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by etplayer 3232 days ago
>From my experience, socialist websites and forums tend to ignore, rewrite, or white wash the history of communism in Russia/USSR

Your experience is irrelevant, because we're talking about a particular case, not a hypothetical website. Do you have evidence that your experience applies in this particular case, or are you just generalising? For a user named after a philosopher, you don't seem to be very keen to apply logic in this circumstance, perhaps because of bias or bad prior experience.

Not to mention you're grouping in several tendencies and ideologies and opinions within a very broad movement that's lasted 200 years to date in your criticism, which is at best inaccurate and at worst disingenuous.

1 comments

>Your experience is irrelevant, because we're talking about a particular case, not a hypothetical website.

It's also true in this case. WSWS is a political and a ideological advocacy site with a non-mainstream interpretation of world history. If you want an objective view of the Russian Revolution, this is not the site you would go to - so I have no issues with Google tuning their search engine to suppress them in the search results for those kinds of queries.

>WSWS is a political and a ideological advocacy site

I'm always a little amused when people use "ideology" in this way. Marx said that ideology promotes "false consciousness" about political power structures; by this measure, that which exposes false consciousness is anti-ideological. So by this measure, WSWS is non-ideological.

On the other hand, Zizek claims that for someone to actually be captured by ideology, the ideology must be first presented to them as non-ideological. Can you see the conundrum? Ideology isn't an illusion, rather, to be rid of ideology may be to put on the glasses rather than take them off, to use Zizek's example in the film They Live.

>with a non-mainstream interpretation of world history

Perhaps it is the mainstream that is ideological, because it's true ideology that holds the most power!

>So by this measure, WSWS is non-ideological.

And by every other (sane) measure, Socialism, Communism, Marxism are regular ideologies.

>Perhaps it is the mainstream that is ideological, because it's true ideology that holds the most power!

Playing with language is fun, I agree.