Raf M

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:

Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie

Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.

This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

The Words We’re Missing

The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.

And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.

The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism

What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.

That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.

This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.

The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.

Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It

People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.

The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.

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[Vesper @vesperdigital]

Probably the most powerful lessons on injustice I have ever heard or watched.

"Why didn't any of you try and stop me?"

Pinning This!
🤯

[Dallas Brodie @Dallas_Brodie]

Five years ago today, the Tk'emlúps band made the false claim that the bodies of 215 children were found buried in unmarked graves next to the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

This is not true, and it is important that we stand for the truth.

That is exactly why we made the documentary Making A Killing on the subject.

Check it out!

[Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 @ryangerritsen]

This is a must read. Bill C-9 must be stopped.
Share this far and wide.

[Raf M @silentmph]

AJ, this is my first post on X. I probably won’t post again for a while but this topic is driving me crazy. Of course Tesla will upgrade HW3 cars at cost. It’s obvious and it’s a no brainer. As long as the car in question is roadworthy and can be in service for say, at least 5 to 7 years, it will be upgraded by Tesla at its cost to whatever hardware package it needs to be at for robotaxi capability. Let’s say it costs Tesla $2k to do the upgrade. That’s way less than it costs Tesla to produce a new car with HW4. Why would they not upgrade all HW3 cars to HW4 or HW5 if that’s what is needed to make it a robotaxi. They will do it regardless of whether the car is traded in or not. The value of the car is in autonomy. The fact that a vehicle is 2021 or 2024 is almost irrelevant. Think about it before you post a reply to this. I’m shocked at how many people miss this point.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

If you’re a hardcore software engineer and want to build the everything app, please join us by sending your best work to [email protected].

We don’t care where you went to school or even whether you went to school or what “big name” company you worked at.

Just show us your code.