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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

> Power vacuums are rarely filled by who you want them to be filled by, and too many are hurt in the process.

I wish more people learned from history.

Punch the Fascists? Well, the Left tried that in Weimar Germany, and it ended with the Fascists in charge.

Have a Socialist Revolution? You end up with Lenin and Stalin, or Mao and Deng, or, for extra points, the Khmer Rouge, a regime so insane even their fellow Socialists in Vietnam invaded them to end their brutality; even if you insist none of those people were True, Honest Socialists, that's part of the point, isn't it? They're the people Socialist Revolution ended up putting into power.

What is to be done? Maybe, just maybe, not something which puts the most violent out in front.

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These are extremely simplistic takes on times that were the result of decades of power shifts and class struggles.

We won't have any of decades of power shifts and class struggles to contend with this time with the "glorious workers revolution"?

Oh but we will. Those things always exist.

What are you talking about? Did you make up a narrative of what my intentions with that post were and then attack it?

I was kind of wondering what you were talking about. On it's face it seems like justification for atrocities committed by Marxists for ideological purposes.

I get it: You think politics is for losers and you want to indulge your power fantasy.

Excuse me?

You've made a very good point about the dangers of failing to learn from history, and I think that if you spent an hour or so researching how Hitler actually came to power in the Weimar Republic, you'd be able to appreciate it.

My point is that just punching Fascists doesn't stop them.

You have to engage with politics and the power structures.

You have to think and do hard work in building coalitions and power bases.

Gangs don't win power, they just get used by those who do.

Look up the SA and the Strasserists.

Actually, you said something hyperbolic that was spectacularly false, which you seem to have no intention of acknowledging. If one has a defensible point, it's usually much better to go ahead and make that point in the first place. As it stands, you'll have to hope that someone else makes it to me on some other day, I guess, if it matters to you.

So you refuse to acknowledge my points, then?

I shouldn't expect too much from people who refuse to see the larger issue and instead get lost in the weeds.

I think that’s a gross oversimplification of the history of political violence in Weimar Germany. Much of the Nazi’s rise to power in Weimar Germany came from their paramilitary forces, the SA and SS. The state was unable to control or suppress those forces. Most other political parties had their own paramilitary wing, including right wing parties besides the Nazis and left wing parties like the KPD and SPD. Left wing parties unilaterally standing down their paramilitary forces while other parties didn’t wouldn’t have prevented the Nazi rise to power.

This also seems misleading with respect to Hitler's rise to power, which had far more to do with the weakness of Weimar Germany's institutions and the cynicism of the ruling classes than the SA or the SS, although I agree with your point about the political violence of the time in general.

I just want it to be clear, I still consider myself a leftist, but I'll never buy into stuff like "we just need to let these folks run things until we're ready for communism".

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