I don’t want to give MLK a pass, but I was thinking about something similar: so many European communists in the 19th century had kinda bad takes on the USA (Marx and Engels included).
Obviously we are all products of our times, but I wonder if how much information we have at our disposal now (thanks to the internet) skews our perceptions of how easy it is to find out information, even things we are receptive to.
It was basically impossible to learn anything about anything back in the 90s. Like you could go to libraries and then you were limited to whatever they had, and if you knew it existed you could use inter-library loan. But, like, the limits of the world were newspapers, popular magazines, bookstores, and libraries. Good luck learning anythign without committing serious time to it.
Just getting exposed to it could be challenging, today you could have a Hexbear tell you on the Internet to read Lenin or post hog and, you know, go from there.
Good luck for that to happen before the Internet, especially if you lived in a reactionary or just lib territory
Even with so much access to information, almost everyone still gets almost all their information from local sources they trust, in their native language. Actively seeking out foreign news and blogs is a good counter to this. Browser translation is excellent these days.
I don’t want to give MLK a pass, but I was thinking about something similar: so many European communists in the 19th century had kinda bad takes on the USA (Marx and Engels included).
Obviously we are all products of our times, but I wonder if how much information we have at our disposal now (thanks to the internet) skews our perceptions of how easy it is to find out information, even things we are receptive to.
It was basically impossible to learn anything about anything back in the 90s. Like you could go to libraries and then you were limited to whatever they had, and if you knew it existed you could use inter-library loan. But, like, the limits of the world were newspapers, popular magazines, bookstores, and libraries. Good luck learning anythign without committing serious time to it.
Just getting exposed to it could be challenging, today you could have a Hexbear tell you on the Internet to read Lenin or post hog and, you know, go from there.
Good luck for that to happen before the Internet, especially if you lived in a reactionary or just lib territory
Even with so much access to information, almost everyone still gets almost all their information from local sources they trust, in their native language. Actively seeking out foreign news and blogs is a good counter to this. Browser translation is excellent these days.