cfgaussian

That ancient history is irrelevant. Myths and beliefs about anglosaxon national identity penetrate deeply into the collective subconscious. They have real world impact and won't be undone by some history nerds (nothing against history nerds, i am one myself) going "um, actually...". What matters is the fact that today there very much is such a thing as an anglo ethno-cultural sphere that includes not just most of the UK but the US, Australia and Canada. This anglo world is absolutely toxic and a breeding ground for racist, imperialist attitudes and a source of constant malfeasance in the world. Denying the existence of the white anglosaxon identity group is an attempt to wriggle out of the historic criminal record of this group and to blur the lines between victims and perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

This is not "anti-racist" this is the academia equivalent of people going "i don't even see color".

The AfD are an eclectic mix of petty bourgeois racists and bigots, fringe conspiracy theorists and oldschool Nazi sympathizers. But they are gaining ground because the situation that the current coalition government has led Germany into is so disastrous. We are now in a recession and they are still doubling down on making things even worse. AfD are the only big Euroskeptic party in Germany, and the only major party who take a somewhat reasonable stance on the conflict with Russia. The mainstream liberal centrist parties have all been completely turned into unhinged warmongers and puppets of the US and NATO who are so spineless that they don't even protest when their own allies destroy vital German energy infrastructure. Instead they go along with sanctions that seem almost purposely designed to sabotage the German economy for the benefit of the US. It is yet another instance of liberals making fascists popular through their disastrous incompetence and fascists being smart enough to opportunistically adopt popular political positions.

The saddest part about this data is that if it remains true until the elections the only leftist party that Germany still has with any even marginal political relevance, Die Linke, will not get over the 5% threshold which will disqualify them from getting any seats in the parliament. The center and right will have managed to completely eliminate the left at the federal level.

And i have to say that part of why this has happened is because the SPD, which is a nominally "social democratic" but in reality has long since turned even more liberal than even the labor parties of countries like the UK or Australia, has had such a terrible track record of time and time again betraying the working class. It has become so unpopular and so indistinguishable from the other liberal centrist parties that it has dragged down the whole of the left with it, including Die Linke which is for lack of a better word a schizophrenic party, internally divided between a more traditionally left wing and an opportunist reformist socdem wing, and not only does this mean they lack a clear party line and decisive stances on political issues, but more often than not the opportunists get their way and make all sorts of awful compromises and alliances with the SPD that just demoralize their base.

So it's no wonder that so many people gravitate to the AfD because there is no other significant political party that at least rhetorically if not in practice dares to champion the interests of Germany instead of being complete shills for the EU, NATO and the US at the expense of the people of their own country. I see this as a catastrophic failure of the left in Germany (and in fact in the EU as a whole) that we have ceded the populist, anti-war, anti-imperialist position to the right and far right. Because despite the omnipresent, daily barrage of anti-Russian propaganda in almost the entirety of the mainstream media here in Germany, there are still a significant number of people who are not buying into the bullshit and want good relations with Russia or at least an end to sanctions and involvement in the war.

There is a real appetite for anti-neoliberal, anti-EU, anti-war and pro working class political options and unfortunately the left is not filling that demand (with the exception of a few communist parties too small to be relevant, such as the DKP in Germany) so people turn elsewhere.

The MLPD is notable for being quite cult-like and it's never been clear where they get their funding from. I may be wrong but to me they look like they could be some kind of OP by the intelligence services/constitutional protection of the German state. At the very least they appear to not be very serious people as their overly sectarian and cultish behaviors alienate a lot of people and keep them from ever being any kind of serious political force. I personally gravitate much more toward the DKP, even though it's a more big tent, multi-tendency party. Unfortunately in Germany like in the rest of Europe, there are far too many Trotskyists and Eurocoms, principled ML groups are hard to find.

The most important thing is to join an org that is not tied to or invested in the political fates of either the Republican or Democrat parties. The one thing that should be a deal breaker is when an ostensibly "socialist" party is just a front for Democrat electoralism, as is the case with the DSA. If the party or org you are joining is actively hostile to the duopoly (and not openly reactionary - this goes without saying) then it is good enough. Do not expect perfection, the ideal ideological orientation or 100% correct political line on every single issue.

So long as it is a genuinely independent org and not dominated by Democrat shills there is always the potential for party internal struggle to correct their erroneous lines and weed out problematic behavior. And even if this doesn't happen, it is still better to be a part of a flawed org that does good and useful things to advance the overall struggle than to not be part of an org at all. So i would advise that instead of being hyper-critical and looking for every single bad thing that someone has said about them, you look at what are the good things that they are doing and whether you think you can do some good by being a part of that.

For instance: are they doing community organizing? Are they helping workers organize their workplaces? Are they helping to educate the people and raise the level of class consciousness? Are they speaking out against the imperialists and their warmongering? Are they doing mutual aid or something to protect marginalized communities against reactionary militias and police violence?

Once you join, if you do observe or know of problems within the organization you can try to get together with other members who agree with you and formulate a plan of action on how to raise awareness about these issues and solve them. Ultimately you need to ask yourself who does it really benefit if leftist orgs are examined with a microscope for the slightest imperfection such that people are dissuaded from joining, supporting or even working together with them?

Cointelpro is always looking to cause splits, infighting, to ruin the reputations of the enemies of the bourgeois state and of those who pose a threat to the imperialist agenda, to keep a broad, popular anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist front from forming, to keep our orgs small and divided. Don't fall for it. Criticize leftist orgs that exhibit problems but do it constructively and remember that this is a process, we all learn and get better through struggle.

What can i say except it's about fucking time. We are an unserious, rude, arrogant and at the same time pathetic and spineless country. We go around the world acting like we are superior, not just toward the global south but even toward the eastern and southern Europeans, but then when it comes to Washington we are their most cucked and subservient vassal.

So why would any sovereign country take us seriously when we are obviously a client state. Might as well cut out the middle man and talk directly to the overlord.

Hopefully this happens more and more often to western countries. The more the global south tells Europe and the Anglo-Americans to fuck off the better.

By the way, this interview with JT showcases how he actually thinks about these things: https://www.youtube.com/live/GwgR4Q-rBpc

It is evident that he is very conscious of what he is doing and why, clearly his views are nowhere near as ambiguous as some of his or the Deprogram's content would superficially suggest, and he explains that he purposely takes a more subtle approach in order to be able to break step-by-step through the anti-communist indoctrination that so many people have.

And it is also clear that their content, even the more "advanced" stuff that goes beyong the socialism 101 videos that JT himself does on his main channel, is not really trying to "preach to the choir" as it were, i.e. it's not just for those of us who are already firmly in the Marxist-Leninist camp but tries to reach a broader audience. I just think that even if there still needs to be some hand-holding when it comes to getting people not to be afraid of communism, as far as the topic of Russia and China goes the conflict that is brewing in the world today is too important, its implications and potential dangers too great to continue fencesitting.

An anti-war movement urgently needs to be built up in the West, and you cannot credibly oppose war, sanctions, etc. so long as you still allow people to go on believing that Ukraine is "just defending itself", or that China is somehow mistreating its people. That opens the door to justifications for war no matter how much you insist that you are against war.

There is some logic to what you say, but the problem is that the entire Deprogram trio already get labeled as "tankies", even with the non-committal position they take on some of these issues. The fact that they speak positively of the former USSR, the fact that they frequently, if not as often or as forcefully as i would like, praise certain parts of what China is doing and speak out against anti-China narratives, the fact that they criticize NATO and the US first and foremost, this is enough for the liberals who are pretending to be leftists to call them "apologists for authoritarian regimes". So then why not go all the way?

I think we have here another one of those disagreements about tactics where it is impossible to say who is right and who is wrong until we see how things turn out and we have the benefit of hindsight. It may very well be that their calculation that they will attract more people this way and ultimately turn them into principled communists turns out to be right. It may be that i am just too impatient and they are thinking more strategically and more long-term than me. I am willing to be proved wrong on this. But to me it just seems too opportunistic at this time to still keep up this veneer of neutrality given the degree to which the confrontation between the imperialist camp and the anti-hegemonic coalition (Russia, China, Iran) has escalated.

Unfortunately the Deprogram guys still refuse to set the record straight on the nature of the Russia-Ukraine conflict which leads to them attracting people whose ignorance, Russophobic bloodthirst, and imperialism compatible views are not being challenged. Case in point: just today in the comments of the new video on JT's First Thought channel there were people who were still saying that the Ukraine war is "an inter-imperialist conflict", were cheering on the assassination of the Russian war journalist in St Petersburg and wishing for Alexander Dugin's death (not that we as communists need care much about Dugin whose ideology is quite confused and undeniably reactionary, but to call it fascist is a misrepresentation, and his importance has been greatly exaggerated...the point being it's never a good sign when you find yourself on the same side as actual Nazis wishing that an enemy of said Nazis is murdered). It's not a big step from those kinds of views to thinking that China is "authoritarian state-capitalist", or that the BRI project is neo-colonialist/imperialist, and unless the Deprogram finally take a clear stance on Russia and China they will keep fostering a community that at the very least tolerates these sorts of views.

This. I want to believe that they adopt this relatively non-committal position so as not to alienate the "normies" who they hope to draw in and convert to communism, and that if they didn't think it would put off these people who they hope to "deprogram" as it were they would adopt more openly unappologetic pro-AES and anti-imperialist positions. But frankly it bothers me, i find it very distasteful and at times i think it borders on opportunism.

One minute they are excoriating NATO and pointing out how the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and that we should not be continuing to arm them, the next they say that they don't support Russia in this conflict and that Russia shouldn't have launched their intervention and Ukraine has a right to defend itself. Which is it? Do you recognize that it was actually the US and its Nazi proxies that started this war or don't you? Are you really opposed to NATO and US imperialism or are you just saying that but are too cowardly to support a country that has said enough is enough and is now actually fighting back and giving their lives to defeat the imperialists and their Nazi proxy army.

I think we shouldn't reject any anti-war initiative no matter which side it comes from. Ultimately anything that weakens and discredits the imperialist war machine is beneficial to the revolutionary cause. This doesn't mean we join forces with reactionaries, but that we don't actively fight against any initiative that for whatever reason advocates against NATO and its global warmongering, even when some very shitty people are involved who have a much different agenda than ours. Let them do their thing while we focus on our task which is to build our own principled working class anti-war, anti-imperialist movement. Wasting our energies denouncing reactionaries who are cynically trying to co-opt popular anti-war sentiments not only weakens the anti-war cause, it also discredits us in the eyes of the masses and is a boon to the reactionaries. If we think we can do better than them and build a more effective anti-war front (and i think we absolutely can because we are coming at this from a principled perspective and not from political opportunism) then we should just do it and not knock other anti-war voices down.

This might be an unpopular opinion but i say it because i really think we have to learn to think and act more strategically and resist the liberal impulses we may have for virtue signaling and purity tests. It is to the benefit of the class enemy that we waste our time constantly criticizing but never actually doing.

I think that adopting biological definitions of settler/indigenous identities is not just un-Marxist, it has disturbing echoes of race realism. Whether someone is a settler or not shouldn't be a question of genetics, it should be defined by how they relate to the settler state and settler ideological and cultural values. Ultimately it's a matter of how someone self-identifies, and whether they see themselves as part of the historical settler project or as outside or opposed to it. It has to do with the community they associate with and grew up in. Indigenous identity can be erased by assimilation but the reverse is also true, that people with settler ancestry can be deprogramed and learn to integrate into an indigenous culture and community (of course, as some comrades have pointed out in their replies below, this can only happen AFTER the stolen land has been returned to indigenous people).

I think Finland needs to think very hard about allowing NATO to place any kind of weapons systems on their soil and remember what happened when Finland in 1939 refused to take the Soviet concerns seriously about the border being too close to Leningrad considering the Finnish alliance with Nazi Germany. Finland back then was being egged on by the British to adopt the most recalcitrant and stubborn position possible and refuse to negotiate with Stalin or even acknowledge the security concerns were valid. Present day Finland should hope that Putin is as lenient as Stalin was when he let them keep their independence after what the Finns did, or i foresee a world of hurt...