its a new week comrades! May you have nothing but victory and celebration!

So because of my profile pic, I decided to read some of the RAFs works for the first time in years and the discussion on legality and illegality in Concept Urban Guerilla stood out to me. This section specifically:

It depends on whether communists are so stupid as to tolerate everything that is done to them, or whether they will use legality, as well as other methods, to organize illegality, instead of fetishizing one over the other.

The fate of both the Black Panther Party and Gauche Prolétarienne resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from seeing that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.

Now let me preface this - I absolutely am not going to compare a shitposting subreddit and some journalists on twitter getting banned to the illegality of underground guerillas. This passage still made me think about the current situation and what’s going to come in the future as contradictions continue to heighten. I also want to be clear this is not meant as a call for illegal actions or a move into illegality.

But let’s be real about this, as material conditions worsen and as revolutionary movements gain steam, the state will employ harsher and harsher legal means to surpress them. Parties, news outlets and people will be illegalized. What we’re seeing right now is a precursor to this. Currently it’s mostly private capital doing it in the imperial core to keep up the veneer of legality and obfuscate the contradiction of legal reality and constitution, but even that is changing eg with the banning of the Z in Germany and prison sentences for “Russian propaganda” (see ASBmilitary stopping).

What we’re also seeing is that people are and were woefully unprepared for these changes. So many people and organizations just kinda relied on capitals and states good will to just allow them to exist in these ‘public spaces’. No contingency plans were made for most people and outlets at all. No backups, no alternatives to move to were established beforehand. I think Abby Martin said she lost some of her content permanently, because the uploads on Youtube were all she had. That just goes to show how naively confident people were that the legal reality would remain unchanged and how sure they were that they couldn’t possibly be the target of repression. That obviously was a massive tactical error. To them these bans were “a stroke of fate”, entirely unforseeable and to many and their communities this was “a death blow”. I obviously don’t want to overstate the importance of social media accounts, but in current day it would also be a mistake to take this loss too lightly.

Funnily enough this small Stalin-fetishizing subreddit was one of the only communities that established a contingency plan beforehand. So guys, good fucking job lol. MLs ahead of everyone as always.

I know this isn’t a particularly new thought or an especially coherent rant, but what I’m trying to get at here is that this situation will not somehow reverse itself. The state and capital will not undo these precedents. On the contrary, this will absolutely get worse and curiously enough, not just for communist forces but anyone opposed to the mainstream imperialist narratives. We have these alternatives like lemmy, matrix, mastodon, telegram, peertube etc and that is a massive asset to ensure a continued online presence. We need to make people, not just GZD or specifically communists, aware of the threat and get them to establish alternatives and contingency plans before the ban happens, because people are still not preparing and are still surprised when it eventually does happen. We need to push this to any content creator and community that could vaguely be in danger, so those people and spaces don’t disappear entirely once they get banned and to weaken capitals control over online discourse generally. And ofc we also need to get organizations in real life to think about urgently this before it happens, but I’m not going to talk about that for obvious reasons.

So there now is an article in the local newspaper about how Russian soldiers are calling their mothers because they are surprised they are seeing paved roads for the first time lmao. Guys, soldiers in the second biggest and most advanced army in the world are surprised at paved roads. You can’t make this up.

Apparently my family has come into possession of one of those “End CCP” Falun Gong propaganda pamphlets, must’ve been stuck in the door or received as junk mail or something lol

No idea how they have such a large presence in the west (CIA probably), but reading one of these myself was a good laugh, especially because of how they’re trying to collect signatures for a petition of some sort, because that’ll surely end the “CCP” for good lmao

Hello everyone I hope you all have a nice week

Are we in agreement that Bucha is a little fishy? I mean come on, not even a week after Ukrainian forces were being criticized for treatment of POWs, right after the US kept suspiciously banging on about an impending chemical weapon attack we suddenly get a video of the most classic of atrocities: A village being killed with bodies littering the streets. Riddle me this, why would the Russians, who are already getting tons of negative press throughout the West and withdrawing kill off an entire town and then not clean up the bodies?

If my gut is right, this the most blatant false flag in years.

I would like to start the day with a story about my grandma who, when playing outside in Nazi occupied territory, threw sticks at tanks and cursed out Nazi’s at a very young age. She continued to live the rest of her life with great chaotic energy. May she rest in peace.

Don’t forget to work out today. There is a rise in facism on social media with a speed that is worrying to me.

I have a technical issue with the site. Much of the time I try to access by wireless or cellular I get a bare white screen with this message:

404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site?auth=<redacted> reason: Unexpected end of JSON input

Hey I would like it if GenZedong considered doing a Marxist Minecraft server. With mods and plugins. I had an idea to host one myself but it would actually be better if it were done by a big community like this.

If people are interested in the idea, I can make a post.

I’m a few days late on this one, but Zelenskyy’s appearance on the Grammy’s is the epitome of abnormal. When is the last time the sitting president of a country at war had the free time to fucking send video speeches to award shows?

I don’t know what the hell is happening anymore, the world’s gone crazy. Is NATO this desperate to sell the idea of war with Russia to people?

One of the biggest Dutch postal delivery services also went abroad to Belgium where they started delivering packages too. As we all may know postal delivery services can be really sketchy and this one is no different.

Now the CEO of the Belgian branche has been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and explotation within the company. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the country I now live in finally has the balls to do what my home country should do as well. He has not been convicted yet but at least someone showed some balls and drew a line. Kudos to Belgium.

Is there any alternative to Lemmy or Lemmur? I can’t get them to work properly on either my tablet or phone. I can’t login or add the Lemmygrad instance and it is really annoying because I browse GenZedong mostly when commuting.

Jeez, I take a look at how things are on regular lemmy.ml and it’s full of libshit, I guess I see why we have Lemmygrad now

I like conservatives so much more than liberals

At least most of their viewpoints make logical sense and are understandable even if I disagree with them

Liberals are wrapped in 10 layers of cognitive dissonance and excuses for why their actions and opinions don’t match their stated beliefs at all

There are now satelite images of Bucha claiming the death bodies were there for weeks. How valid are these claims? I’m not saying it’s all a hoax but with the fog of war, getting good information can be very hard with both sides wanting to create certain points of view.