Passion, Love, & Crime

-tags by @mikumiotics

So I talked to prev about this a bunch in dms cause this prompted me to go a bit more in depth in my comparison, so I’m going to add some of what we talked about to this post.

None of this is to absolve the northern US during slavery, but you cannot really consider the proportion of enslaved people in the US without focusing on the South specifically because there were very few enslaved people in the North during the peak of slavery and it was generally more populous, so it heavily skews statistics. At the peak of slavery, 40% of all people in the US South were enslaved. In Mississippi, a state with an even more entrenched slave economy than somewhere like Virginia, the figure is closer to 55%.

This led me to talking about Haiti, where, before the revolution, about 90% of the population was enslaved, and that figure would be even higher if not for the fact that about half of all enslaved Africans kidnapped to Haiti died of yellow fever within their first year there.

So much of human history has been founded upon inconceivable amounts of enslaved bodies, and it’s still happening today. The US largely outsources its slavery to the imperial periphery, so it’s difficult to make direct comparisons of enslaved vs free inhabitants, though enslaved prisoners still account for about 1 in every 200 people in the US. For an example of a state where slavery is more prevalent domestically, 60% of the UAE’s population are South Asian immigrants, but they comprise 95% of the workforce and most of them work in conditions that are effectively slavery.

Right as I wake up there’s a nurse there who hustles over and says he’s glad he saw me wake up and tells me he’s giving me some pain meds and then he gives me IV Fentanyl and so I go from like “Ow ow ow ow awake awake awake” to “ooooooh fuck I’m floating on clouds made of rainbows” in like 6 seconds and so I was pretty out of it. The hospital had all the recently-post op patients all in one big-ass room, and they see patients for ALL sorts of surgeries, so I was next to an old guy who got his knee replaced on one side and some young 30-something dude with some kind of mechanism on his leg. So I asked him what happened since I was high as fuck and feeling kind as a result, and he said he broke his leg hiking off-trail when his leg went down a literal rabbit hole and snapped his shinbone. I say something like “damn dude that blowssssss” while giggling because I’m high as FUCK on actual fentanyl and he’s like “Yeah, for real, I’m feeling great right now though! What about you? What are you in here for?”

And I fully was not thinking like a person, I was thinking like a fentanyl-addled tgirl so I just go “Oh, haha, they cut my dick off!”

But I took it anyway because I wanted to hear from the people the author was speaking to, and now I have been reading the Georgian women's recollections of communism, and it actually made me cry to see how miserable they had become after the capitalist restoration. The depth of love they have for socialism and Stalin and the Soviet Union is so beautiful

Some of my favourite quotes <3

"[Stalin] comes to me at night. He gazes at me, puffs on his pipe, and twirls his moustache. He smiles, and then heads for the door. Then I weep and cry for him to stay. But what guy could be bothered by a woman crying?" ... "...I have the mentality of a socialist hero of labor. When something needs to be done for society, I go and do it. I've produced a wall newspaper for the employees and classes for single mothers bringing up children on their own. In the Communist era, everyone would have respected me. But now that we have capitalism, they look at me as if I'm an idiot. So when I really can't manage anymore, I come to the museum to calm down. And I say, 'Mr. Stalin, I know you'd appreciate it.' And it helps." ... "When the war was on, they closed the museum, so I came to the park, to the statue, and I said, 'Mr. Stalin, you'd have got a firm grip on it all, and there'd be peace.' And sometimes I go and say to him, 'If you were alive, maybe we'd be together. You'd have a good time with me. I know how to cook, I'm a cheerful person, and I can sing well too.' And I fantasize about how nice it would be to be Stalin's wife. But later on I reject those thoughts, because I'm behaving like an idiot. Stalin is dead. Communism has collapsed. It's over. It's finished. Been and gone. If I dream about him when I'm feeling like that, I'm very cold and official toward him in my dream."

"When I was at college, we were still taught that Stalin was an outstanding statesman. But the system changed, the curriculum changed, and now I have to teach that he was a tyrant and a criminal. I don't think that's true. ... And before you start ranting, please let me finish. Are you feeling calmer now? All right, I'll tell you my personal opinion. I regard Stalin as a great man, but I can't say that, either to my students or to the tourists, so I say, 'Some regard him as a dictator, others as a tyrant, and others see him as a genius. What he really was, you can decide for yourselves.'"

"When I see what they've done to our beloved Stalin, my heart bleeds! How could they? How could they make such a good man into a monster, a cannibal, an ogre? Once upon a time, bus after bus came to our museum. People stood in lines several hundred yards long. I used to look at those people's faces, and I could see the goodness emanating from them. But nowadays? One would bite the other. That's capitalism for you." ... "In the morning I get up, cut a slice of bread, make the tea, sit down, and say to myself, 'O Christ, why did you let me live to see times like this? Why do they badmouth our darling Stalin?'" ... "What do we need all this capitalism for, all these American cheeses, juices, and chocolate? You can't even buy normal milk anymore—it has to be in a carton, because that's how it is in America. I think, 'O Christ, take me off to my dear Stalin. Take me away from this world, because I can't bear it here any longer.'"