Wow… there was even one instance where he wrote the word ‘Nazi’ and another where he mentioned the head of state, but of course he preferred the terms ‘German’ and ‘Germany’ because those sound friendlier and downright neighbourly compared to ‘Nazi’, ‘Fascist’, ‘Reich’, or ‘Axis’. Most people don’t tense up when they hear the word ‘German’. You got your German shepherds, your German Spitze, your German pancakes, your German fries, your German lutes, your German biscuits, your German chocolate cakes. Those sound friendly! You hear ‘Want some German beer?’ and you go either ‘Yeah, sure’ or ‘Eh, no, thanks.’ You hear ‘Want some Nazi beer?’ and you go ‘Wait, WHAT‽’

There were some Jews in the early Soviet Union who harmonized Judaism with scientific socialism, and the folk who run the Minyan have affectionately described communism as ‘Jewish’, though my own familiarity with Jewish scripture, traditions and ancient history is too meager to explain why. Perhaps @[email protected] can elaborate if he feels comfortable doing so, but I do know this:

In their propaganda the stridently secular early Jewish labor leaders used religious imagery to inspire the workers—passages from the Prophets on social justice, references to modern day Pharoahs and to the Israelites’ liberation from Egyptian slavery.

Now, since historically organized religions have frequently worked on behalf of oppressors, I unfortunately cannot blame the Bolsheviki too much for cracking down on them (which undoubtedly resulted in some collateral damage); this is largely why so many religious establishments loathe communism. Even today there are more than a few communists and other socialists who are antitheists, but I think that that is the wrong attitude to have, since religion (including organized religion) does not need to be reactionary. I would much prefer that organised religions be transformed rather than destroyed.

I hope that this response helps you. Perhaps you know a few Catholics who cherish Judaism and would be curious to learn how it is compatible with communism.

I have to admit, I feel disappointed whenever this community attracts negative publicity and it has nothing to do with me, even if it is only somebody taking something that I said so blatantly out of context. For instance, I eventually retitled this thread because ‘economic boost’ sounded less incriminating than ‘boost to capitalism’ and after I published this reply, I realized that it sounded kind of mean, yet I was surprised that I was unable to find anybody talking about it.

tous les régimes ML et associés terminent de la même façon, défendus par des tankies prêts à excuser des génocides tout en écrasant n’importe quel mouvement demandant de l’indépendance et de l’autodétermination, quitte à s’associer avec des fascistes qui ont, in fine, le même but politique qu’eux.

This is basically just a minor variation on the trope that we merely hunger for power (rather than wanting the power to end hunger). I’ve been around the block enough times to know that there is no evidence that I could possibly provide that this anti-Bolshevik would not dismiss out of hand, though sometimes I do wonder… would a generic anticommunist ever have the patience and interest in at least reading one of my many threads on fascism? Since I recognize fascism as a manifestation of capitalism and anticommunism, I suspect that the answer is ‘no’.

Barminam, people are still peddling this myth that the German Fascists accepted evolution?

https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=DC847EDA7838FA2F9AF32978366EA67C

Personally, I do think that it is at least plausible that the leading Fascists, like many other upper-class politicians, secretly doubted their own professed religious convictions. (It would be very unusual for a Catholic to promote both sterilizations and euthanasia.) Even so, blaming the theory of evolution for their atrocities is ridiculous, not only because it is reductive but also because the evidence for its influence on them is extremely thin.

I’ll be honest, I thought that Max Blumenthal was better than this. I’m disappointed.

against Islamic [sic] regime!

Does it never occur to anticommunists that people can prefer or tolerate a government while still opposing some of its policies…? I know that the concept of a ‘Muslim feminist’ is too hard for them to understand, but surely they remain clever enough to figure out that not every single demonstration has to be either pro- or antigovernment, right?

The workers’ demonstration, which in the summer of 1921 was perpetuating fascist violence by merely giving existing fascists further reason to be violent, was in August 1922 turning middle-class liberals into explicit supporters of fascism.

I tried to move the VLC media player window button to another spot on the panel at the bottom of my screen, resulting in the window button vanishing completely. The application kept running, though. I tried to access the application through Ctrl+Alt+Del, except that that does not bring up the task manager here. I deleted some crap on the panel hoping that that would fix something, but I only made things worse. I restarted my computer and it fixed absolutely nothing. Now my panel looks like this:

Oh my G-d, this is bad, bad, bad design. All because I wanted to move a window button to another spot. Please tell me how to reset this to default. This is intolerable.

ETA: my desktop is completely fucked up now… I’m getting Fedora.

Holy hell… I continue to be dazzled by how anticommunists can just omit something as serious as the USMC’s ineconomy from history. Not even Wikipedia has an article on the individual replacement system, and few of its other articles mention it.

Much of my knowledge about the Western Allied forces comes from learning about the Jewish adults who served them. For example, there was one instance where a unit almost committed a massive war crime were it not for one defective grenade. More generally, though, Jewish staff sometimes had to put up with casual antisemitism, and Imperial America apparently failed to investigate the mistreatment of its Jewish POWs.

I kind of get why hardly anybody wants to talk about the USMC’s inefficiency. The fact that Westerners are now pretending to care about antisemitism and yet nobody talks about Imperial America’s antisemitism throughout the 1940s is just… mind-boggling.

The Pink Swastika (which I see that Joseph Howard Tyson cited) is a notoriously unreliable source, and even if a few blokes claimed to have sexual relations with Adolf Schicklgruber, it is plausible that their testimonies were based on dreams or hallucinations, or they simply made them up. Schicklgruber was a fairly notorious politician in the Weimar Republic, so there were motives to spread scandalous rumours about his sex life.

Apart from noting the scarcity of corroborating evidence, it also helps to compare with men from that era who were certainly gay, e.g. Alan Turing. It is common for homosexual and bisexual men to show signs early in life that they are attracted to the same sex, and the trail of clues tends to persist throughout their lives. A few strangers claiming to have sexual interactions with a controversial politician in a particular time of his life is not overwhelming evidence.

There were a few homosexual and bisexual men who chose to side with the Fascists. Nonetheless, a high-ranking Fascist’s sexual interactions with other men is nothing greater than a rumor; the ‘proof’ available is too meager and too uncompelling to be confirmation. Quite honestly, I don’t see how this matter is more important or even more interesting than, say, his experiences throughout World War I.

Can I just say that I’m getting tired of everybody still obsessing over October 7th when there’s a bloody extermination campaign in progress against the Palestinians? It’s really, really annoying. I don’t see anybody still wailing over the murder of Ernst vom Rath or ‘the Poles’ murderous assault on Germans’ during 1939 as if those were more important than the Axis’s war crimes.

Kind of weird that I’ve seen casual observers characterize the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a classic land grab when the only evidence that I see that somebody actually wants a partition comes from the Western bourgeoisie and Ukrainian anticommunists like Zelenskyy there.

But what do I know.

It finally dawned on me that I had heard about him elsewhere… here:

To demonstrate how wide the findings are going into the depth Palestinian society we mention here that almost the entire high‐level politicians of the PLO, as well and the majority of Hamas leaders, are of a Jewish origin. This includes Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen — a descendant of a family of Rabbis), the late Dr. Saʻeb Erikat, Jibril Rajub (Argov), Maruwan Barguti, Nabil Shaʻat, Khanan Ashrawi, from the Fatah movement, […] Khanin Zuabi, and late sheikh Akhmad Yassin, Ismail Haniʻya, Dr. Mussa Abu Marzuk, Muhammed Def, Dr. Aziz Duwek (a Cohen), and above all Yikhyeh Sinuar from Hamas.

How could I have forgotten?

Only recently did I learn that the Palestinians have a word for their Maccabean spirit: sumud. Learning about how Sinwar perished in combat, I was reminded of something as I was doing research for this thread:

A transport of prisoners from Bergen‐Belsen Concentration Camp arrived at Gas Chamber II of Auschwitz. In the undressing room, one of the Jewish women seized SS man Josef Schillinger’s pistol and shot Schillinger and another guard, Wilhelm Emmerich!

You can see that sumud runs in the family.

Unfortunately, not all Jews choose to harness their gifts; some try to imitate their conquerors instead.

‘We will never surrender. We win, or we die. And don’t think it stops there. You will have the next generation to fight, and after the next, the next. As for me, I will live longer than my hangman.’

― Omar Mukhtar, 1931 (as paraphrased in my favorite film of all time, The Lion of the Desert)

Interestingly, while present-day Muslims assume that homosexual behaviour was outlawed by Islam, it was not until after the colonial period of the late 18th and 19th centuries that this conservative opinion became prominent. Scholars such as Dunne (1998), Kligerman (2007), Kugle (2010a), Lapidus and Lena (2014) and Nawaz (2016) insist that intolerance towards queerness and homosexuality was introduced to the Muslim world during the period of European colonialism.

(Source.)

https://mondoweiss.net/tag/anne-applebaum

I’d be cautious towards Dan Osborn.

I would do that except I looked at prices for external drives and they’re fecking expensive.