Last time it was when we released ‘The CIA’s Shining Path’, this time it’s because they took issue with ProleWiki’s Bordiga page lmao
that Bordiga page doing a lot of work with just two little sentences, they hate it so much lol
Last time it was when we released ‘The CIA’s Shining Path’, this time it’s because they took issue with ProleWiki’s Bordiga page lmao
that Bordiga page doing a lot of work with just two little sentences, they hate it so much lol
I give you an A+ on your usage of rhetoric!
I’ve said this in other places and I’ll say it all the time, but the more I am forced to interact with ultras (of all kinds), the more I start to think they have violence fantasies and being communists allows them to live these out & their self-identification as communists doesn’t go beyond that.
Consider this: when someone asks MLs about communism, when they ask about theory, when they have questions, we point them to resources. On the other hand, when they ask ultras, the answer is something like “you shouldn’t even begin to read theory before you correct all your mistaken ideas about communism. You hold reactionary opinions so I have no interest or desire to help you. The revolution isn’t meant for you”.
They want you to do the work of getting their trust, when it should be the other way around. It is the other way around in any other setting.
When we published The CIA’s Shining Path for example, none of the maoists we talked to were interested in correcting the record. Rather, they preferred to call the author bourgeois (despite not knowing the first thing about him), mistaken, counter-revolutionary, anti-communist, etc. etc.
Now imagine you’re a lambda reader coming across this discussion. On the one hand, you have a freely accessible book that’s right there that explains how the PCP-SL behaves like a CIA outfit. And on the other, you have people who go “no u”. Who are you going to learn from, what are you going to take away, intellectually, after that conversation?
They’re not interested in helping you, it’s a very inbred (or consanguine, because one ultra didn’t get it lol) ideology. You have to do the work first, you have to look all of the minute details about Gonzalo’s life or Bordiga’s mathematics before they will accept you.
And this is the part where I go armchair psychologist but ultimately, if we go by the violence fantasies theory, keeping their circle small helps them. Being able to deride others as revisionists, counter-revolutionaries, etc. makes them ideological enemies which makes them legitimate targets. It increases the pool of potential targets if you don’t let too many people into your ideology.
That last part I’m not sure about. The violence fantasies I am becoming increasingly sure of and I have evidence. And again, they can try to debunk it, but they won’t. They’ll call me a fed or a revisionist, which will signal to their friends that they have someone to vicariously cannibalize for catharsis and they’ll join in.
One maoist (mind you this is all on Twitter, which is fed central) sent us a gif of someone being executed by, I assume, a Red Army officer. Another called someone else “low iq”. This was a bordigist, not a maoist. They love using the r-slur. The Gonzalo meme that’s like “you should boil yourself” or something, it’s based on the guy with lightning coming out of his eyes if you know the meme. I mean, even they are playing on the boiling babies atrocity when they repeat up and down till kingdom come that it didn’t happen, that no one was boiled at Lucanamarca. They also love saying it was justified.
Can we talk about Shining Path itself? Violence fantasies need to find a suitable host to latch onto through whom they can live those fantasies. You’re not gonna attach violence fantasies to Barbie, is what I’m saying. In 1989 the PCP-SL killed dogs and then hanged them to lampposts in Lima to protest Deng Xiaoping. That’s the level we’re dealing with here. The event is documented in pictures and witness testimony and Gonzalo claimed it.
Lucanamarca, as we’ve said, is something Maoists revel in. This is despite Gonzalo himself admitting there were excesses there.
Recently there was this quote about “if I killed him it was not because he’s gay but because he was a counter-revolutionary”. There is no indication on who the victim was, they just assume that because Gonzalo said it was justified, then it was justified. End of discussion. Gonzalo said it and that’s that.
Meanwhile I’ve seen entire debates about whether Lenin called for the execution of (literal) prostitutes and pouring over historical records. The consensus is that there is no record of such a massacre or executions happening, there is no reference to it outside of that letter he wrote, and that by prostitutes he meant counter-revolutionaries, as calling your political enemies prostitutes was common enough in Russia at the time.
They deny the evidence of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. They make the argument that it was held under a reactionary government, and sure, it started under Fujimori. But it’s not a refutation. It’s not a refutation of the accusations, of the witnesses, of the evidence, of the reports.
To do that you would have to systematically look at everything the committee investigated and then reinvestigate it yourself. Nobody is saying it’s easy or fun. But it’s necessary if you’re gonna say shit like “Lucanamarca was justified”.
The other option is to agree the Shining Path was a terrorist experiment and move away from whatever the fuck they thought they were achieving. But this is not what Gonzalo maoists do, so we have to ask why exactly do they cling to it?
You can compare to anything Stalin did. There’s lots of material, and we happily share that material, about how for example the population transfers were justified or how they took place. I’m not saying one has to agree with it, I’m just saying there’s arguments for it. The Maoist explanation for their perceived excesses is “no it didn’t happen you fucking idiot, now stop asking about it”.
Again you have to do the work to get them to let you in, and not the other way around. This is very cultish.
The thing is they know they’re not being taken seriously but they swear up and down they’re the reasonable ones, that we’re just not accepting Gonzalo Thought as like the highest stage of Marxism and this makes us counter-revolutionary anti-communists. What do you think they’ll do to us if their maoist revolution comes. What did the Shining Path do to other socialist movements in Peru?
We go back to the premise: don’t ask why they like the PCP-SL, ask why it couldn’t be any other way that they don’t identify with anything else but the PCP-SL. Invert the premise and put it back right side up.
Thank you for this! It reflects a lot of my own experiences with Maoists and other ultras. There does seem to be this kind of fantasy they have of being the “heroic savior” who fixes everything for “the people” instead of being a people’s movement. I’ve seen them act with great contempt for “the people” when the people don’t support a maoist movement. It isn’t the fault of the movement for failing to reach the people, it’s the people’s failure for not accepting everything the Maoists say uncritically.
I’ve had many confusing conversations where I’ve actively asked for information, for theory, for understanding, and I’ve gotten the exact same “you should educate yourself first” response you mention here (I have also had Maoists provide me with reading of course, but it was always “read this then get back to me” not “let’s go through this together as a reading group” that MLs tend to do with difficult theory.) And of course, any questions I had about the material they provided were hand waved with the “that’s just a revisionist/reactionary opinion” response, instead of a real discussion.
I’ve had similar interactions with Jehovah’s witnesses before. We’ll read bible passages together, just reciting the text, but when I ask them what the passage means, or how they could apply its morals to their daily life, they get mad. It’s strange, I was trying to ask questions I thought they would appreciate, something that lets them actively share their faith, but instead it upset them. I get a very similar vibe with Maoists sometimes, where asking questions is seen as a threat, not as a chance to expand upon what they support and believe.
I find that a lot of twitter maoist types also love Pol Pot, which I think lends credence to your violence theory. They see the brutal actions of the Khmer Rouge and on some level, love the idea of getting to “purge” those they deem “revisionist” or “counter-revolutionary.”
I’ve had some very interesting conversations between a maoist and a friend of mine from the Philippines. Western white maoists often treat the movement in the Philippines as the most active and important socialist group in the world today, but most Filipinos treat them as little more than bandits in the mountains. They are notorious for being just as corrupt as the government they oppose, and even if this is completely untrue, they clearly have no control over the narrative, and have failed to win the hearts and minds of the people. Maoists just don’t seem to understand this. At all. The conversation always went the same way with every maoist. My friend would try to point out that they do not have popular support, and the people don’t like them, and the Maoist would respond with the sort of insults you would expect from them (I don’t recall any slurs or ableist language though), insisting that they’ll “be sorry” and “begging for forgiveness” when the maoists succeed in their revolution. This happened every time. It was both funny and sad to see people who consider themselves a “third worldist” type to completely disregard the voices of the people in the third world the instant they stopped agreeing with them.
They really do seem to engage in a lot of cult-like behaviour, and a big part of any insular cult is an extreme hatred and distrust for those outside their circle. Dehumanisation of everyone not in the group. I think this is connected to the violent fantasies.
This is exactly my experience as well. I forgot to mention, especially now that Netflix adapted the Three Body Problem, twitter is going wild over the depiction of the Cultural Revolution at the beginning of the series (a teacher is beaten to death in front of an audience for teaching theory of relativity and other bourgeois science).
I was surprised (somehow I am also surprised I can still be surprised at maoists) that many of them upheld the GPCR but didn’t really know much about it. How can you claim to support something you haven’t investigated yourself? In China, it’s seen as a failure and this is the official line of the CPC too. The author of the 3 body problem is, from what I hear, sort of a liberal though – just something to note, like I said the government’s stance is the GPCR was ultimately a failure. Some were even asking if the story of the teacher was real; apparently, it is. Certainly in some instances (over which the CPC did not have control or even knowledge) such beatings happened. Deng himself was first called a capitalist roader during the cultural revolution, and purged for it.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Great_Proletarian_Cultural_Revolution
They also have kind of a contradictory relationship to the masses. They revere the Peruvian peasants for being poor and illiterate, it seems. This came up a lot when we posted the book, that we were doing them a disservice or whatever, that the revolution in Peru was a real proletarian revolution.
Being poor and illiterate does not make you a good person or revolutionary by default, beyond romanticizing poverty it seems they fetishize it to an extent I am not sure I want to explore.
Regarding the CPP, this is also the impression I get from talking to Filipinos. And like you said, the answer to these concerns is always “do you really believe this propaganda”. They don’t want to engage with it, they feel it sufficiently self-evident to dismiss. Though with that said, it seems the CPP is enjoying more success inland and further away from cities (The Philippines are very mountainous islands, it’s very rural outside the cities and further inland). But even then it’s all relative. And yes, they are seen as being just as big bandits as the government is.
On the asking questions, I think this is a problem in general on the Internet. I don’t know if it’s due to age (I find most ultras I engage with seem to be teenagers, if not in age then in mental state), but they seem to take everything as bad faith. I think this is something we’ve grown away from on Lemmygrad, and it has helped me see questions, even the difficult ones, as interest and ultimately refining my own opinions. We grow through struggle, we don’t learn from passive osmosis. They seem to think they have struggled enough (must be difficult reading the three gonzalo interviews that exist online) and can now relax and take it easy.
When I say ultras btw I lump essentially Hoxhas, maoists and leftcoms in this, but of course there are differences between the three. Well, except maybe the Hoxhas and maos. They seem to overlap a lot, I’ve seen lots of Hoxhaists turn into maoists and back.
I’ve listened to a Maoist podcast on the GPCR, and they barely touched upon it, spending more time talking about how cool Mao was for being able to swim up and down the Yellow river even in his 80s (which yeah, that’s pretty neat, but it was presented in a very hero worship kind of way, like Mao is good at swimming, isn’t he a great and wonderful person who was wronged by the capitalist roaders, rather than an irrelevant fun factoid.)
Their complete refusal to analyse why the GPCR failed is also very alarming to me. They just say some variation of “the capitalist roaders stabbed the gang of four in the back.” acting like it was a soap opera, and not a complex historical event. I don’t think I’ve ever heard them genuinely admit when or where it ever went wrong, only that it failed, that’s where it went wrong, but they don’t even seek to understand why it failed, only some vague gesture towards “purity” One of my biggest “oh shit” moments was when I realised that a lot of these maoists I was trying to learn from actually knew less about an event than I did, they just tried to act like they knew about it, by name dropping some obscure thinker and belittling me when I asked who they were talking about and how they were relevant.
And I’ve seen that weird poverty worship from all manner of ultra, they seem to hate the idea of a people’s state having any sort of success, they seem to love martyrdom too, and the two often go hand in hand. They’ll provide much more support for a “people’s commune” that lasted 2 years and collapsed due to extreme poverty than they ever would to AES.
Oh, and my point with the CPP, wasn’t that they are a failure (I have no idea about that) just that public perception of them is not good, and they claim to be a people’s movement, while the people have nothing but distrust for them, and western maoists tend to adopt a “the people don’t know what’s good for them, they should just shut up and follow us” kind of attitude towards this problem.
Lol the obscure thinkers part is very true. I used to think people knowing about these obscure figures were very knowledgeable because they had read all of Marx and Engels etc. and moved on from them as they had no more to learn there, but most of the time it turns out they went straight to those obscure guys and let’s just say there’s a reason they’re obscure.
My biggest frustration with ultras is they act so high and mighty but then commit the same argumentative mistakes they accuse MLs of doing. They reduce us to Dengists, and that is sufficient to dismiss our arguments. They think of themselves as principled, but prefer to quote Mao without context than make their own argument.
Where has their movement gotten them? They coast by on the successes of other movements. If you really believe in maoism then start a PPW in Seattle. If you believe in leftcommunism then uh… convince people the value-form is revisionist idk what leftcoms actually want to achieve lol.
I’ve been wanting to write about their colonialist grubbiness on China, so why not now (and yes I’m doing a pun on grubby and grabby).
They want the Chinese people to wake up to the revisionist ways of the CPC and restore Mao-era policies (of which they can barely name any), through a popular insurrection that they call revolution.
They want other people, people from the Global South, people who were historically poor and still in many ways are, to wage the revolution. They want to be the colonial masters directing those people over their own self-interests, as if they (maoists) know better what’s right for them or not. They want a bloody revolution in China – they admit as much – to “correct” the CPC. To that, they point to obscure, unknown, tiny maoist cells that “operate” in China (they sometimes publish an article or two).
I guess this is where the fetishism of poverty goes full circle. The destitute are purer, and only they can successfully carry out the revolution. The Chinese, because they are becoming richer, are not pure anymore. They can’t get marxism. Why are the maoist cells in China tiny, while the CPC enjoys 90% approval rates? The best answer they seem to have is that people just don’t know any better.
Like what have they achieved? They decry ProleWiki as whatever ism they like, meanwhile we have editors from literally all over the world who teach us about AES (they come from there!!), about struggles in their country, about their indigenous struggles. They decry China as capitalist revisionist failed state or whatever, meanwhile Chinese people are like “yeah I don’t really want a do over of the cultural revolution, I like having my apartment”.
Or should we all live in thatch huts so we can truly connect to the earth and understand dialectical materialism through this connection.
It’s definitely helped me see communism as something that needs to be pragmatic in this stage. We can’t afford to be pure at this time.
I look at the CPC and I see design thinking at play. They look at the past, at their own past and other countries’ past, and they learn from it without judgment. They take it as is. You can only improve if you learn on correct data. They do this all the time, correcting themselves and admitting to mistakes. It’s a very healthy mentality for growth.
And then we come full circle and back to this incredible piece https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/ that finally puts words in a very simple way to something we’ve all felt creeping up in some way.
Yeah, it was very strange having someone talk about some minor economist from the cultural revolution period (whose name I can’t remember) but was unable to actually mention anything about Deng’s policies while claiming they were all colossal failures. And also successes, because he was a revisionist, so his economic decisions were in a quantum superposition of both failing (because he’s a bad, incompetent bad guy) and succeeding (because he was an evil capitalist roader revisionist). It was very surreal to see and was probably the point I realised that Maoists just flat out don’t have worthwhile arguments, just empty rhetorical devices designed to confuse and obfuscate everything so they can “win.” Funny how despite being “more left” than MLs, they function in the same way as liberals when it comes to trying to convince other people of their ideas.
I added a large edit in the meantime, I think you missed it due to the timing of your reply haha
Oh yep, looks like it lol. I couldn’t agree more, a big part of the “twitter maoist” phenomenon does just seem to be western chauvinism, they want to play at being revolutionaries, living vicariously through revolutions in other parts of the world, while they stay safe and comfortable in their western existence, not actively waging PPW in their own countries, despite boasting about it’s “100% success rate”
That redsails article is spot on as well, and my god does it make Maoists mad. I’ve shared it before and their response is a hilarious “stop sharing that article, I’m sick of people always telling me to read it.”
I had some guy (who claimed they weren’t a maoist but refused to elaborate) explain that the future is maoist because they are the only ones waging revolutions right now or seeing success. I left it at that because I also pulled the rhetoric questions on him and he kept ignoring them lol.
But that was a funny one. Sure, if you think AES doesn’t exist and China, Cuba, Vietnam are not communist anymore, then maoism works. And sure, if you think waging a people’s war for over 50 years while slowly being forced to cede territory over those 50 years is a sign of success, then yeah I guess the future is maoist.
I really want them to explain how they expect people in the imperial core to agree to leave our cozy lives and treats to go fight in the mountains or whatever biomes we have in the imperial core for the rest of our lives. To me the future is Dengist (I know it’s not a real word etc.). Their little adventures will get them to a conclusion we’ve known for over 50 years: you will be expecting the Third World to be doing the revolution for you, because they are perhaps more keen on joining such movements. Thirld Worldism, most of us know by now, is another imperial endeavour circling back to what I was saying earlier, they want to direct the imperialized periphery into doing revolution, but not actually do it themselves. They want to be Sison, safe in the Netherlands, not one of the many officers of the CPP which they have never once name-dropped. I don’t know if many of them even know about them or stopped at Sison and “the masses” (you have to see the masses like a character, like one big thing – this is something, incidentally, Black Red Guard talked about in a medium piece, that Lucanamarca was not carried out by the “masses” but by PCP-SL militants, and now he’s completely shunned by maoists for having written this piece and having joined the DSA lol).
This is the problem with Thirld Worldism, which basically all maoists I’ve met claim (whether they know it or not), and it’s nothing new. Plenty of people have noted that contradiction.
Cause like I’m a communist and I don’t want to abandon my life to be living in barracks in the woods and mountains until I get shot by a cop while robbing a delivery truck to Walmart lol. And they don’t want to either or they would be doing it too. And if they want to prove me wrong, then go right ahead and start a PPW.
But this is what “Dengism” understands. There’s another very pragmatic way of doing things that is beneficial for everybody.
On PPW I was made aware some time back that Vietnam also waged one, and I can’t disagree with that. And certainly China did too. It seems to me, looking at historical examples, that PPW is not so much something you want to get into, but something you get into dialectically as the process of revolution develops. We could say the Bolsheviks also got into a PPW, although it only lasted a few years, not decades like the more famous examples did. From what I know of the Naxalites, CPP and PCP-SL, protracted people’s war is central to their praxis and they consider it important to achieve communism.
Which one anyway?
There was this one by Drew Smith, a foreign professor who decided to settle in China, called the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” podcast and in a nutshell, he said it was, in a nutshell:
A mixed bag of good and bad in terms of judgement,
A kerfufle between pseudo-anarcho ultra-lefts, lefts, and right factions of the Communist party…
From what I’ve heard: I guess some rural and urban areas developed not only politically but materially, like Xi’an, where Drew lives, but some turned into out-right street battles where guns and artillery were even used in the ‘arm the Left’ campaign…
Weird shit ranged from worshipping Mao like that of a God to forcing a professor to chug ink and kick him in the stomach to vomit, for having the wrong ideas… (which Mao wouldn’t have all approved, or just brushed off)
Some seizures of power were genuine, some of them were just self-coups (autogolpes) by rightist factions
It had interviews with some Chinese and foreign people who either personally experienced it, studied it academically, or both… so I don’t think this podcast is necessarily an ego-boosting ultra project…
The name sounds familiar, but I don’t remember much beyond very black and white depictions of the CR, whitewashing any negative events, I think I might’ve listened to the first episode of Drew Smith’s podcast, but his isn’t the one I’m remembering and I think I may have mixed up an anecdote he told with something else, which was full “hero worship” and was just talking about Mao’s “greatness” instead of discussing him, I’ll see if I can’t find it again.
Huh, wonder if Mao himself ever said anything about speaking on subjects one has not investigated.
A huge problem to guard against. Frothing at the mouth about revenge fantasies is purely an aesthetic choice, and not a good one. Righteous anger is understandable, as are occasional jokes, but too many people go well beyond that. And they’ll double and triple down when you try to have a more sober discussion about the role of violence in society.
So I was reflecting on this and tying it into something I was reflecting on in relation to liberalism and the individualist way in which fields like mental health get handled. And you can tell me if this matches the picture of what you describe as ultras at all, I’m curious to know, but my thought can be summarized as something like this: They don’t view themselves as a participant in the development of theory. They view it as a fixed entity that exists beyond them - or in some cases, an entity that can handle change, but whose change is only ever orchestrated by trusted figures that are not them. And so, this is where dogma and inflexibility enters in.
Whereas when people are viewing it in a more dialectical way, when they are viewing the development of theory as an organized exchange between theory and practice, not only one or the other imposing itself, it simply fits better with an understanding of matters like these as gains and setbacks, as successes and excesses, as genuine exercises in the people’s will and rightists co-opting the same language. Those who view it as static only, or only defined by key figures, as something that demands to be imposed upon all others without their consent or understanding (as opposed to something imposed by one class on another), never to be considered as something with any exchange between conditions and theory, are forever stuck in cycles of impotent frustration or fatalistic defeatism, coming to similar endpoint beliefs: that the failure of implementation of the theory is a failure of the individual to accept its benefit. In other words, they are still stuck in individualist idealism, where the imposition of change is a battle of wills between individuals rather than an organized struggle of contradictions.
I hope that makes some sense. I may be overgeneralizing a bit, but I do think there is something in here that is a repeating theme.
Basically if you take as the starting point that they do not want communism but something else (i.e. they have other reasons to call themselves communists), you invert the entire premise and start to think about it differently. If they do not want communism, what do they want? From there we can start observing facts and drawing different conclusions.
The purity fetish is very real, nothing is ever good enough for them. And if nothing is ever good enough, then that justifies you not ever doing anything to change things because what’s the point.
There is no world in which the masses care about the value-form and stopping commodity production as the first order of business. It’s cool theory I’m sure, but it’s ultimately a masturbatory exercise. The point of theory is to inform praxis and the point of praxis is to inform theory, and everything results from that contradiction. They forget their basics so they can start being the pick me communist that knows more obscure figures than you do. Leftcoms fetishize theory – I notice a certain amount of overlap between self-proclaimed leftcoms or ultras and post-modernists – and don’t see any real-world application in it. At least, not applications that Lenin and other figures we MLs take from haven’t said. For this theory to be applied, it has to be followed like a recipe. And perhaps we could say maoists fetishize the praxis without the theory.
It’s interesting because the longer I get into marxism the more pragmatic I get. Maybe that makes me a counter-revolutionary revisionist lol. Just looking at China compared to any capitalist country, and actually reckoning with the reality there – the reality, not the numbers on paper and the theory on paper – leads to the same conclusion always: it’s not the same as in capitalism. By changing the premise, we have changed everything.
In capitalist countries, we grow for the sake of growth. Capitalism is taken to be a self-evident fact of life, that it’s as good as it’s gonna get, that we can just make the best of it. Companies are gonna rise and fall and everyone can get their shot if they try hard enough. In China, they see capitalism as a stepping stone, as a transitory stage. Becoming a capitalist there does not mean the same thing at all than it does in the West. They have a vision which we lack, and which we are unable to get.
But for ultras to understand and see that, they would have to actually start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit.
We talked about maoists and leftcoms but didn’t even touch Hoxhas yet lol. Maybe because they’re so irrelevant. I don’t understand how anyone nowadays would call themselves a Hoxhaist. Anti-revisionist, sure, why not. If you feel like you’re on a mission. But to take specifically after Hoxha and uphold him as like the prime anti-revisionist, the one from which all anti-revisionism originates? I haven’t read him myself simply because hoxhaists have made him so unappealing, but on top of that, the things I’ve heard once you peel back the veneer and actually look at his policies derived from his theory makes him look like a child that was in way over his head.
Like Stalin also fought against the revisionists and they like him, but they stop there. At around 1953. Everyone after that is a dirty revisionist. It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year lol
I think I get what you mean especially with the part about, “It’s like for hoxhaists history stopped on that year.” I’m not familiar with that term itself, but the notion of history stopping for some people, I think, is an important point and relates to the larger point you’re making about China’s current state as well as about those who fetishize theory. I want to choose my words carefully lest I sound like someone who is saying the history does not matter or that we can just abandon all past experiences and methods and pretend they’re irrelevant (an equally silly notion in its own right) but it does appear like some people are effectively stopping after a certain point in history and saying, “This is where socialism [or communism, whichever you prefer to call it for the sake of this example] was halted and from here on out, it has been a failure.” A notion that appears to happen both in the kind of instance you’re describing and in other instances, such as people who are getting their feet wet in theory and who say AES states are “not real socialism/communism.” I’m not sure the motives are the same in every case (I think for the people getting their feet wet, for example, there is a real fear of supporting existing socialist projects because they’re still in this place of viewing them through the lens of imperialist vilification).
Either way, we come back to what you say about “start looking at what’s happening in China in practice and leave the books alone for a bit”, whether it is for China or another country. I know in my own case, I’ve adopted a stance that goes something like: “I don’t know and until I do, I will not act like I do.” So when someone comes to me with empire news perspectives on a historically vilified country, rather than saying “it’s a perfect place, don’t question it” or saying “yeah, real socialism hasn’t been tried” or saying “it was good and then revisionists ruined it,” I will say, “I don’t know.” If I get to a point I understand enough about the details of its conditions through sources I can trust, then I can begin to grapple with the day to day realities of it and I can talk to people about those realities rather than through generalizations that obscure the conditions. But reaching that point is, I think, especially for those of us who live immersed in empire news locales, a difficult thing to do. And it is very easy for us to instead go by the western chauvinist mindset of, “I understand the ‘lesser’ country better than they understand themselves.” That is what those of us growing up in the imperial core have been socialized to do.