On another note, as someone that is quite enjoying Blowback right now (I'm on season 3!), I also feel that it's over-recommended as well.
Still, I feel that it's better than Guerrilla History, at least, and so I prefer it.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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I like Blowback a lot, but sometimes think it can be hard to follow. I can't remember the name of every Afghan warlord they mentioned in a previous episode 
I forgot they actually tried to tackle the Afghan war, which is more hard to follow historically.
My enjoyment and understanding of any podcast/audio book like this would be greatly enhanced by a relationship web of all the different players--if you wanted to be fancy, you could make one master web and then generate incremental ones for each episode as different entities and relationships are introduced so it's not so overwhelming. Keeping track of that many names is difficult but doable when you read them, since you internalize them better and can also quickly and precisely flip back a few pages for a refresher; aurally, it's nigh impossible, at least for me, and especially when so many are in languages I don't speak.
The tightest season for me it's Cuba. S1 is kind of hard to figure out maybe because I have first hand memories of the events being spoken of, and the Korean war is a solid effort, but not as compelling a story as our boys in Havana.
Season 2 is so far the best, but I do like Season 3 better than Season 1.
Aren’t those two fundamentally different podcasts? Blowback is straight up edutainment. Guerrilla History at least has a pretense of being educational.
I'm talking about what's most commonly recommended.
I read it and greatly enjoyed it, but it's not that good of a book and people should stop recommending the same Reddit reading lists, imho.
I keep seeing the same books (not just this one) recommended everywhere. I try to recommend different and, perhaps, obscure works, but eh, I'm just one person, I suppose.
I just don't think that people should be expected to read a book that "everyone is reading" anyway; we should try to encourage others to "go off the beaten path" because, just today, I've seen this book mentioned a lot.
Ah well, just my honest opinion.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I recommend it a lot because it completely rewrites the idea of Communism as a big bad in the third world that most americans have internalized. As lib as it may be, it does a hell of a job of showing that ultimately the fight against communism is a fight against workers who are just trying to not to be treated like slaves.
I see that in a lot of books I've read already.
But fine, for people just getting into Marxism-Leninism, I'm sure it's great for delivering a message that people should internalize.
Lol, I think we're recommending books to different sorts of people. Mine are mostly libs.
Oh fair.
It's good to put together a coherent reading list for deprogramming liberal views. Both Blowback and The Jakarta Method are effective for this both due to their content and how accessible they are. I've seen several people go down the SocDem-to-DPRK-defending commie pipeline through these materials.
It has never been my experience that people with brainworms will choose good reads on their own. Most of the time, especially in the US, people don't read books at all when left to their own devices. When you've got someone on the hook, you've gotta reel it in.
I know, I'm talking about going past the initial reading lists and recommendations that you see on Reddit and Twitter, but that's just me.
Like, for libs? Sure. For full-on Marxist-Leninists? Maybe more experimentation and discovering of different things would be best.
Your angle makes sense but it also made me remember all of the irl MLs I've interacted with that drastically underestimate the depravity of liberals because they don't know these histories. Folks that think the path to revolution in the imperial core won't involve, say, a massive fascistic reaction or civil war. I'm not really sure why they don't think that because they're usually fans of Cuba and the USSR and are familiar with the broad histories of their revolutions, but for the few I've talked to and made recs to, reading these kinds of source materials are very useful for working practically together, such as with better opsec or avoiding actions that don't have a strategic value to the risks we take.
For example, Extinction Rebellion people get arrested for no reason. There is no public outcry or backlash when they get arrested. No campaign to achieve a direct material goal or radicalize off images or stories. I have often had to raise the point (not to XR people but to MLs) that getting arrested is not praxis in itself and tends to remove the most useful and radical organizers from our ranks - that this is intentional on the part of the state, so we need to have real goals of what to get out of it and modify our approach if it doesn't work. And that of we are not coordinated, if we don't plan and commit and understand the dangers, what will tend to happen is that the most marginalized people will take the brunt of the violence. Standing Rock had/has this in spades, where white budding radicals would push for direct actions that risk arrest and then bail when the reality hit them, leaving indigenous people to get arrested. This kind of scenario happens a lot and I think it fundamentally boils down to latent idealism that can only be cured by reading our histories in detail or experiencing the violence yourself - and it's way better to learn from history.
Anyways your point is 100% valid that there are MLs who really won't benefit from these reading recs and would do better with other ones. I was just reminded of all the ones I've met that are still baby leftists in so many ways and do need historical reality checks to keep themselves and others safe.
Thanks! And I agree. Here's an interesting article on what you talked about right through this link right here. Kinda says what you say about the limits of "direct action." We need a movement first, and then we need a revolution, but there are multiple steps we have to take from a movement to the revolutionary situation phase as well. We can't just have "revolution today" or tomorrow or soon; that's idealistic. We need movement now and, quite frankly, revolution later because we need to build ourselves up first, we need to build up our forces. I read Nick Estes' comments on Standing Rock. Oh yeah, and Extinction Rebellion has people that mean well, but will wear itself thin and I think they're weaker now than they've ever been, to your point.
A dose of what's called "social movement studies" (which is an academic field) would also help MLs that want to organize and do activism (rather than just "digital activism" or "education" online). It's good to do theory; but praxis is more important, imho. "Every bit of movement is worth more than a thousand developmenets in theory." (paraphrasing Marx). That's why I recommend William Z. Foster's American Trade Unionism (oh, and Mao's writings are good on this, but you need to keep in mind that he was fighting a civil war so some of what he says has to be amended for movement-building in our context). Oh yeah, and Convergence Magazine has a lot of good articles on activism and praxis, but is a bit lib (which is fine, so long as you're learning something).
100% agree! Incidentally my knowledge on those Standing Rock issues came from people I personally know (not Estes) and their basic sentiment was, "wtf is wrong with white people?" lol.
I usually try to steer MLs towards the Panthers, since IMzo they're the most recent and most successful American commies and there are many lessons to learn from what worked for them and what didn't.
I'm more partial to the CPUSA and its history, but of course, I like the Panthers as well. Oh, and I try to study other communist orgs but not just communists, but also generally leftist or even liberal orgs.
Don't get me wrong though, I do agree with what you're saying.
I guess I just want better recs for people that want to discover something entirely new.
I don't really see a reason to go off the beaten path or recommend obscure books? Like the purpose is to help people understand specific ideas, so if a certain book is good for doing that then that's the book I'm gonna recommend. True for any media really.
If there's a better book than The Jakarta Method for introducing libs to the idea of color revolutions then I'll start recommending that one instead.
If it's about introducing libs, fine.
But we need to discover more books for our reading lists; some of the reading lists I've seen just repeat the same books over and over again.