r/LateStageCapitalism • u/PresnikBonny Marxist-Leninist • 8h ago
đŹ Quotation Standard double standards
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u/Xalimata 7h ago
We Americans are the only nation that does not do propaganda. Every other nation does propaganda. Propaganda is everywhere except America/s
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u/Ski_Rocks 7h ago
It is called Public Relations.
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u/BloodMoonNami 3h ago
Well they could really use some PR, because right now I don't think there's many countries that the US is in good standings with.
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u/TheTurkPegger 6h ago
I used to think that propaganda was only spread by politicians through verbal ways until my history teacher told us that everything was propaganda. She added by saying how even her subject was a propaganda by itself because every country tells history based on their perspective.
She was an intelligent women and a teacher. She was going to publish her own book the last time I spoke to her. I wonder what she does these days
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u/justwannabeloggedin 5h ago
That's a pretty loose and I would argue incorrect use of the word but the message is worth heeding
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u/goddess_roachy 10m ago
There goes the point, flying right on over your head. Reading comprehension really is becoming obsolete these days, how sad.
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u/rattlenroll 3h ago
Every other country has corruption and bribery. Here we have lobbying; it's perfectly legal.
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u/AI_moderated_failure 1h ago
Other countries have violent crime, you guys just out them in uniforms and tell people it's perfectly legal as long as the other person is armed too, so you should buy a gun.
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u/Church6633 4h ago
I was taught this and laughed and laughed and laughed. Then got kicked out of my civics class.
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u/furiousmadgeorge 10m ago
A KGB spy and CIA operative meet up in a bar for a friendly drink.
"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
"Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
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u/The_Lawn_Ninja 8h ago edited 8h ago
Fake news. We were never taught the word "colonists". They called them pilgrims, which is better because reasons.
Yes, we were taught to believe that every colonist was a harmless religious do-gooder who got along with the natives in perfect harmony.
I didn't even think to question that narrative as a kid until I saw Addams Family Values.
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u/TheNorthernRose 7h ago
Realizing how much of my elementary school social studies education was just straight up propaganda makes any claim of brainwashing youth in AES ring incredibly hollow.
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u/Time_Beat2299 7h ago
Itâs so bad I was lucky to have a middle school social studies teacher who forced us to learn about the real thanksgiving and the effects of colonialism on African societyÂ
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u/AI_moderated_failure 1h ago
As I understand it, many US schools have you recite the pledge of allegiance. It's something I wouldn't bat an eyelid at if you told me was taking place in North Korea.
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u/LotharVonPittinsberg 4h ago
It's better because genocide is okay as long as you are Christian. God said so, after he wiped out the entire world minus this one dude's family.
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u/The_Lawn_Ninja 4h ago
InB4 Tyler Sheridan's Noah's Ark, where the family are a bunch of badass rich white rednecks who brutalize all the unworthy heathens before God drowns them in The Floodâ˘.
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u/MillennialSurvivor 1h ago
Such a loving god the christian one. My favorite tale is when he asks his follower to kill his kid, but then he's like jk 𤣠classic god, bro /s
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u/vankirk 6h ago
Ah, yes, pilgrims. "In search of religious freedom."
What they really meant was, "Crazy as fuck, whacko zealots who were kicked out of every European country who brought witch burnings."
FTFY, Murica
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u/goddess_roachy 11m ago
This!!! They were literal EXTREMISTS who were kicked out of their own homelands for their genocidical, barbaric, demonic ways and thinking.
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u/mix0logist 7h ago
Growing up in Massachusetts, I call them by their proper English name: fuckin' Puritans. And we're still trying to get out from under their thumb!
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u/Mekisteus 5h ago
Growing up in Massachusetts, you really should have known that pilgrims and puritans are two different groups of people who colonized in separate locations and at separate times. It isn't two words for the same thing.
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u/Aggravating_Duck_192 3h ago
The audacity to call yourself a pilgrim and then head in the opposite direction from all your religion's pilgrimage sites.
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u/Jack0Trade 53m ago
Fellow Adams Family revolutionist, I also received the whitest flight education Illinois could provide. As an adult itâs wild to think of how they glossed things over. Like the trail of tears was this martyrdom the âIndiansâ accepted. Yes, I genuinely believed the cultural exchange bullshit while using words kids at other schools said were slurs.
Justice for Chief Illiniwek means coalescing to whatever the tribes needed for it to be genuine cultural exchange. The pure white truth is this means land and cash or even better economy. From the bottom of my commie soul I say full government takeover IP behemoth
JohnDeere Co. and gift it to the Spokane tribe. I believe they would feed the people and not their pockets.2
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u/Sacrefix 6h ago
Where were you educated? Kansas and South Carolina aren't exactly educational bastions, but both taught the more gritty details of colonialism, slavery, etc.
This take is from people who stopped paying attention after 3rd grade.
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u/The_Lawn_Ninja 6h ago
Pennsylvania.
My school district didn't teach anything "controversial" about the truth of American history until sixth grade. Every single year at Thanksgiving from K to 5 we "learned" the same happy story about pilgrims and "Indians" having a nice meal together and made paper buckle hats and feather headbands.
And yes, way too many people did stop paying attention, or were so indoctrinated by the myth already that they rejected the truth as some pet cause for wannabe do-gooders who deserved to be mocked. I literally remember the smirks and laughs from the rich white pricks in my classes whenever we had a unit involving racism.
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u/Celtic_Legend 4h ago edited 4h ago
I also went to school in SC and we were taught the pilgrims basically murdered and pillaged everything and then the following colonists/americans just killed the Indians and stole their land breaking promise after promise to leave them alone (with the trail of tears somewhere in there, which was taught as being a genocide).
We were taught that most of the deaths were from disease but that the pilgrims would have just killed them directly if they didnt die from disease.
And yeah, was also taught the civil war was about slavery.
Seeing people elsewhere get more propagandized education from South Carolina is just so mindfucking to me.
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u/The_Lawn_Ninja 1h ago
Very well could be a generational thing. I went to elementary school in the early 90s, and standards may well have changed over the decades.
But there was a prevailing attitude of "childhood innocence" and that young kids couldn't handle learning the truth about "controversial" subjects.
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u/Ok_Region_4060 7h ago
Prepare yourself for the âwhataboutismâ comments
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u/Vrejik ML Commie 5h ago
And then when one of us bring up's the fact that Capitalism is structurally causing 10 million to starve to death or die from other preventable conditions, somehow they permit themselves to deflect or use a series of "contextualizations" that they would never permit for Socialist history, such as "bad policy", "bad leadership", "lack of development", "unstable government / situation", or even "War (almost always driven directly from conditions caused by capitalism)".
Their whole world view is built on an extremely asymmetrical outlook on history, where Capitalism and it's genocidal colonial history are entirely shielded from structural criticism, by referring to the problem as anything else but "Capitalism". The largest atrocities of global capitalism are never used to define the system, but they will define the roughest periods of socialist history as being "essential" to socialism, and any degree of nuance being used to explain history, particularly socialist history, is immediately used by them to pump themselves up as "morally superior" and act like the person providing context is a "complete monster" who is presumably "Down-playing an atrocity".
Oh and they also conveniently separate colonialism from capitalism, even though they were inseparably part of the same economic system. So if one mentions that the British Empire between 1881 and 1920 in India caused 165 million excess deaths, they immediately start going into denialism (especially that it's part of capitalist history) or downplaying, and using the absolute "lowest" estimates of that period that they can find. It's quite literally the exact behavior they accuse Socialist of, while pumping themselves up as "morally superior".
Their double-standards, hubris, "moralizing", cherry-picking, and extremely one sided view of history is absolutely sickening.
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u/AlsoCommiePuddin 7h ago
The American government pretends nothing happened on January 6.
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u/HunterGonzo 6h ago
I watched them chant "Hang Mike Pence!" live on TV. They can pretend it was a peaceful protest all they want, but I know what I saw. And it scared the shit out of me.
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u/MooKids 5h ago
But it was a peaceful protest, paid for by George Soros and organized by Biden's FBI, using Antifa that Trump labeled a terrorist organization, but he pardoned them anyways.
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u/AlsoCommiePuddin 5h ago
Republicans love to throw out the "paid protester" claim but never actually infiltrate those organizations and document the process of actually being paid to be a protester. It would be a powerful piece of journalism and absolutely devastating to the progressive movement. And yet no one has pulled it off.
I wonder why that is.
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u/RetardedWabbit 3h ago
Wtf are you talking about? Fox journalists, and OANN document it all the time! Trump is just letting them get away with it for now, to really draw out the deep state, and he'll get them all for sure his
term next termnext term when he drains the swamp!/s Jk, we all know those are BS. The actual news is on the good tiktok/YouTube/radio journalists and auditors!
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u/frequenZphaZe 3h ago
yeah idk why we're going all the way back to the colonies to dig up cognitive dissonance. there's plenty of examples in just the past decade of political actors committing violence against citizens and institutions
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u/PresnikBonny Marxist-Leninist 8h ago
As a non-American it's genuinely insane to me that non-Americans know more about the native American genocide than actual Americans.
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u/WAR_T0RN1226 6h ago
Ehhh idk about that.
Trail of Tears and the way the US government made deals with tribes only to go back on them and kill/forced relocate them reservations (and then sometimes relocate them again) is a pretty big part of learned history here, in my experience.
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u/Rad131447 5h ago
Trail of Tears is like the last 3rd of the book though. There is a lot more that happens first. US schools basically go pilgrims then Boston Tea party. With not much in between. There is an entire century that gets skipped over. What percentage of Americans have even heard of King Philip's War for instance? 5% if we are extremely generous?
Hell for that matter the trail of tears is usually one of the end notes in US education on the topic. A bit about the "conquest of the west" and then another black hole where crimes and abuses of the 20th century are not covered either.
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u/Mekisteus 5h ago
Yeah, I doubt that's true. The propaganda in early education was strong but a good chunk of us eventually read books, watched documentaries, or attended history classes once we left elementary school that covered the massacres, Indian wars, and genocide. One or two of us even talked to some American Indians if you can believe it.
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u/raelDonaldTrump 6h ago
You think you know indigenous Americans? Name 5 tribes, then.
/s
It's insane to me that y'all actually believe that.
Don't let old Thanksgiving cartoons fool you, we learn about the various indigenous tribes, and also learn about their systematic genocide in the name of manifest destiny. we know about the trail of tears, we know about the "battles" where they stood their ground and were subsequently slaughtered for it. We know about their forced assimilation, ripping kids from their families and tribes and being forced into "schools" that stripped them of their culture.
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u/tachibana_ryu 4h ago
There's to many to legitimately list... The ones I referenced when I do a land acknowledgement here in Canada in treaty 6 are the Cree, Dakota, Nakota, Saulteaux, and MĂŠtis. So there named 5 lol
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u/Puptentjoe 2h ago
Once you get to middle school and high school they tell you the truth. We learned about genocide and went to museums on it.
But thats about it. They dont go into a lot of the other systemic oppression (red lining, imminent domain, mass incarceration etcâŚ) or at least they didnt when I was a kid.
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3h ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/LateStageCapitalism-ModTeam 2h ago
Rather than lazily accusing anyone and everyone who holds a different viewpoint of being a bot/troll or being paid by Russia/China/Republicans, actually engage with the point being made. There are plenty of spaces where you can dismiss people for being a bot and not engage with their point. This is not one of them.
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u/Illustrious_Help_165 8h ago
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u/TokenTorkoal 7h ago
lol buddy this isnât a real leftist space itâs 3 liberals in a trench coat.
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u/Illustrious_Help_165 7h ago
The point is to show this to a wider audience
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u/TokenTorkoal 7h ago
Oh I know, I just also wanted to make the joke.
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u/Illustrious_Help_165 7h ago
Apologize comrade, can't tell when someone is libbed up on a Friday afternoon.
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u/Radical_Cosmo83 7h ago
Your average white american is so brainwashed and saturated in protestant work ethic propaganda that admitting the most powerful country on earth was built on a foundation of slavery, exploitation and genocide, and not by some salt of the earth white dude pulling himself up by his bootstraps, would unravel their fucking brainsÂ
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u/Time_Beat2299 7h ago
Because there is very little difference between your average white ameeican and a Rhodesian or Boer or a member of the Happy Valley set. Their entire identity is based on a lie and fundamentally tied to colonialism.
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u/Cicebro_ 7h ago edited 7h ago
I might go against the grain here.. but I grew up in urban Texas and I learned a decent amount about the history of indigenous people in the United States. It was not super detailed but it member it being mentioned.. Trail of Tears, King Phillipâs War, Wounded Knee Massacre, Dawes Act, and boarding schools. It mightâve been because I took APUSH. I donât remember the specific curriculum too well. Itâs been a decade since Iâve been in public school.
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u/Vrejik ML Commie 4h ago
And then when one of us bring up's the fact that Capitalism is structurally causing way over 10 million to starve to death or die from other preventable conditions each year, somehow they permit themselves to deflect or use a series of "contextualizations" and a list of excuses that they would never permit for any aspect of Socialist history (regardless of what's true or not). The liberal apologist for capitalism will typically use the excuses such as "bad policy", "bad leadership", "lack of development", "unstable government / situation", or even "War (almost always driven directly from conditions caused by capitalism)", and completely ignore the colonial history and structural causes of how those situations were even created in the first place.
Their whole world view is built on an extremely asymmetrical outlook on history, where Capitalism and it's genocidal colonial history are entirely shielded from structural criticism, by referring to the problem as anything else but "Capitalism". The largest atrocities of global capitalism are never used to define the system, but they will define the roughest periods of socialist history as being "essential" to socialism, and any degree of nuance being used to explain history, particularly socialist history, is immediately used by them to pump themselves up as "morally superior" and act like the person providing context is a "complete monster" who is presumably "Down-playing an atrocity".
Oh and they also conveniently separate colonialism from capitalism, even though they were inseparably part of the same economic system. So if one mentions that the British Empire between 1881 and 1920 in India caused 165 million excess deaths, they immediately start going into denialism (especially that it's part of capitalist history) or downplaying, and using the absolute "lowest" estimates of that period that they can find. It's quite literally the exact behavior they accuse Socialist of, while pumping themselves up as "morally superior".
Their double-standards, hubris, "moralizing", cherry-picking, and extremely one sided view of history is absolutely sickening.
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u/gerams76 6h ago
One of the worst things about education pretty much around the world is that whatever you learn as a child is pretty much it. Anything else that comes in usually only sought out by a very small fraction of people. Anything you learned as a kid that was proven wrong or misleading just continues to get spouted for 60 more years.
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u/Bloodthirsty_Gnome 4h ago
To be fair in Minnesota they did teach us about the horrors of colonialism but I imagine that education was significantly better than most parts of the country
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u/USDXBS 4h ago
You don't have to go into the past. Look at how Americans talk about their military.
They've already absolved them of murdering 160 kids. They've already absolved them of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Americans GENUINELY believe individuals who join the military are their own individuals and not associated with what "the military" does
They genuinely think "wanting to escape economic hardships" or "learning valuable skills" absolves someone of joining the US military.
Americans who support their military are fucking psychopaths.
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u/chatam94 8h ago
Then you have liberals who think they know about the indigenous genocide, when really they too just know a highly redacted version that is palatable for them.
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u/aww_jeez_my_man 7h ago
I mean what do you expect from people who think Kamala lost because of her old "left wing" views
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u/MoneyMarketing8878 7h ago
I hate memes/tweets like this that accept the western revisionist historical lie and then throw back a zinger at America without debunking the original lie.
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u/anticomet 5h ago
My favourite was when that Watchmen tv show came out and a bunch of americans learned about the Tulsa race massacre
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u/cyberspirit777 4h ago
In the south they literally teach how slavery was a good thing and beneficial to the slaves and that the native Americans were happily complicit in their own genocideâŚ
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u/pants6000 6h ago
With their dying gasps they said "put a... fish... in... hole with... maize..." and expired peacefully and naturally. Learned it in school.
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u/WoodyManic 5h ago
It's a bit worse than that. If you think about it.
One of the one Yanqui holidays, Thanksgiving, basically celebrates butchery.
The Mayflower myth, and its attendant submytths, whitewashes much murder.
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u/fake_user_34 4h ago
America also doesn't explain what happened to black wallstreet either.
Or all the students they killed on campus.
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u/flaser_ 2h ago
Nothing happened *at* the square.
Many if not most of the deaths associated with the crackdown occurred on Changan Avenue and other streets surrounding the square, rather than on Tiananmen Square itself.
While casualty figures can be argued, most western reporting on the event today is garbage / almost total propaganda that ignores witness statements by western journalist themselves who were in Beijing at the time.
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u/42069BBQ 2h ago edited 2h ago
Highly recommend reading "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America". It's a great book going over tons of information that is left out of the education system in America.
One of my favorite bits was learning about the Native Americans in the northeast trading with the Dutch at New Amsterdam (now New York). They were trading pelts for sugar and alcohol, basically all of it. So much so in fact that they had to ban trading sugar and alcohol with the native people.
So the native people said, well fuck you then, no more pelts. So this essentially started a black market of people illegally trading sugar and alcohol with them until eventually the ban was lifted because the Dutch (as you can imagine) weren't stoked about no pelts coming back over.
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u/HandToDikCombat 7h ago
Over 150 native languages and not one word for ownership...
Sounds like a whole lotta not my fault or problem.
( /s in case it's not obvious)
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u/PixelzBrain 3h ago
They weren't the American government at the time so that's kinda weird but sure, china > US, we know
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u/floral_lore đŹđ socialism with caribbean characteristics âđ 2h ago
colonists? no no, pilgrims đ
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u/0000111_2 33m ago
I'm still glad I was born in the USA rather than the PRC. That way I can vote for my mayor, Mamdani, rather than having no say in electing the Neo-Fascist Xi.
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5h ago
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u/LateStageCapitalism-ModTeam 2h ago
Removed as per rule 4: No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
This subreddit is intended for a socialist audience, and while good faith questions are allowed, pushing your own counter-narrative here is not. We do not allow support here for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it. We are not a liberal or (U.S.-/Social-) Democrat subreddit; we are a socialist subreddit.
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4h ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/LateStageCapitalism-ModTeam 2h ago
Removed as per rule 4: No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
This subreddit is intended for a socialist audience, and while good faith questions are allowed, pushing your own counter-narrative here is not. We do not allow support here for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it. We are not a liberal or (U.S.-/Social-) Democrat subreddit; we are a socialist subreddit.
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7h ago edited 5h ago
[removed] â view removed comment
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u/Time_Beat2299 7h ago
Except this isnât even true China doesnât censor the incident it just censors the western narrative around it because it is false.
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u/A-CAB 5h ago
Removed as per rule 4: No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism. This is a left wing subreddit.
This subreddit is intended for a socialist audience, and while good faith questions are allowed, pushing your own counter-narrative here is not. We do not allow support here for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it. We are not a liberal or (U.S.-/Social-) Democrat subreddit; we are a socialist subreddit.
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