gonna vote blue and then things will be back to normal! (for us) - liberals

Thank you for the link, it’s helpful. Small question, is the link in the 15th source cited source broken? It keeps refreshing for me.

So-called “tankies” are supposedly “authoritarian” but imperialists don’t blink an eye when the empire justifies another aggressive and unprovoked military operation in a country thousands of miles away, when it coups other countries, when it puts sanctions on another country that result in the deaths of its citizens, and so on.

It was doubly frustrating because one person who took GREAT offense to the video, who also linked to wikipedia articles like the kidnapping of a Japanese director or the Malaysia assassination in 2017. When disputed on this, I was not allowed to talk about it because I was “some white dude in Iceland” and they however, was a child of a refugee from the Vietnam war(southern region I think?) and that there’s generational trauma that somehow gives them higher authority on the opinion of this entire conversation. Who then proceeded to defend imperialism while at the same time saying they have issues with US imperialism. What am I to think about this? It was very confusing. Said person was American too.

I wasn’t sure what to think of it myself, because well. I am not oppressed, I am white and living within the imperial core is a status of privilege no matter how well I am actually doing in life. Still though, that whole interaction still bothers me. Is it wrong?

ProleWiki has a good article on that here: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Chinese_“imperialism”

I also read https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:State_Capital_vs._Finance_Capital:_Why_China_is_not_--_and_Cannot_Become_--_an_Imperial_Hegemon which I thought was a very good essay.

Thank you!! I think so too! After having lurked for a bit and seeing how people talk here, it’s very interesting since in other places it ends in a lot of name calling and bans.

Thank you! I’m still learning and the amount of books, lectures and articles are hard for me to read as I am a slow person but the knowledge is very worth it.

Thanks for the link. The two from that list that ring a bell is “PSL is a high-control group with an ineffective strategy” and “Ruthless Criticism, But Keep It to Yourself: Concealment and Corruption in PSL Philadelphia”. I think those are the two that were said about PSL in the forum I was in.

From their literature list; it’s all books on Anarchism. Does that explain it?

Honestly, looking into the documentary. I am really having a hard time finding a connection on it with PSL. The only thing I can find is that PSL had a screening for it sometime after 2020~

The people who were deriding me called the commenters in the documentary “russian bots” because they used the word “westoid”.

It’s this baseless claim to some kind of “neutrality” and is used to position the empire as somehow “above the fray” and able to make judgments of peoples and countries from on high. Likely going back to colonialism and its positioning of the colonizer as a “civil people” who are above the “savages”. There’s a good piece on colonialism pinned on lemmygrad for discussion right now in fact: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10964427

Okay so this basically was my experience in that forum. I wasn’t even conscious of the class struggle and was completely unaware of reading theory before my experience with posting the documentary. I didn’t really understand these feelings, this sense of injustice that I was discovering for the first time. I wasn’t even siding with DPRK yet but realized I should at least be critical of the propaganda that western media spews out non-stop at the very least. That’s what I emphasized in my thread but the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. As the thread went on I became flustered with the responses and looked into the things they were saying, not feeling right with the responses. They brought up USAID and that disagreeing with USAID was horrible to do. That “both sides” of imperialism are bad. (Saying that China and DPRK are imperialist). They were justifying US/NATO presence everywhere because while they “oppose imperialism” they somehow justify that it’s better than the “savages” of DPRK becoming imperalist.

I felt that it was basically? Defaulting to the imperial core? Mind you, the entire forum is mostly Americans. I genuinely thought they advocated for justice and rights, they do call themselves very leftist. But when challenging this, they suddenly became extremely pro-imperialism.

I crashed out and felt betrayed. But out of that I found out why I felt this way because it lead me to read on Marxist-Leninism. How? Because I looked up “tankie” and “campism” which is what they called me and that they don’t tolerate Marxist-Leninist posts.

Sorry for the tangent. Haven’t felt a place to vent these thoughts anywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_blPim4r-s

“PSL would simp for DPRK because it’s authoritarian”: I highly recommend Blowback podcast’s season on Korea. It’s not a pleasant history to learn about, but it may help in knowing more precisely why such a line is nonsense and why you can rebuff these people with confidence. Korea was brutalized first through Japanese occupation/colonialism and then through the US, the second of which continues this day with the occupation of what gets called “South Korea.” Without the DPRK, Korea would probably be a colony of the US and China would probably be in a much weaker position globally. The damage that the US did to Korea, damage to civilians and infrastructure, is horrific. The idea of being called a “holocaust denier” for defending the DPRK is sort of like calling someone a holocaust denier for saying that the holocast was bad. It makes no fucking sense lol. If anyone was abused on a level resembling genocide involving Korea, it was the US doing it to Korea.

On the podcast, is it by RedPylon? Blowback: Season 3? I did look more into Korean history after posting the video and yes it’s seriously horrible. I cried reading about what actually happened there.

They also justified the sanctions and military actions on DPRK because the country stole a movie director from Japan? That they also killed Kim Jong-nam in Malasya back in 2017. What is the reality of that? I can’t find anything on this other than wikipedia links that they had posted on this. And after realizing just how much propaganda western media has, I am quite disillusioned on where to learn more. (I am so glad I found this place, seriously.)

Thanks for the clarity, I’ll keep this in mind.

Making a separate comment to add more onto the initial post:

I’m not American and before my posting of the documentary, I had no idea what PSL was. I was not even aware of Marxist-Leninism. I wanted to ask because the ‘Chinese Maoist Billionaire’ and ‘sex abuse scandals’ was used to discredit the documentary. That because PSL made it—the documentary itself was invalid. That it was just propaganda.

This in addition to justifying the sanctions and attacks on DPRK made me also question their condemnation of PSL.

If you have researched and found nothing to back up any negative claims, there is a better than even chance it’s probably bot bullshit.

I agree. The reason why I still feel the need to ask this is because I don’t know if I researched enough. I am extremely new to all of this, to ML-theory, to materialism.

I recently found this place/lemmygrad and I am so glad that I did. I had recently gotten banned from what I thought was a leftist forum for questioning the propaganda against DPRK and was honestly kinda lost for a while before this place. I’ve not posted before (until this one) but it’s been vital for having me informed on the state of the world without being influenced by imperialistic bias.