Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
You know, I am reading Rabinowitch's book on the July-October 1917 period and what really strikes me is how all the leading Bolsheviks-including Lenin-really wanted the transfer of power to the soviets to be peaceful. They pretty much exhausted every option until the right-SRs/right-Mensheviks and Kerensky types gave them no possible alternative to violent insurrection. There were differences over the timing and tactics of this insurrection (on one hand, those like Lenin and later Bubnov and Sverdlov who wanted insurrection immediately, those in the 'centre' like Stalin, Trotsky, Volodarsky who supported insurrection soon but wanted to shore up support in the provinces + at the front more, and those on the party right like Zinoviev and Kamenev who wanted to create a democratic worker's republic with the SRs and Menshevik internationalists before beginning any violence to ensure full peasant support).
I didn't know that at all. It shows how these guys-especially in 1917-did not like violence, did not glorify it, and did not fetishise it. They tried to avoid it and were all scared of unleashing the horrific civil war that eventually did come to pass. It's something to remember.
Violence is bad and scary and should be only be wielded with immense caution and respect, but at the same time, when the time comes, you have to be ready for the decisive confrontation. Maybe Kamenev or Zinoviev, or maybe Volodarsky and Podvoisky, were actually right and it would have been better to wait longer until the correlation of forces was more on their side and the civil war could have been lessened at the very least. Maybe they were wrong and the revolutionary moment would have passed and the ProvGov would've re-gathered its strength. I don't know. I'm still reading the book!
Very interesting write up. I'll have to put that book on my to-read list. Thank you for sharing this kernel of knowledge!