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I personally have been preoccupied with the concern of the stay-behind networkification or the brownshirtification of the ultranationalist (para-/)militaries in the Ukraine.

I think there’s a serious risk of these groups deciding that the situation is lost and turning their interest and their weapons westward to destabilise other regions or even countries.

I worry that Azov et al. could become the nucleus for a European style ISIS. This would absolutely be in the interests of the US as it would reduce their near-peer competition in the EU and it would push them into the arms of the US military-industrial complex (pun absolutely intended.)

I make intentional reference to the stay-behind networks because this is really relevant to how I would see the role of these veterans and their influence/actions in Europe especially and potentially even beyond.

Some people swear by reading two+ books at once. I marvel at people who can do that. It might work for you though.

My recommendation is to set up focus mode or whatever it is on your phone. It’s best not to have notifications distracting you.

I’d also recommend not reading on your phone but using an ebook reader or the physical book instead. Use your phone for pulling up definitions, Wikipedia entries, articles etc. that will help you to better understand what’s going on in the theory, as needed.

Highlight passages which speak to you, which are of particular interest, which are the important parts of the book if you were to make a short summary, and especially which you don’t understand or feel like you could understand better.

Revise the highlighted passages each chapter to help consolidate your learnings and to see if further on in the chapter you now understand the highlighted parts make sense to you (and thus can be deleted) or if you need to do some research, post a question to social media or a reading group etc.

If you find that you’re highlighting more than a few passages because you don’t understand them in a chapter then that’s a red flag. Either the theory is too “deep” in conversations with prior texts (this is something that happens with philosophy) and you probably need to read what came before it in order to really grasp what’s being discussed in this book or you might need to read the prior work(s) of the author.

I would recommend engaging in some extra processes to help reinforce the learning. This might mean talking to someone (it can even be a pet!) about your learning. Having a friend who is open to hearing about your learnings is really valuable here - giving them updates on each chapter is great for keeping motivation up and for reinforcing learning. You might want to draft a mini essay or summary of the theory. It doesn’t have to be perfect or make sense because you aren’t going to submit it anywhere but the act of typing out the learnings can really enrich your learning experience and consolidate the learnings.

I’m a savage when it comes to books. I will underline passages and write notes in the margins. I’d recommend it. Or you can put sticky notes in your books if you prefer to. You can even get transparent sticky notes to place over pages and write on.

I’d also recommend reading groups, podcasts, lectures etc. to enrich your learning.

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CW: homophobia ahead!

Them (a majority of the comment content has been removed because it’s a long one with extraneous details):

Me:

Them:

Big “You can’t fire me - I quit!!” energy here

Me:

Them:

Big “You [slurs] call anything homophobic these days!” energy

Me:

Them:

“Getting real sick of these queers clogging up my good, honest anarchist politics with their concern-trolling over homophobia 😡😡”

Me:

Them:

Yeahhh, no small degree of ableism here but I wasn’t even going to try and address it because I was going to pin them on their homophobia and I wanted to make them eat their words by this point. (Also imagine my shock that the radlib who is opining about topics hasn’t done the damn reading.)

Me:

Fuck it, gloves off. I even tried baiting him into making the accusation that me using the grammatical construction cum was homophobic but no dice. Can’t win 'em all…

Them:

“I’m not the non-reader. You’re the non-reader!! 😡😡” and is this tripling-down on the gaslighting? Quadrupling-down? I’ve lost count…

Me:

Yeah, I’m the non-reader. I also need to work on my own ableism.

Them:

“Haha, yeah! You’re right about what I said about you but it’s still not homophobia because I said it in defence of my political position so it’s a justifiable hierarchy! (Also you [slurs] are so obsessed with identity-politicking.) At least I admit when I’m wrong (I’m not wrong though!)”

How dare I use insults!? The absolute audacity…

This guy is a crypto-anarchist. He’s one of these eclectic western leftists who would be a LeftCom if it didn’t require all that damn reading first so instead he’s just an “anti-authoritarian” radical who dedicates a significant amount of their time to being an anti-communist. If it walks like a duck…

This is where the sad excuse for an exchange ends.

There’s absolutely zero accountability or recognition of his homophobia but that’s all for the better because I actually got him to admit he said what he did.

If you could imagine a long-term anarchist (myself) who gradually stopped toeing the line and began to question the orthodoxy, first within anarchist spaces, to meet an increasing level of denialism, apologism, and eventually hostility the more I questioned it then this discussion is something of a metaphor for and a culmination of those prior discussions that I had.

This dork, along with Anark and the nonce who shall not be named, ride on this message of anti-tankies and they claim to have done the reading while fooling their gullible audience by lulling them into complacency by reaffirmating their preconceived political biases.

There was an axis of anti-tankies, prior to the term reaching its fever-pitch use in the discourse, of Jonas Ceika, Red Plateaus, and someone else who I can’t remember… maybe Anarchopac but fortunately Ceika has been preoccupied with cultural critique (lol - poststructuralism really is where praxis goes to die. I’d recommend Gabriel Rockhil’s articles on the Frankfurt school etc. if you’re deprogramming yourself from this particular cohort) and writing a book, Anarchopac has been preoccupied with writing a book and, well, producing video essays at her glacial pace due to her studies, and Red Plateau (who was the least principled and the least well-read of the three) has dropped off.

I had a libertarian socialist YouTuber tell me that I was guzzling cum from the assholes of redfash dictators and, when I called them out on their homophobia and they attempted to gaslight me over it by denying they said anything homophobic and that they didn’t know my gender, at which point I asked them if they believe that the cum appeared in the assholes of said “dictators” immaculately and I pointed out that they were assuming a position of unjust authority over my own experience they again engaged in denialism.

(Edit: apparently this slapfight has blurred with other ones I’ve had that are extremely similar over time in my memory; I didn’t play the “unjust hierarchy over my own experiences” card in this exchange and I don’t think that this particular case of libertarian-socialismhomophobia came with them claiming not to know my gender but the overall point stands and I’m keeping my original wording there for accountability’s sake. Not that anyone’s screenshotting these comments or keeping score but I feel like I made the accusations and a sneaky delete wouldn’t be right.)

When I quoted their own words back to them they managed to scrape together enough integrity to admit that they had actually said what I essentially forced them to acknowledge, they simply laughed it off.

These are the anti-tankies who deign to spread their message in the name of anti-authoritarianism

Edit: Fuck it, imma find those comments!

Either they’re a LeftCom or the milquetoast “socialist”/“DemSoc” version of the same ultraleft tendency which is simply filtered through liberal indoctrination or they’re an anarchist.

What really gets me is that I’ve had plenty of discussions with anarchists about how “authoritarian” the Spanish Republic and Makhnovia were and they will either denounce my sources as Bolshevik propaganda out of hand (the sources I refer to are either liberals who were openly sympathetic towards the anarchists/POUM or who were anarchists themselves [including eyewitnesses]) or they will literally engage in apologism for the authoritarian measures that these projects resorted to due to the necessity of the conditions and for the atrocities and the acts of “authoritarianism” that were absolutely not a necessity (e.g. the Makhnovist secret police establishing terror cells within the USSR.)

Now, don’t get me wrong I’m no idealist. A large part of why I broke from anarchism is exactly for this reason - the fact that there is an absolute necessity for authoritarian measures and history absolves this necessity.

What rings true is Engel’s quote from On Authority:

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

Engels didn’t have the fortune of being able to access a century and a half’s additional historical scholarship at his fingertips the way that I do but I am absolutely convinced that he’d be using the examples of the authoritarianism inherent in Revolutionary Catalonia and Makhnovia as real-world examples rather than the hypothetical of a ship on the high seas if he could have.

And he’s right that the most dogged anti-authoritarians will simply redefine their terms with the idealistic belief that changing the name of something changes its nature.

I’ve literally have anarchists/LibSocs tell me that the Makhnovist secret police, the Kontrrazvedka, was a counterintelligence force and this fact, somehow, justifies their existence to an anarchist.

How the Kontrrazvedka was engaging in acts of counterintelligence when they lined up and shot some of their most competent military officers who also happened to be Bolshevik sympathisers in a summary execution without the authorisation of the Military Revolutionary Council, the so-called democratic organ overseeing the Makhnovist military, you might ask, happens to go entirely unexplained. Shocking.

Or how Makhno was acting in an “anti-authoritarian” capacity when he pulled out his pistol but failed to execute Grigoriev, the commander of an army who had eventually defected to the Black Army after a series of prior defections, because Makhno’s commander Chubenko beat him to pulling the trigger also goes unexplained. (I’m no Grigoriev sympathiser and he got exactly what he deserved and not a moment too soon but this is not something which squares with anarchist principles.)

There’s also the Makhnovist ethno-religious persecution of Mennonites in particular but also of German settlers in Ukraine that gets completely ignored. These were mostly kulaks, although kulaks that were liquidated, slaughtered, and ethnically cleansed before they could act in direct sabotage of food production as seen in the USSR, so again I’m not losing sleep crying over this (although the acts of war against the Mennonites absolutely do deserve to be denounced because they resorted to committing atrocities but I’ll leave that for the people who uphold Makhnovia as an example of anarchism to do that without holding my breath) but it’s fascinating that an anarchist would say “How come the USSR wouldn’t just leave Makhnovia to its own devices to run its own society within the USSR (and to operate their own terror cells in the USSR)?” when the Makhnovists didn’t extend that same consideration to the Mennonites, some of whom actually took up arms and fought alongside the Black Army and the Red Army, no less.

There’s an entire effortpost on Revolutionary Catalonia that I have been drafting in my head but in the vain attempt at brevity, I’ll spare going into it.

The fact of the matter is that these people will run defence for what is in all respects “siege anarchism” but for name and yet they’ll take any opportunity to denounce communists to reinforce the paper-thin distinction between the authoritarianism of socialism in practice and the authoritarianism of anarchism in practice. And I mean that quite literally - the only real distinction between the two that exists is words on pages.

At my worst, especially when people have prefaced their anti-tankie screeds with terms like RedFash, I have taken to the habit of turning their own discourse against them and I make the accusation that they are BlackFash and that they’ll excuse any form of atrocities or authoritarianism as long as it comes draped in a black flag.

Turnabout play is fair, after all.

Damn. Does Calibre do OCR these days or do you do it manually?

Do you convert PDFs that do not have embedded text (i.e. scanned images of pages only) into epub format?

Bye-tswoh, with a sharp ending on the oh, so not like an ohhhh that you’d say when you’re yawning but similar to the end sound like when you say “wut?” or the o sound when you say “opposition”

>mrw

(That’s Jin Xing btw)

No. As per the message in the image of the post, posting is not organising.

But how will they confirm that it’s him when Prigozhin is such a cunning master of disguise?

Literally. Japan had no issues rallying around Shinzo Abe who was probably the most flagrant war criminal sympathiser of Japan’s modern prime ministers, and it’s no surprise given that he was grandson of war the criminal Nobusuke Kishi, known as “The Monster of the Shōwa era”.

He got what was coming to him.

Reminder that Okinawa is a colony.

If you can’t find a textbook on LibGen or Zlibrary, hit me up. I’m good at sourcing pirated textbooks.

Sometimes I can only find earlier editions or, for example, the international edition rather than the Canadian-specific edition that your course has instructed you to buy but 95% of the time those special editions and the newer editions are just a reworked version of the exact same content.

It’s actually a racket where courses will tell students to buy the most recent edition of a textbook to actively discourage students from buying second-hand textbooks of the previous edition for fear that they’re getting out of date information when actually all they do is update the pictures, change the cover image, amend typos, and occasionally they’ll shift the content around a bit of update the little case studies that reinforce the learnings from the chapter in order to keep them relevant to today.

But the actual core of the content is almost always identical/virtually identical.

So yeah, let me know if you need help with sourcing any textbooks or other books.

Yep. Chuev conducted a series of lengthy interviews with Molotov over the period of 1969 - 1986 and he kept extensive notes about what Molotov attested to.

While I can’t seem to find an English language translation of 140 Conversations with Molotov, his other work, Molotov Remembers, is frequently cited as a primary source by historians.

Given that it’s testimony from something which was said many years prior to the interview I’d hazard a guess that Molotov was paraphrasing because the chances of it being an exact quote are vanishingly slim but such is the nature of historical work; often the eyewitness testimony is going to be somewhat hazy, especially long after the fact.

I personally would feel comfortable in saying that Stalin had actually said something to this effect, if not exactly word for word, to Molotov.

It’s according to Molotov’s recollection. From Сто сорок бесед с Молотовым by Felix Chuev:

Stalin himself, I remember, said during the war: “I know that after my death, my grave will be piled with rubbish. But the winds of history will ruthlessly dispel it!

TrueAnon did an episode on The Moonies that links into recent news that you might find interesting.

Never underestimate the power of a large group of liberals committed to denialism.