InappropriateEmote

This has come up before, and I don't know why it keeps getting downplayed. It wasn't just one rogue member going off on their own. It was a sizeable faction of the group that followed one of the top leaders who organized the trip, who (along with many others) went to speak with the pro-US opposition instead of the planned meeting with Diaz-Canel in a very blatant snub.

https://redstarcaucus.org/cuban-links/

Throughout the trip, members of the delegation from the Reform & Revolution Caucus (R&R) and the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) criticized the Cuban government both to our Cuban hosts and other DSA members, and skipped out on multiple delegation events. Most shamefully, both Maria (representing R&R) and Renée (representing SMC, and a member of the current NPC) skipped out on meeting with President Díaz-Canel, who spent more than 2 hours in a frank discussion specifically addressing the critiques these very same DSA members brought up to their Cuban hosts earlier on the trip

This behavior from the R&R and SMC delegates is anti-democratic, disorganizing, and chauvinistic. For a resident of the imperial core to go to a socialist state that has survived a U.S. blockade for multiple generations and critique its achievements as incomplete is the height of chauvinism. To reject the democratically-decided purpose of the delegation – which was to support Cuba against the U.S. blockade – and instead insert their individual political goals of making connections with opposition groups and advocate for Cuban government reform is anti-democratic. If the delegates from R&R and SMC wanted to make connections with government opposition groups and advocate for liberalization they should have applied to other delegations instead of the socialist one. Or they could have stayed at home; many other applicants who were aligned with the delegation's goals were not able to attend due to limited seats on the delegation.

Not an insignificant number of other DSA members throughout the org at the time were defending the actions of the snubbers, going so far as citing Cuba's "authoritarianism" as usual. Hell, even here on hexbear there was a long-standing regular poster who got permabanned (or perhaps temp-banned but chose never to return?) for insisting these actions were either not a big deal or were the correct thing to do. This gross betrayal goes a lot further and deeper than a single rogue member.

edit: https://hexbear.net/post/2330099

I was going to comment directly to the post with my own answers, but you seem to have written exactly what I was going to say.

So I'll just add that I think it is a conspiracy itself that so many kooky conspiracy theories are boosted and amplified as a means to discredit all conspiracy theories. Doing this allows people who are understandably ignorant of the history and context (aka "normies') the ability to say "oh, that's just a conspiracy theory" to immediately shut down any consideration that the thing they're being presented with is true. The person who says "I don't believe in conspiracy theories" gets to look like the smart rational person even though all they did was spout a thought-terminating cliche, because so many "conspiracy theories" that are intentionally cultivated and amplified get massive amounts of attention, from Q-anon shit, to UFOs, to bigfoot (sorry SFS you rock, but those are silly), to just about anything Alex Jones and his listeners talk about, really are just kooky noise. Conspiracy theories as a concept is an op to discredit real whistleblowers and anyone who believes them.

Posts about it are removed for being fake/doctored/ai-hallucination, rightfully so.

There have been a number of posts about this, but apparently it's just an AI slop hallucination.

Yeah, all those civilians press-ganged into white vans to be made to die as canon fodder on the frontlines, they sure do insist on fighting! It has nothing to do with the gun to their back that will kill them if they try to go back home. And it sure is a just war they're fighting against that eeevil Russia who ~~invaded out of nowhere because they're big meanies~~ entered into a civil war already going on in Ukraine where literal fascist militias with full government backing, support, and high military direction were killing civilians in the east and helping Ukraine conduct an ethnic cleansing of it's eastern population.

You have no clue what any of this is about. Ukraine should stop fighting, and it shouldn't have fought to begin with. If it hadn't been literal neo nazis empowered by an anti-democractic coup government that started shelling Ukraine's Donbas ("their own people"), murdering civilians, burning trad unionists alive by the scores, etc., then Russia would never have had to intervene. Fortunately, the fascist government in Ukraine never stood a chance long term (or even short term, if Russia had so chose) chance against Russia, even with Ukraine's forced conscription and obscene gobs of funding from the US and Europe. The sooner the fighting stops, the sooner Ukrainians - many of whom have zero desire to fight let alone die for what they know is a bullshit war - will keep getting turned into pink mist. This doesn't even get into how it actually would have ended years ago through peace deals if the fucking interfering US/EU who would not tolerate a deal, particularly through Boris fucking Johnson, hadn't insisted Ukrainians had to keep dying for the sake of western bourgois interests.

Whatever avenues you get your "news" through have been filling your head with bullshit propaganda and your understanding of the situation is significantly worse than if you had never even heard the word "Ukraine."

I wouldn't be shocked to see it either, but the fact that that sort of act has happened so little, especially when contrasted with the frequency of mass shootings, is very telling. All that pessimism in a large population with so many guns that you mention has so far tended to find an outlet in the murder of easy targets, either random people or the already oppressed. There may be some great paradigm shift where the powerful become common targets of "political violence" and frankly , but as of right now, it's still the safest bet that these people will die peacefully in their beds as oct/nonagenarians.

Finkelstein is actually someone who would still go on about how great Chomsky is and how good of a friend he was. At least that was true as of a few years ago (podcast interviews come to mind, one of them for sure from RevLeft Radio) and I remember thinking how much better overall Finkelstein turned out as a human being compared to Chomsky, even if he never received the kind of recognition or accolades Chomsky did... which of course he didn't, because Finkelstein had integrity and honesty particularly to stand up to Zionists, all but ensuring his career would be constantly pushed towards obscurity, but nor did Finkelstein work as a sheep dog to corral wayward pinkos back towards liberalism like Chomsky. So it was hard to hear Finkelstein gush about Chomsky so much, but I wonder if he is having more thoughts now about how good of a guy Chomsky really was in light of these recent revelations, or even the ones of a few years ago.

same smugness he responded to people who asked him about his Epstein connections

An example I had on hand if anyone is morbidly curious.
youtube link in case nadeko isn't working: https://youtube.com/watch?v=166857p5R6Y

You know how they accuse us of "Whataboutism"? Well this is some real "public-intellectual"-grade whataboutism for ya.

I did. But thank goodness I deepened my knowledge enough to leave him behind as an understandable if unfortunate contributor to my early leftism, something to be matured out of. I was fortunate that I did not to end up one of the people who he was put into place deliberately to siphon away from radicalism to be shepherded back to liberalism. But there are many from my age group and older (my father to some extent an example) who did end up like that, just as planned. I'll be curious to see what excuses are made or whether those I know who did idolize him will finally start to grow out of it.

I do think @Awoo@hexbear.net's take on it, cynical as it may be, is accurate - he knew what he was doing. Good on you and others for never falling for it like some of us though.

It seriously is like they want people to be antisemites.

They do! Supremacy ideologies thrive on and even require a victimhood complex. Zionists are Jewish supremacists and I know it's nothing new to anyone here to point out the immediate material reasons Zionists especially have for drumming up hatred of Jewish people.

Funny how the motto has quietly shifted from "never again" to "you don't count."

I know it's been noted before, but this sure is a succinct and blatant example.

Working class people in Poland and Estonia were given the means of production and yet never overcame the anti-Russian racism despite 5 decades without a local owning class creating such propaganda.

And yet Estonia was made part of the USSR. Should it not have been? Should the Soviets not sought to unionize more countries like the one you're using as an example of a country with a racist and reactionary working class? Should any country that doesn't have a sufficient amount of the populous amenable to socialism be "isolate[d] and sanction[ed] said countries the way Cuba has been"? Which brings up another question, what is enough support, where do you draw the line as to how much of the population and by what metric is enough to warrant struggling to expand the revolution there rather than leaving their working class to keep suffering?

you can at best support preexisting movements, but you need a regional vanguard party for this to happen

In a world dominated by socialism, it is ridiculous to think no such parties would exist in every country, and where they don't, it would not be from a lack of trying, but from their immediate destruction by their state (as what happens in the US, most famously with the Black Panthers).

The comment you were responding to was "Seems like a socialist world would not let millions of people suffer like that" and it is absolutely true. No one is saying revolution will "happen spontaneously and overnight," but if a world where more countries operated like Cuba does today, or in a world where the Soviet Union spread throughout MENA and Europe, it makes no sense from a Marxist, materialist perspective, that they would simply leave any countries with a more highly propagandized public to simply suffer without any kind of intervention.