Gonzalothot [none/use name]

Most communists understandably tend to have a very negative opinion of Ceaușescu and consider him to be among the worst socialist leaders of the Eastern bloc. Despite this, a 2014 poll showed that:

66 percent of Romanians would vote for communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989) if he ran in the upcoming presidential elections in November

The survey highlights that 69 percent of citizens believe that they lived better during communism

A 2018 study by polling institute Isogep showed that Nicolae Ceaușescu remains the most popular Romanian president. 64.3% had a good opinion of Ceaușescu, followed by current president Klaus Iohannis with 50.7%, the only other president with an approval rate over 50%.

Some history of Romania's socialist period from a socialist perspective.

Wouldn't be too surprised if the Cliffite Trots and third campists were.

Movements and organizations Cliffite Trots (like the recently dissolved ISO) showed solidarity with (at least initially):

• The “mujahideen” in Afghanistan against the socialist government and the Soviet Union
• The “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia which brought neoliberal capitalism to power
• The pro-Western “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine
• The pro-Western “Rose Revolution” in Georgia
• The 1991 overthrow of the USSR (trumpeting Boris Yeltsin)
• The Kosovo Liberation Army (a fascist force)
• The middle-class and pro-Western Green movement in Iran
• The Libyan rebels that championed NATO intervention
• The Free Syrian Army that champions NATO intervention

Movements and organizations Cliffite Trots refused to support, and attacked instead as “Stalinist”:

• The Cuban Revolution and the Communist Party of Cuba
• The United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution
• The Chinese Revolution and the Communist Party of China including during the Mao era
• North Korea, even during the Korean War
• The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
• The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

Many orthodox Trots (particularly the ones in Latin America) tend to be generally anti-imperialist though.

Phil Donahue lost his job at MSNBC for vocally opposing the Iraq War. An internal memo at MSNBC revealed that they saw Donahue as a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war".

According to Donahue:

They were terrified of the antiwar voice. And that is not an overstatement. Antiwar voices were not popular. And if you’re General Electric, you certainly don’t want an antiwar voice on a cable channel that you own; Donald Rumsfeld is your biggest customer.

It really is funny almost, when you look back on how—how the management was just frozen by the antiwar voice. We were scolds. We weren’t patriotic. American people disagreed with us. And we weren’t good for business.

Chris Hedges also lost his job at The New York Times for publicly denouncing the Iraq War after they formally reprimanded him. He was booed off a stage and had his microphone cut twice for delivering an antiwar speech.

While this is certainly true and the support for the former Nepalese government was rather minimal, it's still the worst foreign policy decision China has made post-Sino-Soviet split imo. It was done out of a selfish desire for prioritizing stability at China's borders because the party at the time was paranoid about right-wing Tibetan exiles in Nepal exploiting the instability caused by the uprisings and establishing a base for promoting Tibetan separatism from Nepal which borders Tibet. The Gyanendra government of Nepal had a policy of prohibiting Tibetan exiles from promoting separatism and any political organizing that would threaten Chinese interests. Certainly not the first time a socialist government has opted for pursuing selfish nationalist interests over socialist internationalism though and it unfortunately won't be the last.

The Sino-Vietnamese War was a horrible consequence of the Sino-Soviet split that began under Mao, escalated in the 70s, and didn't really end until the late 1980s. It led to some atrocious foreign policy decisions under both Mao and Deng. Nevertheless, since the end of the Sino-Soviet split, China has largely repaired its relations with the many socialist countries that they had previously spurned during that era (although there is still some tension with Vietnam especially due to South China Sea disputes). Erik Prince involvement in anything is certainly cringe though.

Castro in 2004:

The relations between China and Cuba are today an example of transparency and peaceful collaboration between two nations that hold the ideals of socialism.

China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. I do not hesitate to say that it is already the main engine of the world economy. In what time? In only 83 years after the foundation of its glorious Communist Party and 55 years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Fidel in 2014:

Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.

China has become Cuba's largest trading partner:

The year 2016 saw the first year ever that China became Cuba's largest trading partner with bilateral trade reaching $2.585 billion, according to a newly released report by the island's statistics, ONEI.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi declared in 2017 that China will continue to “put Cuba at a special place in its foreign policy and will as always support Cuba's legitimate fight for sovereignty and its endeavors against the U.S. embargo.”

And of course Sall unironically believes in Blanchard's pseudoscientific autogynephilia typology that has been repeatedly debunked.

Fidel Castro in 2014:

“Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.”

Also they’re extorting African countries for their natural resources just as western imperialist countries are.

This requires a source, because I’m aware of them having activity in Africa, but what I’ve read about is of a much less exploitative nature than what the western powers are doing.

Their argument is based on a common misconception seen among imperial core lefties regarding Chinese foreign policy and international trade

This is a video that goes more into depth about the matter.

Fidel Castro in 1994:

If you want to talk about socialism, let us not forget what socialism achieved in China. At one time it was the land of hunger, poverty, disasters. Today there is none of that. Today China can feed, dress, educate, and care for the health of 1.2 billion people.

I think China is a socialist country, and Vietnam is a socialist nation as well. And they insist that they have introduced all the necessary reforms in order to motivate national development and to continue seeking the objectives of socialism.

There are no fully pure regimes or systems. In Cuba, for instance, we have many forms of private property. We have hundreds of thousands of farm owners. In some cases they own up to 110 acres. In Europe they would be considered large landholders. Practically all Cubans own their own home and, what is more, we welcome foreign investment. But that does not mean that Cuba has stopped being socialist.

Castro in 2004:

Socialism will definitively remain the only real hope of peace and survival of our species. This is precisely what the Communist Party and the people of the People's Republic of China have irrefutably demonstrated. They demonstrated at the same time, as Cuba and other brotherly countries have shown, that each people must adapt their strategy and revolutionary objectives to the concrete conditions of their own country and that there are not two absolutely equal socialist revolutionary processes. From each of them, you can take the best experiences and learn from each of their most serious mistakes.

China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries. I do not hesitate to say that it is already the main engine of the world economy. In what time? In only 83 years after the foundation of its glorious Communist Party and 55 years after the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Fidel in 2014:

Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.

"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power." - Karl Marx

It was Lassalle and the Ricardian socialists who believed that labor was the source of all wealth.

In April 2018, just one week before UK Government representatives met the Bolsonaro family in secret, the BBC was promoting Bolsonaro-supporting Neo-Nazis as “snappy dressing young conservatives who seek change”.

"In a partial survey conducted by the Afghan Ministry of Mines and Petroleum, the country’s mineral wealth is estimated at $3 trillion, more than enough to compensate for the war’s cost."

Transcript of Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powel:

Putting hard military power in Afghanistan is the closest they can get to the Belt and Road Initiative, that runs across Central Asia. If we had to impact that with military power, we are in a position to do so in Afghanistan.

We are cheek and jowl with the potentially most unstable nuclear stockpile on the face of the earth in Pakistan. We wanna be able to leap on that stockpile, and stabilize it if necessary.

And the third reason we are there is because there are 20 million Uighurs, and they don't like Han Chinese in Xinjiang Province of Western China. And if the CIA has to mount an operation using those Uighurs, as Erdogan did in Turkey against Assad… there are 20,000 of them in Id Lib in Syria right now, for example. That’s why the Chinese might be deploying military forces to Syria in the very near future, to take care of those Uighurs, that Erdogan invited in. Well the CIA would want to destabilize China, and that would be the best way to do it.

A great exposé on the history of the Afghanistan War

The human rights industry now plays an integral role in manufacturing consent for Western imperialism. Ever wonder why the positions of Western human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International seem to suspiciously align with US foreign policy?

• https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/human-rights-watchs-revolving-door/
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/31/human-rights-imperialism-james-hoge
• https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/08/billionaire-human-rights-watch-sanctions-nicaragua-venezuela/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/20/human-rights-watch-bolivia-coup-massacre/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2019/08/25/deaths-for-dollars-nicaraguas-human-rights-organizations/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/14/syrian-network-for-human-rights-opposition-snhr/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/28/us-oas-nicaragua-political-prisoners-murder/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2018/08/31/human-rights-watch-hrw-praises-extreme-war-hawk-john-mccain/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2017/12/11/human-rights-watch-honduras-venezuela-kenneth-roth/
• https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/12/venezuela-opposition-human-rights-regime-change/
• https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/the-ideology-of-humanitarian-imperialism/
• https://monthlyreview.org/2008/09/01/humanitarian-imperialism-the-new-doctrine-of-imperial-right/
• https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/05/18/wels-m18.html
• https://monthlyreview.org/1998/03/01/human-rights-imperialism/
• http://www.kropfpolisci.com/humanitarian.imperialism.bricmont

According to a Gallup poll, only 24% of Ukrainians in 2013 thought that the dissolution of the Soviet Union benefited their country, while 56% said that dissolving the USSR harmed Ukraine. Another poll had 62% of Ukrainians believing that they were worse off today than under communism, whereas only 12% said they were better off now than under communism.

Also, in the 2013 Gallup polls of former Soviet countries , the younger citizens between the ages of 15 and 44 (many of whom were not even born or were very young at the time of the dissolution) were nearly three times as likely as those 65 and older to say that the breakup of the Soviet Union benefited their countries. 76 percent of those ages 65 and older argue that the dissolution of the USSR harmed their countries (only 11% say they benefited from it) . So, it tends to be the older people who had actually remembered and experienced Soviet socialism (even through the shitty Perestroika years of Gorby as well as the embargoes, sanctions, massive prioritization of allocating Soviet resources to the military over consumer goods/services, and the other less pleasant aspects of siege socialism brought on by capitalist encirclement/imperialism) that are far more supportive of socialism, which decisively debunks the common Western myth of "the only people who support socialism have never lived through it" that you get bombarded with by libs and reactionaries.

Some other interesting stats:

• 72% of Hungarians said that most people were worse off today economically than they were under communism (only 8% said most people are better off now)
• 63% of Romanians said their lives were better during communism
• 81% of Serbians believed they lived best during the time of socialist Yugoslavia
• 66% of Russians regret the fall of the Soviet Union (Stalin now even has a 70% approval rate)
• Only 30% of Ukrainians approved of the change to liberal democracy (2009)
• Over 60% of Bulgarians said that they lived better under socialism
• 57% of Eastern Germans defend East Germany
• A poll of East Germans commissioned by West German media (Der Spiegel) showed 71 percent of those surveyed oppose German reunification in 1989.

This is a decent article that chronicles the neoliberal destruction of the Russian economy from capitalist restoration in the 90's that you'll rarely ever hear about in the West.

That's essentially what has been happening for years with North Korean defectors being motivated by cash payments for interviews and information and why their testimonies have proven to be so notoriously unreliable. The defectors became well aware of what the interviewers wanted to hear. This practice drove the demand for “saleable stories”: the more exclusive, shocking or emotional, the higher the fee. Consequently, we get to frequently hear fantastical stories of human atrocities from North Korean defectors who claim to be eyewitnesses like Lee Soon-ok who offered testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2004, vividly describing torture and the killing of Christians in hot liquid iron in North Korean political prisons. This was then later debunked by defector associations which had first hand knowledge that Lee had never even been a political prisoner.

For Latin American sources in English at least:

• https://twitter.com/kawsachunnews?lang=en -Bolivia
• https://twitter.com/OVargas52 -Bolivia
• https://venezuelanalysis.com/ -Venezuela
• https://www.brasilwire.com/ -Brazil
• http://en.granma.cu/ -Cuba

I’m familiar with Caleb Maupin. This will unfortunately require a massive effort post to fully explain what happened. I’ll provide a little bit of background information on Maupin first. His ideology is basically Marxism-Leninism but he thinks vanguard parties are ineffective in first world countries (he had a falling out with the Workers World Party (an anti-imperialist trotskyist party that has an ideology that overlaps significantly with Marxism-Leninism and was founded and led by Sam Marcy) that left him with the impression that first world vanguard parties have strong tendencies to devolve into irrelevant tiny cults with only the few people that lead them having any real power in the party). He supports market socialism at least as a transition phase and is ok with a temporary national bourgeoisie as long as its under the heel of the proletariat with capitalists having no political power and having no ownership in the commanding heights of the economy. He likes to highlight the historical accomplishments of all socialist projects across the world including the more controversial ones in the past like the Stalin era of the Soviet Union instead of doing the popular Western leftist tactic of “that’s not real socialism though” which he sees as an ineffective argument in countering anti-communist propaganda that tries to portray socialism as “something that’s failed everywhere it’s been tried.” In recent years he’s been pursuing an extremely naïve strategy of basically defending anyone who he perceives to be remotely anti-imperialist even if they’re not necessarily communists or leftists without really considering the optics or consequences of some of the people he loosely associates with.

Years ago he did some humanitarian work in Iran and met some Iranians who insisted that he should read Dugin’s takes on Western imperialism to try to understand anti-imperialism from more non-Marxist perspectives and that he should go to one of his conferences. This is what led to his horrifically stupid decision to attend the Dugin conference and even post a video of himself giving a speech there as if it was something to be proud of. He later did provide some context over why he attended the conference and clarified some of his comments in his speech (although it’s buried in some of his horribly structured and excessively long streams so it’s understandable why there hasn’t been much pushback on the “Caleb is a Nazbol!” narrative). By “international bankers” he said he was referring to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) which is made up of literal international bankers who have a horrible history of peddling predatory structural adjustment loans with conditionality that can threaten both the political and economic sovereignty of the Global South countries and ultimately make their people even further impoverished with neoliberal austerity.

He clarified that he disagrees with the rest of Dugin’s views which he had described as being too conservative or right-wing, but he thinks some of his arguments in opposition to Western imperialism are worthy of recognizing in spite of the bad optics. The “promoting weakness” line refers to one of his main talking points in the past where he argues that the Western left is addicted to losing with continuing to pursue lost causes like social democracy and that the revolutions that have succeeded have been unfairly demonized as authoritarian dystopias by Western propaganda to promote Western imperialism with Western leftists uncritically consuming and believing that propaganda. He argues that figures and movements from Rosa Luxemburg to Revolutionary Catalonia are almost universally championed by the Western left is because they lost so quickly before capitalist propaganda could arrive to vilify them. His belief is that as a consequence of the Western left internalizing anti-tankie propaganda, they have adopted less threatening socialist ideologies like anarchism and social democracy that are too “weak” to overthrow the global capitalist order.

Providing a lot of these clarifications and context would have been nice to have in the description of the Dugin conference video he posted and he could have avoided a lot of this controversy. Instead he idiotically posts the Dugin video without any context whatsoever and allows people who he’s had heated struggle sessions online with before (like Bad Empanada, The Serfs, Thought Slime, and other anarchists over issues related to China, Stalin, Soviet Union, Congress for Cultural Freedom, Western propaganda, imperialism, and even silly shit like leftist aesthetics) to blatantly misrepresent his views in bad faith, try to prove that their unrelated arguments against Maupin were actually now right all along because he can now be smeared as a toxic Nazbol with all of his positions now being red-brown conspiracy theories, and get him fully cancelled. It’s a bit ironic considering Caleb actually does have a long history of successfully debating against fascists. He has complained in the past that he wish he hadn’t heard of few disturbing anti-Semitic comments during some of his visits in Iran and has described anti-Semitism as “socialism for fools.”

Caleb likes to talk about his meetings with socialists and anti-imperialists in the Global South in his streams and the types of criticisms that hears from them about Western socialists. A common complaint that he says he hears from them is that the leftists in the West dress very sloppily and don’t care enough about aesthetics. This is what he said ultimately motivated him to wear suits in his videos and in any of his public appearances even if it’s a bit awkward looking. He likes to get into a lot of online fights against anti-tankie radlibs and anarchists in particular who believe in anti-communist propaganda. In response to what he perceived to be personal or bad faith attacks, he would usually respond by essentially insulting their appearances and portraying them as losers who looked like they’ve rolled out of a dumpster. He’s done this to Bad Empanada, Thought Slime, Vaush, and I think maybe some others who personally attacked Maupin earlier. Consequently, this just further devolved into bigger shitstorms of personal attacks and misrepresentations of each other’s actual positions. Maupin then like a dumbass gift wrapped the Dugin speech video to everyone online that already hated him and it was over. This is really what started the portrayals of Caleb being a Nazbol to take off and spammed all across social media.

He also has done dumb shit in the past like praising Joti Brar from CPGB-ML because he thought her strong record as an anti-imperialist and her work in Palestine for example basically absolves her of her cringe divisive transphobia. After their interview together where she randomly shoehorned a bizarre transphobic rant at the very end and he didn’t really offer any pushback against it, he did strongly condemn transphobia as another form of human rights abuse in his following streams and mentioned his past participation in protests against transphobia as a member of the Workers World Party. He argued that Joti Brar shouldn’t be fully and permanently cancelled even if she’s dead wrong on trans issues.

So, Maupin is clearly not an actual Nazbol or a reactionary Red-Brown like he’s being portrayed as by some online lefties that he's had personal beefs with, but he is a naïve moron for thinking that being a communist associating with sketchy figures like Farrakhan, LaRouchies, Dugin, and CPGB-ML that have problematic reactionary pasts even for the purported sake of anti-imperialist solidarity wasn’t going to somehow come back to haunt him. Caleb Maupin actually does provide a lot of great content covering the history of the socialist movement in America and covering geopolitics from a leftist anti-imperialist perspective which are arguably glaring blindspots for the online left right now, but he’s effectively destroyed his own reputation at this point with mostly self-inflicted controversies like this.

He's just regurgitating a Chomsky talking point.

Noam Chomsky, a libertarian socialist, applies the term state capitalism to the economy of the United States, where large enterprises that are deemed "too big to fail" receive publicly funded government bailouts that mitigate the firms' assumption of risk and undermine market laws, and where private production is largely funded by the state at public expense, but private owners reap the profits.

The truth is that there are also countless eyewitness accounts of heinous shit North Korea is allegedly doing. Anecdotal evidence from these "eyewitness accounts" has proven to be extremely problematic and unreliable in those cases as well as seen by researchers, yet we still get constantly pummeled with this atrocity propaganda by Western media. It was eventually revealed that defectors had been motivated by cash payments for interviews and information. North Korean "eyewitnesses" became well aware of what the interviewer wants to hear. This practice drove the demand for “saleable stories”: the more exclusive, shocking or emotional, the higher the fee. Take what you hear from supposed "eyewitness accounts" from countries that are caught in the crosshairs of Western imperialism and are being paraded around by Western media with dubious sources like Adrian Zenz with a grain of salt.