How to shut down annoying libs whining about "tankies". Remind them who liberated Auschwitz and accuse them of supporting the Holocaust.
:maybe-later-honey: uhm sorry sweatie but after "liberating" auschwtitz the soviet union then oppressed the jews even harder than the nazis because stalin hated jews more than hitler did it's just basic facts
I had an old lady at a shelter I used to work at once insist to me that the Soviet Union just rebuilt the concentration camps further east and continued the Holocaust, because Stalin wanted the credit for genociding the Jews.
I thought she was joking at first, but then she got really mad at me for laughing and I decided it probably wasn't worth arguing politics with a homeless boomer at 3am at work.
Wait shit this is actually a common thing anti-communists believe? America must be destroyed.
I seriously wonder where the fuck did people get these particular brainworms from. Who taught them that. Or do these thoughts just naturally clump together and develop from the chaotic maelstrom of "commies bad" that goes on in their heads like planets during the formation of a new star system.
I mean, I was taught in school that WW2 started when Hitler and Stalin met up and agreed to invade Poland together because they were both equally evil. So I can see how you could get there from that.
Yeah, this is the response I get, too. For the average liberal, anticommunism isn't a reasoned position, it's religious dogma.
A ex roommate of mine actually uses this argument. He says his friends grandparents wanted to emigrate to America but the evil Soviets put them in gulags instead. No evidence for these claims of course.
I’ve literally had people say this to me. I do think the only solution is to just double down and call them a Holocaust denier and an antisemite
Don’t forget the “first they came” poem explicitly included communists because they were one of the “undesireables” who were exterminated by the Nazis. But it got changed to “socialists” because the U.S. didn’t want them to garner any sympathy. The US version is more well known but I think some European museums include the original
The creator of it used "socialists" on like a single occasion where he said the poem, so of course that's the version of it used in the west.
In some niche circles, they’re trying to push the narrative that Ukrainians liberated Auschwitz. It’s true that they were heavily involved, but they want to downplay the fact that the Ukrainians were fighting as the Red Army of the USSR and not just “Ukraine”.
But that doesn’t even matter. I didn’t even know they liberated any camps until I started college and became more skeptical of liberalism. Before then I thought that the US simply liberated every concentration camp while the Russians were sending human wave attacks to the Germans. I don’t think this was explicitly taught to me, but the way so much was omitted about the USSR + the previous propaganda, I might’ve just naturally came to this conclusion. So imagine what the average education is like in today’s time
Yeah, I don't really have a perspective on average history class propaganda because I had a good history teacher. I learned about the black wall street massacre in my american history class, for example. It's a bit of a culture shock to see how textbooks in places like Texas are.
I didn’t even know they liberated any camps until I started college
Yeah they always lie by omission about this. It's pretty easy to realize it though, since it's like "oh these death camps are horrible, especially ones like Auschwitz. Anyways, here's a picture of the US liberating this other one."
yeah, i'm a tankie. i support them rolling tanks in to liberate Auschwitz. do you not, liberals???
Lmao Hasan is generally pretty good about not wanting to slice off an important part of the left but also avoiding damage to himself by getting labelled as a tankie. This is a good response.
getting labelled as a tankie
:meow-knit: Any tips on avoiding this?
Looks like it's out early on Patreon, but it should be out for the rest of us in the next few days.
Not sure, you could always ask about it over on /c/podcasts if no one responds here
Is it still $20? It’s an insane price lol. I think if they just made it $1 they would get tens of thousands of people to join which would be more beneficial to everybody
I don't listen to this podcast, but I just checked--it's $5/month for early access (which applies to this episode) and $20/month for an exclusive monthly episode. That's steep as hell. Blowback Season 3 (ten main episodes + ten bonus episodes, highly researched and scripted with expert interviews etc.) is $25. My $5/month for the Death Panel Patreon affords me weekly bonus episodes, and the higher tiers are all just "you can give extra if you wanna" without any gated content, plus they unlock bonus episodes once or twice a month for the standard feed.
the only podcast i've ever paid for remains season 3 of blowback because it's so thoroughly researched that i didn't want to wait to download it from somewhere.
He didn't just shut it down, he highlighted it so he could stomp it into the ground.
Holy shit it's so nice to have a left streamer not turn out to be a lib for once
His work - reaching thousands and normalising leftist politics - is good.
I was mostly joking.
Hasan talking the way he does, with the kind of platform he has, is a huge win for the left. In general I have very little patience for leftist infighting and purity testing, especially when it feels like comrades are looking for a reason to wholesale dismiss other comrades' efforts in agitating and propagandizing.
The kind of rigorous criticism and struggle sessions we have on this site could be useful if we were all in a vanguard party, but when talking to mostly anonymous strangers on the web it comes across as a LARP. I've still found it helpful in constructing a more robust ideological framework for myself, but I recognize that absent a larger political movement with concrete tangible goals, this is little better than individualist self-help bullshit. It's fine tuning a car with no wheels.
Hasan good but Hasanism bad.
spoiler
Don’t ask me what what means. I just made it up.
Hasan is to the left of 95% of the US population. If people wanna say he's bad because he's not saluting to Stalin at the start of every stream, I can't be bothered arguing with them.
He's good for baby leftists. But as your theory and praxis grow, so should your taste.
Hasan's a bit like Bernie in that aspect.
He's way to the left of Bernie, but you're absolutely right about the rest.
that chatter is textbook “i’m mad somebody is to my left”
As a propogandist he' s a net positive for american political culture. However you won't ever find me praising him since he is an open john and exploiter of woman
I'm dumb here what does being a John mean? And how has he exploited women? Not being argumentative just not a thing knower.
John is a common slang word for a sex worker's client.
I've not heard anything about this, but if true it's major :kombucha-disgust:
which tbh I would be fine with if he frame it as "I did a bad thing when I was younger and as a Marxist I can look back and say that I was sexually exploiting woman in a vulnerable condition" and not "actually sex work is super cool and being a cumsumer is awesome"
"John" is a term that's used to describe someone who has consumed full service sex work (paid a prostitute for sex)
Oh yeah I did know he visited a brothel once and have mixed opinions about that but I defer to women ideally sex workers themselves. Hasan is borderline misogynistic sometimes but seems mostly like a good hearted but kinda dumb guy and I think his impact is broadly positive.
I mean if you're super into watching someone read twitter and get performatively angry at whatever the political class did or failed to do this week, then go ahead, go nuts on Hasan's stream.
Chapo is more like a friendship simulator though because it's three fellas hanging out together
good. he reaches soooo many people.
but like its an entertainment twitch stream don't try to squeeze more out of it than there is
He is an entertainer first and foremost. So with that in mind, he’s above the average cast of streamers in terms of views and sometimes content.
But don’t rely on him for anything other than laughs. These streamers’ commentary and coverage of the news is just googling things and learning about them live on air and then forming some half assed opinion that should’ve been thought out more.
I don’t know what he’s like in private and that’s not really my concern. He’s rich which I really don’t care about, but there have been a few times where he flaunted his opulence which annoyed me because it just seems out of touch. But that’s not who he is regularly so again, I don’t care
This isn’t a statement on him, but I do know someone who works at Lockheed who loves Hasan and dismisses that he’s a socialist or even leftist lol
he's cable news that isn't actively bad for your brain because he's doing the work for you of getting angry at fascists doing fash things, and he covers stuff that doesn't get covered in the mainstream a lot.
he's good, but people who unironically have twitter accounts and see posts about him all day have decided that he is DESTROYING THE LEFT and will accuse you of being parasocially gay for him if you don't think he's that important
I'm too old to give a shit about all of the streamer drama but I've got to deliver a hot take: Hasan is good. He says good things.
i've come to the conclusion that he mostly thinks good things, he's just figured out that for his audience, taking the approach of acting like a dumb himbo who's just making some points (and those points are usually applied dialectical materialism) works better than lecturing on theory.
After writing that obsessive spiel your takeaway is that it is in fact me that is the one who is obsessed with online personalities yes you are very normal and I am the one in parasocial hell lmao
looked in the comments of this tweet and found that Twitter apparently suspended @zazasmoka
