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#postmortem propaganda
character-of-all-time · 10 months
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oh my god okay so. apparently one of the mystery girls is miku?? oh my god this is so embarassing im so sorry. idk who the other one is but wow big fumble on my part. gosh, cant believe i didnt recognize miku.
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rw-ship-showdown · 6 months
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wait is puffball (saint x gourm) not coming back in the brackets?
if not, some puffball to remember them by /silly
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puffball has been lost to the void; it lost at 43.9% in week 2 against bath bomb https://www.tumblr.com/rw-ship-showdown/727192662779805696/choose-a-ship-artificerrivulet-gourmandsaint?source=share (also, i know.. in one of the week 4 descriptions i said a ship lost to puffball in week 1 incorrectly? random commentary because i was disappointed in myself while rechecking stuff)
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who-do-i-know-this-man · 11 months
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Idea. Since we can't do propaganda the normal way, maybe people can send in propaganda after a character loses? Because I want to hear people get to talk about their blorbo and maybe find new stuff to read/watch/play but it kind of defeats the purpose of the bracket
This kind of stuff is highly encouraged. Postmortem Propaganda is 👍
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GAZE UPON THE GLORIOUS LIST OF TOURNEY MEMBERS YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR
Names are under the cut, because its a long list. 128 competitors, feel free to ctrl+f for your blorbo. If your blorbo didn't make it, I will accept postmortem propaganda for them. I'm planning on having the matchups up by Sunday, and the tourney should be ready to start next weekend.
Emperor of All Mankind (Warhammer 40,000)
Claude de Alger Obelia 
Gabriel Agreste
Lusamine
Vinsmoke Judge
Bruce Wayne
John Winchester
Jin Guangshan
Manfred von Karma
Shadow Weaver
Varenechibel IV
Fire Lord Ozai
Denethor
Rose Quartz
Martin Mertens
L. D. Curtain
Raven Darkholme
Bro Strider
Hunson Abadeer
Sheila Haywood
Odin
Jija Resistant Tirimo
Todoroki Enji
Qingheng-jun David Cain
Prim Marlon
Shou Tucker
Kaido
Big Mom
Martin Blyndeff
Walter White
Doofenduo
Zeus
The Pale King Andy Dwyer and April Ludgate
Commander Wake
Mrs. Asahina/Mafumom
Gendo Ikari
Morgan Fey
John Gaius
Beatrice Horseman
Mother Gothel
Straff Venture
Anakin Skywalker
Yasopp
Kenjaku
The Pale King
Denethor Hohenheim
Omni-Man
Zhao Jing
Qingheng-jun
Mom Lalonde
Gisela Sencen
Finwe
Mr. Sakura
Shauna Shipman
Lin Davar
Yu Ziyuan
Lady Tremaine
Ayin
Ghetsis
Eol
Logan Roy
Gashu Satou
Zak Gramarye
Mary Keay
Victor Frankenstein
Shoko Nadami
Emiya Kiritsugu
Rainflower
Ging Freecss
Amory St. John
Norman Osbourn
Athena (Final Fantasy)
Sir Reginald Hargreeves
Sasuke Uchiha
Renju Okiura
Sigma Klim
Lord Viren
Isaac Clements
Sanka Dan'ichirō
Mrs. Sakurai
Shin Mao
Carol Dallen
Howard Doyle
Madoc
Monica Sanchez
Doug & Donna Shellstrop
Rosa Ushiromiya
Dr. Yuichiro Hikari
 Harry Morgan
Methony
Penelope Blossom Bloberta Puppington
Leonard Church
Franz Bonaparta
Minato Namikaze
Kinnporsche
Isabella
Angwyn Abernant
Mrs. Kaneki
Fillbrick Pines
Masayoshi Shido
Uther Pendragon
Zouken Matou
Randyll Tarly
Emperor Belos/Phillip Wittebane
Nikos Vasil
Lab Rat
Regina Mills
Clay Puppington
Count Gregoire von Varley
Rusty Venture
Hojo
Jonas Venture Sr.
Lily Specter
Artemis Fowl Sr.
Jacques Schnee
Garmadon
Hermann
Dennis Duplass
Katerina Derefko
Huey Emmerich
Martin Whitley
Mr. Giovanna
Rosa Ushiromiya Sheila Haywood
M. Bison
Medusa Gorgon
Peter Pan (OUaT)
Penelope Blossom
Adelina Glass
EDIT: The first Pale King will be replaced with April Ludgate and Andy Dwyer, and the second Denethor will be replaced with Hohenheim. Thank you for your patience.
EDIT TWO: The first Penelope Blossom will be replaced with Bloberta Puppington.
EDIT THREE: The first Qingheng-jun will be replaced with David Cain.
FINAL EDIT: The second Rosa Ushiromita will be replaced with Sheila Haywood.
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eretzyisrael · 4 months
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Many people on the Left of the #CeasefireNow persuasion are sane and nice folks. They think that the collateral cost of defeating Hamas is too great. Or they think doing so will lead to Hamas 2: Hamas Harder, so what is really needed is a long-term peace agreement.  I also am for a long-term peace agreement, but like the overwhelming majority of the Israeli population, I think first, Hamas needs to die.
OK, so we disagree about this, but their opinion isn’t some insane, evil position. It’s just a thing people can disagree about.
However, there are also many people on the Left who are batshit insane.
Take, for instance, the band Eve6. Their Twitter account is deep in with a lot of the Left and is utterly deranged. They subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the massacre at the music festival on October 7th was in part or in whole committed by Israel. I don’t want to get into the details of this conspiracy theory because it doesn’t deserve it, but here is a tweet they sent last night suggesting that Israel was trying to cover up their evildoing.
This is QAnon shit. To be honest, it’s actually far more popular and widespread than QAnon! But it is just as insane. And this is a recurring theme of the Left going back to the afternoon of October 7th.
They have seen conspiracies and lies everywhere.
The plans found on the dead Hamas terrorists? Those couldn’t be real because Hamas couldn’t possibly have color printers.
The babies who were beheaded? Those babies’ heads fell off postmortem.
The reports of rapes? The oldest wartime propaganda lies in the book!
The missile that hit the hospital? Israel did that! (Islamic Jihad did it.)
Hamas couldn’t be under the other hospital! (They were under the other hospital.)
The guns in the MRI room? Planted.
On and on.
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knightsickness · 8 months
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🎵 all of alicent’s children pls
all of them hozier’s eat your young but you can say that about literally any asoiaf character it’s a core theme. skinning the children for a war drum. you get it it’s like saying runs in the family it’s well-trodden ground. have the same problem with aemond i do with criston i don’t think he would listen to music i think he’s a maniac. however he is real men by mitski and saint bernard 2 by lincoln to me. desperate kind of masculinity tied to lapsed catholicism always pathetically seeking validation from alys. aegon is blur’s charmless man and also carter’s the taking of peckham 123. the carnivore queen who’s looking for three scrooges who are nowhere to be seen. and life’s just a bowl of cherries. for the fruit machine
like mother like daughter if alicent is ethel cain’s preachers daughter helaena is her golden age. lilies casings and knuckle velvet. saying prayers through a throttled neck insane!! last words of a shooting star obvious choice but does make me crazy with they’ll think of me kindly when they come for my things as both helaena reassuring herself and a truth about the way the propaganda machine used her postmortem
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hauntthenarrative · 9 months
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Professor Sada and Turo propaganda:
They are at the root of Arven's entire storyline, the endgame of ScarVi, and really the entire plot of the game. They wanted to make a paradise for themselves and their son after their husband/wife (who is implied to be Turo/Sada depending on the version, meaning they still haunt the story in the opposite version) left them. They made the time machine that brought the Paradox Pokemon to Area Zero, which is why you can't go there until the endgame--it's too dangerous to travel there alone, you need the help of all the friends you've made along the way. They neglected and abandoned Arven to pursue their dream, and the Pokemon they brought to the present day injured Arven's Mabosstiff when he went to Area Zero to look for his parent, triggering the quest for the Herba Mystica. They brought the version legendary to Paldea, and then they were killed by the more aggressive legendary, leaving Koraidon/Miraidon to run away and join the player. And while you think they're guiding you throughout the game, it turns out that was actually their AI copy, who was made as their assistant after the spouse left and tasked with continuing their work postmortem. The AI tries to help you stop the time machine before it causes a Paradox Pokemon apocalypse, but Sada/Turo's programming forces it to fight you. Then the AI has to go to the past/future forever to make sure the time machine stayed shut down forever.
In short, these professors' fuckups fundamentally shape the entire experience of Gen 9, especially everything to do with Arven and the Paradox Pokemon.
:3
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I have Not been looking at the askbox lately. Now that there’s downtime between rounds 1 and 2 I’m gonna go through all of them today. So we will be getting what is likely postmortem propaganda, which is still fun I think
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sirgawin · 11 months
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So much close scrutiny, and none of it much help to posterity. Anne [Boleyn] was a mercurial woman, still shaped by the projections of those who read and write about her. Royal bodies do change after death, and not just as a consequence of the universal postmortem changes. Now we know the body in the Leicester car park is indeed that of Richard III, we have to concede the curved spine was not Tudor propaganda, but we need not believe the chronicler who claimed Richard was the product of a two-year pregnancy and was born with teeth. Why are we all so pleased about digging up a king? Perhaps because the present is paying some of the debt it owes to the past, and science has come to the aid of history. The king stripped by the victors has been reclothed in his true identity. This is the essential process of history, neatly illustrated: loss, retrieval.
Hilary Mantel, Royal Bodies: From Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton (2013), from Mantel Pieces (2020)
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Are we allowed to submit postmortem propaganda? im planning something
Yes of courses :D! I will reblog it!
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xtruss · 1 year
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Analysis | Western Propaganda and Somewhat Truth! The Taliban Have Turned Afghanistan Into a Graveyard of Women’s Rights
The Taliban are marking International Women’s Day with an ever-worsening cascade of abuses against women.
— By Lynne O’Donnell, A Columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian Journalist and Author | March 8, 2023
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Afghanistan is marking its second International Women’s Day since the Taliban returned, with half the population incarcerated in their homes and increasingly shut out of work, education, health care, and hunger relief—a situation that some observers now fear could push the country back to war. The dilemma for regional governments, now faced with a crisis that threatens to spill across borders, is how to engage with the group responsible for the appalling suffering without appearing to condone its actions.
In recent months, the Taliban have barred women from universities, banned nongovernmental organizations from employing female staff, and, according to reports this week, have begun annulling divorces and forcing women to return to abusive husbands.
As misogyny, hunger, and poverty intensify—and with Taliban violence encroaching on bordering tribal regions of Pakistan—Thomas West, U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, is considering meeting with Taliban figures, according to a source familiar with U.S. policy on the issue. The hope, the source said on the condition of anonymity, is that the two sides can find some common ground for discussions that might lead to an improvement in conditions for Afghanistan’s 41 million people—especially for the women who have been detained, abused, and killed with impunity as the Taliban have set about erasing them from public life.
The meeting—which could come within weeks, if it materializes—would continue a tenuous dialogue between the U.S. administration and the Taliban, who after 18 months in control of Afghanistan can no longer blame a 20-year war, foreign occupation, or a “puppet” government for the dire state of the country. The United States and other Western governments and United Nations agencies have watched as the Taliban have abused Afghan women and other vulnerable groups with little consequence.
“We have no leverage. We have no influence” with the Taliban, the source said. In Washington, postmortems over the Biden administration’s past handling of the U.S. withdrawal dominate the political agenda while Afghanistan’s present and future continue adrift. “Policy is very politicized, as investigations into the chaotic evacuation proceed. Diplomatic recognition is not realistic. But it doesn’t hurt to maintain contact,” the source said.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson said: “We have no high-level meetings with the Taliban scheduled at this time. We continue to have a policy of pragmatic engagement with the Taliban on our interests and expect to meet with them in the future.”
International Women’s Day, held annually on March 8, is an opportunity to highlight the Taliban’s attitude toward women, which has manifested as atrocious abuse, including extrajudicial killings of women who demand their rights. In a country where women have long endured severe discrimination, their rights to equality, education, property ownership, and protection from violence were at least formalized in the republic’s constitution. The Taliban have nixed all that in favor of their own interpretation of sharia law. Now, Afghanistan is the only country where women are excluded from education above primary school.
The Centre for Information Resilience has documented dozens of cases of femicide, many attributed to the Taliban since the group retook control. The dead include women protesters and activists, teachers, doctors, police officers, and a politician. Some of them were killed by the Taliban while being tortured under interrogation about male relatives believed to be members of anti-Taliban militias; others were killed by their husbands or other family members; and some were gang-raped, shot, stabbed, tortured, or beheaded.
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Afghan women wait to receive food aid from the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority in Herat, Afghanistan, on March 2. Mohsen Karimi/AFP via Getty Images
Richard Bennett, the U.N. special rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan, said this week that the Taliban’s treatment of women and girls may constitute a crime against humanity. In presenting his second report to the U.N. on Monday, following visits to the country last year, he accused the Taliban of pursuing a policy of “gender apartheid” and said the “abysmal treatment of women and girls is intolerable and unjustifiable on any ground, including religion.” He said the Islamist Taliban’s decision in December 2022 to ban women from working for charities exacerbated their own interference in the delivery of aid, making women and girls even more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Harsh treatment of anyone who dared protest the increasingly tight restrictions aimed not only to punish the protesters “but also to deter others from protesting,” Bennett said. Women protesters had been “subjected to threats, intimidation, arrest, and ill-treatment while in detention.”
Despite this litany of abuse, which has been well-documented since the Taliban retook control in August 2021, some countries are treating the group as legitimate—with Turkey, Iran, Russia, and Pakistan accrediting Taliban figures to Afghanistan’s embassies and consulates in a creeping move toward tacit diplomatic recognition. The Biden administration is aware of the optics of legitimizing a group that has reintroduced public floggings and executions without due judicial process; although officials appear to have concluded that repeated verbal admonition and visits by high-ranking U.N. officials have only made things worse. When schooling resumed on March 6 following a winter break, for instance, female students were banned from university classes, the latest discriminatory measure against women. It compounds bans on women attending secondary school, taking the university entrance exam, working in the civil service, leaving their homes, or traveling without male chaperones. This discrimination comes as women have also been beaten in the street for violating Taliban dress codes.
The potential new round of U.S. talks with the Taliban comes as a leading global humanitarian warns that Afghanistan risks being engulfed once more by conflict if the country remains isolated. Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told Foreign Policy that war will be the “logical” outcome of systemic Taliban abuses compounded by the refusal of Western countries to engage with them in any meaningful way. He described the situation in Afghanistan as a “horrific freefall in living conditions” and said humanitarian organizations like the NRC “feel very alone” as few governments are willing to brave the negative perception of contact with the Islamists.
Yet without the participation of women, Afghanistan will be unable to build a sustainable post-war economy. Locking half the population out of social and economic activity in a country where the conditions for conflict already exist could speed the slide to collapse. An uprising of hungry, jobless, and hopeless citizens would strengthen armed opposition groups, including the Islamic State, that are already gaining strength.
For Egeland, engagement is the only way to avoid a return to war. “If only female health workers can attend to women in hospitals and clinics, and you stop educating them in primary school, you will not have health care long term for half of the population; you will have a smaller and smaller economy. You will have, then, more unlivable conditions. That will lead to more refugees,” Egeland said. Prolonging this situation “would mean disengagement or another war. And that went very well, the last war against them. We need engagement. We don’t need disengagement.”
Like many aid groups, he said, the NRC suspended operations in December 2022 when the Taliban banned women from working in NGOs. Some have since found that working at the district and sub-district levels, as indigenous charities do, enabling them to cooperate with local community leaders rather than national figures who prioritize politics over need. He called on Islamic countries—notably Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey—to pressure the Taliban to reverse their “draconian policies against women” and recognize that further deterioration will lead to mass migration that will directly impact the stability of the region.
With widespread concerns that the United States is planning to reduce aid to Afghanistan, Egeland said: “We are really trying to fight that tendency. It is not going to be the Taliban leadership that starves; it will be women and children and minorities that starve.”
— Lynne O’Donnell is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan Bureau Chief For Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.
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character-of-all-time · 11 months
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Godspeed Firestar! You put up a good fight & I’m glad if anyone took you out they were from the other franchise preteens love to obsess over 🫡
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dr-brainwash · 3 years
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some backstory on claire my beloved abucajo
she grew up in the philippines, remembers it very vaguely because of the passing of the time- but she remembers her mother fondly, and bitterly, at the same time.
in my canon i imagine the philippines was colonized by america, turned into a territory again so they could have a place to keep an eye on the south china sea + another place to reap the nature out of.
to keep the people complacent they pumped a lot of propaganda into phl, for a short time claire genuinely believed the place had gold paved streets (based off of a naive dream someone in my own family had). her mother was constantly ushering her to do whatever she could to get there. so she worked herself to the bone to try and bring her and her mom so she could die living atop gold.
her mother died before she was able to do that, but out of a sense of duty she still worked as hard as her body could let her so she could fulfill her mother’s wishes postmortem.
and she finally got there by boat (fusion-powered planes, i imagine, were getting more and more expensive, and so were their tickets), got through the thousands of checks at angel island, and stepped foot on the glaringly concrete streets.
and quickly, america broke her heart, because it lied to her and her mother. she kept working hard, but all the jobs she could get were ran full of abuses. she lived in san fran’s chinatown for a while, a place constantly and arbitrarily patrolled, she saw mindless raids on her and her neighbors, she was attacked on the basis of her eyes. people told her she was stealing jobs when before she thought there was always going to be enough for everyone—that’s what they said back home.
she soon knew she wanted to emigrate into a propaganda poster, but this was reality. the red scare, internment camps, human rights abuses. it was exhausting.
so, for revenge for playing on her and her mother’s better nature, she took action.
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who-do-i-know-this-man · 11 months
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Didn't see it in FAQs so- what's the difference between propaganda and anti-propaganda? I've seen both in your answered asks and I can't tell the difference
Honestly its so confusing at this point even I don't really know. Technically there are only 2 kinds of "effective" propaganda for this bracket: anti-propaganda and postmortem propaganda. There technically shouldn't be regular propaganda. The later is where you try to convince people to check out a thing you like, but only after they have already lost, so it doesn't even effect the results of the poll it's just for fun.
But the confusing part is anti-propaganda. When I coined the phrase I used it for when you give propaganda about the opponent of your blorbo, to increase the odds of your blorbo winning. But I also think now people are using it for when they can't wait until their blorbo is eliminated, so give propaganda now even if it hurts their chances, since they too are confused by the confusing system.
However you also have to consider that someone could just be lying about what kind of propaganda they're giving so that their blorbo has an advantage (ie labeling the first definition of anti-propaganda as regular propaganda)
Tldr: a combination of mindgames, and lack of restraint is creating a multi layered pile of confusion. So the phrases are basically used interchangeably by this point. Hope this made it less confusing but I doubt this did.
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theculturedmarxist · 4 years
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FASCISM What It Is and How To Fight It
1969 PAMPHLET INTRODUCTION    
By George Lavan Weissman
   * * *    
Liberals and even most of those who consider themselves Marxists are guilty of using the world fascist very loosely today. They fling it around as an epithet or political swearword against right-wing figures whom they particularly despise, or against reactionaries in general.
Since WWII, the fascist label has been applied to such figures and movements as Gerald L. K. Smith, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Senator Eastland, Barry Goldwater, the Minutemen, the John Birch Society, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Wallace.
Now, were all these fascist, or just some? If only some, then how does one tell which are and which aren't?
Indiscriminate use of the term really reflects vagueness about its meaning. Asked to define fascism, the liberal replies in such terms as dictatorship, mass neurosis, anti-Semitism, the power of unscrupulous propaganda, the hypnotic effect of a mad-genius orator on the masses, etc. Impressionism and confusion on the part of liberals is not surprising. But Marxism's superiority consists of its ability to analyze and differentiate among social and political phenomena. that so many of those calling themselves marxists cannot define fascism any more adequately than the liberals is not wholly their fault. Whether they are aware of it or not, much of their intellectual heritage comes from the social-democratic (reformist socialist) and Stalinist movements, which dominated the left in the 1930s when fascism was scoring victory after victory. These movements not only permitted Nazism to come to power in Germany without a shot being fired against it, but they failed abysmally in understanding the nature and dynamics of fascism and the way to fight it. After fascism's triumphs, they had much to hide and so refrained from making a Marxist analysis which would, at least, have educated subsequent generations.
But there is a Marxist analysis of fascism. It was made by Leon Trotsky not as a postmortem, but during the rise of fascism. This was one of Trotsky's great contributions to Marxism. He began the task after Mussolini's victory in Italy in 1922 and brought it to a high point in the years preceding Hitler's triumph in Germany in 1933.
In his attempts to awaken the German Communist Party and the Communist International (Comintern) to the mortal danger and to rally a united-front against Nazism, Trotsky made a point-by-point critique of the policies of    the social-democratic and Stalinist parties. This constitutes a compendium    of almost all the mistaken, ineffective, and suicidal positions that workers' organizations can take regarding fascism, since the positions of the German parties ranged from opportunistic default and betrayal on the right (social democratic) to ultra-left abstentionism and betrayal (Stalinist).
The Communist movement was still on its ultra-left binge (the so-called Third Period) when the Nazi movement began to snowball. To the Stalinists, every capitalist party was automatically "fascist". Even more catastrophic than this disorienting of the workers was Stalin's famous dictum that, rather than being opposites, fascism and social democracy were "twins". The socialists were thereupon dubbed "social fascists" and regarded as the main enemy. Of course, there could be no united front with social-fascist organizations, and those who, like Trotsky, urged such united fronts, were also labeled social fascists and treated accordingly.
How divorced from reality the Stalinist line was may be illustrated be    recalling its translation into American terms. In the 1932 elections, American Stalinists denounced Franklin Roosevelt as the fascist candidate and Norman Thomas as the social-fascist candidate. What was ludicrous as applied to US politics was tragic in Germany and Austria.
(Recently [1969], the term social fascism had begun cropping up in articles by members of the new left. Do those using it imagine that they have invented the term? Or, if they are aware of its history, are they indifferent to its connotations?)
After the Nazis came to power, the Stalinists boasted that their line had been 100 per cent correct, that Hitler could only last a few months, and that a Soviet Germany would then emerge. The time limit for this miracle was extended from three, six, to nine months, and then the idle boasts dwindled into silence. The magnitude of the defeat suffered by the working class, the special character of fascism, distinguishing it from other reactionary regimes or dictatorships, became apparent to all, and the threat to the Soviet Union or a rearmed German imperialism began to take on reality. This brought about a change in Moscow's line in 1935 and the Communist parties throughout the world thereupon zigzagged far to the right, to the right even of the social-democrats. This was their stance in the face of the spreading fascist danger in France and Spain.
The military ruin of German and Italian fascism in WWII convinced most people that fascism had been destroyed for good and was so utterly discredited that it could never again entice any followers. Events since then, particularly the emergence of new fascist groups and tendencies in almost every capitalist country,have dispelled such wishful thinking. The illusion that WWII was fought to make the world safe from fascism has gone the way of the earlier illusion that WWI was fought to make the world safe for democracy. The germ of fascism is endemic in capitalism; a crisis can raise it to epidemic proportions unless drastic countermeasures are applied.
Since forewarned is forearmed, we offer this new compilation -- a small selection from Trotsky's writings on the subject -- as a weapon for the anti-fascist arsenal.
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youngartsblog · 5 years
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Artistic Themes
This is a list of four common artistic themes that I wish to pursue, or feel that I am already pursuing, in my art.
1. Narrative-
I have always enjoyed a piece of art that suggests a story line and allows the viewer to fill in the blanks themselves. I want my work to trigger imagination and emotion that is unique and personal to each viewer. I love storytelling, whether visual or verbal, and a good story is something that transcends cultural differences. When a piece of art is able to transport me to the setting it takes place in, makes me emotionally involved, or makes my mind come up with theories for the actions and reasonings of the characters, I find it particularly powerful. It's like a good book, but one you can read simply by looking at a painting. I feel that this theme of art is particularly popular, maybe because it can be so easily combined with other themes to help make a point. Through the past few years, I have found that the reaction I value most from my viewers is an emotional one. Narrative helps lead the viewer in the right direction. Comics are narrative, but I definitely prefer to leave an element of mystery and imagination to my work, so that it becomes unique and personal to each person that views it.
2. Fantasy/Surrealism-
This theme is one that I've started to try hard to portray in my work, and hopefully it'll become easier the longer I do it. I feel that the "loosening" of my mind I have begun to accomplish experimentally in the past couple years has really helped this. One way I might encourage its growth is maybe I could sit down and challenge myself to sketch out fantastical or nonsensical things for a certain amount of time each day. I believe creativity is inherent in everyone, but using it effectively is a learned skill. A couple artists who used this theme that I am very inspired by are Remedios Varo, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, and Frida Kahlo. I enjoy surrealism because it is very intriguing to be able to take a break from real life and explore a new world. The only aspects of the world are what the artist shows you, but your own brain can still fill in the gaps and imagine more fantastic images just off the side of the frame. It is an incredibly freeing genre of art, and one that not many people get right. There has to be just the right amount of information and just the right amount of mystery to allow for individual reactions.
3. Social Commentary/Discursive-
 I combined these two themes because I feel that they can highly overlap in a lot of ways. I want to get more involved in social commentary, but I feel that there's a very thin line between that and propaganda. If I just boldly state my opinion without any reasoning or discussion involved, the work is more likely to alienate those that need to see it most. If, however, the work is more discursive, and leads the viewer down the path I want them to examine, and the journey becomes one of self-discovery. Each viewer becomes responsible for their own reaction and what they learn. I've found in my life that the only way to change someone is to give them the tools to change themselves. And even then, it may not work. Some people just never want to own up to their mistakes and ignorance. There's nothing you can do about it so you just have to move on and keep pushing yourself to be better. Some themes I want to pursue in this category are immigration, gender, sexuality, wealth/class systems, and maybe parenthood. These are pretty broad and have lots of different nuances which will be fun to explore. 
4. Ritual-
Over the past few years of my life I have only shed rituals and spiritualism from my life. I have highly scientific-based beliefs and ideals, but I still have a view of the world that feels that ritual and spiritualism can still exist even without a god to devote it to. The human condition itself is a unique experience that is shared among all of us, and deserves to be celebrated and shared. This doesn't need some sort of promised afterlife to be worthwhile. If anything, the ephemerality of life makes it more precious and valuable, and more worthy of celebration than the imagined promise of postmortem rewards for acts on Earth that matter little in the grand scheme of things. I do follow many rituals that I find great value in. The ritual of spending time with friends, partaking in drugs and alcohol, being in relationships, having pets, creating art, etc.. I think one way I could put more ritual into my art would be to express my beliefs more clearly, which is a sort of New-Age spiritualism which believes that all life is controlled and created by the physics of electrons and protons. So, in a way it does have an overarching "plan".
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