hello cyrillic reading besties do you wish to have a stroke

ur welcome <3

@vigilantsycamore you win

in what world is this funny?

this one

tumblr user death2america and the continuous enbasedening of murderous autocrats

what are you gonna do about it? take my sauce?

WAIT I THOYGHT THJIS WAS THE POST WITH THE QUOTE EDIT WITH MAO TAKING SAUCE

LMFAO THIS MAKES NO SENSE ON THIS POSTTTTT HELP

iconic moment

Hey, left-wing tumblr? Listen, I hate capitalism too, and I understand the appeal of Funny Socialism, but if you search for stuff like 'stalin,' 'soviet,' or 'north korea' on death2america's blog, you'll find a bunch of posts where they argue in defense of dictators and dictatorships that happen to be socialist. By contrast, if you search for 'uyghur' or 'tibet' you find absolutely nothing. What I'm saying is, they're the kind of person I refer to when I talk about tankies and soviet apologists

I keep seeing people reblog posts from them and I need y'all to understand that Funny Quirky Socialist doesn't always mean Actually Cares About Human Rights Even When It Doesn't Back Up Their Ideology

has the yankee stalin fan girl aka death2america aka tonysopranobignaturals finally deactivated? 🙏

BUT let’s not forget: the peak leftism from the americas is making sexy jokes about totalitarian dictators <3

i think eventually we're all just gonna have to come to terms with the fact that it's impossible to tell a story with any degree of subtlety or nuance without risking a portion of the audience taking the "wrong message", and that's ok. art isn't meant to be strictly a teaching tool, and if you're goal is just to convince people or critique an idea, just write an essay or a polemic

people taking the "wrong message" from a story isn't a failure of that story, it's a function of art itself

all this fucking talk of "stealing" with the queer community. "gays are stealing from lesbians" "aces are stealing from gays" "transes are stealing from everyone" absolutely convinced white queers learned about cultural appropriation and decided it could be applied to sexuality and gender and it became entrenched becuz ppl are fucking obsessed with gatekeeping and exclusionism

besties, we are all in the alphabet soup together. the lines between us are blurred as hell. we are not stealing, we are inspired. our culture is bright and beautiful and a street fair that everyone trades at. quit being so goddamn individualistic and embrace the community. it's the only way we have solidarity

i see it as a symptom of extreme individualism born from capitalism + america centrism (the gatekeeped rainbow culture is often usamerica spesific culture).

the moment people started to treat the countless individual identities with their individual flags same as nationalities with strict borders and laws, the idea of community and solidarity was lost.

has anyone seen the tankies?

smash red fascism 🏴

would much like  to point out that the people publishing these articles are trying to needle millennials into treating gen z with the same disgusting vitriol we were treated with.

don’t buy it.

our younger brothers and sisters might eat a tide pod and get us blamed for it, but we have more in common with them than we ever had with boomers or gen x.

they are terrified of the things we can do together. remember that.

Not to be a sexy beast but lgbt unity also means stopping the ahistorical reframing of the usamerican queer culture as something universal. This means the exaggerated relevance of the terms which can’t be translated or found in other cultures (eg queer) or shaming the use of foreign terms that are slurs in english (eg lesbo). This means treating american history as the default for all, even though events such as Stonewall had no global impact on lgbt rights. These things are part of your local culture and shockingly, not that relevant to many people because being fruity doesn’t make us all american. Uplifting lgbt voices outside of the US is vital to the whole community.

ain't nobody actually giving this person IPA. it's /kæːrijæ/.

you could simply use google translate too https://translate.google.fi/?sl=fi&tl=fi&text=k%C3%A4%C3%A4rij%C3%A4&op=translate

wild that "you can't delete things from the internet; it's there forever" used to be just common wisdom and now we're at risk of losing extensive internet archives and tech companies are starting to wipe out huge swathes of inactive accounts and old data as well as delete and censor things they arbitrarily deem "inappropriate"

25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.

It’s actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred. The picture above, famously referred to as “The Tank Man” was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre. (Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)

So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:

Content Warning for video: blood

“Tell the world…”

I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.

Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)

The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.

After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.

And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.

Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.

I have never seen this video before.

What the fucking hell.

What the hell.

Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and let’s just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.

I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.

The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”

And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.

It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.

To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.

And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.

Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.

And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.

When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.

Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dad’s part. I don’t even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.

I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.

That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.

Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how it’d treat dissent, how it’d treat people who’re used to the idea and practice of freedom.

What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.

The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didn’t use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played — I know every word of China’s national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.

China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly — if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, I’d say this — the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you can’t find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You can’t talk about it in a roundabout away. You can’t change some elements of time/place/person and pretend it’s fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a “discussion”; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.

The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.

The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And there’s nothing more a government like China’s fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils can’t continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, I’m already in violation of its Article 38. It doesn’t matter I’m writing it in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter I’m a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.

Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.

Please help remember 8964 Tiananmen Square Massacre. That summer day, Beijing citizens asked Hong Kongers to please remember this event for them because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford to remember it themselves. Now that Hong Kongers can’t afford to remember it anymore, I’m hoping that everyone who reads this to please remember it, for the students who perished only because they wanted their government to be better, for the Tank Man who, on his way home with his groceries, decided to stand in front of a tank all by himself because it was the right thing to do.

I remember this. Please take a moment to read it.

May their memories be for a blessing, and may they know peace.

I do want to make one point, one thing we do know even though we have no hard proof:

Tank Man is dead. He would have been “interrogated” and shot for this act of defiance.

Never forget what it cost him, to say “this is wrong,” and know that he knew it, and did it anyway.

sry i realize this is an inherently annoying post but g-d i’m so tired of flag discourse because it’s just another aspect of the commercialization of pride and like, everything else in the world

it’s so depressing to see people this obsessed with being marketed to by corporations that they will actively complain if they’re excluded from the creation of ever more hyperdetailed profiles of groups to sell shit to. as far as i’m concerned it’s a good thing that the lesbian flag isn’t on google’s radar or it’d just be another box they’d tick on their orwellian nightmare of an advertisement surveillance network

i understand the underlying frustration, of feeling unheard or erased or invisible, but the solution to that has never been to seek validation from complete community outsiders who absolutely do not have our best interests at heart and instead just wanna exploit us for profit and social capital

also the rainbow flag isn’t the “gay man” flag and has always belonged to all of us so it’s double depressing that people apparently don’t feel any actual connection to it anymore, and i can imagine the way it’s been co-opted by corporations is probably a huge part of that so yknow. let’s not let that snake bite its own tail again

my place of work has been one of the sponsors of my city’s pride parade for years but they still don’t have comprehensive protections in place for LGBT people dealing with homophobic/transphobic workplaces or any sort of process for dealing with transition related changes to ppl’s personal information so like. it literally means nothing that they can paste a bunch of flags on their float. don’t fall for this shit. want better for yourself.

and it’s kind of depressing how people have just left out the original rainbow flag in favour of more “inclusive” flags (the original already included every one of us) that paradoxically are less inclusive in reality.

SO many assumptions buried in this little assertion. "Obvious distinction" Obvious to who? "someone who is able to work and chooses not to" What work? For who? Why? Why are they choosing not to? "a morally bad thing" according to who? why should I care? I thought rejecting bourgeois morals was sort of a 101 deal.

Being able-bodied but refusing to work is morally bad is not something communists should agree with, but I would like to point out that the person who simply obstinately refuses to work for no reason is a figment of capitalist imaginations.

WHY is someone refusing to work? Especially if that work (if we're going to use the word) is accompanied by a lack of alienation and a sense of community, recreation, and hope. They might have a good reason that we can learn something about the project being undertaken from. ("I don't feel like it" is a good reason - it shows the task might not be as necessary as some feel.)

the 238559660th example why leviathan-supersystem and leninists in general are actually cops.

"Asexuality is a sexuality and as a whole is not inherently rooted in mental health problems or hormone problems and thus should not be pathologized."

And

"Some people who use the label asexual are asexual due to trauma, mental health conditions, or medications/hormonal problems and they should always be welcome within the asexual community."

Are two concepts that can and should coexist.

Trans flag + sickle&hammer in bio is such a rabid combination. Not only because of completely irrational denial of the fact that they are advocating for the regime that would have had them killed/institutionalised for "perversion"; but also because 10 times out of 10 they are spreading russian propaganda, thus giving a helping hand to the movement that is actively trying to eradicate people like them today.

And it would have been just a sad but funny example of human idiocy, if they weren't tolerated and listened to as a valid source of information.

It's almost as if trans socialists wanted a symbol that showed how they're both trans and socialist . . .

Jeez, I wonder what symbol has been used for the better part of a century and a half by nearly every major socialist organisation globally to portray socialist ideologies?

Y'all really don't understand that to several million people in more than half a dozen countries where the symbol was held and born it represents a regime that did unspeakable harm. Socialism doesn't need to keep riding the USSRs coatails of blood. Pretending the symbol is somehow disconnected from USSR is disingenuous. Like sometimes symbols become so drenched in harm you have to let them go or be very careful how you use them. The swastika has a long history before the Nazis and is still used today, but you don't just put a swastika in your bio then constantly attack a certain group of people who suffered under that symbol then claim it's just a symbol that doesn't mean Nazis.

When those of us from the places where that symbol meant terror, death and suffering, see that symbol the ideology we envision isn't some detached socialist ideal removed from the reality of USSR.

Or that many of these groups who do use it openly promote and praise the USSR more often than the criticise it. So let's not act like it's a blank slate of "socialism" because it isn't.

Hell, half the shit we have to hear is about runic symbols that apparently mean someone is a Nazi, regardless of how old those symbols are or how varied their use may have been. Because there's something to that and we understand this.

The problem is that you lot have decided that the victims of the USSR, which number in the millions and range in origin and ethnicity, are not ones you will recognize. That they all deserved it somehow or whatever makes it feel ok that they suffered for the great experiment id communism (tm). So you don't see the problem of using a symbol that very much does stand not for the theoretical ideology of socialism but a very specific enactment of the idea, one that was arguably a failure and a nightmare.

It's like the way words become slurs and you don't get to tell the target of those slurs that you are going to keep using the word because you don't find its meaning offensive. It's just you don't think our history and experiences matter enough to actually hear that, don't respect us enough as people to try to understand that yeah, wearing that symbol, for an eastern European, or a Crimean Tatars or a Georgian or a Chechen or a Qazaq, or a Fin may be kind of offensive and weird when coupled with claims about being liberal (not liberal with an L as in "I'm a liberal" but simply as opposed to conservative") or for social justice.

So if any of you actual want to build international solidarity with the left and socialists outside of your bubble, you will need to learn this or just admit you're in it for identity making and cosplay not any actual change action.

Today's tankies are a study in total inability of people who see themselves as champions of the oppressed to extend an ounce of empathy to those with a background different from theirs.

If you want a symbol to signal that you're socialist, use the rose. Or fist and rose. Or bread and roses. Those are all traditional SOCIALIST symbols.

@worstfaithinterpretation can you guess which regime used this symbol:

you could literally say the same thing about swastika. you can’t simply undo the genocides by saying “there was multiple parties in different countries using it”. well guess which one is the most famous? which one colonized various countries some of which are still under russian rule? which one committed literal and cultural genocides that have tens of millions of victims? and then there are people from the americas who give zero shits about victims of imperialism if it’s not done by the US and wave their red fash flag so proudly. here’s your straw man.

STAY SAFE!! [ID: the Gilbert Baker pride flag with the words “Happy pride to all those who are unable to celebrate openly and safely. You are loved and seen!” in all-caps black text over it. /end ID]