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Both the essay and Orwell's preface address this question directly. They say it wasn't wartime loyalty because the same people were perfectly willing to critici

by nvm0n2 3y ago

Both the essay and Orwell's preface address this question directly. They say it wasn't wartime loyalty because the same people were perfectly willing to criticize their own government much more harshly than they'd criticize the USSR, and their love for the Soviets predated WW2 anyway. A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did. This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them: https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&SeriesKey=soca&pageSize=10&startPage=1 https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&S... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037867 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037... This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.

e12e 3y ago
> This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. I don't think dismissing (all of) Marx because of Stalin makes much more sense than dismissing the idea of democracy because of the size of the US prison population or it's history of war crimes?
- joenot443 3y ago
  Perhaps if democracy was an American invention your comparison could hold some water, it doesn't really make any sense otherwise. Democracy's practiced by the majority of nations worldwide, I don't see what the prison population of a single nation has to do with that. The reason myself and others are so dismissive of Marx's ideas is because time and time again, any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation. Every. Single. Time. Many of us have grown weary of tankie types trying to shoehorn pro-Marxist viewpoints into these conversations and are pretty quick to identify the dog whistles ("But, but, America!") when we hear them.
  - JuanPosadas 3y ago
    > Perhaps if democracy was an American invention They invented a democracy. Their democracy is of their own design, based on the historical work of philosophers. The constitution is not a plagiarized document stolen from the greeks. Marx was decades dead when 1917 happened. Your point falls flat on its face. > any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation You are one of today's lucky 10,000. Allow me to inform you of the genocide of native Americans, manifest destiny, the slavery of Africans, the toppling of the kingdom of Hawaii, the contras, operation condor, US Imperialism, etc.. Text book example of special pleading. > But, but, America! IDK, maybe you shouldn't make such weak fallacious arguments that don't pass even the lightest of scrutiny? People living in glass Native American burial grounds shouldn't throw stones? Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere?
    - joenot443 3y ago
      > Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere? I don't think the notion of fair and equal representation is colonizer propaganda, but based off your previous comments, you're far enough down the rabbit-hole that it's not worth trying to lift you out. I'm not a "diet white supremacist" whatever that is, just someone whose family was murdered in the Holodomor and as a result has done a lot of reading on the USSR and its atrocities. Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you.
      - JuanPosadas 3y ago
        > Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you. What's hateful about wanting to expand the benefits of democracy to the working class? Multiple worse real genocides have happened to my people than your historically cyclical-until-1947 famine that's only talked about for the sole purpose of excluding the working class from a better form of democracy.
  - 3y ago
atchoo 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please don't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - atchoo 3y ago
    Are you going to admonish the parent for contravening the flamebait and "ideological battle" guidelines? Treat the cause not the symptom!
    - undefinedland 3y ago
      [dead]
    - dang 3y ago
      Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131782? I haven't read it closely (I rarely read anything closely - moderation works on floats, not doubles) but that comment does not seem to me on the wrong side of the guidelines. If you had posted something half as substantive and thoughtful as that user, it would have been fine. On the other hand, I agree with you in the sense that we don't really need a lot of "Marx was so wrong" comments on HN.
0dayz 3y ago
Marx is not the same as the ussr nor Stalin. For instance if you were to read Das kapital, its very much a dry economy book and not some crackpot ranting about capitalism bad.
arrowsmith 3y ago
[flagged]
pdonis 3y ago
> A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents It was even worse than that. Both the British governments under Chamberlain and Churchill and the US government under FDR sympathized with the USSR. There were continuous sub rosa contacts going on (for example, FDR regularly sent emissaries like Harry Hopkins over to Moscow to confer with Stalin) that were, while not publicly known, officially sanctioned. This was why the USSR was able to end up in control of all of Eastern Europe after WWII--which to any objective observer meant that WWII failed to achieve its primary goal in Europe, which was to liberate Eastern Europe from tyranny. But nobody made any such criticism at the time; the USSR was praised as an ally even while they were shipping millions of Germans and Eastern Europeans to labor camps.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Hm was that the primary goal? I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA. Liberating France and other parts of western Europe was just a requirement of getting to Berlin.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > was that the primary goal? Yes. The reason Britain and France declared war on Germany was that Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France had treaty commitments to defend Poland. (They also had treaty commitments to defend other Eastern European countries, which they decided not to honor when Germany invaded those countries before it invaded Poland, but that was because their governments erroneously believed that Hitler would stop invading countries if they appeased him.) > I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA. Germany never directly attacked the US. (Japan did later on, but that was on their own initiative; they never discussed any overall war plans with Germany.) And when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Germany had not attacked Britain or France either. As I said above, they declared war when Germany invaded Poland.

by nvm0n2 3y ago

e12e 3y ago

> This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. I don't think dismissing (all of) Marx because of Stalin makes much more sense than dismissing the idea of democracy because of the size of the US prison population or it's history of war crimes?

joenot443 3y ago
Perhaps if democracy was an American invention your comparison could hold some water, it doesn't really make any sense otherwise. Democracy's practiced by the majority of nations worldwide, I don't see what the prison population of a single nation has to do with that. The reason myself and others are so dismissive of Marx's ideas is because time and time again, any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation. Every. Single. Time. Many of us have grown weary of tankie types trying to shoehorn pro-Marxist viewpoints into these conversations and are pretty quick to identify the dog whistles ("But, but, America!") when we hear them.
- JuanPosadas 3y ago
  > Perhaps if democracy was an American invention They invented a democracy. Their democracy is of their own design, based on the historical work of philosophers. The constitution is not a plagiarized document stolen from the greeks. Marx was decades dead when 1917 happened. Your point falls flat on its face. > any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation You are one of today's lucky 10,000. Allow me to inform you of the genocide of native Americans, manifest destiny, the slavery of Africans, the toppling of the kingdom of Hawaii, the contras, operation condor, US Imperialism, etc.. Text book example of special pleading. > But, but, America! IDK, maybe you shouldn't make such weak fallacious arguments that don't pass even the lightest of scrutiny? People living in glass Native American burial grounds shouldn't throw stones? Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere?
  - joenot443 3y ago
    > Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere? I don't think the notion of fair and equal representation is colonizer propaganda, but based off your previous comments, you're far enough down the rabbit-hole that it's not worth trying to lift you out. I'm not a "diet white supremacist" whatever that is, just someone whose family was murdered in the Holodomor and as a result has done a lot of reading on the USSR and its atrocities. Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you.
    - JuanPosadas 3y ago
      > Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you. What's hateful about wanting to expand the benefits of democracy to the working class? Multiple worse real genocides have happened to my people than your historically cyclical-until-1947 famine that's only talked about for the sole purpose of excluding the working class from a better form of democracy.
- 3y ago

atchoo 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Please don't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- atchoo 3y ago
  Are you going to admonish the parent for contravening the flamebait and "ideological battle" guidelines? Treat the cause not the symptom!
  - undefinedland 3y ago
    [dead]
  - dang 3y ago
    Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131782? I haven't read it closely (I rarely read anything closely - moderation works on floats, not doubles) but that comment does not seem to me on the wrong side of the guidelines. If you had posted something half as substantive and thoughtful as that user, it would have been fine. On the other hand, I agree with you in the sense that we don't really need a lot of "Marx was so wrong" comments on HN.

0dayz 3y ago

Marx is not the same as the ussr nor Stalin. For instance if you were to read Das kapital, its very much a dry economy book and not some crackpot ranting about capitalism bad.

arrowsmith 3y ago

[flagged]

pdonis 3y ago

> A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents It was even worse than that. Both the British governments under Chamberlain and Churchill and the US government under FDR sympathized with the USSR. There were continuous sub rosa contacts going on (for example, FDR regularly sent emissaries like Harry Hopkins over to Moscow to confer with Stalin) that were, while not publicly known, officially sanctioned. This was why the USSR was able to end up in control of all of Eastern Europe after WWII--which to any objective observer meant that WWII failed to achieve its primary goal in Europe, which was to liberate Eastern Europe from tyranny. But nobody made any such criticism at the time; the USSR was praised as an ally even while they were shipping millions of Germans and Eastern Europeans to labor camps.

nvm0n2 3y ago
Hm was that the primary goal? I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA. Liberating France and other parts of western Europe was just a requirement of getting to Berlin.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > was that the primary goal? Yes. The reason Britain and France declared war on Germany was that Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France had treaty commitments to defend Poland. (They also had treaty commitments to defend other Eastern European countries, which they decided not to honor when Germany invaded those countries before it invaded Poland, but that was because their governments erroneously believed that Hitler would stop invading countries if they appeased him.) > I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA. Germany never directly attacked the US. (Japan did later on, but that was on their own initiative; they never discussed any overall war plans with Germany.) And when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Germany had not attacked Britain or France either. As I said above, they declared war when Germany invaded Poland.