this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2023
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The Deprogram Podcast
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International Anti-Capitalist podcast run by an American, Slav and an Arab.
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My only criticism of the deprogram is their unwillingness to fully voice their support for anti-imperialist causes and AES. They approach China and Russia for example in the most pragmatic way, which allows any liberal leaning viewers to think "both sides bad" instead of digging any deeper into anything.
I think it's a good gateway. Talking from personal experience here, pragmatism is the reason I choose ML over anarchism. Honestly it's still my default lens to analyse a situation, even if I am now willing to engage with more militant support
The only simple reason lies within their name, "deprogram". The target is not people like us. You have be a bit loose (realism) while being firm with your ideology (ideals). Otherwise there will be no treading of blurred lines, and only separated camps.
I think of the Deprogram as a lie-to-children. In physics classes, you first have to get kids to understand temperature, electric power, and motion at a basic practical level via flawed analogies, because real physics is weird and terrifying and inviting towards confusion and fallacies, its core is made out of complicated mathematics and unsolved problems, and if you hit sixth-graders with Fermi-Dirac statistics, U(1) gauge theory, and Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates, you will traumatise 99% of them very quickly. So you lie to them to keep them from having nightmares about geometry, and if this means they think electrons are little balls and space is a rigid and absolute object until they enter university, then so be it.
Physics became such a slugfest for me early on, because I did a deepdive project on Higgs boson during middle school. It did not help that integration calculus became my weak point later on, but I did what I had to. Weird days.
This. I want to believe that they adopt this relatively non-committal position so as not to alienate the "normies" who they hope to draw in and convert to communism, and that if they didn't think it would put off these people who they hope to "deprogram" as it were they would adopt more openly unappologetic pro-AES and anti-imperialist positions. But frankly it bothers me, i find it very distasteful and at times i think it borders on opportunism.
One minute they are excoriating NATO and pointing out how the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and that we should not be continuing to arm them, the next they say that they don't support Russia in this conflict and that Russia shouldn't have launched their intervention and Ukraine has a right to defend itself. Which is it? Do you recognize that it was actually the US and its Nazi proxies that started this war or don't you? Are you really opposed to NATO and US imperialism or are you just saying that but are too cowardly to support a country that has said enough is enough and is now actually fighting back and giving their lives to defeat the imperialists and their Nazi proxy army.
sorry, i dont see how saying "Ukraine is full of nazis and a proxy for USA" is antagonistic to saying "Russia is a proto-imperialist state and should not have invaded Ukraine".
despite what they may say to you, if you are not in neither russia nor ukraine, you do not need to support a side.
actually, AFAIK, that is the official chinese instance in the matter.
wow a based comment on the ukraine war with 0 downvotes!
Yeah. Fuck their fucking shithead fans for being "neutral" on the subject of imperialism. You're either with us or against us.
If you don't pick a side, then eventually a side will pick you.
No "eventually" about it, me thinks - being neutral to imperialism in a country that massively benefits from it is very much taking a side, in its own way.