One of the reasons I stopped being an anarchist was because, due to anarchism's often unquestioned utopianism, I was incapable of theorizing a mechanism that could suppress reactionaries. Instead I wanted to believe that a revolution, if it was truly a revolution, would somehow convince those reactionaries who were too cowardly to fight and die for their beliefs in the moment of revolutionary upheaval, would somehow be convinced of the righteousness of the cause. I believed that any attempt to build a state capable of legislating against their behaviour would be authoritarian and that this legislation, amounting to "Stalinist gulags", was also counter-revolutionary.
This is indeed an extreme form of utopianism because it is premised on the idea that there is some root and nebulous human nature that, once we remove the authoritative mechanisms, would flourish and immediately evolve into something entirely socialistic. Humans would become as they really are (as if they are really anything besides social animals, which means "essentially" messy), selfless and compassionate. Hence there would be no need for suppression, an authoritative and vicious hold-over from the days before this beautiful revolution, because we would all recognize the rational basis of freedom and equality.
This utopian mindset has thankfully been demolished. And it continues to be redemolished whenever I encounter reactionary thought that attempts to pass itself off as "rational"––would the people pushing these backwards ideas, who are invested in either keeping things as they are or returning to a period of more vicious oppression and exploitation change their patterns of thinking so easily? Unfortunately there is a reason that the gulag system emerged and it had nothing to do with some idealistic notion of authoritarianism.
So today, whenever I encounter abhorrent reactionaries, I often find myself thinking that gulags make sense in the face of people who are so committed to a chauvinist set of politics that they have convinced themselves that their commitment is in some ways radical. Particularly, in this post, I am speaking of Mens Rights Activists [MRAs] who are to sex and gender what Neo-Nazis are to race: they are male supremacists whose conservative politics aptly parallel white supremacy; just like white supremacists, these male supremacists are under the impression that they are the victim of some grand conspiracy on the part of the oppressed––that is, they are oppressors who believe they are oppressed. And this is why gulags, or the harshest mechanism of reeducation, makes sense when it comes to these kinds of people: they are not going to like a revolution that "oppresses" their presupposed right to dominate.
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| A cartoon by Barry Deutsch which was originally posted here. |
About a year ago I assumed that MRAs were an internet phenomenon, a population of basement dwelling masculinist trolls who spent most of their time spamming feminist sites and sending death threats to women who, however vaguely, complained about patriarchy. Like all internet pseudo-intellectuals who believe that that the proof of intellectual prowess is trolling, these vicious masculinists seemed like a cowardly population of boys acting out a toothless fantasy of returning to the "glory days" of some imaginary 1950s USAmerica. Unfortunately, this phenomenon extends beyond the practice of online trolling: Mens Rights organizations have started to open chapters on university campuses, are recruiting other disaffected males who tend to interpret a loss of patriarchal power as "oppression" (apparently, if you can't be the master of your household with the right to treat women as property you are oppressed by a grand feminist conspiracy), are receiving SSHRC grants (so much for some "feminazi" conspiracy), and have begun to master the discourse of identity politics to make their claims sound academically feasible.
Although the Southern Law Poverty Center––a mainstream watch group for hate organizations that, ever since the US Civil Rights movement, has garned a certain level of respect––has classified MRA organizations as male supremacist hate groups, universities are allowing these organizations to open up local chapters and spread their reactionary doctrine. Since your average MRA ideologue, like some Tea Party apparatchik, is skilled in undermining the historical definition of important political concepts and inappropriately/inaccurately applying the terms "fascism" and "nazism" to hir opponents, these organizations are benefiting from the very liberal discourse that they accuse of disempowering men in the first place. Feminists are "fascists", anyone who disagrees that men are somehow oppressed (again, since they cannot be like the proper men of the 1950s and earlier) are branded "nazis", and a language of victimhood is used to veil a movement that is in actuality demanding a return to the most vile forms of patriarchal oppression.
Recently, the comrades in Toronto's Revolutionary Student Movement [RSM] decided to take an active role in confronting the MRA groups on university campuses. One of the reasons they decided it was important to take this role was because the left student movement on campus as a whole was not militantly confronting this chauvinism: there were talks organized by some progressive groups, but counter-events are not precisely confrontation since they can co-exist within a liberal marketplace of ideas. Of course, the substantial reason for this failure to confront MRA university clubs is the fact that these MRA organizations, despite claiming victimhood, are so embedded within the normative power structures that they are quite capable of violently penalizing people who disagree with their agenda: they target individual protestors, they hunt down the employment data of the people they dislike and hound the employer, they mobilize death threats––all of this is pretty significant for a group of people who claim they are disempowered. Hell, the Canadian MRA groups even possess ties to the Conservative Party, which is the ruling federal party in Canada, and so all of this nonsense about being poor oppressed victims of feminist conspiracy is patently absurd.
Hilariously enough, the RSM has now been targeted by the MRA blog, A Voice For Men, demonstrating that they must be doing something right because, as Mao reminds us, it is good to be attacked by the enemy. The anti-RSM article demonstrates the bizarro attempt of oppressors to fit themselves into the popular anti-oppression discourse: it absurdly accuses the RSM of being "nationalist" (an odd claim considering that the RSM rejects the colonial narrative of Canada and has actively supported the self-determination of indigenous peoples), as well as being "militarist" (I didn't see any MRA activists at the demonstrations to drive war-mongers off campus, but the RSM was there), because apparently it is just enough to mobilize these terms, despite being in bed with the Conservative party, to make an argument. Oh, and the RSM has made "no rational argument"––an ironic claim coming from several paragraphs of rhetorical nonsense that is pedagogically useful only insofar as it demonstrates multiple fallacies (strawperson, red herring, poisoning the well, bifurcation, abusive ad hominem, slippery slope) in its attempt to come across as sober and reasonable. The peacenik attitude of complaining about the RSM's violent discourse is also quite cute, especially coming from an organization that desires to reestablish violent male power and has no qualms with encouraging death threats and calling the employers of people who disagree with MRA politics. Hey Voice For Men, here's a pointer for you: if you want to attack the RSM maybe you should do your research, figure out what this organization is actually about, and mock them for being communist––this will probably provide you with more traction amongst those liberal misogynists you are trying to recruit.
It is in contexts such as this that I cannot help thinking about gulags. I mean, faced with the aforelinked article about the RSM, I'm forced to wonder how such an intentionally distorted perspective of reality can ever be corrected. Those people who are so invested in a desire to return to the golden ages of male power––and who translate every movement away from this "golden age" as oppression––are not people who will ever be convinced that substantial equality is in their interests. Can reactionaries be re-educated, are they even capable of rectification if their understanding of reality is infected by a reactionary ideology that seeks to catapult us back to some semi-feudal understanding of gender and sex? What is their fate if another dictatorship of the proletariat comes into being––especially if they are attempting to peddle their ideology to certain sectors of the working class? One would hope that this ideology would pass away during the period of revolutionary struggle, that the people invested in it would die fighting to preserve capitalism (since most of the vocal adherents appear to be middle class men and the occasional woman who has bought into the misogynist familial structure), but it is pretty hard to predict whether or not this would happen.
I think that one of the real problems that is faced here is an inability for some elements of the feminist movement to offer up any salve to the lose of identity and position in society, for many males as the equality of women is more and more a matter of fact the males who are unable or unwilling to adapt to the changing circumstances attempt to rally public sympathy. This can be negated or even preempted if you can bring them out in debate and demonstrate the fallacies and hole in their logic. Saying that perhaps the mass imprisonment of those who disagree with you and forced reeducation is the dark road that leads to the death of Socialism's ability to stand above capitalism and the current world system. Their is no victory over something evil if you must in turn become a monster to win
ReplyDeleteand PS Male rights advocates would want you to post this so they can take it out of context and say you're a Nazi
To be fair: anything I post that is critical of the MRA movement would lead to me being called a "nazi"––this is what is so hilarious about their article, linked above, that responds to the RSM critique. The RSM actually does provide a coherent critique of MRA politics and compares them to white supremacists, and the MRA response is basically to say "no you are the nazis." All of this is to say *whatever* I write will be taken out of context by people who are reactionaries and who have no intention of engaging in a debate with progressives: I have come to this realization after having dealt with these people for years––I'll still get comments from MRAs from old posts I've written that, in all caps, call me a "feminazi" who wants "to castrate all men" and other such nonsense, and all on posts that simply identify myself as a feminist and mention the problem of patriarchy. Now I just delete their comments because they are useless. I really don't care what reactionaries think of a progressive post because I find their ideas backwards, useless, incoherent, and destined for the dustbin of history.
DeleteSo *this* is precisely why I talk about gulags and some mechanism of dealing with lingering reactionaries in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Unlike you, I do not think such mechanisms are "evil" and am in complete disagreement with the narrative, which is promoted predominantly by reactionaries who take their information from Arthur Koestler and Solzhenitsyn (dubious sources), that the need to maintain a proletarian dictatorship, and what that will necessarily take, is a "dark road" or "evil"––the only thing that allowed actually existing socialism to sustain itself for so long was in fact these disciplinary procedures, and the only reason why capitalism was reestablished was due to an inability to fully suppress the bourgeois class which returned, even through the party, and took both Russia and then China on the capitalist road. This was precisely the problem recognized by the Cultural Revolution, though to be fair the Chinese did critique the overly autocratic methods of the Soviet Union under Stalin, and so in truth I side more with reeducation than gulags. Some people, as this post indicates, seem to be beyond even reeducation: what do you do with people who will intentionally destroy a society where they cannot be oppressors? It is a frustrating problem.
I've written about this in more detail on this blog, and I think it's important to understand *why* reeducation is necessary if we also believe we are social animals who are socialized according to the common sense ideology of the ruling class––how do you break that ideological problem? You cannot just wish it away: we all need reeducation, both now and during socialism-–to believe otherwise, as I wrote in the introduction of this piece is utopian moralism.
Socialism does not "stand above" capitalism based on a moral argument, it "stands above" capitalism for scientific reasons. Engels was clear about this in Anti-Duhring, pointing out that moral arguments went nowhere, the limits proved by the Utopian Socialists who were ultimately petty bourgeois thinkers and were replaced by Marx and Engels. The entire history of revolutionary thought, and those revolutions that have taught us something about how to build a better world, has generally begun from this proposition. You can find it in Lenin, you can find it in Fanon, you can find it in Malcolm X…
I thought the gulags HAD significant reeducation aspects. And some of the labor was building of canals, etc., that I understood a lot of the prisoners felt pride in. Labor was not always intended punitively but actually as a correction, that there was something uplifting about laboring. And didn't prisoners receive wages for labor? We forget some of the progressive aspects of the Soviet correctional system under all the anticommunist propaganda.
DeleteMaybe there have been advancements in our understanding of human cognition since the 1920's and better solutions exist for addressing these issues than "there's no hope for these people, let's just throw them in labor camps!"
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying there necessarily ARE (I'm a history student, I've had limited exposure to the fields of study surrounding cognition), I'm saying that it would seem appropriate to at least consider ways it could be done otherwise with more care and time invested than "hmm, I can't think of any ways off the top of my head, and professionals who study the human mind/brain couldn't possibly have any insights here, so fuck it, send reactionaries to labor camps!"
I am not proposing a concrete alternative here, but just as a point which I think deserves engagement by people interested in changing society, it has been noted by a number of psychologists/therapists/counselors that mainstream -- hence liberal -- psychology/psychiatry today has this oh-so-weird habit of pathologizing dissent against liberal norms and values. If you dissent over the wrong things or in the wrong way, or you let the horrors of modern society get you down just a little too much, you can be slapped with a label like "oppositional defiant disorder" or "anti-authoritarian/anti-social disorder" (not the precise names but the general thrust of the DSM-IV definitions are "this person thinks society is wrong and insistently rebels against authority figures, therefore they must be mentally ill") and medicated and sent to therapy. Of course the logic is that psychiatry and counseling is about reconciling the mental habits of the individual to work within the parameters of society's norms, whatever they may be. Liberalism likes to hide as objective reality so mainstream psychiatry _as presently constituted_ discursively ignores the political implications of their profession, but the politics of psychiatry are apparent to anyone paying attention and I see absolutely no reason why the political dimensions of psychiatry should be ignored by socialists/communists. If the goal is to establish new norms and values then it would seem a natural outcome of that is to pathologize attitudes which are at odds with those norms and values. It has often been noted that there are parallels between the micro-scale dynamics of abusive/exploitative relationships and macro-scale social oppressions and class exploitation, and often hinges on the same psychological mechanisms. So fuck it. Draw it out, classify it for what it is, and send the person to therapy and/or medicate them for their antisocial attitudes. They don't even have to like it or want it, you could give them a choice between that along with closer social supervision or institutionalization/labor camps because of the dangers they pose to society: this is, after all, how the liberal legal system sometimes to responds to people.
My overall point being that I think that if a dictatorship of the proletariat comes about there will need to be a broader array of responses to reactionaries than just labor camps, because ideology exists on a continuum and some people aren't as entrenched in certain ideologies as others. It could seriously backfire if the only response of a dictatorship of the proletariat to anyone with a reactionary ideology or attitude is "to the gulag with you!" Liberalism has a pretty effective cultural hegemony today but it is enforced through all social institutions and with a variety of approaches, and every deviation from liberal norms and values is not addressed by criminalizing the individual (although it is certainly a common response).
^^ I'm the same author as above here.
DeleteI'm not saying that labor camps/gulags should be ruled out as a potential tool, particularly in a period of revolutionary violence, I am rather thinking about the years and decades after a seizure and consolidation of political power. Certainly during a political upheaval you have little slack with which to leave people and if someone is so entrenched in their ideology that they can't even shut about men's rights or white supremacy or what-have-you during a period of revolutionary terror, then I wouldn't be one to complain if extreme actions are taken for the sake of consolidation.
I'd also like to acknowledge that I may have had a slight knee-jerk response to your post, as upon re-reading I can tell that I read more into your endorsement of gulags than you meant. It certainly should be an option and there's nothing wrong with a little boat-rocking by throwing a view like that out there, and as an expression of frustration over things like the Men's Rights Movement it's certainly understandable and I don't fault you there. But my general opinion about the necessity of a broad array of approaches to reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries in general stands nevertheless (as I don't think we necessarily differ there except perhaps in matters of degree).
1) The comment about gulags was a hypothetical, intentionally polemical, and placed within the context of the need to find a mechanism of placing the defeated bourgeois under the class command of the proletariat;
Delete2) If you did study your history, and not just bourgeois history, you would realize that this isn't just about the 1920s but also about the world historical revolution in China which taught us a lot more about this fact, and also proposed reeducation *for everyone in society* as an alternative to labour camps. The reality, though, is that in the first dictatorship of the proletariat the gulags were an attempted to solution at a problem there was no historical precedent to.
3) I don't care about mainstream psychology, most of which is positivist, as something that can find a solution to the problem of bourgeois ideology. The Cultural Revolution taught us something about this, and though it failed it also went further than the attempts in Russia to deal with the the problem of capitalist restoration and people who would be more than happy to see capitalism fail. I prefer to learn from world historical revolutions in this regard.
4) Yes, liberalism likes to hide as an objective reality, but you have to see how your example of psychiatry is a very good point about what I'm getting at. It is one of the insitutionalized ways of maintaining capitalist hegemony. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie emerged through centuries of its own methods reeducation, suppressing the aristocrats (sometimes by cutting off their heads, as in the Terrors), and subjecting them to bourgeois class rule. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao all believed we needed to learn from that transitionary period to tell us something of the class struggle that would happen under socialism. So the way that liberalism is effective today is the result of a long process of class dictatorship that initially did begin with explicit violence as the sphere of hegemony extended. And I spoke about this in a post on hegemony and Gramsci some time ago––not going to repeat myself here.
5) And as I pointed out in my last response, which you apparently ignored, I have discussed my reasons for believing in reeducation in another post. Read that before replying so I don't have to repeat myself over and over.
6) I don't really believe in "to the gulag with you", though I think that sometimes when you encounter some people it is difficult to imagine the possibility of rectification... I mean seriously consider this for a moment instead of moralizing about it, which is what you are doing. It is all fine and good to make idealist claims about a "broader array of responses" and ignore the attempts to produce this broad array of responses or even grapple with the fact that some people in the early stages of the dictatorship of the proletariat will not *ever* accept socialism. These are not just people with a few wrong ideas, but people who are committed to some pretty heinous ideologies and, due to the way they have been socialized and how they see the world and the privilege they think they have lost with socialism, may not ever want to change their views and will indeed work to destroy socialism. Do we just kill them, do we send them to "gulags", or what? Once again, your claims about liberalism's effective cultural hegemony skips over history and seems to imagine it emerged fully formed and, in its emergence, maintains its hegemony simply through the arm of consent when, as Gramsci reminds us, this consent is also backed by coercion. Liberal capitalism also has its gulags––and let's move beyond a problematic term and call "gulags" what they actually were, *prisons*––to incarcerate those who will not integrate properly in liberal bourgeois society.
EDIT: I wrote and posted my comment before reading your follow-up. Apparently your follow-up posted before my response. Most of my points still stand, but I would have made them in a slightly different tone and cut out some parts based on your addendum. I still think your comment about "a broad array of approaches" is idealist for the reasons I indicated: I am all for a broad array of approaches to producing proletarian hegemony, and I think both the Soviet Union and China attempted a broad array of approaches, I am simply pointing out that sometimes things must happen before this broad array––and you do seem to recognize this in the first sentence of your addition.
DeleteAlso, I think we have to question why we have knee-jerk responses to the word "gulag". There is something to be said about cold war propaganda and generations of anti-communist ideology and how it has programmed us to understand certain things.
Good responses. I'm admittedly weak on red history -- I am still absorbing and integrating and forming a perspective on these issues, and my own focus as an aspiring academic is not in those regions of the world where world-historical revolutions have occurred, so I have to pursue that history on my own time in addition to making time for pragmatic local struggles which also consume a lot of energy.
DeleteThe issue of positivism is valid but critiques of scientific positivism as reifying constructed social conditions have also led to shifts in how researchers approach social sicences (not uniformly, certainly and this does not mean you can drop your guard about research. The point is to critically assess what is being done to see what is salvagable). Particularly in certain subfields of psychology the emphasis is looking at basics of _how_ the brain assembles information and _how_ worldviews are framed which I think has value in any politics.
This is all somewhat beside the point -- I did sort of suggest that there were contexts in which insights from psychology could be useful (I still maintain this but would clarify that critical analysis of all research is necessary but to throw out an entire branch of science because it's dominated by a bad politics seems somewhat misguided to me) but my overall thrust was more about hegemony, and I'll look up your post on Gramsci although from your first post it seems that there was less disagreement and more me failing to be clear in that first post (I haven't slept in two days so I do apologize for any incoherency/rambling).
Your point about cold war/bourgeois propaganda is also well-taken. I don't deny that I have plenty of unlearning still to do, although what I have read of your blog so far has offered some incisive and helpful critiques of those issues. I will try in future to prevent my knee from jerking so quickly.
You might find it interesting to note that I've allowed an MRA comment to make it through, just to demonstrate how vile these people are and why, when you encounter them, your mind instantly wanders to gulags. Scroll down and witness the reactionary ignorance.
DeleteI think it is important to note that your first link to the SPLC does not actually claim MRA movements are hate groups, in fact elsewhere on their website (http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2012/05/15/intelligence-report-article-provokes-outrage-among-mens-rights-activists/) the SPLC explicitly draws attention to this by stating: "It should be mentioned that the SPLC did not label MRAs as members of a hate movement; nor did our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites – false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements and the like – are all without merit. But we did call out specific examples of misogyny and the threat, overt or implicit, of violence."
ReplyDeleteFair enough, but the article as a whole does hint that many of these groups are similar to white supremacists. In the article I did cite they draw the parallel quite clearly… but then they back of in subsequent articles. The question to ask, then, is why do they back off? I'm inclined to argue that this is because the SPLC is still bound within liberal categories and, like the ACLU, has always had problems with making coherent theoretical analyses.
DeleteYou sir, are a fucking faggot with no testicles, if you support feminism.
ReplyDeleteBoy, I'd love to see you try your bullshit with me, I wouldn't have as much patience as those other MRAs, I would have just beaten your stupid ass to a pulp. Fucking mangina.
I normally delete reactionary/ignorant comments that provide nothing interesting to a conversation, and I have already deleted a bunch of "all caps" rants, but I'm allowing this one to demonstrate to other readers why I think some MRAs are reactionary scum that might be incapable of rectification. With all the "Voice for Men" claims about being against hate speech and for peace, this is yet another pretty telling response. This is why there is no point in arguing with you people; you're incapable of rational thought, you like to make threats, you descend into insults in lieu of having anything insightful to say. You are not welcome here.
DeleteOh, so SOME MRAs are reactionaries? What happened to you saying MRAs in general are reactionaries?
DeleteAre you intentionally trying to cherry pick in order to catch me in some contradiction? I think *all* MRAs are reactionary; I think *some* are incapable of rectification (maybe most), like the poster above.
DeletePeople like the homophobic pro-MRA "anonymous" above definitely go towards disproving their own position that they are in fact the ones opposed to violence.
ReplyDeleteAs more of a side note, I always find the machoistic posturing of homophobic and misogynistic types amusing. There seems to be an assumption that those of us who are anti-homophobic and anti-misogynistic are all caricatures of 1960s White flower power hippies. I personally have quite a bit of martial arts and weapons training and the above poster would have a hard time beating my "ass to a pulp", to quote him.
It's like one big stupid machismo feed back loop.
Anyway, the real reason I am commenting is because I was wondering if you had ever come across and read J. Sakai's take on fascism. He has two pieces with a lot of overlap (even sharing chunks of the same text), one of which is published as The Green Nazi, which is an examination of fascist ecology, while the other is published as a response/critique of Dan Hamerquist’s "Fascism & Anti-Fascism". The one I am wanting to draw attention to is "The Shock of Recognition: Looking at Hamerquist’s Fascism & Anti-Fascism". While I do not agree with Sakai 100%, I find many similarities between his discussion of fascism as a MEN's movement, of declassed (lumpen) and petty bourgeois men who feel their "manhood" under assault by crisis, and what we are talking about as the so-called "Men's Rights Movement." I've discussed this aspect of his thesis on fascism a number of times, especially with my partner who is a historian specializing in the weaponization of gender and sexuality by the Third Reich, and have found it very insightful.
If you've never read it, or if other readers would be interested in checking it out, I made it available sometime on The Speed of Dreams website and it can be found here:
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/the-shock-of-recognition-looking-at-hamerquists-fascism-anti-fascism/
Thanks for the link. I did read Sakai's analysis of fascism a while back, though I would like to read it again especially after the Cope analysis at the end of Divided World Divided Class.
DeleteI agree with your points about MRA machismo. I also think it is funny that they imagine I would be insulted by having my sexuality and virility questioned, or that it is a terrible thing to be likened to a vagina.
This whole exchange reminds me of a video I saw regarding the Rutgers basketball fiasco. If you haven't heard, videos just came out of Rutgers basketball coach physically assaulting his players while yelling homophobic, sexist, and racist slurs. While I'm not that surprised that an American sports coach is violent and reactionary, what did surprise me was a news clip of Sean Hannity defending the coach. He said something along the lines of "I like his drive, his energy..... we shouldn't turn into a nation of wimps" etc. So here we have a major political commentator on national televised news outright defending assault without qualification, without an ounce of respectability. I think its a good reminder that these people aren't just a small minority of insignificant internet wackos that are going to magically disappear without a fight.
ReplyDelete-SRM
It is a joy, to see how reactionaries should -yes!- be re-educated in an evolved, and indeed, re-defined, gulag structure. The abhorrent men's rights movements posits that men are now attacked, while campus safe programs, and the likes, through their utmost necessity born of the intrinsic male instinct and drive, per se, towards sexual aggression, have made it clear to both women and men, that the topic of sexual relations has to be approached with utter care; the last thing we want is for people to feel uncomfortable. De-learning the patriarchical ways of the western concept of the body could realistically be operated via sojourns in re-education camps of which the word "gulag" evokes the ever striving effort to improve humankind. No limits should be an obstacle to this utterly necessary re-education to combat male chauvinistic, aggressive, destructive to women, universal dangerous drive. Pharmaceutics, talk therapy, sensory deprivation, and more, are utterly necessary to destroy the fundamental authoritarian drive of the destructive male. Heavens, my allergies are kicking in, writing this! The thought of gulags, defined by ME, also produces a certain tingling sensation, of which I shall not say anything! Basically, I am a Fascist, I work with other crazy male illegitimate children, and ladies whose name is only socially acceptable in kennels, to completely subdue all of humankind -I shall call myself "pro feminist", "pro gay marriage", "pro diversity", ANYTHING that will sound good and fair, to push MY views and make others suffer horrendously under the fake name of "betterment", knowing full well that I am pushing the worst thought that ever was into motherfucking cretins who do not even see what I'm doing because they wanna be dumb as fuck, not because they are! I so despise them! You see, me, with a few others, we KNOW! Burn that fool Spinoza, who wrote that humans cannot know God fully: I am my own god! Isn't that neat? And see, I KNOW! I know that the new moon is coming; I am also waiting for the ancient saturn, you know, the one that used to be, which we're still waiting for, but which is here, without being, but still in the past, right? Awesome!
ReplyDeleteYou really need to have a proper understanding of reality in order to be satirical. Considering that the article in question was half-ironic (no, I do not agree with the way the gulag system existed in reality… please see some of the other comments and discussion by people who are far more thoughtful than you), the fact that you think I and I only know how to punish *my* class enemies when everyone under socialism will have to change (meaning a group of the same people being in charge of this will be a problem) demonstrates you're completely out to lunch. (Also some of the things you've attributed to me are dead wrong.) Well that and the fact that you have demonstrated why I despair of socialism coming about without a repressive mechanism (and, by the way, capitalism and every mode of production has a repressive mechanism – I've written about this elsewhere)––you are precisely the kind of self-satisfied anti-people person who would, imagining you are enlightened, be quite happy in a fascist regime.
DeleteApproval, indeed? Ah, how free...
ReplyDeleteYeah, see my comment policy. Also, learn a proper definition of "freedom"… choosing who is allowed to comment on a blog is not censorship because you can write whatever you want anywhere else. Being able to spread asinine ideas wherever you wish is synonymous with thinking you have the right to walk into people's houses and share your opinions in those spaces––is that your definition of "freedom". Also, I think the liberal definition of free speech (as defined by J.S. Mill) is bullshit.
DeleteNow bye reactionary, you're not welcome here. Go post on "Storm Front": these are the kind of people who would be happy to have your predictable, "common sense" opinion about the world since it is pretty much theirs.