No worries, his other videos are fairly good and if you have free time then I’d recommend giving a few of their videos a spin, I just think this one sucks. It starts strong but then fails to create a big hammer-blow critique of liberalism and how it’s been an ideology for justifying slavery and imperialism and genocide around the world to this day and we must break free of the two-party system, and instead he heads into philosophical ennui

I totally agree with you; I watched this yesterday just after it released because I tend to enjoy Alexander’s videos though I have issues with most of them, and I came away from this very unhappy and have since unsubbed and made the algorithm stop recommending their stuff. Like, I don’t wanna be the guy to be like “Oh, you forgot to discuss X!” when X is only tangentially related and the post/video is already hours long, but holy fucking shit, there is almost zero discussion of anything outside of America in this video, which is a massively critical aspect of how liberalism and capitalism functions (i.e. imperialism). I’m not sure how you could talk about Alexander Hamilton without discussing his contribution to the creation of financial institutions which are now oppressing billions and destroying the planet. Nothing at all about the contradiction between Hamilton’s protectionism and the propaganda that America has been a champion of free markets for its entire existence?

This is the most well-articulated video exploring the “Western leftist” position I’ve ever seen, and it’s very ugly because of that. Marx isn’t dismissed per se, but he does the whole “Marx didn’t consider X” by stating that class conflict isn’t the only conflict in world history - which Marxist feminists and many others have already explored in great depth! It reads like he received this viewpoint from a Marx-sympathetic university course that nonetheless could not fully endorse Marxism for fear of people complaining that they’re turning people into commies; countervailing and ultimately useless ideological frameworks are therefore forced in to provide “balance”, like teaching that antibiotics and magical crystals could help treat the sick, and we have to keep an open mind! The tacit assumption is that Marxism is a dead-end ideology with many good ideas, instead of like, the guiding ideological framework of many if not most communist parties and communist states around the world (and most particularly the non-white world!) The unironic acceptance (though not endorsement) that liberalism stood victorious over the “totalitarian” ideologies of fascism and communism is incoherent in the current environment where a communist China is ascending past the United States. If he made this video in 2010, I’d understand; but this laziness no longer slides in 2024. Despite - and maybe even because of - the milquetoast calls to action and logging off that he does at the end, it leaves the viewer more muddled and confused than when they began. This isn’t always a bad thing, so long as it is part of a grander project to then elucidate the way forward after having dismantled previous conceptions of where society should be headed. This is not that. This is somebody upset at liberalism but so drenched in capitalist realism that they are unable to shift away from it to genuinely revolutionary internationalist thinking, and so they end up doing liberalism again but from a different perspective.

The end of the video is where I was forced to give up on him as a video essayist. I’m not sure if it’s the massive success of his youtube channel making him no longer connect as much with those in poverty (both inside and outside America); his university education in sociology (I think?) turning him into a PMC, or perhaps his background in some way. But saying that half the people telling you not to vote for Kamala are Russian bots is just peak radlib Tumblr/Reddit, and is disconnected from reality. The deaths of hundreds of thousands/millions of Palestinians, Yemenis, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Vietnamese, Koreans, Cambodians, Filipinos, and many others is insufficient to move even the most “radical” of western leftists into working towards the dissolution of American fascist empire. They are the Nazi Germans who refused to fight against Hitler. They are hiding behind their media and will blame it, Nuremburg-style, when the forces of reaction are defeated and anti-imperialism triumphs. Their children and grandchildren will suffer under their weight of their parents and grandparent’s unwillingness to fight the status quo, questioning why they voted for a genocidal empress instead of working to dismantle the death machine. This video convinced me - they are not brainwashed, they know full-well what they are doing, and I can only hope that the oppressed peoples of the world grant them more forgiveness than they deserve.

From Gramsci:

source

To the point that there is a lot of footage of the people of Iran cheering in the streets.

we’re really doing this propaganda again? can we please get more interesting stuff than the “my people yearn for freedom from this tyrant”?

in totalitarian communist North Korea, the regime disseminates propaganda assuring their brainwashed citizens that being hungry is actually beneficial due to their failed communist agrarian policies

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

It does honestly feel like people - on both sides of the war, I will freely admit - put way too much focus on individual events and are unable to see the bigger picture of logistics and equipment produced and so on.

So you end up with, just as a recent example, the Ukrainians going on and on about that Bradley vs tank incident and how “owned” Russia was or whatever (that is managed to keep going for like 5 minutes in constant Bradley fire? sounds like a pretty awesome example of how great Russian tanks are tbh), or that Russian plane full of Ukrainian POWs being shot down by a Patriot, or now this boat being sunk. But none of this actually matters. What’s really going on here is that the pro-Ukraine crowd is seeing these events and drawing absolutely massive conclusions from it. “Aha, see, we can now destroy all Russian tanks with just our infantry carriers! Aha, see, we can now shoot down every Russian plane with our air defense! Aha, see, we can now sink every boat in the Russian fleet!” Russia has thousands of tanks, its planes are routinely not shot down by Ukrainian air defense because of how depleted it is and the Russian countermeasures (flying low, etc), and honestly, sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet would be an L but it would be very far from war-ending, given that Ukraine has no navy for it to fight anyway and Russia obviously has inland missile launchers. But the pro-Russian side like Rybar tends to take these narratives and feels the need to address them because they’re just as caught up in these narratives as everybody else, when they could just ignore them and watch as they’re forgotten in a week.

Wars are determined by systemic issues and, most importantly, the capacity for the warring nations to overcome those issues. Neither side is permanently locked into its state of affairs (in most cases; e.g. WW2 Germany had problems the whole war with getting enough fuel due to simple geography). Not being able to see how a military could make up for its deficiencies is what lead to the Kharkov surprise for the pro-Russian side who didn’t understand that Russia went into the war with too few troops to man parts of the front and that Ukraine had been creating brigades in the rear while their frontline army was getting mauled over the spring and summer, and then the surprise of the failure of the counteroffensive for Ukraine, who didn’t understand that Russia had found a way to counter the Ukrainian offensive strategy and thought that the same trick was guaranteed to work twice.

In short, if you’re going to make an assumption that a military is unable to counter a new problem, you need a LOT of evidence for it - not just vibes about how you think the conflict is going to go. Never assume that a military is stagnant unless you have extremely good reasons to believe so. I personally don’t believe that the Ukrainian military is stagnant and totally doomed and they can still probably keep defending for at least the better part of a year and finding new strategies to counter Russia, but the ongoing lack of Western military reindustrialization is my ‘extremely good reason’ to believe that Ukraine will be unable to win unless there is a very sudden change in the economic strategy of the West away from neoliberalism and just-in-time manufacturing.

It’s the classic argument path:

Liberals: “I hate [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] for [usually somewhat justifiable reason in a vacuum]!”

Communists: “Okay, sure, but [Western government/country/corporation/person/etc] does that same thing but much, much worse! Why aren’t you talking about them?”

Liberals: “Oh, I hate it when they do that too! We’re just talking about this particular [foreign government/country/corporation/person/etc] right now! Why are you deflecting? Are you trying to defend them? Whataboutism!”

Communists: go to their profile; literally no evidence that they have ever complained about a single Western entity in their lifetime, and may even have expressed support for Western entities that do even worse things

Even the “left-wing” of the 2016-2020 period was literally just “Hmm, what if we combined both capitalism and socialism in a big pot to get the best of both!” It was that level of just having absolutely no fucking clue about anything in politics, political theory, economics, etc, you just wanted free healthcare and reasonable rent/housing prices.

It must be very strange having a reasonably large section of Lemmy (by posting power if nothing else) that explicitly rejects the entire capitalist neoliberal paradigm and way of thinking which is the only thing that they’ve been exposed to in their entire lives, aside from the spooky bedtime stories that the government has told them about the USSR or China hiding in their closet, ready to pounce out and eat them. If you’re exposed to an entirely different system of thinking and are unable to even really comprehend it because you refuse to read, then what else are you meant to do other than accusing them of trolling, or of simply being Evil People?

The best you can do is use the talismans that the government and media have bestowed upon you, the good old “But human nature…” charm, the “Works on paper, doesn’t in practice” amulet, and the “100 trillion dead in gulags” enchanted ring. You don’t even really know why you’re saying this stuff, it’s just an automatic response programmed into you, and receiving an effortpost in response which debunks those things just leads you to spew out more talismanic responses. You’re a defender of an ideology that you aren’t even aware that you have, so when somebody comes at you with a different ideology, all you can do is just say shit like “Oh, yeah, those people over there are horrific genocide apologists. Yeah, they aren’t even really trans, it’s just a whole site that’s trolling the rest of lemmy. They’re so idiotic that they can’t even see that competition and markets and democracy (as we conceive it) obviously get the best results - don’t they know that the USSR’s fall totally demolishes the argument of central planning? Just don’t even engage with them.”

all the while, we’re over here debating the finer points of Chinese economic policy in the Deng era and how it compares to the USSR under Lenin and Stalin; the foundations of neoclassical economics and the people who invented the idea of austerity; various obscure countries and conflicts around the world; and, well, having struggle sessions about sillier things too.

It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

“Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you’re the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying.”

This is where the moronic “maybe the curtains are just blue” reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn’t a racist caricature, it’s just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they’re less intelligent; that they’re inherently subservient to men; that they “belong in the kitchen”; that they should be “barefoot and pregnant”; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said “Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they’re the real sexists, not conservatives?” then you would, hopefully (though I’m not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says “Idiocracy is a documentary!!!” and invoke Hanlon’s Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world

Russia, China, and Iran (the last of which isn’t even on that image) have hypersonic missiles, which effectively mean that aircraft carriers are now pre-sunk artificial coral reefs in a direct conflict with those countries. America does not have hypersonic missiles and keeps failing their prototype tests.

Surprisingly, if healthcare is governed by the profit motive instead of an actual duty of care towards people, then the people in charge of healthcare will focus more on making profits than on providing care.

Never you fear, the disparity between America and Europe will go down. Not because America will improve - god no, it’ll get worse, even - but because the capitalists, backed by fascists, are here to loot European countries and rip the wiring out of the walls as the profitability crisis continues.

they demanded anarchists become MLs if they wanted bullets.

Stalin literally gave them hundreds of tanks

Personally, I think that someone leading insurrections against institutions that have overwhelming popular support due to actively working to give people healthcare, food, etc. is clearly a counterrevolutionary prick and an anarchist who opposes a project that feeds the children for the first time in centuries because it’s not a syndicate is being myopic at best, but that’s just me.

If we were in a hypothetical revolutionary situation led by anarchists that was genuinely and successfully challenging state capitalist power here in the UK then I, as a Marxist-Leninist, wouldn’t be like “Erm, guys, you haven’t sufficiently considered Lenin! Aren’t you aware that the hijacking and reconfiguration of the state for socialist purposes is a necessary transition period towards communism?” I would get behind the fucking barricades with them.

There’s a difference between opposing lesser evilism in the context of Western capitalist electoral politics between two bourgeois parties, and like, being anti-ML or anti-anarchist in actual revolutionary situations (and not stupid fucking hypothetical internet arguments) because “it’s not doing communism right.” Unless there were like, REALLY fucking big problems with what the group is doing, I would just shut up and not weaken the overall movement. As Awoo stated, this is literally what ML groups are doing in Palestine as we speak.

Because arriving at a party when there’s not many people around can be awkward especially if you aren’t already friends with the host. So you wait for more people to arrive first.

While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible “Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!” analysis.

Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it’s allowed to be the exception is because it’s a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world’s oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it’s also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you’re not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).

Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there’s a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it’s extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase “… has a right to exist”, it’s always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this “right” in the West’s eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn’t. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.

There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it’s one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas’ victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of “X hates Y and so they’re fighting” obfuscates a lot of what’s actually going on geopolitically. It’s extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn’t mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.

This isn’t to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn’t just some inherently religious war.

Israel created Hamas!

It was already being razed in slow motion. It was an open air prison in desperate poverty. It was a concentration camp that the demons in charge of Nazi Germany would have given their fullest approval.

Dunking on them, or doing idiotic “play stupid games, win stupid prizes!!!” shit is like watching Jewish people trying to escape the Warsaw ghetto in an uprising and then watching the Nazis exterminate them and then saying “Well! If they didn’t want this to happen, the Jews shouldn’t have resisted! They should have calmly and peacefully allowed themselves to be taken to the concentration camps!”

Palestine had the choice of a guaranteed slow death by drowning, or a quick end to the conflict - one way or another. Decades have gone by and nobody outside of the Middle East (apart from the DPRK and a couple others) really give a shit about Palestine. All the back and forth of “ohh where should we put our embassies? ohoho, should we acknowledge that Palestine is a state? ohoho!” achieved nothing. Ten million people could have protested across Europe every single day for decades for the liberation of Palestine, and it would have accomplished less than a single Palestinian soldier making a single rocket to be shot down by the Iron Dome. All the diplomatic shit means nothing. It has meant nothing for decades. Even peaceful protest of Israel in the form of BDS is basically outlawed in some places, and largely ineffectual regardless.

Palestinians shouldn’t, and almost certainly don’t, give a shit about the condemnations of western countries. About what western politicians are saying about them. It means nothing. Their strategies should be independent of “how it looks to outsiders”. A Palestinian could throw a pebble in the vague direction of an Israeli soldier and receive more condemnation from the media than Israel murdering a hundred thousand Palestinian civilians in bombing raids in retaliation. “If you didn’t want the bombing raid, you fucking stupid idiot, then MAYBE you shouldn’t have thrown that pebble! Play stupid games!” Who gives a shit about “how it looks” anymore.

I do have a question for you: let’s say Russia takes, say, Kramatorsk, surrounding it such that no civilians could escape. Imagine those civilians resisted, made Molotovs, fired improvised explosions at the Russians, and the Russians responded by carpetbombing Kramatorsk. Hundreds of civilians dead every single day. I then say “Well, looks like the civilians have guaranteed their own deaths, then. Well done, fucking idiots. Shouldn’t have fired those rockets at the Russian military if you wanted to live.” Would you be in my position, angry that you could possibly think that about a group of people valiantly resisting? How you could possibly look at the buildings being toppled by Russian bombs and think that was justified?

To demoralize Israel. Which it has been, severely.