Maoist Rebel News

This guy is like an edgy Stalin-wannabe that never grew out of his teenage angst communist years.

Maoist Rebel News is a YouTube channel run by Jason "Roo" Unruhe (his real surname is Caden), a rap artist, Red Alert cosplayer, political commentator, and former security guard from Canada. Because making 9/11 jokes and screaming "Fuck you, dad!" for 20 minutes now counts as political journalism.

He's long been blacklisted by many in the socialist community, including some tankies, for plagiarizing their news sources (or essays written by his then-friends). He's basically the Stefan Molyneux of leftists, except less popular. He pledged support to Leading Light Communist Organization (LLCO).

Maoist Rambling Nonsense
One of my few joys in life is making 9/11 jokes.

It's pretty obvious Unruhe lives his entire life online. It's doubtful he's ever been to a Marxist study group or anarchist infoshop. He makes outlandish claims regarding the history of (nominally) Communist leaders, rendering him something of a laughingstock in the community. He even goes so far as to be a DPRK and Khmer Rouge apologist.

In a rare stopped clock moment, Unruhe criticizes the current Chinese Communist Party as "capitalist-imperialist" for its economic exploitation of African countries. Unfortunately, he still makes fun of Uighur victims and Hong Kong protestors. Oh yes, he promotes conspiracies that the US created COVID-19.

Grave dancing
On the 13th anniversary of 9/11, he showed true bravery by going after the victims of the WTC attacks. It's all right there in the title: he condemns those who died in the towers and says they "deserved" their fates. Likewise, Charlie Hebdo kinda acted like jerks sometimes, so they deserved to die. After an arsonist killed 33 people and injured 36 at Kyoto Animation Studio, Unruhe responded "Not all heroes wear capes. Anti-degeneracy gang rise up." You can bet next week, Unruhe will make a video entitled "Why the Colombians killed by FARC deserved it". stage whispers Jesus Christ.

First Worldism
He throws around the term "First Worldist" as if every failure of Western culture can be encompassed in those words—but never explains what those words entails. And according to him, no-one in the first world is part of the proletariat.

He's made plenty of videos going after feminists on the basis that "First Worlders" don't really suffer because Third Worlders suffer more. Unruhe also believes "first worlders" are "parasites" because their wages and social services come from value generated by third world exploitation. He's gone so far as to say fighting for a minimum wage increase is a "First World privilege." Keep in mind that this is the same "Communist" who drinks expensive whiskey, goes on video game binges, smokes Cuban cigars, and regularly brags about how much money he makes from his channel.

His aversion to "identity politics" largely stems from the harsh reactions to his homophobic language and him refusing to apologize. Jason doesn't seem to get that the same "identity politics" he decries originated with the Maoist-inspired student movements of the 1960s. He goes on to attack his critics as "liberals." "I'm glad there's a trend reacting against this…" So, Jason, you're calling for some kind of…reactionary response?

Stalin was nice!
Unruhe claims that deaths under the Stalinist purges were widely exaggerated. For example, Unruhe claims that the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, or Holodomor, was caused by failures of Stalinist farm collectivization. While some historians do support this view of the Holodomor, others contend that the Holomodor was a forced famine that claimed the lives of between 2.4 million and 7.5 million. Either way, trying to portray this as not the fault of Stalin or Stalinism is worrying at best.

Unruhe claims Boris Yeltsin's opening of Soviet documents revealed only--only!--a total of 775,866 executions. However, this statistic leaves out ethnic cleansing committed by the NKVD in the form of deliberate famines which claimed 5-10 million lives.

Unruhe also asserts that the total number of executions is less than deaths caused by the CIA. Even if this is true, this is a red herring, as the CIA committing crimes has no impact on the question of whether or not Stalin was a genocidal dictator. This is a great example of whataboutism.

Unruhe then claims that most executions occurred in 1937-1938, which is accurate. However, Unruhe then uses the concentration camps for communists, social democrats, and trade unionists by Germany as justification for these executions. He then asserts that many had their death sentences revoked, for which he provides no citation and then speculates on the total number of deaths based on data from deaths in one purge.

We have no way of knowing the exact number of people executed in Stalin's purges, but we do know that the purges happened and we know the minimum number of executions (775,866). According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot. Some historians, such as the self proclaimed "Sovietologist" Robert Conquest, claim that the numbers declassified by the Russians are inaccurate and the total number of deaths may be twice as high as reported.

Even with Unruhe's statistics, Stalin is still directly responsible for the deaths of 40,000 prisoners, 90% of whom are confirmed executed. Stalin himself signed 357 execution lists over the course of the Great Purge to make this possible. Even if we accept Unruhe's stats, Stalin is still responsible for the death of 36,000 individuals, which is enough to consider Stalin a mass murderer and not someone to glorify. Stalin personally directed Nikolia Yezhov to torture individuals arrested until confessions were extracted. Recent documents have revealed the following Stalin quote: “Isn't it time to squeeze this gentleman and force him to report on his dirty little business? Where is he: in a prison or a hotel?"

Conspiracy theories
In a debate with "Socialism or Barbarism!" an anarchist-communist YouTuber, Unruhe stated that he "doesn't doubt for a second" that the USA is directly funding ISIS, while the other YouTuber merely stated that the US was funding Islamic rebels that might as well be ISIS. The center point of this debate however, was Unruhe's belief that Rohava Rojava is "an agent of US imperialism", because they "took land from the Assad government to carve up the country", and also stated that the was kicking Arabs out of their homes, and gave his source as "news agencies".

Videos

 * What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? - Considering how much time he spends in a basement, you'd think he'd be familiar with this oldest-than-dirt copypasta.
 * Hey YouTube, Anita Sarkeesian, Anarchists, and Betas: Suck My Cock! - This is some kind of brilliant, lonelygirl15 prank, right?
 * After prevously endorsing Rand Paul, Jason pleads with Canadians not to vote Conservative - Accelerationism is only for AmeriKKKans.