Comment by danielodievich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielodievich | Hacker News Reader

For someone wanting a bit more of this with great anecdotes, I direct you to the Mitrokhin Archive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive) sourced pair of tomes (The Sword and the Shield (1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (2005)).

An incredible source covering more than a century of operations, predating the revolution, and spanning all continents. The first book dives quite deeply into this exact topics, with double, triple and sometimes quadruple crossings. I loved the part about the prep for large-scale sabotage in eastern seaboard of USA in the events of hostilities, something I had no idea about but would have been quite an bold move. There was also a lot of unbelievably dumb stuff.

The book mentions the increased difficulty of doing anything undercover or assumed identity in the modern digitally connected world. All of those undercover things are pretty much the thing of the past now, with OSINT being able to find just about anything about anyone.

> The book mentions the increased difficulty of doing anything undercover or assumed identity in the modern digitally connected world.

What does state of the art facial recognition do to operational technique in China ?

I second that.

Buyers beware: Mitrokhin books are not an easy reading, so be prepared to chew.

Wow, this is incredible. Thank you.

A strong argument in favor of rooting out ideologically unaligned thinking.

Would you want a communist working in the US government? Clearly they would be far more likely to sympathize with the Soviet Union than a capitalist would.

Most anglosphere communists I know have a term for such people: tankies.

And they hate them: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tankie

Maybe if you're talking about anglosphere 'communists' who follow people like Vaush online. Nothing communist about them.

No true Scotsman. V**sh is cursed/cringe/etc., but we can't exclude his fans from the label merely on the basis of his ideology being garbage/wrong/anglocentric.

We can exclude his fans on the basis that they don't believe what communists believe.

I am not talking about them. I am talking about people who are all about worker rights, unions and class struggle — you know — the things that are in the actual communist manifesto.

Whether that fits the people arround that "Vaush" — I don't know — but I can tell you as somebody who studied philosophy at a highly political campus, that the amount of communists who think the soviets (or china for that matter) are anything else than a failure is very low. A few of those strange people exist, but I wish the number of right wingers who think Hitler was a great guy was equally low.

The UK conservative party employs several ex Revolutionary Communist Party (extreme trotskyist) advisors. Sometimes, if you want a job done, these are the people who know how to get things done.

Bannon used to be a performative maoist?

Those people? Claire Fox and the LM crowd? They're professional contrarians. Very good at picking the side most guaranteed to make people angry, which is how they went seamlessly from far left to far right.

Yes, those people, what they learned was political praxis: How to succeed and win an argument. How to be effective, in a minority, how to dominate a room. I was a member of a less rigid, less orthodox, (markedly less effective!) socialist student movement in the UK at a similar time as them in the late 70s and I know some, a little, of how they operate. An older generation in the SDS learned similar lessons during the anti Vietnam war campaign in the USA.

Some anticommunists fail to understand or believe you can ever cease to be a communist. Arguably, they're right: there are political lessons which can't be unlearned. Putin is anything but a communist, Russia is not a socialist state. Do you think Putin has unlearned what he learned across the sixties and seventies and eighties as a loyal party member? Different to Claire Fox but similar lessons learned I would argue.

The USSR was built on a weird combination of Marxist-Leninist ideology (which should, in principle, be anti-imperialist) and ye olde Russian imperialism, and Putin seems to have absorbed most of the latter.

I don't mean literally Claire and Vladimir are "the same" but they certainly learned similar lessons about polemic, argument and behaviour to an outcome. The revolutionary left in Britain from my personal perspective was a very odd power trip between the groups, as well as against the state. The RCP was an offshoot of the WRP which Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were in and probably loathed the SWP and the other 4th international splitting groups.

I have a diagram remarkably like the UNIX family tree about the complex splits and mergers since the 1940s. Winding up in the Tory party.. unexpected but once you see it, sort of .. "yeah"

The Mitrokhin Archive gives multiple examples of spies who became spies by rejecting their former ideology and doing a 180 degree turn. You think that those people changed, while in reality this is textbook method used by russians. Cambrige five did the same thing, they supposedly rejected their old ways. But it was all a lie.

KGB made whole fake right wing organizations to fish out real right wingers in Russia.

On a side note, it is quite clear that UK conservatives are on GRU / FSB leash. UK is now cutting military expenses due to Brexit. Someone in Moscow probably received a medal for that.

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