re: #258 Khal Wimpo (not drinking damn fish tank cleaner)

Definitely in better shape than me; his workout regime must be awesome!

I keep getting into it on a Twitter with dumbass Berners. I gotta stop that. Something about their dim witted insistence upon being the most self righteous, pure expressions correct political thinking just sets me off.

It may be possible to persuade those who aren’t just trolls. I was in a polite FB discussion with a die-hard Trumper (he’s an IRL FOAF — and the mutual friend had asked me months ago to be easy on this guy) who told me that he has students who are Berners. I have no doubt that he would be urging them to hold fast to their ideals.

It’s important that Berners hear the other side — how holding on to these ideals will end up losing them forever — that the right way is to vote D and then work within the party to advance your goals — that anything else is designed to promote those who will wreck any possibility of achieving those objectives. Trotsky wrote in 1933 how the failure of German communists and moderates to collaborate led to the imposition of the most evil government of the 20th century.

The policy of the Communist party has been thoroughly wrong, its leaders started from the absurd axiom that social democrats and National Socialists represented “two varieties of Fascism”, that they were, in Stalin’s formula, not opposite poles but twins”. It is undoubtedly true, that social democracy, like Fascism, stands to defend the bourgeois regime against the proletarian revolution. But the methods of the two parties are entirely different. Social democracy is unthinkable without parliamentary government and mass organizations of the workers in trade unions. The mission of Fascism, however, is to destroy both. A defensive union of Communists and social democrats should have been based on this antagonism. But blind leaders refused to take this line. The workers were left divided, defenseless, without plan or prospects, before the attacking enemy. This position demoralized the proletariat and strengthened the self-confidence of Fascism.