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Why is the nationalist right hallucinating a ‘communist enemy’?

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  • Why is the nationalist right hallucinating a ‘communist enemy’?

    An interesting op-ed piece in light of the planned protests in Oregon today by the so-called "Proud Boys". Why "Boys"? Are females not permitted to join? Of course many such all-male groups often reek of latent homo-eroticism as a way to bond and encourage mutual support.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...lsonaro-brazil

    From the article:

    The Republican national convention was filled with anti-communist alarmism. According to a campaign video posted on Trump’s YouTube channel, the president is “standing between capitalism and communism”. The infamous Tea Party campaigns portraying Obama as a “socialist” – just like Lenin and Hitler, apparently – have become the licensed conspiracy theory of the White House.

    Across the world, today’s reactionaries are hallucinating a communist threat. Anti-communism-without-communism has even found fertile ground in the UK.[...]


    Consider the protests against Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff in 2014, leading to the coup against her government and paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro’s election four years later. “We do not want a communist Brazil,” protesters proclaimed. Bolsonaro claimed that his Workers’ party (PT) opponents wanted to turn the country into Cuba or Venezuela. When Bolsonaro was elected, his supporters cried: “Death to the communists!” When the supreme court reversed the decision to imprison Lula on what turned out to be politicised charges of corruption, protesters complained: “you are leading the country to communism”. Bolsonaro’s son wants to outlaw communism, while the administration is obsessed with purging the institutions of “leftist” values, particularly “gender ideology”, which it says is a manifestation of “cultural Marxism”.

    This is not a wholly new ideology. Just as Trump is leveraging a deeply rooted national history of anti-communist paranoia, from McCarthyism to Massive Resistance, so Bolsonaro is reviving the anti-communism of the Brazilian Integralists in the 1930s, and the period of military dictatorship from 1964-1985. But why should the idiom of anti-communism be so powerful today, when communism barely exists?

    Communist parties could once, if at a considerable stretch, have been seen as a realistic threat to capitalism. That is no longer the case. The political theorist Jodi Dean has a point when she argues that anti-communism is a pervasive ideology of capitalism, as it serves to demarcate what is acceptable and what is off the table. Free healthcare and public ownership of broadband, for example, have been stigmatised as “communist”. However, the systematically violent anti-communism of the right has an emotional depth-charge, expedited by the sinophobic fearmongering about China defeating the US and taking American jobs. It is the latter which has become a campaigning issue in 2020.

    A clue may lie in the spread of the antisemitic trope of “cultural Marxism”. Invented on the Nazi fringe and launched into the public sphere in the “manifesto” of Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik, this meme has gained ground across the right, including in the modern Conservative party. It has incited “lone wolf” killers, such as the Poway synagogue shooter. In India, an equivalent term, “urban naxals”, is used to stigmatise dissent.

    As Paul Hanebrink’s bracing history of the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” demonstrates, 20th-century anti-communism rarely engaged with the reality of communism. It was, instead, driven by racial and nationalist myths. The idea that there was something inherently “Jewish” about communism, that it was a threat to national existence, extended well beyond the fascist right. In 1917,the chief Russia correspondent of the Times blamed the Russian Revolution on the “seething mass of Jewish pauperdom”. Winston Churchill blamed communism on the “International Jew”, who had no loyalty to the nation.

    In the US, race theorists such as Lothrop Stoddard regarded Bolshevism as a “traitor at the gate”, subverting racial hierarchies. Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, Robert Lansing, fancied that the Russian Revolution proved the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Lusk Committee argued that all traditions of socialism were of German-Jewish extraction. Such tropes were commonplace in the battle against civil rights led by White Citizens’ Councils, and the Ku Klux Klan.

    Why should anti-communism be so amenable to such racist, conspiracist, and apocalyptic thinking? Perhaps because it works in a similar way. In “black-hole anti-communism”, as Joel Kovel dubbed it, everything that is perceived as threatening can be compressed into a single, treasonous, diabolical enemy: just different tentacles of the same communist kraken. Rather like a racial stereotype, “communism” figuratively represents systemic crises as something external, a demonic plot. It works through what Freud called dreamwork, wherein a single dream image comes to stand for thoughts that cannot otherwise be acknowledged. Those labelled “communists” are thus blamed, not just for the reforms that they demand, but for the crises that call for reform.

    The hallucinatory world of anticommunism-without-communism is dangerous and violent. Its partisans believe they face an existential threat, which in principle licenses almost any level of violence. The state, as historian Ellen Schrecker points out, has been the teeth of most anti-communist networks. But it has often been bolstered by private militias, whether they be Minutemen, Klans, squadristi, the Sturmabteilung or Brazil’s Green Shirts. That is the significance of the eruptions of militia violence in the US, the hate mobs in India, and the Green Shirt revivalists in Brazil. When these people start to see red, blood flows in the streets.



    Such attitudes are nothing short of fascism towards anything that is "other", with of course the perpetual and underlying anti-Semitic trope.
    "It ain't necessarily so
    The things that you're liable
    To read in the Bible
    It ain't necessarily so
    ."

    Sportin' Life
    Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

  • #2
    Gibberish.

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
      An interesting op-ed piece in light of the planned protests in Oregon today by the so-called "Proud Boys". Why "Boys"? Are females not permitted to join? Of course many such all-male groups often reek of latent homo-eroticism as a way to bond and encourage mutual support.
      Question, do you think homoeroticism is an insult?

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by CivilDiscourse View Post

        Question, do you think homoeroticism is an insult?
        The left regularly will use homosexuality, etc., as an insult, when it suits them.

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by CivilDiscourse View Post

          Question, do you think homoeroticism is an insult?
          Of course not. However, I suspect many of the men who join groups such as the Proud Boys, would do so!
          Last edited by Hypatia_Alexandria; 09-26-2020, 11:53 AM.
          "It ain't necessarily so
          The things that you're liable
          To read in the Bible
          It ain't necessarily so
          ."

          Sportin' Life
          Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
            Gibberish.
            On what grounds? Are you rejecting the evidence that Lula was imprisoned in April 2018? Or that Cultural Marxism is a right wing conspiracy that alleges there is an academic and intellectual "plot" to subvert Western culture [whatever that is deemed to be]? Or that there are hate mobs in India? Or that nationalism is on the rise across the world?

            Or did you just simply have to post something/anything to this thread?
            "It ain't necessarily so
            The things that you're liable
            To read in the Bible
            It ain't necessarily so
            ."

            Sportin' Life
            Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

              On what grounds? Are you rejecting the evidence that Lula was imprisoned in April 2018? Or that Cultural Marxism is a right wing conspiracy that alleges there is an academic and intellectual "plot" to subvert Western culture [whatever that is deemed to be]? Or that there are hate mobs in India? Or that nationalism is on the rise across the world?
              I am rejecting you and your article as the gibberish that it is.

              Or did you just simply have to post something/anything to this thread?
              Aw, taking on your former compatriot's tagline, are you? Why am I not surprised - he was a turdnugget too..

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
                I am rejecting you and your article as the gibberish that it is.
                You clearly do not care for evidence when it does not comply with your world view. By the way, Lula was arrested and his sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court.


                Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
                Aw, taking on your former compatriot's tagline, are you?
                You have lost me there Gond. Is this one of your little "theories"?

                Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post

                Why am I not surprised - he was a turdnugget too..
                Ah and an abusive remark. How novel.

                "It ain't necessarily so
                The things that you're liable
                To read in the Bible
                It ain't necessarily so
                ."

                Sportin' Life
                Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
                  You clearly do not care for evidence when it does not comply with your world view. By the way, Lula was arrested and his sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court.
                  That's nice for Lula.
                  You have lost me there Gond. Is this one of your little "theories"?
                  Don't play coy, my dear, we both know who I'm talking about. You literally said his catchphrase word for word.

                  Ah and an abusive remark. How novel.


                  Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria
                  As is evident from post #259 onwards you are clearly unable to follow a rational discourse. Hence your inevitable descent to the puerility of personal insults and coarse language, both of which illustrate your inability to remain dispassionate and objective.



                  Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria
                  You are clearly entirely irrational and unable to follow a series of logical and coherent comments.


                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
                    That's nice for Lula.
                    I am sure he was very relieved after he was exonerated.

                    Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
                    Don't play coy, my dear, we both know who I'm talking about. You literally said his catchphrase word for word.
                    You used the word "compatriot" i.e. a person born, residing, or holding citizenship in the same country as another.

                    Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post











                    As I can see you are reverting to your usual behaviour I will politely request that you cease posting to this thread.
                    "It ain't necessarily so
                    The things that you're liable
                    To read in the Bible
                    It ain't necessarily so
                    ."

                    Sportin' Life
                    Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

                      Why is the nationalist right hallucinating a ‘communist enemy’?
                      You mean BLM leadership doesn't hold to Marxist ideals or have Communist connections?

                      https://www.heritage.org/progressivi...ms-china-links


                      The hallucinatory world of anticommunism-without-communism is dangerous and violent. Its partisans believe they face an existential threat, which in principle licenses almost any level of violence.
                      And which side is burning buildings down, looting and shooting cops in the street?

                      Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post
                        I am sure he was very relieved after he was exonerated.
                        That's nice.

                        You used the word "compatriot" i.e. a person born, residing, or holding citizenship in the same country as another.
                        Ah, Ms Dictionary didn't bother to read the entire entry:


                        https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dic...ish/compatriot
                        compatriot
                        noun [ C ]

                        uk
                        /kəmˈpæt.ri.ət/ us
                        /kəmˈpeɪ.tri.ət/



                        formal a person who comes from the same country




                        US a friend or someone you work with





                        https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compatriot

                        Definition of compatriot




                        1 : a person born, residing, or holding citizenship in the same country as another We watched our compatriots compete in the Olympics.

                        2 : companion, colleague her compatriots in academia



                        As I can see you are reverting to your usual behaviour
                        Yes, can't be having people posting your past posts while you try to scold them about things you yourself did (despite your claims that you don't do it, at that)
                        I will politely request that you cease posting to this thread.
                        How about no?

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by Hypatia_Alexandria View Post

                          Of course not. However, I suspect many of the men who join groups such as the Proud Boys, would do so!
                          Then why were you tossing it around as if it was an insult...It obviously had no relevance to their beliefs about communism.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
                            That's nice.


                            Ah, Ms Dictionary didn't bother to read the entire entry:


                            https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dic...ish/compatriot
                            compatriot
                            noun [ C ]

                            uk
                            /kəmˈpæt.ri.ət/ us
                            /kəmˈpeɪ.tri.ət/



                            formal a person who comes from the same country




                            US a friend or someone you work with





                            https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compatriot

                            Definition of compatriot




                            1 : a person born, residing, or holding citizenship in the same country as another We watched our compatriots compete in the Olympics.

                            2 : companion, colleague her compatriots in academia



                            Yes, can't be having people posting your past posts while you try to scold them about things you yourself did (despite your claims that you don't do it, at that)


                            How about no?
                            Seems that our dear fraulein who has issues with other people using clear definitions doesn't bother to do so herself.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
                              That's nice.


                              Ah, Ms Dictionary didn't bother to read the entire entry:


                              https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dic...ish/compatriot
                              compatriot
                              noun [ C ]

                              uk
                              /kəmˈpæt.ri.ət/ us
                              /kəmˈpeɪ.tri.ət/



                              formal a person who comes from the same country




                              US a friend or someone you work with





                              https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compatriot

                              Definition of compatriot




                              1 : a person born, residing, or holding citizenship in the same country as another We watched our compatriots compete in the Olympics.

                              2 : companion, colleague her compatriots in academia



                              Yes, can't be having people posting your past posts while you try to scold them about things you yourself did (despite your claims that you don't do it, at that)
                              Who is this compatriot of mine to whom you refer?


                              Originally posted by Gondwanaland View Post
                              How about no?
                              I think you will find that this site has a rule that when the person who started a thread requests another contributor not to post to it, that person has to comply with the request of the person who began the thread.

                              "It ain't necessarily so
                              The things that you're liable
                              To read in the Bible
                              It ain't necessarily so
                              ."

                              Sportin' Life
                              Porgy & Bess, DuBose Heyward, George & Ira Gershwin

                              Comment

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