Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
Yeah, killing Nazis and landlords is necessary for progress sometimes, not something to criticise. Those are the vast majority of the people communism killed on purpose.
Because you’re committing a fallacy by comparing the two. Socialism has achieved, in practice, lowest inequality where it has been applied, universal healthcare, universal education, guaranteed employment, guaranteed housing, guaranteed state pensions for retirees, redistribution of land from landlords and nobility to peasants… In my homeland of Spain we had fascism, and it literally fought against all those things, we still have plenty of people in their 70s and 80s who cannot even read as a consequence. Communism saved Europe from Fascism, they’re literally the antithesis.
Stop trying to maintain capitalism by fighting against the only system in history which has proven it can destroy it and improve our lives.
The old: if you’re not with me you Must be pro USA/Capitalism.
Is that all you got?
Also the millions killed I referred to were the direct orders from stalin to kill millions of their own people (holodomor included).
But that’s just propaganda from “the west” right?
You’re literally making that up, though. Executions in the USSR aren’t numbered in the millions during the great terror, and holodomor was an unintentional famine, nobody was “killed”, it’s the result of unintentional side effects of the first successful mass collectivization in human history. The Soviet leaders knew the process would be chaotic if they embarked in rapid collectivization as they did, but it was a necessary choice enforced by the threat of external invasion and the need for rapid industrialization. It was a hard measure but it worked, and thanks to the rapid collectivization and industrialization, the soviets could create the industry that would 15 years later enable them to defeat Nazism, saving many more tens of millions than were lost in Holodomor.
See? We can do nuanced analysis of the policy. However, if you make ahistorical claims, such as “Stalin ordering the holodomor” (which is untenable under modern historiography), you’ll get called out for it.
For clarity, clashes between the kulaks and Red Army absolutely happened during collectivization in the 1930s, and many kulaks were killed as they took up arms to defend their bourgeois lifestyle. I’m not shedding tears for them just like I won’t shed tears for Nazis, landlords, etc, but these clashes did happen.
I did specify the great terror, for the most part the destiny of Kulaks in the early 1930s was sentenced by peasant trials, not by the Red Army. If I’m not wrong, most Kulaks who died during collectivization weren’t executed, they died during deportation.
Ah, gotcha. Definitely agree that the majority of the kulaks were dealt with by the peasantry that were under their thumb, just wanted to point out that frustrations between kulaks and the Red Army did happen.
Thankfully the red army was there to carry out the will of the masses
Indeed!
Stalin never gave direct orders to kill millions of soviet citizens, nor indirect. Even the Great Purge never exceeded ~700,000 sentencings to death, and was stopped because these sentencings far exceeded what Stalin and Molotov had set at a maximum number, which was around 70,000. The famine in the 1930s was not intentionally caused even if you believe it to have been amplified by mismanagement, either.
Once discovered that a famine was occuring, the soviets did what they could to prevent and alleviate it once it had started. The idea of an intentional famine is simply fringe among contemporary historians, same with claims of white genocide in South Africa. For example, serious bourgeois academic sources tend to say it was a failure of planning, rather than intentional and genocide. For instance, Mark Tauger wrote:
Tauger believes it was a failure of economic policy, not an intentional attack on ethnic Ukrainians. The 1930s famine was a combination of drought, flooding, and mismanagement. Further, the Kulaks, wealthy bourgeois farmers, magnified matters by killing their own crops in the midst of a famine rather than letting the Red Army collectivize them. The Politburo was also kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:
From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.
Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.
Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Muggeridge and Jones reported on the famine. Völkischer Beobachter reported on it as intentional, and then spread the story around further. Why would the soviets try to starve their own people? It was because of the soviets and collectivization of agriculture that famine was ended, and that’s why outside of wartime the 1930s famine was the final famine in those regions, with life expectancies doubling.
Overall, trying to hold on to red scare historiography does absolutely nothing to help the cause of socialism. The soviet archives have provided a wealth of knowledge largely affirming the communist narrative, and debunking liberal and fascist narratives about existing socialism. If you consider yourself a leftist of any sort, then you’ll inevitably run into people using the red scare against you too, so perpetuating their mythos just shoots your own movement in the foot.
Wow, one minute and downvoted.
Guess that’s all you have left.