Aha, I may be stealing your land and massacring your children, but I have depicted you as an unreasonable violent thug and myself as a stuttering innocent smol bean, checkmate Palestine!

Audio from the Yemeni missile

This might be a strange one but 'Apocalypse Now' has one thing in particular for me that's completely inexcusable. Mainly that, for a film supposedly based on Heart of Darkness, a book that is very clearly critical of imperialism and racism, it completely inverts its message.

Like, on the face of it, it's anti-war, and even anti-US in that the US Army is shown as completely dysfunctional, run by cold-blooded psychopaths like the COs at the start who set Martin Sheen off to "terminate with extreme prejudice" or brain-fried madmen like the helicopter commander who just wants to surf, and it's shown how much damage and devastation the US has caused for no tangible gain (but then again, only in a 'why are we even here' type 'oops, the US accidentally stumbled into another war' kind of way).

But the whole film is from the perspective of the US, the Viet 'Cong' [sic] are never shown to be real people, just a nebulous menace lurking out of sight, and every sequence of the 'madness of war' is dripping with glorification of it. I mean, maybe this is shouldn't be a surprise, because it was written by John Milius, the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian and fucking Red Dawn, but there's no way the film that contains the Ride of the Valkyries helicopter sequence can be said not to glorify war. It's like if the Starship Troopers film, while still supposedly intending to be a satire, was written by an actual fascist instead.

So in Heart of Darkness, when Marlow finds Kurtz, he's this emaciated, pathetic figure, who has gone insane in the wilderness of his ivory trading post and turned the area into his personal playground, cowing the local tribes with his guns and putting the heads of 'rebels' on pikes - and okay, the Africans are kind of passive and servile, but given that the novel was written in 1899 and the European colonialist is depicted as this savage, disgusting wretch it has to be given some credit. At best, he's a victim of his own power in a place where that makes him a god, and the natives of that place are his victims.

But in the film, Kurtz is a larger-than-life dominating presence, whose goal is not to fuck around in his personal kingdom but to keep fighting the war. When Marlow meets him after being captured, Kurtz gives a monologue (video), where he describes seeing a pile of children's arms that have been cut off. In real life, the Belgians committed horrific crimes like this against the Africans, but in Apocalypse now, the children had received vaccines from the US, and because of that their arms were cut off by Vietnamese soldiers. And that serves as the basis for his outright fascist screed about the power of will and shamelessness and the primordial instinct to kill and a bunch of other grade-A John Milius bullshit. And yes, the film presents him as insane, but more than that it presents him as a victim of the brutality of the colonized people resisting their oppressors.

That's an absolutely fucking unconscionable change to make and turns the whole thing inside-out. The horrific conditions of life for the Africans shown in Heart of Darkness were a paraphrasing of real historical crimes actually committed by real Belgian colonist monsters. Taking inspiration from that novel, but making the colonized people into the perpetrators of that crime is absolutely unforgivable and renders the whole film into true fascist apologia. Literally, utterly unforgivable.

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Elon assassinated by Chechens please, god, please

Boss fight game over screen hints be like:

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

Man, I'm sure I've read it before but I must have forgotten, he really does always cut it right down to the purest truth.

I agree with everything you've said, and having read through this other thread about astrology I think I was taking too soft of a position on it, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.

I'd also like to link an essay, The Overthrow of Religious Authority and the Eradication of Superstition (1927) which I think is relevant.

You're absolutely right, it's no real help whatsoever. But there's also no other actual guide beyond just having to learn the hard way to discern people's true intentions, which is difficult and exhausting while astrology appears so simple and easy. This is not in any way a justification, just my explanation of why it's so pervasive and attractive, and why the state of the world cultivates pseudoscientific beliefs in general - of which astrology is merely among the most socially acceptable to display, and therefore has the largest reach.

I definitely think its use in making life decisions is actively harmful, but it's hard to pull people away from what may be their strongest social connections. In this way it's just like any other real religion, which as Marxists we obviously oppose, but we also have to understand that these beliefs, and the psychological need for these beliefs, arise from social conditions of alienation. So until we're in a position to change social conditions, just attacking the belief system and the people who believe in it won't achieve results and will just push people away. Especially when so often, the people holding these beliefs will come from among the more marginalized intersections - probably not a coincidence, as if you're a member of a group who has much more control over their life why would you need to look for guidance in the stars?

When the time comes, I'm sure there will have to be some kind of cultural revolution to sweep out every kind of pseudoscience, from astrology to crystal healing to reiki to everything else, but until then all we can do is tolerate these beliefs in our allies, push against them in our actual comrades and make sure they're never used to make the really important organizational decisions.

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Having been close friends with someone who's way into astrology, I think there's a number of factors here.

Firstly, in a world that is clearly 'going wrong', with ever increasing economic precarity, political polarization, and visible worsening of climate change, the idea of a system than can give you any level of prediction for your personal future is a huge comfort. Marxism, despite being a scientific discipline that makes very accurate long-term predictions of social development, has no (or very little) power on the individual level, so some people may cling to this other system that gives them a sense of preparedness for their personal life. And while I agree that truly understanding and internalizing a dialectical-materialist perspective means both an end to being able to believe in things like astrology, and a kind of inner peace in the face of the inevitable dialectical unfolding of the material world, most people (who are still valuable allies) never actually reach that level of understanding.

Secondly, as people are increasingly alienated and atomized, it provides access to a large social space of overwhelmingly non-straight-white-cis-male people, immediately gives you a tribe with specific traits and icons to identify with, has (at the very least, the aesthetic of) a deep history going back to antiquity and has a lot of specific in-jokes that can quickly bring someone into the fold. My friend is constantly posting memes about the supposed characteristics of various different star signs, sub-categories of those star signs, interactions between different star signs, etc. etc. It's an endless source of, for want of a better word, content, which you can enjoy both as part of the space as a whole and from within your specific niche. You can see something and say "Yes, I am like that! They know me so well!", or "Ah, you got me! I do that too!", or "Oh, those [star sign]! That's exactly how they are!", all of which binds you into a social fabric and identity that rarely exists elsewhere.

And thirdly, through the supposed 'compatibility' of different star signs, it gives people a guide to who they should try to form a relationship with. Statistically, by far the number one danger to women is their male romantic partners, both in terms of physical violence but also in terms of the possibility of psychic distress. Will he dump me? Will he cheat on me? Will he leave me to do all the house work? He seems like a good guy now, but is he just tricking me until he thinks I'm stuck with him? Does he secretly listen to Andrew Tate? Will he start doing that a year into our relationship and suddenly completely change? There's no way to know these things, and under patriarchal capitalism men are under constant social pressure to gain these behaviors and traits. So a system that claims to give even the slightest insight into who you can trust to be a good partner offers a huge psychological comfort.