Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country!

To add on to this, I highly recommend Rev Left Radio and its sister pod for theory discussions, Red Menace. Blowback is another great one which takes a detailed look into US foreign policy. They have seasons on Iraq and Cuba, and are releasing one on Korea this summer.

Thanks for the detailed response. It was an overreaction and for that I apologize. I’ve been on edge the past few days due to the news and just needed to vent a bit I guess. It was just very alienating for me to see a resource that I’ve recommended to beginner Marxists in the past appear to be endorsing this kind of view. But I don’t know this person and what they’ve done for the project in the past so it was out of line for me to ask for them to be removed.

As for your question, the tweet is an insult to all oppressed peoples that the USA has trampled on. What does the Cherokee think of the Stars and Stripes, waved by the US Army as they pursued a policy of total removal of indigenous peoples from the East Coast? What about the people of Laos, who are still struggling to remove the millions of undetonated bombs dropped on them over the course of an illegal war? Ask the victims of American imperialism in Indonesia, Cambodia, Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua, Iraq, Grenada, Libya, Yugoslavia…the list goes on and on and on. Any support for patriotism in America should be a slap in the face to every comrade in the Global South. And it’s a perversion of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, etc to equate their patriotism, as leaders of liberation struggles, to the America Über Alles style patriotism at home. Lenin was famously for revolutionary defeatism for example. And you need not look further than Lenin, as he writes “The place of those who advocate the slogan of national culture is among the nationalist petty bourgeois, not among the Marxists.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/crnq/2.htm#v20pp72-023 The tweet ignores all of that context and blasts those of us pushing back against people like Haz. If you look through the author’s tweet history it’s quite clear he’s a follower of Haz. All in all, it’s pure idealism and historical revisionism to suggest that the US left should adopt patriotic imagery.

I appreciate you taking action on this and hopefully some good will come out of it.

On the other hand, it would be great to be able to direct someone new to communism to a dedicated ML video site so they don’t get exposured to socdem breadtube videos.

Check out !genzhouarchive@lemmygrad.ml .

I am not familiar with the subject but you could start by looking into the criticisms of the WTO that the protesters at the Battle of Seattle in 1999 had.

Sounds good, I’ll get started on it this week.

Blowback is a great podcast that discusses the reality of American empire and it’s a great way to get libs thinking critically about imperialism. It dismantles the thinking that we’re the good guys, but are just incompetent and have bumbling idiot politicians like Bush. In fact, everything is done purposefully with a material intention: to extract wealth from failed states and fuel the military industrial complex.

Season 1 is about Iraq, season 2 is about Cuba, and season 3 (coming this July) will be about the Korean War.

It would also be good to post about this in both the lemmy and reddit GenZedong communities so people are aware.

Yup I've been archiving GenZedong. What other subs should I back up?

This is just fantastic, thanks for working on it!

Breht and Alyson talk about this in their episode on Socialism: Utopian and Scientific when they talk about how Marxism is a science. Breht brought up some events that could falsify key pillars of Marxist thought (around 1:25 in)

• Anarcho-capitalism gets established
• If liberal democracy is able to resolve class conflict
• A non-Marxist left ideology is able to lead and defend a world revolution
• Fascism and imperialism is rooted out of liberal society

Any of these events happening would crush key views of Marxism.

Never forget when she tripped walking down the stairs after Deng Xiaoping told her that China was going to take back Hong Kong one way or another

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh1N1GIYxDw

This is complete dogmatism. Sure it would be nice if we could have free reign of the subreddit and post whatever we want but reality dictates that some concessions have to be made. One week of full unrestrained shitposting isn’t worth getting the biggest pro-ML sub on Reddit with 60k subscribers banned. How is that going to help the socialist cause? How are you going to convert people to our side without the biggest radicalization force on Reddit? Your argument is pure idealism.

No it's not dumb. If your goal is just to be able to explore the content on /r/GenZhou, that would be pretty difficult to do. I don't know if you've taken a look at the archive file but it's essentially just a bunch of Javascript code that stores the data. It's pretty much impossible to read easily as-is, even for a programmer. What the next step is going to be is formatting the data so that it becomes human-readable. Some folks are already starting to work doing that. Hopefully eventually we can view everything that was in GenZhou, but on a Lemmy site.

Chinese Character Wiki It's kind of like Pleco but also has some historical context, HSK info, and usage stats for characters.

You could start out with the ML reading hub as a rough guide. You can be as flexible as you want—don’t worry about the stages too much and read what you are interested in (though be aware that you probably don’t want to dive into heavy books like What Is To Be Done right off the bat). For example, Combat Liberalism and Oppose Book Worship are very short and can be read as early as you want in my opinion.

Other works that I really liked: Wretched of the Earth, Autobiography of Malcolm X, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party, The Jakarta Method

Edit: They also have study guides so that should help with absorbing the material

GZD is archived up to the quarantine so far, check /c/GenZedongArchive

You can use the cookie that Reddit stores on your browser. An easy way to do this is to open up the browser dev tools console to the network tab, load Reddit, and then click on the request that was made to reddit.com in your console. You should be able to find a list of headers, one of which being Cookie. Copy that and paste it in the code.

No problem!

https://lemmygrad.ml/post/187006/comment/130288

Yeah I wrote up a quick Python script to call the Pushshift API, which gets a list of post IDs from the subreddit. Then for each post, you can the Reddit json API to get a json with all of the information in the submission. Then, I inserted the json into a database. Here's my code if you're interested

import datetime
import html
import pymongo
import requests
import time

subreddit = 'GenZedong'
sort = 'asc'
sort_type = 'created_utc'
size = 100

client = pymongo.MongoClient('mongodb://localhost:27017/')
db = client.subredditArchiveDB
collection = db[subreddit]

def main():
    query_params = {
        'subreddit': subreddit,
        'sort': sort,
        'sort_type': sort_type,
        'size': size,
        'after': 1646299223, # use this to start the search after a specific timestamp
    }

    while True:
        r = requests.get('https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/submission/', params=query_params)
        r.raise_for_status()

        j = r.json()
        for post in j['data']:
            id = post['id']
            timestamp = datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(post['created_utc'])
            timestamp_str = timestamp.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")

            reddit_r = requests.get(f'https://www.reddit.com/comments/{id}/.json', headers={'User-Agent': 'Subreddit archiver', 'Cookie': 'Paste your Reddit browser cookie here (needed to access quarantined subreddit)' })
            reddit_r.raise_for_status()
            reddit_json = reddit_r.json()
        
            post_archive = {
                'id': id,
                'timestamp': timestamp,
                'json': reddit_json
            }

            collection.insert_one(post_archive)
            print(f'Added {id} from {timestamp_str} to the collection')

        query_params['after'] = timestamp


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Great video! I took almost the same path as you. I was a social democrat for a long time and never realized how academic Marxism was. After I learned the basics I couldn't get enough of it because it completely turned my world upside-down.

And yeah, /u/aimixin is the real MVP. People like /u/aimixin inspire me to read as much theory as I can because I want to be that guy that can answer everyone's questions and help people discover what Marxism is all about. Man, it makes me almost tear up when I realize how much I've learned in the past year and how much of my journey was thanks to GenZhou.

FYI Zhou is pronounced like "Joe".

I can recommend the China History Podcast from Laszlo Montgomery. I don’t know if he is a tankie but it definitely seems to me he is at least sympathetic to the CPC, and has a good understanding of the nuances of the party politics. He has an old episode on Xi Jinping that was overall very positive if you want to get a taste of his perspective. I listened through his multipart series on the Cultural Revolution and Zhou Enlai, and both were very well researched and presented. He kind of jumps around to all kinds of different topics instead of going in chronological order though, so that might be a problem for you.

Yeah I saw that on Twitter and it seems pretty clear to me it was someone trying to discredit him

Good idea, I'll crosspost it there

I backed up all submissions on /r/GenZhou last week because I was afraid this would happen.

If you want to download the raw json, see /c/GenZhouArchive

Uninstall the official Reddit app and get something that isn't infested with ads. Apollo for iOS is fantastic. I've heard redditisfun is good on Android.

Some other bangers that I haven't seen mentioned:

Lenin Is Always With You

The East Is Red

Ode to the Motherland

Eyes Front

Chinese-American. I was a Bernie soc dem and was kind of a self-hating Chinese second-generation immigrant because I heard from the media that I was supposed to hate China for their policies on Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong. Once I learned more about the CPC and read theory, I started seeing the world in a completely different way. Today, I proudly call myself a Marxist-Leninist.

Great work, thanks for doing this!

🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀 There's a special place in hell for imperialists!

Echoing others on the issue with remmel not working for lemmygrad. It seems the site is pretty responsive on Safari though

I'm guessing it's just a matter of time, but it may be a while. I remember /r/ChapoTrapHouse staying quarantined for several months before finally getting banned.

I created an account here months ago but never actually used this site. That changes today. If we want to keep most of our /r/GenZedong users we have to be active here.