those individuals who promote the dismantling of capitalism, rejection of heirarchical systems of power, and wish to share in discussion with others of a similar radical liberatory philosophy, particularly on the subject of armed defense of the self and the community.
The SRA is the Socialist Rifle Association. It started out as a group of all flavors of leftists (anarchists, MLs, demsocs and everything in between) working together to create a positive gun culture for leftism and to train people to defend their communities and themselves during the rise of the alt-right and Donald Trump-style fascism in the States.
However, many branches of the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation, a strongly ML political party in the States) decided that the SRA was the perfect vehicle for them and so instructed their members who were also members of the SRA to do everything they could to push out the anarchists and demsocs. Now it is just another branch of the PSL.
I'm not American myself and this was just explained by a few American friends of mine who were formerly in the SRA and even had leadership roles in their chapters; one was a demsoc and two were anarchists. In my own country there are almost no MLs; they came to power back in the 60s and 70s as part of our national liberation but then they just ended up being power hungry, as all MLs eventually become (or were in the first place). Nobody has faith in them anymore so anybody who is leftist is pretty much anarchist or at least demsoc.
And anybody who praises the government of North Korea has absolutely zero moral high ground on which to stand
Well, our MLs have been in power for a couple of decades, led to us having a disgusting state-capitalist dictatorship with a poor socialist veil that corrupted our society to such a degree that we haven't recovered from it not even 3 decades after the regime fell.
What's even funnier is that western MLs aren't fond of our so-called communist dictatorship because it happened to oppose the soviet dictatorship.
But yeah, to put it mildly, I'm not exactly fond of these kinda people.
I hear you. I assume you're from a former Eastern bloc country or Yugoslavia based on the description you just gave. It was really terrible for yall I feel because the MLs were immediately replaced by rent-seeking capitalist oligarchs who picked off the bones of yall's societies. Even worse that the ML governments suppressed all traditional culture to the point that now it's gone 100% in the opposite direction so that a lot of the people celebrating the traditional culture and straight-up fascists, so if a regular person wants to celebrate traditional culture they're grouped with those fascists.
Ohhh, if only lmao. Yugos had it quite decent... well, for a while at least, then unchecked nationalism made everything go to shit.
But no, we were Yugoslavia's northern neighbor - RSR = Socialist Republic of Romania, we had it so bad that we were escaping to Yugoslavia and the serbs were smuggling all sort of things into our country and sell it on the black market.
And it went so well for those sellers that the entire country knew about the black markets close to the Danube. You could get jeans, brand t-shirts, Kent cigarettes, sweets, electronic watches from Albania, radios, chewing gum that looked like cigarettes and vegeta lol
MLs were immediately replaced by rent-seeking capitalist oligarchs who picked off the bones of yall's societies
Yes and no. Because of the nature of our "revolution" (when we executed Ceausescu and his multi-doctoral and academic wife who didn't know how to read properly and who also pronounced CO2 as in cotwo and not "see-oo-two"), we didn't have any actual justice served. The rest of the system got away with it. The old political class continued to rob us, the torturers from the Securitate weren't punished. Those with political connections got their hands on property and badly managed/unproductive factories and instead of bringing them up to western or even half-way decent standards they sold them for scrap iron - literally.
Even worse that the ML governments suppressed all traditional culture to the point that now it's gone 100% in the opposite direction so that a lot of the people celebrating the traditional culture and straight-up fascists, so if a regular person wants to celebrate traditional culture they're grouped with those fascists.
See, for us it didn't happen like that. That's why in present-day politics our "social democrats" are basically just (corrupt) conservatives, almost identical to our "national liberals" (these are 1% less corrupt). And it is centrist/center-right neolibs types that are the most progressive one. Shit's a fuck, lmao.
Like the Mises Caucus takeover over the Libertarian party; hardcore fringe edgelords took a thing over for optics and reach and have done everything possible to homogenize message and content
I'm not one of these guys masturbating over my dream revolution or anything, but armed minorities are harder to oppress, and are less tempting targets for individual or group violence.
I'm a queer guy in Portland. There are violent extremists in my town who want to kill me, and are organizing and rallying. I've seen them in the streets, and they've attacked people and places I care about because they know that the left wing is broadly non-violent, and that cops are on their side.
Looking at the political climate in the US, I don't think it's too unreasonable of a reaction to buy a gun and learn to defend yourself, just in case.