The issue with studying the collapse of the USSR is that everyone has an opinion on it and very few are principled Marxist-Leninist assessments, as K&K describe in the first chapter.

I’d recommend Carlos Martinez’s Why Doesn’t the Soviet Union Exist Anymore? for a brief but updated synthesis of K&K’s work once you’re finished, it helps in hammering in the main points.

Everything that has been said against suicide goes round and round in the same circle of ideas. People cite against it the decrees of Providence, but the existence of suicide is itself an open protest against her indecipherable decrees. They talk to us of our duties to this society without explaining or implementing our own claims on society, and finally they exalt the thousand times greater merit of overcoming pain rather than succumbing to it, a merit as sad as the prospects it opens up. In short, they make of suicide an act of cowardice, a crime against the law, [society] and honour.

“Why is it that in spite of so many anathemas people kill themselves? Because the blood of men in despair does not run through their veins in the same way as that of the cold beings who take the time to coin all those fruitless phrases. Man seems to be a mystery to man; he can only be blamed, he is not known. When we see how light-mindedly the institutions under whose domination Europe lives dispose of the blood and life of the nations, how civilised justice surrounds itself lavishly with prisons, chastisements and instruments of death so as to sanction its insecure decisions; when we see the numerical immensity of the classes which on all sides are left in misery, and the social pariahs who are battered by brutal contempt, meant to be preventive, perhaps to save the trouble of lifting them out of their squalor; when we see all this, we fail to understand what entitles us to command the individual to respect in himself an existence which our customs, our prejudices, our laws and our morals generally trample underfoot.

“It was thought that it would be possible to prevent suicide by degrading punishments and by branding the memory of the culprit with infamy. What can one say of the unworthiness of such branding of people who are no longer there to plead their case? The unfortunates, by the way, are little worried by that; and if suicide accuses anybody, it accuses above all the people who are left behind, because there is not one in this multitude who deserves that anyone should stay alive for him. Have the childish and cruel means devised been victorious against the whisperings of despair? What does he who wants to flee the world care about the insults which the world promises to his corpse? He only sees in them yet another act of cowardice on the part of the living. What kind of society is it, indeed, where one finds the profoundest solitude in the midst of millions; where one can be overwhelmed by an irrepressible desire to kill oneself wthout anybody being aware of it? This society is no society, it is as Rousseau says, a desert inhabited by wild animals. In the positions which I held in the police administration suicides were part of my responsibility; I wished to learn whether among the causes motivating them there were any whose effect could be obviated. I undertook extensive work on the subject.” I found that any attempts short of a total reform of the present order of society would be in vain.

• “On Suicide” by Jacques Peuchet; collated by Karl Marx, 1845.

You’ve posed a very pertinent question. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is the dilemma that encapsulates the entire project of “Western Marxism” in general and it’s a fair question that deserves more than ridicule or dismissal.

We are long past the era of Eugene Debbs where the Western left had a sliver of actionable material power, so even beyond the question of what the Western left can do for AES states, what is the point to being a Marxist at all? In practical terms, if you consider the things you can materially accomplish in the midst of the imperial core, is there really a point to being a ML and not simply submitting yourself to the Democrats or Labour or the SPD where you can at least organize to defend those few select social progressive interests permissible in this bourgeoisie system?

When you’re powerless, fragmented, isolated and sociopolitically ostracized, what’s the point to all of this, holding all those “geopolitics understander” positions and these “principally correct” Marxist stances at all if you can’t achieve anything real with them and, to most people looking at you from the outside, based on your accomplishable praxis inside the heartlands of anticommunism, you just look like a weird but generic liberal anyways?

Is the Western leftist doomed to be that soyjak meme, standing alone in the corner of a party, with that thought bubble thinking “Heh, they don’t know that Stalin = actually good.” Does it come down to that eternal philosophical question of “If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound at all?”

Marx lived during the apogee of imperialism, the cruelty of the American slave state and a bleak era where that meager revolutionary flicker within 1848 was subverted by the bourgeoisie and where the only successful proletariat uprising, the Paris Commune, was brutally squashed with ease. And yet, he persevered in his writings, which, of course, became the bedrock of what we stand for today. His writings where he railed against the hypocrisy of the Second Opium War against China and the British tyranny over India was meaningless in his own time, this was the height of European colonial despotism, after all, and the tirades of one lone individual was to scream against the void. Was there no point to his opposition towards imperialism and his solidarity, against his own class, with the oppressed then?

For someone in that time, in the midst of all the chauvinism and racism societally designed to socialize and induce the European individual to become a cheerleader for the imperialist cause, for him to reject all those narratives and to see things clear eyed for what they are, now means everything. That was an utterly hopeless time, yet he perserved in spite of it and gave so much to the cause of socialism in retrospect. This is the same with the likes of Michael Parenti, during the nihilism of the 1990s, where socialism was subverted everywhere and even the surviving socialist states like China, Vietnam and Cuba were eyed with paranoia. People like Parenti and Losurdo could have sold out like the rest of western “Marxism,” got a cushy tenure and professorship chair at Oxbridge or the Ivys, but they continued to defend the legacies and memory of Stalin and Mao.

This is not to say that your average Hexbear user will become the next Parenti or that the sequel to Das Kapital will be penned by a News Megathread regular, but to emphasize the important point that those Marxist figures understood. They understood that the imperialist West is a culture obsessed with discourse control and narrative purity. To stand in front of its propaganda and to say “no” in its face is a powerful thing, in of itself. This is why the liberals get so upset when they encounter MLs, why there was two Red Scare campaigns, why Communist Parties in many countries are outright banned, why they’ve legislated criminal charges against those who support designated enemy nations. If it’s all meaningless, the adversaries of the genuine Western left would have never put in so much effort to counter genuine leftist voices. If it’s all pointless, they would not be so livid at seeing ML counter-argumentation and have banned communities like r/genzedong such that the Western left is ostracized to isolated places like Hexbear and Lemmygrad.

As such, yes, the Western left does not have the capacity for its own liberation, but upholding internationalist solidarity and maintaining principled Marxist-Leninist lines has meaning. It’s true that this meaning is not as materially valuable as being the one who fired the October shot on the Aurora, or striding into the Chinese countryside to manage New China’s land reform and this can be demoralizing to many who want more actionable and material gains.

Over the past century, many people on the Western left, not just ultra chauvinists or Trots or sellouts but well meaning people, have allowed themselves to suppress their own socialist beliefs in order to join liberal ranks and push for “change from within” or to achieve acceptable goals within the confines of the imperial core because the capabilities of the Western left, reduced to just providing internationalist solidarity, are such intangible things. This is understandable but one point that must be emphasized is that while the things the Western left can achieve are principally ideological rather than material, however, does not mean those things are meaningless.

Though it understandably can be demoralizing that this is the crux of what we can contribute, principled Western Marxist-Leninists who have a clear eye of how things are represent a slap in the face to the West and its self-image of whitewash and apologia, its modern narrative of LARPing moral sainthood while kicking its 500 years of imperialism under the bed, which I’ve talked about in a previous post. At this point in time, they earnestly believe they’ve gotten away with it and an ML’s principled stance, refusing to play along, threatens that. There’s a reason why Hitler personally ordered the execution of Ernst Thälmann, despite the latter having been imprisoned for eleven years, during the collapse of the fascist reich in 1944 while those like SPD collaborationists were left unscathed. Though western Marxism has almost always been utterly impotent, they nonetheless have a genuine fear of what we stand for.

Above all, our principled stance, though it might seem “immaterial” and feckless, is the continuation of the memory of those comrades of the past, those who built the planks in the house of western Marxism, ramshackle shack though it may be. Those like Thälmann were never able to achieve anything material either, does that mean he should have disbanded the KPD, joining the SPD in hopes of “changing things from within” or that his existence and martyrdom was meaningless? If that was true, then fascist written popular media has a better sense of duty to their predecessors than us western Marxists do.

Ultimately, I think there’s a dialectical dialogue in Disco Elysium, of all things, that encapsulates all of the understandable nihilism inherent to western Marxism quite poignantly.

Rhetoric: The question you mean to ask is both very complicated and incredibly simple…

Endurance: Take a deep breath. Best to go one piece at a time.

You: If communism keeps failing every time we try it…

Steban: (he waits patiently for you to finish)

You: …And the rest of the world keep killing us for our beliefs…

Steban: Yes?

Volition: Say it.

You: …What’s the point?

Steban: (he considers your words for a minute)

Composure: You’re witnessing his ironic armour melt before you. This is his true self you’re seeing now.

Empathy: He’s thinking about someone…

You: Wait, who is he thinking about?

Empathy: Hard to say. Someone dear to him.

Visual Calculus: Track his gaze. He’s looking out past the broken wall, toward the opposite side of the Bay…

You: Toward the skyscrapers of La Delta.

Visual Calculus: They rise like electric obelisks in the night.

Steban: The theorists Puncher and Wattmann — not infra-materialists, but theorists nonetheless — say that communism is a secular version of Perikarnassian theology, that it replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity’s future… I have to say, I’ve never entirely understood what they mean, but I think maybe the answer is in there, somewhere.

You: Wait, you’re saying communism is some kind of religion?

Steban: Only in this very specific sense. Communism doesn’t dangle any promises of eternal bliss or reward. The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we’re willing to work and fight and die for it.

You: But what if humanity keeps letting us down?

Steban: Nobody said fulfilling the proletariat’s historic role would be easy. (he smiles a tight smile) It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn’t mean we can simply give up.

You: Even when they ignore us?

Steban: Even then.

Ulixes: Mazov says it’s the arrogance of capital that will be its ultimate undoing. It does not believe it can fail, which is why it must fail.

Volition: So young. So unbearably young…

Half Light: Why do you see the two of them with their backs against a bullet-pocked wall, all of a sudden?

Inland Empire: Their faces, blurred yet frozen as though in ambrotype. You were never that young, were you?

Steban: I guess you could say we believe it because it’s impossible. (he looks at the scattered matchboxes on the ground) It’s our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain… like this…

Spoilers for the source novel plotline here.

It’s a fictionalized account which seems to be based on Beevor and Alexievich, so definitely junk food.

The reality is that we still exist in the nightmare pangs of a world where the failsons of the past 500 years of imperialism and genocide strut around acting like the moral leaders of the planet. You enter into a sort of mental paralysis despair spiral when you read about the atrocities committed by those who built this western “civilization” through the genocide of the New World, the subjugation of the entire planet and see the chauvinism and nonchalance of how this west conducts itself today.

There has never been such a degree of inhumanity as what followed when the west got its grubby little hands on gunpowder and the compass and to have them now hide the butcher’s knife behind their back and act the saint today, gloatingly prancing about like peacocks about being the “first world,” one built with the inherited loot of 5 centuries of imperialism, gives you a wrenching dissonance at the Kafkaesque parody of a world “order” we now inhabit.

The most farcical aspect of this is that we of the West are the most filial children this species has ever produced. The institutional propaganda purpose of western academia and all those prestigious University Presses in terms of the humanities is to print out endless slop degrading the historical past of designated enemy nations and lionizing our own. It’s viewed as a great triumph to see designated enemy nations so self-conscious in casting down their forefathers as Khruschev did to Stalin and as feckless diaspora reactionaries fantasize about doing to Fidel and Mao.

Meanwhile, the 2020 BLM protests showed how the west would fight tooth and nail to defend every single inch of the historical pantheon of slave owning founding fathers and colonizers. A few like Robert E Lee were (grudgingly) cast down (sporadically) as a concession, but any wider challenge against the likes of Washington, Jefferson, the 19th century Oxbridge imperialism-abbetting dons and even a freak like Rhodes were slapped down. This is what all the pearl-clutching around the statues and the paintings and the named buildings were really about at its core.

This cognitive battle for historical memory is the bedrock of contemporary western chauvinism. The aim is to ensure that only the history of the west is worth being proud of. In the former socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the educational curriculum drills in the historical shame of the socialist half-century, ensuring that the people will always feel wretched about their socialist past while the west still gets to parade around Cold War war criminal Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors as their heroes “with flaws.” The end result is that the past of former socialist states today is a blank nihilistic void with nothing of dignity to draw upon except going back centuries to fawn over inbred royalty or those Nazi-collaborationist freaks who terrorized their forefathers for their choice of socialism or just outright Westanbetung.

In the former DDR, it’s no surprise that the choice has become the far-right AfD. In this societal self-flagellation where the “Stasi” past is denounced, there’s not even some “post-Nazism redemption story” to grasp, like the fiction which the BRD parades around, because the socialist past is consigned to oblivion, equated almost on par with Hitler-fascism. Consequently, the only source of historical self-worth for many then can only inevitably come from LARPing as generic white people and importing American far-right and neo-Nazism as mimicry, vicariously associating with “Europe” and “the West” for that sense of post-socialist Europe pride that comes from being patted on the shoulder as being “semi-white” and “semi-European,” which has become the principal aspiration for those people.

The mental colonization that this represents is so pervasive that MLs are no exception to falling into this trap of helping to aggrandize western memory and denounce that of the designated enemies. In the nihilistic despair of the 90s and early 00s, Michael Parenti would praise Julius Caesar as a “hero for his time” for his cynical appropriation of Roman populism and yet condemned Deng Xiaoping in a fit of western Marxist paranoia. His example shows how easy it is for absolutely anyone to fall into this well worn groove and “cognitive comfort” that comes from accepting the western narrative of all things.

This is the cognitive dimension of why western hegemony is the primary contradiction of the contemporary world and must be recognized as such. Such a recognition accepts, and will never let go, of the historical fact of the west’s 500 year past of savagery. It steadfastly refuses the west’s song and dance at propagating historical nihilism (as Chinese comrades have fittingly coined) to the populace of its designated enemies while simultaneously patting itself on the back for being the failsons of war criminals and colonizing butchers. To awaken to this truth is a form of cognitive liberation, a moment of clarity that pulls the wool from one’s eyes. Even within the fragmented landscape of contemporary western “Marxism,” individuals in the suffocating midst of the imperial core can contribute to this principled stance.

The absolute funniest thing is that whenever something like this happens, including the literal day after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in Feb 2022, there’s the current crop of “realist” Kissinger/Brzezinski wannabes like that Meerswhatever freak screaming in ghoulish rags like Foreign Affairs “not to forget about China!” and waving around RAND Corp PDFs trying to remind the Washington blob that “China is still the real long term adversary!”

They’ve been getting completely sidelined for the past two years in every subsequent geopolitical moment since Ukraine because they don’t understand that the irrational greed inherent of US hegemony can’t stand getting challenged on a single inch of its imperial sway anywhere on the planet.

It’s a self fulfilling cycle that you can see from the testimony of LGBT Chinese individuals in Western coverage.

Because a lackluster societal tolerance climate preventing the domestic development of organic communities for LGBT rights due to the misinterpretations I’ve stated above, alienation drives LGBT peoples to the only real organized groups around, those formed by and subsisting on external backing through Western networked NGOs, as their only safe space. This relationship inevitably makes those individuals more amenable to the ideology behind those groups, ie. it turns them into Chinese liberal (or full blown Western imperialism apologists) types who come to oppose the government, socialist governance and their country on all grounds. None of this is necessary or inevitable and the understanding must be advocated that LGBT peoples in China need not be consequentially Chinese liberal capitalism restorationists if allowed to organize on their own terms.

It’s nearly impossible to get a factual grounding of the status of LGBT peoples in China through English media, since rainbow imperialism has been fully weaponized against designated enemy regimes. Western media describes China’s official policy as “no approval; no disapproval; no promotion.” I can’t find any literature that actually attests to this as written policy, but even if true, this position has given relatively meager ammunition for atrocity propaganda so far compared to other fronts of propaganda assault against the country. China is the chief designated enemy regime today and the only major thing I’ve seen thrown is primarily the “muh censorship” shtick. There is an undeniable fact that organized LGBT groups can and have been appropriated by Western interests in terms of NGO collaboration with Western funding and support, however. The chief obstacle to securing LGBT rights in China will never be the allowance of these dubiously affiliated groups, but overall societal reception. With the latter, wholly independent and organic means of collective organization will naturally form.

Through my personal trawling, the current situation as I understand it is that the more conservative elements of Chinese society see it as a foreign intrusion, similarly to how reactionaries in Russia view LGBT there. Uniquely, however, the main hurdles are mainly cognitive however and can be overcome by LGBT allied advocacy:

• LGBT toleration is not against Chinese historical tradition. There are countries where historical tradition is legitimately in opposition with the fight to secure LGBT rights. China is not one of them. The core of heteronormativity doctrine that prevails today across the world is derived from Western Christian dogmatism. However, China has had a long history of homosexual toleration and practice before heteronormativity was imposed at gunpoint by the proliferation of Western Christian missionaries, whose allowance to propagandize the population was a stipulated condition enforced onto China after the First Opium War by the Treaty of Nanjing. Paradoxically, conservative groups intent on defending Chinese tradition are in reality preventing the restoration of China’s historical tradition of toleration in favor of the 19th and 20th century Western imposed heteronormative dogmatism.
• The latest concern is that for those who see China’s aging population as a national security threat, they consequently therefore see LGBT peoples as abetting this demographic trend. This interpretation of conjoining LGBT liberation with declining demographics is entirely unfounded. Not only is a truly LGBT tolerant society no obstacle to stable demography, this is putting the cart before the horse.
  • The principal impediment worldwide to declining fertility rates is the absurd cost of living for the global Gen Z and Millennial generations, particularly housing costs, and China is not an exception here. As usual with Western coverage of China, if they screech something is going to collapse the country, it’s more likely a good policy decision. The recent popping of the real estate bubble is the government’s campaign against the skyrocketing housing prices. The fixation on enforcing heteronormativity to “resolve” demographic trends is therefore completely misinterpreting the issue.
  • LGBT peoples are not categorically anti-natalists, the clarification of this point must be fully advocated. In the current medical context, LGBT peoples will only be a contributing drag on demographic conditions if they inhabit a social and legal jurisdiction which inhibits their ability to participate in child rearing. A society that establishes an institutional adoption progress by LGBT parent aspirants would find that they are no more proportionally inclined to anti-natalism than heteronormative peoples.
    • Additionally, the developing medical context in terms of reproductive technological advancements see the real possibility of neutralizing the biological hurdles to LGBT contribution towards birth. The promotion of achieving this technological condition would be entirely synergistic with China’s national objective of ensuring the vanguard of a socialist state at the leading edge of human biosciences advancement.
• I’ve seen it suggested from a geopolitical basis that the calculus of securing the liberation of LGBT peoples would alienate China from its Global South colleagues whose societies face similar objections to advancing LGBT rights as neocolonial assaults on traditionist lines, along with the weird social conservative bedfellows that are currently chummy with China, like reactionary Russia and (wtf) the German AfD. The logic of this cynical argument must be connected to the reality that China, by its nature as a socialist state, alienates the capitalist elites (and therefore the media culture) of Global South and capitalism restoration countries like Russia far more than LGBT rights ever will. If the goal was to make Global South social conservatives happy, the logic of that sort of accomodation followed to its conclusion would lead to the overthrow of socialism in China. Rather, China must remain at the vanguard and set an independent standard for how the Global South can liberate LGBT peoples without resorting to the commercial and imperialist appropriation and two-faced perpetual legal and political semi-toleration of LGBT in the West.

My issue is that I view the legacy of past works from a consequentialist perspective and see things this way: every public figure has two sides to them. Tolkein, the private man, may have had a genuine crisis of faith with what he produced and some of his writings suggest something to this like. Tolkein the author however, never expressed any substantive reservations in his canonical publications to correct his original portrayal of the orcs as categorically evil and irredeemable. This is his public side and the legacy that we are left to contend with, as it is the only one which the general population would see through his published works. Through this, the fantasy standard of “evil” races which he popularized (and basically created, frankly) for posterity, and the consequences of that legacy, is an absolutely vile outcome of a so-called “Christian” referenced work and his pretensions to such does make him “clownish.”

There’s an endless amount of written mental masturbation by “Tolkein scholars” how poor Tolkein was “so confused” and “so conflicted” with how his worldbuilding ended up conflicting chiefly with Christian redemption doctrine through his racial characterizations. There’s an entire natopedia page on his so-called “moral dilemma.” If you’re interested in engaging with the topic on his own terms as he presents them, you may check that out, though I’ve read all of it, I personally have no interest in assessing him on that sort of register.

Crucially, neither did he ever consider it problematic that he drew inspiration for the orcs from European caricatures of African and Asian peoples- in fact, through his entire moral dilemma, he never once considered why he needed to make them, in his own words, “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned (a.k.a. yellow and brown skin), with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” This compounds the “dilemma” as he explicitly admits to race coding the orcs.

The bottom line is that no one forced him to write things that were antithetical to his professed faith other than himself and his partial self realization of this being expressed through private musings rather than being made plain and explicit in revisions of his work or canonical publications that made explicit a corrective to the portrayal is not a mark in his favor. The latter was a path he could have chosen if so inclined, if the dilemma was really as serious to him as Tolkein scholars, with an agenda of rehabilitating him for the modern age, allege him to have felt.

The best thing to do was simply not write such problematic material, and it’s always important to keep in mind that there were contemporaneous writers and people in every age ever who thought differently to whatever “dominant” local prejudice, contrary to the belief of the “man of their time” cultural relativism fetishist crowd. Especially by the mid 20th century, where there was no shortage of people even enclosed in the confines of the perpetually chauvinist terf island of imperialist Britain that did not view portrayals of the “other” in such a Manichean perspective as Tolkein did.

The second best course would have been to issue a corrective, either through a sequel or outright revision. On this front, Charles Dickens wrote problematic works with countless prejudical tropes. For one of them at least, the characterization of the greedy antagonistic Fa#in as an explicit Jewish caricature eventually gave him pause either through personal reflection or reportedly through lobbying by a Jewish acquaintance. He later revised his work to remove every reference to Fa#in as a Jew.

Tolkein did not choose to do that. He was clearly too much in love with what he created (more unfavorably said, I’d say he frankly liked the smell of his own flatulence too much) to revise his canonical works. Instead, he tried to bend Christian doctrine to fit his own pre-established problematic worldbuilding rather than tear down and adjust what he developed to re-align with his faith. These are the half-assed “contradictions” that Tolkein scholars attribute to his latter renditions on the etiology of the orcs.

TL;DR, Tolkein is a clown because he rejected any substantive praxis of his faith onto his works. Instead, he tried to have his cake and eat it too, calling his work Christian-based when he refused to allow Christian doctrine to alter what he already wrote. To put it crudely, he sharted on a plate, and upon realizing his mistake, he decided to sprinkle some parsley on top rather than remove the plate and sanitize it. This self conceit is why I have no patience for engaging with his contradictions on his own terms and why I don’t hold reservations for viewing him as I do.

However, I recognize his work is a permanent fixture on contemporary literature and his tropes are now standards of the fantasy genre. I have no issue with people who are fans of his work and would personally prefer to accomodate his (half-baked, in my view) expressions of his “dilemma” in more a favorable light than I do. Yet, I would never pretend to see him through such lens personally.

I had a migraine session on reddit back when hogwarts legacy was released from arguing how blatant the racial coding of the goblins was. The game actually encapsulates how mindless it has become for this “head empty, genocide ready” mentality for designated “evil” races in modern fantasy to be readily used by writers and accepted wholesale by apparently most of the audience.

Beyond the already odious Jewish caricature borrowed from the original Harry Potter representation as greedy moneylenders, classic subconscious British liberal chauvinism by JKR, the game went further by making the goblins an antagonistic faction which uses militant means to secure their species rights. This is viewed by the protagonists through the same light that liberals view real world armed resistance groups of marginalized peoples like the Black Panthers and, of course, Palestinians.

The goblins canonically live in an apartheid state where they’re relegated as financial serfs for the humans, with restrictions on magic use and unable to access the same educational institutions that humans do. Yet, because Ranrok (their leader) chose violence (along with doing plot nonsense bad things to justify their elimination), the usual liberal exclamation of “they’ve gone too far and ruined the purity of their victimhood” comes up. There is literally a comprador goblin by the name of Arn who opposes Ranrok’s movement and bemoans (in a chud dialogue scene) that “While I would like to see goblinkind treated by wizards as equals, bloodshed is not the answer.”

This typical liberal sentiment, the same one even MLK denounced in his Birmingham Jail letter, is wildly hilarious when applied to the Harry Potter universe. Ranrok is defeated, so certainly his violent ways must be disproven by a vindication of the liberal “peaceful gradualism” theory right? Except the game is set a full century before the books, and so we know that canonically absolutely nothing has changed in human-goblin race relations nor would goblin rights improve even a single inch. Dumbass comprador Arn’s fantasy of a “diplomatic end to the discord with wizardkind” still has predictably made zero progress in a hundred years, and ever onwards considering J.K. “Elves love slavery” Rowling never cared about addressing the racial apartheid of the setting.

Also, the protagonist is a full blown psychotic terrorist who literally shouts “Your blood is on Ranrok’s hands” as they murder goblinfolk- all while being an underage Hogwarts student. This last bit tore apart the cognitive dissonance far enough that even the reddit crowd started memeing about it (and of course, there were the customary apologists in there explainbroing how this was all still OK and kosher).

The race trope in D&D was inherited from Tolkein’s racializations in his LOTR. To preface, I don’t care for the work nor for the author. LOTR was way before my time and I never vibed with the weird insistence from the r/fantasy crowd that I need to “like” it to get their “fantasy fan starter pack.”

Tolkien was a massive racist POS for the racializing and racial coding in his works. Orcs are, by his own admission, inspired by 19th and 20th European racial caricatures of Asian and African peoples. He sees no problem with characterizing them all as canonically irredeemable and the definition of “evil,” this coming from a clown who apparently professed to be a “Roman Catholic,” who should then know then the importance of the Christian redemption doctrine. He himself later admitted it was problematic that he antithetically made the orcs irredeemably evil when the LOTR is supposed to be a Christianity referenced work… but then did nothing about it.

Fantasy today portrays goblins and orcs and trolls and whatever races as inherently vile, down to even their physical appearance. This is a racial characterization that has absolutely no material basis in reality other than in the racist caricatures of every non Anglo-American race during Tolkein’s time which he directly lifted from in his work. Seeing a non-white person back then produced the same conditioned revulsion that fantasy today makes people feel about those “monster” races.

It’s very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkein in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving “other” peoples, simply continued it within the confines of “fictionalized” races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkein admitted).

All this would have just been a simple rant on a problematic media tradition if it isn’t now being reverse applied onto real world designated enemy groups, like how Russians are now being called “orcs.” Fantasy through this trope has basically preserved through fictionalized cryo-statis, the conviction that an entire race can be genocided so long as they look “monstrous” and act “pure evil” used at the height of 19th and 20th century settler-colonial imperialism.

Without exaggeration, I’d argue it has contributed to how easy it has been for regimes like Israel and their Western apologists to resurrect the “shut your brain off, the entire population is inherently monstrous and worth exterminating” mentality, embedded particularly in the younger generations through media consumption of the fantasy genre, by invoking atrocity propaganda (similar to how “evil” races always have the inciting incident in the first chapter/episode where they do “the bad thing” to justify their subsequent extermination by the “hero” protagonists) to justify the Palestinian genocide.

Didn’t expect to see stray weeb wastewater apologia here.

All these Reddit “science understanders” can’t comprehend nuclear by-products aren’t just tritium alone. FFS, criticism denouncing TEPCO’s discharge plan was literally published in Nikkei Japan and yet this is just apparently a “China beefing” thing.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/It-is-not-too-late-for-Japan-to-change-course-on-Fukushima-water

To explore your tangent a little more, I’d say that Western and Chinese territorial expansionism is more different than alike, precisely for the examples you’ve cited.

Viewing cultures in reductive civilizational cliches is not a rigorous mode of analysis, but it is worth drawing a few points from. The Qing and Yuan phases of expansion are in direct contrast with the remarkable lack of relative expansion under the so-called “Han Chinese” dynasties. Those two dynasties were established under conquest and actively contextualized their reign as one of triumphal subjugation over the general population and majority culture. Operating under that mode of cultural belief allows a more assertive geopolitical posture compared to the more passive foreign policy philosophies of the “traditional” dynasties.

The example of the Imjin War between Ming China and Korea vs Japan is a good example, because it establishes the stakes involved in clarifying this. Some scholars in South Korea (though not the consensus view, as far as I’m aware) who operate from an adversarial basis towards the entire Chinese presence in Korean history see the war as a fight for Korea’s independence against not just Japan, but also Korea’s Ming ally, who “actually wanted to annex Korea while they were there supporting Korea.” Thus, Korea fought off not just Japan’s hard takeover but also the Ming “soft takeover.” K.M Swope’s “A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598” shows how this view is completely unfactual. The Ming were certainly frustrated at the military inefficiency of lacking direct control in Korea while conducting the defence against Japan, but they were never interested in annexing Korea as a result of this.

The real reason for this allegation is that those scholars simply aren’t capable, through their Hobbesian cynicism, of conceiving a foreign policy relationship that isn’t based on an agenda of conquest and eventual annexation in the style of European imperialism. As such, they see shadows of European settler-colonialism everywhere in history, even when the evidence isn’t there. By this, their motive is to essentially whitewash the genocidal European mentality that brought about the past 500 years of global trauma by saying that “Europe just simply got to it first, everyone else would have done it as well in the same position.”

I call this the “You would have been a Holocaust supporter if you lived in Nazi Germany” cultural relativism-fetishist argument you used to see all the time on Reddit, which forgets through its assumption that, no, not everyone is a hetero-normative White Christian and most people in the world would have been thrown into the camps if they were somehow transported to Nazi Germany.

Nevertheless, a rejection of that mode of conduct is how China historically behaved by-and-large under the “traditional” dynasties and how modern China aims to be.

I would add that through this, the parallels between the “Ming takeover” allegation and the modern propaganda against China’s BRI could not be more plain. The argumentation is basically the same. “Sure, those countries may be right to resist the Western/IMF neocolonialist ‘hard takeovers,’ but they also have to watch out for China’s aid ‘soft takeovers’ too.”

I collect ancient coins, which is a bit different from more “modern” coin collecting.

The most important thing is staying to your budget. Don’t get anything that would set you back financially, because apart from a few specific issues, coins are not for “investing” in. It’s always good to keep in mind that it’s just a hobby. Try not to get caught up in the rat race of getting a coin just because it’s “rare” or spending far more on the more pricey of two nearly indistinguishable options just because that one’s a better grade.

If you’re interested in a series, or a theme, get the lay of the land first and find out how many coins are in that set and how much it would roughly be. For example, I’ve heard stories of collectors who had to spent above and beyond just because of the opportunity cost of spending time gathering a collection and paying eye watering amounts to complete the set with that last missing piece they didn’t know was going to be so rare and expensive going in.

Interesting theory, though I don’t think the Reddit Genshin crowd would take it well.

I think what I’ve noticed in Hoyoverse games isn’t the presence of any explicit ML themes, but rather the absence of explicitly liberal ones. That’s the one distinctive facet of their storytelling that often leaves the impression that there’s something different between their themes and Western media tropes.

The most plain example of this isn’t in Genshin, but in Honkai Star Rail. There’s a moment in the first planet of the game where the land is near collapse from environmental disaster, on the brink of civil war due to an apartheid regime and badly demoralized about the future. The authority figure, who is ideologically compromised to put it mildly, is deposed and the new leader decides to refrain from publicly broadcasting how compromised the previous government has been. They choose to do this because it would badly shake confidence in the planetary leadership and because knowing that the past authority purposefully exacerbated the world’s class segregation would inflame tensions towards civil war. Revealing to the public the nature of the past leadership would do nothing but harm at a critical moment, especially when the planet was finally offered an opportunity to rebuild by resolving the environmental crisis.

Let’s just say the Reddit crowd did not take this well. One of the hallmarks of liberal storytelling is the importance on individualist moral purity towards core liberal values. The ultimate deontological anti-utilitarian mentality. In a context like HSR’s, you are meant to tell the truth, no matter how destructive it might be, and damn the consequences. The liberal mindset loves to bash utilitarian “end justifies the means” decision making, but their “means justifies the end” reverse calculus is far more destructive. Walking away from a fire you gave the spark to is worth the moral absolution of having stuck to your “principles.”

In other words, although the surface rationale for this principle is “democratic accountability to the collective,” the result of valuing the means over the end means that the true intent is that individual self-gratification is more important than the collective common good. Wthholding the “truth” from their perspective is a massive sin, and the idea that someone could commit a sin for the sake of the betterment of the community is completely anathema to the liberal worldview. There are stories like that of HSR’s dilemma in liberal Hollywood and Video game storytelling, but it is always baked in a overarching thematic emphasis that what the character did is wrong or at best, indicate to the audience through a whole song and dance that the story is self-indulgently bathing itself in “grey,” “complicated” themes. HSR simply has the leader character make the decision in an aside and then the story moves on. The player character gets to make a dialogue choice to blurt out “a lie is always a lie” HBO Chernobyl-style liberal outburst, but it’s a comestic line and the leader ignores the player’s input. This is not their decision to make.

The story was flamed on Reddit for revealing Hoyo’s Communist roots to detractors on one end and with the most favourable interpretation being that the government forced Hoyo to insert “pro-authoritarian” propaganda themes in the story. They can’t fathom the idea that “leaders withholding societally damaging information” is a fact of human governance rather than a trait of the West’s designated adversaries. The West simply puts a bow on it and calls it “classified information” or “national security” to dodge their surface claims of “democratic accountability.” They always mentally masturbate to their fantasy of the Soviets not fully disclosing about Chernobyl and never reflect on how they were led by the nose to the Iraq War by an administration that openly lied about WMDs, by consecutive governments that openly sponsored programs like MKUltra, by endless lies from their leadership ranging from the Vietnam War Gulf of Tonkin false flag to the Nicaraguan Contra war crimes. None of those crimes by their own leadership was ever punished and yet the liberal theme that “the truth will always come out and lies will never last” is still odiously and hypocritcally pervasive.

This is what I’ve noticed that Hoyoverse’s storytelling has. Not a presence of leftist themes but an absence of liberal ones.