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?
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.
Imagine defending a state that set an arbitrary number of human lives to end for ideological reasons. Repugnant
And before you start on it I don’t believe any state should have the right to execute its citizens.
That wasn’t what happened, though. The soviets had discovered in the 1930s that not only was there a plot against the soviet state from within, but also severe corruption and remnants of the former ruling classes and their sympathizers in place. The soviets had set up means of internal investigation, and by and large managed to kick out corrupt officials from government. They found many guilty of treason, corruption, and other serious crimes, but the number of found guilty and sentenced to death exceeded their estimates, and hence it was called off.
The death penalty should be abolished, sure. However, socialist states, and especially the soviet union, are in a constant state of siege and infiltration. They weren’t killing random people willy-nilly.
Then why did you say that’s what happened? I quoted you exactly. Any state that plans to execute 70,000 of its own citizens I’m not going to support. Creating a arbitrary maximum shows a complete disregard for human life. It’s simply unacceptable.
That’s the problem. When the state has the right to execute people they can make the law what they need it to be in order to “legally” execute anyone they wish. The state is the law.
The state finding 700,000 people guilty kinda exemplifies the issue even if they didn’t carry out the sentences.
You claimed things like “it was done purely for ideology” and other bits I didn’t say, so I added context. There wasn’t a plan to execute the maximum limit, nor was the limit arbitrary. Further, the purges were popularly supported by the populace, because terrorism, infiltration, and assassinations were prevelant, including people like Kirov who were close to the top. The soviet system was democratic, the state was not above society.