As I near 200,000 followers here at fishingboatproceeds, I just wanted to to say China is one of my favorite countries. Not only that, but communism is amazing. It makes me go a little crazy on it to be honest. Like, I cannot spread it wide enough through the world to be satisfied. I’m only satisfied when I feel those intense, powerful, rhythmic chants of the workers in the streets. When I sit back on my heels, look around at the revolution with warmth in my heart and sweat running across my brow, hair all fucked up and wipe my face with the back of my arm and ask you if I did a good job and you cannot even speak because I’ve drained the means of production out of the parasitic bourgeoisie..... that’s when I’m satisfied.

  • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    john green is a bourgeois author who employs hundreds of people and has used his platform to slander socialism and socialist history several times. He's not PragerU tier or anything but I'd never call him chairman.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6KR4cLLVzQ

    5 mins in...

    In a way he's more insidious than prager-U tier propaganda because he's able to slip in easy liberal jabs at socialism and communism while pretending to sympathize with their broader ideals and appearing "reasonable." He offers massive oversimplifications of very complicated history and tellingly picks and chooses which details to highlight and which to ignore. (No mention anywhere in this video, for example, is the allied imperialist coalition of 14 nations formed to aid the white movement, the sanctions and embargoes against the newborn USSR, or the internal sabotage carried out out by people resisting redistribution, who are framed as entirely wholesome and vaguely "democracy" oriented). Note his source list in the episode notes (which he only pastes in after the fact and never edits into the videos to apply to each claim he makes) is curiously all Western published books:

    -Engelstein, Laura. Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, and Civil War, 1914-1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

    -Kivelson, Valerie A. and Ronald Grigor Suny. Russia’s Empires. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

    -Sanborn, Joshua A. Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

    -Smith, Bonnie G. Europe in the Contemporary World since 1900. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

    • MendingBenjamin [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I thought the context of him being a spokesman of neoliberalism was clear. I was not unironically calling him chairman lol

      • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I thought the context of him being a spokesman of neoliberalism was clear.

        i don't assume other people know or don't know stuff as a rule. this relatively good tweet from him might have been the first thing from him you ever saw :shrug-outta-hecks: I just wanted to dunk on John Green, not on you.