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Just took em a second to figure out how.
People love to talk about how ‘the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.’
It’s easy to talk about big dramatic battles.
The truth is that it’s really a never-ending struggle that requires sweat.
How many people bother to show up for primary elections? How many are willing to get a petition signed to get a good candidate on the ballot?
The quote is that the tree is “refreshed” with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we’d be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won’t take even the simplest of actions until they’re forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it’s desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who “aren’t really into politics,” by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn’t enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
if we want a breather we gotta upend the system.
not keep struggling with it.
Let me count the ways that upending the system isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
For the system to be upended in a meaningful way first means you’ve got an organized cadre in place. Savvy political operators who can make things happen.
The Left failed to get past the DNC twice with a popular candidate. The idea that the Left could get past the US Army is ridiculous.
Next, let’s look at what ‘upending the system’ would actually look like. Look at the hyperinflation in Germany after WW1. Or the Depression. Or maybe just the riots of the 1960s. Life isn’t a video game, and when the system fails the most vulnerable people are the ones who suffer the most.
Finally, do you really think that companies like Blackwater are just going to step aside and let themselves be swept away?
If the system goes down, it will be replaced by something much uglier.
none of the examples you came up with have anything to do with a worker revolution. yes, silly, it does takes time. and no, democrats have never been leftists.
do you have an actual idea to save the rest of that broken democracy? because its already being replaced with something uglier. you seem to think fascism is gonna stop itself?
The Left failed to get past the DNC twice with a popular candidate. The idea that the Left could get past the US Army is ridiculous.
cmon, tell me what your idea is for fixing the system that doesnt involve begging the right wing for a candidate nomination.
You’d rather face the US Army then vote for someone endorsed by Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders.
Please read some history. Back in the day, Frederick Douglas campaigned for candidates who couldn’t promise to end slavery.
im sure you will have plenty of fascists to root for in 2028, no worries 😂
did the whitewashed history you learned in school include all the genociding you have been doing this last couple of centuries?
What did the Arab spring give the people in the end?
Syria? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Lybia? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Tunesia? temporary improvements now to be revoked by a new authoritarian
Egypt? temporary improvements followed by an US backed coup installing an even worse military dictatorMaybe we were just naive in thinking that social media back then wasn’t already doing the bidding of governments against people.
The conclusion: as soon as a country is destabilized, you can bet your ass the US is going to come in and fuck up any democratic progress in their own favor.
Not only the US though.
Mostly the US. Even indirectly.
It gave women significantly more rights than they had before, but we all know that shit doesn’t matter apparently.
Is this true?
There’s a good retrospective on the mass protest movements of the 2010s called If We Burn. The main takeaway I got was that leaderlessness and horizonalism do not work.
If you don’t pick your leaders, they will pick themselves.
Anarchism is the worst social order, except for all others that have been tried.
Anarchism can’t defend itself. That’s the point. Either it gets coopted and recuperated under capital, or it gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes.
While Marxism-Leninism gets hijacked by reactionary forces for their own purposes and gets recuperated under capital after that.
The USSR lost the Cold War, but there’s plenty of ML counties still around. I’m sure you’ll whine they aren’t paradises, but they’re all generally progressing and developing in a positive direction (when they aren’t being strangled to death like Cuba)
Not a lot of anarchist spaces by comparison. There’s the Zapatistas and they’re pretty cool, but like, the record is pretty clear.
And before the end of the cold war, USSR was a reactionary country governed by an elite for its own interests. It’s the same in China. The same in Vietnam, the same in Cuba (but at least there they have the excuse of the unjust US politics against them).
Eliminating homelessness, eliminating illiteracy, eliminating hunger, increasing life expectancies, increasing graduation rates, increasing quality of life, actually existing socialist countries accomplish incredible things (some more than others, admittedly). They’re not perfect utopias, but you can’t ignore the context they exist within (i.e. they’re still developing countries and they exist within US global hegemony)
I’m sure you have some specific criticisms of China or Cuba or whatever, but they’re doing pretty fucking good considering what they’re up against.
While you keep on dreaming of utopia, I’m more concerned with defeating than US empire in the real world. Anarchism can’t.
Capitalist countries did the same thing without building walls to stop their population to flee…
I mean, anarchism was the initial state, so it has been tried. It seems that it is not very resilient against being replaced by other systems, so it can’t really be the best system in the real world.
Unlike the resilient anti-capitalism of Marxist states amirite.
It’s almost like you need to learn and evolve from the mistakes of the past to create systems that work in the present.
For example, when white colonizers land on your shores, don’t ignore them and start an escalating series of tribal wars to sell them war-slaves.
Also, maybe don’t have slaves.
See? We’ve already improved on proto-anarchism.
Yes. And by improving and changing the system, it by definition stops being anarchism and becomes something else. Which is what I was saying.
The anarchists love to come out of the woodwork whenever democracy is having a bad day, then they disappear whenever someone mentions medicine being more of a global effort.
Yes, I’m sure an entirely fragmented world full of companies protected by privatized militias would be extremely cooperative, with the added bonus modifier of there being no borders.
Yeah, how is that going in the Arab Springs countries though? Was that actually a glorious people’s uprising, or just another despot using an angry mob to do his bidding?
The oligarchs got scared, then they got even.
that’s part of why there’s saudi money in twitter
We let the normies into our spaces.
How has it been weaponized against democracy?
It’s still the best way to get info not filtered by MSM. There’s a reason politicians in both parties are calling for increased social media censorship.
Haven’t you heard? Unregulated communication is our biggest threat. It tricked people into voting for the wrong candidate, which proves my point.
That’s when they noticed it could be used to topple governments and decided to use selfishly.
Arab Autumn
The ruling class, against whom the internet was a critical tool in the name of democracy, decided they were not going to let us have that tool anymore.
Oh so you like the Internet eh?
It’s just a fad, it’ll go away.
I remember when people used to tell me that.
Well, Kraut of all people should know how one can change their mind in the span of a decade.
Context?
Kraut (then Kraut & Te i think) was deep into Gamer Gate and Europe’s far right, a large chunk of his video’s were political commentary. I believe I first learnt of him through the “XY Einzelfall” video by Shaun. One day I read a comment saying Kraut response was pathetic, leading me to a Destiny stream where he defended the map, not believing that all the cases on the map just “magically vanish” under scrutiny. There apparently was a video he made in response too.
E: I just remembered, I actually watched the video itself. I can confidently say it included Kraut saying “Um actually, your definition of Arson only mostly correct” with the difference not mattering, and that the smoke in one of the cooking fires was not just a bit of smoke, but severe. Pathetic response indeed.
You can no longer find the stream or video, the only hint being this reddit post, with one comment mentioning Kraut was on the stream. Kraut rebranded himself and deleted his past videos in the process. This is just hearsay, but I heard he was attacked really hard by the far right after attacking their own for pedophillia. He left political commentary and made history videos instead, though there are still hints of Islamophobia and Racism in his videos, or common jokes just earn more criticism because of his past. I can’t say, I don’t watch them. However he definitely isn’t nearly as much right as he used to be.
Oh wow, I had no idea about the XY incident map. It certainly seems compelling on first glance.
I guess he got swept up in some shared hysteria at the time, went along with it, and then realised which group he was getting swepped up with, and backtracked, cutting ties.
Bless the color revolutions! Thanks Facebook and the CIA!
Or maybe mediums are inherently neutral?
