Is it simply over-correcting in response to western anti-communist propaganda? I’d like to think it’s simply memeing for memes sake, but it feels too genuine.
Is it simply over-correcting in response to western anti-communist propaganda? I’d like to think it’s simply memeing for memes sake, but it feels too genuine.
I would wager it’s as they don’t read actual historical documents of those who witnessed and survived Stalin, is why. Dude was bloody-minded as fuck, and in a tweenaged subset of the population, death, misery and degradations are “cool”.
The political flip side are the right-wing chuds that join ICE so they can tear families apart and “own” the left.
Any recommended reading that isn’t The Gulag Archipelago?
Off the top of my head, no. (It’s been decades since I’ve thought about any of this, TBH…)
What you can do is branch out and read up on the people he had around him in government, like the Deputy Chair of the Soviet secret police, Lavrentiy Beria. (Now that’s a dark hole to look in to, he was feared more than Stalin.)
Stalin was a thug at heart. Angry and conniving, but surrounded himself with even worse people. (Gee, who can we see as a mirror of that today? Yikes…)
Who he chose to do his bidding, that’s where the full scope of the horror of Stalin can be found.
here is a good podcast about him. its well sourced
you mean the podcast hosted by Robert Evans, the anarchist who writes for Bellingcat which is funded by the anticommunist National Endowment for Democracy which is currently run by former Bush staffers and is a literal CIA front?
that ‘anarchist’, who likes to talk over his guests, and his takes on countries outside the US repeatedly mirror the State Department?
as an anarchist, i do wonder if the antistatist who is funded by an anticommunist US government organisation might have a bias…
This combined with “America bad, anything anti-america good”
The worst tankie-argument I’ve encountered so far was “well gulags weren’t that bad, only couple millions died”, so I have to agree they haven’t read a single thing about history of those times, but also it seems like there’s something seriously wrong with these types of people just in general
Somebody in this thread said Churchill was way worse than Stalin lol. I must have missed the chapter about the English gulags and millioms murdered in them.
Churchill was largely responsible for starving over 4 million Indians to death, and had this to say to defend himself:
On top of this, Churchill was very close with the Nazis, to the point that Hitler was certain Britain would side with the Nazis in the coming war. When FDR and Stalin joked about executing Nazi officers after the war was over, Churchill stormed out of the room, as “those men were defending their country.”
As for the soviet prisons, an enormous number of prison deaths occured during World War II, when famine was widespread due to the Nazis storming Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice.
The soviet union, despite having a progressive legal system, was in a state of constant turmoil caused by pressures both external and internal. They couldn’t simply delete all previously existing ruling-class people and ideology, class struggle continues under socialism. Further, pressure from the imperialist west, invasion both in threat and in action, and intentional sabateurs meant that the prisons certainly weren’t empty. The soviet union never had a single year of normal, stable growth, free from intense opposition on the outside and counter-revolutionary forces on the inside.
I’ve had multiple arguments online with people regarding the Holodomor. They all found some way to blame it on the US or claim it was overexaggerated. Which is interesting, because there is absolutely no proof of either claim. If the US had somehow found a way to starve Ukraine specificially, the Soviet Union could’ve fixed that quite quickly, with this little invention known as the train.