No.

I assume “tankie” is a roundabout way to lump revolutionary leftists with those fomenting red-brown alliances. That is, a “tankie” in the modern day is a way to describe someone as Strasserist, NazBol, LaRouchite, etc.

The chances of me not being Marxist is as high as the chance imperialism collapses.

The shelf for Kautsky, Dugin, and Keynes is further down. It should be easier for you to digest.

Moishe Postone might have something interesting for you, when you’re ready to come back to earth to discover my support for North Korea and Palestine (clearly from what I wrote, if anyone spent the time to extrapolate and use some thinking skills) is not an anachist position, but is almost verbatim what Lenin and Stalin would argue.

That’s fair, I can give finishing remarks as well - I’ll make it even shorter.

I see where Marxism influenced you, but that doesn’t make you a Marxist.

You don’t know class struggle, you know struggle of civilizations and races.

That’s exactly what it is - competition. They don’t want to cooperate with China, they want to compete. I’m not talking about the domestic “free market,” I’m talking about the world economy and power politics. If the US keeps pursuing this path of foreign policy and no longer wants to play friendly, then, yes, either China or Russia (or some other country) will have to step up and be the competing imperialist power. Either that, or they have to choose the submissive role, a puppet government. There’s no way around this. We live in the era of imperialism and globalization - all countries have to be interconnected by some way and we can’t backtrack. Something like BRICS is an alternative, not a revolutionary new thing, but just a plain alternative to what already exists. That’s not inherently a good or bad thing. But when we have the US pushing countries into competiting spheres of influence, what happens in a system like this? The same that already happened before.

This isn’t a moral concept, this isn’t a voluntary thing. This is just what happens when you have a bunch of sufficiently developed capitalist countries. They will all demand imperialism at some point, that’s their aspiration, and those competing interests will interfere in the peace of all other (both capitalist and socialist) countries. People will be forced to pick sides at some point, that’s the competition.

It just sounds like a long way of saying that China and Russia should function as imperialist powers using some type of Keynesian economic policy or war economy boost. This is undeniably what the US is trying to do. They want to drive competition. Either China or Russia hardens their stance into an imperialist bloc, or the US destroys them. That’s the goal. The US will not collapse nor will the imperialist system lead by the US. Weaken, lost influence, lose relevance or merit - yes. Collapse is still a resounding no. It’s the reason China is so careful with the US, so willing to go the extra mile to satisfy, the reason China wants to cooperate in international politics as a neutral player. China has reiterated time and time again that they are against bloc formation. This is why: China doesn’t want to be seen as an imperialist power or even a competing superpower. They want cooperation with all, whether that be Russia, the US, the Eurozone, or major countries in Africa and Latin America.

If the US keeps pushing power politics, China will be forced to push back, just as Russia was pushed to do in 2022. No one seriously wants that. It will be devastating. That’s not progress, that’s reaction. The DPRK has even admitted peaceful reunification isn’t possible in relation to the South (RoK). Of course it’s the truth, but peace is always what we demand first. That can’t happen in a world dominated by capitalism, and capitalism has to be taken down consciously with great effort. Peace holds off struggle for another day, it buys time. But we can’t fool ourselves. That peace is as much of a facade as American liberal democracy. It’s stable and looks good, maybe feels good, but it’s fake, another way of obstructing reality.

Though peace can’t be shaken out of regular conflict to get rid of capitalism. It has to be liberation, the wars have to be revolutionary wars. Otherwise we’re back to step one, always on the edge of a new imperialist competitor, the ultimate aspiration for all capitalist countries at sufficient level of development. At the moment, only Palestine and the DPRK are really capable of fighting those types of wars. Even if the US adopts an America First policy (we all know this is just coded fascism), we know they’ll still perform covert operations illegally and against their supposed policy.

It’s socialism or barbarism.

When you were a kid (if you ever grew out of being a kid, that is), did anyone tell you the story of the apples and oranges? Did you ever hear someone talking about comparing apples to bananas? Anything of that nature? You still can’t explain why you specifically chose to compare Hitler and Bin Laden to Raisi.

Let me break it down for you slow, in hamburger American terms.

Say I want to talk about America. Should I compare America to McDonald’s and apple pie? Or should I compare America to shrimp and gyros?

Fill in the blank: As American as _______.

Did you say “apple pie” or did you say “shrimp and gyros”? Why? Reflect on this in your own time.

I have to be honest. The only thing that will happen is either 1.) The US goes full mask-off fascism; or 2.) militant union organizing and popularization of left-wing, even explicitly Communist, ideas. Yes it’s true that imperialism is broken, it’s also true that the US is running out of force abroad. It’s still an economic power house with a functioning (albiet backsliding) liberal democracy. No one really likes the government, but you can tell at least 30-40% of the population is on board 100% with pushing desired candidates and they believe the US has a chance in electoralism.

If you want to know the truth, we are essentially going to have to repeat the work of SDS, the Black Panthers, and all the other post-Civil Rights activisist left-wing movements. Now, instead of the Russian Empire going down as an imperialist force in favor of the Communists, we will have to organize to make that happen in the US or the UK.

As much as we clown on the Democrats and their supporters, it’s true that if the Democrats fail we will not have a liberal democracy. Fascism is weak and fragile, but it gets the job done for whoever needs that job done. Bullets are cheap. Prison labor is already raking in plenty of cash and the US doesn’t care about overcapacity in the cells or abuse of solitary confinement. Biden himself is already sliding away from the liberal democratic facade that at least Obama was able to keep up. Trump did real damage and pushed us away from keeping up our image, but, yes, there were real conditions behind it (namely between 1980 and 2009).

A collapse is still a pipe dream, either way. Even when the feudal order was weakened and unable to sustain itself, we still had many bloody conflicts and revolutions to push through. The monarchs didn’t care, they fled or escaped along with the aristocrats and landowners and landlords. Even some decades after the French Revolution, people were lamenting the death of the old order. To this day we have anti-revolution propaganda from monarchs.

In all honesty, we can exploit external conditions but we still have to realize those conditions alone are not revolutionary or even necessarily progressive. What the US is doing right now is exactly what we expect in a weakened state that used to be so powerful. But this exact policy is also going to force China and Russia to be more agggressive, more competitive, and even form alliances and tighten up on separating their sphere of influence from that of “the West” or the US. This is very bad. This will push China to align more with the right-wing of the CPC. We don’t want that. Thankfully we have Xi Jingping as prevention, but I don’t trust whoever is going to succeed. It’s too shakey, too unpredictable.

I still follow in my belief that we need fresh revolution. If Americans or the British can’t do it, there’s going to be some serious issues. It will be the equivalent of the German Revolution failing. The US wants China and Russia to get into the politcs of bloc-formation, while the US is also pushing to allow Western Europe to go fascist. Then we have Nigeria playing too neutral. The US has Argentina, Peru, Ecuador in their pockets as well. The Sahel is too weak at the moment.

I won’t entertain an idea of collapse for these reasons alone. It’s too dangerous to spread that idea. We have decades to keep pushing.

Just admit you make awful comparisons and fail to make analogies work.

Hitler, for one, had a specific fascist ideology comparable to Mussolini. I’d feel comfortable comparing the two. Not only based on their alliance and ideology alone, but also their actions taken.

When we compare people to Hitler, we generally make the assumption that we are talking about genocide, fascism, and an extreme passion for exterminating and villifying the “other” (whether that be Jews or Muslims or Slavs or something else). I wouldn’t even make a comparison between Hitler and Netanyahu if I had to be professional and make time for an appropriate comparison.

On to Bin Laden, now. Why isn’t he similar to Hitler? Back in the day, the US had a strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia. Backing the dollar with gold wasn’t the best plan for us, we didn’t gain a strong advantage doing so. Saudi Arabia was happy to help us with new US policy abroad. We went above and beyond to treat Saudi monarchs to the best life available, all at our expense. We even ignored the Saudis backing of people like Bin Laden back when we first knew of his type, all the way in the 1970s. We even used his allies and people with the Mujahideen that fought against the Soviets in the 1980s. Long story short, we had a blowback incident. 9/11 came around to hit us, likely with Saudis allowing it to happen while US intelligence was too incompetent or bogged down to act effectively (or maybe we knew and couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything). We went to war with Iraq and Afghanistan - not Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was a failure the US contributed to actively for about 20 years, not including the interference from years prior. The Taliban is still governing Afghanistan today in fact. It wasn’t anything like Hitler, except for the brutal anti-Communism. It certainly wasn’t like Raisi either, considering that Iran and Afghanistan’s Taliban aren’t on the best terms.

I would compare Raisi to General Torrijos. Why is that? Because they were both nationalists, both concerned with sovereignty and not bending the will of their country to the US, yet each of them were not inherently accepting of either far-right extemist ideology or Communism (or other explictly left-wing political movements or ideologies). In spite of ideological differences, they both had a desire to stay neutral, choose key allies, and were rather accepting of liberation movements. People didn’t really celebrate the death of Torrijos, at least in Panama. I wouldn’t say people were exceptionally happy in Iran about the death of Raisi either. They weren’t good leaders per se, but they stood on principles. I don’t care for either figure myself, but I recognize who they were and what they fought for as humans.

Again, I know what an analogy is. We already established that. So, that means I do know Hitler is not just a nom de plum or alias for Raisi, or vice versa.

It’s just not a good analogy. Look at the names I wrote and think about it for a second.

Why do I think comparing Hitler to Bin Laden is not a good comparison? Why do I believe comparing General Torrijos to Raisi is a good comparison?

Then, back to you. “[Celebrating] the death of horrific people is not necessarily a bad thing.” You didn’t even clarify what made Raisi a horrific person comparable to Hitler. You sound like everyone else in that Reddit-esque circlejerk.

If you read closely, you can see I don’t really mind the act of celebration itself. My problem is that there is no acceptable reason to compare Raisi and Hitler, first of all; and, secondly, the people celebrating don’t even know who Raisi is. Your comparison alone tells me you’re in that group, the people who are celebrating without even knowing.

I can celebrate the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini, Kissinger, Pinochet, Reagan, and so on. That’s because I actually know who they were and what they did.

I understand what an analogy is. But you know (and I know) that we don’t make analogies at random. There’s a specific reason you chose Bin Laden and Hitler to make the analogy. Even comparing Bin Laden and Hitler is dishonest and lacks appropriate context.

I’d say Raisi’s death celebration is more akin to celebrating the death of someone like Omar Torrijos (Panama), and I’m not speaking of similarity of death itself or the conditons that created the death. I’m talking about their respective policies.

Death happens everyday and you chose to make the specific comparisons you did. It wasn’t an accident, no one forced it into your brain. You did that.

If anyone wants their prediction to be true, let us pick the most liberal of choices, say this can happen by 2050. Then, expect to be actively organizing regulary starting today (if not ten years earlier) and continuing until the 2050s. That’s about three or more whole decades, not including a success story where you’d have to also manage the governing body and/or manage civil war and/or manage post-revolution struggle.

It’s not going to collapse. It’s more likely that we’ll have a full-scale inter-imperialist conflict before anything resembling a collapse would occur, and I still don’t think it’ll be a collapse, for any participants.

You would need revolution, requiring revolutionary conditions. Like the ruling capitalist class of the United States turning to a situation where capitalism just can’t function anymore. We know, based on the 20th Century, that these conditions haven’t really occurred in “the West”, except temorarily and only causing at best what amounted to general strike, increased union activity, or spontaneous riot/uprising. Maybe we can give credit to the failed revolutions of Germany (Sparticist) and France (Paris Commune).

Aside from that, they turn their inability to rule into an irrationalist or even illiberal form of government. They strip away the facade and turn to fascism. That’s how they save themselves from crisis, that paired with the ability to extract resources a la carte from the countries oppressed by the imperialist/neo-colonial relationship. If they don’t bend to the will, we can crush their economies or incite political crisis. On top of that, the US is the most highly advanced and most stable liberal democracy in the history of democracy as we know it. They’re doing just fine and a general crisis of capitalism can be managed to benefit exactly who needs to benefit and hurt exactly who they need to hurt.

If anything does happen, however, that creates revolutionary conditions, we have to remember that there is no economic determinism, no inevitable crisis/crash/collapse, no guarantee of choosing socialism over barbarism. China isn’t going to save us. The deep global recession won’t save us. Accelerationism isn’t going to work.

It’s simple. If you want revolution, you need to make it happen. There is no other solution, no easy way around it, no shortcuts.

If you think Iranian leaders are equivalent to Biden Laden and Hitler, you still have a few years (or decades) of brain development left. Please at least make an attempt to sound educated when making comparisons. This place is going to be more embarrassing than Reddit soon…

It’s not the fact that they celebrated his death that is most important. It’s the fact that the people celebrating have no coherent understanding of who he was. All they know is “Media told me Iran bad. Iran bad means Iranian dying is bad man dying. Funny meme death of people I don’t see as human.”

You can tell based on responses they haven’t read even a single article in full about anything even tangentially related to the man.

Imagine someone speaking a Semitic language in public, likely in the United States. Regardless of the language, think about what they look like. They are likely black, from Africa, or they “look” Arab (in American terms, they look like a terrorist). If this person was discriminated against after speaking that language, do you think it’s because of antisemitism? I doubt it.

The antisemitic attacks seen are those against people working in finance/banking, orthodox Jews, synogogues, and “secret society” meetings like the freemason lodges. Conspiracy theory brained at best, explictly vile antisemitism otherwise. We know these stereotypes and they have nothing to do with the Semitic language family.

I don’t believe the attacks on an orthodox Jew is the same as an attack on someone speaking Arabic. The first is antisemitism plain and simple, the latter Islamophobia.

The reason I mentioned blackness is because of the US’ historical targeting of black (black as in African-American here) muslim populations in the country as well as dark-skin and black Muslims from Somalia, Sudan, etc

Even though these attacks are primarily Islamophobic and/or anti-black, it is still true that some Jewish people get caught in the middle of it. But those Jewish people are not targeted due to antisemitism in these particular cases.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t understand this history, but this is not a good look for supporting Palestine. There are better ways to present the points and this will never be one of them. Palestinians are under attack because of an extremist ideology (Zionism and Christian evangelicals), colorism, colonialism, Islamophobia - not antisemitism.

I don’t think I can cosign a message like this. When talking about semetic, people aren’t talking about the language families. They are talking about instead a concept of Jewish people belonging to a Semitic race, race in reference to a racial “science” category. Antisemitism is explicitly anti-Jewish and Islamophobia is inciting hatred against Muslims. I don’t think Jewish people are laying claim to the entire Semetic language family and excluding ones like Arabic, nor do I see any new definition of antisemitism now referring to non-Jews.

This just leads to an ineffective argument that crumbles under pressure. I wouldn’t bother using this concept unless some day all people speaking Semitic languages are lumped together and oppressed by that category. and besides, anti-black and Islamophobic sentiment already does enough lifting to attack both Jews and non-Jews who speak Semitic languages on top of the already-existing antisemitism that was prominent 19th and 20th century.

There is no value with Russian foreign policy right now, no mass movement to use the potential for heightened class contradiction. Besides, modern day Russia is just the hotbed for disguntled nationalists who only exist with even a modicum of power because of US strategic interests. The ideology guiding the ruling class of Russia is bland, incompatible with the concept of class struggle, and archaic. I see Russia to China as Canada is to the US. Do I really care that Canada may have better standards than the US or better foreign policy or better whatever? No, not really. I’m looking at countries that can actually do something useful for me, and the choices are between the US and China, not between Canada and Russia.

China > > > > > > North Korea > > > Russia

Their worldview is unscientific. You just have to educate the people willing to be educated and hope their lessons come back to people like those in your family.

If you can’t agree on the fundamentals, the higher level issues are going to be far too abstract. If compassion and being nice is where they start, you have to meet them there. to be compassionate and nice, an American, especially a liberal American, would have to refute death and killing of any sort. If they are “bothsidesing” the issue, that is consistent with their framework.

This same framework is being constantly reinforced through other family members, middle class liberals, liberal news outlets, government officials, think tanks, and active digital spaces.

Unless you can find someone in the bunch who understands colonialism and struggle/resistance against oppressors, you are only putting yourself on the offensive. Pushing back would just further reinforce their ideas.

Try what Kwame Ture said in response to someone who opposes violence here. Think about the situation. If the only way for a slave to free himself is to kill his master, what should the slave do? Watch part I and II of this speech and ask your family some open ended questions about the oppressed-oppressor relationship. See if you can get anyone to consider that Israel and Palestine are in no way on equal footing. Explain what relationship exists. Explain how oppressed people had to fight for their freedoms. Explain that some anti-colonial forces committed some atrocities while explaining how the relationship makes peace between oppressed and oppressor impossible. Explain how one needs to focus on the primary contradiction, that bringing up one or two atrocities is a tactic used to distract from the broader relationship and the broader moral and compassionate position of the resistance.

If you can’t find a single person within the circle of any family member to get on board with this, you just need to move on to people willing to learn and willing to listen. Educate the others, maybe your family isn’t primed to hear it yet.