“This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” Despite the bitter cold, the solidly frozen ground and black ice, between 100,000 and 350,000 people had assembled on Sunday, the 21st of January, in front of the famous Reichstag building in Berlin, which houses the German parl
TIL - that’s actually pretty interesting.
I am consistently infuriated by how far-left political parties have become Russophile/Sinophile/extremely anti-western, for no other reason than “Russia is the successor state of the USSR” (sorta, but not really, if we’re getting technical) and “the PRC is the only true socialist country!1!!one”(lmao no it’s fucking not).
Like, I’ve gone to rallies in my city run by the DSA and Socialist Alternative, and there’s always some dipshit up at the front with the big fucking Soviet flags with pics of Stalin, Lenin, and Mao on them, and I just want to smack them and beg them to read, like, literally any history on the atrocities they perpetrated. They’re not heroes. Socialism isn’t supposed to be about heroes. It’s supposed to be about equality, egalitarianism, and human decency, rendered through political and government policies.
It feels like a lot of these groups are actually far more enamored by the authoritarian components of the former USSR, and far less interested in the actual “socialist” aspects - particularly, in the ways that socialist ideas could be applied in western societies that are going through late stage capitalism, but in most cases were able to avoid being subjected to authoritarian “communism” (quoted so because the USSR was very, very far from what communism is actually supposed to be in an idealistic sense, even if you ignore the authoritarian part).