honestly, how can you be an anti-imperialist and an American patriot? do you just watch Saving Private Ryan on loop and plug your ears with your fingers yelling LA LA LA LA LA LA LA anytime anything else comes on?
This is !the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net, and you're asking who cares about dunking on bird site takes?
Okay, you're a patriot. What exactly do you love about the US?
The examples are like the Iraq war protests, which failed miserably as the country went into Iraq anyway.
Martin Luther King? A man who was most likely murdered by the state for trying to change things. A man whose beliefs and actions have been watered down to be palatable for both liberals and conservatives, enough that they both invoke him without understanding him.
BLM? Once again absorbed into the Democratic party and nullified. The response to huge protests all over the country was both political parties getting into a competition over who loved the police more and who could give them the most money.
You're literally in basically the current imperial superpower in the world and you have the audacity to be like "It's actually Communist to love this country". Why do you love the country that has attempted to harass, damage, nullify, and kill any sort of working-class movement throughout its history? Or do you just mean that when you do the revolution, some of you get to wave the US flag around?
Or do you just mean that when you do the revolution, some of you get to wave the US flag around?
Even that's an optimistic reading.
The other reading is that when he says he's a "patriot" who "loves America" he means that in exactly the same way folks like Tucker Carlson do, and he defines "anti-imperialism" very narrowly (and wrongly) to line up with the shallow anti-interventionism of the populist right.
A lot of people feel icky when they insult their neighbors, or they don't want to view them as the imperial dogs and swine that they are. "The US" had never been anything but a Blade Runner off-world colony for western Europe's most insane bourgeoisie and failsons to buy a peerage instead of being graced with it by God, but people still like the people they're stuck with.
I think people imagine anti-patriots want to like, burn the crops and salt the earth and sink the US into the sea, rather than change the government and economy into things that aren’t miserable
if annihilation is on the table, the least we could do is give it back in mostly working order
/uj for the record I'm with you in that being anti-American Empire is not the same as being anti-America. I don't think you can solve anything by just blowing shit up, just ask :a-guy:
but any would-be anti-imperial project will have to incorporate political violence into its toolkit, because the American State can and will use any force it thinks necessary in order to defend itself and eventually that will need to be opposed in kind. So I can't fault political violence on its methods, only its timing.
/j DEATH TO AMERKKKA ACAB 103,410,868 9/11s!
burn the crops and salt the earth and sink the US into the sea
:sicko-blur: let's do :ukkk: next
But yeah obviously destroy America doesn't mean carpet bomb it with nukes, and refers to the state of America as it exists.
sink the US into the sea
Step two after operation Arizona Bay
This is just one of those “yes I’m x identity, yes I do y that is contradictory to that group, yes we exist” memes with extra steps
Having two different definitions for a word then getting big mad at others for not mirroring your sentiment at the definition you're operating under.
...classic leftists.
Is there a single person who calls themself a Marxist-Leninist who supports the American state, imperialist machine, or settler colonialism? Perhaps it would be more likely that the other person understands "patriotism" to mean "standing with the people even in the face of personal detriment".
Have these terminally online motherfuckers ever considered that you aren't required to have an opinion on everything? Every person involved here could have just said nothing instead of whatever esoteric nonsense they're getting worked up about.
Ask yourself, "would voicing my opinion aid the development of class consciousness or people's material conditions or show solidarity with someone struggling?", if not, consider shutting the fuck up so that you don't further increase the surface area that schism can take hold upon amongst the left
Remember: oftentimes, the most useful thing you can do as a leftist is shut the fuck up.
https://twitter.com/rogsalmon/status/1435241412690206728
I am a communist and a Rhodesian patriot, we exist
https://twitter.com/rogsalmon/status/1435241412690206728
I am a communist and a Rhodesian patriot, we exist
:michael-laugh:
am stupid, someone please explain why I should be mad.
-7DeadlyFetishes
This tweet is calling people ultras for being opposed to "American Patriotism".
I can understand Hakim liking this since his internal experience of nationalism is as part of a national liberation movement, and he might well not get the connotations of "Patriotism" as a statement of political support.
I am a patriot of the greatest imperialist state in history. I am an anti-imperialist. I am very smart.
Twitter link BTW, he's getting dragged in the replies: https://twitter.com/MarxMidwest/status/1435038558717419525
:purge-1:
:purge-2:
I legitimately don't know what "American patriot" is supposed mean in that context, beyond the usual use of that phrase to mean "jingoistic, pro-war, pro-empire." How can you possibly be anti-imperialist and be for American imperialism?
Like, do they think it means "kinda likes most of the people who live in America" or something? Because no one uses "American patriot" to mean that.
Yeah, if someone says they're a "German Patriot", no one thinks they're talking about Dirndls and Goethe. Ditto the USA.
Of course not, Germans should be rightly proud of the good things about their culture.
But, there's a difference between "I love my country, it's culture, and the cool things we've done as a people. It's the best country for me to thrive in." and "I'm a patriot".
Patriot (at least in the anglosphere and especially outside the USA) implies a militant defense of national culture and usually the political system, if not an outright "Best country in the world" supremacist statement.
It's not just shorthand for Nationalist, but outright Revanchist sentiment. When I think of an Australian "Patriot" I think immediately of a fascist gang with Eureka flag tattoos beating up teachers for talking about Captain Cook with a critical eye.
In Germany we had plenty studies done, turns out there is no functional difference between patriot and nationalist. Those who checked patriot boxed had the same sentiments as nationalists in othering others, being prone to authoritarian thought, diminishing fascism etc.
Also I want to highlight that the talk Skoubalon does led to the following sentence:
Of course not, Germans should be rightly proud of the good things about their culture.
This strengthens the ideas of Germans existing as a distinct people, strengthens the ideas of a good culture of Germany (which Skoubalon did previous also claim to have existed and be (more) relevant than Fascism - thus continuity of it till today and the things before leading to it) and that it is okay to be "proud of ones culture", which is often a hard dog whistle. Not thinking they are dog whistling, but sure that they are using talking points that would get applouded by the reactionaries in Germany.
I agree with pretty much all of this, and I get that any display of cultural attachment can be fraught at best in Germany. "Proud" can be a (softer) dog whistle here too, and I perhaps used the wrong term.
"People of any origin who live in Germany are allowed to like and feel attachment to good things that happen to be in Germany, both current and historical. The Fischbrötchen isn't Fascist." is what I was aiming for.
That said left needs to be able to say that it's ok to like the place you live in, while engaging with the fact that all the good things are always tangled up in an antagonism with the bad parts. One that can't be fully resolved, only progressed.
To be internationalist doesn't mean to float in a disembodied sea of enlightenment universalism, or to say only the cultures of the Third World have any validity (even though they must be defended from imperialism.) To engage with local culture in the west without enabling Fascism is a hard problem for leftists but we need to work with it.
I guess we're talking about semantics at this point.
To me, and to most people I know, "Patriotism" is a substantially stronger statement than "I love my country", and even that is much much weaker than what the sort of wanker who would actually come out and say it in public would be trying to say.
Maybe this is an Australian/New Zealand specific thing, because of how our national character is tied up in disastrous colonial military action. Maybe it's a softer meaning where you live and doesn't have those connotations.
But I have never met anyone in real life who would describe themselves as a Patriot who hasn't been a chud, including the people I know who are centre-right and working class.
Patriotism =/= supremacism =/= revanchism, these are all very distinct categories from each other.
followed by
It just means that you have a special relationship with your family that you don’t have with others.
So people have a special relation (akin to a family and thus maybe based on love and solidarity) to "their" nation? I disagree except for the structuring of ones life. A nation and the exclusion of others which comes from nation states esp. those who are based on blood like the German one does (till recently having German blood was enough to claim citizenship, but having lived here for 3 generations wasn't).
I understand what you mean with your arguments, they just feel too close to the talking points of the identitarians in Germany for me to be taken seriously and without rejection.
Okay, I have German heritage (and Slav heritage if that counts for anything) and you are badly mistaken.
Not only is Goethe a bad person for being anti semitic, kinda racist, but also he sold ten(s) of thousand soldiers (who were often pressed into military service) as slave soldiers to the US, but also he used what amounts to slave labour in the mines/road construction he oversaw and lead to cruel harshly exploitative policies in those mines.
Furthermore it is a dog whistle in Germany to say "muh heritage" so no, except for reactionaries and a few "normies" this reads right wing, in addition what is this "German heritage" supposed to be? Before 1870 there was no Germany, but only a political disunited bundle of small semi-feudalist states. To take a person of ~1780 to 1830 (Goethe) as heritage is kinda disengenious.
We can’t just take the Nazis as defining Germany for all time
This is revisionist take and in German left circles or academic non left circles would get you silenced hard.
Germany has an incredible artistic, philosophical, and literary history even compared to the other big European powers
Is culturchauvinistic, too.
Germany’s is pretty alright.
No. You just don't know about "our" "heritage" and history.
when Hitler never even won a fucking election
The NSDAP won plenty elections, yes the Machtergreifung [seizure of power] did follow not cause they had the majority in the Reichtsag, but that isn't necessary to seize power for fascists as Mussolini showed, too. Controlling the police institutions of the federal and state levels are good enough.
The idea that you have to lead the majority government (at best only with your party) is idealist and might be based in an understanding of legitimacy of governments by the amount of seats they hold in government which isn't the case.
much less represent the will of the bulk of the German people
Is also a bad take, but I will not talk about it.
