World News

To be honest, I don't understand how some people are arriving at the conclusions they are in this thread. I'd think a warning is a very low bar to ask for w/ regards to the way you're presenting it. Like, "Hey, this is from a source that I find trustworthy on X narrow subject, but on Y, I do not advise listening to them." Then there is at least a baseline established on the why. Because: 1) It is foolish to not guide people at all on what is and isn't trustworthy and 2) It becomes hard to distinguish who is and isn't laundering anti-communist politics if they can post just anything as long as it's agreeable to communism and anti-imperialism some of the time.

In particular, w/ regards to this part:

Cutting off an information stream due to ideology harms, rather than benefits, the ability of Marxist’s to analyze what’s going on in the world.

I can guess what the intent is here, but it can't be approached blindly as an individualist problem of discernment. For this to work, it requires an organized and disciplined approach to information. You wouldn't tell a communist to listen to Fox News for 4 hours each day because they might "miss out on information streams" if they don't. Cutting off information or not requires processing it with care. China didn't cut themselves off from information about the world as a whole, but they did develop their own social media and messaging platforms, making it much harder for the west to come in and astroturf on them and their people.

It's not liberalism to recognize that managing information and how people engage with it is a critical part of developing towards socialism and communism and their goals. We are supposed to approach it from the standpoint of actual truth, not manipulation for selfish gain, but that doesn't mean you let just anything in because it contains a nugget of truth in it. You must have some boundaries, it's just a question of what and when.

I think this response is a bit harsh. I can understand where they are coming from, and once upon a time i myself may have had a similar kneejerk reaction. I think that as i matured (politically, though age also helps to put things into perspective) i came to understand that such an emotional reaction was not productive. Criticize what needs to be criticized and learn as much as you can from any source that you can. As Lenin said the most important thing a young revolutionary can do is учиться, учиться и учиться.

I think what the OP of this comment chain needs to ask themselves is this: there are already enough imperialist shills trying to discredit and smear anti-imperialist voices, regardless whether these voices come from the left or the right (and frequently conflating the two anyway); do i really want to help them do that and what does my revolutionary cause gain by doing so?

The problem with saying "X is right wing therefore anything they have to say is automatically suspect and we should not listen to them" is not just that it's superficial moralism, it's that by doing so you also discredit any correct analysis they may have. Then later when communists make the same correct arguments and point out the same factually true things, our own analysis will have already been discredited by association with the objectionable source. According to the "guilt by association" precedent that we ourselves would have already set.

This is obviously a self-defeating strategy for communists which allows the liberal imperialists to successfully smear the anti-imperialist position as a whole as a right wing one. The correct approach is to critically analyze the content of an argument and judge it based on its merits rather than who it came from.

If you're worried about empowering the far right, the worst thing you could do is refuse to look at reality because occasionally some far right nutter talks about it

Indeed, because once we start doing that then we allow the right to monopolize anti-establishment and anti-imperialist rhetoric. You don't diminish the right by doing that, you diminish the left and drive people toward the right. People, by and large, realize that something is not right and they look to whoever will validate that feeling and give them an explanation. If the left fails to do that then the right will. The surest way to alienate people who are just beginning to have some nascent class consciousness is to give in to the liberal moralizing impulse (of which the ultra-left purity fetish is a manifestation).

If a right wing source presents a correct geopolitical analysis then we need to acknowledge that, otherwise we just discredit ourselves. And then, if and when they go on to state nonsense about other topics we will have the credibility to say "no, actually on this topic they are wrong" and explain why and convince people that we communists have the more correct analysis on the greatest number of issues, because we do not make the idealist errors that the right does.