I know blowback is amazing for that, but, does anyone know of any good books or articles that can contribute to coming to a truely international perspective?

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    A big thing that influenced me was actually the topic of the other day’s megathread about the 1953 Iranian coup, because from a lib perspective Mossadegh did everything right and it didn’t matter. All the Shah’s Men is a pretty good telling of events, I looked up the guy who wrote it and he’s a former NYT correspondent but he was skeptical of the media blitz against Assad and is also critical of NATO’s role in the war in Ukraine (Stephen Kinzer, if you’re low key a Hexbear poster, I liked your book). I think if you genuinely try to study world history in a way that emphasizes the perspectives of people in countries outside of the imperial core, then it’s almost inevitable to come to our conclusions. It doesn’t have to be that book or that country, there’s tons of countries that can serve as case studies in why the US is the great Satan. Luna Oi has some videos about Vietnam and the Vietnamese War that are pretty good too imo.

    Naomi Wu’s story also did a lot to influence how I looked at things. She got in hot water with the cops in China some but a lot of it was because Western journalists have done things like publically outing her as a lesbian and taking clips out of context and using them in anti-China stories without her consent, and generally treating her like dirt, and she’s generally more critical towards them than toward’s China’s government.

    As for more theoretical stuff, I’ve been meaning to post this bit about Revolutionary Defeatism but I think it’d probably be too much for the libs (Lenin is a tankie!!! 😡). Really I think they need to be introduced to the idea of critical support but I don’t know any good resources about that.

    Honestly the hard part is just getting people to read or listen to anything. They’re all allergic to sources and some of them seem to think that using any historical reference is “whataboutism.”

    The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War, V.I. Lenin

    Full Text

    To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to deg----ate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.

    What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat” (Semkovsky in Izvestia No. 2; also the entire Organising Committee in No. 1). This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”. “The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the “neither-victory nor-defeat” slogan.

    On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.

    When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.

    Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes.