I understand perfectly well what you are saying. Objectively it is rehabilitating Nazism. There's no way around that.

E.g.

>The communist parties in each country in Eastern Europe were just as bad as the nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory

Communists do not make pillows out of hair of jews. If you think these parties are equivalent you should be accused of Holocaust denialism or at minimum holocaust obfuscation, it's simple Nazi apologism and it contributes to a real ongoing project in Europe to rehabilitate Nazi collaboration. To say that the Red Army is the same animals as Jew-Gassers is absolutely a sign of relative Nazi sympathy, because at that point, hey, maybe your country's historic freedom fighters chucked some jews in an oven and enabled some of the most atrocious crimes of the 20th century, but it was all for National Liberation, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria_during_World_War_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

It's inhuman, it's not respectable or aligned with reality in a meaningful sense. There are simple facts of history - France was under the thumb of Nazism, 80% of Nazi soldiers died on the Eastern Front, and thus the bulk of responsibility for freeing France falls to the Soviets. Simple!

And further, you know very fucking well there is no unified opinion of the Soviet era, or if you don't, it's amazing how you have been lied to. 45% of Georgians still approve of Stalin. 70% of Russians. 79% of Armenians say the dissolution of the Soviet Union was harmful. 61% of Kyrgyz, and 56% of Tajikistanis agree. A third of Bulgarians approve of communism to at least some extent. All of this data is pulled from Pew, Gallup, etc. You're not being honest on how divisive this legacy this is, there are millions of people with just as much if not more "lived experience" than you who nonetheless still give a net positive appraisal as I do.

You shotgun out a mix of real issues, myopic slander, and nonsensical bourgeois liberal gibberish. But for the real issues - you'll notice at no single point have I actually denied that there were problems - there are many issues, there are aspects not worth defending, there is a reason it's not still around and that can't be attributed to malice or personal failings - those are why I support the turn China has made, they were correct during the Sino-Soviet split, history has proven them correct by making them the last major ML State standing, they continue to be ascendent and that is why they are the target of so much smear and fear.

No.

https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory

Nazi ideology was premised on an economic gamble to genocide 10s of millions of people - a war economy for looting and raping, primarily, "subhuman" Slavic peoples and land in the Soviet Union. There is no realistic comparison to be made, Nazis started the Holocaust, Communists ended it, it's just that simple. The Nazis brought a puppet regime to France to kill and slaughter disabled and jews, the Soviets drove those looters and jew-gassers and bandit piracy into the dustbin of history. Simple, simple, simple. There is nothing in that to be redeemed, all successful things they did (e.g. infrastructure) were mere investments to genocidal ends. Nazism has no accomplishments - no positive contribution to mankind - no complicated history - no respectable striving - it lived for the thrill of death itself and was rightly put down like rabid dogs, for which tens of millions more would have died if not for the rapid industrialization taken in the Soviet Union under Fucking Papa Joe Stalin and the heroism of the Red Army resisting Nazism's degenerate rabid inhuman plans.

The Soviets brought the first man into space. America put a man on the Moon. The Nazis made pillows from the human hair of jews. Simple. The Soviets made a strong country, and Marxism Leninism continues marching on across the world to this day. Nazism turned a country into rubble in little over a decade, with nothing to show for it but pain. Simple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

>So forgive me if the sight of that flag makes my blood boil just as much as when I see a nazi flag

Forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to liberal nonsense and a practical form of Nazi rehabilitation. You make my own blood boil.

>France was liberated by the allies, not the Soviet Union.

[IINTENSE COUGHING] what were the three main allied powers

hint 1

hint 2

second question do you understand how a Two Front war works

10 million - Genocide in the Congo

Over 3 Million Vietnamese dead expelling French & American colonizers

Irish Potato Famine 1 million dead.

15 Million Dead from pointless inter-imperialist Conflict of WW1

12 Million African slaves trafficked in Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

1 Million dead from immediate conflict against "Terror" in Iraq alone.

56 Million dead - Settling of the Americas

100 million - Colonial enslavement of India

???? millions - General rape of Africa

Black Hole calls the kettle black.

>And, for the record, the US never murdered millions of people.

This is such a laughably absurd lie, what the fuck? What the actual fuck is wrong with you people?

Millions dead in Vietnam. Millions dead in the "War on Terror" across the Middle East. God knows how many millions dead on account of our colonial history - Chattel Slavery and the expulsion of the peoples here before us. Objectively, you're an ignorant person - don't try to play a cutsie little numbers game when our closet is drenched in blood.

The East turned around under the communists and did in decades what took centuries for the West. And yeah, bursting out of thousands of years of subsistence farming into industrial modernity is not fun, but you are only correct on one thing - that there is no conflation, they crossed the bridge far more humanely, and it's not even fucking close. That's what it symbolizes.

We will get back on track once we are able to reign in the banks and drive out all the petty fiefdoms that amount to Americans cutting off one another's kneecaps.

The Soviet Union saved the lives of countless French people in freeing them of the Vichy puppet regime and the holocaust.

>There's a reason why the USSR fell apart.

And communists must learn form this and have been learning from this. It was a inevitable for the sclerosis of Soviet society, but still an extreme tragedy. Nobody can look at the Post-Soviet situation as a whole and call it success story with a straight face, especially when compared against the route that China was able to take.

>But waving a symbol of an oppressive regime that has taken the lives of millions is not something anybody should support, don't you agree?

I'm a patriot, American, and my own country has also taken the lives of millions, but I don't admonish people for having a connection to our flag that is still meaningful for us in our own context and life. The communist flag, flags, have a meaningful history woven into the liberty of the French people. It's part of their patriotic tradition.

When you have crimes in your past you take responsibility for them and overcome them, that doesn't require a fundamental break with it being our history and our past. But that's not even how I would fundamentally characterize the sum history of Official Communism™, which has been and continues to be a success.

>The flag that the dude is waving has nothing to do with the 2 months of "communism" that France had. [the Paris Commune]

It has everything to do with it.

Advance of the productive forces. We can make far more stuff now per hour of time than when our parents were alive. Anyone saying the retirement age must increase as we also live longer is just disconnected from their own humanity, duped or malicious.

Man I wonder if there is any historical precedent or major wars that would make French people particularly receptive to communist ideas. It would be a real shame if that was directly tied to a revolutionary tradition that actually begins in France. It would be even worse if those communists were associated with the objectively progressive act of pulling the rug out from French colonial projects

You can ascribe panprotopsychism to Lenin - who saw the capacity of reflection as fundamental in manner - and that philosopher was the materialist to end all materialists. I believe Engels comes out with much the same stripes (Anti-Duhring)

Dennet - as a mechanical materialist - called materialism the quest to always find cranes building taller cranes. When you find something tall, a high level of organization, you look for how it was built up from below. This contrasts against religious / idealist thought - where a skyhook swoops in a gives you structure from the heavens, build by the ordained hand of God (Intelligent Design for example - very bad theory!)

I think we have sufficient evidence against miracles, FWIW.

Marx extends similar thinking to politics and economy - rather than derive society from ideas, one derives our ideas from our society - and the objective factors dominate over the subjective factors ("Social being determines Social Consciousness").

Albeit Marx is also a dialectics guy, as is Lenin and Engels obv -and this contrasts against my earlier accussation of Dennett as a mechanical materialist. (This FYI has very important results for how Dennett describes consciousness as illusory, versus how Marx&Co see biological evolution having developed the unique causal powers of consciousness, a result whivh cannot be reduced as a quantitative sum of its elements)

My take on being a materialist, is there is that which is unaware of its being, unconsciousness, comes before, and outnumbers, any conscious results - this blind essence swirls into causal nodes without planning, where reality then interacts with itself without planning - within this swirl, things fold into themselves, reality is condensed. And in this point of compression, ordered without⁶ a plan to have been orderly, reality may then engage in reflection - holistic management that rides nonconconscious chaos.

This is simply the next level of propagating being. It happens just the same in many places - much how hydrogen condensed to trillions of stars -, and so these protoconsciousness nodes, in a sense, are reduced to being considered nonconconscious once we raise our analysis up a level - and consider how yhe plurality of those nodes are now brought into unplanned and chaotic organization that each node fails to understand its place in.

But the same coalescing of order out of chaos repeats. From chaos, order again, and a qualitatively new level of analysis to consider. Atoms, to cells, cells, to animals, animals, to social packs, social packs, to modern civilization.

To restate: Out of chaos, order emerges, where the order is the manner in which the unconscious activity organizes to regular, holistic determination by the whole on the whole - conscious reflection. And that this is the building block of consciousness - enabling higher levels of activity to emerge - from the bottom working all the way to the top (and our thoughts).

>At this point, there is no concrete empirical evidence of consciousness

We have an interaction with reality. You are reading this now. We call this consciousness. This is sufficient evidence that something is occurring, with sufficient standardization - the evolution of brain states accords to discrete realizations of data, concentrated to a single experience, that enable our brain to engage global executive functions, problem solving, long term planning.

You can think! You exist! This is data!

And the world as it is, determines the norms we wish to transform it by. That is what I am trying to say to you, again and again.

>The contract is based on reason

Objectively, it isn't. You want it to be. But what binds us in real life isn't. Or was it just emanantly reasonable when we slaughtered millions of muslims in the last two decades? Is decades of blockade on Cuba reasonable? Or our alliance with Saudi Arabia and active contribution to their genocide, over our petroleum concerns? Is it reasonable that people may be bankrupted through no fault of their own, by medical emergency? Or again, that the guy who picks your abundant avocados is not granted his own? That our wealthy buy their politicians? That our planet is being sacrified for fleeting monetary gains? None of this is reason. The obligation is not to law, our obligation must be to break and reshape law in service of a genuine human interest.

>someone's identity (like class)

Class is not an identity. You belong to class regardless of how you think of yourself. The proletarian, working class interest is uniquely singled out because workers actually constitute the majority of global humanity, and is thus the best class interest to serve as a ruling class, as self rule of the class ruling itself.

You could, if you wanted, have a referendum to affirm a social contract. Until we do that, I do not care about the concept, I never consented to these conditions except through my refusal to commit suicide in the face of our indignities (how voluntary)

And, more pressingly, the essay never mentions class. It seems, frankly, suspicious for it to never come up, given the central importance of production and the management of production in our daily life.

I think you aren't being attentive enough to the manner in which you and your consciousness and your capacity for reason are a social product with historically determined characteristics. Much how Aristotle, or our own Founding Fathers, at the top of Slave Societies, could wax poetic about the liberties, while owning people. Were they cruel liars? Were they stupid? No. (Well, the slaves might disgree). At least, not really. But they committed the same error as you do. Really put yourself in their shoes, what do they miss? Probably a few things jump out. Carry forward, to the present, what is it that you might miss?

And if you think we have overcome the brutalities of history, think about how you can buy avocados in winter, and if the guy who plucked them for us is granted the same liberty. That is the water we swim in, which still molds our thought.

Because it's a well written rebuke to Social Contract Theory: David Hume, Of the Original Contract might be up your alley.

https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cofc.edu/dist/8/406/files/2014/09/David-Hume-Of-the-Original-Contract-1kif9ud.pdf (pdf warning)

Conflicting class interests can also lead to rational agents in incompatible formations- their disagreement over the proper course of class society is not confusion, but clarity.

This is idealism.

Start with the realities of life, and then derive principles from it, and then those principles may guide the couse, but they are not nor ever have been the starting point of social being. And, as a result, these built principles are not eternal truths, but ultimately, contingent to the society which produced us, our biological evolution, our state of development. Superstructure atop the base.

If you want a reason to do well, nothing external can provide that. It's an axiomatic assumption to do right by people. That gets the job done much faster. We take axiomatic assumptions to do math. We take axiomatic assumptions to do science. We use them because they get the job done, nothing more, nothing less.

If someone wants to act to harm people, they may be reminded they live in a sea of people, and that this person is dependent upon those people, and they can either respect that, and be respected by us all as our social whole, or they don't, and society owes them no kindness. Our interdependence is a far stronger basis for moral arguments. By starting with the isolated "free" individual, the brain in the cloud, you start with someone who does not exist and who we do not meet. Whatever this imaginary person is compelled to accept will hardly be influential upon the real people.

But otherwise it was a good essay!