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?
Socialism in real life has achieved the absolute highest rates of improvement for the working classes in terms of life metrics, immense social equality, and has presented a path forward in an era of dying capitalist imperialism. You’re spreading propaganda too, knowingly or not, given that propaganda is merely agitating for your own beliefs.
The “millions intentionally killed” by socialism consist of landlords, capitalists, fascists, the Nazis, etc. Socialism has never killed people willy-nilly, but has run into conflict with the old ruling classes time and time again, as socialism is the establishment of working class power over the former ruling classes.
This implies the communists and Nazis are equal evils, a form of Holocaust trivialization called Double Genocide Theory. Communists, upon gaining politucal power, did and do their best to uplift the lives of working people. The Nazis on the other hand built industrialized mass murder, and attempted to colonize Europe the way Europe had colonized the world.
What are these theories? Any establishment of socialism will necessarily put you into conflict with the ruling classes of capitalism. Socialism historically has not been a “horror” for the working classes, and as such has been popularly supported by them. A theory being “interesting” doesn’t make it practical, nor is socialism “killing everyone.”
Above all, here, you cling to vagueposting. You erase class analysis, weeping for killed Nazis, and when it comes time to present a solution, you just say “other things might work” without elaborating. It’s sterile and negative “left” criticism that serves nobody.
Lol ok genocide lover, if it’s the URSS doing it, it’s okay.
Blocked.
I despise genocide, what the hell is that pivot? The USSR never committed genocide, this is backed up by modern historical analysis. Are you calling killing Nazis “genocide?”
What do you call the Holodomor?
The Holodomor was a genocide
No, it was not. 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.
Nice copy paste of r/communism talking points you got there
If your argument can be dismantled by copying and pasting that’s entirely your own fault
Fuck off dude
If I have spoken about something before, then there’s no advantage to rewriting the same information, is there? Do you dispute any of the evidence I brought? Do you have any of your own? It seems like you’re using the fact that this topic has been discussed before as proof of not needing to look at existing evidence, which is blatantly wrong. The fact that communists tend to agree on something is not evidence of it being “false,” no matter how much you frame agreement as “talking points.”
Either way, I am curious how long it will take you to become a Marxist, given you seem more curious about theory than most anti-communists.
Been a Marxist a while now buddy. I’ve read most of the foundational texts, much to the detriment of my academic work. The genocidal character doesn’t take away from the rapid technological advancements that came from the collectivisation, but facts are facts.
The evidence is there and has been presented by many historians. Most historians agree that the Holodomor was a genocide, but i know all too well the character of your response to this evidence.
Here’s a good literature review by Olga Andriewsky that corroborates the genocide view
I know you consider yourself a Marxist, but when you push ideas like “opposing slur usage is idealist,” you completely betray any comprehension of what you’ve read. I’m curious what you consider to be “most of the foundational texts,” but either way, simple input does not make one an actual Marxist. That’s why theory and practice have to be unified. I don’t know if you’ve moved beyond that particular position, but it’s just an example.
The famine was not a genocide. This theory is pushed by liberals and by fascists, but as I already showed, there was no targeting of Ukrainians or any ethnicity, and archival evidence from opening the soviet archives proved definitively that the soviets did all they could to alleviate famine. You haven’t actually addressed my claims. Facts are facts.
Get a job