Let him know that you think those anti-communist materials are wrong or misleading. Offer to explore some of these topics in depth with him in some format(s) that's agreeable to both of you (video, books, podcasts, whatever). Let him pick some sources, and you pick some sources, and then you both discuss them together.

Most people who are anti-communist are reflexively so, and have simply never heard a lot of key history. Just studying/exploring/discussing communism and its history can undo a lot of that.

As tempting as it might be, you don't have to go through everything in the propaganda they've sent you sentence by sentence and then debunk it. Just have a conversation with them about it and take a look at the real stuff together.

Made curious by some of the other comments here connecting that Redditor's abusive language and refusal to really say anything of substance beyond 'I don't like this' and Maoism, I just spent kind of a long time looking back through that person's comments trying to figure out what about their thinking is particularly Maoist, especially in the context of that series of insults they wrote on your post, which don't, to me, reveal any particular way of thinking so much as a temperament.

I did eventually find some Maoist language across their comments. They probably do self-identify as a Maoist or Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, though I didn't see a comment to that effect.

But what I noticed more was that pretty much their only mode of discussion was verbal combat, and maybe in some cases declarations on certain questions or definitions of terms. There wasn't a lot I could recognize as instruction, exploration, or listening, although I imagine they'd consider some of their declarations educational.

I'm tired. I can't think. I don't have a thesis here. But OP, I'm sorry that someone took it upon themselves to shit on your work instead of offering you feedback or simply saying nothing.

Last week someone here called me a 'fucking worm' (repeatedly) and a 'little baby', and told me I should be 'erased from existence', along with a pile of other insults. (Someone else reported and the mods banned them, in addition to deleting the worst of their comments. Thank you.) That outburst was in response to me trying to voice what is, imo, another aspect of this same exact problem. That experience naturally got me thinking even more about this pattern, and my own relationship to it.

I've been cruel and domineering online before, especially in my late teens and early twenties. Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out how to be critical and steadfast in my criticism without ever being vicious.

Finding one's way to communism means, among other things, becoming more intimately aware of horrible, painful facts about imperialism past and present. There's also a real sense of alienation that comes with rejecting the dominant ideologies in one's own culture and society. I think that unfortunately often, among young men especially, 'conversion' to socialism does less to challenge certain patriarchal attitudes to violence and domination than to direct those attitudes to new targets.

It's perhaps an especially difficult thing when learning the real history of socialist revolutions involves coming to understand that revolutionary violence can be truly necessary, that 'terrorism' is a label that has been weaponized against righteous and successful liberation struggles, that failure to suppress counterrevolution has historically meant defeat at the hands of brutal, brutal, reaction, and so on.

Emphasis on the material as a historical force, as something which generates ideology as a kind of rationalization, can also be misused to downplay or turn away from the role of the subjective. If one is already so inclined, it is easy to dismiss any call to introspection as idealism— especially when one sees radlibs make such calls in bad faith and treat them as the limit of politics.

The road to socialist understanding for men and boys raised under patriarchy is riddled with pitfalls. The distance and abstractness of online interaction don't help here, either.

He said no to a permanent cease fire against Hamas.

Yes. The criticism is precisely that Bernie won't call for an enduring ceasefire. This is not a gotcha.

Hamas killed a bunch of Israeli civilians and expects no consequences, come on.

Hamas is not a naughty child and raining bombs on entire neighborhoods, killing over 10,000 civilians and counting, is not a spanking. What the fuck?

tl;dr: this appears to be an inauthentic Che quote, and the meme seems more or less designed to paint anti-Zionism as anti-Semitic, decolonization as annihilationist/genocidal, etc. I've reported this post.

The language of extermination is obviously fraught in this context and plays directly into the hands of those who would equate Zionism with Judaism and Jews. It's also repulsive in its brutality and childish in its simplicity, even in contexts where it is understood that force is necessary to resist oppression.

Beyond that, the idea that there's an analogy here isn't credible. Who is in a position, in Palestine, to oppose and crush a fascist movement in the way successful domestic opposition to fascism has ever been carried out?

Searching for more context, I found a transcript of what appears to be the text of the speech named. It doesn't mention fascism at all. It does (naturally) address colonialism, which obviously does have a great deal of relevance to Palestine. Maybe we should post some real quotes from that speech instead. He does mention Palestine once:

When we send our greetings from here, and from all the conferences and the places where they may be held, to the heroic peoples of Vietnam, Laos, so-called Portuguese Guinea, South Africa, or Palestine — to all exploited countries fighting for their emancipation — we must simultaneously extend our voice of friendship, our hand and our encouragement, to our fraternal peoples in Venezuela, Guatemala and Colombia, who today, arms in hand, are resolutely saying “No!” to the imperialist enemy.

All of the results I can find for the phrase "exterminate them with bullets" from a quick web search are this very meme, posted simultaneously here, in Hexbear, and various leftie subreddits. I've reported this post to the mods.

I'm not on Reddit. If anyone lurking here is also on Reddit, would you please do a web search on the post title and/or some phrases from it and report those posts for our comrades on Reddit? (A couple posts come up when I search on DuckDuckGo, and at least one does on Google)

Instead of mainstream social media, I've been directing the energy that ongoing events in Palestine stirs up in me into educating myself on related topics, and just engaging the topic in conversations with the people closest to me. Similarly, when I feel too tense or riled up about news coverage and commentary, I focus on long-form content not directly concerning the current bombing campaign, like history books or YouTube lectures.

What I probably need to do more of generally is just disengage altogether, but overall I do feel like it serves my mental health better when I avoid the punditry in favor of more substantial content.

Anyway I think that advocacy is important and valuable, but I think it's absolutely your prerogative to limit that or pursue that in a way that supports your overall mental health.

And it's not just you. Mainstream discourse on the ongoing slaughter of Gaza, and indeed the whole Palestinian struggle and situation, is fucking exhausting and infuriating here in the imperial core. And the facts of what's happening, even aside from the way the situation is discussed, are just plain heavy and painful.

mostly

For your convenience, here's the article.

Currently they're saying 1,200 total, listing ~320 names, with ~105 of them civilian and ~215 military and police, so of the confirmed Israeli deaths from October 7, it's about 67% active military and police.

You can find some PFLP literature on the website of Foreign Languages Press.

Not really, insofar as temporariness is counterposed to permanence. This view comes from a misunderstanding of the concept of permanence: what is permanent is not necessarily eternal. Permanent is more like enduring, in the sense of lasting indefinitely, until further notice, or until longer than one could reasonably be expected to need it.

When we compare a tent to permanent housing, for example, we are not comparing it either to a structure which will stand for thousands of years or a home from which the occupant will not be allowed to move away for their lifetime.

Same thing with 'permanent' vs. 'dry erase' markers and so on. Tattoos are only temporary in the completely trivial sense that everything is.

I'd question the nature of that support. I'm sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game in protecting them, however support for the recent bombings and ground assaults is significantly lower.

Well, a large supermajority of Israelis support continuing the current campaign, which is inarguably characterized by indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza, 'until Hamas is completely eliminated'. This is a clear statement of support not just for the bombing which has so far taken place, but a claim that it must continue (indefinitely— until reaching a goal that is arguably impossible).

I'm sure nearly every Israeli wants the military to step up their game

Are you familiar with the concept of strategic depth? Given Israel's limited size and accessible terrain, its geography profoundly lacks this feature. This means Israel's defensive capabilities have a virtual ceiling, and the ability to make strategic retreats against an invasion is very limited.

For this reason, Israel has a long history of preferring offensive action over defensive action. And indeed, a large plurality of those polled by IVP, as reported on in the article cited above, have come out and said that Israel's biggest mistake leading up to October 7 was failing to carry out more offensive operations in Gaza prior to the attack.

Calls for Israel to 'step up its military game' are intimately tied to offensive action in Israel, and the pretense that they could conceivably relate only to defensive measures for 'protection' or 'safety' is unsustainable under any historical scrutiny.

there are many in Israeli leadership roles behaving that way. It's hard to say whether they genuinely feel that way themselves or if they're just encouraging it for their own benefit - Netanyahu is probably the latter, in my opinion

Why such interest in the rhetoric when there is a growing pile of civilian corpses behind it? Who cares what is in Netanyahu's heart when the evident fact is that his finger is pulling the trigger?

Most people in any nation just want peace and prosperity for themselves, rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

The demand for peace without justice is a demand to normalize violence. Are you familiar with the concept of 'normalization' in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or in the BDS movement? If you aren't, regardless of the outcome of this discussion, I urge you to take the time to review and at least consider this recent lecture on the concept. Peace is indeed vital for all human beings, but how peace is demanded is equally vital.

rather than the destruction of others to expand political borders.

And yet Israel, a country in which conscription is mandatory for both sexes, military training typically begins at age 14, a large supermajority of the population serves in the military, and whose military and intelligence agencies are rooted in paramilitaries that antedate the formal state by decades, has been engaged continuously in exactly such a project of forceful expulsion for more than a hundred years, without pause.

If this history is unfamiliar to you, or Palestinian displacement has been presented to you primarily as very recent or unintentional, you may find some deeper engagement with the topic enlightening, if challenging (and you may not agree with all the analysis you read, of course).

There are a large number of books, including books by Jewish Israeli scholars, currently available for free on this topic.

If you're interested in diving deeper, outside the context of this argument, please let me know. If you have preferences for audiobooks, videos, or other formats, I can help you find something that works for you.

I'm also willing to do a 'reading exchange' with you if you're open to that— I'll read one related book of your choosing if, after you give me a sense of what texts most interest you, you agree to read one book I recommend, and we can discuss both books together.

I understand that the latter is a big time commitment, so no big deal if you can't do it.

This kind of functional role of 'bad settlers' is well-documented in settler-colonialism, and there are even instances of leaders and government officials in the United States case admitting the necessity of 'unofficial' settler violence, from paramilitaries to illegal settlements and more.

Can any comrades with more recent contact with this material than I've had help me out with a citation on this, ideally 'from the horse's mouth'?

Thanks for writing out your thinking on this explicitly, and for inviting discussion in that way.

Public support in Israel for Israeli military operations is typically very high (70% or more, often even above 80%). The only sense in which those supporting massively disproportionate violence and indiscriminate killing of civilians are a minority is in terms of rhetorical style— not the substance of supporting the actual operations that kill people.

Moreover, many of the Israelis on TV 'frothing at the mouth' are current or former government officials. To characterize them as a 'tiny minority' is extremely misleading about their role in effecting this violence.