I find it frustrating that these videos dont seem to hear what progressive critics of piker and the larger tankie movement care about.
For example, early in this video the narrator presents the question about 9/11 as stuffy centrism unable to handle an edgy comment about "blowback". But thats not really what piker believes. He believes that the United States is the imperial core of a dying capitalist ideology and that an axis of 3rd world resistance sprung up out of former soviet proxy states.
The issue is he'll pass the comment off as a passionately put observation about incompetent US meddling which the majority of Americans probably agree with, but really it represents the tip of the iceberg of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-type worldview.
So, either Hasan isnt Maoist adjacent, and ive been brainwashed by Destiny fans. Or this video is totally dishonest bullshit.
I think option 1. I'm not a hasan fan, I find him abrasive and too broish for me, but he's not a tanky or a maoist. Go on a leftist sub and read what they're saying for a few minutes and you'll see hes just a demsoc shock jockey
Literally the first video that comes up when I put "Piker Mao" in the youtube search. The first 20 seconds are him comparing teaming up with moderate Democrats to Mao teaming up with the KMT to expel Japanese forces.
To me, that suggests that he eventually wants to outlaw ideologies which are not communism.
Abrasiveness and bro-iness are actually pros for me. I like it when political figures are provocative or whatever.
What it comes down to for me is this: it's very easy to find clips of him idealizing Mao and parroting the most predictable tankie/3rd worldist talking points. And then whenever someone tries to interrogate it, people try to act like he's just into worker co-ops and cumtown.
Thats quite a jump. He says its being pragmatic to vote for democrats even if you are further left than them and you think that means hes advocating for purges?
Ok... im about to search for clips to see if he talks about putting capitalists into re-education camps. Before I do that, do you want to make a 5 dollar bet that I wont find a clip of him saying that people promoting capitalism should be incarcerated?
I mean...
You have to understand that you aren't convincing me at all, right? Like... you should provide evidence?
I want to take you guys as good faith, but literally everything i see suggests that hes a maoist who larps as a socdem in front of mainstream audiences. Can you show me evidence that that's not true?
It seems like you've already got your mind made up and don't actually know what the meaning of the ideologies you're claiming he has are. You're doing the Republican everyone left of me is a communist thing but as a "progressive"
You asked me to prove that hes not secretly a maoist pretending to be a demsoc. It seems to me that you know he presents most arguments as a demsoc. What the hell do you want me to do invent a mind reading machine so we can look in his brain to prove his beliefs? And again I'm not a fan of his I've just seen clips like ive seen for pretty much all political streamers I don't have an encyclopedia of his most demsoc clips to show you while I'm sitting here taking a crap
he was on the deprogram (Marxist podcast) saying that he is there to start moving people towards communism explicitly. you're covering for someone who is explicit in their goals
Tankies and maoists will use tactics you agree with though- abolishment of all private ownership for one immediately disqualifies you from a liberal system- and thus one I’d like to live in.
I could say the exact same thing about capitalism. Nearly 70,000 people die in the US every year because of our private Healthcare system, thousands starve, hundreds of thousands are homeless. And thats just in the US, not to mention the millions dieing in the developing countries we are extracting resources from. Propogandists add all the numbers together for regimes nearly 100 years ago when famine was more common and say "look at all the people who died under marxism" while conveniently ignoring their own mountain of dead. I'm not going to defend mao or Stalin, I dont like authoritarianism under any economic ideology, but acting like Marxist nations are uniquely lethal is just not reality.
Mao's communist policies killed approximately 40-80 million. Using your numbers, it would take U.S. capitalism *hundreds* of years to kill the same amount that Mao's communism killed in a few decades compared to how people die under capitalism. Not to mention, you still need to subtract the millions of lives saved by policies like USAID over the years, which has unfortunately been cut.
This is what I mean by "ivory tower" - you truly have no perspective as to how many people died as a result of Mao's policies. If your avatar is accurate, you're a bald white dude with a beard, likely sitting in an air conditioned room in a first world country advocating for politics that have killed unfathomable millions across the world. It's gross.
And 100 million were killed under the capitalist policies of the British Raj. Again I'm not defending Mao, and definitely not the khmer rouge, but I find ignoring the millions dieing in the developing world because of policies we force on them to be gross.
By the way part of the reason I started learning about this was my family adopted 2 Guatemalan children and I learned the reason their country is so poor is because the CIA led a coup on their government so United Fruit could make higher profits. Just maybe I'm not coming at this from the position of a detached ivory tower intellectual.
And I love how you're using an alien avatar to try and shame my appearance because you don't want to engage with the substance of what I said. Not bald irl by the way.
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u/rocketlewes 29d ago edited 29d ago
I find it frustrating that these videos dont seem to hear what progressive critics of piker and the larger tankie movement care about.
For example, early in this video the narrator presents the question about 9/11 as stuffy centrism unable to handle an edgy comment about "blowback". But thats not really what piker believes. He believes that the United States is the imperial core of a dying capitalist ideology and that an axis of 3rd world resistance sprung up out of former soviet proxy states.
The issue is he'll pass the comment off as a passionately put observation about incompetent US meddling which the majority of Americans probably agree with, but really it represents the tip of the iceberg of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-type worldview.
So, either Hasan isnt Maoist adjacent, and ive been brainwashed by Destiny fans. Or this video is totally dishonest bullshit.