You really witness the inhumanity of Western imperialism, that was then replayed in every first contact with the West since the 1500s, being first expressed through the period of early Spanish settler-colonialism. And you see the inability of those they encountered in grasping the refusal of Western chauvinism to ever see them as human equals.

You see it in Montezuma welcoming the armed Spanish conquistadors to the Aztec capital; you then see it with Lin Zexu's letter to Britain's inbred Victoria (which she never read) appealing to her "better virtues" to stop the opium trade right on the eve of the First Opium War; you see its modern reincarnation with Gorbachev betraying the entirety of Europe's actually existing socialism with his delusion of a "Common European Home" and his weepy need for approval and "friendship" from Reagan, H.W. Bush, Thatcher and Kohl, an especially reactionary generation of mediocre Western leadership that had been utter domestic policy failures, which he then elevated into the history books through the credit they took for the capitalist restoration of Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Because English language academic "scholarship" on the extermination of the Aztec state are obsessed with getting the "conquistador" perspective and revisionist apologia, same as every other Western historical atrocity, to treat historical figures like Cortes "with more nuance," the best history on the subject likely remains Miguel León-Portilla's 1962 "Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico," a compilation of Aztec primary source documents.

In the Aztec account, first contact between the Aztecs and the Spanish in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan begins like this:

When Motecuhzoma had given necklaces to each one, Cortes asked him: “Are you Motecuhzoma? Are you the king? Is it true that you are the king Motecuhzoma?” And the king said: “Yes, I am Motecuhzoma.” Then he stood up to welcome Cortes; he came forward, bowed his head low and addressed him in these words: “Our lord, you are weary. The journey has tired you, but now you have arrived on the earth. You have come to your city, Mexico. You have come here to sit on your throne, to sit under its canopy. [...] You have come back to us; you have come down from the sky. Rest now, and take possession of your royal houses. Welcome to your land, my lords!”

When Motecuhzoma had finished, La Malinche translated his address into Spanish so that the Captain could understand it. Cortes replied in his strange and savage tongue, speaking first to La Malinche: “Tell Motecuhzoma that we are his friends. There is nothing to fear. We have wanted to see him for a long time, and now we have seen his face and heard his words. Tell him that we love him well and that our hearts are contented.” Then he said to Motecuhzoma: “We have come to your house in Mexico as friends. There is nothing to fear.” La Malinche translated this speech and the Spaniards grasped Motecuhzomas hands and patted his back to show their affection for him. [...] When the Spaniards entered the Royal House, they placed Motecuhzoma under guard and kept him under their vigilance.

After the Spanish place Montezuma under house arrest in his own palace, a festival leads to a massacre:

[...] Motecuhzoma said to La Malinche: “Please ask the god to hear me. It is almost time to celebrate the fiesta of Tox- catl. It will last for only ten days, and we beg his permission to hold it. We merely burn some incense and dance our dances. There will be a little noise because of the music, but that is all.” The Captain said: “Very well, tell him they may hold it.” Then he left the city to meet another force of Spaniards who were marching in this direction. Pedro de Alvarado, called The Sun, was in command during his absence.

Then Tecatzin, the chief of the armory, said: “Please remind the lord that he is here, not in Cholula. You know how they trapped the Cholultecas in their patio! They have already caused us enough trouble. We should hide our weapons close at hand!” But Motecuhzoma said: “Are we at war with them? I tell you, we can trust them.” Tecatzin said: “Very well.”

Then the songs and dances began. A young captain wearing a lip plug guided the dancers; he was Cuatlazol, from Tolnahuac. But the songs had hardly begun when the Christians came out of the palace. They entered the patio and stationed four guards at each entrance. Then they attacked the captain who was guiding the dance. One of the Spaniards struck the idol in the face, and others attacked the three men who were playing the drums. After that there was a general slaughter until the patio was heaped with corpses. A priest from the Place of the Canefields5 cried out in a loud voice: “Mexicanos! Who said we are not at war? Who said we could trust them?” The Mexicans could only fight back with sticks of wood; they were cut to pieces by the swords. Finally the Spaniards retired to the palace where they were lodged.

Another account of the Fiesta of Toxatl Massacre:

At this moment in the fiesta, when the dance was loveliest and when song was linked to song, the Spaniards were siezed with an urge to kill the celebrants. They all ran forward, armed as if for battle. They closed the entrances and passageways, all the gates of the patio: the Eagle Gate in the lesser palace, the Gate of the Canestalk and the Gate of the Serpent of Mirrors. They posted guards so that no one could escape, and then rushed into the Sacred Patio to slaughter the celebrants. They came on foot, carrying their swords and their wooden or metal shields. They ran in among the dancers, forcing their way to the place where the drums were played. They attacked the man who was drumming and cut off his arms. Then they cut off his head, and it rolled across the floor.

They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them, striking them with their swords. They attacked some of them from behind, and these fell instantly to the ground with their entrails hanging out. Others they beheaded: they cut off their heads, or split their heads to pieces. They struck others in the shoulders, and their arms were torn from their bodies. They wounded some in the thigh and some in the calf. They slashed others in the abdomen, and their entrails all spilled to the ground. Some attempted to run away, but their intestines dragged as they ran; they seemed to tangle their feet in their own entrails. No matter how they tried to save themselves, they could find no escape.

Some attempted to force their way out, but the Spaniards murdered them at the gates. Others climbed the walls, but they could not save themselves. Those who ran into the communal houses were safe there for a while; so were those who lay down among the victims and pretended to be dead. But if they stood up again, the Spaniards saw them and killed them.

The blood of the warriors flowed like water and gathered into pools. The pools widened, and the stench of blood and entrails filled the air. The Spaniards ran into the communal houses to kill those who were hiding. They ran everywhere and searched everywhere; they invaded every room, hunting and killing.

After this moment, the Aztecs unite and retaliate, driving the Spanish out of the city. In a pathetic historiographical display of playing the victim card, the Spanish-dominated historical record calls this eviction "la Noche Triste" or "the Night of Sorrows." They later return to put the city under siege and this leads to the fall of Tenochtitlan:

The Spanish blockade caused great anguish in the city. The people were tormented by hunger, and many starved to death. There was no fresh water to drink, only stagnant water and the brine of the lake, and many people died of dysentery. The only food was lizards, swallows, corncobs and the salt grasses of the lake. The people also ate water lilies and the seeds of the colorin, and chewed on deerhides and pieces of leather. They roasted and seared and scorched whatever they could find and then ate it. They ate the bitterest weeds and even dirt. Nothing can compare with the horrors of that siege and the agonies of the starving. We were so weakened by hunger that, little by little, the enemy forced us to retreat. Little by little they forced us to the wall.

After the Spanish colonial regime is established, one indigenous leader rebuilds on the land left to his people:

I remember, I will establish a little temple where we will place the new god that the men from Castile have given us. Truly this new god wants us to worship him. What will we do, my sons? Let us receive the water on our heads [be baptized], let us give ourselves to the men of Castile, perhaps in this way they will not kill us.

Let us remain here. Do not trespass [by] going on another’s land, perhaps in this way they will not kill us. Let us follow them; thus, perhaps we will awaken their compassion. It will be good if we surrender entirely to them. Oh, that the true god who resides in heaven will help us [coexist] close to the men of Castile.

And in order that they will not kill us, we will not claim all our lands. We will reduce in length the extension of our lands, and that which remains, our fathers will defend.

Now I declare that, in order for them not to kill us, . . . we accept to have water poured on our heads, that we worship the new god, as I declare he is the same as the one we had.

Now I reduce in length our lands. Thus it will be. Their limits will begin in the direction from which the sun rises and continue . . . [he mentions each of the limits].

I presume that for this small piece of land they will not kill us. It does not matter that it was much larger. This is my decision because I do not want my sons to be killed.

Therefore, we will work only this little piece of land, and thus our sons will do so. Let us hope in this manner they will not kill us. ...

The result is that beyond the works of Grover Furr and Domenico Losurdo’s “Making of a Black Legend," there are virtually no widespread English literature that portrays Stalin in a positive light. When even the USSR adopted the position of denouncing Stalin following Khrushchev, there was no opportunity for works that positively portray Stalin to be published. If you were an anticommunist, you were against Stalin. If you supported the USSR, you accepted their narrative about Stalina and thus you were also against Stalin. Only a few principled Marxist-Leninists denounced anticommunism and stood by Stalin’s side, but they were deeply marginalized with no institutional publishers to support their writings and this ideological isolation led many of them to become ultra-leftists. It also means that any history of the Stalin period, including all coverage of Soviet feats in WWII, is inescapably covered with tedious tirades against "Stalinism" in every second paragraph. As Keeran and Kenny write:

Among many friends of the Soviet Union an un-examined assumption grew that, after Stalin, the USSR was perfecting socialism. Khrushchev was better than Stalin. Gorbachev was better than Brezhnev. With the rare exceptions of Isaac Deutscher and Ken Cameron, few attempted to deal with the Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev periods in a critical but balanced way. Particularly in the case of Stalin, Soviet supporters gave up the effort of an overall assessment, perhaps because of its inherent difficulty, perhaps because such an effort could have no possible payoff, or perhaps because of an assumption that Soviet progress would make Stalin a historical anomaly of diminishing importance. The enemies of the Soviet Union readily filled this vacuum with shelves of books portraying Stalin as a monster or a madman. These caricatures in turn influenced the views of Communists whose only knowledge of the Stalin period was second hand.

Compare this to Deng’s formulation of 70%/30% for Mao, which he borrowed from Mao’s own profound 70%/30% formulation for Stalin. The trick was not to claim that Stalin was faultless and without blame: he made mistakes and as shown above, many in the Comintern thought those mistakes were fairly sizeable. Claiming Stalin was 100% right would have been laughably dogmatic and would have sounded insincere to those who thought they knew better. 70% right and 30% wrong was the perfect balance: Stalin saved the USSR from Hitler’s genocidal lebenstraum and his leadership led to the indisputable (until today) role of the USSR as the primary contributor to the defeat of Hitler-fascism and the liberation of Europe and his faults, no matter how large they seemed to anticommunist freaks, were dwarfed by this shadow. 30% is not too high as to compete with his achievements but not too low as to dismiss his faults either. This is the principled line that should have been adopted with Stalin and was adopted for Mao. As such, Chinese people can cognitively accept the idea of Mao’s faults without having their entire worldview shaken like what happened with Soviet people and global leftists following the 20th Congress, who the USSR itself stripped them of their weapons to defend against anticommunist propaganda.

This is how, despite all the same copycat anticommunist propaganda barrage against Mao and all the Ivy League and Oxbridge University Presses printing out endless slop attacking Mao about his “great famine” and the “tragedy” of China’s liberation, they’ve ended up screaming into the void because the CPC maintained the achievements of Mao, allowing for a coherent historical narrative that has the strength to reject Western propaganda assault. This is why the modern Western academic line of attack on China is to promote “historical nihilism,” which is basically begging Chinese people to be “nihilistic” and forget the entire coherent historical narrative they are taught and accept the West’s anticommunist revisionist propaganda instead. With the USSR, there can be surgical strikes on Stalin himself. With China, the only option to to slam impotently against the wall of China’s own history to try and get at Mao.

Mao’s portrait still hangs proudly in Tiananmen and up to this day, Western Marxist-Leninist authors still often publish positive historical accounts of Mao and many leftist movements that distance themselves from modern China itself like the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, Communist Party of the Philipines and Communist Party of India (Maoist) still nonetheless proudly call themselves Maoist parties. Through them, the term “Maoist" is a (chauvinistic) source of pride, distinguishing themselves and their “correct ideological stance” from normal Marxist-Leninists. The term "Stalinist,” however, through the disintegration of a counter-narrative, has been entirely appropriated by anticommunists as a slur.

Beyond the power struggles within the CPSU that allowed Khruschev to consolidate his position, the main reason why he was “allowed” to get away with de-Stalinization is because of his abuse of trust. It’s the same thing with Gorbachev later, really, but especially so during Khruschev’s time. Both Soviet citizens and leftists around the world trusted the USSR in the 1950s. They recognized the heroic struggle and undeniable contribution of the USSR and its people in the war against fascism. They saw the blatant persecution and censorship against the left in the Western world following the ousting of Wallace in the 1944 Democratic convention and Truman’s coup as FDR’s successor. They trusted the CPSU to do the right thing.

There were, in essence, two camps in the left before the 20th CPSU Congress: those that had grievances with Stalin and initially saw some criticism of Stalin as not necessarily unwelcome until they later realized over time how far Khrushchev took it and the fallout; those that deeply admired Stalin and thus transitively trusted the CPSU which he led and built, meaning that when the CPSU under Khrushchev turned against Stalin himself, the latter group was completely paralyzed and didn’t know how to respond.

Many leading parties in the Comintern belonged to the first camp. Stalin completely alienated the Yugoslavs through his overreaction to Tito’s attempt at market socialism. The Communist Parties that fell into the Western NATO sphere of influence felt betrayed, especially Italy’s CPI and Greece’s KKE, over his abandonment of them through Stalin’s fears of provoking a WWIII. Stalin may have been right and the USSR deserved peace, but being right had its consequences as well for the Italians who he advised to hand over their arms to the soon-to-be NATO regime and his feuding with Tito which allowed the reactionaries to defeat the KKE in the Greek Civil War. Churchill claimed that he settled the division of Europe and the surrender of Greece with Stalin through a simple five minute chat and officiated with a napkin agreement.

The CPC themselves initially did not denounce Khrushchev because Stalin deeply let down the party through his advice in the 1920s of demanding the CPC to subordinate themselves to the KMT, which led to the 1927 massacre and purge by the fascist Chiang once he took over the KMT. Stalin also deeply distrusted the CPC following 1949 and thought they were a nationalist force and a “fake revolution,” a denial of socialist comradery which was deeply insulting to all the CPC’s heroic first generation like Mao, Zhou Enlai and Deng that fought off the Japanese and liberated China from the KMT. To his credit, Stalin was a man of principled integrity and when he was proven wrong after seeing the Chinese People’s Volunteers rescue the DPRK, he completely corrected course and apparently never again disagreed with Mao on the handling of the Korean War again, even to the point of always siding with Mao against Kim Il-Sung.

Also importantly, like Caligula in the Julian-Claudian dynasty of imperial Rome, Khruschev’s early years were seen as a “honeymoon” period. The SED in the DDR also chafed under Stalin because while they understood and agreed with the necessity and righteousness of German reparations to the USSR, the fracture of Germany meant that the DDR was forced to foot the entire reparations bill. The USSR absolutely deserved reparations but this forced the DDR into a catastrophic lose-lose “catch-22.” As the least developed region of the old Germany and only half the size of the BRD, the DDR was already in an imbalance with the Wessis. With the US sponsoring the Marshall Plan (which contemporaries largely only saw for its "benevolent" face value and failed to see as the self-serving financial imperialism it really was), the reparations to the USSR meant that the DDR-BRD economic dichotomy went from the DDR stagnating-BRD improving to DDR worsening-BRD improving. This later led to the material disparity and population flight that then forced the SED to construct the Berlin Wall. Khruschev annulled the reparations and this was widely appreciated in the DDR. With the CPC, he further extended Soviet aid to China meaning that his early years were the height of the Sino-Soviet alliance and this furthered the CPC’s hesitation at instantly denouncing Khrushchev.

This was the camp in the left that initially tolerated the criticism of Stalin. The other camp, those that trusted Stalin and the CPSU, were for the most part too completely stunned, when the latter turned on the former, to denounce Khrushchev. At "best," this led to simply rejection of Stalin and a swerve towards following Khrushchev. At worst, this led to complete disillusionment with the entire socialist cause. How this occurred is best exemplied from the story of Eva Kaufmann, a SED party member, and her reaction to the 20th Congress as a youth in the FDJ, the Communist youth organization in the DDR.

"People who thought like me had no doubts that the new order was a good thing, so when I heard from a friend who wrote to me from West Germany that there were camps in the Soviet Union and people were being murdered, I said to myself, “That’s propaganda, it’s simply lies.” Then when the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU revealed the atrocities, it was a terrible shock, even through the reports about the terrible number of victims were not very clear. We were allowed to listen to Khruschev’s secret speech which was read out to us and it was clear to me that what was now being revealed would mean a very deep crisis for the whole communist movement for the socialist countries."

The Twentieth Congress abused the trust of people in the institution of the CPSU to then destroy their trust in Stalin. As a consequence, they felt betrayed not only by Stalin but also the CPSU which had “hidden” his actions prior to the revelations. This had immense consequences through its inescapable logical conclusion: if even Stalin, who led the USSR to become the principal force that defeated fascism and liberated Eastern Europe, did all these things, then all future socialist leaders could also have the potential to turn out to be “criminals.” No one could trust the motives of any socialist leadership if they accepted the narrative of the 20th Congress that Khruschev put out, since Stalin “got away with it” during his own time and it was only through the voluntary disclosure of his successor that allowed “the truth to come to light.” This led to a damnation of any socialist leadership that was unfalsifiable and the sustained rise of the chauvinistic and smug Euro-“Communism."

As Kaufmann’s story also showed, Khruschev’s betrayal also legitimized anticommunist Western propaganda. Leftists were used to the propaganda barrage against the socialist cause and against the USSR and had generally learned to dismiss it. Because the most openly anticommunist regime was the fascist reich, the revelation of its own atrocities after WWII thus transitively debunked all anticommunist and anti-USSR narratives as propaganda in the eyes of most leftists. As Kaufmann shows, this allowed a cognitive dismissal of all subsequent anticommunist propaganda as the Cold War began. For the CPSU to reveal that not only did Stalin do wrong things but criminal things beyond even what Western propaganda alleged then legitimized anticommunist sources of information from the West. This led to blowback against the USSR and led to the schism between Khruschev himself and Western leftism after the 1956 intervention in Hungary because Western leftists felt compelled to question Khruschev’s rationale and bought the shrill Western narratives that the Hungarian reactionaries were mere “reformers.”

In the socialist world itself, many people were utterly disillusioned and lost their trust in authorities entirely. Nearly all the dissidents, reactionaries and soc-dem “reformers” that came out of the woodwork in the Gorbachev era, reading through their writings, directly attribute trace their own disillusionment with the socialist system through the common origin story of their shock at the “revelations” of the 20th Congress. Some people like Keeran and Kenny in “Socialism Betrayed” see Khruschev’s later, more “evenhanded” comment that "All of us taken together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit” (the truest thing he ever said) as a sign of desperate damage control, but it was far too late. A CPSU leadership collectively worth less than Stalin’s shit had turned the image of Stalin, the CPSU and socialism itself to shit. Later, the anti-Stalin agenda was used in the Gorbachev period as a powerful propaganda cudgel for the reactionaries to resmirch and sideline Marxist-Leninists, as can be seen from the ouster of Ligachev following his promotion of the letter by Leningrad chemist Nina Andreevya who defended Stalin. The Overton window had moved so far to the right in the USSR that this defence of Stalin was able to be used to purge Marxist-Leninists from leading government positions, directly causing the counter revolution that led to the collapse of the USSR.

Since this is being asked on Hexbear and not r/manga, I'd recommend "Sensou wa Onna no Kao wo Shiteinai," the manga adaptation of Alexievich's "The Unwomanly Face of War." That book is a collection of interviews with female soldiers of the Red Army that fought in the Eastern Front of WWII. As with all things USSR that see the light of day in the English speaking world, the author is an anti-communist, which is why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. However, the work is still worth reading because the interviewees are all Soviet war heroes and their deeply personal stories are the focus. Alexievich's "capital T Truth" fetishist shtick means that she doesn't often editorialize or interject, for example, every time Stalin is mentioned with "By the way, dear reader, remember that he ate all the grain" like Western accounts of socialist history do (though there are a billion footnotes crammed in the book version that "clarify" the interviewees' narratives with the anticommunist correct-think "fact checks"). The illustrations really bring to life the stories of the interviewees in a vivid way and so it's worth checking out.

Some great historical fiction include "A Bride's Story," set in 19th century Central and West Asia, with a great cultural anthropology-lite style narrative, and "Song of the Long March," which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period. I actually came across that work before all the Western atrocity propaganda started clogging the airwaves in the late 2010s and I'm personal grateful to it for pre-emptively being my first impression to the Uyghur Chinese people rather than having some shoddy copycat Holodomor 2.0 plagiarized slop become the introduction to that culture.

As a purely personal aside favorite, I'd also recommend "Fire Punch." It has a lot of the typical anime genre nonsense and really, the only reason I'd recommend it is that it has one of the best portrayals of an LGBT character in manga and anime. I was deeply struck by it personally and I've also seen heteronormative responses to the manga remark that the character humanized "LGBT individuals" as something beyond a "concept" for them.

"Everyman his own ~~historian~~ journalist"

You've posed a very pertinent question. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is the dilemma that encapsulates the entire project of "Western Marxism" in general and it's a fair question that deserves more than ridicule or dismissal.

We are long past the era of Eugene Debbs where the Western left had a sliver of actionable material power, so even beyond the question of what the Western left can do for AES states, what is the point to being a Marxist at all? In practical terms, if you consider the things you can materially accomplish in the midst of the imperial core, is there really a point to being a ML and not simply submitting yourself to the Democrats or Labour or the SPD where you can at least organize to defend those few select social progressive interests permissible in this bourgeoisie system?

When you're powerless, fragmented, isolated and sociopolitically ostracized, what's the point to all of this, holding all those "geopolitics understander" positions and these "principally correct" Marxist stances at all if you can't achieve anything real with them and, to most people looking at you from the outside, based on your accomplishable praxis inside the heartlands of anticommunism, you just look like a weird but generic liberal anyways?

Is the Western leftist doomed to be that soyjak meme, standing alone in the corner of a party, with that thought bubble thinking "Heh, they don't know that Stalin = actually good." Does it come down to that eternal philosophical question of "If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound at all?"

Marx lived during the apogee of imperialism, the cruelty of the American slave state and a bleak era where that meager revolutionary flicker within 1848 was subverted by the bourgeoisie and where the only successful proletariat uprising, the Paris Commune, was brutally squashed with ease. And yet, he persevered in his writings, which, of course, became the bedrock of what we stand for today. His writings where he railed against the hypocrisy of the Second Opium War against China and the British tyranny over India was meaningless in his own time, this was the height of European colonial despotism, after all, and the tirades of one lone individual was to scream against the void. Was there no point to his opposition towards imperialism and his solidarity, against his own class, with the oppressed then?

For someone in that time, in the midst of all the chauvinism and racism societally designed to socialize and induce the European individual to become a cheerleader for the imperialist cause, for him to reject all those narratives and to see things clear eyed for what they are, now means everything. That was an utterly hopeless time, yet he perserved in spite of it and gave so much to the cause of socialism in retrospect. This is the same with the likes of Michael Parenti, during the nihilism of the 1990s, where socialism was subverted everywhere and even the surviving socialist states like China, Vietnam and Cuba were eyed with paranoia. People like Parenti and Losurdo could have sold out like the rest of western "Marxism," got a cushy tenure and professorship chair at Oxbridge or the Ivys, but they continued to defend the legacies and memory of Stalin and Mao.

This is not to say that your average Hexbear user will become the next Parenti or that the sequel to Das Kapital will be penned by a News Megathread regular, but to emphasize the important point that those Marxist figures understood. They understood that the imperialist West is a culture obsessed with discourse control and narrative purity. To stand in front of its propaganda and to say "no" in its face is a powerful thing, in of itself. This is why the liberals get so upset when they encounter MLs, why there was two Red Scare campaigns, why Communist Parties in many countries are outright banned, why they've legislated criminal charges against those who support designated enemy nations. If it's all meaningless, the adversaries of the genuine Western left would have never put in so much effort to counter genuine leftist voices. If it's all pointless, they would not be so livid at seeing ML counter-argumentation and have banned communities like r/genzedong such that the Western left is ostracized to isolated places like Hexbear and Lemmygrad.

As such, yes, the Western left does not have the capacity for its own liberation, but upholding internationalist solidarity and maintaining principled Marxist-Leninist lines has meaning. It's true that this meaning is not as materially valuable as being the one who fired the October shot on the Aurora, or striding into the Chinese countryside to manage New China's land reform and this can be demoralizing to many who want more actionable and material gains.

Over the past century, many people on the Western left, not just ultra chauvinists or Trots or sellouts but well meaning people, have allowed themselves to suppress their own socialist beliefs in order to join liberal ranks and push for "change from within" or to achieve acceptable goals within the confines of the imperial core because the capabilities of the Western left, reduced to just providing internationalist solidarity, are such intangible things. This is understandable but one point that must be emphasized is that while the things the Western left can achieve are principally ideological rather than material, however, does not mean those things are meaningless.

Though it understandably can be demoralizing that this is the crux of what we can contribute, principled Western Marxist-Leninists who have a clear eye of how things are represent a slap in the face to the West and its self-image of whitewash and apologia, its modern narrative of LARPing moral sainthood while kicking its 500 years of imperialism under the bed, which I've talked about in a previous post. At this point in time, they earnestly believe they've gotten away with it and an ML's principled stance, refusing to play along, threatens that. There's a reason why Hitler personally ordered the execution of Ernst Thälmann, despite the latter having been imprisoned for eleven years, during the collapse of the fascist reich in 1944 while those like SPD collaborationists were left unscathed. Though western Marxism has almost always been utterly impotent, they nonetheless have a genuine fear of what we stand for.

Above all, our principled stance, though it might seem "immaterial" and feckless, is the continuation of the memory of those comrades of the past, those who built the planks in the house of western Marxism, ramshackle shack though it may be. Those like Thälmann were never able to achieve anything material either, does that mean he should have disbanded the KPD, joining the SPD in hopes of "changing things from within" or that his existence and martyrdom was meaningless? If that was true, then fascist written popular media has a better sense of duty to their predecessors than us western Marxists do.

Ultimately, I think there's a dialectical dialogue in Disco Elysium, of all things, that encapsulates all of the understandable nihilism inherent to western Marxism quite poignantly.

Rhetoric: The question you mean to ask is both very complicated and incredibly simple...

Endurance: Take a deep breath. Best to go one piece at a time.

You: If communism keeps failing every time we try it...

Steban: (he waits patiently for you to finish)

You: ...And the rest of the world keep killing us for our beliefs...

Steban: Yes?

Volition: Say it.

You: ...What's the point?

Steban: (he considers your words for a minute)

Composure: You're witnessing his ironic armour melt before you. This is his true self you're seeing now.

Empathy: He's thinking about someone...

You: Wait, who is he thinking about?

Empathy: Hard to say. Someone dear to him.

Visual Calculus: Track his gaze. He's looking out past the broken wall, toward the opposite side of the Bay...

You: Toward the skyscrapers of La Delta.

Visual Calculus: They rise like electric obelisks in the night.

Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity's future... I have to say, I've never entirely understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.

You: Wait, you're saying communism is some kind of religion?

Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn't dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it.

You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?

Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up.

You: Even when they ignore us?

Steban: Even then.

Ulixes: Mazov says it's the arrogance of capital that will be its ultimate undoing. It does not believe it can fail, which is why it must fail.

Volition: So young. So unbearably young...

Half Light: Why do you see the two of them with their backs against a bullet-pocked wall, all of a sudden?

Inland Empire: Their faces, blurred yet frozen as though in ambrotype. You were never that young, were you?

Steban: I guess you could say we believe it because it's impossible. (he looks at the scattered matchboxes on the ground) It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this...

Spoilers for the source novel plotline here.

It's a fictionalized account which seems to be based on Beevor and Alexievich, so definitely junk food.

This is not a great argument. Land reform is a necessary step towards socioeconomic sovereignty but it does not guarantee economic prosperity. This is akin to blaming the hardships of Cuba's heroic revolutionary struggle to its own decision of committing to socialist land reform rather than the economic blockade by American imperialism in response to its national liberation. Ian Scoones et al.'s work, in fact, explicitly challenges the "myth" that "Zimbabwean land reform has been a total failure."

I don't disagree that such a line of argumentation is definitely the predominant narrative regarding Zimbabwe nor with the depiction of its current socioeconomic conditions, but such an assessment needs to contend with the question of the chicken and the egg.

It's a question of whether Zimbabwe's contemporary problems (as much as it can be attributed to its land reforms) dialectically come principally from its non-socialist and rather haphazard land reform process and the Mugabe government's mishandling or whether there is a predominant issue of the Western sanctions, foreign and IMF/World Bank divestment and economic ostracization that Zimbabwe faced following its decision to uphold the Jambanja period 'land invasions' which are the primary contradiction in determining its contemporary struggles.

The historical and contemporary severe poverty of Haiti is also not "a myth," but the source of its material conditions principally stemmed from the counter-revolutionary reaction from Europe who sought to punish and make an example of the first independent black state in the New World and the only successful enslaved uprising in recorded history. The Haitian state was not recognized by any 19th century world power and France, following the Bourbon Restoration, imposed a huge indemnity that made destitute any possibility of Haitian prosperity.

This is what happened to Zimbabwe, which was punished just as Haiti was two centuries ago, for demonstrating a model towards sovereignty by an independent black state:

As in any land reform program, newly settled farmers needed timely inputs, such as seeds, fertilizer, tools, irrigation, mechanization, and financing to get established. Unfortunately, the state’s ability to provide that support was hampered from the start after the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act was enacted in the United States. The law instructed U.S. members of international financial institutions to vote against “any loan, credit, or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe.” Since the United States wields decisive influence in those organizations, the effect was to severely curtail Zimbabwe’s access to credit and foreign exchange, without which no modern economy can effectively function. https://monthlyreview.org/2023/06/01/the-dynamics-of-rural-capitalist-accumulation-in-post-land-reform-zimbabwe/

The concluding tangent about China is wildly off the mark, however. China's own socialist land reform process was the largest redistribution of wealth in human history and the foundation of China's success stems from its near total eradication of imperialist influence under Mao, which was imperative to the success of Deng's Reform and Opening Up. As Zhou Enlai famously articulated:

The imperialists still want to retain some privileges in China in the hope of sneaking back in. A few countries intend to negotiate with us about establishing relations, but we prefer to wait for a time. The remaining imperialist influence in China must be eradicated first, or the imperialists will have room to continue their activities. Although their military forces have been driven out, the economic power they have built up over the past century is still strong, and their cultural influence in particular is deep-rooted. All this will undermine our independence. We should therefore clean up the house before entertaining guests, that is, before establishing relations with them.

As such, the outcome of Zimbabwe's national process does not invalidate the example it demonstrated, as Ian Scoones et al. note, which was that it "highlighted one potential path for countries unable or unwilling to deal with the unequal inheritance of apartheid or colonialism" in the form of settler expropriation and land reform. There is no world where you can have your cake and eat it too in the context of land reform: no settler is going to shake your hand and give you a smile when you kick them off your land and write a glowing letter back to the European metropole about you.

Thus, by nature of the Western reaction, this could not be a clean or thorough process and it did not end in economic success, but such is precisely the "fait accompli" which committing the ultimate form of property re-appropriation from legacy settler colonialism is made to perform and designed to suffer under in the contemporary global conditions of Western hegemony.

The Soviets continue to outdo us with their version of this.

The 90s were one of the blackest eras of reaction, with no exaggeration, in all of human history. The entirety of former USSR societies fell into a highly publicized humanitarian disaster of spiraling mass poverty. The fact that the DPRK suffered in this time is undeniable but it should be emphasized that the DPRK's 1990s famine is to the anticommunist mythology of Western propaganda what the pre-WWII famines, including that infamous Stalin's Giant Spoon-domor, were for the USSR and the Great Leap Forward coinciding famine was for China; appropriated by endless hordes of payrolled academics to outwrite any alternative accounts with their word vomit, with the intended agenda of establishing a discourse hegemony that wholly pins the disaster squarely on the man-made decisions of socialist leadership and the socialist system. This is all to say that, due to this slathering of Western propaganda and the hijacking of the narrative airwaves, so to speak, it's difficult to ascertain the material conditions of the food scarcity circumstances of the 90s DPRK, including its extent and the particular catalysts and aggrievating factors.

I had a look at Steve Gowans' "Patriots, Traitors and Empires," and this is what he interpreted:

"the inevitability of a North Korean collapse, appeared, from Washington’s point of view, to be beyond question. North Korea was reeling from the dissolution of the socialist bloc and the concomitant loss of important trading partners, and had been wracked by a series of natural disasters which left it food-insecure. Its economy was shrinking and its people were hungry."

It is true that under the allegations of an uranium enrichment program in 1994, the US put significant pressure on the DPRK right at the height of its unipolar hubris moment, which undoubtedly exacerbated conditions. The US would later, under Bush Jr., explicitly place food export licensing sanctions on the DPRK.

As for Chinese responses to this moment, here's what the US-based so-called "Genocide Studies and Prevention International Journal" in a 2012 article alleged were the conditions of China-DPRK and Russia-DPRK relations in the 1990s:

... in the early 1990s, both Russia and China cut their food and fuel aid to North Korea. Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, had no interest in subsidizing Communist states abroad. Chinese exports of maize to North Korea declined by 80% from 1993 to 1994, in part because of a poor harvest in China itself and in part as punishment to North Korea for having opened up diplomatic relations with Taiwan (I have no clue what 90s lore this is referring to here). Both Russia and China informed North Korea that it would have to start paying market prices in hard currency for their exports.

One thing to keep in mind while miring through all this is that it's clear that the DPRK weathered through its food-scarcity conditions of the 90s. This indicates that either 1) its systems of autarkic food self-sufficiency could be sustained and that those conditions were derived from principally natural causes, contrary to Western narratives of "inherent flaws of its system" or that 2) it was able to supply food imports despite the semi-public estranged relations with China (I agree with the cited ghouls above that it's unlikely Yeltsin's Russia would have stepped in). For the avenues in which foreign (i.e. Chinese) aid could have been made, as can be seen from the current circumstances of the Ukraine War, where while Chinese support is undeniable, the extent of it is still unknown and deliberately obfuscated and clandestine, I would argue that, in the midst of American 1990s triumphalism, any actions by China to support AES states, particularly the DPRK which fell under US crosshairs following the 1994 uranium enrichment allegations, would have been conducted through similar degrees of inconspicuousness and inherently contradictory to publicly stated positions.

There is some discernible evidence of this from the Jiang Zemin era China. For example, Adrian Hearn's "Diaspora of Trust: Cuba, Mexico and the Rise of China" argues that Cuba's painful Special Period sustained the survival of the Cuban revolution in a large degree through China's substitution of former Soviet assistance: "China played an important but little-known role in seeing Cuba through this tumultuous period" and that with regards to Jiang's private agenda:

According to a Chinese diplomat I interviewed in Beijing (who requested anonymity), Jiang conducted the visit to “save Cuba’s revolutionary project,” expressly against the advice of China’s increasingly pragmatic Communist Party.

I'm not sure I follow.

It's not necessarily relevant in this particular instance since the source is straight from the horse's mouth. Every once in a while, they brag about things like this because they understand there will be no recourse from their own side on the hypocrisy and belligerency of what they did. The conversational register they're aiming for isn't the crowd that thinks this is wrong, but those that would be delighted that the CIA and Trump were taking action to be "tough on China" and trying to "regime change it."

The journalistic paradigm you're referring to is the "anonymous source says they personally saw Stalin eating all the grain with a big spoon" skit where they use the "unverifiability gimmick" to attack an adversary. It's not a reporting tactic done against one's own side. Reuters would have never published this if it could not verify the sources.

It's a self fulfilling cycle that you can see from the testimony of LGBT Chinese individuals in Western coverage.

Because a lackluster societal tolerance climate preventing the domestic development of organic communities for LGBT rights due to the misinterpretations I've stated above, alienation drives LGBT peoples to the only real organized groups around, those formed by and subsisting on external backing through Western networked NGOs, as their only safe space. This relationship inevitably makes those individuals more amenable to the ideology behind those groups, ie. it turns them into Chinese liberal (or full blown Western imperialism apologists) types who come to oppose the government, socialist governance and their country on all grounds. None of this is necessary or inevitable and the understanding must be advocated that LGBT peoples in China need not be consequentially Chinese liberal capitalism restorationists if allowed to organize on their own terms.