I haven’t looked much into him yet but he checks a lot of good boxes.
Is he someone that leftists could back?
Is there any dirt that people have dug up that I’m not aware of?
If we wanted to champion him, could the leftist orgs unify and help him?
Do I sound like a dirty reformist(God pls no)???
Thoughts? Opinions?
“Ronald Reagan was a freedom fighter in terms of supporting our Jewish bros & sis in the Soviet Union & opposing vicious forms of communism” - West
He’s not wrong in that. The USSR did some Nazi-esque shit to Jews. Just at a slower pace.
Example?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
While the USSR certainly didn’t target Jewish folk as aggressively as the Nazis, that’s not really the bar for being horrible.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/534/
I recommend this, heavily.
Soviets ended the holocaust.
In pushing into half of Poland, they saved over 3,000,000 Jews from the Nazi war machine.
In this piece, there are touching quotations from Jewish anticommunists and sympathizers alike saying that they could never hate the USSR. Soviet soldiers spoke Yiddish to them, told them their nightmare was over. They cried and hugged them.
In the Soviet Union, antisemitism was illegal and punishable by death.
addendum from the source
I’m not USian, so take this with a tablespoon of salt. My understanding is that he had some awful takes about AES countries in the past (seems to be better in some respects now, but I’m not sure to what extent). He seems like the least bad candidate by a wide margin (although that’s not saying much), but I’d still be cautious about investing too much effort into electoralism – of course, an anti-imperialist is not going to be allowed to win, so it all depends on whether the movement surrounding him can be used to prepare for revolution, e.g. if it’s going to work with indigenous movements, the African People’s Socialist Party, etc.
I have many disagreements with him, but he is the best candidate in the current election by a mile. I don’t think I will be a US citizen anymore by the time (assuming the US finally lets me renounce) the election rolls around, but if I were I would probably throw my vote his way.
There’s no chance he would win, even though he is far to my right he is far too left for the establishment to tolerate. If nothing else, I hope he represents a “gateway” to people getting more interested in actual left thought. People realizing there is a choice outside the two colors of the same party. I know a few comrades who started as liberal Bernie supporters, and then sprinted left from there. They would never support somebody as rightwing as Sanders now, but he was at least the first step for them.
I ultimately don’t think the US can vote itself into an actual socialist government anyway, that would take an actual revolution.
