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I want to read at least one thing by Leslie Feinberg before the month ends. Help me pick please. Even if you’re just going off of the name.

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Sometimes I forget Letterboxd is a largely american dominated website

This made me remember

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Ayo that water park looks like fun.

i saw this headline

and decided to look up pictures of this allegedly creepy water park

it’s a fucking water park. these pictures could be in any country in the world. fuck are you talking about, the washington post?

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Ever get that feeling where you know something already but having it explained again by a new person makes the realization hit in a different way?

That’s how I feel with these paragraphs. Ugh.

From The Knoweldge Economy And Socialism by Agustín Lage Dávila. Pages 237-238

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Tumblr is the website where you could get a callout post for not wording your sentiments on queer-reclamation discourse correctly but also not get a callout post for platforming US state department atrocity propoganda designed to sow consent for mass murder campaigns.

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donations for marah have significantly slowed down! the balousha family is famished, exhausted, depressed, and desperate. i care about them deeply and i hope that you're able to share this post and spare a dollar or two! :)

I am hosting this campaign !! The money you have all helped raise for this family has kept them alive through this nightmare - please continue to share and donate if you can!

@mahrahpalestine @palestinian95 this campaign is vetted, please check marah's blog(s) out!

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If Zohran Mamdani instiutes even 1 of his promise (much like DeBlasio instituting the cessation of stop and frisk), he would be considered an above-average mayor of New York.

That aside, his victory does loudly show to establishment democrats that Zionism and Zionism-baiting has lost them yet another election. No lessons will be learned from this, but it's nice to know that the democrats have completely lost control of their electorate re: this issue.

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Black people in the U.S. are seven times more likely to be falsely convicted of a serious crime like murder than white people, according to a new report published Tuesday by the National Registry of Exonerations. The finding is based on an analysis of exonerations for serious crimes in the U.S. over the last four decades, which found that Black people make up less than 14% of the U.S. population but account for 53% of exonerations in the country.

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Motherfucker did not just fucking say “improves the lives of hundreds of millions people”

I’d also like to bring up a paper a friend told me about earlier today.

"Taking Stock of Shock. Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions" by Kristen Ghodsee. Where the study looked at East German and Polish populations after the transition to capitalism had occurred. The study found destitution that you would usually find in war zones.

Suffice to say. Fuck Gorbachev. If there’s a Hell he’s in there.

the fact it's mainstream imperial core narrative is inhumane. it's confirmed that MILLIONS of soviets DIED because of hawkish capitalist policies which were implemented after ussr fall. gorbachev should be remembered as complicit party in this, i will not be afraid to say, genocide.

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soviet ukraine had economy compatible to france and was among european leaders in many industrial production spheres. without neocolonies and subservience to usa empire. what ukraine turned into after ussr fall and maidan coup is a tragedy.

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Hey wait this is just that one image

(I don’t remember who drew this. I wish the artist had put a watermark with their name on it or something)

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We are seeing the same playbook as Iraq and a lot of Iraqi diaspora also said the same things when it was ongoing. Regardless of how you feel about the Iranian government, do not fucking do CIA job

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He’s a strange source of humor these days.

dhqbhshdbsbs what did I wake up to

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Genuine question, what did Stalin think of Zionism?

Stalin as an individual was never a fan of Zionism (or Jewish nationalism in general). For most of his political life, he spoke out against such ethnic and religious chauvinism, for example saying in 1913 in "Marxism and the National Question" on the question of whether or not the Jewish people constitute a nation that it is only religion that connects the disparate Jewish diaspora communities, asking "how can it be seriously maintained that petrified religious rites and fading psychological relics affect the 'destiny' of these Jews more powerfully than the living social, economic and cultural environment that surrounds them?" In addition, in Chapter 6 of the Foundations of Leninism, "On the National Question", Stalin stressed the importance of combating colonialism and promoting the national liberation of colonies as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle.

Yet it is from this same opposition to chauvinism that led him to condemn at every turn antisemitism and hostility towards the Jewish people. As he stated quite clearly to the Jewish News Agency in 1931, "Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism." In this vein of communistic opposition to antisemitism, upon the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was founded in the Soviet Union in order to coordinate international support from Jewish communities abroad towards the Soviet war effort.

However, Stalin was neither a dictator nor an ideologue. His personal beliefs did not alone shape the policy of the Soviet Union, and he was often pragmatic in his dealings as a national leader. The Soviets, while initially advocating for a secular and multi-ethnic democracy in Palestine, ended up backing the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel as a Jewish state. The Soviet representative at the UN, Andrei Gromyko, explicitly invoked the recent memory of the Holocaust in his defense for the Soviet decision, decades before the West would adopt the same rhetoric in defense of Israel (probably because such rhetoric had been associated with the communists at first.)

That said, I have not been able to find a single quote from Stalin in his own words expressing support for Israel or Zionism. While many sources make the mistake of identifying Soviet policy with Stalin's own thoughts and beliefs, whenever it comes to the question of Soviet support for Israel, it is always other members of the Soviet government who are quoted. I cannot say for certain that Stalin was not in agreement with the Soviet decision to back Israel at the UN, but I cannot say for certain he was, either.

Soviet friendliness towards Israel would not last for long. The Soviets had been convinced, due in no small part to the fervent efforts of Zionist diplomats both during and after the war, that Israel would be a neutral, even Soviet-leaning nation. The reality of the matter quickly asserted itself, as Israel almost immediately sought ties with Western powers upon independence, as well as conducting active propaganda campaigns trying to convince the Jewish citizens of the Eastern Bloc to emigrate. By 1948, the year following Israel's independence, the Soviet Union began efforts to combat Zionism as part of a broader campaign against "cosmopolitanism", or pro-Western and pro-imperialist sentiment. (It should be noted that while the anti-cosmopolitan campaign during this period has often been maligned as "antisemitic" by Western commentators, and while I will not claim there was no excess or intolerance involved, the campaign was not at all targeted towards Jews. Zionism, while widespread, was not a very popular political position among the Jewish members of the Eastern Bloc and the opposition against Zionism came just as much from Jewish communists as it did from non-Jewish communists.)

Relevant reading:

The Soviet Union and the Creation of the State of Israel, Gabriel Gorodetsky (a detailed look into the diplomatic efforts to achieve Soviet support for Israel, primarily from the Zionist perspective)

Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, Domenico Losurdo (while not focused on Israel, it provides more information on the Soviet perspective on the matter during the chapter addressing claims of Stalin's antisemitism. It does make the mistake of identifying Soviet policy with Stalin's own beliefs, however.)

Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Albert Szymanski (this and the previous book discuss in part the charges of antisemitism relating to the anti-cosmopolitan campaign)

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The Vietnam War was wrong and cruel

The Iraq War was wrong and creul

And this war shall be shown by history to have been wrong and cruel as well

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One of the key tasks of any Communist Party is to prove itself a force capable of seeing to the needs of the people, that it is a group from the people and of the people that recognises the problems faced on the ground and can be relied upon to address them more than any liberal organisation.

Ho Chi Minh distributed rice, the Black Panthers ran breakfast programmes & literacy groups, meanwhile every communist group in this country just spends its time going on marches and (not) selling newspapers when if any of them were worth the red dye of their banners they'd be actually trying to help any of the myriad struggles faced by the proletariat today. This is just a brief thought, not a formulated plan, but frankly I think if a Communist group put up flyers offering a free (or at least at-cost) cleaning service to help people with mold issues they'd do infinitely more good than any number of recruitment flyers & protest placards.