This is my shocked face.
Nicaragua: Ortega blames civilian murders he ordered on a 'coup-mongering satanic sect' (he's lying)
There must be some sort of Autocrat Depot where dictator wannabes can buy sheets of 1mm thick “Socialist Veneer” to camouflage their motives from European and American leftists. It worked in Nicaragua and in Venezuela and in China. Heck, it worked for Stalin in the 1930’s, even causing some to support peace with the Nazis because Stalin signed a deal with Hitler.
Eventually the veneer wears off, but things have to get pretty bad first.
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Not universally. The Barcelona May Days didn’t spontaneously happen from nothing, the Socialist Party of Great Britain were criticising the Bolsheviks before the start of 1920, and the biggest supporter of peace with the Nazis, at least in Britain, were the free-market liberals and former liberal party voters who had switched parties who didn’t want a repeat of the great war.
There is no monolitic “the left”, and there hasn’t been one since the Hague Congress in 1872. Anarcho-communists are the most likely to criticise dictators early, followed by non-anarchist libertarian socialists. Likewise, there is criticism from the authoritarian left about “left communists”.
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It also worked in, at least,Cuba and Vietnam. My father was marching to chants of Ho, Ho, Ho-Chi Minh and we all had those Che posters on our walls, blissfully ignoring how the sexy revolutionaries had dozens of dissidents executed for a better world. we even stood with Lenin, Trotzky, Tito and many more, even though they had their guns pointed at the masses if those wouldn’t comply to their call for liberation or just because: wrong place, wrong time. All to the sound of Victor Jara who was also blissfully ignorant and tragically paid with his life because he supported the other butchers, those with the Organic seal on their meat, whose blades are so much softer to the flesh.
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If there’s a current leftist faction which saw through Ortega or Hugo Chavez from the get-go, let me know, I’ll sign up.
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Oliver North’s creativity extended to organizing cocaine shipments to LA. He thought he could flog the coke to Hollywood, thus making liberals fund the Contras. But Hollywood had their own coke dealers & were loathe to buy drugs from someone they didn’t know. A black drug dealer named Freeway Rick found out about all this coke, turned it into this new easily smokeable form called crack & sales in the black community took off. The rest is history.
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Indeed, while people of power willing to do good are far between, it sometimes feels that people willing to give up power are even fewer.
I thought Erdogan would be good for Turkey, and I think he was… for a while.
Nonetheless, I am optimistic to the degree that I think that the younger version of themselves would have despised what they eventually became.
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How about the anarcho-communists? The anarcho bit is a big clue to their views.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain are also still around. Just don’t get them confused with the trotskyist Socialist Party of England and Wales (formerly Militant). They didn’t really get along even before the attempt to steal their name.
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Absolutely, as long as political leaders are cycled out of office on a regular basis before they get addicted to power and bribes.
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Pish-posh, it’s nobody’s fault. When the Communists won in Nicaragua, they had to fight the Contras. It just took a few extra decades for the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” to kick in. No worries.
That was in 1990 according to @petzl
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is universal suffrage. At the time when Marx and Engels were talking about the Dictatorship of the proletariat in the UK, the working class generally didn’t have the vote as they didn’t meet the property requirement and even the reform act of 1867 didn’t give the vote to unskilled labourers. Compare with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (that was in place until the Representation of the People act 1918), which Marx also talked about.
Of course, Lenin came along and twisted it into something only useful to him and his allies, just as he did with the rest of Marxism.
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Query what Nicaragua would be like if we didn’t empower the Somosas and fuck with the Sandinistas – or, for that matter, what we’d be like.
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Agreed, if “his allies” include Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Mao and Deng and Ho and the Kims and Ceaucescu and Fidel and Chavez and Ortega and . . . . .
I think it is a problem with authority as a function. Doesn’t matter if you are left, right, up, down. It is almost impossible to govern well - nobody has yet managed it perfectly, ever.
So the problem arises when a person in authority starts to see him/herself as indispensable, the only bulwark against the much worse. Sometimes they are correct, usually they are just deluded. And authority slowly corrupts them until they become what they despised.
It happens on the right - Mussolini saw himself a a great leader. It happens on left, it happens in the middle. It’s a hard puzzle.
On the one hand we want people who are competent to make society level decisions - we can’t just pick people at random and have them make decisions about, say, medical policy. On the other hand we don’t want anyone staying in power too long - where it becomes about power and not the common good. And anyone who is in power has an impossible job.
Ortega should have stepped down ages ago. Right now he should look in the mirror and see what is happening, and step down immediately. He won’t, and he will become another hideous caricature of what he once wanted to be.
The CIA also sold weapons and massive amounts of cocaine to the gangs of LA and Miami, kick-starting the violent gang problems here in the US.
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And…Trump.
You’re thinking of Despot Depot. They have palettes of Socialist veneer stacked in the parking lot. Bring a trailer and they’ll load you up with a forklift.
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Every name you mentioned had a ideology derived from Marxism-Leninism.
I believe we have had this conversation in the past.
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Fuck off! ‘Judean People’s Front’. We’re the People’s Front of Judea! ‘Judean People’s Front’.
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Splitter!
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