You nerds trying to rehab this social imperialist need to read what he actually says. He's a chauvinist of the highest degree. Keep in mind NJR lives in a country that is at war currently with DPRK, has killed millions of Koreans & is an imperialist superpower.
Myers says that the DPRK’s governing ideology has been misunderstood by the United States. We think of it as “authoritarian communist,” thanks to its all-powerful state and various Stalinist trappings. But Myers says this is misleading: The regime is closer in character to fascism, because of its racism and nationalism (Stalinists have many unappealing qualities, but they do not build their ideology around race and nation). The communist elements, Myers says, are window dressing. Even Kim Il-Sung himself knew little about Marxism, and he dismayed the Russians when they quizzed him on it. And strictly speaking, the regime operates as a monarchy. Myers says that “socialism” is not the right term, because it doesn’t describe the self-image we see in the state’s propaganda, which heavily emphasizes the purity of North Koreans and their need for a protective parent-leader. Demick acknowledges that Kim Il-Sung “rejected traditional Communist teachings about universalism” and “was a Korean nationalist in the extreme” who treated Koreans almost as a “chosen people.”
For example, personally, I find Myers’ explanation appealing. If I’m being honest, though, that’s probably partly because it lumps Kim Jong Un in with right-wing fascists, and distances him from the left. I’ve always felt that “socialists” have no more responsibility for dictatorships that call themselves socialist than democratic republicans have for, well, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Since I oppose dictatorships universally, pointing out that there have been “leftist” dictatorships poses no actual challenge to my politics. Instinctively, though, I confess that I’d feel relieved if Kim Jong Un was lumped in with the right rather than the left.
He is quoting Brian Reynolds Meyers and agreeing with him on the DPRK, even after admitting to knowing basically nothing about the country earlier in the article. Thousands of social imperialist nerds are reading this and nodding along, cementing their ridiculous chauvinist worldviews and failing their revolutionary duties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reynolds_Myers
Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963), usually cited as B. R. Myers, is an American professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, best known for his writings on North Korean propaganda. He is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and an opinion columnist for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Myers is the author of Han Sǒrya and North Korean Literature (Cornell, 1994), A Reader's Manifesto (Melville House, 2002), The Cleanest Race (Melville House, 2010), and North Korea's Juche Myth (Sthele Press, 2015).
Myers was born in New Jersey, near Fort Dix. His mother is British, and his father was a U.S. Army officer from Pennsylvania who served in South Korea as a military chaplain, often helping out local orphans.
Myers spent his childhood in Bermuda and his high school youth in apartheid-era South Africa, and received graduate education in West Berlin during the early 1980s, occasionally visiting East Germany. He earned an MA degree in Soviet studies at Ruhr University (1989) and a PhD degree in Korean studies with a focus on North Korean literature at the University of Tübingen (1992). Myers subsequently taught German in Japan and worked for a Mercedes-Benz liaison office in Beijing during the mid-1990s.
This guy is a Liberal. Stop trying to make NJR cool, he's never going to be cool
Use of the term Stalinism gives off liberal particles like the demon core gave off radiation.
Huh his source on what DPRK is like writes for the Atlantic, Wallstreet Journal and the New York Times? What's this, they were sent to high school in Apartheid South Africa despite being an American/British citizen? Then they went to college in West Germany for "Soviet Studies" in 1989? Then back to occupied South Korea for their graduate studies to pivot to anti-DPRK propaganda as their anti-USSR propaganda diploma was now useless?
Can I point out that
also had a good take on Palestine and that doesn't redeem him generally?Like if some lib was appearing to be persuaded by their favorite YouTube grifter into being anti-genocide I'd hold my tongue but in general I still despise that motherfucker.
Israel is just so cartoonishly evil right now it's impossible for anyone with any scruples to not at least somewhat defend it. I don't really give Libs credit for it anymore when they're total cowards in any other situation where the sides aren't quite that immediately blatant.
It's like people who despise full on Swastika-on-Face-Tattooed Nazis with a passion but then make apologia for the more subtle forms of white supremacy in society. It's easy to hate the most grotesque forms of oppression, if anything it gives cover for the more subtle yet pernicious forms of oppressions going on.
I was thinking about this when the US started bombing Yemen. Supporting Palestine - though essentially - is also “easy” in that Israel has been so monstrously barbarous, even people who have shitty opinions about stuff can’t deny that Israel is evil. I check out a lot of completely unhinged right wing Christofascist twitter accounts, and even they almost unanimously think Israel is committing a genocide.
But with Yemen, I see way more people just uncritically accept the line that they are “Iran-backed insurgents” and that bombing them is just normal and necessary to keep shipping lanes open. A better litmus test if someone is truly anti-imperialist. Even better than Ukraine was at first because Ukraine has some other political and racial elements going on. With Yemen, you just know there’s a huge chunk of white Americans who don’t know the first thing about Yemen, but they know it’s in the Middle East and Muslim and “they’re attacking American ships”; so their brain immediately goes to all the media they’ve consumed over the last 20 years about young, cool CIA agents or Delta Force operators always saving America from the evil Muslim terrorists in [Unnamed Arab or Central Asian Country], and just hand over their unthinking support to the US government.
Vaush and his fandoms relatively "good" position on Palestine faltered the second the Houthis started seizing ships. Now they're repeating a bunch of lines about how the Houthis are just pirates doing this for profit and how US "precision strikes" are justified. Also repeating the whole slavery claim with their only source being a Saudi funded news network.
I'm not exactly a Houthi Stan but Jesus, have some fucking skepticism about western narratives. The western "left" is worthless.
Another test I think re: Palestine is whether someone supports only a ceasefire in Gaza, or if they actually follow through on anti settler colonialism. Ceasefire is an easy position even for Zionists if the resistance begins kicking IDF ass too much
It’s also that Hamas/Palestine is now doing very limited damage to Israel, so it’s safe to call out Israel again, knowing that the status quo is well preserved.
You want to see the real masked off reaction of libs and soc dems, go back and read what they say during the first 2 weeks immediately following October 7th.
If you drill into these squishier types about Palestine you will find they don’t support the abolition of Israel, decolonization, ending the occupation and they condemn Hamas. They have more in common with the PA and with the gulf states, who mouth condemnation of Israel but work against any actual justice for short term selfish goals. They don’t support armed Palestinian resistance, let alone the axis of resistance against US-backed fascist jihadist networks throughout the Middle East. They supported destroying Syria and Libya probably. They didn’t mind Obama drone striking 7 African countries.
I think any goodwill that may win him has been squandered by him coming down on the side of the US state dept. on Yemen recently, of course.
Lmao of course he did, I don't follow him and haven't seen anyone dunk on him for it yet so this is the first I'm hearing. What a loser.
One of the people you are arguing in that other thread has consistently mald over white people getting called crackers lmao. You shouldn't take anything he says seriously. Or alternatively, start addressing him as a cracker lol
Lmao, which one. I knew it though, defending NJR is extreme crackkker energy
That post person did the same exact Nietzschian routine in the thread about the Al Aqsa flood.
When anyone points me to the Soviet Union or Castro’s Cuba and says “Well, there’s your socialism,” my answer isn’t “well, they didn’t try hard enough.” It’s that these regimes bear absolutely no relationship to the principle for which I am fighting. They weren’t egalitarian in any sense; they were dictatorships. Thus to say “Well, look what a disaster an egalitarian society is” is to mistake the nature of the Soviet Union. The history of these states shows what is wrong with authoritarian societies, in which people are not equal, and shows the fallacy of thinking you can achieve egalitarian ends through authoritarian means. This is precisely what George Orwell was trying to demonstrate, though almost everybody seems to have missed his point. Orwell was a committed socialist, but he knew that socialism was about giving workers ownership over the means of production, which they don’t have if they’re being told what to produce at gunpoint. Animal Farm is not about the dangers of socialism, it’s about the dangers of using revolutions to justify totalitarianism.
The history of the Soviet Union doesn’t really tell us much about “communism,” if communism is a stateless society where people share everything equally: it was a society dominated by the state, in which power was distributed according to a strict hierarchy. When Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman visited the Soviet Union, they were horrified by the scale of the repression. “Liberty is a luxury not to be permitted at the present stage of development,” Lenin told them. Goldman concluded that “it would be fantastic to consider it in any sense Communistic.” (Her pamphlet “There Is No Communism In Russia” argues that if the Soviet Union was to be called communist, the word must have no meaning.) Bertrand Russell visited Lenin and was alarmed by his indifference to human freedom. Russell left disillusioned, “not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.” Lenin himself acknowledged that he was implementing a form of “state capitalism.”
The primary lesson here is not about “egalitarianism” or “socialism” or even “communism” since Castro, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin did not actually attempt to implement any of those ideas. Instead, the lesson is about what happens when you have a political ideology that contains a built-in justification for any amount of horrific violence. The bad part of Marxism is not the part that says workers should cease to be exploited, but the part about the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The dominant “communist” tendencies of the 20th century aimed to liberate people, but they offered no actual ethical limits on what you could do in the name of “liberation.” That doesn’t mean liberation is bad, it means ethics are indispensable and that the Marxist disdain for “moralizing” is scary and ominous.
Wait, hold up. The USSR is one thing, but this little shit can't even bring himself to support Cuba? That's like the bare minimum, holy fuck.
Damn
It’s amazing how somehow the Chapos are the best people in the Chapo extended universe. They pass a very low bar of not saying shit like this (at least themselves, sometimes they let libshit guests say some dumbass stuff. Especially Taibbi)
What we do know of Stalin's purges is that many victims were Communist party officials, managers, military officers, and other strategically situated individuals whom the dictator saw fit to incarcerate or liquidate. In addition, whole catagories of people whom Stalin considered of unreliable loyalty—Cossacks, Crimean Tarters, and ethnic Germans—were selected for internal deportation...
To be sure, crimes of state were committed in communist countries and many political prisoners were unjustly interned and even murdered.
Yeah, look at this clown repeating State Department criticisms of the USSR!
Robinson doesn't have the best take here (it's basically an anarchist take, which makes sense given how often he quotes from anarchists), but even the strongest supporters of Stalin and the USSR agree there should be "ethical limits on what you could do in the name of liberation."
There are legitimate criticisms of Stalin and the USSR, but the way Mr. Robinson wrote the essay I can assure you that he was referring to the typical Western propaganda against totalitarianism under the Soviet rule.
Robinson doesn't have the best take here (it's basically an anarchist take, which makes sense given how often he quotes from anarchists)
I don't think he has good positions on AES states, either. But his big issue (excess, unjustified state violence) is shared by many we consider unimpeachable supporters of AES states, and also many anarchists, and also many people who are interested in socialism but haven't read everything we have. If we write off all these people we will be left with a miniscule circle of True Leftists who will accomplish nothing.
The approach with people who call themselves leftists and on most topics are to the left of the vast majority of the U.S. population is to engage with them on points of disagreement, not attack them and say they're basically fascists.
But his big issue (excess, unjustified state violence) is shared by many we consider unimpeachable supporters of AES states, and also many anarchists
You really can't get over guillotine and wall jokes, can you?
The quotes listed here sound 100% like the kinds of statements from Western Marxism that are evisercated in this article. Very good read which nails the "no country has done REAL socialism/communism" critique common among the western left.
https://socialistchina.org/2023/10/13/china-and-the-purity-fetish-of-western-marxism/
I gotta get the book the article is based on.
The unquestioned, purity fetish grounded, and Sinophobic assumption of Chinese ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘lack of democracy’ also prevents the Western Marxist from learning how the Chinese socialist civilization has been able to creatively embed its socialist democracy in “seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.”[4] It has withheld them from seeing how a comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has arrived at: namely, that “China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.” This is a position echoed by John Ross (and many other scholars of China), who argues that the “real situation shows that China’s framework and delivery on human rights and democracy is far superior to the West’s.”
They're red fascists, The Atlantic says so and that's very compelling to me, an American social chauvinist.
Imagine getting captured during the revolution and your executioner is the DSA popinjay telling you it's your (tankie) fault he's doing a bad job loading the gun.
Bernie killed Rosa needs to be updated for modern day hexbears. NJR killed Rosa.
Eugen Levine, head of the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Probably got the closest to a successful German revolution, beating the socdem military at Dachau of all places and executed major aristocrats including founders of the Thule Society which would serve as a direct predecessor to the Nazis esoteric views. The government brought in the Friekorps despite swearing they had no involvement in all those terrible things they let them do previously, and sicced them on the soviet. Many died, Levine was arrested, Einstein famously writes in his defense but it is clear he is gonna die.
Levine's final words at his trial are legendary https://www.marxists.org/subject/germany-1918-23/levine/last-words.htm
particularly
We Communists are all dead men on leave. Of this I am fully aware. I do not know if you will extend my leave or whether I shall have to join Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In any case I await your verdict with composure and inner serenity. For I know that, whatever your verdict, events cannot be stopped. The Prosecuting Counsel believes that the leaders incited the masses. But just as leaders could not prevent the mistakes of the masses under the pseudo-Soviet Republic, so the disappearance of one or other of the leaders will under no circumstances hold up the movement.
And yet I know, sooner or later other judges will sit in this Hall and then those will be punished for high treason who have transgressed against the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Pronounce your verdict if you deem it proper. I have only striven to foil your attempt to stain my political activity, the name of the Soviet Republic with which I feel myself so closely bound up, and the good name of the workers of Munich. They - and I together with them - we have all of us tried to the best of our knowledge and conscience to do our duty towards the International, the Communist World Revolution.
Tragic, although the more inspiring... the next time those Socdems try to create a new Freikorps, we should put them a la lanterne!
"I've got an island of liberal dinosaurs to sell you"
Whatever you do, do NOT pluck his flower out, point it in your face, and squeeze it
Dresses like he's trying to beat Indiana Jones to some ancient relic
it lumps Kim Jong Un in with right-wing fascists
A key pillar of Kim Jong Un's political program has been expanding access to luxury entertainments to all DPRK citizens. He's adamant about maintaining nuclear sovereignty, sure, but his image in North Korean politics is very much "we all know the 90s sucked, but that's in the past, now's the time to party", and that's the reason why the DPRK has water parks and equestrian clubs and bowling alleys dotted all over the place.
I guess what I'm saying is that that doesn't feel super fashy to me.
Equestrian clubs? Damn, that's some bougie shit. I guess the DPRK really is revisionist. 😔
I know some lore about "The Cleanest Race" because I read through a good bit of it a while ago. Let me tell you, that shit is unhinged. The author claims that a painting of a mountain stream is symbolically representing "the lofty heights and purity of the Korean race" with zero evidence, when it's literally just a pretty Korean landscape painting.
Transplanting post-colonial critism of group of five paintings onto non-colonizers
i like this shadow war being waged about whether this guy i do not care about is cool or not
I don't think anyone's silly enough to argue he's cool. The question is whether or not he is good, beautiful, and velvet (he is) or not.
Good ❌
Beautiful ❌
Velvet ❌
That's a strikeout there.
I forget which one he is. Is he the one who dresses likeva fancy lad and kept his staff from unionizing?
If I lived in the deep south I would avoid dressing like a cartoon plantation owner but otherwise I do agree dunking on fashion choices is badposting
Yeah he dresses like if he was the riddler in a civil war era batman alternate universe comic.
Smdh, NJR should be critical of the US government for a change.
