purpleworm [none/use name]

You can see people use the term that way if you put it into a search engine. I was just noting that specific word because the person I was responding to proposed it as a hypothetical nonsense word while they were misunderstanding what Islamism was.

This person is a horrible, orientalizing racist, but “Islamism” in this context is basically a shorthand for “Islamic theocracy,” isn’t not just a confused way of saying “Muslim.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism

So ISIS, for example, are extremely Islamist, and the Taliban are as well. That is much less true of the overall factions opposing Israel in relation to the genocide, though they will inevitably have members and segments who are straightforwardly Islamist (as you have in most militant movements with mostly-very-religious membership).

(“Christianism” is sometimes used in the corresponding way, though it has other terms like christo-fascism or Catholicism to refer to it by depending on the specifics).

Yeah, there used to be tons of videos circulating around of resistance fighters running up on foot and sticking bombs to IOF tanks and things like that. It’s really incredible.

The symmetry of conspiracy theories is always really interesting to me, like how both Western and Russian conservatives say that queerness existing in society is basically a psychological warfare weapon being inflicted upon them by the other side. Whether the Brits control China or China controls the Brits is just a matter of which group your audience hates more.

It’s almost refreshing to see them suggest that communism is mostly not racist.

What I mentioned is not an exhaustive list, but in terms of specific political movements, those are the two stories that I see most often, the “betrayal” of the Spanish anarchists (and Trots) who thought that a civil war with fascists was a good time for a revolution and therefore sabotaged their liberal allies (the Spanish Republicans, who the Communists were working with), and the betrayal of the Makhnovists who had genuinely been engaging in banditry on Bolshevik-controlled cities because, despite being very militarily effective, they (the Makhnovists) were not economically self-sufficient or really productive at all, and that’s before you factor in having maybe their whimsical monetary policy, because the root issue had more to do with relations of production.

I’m not going to pretend to you that anarchists have never been wronged by communists, whether in Spain, Russia, or elsewhere, but the specific examples that I usually see are instances where it would be more accurate to call the anarchists the “traitors,” but the communist retaliation is framed as the first shot. I am quite confident that you can go through the history of the Red Terror, of the post-Cultural Revolution crackdowns (and I mean under both Mao and Deng) and find much more genuine misdeeds, I’m just less familiar with these because they aren’t thrown in front of my face all the time like the stories I mentioned.

It should also be mentioned that even though I think Mao ended his career with some of the gravest betrayals of a political project that I have ever heard of, he and the CPC had facilitated various anarchist and anarchist-like projects from the interwar period until the unofficial end of the Cultural Revolution, and there wasn’t zero communist interference, but generally they had neutral or supportive relationships (with some communist factions being much more hostile, one going as far as assassinating a KPAM leader) until various factors (Japanese aggression, poor construction, etc.) caused them to fail. That and Mao’s crackdown ending the CR was mainly to stop country-wide gang violence, meanwhile the more substantial anarchist-like projects like the Shanghai People’s Commune were dissolved in a more orderly fashion as they didn’t perform as well as hoped and were deemed effectively to be left-deviationist.

Anyway, I wouldn’t ascribe a “level of historical knowledge” to myself, I just know some stories, and the accusations led me to read a bunch of different anarchist (and Trot) accounts until eventually I found bitter anarchists who nonetheless admitted to things like the Spanish anarchists sabotaging the Republicans. I encourage you to look up things on your own and treat what I have to say like a Wikipedia article, as mainly being a basis for further research at most. If someone would like to offer corrections, I am happy to hear them.

My real thesis is that these myths of aggrievement are just the Red Scare as processed by, well, another group of people who don’t seem to have more nuance in their accounts than the neoliberals and are therefore happy to have the same boogeymen following roughly the same logic. Besides the blatant revisionism, I’d respect it a lot more if the people in question were just more upfront about the fact that the substantial divide (where there is one, and that really depends on the anarchist) is about democracy vs autonomy, where the communists demand the continuous advancement of the former and anarchists the latter, and these two things are inevitably at odds.

It’s like the newest level of

“This is hurting your cause” – person who hates you and your cause.

And it really shows how Klein doesn’t believe in anything but drama.

You mention marxism earlier, but this is a very moralizing framing. Yes, the Palestinian people, including the membership of Hamas, has been brutally victimized past most living memory. There is no contradiction in being both a victim and – to a lesser extent that we should not allow to eclipse our view of the former – a perpetrator. If there was a breakout from Dachau and the people breaking out deliberately executed children in the later stages of their short-lived freedom, they have committed a crime. That doesn’t mean we condemn even that specific group as people who should be left in the camps, or even that the project they were engaging in was a bad thing overall, it just means that there were also misdeeds involved.

The opposition to the idea that people need to be perfect victims to deserve support does not need to produce the inverted extreme in which we must take victims as being perfect by merit of being victims. No, they don’t deserve their victimhood and they should be supported in their fight, but that doesn’t mean they get some kind of blank check that every individual action in that process is to be regarded as justified. You’re seriously going to talk yourself into Gonzalo-style terrorism with this set of assumptions.

someone consistently saying something bad doesnt make it good lol

He has consistently denied Israel’s “right to exist” as an ethnostate, that’s my point. If you believe that means opposing the Israeli government completely, I agree with you and he probably does too. He recognizes, as should you, that supporting an apartheid state’s hypothetical right to exist if it didn’t have apartheid is immaterial in terms of supporting it with apartheid and is a reasonable tool for reorienting the conversation toward who is supporting apartheid and who isn’t.

what we do know is the act its self was not a war crime, it was an act of resistance.

There were several prongs to the attack, some of which were on military bases and those were not war crimes that we know of. Other prongs amounted to just attacking normal families and killing people, men, women, and children alike. We do not know the true extent to which this happened because Israel has systematically made this information impossible to determine. But saying they committed war crimes is not a condemnation of the broader movement. The Haitian Revolution involved some pretty severe war crimes, and it is still better for it to have happened than for it to have not happened because it still repelled France and freed countless people from slavery.

No, you need to understand, sabotaging the Spanish Republicans who were fighting Franco was based and that’s why Mamdani is going to betray his anarchist volunteers (I did not volunteer) and then I guess hunt down anyone who posts about being an anarchist on X.

It was actually cool and good to pillage cities in Bolshevik territory when you’ve got a truce with them, the problem started when the scheming reds betrayed the valiant Makhnovists and that’s going to be Mamdani’s playbook.

(Lots of anarchists do cool things currently and have done so historically, but the ones coming at you with this weird dogmatic aggrievement based on historical movements they have no connection to are usually referencing things like this out of context. The anarchist Scholem Schwarzbard was a hero and Makhno, a coward for trying to stop him.)

It has recently been re-appropriated into representing the Israeli hostages. If you watched the Mayoral debate, that’s why a bunch of them had yellow ribbons, not for veterans.

Mamdani has been very explicit and consistent in saying Israel has “the right to exist” as “a state with equal rights” (which he currently does not view it as being). That’s why he keeps getting badgered about the “Jewish state” question and he has never said it has “the right to exist as a Jewish state”.

Obviously, he does not believe what we do, but the logical implication of his beliefs are functionally the replacement of the existing Israeli government with one that is not apartheid.

Also there were many warcrimes committed on Oct 7th by Hamas, though in all likelihood Israel committed more in pursuit of the Hannibal Doctrine and so on. I don’t think it’s a great point to dwell on, and Hamas is still obviously the superior side, but he is correct.

It’s so perfect that the meaning of the yellow ribbon has been replaced with something maybe even more fash. I can’t believe that they didn’t just pick another color, since vets (etc.) are like the highest sacred cow in the country.

There was an Israeli politician in I assume the Knesset who famously repeated an apocryphal Hitler quote, that “I cannot live so long as a single Jew lives” saying that he believed the same but of “Islamo-Nazis,” which contextually seemed to mean any Palestinian with political agency independent of Israel.

As soon as a zionist opens their mouth about Weimar or Nazi Germany, you get at minimum “soft Holocaust denial”.

You’re right that a lot of them are bad faith, but I honestly think more Israelis and people overly-close to Israel (i.e. have the sort of fried brains where they think Qatar is a state sponsor of Islamist terror directed at Israel) do sincerely believe that, because they believe in an equivalent of the Great Replacement. They earnestly believe that Jews need to be kept a majority in Israel because an Arab majority – where those Arabs also have civil rights – means that the Holocaust 3 begins (2 being October 7)

Yeah, when people are saying someone is Hitler and an “existential threat” to Jews, if you believe these claims, the logical conclusion is to kill that person. It would be inexplicable if there were no attempts on his life, unless the Dems shut him down so effectively that people decide he’s not a threat after all.

It’s ridiculous how quickly liberals will jump to whitewashing fascism. When Hitler ran, he lost, and it was an economic liberal who appointed him as part of what amounted to an anticommunist coalition. Furthermore, those who did vote for Hitler (and we can say those who voted for Nazis generally, since even the “left wing” was just using a different framework to condemn all Jewish people), the Holocaust’s specific form was undecided but Hitler was screaming in Mein Kampf about the need for Europe to have no more ethnic Jews, and “the Jewish Question” was a standard element of political discourse where basically any member of the Nazi Party would give you this or that reason to reach the same basic conclusion.

So they are telling two lies pulling in opposite directions – exaggerating Hitler’s popularity and then absolving his supporters – where the only real commonality is whitewashing fascism. It’s seriously just Nazi apologia.

Humility is a great virtue, but you’re correct, I think. OP isn’t even really accelerationism because it doesn’t even take the agency to do acceleration (so that’s two garbage ideologies that it’s even worse than) but yeah, accelerationism in a scenario where capitalists are winning just means them winning more or the fascists taking over in case of collapse (which you are right, is not at all imminent). It’s a nonsense ideology equivalent to cheering on the rapture.

Letting the city sink under and establishment Dem was totally not the smarter fucking move.

You may as well be a Posadist to say this. Fighting for things is good and waiting for things to get worse and worse as though you can then waltz in and win the confidence of the proletariat is nonsense. You’re not a doomer because doomers don’t pretend that giving up is 4D chess.