Are there valid successful Socialist States?

That question seems be a key dividing issues in the modern American online Left's factional infighting.  And like many such fights few are willing to actually bring any nuance to the conversation.  On the one side are people insisting Socialism has still never been tried (which includes Anarchists who think a benevolent state is not even hypothetically possible).  Then you have your MLs who think criticizing any state or party with a claimed Leninist lineage "serves imperialism".

For States in existence today I consider both Cuba and Vietnam legitimate examples of successful Socialist experiments.  Their societies still aren't perfect, under the model of Socialism they're going for the "higher phase" won't be possible till the entire world is Communist.  But they are still Revolutions that have improved the conditions of their working class and are not guilty of most of the crimes the western media seeks to level against them.  And I'm willing to say the same of Eva Morales in Bolivia.

However Modern China and North Korea are Fascist Ethno-States, Mao may have been legit, but China as it is now is an authoritarian Ethno-State.  The Baath Party and Fatah parties are also Fascist parties.  Caleb Maupin doesn't even limit his apologetics to dictators claiming to Communists, he even defends Nasser, a Green Shirt who hired multiple high ranking SS Officers and banned Egypt's Communist Party, Khrushchev asked him to unban it but he refused.  There is a video on YouTube of a speech where Nasser sounds like he's defending Socialism, but it's the same wishy washy abstract "socialism" you get from Social Democrats calling them Democratic Socialists.

Maupin also spreads this "color revolution" narrative, seeking to discredit Left Wing resistance movements within States he likes by pointing to their CIA backing.  Empires like the US will often back revolutionary movements within enemy nations simply to cause instability, even though the ideologies of those groups are ones they will also be opposing if they take power.  That does not discredit those movements as legitimately Leftist.  Because guess what, you can pull that same card on Lenin himself, Lenin was only able to get back to Russia in 1917 because of the assistance he got from the Kaiser.  The CIA may very well also wind up backing a revolution they shouldn't have.

So that leads me to finally talking about the USSR.  I believe that the Russian Revolution should have went a different route, the Socialist Revolutionary Party I think had the right ideas for Russia given how much Russia was still Feudal and Agrarian unlike the Industrialized states Marx and Engels were mainly thinking of when they wrote their theories.  The Left SRs would have handled the Kulak situation differently.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to demonize Lenin or even Stalin, in fact I disagree with separating them, whatever Stalin did you object to Lenin would have probably done the same.  And if anything Stalin was better since he ended the state persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is actually one of George Orwell's criticisms of Stalin expressed in Animal Farm.  They did make Russia better, much of what's said to vilify them are lies, but they did do things I feel they shouldn't have.

As far as the Holodomor goes, I do believe the Kulak situation should have been handled differently, but calling it a Genocide is absurd.  Under the Tsars Russia had a famine about every decade, Socialists don't claim they can magically make the conditions that cause Famines disappear, none the less after having three Famines in the first 35 years of Bolshevik rule Russia had none between the end of WWII in 1945 and Gorbachev's Neo-Liberal reforms in 1985.  40 years of no Famine is considering Russia's material conditions absolutely impressive.

Spiritual and Heavenly, what do they actually mean?

This post is kind of a follow up to God and The Universe.

The problem with all this talk from Platonized Christians of various forms about how Scripture is supposed to be interpreted "Spiritually" rather then "Carnally" is that the modern English connotations for words like "Spirit" and "Heaven" don't truly fit the original meanings of the Hebrew and Greek words being used in those verses.

The word "Sky" rarely appears in English translations of The Bible, because the primary Hebrew and Greeks words used to refer what we call the Sky are translated "Heaven", also "Celestial" in the KJV is the same Greek word as Heavenly. The Ancient Platonists referred to the World of Forms where their transcendent God lived not as Heaven but as "A Place Beyond Heaven". Some Bible verses even refer to the Dew as being of Heaven in the same way Fruits are of The Earth, as if the Ancient Hebrews were not entirely ignorant of the Scientific fact that what we are looking at when we look at the Heavens is the same air we inhale when we breath.  

Which leads us to how the words translated "Spirit", "Ghost" and in the Hebrew at least "Soul" are also words for "Breath" and "Air", as is the word for "Life" when Leviticus 17 says the Life is in The Blood.  Leviticus is actually quite literally alluding to the scientific fact that our blood caries the oxygen we inhale from our lungs to other parts of our body chiefly the brain, but translations obscure that to modern readers.  Adam became a living Soul when God breathed the breath of life into him.  And that same imagery describes the future Bodily Resurrection in Ezekiel 37.  The phrase translated "give up the Ghost" really just means to stop breathing, The Bible constantly refers to death as being asleep, not separate from the Body which is built on a misuse of one verse in 2nd Corinthians 5.

Even in Gentile Greek thinking the strict Dualism of Pythagoras was still a minority view in Paul's time, and those who were Pythagoreans or Platonists in the 1st Century didn't use the word Pneuma for the intangible realm they believed it.  In Anaximenes Pneuma is synonymous with the element Air which in his theory was the first element from which all the others were formed.  In Greek medical texts this meaning remains but also became associated with being how the different parts of the body communicate with each other.  In Aristotle the "connate pneuma" was the "air" in the sperm that passes on capacity to the offspring, sounding a lot like what would become the the Christian Doctrine of Traducianism.  The Stoics then greatly developed the concept of Pneuma to refer to "unseen" manifestations of the Divine but still very corporeal.

The Greek word translated Soul is Psyche a word we still use in modern English but with a seemingly completely different meaning to how we use Soul.  Most people aware of this assume it's the Psychological meaning that has no relation to Ancient Greek usage, but I feel the truth is closer to being the opposite.  Plenty of early Christians like Justin Martyr argued against the Immortality of the Soul as taught by Plato, Pythagoras and Origen.

So when in some contexts The Bible calls The Kingdom of which Jesus is King a Kingdom of Heaven rather then Earth, or uses Spiritual as a contrast to the Carnal/Physical/Natural, those are symbolic uses of those words that still derive from what they refer to materially.    

Now in 2nd Corinthians 12 Paul refers to a "Third Heaven", the popular view today is that the first two Heavens are the Sky and Outer Space but the Third Heaven is actually Plato's "Place Beyond Heaven".  I however would argue the Third Heaven is still part of the Universe simply not within the 4 Dimensions we can currently mortally perceive.  According to E. W. Bullinger, the Greek says "caught away", not "caught up" possibly reflecting Jewish beliefs that Paradise was somewhere other than the uppermost heaven.(A Critical Lexicon and Concordance to the English and Greek "2, 14, To this "Third heaven" and " Paradise " Paul was caught away, 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4, (not " up," see under " catch,") in "visions and revelations of the Lord," 2 Cor. xii. 1. One catching away – with a double revelation of the New heaven and the ...")

The Dualistic Platonist/Pythagorean senses of these words are maybe in mind in how Paul uses them more then any other NT writers, but Paul while engaging with the Greeks is seeking to deconstruct that dualism.  People take out of context from 1st Corinthians 15 the "flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of Heaven" and the contrasts that are made.  But what they build up to is saying the Bodily will put on the Spiritual, the Mortal will put on the Immortal, the separation between the Material and Divine caused by the Fall is undone in The Resurrection.

So one Full Preterist YT video I watched part of went on about how in John's Gospel the "Jews" kept interpreting what Jesus said "Physically" or "Materially" while the narrative voice informs us Jesus really meant something "Spiritually".  Jesus often used metaphors and symbolism and figures of speech, that doesn't mean those metaphors need to be interpreted in a Spiritual vs Physical paradigm.  

Like when Orgasm is called a "little death", that expression is using one physical event to analogize another physical event. I started writing this thinking it was specifically Male Orgasm called a "Little Death" because visually that analogy instantly makes sense to me while I always thought of Female Orgasm as well the opposite.  Bur upon researching it for this post it seems La petite mort is used pretty gender neutrally.  The expression in it's French origins is mainly supposed to be about the sense of exhaustion, it is after all not uncommon to go to sleep right after.

Likewise when Paul refers to the dead as being asleep, that is one physical state being analogized to another, but the point lies in how the basic difference between death and sleep is that sleep is temporary, Paul is communicating that The Gospel is that Christ has made death temporary.

The quote from John's Gospel about eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood is obviously meant to be understood in terms of The Eucharist, the Last Supper depicted in the Synoptics and referred to by Paul, where His Body and Blood is symbolized by Bread and Wine.  So there are layers of symbolism there, when He was tempted by Satan He speaks of the true Bread of Life being the Word of God, the Scriptures, which is a part of the Material world.

The beginning of this theme is the Born Again teaching from John 3.  I disagree with most casual usage of the Born Again phrasing, but I'm no longer happy with my prior post on the subject, so I may have to redo it. Point here is the Birth imagery is indeed symbolic, it's symbolic of Resurrection.  Our conversion is merely when we're Begotten again.

And that Birth imagery being associated with Resurrection itself points to a physical Resurrection.  It has it's roots in Isaiah 26:19 in many translations saying "the Earth shall give birth to her dead", terminology that refers to Revelation 20 talking about Hades and the Sea giving up the Dead that are in them.  And those translations of Isaiah 26:19 must be the correct ones because all translations are setting up this birth imagery in verses 17 and 18.

There are three different Hebrew words for "dead" as in words you'd use to refer to dead people, all three are in Isaiah 26:19, as if YHWH through Isaiah really wanted us to get that there is no sense of Death not included in this Resurrection.  One of the words is frequently translated very specifically as  words like Corpse, being the word Leviticus uses when talking about being made unclean by touching a Carcass.

In this Birth metaphor the Earth is the mother, our dead corpse is the seed which enters her after our "big death" and our Resurrected perfected form is The Man Child of Revelation 12.  The Mother is also Israel in that Chapter, but Israel is tied to her Land(Ertetz), Hephzibah and Beulah of Isaiah 62.  I've also proven with Revelation that Sheol/Hades is a physical location of bodies and that Grave is an accurate translation.  If the Earth is the Mother and the dead body is the Seed, then Sheol would be the Earth's Womb.

That is also complimented by the sowing imagery Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 15:37, our mortal Body is the Seed that is planted in the Earth and from which our future Resurrection Body will sprout.  So yes our current bodies and future bodies are sometimes referred to as separate bodies, but that's not because they are completely separate things, there is still a continuity, just as in a sense I'm not the same person I was 15 years ago.  1 Corinthians 15:44 is clear that the Natural Body and Spiritual Body are the same matter, simply changed.

2 Corinthians 5 doesn't in any translation say "to be absent from the body is to be present with The Lord".  But either way in the context of what's set up at the start of the Chapter and what Paul had earlier taught to this same community in 1 Corinthians 15, "the Body" being spoken of just means our body in it's current mortal state before we put on immortality.  Nothing Paul says implies we are absent from the body when we Die, instead Paul consistently refers to physical death as being asleep.

The word translated "Naked" in Genesis 2:25 is not the same as the word being translated Naked repeatedly in Genesis 3, they are arguably similar but not the same.  The word used in Genesis 2 is the same as a word translated Cunning, Crafty and Subtle, in Genesis 3:1 that word is used to describe what The Serpent is more of then any other beast of the field. When Jesus says believers should be "wise as serpents" the Greek word for "wise" being used there is an equivalent to this Hebrew word. Likewise the word for "ashamed" in 2:25 is elsewhere translated "confounded".  The irony is the West has spent centuries acting like the sense in which Adam and Eve were "Naked and unashamed" in Genesis 2 symbolizes childish innocence and naivety when the actual etymology of the words used says the opposite.  Later Hebrew Scripture definitely does use this word for "naked" as in not wearing clothing, but never in the Pentateuch, that I believe was a development of the word's usage in later Hebrew.

The word for "naked" used in Genesis 3 is the more proper word for Naked, and based on 2 Corinthians 5's discussion of how we are currently Spiritually Naked until we are clothed in The Resurrection, I believe the reason Adam and Eve didn't "know" they were Naked before was because they weren't really, they might have seemed to be Naked to how we in our current state perceive that concept, but that's because they were clothed in this Immortal Oiketerion.

When we Put On Immortality at The Resurrection, it's not us ceasing to be Material, it's the Material being upgraded, improved, perfected.  Some may find this weird, but I think a good visual analogy would be like a Transformation in a Magical Girl Anime.