If so, was it polled somewhere?
comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives
many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.
it honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space
The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.
Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There’s no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.
That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.
I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is “shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I’m not reading that.” “Genocide denier” — or, even less accurate, “genocide supporter” — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you’re an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.
As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup’d by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.
I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.
The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it’s like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.
Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.
On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country’s newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America’s real concern.
continued:
only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.
in the previous sentence you pointed out that hexbear has been isolated for 3 years.
Why the fuck would any government give a shit about them?
The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.
I’m gonna gloss over the “genocide of westerners and white people” comment and give you the benefit of the doubt.
You mentioned democracy. What democracy? In all seriousness. People have looked, and they don’t find it.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014) — Cambridge University Press
from the abstract:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
and from further down
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
What was it, 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare?
Where is the democracy? Even mathematically it’s questionable. The districts are gerrymandered, poor communities have woefully inadequate election resources and wait in line for hours to vote, first-past-the-post tosses out millions of ballots, and it’s all filtered through the electoral college. But even before all of that, corporations own the fucking political parties and the media! Corporations own the think tanks that write the fucking policies! Corporations fund the campaigns! Voters are a fucking afterthought!
America is not a democracy. And even if it were, where are its accomplishments? Domestically, living conditions are getting worse every year. People are poorer and more precarious. Infrastructure is failing. Millions of people have addictions they cannot treat. What wealth there is is massively concentrated. Internationally, much of America’s wealth is extracted from the impoverished and underdeveloped global south, contributing to massive, widespread global poverty. 9 million people fucking starve to death every year under global capitalism so that western companies can buy cheap outsourced labor to enrich a small number of owners and shareholders.
Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (2022) — Global Environmental Change
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices.
Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth .8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.
And that’s not mentioning the fucking wars.
Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests
There are open-air slave markets in Libya now. Great job, America.
