Reading books is how you become communist, not anticommunist. Anticommunism depends on an ignorance of history and incuriosity generally.

Left-bashing tends to signal a green light for more left-bashing.

Anticommunism and fascism are the best of friends.

Then every social structure is authoritarian.

Anarchists usually distinguish between just and unjust hierarchies, by the way, and svoid the word “authoritarian” when describing just ones. Anarchists still need to organize themselves to have leadership and delegation.

It’s an insult used by liberals to punch left. Because liberals, as a rule, don’t really read history or politics with any depth, they don’t use it consistently. Sometimes it is conflated with communist. Sometimes they throw it at liberals that are just a bit less racist and xenophobic than them.

Originally it meant communists who supported the 1956 invasion of Hungary, and was used by British communists to split up their own parties on the issue.

imperial_capitalist_order.png.

Now do the map about whether food is a human right.

A slur filter isn’t DRM and free software is in no way some kind of culture that obliges software developers to write code that lets you be more racist/whatever online, lol. The code is generously licensed and you can fork it if you want something else.

That’s okay when the left is Zhou Enlai.

Classic banger from hexbear user CommunistBarbie

I’m convinced you’ve never read the works that I, the Carl Marks, wrote.

There was kabuki theater around this, so far as intelligence was involved. Mostly the official faces quietly did nothing. None actively contradicted the narrative. And of course, Tenet (the CIA director at the time) called it a “slam dunk”. Most of them were never under oath about any of this - it’s not like the US actually investigates or punishes its own war crimes or violations of the UN Charter. In reality, invading Iraq was a Washington consensus position to destabilize that country further after over a decade of civilian-targeted sanctions. Our liberal hero, Joe Biden, happily laid the propaganda on thick through his position as chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, bringing in hack after hack to testify and make the case via the media apparatus. Very few people in power even publicly questioned the case for a war of aggression, let alone did anything to oppose it, and media narratives were more or less lockstep with them despite record-setting protests. Actually, scratch that: there was a pervasive culture of anti-brown, islamophobic rhetoric that questioned the patriotism (read: right to belong) of anyone who pushed back. Ask anyone that looked vaguely South Asian or Arab at the time.

Of course, I don’t want to gice the impression that possessing WMDs has ever been a consistent, valid, or legal justification for being a target of a war of aggression. The only country to use nukes on civilians was the US and I don’t see them invading themselves with a “coalition of the willing” since then, though they have certainly been very aggressive.

But I digress. Of course US intel is going to be doing shady things, that’s not really debated. The thing I think is most relevant here is the parallel of a lack of media criticism and how easy it is to get folks, and particularly Americans, to absorb headlines and claims without looking any deeper into sourcing, into the history at hand, or even just for now, admitting that there is very little information or ways to get a good handle on the sequence of events, and it’s okay to not have a hot take. Opposing a jingoistic fervor is essential to opposing fascism.

Accusations of whataboutism are a thought-terminating cliché that, ironically, usually just help the accuser avoid engaging with a critical argument.

The relevance here is that using “it sounds right to me” to decide whether a media narrative is true will lead a person to make big mistakes. And I am criticizing the general lack of media criticism in this thread.

It also “made sense” to most Americans that Iraq had WMDs. Colin Powell even said so, and he was greatly respected despite his participation in covering up the My Lai Massacre.

Love to see the immediate certainty that Russia did it based on… UA saying so. Impressive media criticism. I’m sure Iraq’s WMDs will turn up any day now, too.