I think the point is that the Afghans went out of their way to obscure the time and place of the meeting for security reasons, and the Trump administration undid all their efforts
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A blur would be distracting and kind of ugly though. Better to just wipe it out cleanly if you’re going to bother or remove/cover it before you take the picture.
The same is true of the American revolution. Roughly a third wanted independence, a third wanted unity, and the rest just wanted the whole mess to be finished one way or the other.
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That’s still a thing for a surprisingly large amount of people.
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Not for any people who sympathize with communism that I know, but I’m sure they must be out there.
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I wouldn’t say that they must - but they are.
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Do you think these are hard core committed communists (in the sense of identifying with it as a global political movement, studying the works and history of lived communism, etc) or part of a Putin propaganda campaign in Russia to rehabilitate Stalin in order to make his own authoritarian government seem not only acceptable, but a natural part of the Russian landscape? Plus, this is RT, which is most certainly a propaganda arm of the Russian government.
I’m not saying that some don’t still admire Stalin (in the same way some still admire Hitler), I’m saying that admiration of Stalin in Russia isn’t necessarily driven by doctrinaire communism. I doubt he has much rehabilitation among western communists (but I don’t know if there are numbers on that or not). I’d guess that Trotsky and Che are still more popular in places like US and Britain… Maybe @the_borderer has more insight on that?
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is work of Moose and Squirrel
I suspect that Stalin being a nationalist is what drives it. There is a similar situation with Ukrainian nationalists and Nestor Makhno, even though the Makhnovists would have found the current nationalists far too authoritarian and would have declared war on them too.
I’m going to guess that’s probably true.
Most of the far left parties in the UK are Trotskyist, exceptions include the Socialist Party of Great Britain (Impossibilist, predate Marxism-Leninism) and the Independent Working Class Association (Libertarian Socialist, a side project of antifa).
The only parties here that I know of who show any signs of being Stalinist are the Socialist Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist), who were kicked out of the Socialist Labour Party because Arthur Scargill didn’t want his party supporting North Korea. CPGB (ML) march in London with a banner featuring Stalin every May 1st.
While reading about this I did find out about this group though
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Oh, I’d say admiration of Stalin in Russia driven by doctrinaire communism stopped circa 1925.
After that came a massive cult of personality plus negative selection by purge, and of course winning The Great Patriotic War.
All this left a lasting impression which still echoes back and forth through the collective unconscious. Over time, a yearning for the halcyon good old time added itself.
I can always count on you for this kind of history!
Nationalism is back in ascendancy now for sure, and I can imagine it’s causing all sorts of willful blindness regarding history.
Yeah, there was certainly a wave of Soviet nostalgia in the late 90s and early 2000s when neo-liberalism really began to assert itself in the former Soviet union and eastern bloc, and Yugoslavia (give what happened with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, that’s the most understandable one, I’d argue). And as the Border indicated above, nationalism likely plays a role in the current nostalgia. Again, I’d argue that’s a reaction to neo-liberalism and the war on terror, too. It’s easy to forget that the good old days had a strong element of bad old days, especially if you aren’t old enough to remember it properly.
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I was going to post something about the three generations rule, but it seems like things have sped up somewhat.
Anyway, beware of the “well, it wasn’t all bad” revisionists.
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I agree. But sometimes, it actually wasn’t all bad. I do think that it’s valuable and understand how people felt about living under communism at the time, where they had positive experiences, where they had means of accommodating and negotiating, and where things were truly bad or even horrific. There has been a wave of studies of the former communist bloc that has been doing that (prompted by the opening of the archives for a short time in the 90s before Putin closed them up again.
But that’s certainly different from trying to rehabilitate someone like Stalin.
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We are on the same page here, but I’d like to expand on this somewhat.
No matter what system, it’s never all bad. In fact, you’ll probably find some pretty good points too.
But in some systems, the crappy bits outweigh the good bits by a lot. Sometimes people just forget this.
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“I think the point is that the Afghans went out of their way to obscure the time and place of the meeting for security reasons, and the Trump administration undid all their efforts”
The point was originally that the Trump regime are evil Stalinists who airbrushed out the clock. Then it turned out that the Afghans did it. So the point became that the Trump regime are incompetents who failed to airbrush out the clock.
Really, those posts saying the first version need to be airbrushed out of the thread…
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