There are two parts to the European far right. One is the so-called “populist” right (a purposely misleading label, as their “populism” is just a mask for neoliberal and pro-corporate economic policies like tax cuts for the rich), which tends to be pro-Russia in most European countries because of their shared anti-liberal, socially conservative views (though not always… in Poland for instance the right wing is just as Russophobic as the liberal centrists are).

The other are the outright Neonazis who have ties to Ukraine’s Neonazi scene and who are anti-Russian because they view the Russians as Asiatic non-Europeans and a threat to their vision of a racially pure Europe. The Ukrainian Neonazi movement has been busy over the past ten years building up connections with their counterparts in the rest of Europe, trafficking weapons and organizing para-military training camps.

They have had substantial resources to establish their networks in Europe thanks to state backing by the Kiev regime, and European governments have tolerated and turned a blind eye to these groups and their activities because of their usefulness against the Russians.

This latter group, from what i can tell, has never had a hugely positive view of Trump (in part also because of his ties to Jewish oligarchs) - though they of course welcomed his normalization of xenophobia and racism - and now if Trump ends up ditching the Ukraine project they may even turn outright hostile toward him.

I think unfortunately that both of these parts of the European right will be strengthened as a result of the Ukraine conflict. The first because it will have been validated in their skepticism toward the Ukraine project, and the second because there will be huge resentment in the Neonazi ranks over what they will perceive as the West’s betrayal of their cause.

And that second group is especially concerning, as with the end of the war we will suddenly have a large number of hardcore ideological Nazis, with ample combat experience and severe PTSD, flood into Europe as Ukraine is either taken over by the Russians or is left as an economically devastated rump state where they will be unable to find jobs after the war.

Not to mention that the black market for all kinds of very dangerous weapons, which has already been thriving thanks to the monumental levels of corruption in Ukraine, will become an order of magnitude worse as tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers with no economic prospects and no war to fight anymore try to sell whatever they have left to whoever will buy it. In practice that means organized crime and militant Neonazi networks (these two often have significant overlap in Eastern Europe btw).

I agree. I think this take gives them altogether too much credit. We’ll see what happens, but for now my gut instinct is to think that the extent to which the Trump administration is actually embracing “realism” is being overestimated by many commentators. A tiger doesn’t change its stripes…not this quickly.

Still…some very interesting things are happening, and we see the US is at least trying to adapt to changing realities…Europe is still hopelessly delusional and will get left further and further behind by every other major player.

PNAC was about trying to maintain the unipolar global hegemony. I see this as a departure from that and the acknowledgement that a new strategy of empire is needed.

It wouldn’t be that far fetched. It’s just the leftist version of something we’re already seeing happen, which is when religious conservatives who think the US/Europe are too liberal decide to move to Russia. Just like there are instances of that, there are bound to be instances of leftists wanting to be in a more progressive society and moving to China or Cuba. But really the real driver for both are the deteriorating material conditions in the US, and we’re going to be seeing this phenomenon more as the material situation worsens.

Even the labour unions (including the largest industrial workers union in the west, maybe even the world) choose to cooperate more with corporate executives than with the workers they ostensibly represent.

This is a very important point that a lot of people who are unfamiliar with Germany and how its unions work may not even be aware of. Unions in Germany are highly regulated by German law to be effectively neutered as tools of class struggle. They are at best glorified intermediaries for negotiation between workers and employers, and the vast majority of the time they act primarily in the interests of the employers (hiding behind such flimsy justifications as “if we demand too much it will harm employers and workers will lose their jobs”).

They are there to stamp down any independent dissent by workers, forcing workers to go through the reactionary, collaborationist union structure where any complaints or demands they have can disappear into a bureaucratic swamp.

I have some personal experience with this whole system as my partner, who works in a unionized field, at one point was part of their workplace’s employee representation for a few years and there was effectively nothing they were legally allowed to actually do except get together and talk every once in a while. To even dare utter the word “strike” would have been unthinkable, maybe even illegal (as i said, labor representation is highly regulated in Germany). At best they could complain if they thought that some workers’ contracts were being violated.

To me it all just looked like a way to keep the more socially conscious workers busy and create the illusion that they were actually helping other workers lest they think of doing something that would actually threaten the profits of the employer… sort of like letting your infant sit in the passenger’s seat and play with a toy steering wheel thinking they are actually driving the car so they keep quiet while you drive.

For someone who is class consciouss the whole thing is just humiliating, pathetic and demotivating to see how many people in Germany fall for this scam, how they think this means they really have some power. And more than that, how convinced they are that this is the best you can do. And when you try and criticize this system that you can see is actively victimizing them and making them miserable, they react very aggressively in defense of it and they get angry at you for pointing it out, telling you that you don’t know how the world works…

I didn’t imply they were. But the least someone can do is listen to both sides. Especially when we’ve been hearing the West’s narrative on repeat from every single mainstream media outlet for the last ten years, and always it turns out that it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

It’s definitely on life support at the moment.

Linke is not only pro-Zionist, they also went and jumped on the mainstream bandwagon on the Ukraine conflict. So i’m not even sure anymore between BSW and Linke who is more right wing. At least BSW is consistently anti-war. Not to mention that Linke also agrees with many of the liberal narratives on China whereas BSW doesn’t.

Bottom line: they’re the only leftist parties who have a chance of getting past 5% and they both suck. And the only party in Germany that doesn’t suck, DKP, aren’t even on the ballot this election.

Another good documentary on the subject: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JM0VYkL_UI4

As opposed to the totally trustworthy documentaries funded by the Nazi regime in Kiev and by the CIA cutouts NED/USAID?

I’m not going to comment on a fictional family’s fictional experiences as described on a Western TV show, but as for:

Is psychology and potentially psychiatry still considered bourgeois science?

Regardless how they were viewed in the past, they certainly don’t seem to be viewed that way today considering that you can get a degree in these fields from most Chinese universities:

https://edurank.org/psychology/cn/

https://edurank.org/medicine/psychiatry/cn/

If I were to move to China, would I be unable to get psychiatric meds?

This is a completely different question, and the answer to that is: maybe. It depends on the specific meds that you need. If you currently live in the US then it’s not even guaranteed that you will find your exact same meds even in Europe, because different countries have different laws about what kind of drugs they allow on their market.

Some that are prescription free in one country may not be in another. Also, sometimes certain drugs are legal but just not made/sold in those countries so you would either have to import them yourself, or you would have buy a local alternative that is effectively identical but is just sold under a different brand name.

In the case of China this is something that you will have to research beforehand on a case by case basis. But i’m guessing that you can find an equivalent for most things, maybe with a few exceptions since China has stricter drug laws than the US (you probably won’t get opiates very easily for instance).

Edit: About psychology/psychiatry during the period of the Cultural Revolution, this is not a subject i know much - if anything - about, but a cursory search online shows that articles and books were being written about the psychiatric practices in China at the time as well as in the decade immediately afterward:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-41581-006

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.130.10.1082

https://cir.nii.ac.jp/crid/1130282271175962112

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3109/00048678009159351

So it would seem that at the very least we can say that the discipline was still active during that period, though perhaps it was practiced differently than today, and differently than it would have been at the time in western countries, as the Chinese were experimenting with more social approaches of solving psychiatric and psychological problems rather than purely clinical and individualistic ones. Whether this has merit or not, i don’t know, i’m not a psychiatrist.

Are you lost? Do you need a map? Do you think this is a conservative instance? Do you think everyone here is American? You seem very confused.

I agree with these people on all kinds of things, but what do they want me to do?

I don’t think it matters what these people want you to do. We shouldn’t be letting media people tell us what we should do anyway, even if they were all communists, they aren’t political organizers, at best they are propagandists and information sources for our cause. We are communists and we have to decide what we should do based on our own world outlook and our own theoretical framework. You should just see these media personalities as simply one more asset to help you in educating, agitating and organizing the working class.

That’s why i personally don’t care whether the forms of activism that they engage in are ineffectual or misguided, because i don’t take my cues from them.

See all of that just sounds to me like you think they are controlled opposition just because you disagree with some of their views and tactics. I don’t know this Kiriakou person but i will admit he sounds like a bit of a grifter. The rest of them i just think are not communists, that’s all. And because they are not they will do or say things and associate with people that we don’t like or agree with.

As for alleged scandals, a huge disclaimer that i have not looked into any of those allegations so they may very well be true, but a priori i always tend to be skeptical of when anti-establishment figures suddenly become embroiled in all sorts of allegations, as the intelligence agencies are known for planting dirt on people, creating infighting and discrediting people who pose a threat to the imperialist state.

I think it’s good to be cautious and skeptical, but maybe we shouldn’t let that turn into all out paranoia that makes us see ops in every corner, because that only benefits our enemies. Sometimes even people who are not communists can be useful, as sources of information, as situational allies on certain anti-imperialist causes, etc.

Maybe. And i’m open to evidence to back that theory up, but for the time being i personally don’t believe it. I think that’s too convoluted an explanation when a much simpler one fits perfectly well. We shouldn’t ascribe more subtlety or intelligence to the ruling class than they actually have. Most of these people are not evil geniuses, they are just evil…and some of them are really not that bright at all.

Sometimes the only reason why they do things is the straightforwardly obvious one: they are desperately trying to reassert control in a situation in which they fear they are losing it, when they feel everything is spiraling out of control for them and they just don’t care anymore about being subtle.

And sometimes it turns out that they can get away with it, which then emboldens them to go even further next time, but sometimes they can’t, and they find out that they have underestimated the level of pushback they will actually get. It’s the same phenomenon of arrogance and belief in their own omnipotence that we see the imperialists display over and over. But whether they succeed or not in this or that individual case is not very relevant, because the intimidation still occurs either way.

Intimidation. And it works. Not many people have the public support that these bigger journalists do to be able to pressure the government to release them. So the whole thing has a chilling effect on anti-hegemonic, anti-imperialist speech in the West because the average person is scared to be the next target of the state and suddenly having the police at their door or being abducted off the street into a van under some trumped up charge. They are doing exactly what they have always accused their geopolitical enemies of doing.

The western (socdem/demsoc) left summarized:

Yeah i’m referring to the typical pictures you would see of Shanghai or Guangzhou for instance, especially at night, or some of those futuristic looking train stations China has. I’m sure if you go to the back streets of any city they won’t look quite so perfect, but nowhere in the world is perfect.

This meme went over like a lead balloon at the other instance

Probably because it looks AI generated. A common problem with pictures from China. Their shit is so advanced (not that monorails are that advanced but there is a lot of other infrastructure in China that you literally won’t see in any other country, and certainly not on that scale) and so clean that a lot of people literally have trouble believing it’s true.

And no mainstream media publication is going to say a word about this. They are not going to accuse Austria of suppressing free speech by targeting journalists (as they 100% would if this happened in a country like Russia or China), they are not going to call them authoritarian, repressive, dictatorship or totalitarian. There will simply be crickets, or if they do write anything it will be to take the side of the state and pile on to the slander against Richard calling him a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer.

As we have seen with the whole USAID saga now, there is no such thing as “independent media” in the West, at least not in the mainstream. They are all funded by Zionist billionaires, tech oligarchs, government agencies and shady NGOs. And the German language media are some of the worst in the world…the shit i have to read and hear every day from them makes me wish i didn’t speak German.