War Room Lounge v133: This is Lead's fault.

[Lead]

Hah! Whoops, I meant WallyBrando, not MarlonBrando. Even Ripwarrior, his earliest account was entirely different, but then it's been decades. Only the most weirdly dedicated trolls/racists/shitposters seem to come back that much though.
To the point they pretty much have to be some sort of dud unit.
Likewise from the rest of the forum with AndersonsFoot or OlympicDom.

What weird is I thought you did write WallyBrando until you just said this now. We both knew who it was about.

 

[Pseudo Sane]

Hey @Trotsky

How do you feel about my boy John Brown? Dude was pretty ruthless, and helped 1,200 enslaved humans escape to Canada.


Pretty hardcore way to set off the Civil War.

I thought it was more like 2500 people? I can't believe I need to write this, but chattel slavery was a vile institution, and the abolitionists were right. Brown was right to fight against slavery. Did he choose the best way to do it? Fuck if I know.

But don't forget that most of the people following John Brown died, and that Brown's prophecy, that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood," came very true.

If people think we are in a situation analogous to the antebellum USA, then I just hope people think carefully about the potential cost of what might get unleashed.

 

[Prokofievian]

Hah! Whoops, I meant WallyBrando, not MarlonBrando. Even Ripwarrior, his earliest account was entirely different, but then it's been decades. Only the most weirdly dedicated trolls/racists/shitposters seem to come back that much though.
To the point they pretty much have to be some sort of dud unit.
Likewise from the rest of the forum with AndersonsFoot or OlympicDom.

Ripwarrior is posting right meow, though?

 

[Ruprecht]

Ripwarrior is posting right meow, though?

Really? I guess it's been at least a day since I banned his last account.

 

[AgonyandIrony]

One of Trotsky's favorite methods of subjugating rebellion to his authority, was to take the relatives of anyone deemed to be a rebel hostage, in order to threaten and intimidate them to submission, exercising a sort of "collective punishment" on families. A trait he later passed onto Stalin.

Ironically his own relatives were taken hostage by Stalin.



I only brought it up because you attempted to make it seem as if the exercise of raw power, by a Leon Trotsky, was somehow of a different kind to the raw power exercised by a fascist.

Where I'm from, there's a saying that left-wing violence is a "better kind of violence", but realistically, we have to be honest about what it was. It was just violence.

There's a famous Anarcho-Punk band that has a song about communist violence. I always find it odd in the US how Anarchists, Socialists, and Communists are all lumped together.

It all seems very easy, this revolution game But when you start to really play things won't be quite the same, Your intellectual theories on how it's going to be Don't seem to take into account the true reality Cos the truth of what you're saying, as you sit there sipping beer Is pain and death and suffering, but of course you wouldn't care

You're far too much of a man for that, if Mao did it so can you What's the freedom of us all against the suffering of the few? That's the kind of self-deception that killed ten million jews Just the same false logic that all power-mongers use So don't think you can fool me with your political tricks Political right, political left, you can keep your politics Government is government and all government is force Left or right, right or left, it takes the same old course Oppression and restriction, regulation, rule and law The seizure of that power is all your revolution's for. You romanticise your heroes, quote from Marx and Mao. Well their ideas of freedom are just oppression now

 

[Prokofievian]

Really? I guess it's been at least a day since I banned his last account.

Long Branch isn't RipWarrior?

 

[Ruprecht]

Long Branch isn't RipWarrior?

Oh, I suspected him, but if so he's moved/changed techniques.

 

[PolishHeadlock2]

 

[Unknown Pleasures]

There's no telling what would happen if dangerous radicals like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi ever got a whiff of power in the American gov't.

When I read that and skipped past who tweeted it. After the first sentence I was convinced it was going to be a pro-Biden tweet. Then when I read the rest and who sent it.....

 

[Prokofievian]

Excellent. The communist revolution is coming along exactly as I have foreseen. WPEMs of the world, unite!

 

[AgonyandIrony]

I thought it was more like 2500 people? I can't believe I need to write this, but chattel slavery was a vile institution, and the abolitionists were right. Brown was right to fight against slavery. Did he choose the best way to do it? Fuck if I know.

But don't forget that most of the people following John Brown died, and that Brown's prophecy, that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood," came very true.

If people think we are in a situation analogous to the antebellum USA, then I just hope people think carefully about the potential cost of what might get unleashed.

You might be right. I'm rather baked at the moment. There's a John Brown series coming out on Showtime in August which pleases me to no end, as he's one of my favorite Americans in our history. So of course I watched about five hours of documentaries on him and the common topic is if he was a terrorist or hero. I remember reading once that "Abraham Lincoln didn't free the slaves, John Brown did" Granted, I see what he did, including kicking off Bloody Kansas by sneaking out in the night with his son and a few others and hacking up slavers with swords and dumping them in the water after they threatened to kill all the abolitionists.

The topic of political violence is one that I find extremely interesting. John Brown was looked as a lunatic up until rather recently but dude went to his death like a straight up gangster. I suppose let me draw upon a more recent revolutionary. Lets look at the original Oakland Black Panther Party and the AIM movement. If we dive into COINTELPRO and what the FBI was doing, along with the current social situation of the times could you in a small way exonerate them for seeing political violence as a final tool?

The Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin eventually led to the Anglo-Irish War, which allowed most of Ireland to be free outside of the occupied six counties. Kurdish resistance groups in Turkey are another interesting one to look at.

 

[Pseudo Sane]

You might be right. I'm rather baked at the moment. There's a John Brown series coming out on Showtime in August which pleases me to no end, as he's one of my favorite Americans in our history. So of course I watched about five hours of documentaries on him and the common topic is if he was a terrorist or hero. I remember reading once that "Abraham Lincoln didn't free the slaves, John Brown did" Granted, I see what he did, including kicking off Bloody Kansas by sneaking out in the night with his son and a few others and hacking up slavers with swords and dumping them in the water after they threatened to kill all the abolitionists.

The topic of political violence is one that I find extremely interesting. John Brown was looked as a lunatic up until rather recently but dude went to his death like a straight up gangster. I suppose let me draw upon a more recent revolutionary. Lets look at the original Oakland Black Panther Party and the AIM movement. If we dive into COINTELPRO and what the FBI was doing, along with the current social situation of the times could you in a small way exonerate them for seeing political violence as a final tool?

The Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin eventually led to the Anglo-Irish War, which allowed most of Ireland to be free outside of the occupied six counties. Kurdish resistance groups in Turkey are another interesting one to look at.

I'd love to discuss this sometime but I'm going to have to take a raincheck, given the current warnings from on high.

 

[BarryDillon]

Obamacare? Please find my posts on the dangers of Obamacare. I'll wait. To avoid keeping you in suspense, I'll say explicitly that I don't equate those things at all. What I find dangerous are attempts to justify political violence, which is 100% what you are interested in doing here.

Lets flip your earlier statement on its head and see how you feel about it.



Of course I anticipate your response to be that this is not fair, that the real bad actors are on the other side, which is to miss my point. The breakdown of political norms is never one-sided, it's always a dialectic, which I would expect a communist to understand.

Everyone advocating for political violence views it as justified based on the outrageous conduct of their opponents. It's how fascists justified killing Jews, how communists justified killing kulaks and other class enemies, how Hutus justified killing Tutsis. All of them viewed it as 'violent resistance'.

When everyone on all sides views themselves as the resistance against the forces of evil, it doesn't even matter who is right, we are in political zugzwang, completely fucked.

Also...

I think equating fascists and communists is stupid.

 

[Trotsky]

One of Trotsky's favorite methods of subjugating rebellion to his authority, was to take the relatives of anyone deemed to be a rebel hostage, in order to threaten and intimidate them to submission, exercising a sort of a "collective punishment" on families. A trait he later passed onto Stalin.

Ironically his own relatives were taken hostage by Stalin.



I only brought it up because you attempted to make it seem as if the exercise of raw power, by a Leon Trotsky, was somehow of a different kind to the raw power exercised by a fascist.

Where I'm from, there's a saying that left-wing violence is a "better kind of violence", but realistically, we have to be honest about what it was. It was violence, and in a lot of ways, over-the-top violence (such as the gassing of peasant rebels in Tambov). It cannot even be argued that these were violent fascist groups, as many of them were just peasants with left-wing/egalitarian sentiments who hoped to govern their own regions or atleast be less burdened by government demands.

As usual, you are cogent and correct in your criticisms of the Reds. However, also as usual, your criticisms are not relevant except as whataboutisms. Setting aside the fact that unqualified and reactionary violence was not ever a part of the communist movement leading up to the October Revolution, your criticisms have no bearing on this conversation until you can point to contemporary leftist movements that seek, or that even demonstrate the potential for, the exercise of political violence without regard for policy aims. That's the point: the difference between zealous advocacy to the point of violence versus ruinous conduct the point of which is violence. And, frankly, that's why white nationalism as a democratic movement (which receives some great attention) is, in my opinion, a less ideologically dangerous faction within Trump's support than the persons we are talking about (although there is a whole lot of overlap) since there is at least a recognizable policy aim that is taking precedence over democracy, liberty, honesty, etc.

 

[AgonyandIrony]

I'd love to discuss this sometime but I'm going to have to take a raincheck, given the current warnings from on high.

I was hella about to go into NAFTA creating the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas

Thanks Obama.

As usual, you are cogent and correct in your criticisms of the Reds. However, also as usual, your criticisms are not relevant except as whataboutisms. Setting aside the fact that unqualified and reactionary violence was not ever a part of the communist movement leading up to the October Revolution, your criticisms have no bearing on this conversation until you can point to contemporary leftist movements that seek, or that even demonstrate the potential for, the exercise of political violence without regard for policy aims. That's the point: the difference between zealous advocacy to the point of violence versus ruinous conduct the point of which is violence. And, frankly, that's why white nationalism as a democratic movement (which receives some great attention) is, in my opinion, a less ideologically dangerous faction within Trump's support than the persons we are talking about (although there is a whole lot of overlap) since there is at least a recognizable policy aim that is taking precedence over democracy, liberty, honesty, etc.

I was watching an old interview of Dr West and he basically said the exact same thing about the Neo-Fascist tendencies of Trump and his supporters and how in many ways it's more dangerous to the fabric of American democracy in comparison to contemporary American white supremacy.

 

[Unknown Pleasures]

It's not often you get called out by the NFL player who's shirt your wearing.

Also this Columbus stuff is straight from the Sopranos.

Europe is still lost.

 

[Trotsky]

I was hella about to go into NAFTA creating the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas

Thanks Obama.


I was watching an old interview of Dr West and he basically said the exact same thing about the Neo-Fascist tendencies of Trump and his supporters and how in many ways it's more dangerous to the fabric of American democracy in comparison to contemporary American white supremacy.

I haven't seen that, but obviously I agree. Although, again, there's huge overlap. For instance, the amount of white supremacists who support disenfranchising black people and violating the law and/or policy aims in order to bludgeon black people but who do not support doing those things to white liberals/leftists/globalists/etc. is, I suspect, very small.

 

[TheGreatA]

There's a famous Anarcho-Punk band that has a song about communist violence. I always find it odd in the US how Anarchists, Socialists, and Communists are all lumped together.

Communists didn't really get along with anarchists at all, certainly not in USSR times. The black flag was raised against the "reds" many times, most notably by Nestor Makhno.

In many ways these ideologies amounted to the exact opposites (despite sharing similar sentiments about the human condition), the anarchists believed in the decentralization of power, whereas the communists believed in the centralization of power. While the communists promised a gradual reduction of the force used against people, at yet to be determined date (ultimately revealed to be never), the anarchists promised that immediately.

What the anarchists proposed, was more of a natural result of how these communities had always existed, with peasants sharing their yields with one another, and thus the small-scale "anarcho-communist" experiment could be expected to occur with a very small amount of "force" involved from any over-seeing structure, whereas the communists attempted to impose an industrial "revolution" which in many ways, was unnatural to the Russian population (which was not far removed from the "feudal" state) and thus required a great amount of force in order to be realized.

Nobody could have expected that it was going to require such an absurd amount of force to allow an industrial USSR to come to being, though. I tend to think that the "anti-human" sentiments prevalent in Russian "nihilist" thought and even to a degree in Marx and Engel's own thoughts, played a part in the worst excesses. As well as the criminality/violence freely exercised by the leaders of the Bolshevik movement, and how it tainted whatever their original purposes may have been, the more they succumbed to these radical and inhumane methods.

As usual, you are cogent and correct in your criticisms of the Reds. However, also as usual, your criticisms are not relevant except as whataboutisms. Setting aside the fact that unqualified and reactionary violence was not ever a part of the communist movement leading up to the October Revolution, your criticisms have no bearing on this conversation until you can point to contemporary leftist movements that seek, or that even demonstrate the potential for, the exercise of political violence without regard for policy aims. That's the point: the difference between zealous advocacy to the point of violence versus ruinous conduct the point of which is violence. And, frankly, that's why white nationalism as a democratic movement (which receives some great attention) is, in my opinion, a less ideologically dangerous faction within Trump's support than the persons we are talking about (although there is a whole lot of overlap) since there is at least a recognizable policy aim that is taking precedence over democracy, liberty, honesty, etc.

The Bolshevik party was basically founded on violence. Bank robberies, kidnappings, extorting people in order to amass more wealth for the movement. That's how men like Stalin originally "moved up the ladder", along with his loyal group of goons such as Kamo, a man who boasted of having cut out a live heart from another man's chest. Lenin ultimately had to distance himself from these practises due to the shame that it brought him and his movement, among the international left-wing circles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1907_Tiflis_bank_robbery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Stalin

My criticisms have bearing as far as your statements about Trotsky and the communists goes. They're not meant to be a "whataboutism" in regards to contemporary movements (since they're not even addressing contemporary movements).

 

[AgonyandIrony]

I haven't seen that, but obviously I agree. Although, again, there's huge overlap. For instance, the amount of white supremacists who support disenfranchising black people and violating the law and/or policy aims in order to bludgeon black people but who do not support doing those things to white liberals/leftists/globalists/etc. is, I suspect, very small.

This shit is just wild to me. I've said it multiple times having been a member of Anti Fascist Action and a pretty dedicated Anti-Fascist. The Antifa obsession is absolutely mindblowing to me. I've seen posters here literally deny there are peaceful protesters and calling us domestic terrorists, I've seen posters here say "shoot them, shoot them all, I don't care if I get a yellow" about people tearing down statues, and get gleeful about running over protesters. When I told a poster I'm going to keep enjoying my First Amendment Right by marching all week he said "We'll see about that" It's fucking wild. Now Fox News is releasing doctored photos to scare boomers into thinking Antifa is taking over.

Some angry boomer was honking like crazy to drown us out yesterday and revved their engine and I was like "Welp. I'm about to do the time warp and jump to the left" I don't even remember the Anti-Iraq War or Occupy being met with this much hatred. It's fascinating in a morbid way.

 

[Unknown Pleasures]

It will be the final death of 2020.

or .