Reds! Official Fanfiction Thread (Part Two)
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Unseen No Longer: Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" Turns Fifty (By GoulashComrade)
Unseen No Longer: Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" Turns Fifty
From one of the most controversial and divisive works produced in the 1950s to a cornerstone of the American literary canon, the late Ralph Ellison's magnum opus shaped everything from the way African-Americans saw their own political situations to the nature of the discussion on institutional racism within the UASR. Often considered a forerunner of the Black American thinkers that would later take part in the formation of the SEU - although Ellison remained a Liberation supporter for the length of his political life - Invisible Man's cuttingly sardonic prose still shines a harsh spotlight on the societal inequalities that produced the modern nation and poses thorny questions about the direction of the socialist experiment that modern Americans still grapple with.
The novel opens with the unnamed narrator, who is living "off-the-grid" in a series of interconnected basements underneath Metropolis, explaining his unique situation - he is invisible. Not an invisibility of the flesh, says the narrator, but rather an invisibility that results "simply because people refuse to see [him]." At first enraged when he discovered that "no matter what I did, those who called me 'Comrade' on the street before rushing past or said their hellos in mumbled breath before moving to the other side of the street could see me, but did not comprehend that there was a full person looking back", the narrator has since come to exult in his position as a "void person", biding his time until the moment is right to "make everyone look at me, at us, again."
Recounting the tale of how he came to realize that he was an invisible man, the narrator first describes his early life in the post-revolutionary South. The most notorious (and later celebrated) scene in the novel describes the narrator's quiet romance with a white girl he'd known from childhood - and the reaction of his white, ostensibly communist, neighbors when they discover their relationship. Ellison's detailed descriptions of the frothing racist rage on the part of the white citzenry at the narrator's "defilement of [her] lily-white womanhood" jarred White American readers of Invisible Man, many of whom had blithely assumed that racism and sexism had died with the Revolution. Run out of town by increasingly violent threats against his person, the narrator then applies and is accepted to a university run by the African-American ANC member and professor of literature Comrade Bledsoe. Comrade Bledsoe, a groveling apparatchik who intentionally misrepresents the chronic problems that the university faces with underfunding and an "overenthusiatic" community police to his white superiors, was Ellison's critique of the "respectable black" politically centrist and often varingly corrupt ANC leaders in ANFR - people who Ellison saw as having sold their own people down the river for "pats on the head from Master." After a situation where the narrator, aggravated by the constant crowing of a visiting White American apparatchik from the Department of Education about how fantastic universities in the ANFR have become, drives the apparatchik through the run-down ghettos surrounding the university to show her the reality of Black American life in the South, he is expelled by Comrade Bledsoe and travels north to Metropolis.
The already-improvisational and jazz-inspired style of the novel becomes fully magical realist as the background switches from the rural South to the megacity of Metropolis. No aspect of society was safe from Ellison's incisive criticism - from what he saw as the stagnation of the socialist experiment to the state of mental illness treatment to the "half-socialists" (as the narrator referred to them) of the embryonic ANC wing of the SEU. Taking up a job at a factory collective making paint (famous for its "Arctic White" paint - a jab by Ellison at what he saw as the UASR's tendency to mask its racial problems with a shiny coat of "solidarity!" paint), the narrator gets involved in a growing dispute between the elected management and the workers when the decision to "tighten the belt" and shave payments comes down. The narrator gets swept up in an impromptu strike of the mostly Black American workers that leads to violence and beatings administered by the Metropolitan Red Guard's Public Safety Units. The paint factory chapter in particular was Ellison's sharp rebuke of the UASR's failure to begin a transition to full communism and instead becoming bogged down in the remnants of capitalist relations that still pit the rank-and-file workers against the managers. As a member of Liberation and thus a supporter of decentralized syndicalization of the economy, he portrayed the rank-and-file in the more positive light when compared to the increasingly out-of-touch elected managers.
After another controversial section where the narrator falls in - and out - with the Communist Labor Party members of Metropolis who chide him for being insufficienly Marxist when the narrator points out the existing problems of soft-segregation in Harlem and excessive force on the part of the Public Safety Units, the book derides the emerging ANC current that would later break from the ANC's longtime association with Liberation in the form of Ras the Exhorter. A conspiracy theorist who believes that the Marxist parties and Marxism itself are white-dominated ideologies, Ras the Exhorter and his "Afro-Socialists" are painted as deeply flawed but sympathetic figures turned against the main Marxist parties because of those parties' callous apathy to the plight of African-American communities in the UASR's largest city. In the climax of the novel, the CLP members that the narrator broke with cynically instigate a riot in Harlem to cripple Liberation in a coming municipal election, but the riot blows up in their faces when Ras the Exhorter appears on horseback dressed as Toussaint L'ouverture. Ras and his Phalanx of the Black Liberation enters into an over-the-top gun battle with the Public Safety Unit troopers who arrive to "keep the peace." Chased into a basement by the Exhorter's "anti-Marxist Marxian Marxoids" and sealed up in there by the peace officers, the narrator ends the novel by saying that he is prepared to come to the surface again, him and every other "invisible comrade."
Although heavily criticized as anti-Marxist and perhaps even slightly seditious by both Black and White American critics when it debuted, Invisible Man is now seen as the first powerful instance of the Black Ultra-Left flexing its muscles and making itself noticed culturally. Indeed, many later members of the SEU saw the book as something of an early manifesto, even if Ellison scathingly criticized the tendency in his work. The publishing of Invisible Man marked a watershed moment in the history of Afro-America: no longer would Black Americans be content to place their struggle second to the "wider communist movement" - they would be heard and they would be seen.
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Big thanks to @Jello_Biafra for her help in writing this!
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Bookmark1995
Banned
Really great contribution @GoulashComrade!
It really adds nuance to life in the UASR: how even a successful worker's revolution can't end institutional racism overnight.
It really adds nuance to life in the UASR: how even a successful worker's revolution can't end institutional racism overnight.
Thank you! That's exactly the point Ellison would be making in TTL's version of Invisible Man - there are vast improvements from the previous state of race relations in the old US (case in point: the narrator isn't straight up lynched for dating a white girl), but the progress of civil rights has begun to slow with many of the previous issues sticking around. I also imagine the "full syndicalism now" part of his message will be well-received in the hard-leftist bastions of Chicago and Metropolis.
Why We Should Start Treating Death Like an Obstacle, NOT Something to Be "Tolerated" (By Bookmark1995)
Bookmark1995
Banned
Recently, scientists have said they may be able to cure aging. I wonder how Red Americans would feel about this advancement. Here is my take on this....
Humanist Monthly-The Magazine for Forward-Thinkers
Why We Should Start Treating Death Like an Obstacle, NOT Something to Be "Tolerated".
Margarita Feliciano
March 10, 2018
If anyone has bothered to pick up or glance at a science journal, you might learn something astonishing: that aging could one day be cured, maybe within a generation.
For most people, the response has been "Humbug!," to quote one of the most infamous capitalists in all of fiction. And that is no surprise.
Immortality has long been the domain of superstition and pseudoscience. Alchemists (who occupy a transitional period between superstition and the scientific method) spent centuries searching for the elixir of life, trying to create eternal life within people. Not only were these experiments useless, their "elixirs" often shorted the lives of their followers.
Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, is said to have been poisoned by the very mercury he ingested to extend his life. Not only did this shorten it, but is also contributed to his searing insanity.
Gradually, as real medicine emerged by the 18th century, the dreams of immortality soon faded. Though humans lived longer thanks to better living conditions, better doctors, and better food, we soon acknowledged and accepted that death itself was unavoidable.
What Makes Things Different
Well, I am not going to go into too much detail (as I am not a biologist nor do I study genetics), but the gist is this: some say aging and decay are the result of damage to genes that occurs overtime, the same way an appliance will gradually breakdown with out repairs [1]. The possibility is that with advance genetic engineering, it may possible to reverse this damage.
The point is, that since a specific cause of aging has been determined, it may be possible to cure aging, potentially within our lifetimes. One day, we may be able to purchase an anti-aging pill at our local pharmacies.
Horror and Fear
But for many people who do see the implications, the response is-like with many new ideas-horror, fear, and revulsion. Of course, much of this comes from the same place-the radical wing of the Social Ecology Union that opposes things like vaccines, GMOs, and insect killing pesticides despite their obvious utility. Before we hear about the "minor" advantages of immortality, let us hear about the supposed objections to it.
Overpopulation
For centuries, Malthusians have cried about the dreaded day when the world would become so overpopulated, it would run out of space and resources, and humanity would fight over what remained, until the population dropped to the point when the soil would regain its fertility.
This was the future imagined in the 1975 Charlton Heston movie The Green Zone. [3] In one gruesome scene, a starving militia commander (played by Heston) and a starving political official end up in a brutal fight over "the last can of soup", to show the future decay we would all face.
Of course, this fear wasn't completely unfounded in the time period. I mean, the Aral Sea was drying up and becoming full of pesticides, the Cuyahoga River had caught on fire, Pittsburgh was one of the filthiest cities in America. And world population was growing very quickly.
It was easy to believe those fear-mongers like Paul Erhlich, who believed that oil, coal, and farmland would all be exhausted by the end of the century [4]. The greenhouse effect made us fear that snow and ice would vanish from the Earth.
But, 4 decades later, and with a population of 7 billion, and the Earth has not tumbled into a terrifying abyss that so many feared. Through environmental and industrial reforms, education, and innovation, the Red bloc has been greener then ever.
One the reasons why the UASR and the USSR have such an open immigration policy is because birthrates have been dropping for decades, contradicting those who said human breeding would spread out of control. The Debs government offers so many bonuses and benefits to families is because they want to ENCOURAGE population growth. The only places having lots of kids are the Amish and the Kollontaians. These trends have continued throughout the world. Countries like India, which were backwaters only a few decades ago, have seen birthrates drop by half.
The Aral Sea is a popular fishing ground for many Soviet tourists, Pittsburgh has become one of the cleanest cities in the world, and the Cuyahoga River is one again beautiful.
Instead of running out of coal, coal mining has pretty much stopped in the last decade. West Virginia, which once relied on coal for industry, now relies on ecotourism, forestry, wind power, and biotechnology for jobs.
Instead of running out of oil, we have slowly but surely developed replacements for it. Living in Miami, I have not used a drop of gas to go anywhere. My friends all live in the same apartment, I can walk to work, bike to the park, take a bus to the beach, and take a train to the nearest city or town. Instead of peak oil, which M. King Hubbert talked about, we are on the verge of post-peak oil [5]
While the end of death will cause a spike in population, which will generate severe panics, I can imagine that scientists and engineers will be able to engineer means to accommodate such a vast population [6], as history has shown time and time again.
Life Would Get Boring
This is another shrill cry from someone objecting to immortality. That living longer then 70 years gets boring, and a person would get sick of life.
Well, my answer is that, if you're in a decaying body, then yeah, I can imagine that it could. But, stop the decay, and then suddenly, life wouldn't get boring. While yes, age can bring weariness, there are many, many people who were busy into their old age.
Albert Einstein was still working on scientific theories into his old age. Orson Welles is said to have suffered a heart attack while working on a manuscript. Imagine if these men had been given the time they needed. Who knows what they could have accomplished, if they had a few years.
Imagine so many other brilliant people who worked until their demise, and what they could have brought to this Earth? While there are some who would grow tired of life, there are those who wish to remain productive, and they ought to have the right to keep working and innovating as long as they wish.
Death is a Part of Life. Death is Natural.
Yes, one of the arguments of the SEU extremists is that death is a part of life. Death is something that has always existed, and will continue to exist, because it is a part of nature.
Well...
Yes that is true. Death has been part of our existence since, well, we've walked the Earth. Dying is something we've accepted as being a part of our existence.
But...just because something is a part of life, does not mean it ought to be.
Human exploitation and social stratification was once considered to be a part of life. From Mesopotamia, to Medieval Europe, people acknowledged that they must bow and scrape to some leader, and were taught that this leader had some divine right to rule.
This was the norm for millennia. But that did not mean that life was good then. Being a medieval peasant meant horrible working conditions, brutal mistreatment and exploitation, and the possibility of starving to death.
But then, in the 18th century, philosophers and technocrats began challenger the power of kings and feudal courts, and demanding rights for all. These people were looked upon as heretics, subversives, or opponents of the divine right to rule. Figures like Rousseau and Locke knew that just because they've lived that way for a long-time, didn't mean it was the correct way.
The industrialized world itself was also beholden to this social stratification too, even as the image of power soon switched from noble lineage to wealth.
From the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen to the First World War, the social division between capitalist and worker remained. Capitalists, like the monarchs of the past, justified their power over workers as a natural outcome of nature, hence the term "Social Darwinism."
But the great reformers, from Debs to Goldman, recognized that, like with feudalism and absolute, this was not how society should operate.
Finally, in 1917, the proletariat of Russia understood the horrors brought about by "tradition" and overthrew their hated bourgeois governments to build the first true workers' state. Almost two decades later, the American worker did the same.
We love our freedoms and control, and we could never imagine having the capitalist chains put back on our wrists. But if listen to those who didn't seek to change society, then we would have remained under the iron heel of capitalism.
Disease was also once a common part of life too. A plague could kill an entire population. Getting sick and possibly dying was once accepted.
Again, we challenged the notion that one should accept getting ill, and invented vaccines and penicillin. There is no (sane) person on Earth who says that one should accept getting sick and dying, except for the SEU radicals who preach against "unnatural medicines". If someone has a severe bacterial infection, it would be heartless to deny that person medicine. If we can cure the effects of aging, wouldn't it be heartless to deny someone the ability to terminate a disease of aging, like Alzheimer's or arthritis?
And, why should it be a crime to stay young? Don't we go to gym, put on makeup, and eat healthy because want to be fit and look hot? So what is the problem with wanting to keep in shape and look good for much longer? Nothing, but fear of the unknown.
If smallpox and cholera were things that needed to be cured, then surely aging and death are things that we can do without.
Death Helps You Appreciate Life
Here is another argument for death: it gives a person perspective, meaning, etc. Without death, I would not understand the joy of life, they say. I understood how good my life is because I know I will die.
That is ridiculous.
My grandmother from Cuba lost two of her younger brothers to the effects of TB, because they lived in a slum of Havana. What did she gain from her siblings dying due to a lack of medicine? Nothing. And I gained nothing from watching her slowly age, grow senile, and end up six feet under.
Death does not help me appreciate life. The death of another doesn't make me stronger. Suffering is not the key to happening (unless you like bondage).
The point is that the arguments for mortality are nonsensical and misguided. Mortality, like hunger, like oppression, like capitalist oppression, is not something to be cherished and celebrated, but something that must be consigned to the ash-heap of history.
[1] This video from Kurzgesagt goes into more detail.
[2] There is an argument that the Irish famine was an Irish Holodomor engineered by the British. I can imagine a Red American making that assumption.
[3] TTL Soylent Green-type story about ecological catastrophe.
[4] Erhlich was very doom and gloom indeed.
[5] Some say because of renewables, we may be headed there as well.
[6] This is a cornucopian school of thought, which argues that innovation can stave off resource depletion.
Humanist Monthly-The Magazine for Forward-Thinkers
Why We Should Start Treating Death Like an Obstacle, NOT Something to Be "Tolerated".
Margarita Feliciano
March 10, 2018
If anyone has bothered to pick up or glance at a science journal, you might learn something astonishing: that aging could one day be cured, maybe within a generation.
For most people, the response has been "Humbug!," to quote one of the most infamous capitalists in all of fiction. And that is no surprise.
Immortality has long been the domain of superstition and pseudoscience. Alchemists (who occupy a transitional period between superstition and the scientific method) spent centuries searching for the elixir of life, trying to create eternal life within people. Not only were these experiments useless, their "elixirs" often shorted the lives of their followers.
Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, is said to have been poisoned by the very mercury he ingested to extend his life. Not only did this shorten it, but is also contributed to his searing insanity.
Gradually, as real medicine emerged by the 18th century, the dreams of immortality soon faded. Though humans lived longer thanks to better living conditions, better doctors, and better food, we soon acknowledged and accepted that death itself was unavoidable.
What Makes Things Different
Well, I am not going to go into too much detail (as I am not a biologist nor do I study genetics), but the gist is this: some say aging and decay are the result of damage to genes that occurs overtime, the same way an appliance will gradually breakdown with out repairs [1]. The possibility is that with advance genetic engineering, it may possible to reverse this damage.
The point is, that since a specific cause of aging has been determined, it may be possible to cure aging, potentially within our lifetimes. One day, we may be able to purchase an anti-aging pill at our local pharmacies.
Horror and Fear
But for many people who do see the implications, the response is-like with many new ideas-horror, fear, and revulsion. Of course, much of this comes from the same place-the radical wing of the Social Ecology Union that opposes things like vaccines, GMOs, and insect killing pesticides despite their obvious utility. Before we hear about the "minor" advantages of immortality, let us hear about the supposed objections to it.
Overpopulation
For centuries, Malthusians have cried about the dreaded day when the world would become so overpopulated, it would run out of space and resources, and humanity would fight over what remained, until the population dropped to the point when the soil would regain its fertility.
This is the future imagined by British imperialists when they justified not sending aid to the famine stricken Irish during the famine of the 1840s [2].
This was the future imagined in the 1975 Charlton Heston movie The Green Zone. [3] In one gruesome scene, a starving militia commander (played by Heston) and a starving political official end up in a brutal fight over "the last can of soup", to show the future decay we would all face.
Of course, this fear wasn't completely unfounded in the time period. I mean, the Aral Sea was drying up and becoming full of pesticides, the Cuyahoga River had caught on fire, Pittsburgh was one of the filthiest cities in America. And world population was growing very quickly.
It was easy to believe those fear-mongers like Paul Erhlich, who believed that oil, coal, and farmland would all be exhausted by the end of the century [4]. The greenhouse effect made us fear that snow and ice would vanish from the Earth.
But, 4 decades later, and with a population of 7 billion, and the Earth has not tumbled into a terrifying abyss that so many feared. Through environmental and industrial reforms, education, and innovation, the Red bloc has been greener then ever.
One the reasons why the UASR and the USSR have such an open immigration policy is because birthrates have been dropping for decades, contradicting those who said human breeding would spread out of control. The Debs government offers so many bonuses and benefits to families is because they want to ENCOURAGE population growth. The only places having lots of kids are the Amish and the Kollontaians. These trends have continued throughout the world. Countries like India, which were backwaters only a few decades ago, have seen birthrates drop by half.
The Aral Sea is a popular fishing ground for many Soviet tourists, Pittsburgh has become one of the cleanest cities in the world, and the Cuyahoga River is one again beautiful.
Instead of running out of coal, coal mining has pretty much stopped in the last decade. West Virginia, which once relied on coal for industry, now relies on ecotourism, forestry, wind power, and biotechnology for jobs.
Instead of running out of oil, we have slowly but surely developed replacements for it. Living in Miami, I have not used a drop of gas to go anywhere. My friends all live in the same apartment, I can walk to work, bike to the park, take a bus to the beach, and take a train to the nearest city or town. Instead of peak oil, which M. King Hubbert talked about, we are on the verge of post-peak oil [5]
While the end of death will cause a spike in population, which will generate severe panics, I can imagine that scientists and engineers will be able to engineer means to accommodate such a vast population [6], as history has shown time and time again.
Life Would Get Boring
This is another shrill cry from someone objecting to immortality. That living longer then 70 years gets boring, and a person would get sick of life.
Well, my answer is that, if you're in a decaying body, then yeah, I can imagine that it could. But, stop the decay, and then suddenly, life wouldn't get boring. While yes, age can bring weariness, there are many, many people who were busy into their old age.
Albert Einstein was still working on scientific theories into his old age. Orson Welles is said to have suffered a heart attack while working on a manuscript. Imagine if these men had been given the time they needed. Who knows what they could have accomplished, if they had a few years.
Imagine so many other brilliant people who worked until their demise, and what they could have brought to this Earth? While there are some who would grow tired of life, there are those who wish to remain productive, and they ought to have the right to keep working and innovating as long as they wish.
Death is a Part of Life. Death is Natural.
Yes, one of the arguments of the SEU extremists is that death is a part of life. Death is something that has always existed, and will continue to exist, because it is a part of nature.
Well...
Yes that is true. Death has been part of our existence since, well, we've walked the Earth. Dying is something we've accepted as being a part of our existence.
But...just because something is a part of life, does not mean it ought to be.
Human exploitation and social stratification was once considered to be a part of life. From Mesopotamia, to Medieval Europe, people acknowledged that they must bow and scrape to some leader, and were taught that this leader had some divine right to rule.
This was the norm for millennia. But that did not mean that life was good then. Being a medieval peasant meant horrible working conditions, brutal mistreatment and exploitation, and the possibility of starving to death.
But then, in the 18th century, philosophers and technocrats began challenger the power of kings and feudal courts, and demanding rights for all. These people were looked upon as heretics, subversives, or opponents of the divine right to rule. Figures like Rousseau and Locke knew that just because they've lived that way for a long-time, didn't mean it was the correct way.
The industrialized world itself was also beholden to this social stratification too, even as the image of power soon switched from noble lineage to wealth.
From the invention of the steam engine by Thomas Newcomen to the First World War, the social division between capitalist and worker remained. Capitalists, like the monarchs of the past, justified their power over workers as a natural outcome of nature, hence the term "Social Darwinism."
But the great reformers, from Debs to Goldman, recognized that, like with feudalism and absolute, this was not how society should operate.
Finally, in 1917, the proletariat of Russia understood the horrors brought about by "tradition" and overthrew their hated bourgeois governments to build the first true workers' state. Almost two decades later, the American worker did the same.
We love our freedoms and control, and we could never imagine having the capitalist chains put back on our wrists. But if listen to those who didn't seek to change society, then we would have remained under the iron heel of capitalism.
Disease was also once a common part of life too. A plague could kill an entire population. Getting sick and possibly dying was once accepted.
Again, we challenged the notion that one should accept getting ill, and invented vaccines and penicillin. There is no (sane) person on Earth who says that one should accept getting sick and dying, except for the SEU radicals who preach against "unnatural medicines". If someone has a severe bacterial infection, it would be heartless to deny that person medicine. If we can cure the effects of aging, wouldn't it be heartless to deny someone the ability to terminate a disease of aging, like Alzheimer's or arthritis?
And, why should it be a crime to stay young? Don't we go to gym, put on makeup, and eat healthy because want to be fit and look hot? So what is the problem with wanting to keep in shape and look good for much longer? Nothing, but fear of the unknown.
If smallpox and cholera were things that needed to be cured, then surely aging and death are things that we can do without.
Death Helps You Appreciate Life
Here is another argument for death: it gives a person perspective, meaning, etc. Without death, I would not understand the joy of life, they say. I understood how good my life is because I know I will die.
That is ridiculous.
My grandmother from Cuba lost two of her younger brothers to the effects of TB, because they lived in a slum of Havana. What did she gain from her siblings dying due to a lack of medicine? Nothing. And I gained nothing from watching her slowly age, grow senile, and end up six feet under.
Death does not help me appreciate life. The death of another doesn't make me stronger. Suffering is not the key to happening (unless you like bondage).
The point is that the arguments for mortality are nonsensical and misguided. Mortality, like hunger, like oppression, like capitalist oppression, is not something to be cherished and celebrated, but something that must be consigned to the ash-heap of history.
[1] This video from Kurzgesagt goes into more detail.
[2] There is an argument that the Irish famine was an Irish Holodomor engineered by the British. I can imagine a Red American making that assumption.
[3] TTL Soylent Green-type story about ecological catastrophe.
[4] Erhlich was very doom and gloom indeed.
[5] Some say because of renewables, we may be headed there as well.
[6] This is a cornucopian school of thought, which argues that innovation can stave off resource depletion.
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Time to kill death, I guess? I dread what the capitalist world would make of a cure for death though. The level of extortion by pharmaceuticals corporations would be through the roof with such a leverage. Especially if you have to keep taking it. It could easily be the spark that ignite the next revolutionary wave.
The downside is that if a Red American is the first to figure out a way to "cure mortality" then a significant fraction of the population would implode under the unbearable weight of their own second-hand smugness.
Which would mollify the Malthusians somewhat and ease the remaining pressure on resources for a while, so I suppose every cloud has a silver lining.
Which would mollify the Malthusians somewhat and ease the remaining pressure on resources for a while, so I suppose every cloud has a silver lining.
I'll take the smugness over an immortal capitalist class in control of the means of immortality production.
At what point did I imply I was in favour of the latter? Imploding the most self-righteous portion of Red America is a small price to pay to avoid a dystopian, segregated-immortality hellscape as far as I'm concerned.
Bookmark1995
Banned
That would sound like an amazing thriller novel.
But these are real-life experiments in genetic technology-that may be one day in the hands of the average physician or practitioner.
At what point did I imply I was in favour of the latter? Imploding the most self-righteous portion of Red America is a small price to pay to avoid a dystopian, segregated-immortality hellscape as far as I'm concerned.
Uh...
I don't know if you are being facetious or not.
Are Red Americans smug? Yes. Do they actually help the world more than they hurt it? My impression is yes. Their exports of revolution are better than OTL Americans exports of freedom (and SUVs).
The woman writing the article is smug, but she also has really sympathetic reasons for supporting the end of aging.
Exaggerating for comedic effect, but the underlying sentiment remains. I'm well aware that the segment of the population I'm talking about is the smallest it's ever been at the point that article was written ITTL and that the motives and intent in the article and associated research are admirable.
What I've been getting from the glimpses of the post-WW2 era (mainly the 50s and Red Turn eras) doesn't give me a high opinion of Red Americans. Red America itself I quite like, but so far I've seen almost exactly the same braggadocio that gets OTL Americans (mostly unfairly) stereotyped as nationalistic boors with an added sense of self-righteousness stemming from an incorrect belief that they've solved the problems of the pre-communist USA and can easily apply those solutions everywhere else. I'm sure that by 2018 it's simmered down to the usual arrogance that plagues political idealists no matter what part of the political spectrum/compass/hypercube they're on and is no worse than OTL, but I'm hardly enamoured with that either.
I'd definitely be a Ralph Ellison fan if I was living ITTL, smugness is only excusable when you don't have such a gaping disconnect between what you practice and what you preach. If I were to pick any group in Red America we've seen so far to live amongst, "native" (i.e. not Cuban/Soviet/etc immigrant communities) Big-City Red Americans would probably be at the bottom of the list.
Good work on not having OTL's plague of school shootings though, it sort of makes up for ignoring serial killers for so long because acknowledging them would be ideologically inconvenient.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Yeah, I think native-born urbanites will boast about descending from the brave workers' who resisted exploitation, and will gloat about that like some people will gloat about their descent from the Mayflower. They probably sing:
America
America, Fuck Yeah!
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, Yeah
America, Fuck Yeah!
Freedom is the only way, Yeah
But again, this is an America I can say fuck yeah to, not the increasingly dysfunctional democracy whose political class has a Scrooge-like view of social problems. So a lot of that arrogance is, to myself, more understandable.
But I imagine Ralph Ellison won't be the only one who poke holes in the highly inflated ego of the UASR.
I think Mr Ellison already summed up my views on that attitude quite well. Being better than a shit sandwich is nothing to crow about.
Bookmark1995
Banned
OK. Fair point.
In my posts about Cubans, I did imagine there being tensions between The Cubans of South Florida, and the more conservative Northern Floridans, so I have observed that there are lingering stratifications and resentments in UASR society.
Mr Ellison is a rather harsh critic (for a number of good reasons) of the state of things in the UASR, but he is writing during the 1950s. A lot happens after that point to make the UASR more authentically like the harmoniously multi-ethnic bastion of libertarian communism it paints itself as - things like the Second Cultural Revolution and the rise of new parties like the Bookchinite SEU. Tellingly, Ellison never stops identifying with Liberation - the most fervent believers in exporting the revolution abroad and arguably the party that's most prone to the "Red America, Fuck Yeah!" sentiment.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Yep.
The UASR is a nation decades ahead of the USA in many, many things. And even in the ITTL 1950s, Black Americans still have more political rights then they did in the OTL 1950s.
Just like a huge number of other nations in OTL, congrats.
Yeah, they were only getting run out of town by "vigilantes" in the Deep South for looking at white women instead of being lynched. Some countries' prisoners have more rights than black Americans had in the 1950s, being better than that is not something worth boasting about.
My view was never that Red Americans never made any improvements over OTL to be proud of, it's that I think there's too much of a gap between their words and their actions to justify their attitude. I find it all too plausible that when interacting with non-Comintern citizens modern Red Americans (especially those whose families were never oppressed beyond the usual revolution-fomenting economic ways) would behave like the shift to communism rather than capitalism somehow erased every problem that the old USA ever had and never think about why there needed to be a Second Cultural Revolution, just like someone from the capitalist nations would focus on the hypocrisy of the UASR's early race relations (I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of the implications of that Ellison book) and psychology ("only capitalist societies produce serial killers") as well as their (from what I can tell from the tidbits we've been give) frankly rabid foreign policy rather than the deteriorating class situation and growing inequality in their home nations.
It is telling and the implications that even a cynic like Ellison considers the UASR to be capable of self-improvement are heartening.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Yeah.
There could still be glass ceilings for many women.
There could still be those object to the bellicose behavior of their generals.
There could still be many limits on free speech (ITTL Ellison comes under fire for puncturing the myths of ITTL America).
The postwar period ITTL could be like the OTL postwar period: a period of promise, with discontent brewing underneath the surface.
The overtly violent forms of racism ITTL get you staring down the business end of the Red Terror. Racism takes a more insidious form; in the case of miscegenation it often leads to ostracism even by many ostensible communists. It's not uniform; things are a bit better in cities with large black, Chinese, or Native minorities.
Also monolithic whiteness is something that is mostly stillborn. IOTL 1930s it was still very much an Anglo-Saxon club with the various 'white' ethnix taking lower positions on the chain. ITTL, white ethnic identity is much more strongly preserved. Most people born after the revolution would not consider themselves part of a white race or ethnic group; they'd consider themselves German, Scots, Italian, Jewish, etc.
Also monolithic whiteness is something that is mostly stillborn. IOTL 1930s it was still very much an Anglo-Saxon club with the various 'white' ethnix taking lower positions on the chain. ITTL, white ethnic identity is much more strongly preserved. Most people born after the revolution would not consider themselves part of a white race or ethnic group; they'd consider themselves German, Scots, Italian, Jewish, etc.
Bookmark1995
Banned
And I'm assuming the true horrors of the Nazis (which ITTL Americans have been exposed to directly, and in the case of POWs, victimized by) have killed, burned, and buried the idea of the White Race to pretty much everybody.