Facebook and instagram are the two social medias most used by young activists where i live lol
ComradeRat
joined 6 years ago
I never want to be cured bc its fun to flashbang people who can visualise stuff with and i dont wanna hit myself with my flashbangs
Im aphantasiac, I see visual images when dreaming. I'm not sure bc i have no baseline to compare it with, but it feels like aphantasia makes it harder for me to tell dreams from reality bc i'm just not used to seeing stuff that isnt there. I really dont like dreaming much bc of this
Yeah she's easy to read too. Very good at making the subject come alive
To play devils advocate (to attempt to show why its really hard for historians to say for sure one way or the other in cases like these): the archives being sealed could also suggest they dont line up with the official narrative, as well as the other reasons i suggested to electric nan.
People were scared of him and hated him, but as you say no one's saying beria's a nice guy (except perhaps his son): historians' debate here is entirely over whether or not he was a child molester, not over whether or not he signed off on mass executions and imprisonments
Could be yeah, but its equally possible that its locked away bc it proves khrushchev lied, or bc it incriminates some contemporary oligarch's granddaddy, or even bc no one wanted to spend the time and energy needed to sort it into more or less sensitive info and just slapped "do not open" on the whole thing and called itna day. From what ive read, theres not rly enough evidence available to make more than guesses in the dark
So the big issue with scholarship on Beria is he's one of the least accessible (possibly the single least accessible) bolshevik leader to study.
According to Sheila Fitzpatrick in the introduction or preface to On Stalin's Team, when she was allowed access to some of the soviet archives Beria's were off limits. Khrushchev, Stalin, Lenin, Molotov, Yagoda, Yezhov, etc were accessible, Beria's was shut. From what she wrote, his archives werent shut to just her, or to westerners, but to literally everyone.
Fitzpatrick's introduction also notes that most (all?) of the accusations of Beria postdate Khrushchev's secret speech, after which Beria was dead and he and Stalin were used as sin-eaters for the rest of the Soviet government.
She says that bc the archives are shut, what we know of Beria is based pretty much entirely on four groups of sources: 1. pre-1956 official public documents and such ("Comrade Beria is a diligent defender of the USSR"); 2. post-1956 documents ("Beria was a monster and he and Stalin caused every problem"; 3. Beria's son's memoirs ("my dad was a decent guy"; and 4. apocryphal stories which are difficult to date or validate ("Stalin was afraid to leave Beria alone with his daughter"). Besides 2 and 4 (and 4 may well largely be derived from 2) these all paint entirely different pictures, and without archive access theres no real way to prove which is closest to reality.
Fitzpatrick doesnt claim "Beria was innocent" tbc, just notes that there is very little at all that can be said for sure about this question bc of lack of archival access.
Expensive designer ripped jeans are very much exaclty this, as are brand name t shirts and the like
You will find a million bolshevik pamphlets talking about the workers need for bread and supporting workers mutual aid societies; you will be hard pressed to find any examples of the bolsheviks bringing food to meetings to encourage attendance.
I agree with you; unfortunately i've been outvoted. In my ideal world, all my orgs money would go towards distributing food and masks to people and printing agitprop instead of plane fares.
To be clear, i was not implying its only your chapter that masks. I am saying that, where i am, literally 0 (zero) orgs have masking policied and all of them are very enthusiastic to share food indoors with 50+ people with me being the only person wearing a mask. I am genuinely glad many other chapters are better on this.
Ye, those sorts of orgs distributing food is very different from food as an incentive for coming to meetings tho (as i mentioned in my edit)
Edit: Also, i'm glad your chapter masks and does stuff outdoors. Mine doesnt. Our experiences are very different it seems.
Anyone who lived in Jasper Park in the period preceding the 1960's sure knew about bears as they lived with them and their troublesome habits all throughout the summer. Bears wandered through the town like dogs. Although they were most active in town at night there was always one or two active on the edge of town and often down-town in mid-day...
You could not walk down a back alley after dark without running into a bear every couple of blocks...scavenging in the garbage cans. They frightened the tourists by strolling across the lawns and sometimes coming up behind them...
...When a bear saw a nice white [golf] ball rolling over the grass near him, he sometimes got up and strolled over for a look and more often than not picked it up in his teeth and wandered away. The dilemma was then to try and recover the ball from the bear — not wise — and if not, how to score that stroke...
I delivered groceries after school for Jasper Hardware and Grocery...and you had to watch the back door very closely or a bear would wander into the store attracted by the smells. One day I was loading the truck for deliveries and...I noticed that a loaf of bread was missing...I looked around ans saw a big black bear strolling away toward the C[anadian].N[ational].R[ailway]. station with the bread in his mouth. He crossed the station platform, which was crowded with people off the train, and never looked right nor left...
There was no hollering or shouting, no fuss, no muss, and nobody trying to shoot him or immobilize him with a drugged dart as they do now. It was just a bear.
Our house was just off the edge of the townsite at the foot of Pyramid Hill and I have seen as many as eight bears go through our yard in the interval between supper-time and dark...
If you strolled along the banks of the Miette River in the daytime you could see bears of all colours and sizes, big bears, little bears, black bears, brown bears, cinnamon bears and shades in between, sleeping in the trees or at the foot of the big trees, or swimming in the Pond or Dead Man's Hole to cool off...
The kids used the Pond to swim in and sometimes there would be a bear enjoying the deep end and a few kids splashing around at the shallow other end...
Even with all those bears around nobody got hurt from bears. One or two tourists got bit or scratched on the arm while trying to feed the bears by hand in spite of being warned not to — but nothing serious...
In the 1960's the Park Authorities destroyed [just say killed ffs] a lot of bears when they persisted in coming into town or to the campgrounds and also "bear-proofed" the garbage cans and buried and burned the garbage so that the food source was generally eliminated. The result of those actions was to slowly erode the bear population down to a very small portion of their former numbers, and a tourist is very lucky if he sees a bear in the park today, although there are still a few coming to the campgrounds at night. I think they learned that if they came around in daylight they would probably get a bullet in the head or an immobilising dart in the arse.
–Bruce Neighbour, Memories of a Mountain Man
My grandmother lived in jasper around the same time and has said the same thing: the locals were fine with the bears, the tourists did foolish shit like trying to take closeup pictures
21
[Chapman - Empire of Normality] has some neat ideas about capitalism.and neurodivergence and disability
(hexbear.net)
finished reading this book last night, was pretty interesting. Tries to create an "autistic marxism". Imo it lacks engagement with 1)bipoc, 2) global south and 3) exploitation (though Chapman at least acknowledges the gaps), but otherwise great analysis of the connections between disability and capitalism particularly in the global north over the last 80ish yearz. I also do like how he draws on the connections between disability and surplus population
Rly shit takes from Engels here [Engels - The Magyar Struggle] Apparently there's worse yet to come in "Democratic Pan-Slavism"
Its also a total reversal from his position in septemberish 1848, when he was castigating germans for their chauvanism being the cause of slavs opposing revolution
Reading this like "nope, sorry bud all ur hopes and dreams are gonna be crushed next year"
Poor marx
Marx has been maintaining this nonviolent resistance stance since the first article in Neue Rheinische Zeitung back in June, in part bc he believed the reactionaries would definitely lose
However, counterrevolution rallies and two days later Marx admits he was wrong:
[Marx - Confessions of a Noble Soul]
And two days after that, Marx is explicitly advocating violent resistence:
[Marx - A Decree of Eichmann's]
Source is Marx Engels Collected Works vol8. Its very interesting to see Marx and Engels operating as agitators/organisers rather than theorists
From Marx Engels Collected Works vol7
Overall the Neue Rheinische Zeitung articles have been very interesting both theoretically and to see Marx and Engels engaged in organisational work during what they hoped would be THE revolution
been reading Barbara Allen's biography of Shlyapnikov. Very well written and sourced almost entirely by archival stuff. But depressing because the workers' opposition gets run roughshod over by basically everyone in power (Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, Trotsky, Molotov, etcetc). Been wondering what others' have read on the workers' opposition and what your takes are.
The 1930s have been by far the most depressing
But even the late 10s and early 20s have some "dude wtf" moments from leadership imo
Somewhat relatedly, what do folks think of the Democratic Centralists? I've actually never heard of that faction in the 1919-21 debates before
3
Some excerpts from The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939
(hexbear.net)
Very good book on soviet nationalities policy using archival research
This one does a good job of showing how rapidly the (centre) of the party shifted lines on nationalism
Russian opposition to affirmative action programmes was pretty strong
Nationality could be shockingly arbitrary and sudden (and often informed by politics)
Stalin begins to turn towards supporting Russians
collectivisation interacted badly with the nationalities policy
The degree of internal conflicts within the party and soviet bureaucracy was also a huge part of the book.
Ethnic cleansings going on, and there's still tons of affirmative culture programmes running. Weird contradictions
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Except thats literally not what happened in Russian or chinese revs
before the fighting started (pre october rev and pre long march) captured comrades were helped to escape and go undergroun and/or into exile. During the civil wars, captured comrades were usually brutally murderes by reactionaries and people were happy if they survived somehow, helped them recover, and sent them.back to work.
I dont know as much about the internal processes and procedures the cpc followed, but the bolsheviks did full investigations for suspected traitors not just kill on suspicion.
Cuba's an even bigger demonstration of how misguided your view is. Even enemy troops were treated well and often recruited! Fidel stressed this "niceness" as the unique element thats made cuba so strong and popular