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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Stalin and Trotsky (and Zinoviev, and Bukkarin, and many more) were all totally and irredeemably opposed to each other, eventually.

Eventually is doing a lot of work here! Those guys were all in the same party together for a long time. The Nazis kicked out Strasser, who was very socialist. But he was also very nationalist and anti-semitic. Rohm might've been gay buy he was also a keen nationalist, militarist and anti-semite. Both men participated in the 1923 putsch too, they had a necessary disdain for democratic norms. But at no point would the Nazis have let in anyone like a modern progressive. Go directly to Dachau, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Modern progressivism: gay rights, trans rights, privileges/equality for non-whites, anti-authoritarianism, anti-militarism, anti-anti-semitism... you can see the SS officer clenching his pistol

At no point would the Soviets invite Ayn Rand into the Communist Party, at no point would Ronald Reagan join up with Pol Pot. Just because people got purged for power or other reasons, it doesn't mean that they're totally and irredeemably opposed.

I don't think it takes away from your overall point, but Reagan actually very much did support PolPot for many years. That was a real thing that happened.

Damn, that does rather undermine my argument. I suppose there's a distinction between using someone weaker than you as a disposable tool and a genuine alliance. I originally thought of contrasting Reagan vs the Chinese Communist Party but considered that they were working together throughout the 1980s against the Soviets. Obviously the plan was to turn China later on, along with Cambodia for that matter. On a strategic level, strange bedfellows... things are somewhat purer on an ideological/political level.

I don't think it does undermine your point, just a funny coincidence. There's a world where Che and Castro are fighting alongside Kennedy against the great Brazilian fascist menace, or something like that. Things like that are contingent, I think your larger point stands; though it should be noted the ideologies are themselves contingent. Ho Chi Minh was a communist because he needed the help. There's no reason gay rights and anti capitalism are considered allied; they're natural enemies.

There's no reason gay rights and anti capitalism are considered allied; they're natural enemies.

How so?

Gay Rights only co-occurs with Advanced Capitalism. There are no traditional feudal countries with gay rights, there are no communist countries with gay rights, not now, not historically. The closest you get is specialized roles for catamites in certain traditional Asian, Muslim, and Greco-Roman societies. The litany of Marx is always relevant here:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Capitalism is the universal solvent, and one of the things it has most thoroughly dissolved are the religious, cultural, and moral strictures on human sexuality.