• 93 Posts
  • 762 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Communists never championed democracy and rights?

    What do you know of modern Greek history?

    Here is what I wrote:

    Communists were (and are) the people arguing for democracy for human rights and for liberty. And they were the people persecuted and jailed and tortured for this.

    Do you want me to list names of Greek communists who did exactly that and suffered exactly thar? I even have a great-uncle who did several years hard time.

    You say what state falls under this description? I dunno, Chile under Allende? Kerala under several decades of communist government? Uruguay under Mujica? Burkina under Sankara? Or do you want a recent European example, like Cyprus under Christofias? Or do you want examples of countless communist mayors from around the world? I could expand to Chiapas under the Zapatistas or Republican Spain or even Rojava under the SDF but let’s keep revolutionary governments out of the picture.





  • Listen, people from the former Soviet bloc, we get it, you were traumatized. But you can’t just blanketly force your bad experience on the rest of us. In much of the world, the polarity of your experience was reversed. Communists were (and are) the people arguing for democracy for human rights and for liberty. And they were the people persecuted and jailed and tortured for this. Joke all you like, but it’s just simply historical fact in places ranging from Spain and Greece to like Indonesia and Nepal. And in those places, the conflation of communism and Nazism as “totalitarianism” is just obscene.

    In France in particular, I mean look at the tricolour: socialist ideas are part of what being French is. And this fascist mayor is doing something obscene, essentially lumping the collaborationists and the pétainistes together with the people who fought against them for a free french people.

    Yes, your experiences are valid, but they are not the only ones that are valid.









  • At some point, western countries have to actually believe Netanyahu when he says there is not going to be a Palestinian state. The 2 state solution is dead. Israel has killed it with acts just like this. No amount of farcical recognition of the rump Bantustan in Ramallah is going to undo this.

    So it’s a simple matter of recognizing the reality that Israel is either going to be a Jewish state serving the fears of a Jewish diaspora or a democratic republic of the actual people, Arabs, Jews and others, who live under its law. It’s a simple choice, that the Israeli governments of the past twenty years have been etching in blood on the land.