These people actually like Rosa because:
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They don't read her
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She was killed and didnt succeed in creating anything lasting
It's just a harry potter house aesthetic for them, gotta dig up shit to sling around to own the tankies
She was killed and didnt succeed in creating anything lasting
Liberal brain worms. They've infected online only anarchists to loving losers.
Rosa in reality: I don't approve of the Bolshevik's methods, but I recognize they are currently fighting for their lives, so I will withhold my criticisms until a more stable time.
Rosa in online anarchists's mind: Lenin was a stinky poopoo head and I love anarchism
They hate actual socialists that succeed because they were not killed soon enough (bias towards martyrs).
"Hey, you know how the culture of different countries influences their strains of socialism?" "Yeah, what's your point?" "So do you think how western culture glorifies martyr's may have something to do with the fact that most of the revolutions we glorify have failed?" "Nahhhh"
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left infighting and hate for anarchists is weird because communism is literally a classes, stateless, society. That's what these people fought for and what they fought for sounds like communism and anarchism to me. What you call the ideal society seems to depend on what lens you put on your camera.
I agree with that. I think the trap too many people fall into is leaning on old theorists for their prescriptions for America. Like any other country it has its own unique set of material and social conditions and as such needs a political program built around that.
Internet chats just get notoriously spicy. Reddits format also encourages performative debates.
It's not just internet points, though I am sure most users internalize upvotes at least somewhat. In this site you get pop up notifications of replies if you're browsing. Default setting is active, so you see comment chains going back and forth rise. Which isn't bad, I come here for the discussion, but reddit format has its downsides.
Right but if you don't have a historical or material framework within which to achieve these things, you're just a kid imagining a different world without any means of getting there. For a lot of the online dork anarchists they take industrialization completely for granted.
these the same petite-bourgeois pretend anarchists who had that good/bad image where all the POC communists were suspiciously on the "bad" side?
Sankara wasn't even a tankie lmao, what is this person trying to get at. This r*dditor is a liberal, simple as
I'm an anarchist, I don't think Sankara was a "tankie". Maybe that's because I literally live in Africa and I'm out of sync with the "western left". He was, as you said, a ML that was heavily inspired by the Cuban Revolution and other Marxist/Maoist projects. And he upheld those values himself, he owned almost no material possessions and did practically nothing wrong, and admitted to any mistakes he made (such as the show trails going overboard). Like if western leftists (liberals) can't even critically support someone like him thats not my problem
Teaching libs about the word tankie was the biggest mistake of the terminally online left, change my view.
spoiler
This is an obvious joke
Sankara's only mistake was refusing to get material assistance and military protection from the existing socialist states (predominantly the USSR, but also to a lesser extent Cuba and Libya could have given some help) so as to keep political independence.
He was also warned that Blaise Compaoré was plotting to kill him and did nothing about it because he felt that he would be betraying his friend.
Literally too good for this world.
Real Bernie Sanders hours :P
On a serious note, I've always wondered how come all the gains of the revolutionary program got reversed so quickly once Compaoré expected his coup - how come people didn't rise up and push back?
I don't think he had much of a communist movement behind him. His situation was weird - almost Blanquist - in that his revolution was more of a coup with a relatively small cadre of leftist supporters. The people loved him but he didn't manage to establish much of a political education among the populace. So when he died I think they mostly just figured it was back to business as usual. Probably helps that the military and foreign powers supported it.
However, they did rise up and overthrow him in a mass protest literally last year and now he's in exile.
Ah I see. I knew it was a coup (one of the few good ones, like Ghadaffi and the Carnation Revolution) but thought he used it as a springboard to establish an actual popular democratic movement, too bad he never got around to it. Shows how crucial it is to create proper self-perpetuating meritocratic structures, otherwise any gains are fleeting. This is for example my biggest critique of Stalin (as well as his comrades in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War), since even if we assume, for arguments sake, that Stalin was the most dedicated communist ever ultimately it all got dismantled pretty quickly because there was nothing to safeguard all the gains.
These kind of people are going to unironically call Nelson Mandela a tankie in the future because the ANC became corrupt
The word is meaningless. I wish people would stop trying to create a false dichotomy between the "good MLs" and "tankies". The only difference is how many layers of propaganda the one doing the differentiating has internalized.
The distinction so many non-MLs try to make is really incoherent; Sankara, Che, and the Black Panthers were all Stalin-loving MLs, but they're considered the good ones, whereas Mao, the Kims, and Stalin himself are the fake socialist red fascist authoritarians or whatever. It has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with how successfully slandered they've been by capitalist propaganda.
If anything, the Reddit OP is just being more consistent.
I mean tankie has just become a meaningless word now. It's used for basically "anyone I disagree with" online. Anyone that uses it unironically is probably some form of liberal or radlib.
I'm an anarchist and I'm so often disappointed by the internet anarchists like this who decided one day "fuck all authority" and then just lose/never develop any ability for critical thought and just discard any and all leftist theory without actually examining it. They just take the one idea and run with it. That's not praxis. Sukk.
Unfortunately after the gutting of leftist movements during the Red Scares, homegrown Anarchist movements in Americas were basically set back to zero. The late 20th century the next wave came from a liberal, personal view of anarchism.
But times make the people and people are doing direct action from both (or no) leftist tendencies.
Leftist tendencies are a lot like the unreleased version of Cats where they CGI the buttholes; I talk about it a lot but I don't know if I'll ever see it in real life.
Your arguments are pure rhetoric with no substance.
Oh my god you cannot be this dense.
"You would kill me as soon as you had power, and that's why I'll resist you every step on the way."
tfw you only engage in politics because of all the melodramatic reddit comments you get to write
I’m not an ML by any stretch but the only “bad” thing I ever heard about Sankara was that he had some fancy guitar? If that doesn’t tell you how good he was that that comes up as a negative i don’t know what to tell you.
As spokesman for the proletariat, I allow him this one guitar
I was digging around in the talk page, very little discussion in any case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Thomas_Sankara
I looked at the page to see if the criticisms have merit, decided they don't. I did find somethign interesting though.
There is a chart in the "Criticisms" section with the "Freedom in the World" country ratings indicating that Burkina Faso was "not free" during Sankara's presidency. We all know this is just a bullshit metric, etc, etc. What I thought was interesting was, looking at the document that they cite. http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/Country%20Ratings%20and%20Status%2C%201973-2014%20%28FINAL%29.xls
You can see the previous year had the following designations:
Year: 1983-1984
Political Rights: 6
Civil Liberties: 5
Status: Partially Free (PF)
Year: 1984-1985
Political Rights: 7
Civil Liberties: 5
Status: Not Free (NF)
An increase in political rights and no change in civil liberties (by their own metric) makes the country less free.
Yeah, they left out the 'range of Cheetos Mac'n'Cheese flavours available' metric I'm the final paper.
Sankara are the last flaming barbecue pack as a new years treat in 1984, reducing the flavours to two. According to US metrics, this automatically makes a country 'not free'.
The only good centrism is left-wing centrism. As long as we share the end goal of a better world free of capitalistic tyranny, that should be all that matters. Both Anarchists and Tankies have furthered these goals in some way, and both have also made grave missteps. All that matters is we progress forward, together as comrades, workers and allies. Only our combined solidarity will bring down the fortress of capital.
On that note— been meaning to read a book or two on him recently, whoms got some recommendations?
My local bookstore had one about him, maybe when I'm able to leave the house again I'll buy it and
scan it for you chapos. If you want to find it somewhere it's called "Thomas Sankara Speaks" and it's written by Sankara himselfMaybe this one? Haven't read it but I'm here for other recommendations
Boring. Who cares. I'm shocked that someone on the internet has a bad take.
This guy is a nobody with no audience. This place is best when we are dunking on people like vaush who have a real audience to listen to their idiocy
This may shock you but the type of behavior where you go around the internet picking fights over stuff like this actually turns people off to marxism-leninism, especially when you're calling in backup.
Uhhh what? Have you been to this site? Dunking on shit takes on the internet is our house special.
For what its worth I think the OP is dumb too. I get why it annoyed you. Sorry to be a jerk I just don't want factionalism to overtake everything here. Its pretty easy to see that Sankara ruled.
I'd never heard of Sankara before this site (because of course I haven't) and he just sounds absolutely incredible. All the stuff he was doing seems a lot like what the IMF and World Bank pretend to want. Oxfam opposed Sankara as well. Sankara was assassinated and ousted by a coup, that included, shockingly, the United States. This really makes me feel like a tankie right now. It seems you have to sacrifice a great deal in your country just to prevent counterrevolutions. That's why communist militias are so large.
