this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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Being a Liberal must be fucking exhausting.
it's actually really easy for them, because they're so bereft of intellectual rigor and honesty, and the cloud-like consistency of their idealism so unfettered by any material reality; context; or need for integrity and internal coherence, that none of these things actually create cognitive dissonance in them to have to confront and contort around in the first place. Their cognitive stride does not stutter or even notice the incomprehensibility and self-refuting in the garbage they say, because they don't in reality possess a methodological framework for their thinking which requires it. And if pressed too hard toward Our God's Green Planet Earth on their own statements and beliefs, they inevitably either:
deflect: ( "but 100 gorillion vuvuzela ifone!" | "X fallacy!!" | "Yeah well every country does bad things" | "that sounds good on paper but [status-quo reinforcing trope]" | "You say Y movement/country did good thing or has lesson to teach, but Y country/movement [Imperialist or actual Nazi propaganda or half-understood historical circumstance learned from a youtube video or mid-argument-wikipedia-scan]" | "you're just a [thought-terminating juvenile insult ie. 'tankie/bot/social credit/wumao/putin asset' etc.]" | and so on )
project/accuse: ( "not voting for Kamala means you want trump to win/support fascism!" | "so you're saying [Z outragious hypothetical that no one, in fact, said]" | "you think you speak for A,B,C, and treat them like a monolith!" then talking about the
'international community' or what 'people who really lived under communism think,' etc. | [baseless accusation of being an advocate for/denialist of some terrible thing] | and so on )
or otherwise 'indicate that the time for conversation has passed'.
.
It is Marxists who have to struggle against cognitive dissonance when holding or confronting contradictory ideas. Due to having our conceptions actually be necessarily rooted in material reality, and there existing analytical criticality in the foundation of the methodological framework of the marxist worldview.
It's from this that they derive their ability to seemingly-endlessly exhaust us and wear us down jumping all over the place with no rhyme or reason expecting us to slog through the 50 different ways the things they said are wrong or inapplicable, without ever engaging materially and critically with the things we ourselves say. There's no compulsion or need within them to chew on new information and how it jives with their preconceptions, particularly when they are still benefiting, or at least not sufficiently crushed by their material conditions to have any incentive to change their minds and seek alternatives to smug status-quo-reinforcing.
It is also why the revolution can't be built from propaganda alone, but from having the agitation and education already un-ignorably there loudly and vigorously critiquing all that is happening and will happen out of all that has happened, laying bare the mechanisms and consequences of maintaining the current way of things better and clearer than our opportunist and fascist opponents, at the same time as (and alongside) organizing and safeguarding better than them those alternatives and solutions our propaganda agitates for; so that when lived political experience and concrete material reality of their conditions and station in a system which only tolerates them insofar as they are needed as a class of laborers kicks their face in, they need only turn away from the boot to see the ways in which we were and are right, and are and have been struggling for what is right; to from there, having been brought back to reality by the tightening crunch of structures in which even their vaporous idealism can't escape its own reckoning, be in their masses obligated to move toward either active support for or passive sympathetic neutrality toward the communists; or otherwise for those among them who it applies, drop the mask of having been anything but a fascist-in-waiting and so lose the protection of the shell-game deniability that they previously so enjoyed.