Nothing inherently good about being a political scientist! They are wrong or naive so often it is ridiculous. I think it is just an interesting example of how the people paid to think about such topics are still embedded in propaganda milieu and spectacle. You can very much become far more educated and insightful than one, it just takes healthy criticism and reading.

While I don’t salivate at the idea of war, and especially civil war, I can not fear it; dread and fear not always being the same thing or of the same source.

I dread and fear all war but also understand that the violence comes for us regardless, we just get to choose how to organize, become resilient, and strategically protect ourselves while also engaging in meaningful action. The ruling class will never let us vote them out. We may succeed at voting out their preferred sects of the political class, and thus agitate and build against them, but they will bring violence in response - violence that, per the dominant thought patterns, won’t be called violence. It will be joblessness, deprivation, essential services shut down. Capital strikes, etc. And such crises can then be leveraged to restore their preferred sects. Civil war is not likely to spring up early, but as a downstream outcome of repeated struggles like this, of preventing eventual popular will. We will also probably lose at least one round, assuming we cannot organize quickly enough. What that kind of thing looks like can be real horror, which is why we must organize. We need our losses to look like 1905 Russia not 1965 Indonesia. We should also be realistic in that these kinds if fights will happen earlier and more successfully in the third world and one of our duties is to support them, particularly as our governments and media apparatuses will be leading the charge to demonize them.

I’ll do what is necessary, while also acknowledging that my opponents are decent, but misguided and just as heavily brainwashed people.

Some will be decent and misguided. Others will be misguided but not at all decent, having cruelty and racism and a desire for domination deeply embedded in their psyche. It will be virtually impossible to sympathize when they do overy violence to us. They already do “civilly”, like with cops that harass and murder, particularly against black and brown people. Or like ICE. Or the soldiers that dehumanize the people in a country they invaded. Historically, those most targeted by them will rightfully want justice.

I just hope when it comes to that, fascism won’t prevail, whether that happens in whatever years I have left, or follows the generations behind me.

On the bright side, the world is rebuilding structures and relationships that can rein in empire. And in the US, the nascent left is relearning all of the old lessons of the last 300 years. The opposing forces are escalating and organizations are building, which is better than the unipolar malaise of the prior 40 years.

What on earth is purist in what I said? Do you have nothing to say in response to my explanations? Am I right in them? Where am I wrong?

I just laid out an honest assessment of the threats, the real and material things, the history and current policies. And you are now bailing rather than look at them squarely and actually respond to the content.

Please engage in good faith or not at all.

Yawwwwn

Politics IS compromise.

Genocide is wrong no matter who’s doing it. That’s not even the argument here. Sadly, half a dozen presidents ago Congress decided the US needs Israel for some reason (very likely because it’s mentioned in their dumb little book as key for the second coming of their dumb little god) so now there’s a binding agreement and nobody can say anything bad about Israel. Violating that causes a whole storm of international drama that would (shock!) cause more destruction than the current horrifying, illegal, and whitewashed genocide.

I’m dumbing this down for you. You’re welcome.

Where we are now the government’s hands are tied unless it gets overhauled. Since there are only two viable political parties, the lesser of two evils is the choice - and you’re right, they’re both evil, but there’s the “supports genocide” evil and the “supports genocide AND fascism AND suppression of women & minorities AND oligarchy AND Russia etc” evil. Dems in power = slim possibility of overhaul. GOP in power = no possibility of the public having any sway ever again.

Your smug all or nothing rhetoric is short sighted, excessively privileged, and frankly dangerous. I’m ignoring you now. Feel free to post your gotcha and declare yourself victorious.

You’d have to be a bit silly to think the Tsarist regime was better for Russia, the nationalist Kuomintang for China, the fascist slaver Batista for Cuba, etc.

The vast majority of every poverty alleviation statistic for the last 50 years has been China.

Generally speaking, third world countries do not advance without tackling the worldwide capitalist system. This is because it is set up to enrich international corporations largely seated in the heart of first world countries, particularly the US, and can only sustain itself through the maintenance of profits acquired through exploitation of those third world countries. Unequal exchange, forcing international business-friendly labor laws on them, preventing them from building up their own industries so they must import necessities, structuring their economies around whatever the imperial core needs (lithium, oil, an underpaid service industry), forcing them into situations where they have a ton of dollars and therefore must import using them, etc etc.

Under this scenario, conditions in these countries regularly degrade. Poverty and a lack of infrastructure, low wages, and the necessity of a pro-international-capitalist government means petty autocracy around the basics of life. High unemployment, rates, few prospects, a brain drain, and eventually internal violence via black markets, the associated organized crime, the government, and those who correctly recognize the problem and attempt to directly combat it (fighters for national liberation, socialists, etc). Things are not good and they rarely get better, quite the opposite. They shift according to whims far outside their control at virtually any level, as they are enslaved by capital right down to their national government. Resistance movements rise up for simple things like insigenous rights, land rights, etc, and the federal government suppresses them with far greater violence.

When organized anticapitalist forces win a revolution, they tend to work directly against the problems that fomented the revolution. They address issues of land rights, abolish systems like feudal relationships and the most heinous capital relations, invest in public education, utilities, housing, etc that were denies by their xapitalist comprador governments.

And the US responds. It attempts to destroy them, as it requires control over its vassal states to maintain its position at the top of a conveyor belt moving their resources and other labor products over to itself. Much of what you see that is negative in countries run by socialists is of that particular legacy. The US killed 20% of the population in North Korea and tried to isolate it so it spawned Juche. After the fall of the USSR, its primary trading partner, the US unleashed a massive series of sanctions, attempting to starve the country of everything needed to run it. The meme of a starving, poor North Korean is from the poverty created by fuel and food from sanctions. You until the late 80s North Korea regularly outperformed South Korea. This playbook has repeated many times. Those countries that can both carry out the initial revolution and then defend it against attack do much better than the alternative offered to them.

You might be thinking, “hey, but what about Japan or Taiwan or Estonia? They are doing okay.” This is true, though you should keep in mind that they have been propped up in order to act as forward bases against targets of US Empire, namely Russia and China. And they are reigned in and will be subjugated as soon as it is seen as more beneficial than not for US interests. Japan experienced this in the 90s when the US created a massive recession for them.

Who did the killings? What are the numbers on social violence, social murder, in the previous status quo? The capitaliat status quo is one of poverty and disposession, hard lives and early deaths due to a lack of infrastructure, safety in workplaces, poor nutrition and healthcare, environmental degradation, etc.

That violence is intentionally maintained by the capitalist order, it is violence done to every working person, but particularly those in the global south like Nepal. Include it in your calculations. Watch it dwarf those numbers.

You’ll notice that the government did far more of the killing than the Communist revolutionaries. And, like I said, metrics are improving since overthrowing the previous regime.

Survivorship bias, after we murdered everyone that was having a bad time everyone was having a great time.

I’ll just copy and paste my earlier explanation, hope it makes sense for you this time:

Participation in bourgeois elections is to delegitimize the system (such as pointing out Dem/Rep collusion to kick them off the balot in Georgia), and advertise their platform.

Marxists believe revolution is necessary and electoralism is a sham.