Thanks for the detailed response. It was an overreaction and for that I apologize. I’ve been on edge the past few days due to the news and just needed to vent a bit I guess. It was just very alienating for me to see a resource that I’ve recommended to beginner Marxists in the past appear to be endorsing this kind of view. But I don’t know this person and what they’ve done for the project in the past so it was out of line for me to ask for them to be removed.
As for your question, the tweet is an insult to all oppressed peoples that the USA has trampled on. What does the Cherokee think of the Stars and Stripes, waved by the US Army as they pursued a policy of total removal of indigenous peoples from the East Coast? What about the people of Laos, who are still struggling to remove the millions of undetonated bombs dropped on them over the course of an illegal war? Ask the victims of American imperialism in Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Iraq, Grenada, Libya, Yugoslavia…the list goes on and on and on. Any support for patriotism in America should be a slap in the face to every comrade in the Global South. And it’s a perversion of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, etc to equate their patriotism, as leaders of liberation struggles, to the America Über Alles style patriotism at home. Lenin was famously for revolutionary defeatism for example. And you need not look further than Lenin, as he writes “The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/2.htm#v20pp72-023 The tweet ignores all of that context and blasts those of us pushing back against people like Haz. If you look through the author’s tweet history it’s quite clear he’s a follower of Haz. All in all, it’s pure idealism and historical revisionism to suggest that the US left should adopt patriotic imagery.
I appreciate you taking action on this and hopefully some good will come out of it.
Thanks for the detailed response. It was an overreaction and for that I apologize. I’ve been on edge the past few days due to the news and just needed to vent a bit I guess. It was just very alienating for me to see a resource that I’ve recommended to beginner Marxists in the past appear to be endorsing this kind of view. But I don’t know this person and what they’ve done for the project in the past so it was out of line for me to ask for them to be removed.
As for your question, the tweet is an insult to all oppressed peoples that the USA has trampled on. What does the Cherokee think of the Stars and Stripes, waved by the US Army as they pursued a policy of total removal of indigenous peoples from the East Coast? What about the people of Laos, who are still struggling to remove the millions of undetonated bombs dropped on them over the course of an illegal war? Ask the victims of American imperialism in Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Iraq, Grenada, Libya, Yugoslavia…the list goes on and on and on. Any support for patriotism in America should be a slap in the face to every comrade in the Global South. And it’s a perversion of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, etc to equate their patriotism, as leaders of liberation struggles, to the America Über Alles style patriotism at home. Lenin was famously for revolutionary defeatism for example. And you need not look further than Lenin, as he writes “The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/2.htm#v20pp72-023 The tweet ignores all of that context and blasts those of us pushing back against people like Haz. If you look through the author’s tweet history it’s quite clear he’s a follower of Haz. All in all, it’s pure idealism and historical revisionism to suggest that the US left should adopt patriotic imagery.
I appreciate you taking action on this and hopefully some good will come out of it.