You’re so right, it would have been way better for everyone in the territory of the USSR to be illiterate and poor and starving, so they wouldn’t have cared so much when the Nazis effortlessly murdered everyone from western Poland to eastern Siberia. Who even needs industrial output when you could have a “”“horizontally-organized”“” bandit kingdom named after its unelected leader?
Why would there need to be an alternative? It was already the best possible version of what could have happened, within the bounds of a crushing siege by the entire capitalist world on one hand, and basic human fallibility on the other. There is no other political leader in history with a higher proportion of correct decisions to mistakes than Stalin, and they were mistakes, as in consequences not intended from actions taken earnestly to protect the people of the USSR - unlike the actual unspeakable atrocities being committed constantly by every single imperialist nation at the time, as well as before and since.
Even just on its own terms, the USSR was unimaginably more humane than what came before:
what existed outside of it:
and what came after:
This is called the “Eastern Cross” by the way, a demographic phenomenon unique to former nations of the USSR, where the death rate and birth rate suddenly cross over each other in the 90s. It’s way better that this happened, of course, than the USSR being run by “”“authoritarians”“” who would protect their people from sabotage and murder using the necessary amount of violence (that is, still less than their enemies).
But I forgot, we’re comparing an actual nation that had to actually exist in the dirt and blood of the real world, to the geometrically perfect platonic anarchist society that lives in your head, so I guess I have to concede. I’ll go tell all the communists in the third world to pack it up and disband their organizations and scratch out all the hammers and sickles so you can go tell them how to avoid being assassinated by the CIA the right way.
Thanks, and to add even further, this had global effects too
High living standards and strong workers’ rights and compensation in the USSR forced capitalist nations around the world to make concessions to their workers. Once the USSR had been destroyed, the concessions could be rolled back and the profits guzzled by the capitalists.
It’s crazy that the absolute lowest mortality rate the empire ever managed was still like double the Soviet Union’s mortality rate during the middle of WW2.
Yeah, doing the same thing without imperialism, massacres, oppression, population displacements, secret police, thought crimes, and other stalinist atrocities was just not possible. I understand now. Those are things are a necessary path to a society which will eventually transform into a liberal capitalist cleptocracy.
Likewise imperialism, slave trade, enclosures, exploitation was clearly the only way for the UK to transform into a democracy you see, and they too fought the fascists so they were clearly on the right side of history.
I swear, MLs and their fetishizing of stats are exactly like the nroliberals fetishize GDP growth.
Oh shit yeah, I forgot about all that bullshit the CIA made up.
Wait a second, THOUGHT CRIMES??? THOUGH CRIMES??? Do you think ‘Thought Crimes’ were a real thing that existed outside of the anticommunist screed ‘1984’?
Anyways, on to your next point, oh, it’s the most unreasonable fucking false equivalency I’ve ever seen in my life. The UK is not and has never been a democracy, it is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that has occasional political pageantry where it pretends the people have any power at all, just like every single nation that is not communist. Fighting the Nazis is the literal only time the British Empire did a single good thing, and their problem with German fascism was the German part, not the fascism part. And then they immediately started drawing up ‘Operation Unthinkable’, the plan to resume an invasion of the USSR using mainly Wehrmacht soldiers, a plan I assume you support wholeheartedly as it would have destroyed what was obviously the most evil nation in the world at the time, the one whose soldiers liberated Auschwitz.
That’s true and good, but even then, in the process they also invented the concept of the concentration camp. I mean, rounding up civilians into cramped, unsanitary conditions with little food so that they all die of disease is a pretty obvious idea, but they systematized and came up with the euphemism for it.
it is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that has occasional political pageantry where it pretends the people have any power at all, just like every single nation that is not communist
FTFY
Wait a second, THOUGHT CRIMES??? THOUGH CRIMES??? Do you think ‘Thought Crimes’ were a real thing that existed outside of the anticommunist screed ‘1984’?
… They said while “AES“ China is massively oppressing it’s LGBT populace from expressing LGBT ideas.
But I know the typical delusions of campists, any criticism about “communist” nations is “CIA lies”, (until it’s irrefutably proven, at which point it becomes an “unfortunate mistake”) much like any criticism of fascist nations is “fake news”. Just one of those wacky coincidences.
Chinese people both feel that their country is more democratic, and that democracy is more important, than every other country in the world.
They said while “AES“ China is massively oppressing it’s LGBT populace from expressing LGBT ideas.
What the fuck are you talking about?? When you make a claim you have to back it up with evidence. It is obviously much, much safer to be LGBT in China than in most other countries in the world, ESPECIALLY the US - and if you want the most progressive legislation on LGBT rights, womens rights and the rights of children then you have to go to the communist state of Cuba.
Ah, of course, I forgot that protesting against claims that are false is exactly the same as protesting against claims that are true, you’re so balanced and wise. Saying that the Holocaust didn’t happen and saying that Stalin didn’t actually personally eat all of the corn in Ukraine with a giant spoon are exactly morally equivalent. If you would like to provide any evidence for a single one of your “irrefutable claims” I would love to see it.
That is in fact very obviously true. If they hadn’t developed their economy far faster than any other society in history, they couldn’t possibly have produced enough food and war materiel to defeat the Nazis, which I hope we can agree was an extremely important thing for the Soviets to be able to do.
The revolution which was betrayed by the bolsheviks in its infancy would have achieved the same results and not devolved into an authoritarian dystopia in the process.
“A type of economic success achieved multiple times under “the tankies” and under literally nobody else would definitely have been achieved under the liberal government that the October revolution overthrew” is too farfetched and historically unfounded to even make a good historical fiction what if novel.
Funny how you still sound like the liberals who talk about the economic success of liberal capitalist revolutions based on cherry-picked metrics. Much like they ignore the imperialism and exploitation which powered those results, so do you ignore the exploitation and oppression that powered yours. Both are insufficient by anarchist standards and therefore we criticize them instead of having a naive deterministic view that this is the only way it could have happened.
But I’m sure you don’t get it again, so I doubt I’ll try to explain it once again after you reply with some delusions about the grandeur of the USSR.
Delusions of grandeur about the people who ended the Holocaust is wild coming from the petty tyrant of a reddit knockoff that they named after themselves.
your commitment to maintaining a pure idealistic ignorance about 20th century history, in the face of many people much more informed than you doing their best to educate you, does imply a certain tenacity. however, i can’t go as far to say that it’s commendable in any way. you should read some books.
You looked at a chart that outlined improvements in quality of life that included a boom in agricultural output, aka, literally feeding the children and called it
The Marxist equivalent of “but the GDP…”
You’re so right, it would have been way better for everyone in the territory of the USSR to be illiterate and poor and starving, so they wouldn’t have cared so much when the Nazis effortlessly murdered everyone from western Poland to eastern Siberia. Who even needs industrial output when you could have a “”“horizontally-organized”“” bandit kingdom named after its unelected leader?
Ye ofc the only alternative the the Stalin regime was stagnation and defeat, clearly nothing else could have possibly have happened…
Why would there need to be an alternative? It was already the best possible version of what could have happened, within the bounds of a crushing siege by the entire capitalist world on one hand, and basic human fallibility on the other. There is no other political leader in history with a higher proportion of correct decisions to mistakes than Stalin, and they were mistakes, as in consequences not intended from actions taken earnestly to protect the people of the USSR - unlike the actual unspeakable atrocities being committed constantly by every single imperialist nation at the time, as well as before and since.
Even just on its own terms, the USSR was unimaginably more humane than what came before:
what existed outside of it:
and what came after:
This is called the “Eastern Cross” by the way, a demographic phenomenon unique to former nations of the USSR, where the death rate and birth rate suddenly cross over each other in the 90s. It’s way better that this happened, of course, than the USSR being run by “”“authoritarians”“” who would protect their people from sabotage and murder using the necessary amount of violence (that is, still less than their enemies).
But I forgot, we’re comparing an actual nation that had to actually exist in the dirt and blood of the real world, to the geometrically perfect platonic anarchist society that lives in your head, so I guess I have to concede. I’ll go tell all the communists in the third world to pack it up and disband their organizations and scratch out all the hammers and sickles so you can go tell them how to avoid being assassinated by the CIA the right way.
Thanks, and to add even further, this had global effects too
High living standards and strong workers’ rights and compensation in the USSR forced capitalist nations around the world to make concessions to their workers. Once the USSR had been destroyed, the concessions could be rolled back and the profits guzzled by the capitalists.
Nice list of pre-prepped propaganda.
Did pootin give you those?
If we argue based just on principles and philosophy, we’re dogmatists.
If we argue based on lived experience of people who lived in socialist countries, we’re nitpicking.
If we argue based on statistics and empirical evidence, we’re using pre-prepped propaganda.
If we argue based on more basic knowledge about communism defeating fascism, we’re oversimplifying history.
So how do you want us to argue? Would you rather the communists just not explain their case at all, McCarthy?
It’s crazy that the absolute lowest mortality rate the empire ever managed was still like double the Soviet Union’s mortality rate during the middle of WW2.
Yeah, doing the same thing without imperialism, massacres, oppression, population displacements, secret police, thought crimes, and other stalinist atrocities was just not possible. I understand now. Those are things are a necessary path to a society which will eventually transform into a liberal capitalist cleptocracy.
Likewise imperialism, slave trade, enclosures, exploitation was clearly the only way for the UK to transform into a democracy you see, and they too fought the fascists so they were clearly on the right side of history.
I swear, MLs and their fetishizing of stats are exactly like the nroliberals fetishize GDP growth.
Oh shit yeah, I forgot about all that bullshit the CIA made up.
Wait a second, THOUGHT CRIMES??? THOUGH CRIMES??? Do you think ‘Thought Crimes’ were a real thing that existed outside of the anticommunist screed ‘1984’?
Anyways, on to your next point, oh, it’s the most unreasonable fucking false equivalency I’ve ever seen in my life. The UK is not and has never been a democracy, it is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that has occasional political pageantry where it pretends the people have any power at all, just like every single nation that is not communist. Fighting the Nazis is the literal only time the British Empire did a single good thing, and their problem with German fascism was the German part, not the fascism part. And then they immediately started drawing up ‘Operation Unthinkable’, the plan to resume an invasion of the USSR using mainly Wehrmacht soldiers, a plan I assume you support wholeheartedly as it would have destroyed what was obviously the most evil nation in the world at the time, the one whose soldiers liberated Auschwitz.
didnt they fight the boers at one point. would have been much better if they beat the amerikkkans too tbh
That’s true and good, but even then, in the process they also invented the concept of the concentration camp. I mean, rounding up civilians into cramped, unsanitary conditions with little food so that they all die of disease is a pretty obvious idea, but they systematized and came up with the euphemism for it.
FTFY
… They said while “AES“ China is massively oppressing it’s LGBT populace from expressing LGBT ideas.
But I know the typical delusions of campists, any criticism about “communist” nations is “CIA lies”, (until it’s irrefutably proven, at which point it becomes an “unfortunate mistake”) much like any criticism of fascist nations is “fake news”. Just one of those wacky coincidences.
Chinese people both feel that their country is more democratic, and that democracy is more important, than every other country in the world.
What the fuck are you talking about?? When you make a claim you have to back it up with evidence. It is obviously much, much safer to be LGBT in China than in most other countries in the world, ESPECIALLY the US - and if you want the most progressive legislation on LGBT rights, womens rights and the rights of children then you have to go to the communist state of Cuba.
Ah, of course, I forgot that protesting against claims that are false is exactly the same as protesting against claims that are true, you’re so balanced and wise. Saying that the Holocaust didn’t happen and saying that Stalin didn’t actually personally eat all of the corn in Ukraine with a giant spoon are exactly morally equivalent. If you would like to provide any evidence for a single one of your “irrefutable claims” I would love to see it.
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That is in fact very obviously true. If they hadn’t developed their economy far faster than any other society in history, they couldn’t possibly have produced enough food and war materiel to defeat the Nazis, which I hope we can agree was an extremely important thing for the Soviets to be able to do.
The revolution which was betrayed by the bolsheviks in its infancy would have achieved the same results and not devolved into an authoritarian dystopia in the process.
“A type of economic success achieved multiple times under “the tankies” and under literally nobody else would definitely have been achieved under the liberal government that the October revolution overthrew” is too farfetched and historically unfounded to even make a good historical fiction what if novel.
Funny how you still sound like the liberals who talk about the economic success of liberal capitalist revolutions based on cherry-picked metrics. Much like they ignore the imperialism and exploitation which powered those results, so do you ignore the exploitation and oppression that powered yours. Both are insufficient by anarchist standards and therefore we criticize them instead of having a naive deterministic view that this is the only way it could have happened.
But I’m sure you don’t get it again, so I doubt I’ll try to explain it once again after you reply with some delusions about the grandeur of the USSR.
Delusions of grandeur about the people who ended the Holocaust is wild coming from the petty tyrant of a reddit knockoff that they named after themselves.
lol just take up a hobby or go do some productive labour, why do you do this to yourself
I’m autistic. I know I should just disengage but sometimes I can’t help it.
plenty of better ways to spend your time, is all i want to say. like, is this really fulfilling for you or does it just feel empty afterwards?
Again, I’m autistic. I can’t always help myself from replying to goading and disinfo. It’s a waste of time for everyone involved.
your commitment to maintaining a pure idealistic ignorance about 20th century history, in the face of many people much more informed than you doing their best to educate you, does imply a certain tenacity. however, i can’t go as far to say that it’s commendable in any way. you should read some books.
You, apparently: fuck those kids
What a stupifyingly disingenuous statement, but then again about right for a campist.
You looked at a chart that outlined improvements in quality of life that included a boom in agricultural output, aka, literally feeding the children and called it
Clearly the tankie brain cannot comprehend criticism from the left…
It’s alright, don’t worry about it.
Being so ideologically rigid that you’d let children starve to avoid “state authoritarian bureaucracy” is not actually something to be proud of, lib
Disengage
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what is your opinion on left coms (i.e. like, bordiga fans/council communists that like lenin but hate the USSR from like 1922 or whatever onwards)