Memes

See this is what we're talking about, you correctly see through some lazy capitalist mythologies (such as anarchists being mindless drug-addled destruction junkies with no political goals other than chaos) but fail to see through others, such as "Stalin was The Guy in charge of the USSR and he killed eighty bazillion people through nonspecific means, for no reason other than he was The Joker".

Like with Hitler we all know the story, we can be specific. He came to power with bourgeois support on the back of a wave of fascist resentment following an economic crash caused by the sudden contraction of Germany's colonial empire. He was an effective mouthpiece for capitalist interests, who instituted mass privatization and applied colonial doctrine to other Europeans with a war of conquest and extermination externally and a war of antocommunist and racial liquidation internally, as a way of shoring up profits. The methods used were bombs, bullets, starvation and gas, and there is ample firsthand documentation of both action and motive, a million papers that say "we are killing all the jews because they are part of a communist plot to undermine us, plus all the slavs, roma and disabled while were at it."

Meanwhile, "the story" we all "know" about Stalin and the soviet union is uhh...revolution against the king bad for some reason, new boss same as old boss, something something power corrupts, one guy in charge of everything, George Orwell 1984, communism no food 100 morbillion dead. It's a loosely strung together list of unsubstantiated cliches peddled by the biggest propaganda machine in human history, usually with the intent of building up to "so that's why we prop up fascists all over the world, because communists worse, and maybe actually fascists not that bad?🤔"

This form of propaganda, this smearing of the historical lens until one smudge can be said to look like another, is a mainstay of liberal propaganda. They can't justify themselves or their actions, can't make themselves look good, so they equivocate, stretch facts and outright fabricate things in order to claim that everybody is "equally bad", a position that conveniently justifies them continuing to support their "equally bad" side over anyone who stands up to then. It's supremacist thinking wrapped in the faux-modesty of Chruchill, the notion that "ho ho, ours is the worst system, except for all the others". Ain't we stinkers, but you should see the other guys. Israel bad, but how can you support Hamas? USA bad, but how can you support Iran? Nazi Germany bad, but how can you support the Soviet Union? Don't you know these things are all equivalent to each other, somehow, conveniently, and the only smart position is to ride the fance so hard you get splinters in your crack?

In reality of course, yours is simply the worst system. Your insistence on supporting the lesser evil every four years when it comes time to yell at people that they have to vote for genocide mysteriously vanishes when it's time to extend that critical support to factions fighting the most wretched empire on earth: ours. It's the last hurdle before you become a member of the global human community: abandoning the nationalism, exceptionalism and impotent chauvinist supremacism that we were raised in, that tells us to sit in judgement of the way our victims breathe even as we choke them, and tell ourselves we would do a better job even as we do nothing. That's why I have endless arguments with liberals who still, after centuries of lies and warmongering, still believe what the US fascist empire says about the people it's wants to kill, still believe western corporate news media: because deep down, you want to, because it's hard to accept that we're the bad guys and always have been. But I promise you that acceptance is the necessary first step towards beginning to understand the world as it actually is: not as the static child's diorama of heroes and villains that we've been taught by a fundamentally childish society, but as the wonderfully complex and eternally moving machine that it is.

Even if we believed the wildly exaggerated numbers from the black book of communism, that still doesn't compare to the victims of capitalism, Churchill alone killed millions in Bengal but you don't care about that do you

I don't consider the bourgeoisie to be our own people.

He’s more of a son of a bitch than Randy Walters!