Permanently Deleted

  • volkvulture [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    I didn't say doing charity made them "good" or "bad". It's your insistence on creating boogiemen out of history that does this. But equating a leftist religious organization to literal Nazis in Greece is cynical and underhanded.

    You again are deflecting and trying to regurgitate anti-leftist sensationalism to make the organization's members out to be unthinking or malevolent beasts incapable of making their own decisions. I put quotes within quotation marks, so that they are easy to discern as quotes.

    If you want to imbibe propaganda and disconnect the context of the People's Temple from the rest of the era, then you are doing the same thing that most liberal & establishment historiographies do with the BPP & Nation of Islam and others. They call them cults & extremists too

    I didn't say anything about "honey pot", because the CIA blatantly had its hands all over this, and in the larger context of Operation Condor & other anti-leftist meddling, they definitely forced them into this box and gave them little recourse. Maybe the "cult" members would've been able to see how going back to existing within capitalism & racist imperialist US culture was a better option if only they had you there to show them the better way

    "It's literally a cult" is what is said about Maoism & Stalin era and BPP & so many other leftist political situations in recent history. You want to make People's Temple out as this politically inert or dastardly or completely disconnected fringe group, when it was a misleading & misled & historically misrepresented product of the larger radicalization & dissent of the 1960s and 70s.

    "Textbook definition of a cult" applies to literally any affinity group that attempts to chart its own course in society & revolves around a leader in any way. It's not really an adequate term for large and diverse groups that all have their own motivations and are created within real adverse circumstances and flourish on many political & social & productive levels.

    But sure, BPP's unfortunate dissolution & disintegration isn't in any way similar to how the media & bourgeois histories treat People's Temple. Anti-communism and the need to tie historical tragedies to any future attempt to practice radical dissent isn't counter-revolution.