Anyone who doesn't make reckless moves that will very likely backfire and hurt us in the near future is a Russian asset!!!
These warmongering clowns really have a humiliation fetish. An actual "asset" would give the money to Ukraine, knowing that it would not only severely damage outside trust in the EU's banking system, but would also allow Russia to sue after the war and demand they be paid back.
49
Evilsandwichman [none/use name] - 1w
would also allow Russia to sue after the war and demand they be paid back
Much like the ICC was punished for attempting to apply international law by putting out a warrant for Netanyahu's arrest, this will be another time international law will be expected to take a backseat.
23
SexUnderSocialism [she/her] - 1w
With how things are going, and the US being openly interested in investing in Russian real estate and other lucrative deals, while showing their contempt for Europe, I would not be shocked if the US ended up backing Russia's demands for reparations after the war, further bleeding the EU dry and putting them in their place.
18
FortifiedAttack [any] - 1w
At this point I really just want the EU to go ahead with it and have it backfire as hard as possible.
Europeans when they realize soldiers cannot just materialize out of money alone
Europeans when they realize they only kicked the can down the road for 2 more years
Europeans when they realize Ukraine is the most corrupt country on Earth and all that money vanished into oblivion
42
LeninWeave [none/use name, any] - 1w
Europeans when they realize soldiers cannot just materialize out of money alone
Pretty sure this is a grift where they use the money to guarantee loans "to Ukraine" that they use to pay themselves for military equipment they get from the US.
25
10TH_OF_SEPTEMBER_CALL [any, any] - 1w
grift
France wanted Ukraine to buy weapons made in Europe. Finland, among others, argued that Zelenskyy should be free to procure whatever kit he needed from wherever he could find it.
2
Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name] - 1w
Europeans when they realize soldiers cannot just materialize out of money alone
That's why conscription is being reintroduced. If you can't motivate people to fight for national capital and its protectors' interest, you must use the threat of violence.
19
jack [he/him, comrade/them] - 1w
Traditionally a very politically stabilizing move, conscription during an economic downturn
10
Nasalstrip [he/him] - 1w
(This is a genuine question, I know about Ukraine and Russia fighting right now but not much else, especially about Ukraine) what makes Ukraine the most corrupt country?
7
Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name] - 1w
What caused it to be corrupt was capitalist restoration empowering an emerging bourgeoisie. As far as how it's corruption was measured, that was probably some western ngo nonsense originally intended to distract from something shameful happening in western Europe, so who knows.
20
xiaohongshu [none/use name] - 1w
Ukraine is just Russia without Putin. Seriously, if Yeltsin had picked a different successor, chances are we’re going to see an even worse version of Ukraine in today’s Russia.
My friend’s dad lived in Moscow during the dissolution of the USSR as an Algerian exchange student, and he said Moscow was an incredibly wild place at the time. There were neo-Nazis everywhere that literally murdered people on the metro and in other public spaces. There were no rule of law, and criminal gangs and violent crimes were everywhere.
Moscow turned from the beacon of socialism into one of the most dangerous cities over a short span of time. You can imagine what the rest of Russia looked like.
Putin came in and cleaned up the neo-Nazis and cracked down on violent crimes. People often joke about how business people are randomly murdered in Russia, but rest assured the public safety was dozens times worse back then, and today Moscow is one of the safest cities in the world, and definitely safer than any large American cities.
We all dunk on Putin for being a lib, for having a corrupt oligarchy under his regime, but somehow he managed to form an uneasy truce with the oligarchs (and even the Chechens, who were launching terror attacks across Russia at the time). Yes, the oligarchs continued to accumulate their wealth through corruption, but at least the outflow of capital was mitigated to a large extent, and public safety and stability were restored. Russia was one of the fastest growing economy (GDP increased by 10-fold in a decade since 2000) until the 2008 global financial crisis, then later the sanctions during the Ukrainian civil war in 2014).
Put another way, Putin somehow managed to stitch together the disemboweled body of Russia after Gorbachev-Yeltsin and had it limping along towards the finish line. Not great, but at least it isn’t dead yet.
Ukraine doesn’t have that historical development. If anything, this is proof that the socialist institutions of the USSR can only curb the reactionary elements for so long, but could not eradicate them. Putin’s governance, which is far from socialism, may keep the stability for now, but in the hands of another leadership, things could go way worse after he’s gone.
Russia is an old civilization and like many European countries, corruption is deeply entrenched. In fact, in China we have an even worse corruption problem, as a 2,200-year old unified civilization.
One of the best things Xi has done was to massively crack down on corruption, but have you ever wondered why after 10 years of intense crackdown, corruption is still everywhere in China? Just a few months ago, we get heads of national banks getting caught laundering money, and it is not uncommon to see all kinds of party officials and bureaucrats doing that. The more crackdowns there are, the more corruption thrived. Why?
My take is that when you are an old civilization, you inherit all the goods and the bads with it. They are deeply etched into the DNA of the Chinese civilization. You don’t get to choose. Socialist institutions can only curb such excesses for so much, but they can never eradicate it.
Why do you think Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution?
This was because he had realized that in order to weed out the reactionary elements (where multiple iterations of feudal oligarchy had risen and fallen over the dynasties, where corruption in the bureaucracy was an essential component of the system) so entrenched in the Chinese society, one must make a complete and decisive break with its 2,000-year old past.
Mao’s solution was radical, and the Cultural Revolution failed with disastrous consequences. Today, the feudal landlords (which were purged in the 1950s) have made a comeback and fused with the local governments of the CPC after the reform and opening up era, and continue to cause a lot of trouble for the economy today.
But my point is that Mao wasn’t some madman who wanted to cause chaos and destruction with a Cultural Revolution, as popular narrative would tell you. It was a genuine problem inheriting a civilization with thousands of years of sociocultural norms and practices that have pervaded every aspect of the society - the question is, how are you going to root out the reactionary elements in a socialist society?
So far, nobody has managed that, and nobody seems to have a solution that worked.
16
0__0 [he/him] - 1w
There is absolutely nothing inherently corrupt about Chinese or Russian civilization, only the material conditions that make them up. These of course include various folklore myths and fantasies that have no connection with the real world, which should be taken care of. As much as society acts upon us, we can also act upon it, so change is most certainly possible. In fact it's inevitable, from the standpoint of our ideology.
I would argue the best way is to simply use dialectical materialism. For example, how would you eradicate religion in a future communist society? I'd start by investing into propaganda against the church. I'm sure there's a lot of corrupt priests, pedophiles and so on, so you should use all these public scandals and make them as publicized as possible. Have culture and art that generally align against the existence of god. At the end, I'm sure the church as an institution is knee-deep in corruption, so after all that it wouldn't be hard to convince the public to be passive while all their assets are seized.
But you cannot simply discredit your opponent, you also have to present your own case as to why your philosophy is the superior one, so reform the education system and start teaching children this stuff from day 1, whilst they're still a tabula rasa. Develop a coherent, materialist framework where they can simply do the work themselves and come to a logical conclusion around the foundations of religious belief. Make them realize that the materialist reality of our world is the only thing that is actually tangible and what they should obviously focus their attention on, instead of some imaginary man in the sky who as some incredible spirit pulled matter out of his ass.
At the end of the day you probably know much more about the Cultural revolution that I do, but as far as I understand Mao and the revolutionaries were pretty idealistic, to the point of being pretty ultraleftist in some beliefs. But this is not uncommon, aside from the revolutionary republican movements in Europe even before socialism, the Bolsheviks were pretty idealistic as well. Proclaiming that the foreign ministry would soon becomes superflous and that it would soon be dissolved because of an international revolution, making soldiers elect their officers and so on. Nothing can be done overnight, and radical change must not only have a concrete strategy, but must inevitably be based in the material conditions of the times.
15
xiaohongshu [none/use name] - 1w
You are correct in that we are also changing society, but how are you going to weed out 2,000 years of deeply entrenched sociocultural norms? Is it going to take another thousand years? This was a problem that Mao had to face when taking the country to a completely new direction.
Chinese practices are very ancient, so ancient that Mao could not see any other way but through a Cultural Revolution.
I’ll just give you an example: the Imperial Court Examination began to emerge during the Northern Wei Dynasty and became a fully matured institution by the Tang Dynasty (5th to 8th century AD). It was an important institution that allowed the Emperor to form his own cliques and power base against the feudal aristocratic class that controlled much of the imperial court at the time, shifting the balance of power towards the monarchy.
The Imperial Court Examination allowed people from the lower classes to gain social mobility and ascend to the higher class, and back in the days (as well as today’s), a young man from a poor family who passed the examination and became a local official would allow his entire family and those related to him to leap to a different social class. 一人得道，鸡犬升天: “one person gets promoted, even his chickens and dogs get to ascend to the heaven.”
His examiner (the person who decided to promote him) and his teacher would become his second fathers. His entire life would now be indebted to the examiner and the teacher. At the court, you are expected to be the “attack dog” of your examiner’s political stance, to help attack his opponents int he court, defend him at any cost, and in some cases, even with your life. This is because he was the one who made you who you are today, who chose to promote you and not anyone else. You will be his “boy” for the rest of your career. Can you see how corruption can so easily emerge in such an institution?
This was a very important cultural element in the Chinese society - the so-called filial piety - where betraying the will of one’s father(s) would cause one to be ostracized by society and become an outcast. Of course, exceptions exist but they became very controversial.
One thousand and five hundred years later, literally the same cultural practices still exist in Chinese academia, and occurs at the highest and most prestigious level. Your “lineage” is very important in Chinese academia today, far more important than Western academic institutions. You are very much indebted to the person who “gifted” you your prestigious career.
Again, once you understand this, you can see why corruption is almost impossible to weed out even under the present socialist system.
This is just one of thousands of “hidden” rules that everyone expects to accept. It is deeply entrenched into the societal norms. You are not expected to break the rules imposed upon by the society. The institutions may have changed to a more modern one, heck, we have a socialist system, but these essence of these practices remain. We’re not going to see radical changes any time soon.
At the end of the day you probably know much more about the Cultural revolution that I do, but as far as I understand Mao and the revolutionaries were pretty idealistic, to the point of being pretty ultraleftist in some beliefs.
Idealistic, to a degree, yes, but Mao was also extremely pragmatic (Chen Duxiu’s faction, the Trotskyists, were the idealist ones). Mao took land reform seriously and worked on that for years, and the end result was that he could unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses even when completely outnumbered and outgunned by the KMT. In fact, there were mass defections among the KMT’s own ranks. This shows you how Mao was able to identify the fundamental contradictions of the Chinese society, and used that knowledge to plan and devise a successful strategy that would take years to materialize.
The problem with the Cultural Revolution was that Mao tried to fight a 2,000-year old institution. The ancient institution fought back and won. The landlord class that were purged in the 1950s have now fully integrated into the governmental ranks.
3
jack [he/him, comrade/them] - 1w
Q: "what's wrong with ukraine?"
A: "mao launched the cultural revolution because china is an ancient civilization"
the question is, how are you going to root out the reactionary elements in a socialist society?
So far, nobody has managed that, and nobody seems to have a solution that worked.
You can't do it until you progress to a further stage of socialism where you begin to abolish wage labor and commodity production. The closest figuring out how so far is the communal movement in Venezuela. See "Commune or Nothing" by Chris Gilbert.
8
LeninWeave [none/use name, any] - 1w
lmao I love the grind you're on with Venezula-posting. Very informative, very cool.
5
jack [he/him, comrade/them] - 1w
It has never been more important to understand and defend the Bolivarian Revolution than right now
3
xiaohongshu [none/use name] - 1w
I mean in practice, in an entire state with real people. Nobody has been able to do that over the 100 years of AES history. We have enough historical evidence for this.
70 years of socialist institutions under the USSR did not make the Russians and the Ukrainians and the likes more progressive. The moment the USSR was gone, material conditions took over and all forms of reactionary fascist elements came back in seconds. Heck, even the late stage USSR was already corrupt as fuck, let’s not pretend as though it was all Gorbachev’s fault.
China also faced the same problem. After the landlords were purged, Mao noticed that it’s not the people he had to purge, but an entire deeply entrenched sociocultural norms evolved over thousands of years. Mao’s mistake was to fight a 2000-year old institution. The ancient institution fought back and won. The landlords class that he purged in the 1950s was already back the moment the liberal reforms took place. Today, it is deeply integrated into the governmental ranks. The local governments have become the new landlords, with the same excesses as the feudal landlords once did. Once you understand this, the property crisis in China today - a socialist country, I remind you - isn’t so hard to grasp at all.
Yes, one could imagine we can slowly weed that out over the next 1000 years, but anyone who understands Chinese history knows that even the current CPC reign is merely a blip through its entire history. The Chinese civilization will still be here centuries after the CPC is gone. It’s a cyclical pattern of dynastic changes that is a fundamental characteristic of the Chinese civilization unless there is a decisive, radical change that breaks the cycle. Hence, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which failed and we go in circles here.
1
OnlyTrueLiberal [he/him, comrade/them] - 1w
socialist institutions of the USSR can only curb the reactionary elements for so long, but could not eradicate them
Those reactionaries largely fled to west beyond the reach of soviet institutions and returned with western backing after the fall of the USSR. But yes USSR can be blamed for this because one very big mistake: stopping at berlin.
5
xiaohongshu [none/use name] - 1w
And what made these people so susceptible to foreign meddling the moment the state collapses?
70 years of socialist institutions under the USSR went down the drain and material conditions immediately took over. Socialist fraternity was immediately forgotten and people turned on each other while struggling to survive.
GDR (East Germany) turned from an LGBT progressive haven to a land full of reactionary fascists and AfD breeding ground as the economy degraded after the reunification.
Mao was right in that you cannot purge the reactionary base elements out without a true break from one’s cultural past, which has been shaped by thousands of years of traditions (and hundreds of years for some other countries) and has become deeply etched into one’s sociocultural behavior, whether you are consciously aware of it or not. His method, on the other hand, was far too radical and it ended with disastrous consequences.
1
demerit @lemmygrad.ml - 1w
Under Khrushchev, revisionist elements became mainstream, success became no longer an internal characteristic but one entirely dependent on the west, the west was the definition of "success" and if "couldn't compete" with the west, then it was a failure, western culture became hegemonic over soviet one - the system rotted from the top down. And the soviet union tried to spread this view into the rest of the Warsaw Pact states.
East Germany had it worst because it was economically isolated (basically non-recognised by most states, which the soviet union never really pushed for) but not culturally, one could argue that the east german leadership survivors of the camps and purged by the nazis never really trusted most of its own populace and hoped to "wait them out" and hope for the next generation to be "better", ironically it was the boomers & older gen x who brought down the GDR, not those who had lived under nazi rule and had various degrees of complicity. So it wasn't 70 years of socialist institutions breaking down suddenly, but socialist institutions serving decades and decades of rot, until not even the proletarians believed socialism was going to work.
4
TreadOnMe [none/use name] - 1w
This is good shit XHS. I have been thinking about the same thing when it comes to contemporary American politics and what theoretically comes after. Being a really young but incredibly pervasive institution, I do often wonder how a radical reform process would even go in as reaction-as-default-fo-culture country as the U.S.
4
xiaohongshu [none/use name] - 1w
It should not surprise you to see that progressive stances like LGBT acceptance also occurred the fastest in a country like the US, but at the same time it is also tenuous, and it can easily go the other way just as fast. The civilizational DNA, as we can call it, is still young and malleable.
It is true that the US is founded on white supremacy and colonialism but if you compare it to the lengthy history of an ancient civilization like China, there are still plenty of opportunities for change before the culture becomes entrenched, at which point it becomes an uphill battle. I feel like it’s actually harder for European culture to change for this reason.
1
oscardejarjayes [comrade/them] - 1w
As an example, the initial Witkoff peace plan included a requirement for an audit, and that point, above even territorial concessions, is what the Ukrainian government most protested. I'm pretty sure they were successful in getting it removed from the current plans.
europeans dont want any of this, its all because of a bunch of german ghoul in brussel and their canonsalesmen lobbyists buddies
5
PKMKII [none/use name] - 1w
Frozen assets are leverage because you can hold the possibility of getting the assets back if they come to a peace agreement. Raid them, and that leverage goes away.
35
10TH_OF_SEPTEMBER_CALL [any, any] - 1w
they dont give a shit, all they want is to give more money to their bombsalesmen friends
15
jackmaoist [none/use name] - 1w
More like literally everyone else pulls their assets out if you try to pull shit like that.
Kopfrkingl in slop
Belgium to adopt Russian as its official language
Anyone who doesn't make reckless moves that will very likely backfire and hurt us in the near future is a Russian asset!!!
These warmongering clowns really have a humiliation fetish. An actual "asset" would give the money to Ukraine, knowing that it would not only severely damage outside trust in the EU's banking system, but would also allow Russia to sue after the war and demand they be paid back.
Much like the ICC was punished for attempting to apply international law by putting out a warrant for Netanyahu's arrest, this will be another time international law will be expected to take a backseat.
With how things are going, and the US being openly interested in investing in Russian real estate and other lucrative deals, while showing their contempt for Europe, I would not be shocked if the US ended up backing Russia's demands for reparations after the war, further bleeding the EU dry and putting them in their place.
At this point I really just want the EU to go ahead with it and have it backfire as hard as possible.
Europeans when they realize soldiers cannot just materialize out of money alone
Europeans when they realize they only kicked the can down the road for 2 more years
Europeans when they realize Ukraine is the most corrupt country on Earth and all that money vanished into oblivion
Pretty sure this is a grift where they use the money to guarantee loans "to Ukraine" that they use to pay themselves for military equipment they get from the US.
France wanted Ukraine to buy weapons made in Europe. Finland, among others, argued that Zelenskyy should be free to procure whatever kit he needed from wherever he could find it.
That's why conscription is being reintroduced. If you can't motivate people to fight for national capital and its protectors' interest, you must use the threat of violence.
Traditionally a very politically stabilizing move, conscription during an economic downturn
(This is a genuine question, I know about Ukraine and Russia fighting right now but not much else, especially about Ukraine) what makes Ukraine the most corrupt country?
What caused it to be corrupt was capitalist restoration empowering an emerging bourgeoisie. As far as how it's corruption was measured, that was probably some western ngo nonsense originally intended to distract from something shameful happening in western Europe, so who knows.
Ukraine is just Russia without Putin. Seriously, if Yeltsin had picked a different successor, chances are we’re going to see an even worse version of Ukraine in today’s Russia.
My friend’s dad lived in Moscow during the dissolution of the USSR as an Algerian exchange student, and he said Moscow was an incredibly wild place at the time. There were neo-Nazis everywhere that literally murdered people on the metro and in other public spaces. There were no rule of law, and criminal gangs and violent crimes were everywhere.
Moscow turned from the beacon of socialism into one of the most dangerous cities over a short span of time. You can imagine what the rest of Russia looked like.
Putin came in and cleaned up the neo-Nazis and cracked down on violent crimes. People often joke about how business people are randomly murdered in Russia, but rest assured the public safety was dozens times worse back then, and today Moscow is one of the safest cities in the world, and definitely safer than any large American cities.
We all dunk on Putin for being a lib, for having a corrupt oligarchy under his regime, but somehow he managed to form an uneasy truce with the oligarchs (and even the Chechens, who were launching terror attacks across Russia at the time). Yes, the oligarchs continued to accumulate their wealth through corruption, but at least the outflow of capital was mitigated to a large extent, and public safety and stability were restored. Russia was one of the fastest growing economy (GDP increased by 10-fold in a decade since 2000) until the 2008 global financial crisis, then later the sanctions during the Ukrainian civil war in 2014).
Put another way, Putin somehow managed to stitch together the disemboweled body of Russia after Gorbachev-Yeltsin and had it limping along towards the finish line. Not great, but at least it isn’t dead yet.
Ukraine doesn’t have that historical development. If anything, this is proof that the socialist institutions of the USSR can only curb the reactionary elements for so long, but could not eradicate them. Putin’s governance, which is far from socialism, may keep the stability for now, but in the hands of another leadership, things could go way worse after he’s gone.
Russia is an old civilization and like many European countries, corruption is deeply entrenched. In fact, in China we have an even worse corruption problem, as a 2,200-year old unified civilization.
One of the best things Xi has done was to massively crack down on corruption, but have you ever wondered why after 10 years of intense crackdown, corruption is still everywhere in China? Just a few months ago, we get heads of national banks getting caught laundering money, and it is not uncommon to see all kinds of party officials and bureaucrats doing that. The more crackdowns there are, the more corruption thrived. Why?
My take is that when you are an old civilization, you inherit all the goods and the bads with it. They are deeply etched into the DNA of the Chinese civilization. You don’t get to choose. Socialist institutions can only curb such excesses for so much, but they can never eradicate it.
Why do you think Mao felt the need for a Cultural Revolution?
This was because he had realized that in order to weed out the reactionary elements (where multiple iterations of feudal oligarchy had risen and fallen over the dynasties, where corruption in the bureaucracy was an essential component of the system) so entrenched in the Chinese society, one must make a complete and decisive break with its 2,000-year old past.
Mao’s solution was radical, and the Cultural Revolution failed with disastrous consequences. Today, the feudal landlords (which were purged in the 1950s) have made a comeback and fused with the local governments of the CPC after the reform and opening up era, and continue to cause a lot of trouble for the economy today.
But my point is that Mao wasn’t some madman who wanted to cause chaos and destruction with a Cultural Revolution, as popular narrative would tell you. It was a genuine problem inheriting a civilization with thousands of years of sociocultural norms and practices that have pervaded every aspect of the society - the question is, how are you going to root out the reactionary elements in a socialist society?
So far, nobody has managed that, and nobody seems to have a solution that worked.
There is absolutely nothing inherently corrupt about Chinese or Russian civilization, only the material conditions that make them up. These of course include various folklore myths and fantasies that have no connection with the real world, which should be taken care of. As much as society acts upon us, we can also act upon it, so change is most certainly possible. In fact it's inevitable, from the standpoint of our ideology.
I would argue the best way is to simply use dialectical materialism. For example, how would you eradicate religion in a future communist society? I'd start by investing into propaganda against the church. I'm sure there's a lot of corrupt priests, pedophiles and so on, so you should use all these public scandals and make them as publicized as possible. Have culture and art that generally align against the existence of god. At the end, I'm sure the church as an institution is knee-deep in corruption, so after all that it wouldn't be hard to convince the public to be passive while all their assets are seized.
But you cannot simply discredit your opponent, you also have to present your own case as to why your philosophy is the superior one, so reform the education system and start teaching children this stuff from day 1, whilst they're still a tabula rasa. Develop a coherent, materialist framework where they can simply do the work themselves and come to a logical conclusion around the foundations of religious belief. Make them realize that the materialist reality of our world is the only thing that is actually tangible and what they should obviously focus their attention on, instead of some imaginary man in the sky who as some incredible spirit pulled matter out of his ass.
At the end of the day you probably know much more about the Cultural revolution that I do, but as far as I understand Mao and the revolutionaries were pretty idealistic, to the point of being pretty ultraleftist in some beliefs. But this is not uncommon, aside from the revolutionary republican movements in Europe even before socialism, the Bolsheviks were pretty idealistic as well. Proclaiming that the foreign ministry would soon becomes superflous and that it would soon be dissolved because of an international revolution, making soldiers elect their officers and so on. Nothing can be done overnight, and radical change must not only have a concrete strategy, but must inevitably be based in the material conditions of the times.
You are correct in that we are also changing society, but how are you going to weed out 2,000 years of deeply entrenched sociocultural norms? Is it going to take another thousand years? This was a problem that Mao had to face when taking the country to a completely new direction.
Chinese practices are very ancient, so ancient that Mao could not see any other way but through a Cultural Revolution.
I’ll just give you an example: the Imperial Court Examination began to emerge during the Northern Wei Dynasty and became a fully matured institution by the Tang Dynasty (5th to 8th century AD). It was an important institution that allowed the Emperor to form his own cliques and power base against the feudal aristocratic class that controlled much of the imperial court at the time, shifting the balance of power towards the monarchy.
The Imperial Court Examination allowed people from the lower classes to gain social mobility and ascend to the higher class, and back in the days (as well as today’s), a young man from a poor family who passed the examination and became a local official would allow his entire family and those related to him to leap to a different social class. 一人得道，鸡犬升天: “one person gets promoted, even his chickens and dogs get to ascend to the heaven.”
His examiner (the person who decided to promote him) and his teacher would become his second fathers. His entire life would now be indebted to the examiner and the teacher. At the court, you are expected to be the “attack dog” of your examiner’s political stance, to help attack his opponents int he court, defend him at any cost, and in some cases, even with your life. This is because he was the one who made you who you are today, who chose to promote you and not anyone else. You will be his “boy” for the rest of your career. Can you see how corruption can so easily emerge in such an institution?
This was a very important cultural element in the Chinese society - the so-called filial piety - where betraying the will of one’s father(s) would cause one to be ostracized by society and become an outcast. Of course, exceptions exist but they became very controversial.
One thousand and five hundred years later, literally the same cultural practices still exist in Chinese academia, and occurs at the highest and most prestigious level. Your “lineage” is very important in Chinese academia today, far more important than Western academic institutions. You are very much indebted to the person who “gifted” you your prestigious career.
Again, once you understand this, you can see why corruption is almost impossible to weed out even under the present socialist system.
This is just one of thousands of “hidden” rules that everyone expects to accept. It is deeply entrenched into the societal norms. You are not expected to break the rules imposed upon by the society. The institutions may have changed to a more modern one, heck, we have a socialist system, but these essence of these practices remain. We’re not going to see radical changes any time soon.
Idealistic, to a degree, yes, but Mao was also extremely pragmatic (Chen Duxiu’s faction, the Trotskyists, were the idealist ones). Mao took land reform seriously and worked on that for years, and the end result was that he could unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses even when completely outnumbered and outgunned by the KMT. In fact, there were mass defections among the KMT’s own ranks. This shows you how Mao was able to identify the fundamental contradictions of the Chinese society, and used that knowledge to plan and devise a successful strategy that would take years to materialize.
The problem with the Cultural Revolution was that Mao tried to fight a 2,000-year old institution. The ancient institution fought back and won. The landlord class that were purged in the 1950s have now fully integrated into the governmental ranks.
Q: "what's wrong with ukraine?"
A: "mao launched the cultural revolution because china is an ancient civilization"
You can't do it until you progress to a further stage of socialism where you begin to abolish wage labor and commodity production. The closest figuring out how so far is the communal movement in Venezuela. See "Commune or Nothing" by Chris Gilbert.
lmao I love the grind you're on with Venezula-posting. Very informative, very cool.
It has never been more important to understand and defend the Bolivarian Revolution than right now
I mean in practice, in an entire state with real people. Nobody has been able to do that over the 100 years of AES history. We have enough historical evidence for this.
70 years of socialist institutions under the USSR did not make the Russians and the Ukrainians and the likes more progressive. The moment the USSR was gone, material conditions took over and all forms of reactionary fascist elements came back in seconds. Heck, even the late stage USSR was already corrupt as fuck, let’s not pretend as though it was all Gorbachev’s fault.
China also faced the same problem. After the landlords were purged, Mao noticed that it’s not the people he had to purge, but an entire deeply entrenched sociocultural norms evolved over thousands of years. Mao’s mistake was to fight a 2000-year old institution. The ancient institution fought back and won. The landlords class that he purged in the 1950s was already back the moment the liberal reforms took place. Today, it is deeply integrated into the governmental ranks. The local governments have become the new landlords, with the same excesses as the feudal landlords once did. Once you understand this, the property crisis in China today - a socialist country, I remind you - isn’t so hard to grasp at all.
Yes, one could imagine we can slowly weed that out over the next 1000 years, but anyone who understands Chinese history knows that even the current CPC reign is merely a blip through its entire history. The Chinese civilization will still be here centuries after the CPC is gone. It’s a cyclical pattern of dynastic changes that is a fundamental characteristic of the Chinese civilization unless there is a decisive, radical change that breaks the cycle. Hence, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which failed and we go in circles here.
Those reactionaries largely fled to west beyond the reach of soviet institutions and returned with western backing after the fall of the USSR. But yes USSR can be blamed for this because one very big mistake: stopping at berlin.
And what made these people so susceptible to foreign meddling the moment the state collapses?
70 years of socialist institutions under the USSR went down the drain and material conditions immediately took over. Socialist fraternity was immediately forgotten and people turned on each other while struggling to survive.
GDR (East Germany) turned from an LGBT progressive haven to a land full of reactionary fascists and AfD breeding ground as the economy degraded after the reunification.
Mao was right in that you cannot purge the reactionary base elements out without a true break from one’s cultural past, which has been shaped by thousands of years of traditions (and hundreds of years for some other countries) and has become deeply etched into one’s sociocultural behavior, whether you are consciously aware of it or not. His method, on the other hand, was far too radical and it ended with disastrous consequences.
Under Khrushchev, revisionist elements became mainstream, success became no longer an internal characteristic but one entirely dependent on the west, the west was the definition of "success" and if "couldn't compete" with the west, then it was a failure, western culture became hegemonic over soviet one - the system rotted from the top down. And the soviet union tried to spread this view into the rest of the Warsaw Pact states.
East Germany had it worst because it was economically isolated (basically non-recognised by most states, which the soviet union never really pushed for) but not culturally, one could argue that the east german leadership survivors of the camps and purged by the nazis never really trusted most of its own populace and hoped to "wait them out" and hope for the next generation to be "better", ironically it was the boomers & older gen x who brought down the GDR, not those who had lived under nazi rule and had various degrees of complicity. So it wasn't 70 years of socialist institutions breaking down suddenly, but socialist institutions serving decades and decades of rot, until not even the proletarians believed socialism was going to work.
This is good shit XHS. I have been thinking about the same thing when it comes to contemporary American politics and what theoretically comes after. Being a really young but incredibly pervasive institution, I do often wonder how a radical reform process would even go in as reaction-as-default-fo-culture country as the U.S.
It should not surprise you to see that progressive stances like LGBT acceptance also occurred the fastest in a country like the US, but at the same time it is also tenuous, and it can easily go the other way just as fast. The civilizational DNA, as we can call it, is still young and malleable.
It is true that the US is founded on white supremacy and colonialism but if you compare it to the lengthy history of an ancient civilization like China, there are still plenty of opportunities for change before the culture becomes entrenched, at which point it becomes an uphill battle. I feel like it’s actually harder for European culture to change for this reason.
As an example, the initial Witkoff peace plan included a requirement for an audit, and that point, above even territorial concessions, is what the Ukrainian government most protested. I'm pretty sure they were successful in getting it removed from the current plans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/world/europe/ukraine-corruption-zelensky.html
Even the New York Times is putting out articles about how brutally corrupt Ukraine is
Omfg why does everything need an account just let me read the damn article😭
https://archive.ph/YrQai
europeans dont want any of this, its all because of a bunch of german ghoul in brussel and their canonsalesmen lobbyists buddies
Frozen assets are leverage because you can hold the possibility of getting the assets back if they come to a peace agreement. Raid them, and that leverage goes away.
they dont give a shit, all they want is to give more money to their bombsalesmen friends
More like literally everyone else pulls their assets out if you try to pull shit like that.
Bart DeWever is a litteral nazi whose party comes straight from the flemmenpolitiek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamenpolitik).
And yet even them see the problem in making belgium seize russian money
The old "You're either with us or against us" routine; classic
also I wish. Russian > dutch
There are only two things I hate in this world and that is people who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.
worse, the vlaams
They're the reason ww2 happened.
Da, da, tovarishi
Да, ха ха ха, да!
nobody stopping politico (owned by nazi-founded org) from executing raid on a treasury to finance their favorite nazis.