Magatte Wade on X - "In 1960, Zimbabwe was 4.6x richer than Botswana. Then Zimbabwe went full socialism: land grabs, money printing, and a series of “government knows best” policies. Botswana embraced property rights and free markets. By 2011, the average Motswana was 6x richer than the average Zimbabwean. Wake up Africa! Men lie, women lie, numbers don’t. If you’re not learning from the past, you’re condemned to repeat it."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Botswana is one of the most obvious and interesting national success stories. There just...are no hereditarian or KendiAngelist explanations - it's all clearly due to trackable "culture and systems" stuff."
Damn colonialism and capitalism keeping Africa poor!
Thread by @mobleywho on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Something incredible just happened. My doorbell rang and I answered to find an older woman I've never met before. She politely said, "I'm trying to find a place to sleep tonight. My sister used to live here. Can you call her? I might be listed as a missing person.""
A story about a missing person can be turned into a call to end capitalism. Somehow.
Meme - "Y'all remember when the french guillotined their kings and then the haitians were like 'bet' and killed their slave masters? Let's bring that energy back. Oh and y'all remember when the bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace and executed the Czar and his family? Iconic"
The state of Haiti, the Reign of Terror and the gulags of the USSR are a great advertisement for following the left's prescriptions of Revolution
60 Minutes on X - "Hunger, chronic blackouts, and scarcity of essential medicines plague Venezuela. Today, more than 70% of residents live in poverty — a stunning reversal of fortune for a nation that was once one of the wealthiest countries in the world."
tantum on X - "Btw, 20 years ago every American leftist was very excited about socialism in Venezuela. Don’t let them tell you “that’s not what we mean,” Venezuela is exactly what they want for you"
Meme - Green-haired guy with Che Guevara t-shirt: "OF COURSE US DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS HAVE GOOD INTENTIONS!" *barbed wire*
Green-haired guy with Che Guevara t-shirt and AK-47, in concentration camp with barbed wire, Communist watchtower and 4 blindfolded men on their knees: "WE JUST WANT TO USE VIOLENT FORCE TO END ALL PRIVATE PROPERTY AND CONFISCATE ALL WEALTH FROM CAPITALISTS."
An African American soldier during the Vietnam War looks at a wall monument built by the Việt Cộng that reads: "U.S. Negro Armymen, you are committing the same ignominious crimes in South Vietnam that the KKK clique is perpetrating against your family at home." : r/communism
The KKK fighting a dictatorial, murderous regime is certainly one way to view it! They'd agree with them, ironically
The End of 'Boys' and 'Girls' at Interlochen Arts Camp, and Other Big Issues | National Review - "There are three great myths of the Castro regime — propagated by the regime itself and its (many) supporters abroad: that the regime has been good for literacy; that the regime has been good for health care; and that the regime has been good for black Cubans. All of this is bunk. You can read about the three myths elsewhere. (In 2007, I myself wrote on the health-care one, here.) Let me now tell you the story I told in that 2001 post. When I was in grad school, Armando Valladares, the great Cuban dissident, who had been in prison for 22 years, came to speak. During the Q&A, students pounced on him: “What about literacy, what about health care, what about blacks, huh, huh?” Valladares answered essentially as follows: What you say is nonsense. You are ignorant. You have swallowed false propaganda. But say those things were true. Say that the Communists had delivered literacy, health care, and harmonious race relations. Do you have to have an absolute dictatorship to accomplish those things? Do you have to deny people their political and human rights? Do you have to torture, imprison, and murder innocents? In the democracies, don’t you have literacy? Can’t people read? Isn’t health care and the rest possible under freedom?... Bernie Sanders said, “When Fidel Castro came to office . . .” Office! I loved that . . ."
Meme - Stalin with eyes closed and hands on face: "When everyone only hates that German with the funny mustache even though you also had concentration camps and also committed multiple genocides"
Until the 1970s, North Koreans were, on average, wealthier than their South Korean counterparts. So why was North Korea economically ahead of South Korea after the end of Korean War? : r/AskHistorians - "North Korea's stronger economy in the immediate post-war period was due to a few major factors. First, we need to take into consideration Korea's natural resource distribution and the way Japanese colonial development policy sought to exploit it. North Korea had, and still has, the majority of the peninsula's mineral wealth, while the South contains most of its arable land. Seeing this, the Japanese Government-General concentrated the majority of Korea's heavy industry north of the 38th parallel and Korea's light industry and agriculture to the south of it. The difference was stark - the area that is now the DPRK accounted for 92% of the peninsula's electricity generation, 90% of its metal products, and 83% of its chemical products, while the modern ROK produced mostly textiles, food, and paper products.[1] Now, the Korean War had devastating effects on North Korea, and left much of the country in utter ruin. The country's industrial output was reduced to mere fractions of what it was prior to 1949, with the production of consumer goods down to 40%, electricity to 26%, chemicals to 22%, and metals just 10% of their pre-war levels. The overwhelming majority of North Korea's industrial capacity had been destroyed by three years of bombing raids.[2] Yet, even though only a small percentage of North Korea's industrial base remained after the war, this was still more than the South had. Remember, South Korea's economy was still largely agrarian at this point, and the little industry that the North possessed gave them quite an edge until the South started developing heavy industries of its own in the late 1960s. The second major factor in the North's initial economic strength compared to its southern counterpart was foreign aid. North Korea was enormously successful at securing help from its allies in the aftermath of the war, so much so that over 1/3 of North Korea's entire budget in 1954 was supplied by other countries. While I'm a bit loath to quote the now-disgraced Charles Armstrong, he was indeed correct when he pointed out that "the period of post-war reconstruction in North Korea was the first and only time the Soviet Union, China, and the Soviet-aligned countries of Eastern Europe and Mongolia cooperated in a multilateral development project of such scale."[3] The Soviets, the Chinese, and their allies sent North Korea a massive amount of labor, materials, goods, and technology, which aided greatly in helping rebuild the shattered country. While the South received no small amount of aid itself after the war, it was considerably less effective due to a combination of corruption (much of it found its way into private hands) and bad policy (Seoul initially encouraged import substitution, which resulted in little economic growth). North Korea thus outpaced the South economically in the post-war period due to a combination of geography, the differences in the two countries' pre-existing industrial bases, and the amount of foreign aid they received in the reconstruction process. This, as we now know, wouldn't last - aid from the PRC and the USSR would eventually start drying up after the Chinese and the Soviets ran into economic problems of their own, the United States began pouring more aid into the South (John Foster Dulles saying "Syngman Rhee is a son of a bitch, but at least he's our son of a bitch" is probably apocryphal, but a good encapsulation of Washington's initial ambivalence), and Park Chung Hee's star-chamber economic policy resulted in the ROK becoming a powerhouse in its own right."
Damn US sanctions keeping North Korea back!
Rock Chartrand🤑 on X - "They want to eat the rich for the same reason children want to smash a vending machine. It’s easier than paying, and they assume someone will refill it afterward. Their fantasy depends on someone else continuing to produce while they destroy the producers. History already proved what comes next:
• The rich get eaten
• The system collapses
• Blame shifts to “saboteurs”
• Rationing begins
• Dissent becomes treason
• Hunger becomes normal
And then, this part they always forget, someone new becomes “the rich” even at $2 of wealth, because someone must be blamed for the lack. So yes, despite depending on them, they still want to eat the rich, because they want consumption without creation, and they believe reality will bend to their envy. But reality keeps the receipts."
Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost on X - "Marxist‐Leninist movements begin with a universal programme: abolish class divisions, liberate humanity as such. Yet, once they seize the "moment of ethical life," control of the coercive and educational machinery of the State, they face the Hegelian problem of particularisation. So, whats particularisation? An abstract ideal needs flesh. It must become an authoritative set of laws, rituals and symbols that ordinary people can "feel at home in." The quickest, most stable reservoir of such symbols is the pre-existing cultural community (ethnos). So, the revolutionary vanguard, having promised internationalism, finds itself compelled to speak the language, adopt the heroes and defend the territorial interests of the dominant nation whose state apparatus it now inhabits. In Hegelian terms, the "subjective good" (the Party's programme) must align with the "objective ethical order" already sedimented in the population’s historical life. Soviet history illustrates the point. After 1917, the Bolsheviks quickly discovered that class solidarity had limited emotional and symbolic appeal across the vast diversity of the former Russian Empire. To sustain unity, they increasingly relied on Great Russian myths, holidays, heroes, & war memories. Similarly, in Mao's China, the initially universalist Communist ideal rapidly consolidated around Han Chinese cultural dominance especially under Deng. Tito's Yugoslavia experienced an analogous shift, with Serb dominance crystallizing after Tito's death, fragmenting the universalist veneer into ethnically charged polities. This is a pattern that happens again and again. Hegel's insights are profound here: the abstract universal (class consciousness and solidarity) lacked a sufficiently robust, concrete bearer. This requisite bearer inevitably emerged as ethnos. Marxist-Leninist praxis thus functions as a kind of summoning spell, unintentionally but inevitably invoking ethnos to fulfill its demand for concreteness. So, what begins as an appeal to universal human liberation invariably resolves into ethnosocialist states, where cultural particularity and ethnic identification supersede abstract class identities."
Yuri Bezmenov's Ghost on X - "Let me plain speak the idea that “all ‘communist’ state level projects, eventually, prioritize some form of ethnos to stabilize” and why this folds into the similarities of “socialism” and national-“socialism” in practice. It’s apparent people can feel there is a family resemblance between real world “communist” states and national "socialist" projects, but they struggle to define it, and get dragged into theory fights with leftists that go nowhere. However, in their gut they are reacting to the same pattern observed time and time again: once the “communist”(universal) ideology takes over a state, it ends up drawing on ethnos to hold that state together. This does not track with “communism” as defined by theory (mostly). Let’s say Marxism promises a borderless class politics that will dissolve nations. However, in practice, once a communist party controls a concrete state, it has to keep millions, tens of millions, or more of very specific people loyal, motivated and willing to sacrifice. Abstract class slogans are not enough. So the regime raids the oldest, richest store of loyalty and meaning it has: the dominant ethnos. Language, holidays, schoolbooks, war stories, founding myths, even who counts as "the real people" of the country all start to track that ethnos. At that point you no longer have internationalist socialism. You have some degree of ethno-socialism: a socialized economy and one-party rule wrapped around a preferred national or cultural core. That is what you see in the USSR drifting into Russian-centered patriotism, in Deng-era China tightening around Han identity, in Baathist Arab socialism, in Juche Korea, in Vietnam’s fusion of Marxism with Vietnamese national struggle, and even in softer cases elsewhere (my favorite example being Cuba). Now, this is also why arguments with committed leftists spiral into pointless debates. You are pointing to how the projects actually stabilized themselves, which is through ethnos. They retreat back into theory and say "that was not real communism" or "you have not read X, Y, Z." They are guarding the purity of the written system. You are talking about how the system behaves when applied once it has tanks, schools and a flag. In that world, ethnos keeps coming back, no matter what the books say. So, the similarity people sense between communist states and national "socialism" is not imaginary. It sits in how they’re actually applied - which is different than theory. As soon as a universalist ideology has to govern a real country, they time and time again summon ethnos as its concrete backbone, and the result is some version of an ethno-socialist state. That’s why you, in your gut, know there’s a similarity between “communist” states and national “socialism.” They all in some way use ethnos and “socialism” together."
Ian Miles Cheong on X - "A Venezuelan influencer goes off on woke western communists."
"There is nothing that annoys me more than a fucking communist from the first world. they have no idea of what happens in Nicaragua, they have no idea of what happens in Venezuela, but they think they can explain to you, the citizens of those countries what actually happens there, because they know it better. those son of bitches from Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain that want to tell YOU what communism actually is and why it's supposedly good. You know what'd be good? That you fucking communist SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH. When you experience what it means to starve, then you can talk to me about communism. IDIOT."
Can Socialists Be Happy? | The Orwell Foundation - "All ‘favourable’ Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness... Heaven is as great a flop as Utopia though Hell occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly. It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. Almost all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that it is indescribable or conjure up a vague picture of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is true, inspired some of the best poems in the world... But what it could not do was to describe a condition in which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘bliss’, with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned. The pagan versions of Paradise are little better, if at all. One has the feeling it is always twilight in the Elysian fields. Olympus, where the gods lived, with their nectar and ambrosia, and their nymphs and Hebes, the ‘immortal tarts’ as D.H. Lawrence called them, might be a bit more homelike than the Christian Heaven, but you would not want to spend a long time there. As for the Muslim Paradise, with its 77 houris per man, all presumably clamouring for attention at the same moment, it is just a nightmare. Nor are the spiritualists, though constantly assuring us that ‘all is bright and beautiful’, able to describe any next-world activity which a thinking person would find endurable, let alone attractive. It is the same with attempted descriptions of perfect happiness which are neither Utopian nor other-worldly, but merely sensual. They always give an impression of emptiness or vulgarity, or both. At the beginning of La Pucelle Voltaire describes the life of Charles IX with his mistress, Agnes Sorel. They were ‘always happy’, he says. And what did their happiness consist in? An endless round of feasting, drinking, hunting and love-making. Who would not sicken of such an existence after a few weeks?... It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast. That is why the conception of Heaven or Utopia varies from age to age. In pre-industrial society Heaven was described as a place of endless rest, and as being paved with gold, because the experience of the average human being was overwork and poverty. The houris of the Muslim Paradise reflected a polygamous society where most of the women disappeared into the harems of the rich. But these pictures of ‘eternal bliss’ always failed because as the bliss became eternal (eternity being thought of as endless time), the contrast ceased to operate. Some of the conventions embedded in our literature first arose from physical conditions which have now ceased to exist. The cult of spring is an example. In the Middle Ages spring did not primarily mean swallows and wild flowers. It meant green vegetables, milk and fresh meat after several months of living on salt pork in smoky windowless huts. The spring songs were gay – Do nothing but eat and make good cheer, And thank Heaven for the merry year When flesh is cheap and females dear, And lusty lads roam here and there So merrily, And ever among so merrily! – because there was something to be so gay about. The winter was over, that was the great thing. Christmas itself, a pre-Christian festival, probably started because there had to be an occasional outburst of overeating and drinking to make a break in the unbearable northern winter. The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain. But clearly we are not aiming at the kind of world Dickens described, nor, probably, at any world he was capable of imagining. The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which ‘charity’ would be unnecessary? We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable. But does that mean we are aiming at some painless, effortless Utopia? At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood... The world wants something which it is dimly aware could exist, but cannot accurately define... Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. This is the case even with a great writer like Swift, who can flay a bishop or a politician so neatly, but who, when he tries to create a superman, merely leaves one with the impression the very last he can have intended that the stinking Yahoos had in them more possibility of development than the enlightened Houyhnhnms."
As with other utopian predictions, socialism can never deliver, and left wingers thinking their life won't be miserable after the Revolution are deluded
Meme - Wally: "I DECIDED TO BECOME MORE OF A SOCIALIST. WITH ANY LUCK, I'LL BENEFIT FROM YOUR HARD WORK WITHOUTADDING ANY VALUE MYSELF."
Alice: "THAT FEELS IMMORAL."
Wally: "GET BACK TO WORK. I HAVE BILLS TO PAY"
Meme - ""DEMOCRATIC" SOCIALISM BECAUSE CARING FOR ONE ANOTHER SHOULD BE FORCED BY LAW RATHER THAN INDIVIDUAL CHOICE *gulag thugs with bats and barbed wire*"
The Little Platoon on X - "It's honestly quite depressing that a book as (almost comically) unsubtle as Animal Farm can be so badly misunderstood. To use the original Orwell quote, often paraphrased: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." The farm under Mr Jones is the stand-in for pre-revolutionary Russia. It's an allegory for, mainly, feudalism. Mr Jones is Tsar Nicholas II, and written to possess all his personal and professional flaws. Orwell did not consider Tsarist Russia a capitalist state. Nor even did Karl Marx, for that matter. In fact, Marxian analysis usually held that Tsarist Russia was a counter-revolutionary force precisely because it had not yet become capitalist. Leninism merely disproved the notion that Russia could bypass capitalism entirely and become the promised utopia. The critique of Napoleon's revolution is not that the Pigs become capitalists, it's that Communist revolutions recreate the worst features of feudalism — a class of self-serving Lords ruling over a class of impoverished serfs. Specifically, it mirrors the fatal flaw in the idea of the Leninist Vanguard Party. The pigs are the Bolshevik intelligentsia, those deemed clever and committed enough to lead the illiterate masses into paradise. Orwell specifically states, elsewhere in his writings, that Communist revolutions predicated on this arrangement - an awakened vanguard and the sleeping masses - inevitably lapse into tyranny. As with Stalinism, everything that happens in Animal Farm stems from this original sin. Animalism - Marxist-Leninism - simply and necessarily recreates the feudal hierarchy it was supposed to overthrow. And all this happens long before Napoleon opens trade with neighbouring farms, which idiots mistake for "capitalism". The closest you get to a critique of capitalism - which involves taking extremely broad definitions - is that it has no moral qualms about dealing with Communist dictators. But Communist dictators exist, and are bad, independent of capitalism. They are separate branches of the worldline with a common root. Socialists - like Orwell - used to understand this, because some of them were capable of independent thought."
Meme - Gaby Blanco @ gabyblanco: "The people most enticed by communism aren't the working class. It's the university brainwashed "intellectuals" with failed careers who feel their overpriced degrees should guarantee results in the real world. They see socialism as a promise of relevance if the current system collapses. They can't control their own outcomes, but they want to play central planner and control yours."
"Support for Political Violence. Agreement by Educational Attainment
"If you are protesting something unjust, it is reasonable to damage property."
High School Diploma or Less - 18% agreed
Some College or AA Degree - 13% agreed
Bachelor's Degree - 19% agreed
Graduate or Professional - 36% agreed
"Violence is often necessary to create social change."
High School Diploma or Less - 23% agreed
Some College or AA Degree - 20% agreed
Bachelor's Degree - 26% agreed
Graduate or Professional - 40% agreed"
Left wingers like to claim that if more educated people support a position, it must be right (they use this to justify left wing beliefs). But of course we will still be told that political violence is caused by the right
Michael A. Arouet on X - "Venezuela used to be much wealthier than Poland, which was suffering under socialism. Then Poland implemented free-market and capitalist principles and enjoyed an economic boom. Venezuela chose socialism, which brought poverty and misery to its people. That’s the difference."
