I am reading Lindsay’s critique now of pro-trans-pedagogy, and it’s pretty good. But the man is a raving McCarthyite. And judging from the title, this is not a book I would recommend to anyone possessing more than half a brain cell. Lindsay is tilting at windmills, all the while frothing at the mouth.
I am an anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-Great Reset Marxist adjunct sociology professor, formerly working at CUNY. Over the past year, I have been dismissed from my teaching positions at two CUNY campus sociology departments, one after another, because of my insistence upon my right—and duty—to present different views, including my own radical Marxist view, on controversial issues, such as the slaughter in Palestine, the corruption of Dr. Anthony “da Science” Fauci, and the CIA-organized murder of Leftist pop stars like John Lennon. My “offense”, was not that I don’t subscribe to Marxism. I do. It is because the full time faculty who control these departments and colleges, are “woke” Centrist liberals. Despite the AAUP statement in the 1940s about the right to academic freedom, these conformiats do not like controversy, “conspiracy theories”, imitates the speech of film actors whose characters do not come from my personal ethnic or racial group (“cultural expropriation!”, anybody who criticizes Nikole Hannah Jones, Critical Race Theory, #Me2, Pope Fauci, or even so much as quotes from Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s expose of the latter.
Woke is the real enemy. Woke is the foundation of the hegemony of the ruling class Great Reset. Many so-called Marxists understand this. But due to their religio-scientism, they accept all the nonsense about the pandemic, the mandates, etc. etc. That’s unfortunate. But branding the woke academic establishment “Marxist” is positively Orwellian, as well as intellectually and politically lazy and irresponsible.
Most people don't understand or care to understand the difference between liberalism and left politics. They also don't understand the history of how the left was co-opted/assassinated/bombed/bought off and attacked through every trick in the book.
As truly ignorant as is most of the US populace on these matters they know less about political economy and pretty much nothing about Marxism.
The right wing nut jobs are just as politically incoherent as the right wing liberals- yes people liberalism is a right wing ideology.
Here those right-wingers can't see that the COVID agenda that they were in opposition to over these past four years (to varying degrees) was a global operation orchestrated by the capitalist's that they are now defending.
Trouble is none of these people have read much of anything and don't know any actual history. Just flopping around from one reactionary position to the next based on tropes and entrenched sentiment.
I got about half-way through Volume 2 of "The Gulag Archipelago" before I had to put it down. It was just too appalling. Yet I wonder if our professor friend above could say even that much... 🙄
My ex-mother-in-law told me the story of her husband – a surgeon – during The Cultural Revolution dragged through streets on a rope covered in placards and pelted with mud and shit. His crimes against "The People"?
1. He was a surgeon and
2. He belonged to the Guomindang as a student.
She herself was a pediatrician, and the stress she endured during the Cultural Revolution – either of them could have been shot at any moment for any sin, real or imagined – resulted in a massive stroke at 45, left her speechless and paralysed for 3 months.. she eventually... recovered... but her career was toast; she was forced to retire. Meanwhile her crime? She was trained by Methodist missionaries.. 🙄💩
After the blood-soaked history of the 20th Century and 200 million dead, the fact that you admit to being a Marxist is already a damning indictment. How DARE you? Pull the beam out of your own eye first before you complain about the speck in anyone else's!
How dare I adopt Marxism as my belief system?! That's rather totalitarian. It is my right to adopt the beliefs I wish to, along with the duty each of us has to be willing to defend rationally the belief system of our choice. To ask me "how dare you", is not being reasonable. It's emotional and demagogic.
Your unstated assumption is that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were responsible for the deaths of 20 million people, because the Bolshevik Regime was constructed (falsely) in their name, and degenerated into Stalinism, which killed 20 million people. .
it is obvious to me that you are not intellectually equipped at this point, due to your own McCartyite ideology, to understand how ridiculous that assumption is.
The leaders of the Bolsheviks, as both Kautsky and Luxemburg opined, did not have a Marxist political ideology--an ideology which is fundamentally democratic.
You might also try Richard N. Hunt"s @ volume work< THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS
Most everyone who cites some figure that was allegedly killed by Stalin/Soviet Union have no idea how that figure has been fed to them and how those numbers came to be the "accepted truth."
They also easily dismiss the numbers that have been killed by capitalism which are beyond calculation if we start in the 16th century, go to the various genocides of indigenous people, the Slave Trade and the numerous wars.
None of these people have read any Marx and can't and won't differentiate between Marxism and Stalinism and State capitalism for but one example.
Ah, the usual dishonest self-serving bullshit 🤔: "That's not true Communism" ...
🙄💩💣🕳
Explain to me please, why every interpretation of Marxism you care to mention has always resulted in the same outcome: Human bodies stacked like cordwood, half-way to the sun; how Jordan Peterson could bluntly state that every attempt at implementing Marxist principles has always been a catastrophic failure?
I have Solzhenitsyn, I have my ex-wife's family's story of living under Mao, to illuminate my path – and I've lots of others, including my Polish-emigre professor of English history in first year, telling the class of her experiences under Communism. Or how about Michael Walsh's "The Devil's Pleasure Palace" which if memory serves mentions in passing Karl Marx's dalliance with Satanism and Black Magick. Karl Marx was one of the most contemptible human beings who has ever lived; he allowed 4 of his infant children to starve to death because he was too shiftless and irresponsible to get a job to support them. He got his maidservant pregnant, and tossed her and his illegitimate son into the street, to fend for themselves. There is NOTHING GOOD, to be said of Karl Marx and his Satanic Filth and the fact someone like you could be where you are, influencing impressionable children with this woolly-minded rubbish is an indictment against the academy, just by itself.
"it is obvious to me that you are not intellectually equipped at this point, due to your own McCartyite ideology, to understand how ridiculous that assumption is."?
I didn't say "20 million": I said "TWO HUNDRED MILLION": 66 million in Russia alone by Solzhenitsyn's accounting and I'm not inclined to question a man of his iron integrity. No-one knows how many that butcher Mao slaughtered but at least 75 million. A mere 2 million in Democratic Kampuchea – but 40% of the population. You asked me to read "Was the Bolshevik Regime and its Policies Marxist—or Blanquist?" https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/was-the-bolshevik-regime-and-its. I will afford you that courtesy. In turn I will ask, have you ever watched "The Killing Fields"? Have you ever read "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution"?
In the meantime? Get an honest job where you're not subverting impressionable children.
Well that wsa fast. I gave you an article to read, on how the Bolsheviks' state policy was not Marxist, but rather, deliberately totatlitarian. That regime spawned all the rest of the so-called Communist regimes, which were also, necessarily, Stalinist and totalitarian.
Did you read the article, or are you just talking through your hat?
and why is it that capitalism has led to mass murder of millions< all over the world?
In any case, this is quite beside the point of this thread. Which is Lindsay's confusion of woke-ism with Marxism.
I don't have any more time to respond to your hysteria.
I'm in the process of reading it. And I'm not being "hysterical", merely using strong language to voice my opposition to a deliberately contrived, developed and maintained abomination. Take the time to read CS Lewis' "The Abolition of Man" and EF Schumacher's "A Guide for the Perplexed"; they're both mercifully short, at under 100 and 200 pages respectively.
You do know Solzhenitsyn was a pathological liar among many other worse traits.
But that's not really the point- it's about examining assumptions that have been provided for you by forces that want you to believe a story- incidentally those are the very same forces that are violently oppressing us today.
In turn, where did you get the idea Solzhenitsyn was a pathological liar?
200 million is an estimate I derived from totalling up the estimates of others of the democides / genocides perpetrated by all flavours of Marxism. A fairly straight-forward procedure.
Solzhenitsyn became famous throughout the capitalist world towards the end of 1960 with his book, The Gulag Archipelago. He himself had been sentenced in 1946 to 8 years in a labor camp for counter-revolutionary activity in the form of distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the fight against Nazi Germany in the Second World War could have been avoided if the Soviet government had reached a compromise with Hitler. Solzhenitsyn also accused the Soviet government and Stalin of being even worse than Hitler from the point of view, according to him, of the dreadful effects of the war on the people of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn did not hide his Nazi sympathies.
Solzhenitsyn began in 1962 to publish books in the Soviet Union with the help of Nikita Khrushchev. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature with his book The Gulag Archipelago.
In the US, Solzhenitsyn was frequently invited to speak at important meetings. He was, for example, the main speaker at the AFL-CIO union congress in 1975, and on 15 July 1975 he was invited to give a lecture on the world situation to the US Senate.
His lectures amounted to violent and provocative agitation, arguing and propagandising for the most reactionary positions. Among other things he agitated for Vietnam to be attacked again after its victory over the US.
After 40 years of fascism in Portugal, when left-wing army officers took power in the people’s revolution of 1974, Solzhenitsyn began to propagandize in favor of US military intervention.
American journalists who dared write in favor of peace between the US and the Soviet Union were accused by Solzhenitsyn in his speeches of being traitors. Solzhenitsyn also propagandized in favor of increasing US military capacity against the Soviet Union, which he claimed was more powerful in ‘tanks and aeroplanes, by five to seven times, than the US’ as well as in atomic weapons which ‘in short’ he alleged were ‘two, three or even five times’ more powerful in the Soviet Union than those held by the US.
Solzhenitsyn’s lectures on the Soviet Union represented the voice of the extreme right. But he himself went even further to the right in his public support of fascism.
After Franco died in 1975, the Spanish fascist regime began to lose control of the political situation and at the beginning of 1976, events in Spain captured world public opinion. There were strikes and demonstrations to demand democracy and freedom, and Franco’s heir, King Juan Carlos, was obliged to introduce some liberalisation in order to calm down the social agitation.
At this moment in Spanish political history, Alexander Solzhenitsyn appeared in Madrid and gave an interview to the programme Directísimo one Saturday night, the 20th of March, at peak viewing time (see Spanish newspapers of 21 March 1976).
Solzhenitsyn, who had been provided with the questions in advance, used the occasion to make all kinds of reactionary statements. His intention was not to support the King’s so-called liberalisation measures. Solzhenitsyn warned against democratic reform. In his television interview he declared that 110 million Russians had died the victims of socialism (total lies created by Western Intelligence assets) and he compared ‘the slavery to which Soviet people were subjected to the freedom enjoyed in Spain’.
‘Last autumn,’ said Solzhenitsyn, ‘world public opinion was worried about the fate of Spanish terrorists [i.e., Spanish anti-fascists sentenced to death by the Franco regime]. All the time progressive public opinion demands democratic political reform while supporting acts of terrorism’.
To inquiries by the journalists as to whether such statements could not be seen as support for regimes in countries where there was no liberty, Solzhenitsyn replied: ‘I only know one place where there is no liberty and that is Russia.’
Solzhenitsyn’s statements on Spanish television were a direct support to Spanish fascism, an ideology he supported to his final days.
What Solzhenitsyn wanted for Russia’s political future is a return to the authoritarian regime of the Tsars.
None of this is controversial and it is all in the public record. Like virtually all history it is kept from the public and most are completely ill-informed on these matters particularly when it comes to the ex-Soviet Union.
So you haven't looked into the archival records of what happened in the Soviet Union? Hard to take you seriously in this Roy.
Solzhenitsyn supported Franco's fascism among many other buried historical facts.
His books came about through support from Nikita Khrushchev. His and Robert Conquests claims are nothing but lies and exaggerations as documented through archival records which are purposefully ignored in the Western academic and media circles.
His books were widely published and catapulted in capitalist countries, as he became one of the most valuable instruments of imperialism in combating the socialism of the Soviet Union. His texts on the labor camps were added to the propaganda on the millions who were supposed to have died in the Soviet Union and were presented by the capitalist mass media as though they were true.
The methods Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev, Conquest and others used for deriving the numbers of those who died in labor camps were completely fraudulent.
In 1974, Solzhenitsyn renounced his Soviet citizenship and emigrated to Switzerland and then the US. At that time he was considered by the capitalist press to be the greatest fighter for freedom and democracy. His Nazi sympathies were buried so as not to interfere with the propaganda war against socialism.
Solzhenitsyn also supported US military intervention in Portugal which, according to him, would join the Warsaw Pact if the US did not intervene. In his lectures, Solzhenitsyn always bemoaned the liberation of Portugal’s African colonies.
Michael Parenti has written about these numbers. None of them have a source that is anything more than just an opinion. It is just assumed that these massive death counts are true w/o any evidence. For example, in the 90's Western scholars went to Russia to investigate the records of the Soviet penal system. They assumed that there would have been many millions of prisoners. After digging thru all the available records, they could only account for about 900,000 - or less than half the prison population of the US. (900 k is still a lot, not saying the USSR was perfect by any means). Now, you could say that the figures were falsified - ok, fine. However, that doesn't bring you any closer to any numbers that are based on reality. You have to recall that for decades (and really to the present time) the US has engaged in near constant anti-communist propaganda. The truth may never be known. Brandishing those numbers about is just another form of propaganda you yourself are participating in.
Through reading history- not the spoon fed US/UK intelligence portrayals of this venal liar. So you don't know about this guy? You don't know of his staunch support of fascists?
And by the way< your insinuation that the recent mass murders of 33,000+ Palestinians, and millions more all over the globe as the result of imperialism, is just a "speck"--that's GROTESQUELY INSENSITIVE.
Ok I'm going to mute this thread now, because the Captain here is using this as a bully pulpit for his McCarthyite hysteria, rather than sticking to the subject. Get in tough if you want to say something rational to me about the actual topic of this thread--the confusion of Marxism with woke-ism, by Lindsay.
Go live in Russia,China, Venezuela,Iran etc if you want Marxism. I came from a Communist Marxist country and it ain't pretty. You have no voice, you own nothing, you have no freedoms. Don't allow yourself to ve part of the "herd"... think for yourself. Teaching DEI in our schools is dangerous and destructive. Yes I'm a former elementary school teacher and what they're teaching our children today is evil. Beware parents. These children are the future of the world as we know it. Dzvinka Dzvinka Dzvinka
Would that be go live in the many places that were establishing autonomous governmental and social structures and labor unions that were in opposition to transnational exploitation that were allowed to develop on their own?
Or go live in such places that were attempting to do such but were never allowed as they were bombed into the stone age by the US/UK Western cartels as well as coups, assassinations, embargoes etc.
What they have been "teaching" (indoctrinating) children with in US schools has always been evil- the US education system is based on the Prussian system with the architects of this system being the industrialists of the 19th and 20th century that were also responsible for exploitation and crimes everywhere you turned.
You sound like yet another teacher who knows zero actual history- which is almost always the case- just another reactionary.
Well, we can do both: teach the basics (reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic) AND critically evaluate the structures, players, and mechanisms that currently largely hold sway over this planet and her peoples. A big problem for me in this interview is that the word “education” is often used where the word “schooling” would be much more appropriate. Schooling, for the most part, does involve training and forming and molding a person into behaving, memorizing or reacting a certain way, and, to some degree, it is necessary. For most of us, however, once we have mastered the “3 Rs”, the bulk of our education comes from “doing”, as in real life experience. Blurring the distinction between the two processes is rarely helpful, and is just confusing. We do need to challenge, far, far far more than is done now, the ruling classes and hold them accountable for their egregious behavior. That’s not Marxist, that is just common sense. And we also need to be able to coherently and rationally do so, which points back to the importance of a good fundamental background in the basics, as well as critical thinking.
Following some great ideas from Bezmenov’s Substack, combined with the user-guide movie for future mind controllers, I would say that we only need one basic tool, or tactics. When applied, and applied consistently and with strong perseverance, it will be immensely successful, without the target population being even aware of how their minds have been redesigned.
This tactics is labeling. Putting a name on anything, the most vague you can think of, but a name short enough and “catchy” to be converted into an anchor to trigger the desired reaction of the controlled mind.
The media are now abundant with such trigger labels: Democrats, Republicans, anti-vaxxer, lives matter, freedom fighter, pronouns, queer, great reset, digital currency, Jews, Putin, China, patriotism, even constitution has been converted into a label. “Marxism” (and any versions of this name) is just another vague term which is excellent to trigger a desired mind-controlled reaction.
When such terms are first presented to the public, they are charged negatively. As a linguistic structure, they are neutral, words like any other, simply describing a specific phenomenon. The negative charge is associated with them by the presentation of the context in which the target population (“we”) can paint their own image. PR companies will not tell you why the term should be interpreted negatively. The vaguer references they make, the more negative impression your imagination will build.
Once you create your own negative interpretation of the term, you will self-propel the suggested fear associations. The impression of a vague, intangible “enemy” will terrorise you into spreading your fear among your neighbors and colleagues. The governing PR-advised decision makers won’t need to do anything specific. You - we, the public - will become their loudspeakers. The propaganda effect will be achieved through you.
All labels which end with -ism are such trigger terms. You will create and build up negative images inspired in some ancient past by truly skillful master manipulators. The phenomenon may no longer be here, like the “threat of communism” of 1950s, those who created the label may no longer be here, that future generations of manipulator decision makers will continue to refer to the past label. Why? Because the population is made up of a number of overlapping generations, and some of them will be actively reminded of the “fear” which was made up when the label was first released to the public. These “infected” generations will spread the fear among the whole population.
Marx died in 1883 - ONE HUNDRED FORTY ONE (141) years ago. The “Marx” label has become so effective that we continue to allow ourselves to be enchanted/bewitched by it. It is beyond absurd. How can you believe that the current, modern trends in social manipulation have anything to do with a person or ideas buried so long ago?
Marxism died with Marx. His original ideas could have been borrowed, customized and applied, year after year, by all subsequent decision makers, both followers and antagonists. But the label is no longer valid.
If you do not want your mind to be controlled, you need to change the label. Update your firmware. McCarthyism is a great label, because it was current, pertinent, very specific and easily recognisable. This label died in 1957, though. It’s no longer here.
If you want your mind to be free of control, you need to update all these labels. Make connections to the persons who perpetuate particular ideas and label these ideas with their surnames. Make it specific. Make it verifiable. This is the only way to get rid of the old conditioning.
I suspect that a prerequisite for the target population to be a target is a strong desire to believe lies. It's a bit like agriculture. Unhealthy crops attract life-eating pests and parasites. We could, however, ask why they were unhealthy in the first place, and the same applies here. Perhaps the cause in both realms involves undernourishment.
To bypass all searches for “whys”, which may take a day or a lifetime, I’d go for a test drive.
Maybe the reason is that we don’t care?
We don’t care whether this is truth or lies, because we don’t care about today. We hate our jobs, places where we live, people whom we meet every day. It’s all because (maybe) we do not do what we are supposed (like the fate) to do.
You take 15 years out of your life to become a master of something, and then you are told that you are nobody. Your poisoned mind cannot let go. But your are an MD! So you go on doing what you know is not your place in this life. Gradually, you stop caring. A few years more, and you will be free. Teachers, soldiers, public transport drivers, lawyers, eco activists, inventors, everyone is sold a lie, a carrot to drag you along.
So we get used to lies. Just an ad hoc explanation.
There is an interesting issue about lies. We cannot differentiate them from truth. Our mind cannot tell lies from truth. It has been proven in psychological experiments many times over.
So the repetition does not grant lies some supernatural power to become truth. Both lies and truth are expressions of certain states.
Our mind more easily “befriends” what is known to it. So it is not a matter of repetitions, it is a matter of exposure to the signal.
Another factor is how ready the person is to “digest” (absorb, assimilate) the signal. It turns out that we precognitively decide where to put our trust. Without knowing anything about a person, we subconsciously decide “yes, this one will be a great authority for me to obey and listen to and follow”. It happens in an instant, beyond our conscious control.
Once we choose to “follow” that person, he/she can lie 24/7 and we will accept everything as truth. Up to the point of denial of the facts put right in front of us. This mechanism is behind all “elections”. We do not elect persons. We elect to believe one person and not the other. Irrationally - because we have never met them, we don’t know them, and their presentations on a miniature screen may all be lies.
In exactly the same way we elect to believe that marxism is bad and capitalism is good, or the other way round, or both are bad and ecologism is good, or whatever. There are no rational premises to these choices. But all they are logical and can be preprogrammed - this is where PR, propaganda, marketing and advertising come in…
You have named it as it is. Self-hypnosis. We choose some things over others. We choose to be attracted to some persons or events, and not to others. The same with believing or trusting. Sure, there are causative factors, and aware, observant people can find them and use: interviewers, investigators, psychologists, actors.
The best part is with self-triggering emotional reactions as a “response” to a particular person. The actual sequence is just the opposite. We decide to express a certain emotion and then we are out on a search for a person suitable to put this emotion on. This mechanism is very subtle, and most orthodox professionals deny it. However, most normal people know it and are aware of it, especially women. It’s like when you are angry, you don’t care to return this anger to the person who caused it, just about anyone will do as a substitute. And we do the same with positive feelings, as well.
Master manipulators know this and use it on a daily basis.
I was married to a Chinese woman for about 10 years... the stories she and her parents told me.. "The One Hundred Flowers" ... "The Great Leap Forward" ... "The Cultural Revolution" ... "Tiannanmin Square" 😱
Wrong. That’s a problem with Marxism, suppositions and conjectures based on falsehoods.
Thomas Sowell has several YouTube videos on socialism which leads to communism. Why don’t you view those videos to gain a wider perspective on the subject on Marxism?
The core of the argument isn't about her bookshelf, it's about the current appeal of an ideology where the state takes care of everything for you--including your thinking. We don't want a semester's worth of study, we want tools that quickly illuminate people to the spell they are under.
Was this an exercise in AI? Because that's what the responses read like and felt like in this Q & A.
Repetitive, boring, fixed responses. So, for me, the subject matter is just another form of propaganda indoctrinating whomever into the difference between aged common sense education that used to be taught into a new form of woke education. What is said, described and formed between these polar opposites is a waste of politically correct grammar that we've all heard before
I have been wondering the same thing about these summaries being AI-generated. I find them annoyingly helpful, and I've trained myself to disregard the repetitiveness. But then I am not reading to be entertained, and that often enough means reading material I'm not terribly crazy about.
I'd rather have summaries like these than have to buy the book to see if it's worthwhile reading or not. This book I'll pass on, but I forwarded the summary to someone else who might learn something from the summary or the book.
It's amazing to now see you get into Marxism and through your interviews or discussions illustrate that without question you know less than zero about Marxism.
Please tell the audience how much of Marx you have read. You should be able to get into some details on this if you have any depth of knowledge on the matter.
I am reading Lindsay’s critique now of pro-trans-pedagogy, and it’s pretty good. But the man is a raving McCarthyite. And judging from the title, this is not a book I would recommend to anyone possessing more than half a brain cell. Lindsay is tilting at windmills, all the while frothing at the mouth.
I am an anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-Great Reset Marxist adjunct sociology professor, formerly working at CUNY. Over the past year, I have been dismissed from my teaching positions at two CUNY campus sociology departments, one after another, because of my insistence upon my right—and duty—to present different views, including my own radical Marxist view, on controversial issues, such as the slaughter in Palestine, the corruption of Dr. Anthony “da Science” Fauci, and the CIA-organized murder of Leftist pop stars like John Lennon. My “offense”, was not that I don’t subscribe to Marxism. I do. It is because the full time faculty who control these departments and colleges, are “woke” Centrist liberals. Despite the AAUP statement in the 1940s about the right to academic freedom, these conformiats do not like controversy, “conspiracy theories”, imitates the speech of film actors whose characters do not come from my personal ethnic or racial group (“cultural expropriation!”, anybody who criticizes Nikole Hannah Jones, Critical Race Theory, #Me2, Pope Fauci, or even so much as quotes from Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s expose of the latter.
Woke is the real enemy. Woke is the foundation of the hegemony of the ruling class Great Reset. Many so-called Marxists understand this. But due to their religio-scientism, they accept all the nonsense about the pandemic, the mandates, etc. etc. That’s unfortunate. But branding the woke academic establishment “Marxist” is positively Orwellian, as well as intellectually and politically lazy and irresponsible.
Most people don't understand or care to understand the difference between liberalism and left politics. They also don't understand the history of how the left was co-opted/assassinated/bombed/bought off and attacked through every trick in the book.
As truly ignorant as is most of the US populace on these matters they know less about political economy and pretty much nothing about Marxism.
The right wing nut jobs are just as politically incoherent as the right wing liberals- yes people liberalism is a right wing ideology.
Here those right-wingers can't see that the COVID agenda that they were in opposition to over these past four years (to varying degrees) was a global operation orchestrated by the capitalist's that they are now defending.
It's completely insane.
Trouble is Allen, most of the goofballs are consumed by "politics" – but are utterly oblivious to things like "morality" and "ethics." 🤔
Trouble is none of these people have read much of anything and don't know any actual history. Just flopping around from one reactionary position to the next based on tropes and entrenched sentiment.
🎯
I got about half-way through Volume 2 of "The Gulag Archipelago" before I had to put it down. It was just too appalling. Yet I wonder if our professor friend above could say even that much... 🙄
How many people know who Solzhenitsyn was and his support of fascism.
Guessing not many.
My ex-mother-in-law told me the story of her husband – a surgeon – during The Cultural Revolution dragged through streets on a rope covered in placards and pelted with mud and shit. His crimes against "The People"?
1. He was a surgeon and
2. He belonged to the Guomindang as a student.
She herself was a pediatrician, and the stress she endured during the Cultural Revolution – either of them could have been shot at any moment for any sin, real or imagined – resulted in a massive stroke at 45, left her speechless and paralysed for 3 months.. she eventually... recovered... but her career was toast; she was forced to retire. Meanwhile her crime? She was trained by Methodist missionaries.. 🙄💩
After the blood-soaked history of the 20th Century and 200 million dead, the fact that you admit to being a Marxist is already a damning indictment. How DARE you? Pull the beam out of your own eye first before you complain about the speck in anyone else's!
Captain Roy Harkness,
How dare I adopt Marxism as my belief system?! That's rather totalitarian. It is my right to adopt the beliefs I wish to, along with the duty each of us has to be willing to defend rationally the belief system of our choice. To ask me "how dare you", is not being reasonable. It's emotional and demagogic.
Your unstated assumption is that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were responsible for the deaths of 20 million people, because the Bolshevik Regime was constructed (falsely) in their name, and degenerated into Stalinism, which killed 20 million people. .
it is obvious to me that you are not intellectually equipped at this point, due to your own McCartyite ideology, to understand how ridiculous that assumption is.
You might begin by reading this article that I wrote: https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/was-the-bolshevik-regime-and-its
The leaders of the Bolsheviks, as both Kautsky and Luxemburg opined, did not have a Marxist political ideology--an ideology which is fundamentally democratic.
You might also try Richard N. Hunt"s @ volume work< THE POLITICAL IDEAS OF MARX AND ENGELS
"
Most everyone who cites some figure that was allegedly killed by Stalin/Soviet Union have no idea how that figure has been fed to them and how those numbers came to be the "accepted truth."
They also easily dismiss the numbers that have been killed by capitalism which are beyond calculation if we start in the 16th century, go to the various genocides of indigenous people, the Slave Trade and the numerous wars.
None of these people have read any Marx and can't and won't differentiate between Marxism and Stalinism and State capitalism for but one example.
Ah, the usual dishonest self-serving bullshit 🤔: "That's not true Communism" ...
🙄💩💣🕳
Explain to me please, why every interpretation of Marxism you care to mention has always resulted in the same outcome: Human bodies stacked like cordwood, half-way to the sun; how Jordan Peterson could bluntly state that every attempt at implementing Marxist principles has always been a catastrophic failure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoG9zBvvLQ&t=216s
I have Solzhenitsyn, I have my ex-wife's family's story of living under Mao, to illuminate my path – and I've lots of others, including my Polish-emigre professor of English history in first year, telling the class of her experiences under Communism. Or how about Michael Walsh's "The Devil's Pleasure Palace" which if memory serves mentions in passing Karl Marx's dalliance with Satanism and Black Magick. Karl Marx was one of the most contemptible human beings who has ever lived; he allowed 4 of his infant children to starve to death because he was too shiftless and irresponsible to get a job to support them. He got his maidservant pregnant, and tossed her and his illegitimate son into the street, to fend for themselves. There is NOTHING GOOD, to be said of Karl Marx and his Satanic Filth and the fact someone like you could be where you are, influencing impressionable children with this woolly-minded rubbish is an indictment against the academy, just by itself.
"it is obvious to me that you are not intellectually equipped at this point, due to your own McCartyite ideology, to understand how ridiculous that assumption is."?
I didn't say "20 million": I said "TWO HUNDRED MILLION": 66 million in Russia alone by Solzhenitsyn's accounting and I'm not inclined to question a man of his iron integrity. No-one knows how many that butcher Mao slaughtered but at least 75 million. A mere 2 million in Democratic Kampuchea – but 40% of the population. You asked me to read "Was the Bolshevik Regime and its Policies Marxist—or Blanquist?" https://bmccproftomsmith7.substack.com/p/was-the-bolshevik-regime-and-its. I will afford you that courtesy. In turn I will ask, have you ever watched "The Killing Fields"? Have you ever read "Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution"?
In the meantime? Get an honest job where you're not subverting impressionable children.
Well that wsa fast. I gave you an article to read, on how the Bolsheviks' state policy was not Marxist, but rather, deliberately totatlitarian. That regime spawned all the rest of the so-called Communist regimes, which were also, necessarily, Stalinist and totalitarian.
Did you read the article, or are you just talking through your hat?
and why is it that capitalism has led to mass murder of millions< all over the world?
In any case, this is quite beside the point of this thread. Which is Lindsay's confusion of woke-ism with Marxism.
I don't have any more time to respond to your hysteria.
I'm in the process of reading it. And I'm not being "hysterical", merely using strong language to voice my opposition to a deliberately contrived, developed and maintained abomination. Take the time to read CS Lewis' "The Abolition of Man" and EF Schumacher's "A Guide for the Perplexed"; they're both mercifully short, at under 100 and 200 pages respectively.
Where did you get that 200 million figure?
You do know Solzhenitsyn was a pathological liar among many other worse traits.
But that's not really the point- it's about examining assumptions that have been provided for you by forces that want you to believe a story- incidentally those are the very same forces that are violently oppressing us today.
In turn, where did you get the idea Solzhenitsyn was a pathological liar?
200 million is an estimate I derived from totalling up the estimates of others of the democides / genocides perpetrated by all flavours of Marxism. A fairly straight-forward procedure.
Solzhenitsyn became famous throughout the capitalist world towards the end of 1960 with his book, The Gulag Archipelago. He himself had been sentenced in 1946 to 8 years in a labor camp for counter-revolutionary activity in the form of distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the fight against Nazi Germany in the Second World War could have been avoided if the Soviet government had reached a compromise with Hitler. Solzhenitsyn also accused the Soviet government and Stalin of being even worse than Hitler from the point of view, according to him, of the dreadful effects of the war on the people of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn did not hide his Nazi sympathies.
Solzhenitsyn began in 1962 to publish books in the Soviet Union with the help of Nikita Khrushchev. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature with his book The Gulag Archipelago.
In the US, Solzhenitsyn was frequently invited to speak at important meetings. He was, for example, the main speaker at the AFL-CIO union congress in 1975, and on 15 July 1975 he was invited to give a lecture on the world situation to the US Senate.
His lectures amounted to violent and provocative agitation, arguing and propagandising for the most reactionary positions. Among other things he agitated for Vietnam to be attacked again after its victory over the US.
After 40 years of fascism in Portugal, when left-wing army officers took power in the people’s revolution of 1974, Solzhenitsyn began to propagandize in favor of US military intervention.
American journalists who dared write in favor of peace between the US and the Soviet Union were accused by Solzhenitsyn in his speeches of being traitors. Solzhenitsyn also propagandized in favor of increasing US military capacity against the Soviet Union, which he claimed was more powerful in ‘tanks and aeroplanes, by five to seven times, than the US’ as well as in atomic weapons which ‘in short’ he alleged were ‘two, three or even five times’ more powerful in the Soviet Union than those held by the US.
Solzhenitsyn’s lectures on the Soviet Union represented the voice of the extreme right. But he himself went even further to the right in his public support of fascism.
After Franco died in 1975, the Spanish fascist regime began to lose control of the political situation and at the beginning of 1976, events in Spain captured world public opinion. There were strikes and demonstrations to demand democracy and freedom, and Franco’s heir, King Juan Carlos, was obliged to introduce some liberalisation in order to calm down the social agitation.
At this moment in Spanish political history, Alexander Solzhenitsyn appeared in Madrid and gave an interview to the programme Directísimo one Saturday night, the 20th of March, at peak viewing time (see Spanish newspapers of 21 March 1976).
Solzhenitsyn, who had been provided with the questions in advance, used the occasion to make all kinds of reactionary statements. His intention was not to support the King’s so-called liberalisation measures. Solzhenitsyn warned against democratic reform. In his television interview he declared that 110 million Russians had died the victims of socialism (total lies created by Western Intelligence assets) and he compared ‘the slavery to which Soviet people were subjected to the freedom enjoyed in Spain’.
‘Last autumn,’ said Solzhenitsyn, ‘world public opinion was worried about the fate of Spanish terrorists [i.e., Spanish anti-fascists sentenced to death by the Franco regime]. All the time progressive public opinion demands democratic political reform while supporting acts of terrorism’.
To inquiries by the journalists as to whether such statements could not be seen as support for regimes in countries where there was no liberty, Solzhenitsyn replied: ‘I only know one place where there is no liberty and that is Russia.’
Solzhenitsyn’s statements on Spanish television were a direct support to Spanish fascism, an ideology he supported to his final days.
What Solzhenitsyn wanted for Russia’s political future is a return to the authoritarian regime of the Tsars.
None of this is controversial and it is all in the public record. Like virtually all history it is kept from the public and most are completely ill-informed on these matters particularly when it comes to the ex-Soviet Union.
So you haven't looked into the archival records of what happened in the Soviet Union? Hard to take you seriously in this Roy.
Solzhenitsyn supported Franco's fascism among many other buried historical facts.
His books came about through support from Nikita Khrushchev. His and Robert Conquests claims are nothing but lies and exaggerations as documented through archival records which are purposefully ignored in the Western academic and media circles.
His books were widely published and catapulted in capitalist countries, as he became one of the most valuable instruments of imperialism in combating the socialism of the Soviet Union. His texts on the labor camps were added to the propaganda on the millions who were supposed to have died in the Soviet Union and were presented by the capitalist mass media as though they were true.
The methods Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev, Conquest and others used for deriving the numbers of those who died in labor camps were completely fraudulent.
In 1974, Solzhenitsyn renounced his Soviet citizenship and emigrated to Switzerland and then the US. At that time he was considered by the capitalist press to be the greatest fighter for freedom and democracy. His Nazi sympathies were buried so as not to interfere with the propaganda war against socialism.
Solzhenitsyn also supported US military intervention in Portugal which, according to him, would join the Warsaw Pact if the US did not intervene. In his lectures, Solzhenitsyn always bemoaned the liberation of Portugal’s African colonies.
Michael Parenti has written about these numbers. None of them have a source that is anything more than just an opinion. It is just assumed that these massive death counts are true w/o any evidence. For example, in the 90's Western scholars went to Russia to investigate the records of the Soviet penal system. They assumed that there would have been many millions of prisoners. After digging thru all the available records, they could only account for about 900,000 - or less than half the prison population of the US. (900 k is still a lot, not saying the USSR was perfect by any means). Now, you could say that the figures were falsified - ok, fine. However, that doesn't bring you any closer to any numbers that are based on reality. You have to recall that for decades (and really to the present time) the US has engaged in near constant anti-communist propaganda. The truth may never be known. Brandishing those numbers about is just another form of propaganda you yourself are participating in.
Through reading history- not the spoon fed US/UK intelligence portrayals of this venal liar. So you don't know about this guy? You don't know of his staunch support of fascists?
And by the way< your insinuation that the recent mass murders of 33,000+ Palestinians, and millions more all over the globe as the result of imperialism, is just a "speck"--that's GROTESQUELY INSENSITIVE.
Have you ever actually READ anything by Marx, Engels, or Marx and Engels?
"Strange all this Difference should be
‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!"
– John Byrom
Ok I'm going to mute this thread now, because the Captain here is using this as a bully pulpit for his McCarthyite hysteria, rather than sticking to the subject. Get in tough if you want to say something rational to me about the actual topic of this thread--the confusion of Marxism with woke-ism, by Lindsay.
Actually yes I have.
Which pieces?
I insinuated nothing of the kind. And the score is more like 200,000, if Ralph Nader is to be trusted, and I've never caught him in a lie.
"How Many Gazans Have Already Died? Perhaps 200,000" https://www.unz.com/article/how-many-gazans-have-already-died-perhaps-200000/
Go live in Russia,China, Venezuela,Iran etc if you want Marxism. I came from a Communist Marxist country and it ain't pretty. You have no voice, you own nothing, you have no freedoms. Don't allow yourself to ve part of the "herd"... think for yourself. Teaching DEI in our schools is dangerous and destructive. Yes I'm a former elementary school teacher and what they're teaching our children today is evil. Beware parents. These children are the future of the world as we know it. Dzvinka Dzvinka Dzvinka
Would that be go live in the many places that were establishing autonomous governmental and social structures and labor unions that were in opposition to transnational exploitation that were allowed to develop on their own?
Or go live in such places that were attempting to do such but were never allowed as they were bombed into the stone age by the US/UK Western cartels as well as coups, assassinations, embargoes etc.
What they have been "teaching" (indoctrinating) children with in US schools has always been evil- the US education system is based on the Prussian system with the architects of this system being the industrialists of the 19th and 20th century that were also responsible for exploitation and crimes everywhere you turned.
You sound like yet another teacher who knows zero actual history- which is almost always the case- just another reactionary.
Well, we can do both: teach the basics (reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic) AND critically evaluate the structures, players, and mechanisms that currently largely hold sway over this planet and her peoples. A big problem for me in this interview is that the word “education” is often used where the word “schooling” would be much more appropriate. Schooling, for the most part, does involve training and forming and molding a person into behaving, memorizing or reacting a certain way, and, to some degree, it is necessary. For most of us, however, once we have mastered the “3 Rs”, the bulk of our education comes from “doing”, as in real life experience. Blurring the distinction between the two processes is rarely helpful, and is just confusing. We do need to challenge, far, far far more than is done now, the ruling classes and hold them accountable for their egregious behavior. That’s not Marxist, that is just common sense. And we also need to be able to coherently and rationally do so, which points back to the importance of a good fundamental background in the basics, as well as critical thinking.
Following some great ideas from Bezmenov’s Substack, combined with the user-guide movie for future mind controllers, I would say that we only need one basic tool, or tactics. When applied, and applied consistently and with strong perseverance, it will be immensely successful, without the target population being even aware of how their minds have been redesigned.
This tactics is labeling. Putting a name on anything, the most vague you can think of, but a name short enough and “catchy” to be converted into an anchor to trigger the desired reaction of the controlled mind.
The media are now abundant with such trigger labels: Democrats, Republicans, anti-vaxxer, lives matter, freedom fighter, pronouns, queer, great reset, digital currency, Jews, Putin, China, patriotism, even constitution has been converted into a label. “Marxism” (and any versions of this name) is just another vague term which is excellent to trigger a desired mind-controlled reaction.
When such terms are first presented to the public, they are charged negatively. As a linguistic structure, they are neutral, words like any other, simply describing a specific phenomenon. The negative charge is associated with them by the presentation of the context in which the target population (“we”) can paint their own image. PR companies will not tell you why the term should be interpreted negatively. The vaguer references they make, the more negative impression your imagination will build.
Once you create your own negative interpretation of the term, you will self-propel the suggested fear associations. The impression of a vague, intangible “enemy” will terrorise you into spreading your fear among your neighbors and colleagues. The governing PR-advised decision makers won’t need to do anything specific. You - we, the public - will become their loudspeakers. The propaganda effect will be achieved through you.
All labels which end with -ism are such trigger terms. You will create and build up negative images inspired in some ancient past by truly skillful master manipulators. The phenomenon may no longer be here, like the “threat of communism” of 1950s, those who created the label may no longer be here, that future generations of manipulator decision makers will continue to refer to the past label. Why? Because the population is made up of a number of overlapping generations, and some of them will be actively reminded of the “fear” which was made up when the label was first released to the public. These “infected” generations will spread the fear among the whole population.
Marx died in 1883 - ONE HUNDRED FORTY ONE (141) years ago. The “Marx” label has become so effective that we continue to allow ourselves to be enchanted/bewitched by it. It is beyond absurd. How can you believe that the current, modern trends in social manipulation have anything to do with a person or ideas buried so long ago?
Marxism died with Marx. His original ideas could have been borrowed, customized and applied, year after year, by all subsequent decision makers, both followers and antagonists. But the label is no longer valid.
If you do not want your mind to be controlled, you need to change the label. Update your firmware. McCarthyism is a great label, because it was current, pertinent, very specific and easily recognisable. This label died in 1957, though. It’s no longer here.
If you want your mind to be free of control, you need to update all these labels. Make connections to the persons who perpetuate particular ideas and label these ideas with their surnames. Make it specific. Make it verifiable. This is the only way to get rid of the old conditioning.
I suspect that a prerequisite for the target population to be a target is a strong desire to believe lies. It's a bit like agriculture. Unhealthy crops attract life-eating pests and parasites. We could, however, ask why they were unhealthy in the first place, and the same applies here. Perhaps the cause in both realms involves undernourishment.
A great comment.
To bypass all searches for “whys”, which may take a day or a lifetime, I’d go for a test drive.
Maybe the reason is that we don’t care?
We don’t care whether this is truth or lies, because we don’t care about today. We hate our jobs, places where we live, people whom we meet every day. It’s all because (maybe) we do not do what we are supposed (like the fate) to do.
You take 15 years out of your life to become a master of something, and then you are told that you are nobody. Your poisoned mind cannot let go. But your are an MD! So you go on doing what you know is not your place in this life. Gradually, you stop caring. A few years more, and you will be free. Teachers, soldiers, public transport drivers, lawyers, eco activists, inventors, everyone is sold a lie, a carrot to drag you along.
So we get used to lies. Just an ad hoc explanation.
There is an interesting issue about lies. We cannot differentiate them from truth. Our mind cannot tell lies from truth. It has been proven in psychological experiments many times over.
So the repetition does not grant lies some supernatural power to become truth. Both lies and truth are expressions of certain states.
Our mind more easily “befriends” what is known to it. So it is not a matter of repetitions, it is a matter of exposure to the signal.
Another factor is how ready the person is to “digest” (absorb, assimilate) the signal. It turns out that we precognitively decide where to put our trust. Without knowing anything about a person, we subconsciously decide “yes, this one will be a great authority for me to obey and listen to and follow”. It happens in an instant, beyond our conscious control.
Once we choose to “follow” that person, he/she can lie 24/7 and we will accept everything as truth. Up to the point of denial of the facts put right in front of us. This mechanism is behind all “elections”. We do not elect persons. We elect to believe one person and not the other. Irrationally - because we have never met them, we don’t know them, and their presentations on a miniature screen may all be lies.
In exactly the same way we elect to believe that marxism is bad and capitalism is good, or the other way round, or both are bad and ecologism is good, or whatever. There are no rational premises to these choices. But all they are logical and can be preprogrammed - this is where PR, propaganda, marketing and advertising come in…
You have named it as it is. Self-hypnosis. We choose some things over others. We choose to be attracted to some persons or events, and not to others. The same with believing or trusting. Sure, there are causative factors, and aware, observant people can find them and use: interviewers, investigators, psychologists, actors.
The best part is with self-triggering emotional reactions as a “response” to a particular person. The actual sequence is just the opposite. We decide to express a certain emotion and then we are out on a search for a person suitable to put this emotion on. This mechanism is very subtle, and most orthodox professionals deny it. However, most normal people know it and are aware of it, especially women. It’s like when you are angry, you don’t care to return this anger to the person who caused it, just about anyone will do as a substitute. And we do the same with positive feelings, as well.
Master manipulators know this and use it on a daily basis.
Marxism is the ultimate ignorance because some misfits decide how everyone else will live in a dictatorship.
I was married to a Chinese woman for about 10 years... the stories she and her parents told me.. "The One Hundred Flowers" ... "The Great Leap Forward" ... "The Cultural Revolution" ... "Tiannanmin Square" 😱
Orwell doesn't begin to do his subject justice. And no-one dare point in the direction of the cause of the contagion... https://www.bitchute.com/video/7LmnFZr9hZN3/
What are your three favorite or least favorite works written by Karl Marx.
C'mon be honest here- you've not read anything written by Marx and certainly haven't studied it.
Wrong. That’s a problem with Marxism, suppositions and conjectures based on falsehoods.
Thomas Sowell has several YouTube videos on socialism which leads to communism. Why don’t you view those videos to gain a wider perspective on the subject on Marxism?
Here is one, Why I Quit Being a Marxist:
https://youtu.be/HpCm6mOu0MU?si=G_euJnt9Ydv3LMV5
You refuse to acknowledge a scholar who rejected Marxism. Instead keep on a path of ignorance of Marxism.
You didn't answer the question.
What are your three favorite or least favorite works written by Karl Marx?
Expound please.
The core of the argument isn't about her bookshelf, it's about the current appeal of an ideology where the state takes care of everything for you--including your thinking. We don't want a semester's worth of study, we want tools that quickly illuminate people to the spell they are under.
Was this an exercise in AI? Because that's what the responses read like and felt like in this Q & A.
Repetitive, boring, fixed responses. So, for me, the subject matter is just another form of propaganda indoctrinating whomever into the difference between aged common sense education that used to be taught into a new form of woke education. What is said, described and formed between these polar opposites is a waste of politically correct grammar that we've all heard before
I have been wondering the same thing about these summaries being AI-generated. I find them annoyingly helpful, and I've trained myself to disregard the repetitiveness. But then I am not reading to be entertained, and that often enough means reading material I'm not terribly crazy about.
I'd rather have summaries like these than have to buy the book to see if it's worthwhile reading or not. This book I'll pass on, but I forwarded the summary to someone else who might learn something from the summary or the book.
more i read about Friere the more i liked! Thank you
Once again this substack shows that it is one of the few substacks that provides the most valuable content.
It's amazing to now see you get into Marxism and through your interviews or discussions illustrate that without question you know less than zero about Marxism.
Please tell the audience how much of Marx you have read. You should be able to get into some details on this if you have any depth of knowledge on the matter.
Just got thru listening to his time with Joe Rogan while working out recently.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IlRNjBQm5Y