest Hemingway
“whataboutism” means “you’re absolutely fucking 100% right and I am a big liberal baby who shidded his doodoo ass”
whataboutism 
True
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We cut them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.―Kahlil Gibran
My great grandfather had the monopoly of eggs in all of China and my grandmother was super rich living in a mansion when the cultural revolution happened and communism took everything away.
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
This reads like the opener to a chapter of God Emperor of Dune.
“I don’t know why you’re complaining,” I say to my fellow scavenger as I pull a shabby jacket off a frozen corpse in the alley behind an abandoned Applebee’s, “the economy is doing great!”
Sipping on a gin and tonic as I castigate my son for wearing long pants before the age of twenty. He asks me when he can see his mother— who is also my cousin— again, and I remind him not to ask about her, because I don’t know how to say that my uncle and I had her lobotomized and put in a hospital for crying too much. I send him back to boarding school for another six months as I head to my job as an executive for a large chemical company that my grandfather got me, overseeing South American mining operations. Upon hearing that a newly-elected government wants to levy a tax on our mining profits and institute an eight hour work day, I call up my old Skull and Bones chums who work for Zapata Oil and Air America, ask if there’s anything they can do to help, and they promise they’ll look into it. I will drink nine more gin and tonics throughout the day before switching to bourbon. Old Money Life.
Kelseyville, CA is named after Andrew Kelsey, who enslaved natives, starved them and worked them to death, and whipped natives who would not bring him their teenage daughters to be raped
https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/Bloody-Island-massacre-Pomo-history-Clear-Lake-15325476.php
Liberal conception of “human rights” is just so stupid.
You have the “right” to own things, but you don’t have the right to the means to actually own things, so in practice you might own nothing, but who cares? This piece of paper says it’s your “right” to do so!
You have the “right” to free speech, but you don’t have the right to an actual platform, i.e. the right for your speech to actually be heard. If the system doesn’t like what you say, they can just kick you from all platforms. You have the “right” to shout as loud as you want as long as it’s in a place no one can hear you, so you don’t actually have the right for your speech to actually mean anything.
That’s how all liberal “rights” are. They’re in practice useless, because you have the right to something in principle, but don’t have the right to actually use that right, you just have the right in some vague, ethereal, almost magical sense, disconnected from reality, and many indeed view it as magic, saying these “rights” are handed down by God almighty and not social constructions.
Because you can’t actually use these “rights” in practice, then in the real world, they only serve as justification for restricting people’s freedoms. Why does this corporate giant get to censor dissenters? Because they have the “right” to do what they want with their platform! Why do billionaires get the “right” to control hoards of wealth and other people’s labor? Because they have the “right” to do so! Why does this landlord get to tell me how I should live when I’m the one taking care of the actual apartment and living here? Because they have the “right”!
It’s a funny thing, because it is very reminiscent of divine right of kings. Since many people genuinely believe these rights come from God almighty, then suddenly, Jeff Bezos’s rule becomes sanctioned by God almighty. It’s not much different than saying, the king has the authority to control the nation’s wealth and its people, because the “right” was given to them from on high!
Westerners are the most propagandized people on the planet. While, yes, something like CCTV is clearly biased, people who watch CCTV can at least tell you it is biased and admit they are getting info from a particular point of view. Westerners have a tendency to not view their propaganda as biased at all, but merely as “facts” and “common sense”. They don’t even see the BBC, PBS, RFA, VOCMF, CNN, MSNBC, etc, as a particular point of view with its own agenda. They just gobble it up as the unbiased truth.
It’s why there are so many subreddits, Discord servers, etc, which have a rule that bans “talking about politics”, but then somehow this rule never seems to apply to western media propaganda. They will randomly start China bashing and if you disagree they will accuse you of talking about politics and ban you. Because to them, these absurd headlines about China are not a particular point of view pushed by their media for geopolitical reasons but is simply a “fact” with no political content.
It’s why they will accept tons of media being filled with western propaganda, like movies and games that include modern military equipment often working directly with the US military to make them and being required to depict the US military positively and to allow the US military to edit and remove anything from the movie or game, they see this as not “political” but if a game removes something because of outcry from Chinese fans or there is some leftist message put in a game, they will decry it as “bringing politics into my video games!”
The word “propaganda” in and of itself has a bit of a foreign connotation in English, by that I mean that it’s often associated with things from foreign countries and not from your own. People tend to see “propaganda” as “something foreign countries have” and not something they have to worry about.
No matter how hard you try, for the vast majority, you cannot even get them to consider the possibility that maybe a media organization created directly by the US government through an act of Congress with an explicitly stated purpose of pushing ideas to disparage countries like China might be an incredibly biased source and might have be inclined to push narratives to further a geopolitical agenda, and when his only citation is an “anonymous” source maybe you shouldn’t take it too seriously.
This is pretty much impossible to even get them to consider. It’s like they have some blocker in their brain that makes it nearly impossible for them to even entertain this idea in their head.
It’s also why they call us things like “wumao” and “Russian bot”, because since they believe their media is simply “fact”, they legitimately believe it’s not even possible to actually disagree with it. That means if you claim to disagree with it, in their mind, you must be lying. And why would you lie? Because you must be paid to do it!
It’s even further the reason why they are so ready to support invasions, sanctioning, bombing, etc of other countries, because in their mind, since no one can truly disagree with western propaganda except those who are paid for it, they genuinely believe the people of these countries all themselves agree with western propaganda. They think while the Chinese government, for example, pushes one narrative, in reality, all the citizens of China secretly believe the western narrative and are begging for their white saviors to “liberate” them.
It’s why they say “I support the people but not the government of China”, because they genuinely think they are saviors of the Chinese people from their evil government and the Chinese people secretly want to be “liberated” by them. But I have seen this façade break down very quickly in the rare instances that they actually talk to a Chinese person, they don’t agree with their beliefs, and then the yankee accuses the Chinese person of being a “brainwashed ultranationalist” simply for not hating their own country and its achievements.
from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/uwwvqn/interesting_i_wonder_what_that_source_is/i9usz08/
He explains it well. It is so frustrating to argue with libs who make arguments so old that literally Marx himself responded to them. I get the impression that Marxists already won the debate back in the 19th century and the liberal tactic has just been to pretend the debate has never happened, to continue repeating centuries-old arguments over and over again as if they’ve never been responded to, and to discourage anyone from looking into Marxism or reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.
—zhenli真理 comments on Why we say Read Theory; From A Marxist-Leninist Perspective
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
“authoritarian” is the worst libertarian meme of all time. The important difference between governments is who they work for— all states are class dictatorships, either ownership class or working class. Putting them on an “authority” scale implies that all governments are somehow separate from the people, and in the same degree.
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
—Georgian philosopher Ioseb dzе Jugashvili
The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists managed to sneak his work past a censor that banishes the likes of Karl Marx and Malcolm X.
The less complicated reading is the correct one: it’s an anti-communist book that the establishment pushes, and the right adores and cites constantly, because it is effective anti-communist propaganda.
Let’s part from a very basic fact: The CIA loves Orwell.
Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down. [1]
The movie adaptation of Animal Farm was the UK’s first animated feature film, and it was entirely funded by the CIA. This fact was kept secret for 20 years, and only revealed in 1974, to no cultural impact. [2]
Orwell enthusiasts insist that he would be horrified by this turn of events, that he was trying to preserve a genuine and humane socialism from the clutches of “Stalinism”. They insist Orwell was against all empires, not just the one he lived in. However, his life and his work rather undermine this interpretation.
