this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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I take the badempanada line on this: so what! We wouldn’t accept someone becoming a cop or a prison guard to escape poverty, why should we do the same for troops?
This is my line too. It’s more morally acceptable imo to turn to straight up robbing people’s houses to escape poverty than to join the military.
Hell, it's more moral to sell drugs like crack and heroin than it is to join an imperialist military. At least everyone involved is there because they want to be.
Obviously, you shouldn't sell drugs because you're taking advantage of addiction. You're also complicit in whatever activities your criminal organization takes part in, whether that's contract killing or pimping. That's how low the bar is in comparison to being a troop. But no one who's in the mafia is under any illusions about what it is they do. Trying to convince Americans "Hey, maybe your friends deserved to get shot by the Vietcong," is a fool's errand.
Think about the context: Opium was a tool of imperialist subjugation of China. Being a drug dealer was being part of that imperialism. America isn't being imperially subjugated by means of drugs(unless you count the CIA crack thing)
Didn’t the black panthers (and the IRA) have harsh policies towards drugs? The “cia crack thing” is exactly the same strategy as the British opium trade
“And there, always there and ever willing, for a price of course, to meet the addict's demand for dope is the cop-man, the dealer, purveyor of poison, distributor of death, merciless, murdering scum, of the planet, vile capitalists, salesmen of death on the installment plan, the dope pusher, the plague-man.”
“We are the only ones capable of eradicating the plague from our communities. It will not be an easy task. It will require tremendous effort. It will have to be a revolutionary program, a people's program. The Black Panther Party is presently in the process of formulating a program to combat the plague. It will be controlled totally by the people. We, the people, must stamp out the plague, and we will. Dope is a form of genocide in which the victim pays to be killed.”
I could be wrong but this seems pretty clear
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/black-panthers/1970/dope.htm
You're both right.
Drug-dealing is a crime against the working class and the Chinese socialists along with the Black Panthers were so negatively impacted that they had no tolerance for it in their revolutionary praxis.
That doesn't mean that a petty dealer deserves the same ire as US military members. If that were the case, every convenience store clerk is also an agent of reaction and death. Maybe you were specifically talking about opium? Even still, the other poster was also being bombastic rather than writing a thesis.
I’m a little confused by this response, I never said a drug dealer deserves the same ire as the foot soldiers of imperialism, just that they can serve the same purpose to the imperialists in the domestic sphere. Not sure what the convience store clerk example has to do with this and I wasn’t specifically talking about opium, crack is an upper but served the same purpose as heroin or opium
alcohol is pretty destructive
You don’t think there’s a distinction between alcohol’s penetration into all American communities and the targeted attacks against the black community by planted narcotics?
Also could you address the rest of my comment? Thx
I don't know what the current disagreement is, especially given that my comment centrally agreed with both you and the other commenter. I just pointed out that you were talking past each other in an unproductive manner.
As you claim, it is just a difference of scope. The Quote which constitutes most of your comment, at least without further context, doesn't seem to be stressing the discriminatory drug sales but rather the pernicious nature of drug sales.
In the context of China, the drug dealers were traitors who collaborated with imperialists (where did they get the opium from) while the soldiers (presumably you meant soldiers in the Nationalist army) were literally kidnapped from their villages and forced at gunpoint to put on a Nationalist uniform. Not remotely comparable.
Do you think there might be some historical background that coloured chinese civil war socialists thoughts on drug dealers?
So why's this a twitter take then. Was that meant positively?
I mean...yeah? yeah it is?
These two points do not contradict each other at all. Imperalism turned inwards is just very different from imperalism turned outwards.
How so? What’s the difference between the US importing crack and heroin to mollify revolutionary elements within society and Britain exporting opium to make the Chinese more vulnerable to exploitation?
At the time that was happening the US claimed to be a democracy for one, to stick to that example. It doesn't make that better by any means, but the results of whether your own (democratic) country has that happening vs. it being inflicted by a foreign power makes a big difference in perception, which then guides action
Why does the “democratic” nature of the US matter more, the internal colonized people in the US didn’t see drugs as less of a threat because it was “their” government instead of a foreign one?
I'd argue the reception, even post that coming out, is very much different between "this was foisted upon us by a hostile nation" vs. "this was a small part of the state that kind of did an oopsie for a while but we fixed it now" and that's without even getting into american exceptionalism basically overwriting the last part with "no that didn't happen" for large swathes of people
Are the soldiers in the Chinese civil war comparable to the American army today? Totally agree on the drugs issue, it feels more like accepting Japanese defectors than Chinese nationalists
somehow i grew up poor without even once being tempted to sign up as a mercenary for corporations to kill random brown people
Hmm sounds like you’re a superhuman with obscene standards we can’t possibly use to judge the poor widdle imperialism facilitators
yankee chauvinism mostly