Democratic Kampuchea!

The claim that “two million people died under Pol Pot” conflates decades of foreign destruction that came before Democratic Kampuchea. Cambodia’s population had already been shattered by French colonial exploitation, U.S. bombing, and postwar famine caused by blockade and invasion. From 1969 to 1973, the United States dropped more than 2.7 million tons of bombs on rural Cambodia, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands, destroying farmland, and collapsing food systems. The U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime (1970–1975) waged a civil war that caused famine before the Khmer Rouge ever took power. After 1975, Kampuchea inherited a ruined agrarian economy, surrounded by hostile powers. Starvation and disease, consequences of bombing, sanctions, and isolation, were later added to Western “genocide” numbers. When Vietnam invaded in 1978, warfare and occupation killed tens of thousands more. The simple slogan that “Pol Pot killed two million” erases the continuous chain of imperialist violence. Colonial extraction, U.S. intervention, and foreign occupation created the conditions for mass death long before and long after 1975. These numbers are used politically to justify Vietnam’s invasion and Western interference rather than to expose the deeper causes: French colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and Vietnamese expansionism.

Marcus Garvey inspired millions of Black people and gave them pride, which showed how much power ordinary people have when they come together. But his movement had limits that kept it from changing the system that oppressed them. Garvey treated all Black people as if they had the same interests. He did not look at the differences between poor people, workers, and the small group of Black business owners. When you treat everyone as one group, the people with money and status end up guiding the movement, not the people who suffer the most. Real change has to start with the poorest and most exploited, or it will not transform the system. Garvey told people to build businesses and gain wealth as the path to freedom. But you cannot escape oppression by joining the same system that created it. Pride and self-reliance are good, but they cannot replace a strategy for changing how society is organized. Without changing the base of the economy, people stay trapped in the same conditions. His call to “return to Africa” came more from emotion than from a study of the real situation in Africa. At the time, Africa was under colonial rule, and every country had its own struggles and class divisions. You cannot build liberation on a dream alone. You have to understand the facts on the ground. Garvey even tried to work with white segregationists because they both believed in racial separation. This shows the danger of focusing only on race and not on the deeper forces at work. Segregationists wanted to keep Black people oppressed. Working with them only showed how a movement can get confused when it does not study who its real allies and enemies are. Garvey stirred the people, and that matters. But awakening people is only the beginning. To change their lives, a movement needs a plan that deals with the real conditions and fights the forces that keep people poor and powerless. Garvey inspired pride, but he did not give the people a path to transform the world they lived in.

Malcolm X was not a communist. His worldview came from the Nation of Islam, a religious nationalist movement, not a materialist one. Even after embracing orthodox Islam, his analysis stayed rooted in faith, not Marxist theory. Religious anti-imperialism can oppose Western power but often preserves gender norms and moral rules Marxists critique as homophobic or transphobic.

@Tazaryach This repeats a white supremacist divide and conquer script. Blaming Somalis is house negro behavior that shields the system harming all Black people.

No black person should feel bad for them Somalis All Africans do is look down and talk about black people

@ThePaddedMeowth @HingleMcCr64580 @Lilith_Atheist Patriarchy is the symptom. Christianity is the disease.

@MindVsMyth @HingleMcCr64580 @Lilith_Atheist Communism is the symptom. Atheism is the disease.

Trans women are women. Womanhood is a social construct. It involves adulthood, which legally and culturally changes throughout history. Adulthood being a social construct alone shows that womanhood is not fixed by biology, but one could go further. Womanhood is not determined by any single biological trait. All women do not have breasts, XX chromosomes, ovaries, a uterus or a vagina, which proves that biological variation exists inside the category. Biological sex is real, but patriarchy does not treat bodies according to neutral biology. It takes sexed bodies and assigns them meaning, value and hierarchy based on the needs of the social order. This means womanhood is a social category shaped by material conditions, not by anatomy. This category develops through the historical organization of labor, kinship, property and political power. When private property emerged, control over the fertility, labor and movement of biological females became necessary for inheritance and the consolidation of wealth. This created a system where the category of woman was tied to subordination and economic function. Family structure turned into a political institution that directed women’s labor, regulated reproduction and restricted access to resources. Religion and ideology then naturalized these relations and presented them as biological truths, even though they were created by economic interests and power. As modes of production changed, the meaning of womanhood changed. Industrial labor separated wage work from domestic work and reshaped the expectations placed on women. Later expansions of wage labor changed it again. Biology remained the same, but the social meaning placed on biology shifted each time the economic base shifted. This shows that womanhood is produced by social relations rather than by fixed anatomy. Biological sex matters because patriarchy organizes bodies in different ways, but the category of woman is created by the structure of society, not by the traits of the body. This is why the category of woman is not fixed and why it can include trans women. When a society recognizes a person within the social relations, expectations and power structures that define womanhood, they occupy the social category of woman. The body does not dictate the category. The category reflects the material conditions of the society that created it.

It’s ironic when Christians use Pol Pot as proof that atheists commit atrocities, yet ignore the Christian-majority countries that bombed Cambodia long before he took power. Those bombings dropped millions of tons of explosives on rural farmland and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Villages, irrigation systems, roads, livestock and rice stores were wiped out. Entire communities were displaced, the rural economy collapsed and famine and desperation spread. The Cambodian state lost credibility because it could not protect its people, and the Khmer Rouge used this chaos to recruit those who had lost homes and families. Pol Pot did not take over a stable country. He inherited a society already shattered by years of foreign attack and economic ruin. The destruction of Cambodia’s agriculture, infrastructure and social stability had already created the conditions for collapse. Blaming atheism while ignoring the role of Western Christian powers leaves out the real chain of events that drove Cambodia into disaster.

Shows you know nothing about communism. Communism has worked in very real ways when it comes to overthrowing white colonialism. Vietnam defeated France and then the United States, ending nearly a century of colonial rule. China broke British, French and Japanese domination. Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau won independence through Marxist-led movements that pushed out Portuguese colonial power. Cuba overthrew a U.S. backed dictatorship and ended direct American control over the island. In South Africa, the Communist Party played a major role in the anti-apartheid struggle that toppled white minority rule.

@MindVsMyth @Lilith_Atheist This is the TLDR version LOL

@HingleMcCr64580 @Lilith_Atheist Source: trust me bro. You couldn’t define communism and its worldview if you tried.

@MindVsMyth @Lilith_Atheist Communism and atheism go together like peanut butter & jelly there comrade

“Nobody is mandated by any belief to do anything.” The Bible mandates actions. Exodus 21 commands slavery. Deuteronomy 22 commands marriage to a rape victim. Leviticus requires killing adulterers and gay people. These are not mere beliefs. They are orders to act, so belief can and does mandate behavior.

@MindVsMyth @ShadowSkelett @Lilith_Atheist Thats a very ridicolous hing to say. Technically nobody is mandtaed by any belief to do anything

When later economic systems, including capitalism, developed, they absorbed and reinforced these older patterns. Women were pushed into low paid jobs, treated as secondary workers and relied on to perform unpaid labor in the home. These practices helped employers lower costs and keep the workforce functioning. The system of male advantage and female disadvantage remained strong because it fit the needs of the larger economic order. Patriarchy survives because it is tied to the concrete conditions of daily life. It is woven into how work is organized, how wealth is controlled and how families function. As long as those conditions remain, patriarchy reproduces itself. To understand it, one must look at how people actually live, not at abstract ideas about what men or women are supposed to be.

When people learned to farm, everything changed. Farming created settled villages, stored grain and herds of animals. For the first time, families could hold more than others. Control over land and livestock became a new source of power. These new facts of life created new relationships. Men took on roles tied to plowing, herding and defending property, while women’s work became more centered on the household and child raising. As stored wealth grew, inheritance became important, and men began to control women’s sexuality and labor in order to pass property through the male line. These changes did not come from ideas alone. They came from the practical realities of farming, ownership and storage. Once surplus existed, control over that surplus shaped social expectations. Rules about gender hardened because they helped protect property and organize work. Over generations, this arrangement became a stable system in which men held most public authority and women’s autonomy was restricted.

Patriarchy does not arise because one sex suddenly decides to dominate the other. It grows out of the basic facts of how people live. These basic facts include the kind of work people do, the tools they use, how food is produced, how families survive and how communities organize daily life. These realities shape what people value, how they behave and how power forms. They are the foundation on which every society stands. In early human groups, people lived by hunting and gathering. No one could store large amounts of food, and no one could survive alone. Everyone depended on the group. Women and men both contributed essential work, and because resources were shared and there was no lasting wealth, no one could use property or inheritance to control others. There was no stable hierarchy because the way of life did not allow it.

@RegularSanStan @Greynxgga69 In the context of state-power and most social hierarchies.

@MindVsMyth @Greynxgga69 "Anarchists reject power" what?

Marxist-Leninists and anarchist communists are incapable of producing robust critiques of one another, because they operate on basically the same registers. Where does this become most apparent? When both of them reduce transition to resolving the technical & pragmatic problems posed with holding (and rescinding) political power. For the MLs, the communist program becomes a geopolitical game of 'socialist states' competing against capitalist states, by any means necessary. Communism is turned into whatever is directly or indirectly good for the 'socialist states', or bad for the capitalist states. Here the positive side of the program is folded into the negative side, and the ML reduces communism to the motion of struggle itself. The state apparatus - being the instrument best suited to resolving immediate obstructions to the power of the proletariat - becomes the center of ML politics, and the party is reduced a component of the state which serves to optimize its performance in identifying and opposing class enemies. Proponents of the ML perspective are largely indiffererent to the forms of political (and economic) organization they must take on to undermine their enemies, and many of them rate marxism-leninism above other 'leftist' currents because they believe that it strikes a balance between principle and practical fluidity. But the logic of MLism is fundamentally divorced from communism because, in effect, this absorption of the party into the state prevents either structure from acting as anything more than a channel for the forces of capital, because the state spontaneously takes on a shape that preserves the forms of production it arises from without counterpressure from the organized proletariat, and a total shift towards socialism is simply not possible within the boundaries of one country. So long as the workers of a particular territory are isolated, and the economic categories of capitalism remain, it is only a matter of time before their political institutions completely and totally take on a shape which is adequate for the reproduction of the economic relationships that they depend on. A mirror image of a bourgeois dictatorship is not a proletarian one, it could only be a system which develops along the same axis as the rest of the bourgeois world, and this has been revealed countless times in the internal trajectories of every "actually existing socialist" regime to date - the only systems that ML parties have ever lead, or could ever lead, are capitalist from base to center, and this is enshrined in ML doctrine through their blindness to path-dependency and everything that path-dependency entails. Even the ML/Maoist scholars who acknowledged the basic issues with party-state fusion (see Althusser and Balibar) failed to do much more than describe it, and prescribe local remedies (e.g. "rectification" in Maoism) to a disease whose real origins are global in nature. For most anarchists, the negative side of the program is turned into the defense of positive, pre-given forms of organization that (in the abstract) are either directly free of the basic features of capitalist society, or are functionally the embryo of communism. The communist program is reduced to the design and conservation of organizational structures which can absorb the heat of the class struggle, without taking a shape that is fundamentally altered by the forces that they're opposing. In their framework, the motion of class struggle becomes the absence of motion - while in word they may oppose utopianism, and recognize the challenges posed by confronting the bourgeosie, in deed 'prefigurative politics' is grounded on a pretension to freeze history in place so that their blueprint of communism can be realized. The anarchists may object on the grounds that they are capable of pragmatism like their ML counterparts, or they may claim to stay truer to communist principles by defending organizational practices that have continually proven to be unsustainable. But the fact that neither of these responses is sufficient should be clear by now. In both cases the nature of communism is distorted in both theory and practice, it is turned into an abstract ideal which can only be grasped by clinging to the institutions of capitalism. The concrete dimensions of the proletariats struggle against capital, and the contradictions which define that struggle, are replaced with immediacies which (in their respective doctrines) abstractly represent a point of collision between labor and capital, but obscure the refraction of the capital-labor conflict in the forms of organization that they adopt to engage in that conflict. For marxism proper, the execution of the communist program is a dynamic and conflictual process which is identifiable through points of rupture. Those moments where socialized labor outstrips the shell of capital, and the qualities of capitalism are broken down in discernible ways. This means the end of commercial production, and the beginning of production that is consciously and cohesively planned by society as a whole. In the marxist perspective, the process of transition - the dictatorship of the proletariat - involves a kind of class dictatorship which is not strictly a state or a non-state. It is a contradiction in process - a zone where the tendency to affirm and deny the state (as a mode of capital) collide throughout the course of the workers struggle against capital. In one sense the anarchists suspicions concerning the state are well-founded - there is no programmatically consistent way for the proletariat to manage a state, because the state itself is effectively a condensed form of reification, it is the 'alienated form of public power', and (left to its own devices) it is antithetical to the conscious/rational control of power and production engendered by communism. But historically, the dynamics that cause the decay of the proletarian dictatorship into a capitalist one, tended to concentrate first within the bodies responsible for performing immediate managerial functions. In the RFSR - which is the last clear instance of the proletariat holding power - these organs were the mass organizations (e.g. councils, unions, etc) that anarchists usually center in their models of transition, not the Party. In the Spanish civil war, when there was no real communist party, the same fate also clearly struck the anarchists, who executed the functions of the state out of necessity. The importance of the communist party rests in its capacity to maintain a coherent and grounded view of immediate problems without losing sight of the communist program, and intervening to ensure that nothing - even the innumerable painstaking details of everyday administration - snaps the focus of the workers away from the communist program. In an important respect, the internal dynamics of the party also anticipate the dynamics of communism, because it operates on the basis of collective planning and co-operation without coercion. In light of this, ML intuitions surrounding the importance of a communist party have precedent, but the prefigurative function of the party is totally purged from ML doctrine, and even if it were recognized, in reality the orientation of marxism-leninism towards blind pragmatism - as well as its proponents often dogmatic commitments to party-state models that replicate all of the problems I've described above - prevents "marxism-leninism" from ever being anything more than a petty-bourgeois forgery of communist theory. The one and only way to avoid the pitfalls of both frameworks is to recognize the necessity of international revolution, the grim prospects of the workers substantially retaining power once a revolutionary wave has receded, and a relative distance between Party and state. The Party must indirectly wield the state through the party's base. Rank-and-file members, who are distinct from & self-subordinated to the center, would act through the mass organizations of the workers, and mediate their activity so that they do not capitulate to the counterrevolution either from outside or within their domain. The centers of party and state - to whatever extent the state manages to recompose itself within the DOTP - must synergize around completing the revolutionary tasks of the proletariat without the former being folded into the latter.

Eternity means the universe did not come into existence at a first moment and will not go out of existence at a last moment. Stars are born and die, planets form and break apart, and even entire cosmic phases may rise and fall, but the matter that makes up the universe continues to exist through these changes. Even theories that describe a future heat death do not say matter becomes nothing. They say the universe reaches a state where usable energy is gone, but matter still exists in a quiet and uniform form. Since nothing in nature ever turns into nothing, and since every change comes from prior material conditions, the universe must always exist in one form or another.

Infinity in this context is not a giant number. It means the universe has no final limit. When scientists study large scale structure, they find galaxies grouped into clusters, then into superclusters, and so on, with no single largest layer. When they study small scales, each level of matter reveals deeper structure. What looked like a solid atom turned out to have electrons and a nucleus, and the nucleus turned out to have protons and neutrons, which turned out to have quarks. Infinity here means that the universe cannot be exhausted by counting or by reaching a final indivisible piece.

The universe cannot be created out of nothing because nothing has no properties, no energy and no ability to cause change. Every event we have ever observed comes from something that already exists. Matter becomes radiation, radiation becomes particles, particles combine into atoms, and atoms break apart again. Energy changes form, but it is never seen appearing out of thin air. Even the quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is a physical state with fields that can fluctuate. Calling it nothing is just a misunderstanding of the word. Since no example in nature shows something coming from literal non-existence, the idea of the whole universe appearing from nothing does not make sense.

@HingleMcCr64580 @Lilith_Atheist Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of God. Even if it were the belief that no God exists, there’s still no logical connection between not believing in the existence of God and communism. Someone can be an atheist and be a boot-licking capitalist.

@MindVsMyth @Lilith_Atheist Atheism was the worldview, anti-theism was the policy

Proof? Even if he said he was an atheist, that does not mean atheism told him to act the way he did. Atheism is not a political program and it does not mandate any action. You still have not shown a logical link between atheism and his invasion of Ukraine, because there is none. You are stereotyping atheists. There is also nothing wrong with living for earthly means. Life, family and society are all on earth, so living for them is not immoral. I would rather live for what can be shown to exist than for a supernatural claim that has never been demonstrated and probably does not exist, since most supernatural claims conflict with scientific evidence.

@MindVsMyth @Lilith_Atheist Putin addressed this recently. Admitting he is Atheist. That he gave up on Christianity as he felt he was pestered by it. Funny how an evil bastard like him thought being a decent man wasn't right. And Atheists live for earthly means. They killed for them.

Human nature starts with biology because we are animals with bodies and brains shaped by evolution. But human biology is social at its core. A human baby cannot survive alone. We are born early, weak and completely dependent on others. This basic fact forces humans to live in groups. It is part of what our bodies require for survival. Our brains also grow through social contact. Babies who are talked to, held and interacted with develop stronger thinking and emotional skills. Babies who are isolated or ignored show serious delays. The brain is built to learn from other people. That means social life is not optional. It is a biological need. Our bodies support this need in many ways. We have speech organs designed for language. Our stress levels drop when we are around trusted people. Hormones increase bonding, trust and cooperation. These reactions come from our biology, not from culture alone. They exist because humans survived better when they worked together and supported each other. Once humans live in groups, they must also figure out how to get food, how to share it and how to make decisions. These basic tasks are the start of economics and politics. They are not separate from human nature. They grow out of the simple fact that humans depend on each other to live. Human nature begins in the body, but the body itself pushes us into social life. Our biology makes us social, and our social life creates the economic and political systems that shape how we live.

@lamsLore3210 @Lilith_Atheist Billions? That’s a new number. Source: trust me bro.

@Lilith_Atheist The most criminals who killed billions of people were atheists🤣🤣🤣😂😂