when anticommunists tell u that “you havent paid attention to history” or “you need to study history” what theyre really saying is “why wont you take at face value the biased and often reductionist history you were taught by capitalists about why socialism is evil”. when they talk about “studying history” theyre not interested in talking about every coup the cia backed, every terrorist group the us funded in order to “fight communists”, every war that imperialist powers started over profit, or every innocent person killed in those wars. they dont want to talk about the history of violent racism and police brutality, or about every person the us government has tortured, or the history of suppression of leftists and the working class, or how companies fund right wing death squads, they just want to say “the ussr is why communism is bad”
ok since this post made a lot of people who cant stand to see capitalism critiqued in any form mad im going to provide sources for all the shit im talking about.
- list of us involvement in regime changes and heres a notable one when the cia helped overthrow the democratically elected socialist president of chile and replaced him with a fascist dictator who was responsible for thousands of deaths
- oh here, 35 countries where the us supported fascists drug lords and terrorists
- that time when reagan supported and funded islamic extremists because they were “fighting communists”, now go forward a decade or so and the us thinks islamic extremism is a huge threat
- a timeline of atrocities committed by the cia– did you know the cia took in a bunch of nazis spies right after ww2 so they could help the us once again fight communists?
- when reagan illegally sold weapons to iran and used the money to fund a right wing militia in nicaragua called the contras, who were fighting the left wing socialist sandinistas. oh heres all the human rights violations the contras committed while illegally getting money from the us, home of the free and land of the brave am i right
- torture under the bush administration and by the cia
- us war crimes and the casualties of the iraq war
- btw the us has most likely been lying about the amount of civilian deaths caused by drone strikes and the actual number is way higher than theyre officially saying and this is just from the obama administration
- that time coca cola used right wing death squads to murder and terrorize workers and stop them from unionzing
- nestle using slave labour
- how cointelpro targeted civil rights movements, black power movements, and radical leftists and murdered leaders of the movements
- when the us outlawed the communist party and being involved in communist actions
- and if you didnt know the us uses prison labour where prisoners get payed sometimes only a few dollars a week all for the profit of the prisons
- list of people killed by police by year
if you want to tell leftists they need to study history but you dont want to look at any of the crimes of capital, or the crimes committed in upholding capitalism then you dont give a shit about studying history. if you can recognize that gulags were fucked up and horrible, as you should, you cant turn a blind eye on the american prison system where people are being forced to work for almost no pay. so the question is do you actually care about studying history or do you just want to deflect off every critique of capitalism
“But if your question wants to ask: was Capitalism revolutionary in the beginning, did the industrial revolution ever coincide with a social revolution? The answer is no. At least I don’t think so. From its birth Capitalism has been connected with savage repression. It very quickly acquired its own organization and State apparatus. Did Capitalism entail the dissolution of previous codes and power? Absolutely. But it had already set up the gears of its power, including its State power, in the fissures of previous regimes […] The Bourgeoisie never mistook its real enemy. Its real enemy was not the previous system, but that which had escaped the control of the previous system, and the Bourgeoisie was resolved to control it in its turn.”
– Gilles Deleuze, “On Capitalism And Desire”
I want a heavenly help desk where I exchange all my worst moments for cold hard cash
“…and I’m disgusted with dreams now — I want real things — live people to take hold of — to see — and to talk to — Music that makes holes in the sky —”
— Georgia O’Keeffe, in a letter to Anita Pollitzer, from Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (via dieworten)
countervisuality 