The Three Anti-imperialists
The glorious future.
The Multipolar world is taking form.
No longer is the global majority going to turn the other cheek.
American imperialism, just like all of its imperial forefathers, will fall.
Only through the destruction of the empire and the tyranny of capital can we #FREEAMERICA and the… pic.twitter.com/917wFImO4v
— Midwestern Marx (@MidwesternMarx) April 13, 2024
This is parody, right? Right??
Harald: Poe’s Law is in full effect. The Woke have gone so far that it’s not possible to identify parody anymore. Not when men can be women and Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” goes viral.
Nullius: Yeah, I know. I was just engaging in some wishful thinking. That seems necessary to maintain a tolerable level of sanity.
To prove the point, behold The Prophecies of Titania McGrath. Tremble before Social Justice, bigots.
I’ve never understood people who worship Marx like a god and treat his writings like holy text. The philosophers and thinkers of the past had good ideas and bad ones. As I see it, the general rule is, the further back you go in time, the more surprising it is to find good ideas that hold up today — and the more credit is due to those who came up with them — and the more apt you are to find bad ones that didn’t hold up so well. Because that’s how knowledge is built: over time. So it seems weird to me that anyone would revere thinkers from centuries past beyond merely admiring them for what they did in the context of their time.
Like, say, Freud: amazing that he got people thinking about the human mind like that. Credit where it’s due in the context of his time and place. But the “Freudians” who take his nonsense literally today? Ridiculous!
Kant? Hume? Adam Smith? Great stuff! For their time. Even Darwin — even Einstein — they didn’t get everything right. Evolutionary biologists and quantum physicists get this. They take delight in showing where their fields have moved beyond their great founders’ texts. It’s a sign of how much those fields have grown.
Not so much with the Marxists, with their worldview seemingly set in amber. Is it just me who feels like they take his extremely out-of-date prescriptions for how the world should be organized far too literally? We tried applying a lot of Marx’s theories in the real world over the last one hundred years. Tens of millions of dead bodies later, it’s safe to say the ideas, radical as they were, and influential they have been, they needed a little finessing. They shouldn’t be taken at face value today.
It feels very religion-y, the Marx worship. The way even moderate Christians talk like the Bible is this great source of moral knowledge. In its day, two thousand years ago, the New Testament was radical, sure. Nowadays, we’ve built up a body of knowledge that cancels out a good three quarters or so of Jesus’s moral ideas.
I used to have lunch with a Muslim colleague every day, and one of the things that really surprised me was his inverse view of progress: that the world was perfect in Mohammed’s time, and the further we get from it as we move forward in time, the more corrupt the world becomes. His idea of progress was literally my idea of regress.
I sense the Marxists pine for a glorious past in the same vein.
So what exactly does Marx have to do with any of those three? Kleptocrat without the window dressing of communism, religious nutter, and state capitalist (who does rather worship Mao, in fairness)?
@ #5:
Isaac Deutscher, the great Marxist biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, recommended to all his numerous readers and co-thinkers that they study Christianity. This in his view would help them avoid the sectarianism and resulting strife that Christianity, with its intolerance, heresy-hunts, witch trials and such had fallen to, and which in turn had led to the Reformation the European wars of religion, and the rise of atheism and agnosticism after the French Revolution of 1789.
Just as we in our embryonic (pre-foetal) stage of life grow and then lose a tail, arguably repeating evolution, so ideologies like Marxism go through a similar developmental process. Just like Christianity, its ideological fore-runner, Marxism shattered into a horde of sects, each with its own head preacher and pet issue that led to its departure. (Full vs partial immersion at Baptism is my favourite example from Christianity. It’s like nothing so much as a game of Trivial Persuit.)
In his own lifetime, Marx himself saw sectarianism rise amongst his own following; leading him to famously say “thank God I am not a Marxist.!” Chinese vs Russian communism was about as big as that particular ideological bunfight could get, without blasting off into outer space.
As if these three aren’t ready to kill loads of people (including each other) in order to defend or promote what they see as their “interests.” Oh, wait; they already have. This is what Great Powers (or regimes that fantasize that they’re Great Powers) do.
Probably because it is very religion-y. I think the original mistake is in classifying Marxism as philosophy. Theosophy is a more accurate description, with Social Man at the End of History acting as God in the eschatological drama.
Blood Knight @6
I think they’re mainly happy about the end of American (and, by extension, Western) hegemony.
And maybe they think China and Russia will revert to True Communism once we’re out of the picture.
I suppose they love Khamenei because Islamists, being Muslims, belong to the approved class of Marginalized Victims (Muslim victims of Islamists don’t count. We’re not to notice them; they make for bad optics.) And of course he opposes Israel, and supports Hamas, so he’s part of the glorious fight against evil colonialists.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the tankies. Too many on the Left seem happy, or at least unconcerned, about the possibility of the West losing the (currently tepid) War to these guys.
Like the three of them don’t have long imperialist ambitions.
I’m just very clear-eyed about who I venerate; political memes are almost always simplistic and stupid.
Unlike the rest of us who simply adore this darling trio.
Well all my heroes are fictional… There’s this tendency these days to make cartoonish (almost literally in this case) idols out of real people and cheering them on like it’s a sort of boxing match.
I do not know much about the Islamic fundamentalist, or of the Chinese autocrat. But Putin would have to be in the forefront of those the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko had in mind when he wrote his classic Stalin’s Heirs.
“The Party discourages me from being smug. / ‘Why care? ‘ some say, but I can’t remain inactive. / While Stalin’s heirs walk this earth, / Stalin, I fancy, still lurks in the mausoleum.”
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Stalin now once again has an office in the Kremlin, from whence he issues orders to his minions to liquidate any who cross him. His is the ghost that stalks Putin’s Russia.
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-heirs-of-stalin/
I was, I fancy, one of the last people to see Stalin (his body, anyway). They moved it out of the mausoleum a few months afterwards.
While I’m at it, and for no good reason, I mention that my nephew Christopher Willis composed the music for Death of Stalin, and performed the piano parts. A lot of it sounds like Shostakovich (intentionally), but it isn’t.
That’s interesting, which is good reason enough.
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