Cave Man Xi would be an awesome meme, by the way.

Another brave redditor, speaking from the front lines

No problem for the late reply, comrade -- mine was very late as well. Glad I could help a little bit! Maybe in ten-fifteen years representatives of both our countries will meet at some world summit of socialist nations. That would be the dream, wouldn't it?

Yeah, no. I'm from the states, and these Ukronazi losers can fuck off and pay their own bills. The same goes for Taiwan, Israel, and whatever other meme countries our government and ruling class -- the real traitors -- are supporting. Americans have their own bills to pay.

Sounds like something a fascist loser, whose country has no production of its own, would say.

I think this is where me being a bit of an oddball comes into play. I am german by birth, but I grew up in Turkey as the lone german in my social network.

Here it gets so messy, because one's lived experience can alter things a great deal. I think being raised in two cultures like you've described can actually be an advantage, in that it lets one see outside the parochialisms inherent in any society. Right-wingers will of course say that such an upbringing leads to liberalism and faux-cosmopolitanism, but everybody in capitalist society is in danger of that; and fascists, in my experience, are some of the worst offenders, the libbiest of cosmopolitan libs. For to talk about the "white race" rather than Germans, Poles, Italians, and so on is after all to engage in the most artificial and idealistic of constructs. I think that, as touchy-feely as it sounds, the important thing is to be true to yourself. Recognize, sure, that your upbringing is unusual, but it's part of you; embrace both it and the insights it gives.

In a small way, I think, I kind of get where you're coming from, because I've never really identified with mainstream American culture. It's as you described modern German culture, artificial and imposed from the top. The flag doesn't stir me; movies aren't really my thing; and the over-the-top brashness and sexuality of American music really rubs me the wrong way. Plus, the performative nationalism of it all -- "we're the bringers of FREEDOM, Yee-HAW!" -- is extremely hard to take seriously, even if you ignore (as most of my countrymen seem able to) the associated crimes and bloodshed. To me, accepting my "American-ness" is sort of like accepting one's descent from a dysfunctional family. I recognize the horrible problems with this place -- the imperialism, racial injustice, settler-colonialism, and so on -- but also accept that, like it or not, I am intimately connected with these problems. Thus it is my duty, not to hold myself aloof, but to try in whatever small way I can to fix them. And there are things to love, not the government or the constitution, but certain small material things: night in the great western deserts with the smell of dust and sage, wandering through a small midwestern town at dusk and mingling with the people returning homeward, sitting at a bus stop and talking to the stranger next to you. It's a strange balancing act, but as a communist I try to maintain it, usually poorly.

typically people see themselves not just as german but as “thuringian” or “swabian”, the less mutually intelligible the dialect the stronger such an identification and the need to feel superior to some other state

Take this for what it's worth, because I see things purely as an outsider. But I get the sense that German culture, in its authetic form, has always been local, with "German-ness" itself being largely a literary and artistic phenomena. Hence the saying (by Goethe, I think?) that there existed a "Germany of the mind;" i.e., that Germans had no common political identity, but did share a kind of common artistic language, especially where music was concerned. This is a real, though unusual, sort of bond. It was presumed, I think, that this bond would exist through unification and the annihilating of the old feudal order, and modern Germany would usher in a different kind of modernity: fully of the moment, but also in continuity with the past. This did not happen, because the architects of German unification were, like everyone else in Europe at the time, liberals with absolutely no sense of superstructure and base. Hence the odd, pathetic phenomena of World War I era nationalists helming one of the most powerful countries in Europe and at the same time bemoaning the fact that their culture was disappearing. Even in music there is in the late 19th century a steep decline, with Wagner's Parsifal and Brahms' German Requiem being a kind of swan song. This is all the result of the attempt to remake Germany in the image of England, a modern liberal, capitalist, and imperialist nation; which attempt culminated in Nazism, and the modern German state with its wholly artificial form, not just of nationhood, but of national identity itself.

(Sorry for the very very late reply -- life, work, and the flu all happened together).

BRONZE AGE MINDSET

This is not quite the insult you think it is.

Exactly, losers hate winners.

The Jedi were a bunch of moralizing libs. Qui-Gon was the only one of them who really got it.

This is a long essay, so right now I'll just respond to a few points.

(1) Cultural Revolution. This is a very complicated topic, with much more nuance than either ultras or ML's give it. But to speak very broadly, the problem isn't that it mobilized the people to do nasty things to the bourgeoisie; the problem is that it was voluntarist and anarchistic. Hurting and shaming the bourgeoisie is a worthy goal, but it accomplishes nothing if it isn't accompanied by a real increase in people's living standards. The tendency of late Mao, and even more, of the Gang of Four, was to think that communism could be built simply by instilling in people the right ideology; which is idealist rather than materialist, for ideology is a function of material conditions. Thus Deng's corrective, "socialism is not poverty," was desperately needed. One can argue that Deng went to far, and ultimately fell into right deviation. But we should not allow this to obscure the fact that Gang of Four were massively left-deviant, and that Deng's occasional rightism was simply the inevitable reaction. Thus, if China during the 1990s came dangerously close to neoliberalism, it was ultimately the fault, not of Deng, but of the Gang of Four.

The DPRK, by the way, does uphold a cultural revolution -- it is an integral part of the Three Fronts theory, so the writer of this article is wrong again. The difference is that here the cultural revolution is ongoing process, proceeding alongside economic development and gradually transforming the whole of society. It is planned, rather than voluntaristic. And this brings us to the central problem with "Maoism" and all forms of ultraleftism. Processes need to be guided; you cannot simply hand people guns and assume good things will happen.

(2) On "Vladimir-Fucking-Putin." The author finds it odd that MLs give critical support to the Russian Federation in its fight against Ukrainian Nazis, but not to the Shining Path in its struggle against the Fujimori and his goons. The difference is this: Putin, by stomping the Ukro-Nazis, is actually performing a useful service. What Gonzalo did was the reverse of useful: it alienated the masses, and drove people who otherwise might have sympathized with socialism straight into the arms of the Fujimori regime. There is a reason that many Peruvian leftists today believe (in the face of any real evidence) that the Shining Path was a CIA op. Which brings us to --

(3) Gonzalo was violent, but so were the Bolsheviks. The implied "goodness" of violence smacks of anarchism, or of Georges Sorel. As Marxists, we are not for violence; we merely recognize its occasional necessity. We don't do the fascist thing of walking around and advocating violence for its own sake; that is adolescent. We would all prefer a peaceful transition to socialism; the problem is that the bourgeoisie never lets it happen. We advocate, not violence as such, but the right of people to defend themselves by any means necessary. If some Gonzaloite can explain to me how killing pregnant women and scalding peasants to death constitutes necessary and appropriate revolutionary violence, I'll gladly become an ultra; but until then, I'll keep thinking of the Shining Path as basically Azov with a red flag.

(4) Why don't AES states export revolution anymore? The DPRK does, in a limited way; obviously it can't do much given present circumstances, but they do give what aid they can to revolutionary movements around the world. The question really comes down to: Why doesn't China export revolution?

The flippant answer is that we should be grateful China doesn't; after all, their attempts to export revolution during the 1970s led to some of the strangest foreign policy the world has ever seen. The serious answer is this. Global capitalism is in its last, decadent stage: accumulation through destruction. No longer able to produce real wealth, the bourgeoisie create wealth in the imperial core by destroying it elsewhere. Thus, it is imperialism that now must export revolution in order to survive. To uphold stability, and global trade, in the face of never-ending destruction is now, ironically, the revolutionary position.