Thomas_More
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Wez, do you extend this feeling to other species, with whom we are all related, or only to humanity?
TS ““… providing space for all nations to pursue sovereignty and peaceful co-prosperity…”
Proof he has no idea what a nation-state is, what capitalism is, nor what socialism is.
So in what way were Soviet Russia and China not fascist?
If you want to be super strict about it, only Italy was fascist and not Germany, because only Italy called itself Fascist.
Otherwise, I don’t see how Russia and China were not.
True. It’s a waste of our time. We should ignore him and scroll past his comments so as not to be angered into responding.
I agree with Wez here about Freud. I think it is a shortcoming in socialists to ignore and not face the multiplicity of factors that prevent most of the working class from becoming aware.
Nationalism restricts the personality. I, for instance see kinship in all life, not just other humans. So, how can one grow in the perception that we are kin with all mammals and other animals if one can’t even accept other humans as kin?
It’s like a sketch in The Likely Lads, where Terry says he hates Germans, Italians, Chinese, Arabs, Pakistanis; then that he also hates Scots, Irish and Welsh; hates his English neighbours too, and hates the sod who lives downstairs in the same building.
We are every one of us a descendant of a nonhuman, and we are all relatives.
And Russia’s workers could have sabotaged the invasion by following Rosa Luxemburg’s advice to workers in wartime: a mass industrial strike, stopping the war machine in its tracks.
Unfortunately, patriotism stops the workers from realising how much power they have to stop war and save lives.
By ignoring Zelensky’s call to fight and die, the people of Ukraine would have made all this unnecessary. There would simply have been a change of leaders, from Zelensky to Putin; no bombings, no war, no displacement of people. By recognising this is a quarrel between capitalist exploiters, the workers should have just made no resistance, and their lives and communities would have carried on as before. A different colour flag would be the only difference.
From WILD SWANS by Jung Chang, pp 387-88:
“Books were major targets of Mao’s order to destroy. Because they had not been written within the last few months, and therefore did not quote Mao on every page, some Red Guards declared that they were all ‘poisonous weeds.’ With the exception of Marxist classics and the works of Stalin, Mao, and the late Lu Xun, whose name Mme. Mao was using for her personal vendettas, books were burning all across China. The country lost most of its written heritage.”
Unlike the caste system in India, in which caste is rigidly determined by birth, in China there was no inheritance per se. The sons of officials had to earn the post and thus the wealth their fathers had had, via the scholastic examination system. This system was theoretically open to everyone, including peasants. Many mandarins were peasants’ sons.
Of course, when China was occupied by the Manchus, Manchu birth was favoured at all levels, but the examination system functioned as it had for two thousand years, except during the brief era of Mongol rule.
