RollaD20 [comrade/them, any]
I’m pretty sure he’s a succdem type with some anarchist tendencies/aesthetics. Better than a lot of people that infuse politics into their work, though.
The people who defend the Romanovs fucking disgust me. I was ‘friends’ with another russian jew who went to bat for them because of the fucking movie Anastasia. Both their and my families were being slaughtered in state-sanctioned pogroms… how the hell do you get to that fucking point? Even at my most liberal, I always believed the Romanovs deserved everything they got. Every single time someone brings it up I just list the horrific conditions that thrived under the Romanovs making them feel as terrible as possible.
I get not wanting to relish in the death of oppressors, personally I believe an unceremonious is more than sufficient. But defending them???
While I’ve been living in Europe for the past 3 years I have definitely experienced more antisemitism than I have since being bullied as a kid in the USA. People bringing up the rothschilds (lots of banking talk), casual insulting of jews while also disparaging other minorities, claiming that the jewish people deserved the holocaust because of what they did afterwards (implying Israel).
All to say, I think that anti-semitism in europe is more prevalent than in the USA, but I am unsure how widespread it is. I don’t think it’s necessarily common but I don’t really come across as jewish so who knows how many people just treat me as another white person. I think a lot of it comes from just not knowing any jews or really learning about them in their history. My landlord was a history teacher and had no clue about jewish history in europe outside of the holocaust. Her son even less. Folks end up learning about us through the news, especially about Israel and/or wealthy jewish bourgeois. It’s basically just ‘socialism of fools’. People making uncritical critiques of Israel, banking, capitalism, their personal material woes and blame it on the jew. Tying it up with a nice bow is the dumb conflation of anti-Israel sentiment with antisemitism which made it even messier to engage with people about it.
Not trying to say that if literature was taught through a marxist lens that kids would be more interested, I’m saying that the current pedagogical mode is anti-communist and doesn’t engage students. Both of these things can be true without necessarily being explicitly related.
That being said, from my experience, students/learners are more engaged with literature (or reading period) if the topic relates to them, and only formalist education makes the text sterile. Books, especially literature, I’ve found much more engaging if the students can relate to places that they know(especially if its a new perspective on them), topics that interest them, etc. There are currently a ton of problems within education. I don’t think that anti-communism is necessarily the most pressing, but I don’t see it meaningfully changing under capitalism either. So it kind of leaves us in a position where education sucks because of the current economy and state formation and said education reinforces the status quo through, amongst other things, anti-communism. So, any leftist speaking on the sorry state of education is doing a disservice by not at least mentioning how anti-communism puts unique and extra pressure on an already exploding system & how education might be differently approached within socialism (if the conversation allows the avenue).
“i’d like a 6th french republic, dressing on the side, oh and make it a people’s republic pls, thanks”