SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]

literally 95% of my interactions with other instances’ liberals have been them saying something absurdly reactionary and not expecting to receive any pushback for having dogshit takes, and then going “Ohoho, the Hexbear tankie redfash have arrived to defend the CCP and Putler’s regime! Why am I not surprised!” without offering even the slightest counterargument because they know they have none

we have cultivated a community of genuine good-faith discussion on Hexbear over the last three years and we aren’t about to lose it

perhaps North Korea might be in a better condition if the United States didn’t murder a fifth of their entire population and raze every single building to the ground

North Korea’s considerable economic achievements since liberation were all but completely wiped out by the war. By 1949, after two years of a planned economy, North Korea had recovery from the post-liberation chaos, and economic output had reached the level of the colonial period. Plans for 1950 were to increase output again by a third in the North, and the DPRK leadership had expected further economic gains following integration with the agriculturally more productive South after unification. According to DPRK figures, the war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes. Most of the destruction occurred in 1950 and 1951. To escape the bombing, entire factories were moved underground, along with schools, hospitals, government offices, and much of the population. Agriculture was devastated, and famine loomed. Peasants hid underground during the day and came out to farm at night. Destruction of livestock, shortages of seed, farm tools, and fertilizer, and loss of manpower reduced agricultural production to the level of bare subsistence at best. The Nodong Sinmun newspaper referred to 1951 as “the year of unbearable trials,” a phrase revived in the famine years of the 1990s. Worse was yet to come. By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans. Only emergency assistance from China, the USSR, and other socialist countries prevented widespread famine.

usually how conversations go is this

1. I see a reply to a post by a liberal stating a point which we regularly debunk

2. to help them see why they might be wrong, I politely, and in good faith, though often with a little force, push back on it and explain why they are incorrect

3. they then smugly and condenscendingly reply with a sentence like “Oh, so you’ve come along with your CCP/Kremlin propaganda now / Oh great, the Hexbear horde has arrived / Actually, it’s much more complicated than that [refuses to elaborate] / Actually, you’re wrong because of [link to wikipedia]”

4. we then start dunking given that they aren’t operating in good faith

perhaps reddit’s typical style of “debate”, where you smugly reply thought-terminating cliches and decontextualized quotes at each other while being variously awarded and downvoted, is more harmful and damaging to actual discussion than our style of “You’re wrong, here’s why you’re wrong with a bunch of references included, hell, most of them are to western media because if I don’t then you’ll start screeching ‘CHINESE CCP XI JINPING PROPAGANDA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH’ at us”

additionally, we have no downvotes, and haven’t for three years, because it just fosters anonymized disagreement and even harrassment without any constructive points being made. thousands upon thousands of times, I’ve seen arguments become people just saying quotes like “Well, communism works on paper but not in practice” and “If you sacrifice freedom for security then you deserve neither” or “Did you know that the Founding Fathers warned against parties?” and just a hundred other pseudo-points gathered from a lifetime of being exposed to various kinds of media and irl interactions, without even the slightest curiosity as to the underlying philosophies and ideas and complexities and nuances behind, say, what authoritarianism really means, or whether democracy is necessarily “when you have elections” or if there’s something deeper, or even just the basic histories of the USSR and China and Cuba etc. the average Westerner’s knowledge of anything beyond culture is as wide and deep as a puddle. I’ll even be a little self-depreciating and include myself in that, though I am actively working to improve.

no matter how often you remind people that downvotes should only be used for comments that don’t “contribute to the discussion”, no matter how good their intention, downvote systems online always devolve into “I dislike you and/or the point you’re making and I’m not going to explain why. fuck you.” disagreement on Hexbear can only be done through posting and replying, and sorting these things out through discussions (or “struggle sessions”) rather than building up silent resentments over time that split everybody up, and because of that, it’s by far the healthiest online community I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. it’s also why we come across as overbearing - even if we had only a third of the members, the site culture of “if you disagree, reply and tell them, you can’t downvote” means that we’re all used to commenting a lot and could overwhelm other instances which are more used to downvote-and-move-on tactics.

Part of that equation, for my point of view, includes the ability for people to think and speak freely without fear of reprisal by the government

This is like the people who say “We’re freer than the Chinese because I can call Trump a peepee poopoo pants on Twitter without being arrested!” when that doesn’t actually do anything at all

but if you try and protest and change conditions materially and meaningfully, you can absolutely bet your ass you will be disappeared like the horror stories you find on reddit about “totalitarian regimes”. The only reason why Americans don’t think it doesn’t happen in the West is either because it’s so completely internalized that it becomes memeified (“Haha, I hope the FBI agent watching me through my camera is having a nice day!”) or none of the media that they engage with reports on it.

IMO, this entire point is just a liberal ideological bludgeon, a condition that can be applied at-will to any government they want to criticize because no government will be good enough all of the time. it’s one thing if you’re an anarchist and oppose every government equally for not fulfilling that condition, that I can understand and respect, it’s quite another when you’re like “Oh, no, I hate authoritarianism! That’s why we need to constantly criticize a country on the literal other side of the planet 99.7% of the time, and then only criticize our own country when somebody calls us out on it by saying ‘Oh, yeah, America also does bad things too!’” Especially when America’s role in the world for the last century at least, and more accurately really since its conception, has been a source of capitalist reaction across its whole hemisphere and later the whole planet, with hundreds upon hundreds of military bases and tens of millions directly and indirectly killed in wars. Criticizing, say, Cuba or DPRK for these sorts of things is effectively zooming in on a single corpse in righteous indignation while ignoring the seas of blood spilled by America behind you.

we must all kill the liberal part of our brain, every single day

libs will say this and then turn around and say “BRICS is just an arm of China, it’s dominated by them economically”

(not that that point is entirely false, BRICS is indeed economically dominated by China and I wonder if there would be half as much interest for countries to join if China wasn’t in it, but India is a pretty big counterweight to China’s power in BRICS in practice)

you don’t really have to support Putin per se, many of us including myself would feel glee watching him be put up against a wall by communist revolutionaries, but supporting NATO is a pretty big dealbreaker given NATO’s imperialist and fascist history. e.g. Several Nazi German officials being put into NATO’s government. Gladio and funding of fascist stay-behind groups in the event of Soviet invasion. Yugoslavia. Libya. I certainly want NATO to be destroyed, hopefully from within rather than without to prevent nuclear war, and unfortunately for us, the reactionary state of Russia seems to be the best bet to maybe have that eventually occur.

also, stop calling things “wars of aggression” unless you’re going to call everything a war of aggression, my god. what an annoying thought-terminating cliche.

so, not at all, considering they even lost in Afghanistan

World order is acknowledging sovereign countries exist and it’s wrong to invade them

The United States has invaded many more countries than Russia and China, and yet they are sanctioned for doing so/if America thinks they might do so, while not a single person in the American government is punished for the deaths of millions. They even get promoted and hired again on later governments! America created the world order! Rules for thee, not for me!

What, the guy that Putin just killed? sounds like he has a better track record of killing Nazis than you give him credit for

the only people trivializing fascism are those who see fascism symbology like the swastika, Black Sun, various nordic runes, etc on the soldiers they’re egging on and go “doesn’t look like anything to me!” while advocating for the double genocide theory

Apologies, the Hexbear motto is usually to be Polite, Precise, and Brief (our writeup of our PPB motto can be found here, only a hundred words or so) so I went a little overboard!

I think a way to do this without supporting oppressive regimes is to specifically support the people, and not the government.

On Hexbear we have seen this line of reasoning a hundred thousand times and so we just laugh now whenever we see it; I thought you were making a joke until I saw your instance.

The cause of so much of the suffering of “repressive regimes” like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, the DPRK, etc is specifically because of the sanctions that the West puts on it that are designed to impoverish the people and try and make them overthrow their government, because they refuse to engage in the global economy according to the United States’s rules, and not really because of those “regimes” themselves. Of course, it’s taken for granted that what the United States wants is what everybody should want, but considering the billions being exploited abroad for tiny wages in hostile working environments for the West’s benefit, perhaps America’s “international rules-based order” isn’t the best for anybody except for the West themselves! Of course, America has all the military bases, and those countries do not, and bullets and bombs tend to be quite persuasive.

For liberals, which I assume you are, these sanctions exist in a weird doublethink space. Working through it, liberals basically end up saying something contradictory like “The suffering that the people here are experiencing is because those countries are Bad. We need to put sanctions on Bad Countries. The sanctions aren’t what’s causing the suffering, it’s the Bad Countries’ fault (which thus implies sanctions don’t work and have little to no effect), but we still need to put sanctions on them to punish them (thus implying that sanctions do have some negative, disciplinary function).”

Sanctions both do and do not function depending on the rhetorical frame you’re taking at any particular time. When you’re talking about the repression that Iranian women feel and why that sparked the protests, the sanctions will never be mentioned - this is purely Iran. When you’re talking about the fact that Cubans struggle with food insecurity and don’t have enough fuel and sometimes some of them protest or complain, then what caused those shortages is, again, never mentioned - it’s purely the Cuban regime. If, on the other hand, you’re talking about how repressive regimes must be punished in general, then westerners online clamour and shout for sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.

This is why we laugh about such “support the people, not the government” rhetoric a lot of the time. Of course, in the case of Iran and similar countries, they aren’t left-wing and so we only really have critical support (in the sense of “they are better than those they are opposing, but they are not good in a vacuum”) and there is genuinely nuance about how the Iranian bourgeoisie are worsening conditions by exploiting the people, and repressive religious institutions, etc, but by and large American sanctions are the larger factor. In the case of Cuba, or the DPRK, such a line about supporting the people, not the government is quite ridiculous. Liberals (usually of the chud variety) who just come right out and say what they really mean - that, yes, the sanctions are explicitly designed to make the population overthrow the government so that Western compradors and corporations can loot it of its resources and exploit its people - are horrific monsters, but at least slightly refreshing compared to the mental knots that most liberals tie themselves in to not say that line explicitly, invoking “restoring democracy” and “fighting authoritarianism” and other such meaningless cliches instead.

the one killing citizens who speak out against it

Truly, the most dastardly invention of the Iranian government was killing people who oppose it. No government before or since, especially not in the West, has steeped to such lows.

thank god, that means we can safely disband NATO.

all it cost them was shutting down their industries to use less gas to keep gas prices low

Just because a country does not conform to a Western definition of “democratic”, doesn’t mean that that country is not a democracy.

I would personally say that the United States is not a democracy by a typical definition, because voters don’t actually have the choice to vote for anything they like, and not just crank things but even things that are very popular and very important - medicare for all is a popular policy that neither party represents for example, and third parties are so disempowered by the voting system that it is essentially impossible (but not technically! as if that matters!) for any other party to gain power in their place. The generally low approval ratings for various parts of the government (the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court) are an indication of this. Is the mere ability to choose between two options, especially bad options, really a good definition of democracy? Might, perhaps, there be better ones?

Compare this to China. Sure, it’s a one-party state, but it’s a communist one-party state, as opposed to the United States’ capitalist one party state that is merely separated into two separate parties to meet their own, bad, definition of democracy. That being said, it’s actually quite a highly decentralized country, with regional and local officials elected by the people. More importantly, it has very high approval ratings and the people’s needs are generally met. I think this is a much better definition of democracy because where the people’s needs are made the priority. It’s harder to game that kind of system - the former definition has the “cheat code” of just splitting one party in two and then having the rich “lobby” both of them (AKA, legalized corruption) to have the same policies where it counts, whereas the latter can’t do that, it actually has to deliver the goods. Of course, it’s not as if you can’t have both - a system where you can choose everything about your country, and one where most people’s needs are generally met and most people approve. But if we have to have one or the other, the latter is the more important feature, IMO.

liberals have universally allied with fascists over communists. the liberals in the Weimer Republic put Hitler in power, to give but one example. Churchill admired Hitler.

Both liberals and fascists agree that capitalism is the bee’s knees, they agree that most things should be privatized, they agree that people must be exploited by an elite. There’s a common saying - “If you scratch a liberal, a fascist bleeds,” meaning that the second you exert even the slightest violence towards liberals or threaten to do so, they suddenly turn into fascist monsters, seemingly out of nowhere! Macron in France is a good current-day example - the riots have prompted him to turn France into ever more of a police state in which the pigs have unbelievable powers and surveillance. When America has been provoked by actions (many of which didn’t even actually happen, e.g. the Gulf of Tonkin, the Nayirah testimony, etc (or those that did happen but didn’t need to provoke an entire invasion in response, like 9/11) they start wars that kill hundreds of thousands, even millions.

It’s actually hard to describe exactly where liberals and fascists have opposing beliefs sometimes. I suppose where they differ is whether the cruelty should be more obscured or more out in the open? But you have to understand, the political dichotomy isn’t and has never been “liberal vs conservative”, because of those are on the side of the bourgeoisie in the class war. It’s communists vs capitalists, and liberal, conservatives, fascists, even the more left-wing people in the American establishment like Warren and Bernie are on the side of the capitalists. We hold fundamental political beliefs that differ from liberals. Liberals do not differ in fundamental political beliefs from fascists. It’s also why accusations of “horseshoe theory” are so hilarious to us.

when my local stores here in the UK have QR codes in them showing their websites I’m going to start complaining about the tyrannical British regime that forced them at gunpoint to put it in the window

“What if they invaded, pillaged, and coup’d the countries WE were going to invade, pillage, and coup! Can you imagine the tragedy?! Better that us, The Good Guys, exploit these countries than The Bad Guys!”