Stay in school. You will regret it otherwise later if you don’t. You might be able to find a program offering a semester or year abroad. I would absolutely take that opportunity. It will open up many other possibilities for you, including, should you wish it, moving to another country. There are countries where tuition is free or very low.

Thank you for writing this, it is very interesting and educational about a point of view/topic that is not often talked about. I don’t have a specific position on the question of Occitan nationalism, but i just want to make a general point here which is that the question of whether or not to support separatism in my view also includes an element of strategic expediency. What i mean by this is simply that i think that as communists we should also consider the effect that separatism and balkanization of larger states has on their ability to sustain themselves as independent entities and their ability to project power in the world.

For instance, a country which may be capable of a considerable degree of self-sufficiency before, if balkanized might result in states are are too small to be able to sustain enough agriculture and industry to exist without becoming dependent on other states. The result can be that these smaller states then become more vulnerable to imperialist subjugation and capture of their political system (it is easier to bribe/threaten smaller countries than big ones), such as happened in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. I am sure that many of those people who supported the dissolution of these states thought much the same as you do about their culture, but did their formal independence result in their overall conditions improving?

On the other hand, you can also argue that if the chances of an imperial core state, such as the US or UK, becoming socialist are very low and if the role they are likely to continue to play in the world in the future is undoubtedly a malicious one, using their strength to pursue an imperialist agenda, then is it not in the interest of the greater global good for them to disintegrate so that their remnants can no longer do the same damage to the world? Would the world be a better place with a weaker, smaller France? Or is it better for socialists to hold out hope that France can turn socialist and anti-imperialist, in which case a strong France would be preferable?

Do your homework, be good, eat your vegetables, and you will be allowed a little adventurism as a treat every once in a while.

I feel very much the same way. I was also born in eastern Europe and live in Germany. I am not Russian so i haven’t experienced the same level of racism as you but i still experienced (and especially witnessed) it to some degree. You talk about Germans not being “willing to forgive” but what do they have to forgive you for?! They should be the ones asking you for forgiveness, for the crimes their country has and continues to perpetrate against Russians.

And i could also point to what Germans have done to my own home country after 1989 that has had devastating effects on the country forcing so many to emigrate, but i don’t want to make it about me.

What really bothers me most of all is the self-righteousness and the conceit of moral superiority that many Germans have where they look down on anyone who is not a western European. They love to pat themselves on the back about how enlightened and progressive they are, how not-racist they are, how democratic they are, but all of that is surface level and just beneath that surface you can always sense what they really think.

(It even bothers me how they look down on Americans, even though everyone here knows i am pretty much as far from pro-American as you can get, but when Germans act like they are so superior to the “uncivilized” Americans when America itself is a product of European colonialism and racism, i just find that so hypocritical and such an insufferable attitude; no, you are not superior just because you have a bigger welfare state, when deep down you share the same worldview and values)

And as soon as they feel scratched they quickly turn all that liberal patronizing into very hostile cultural supremacism and racism. And this isn’t exclusive to Germans, nor does it apply to all Germans. But it is indicative of a broader problem with the culture of the imperial core, which is extremely pronounced in the most prosperous parts of Europe, especially Germany, Scandinavia (they are far from the “progressive social democratic paradise” they are often portrayed as in the US…some of the most racist people i’ve ever met were Scandinavians), France and Britain.

Anyway, the point is that this makes it hard to find like-minded people where i live, which is why i appreciate Lemmygrad so much for the contrast it offers to that. There are things that i know that i don’t agree with this community 100% on, but i always feel that at least there is a sense of comradeship and tolerance as long as you come with good intentions. And i do think that Marxism-Leninism has a lot to do with that, because of its emphasis on critical, materialist analysis and scientific thinking.

Iran hasn’t been sending Russia drones for years. Russia produces more drones than Iran ever did, and more advanced. It is in fact the opposite: Russia has been sending Iran drones and other military equipment.

It is pretty clear that you don’t understand Russia’s aims in Ukraine.

It’s not Russia that is dragging men off the streets into unmarked vans to force them into trenches at the front.

Russia has in fact advanced over the last 2 months and continues to advance. Everything you wrote is pure projection.

It’s precisely because they don’t want to live under a corrupt fascist dictatorship without free speech that they chose to leave Nazi Ukraine and re-join Russia.

Like Germans saying they are proud of Auschwitz…

All of this simply shows that conditions have not yet deteriorated to a sufficient point where people in the imperial core are forced to develop class consciousness en masse. There is still too much comfort, it is still possible to go on as if nothing is happening because it’s not yet a life or death situation for most people. The good news is that this will change. As the empire loses more and more battles and begins to recede and turn inward, and as the global south rises alongside China, the possibility for extraction of super profits with which to bribe imperial core populations will dwindle. At that point the labor aristocracy of the imperial core will slide into true proletarianization and existential precariousness which will force an awakening.

TL;DR: you have to look at things dialectically. Everything is in a state of flow and change. What is true today will not necessarily be true tomorrow.

Everyone wants to think they’re special. Everyone wants to think they’re the exception. It can’t happen to them. This time it will be different.

https://www.stalinsociety.com/news/homosexualityintheussr

Because he was unshakeably principled as a communist and anti-imperialist, and during his leadership the USSR posed the biggest threat to the global system of capitalism that the world has ever seen. He could not be reclaimed for the purposes of anti-communist propaganda like Trotsky nor relegated to the status of a mere theorist like Marx or an idealist revolutionary like Lenin is sometimes (erroneously) portrayed. Stalin achieved too much in practice for the building of socialism, while the victory of the USSR in WW2 under his leadership gave socialism an immense prestige boost around the world.

In short, he scared the bejeezus out of the bourgeoisie for what he represented and what he could have inspired in people across the world had he not been smeared with the lies of Khrushchev and the anti-communist propaganda of the West (frequently borrowed directly from Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda), so they vowed to forever destroy his image and make sure no one like him would ever arise again.

Sadly, this ploy worked. Thanks to Khrushchev’s speech of lies you even had other principled communists (at one point even Che Guevara believed some of the accusations leveled at Stalin) around the world start to doubt what they thought they knew about Stalin and the USSR which caused a worldwide crisis of confidence among communists and a massive split between those parties who accepted the Khrushchevite lies and those who didn’t.

Meanwhile in capitalist societies anti-communist indoctrination raised entire generations to internalize the belief that Stalin was equivalent to Hitler and the USSR another Nazi Germany, which destroyed their communist parties as effective political forces and made sure that most remaining communists and socialists would have an almost instinctual aversion to the Marxist-Leninist line and practical revolutionary politics.

This led to Western communists retreating into the realm of purely academic Marxism as an economic and not a revolutionary theory, or into all sorts of schools of pseudo-Marxist radical liberalism (like the “Frankfurt School”), anarchism, ultra-left deviations, or just straight up defect to social democracy.

But i will end this on an optimistic note and remind everyone of what Stalin himself said:

“I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.”