• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    I think you should use your experiences in Azerbaijan as a push to confront some of your biases, and re-examine your understanding of Socialism in the Soviet Union. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t “totalitarian” by any stretch either. The benefits of the Socialist economic structure are pined for precisely because they worked, and did so for the common people. There are improvements that can and have been made in other Socialist countries, but these improvements would not have been possible without the brave Soviet people pioneering Socialism as it exists in the real world.

    • punksnotdead@slrpnk.net
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      2 days ago

      Not totalitarian you say?

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purges_of_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

      My experience in Azerbaijan also included tales of when they were children passing curds to starving prisoners through chain fences in Kazakh gulags. The Soviet Union did more harm than good to the leftist movement and is used as the scary example every single time someone begins to think twice about the capitalist system they live under. Socialism is forever tainted by the USSR and severely struggles to remove that image. Fuck the USSR.

      • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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        2 days ago

        The Soviet Union did more harm than good to the leftist movement and is used as the scary example every single time someone begins to think twice about the capitalist system they live under. Socialism is forever tainted by the USSR and severely struggles to remove that image. Fuck the USSR.

        The soviet union literally stopped nazi germany from doing a gargantuan genocide on eastern europe, it’s quite literally the biggest leftist victory hitherto and even now these eastern european countries still live off the crumbling infrastructure built during the soviet union period.

        Only idiots parrot this narrative that the USSR was unimaginably bad, please educate yourself and purge this comical perception of the USSR, it’s only there to make you think there is no alternative.

        • wtckt@lemm.ee
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          2 days ago

          Oh yes. All alone without help. And they didn’t start the whole thing together with Nazi Germany in the first place. And everyone was living happily ever after. Everyone weeped after the Soviet Union collapsed because we now have to live under horribly oppressive systems…

          They continued to commit horrible atrocities after the war ended. On their “own” population so who cares.

          • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
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            2 days ago

            All alone without help.

            U.S. capitalism was far more useful to the Fascists than to the Soviet Union.

            And they didn’t start the whole thing together with Nazi Germany in the first place.

            The Empire of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 would be a better starting point, but other candidates include 1935, 1937, 1938, and 1941. There was significantly more fighting throughout the 1930s than the 1920s. An important reason (if not the most important) for WWII was the Great Depression. See the link for details.

            • wtckt@lemm.ee
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              2 days ago

              Far more useful… The soviet union was an ally of fascist nazi Germany.

              The allies liberated western Europe and supplied loads of machinery to the soviet union. And thank god they did. And thank god they didn’t stop further west.

              • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
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                1 day ago

                No, the relations between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich were an alliance. The relations between the Slovak Republic and the Third Reich were an alliance. The German–Soviet Pact was 1.8 years of neutrality, which the Western Axis broke by launching the largest and deadliest invasion in all of history, yet for some reason antisocialists seem far more interested in the Pact than the invasion.

                We can spend all day condemning the German–Soviet Pact to the lowest depths of Hell and overrate its importance to be greater than every other event in history combined. It won’t get us a damn bit closer to understanding the circumstances that made it a likely outcome. Because unlike you, I take tragedies seriously by thoroughly examining their causes as well as their effects. That is why I taught people about the Pact from the Fascist bourgeoisie’s point of view whereas generic antisocialists have bupkes to say about that subject.

                • wtckt@lemm.ee
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                  1 day ago

                  So the secret clause was inevitable and necessary. The soviet union had to attack Poland together with Germany and had to do horrible atrocities while doing so? You don’t take anything serious other than soviet apologism.

                  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.ml
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                    1 day ago

                    It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.

                    Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.

                    The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

                    — A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262

                    When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.

                    This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.

                    — Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145

              • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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                2 days ago

                The soviet union was an ally of fascist nazi Germany.

                aight 😂 i must’ve imagined the war then

                  • Kras Mazov@lemmygrad.ml
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                    1 day ago

                    Now cite every single other pact signed with Nazi Germany. Or are you just gonna talk about the one the Soviets did to buy time to be able to beat the Nazis?

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        I am aware of the Soviet Union expelling fascists and Tsarists from the party, and punishing those found corrupt, criminals, or had been members of the White Army. I am aware of the GULAG administration that formed the early Soviet prison system, read Russian Justice for more on how that functioned. I am aware of the famine in the 1930s. I have read these articles, as pretty much every Western Communist has had to, these are not “gotchas.”

        The real truth of the matter is that the western anti-Communist “Left” that denounces the USSR and every real attempt at building Socialism plays into the hands of the US Empire. The Soviet Union was a massive victory for the working class, the first real Socialist state in history, and with it came dramatic improvements in key life metrics and working class dignity.

        1. Life expectancy doubled.

        2. The economy was democratized, following the method of Soviet Democracy

        1. Wealth inequality shrank, while economic growth boomed:

        1. Large expansions in social safety nets were made, such as free and high quality education and healthcare.

        2. Housing rates skyrocketed, and literacy rates over tripled to 99.9%.

        3. Food security was achieved in a country that was always food insecure.

        4. The Red Army defeated the Nazis, with 80% of the combat of World War II on the Eastern Front.

        5. The Soviet Union supported countless liberation movements, such as in Cuba, Algeria, and more.

        And many, many more achievements. People who denounce the USSR maintain unstated approval for the other Great Power, the United States, which without the USSR would have been entirely unopposed. The US, which committed Imperialist slaughter and even genocide in Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Angola, Palestine, and many, many more countries, was opposed primarily by the Soviets.

        The Soviet Union was by no means perfect, nobody asserts that, but to claim that the Soviet Union did “more harm than good to the Leftist movement” is ludicrous. This is the sentiment of Western Chauvanists that don’t want to support Socialism unless they are the ones who acheive it. Jones Maonel was spot on in Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, but not Real Revolution.

        You should read Dr. Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, or at the very least the sections on “Left” Anti-Communism.

      • jaxxed@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Things were different in the periphral nations, than in the center. Those who read your comments with heritage from the peripheral will understand you, and the others will not.

      • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online
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        2 days ago

        You would’ve had the image of leftists destroyed no matter what, the faults of USSR is ever present and has even been maximised to the point of hilarity where it is compared with the Nazis, even if false or inaccurate or misrepresented

        You could see the victories of socialism and communism within USSR and read and learn about it, but also critique the system that Stalin created alongside it which allowed repression, where it lead to millions dying in Ukraine and millions to suffer in prison, but these have been exaggerated as part of western doctrine to deface communism as much as possible, so never take it at face value

        It’s extremely unfortunate that communism was cursed as not only the biggest enemy of the developed world as it was just only developing, but also had the misfortune to be lead by a leader who had little regard for democracy or democratic values in politics and which lead to later on revisionism, inefficiencies and the collapse.

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          but also had the misfortune to be lead by a leader who had little regard for democracy or democratic values in politics and which lead to later on revisionism, inefficiencies and the collapse.

          Yeah, fuck Khrushchev