• Angel [any]
    ·
    14 days ago

    Upside down Benito will never get old

    • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      14 days ago

      Show

      [Transcript]

      In January 1923, the young journalist Ernest Hemingway covered the Lausanne Conference for the Toronto Daily Star. His first encounter with Mussolini left him distinctly unimpressed. Ushered into a room along with other journalists, Hemingway found the Premier so deeply absorbed in a book that he did not bother to look up. Curious, Hemingway “tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French–English dictionary—held upside down.”¹

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
        ·
        14 days ago

        you could say that it was fate that would lead him to being able to properly read a French-English dictionary.

      • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
        ·
        13 days ago

        Meanwhile, a certain V. Ulyanov stated around the same time that Mussolini's defection to fascism was a "huge loss" for the socialist movement.

          • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
            ·
            13 days ago

            You want people with deep reactionary persuasions in the socialist movement with you?

              • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
                ·
                13 days ago

                You have it the wrong way around. Defection wasn't some accident of history that ended up being consequential, it was something with a substantial lead-up.

                People don't try on different political hats and then change their philosophy. They have a set philosophy, and they try to make sense of what politics are the most reachable, and then if those don't work out, they change their politics.

                Political views are downstream from values, which in turn are downstream from worldview and philosophy. If you have people who self-identify as socialists but who have a might-makes-right outlook on the world, they're not going to stay socialists for long.

                  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
                    ·
                    13 days ago

                    I'm not lecturing a dead man, I'm pointing out how the Bolsheviks, at an earlier time, were more likely to be prone to certain mistakes that we have less excuse to make ourselves.

                    You shouldn't be interested in any kind of formal association with people that prove themselves to be reactionaries. Red-brown alliances are only going to strengthen fascists by giving them the appearance of working-class support.