The day that lasted 21 years

[La Guaneña]

April 1st, 1964. The troops of General Olympio Mourão Filho arrive in Rio de Janeiro, president João Goulart manages to escape to Rio Grande do Sul without mobilizing troops to hault the golpistas.


One more coup in the middle of dozens in the poorest countries of the world, one more coup to hault any kind of nationalist interests that went head on with those of imperialism and landowners.

Hundreds of dead, tortured or dissapeared unionists, workers, students and artists. Thousand of landless workers, native populations and poor, black men and women who disappeared onfy because of being in the wrong place, being the wrong color, belonging to the wrong culture, according to those from the North.

Why do we fight for bourgeois democracy when there is none? This questions sound pretty dumb when you have talked to people who got to meet the dungeons personally.

Médici, Pinochet, Videla and their kind are the most direct products of imperialism. And people on this forum still ask: "why anti-imperialism?", or even worse, shun it off as collaborationism. Things haven't always been this cozy here.

Para que ninguém se esqueça! Para que nunca mais aconteça!

[Sasha]

Hundreds of dead, tortured or dissapeared unionists, workers, students and artists. Thousand of landless workers, native populations and poor, black men and women who disappeared onfy because of being in the wrong place, being the wrong color, belonging to the wrong culture, according to those from the North.

Sounds like the practices of many "anti-imperialist" leaders too though...

If you can't differentiate between a goulart and a Assad or gadaffi...

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

Sounds like the practices of many "anti-imperialist" leaders too though...

If you can't differentiate between a goulart and a Assad or gadaffi...

It's troubling that you can't disconcern grassroots anti-imperialist movements and soviet client states installed by the help of some KGB agents and some hardmen in the military.

[Sasha]

Its not that the self described "anti-imperialists" here give me any reason to think there is a difference.

[synthesis]

Thousand of landless workers, native populations and poor, black men and women who disappeared onfy because of being in the wrong place, being the wrong color, belonging to the wrong culture, according to those from the North.

How much has anti-imperialism accomplished in terms of returning land to workers and native populations? Or in terms of police brutality in the favelas?


Hundreds of dead, tortured or dissapeared unionists, workers, students and artists.

How much has anti-imperialism helped there? (http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/04/201344174238580304.html)

Even if you accept anti-imperialism despite its class-collaborationism, you might be inclined to reject it on the basis of its abject meaninglessness and futility. (For the working class, anyway. For some factions of the local bourgeoisie, of course, it might be a different story.)

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Sounds like the practices of many "anti-imperialist" leaders too though...

E moj Saša.

The thing is, you could make an identical argument when it comes to anti-fascism. "Death camps? Sounds like the practices of the French too though..." "Mass murder of Jews? What do you think the British did in Palestine?" And so on, and so on. And that argument would be just as daft as the one you're implicitly making here.

Anti-fascism doesn't mean being for "democratic" France, whether the one led by Mollet (a "socialist" to your liking, probably) or the one led by Hollande. It's just that fascism requires special tactics due to its character as a mass reactionary movement. Likewise, anti-imperialism doesn't mean being for figures such as Nasrallah or Chavez.

Take Iran, for example. To paraphrase Trotsky's discussion of semifascist Brazil, in Iran there now reigns a vile, reactionary regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. If tomorrow the heads of the mullahs were to end up on a pike, revolutionaries could only be pleased, the "comrades" that PressTV employs aside. That would be a fitting end to people who butchered and hounded leftists, gays, Kurds, women etc. But if the imperialist powers were to invade Iran, this would not happen. Only the workers can smash the mullah regime. The imperialists would install a regime, probably drawn from the ranks of the old one, that would be worse than the existing one - just look at "democratic" Iraq and "democratic" Afghanistan (the Taliban were also an imperialist-installed regime, and their successors are fundamentally the same) - and that would turn Iran into a neo-colony, imposing additional oppression, misery and death on Iranian workers. Even worse, the workers of Iran would come to sympathise with the miserable dregs of the old regime as "progressive". People who clamour about class collaboration (some of them, oddly enough, admit to participating in liberal-led anti-war marches and worse) being the result of anti-imperialism aren't looking at the situation objectively. Class collaboration isn't some sort of brain bug that workers catch by being in proximity to the PressTV crowd. Communists fight against class-collaborationist tendencies by addressing their material causes - imperialist predation, national oppression etc. etc.

Anti-imperialists don't defend the rulers of Libya, Syria etc. They defend the workers of Syria, Libya and so on - often from politicians that receive massive support on this site (Obomber for example). If you don't see the difference, would you kindly ban yourself because every anti-fascist action supports the bourgeois state according to your logic?

I mean this fucking site has become some weird kind of pro-Odroner, semi-Shachtmanite, antideutsche forum.

[Tim Cornelis]

Its not that the self described "anti-imperialists" here give me any reason to think there is a difference.

Indeed:

https://scontent-a-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/t1.0-9/q71/s720x720/10154457_1417988525126542_1656441153_n.jpg

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

What an interesting and groundbreaking contribution to the discussion here. It's as if the antideutsche (sorry, "anti-anti-imperialists", the antideutsche don't exist according to Sasha) think they're on 4chan.

[Tim Cornelis]

What an interesting and groundbreaking contribution to the discussion here. It's as if the antideutsche (sorry, "anti-anti-imperialists", the antideutsche don't exist according to Sasha) think they're on 4chan.


I mean this fucking site has become some weird kind of pro-Odroner, semi-Shachtmanite, antideutsche forum.

This doesn't even make sense. Antideutsch? I don't think it means what you think it means.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

This doesn't even make sense. Antideutsch? I don't think it means what you think it means.

It means the sort of people who might join a "solidarity with Israel" group - which is just as ridiculous, on an ostensibly socialist site, as that picture of Guevara (don't the Maoists consider Guevara to have been an agent of social-imperialism?), Assad and, what, Hawatmeh?

[synthesis]

I mean this fucking site has become some weird kind of pro-Odroner, semi-Shachtmanite, antideutsche forum.

Dude, you are one hell of a namedropper. :lol:

Seriously, though, the direction of this thread seems to indicate a misunderstanding and a conflation of the "anti-imperialism" of psycho/Sasha and the "anti-imperialism" of the ultra-lefts here. I think it's important to distinguish them. The former seems to be a condemnation of form and style whereas the latter is a condemnation of function and substance.

[Tim Cornelis]

It means the sort of people who might join a "solidarity with Israel" group - which is just as ridiculous, on an ostensibly socialist site, as that picture of Guevara (don't the Maoists consider Guevara to have been an agent of social-imperialism?), Assad and, what, Hawatmeh?

No it doesn't mean that at all.

The picture is of Mihraç Ural, the leader of the pro-regime Stalinist Syrian Resistance, an "anti-imperialist" in the service of Syrian expansionism.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Seriously, though, the direction of this thread seems to indicate a misunderstanding and a conflation of the "anti-imperialism" of psycho/Sasha and the "anti-imperialism" of the ultra-lefts here. I think it's important to distinguish them. The former seems to be a condemnation of form and style whereas the latter is a condemnation of function and substance.

Well, the thing is, Sasha and the new TC sometimes use the same arguments as the left-coms and ultra-lefts, and I was simply pointing out how ridiculous that is, especially coming from Sasha, who admitted to going to liberal-led anti-war rallies, and who takes pride in their anti-fa work. I don't think I've ever implied that left-coms and ultra-lefts in general make the same arguments as Sasha - that would be uncharitable. Most of my post was a pretty pedestrian outline of the Leninist case for anti-imperialism - I'm not even going to address stupid "arguments" like "but this guy carries around an Assad poster" (yeah, and you carry around an Israeli flag), except to point and laugh.


No it doesn't mean that at all.

Then what do you think it means?


The picture is of Mihraç Ural, the leader of the pro-regime Stalinist Syrian Resistance, an "anti-imperialist" in the service of Syrian expansionism.

I swear he looks like a slightly older Hawatmeh. Anyway, yeah, the weird "foco" for the liberation of Alexandretta. That explains what Guevara is doing in the picture. But what about it? Do you also condemn the October Revolution because NazBols go around waving posters of Lenin and Goebbels?

[motion denied]

If you can't differentiate between a goulart and a Assad or gadaffi...

Wow, shut the fuck up.

Idiocy aside, the supporting of Goulart and the search for a "national and progressive bourgeoisie", gross class collaborationism, is a dead-end, and history proved that.