WideningGyro [any]

Coming from the person who defended generational racism because one bad thing happened once.

I have a close friend who was kidnapped and kept as a fucking slave by a gang once. That gang’s ethnic makeup? Romani. It’s a horrible story and I hate the people who subjected my friend to that shit and gave him PTSD with a burning passion and hope they die in a ditch. And yet, when talking about the extreme racism Romani people face, I don’t decide to defend it because a handful of horrible people did something horrible to my friend. It’s not that fucking hard to separate general systems of oppression from individuals and their actions. You even acknowledged how extremely limited your knowledge of Romani people is, and yet still chose to defend racism.

Can you point us to the exact page of the Black Book you get your numbers from? I want to read along at home

This is really the point to hammer home. Back in my lib days, I started hanging out with a dude who was much cooler than me, and his anarchist friends. We once got to talking about how our town used to have a pretty substantial neo-nazi presence, in the 80s-90s. I said something to the effect of “good thing people are smarter today!” and he and his friends got really animated and saying how “they didn’t just go away one day, we fucking chased them out of here!”

While at first I just didn’t like getting yelled at, it eventually dawned upon me that that he was right. I, and everyone I had ever talked to about it (other libs), just assumed that that whole unpleasant nazi thing just went away, through the magic of progress, presumably. It was just a thing that was there once, now wasn’t. People like him and his friends (and I’ve since met many more) were the actual people who went out and risked life and limb to oppose the nazis everywhere the went, to vandalize their posters and stickers the moment they went up, to show up in numbers every time there was a demonstration. To do everything to make life as shitty as possible for these pieces of shit until it just wasn’t really viable to be a nazi in our town anymore.

That whole realization did a lot to cure me of my “we can’t sink to their level”/freezepeach brainworms.

Yeah, clearly the Soviet, Chinese and Cuban workers had completely different interests than being raised out of poverty and squalor. Damn those dastardly political parties and their… diligent work towards eradictaing poverty while promoting actual, decentralized democracy.

And I assume by “dictatorial regimes” you mean any actually existing socialist country, right?

Do you agree with this meme and consider yourself part of “the Left”? Just curious

I’d love for you to explain exactly what you mean by “tankie”