I imagine it would be similar to the authoritarian practice of forcing teenagers to attend school: it really depends upon how it is organized and executed with additional variations in response based upon the individual.

What is this, academia?

For real, it doesn’t take much reading to dispell many of the myths and I frankly think most people wouldn’t be content to stop there. Once you begin reading, you hunger for more.

I appreciate the extra effort you made to use profile pics.

This may help clear up much of where you are butting heads with MLs in your comments.

it’s non-Marxists that paint Marxism as dogmatic and inflexible.

Yeah, it’s such a tired trope that it’s almost become a meme.

Never in my life have I seen someone call Star Wars prophetic before this moment.

Don’t turn it into Harry Potter. SW has seen enough pain as it is.

I would only suspect anti-Stalin leftists of ignorance as I have yet to find an instance where someone talks about Stalin in this way and it isn’t from a place of ignorance. Never seen it from someone who was informed and purposely pushing anti-Stalin Cold War propaganda…except fucking Trots.

Not that ignorance is a good excuse for their actions, but the amount of damage propaganda has done to the history surrounding Stalin is very difficult to break through and shouldn’t be overlooked. If someone didn’t grow up in a Western country, it seems they have a serious advantage in overcoming the challenge of looking at Stalin with a critical eye because they aren’t constantly exposed to an overwhelming amount of trash heaped on his grave. Not only can it be difficult to find information that isn’t Red Scare propaganda on your own, but you’ll be ostracized when trying to speak to anyone about the subject from anything but an anti-comminist perspective. It makes having discussions on the subject difficult and I can’t say I would have ever broken through this without the Internet.

Maybe I’m going too easy on them because overall I agree with you. I also want to give people the benefit of the doubt because I was once where they were and my anti-Soviet, anti-Stalin, and anti-China stances all came from a place of ignorance (and miseducation) that I only overcame once I began looking at the topics with a critical eye and put effort into learning about them from a different (and materialist) perspective.

A friend sent me this. Doesn’t work on most phones now, just older androids I think. It’s meant to teach you not to scan unknown QR codes by causing androids to restart on scanning.

At least five generations living outrageously opulent lifestyles while assuming they’re shite with money.

The situation is more complicated than your comparison and your analysis shows a fundamental lack of understanding about what critical support is or why it’s given. It only appears like cherry-picking when you don’t understand the underlying reasoning that informs these decisions and how they are consistent with Marxist-Leninist theory.

A better metaphor for comparison is if you think of Putin as chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is poisonous, it’s bad for your body, and enough of it will kill you. It sucks and it hurts to go through, however, it also kills cancer cells (weakens US/Western hegemony/imperialism). No one likes chemotherapy and everyone recognizes that is bad for your body, but we suggest the use (critically support the use) of chemotherapy in the fight against cancer (Western Imperialism/capitalism) because it helps us progress toward our ultimate goal.

If the West had allowed Putin to join their hegemony as he had always wanted, then there would be no critical support for him from MLs because all the geopolitical waves he makes that are destructive towards the Western imperialist geopolitical waves would not exist. Anytime you see an ML saying “I love you daddy Putin” please understand that it’s a joke. People misrepresent our positions all the time and we cope by embracing them in jest. He’s a capitalist pig who we’d like to see gone or reformed like the others, but he’s a strategically useful pig in that his actions are weakening Western Imperial power in the current moment. By the ML definition, imperialism = capitalism (it’s just the stage we are in) and the biggest base of imperial power comes from the US. Once the bigger threat is defeated, if he’s still around and up to capitalist bullshit, Putin will not have our support. While his actions help support our goals, it makes no sense for us to actively oppose him when we could better spend that energy elsewhere. It’s similar to “the enemy of my enemy is my [strategic] friend”. ML prefers an approach that is more focused on pragmatism than ideological purity.

Not all leftists agree on this type of critical support. Typically, those are the ones shouting for more purity and are typically who we call ultras. The same reasons they would not critically support Putin are the same reasons they don’t support China and call it capitalist (a focus on ideological purity rather than a practical approach toward achieving our goal of communism).

If you want to better understand why certain leftists do what they do, there is plenty of material out there explaining leftist theory and contemporary geopolitical analysis. Likewise, you could always ask us why we take certain positions on Lemmygrad or Hexbear. There is likely someone happy to take the time to explain or a well written explanation that already exists that can be linked for you if you show genuine interest and a willingness to listen, though you should be warned to expect some prickly responses in those spaces due to people who asked before you and turned out to be trolls.

The extent of the energy I’m willing to spend on the topic now ends here. Hopefully it helped clarify what we mean by critical support.