this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Anarchism
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Discuss anarchist praxis and philosophy. Don't take yourselves too seriously.
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Ask them about Khrushchev and co's destalinization or 70s Mao or Gonzalo.
afaik hexbear unanimously hates Gonzalo, which is throwing me off trying to interpret this comment. not being snarky
All three are examples of ml leaders who took huge Ls abusing their power that nobody is afraid to criticize. I'm not familiar enough with the boiled baby guy to say whether he was actually an ml or if it was another pol pot situation.
Gonzalo was a self-proclaimed Maoist, part of the reason we say ML-MZT and not MLM in English
If you want criticism of a self-proclaimed ML (and don't count Pol Pot because that claim was not even paper thin), Khrushchev is someone we all hate who has slightly more of a claim to the title, though naturally I would argue that he is a revisionist.
If you want criticism of an actual ML, we criticize Stalin and Mao all the time, but usually not on "selfish abuse of power" terms because that generally isn't what they did compared to simply being a bit reactionary or foolish (often right and left deviationism, respectively, though that is a slight stretch for the Four Pests case).
Naturally, if it is an ideology we believe in, then actions we disagree with are generally going to be outside of what we consider those principles to be.