Your regular reminder that I personally loathe Noam Chomsky for the reprehensible things he said in apologia for the Khmer Rouge - and has never really taken back. He was no friend to the Cambodian people.
(Not to mention his stance on Ukraine).
It's a bit funny because how quick the left usually is to cut people loose for failing purity tests, but there's always the few who manage to get into the state of grace where the test must be wrong.
Tbh the left is pretty fucking awful at enforcing the “supporting Russia/genocides committed by vaguely leftist seeming countries” purity test nowadays
If your leftism isn't fundamentally centered on the idea of human dignity and freedom as universal and immutable values of everyone, frankly, what is the fucking point of your philosophy.
And yet traditionally that hasn't really been a requirement for leftism. There are still old school authoritarian communists who really are gleeful about the idea of oppressing their enemies.
Yeah, well, in my family, my grandparents' generation was chock full of leftists who despised those old school commies, so I'm just proudly carrying on in a tradition older than Marx, much less Stalin.
It's been majoritarian anti-authoritarian. In the 1930s folx joined the CPUSA in droves to join in organizing & left in droves once they experienced the organizing culture. The result was LOTS of folx who'd "been communists" in terms of membership, but had never been down with the CPUSA agenda.
I first learned this stuff as a kid from grandparents, great aunts & uncles. I haven't seen data, but as I read accounts it was clear that the vast majority of folks targeted by McCarthy & others like him who had been party members had only been members for 1-2 years at most.
