I do like it when otherwise quite serious people break from their carefully studied analysis and start going like "God, I fucking hate that guy, he's such a clown." Very nice to see thinkers and authors in the West who don't have weird brainworms where they have to both-sides everything, and they just outwardly say that NATO is the imperialist force against Russia and resistance against Israel is perfectly justified. With these kinds of white academics, I'm increasingly hating having to go through the five-minute tedium of "What Hamas did was atrocious. Worst thing I've ever seen. Nobody is justifying that, I'm not justifying it. It was horrific, it was atrocious, over a thousand people were killed..." and the same thing with Russia, before they actually get to talking about the genocide which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in one of the most brutal ways possible. Very glad to see that Gabriel doesn't see any need to do that song and dance.

I'm also getting very tired of the two poles of the argument being "Palestine/the Resistance is being destroyed and that's good" in the imperialist West and "Palestine/the Resistance is being destroyed and that's bad" among the left-wing Western intelligentsia. It tends to be people actually in the Middle East who have been studying the situation in-depth for decades who are like "Many people are dying but the Resistance is winning, actually." Like Amal Saad, for example. They don't ignore the problems that the Resistance faces, but they're actually observing Palestine and Lebanon and Yemen and Syria and Iraq fighting back and including that in their analysis and predictions, rather than the very meek, semi-defeatist words that are coming out of several Western thinkers where they never even seem to mention the Resistance as a serious entity, they only talk about the civilian casualties and talking about the failing diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire. Which is better than not doing that at all, as most Western media doesn't, but there should be higher standards.

The talk itself was good too, of course. I liked the part where he's talking about Stalin and how what he did makes a lot of sense in the context he was dealing with (every developed country on the planet fucking HATING the USSR and wishing for its immediate destruction, and Russia being a feudal backwater that needed to do in 10 years what Europe and America did in 100, with all the massive problems that causes). And that it's bad history, bad politics, and bad analysis to remove Stalin from that context and judge him as if he was in a situation where there were no threats at all and everything was sunshine and rainbows, and he was just an evil authoritarian who liked causing suffering.

Having moral judgements about historical events is fine, but only once there's a good understanding of what the actual conditions were and what constraints people and parties were under that would have prevented them from acting perfectly and with perfect information. We should deal with hypotheticals as little as possible in that regard, only offering genuinely practical advice. No "well, China shouldn't have reformed and opened up under Deng because it would have kept the communist project purer despite all the hardship," we should try and understand why Deng and the party did what it did, what successes they had, what errors they made, and learn and improve on it. A philosophy of genuinely trying to learn and improve will help prepare us for the mistakes - BIG mistakes! - that Western left parties will inevitably make (just as Mao and Stalin made big mistakes) as the imperial core weakens over the coming decades.

He absolutely nailed slavoj zizek and his actual role