In the process of pointing out that their flirtations with John Birchers and other general “rightwing nutballish” behaviors are quickly turning the Trump administration “into the grease trap of American political history,” Charles Pierce stops to notice that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is still in league with the Russkies. To wit, the lunatic far-right Austrian Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache traveled to New York in November to meet with Flynn. The Freedom Party presidential nominee, Norbert Hofer, just came within a whisper of winning an revanchist Anschlussian political victory in the early December election. He had hoped to do better, saying just prior to the vote that he was drawing “encouragement from Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States.”
So, Strache, Hofer, Flynn and Trump are best buddies, it seems, and now Strache and Hofer have decided to balm their political wounds by sidling up to the Kremlin:
Heinz-Christian Strache, Freedom Party leader, and Norbert Hofer, the candidate who narrowly lost Austria’s presidential election earlier this month, signed a “working agreement” on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, according to a statement from the Freedom Party.
Pierce’s response is laconic:
At the risk of being called a neo-McCarthyite, may I point out that this smacks an awful lot of the incoming administration’s involvement in a worldwide right-wing movement at the center of which is our good friend Vladimir Putin.
Of course, this is impossible because liberals who lived through the Cold War keep telling me that all this Russia-bashing is just so much Dulles Brothers flimflam designed to distract the plebes from their rightful destiny at the head of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To bash Russia is to bash the left here at home in order to crush the left everywhere from Ho Chi Minh City to Buenos Aires.
It therefore cannot be that our president is in the thrall, if not the control, of a “worldwide right-wing movement” to restore the purity of essence to the European bloodstream and bring Christianity back to its former central and crusading glory.
Or, in other words, you need to check that “grease trap of American political history” carefully, because a few of the roles have been reversed.
<“imgur-embed-pub” lang=”en” data-id=”rXqfGVn”>View post on imgur.com
now if I could only figure out how to get the damn picture to show up.
When coastal flooding reaches Charleston WV.
Not to mention the great Missouri Inland Sea…
Thanks, fracking.
If you’re going to make an attack this sarcastic and inflammatory, you really should identify your target more precisely than “liberals who lived through the Cold War”. You’re not seriously suggesting that every liberal significantly older than you minimizes the danger of the far-right? I’ve heard very little such minimization anywhere on the left.
Joy Reid, of MSNBC fame, thinks Russia is still Communist. Anyone with a brain, and not trying to score cheap political points, knows that Russia is an oligarchy. Pretty much like the U.S., actually.
Joy Reid is in her 40s, about the same age as booman I believe, so she hardly justifies the generational sniping.
Might be a divide between those that experienced the ugliness of the Cold War as adults (including all the stupid stuff the USG did and the USG propaganda) and when Nixon went to China and those that were barely old enough in 1985 to appreciate the perestroika and Reagan/Gorbachev arms control negotiations.
Sort of like how those that were too young to experience all the impacts of the Vietnam War embraced Rambo movies as a telling of what tough hero-Americans could have accomplished without all those “stab-in-the-back” liberal peaceniks in the way.
She’s just as much as a stooge as Hayes and Maddow. They’ll say whatever it is Comcast tells them because the money, to them, is too good.
Norbert Hofer Losing by 7.5% is not a whisper.
It’s possible you are confusing the result with the May results that he lost by 30k votes but which ended up being annulled.
Speaking of Neo-Nazis, why haven’t the troll rating abusers here lost their rating privilege? I’m guessing that their itchy troll fingers won’t lead to any automatic banning of those they see as their enemies, but bullying in all spheres of life increases the level of conflict and reduces constructive dialogue.
do ratings actually mean anything here? do posts get hidden like at dkos?
Don’t know because the adults here don’t abuse their rating privilege and annually and in the aggregate dispense fewer troll ratings than the current abusers dispense in a day. If the abusers could enlist ten more like them and/or create a dozen sock puppets, we might find out. That’s what happened to me at dKos and led to me being banned. Those abusers were later banned by the administration but before then they effectively took a few scalps.
Yes they can! Except the troll abusers suffer a setback by members who willingly uprate the troll ratings. See the FAQ by Martin in the early years of this blog.
The “trusted users” are able to detect the hidden comments and decide to uprate those comments. A single hidden comment would also hide the string of replies attached to it.
Average under 1 and only trusted users can see the post, which allows them to update it if they feel it deserves viewing.
But more importantly ratings help determine where in the list an original comment can be. Look at first comment here, it has two 4’s. It can be dislodged from first if a post gets as many or more, with several answering comments also getting 4’s. It’s an amalgam of responses and uprates.
That is why some care about ratings, they want to be first in line, and set the ‘mood’ of the site. When you see someone complain, it’s their ego screaming ‘I want people to look at me, pay attention to me!’
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the first-in-line thing is my least favorite feature of this site. i hate having things move around.
To a certain extend I agree.
Except….
If people drop by and see constant junk from a libertarian (for instance) they might not come back, and the community is the lesser for it. I know for a fact the the constant repeating by trolls of republican memes about Clinton cost the Pond good commenters, and conversely, attracted alt right types….and let’s face the truth, people who disseminated fake news sites.
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you can set how the comments display in your preferences.
Set your comment preferences to “ignore ratings” like I always have and you won’t have comments moving around. Look under Settings.
Thanks for the info, much better.
thank you.
I’m kinda new here so I don’t completely understand the ratings, or their purpose. I would only down rate someone who was making an ad hominem attack, not merely someone I disagree with.
There’s a specific definition for a troll. It’s someone that show up with no, or little, intent other than to disrupt and create unnecessary conflict, havoc, and division. In the early days of blogs, it seemed like a good idea for contributors to have a feature that allowed them to collectively deep-six such people because their intent was quickly apparent and written responses only encouraged the trolls. Unfortunately, like many good ideas, far too many people quickly began using the feature to slam those they disagreed with. I was a particular target for the Clarkies.
Here, most people use a four rating as a shorthand for a comment that they particularly like and/or agree with. May also use a four rating for a comment that they’re indifferent to but is being slammed by rating abusers.
I think it’s better to use words in response to an ad hom than the rating button.
For a current example, a troll is somebody who continually derails conversations (in brand new threads, no less) to nurse grudges against other posters because they don’t like the ratings their previous grudge-nursing comments have received. They present themselves as being unfairly moderated due to political disagreement when in fact the moderated posts are JUST TROLLING.
This has been an ongoing problem for months. For awhile every single diary was hijacked into Clinton attacks. That’s the very definition of trolls.
It’s no shock that a diary about Putin, Russia, and the alt right faced a hijack.
They do love their Putin. Too bad the Russians aren’t here anymore to uprate!
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I suspect your understanding of trolling and mine are not the same. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to people venting about Hillary/DNC/DWS or whatever pet topic they want to rant about so long as it’s at least somewhat related to the topic at hand and there’s some actual content to the complaint.
It’s the ad hom attacks, railing against other posters as neoliberal stooges or berniebros, whining about moderation, and completely content-free out-of-context thread derailers that are the real problem. I’m sure you’re aware I’ve troll-rated you several times for initiating those kind of useless you suck! / no you suck! arguments (though I doubt the conspiracy-minded folk like marie3 would believe it).
i felt the down rates you gave me were earned, they made me look closer at them.
The series of zeros I received from the Russians and their cohort I wear proudly. IMO they reset what was socially allowable, because the republicans uprated them constantly.
Probably where our definitions differ is my belief ‘no comment is an island unto itself’.
And I have a looong memory.
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Let me fix that
‘The republicans here uprated the Russians constantly’.
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>>I would only down rate someone who was making an ad hominem attack
that’s the right attitude IMO.
there are also sometimes plain spammers that should be hidden.
Ah, and speak of the devil. What a childish punk.
I’m irresistibly drawn to a metaphor about a pot and kettle here…
This community member behaves extremely belligerently and demands collegiality in return. It’s not likely to happen in this community, or elsewhere in life. One earns respect by providing it.
Maybe if you laid off your obsession with attacking this imagined “Neo-Nazi” cabal and posted about the topics under discussion you’d stop making so many troll posts? It’s easy to avoid trolling if you try.
Just a thought.
You don’t understand,
IOKIYAR
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A Republican is someone that supports Republican public policies. Regardless if it’s an extremely Republican position or a mushy version of a Republican position. Regardless of his/her self-identified political party affiliation and the political party affiliation of the candidates that they support and vote for. Thus, Libertarians are by affiliation Republicans. After Lincoln Chafee left the GOP, there are only Republican politicians left in the party.
Only once, and to my everlasting regret, did I not oppose a GOP policy. I didn’t have and didn’t make the time to fully explore the proposal and therefore, knew better than to support it. Still, deferring the Bill Clinton on NAFTA was instructive to me and I vowed never again to be such a sucker.
So, your poo-flinging in this instance falls so short that your credibility with me is now deeper into negative territory.
Why don’t you lay off the troll rating button? If I were obsessed with “neo-nazis,” you’d find lots of evidence of my use of the term. But you won’t find it.
Hell, I’m not even obsessed enough with the troll ratings abusers to read any of their comments except when it’s a direct response attack to a comment I’ve made and even then I often walk away without responding because meaningless fights bore me.
I was, literally, quoting you.
Taken from Naked Capitalism, Water Cooler, today (December 20).
“Just one-third of Americans say they believe Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll” [Politico].. Good proxy for the size of Clinton’s base. Not enough.
” 56 Interesting Facts About the 2016 Election” [Cook Political Report]. Many interesting true facts, including these:
1. Effectively 77,759 votes in three states (WI/PA/MI) determined the Presidency: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump won by:
22,748 votes in WI, 0.7 of a point (3rd party candidates received: 188,330)
44,307 votes in PA, 0.7 of a point, (3rd party candidates received: 218,228)
10,704 votes in MI, 0.2 of a point (3rd party candidates received: 250,902 votes)
Did you see Orlov’s post? A bit of humorous antidote.
Garrison Keilor of all people said this a couple of weeks back:
https:/www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/thank-you-trump-voters-for-this-wonderful-joke/2016/12/06/23
5877ae-bbe2-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?utm_term=.2bfa6f0db984
Basically:
“A minority of the electorate goes for the loosest and least knowledgeable candidate, certain that he will lose and their votes will be only harmless protest, a middle finger to Washington, and then — whoa. The joke comes true. You put a whoopee cushion on your father’s chair and he sits down and it barks and he has a massive coronary. You wanted to get a rise out of him and instead he falls down dead. Very funny. Thank you, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for this wonderful joke.
And then on 1 Dec, Phillip Bump said exactly the same thing:
https:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-8
0000-people-in-three-states?utm_term=.1c2a032ebea2
“More people live in Gary, Ind., than made the difference in this presidential race.”
Quite similar to Netanyahu meeting up with Republican majority leader Boehner on the Hill in the USA.
Signed agreement with Duma deputy chairman of United Russia party in Moscow, not the Kremlin.
I’ve had my disagreements with Prof. Juan Cole on Syria policy, however I agree with his recent articles:
○ Demonization of Putin as “Personally” behind Clinton Hack is old Propaganda Technique
○ Hard Truth: Aleppo Rebels weren’t defeated by Main Force but b/c they alienated Syrians
See my recent diary – Galeotti: The West’s Paranoia About Putin.
Yeah. I had thought him to be a level headed ME analyst but Syria…
That last “Hard Truth” was the Cole I remember.
Did you mean, “but Libya…?” If so, I agree and it’s when he lost me. It’s a lot of work for a reader to have to question when a writer is presenting valid facts and analyses and when the writer is being biased for some unstated personal or political reason. Same with media sources — although there one has to sort the areas and issues on which the newspaper/etc. is reliable and non-reliable. 2016 significantly increased the non-reliable quotient for the MSM.
I had not read anything of his in some time. Honestly don’t remember him on Libya. He was awful bad on Syria, though. Dishonest. Even before the Russians showed up.
Oh, since I stopped reading him when he backed the US/NATO bombing of Libya and ousting Ghaddafi, I missed his “sterling” insights on Syria. Perhaps his honesty and ME expertise during the run-up to and actual invasion and occupation weren’t beneficial to his career and changing his tune was a good idea. Particularly at he’d built up a decent sized readership from his Iraq War writings and those readers trusted him.
Is it possible to separate out a legitimate concern for Hillary Clinton’s recklessness with respect to aggressive policies against Russia from an equal concern about the pan-national (relgious) [white supremacist?] nationalist movement across the Anglophone countries and Europe in which Putin has taken an especial interest during this US election cycle? And the US media have completely missed by repeating their Cold War tropes when sanctions against Russia were brought up.
Where was the concern when Pussy Riot was being thrown in jail at the same time that protesters in Madison, Wisconsin and those of Occupy Wall Street were being thrown in jail?
Where was the opposition to being stampeded into war in Ukraine (and Syria), given the concern about being stampeded into war in Iraq and Libya?
And why do these concerns about Trump come out only after he has won the election? Why were they not disqualifying when he was still a minor candidate in the GOP clown car primary?
The reality of Russia’s campability is indeed that they can pose an existential threat to the US (and to the world) far more serious than any other country. One would think that eliminating that threat through diplomacy and military build-down would be more important that it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1962, a lot of of old liberals felt like we were going to die in a nuclear conflagration pushed by our own generals. We were gifted with a President who knew when to back off and a Soviet Premier like Trump who happened to have a peaceful whim. In 1983, we almost did die because of mechanical decision-making. Once again our survival depended on rationality in Russia. Only after Reagan understood what he just missed doing did he break for opening detente. It happens that we only now know what we couldn’t know then because “it was classified”.
Yes, there is now a pan-national movement that ranges from the Ku Klux Klan to factions of the United Russia Party and even more nationalist parties.
The dangerous question to contemplate is not what Trump will decide with Putin about the fate of the United States but what they both will agree on about the fate of China, India and other powers and to what extent they will allow a nuclear proliferation breakout.
That is truly dicey, but no less dicey than Hillary Clinton’s pressure for a confrontation at the Russian Federation border between NATO and Russia just to preserve NATO and rescue the European Union.
Yes, indeed the roles have been reversed. The German-American Bund, the Silver Shirts, and other organizations of the 1930s have their grandchildren and great grandchildren (spiritually if not genetically) in positions of media influence and political power. Of course, the OSS and CIA to some extent enabled the rehabilitation of Nazis in the 1940s even as they were ramping up the Red Scare.
But look carefully and you see a US one-party state. There is no effective opposition party. There are none willing to get out of their cozy chairs and create a meaningful political opposition in Washington DC that risks cutting off corporate funding.
That is one huge contradiction to opposition–who Trump’s tax cuts will benefit. And who in power is indebted to them. If Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Dianne Feinstein, Claire McCaskill, etc., are not concerned enough about Putin’s interference to put up the fight that they can in Congress, rhetorically whipping us old liberals is just wasted bandwidth.
But going to war over Ukraine or Latvia by being rash about Kaliningrad or Seabatapol could kill us just as easily. And well enough that climate change will not be an issue.
By the way, there are still those in the media and the Democratic propaganda machine who have not realized that Putin is no longer a Marxist-Leninist-spouting Communist–if he ever was more than a intelligent, clever counter-espionage thug.
>>Is it possible to separate out a legitimate concern for Hillary Clinton’s recklessness
not to speak for Booman, but I think part of his point is separating legitimate concern from ridiculously overblown concern, and the “she’ll have us in a war in six months” shit that we DID hear during the campaign was IMO the second kind.
thank you for a nice turn of phrase that summarizes why I think Pierce’s take is wrong: “pan-national …nationalist movement “. Right-wing politics is ALWAYS nationalist at the base, and though they might agree on white christian supremacy I don’t see any international Russia-led movement. I see Putin stirring shit where and how he can, and hoping to take some advantage of whatever happens.
“… though they might agree on white christian supremacy I don’t see any international Russia-led movement.”
You may not see it, but it’s there.
By the way, fascism has had an international network from the start. And there has always been an American component. And there has alwauys been a Russian component (mainly czarist Russian emigrés.)
By the way, there are still those in the media and the Democratic propaganda machine who have not realized that Putin is no longer a Marxist-Leninist-spouting Communist–if he ever was more than a intelligent, clever counter-espionage thug.
Which I mentioned above! See:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/joy-reid-roundly-derided-for-tweeting-that-russia-is-still-a-communis
t-state/
and:
Ah, yes.
No one was ever going to war with Russia over Ukraine, not even the Hillary Clinton of your nightmares. This bogeyman that was built up with what her foreign policy would look like was largely exaggerated.
Very little. to none, of the Russia bashing this cycle has to do with Russia’s communist past. It has everything thing to do with Russia’s motive and capability to influence the election, at the margins.
When you make the case that Hillary or the Democrats, by extension, were looking for war with Russia you are lying, plain and simple.
I don’t think it is a movement predicated upon racism, per se, just that racial and other forms of categorical prejudice appear to be key tools for manipulating its followers.
What the movement appears to be is authoritarian populism. It was evident as much on the left too, such as in Venezuela, Ecuador, and a host of other “New Socialist” governments that were elected in South America during the last decade, all of whom are also very close to Vladimir Putin and also use Twitter and other means of bullying political opponents.
I absolutely disagree. Bannon is a true believer in race superiority, and Trump pick him for chief advisor.
But does it really matter? It’s an age old question…
Which is worse, the racist true believer, or the person that profits from racism and give racists agency?
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that Rush Limbaugh is not a true racist…but simply an entertainer that profits from racist statements to his followers.
He’s still dangerous.
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Bannon is a racist. It is not at all clear that Putin is. Yet they are connected by this same global movement of nation-state authoritarianism.
This might be a good example of my comment.
Putin is almost certainly financing, or at least giving some sort of support, to right wing nazi type organizations. Booman is actually describing meetings between like minded groups.
I believe that shows he does harbor racial superiority beliefs. But does it matter? He might be doing it to sow discord, but does it matter?
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No, it doesn’t matter. But it does mean that racism isn’t the global movement part of anything — statist authoritarianism is because that is what is common to all of Putin’s allies now. Racism is just a local tool that happens to work here in the US and some other areas as well right now. Putin is doing the same things with his actions in South America as well, where neither white superiority nor crony capitalism has had anything to do with his alliances there. Racism, therefore, is a red herring for the bigger, core threat of state authoritarianism. We can oppose Trump supporters because they are racist, but stopping racism won’t stop the authoritarian movement that is happening all over the world right now.
Ah!
Very good. I was looking at the tree, you were talking about the forest.
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It is the institutionalization of ethnic discrimination that is the critical human rights issue. All of the psychology of manipulation and persuasion is instrumental but secondary to the actual institutionalization so that people who are psychologically not racists are forced to participate in racist institutions. Bullying, lynching, pogroms,are political institutions in society until they are de-normalized and de-legitimized. That is the ideological point.
The foreign policy point is that nations don’t have to ideologically agree with countries that serve as power counterweights to the countries that are cultural imperialists. Countries that want to fend off US pressure and power align with Russia or China these days as a practical matter. Countries that want to fend off Chinese or Russian pressure align with Europe or the US. All countries use the available means of power in various mixtures.
OMFG — NY Daily News – Assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov was not terrorism, but retribution for Vladimir Putin’s war crimes.
Not helpful.
wow. “not helpful” is an understatement.
to what extent should the Daily News and this writer be taken seriously?
Straight news, too. Not a column. Look at the author.
Very click-baity.
. . . opinion, not “straight news”.
As if that weren’t obvious enough from the text itself, it’s even stated explicitly in a photo caption:
Yes, he is a columnist, which is why I looked at the paper header, which had “news” highlighted, no?
Correction…”world” is highlighted, which for me implies news, not editorials/opinion pieces. It is the lead story.
But I don’t know this site. Do they commonly mix opinion and straight news without labeling them clearly?
I’ll just say this does seem a prime example of the importance of basic critical reading/thinking skills.
I read the linked piece. Indicators in the content throughout that it was being presented as opinion, not “straight news”, looked thoroughly pervasive to me (would have seemed remarkable to see this published as “straight news” pretty much anywhere, including not just Fox, but even wildly biased/dishonest and UnReality-Based cesspits like NewsMax or Breitbart).
So seeing it declared “straight news” and “not a column” raised a huge, vivid red flag.
I looked more closely, e.g., for author bio/ID, links to other columns, “News”/”Opinion”/etc. rubrics, photo captions. Confirming that, indeed, as all textual hints had argued, it was in fact opinion, not “straight news”.
I presume, but don’t know, it would have been even clearer in print that this was opinion (e.g., by placement on Opinion pages!). Websites do often seem less obvious/transparent about this. (Caveat lector!)
The actual content practically screamed “opinion”, though.
Interesting that again Marie sees getting something factually wrong as a basis for uprating.
Given the silly tear she’s been on about alleged “troll rating abuse”, I can’t help wondering if she’s at least consistent, i.e., also recognizing “uprating abuse” as a thing that’s also objectionable. The evidence contained in those uprates would seem to suggest “no”.
“I’ll just say this does seem a prime example of the importance of basic critical reading/thinking skills.”
I agree. It seems you missed the implication of my words when I remarked that it was being presented as a conventional/straight news article. If I had failed to recognize the editorial slant of his writing, why would I have remarked that?
Take it up with their omnibusman. I don’t require your instructions.
Sounds like an argument the jidhadists in Aleppo would make and possibly their backers–including Turkey?
Of course, it’s not helpful. It’s intended to derail the restabilization of Syria.
Or looking too closely at al-Nusra, who has been celebrating it. ISIS, not so much.
I think it drives Turkey and Russia closer together… We will see.
And cites Herschel Grynszpan without mentioning Kristallnacht.
In that case violence begets violence is completely apt. And who knows how much that violence contributed to the invasion of France two years later.
They might as well have approvingly cited the assassination of Folke Bernadotte or Sérgio Vieira de Mello.
Folke Bernadotte; what a deep insight into 20th century history even the rough outline of his life provides. Our modern world seems impoverished of personalities as strong yet as individual as his. Most people don’t realise that the Stern gang were hoping to assassinate Ralph Bunche at the same time as the Count; that might have changed history in unforeseen ways.
Ralph Bunche was also a remarkable man and may wished he’d never been given that dastardly assignment.
I don’t think “impoverished” of such personalities is the word I would use. Such people continue to exist. It’s that governments and national leaders have learned not to promote them to prominence where they won’t serve the interests of the elites. Better never to let them rise than to snuff them out when they become too troublesome.
Well then our public discourse is impoverished even though they still exist; perhaps our larger media markets demand less disturbing narratives than those offered by original thinking and cri du coeur sensibilities.
My own sense is that Bannon is more of a threat than Putin–especially if Bannon swings RushBo and FoxNews in a white nationalist direction in a hardline way–iron crosses, hoods, and all.
I fancy myself somewhere to the left of Emiliano Zapata but a fascist is a fascist. Putin, Erdogan, Trump; same difference, all mortal enemies of the people wherever encountered.
My attitude toward Stalin is somewhere between FDR’s and Churchill’s but clearly only the dire necessity of global war justified their alliance with him against the Reich but it was enough. From a distance it seems fitting that these two murderous tyrannies hurled their mighty industrialised armies at each other above all others. The Soviet Union deserves a nod for that, to be sure, and history so records. Other than that, pfft… Stalin is a close to even second to Hitler for despotism and democide.
That the problem of Stalin’s police-state totalitarianism dogged their ideology and culture from the 1930s until his death is among the Left’s original sins and fatally undermined whatever rational arguments socialism might have offered from Khrushchev until now.
What Stalin did was monstrous (Holodomor is something anyone with an interest in the USSR should be at least somewhat aware of), and that there are still apparently self-identifying “Marxists” who continue to venerate Stalin is monstrous as well. I’d like to think that at least in the circles I once traveled that the USSR was not looked at with admiration.
In realpolitik terms perhaps admiration is not the issue; the USSR was probably malign but on the other hand was an equal participant in not having a nuclear war back when it seemed inevitable. Ditto Mao’s China. In the category of world-historical tests of shared human values and survival that was a big one. So there’s that.
And the struggle of the Soviet Union against fascism is truly one of the epic tales of human history. It never disappoints for drama, scale and, sometimes futile, heroism. Like our parents and grandparents they believed they were fighting for something beyond their mere prosperity and survival, and they died in multitudes. It is hard to imagine that fierce struggle from within the soothing experience of our current circumstances, such as they are.
A bit of humility might be in order. Shouldn’t forget that the visions and crude implementations of government by, for, of the people is quite young in almost all parts of the world. (Much older and better practiced in some small communities but those have mostly been wiped out by larger “civilized” societies.)
How much of a difference is there between one person/family is head of state and head of government compared to a revolving door of heads of state/government where they’re all incubated in the same pot and serve the same interests when in power?
Stalin was a compromise between factions that couldn’t agree among themselves. And then he killed off the factions to avoid having them challenge him. (Doubt that impulse is absent from any person that achieves great power, and particularly among those that couldn’t be less deserving of such power.) While it wasn’t called the Cold War, western opposition to the Russian Revolution started immediately. And the price Russia/USSR paid to defeat Hitler was ever so much higher than what the US paid and defeating Germany and Japan was likely not possible without the alliance with the USSR. And who did the US reward after the war with aid? Who did the US immediately put back into the enemy category?
It’s not the left that undermined socialism. It was flourishing in various forms from the late 1920s through the 1960s throughout the western world and in spite of all the forces in opposition to it. ’30s leftists weren’t well informed as to the form of Stalin’s socialism which I’d call Potemkin communism, and while those leftists meant well, they seriously underestimated human nature for greed and power over and that is a major impediment for quickly reorganizing a people’s economy into equitable. Americans may be worse at this than those in other countries and we whine endlessly for “more.”
What should disturb us today is how far along the path this country have come towards police-state oligopoly. It’s as if Trump and his proposed very wealthy hack nominees have decided it’s time to cut out the middle-men political hires and rule more directly. “Thank you very much Reagan-Obama for building up those fascist military, police, and domestic spying operations. We can take it from here.”
In my opinon, what the folks in the comfy chairs are obscuring with their fixation on Putin. After having killed the donkey with their fixation on the Presidency.
Those in the “comfy chairs” are too stunned at the moment to do anything other than repeat the crap that was supposed to put them in the seats of power. They’re waiting for instructions from the oligarchs that were with them (a much larger, more important, and more powerful faction than the one with Trump). They too are stunned and so far are only doing what they know how to do which is suck up to the incoming power and try to get their share of the spoils. Peter Thiel may be the only one in either faction that’s ahead of the game.
That Peter Thiel ‘may be the only one in either faction that’s ahead of the game’ only demonstrates how monstrous the game actually is. Give me the blood of the country’s youth.
But was he speaking literally or figuratively or both? As usual, liberals focused on the literal for their outrage. Wouldn’t discount the literal in Thiel’s case because his narcissism seems not to have any bounds. However, figuratively, he’s been saying crap like this for years and has a lot of power within the tech community. He and that community teamed up in this election cycle to defeat a good House Rep, Mike Honda. (They also did so in ’14 but failed. Either from too little resources or they weren’t as united.)
In Dr. K’s time, it was academia that was the ticket to power (the “Best and Brightest” and all that nonsense). Now it’s personal wealth, and particularly wealth that one has accumulated on one’s own and not inherited wealth. Call it the Billionaire’s Boys Club. Some stick with one political side or the other (ie Soros and Adelson). But that’s somewhat illusory because how much real difference is there between Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson? Some are swingers (ie Bill Gates and Bloomberg). Thiel may be unique because there’s no evidence that he has even a smidgen of social conscience. And he’s not nutso like McAfee and may be smarter than all the others. A very dangerous man.
Thiel is by far one of the most dangerous people associated with Trump. Between suing media into bankruptcy over spite, and his power with the tech industry. But then there’s this:
Documents suggest Palantir could help power Trump’s `extreme vetting’ of immigrants
You just described the majority of Tumblr communist blogs. The discussion is about that addled. Best avoided unless one enjoys trolling them.
Speaking of addled…….
.
The impression I get is that the Correct line is that it’s okay if Russia does something because western capitalist imperialism is evil, but one must ignore that Putin is a capitalist with imperialist aspirations. Sort of an enemy of my enemy sort of thing I guess, but it’s sad.
Just one example, but it gives enough of an idea:
Gaddafi and Assad are characterized as progressive. What a laugh.
Anarchist twitter seems split on this question, but in the end so many came to that very same conclusion. A blurring of all the fighters as “jihadists” is also common (talk about Orientalism). It’s really depressing.
Noticed something similar on Tumblr. Depressing pretty well sums it up.
is it just Tankies or pretty widespread?
I also felt betrayed by many of the people I read to keep me informed on FP. It’s my own fault for my own ignorance — and a war zone is naturally going to be hard to figure out “what’s happening” — but for much of the Syrian war I swallowed their lines. Also it was comfortable; you didn’t need to examine your own knowledge when you could know how “right” you were with Iraq and then extrapolate that to the rest of the region.
Found this conversation with Charles Davis very illuminating, although Charlie isn’t “popular” anymore — and I think a lot of that has to do with his reporting on Syria:
For sure the tankies. For those wondering what a tankie is, the top definition here should give you a basic idea. Just a quick small sample suggests to me that this is a perspective beyond the tankies. I want to be careful before generalizing too much, though, given that I haven’t had the time or patience to wade through the much there in a while.
Interesting video. Listening to it right now. Some necessary nuance in that conversation.
The end of the video hits on Booman’s theme of “power” in the left in how they’re not ready to really use it in the real world of politics and their respective hard choices. It brings me to Mandos from over at Ian Welsh’s where he wrote about how Syriza simply wasn’t ready to take power because we don’t have the organizational structure to use it. I think to Sanders and imagine the people he’d be elevating and then thinking about Trump’s hirings. Would we even have enough people in power to successfully staff an administration in our image — or would we be elevating a few people, but largely being forced to turn to those same neoliberal forces once in power.
Personnel: A Potential Achilles’ Heel for Progressive Electoral Politics
Syriza in Greece definitely has struggled. Tsipras was handed a horribly awful set of cards, and my impression was that their initial victory in early 2015 was more than a bit of a shock. My subsequent impression is that the reshuffling of cabinet positions was inevitable once it became clear that the party would actually have to govern and be held accountable for making decisions that would not please much of anyone in Greece. I look at Corbyn’s rise as leader of Labour. He’s now survived two rounds of voting, and has a difficult time staffing a shadow cabinet. I have no doubt Sanders would have had some struggles as well, and that is not to put down Sanders at all. We in the left have been fed a line for several decades that power is inherently bad, and under those circumstances we’ve been reduced to being outside agitators and little else. Truth is that really running a government does require difficult decisions, where it is very unclear as to whether those decisions were satisfactory, and in which identifying “good guys” and “bad guys” is practically impossible in the moment (and perhaps even in retrospect). Governing effectively requires having people in various Cabinet seats who actually are competent. A left party or left wing of a party that really wants to impress me will show that it can attract and retain experts, that it can field candidates who can hold office and who know how the proverbial sausage is made. At the moment that seems like a daunting task, but not impossible. Just my off the cuff two cents.
“Those who feel irritated by our friendship with
President Gaddafi can go jump in the pool.”
Nelson Mandela
Of course us Americans know better than Africans what’s good for Africa …
just like we knew what’s best for the Philippines, Mexico, Latin America, Persia, Iraq, Libya and Syria.
○ What does Gaddafi’s death mean for Africa?
○ Muammar Gaddafi, the African Who Cleansed the Continent from the Humiliation of Apartheid
In no way do I support dictatorship, killing of citizens by a rogue regime, abuse of human rights and glorification of any “leader” or “führer”.
One should however judge the cause and effect of events. More often the media and politicians like to juggle both.
Btw, Gaddafi was in no way linked to Assad or his policy until the US/UK/NATO decided it was time for regime change.
○ Tony Blair visited Gaddafi at his luxurious Bedouin tent after sanctions were lifted | BBC News – May 2007 |
When you say condescendingly “of course we know better than X,” are you denying genuine revolution happened? What, I just imagined people in the steeets demanding he step down, just as Mubarak stepped down, until he started slaughtering them? All those people were organized by the CIA and the west? That polling surveys generally showed Libyans approved of the intervention? Or was that just made up by “western imperialists” to you?
Look, in realtime I opposed the intervention as I did not think genocide was inevitable, and I’m still not sure if it was the right thing to do — I don’t think it’s open-shut one way or another, and there’s too much damn propaganda with people having their own agendas. Times of revolution are usually chaotic and bloody, and most people prefer stability (for good reason, no one wants to die). The main lessons are to stop arming the despots in the first place.
○ Overseas interventions of the United States | WikiPedia |
○ From Wounded Knee to Syria: A Century of U.S. military interventions (incl. domestic)
○ Ukraine: the Enemy of Your Enemy is Not Always Your Friend by Zoltán Grossman - Evergreen State College
Yes, never denied that the US doesn’t intervene. Shit, we intervened in Libya well before NATO bombs to prop up Gaddafi himself. We trained his security. We sold him weapons — including on Clinton’s watch. The Bush admin kidnapped and tortured Gaddafi’s political opponents.
Still doesn’t mean NATO intervention was prima facie the wrong move.
○ The Libyan Revolution, FB17 (February 17th) – Cornell Research and Study Guide
○ The Destoori Project: Constitutional Options for Libya [pdf]
○ Benghazi and the 17th February Martyrs Brigade – R2P
○ Lawyers for Justice in Libya is disappointed by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee lack of consideration of human rights issues
Just as in Iraq, regime change was not tabled at the UN Security Council and therefore illegal by Internationl Law. Just as in Iraq, the intervention forces were not equipped to deal with the aftermath and let Libya sink in tribal war [chaos] which spread Gaddafi’s weapons southward across the Maghreb and African continent: Mali and Boko Harem par example. A pure criminal act by western powers and not a task for NATO. The blow-back will be with Europe for at least a decade.
“When I feed the poor they call me a
saint. When I ask why so many people
are poor they call me a communist.”
Helder Câmara
Original headline: Don’t cry for Russia’s slain envoy, who was Putin’s lackey
Hatred propagated by president Barack Obama, his administration, Samantha Power as US top diplomat at the UN and served to the American people by the media!
When you drop bombs on people indiscriminately you’re going to piss some people off.
You should know… you criticize the US when it does things like this and gets backlash for it.
Be consistent.
You need to find a better class of “liberals” to talk to. Sounds like you’re talking to the same ones who talk to Bill O’Reilly. Sounds like a vast right-wing conspiracy and why wouldn’t it include Putin. You think he’s a Communist or something? He was a career KGB officer, for FSM’s sake, of course he didn’t believe in Communism. So what? Given that Warren Harding was never nearly as openly corrupt as Trump, the picks for Trump’s cabinet make Harding’s look like school boys. Does Putin have influence over Trump? I sure don’t know, but at this point I’m hopeful it’s for the good. Putin’s foreign policy looks more sensible than ours in the sense of preserving human life on this planet. Aside from that, no, Vladimir Putin is not our friend. He wants to take some of the profits away from the big petro firms and give them to his friends (while taking some for himself, I imagine). That is not an existential threat to our people. Why has Russia become such a boogie man? Because the Deep State wants a war in the next couple of years (OK, it’s more complicated than that, but I’m trying not to abuse this space).