this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Lefty Memes
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
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0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
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That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
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6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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British Museum: "what's a country of origin?"
I came here to say this, BM is the worst.
It's fun to say this, but at least BM is really able to do their main job and preserve the artifacts.
There's dozens of cases where the original sites have been looted or destroyed by the origin country's own leaders.
Storing the artifacts outside of the influence of an area's internal issues is actually really wise. The BM's real wrongdoing is not paying anything for the artifacts they've took. I argue they've done enough good to offset that a little. They're bad but not the worst.
That's a lot of words to make the exact same excuses used not only to steal the art in the first place, but to colonise the countries it came from too - that us "civilised" people need to take care of their things because they are too "savage" to do it themselves.
Spoken like a true coloniser.
Fun Fact:
European society decided at one point that eating mummies was a great and healthy idea.
Previously it was quite easy to find mummified remains in Egypt, that's what a 6,000 year old tradition will do, but the by the time the British Empire went through its Egypt Fever phase they had eaten so many corpses there was a supply shortage.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummia
If they're not going to take care of their shit then they won't mind is taking it!
They actually paid for a lot of the artifacts. A lot of arguments come from people who don't realize stolen is hyperbole.