I wonder how many people have spent some time on incel forums. I have, though I never self-identified as an incel (I only looked at these forums out of curiosity while I happened to be dating someone) and an interesting thing about them is that they spend way more time than you would think not talking about women. Yeah, they mostly talk about women, but there were a lot of threads that were like "When I go to the grocery store, everyone gives me strange looks. They think I'm disgusting and they're probably right."
I think people ignore how these incel communities are an indoctrination process that prey on the severely mentally ill, racial minorities, and actual children. It's not just an evil that bursts from someone's heart when they spontaneously choose to be a reactionary after getting turned down twice. It's a somewhat-elaborate ideology that people, often minorities of some kind, are taught to believe, using their histories of trauma (as in spending a 7+ years being bullied, not not getting laid) as "evidence" that the world is just like this, maybe even on an evolutionary basis, and they are encouraged to hold on to this false consciousness by their peers standing in so-called solidarity with them. These same peers make a contest of who can devise the most soul-crushing posts to encourage catastrophizing and suicidality in each other ("rope fuel"), but I guess that's what false consciousness gets you.
I don't really know what my purpose in saying this is, I just tend to feel bad for the people abused by this cult, and yes, that's with having read some of their repulsive fantasies (though obviously I struggle to feel bad for the specific people who post those). Obviously they need re-education. Obviously. But I think your prospects of re-educating someone are going to be pretty poor if you don't understand their motivations and their context. You can't just fucking Ludovico Technique Mao into their brains and overwrite what is there. Reaction and false consciousness are a knot to be untied, and you can't get past the problem by trying to cut through it instead of unraveling it.
In revolutionary circumstances, fascists should be shot on the basis of practical expedience. Once the dust is settled, if you have the resources to imprison someone and you still choose to execute them, you're a sicko. If you can re-educate them and you choose to have them rot in prison, you're a sicko. Treating people, including the followers of a reactionary movement, as just an uncomplicated evil that exists only for you to inflict pain or death on it is itself reactionary. As communists, yes, quite a number of people will need to die as a matter of winning the revolution, but when we have someone who can be a good member of society -- and that means basically everyone, even the people we both dislike -- and we choose to treat them with cruelty out of our own ignorance or a malice we might not even acknowledge exists, we've already begun to take the wrong path.
On average, who do you think was the bigger reactionary? One of these not-fucking fuckers, or Emperor Puyi? The one who collaborated with the KMT and Imperial Japan and opened the gates to a marauding occupation China that I'd need to CW to say anything about? Who has done more to "deserve" punishment? This may be controversial, but I think it's Puyi. So what did Mao do with him? Shoot him? Torture him? No, most of you reading this know that he was re-educated and Mao saw it as a meaningful victory for the CPC that they were able to turn this depraved figure into a good citizen of the new China. Mao was right, and the CPC and WPK were right to take the Americans they captured in the Korean War and do their best to re-educate them, despite knowing the US military was a heinous organization full of wildly violent racists. [Don't tell me there was a draft, there is no equivalency between some prison time and slaughtering countless civilians.]
I will repeat Marx's motto until I die: "Nothing human is alien to me." It should be the aspiration of any communist, even if we all acknowledge that many of those people need to die* nonetheless, that's just the nature of a revolutionary war. Not a single death should be because they "deserve it," but only because the rest of us need it to happen to end the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, to protect our vulnerable comrades, etc. etc.
But most of all I just wanted to procrastinate from finals. And before you ask, no, I did not watch the video.
dumb rant
I wonder how many people have spent some time on incel forums. I have, though I never self-identified as an incel (I only looked at these forums out of curiosity while I happened to be dating someone) and an interesting thing about them is that they spend way more time than you would think not talking about women. Yeah, they mostly talk about women, but there were a lot of threads that were like "When I go to the grocery store, everyone gives me strange looks. They think I'm disgusting and they're probably right."
I think people ignore how these incel communities are an indoctrination process that prey on the severely mentally ill, racial minorities, and actual children. It's not just an evil that bursts from someone's heart when they spontaneously choose to be a reactionary after getting turned down twice. It's a somewhat-elaborate ideology that people, often minorities of some kind, are taught to believe, using their histories of trauma (as in spending a 7+ years being bullied, not not getting laid) as "evidence" that the world is just like this, maybe even on an evolutionary basis, and they are encouraged to hold on to this false consciousness by their peers standing in so-called solidarity with them. These same peers make a contest of who can devise the most soul-crushing posts to encourage catastrophizing and suicidality in each other ("rope fuel"), but I guess that's what false consciousness gets you.
I don't really know what my purpose in saying this is, I just tend to feel bad for the people abused by this cult, and yes, that's with having read some of their repulsive fantasies (though obviously I struggle to feel bad for the specific people who post those). Obviously they need re-education. Obviously. But I think your prospects of re-educating someone are going to be pretty poor if you don't understand their motivations and their context. You can't just fucking Ludovico Technique Mao into their brains and overwrite what is there. Reaction and false consciousness are a knot to be untied, and you can't get past the problem by trying to cut through it instead of unraveling it.
In revolutionary circumstances, fascists should be shot on the basis of practical expedience. Once the dust is settled, if you have the resources to imprison someone and you still choose to execute them, you're a sicko. If you can re-educate them and you choose to have them rot in prison, you're a sicko. Treating people, including the followers of a reactionary movement, as just an uncomplicated evil that exists only for you to inflict pain or death on it is itself reactionary. As communists, yes, quite a number of people will need to die as a matter of winning the revolution, but when we have someone who can be a good member of society -- and that means basically everyone, even the people we both dislike -- and we choose to treat them with cruelty out of our own ignorance or a malice we might not even acknowledge exists, we've already begun to take the wrong path.
On average, who do you think was the bigger reactionary? One of these not-fucking fuckers, or Emperor Puyi? The one who collaborated with the KMT and Imperial Japan and opened the gates to a marauding occupation China that I'd need to CW to say anything about? Who has done more to "deserve" punishment? This may be controversial, but I think it's Puyi. So what did Mao do with him? Shoot him? Torture him? No, most of you reading this know that he was re-educated and Mao saw it as a meaningful victory for the CPC that they were able to turn this depraved figure into a good citizen of the new China. Mao was right, and the CPC and WPK were right to take the Americans they captured in the Korean War and do their best to re-educate them, despite knowing the US military was a heinous organization full of wildly violent racists. [Don't tell me there was a draft, there is no equivalency between some prison time and slaughtering countless civilians.]
I will repeat Marx's motto until I die: "Nothing human is alien to me." It should be the aspiration of any communist, even if we all acknowledge that many of those people need to die* nonetheless, that's just the nature of a revolutionary war. Not a single death should be because they "deserve it," but only because the rest of us need it to happen to end the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, to protect our vulnerable comrades, etc. etc.
But most of all I just wanted to procrastinate from finals. And before you ask, no, I did not watch the video.