When even the king of renegade ex-trot neocons has a better sense of Soviet history then 99% of progressive radlibs in the west
As weird as it is, I would not be a communist today without hitchens. I was raised very conservative religious and his shit helped me shake the only way of thinking I knew. Obviously not stanning hitchens at this point in my life but I really can’t bring myself to hate him despite his multitude of dogshit opinions
They say that almost everyone from the New Atheist movement has either moved on to socialism or they're measuring peoples' skulls.
Every annoying teenage atheist eventually has to answer the question “Do I care about other humans?” If the answer is yes they become a communist, if no, a fascist.
Also, anyone else have their atheist phase at 15 , buy Hitchens and Dawkins books, but never actually finish them?
I read Dawkins because I was very excited to ingest the antidote to a childhood's worth of Catholic orthodoxy. What I got out of "The God Delusion" was little more than 400 pages of self-aggrandizing bullshit. That pretty much killed my interest in "New Atheism". I got PZ Myers-pilled and just went all in on modern academics - math and physics mostly - holding to the belief that these rhetorical fights were for dorks and losers, while scientific inquiry and logical proof offered much firmer ground to build on.
Then I got deep into that and discovered how gutted and hollow academia was... Even then, you could hold up a piece of technology and know how it works if you dove deep enough into the manuals. That offered so much more value than anything religious institutions (or the jerk-offs doing anti-religion) had to offer.
had a professor in a molecular biology course post assignments where we had to read and answer questions on the selfish gene. i did the first assignment and thought the first few chapters were interesting but i didnt do the other chapters bc i already knew dawkins was cringe
I haven't read it but Hitchens apparently has a pretty great book that outlines in detail all the bad shit Kissinger's done.
I do genuinely wonder what would have happened if full blown fascism had taken root in Russia before Germany.
But I'm also predisposed to just slap the Matt Christman button and proclaim "Overdetermined". When you look at the seeds of the Soviet Revolution as inherently anti-war and you recognize the White Army as a bunch of military brass without a proletariat enlisted force to draw from, the only real question is why they didn't collapse sooner. The White Army was outnumbered nearly six to one and fighting a rear-guard action pretty much from the day of its inception. The leaders were scattered, the operations uncoordinated, and their goals of retaking the revolutionary interior were little more than a fantasy.
The Whites were facing all the same struggles as their Red counterparts - food shortages, typhoid run rampant, deterioration of the nation's productive capacity, mass casualties from simple poverty - and were in an even worse position to resist them if they somehow had butchered their way back into Moscow or St. Petersburg. They would have played the Russian KMT to Stalin's Long March Maoists in another ten years, in the absolute best case scenario.
What is fascism even worth without the engine of modern industry? Its just screaming into the wind.
