https://archive.ph/cutnz
07 NOVEMBER 2022, 09:11
Lukashenko: October Revolution ideas remain viable alternative to colonial policy of capitalism
MINSK, 7 November (BelTA) – Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko extended October Revolution greetings to Belarusians, BelTA learned from the press service of the Belarusian president.
“This event marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the Belarusian people who got a chance to create a national state on their native land, to become a full-fledged subject of international relations,” the message of greetings reads. “October 1917 fulfilled the aspirations of millions of working people in the world for a just society based on the principles of people's power, mutual social responsibility and humanism. These ideas still remain a viable alternative to the colonial policy of capitalism in its modern form. The Soviet project of the Union of Socialist Republics, based on the equality of nations and respect for their cultures and traditions, remains a beacon for countries seeking to live in peace and to work for the common good.”
The head of state stressed that Belarus has preserved the achievements of the Soviet era, multiplying them with the accomplishments of the sovereign period. “We remember the tragic events of the past, perpetuate the victories and the names of the heroes of the thousand-year history of the Belarusian people, whose examples of courage and wisdom help us overcome challenges and build a reliable foundation for the future,” the president said.
On this festive day Aleksandr Lukashenko wished Belarusians good health, happiness and new achievements for the benefit of the Fatherland.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, center, gives a speech during a military parade that marked the 75th anniversary of the allied victory over Nazi Germany, in Minsk, Belarus, Saturday, May 9, 2020. (Sergei Gapon/Pool Photo via AP)
This rhetoric is much stronger than Putins “woke effeminate westerners” spiel. It’s a little odd the Russians haven’t (that I’ve seen) tried to tap into this sort of anti capitalist language more often.
Imo there's a real danger in allowing the mainstream lib West to continue to push things like gay and Trans rights on countries because they inevitably come as a package with shit like neoliberal "reforms" (read: looting) that are objectively not good for the recipients. The recipients then come to associate the good (gay and Trans rights) with the bad (everything else) and reject them.
An analogy would be how the US used aid workers administering vaccines in Pakistan as cover for US intelligence. Once people found out, they started refusing vaccines in general because of the association and fear that the US will tamper with the vaccines.
Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that the left has to somehow overtake mainstream liberal institutions in pro-gay/Trans rights messaging but that hardly seems possible.
it's what happened in iran too. they threw out women's liberation and all that stuff to get rid of the western looters. it's how the US keeps creating fundamentalist regimes in the middle east.
when the good things they push get associated with the looting, people reject modernity and return to monke (or in this case, good old bigotry).
Unfortunately, the answer seems to be that the left has to somehow overtake mainstream liberal institutions in pro-gay/Trans rights messaging but that hardly seems possible.
This is indeed the answer - recognizing LGBT rights is an easy way to prevent that CIA-backed NGOs use them as a front to agitate. Repression of the queer community pushes us to side with whoever offers us the chance of survival. It is the repression itself that creates this risk. This was why the DDR legalized gay sex and why it was so ahead of its time in regards to trans rights (Germany still has more restrictive name and gender change laws today than the DDR): The Stasi recognized that there was a massive potential to blackmail queer people with the threat of a forced outing and "flip" them. That happened all the time in the mid 20th century, navy admirals in West Germany were still sacked for being gay in the 1980s. So the DDR did the pragmatic thing and removed that blackmailing potential, because they recognized that it is impossible to remove queer people. We'll always be around, accepting that is the only rational response.
LGBT rights are very definitely not inevitably linked to neoliberalism, quite to the contrary. Neoliberalism can only pay lip service to our cause, it will always favor an assimilationist, invisible queer existence full of internalised queerphobia that does not offend the reactionary sensibilities of the bourgeois class and their clerico-fascist allies. Neoliberalism elevates a privileged minority of cis-passing trans people while ridiculing those of us who will always be visibly trans because we didn't luck out in the genetic lottery. It cannot do otherwise in a society were looks are part of your economic value, capitalism will always be judgemental in that regard. It will grant us advances that are cost-neutral, like marriage equality, legally recognizing our gender identities or using us for PR campaigns, but it will always struggle to go beyond that and also meet our material needs - neoliberalism gives us access to gender-affirming care, but will not provide it as a human right like Cuba does. The hoops i have to jump through even here in Europe to just go on HRT or get voice training are ridiculous, and if i ever want to live without having to shave my tits every day, i will pay for that completely out of pocket in spite of "socialized health care". Bottom surgery that is up to today's medical standards will also only be covered partially by my insurance, meaning i have to pay a 4-digit sum myself if i ever want a vagina that does not require lube. Meanwhile, Cuba just trained an entire team of ten surgeons in gender-affirming procedures, they are now able to help trans people all over LatAm to get otherwise unaffordable treatments for free. Only socialism can achieve that much. The same goes for other areas were queer people are materially pushed to the margins, such as homelessness. Nobody in the US is at such a high risk of becoming homeless as queer people. Neoliberalism cannot solve that, because it is incompatible with the obvious solution of giving free housing to a gay kid who just got kicked out by their evangelical parents. Neoliberalism dreads to protect trans people from getting fired by their transphobic boss because that infringes on the boss's property rights. Neoliberalism only sees the option to performatively wave a pride flag for one month a year to pinkwash itself, but it will never confront the many, many rich and powerful enemies that we have. It will point the finger at Russia, but it has done nothing against the rampant homophobia in Poland, as Poland is a good little lapdog of Amerika. It will wring its hands about how some decision from China may be read as disrespecting gay rights while applauding the monarchy in Qatar, where torture and forced conversion "therapy" of LGBT people are an everyday occurence, as it desperately needs Qatars LNG now. It will highlight how queer people are threatened with death in Iran, but when an Iranian trans woman flees to my country, she gets denied asylum, gets denied medical treatment and gets deadnamed every time she has to confront our racist buerocracy until she publicly sets herself on fire because she has lost all hope (that's an actual, real life example how neoliberal Germany dealt with a trans refugee from Iran while performatively condemning the state she fled from - rest in power, Ela Bayan).
And most queer people are painfully aware of all of these injustices. We know that this system does not give the tiniest fuck about us, and if we connect the dots we can easily extrapolate that this is because our system does not care about human beings in the first place, and because it routinely bankrolls queerphobes who naturally align with capital's interests as reactionaries tend to do. Capitalism always relies on people who love punching down, it will always love our enemies for that. Our existences are inherently radicalizing. Simply existing as a trans person in public is a revolutionary act. My existence can only be understood properly through the lens of viewing it as a struggle for the most basic material need, a body i can safely and comfortably inhabit, and i have to fight against a capitalist healthcare system and a patriarchal superstructure with every step i take on the road towards that goal. When socialist orgs reject that because Stalin and Mao, unfortunately, were as homophobic as most people in the 1950s were, when they mistake such reactionary "birth marks" for core parts of a communist value system instead of recognizing them as artifacts left over from the pre-revolutionary society, they give up on one of the angriest, most disappointed, politically most disenfranchised demographics that exists. That so many gay or trans people are radlibs is not due to liberalism being a perfect fit for us. It is due to a lack of choice, it is because many people in my community get the feeling that nobody else even pretends to do anything for us. It is out of hopelessness. But there is hope for us, and it comes in the form of getting back to the point were in a confrontation with the forces of reaction, we are the ones who are throwing the bricks again. Fuck assimilation. Revolution is the only thing that will get us the lifes we deserve and it is high time the "culturally conservative" far left does some self crit, understands that and closes the ranks by not recoiling from us when we offer to stand shoulder to shoulder with all other oppressed people.
“Remember this kind of speech is specifically crafted towards an intended set of audience. Putin was mostly speaking to the countries of the Global south,”
I agree, especially about the bit about the global south bring his intended audience. Thats where I think sort of vague ‘populist anti-capitalist’ rhetoric could play really well. And it would be a natural companion in their framing of the western and Ukrainian governments as empowering Nazism.
This sort of argument would be very compelling in a lot of countries. And we’ve already seen pro-Russian protests in Haiti and Burkina Faso for example, the Russians could probably gain a lot of sympathy throughout Latin America, and Africa. It’s also something that NATO and the west don’t have a very good counter argument for. I mean I don’t really care because I’m not a Russian partisan, it’s just a little surprising I think.
I guess I need to learn a lot more about Belarus... I'm confused about is how he's in this position in a country that isn't communist, and is able to make these kinds of statements without being deposed somehow. They have a market economy, capitalists' only real incentive is profit and this kind of rhetoric is generally perceived as bad for business even if nothing's being done at the moment.
He's socdem-y, but his primary opponents are neolibs and fascists, so he uses communist sympathies of the population against the right-wing.
There was the usual attempt at a color revolution last year, which failed.
Is Tankieshenko real? Can he hurt me? Someone please help me, my therapist isn't responding.
Lukashenko is close to being based, but I'm not hoping he will be. He seems to be fine sitting in the middle lane and not doing shit. I kinda wish he was in charge of Russia, not putin. Russia would be better off for it.
Lukashenko is close to being based
Idk, hard to watch that video of him threatenting to slaughter Western NGOs and not think he's based.
Juche proves to be the superior socialism, it has the best hats.
It was formerly the "accepted" idea that the world has been divided from time immemorial into inferior and superior races, into blacks and whites, of whom the former are unfit for civilization and are doomed to be objects of exploitation, while the latter are the only bearers of civilization, whose mission it is to exploit the former. That legend must now be regarded as shattered and discarded. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice that the liberated non-European peoples, drawn into the channel of Soviet development, are not one whit less capable of promoting a really progressive culture and a really progressive civilization than are the European peoples. It was formerly the "accepted" idea that the only method of liberating the oppressed peoples is the method of bourgeois nationalism, the method of nations drawing apart from one another, the method of disuniting nations, the method of intensifying national enmity among the labouring masses of the various nations.
That legend must now be regarded as refuted. One of the most important results of the October Revolution is that it dealt that legend a mortal blow, by demonstrating in practice the possibility and expediency of the proletarian, internationatist method of liberating the oppressed peoples, as the only correct method; by demonstrating in practice the possibility and expediency of a fraternal union of the workers and peasants of the most diverse nations based on the principles of voluntariness and internationalism. The existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which is the prototype of the future integration of the working people of all countries into a single world economic system, cannot but serve as direct proof of this.
—J. V. Stalin, The International Character of the October Revolution, 1927
He means let’s do it again. He’s a true believer. The last old school soviet communist of the socially conservative but economically red as fuck type.
He’s hard to like but he’s impossible to hate imo.
Too conservative and reactionary on social issue for me to support. Too genuinely red to the core for me to dislike.
He's socdem, not communist, still better than neolibs and fascists.
Yup, protests were going on in Belarus and like clockwork John Oliver was there to tell liberals that America's enemies are definitely The Bad Guys.
Lukashenko is cringe
“The Jews managed to force the world to remember the Holocaust,” Lukashenko declared. “The entire world grovels before them and gives in to them. They are afraid to say a single word out of place.”
“The history of Germany is a copy of the history of Belarus. Germany was raised from ruins thanks to firm authority and not everything connected with that well-known figure Hitler was bad. German order evolved over the centuries and attained its peak under Hitler. This corresponds with our understanding of a presidential republic and the role of a president in it,” Lukashenko said in 1995, perhaps anticipating that he would still be in power more than a quarter of century later.
not happy to see hexbear praising a Hitler sympathizer
The only good thing about Belarus is that they didn't sell out their state industry to western capitalists and that will make it easier for the workers there to retake power eventually. Lukasheno's only plus is that he's maintained that relation. Other than that, he needs a good slap by Belarusian communists.
So that's what Parenti meant when he called Lukashenko a self-professed admirer of Adolf Hitler's organizational skills in Blackshirts and Reds lol
As if the "organizational skills" are at all separable from the things and people being organized :blob-no-thoughts:
Yeah it's a lot of :so-true: vibes just because they kept the Soviet aesthetics and he talks positively about the USSR sometimes. As others have said, it's just 100% pure nationalism
:ohnoes:
How can you celebrate May 9th and Hitler at the same time? COMON!
