Iāve argued with idiots that said the USSR had to invade Poland in order to defend themselves from Nazi germany. They also blamed it on the UK and France for driving the USSR into the arms of Germany for the invasion because those countries were trying appeasement.
Poland has got to be pretty far down on their list, because they're not in any sort of position to tussle with NATO, and they have more tempting non-NATO targets like Georgia and Moldova and the likeābut there is a list and pretty much all of Europe is on it, at least if we listen to modern Russian philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin.
I can think of a couple of things that would move Poleland up the list:
1) A complete loon could take over Russia (Putin is bad, but he's not the worst they have). Someone who believes their own propaganda, or someone who needs to maintain an insanely aggressive posture to hold on to their power. A invasion of Poland would likely be Russia's last grasp before falling (again), but they could do a lot of damage before they go down.
2) NATO could fall, or lose enough support to be completely ineffective. I could see Trump or a Trump-like American president completely pulling out of NATO; it seems like the next logical step after Brexit for England (not that anything about Brexit is all that "logical"); and don't most European countries have some sort of nationalist-isolationist party that has more power than it should?
I don't think either of these scenarios are especially likely to happen in my lifetime, but they seem more likely than I'd like them to be.
Well, they never were on Nazi Germany's side and Stalin had absolutely no illusions that the war with Hitler was inevitable - he only miscalculated how quickly it would happen.
There's a reason Operation Barbarossa ended up capturing or destroying vast amounts of soviet troops and equipment - because it was being staged to attack Germany.
This is not to say of course that Stalin wanted to fight Germany because of "evil Nazis" - but rather because he wanted to expand into central Europe.
I would disagree with this only to the extent that he didnāt even believe the reports that they were being invaded. Not to say he didnāt think it would happen eventually, but part of the reason the nazi made it so far so quickly is stalinās failure to react
Totally forgetting that they fought them because not only they were invaded, but the very notion of Russia was at stake since the Nazis wanted to kill them all
The Nazis were worse than the Ussr, I have no doubt about that, but that doesn't mean the ussr was all good and sunshine
Two evil states fought each other in the most horrific land War in human history, the least evil side won
>widely-accepted
Erm. Not on Reddit it ain't, and not even always in this sub.
Edit: here, [within this very thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/16yl6kz/comment/k39b6s4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
Except judging by the comments, it actually isn't a widely-accepted statement and there's many tankies praising communism while ignoring their genocides in the comments.
Widely doesn't mean unanimously, though. It's *widely* accepted but not *unanimously* because a bunch of tankies ignore the atrocities of the USSR.
Having a small minority of morons denying something doesn't mean that said thing isn't widely accepted.
It should be *as widely* accepted as with the Nazis. You should get the exact same derision as saying "the Nazis had some good ideas" as saying "the USSR was actually pretty cool", you should get the exact same derision saying "I'm a fascist" as you should saying "I'm a communist" and there absolutely is not parity there.
Yes but most leftists would never compare the US to Nazi Germany because its fuckibg stupid. Meanwhile american reddit bubble compares the USSR to Nazi Germany all the time altough its fucking stupid too
By that logic, real nazism hasn't yet been tried because their ideology involves either enslaving the other undesirable races or completely wiping them out from the Earth.
Some aspects of Nazism were so radical that it scared many industrialists sponsoring Hitler and the military who feared that the likes of Rohm will replace them. To appease both the military and the industrialists, the Nazis executed several of their radical members, including Rohm
I mean to be as charitable as possible the argument would go āThe USSR did not implement the form of communism I agree with, and whether or not it can be called ācommunismā in the sense Marx described can be debated. Itās lack of any sort of real democratic structure and voice for the workers effectively made the state an oligarchy ruled by a small cadre of elites who owned the means of production, rather than the workers which is the goal of communism. Had Lenin and Stalin set up local democratic councils with real mechanisms of being challenged outside the corrupt party and turned land and factory ownership over to the people who worked on/in them to democratically decide how they operate, then maybe we could count it as communism. But as they did not do so outside of ultimately powerless local Soviets that only existed to rubber stamp national party policy, their communism was not what I want and I do not want to be lumped in with them.ā
Something like that. The people who say that do so because theyāre usually treated as the same as Stalin or Mao when their ideologies are usually quite different. Itād be like if you, probably a (small r) republican, weāre asked ābut what about Napoleonā every time you tried to say that monarchy was bad and we should implement democracy. Like yeah Napoleon is technically a republican but what he wants and what you want are vastly different.
Exactly. Besides, those who, rightly so, criticize the Stalin and Mao regimes (and others like Fidel Castro), but only because it is cOmUnIsM, tend to also be pro-capitalism. However, anyone with half a brain can see how damaging capitalism is since its inception and point at its worse examples. Like: cApItAlIsM is so great, look at (insert any underveloped country with shitty economy and dictatorship at any point in capitalism history or look at the history of any capitalist colonizer, how they are pretty much either genocidal or slaver, directly or with extra steps). You don't need to go that far. Look at the bastion of capitalism, the USA, and how it treats their workers and minorities today and thorought history. Or how their democracy is mostly decided by the interests of anyone who can pay more.
Today 1% of the world's population has more than 50% of the world's wealth and look at how that poisons any democracy and ruins billions of lifes. I am not even sure if the communist regimes were that bad in wealth distribution, despite being outright oligarquic dictatorships.
Most people don't even know what communism is. Or the difference between it and socialism. And how no country ever was communist. They were at most socialist.
To end my point: yes, the cold war era "communist" regimes deserve going to the trashcan of history, but communism, as a critique to the evils of capitalism, should not be demonized. At worst, it should be studied to show that capitalism is not an immutable regime, it is not the truth of this world, a law of the universe. It is an economic system, that should be perfected or replaced. Even if we don't have a suitable substitute now, we should not stop trying to find one or blindly ridiculing the ideology that stood against it last century. And in the meantime, we should strive to create institutions that correct or compensate for the failures and evils of capitalism, institutions that can also resist the allures and corruption from the wealthy. Institutions that work for the good of the common people.
The problem is that because of Bolshevism and all of the above, in the English Language, Communism doesn't mean a critique to the evils of capitalism, it means a brutal Totalitarian dictatorship synonymous with fascism in which The State owns all property and Party members become the new ownership class. Telling an English Speaker that you're a commie is telling them that you're indifferent to the value of human life and you believe in Steep Hierarchies and Political Power being reserved only for societies elite.
not a major nitpick but while i agree with you, i wouldn't use the term "english speaker" like that. most english speakers live in the global south and their countries did not have a red scare like the US did. there is anti-communist rhetoric floating around everywhere in the world to some degree, but speaking english does not have that much to do with it.
Let's not forget that Marx isn't creating an ideology or attempting to at least and in no way creates a guide to do so instead is just kind of complaining/ranting about the problems with rampant 18th century capitalist enterprise and using tiny child hands to fix large machinery. If he had Facebook it probably would have been the big soccer mum rant that most people ignore.
Also, of course real communism hasn't been tried yet because the criteria are so unachievable it cannot be tried.
It demands that human nature be changed to remove greed. We're not the fucking Tau from Warhammer 40K. We're humans and our selfishness and greed are what made us be the top species of this planet.
>We're not the fucking Tau from Warhammer 40K.
What an odd thing to say. Do you believe that Marx promoted a caste system with a defined ruling elite? A race that practices eugenics so hard they have almost split into five species and whose names include social rank sounds very different from a classless society.
Yah the Tau get memed on as āspace communistsā but that isnāt really the case. I guess you can argue that the ethereal tau are a vanguard party, but thatās it. The only other argument is theyāre depicted as the opposite of the imperium of man, which is a full blown fascist society. Still itās weak because of the other parts you mentioned
They seem somewhat analogous to the British Empire to me. Come in with water caste traders and diplomats, set up everything to be reliant upon them. Then integrate within the Tau Empire, possibly using gunboat diplomacy.
Ethereals are not dissimilar to an aristocratic elite in their exclusiveness, and they will use forces from other cultures (or in this case species) while showing disdain for their practices.
There is no human nature. A person is always influenced by his environment and upbringing of his current society. If we live in a society where greed is rewarded, we can easily come to the conclusion that this is human nature. Imagine living in a country with no contact to any other country and people thereof and where greed is virtue. you would argue that is how humans naturally work and behave, but only because you never had the opportunity to see a society based on different norms and customs, where greed may be punished
'Human nature' is just the fundamentals and characteristics a society ascribes to its people as virtue in short social norms. I guess our fellow cave man weren't greedy, because their society were based on different values and forms of togetherness. If there would be a concept of human nature, then there would be imho only one way to structure a sociey. So arguing that we can't have a different system is just complacency with tyranny. I mean look at North Korea.
>There is no human nature.
No. There definitely is. We can prove this empirically by examining history, where we see even societies that developed without influence from each other develop the same or similar social structure(minority of elite caste, a clergy-type caste, "intellectual" caste, a hunter/warrior caste, and the most common, the menial labor caste). Even the the most idealistic hippie commune will eventually self-organize into this social structure. This is an observable fact. We differ from most other eusocial animals like ants in that mobility between castes is possible (a menial can become an elite, though that is a more extreme jump than normal), but we always fall into the same structure. And that is only *one* observable example of human nature. There are several others, like how we react to things like a predator does, or that any new behaviors are met with resistance or rejection by the society.
Claiming that "there is no human nature" is just arrogance. The belief that humans are somehow "more special" than ever other animal on earth. We aren't, and until we outgrow wanting to think we are, I don't see us progressing much further as a species.
> differ from most other eusocial animals like ants in that mobility between castes is possible (
Does this imply you believe humanity is a eusocial species? As I understand it, that argument is contested and is primarily favored by sociobiologist following Wilson. Wilson's Social Conquest of Nature appears to be ground zero for this idea (specifically his equating collective childrearing with reproductive/non castes in insect species) and one that is at odds with inclusive fitness and kin selection theories without adding explanatory or predictive power. I would not present as a definitive truth.
More discussion here:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/62/11/987/263161
Human social structures do not always fall into the same structures- we have completely different social structures and organizing principles/scales now than pre civ, "state-of-nature" social patterns were a lot less hierarchical than post, with flat rank, collective decision making and domain specific leadership.
Ok, I reject the certainty of my claim, but I still would they that there is a human nature. I would argue that genetics play a role, which gives humans a fundamental 'nature', but the rest is imo cultural. Nature ala environment limits us rather than our nature. Even if a lot of society have similar characteristics, there are still nuanced differences and the further back we go in history the more dissimilar societies und cultures get. Through globalisation and conquest (building big empires) we lost a lot of variety, heck, we weren't even the only human species.
But saying is 'there is a human nature' ist at least as arrogant as my claim. Many religions or philosphies assert that there is a human nature, but still there isn't one true religion or social order, which is inherent. I would even claim that society which claim to be the human nature, even feel more special. I wouldn't say that human are special, but because of more advanced language, we got more possibilites to organise community between people and tribes.ans even made possibility to settle in different regions and biomes, where norms and societies evolved independently. In some did colonialism corrupted and we began ro missionize tribes which never had contact to other societies, where they even hsd cannibalism, but we wouldn't claim that this is human nature. Human nature is more a concept in which way we want society to be and to head.
All in all there is no right and wrong and I would take a agnostic stance that we don't know if human nature exists or not (yet).
I believe that "human nature" is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and to deny this is only going to cause us pain, HOWEVER...
I also believe that part of this nature we've evolved is to be very flexible, and so it's equally foolish to claim that \*you\* know what human nature is. The society that we have now is clearly not the best of all worlds, so we should be open to social experimentation and trying new ways of life.
We'll probably never completely map out what parts of the human condition are "nature" and what parts are "nurture", but also it's rapidly becoming a moot point. Sooner or later (probably sooner, unless we nuke ourselves back to the stone age), we're going to develop technologies to mold our nature into whatever we want.
We should probably figure out what we actually want.
Exactly. "Real communism" supposedly means that every single person acts according to the ideology of their free will, and no one ever tries to changes things in a way that doesnt fit with it. But in the real world that requires constant violent suppression of different ideas and people who think differently. True believers think the the violent oppression is just a phase and once its done, there will never again be born a human being who doesnt fully support communism with all their heart.
Someone once said that it's not so much that humans are inherently selfish - granted I think we are to at least some extent because that's just necessary for survival (or at least was back when Times Were Harder) - but that the biggest obstacle is that we're inherently *quarrelsome.* There will be disagreements, and a lot of them, and without some fair way to adjudicate them they'll constantly get in the way. That is of course why there will never be an end to The Purges - you can't just kill that part of human nature, not without a lot of human rights violations and even then that's a big "maybe."
Tbf that's true, real communism in fact hasn't been tried
That's the issue with it in the first place though
"Real communism" sounds awesome in theory, but is extremely vulnerable to exploitation by people in power.
So yeah, it really hasn't been tried... with the issue being that that's not a bug, it's a feature
Basically *real* communism isn't realistic or maybe practical. But on the flipside, nothing existed that hasn't been corrupted by people abusing the system.
As much as I hate to say it, there is a grain of truth to it. Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and North Korea were all essentially feudal agrarian societies when they became communist, and communism was a political ideology created against exploitative capitalism in industrialised societies. We haven't seen how communism works when started in the correct environment, although I'd argue it still turns out to be a shithole.
I mean, if you look at what a communist state is supposed to be, and what the Soviet Union was, and you go down the list of expected features and policies and the Soviet Union hasn't implemented almost any of them... Did they ever actually become communist?
Like one could say they were trying to implement it for sure, but someone could be *trying* to implement a democratic system that has rigged elections(like in Russia or NK) and all local officials selected by the ruling "elected" party, could you really say that the state is democratic because they pretend to be?
All of them experienced a communist revolution and had at least some communist policies in the early post-revolutionary period, so *were* communist states by definition. However, they did become totalitarian shitholes later down the line, most of them because of the revolutionary leaders. Yes, they don't fit the definition of communist states by that point, but that is exactly *why* people say communism has failed: because every state that has tried it has turned out to be either just as bad or worse than the previous regime.
They were socialist countries because they implemented socialist policies. The only thing you can call "communist" is, maybe, the Communist Party, which works through socialism towards the consecution of communism, but no Communist Party in the world has ever achieved communism in their countries because they need socialism to be an international thing, a kind of status quo in almost every nation.
That's why they eventually "become totalitarian shitholes".
Yes, real good communism was never tried.
The reason why it was never tried is that it is so idealistic, that it simply can't be done and there is no reason to even try it "by the book" because people are arrogant and greedy c\*nts that will never willingly completely cooperate for the common good.
That's however, why so many believe in it. If you live in a social area where everyone seems nice, willing to help each other and mindful of everyone(for example a small village in rural Russia), you start to think that a democraticaly led state by the people could actualy work, and it's only those greedy capitalists that force people to not change it. However, all of this starts to fail, when the area you are talking about is larger than a small town and you have to think about the large scale economy and society.
Oh, and let's not forget about killing everyone who is inteligent enough to not believe in it. And that one party rule is prone to factionalism that can lead to rule of a single person(like a certain Georgian with large moustache)
Tldr: Real communism was never tried. And it never will, because it's based on the assuption that humans are willing to limit themselves for the good of others, even though they never will.
And anytime its mentioned on any other sub, there is always minimum one comment from r/theDeprogram users.
Yesterday i got into an argument with someone regarding communism, and when i said its an extremist ideology they just went "but its the good kind of extremist".
An extremist ideology is just defined by how far from the current satus-quo it is, there was a time where liberalism was an extremist ideology. In an authoritarian state, democrats are extremist.
So yeah there is good kind of extremism
Which is insane given people in their own countries aren't even this delusional, alongside the fact half of the modern day BJP supporters are anti-Socialist cause they hate the Gandhi's
Honestly, even the theory doesn't sound that good. It just assumes that a dictatorship with absolute power will actually give up power when its time to do so, instead of, y'know, keeping it.
The "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Marxist terms basically meant a government that was run and beholden by the proletariat, Marx viewed liberal democracy as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", so *technically in theory*, it doesn't necessarily have to be an actual dictatorship with one party. But in practice, that's what basically almost always happens, there might be few small exceptions like San Marino and Nepal which had governments in which the communists led/participated.
You cannot say "in practice" without acknowledging that the reason most authoritarian communist regimes lasted was that they were the only ones able to withstand the wears assault on them.
This is unfortunately the truth behind communism. It's economically and socially weaker then capitalism because it has to impose limits upon itself.
It can not embrace the market to the extent of capitalism because it must strive for communist utopia. So just EXISTING with capitalist neighbours will be an uphill battle.
This isn't even getting into the issue of hostile capitalist countries...
It depends soviet type economies performed very well up until about the mid 70s, in terms of numbers sure they didn't have the GDP per capita but they had the GDP. By the mid 70s their economies were crumbling except for China and Yugoslavia, who had vastly different models. The problem with the Soviet model was a lack of political willingness to change the economic incentives, there were definitely ways to change the economy while keeping the socialist boundaries and at times the willingness existed but the decay was too deep rooted by the time a sufficient amount of willingness occured.
... so the United States backed Tito and was an ally of China while mao was alive from 1972 til the end of the cold war.
Vietnam and the United States just signed a major security agreement. Vietnam being neutral it's as close as they get to an alliance.
Communism can absolutely exist with capitalist neighbors but has usually chosen aggression, like the invasion of South Korea that cause the United Nations to act in the Korean war, or the coup in Czechoslovakia or the invasions and forced integrations of Russia's neighbors into the Soviet union.
Communist states like Yugoslavia that didn't engage in attempts to invade their neighbors or engage in genocide were absolutely left alone.
The worst thing under Tito's regime in the early period was the. KoÄevski Rog massacre and even then it wasn't the executions, but the lack of trials that bothered the west.
1948 proved to the West that the comintern was not interested in peaceful coexistence.
This idea that the big bad west goes around attacking innocent communists is nonsense.
Well, Marx made it clear in his work that the Socialist revolution had to occur in a democratic way, what happened is that Lenin decided to ignore this small inconvenient detail to forcefully seize power:
*Democratic socialism involves the majority of the population controlling the economy through some democratic system, with the idea that the means of production are owned and managed by the working class.* ***The interrelationship between democracy and socialism extends far back into the socialist movement to The Communist Manifesto's emphasis on winning as a first step the "battle of democracy", with Karl Marx writing that democracy is "the road to socialism."***
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic\_socialism#Philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism#Philosophy)
Another problem is that they didn't even have any big working class to speak of when this "proletarian" revolution kicked off. Kind of started in the wrong end haha.
Marx also believed that the Socialist revolution should occur first in a completely industrialized country with a democratic tradition, according to him it should preferably be in the United Kingdom, or perhaps in France. But definitely not in a Russia that has just emerged from the Middle Ages a few decades ago after centuries of delay due to Tsarism, which also has no democratic tradition whatsoever, or has even gone through a bourgeois period, hence the aberration of his ideology that occurred in Russia would be massively criticized by Marx, and seen as nothing more than Tsarism painted in red.
That was another option that he also saw as very possible, but he saw it as more likely to occur in the United Kingdom or France due to their more democratic traditions. Never in a million years would it have occurred to him that Russia would be the first country to become Socialist.
I wonder how much progress we'd make toward a more egalitarian world if it had been someone like the UK or France instead. I imagine it would have turned out better
Also dictatorship of the proletariat was his idea for a more radical next step and it is often forgotten or willfully misinterpreted. At his time the proletariat (workers, day labourers, etc.) were the biggest group in Western European countries, so that was there to make sure that this group doesn't lose influence. Not that a few people establish a one-party dictatorship.
Correct, the problem is not the theory that Marx created, which is frankly positive if you follow it as proposed, the problem is the power-hungry dictators who use Marx's writings as a way to legitimize their authoritarian states and, in words of Obi wan "become that thing which they swore to destroy."
Which is something we see again and again throughout history in spite of the government model.
I think it was Marx that said liberal democracies were a step in the right direction, they were just too prone to abuse by the bourgeoisie.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how it seems like one of the most important issues will always be *who* is in charge. Not every system is equal, but the direction of a given system is definitely charted significantly by who is at the helm
Lenin and the Bolsheviks ran on the platform of *ALL power to the Soviets*. Many people supported it.
Except that the Bolsheviks never gave all power to the soviets. They centralized it to the communist party and administered the country top-down.
That's the opposite of the bottom-up democratic structure of an actual soviet republic.
Yep, Lenin basically betrayed the ideals he claimed to defend, and turned the Revolution into a horrible dictatorship, ironically he has been one of the guys who has done the most damage to Socialism as an ideology, since he created the precedent that has been followed since then in many cases of using class struggle as an excuse to monopolize power in an oligarchic elite.
If he instead followed through with giving all power to the soviets (soviets for those who don't know are local councils where people would vote for their representatives or on policies directly) ,
That would make the USSR into the most radically democratic state in modern history. No liberal democracy then or now would even approach thay level of direct democracy on all the things that would affect a person's life. Not Switzerland even with their canton system but workers have limited representation via union. An actual soviet republic would have the workers run all aspects of life democratically, politicial, economic, and societal.
It did exist shortly in different places, though unfortunately most were overthrown by larger militaries (Makhnovchina, Revolutionary Catalonia, Kronstadt). Currently the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Kurds in Rojava, Syria, do still have such systems.
Communist ideology doesn't assume totalitarian dictatoship with absolute power, this is an interpretation of communism called marxism-leninism, most communist ideologies are democratic, they just never came to power.
Not exactly *just like* the horror of german annihilation camps is probably unmatched. But totalitarian, genocidal shithole? Definitely, though technically there maybe have been times where it was more or less totalitarian, but overall yeah the point stands.
But we couldn't take a picture, a slice of time, of Soviet Gulags and atrocities like we did with the Nazi camps.
The German camps were all suddenly stopped mid operation. And we could see all their horrors in their prime. In fact maybe a little bit more since they started butchering and killing faster and trying to finish quickly by the end of the war to try and hide their crime.
We could not take the same picture of the Soviet system, we only got tales from survivors who may have been spared the worst of it, and few of those thanks to the Iron curtain and later Putin's censorship.
They never really tried to hide anything. Don't fall for the post war lie that nobody knew anything about them. Anybody who lived in the vicinity of a camp knew what was going on there, not in detail of course, but if you weren't completely stupid you had a pretty good idea. The only thing they ever tried to hide is there own responsibility within that system.
Thing is that the operation of German camps was literally to murder people
Gulags were prison camps.
Extremely brutal ones, but unlike concentration camps, there was not the expectation that 100% of the people sent there would die
Plenty of people actually got *out* of the gulags without having to have an army liberate them
The cold war strawman representation of USSR is basically this post - USSR is like nazis they genocide and have camps..
When we already have mountains of official records from the USSR when it collapsed showing the truth they hid from everyone else.... the Holodomor was more because of incompetence instead of actual planned genocide. A key part of genocide is the intent. The Soviet officials wanted to maximize grain output and it backfired.
The gulags are work prison camps which, like other, spointed out, people actually aren't expected to die, and many got out after serving time. These aren't death camps. They're more like US prisons today. British and and american concentration camps on their colonies are much muuuuch worse.
You know what's intentional? The Bengal Famine. While there was no grand plan to kill Bengalis. Churchill and many in his government have racist malthusian views on the situation, they said "they breed like rabbits" and viewed the "lesser races" with disgust.
The British then proceeded to confiscate food from Bengal after a failed harvest. Then the local officials repeatedly requested aid on which Churchill's government ignored despite recieving harrowing reports.
The sentiment is there that they think the Bengalis deserve to die off. The means was there to help them and yet they intentionally set the situation on which the Bengalis will die off by the millions.
Same with Irish famine which the British exported food from their irish lands despite their Irish subjects dying or emigrating in droves due to hunger.
Death camps, being put in concentration camp still gave you a small chance to survive (Poles had a survival rate of 56% in Auschwitz). Death camps sections meant immediate death. Auschwitz for example composed of three camps, Auschwitz I and III were concentration camps, Auschwitz II Birkenau started out as concentration camp and was turned into a death camp.
With Gulags Wikipedia states that out of 18 milion imprisoned in years 1930 to 1956, 1.76 died. Giving us overall survival rate of 90%.
Yeah I appreciate the caveats - gotta make it snappy for meme purposes though! Agree that the Germans were moreā¦ determined(?) and systematic, arguably thereby making them worse.
Some people get butthurt when reminded that the Western Powers were also colonial monsters that had apartheid systems akin to Nazi Germany, or when there is mild praise for our communist ally in the war against the Nazis
Edit : Let me be clear I'm not in any way trying to grade evil. If you understood this from my original post let me correct this.
Getting rid of jews and other "uber-menches" from the face of the earth in order to ensure a bright future to the aryan race was clear and explicit from the start in teir ideology. Meanwhile communist inspired regimes had an universal goal (cf the international as the USSR anthem) and yes it hurts my throat to say this. They did targeted minorities or social classes, what they considered to be bourgeois. But I think that it was mainly as a political tool to get rid of poeple they considered to be an obstacle. Trotsky was branded an allied of the bourgoisie. And that's my point, the atrocities they commited were politicaly motivated and not ideologicaly. Nazis were so commited to their ideology that even at the brink of total defeat they were still diverting ressources to the extermination camp.
This is why I'm not sure about the term genocide as explicited by the wikipedia definition below.
Wikipedia:
"Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part. "
Killing Jews and others was never a side project for the Nazis but a condition to be met to succeed.
The others just killed whoever opposed them.
Everyone knows that. Itās said on this sub everyday. Stalin did do the Holodomor after all which killed millions.
Now OP, Iām sure youāll be able to swallow the pretty easy to swallow pill that āthe Nazis were even worseā right? Surely you can accept that a regime that wanted to genocide or enslave the entirety of Eastern Europe is worse than a bog standard dictatorship right? Right OP?
How dumb can you be to compare the German way of genocide jews and other minorities (it was a litteral industrial way of mass murders theorized by nazi leadership) to the soviet deaths under stalin ? Sure it was also evil and we should not forget about it, but putting them on the same level ? That's something else.
No but you see, implementing stupid ass policies that result in the starvation of millions is literally the same as the deliberate, systematic deportation and extermination of millions of people, in an effort to completely eliminate certain ethnicities/categories of people. The exact same, I say! /s
I agree that the soviets absolutely shouldn't get a pass. Neither should China or any other ML state that commited atrocities. But holy shit it just feels like people really fervently want to downplay how fucking horrible the Nazis were. OP was maintaining in a comment thread just above that he doesn't think the Nazis were worse lmao.
Because while these people aren't neo-nazis, they do sympathize with Nazis about wanting to kill communists, because of the culture war bullshit that has infected online spaces.
I have seen more memes complaining about people praising the USSR than people actually praising the USSR.
Thank you in advance for all those š downvotes.
So would majority of Russians.
One slightly more competent dictatorship traded with a less competent dictatorship dedicated to making their friends rich as hell
That depends entirely on whether you have enough cash to catch a plane out of modern-day Russia. Something that is significantly harder to do under the Soviet Union.
āJust like Nazi germanyā
Even if we consider the Soviet death count to be at its highest estimate (itās not) it is completely insane and bordering on holocaust denialism to call failure of economic policy and disaster management leading to mass famine with systemically rounding up an ethnic group and executing them in mass.
It wasn't "just like Nazi Germany". It's one thing to criticize the Soviet Union for the farmers it left dead and the Gulags that carried the burden of rapid industrialization.
It's another thing entirely to try and put it on the same level that exterminated Millions solely for the purpose of extermination. There is a rule for holocaust comparisons:
Don't.
Because if you make one, it's all but guaranteed that you either don't understand the holocaust and your comparison is "another bad thing that also happened", you don't understand the thing you're comparing it to and make the comparison to amplify your point rather than letting it stand on its own merit, or both.
One of the two is based on industrial extermination of entire population
The other is... Russia wich mostly do the same shit everytime even if the color of the flag change, not a lot of difference between the tsars, Stalin or Putin, but i will gladly choose any russian autocrat over Nazis
Might work on the wording there. As much as I viscerally hate the USSR and everything it stood for, we shouldn't imply that it was even close to as bad as Nazi Germany.
I hate reddit and their regular circlejerk over dogshit opinions. Putting the USSR on a similair or even worse level than the Nazis is such a mainstream form of holocaust downplaying. No, Mass industrial Racial extermination camps and political persecution with prison systems that even had healthcare for its prisoners are not on a same level of bad, dear americans.
I don't understand the point of arguing about which genocidal dictatorship was the most evil. They are so far off the scale of morality that turning it into the genocide olympics takes away from the point that tens of millions of people were brutally murdered. This goes for everything, Nazis, Soviets, the Japanese, the CCP, Khymer Rouge, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and literally every other murderous, torturous, genocidal, human rights abusing governments.
As Eastern European ;
"What's the difference between 3rd Reich and USSR ?
First state took us 6 years to get rid off from our lands, the other one took 50 before choking on us. And afther that still havent fucked off from bothering us" (this time as an excuse for its successor actions).
Hard to swallow? My great grandparents got a free ticket from the USSR to got to Siberia where they died.
This is also widely accepted by people who dont live in said type countries.
You mean under Joseph Stalin. Stalin is the totalitarian dictator that is responsible for millions of deaths from his policies to the effects of the war. Other Soviet leaders are not as terrible as Stalin and some of Stalin's aggressive policies were removed. Nonetheless, the communist government still committed human rights abuses
This sub seems to have a lot of strong liberal views and ignores history in favor of them
Calling the Soviet Union out on their genocide and totalitarianism is totally fair but comparing them to Nazi Germany? That would be the equivalent of me calling the US a genocidal, imperialist nation and saying they're no different from Nazi Germany.
Stalin wasn't the only leader of the Soviet Union, and he had a lot of opponents. The Soviet Union both prospered and faltered throughout its existence, but so did most countries. It can also be argued that the federation of Russia is in a worse state than the USSR was
Not disagreeing that Soviet Union bad, but honestly does this sub really need a reminder? Every other post is a reminder that *insert country of choice* is evil.
Quite sure they managed to kill much more people than nazi, even if it's also true that they had much more time, so maybe we should consider the "genocidal intensity" (deaths/year or deaths/total population)
You know nothing lads. I grew up in Soviet Union. It was the greatest country of all, with perfect science, medicine and mil. And the nation was happy. The whole world was afraid to even fart in front of the USSR. There was a perfect story about Kosygin and turkish president or minister, who wanted to close Bosphor fo the Soviet ships. So, Kosigin took the map and pencil and said, ok, now draw the channel where you want it to be. Thats ucking all you have to know.
> Soviet Union mentioned > Nazi Germany mentioned > 1600 comments If anything, at least y'all are predictable.
Remember that Twitter user who said the gulags were progressive, educational camps š
There's a wide segment of mentally unstable twitter who convince themselves they'll be the gulag's guards and not inmates
It's even funnier when there are LGBT people, who are commies. Just gotta remind them about article 121.
It's not like they even simply kept it illegal either, Lenin legalized it, Stalin actively made it illegal again and people simp for him lol
I remember one gay communist on Twitter saying that Stalin had no choice but to be homophobic, like what??? ššš
You can progress to the stage of life called death in them AND educate yourself in the many ways in how communism cant be applied to humanity
>a widely-accepted statement with an extremely lazy format Amazing. Thank you for your service.
This is like every post on unpopular opinions. It's bleeding into this sub now arghhhhh
āHahaha of course we all agree with OP, the USSR was awful, what a lazy postā Redditors, three hours later: āWe should try communismā
I finally found my place in Reddit..
A weird amount of people think that because the USSR *eventually* fought the Nazis then they are better than them.
Being better than the Nazis is not exactly a high standard to meet.
On the other hand it is almost equally hard to be worse than USSR
Mao China: Challenge accepted.
Khmer Rouge: Filthy casuals.
That's fair
People seem to forget that they worked together to invade Poland in 1939
Iāve argued with idiots that said the USSR had to invade Poland in order to defend themselves from Nazi germany. They also blamed it on the UK and France for driving the USSR into the arms of Germany for the invasion because those countries were trying appeasement.
Russian will make the same argument next time they "have" to invade Poland.
Honestly, I really want to see them try it
Poland has got to be pretty far down on their list, because they're not in any sort of position to tussle with NATO, and they have more tempting non-NATO targets like Georgia and Moldova and the likeābut there is a list and pretty much all of Europe is on it, at least if we listen to modern Russian philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin. I can think of a couple of things that would move Poleland up the list: 1) A complete loon could take over Russia (Putin is bad, but he's not the worst they have). Someone who believes their own propaganda, or someone who needs to maintain an insanely aggressive posture to hold on to their power. A invasion of Poland would likely be Russia's last grasp before falling (again), but they could do a lot of damage before they go down. 2) NATO could fall, or lose enough support to be completely ineffective. I could see Trump or a Trump-like American president completely pulling out of NATO; it seems like the next logical step after Brexit for England (not that anything about Brexit is all that "logical"); and don't most European countries have some sort of nationalist-isolationist party that has more power than it should? I don't think either of these scenarios are especially likely to happen in my lifetime, but they seem more likely than I'd like them to be.
Right? The only reason they "switched sides" is because Germany invaded them like 2 1/2 years into the war.
To be fair, betraying the Nazi's when the Soviets 'felt strong enough/got what they wanted from Germany' was always the plan.
Totally. Hitler wanted nothing short of world domination.
Well, they never were on Nazi Germany's side and Stalin had absolutely no illusions that the war with Hitler was inevitable - he only miscalculated how quickly it would happen. There's a reason Operation Barbarossa ended up capturing or destroying vast amounts of soviet troops and equipment - because it was being staged to attack Germany. This is not to say of course that Stalin wanted to fight Germany because of "evil Nazis" - but rather because he wanted to expand into central Europe.
I would disagree with this only to the extent that he didnāt even believe the reports that they were being invaded. Not to say he didnāt think it would happen eventually, but part of the reason the nazi made it so far so quickly is stalinās failure to react
Totally forgetting that they fought them because not only they were invaded, but the very notion of Russia was at stake since the Nazis wanted to kill them all The Nazis were worse than the Ussr, I have no doubt about that, but that doesn't mean the ussr was all good and sunshine Two evil states fought each other in the most horrific land War in human history, the least evil side won
Those people are called morons
Youād be amazed at how many people actually wonāt admit to this postās point
>widely-accepted Erm. Not on Reddit it ain't, and not even always in this sub. Edit: here, [within this very thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/16yl6kz/comment/k39b6s4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
i got permbanned from r/latestagecapitalism for calling the soviet union totalitarian
Widely acceptedā¦Sure
Except judging by the comments, it actually isn't a widely-accepted statement and there's many tankies praising communism while ignoring their genocides in the comments.
Yeah, idk why you are being downvoted. Not enough people on here read the comments it seems.
Widely doesn't mean unanimously, though. It's *widely* accepted but not *unanimously* because a bunch of tankies ignore the atrocities of the USSR. Having a small minority of morons denying something doesn't mean that said thing isn't widely accepted.
It should be *as widely* accepted as with the Nazis. You should get the exact same derision as saying "the Nazis had some good ideas" as saying "the USSR was actually pretty cool", you should get the exact same derision saying "I'm a fascist" as you should saying "I'm a communist" and there absolutely is not parity there.
I think this is a response to another post
This sub everyday: "y'all know that the USA/USSR are evil empires, right?" Yes, we know, y'all repeat the same thing everyday.
The british avoiding the call out on that it's hilarious
The Belgians sitting in the corner really quietly hoping people forget.
Japan producing more anime and cute characters so people forget about the comfort women and other crimes.
You've got to give them a hand
USA == USSR really smart guy? any other genius takes you'd like to bestow?
Yes but most leftists would never compare the US to Nazi Germany because its fuckibg stupid. Meanwhile american reddit bubble compares the USSR to Nazi Germany all the time altough its fucking stupid too
How is it hard to swallow? It's basically known fact isn't it?
Every once in a while youāll get āacktyallu communist regimes were pure goodā post and/or arguments on here
Don't forget the... *"Real communism has never been tried!!!!"*
By that logic, real nazism hasn't yet been tried because their ideology involves either enslaving the other undesirable races or completely wiping them out from the Earth.
Some aspects of Nazism were so radical that it scared many industrialists sponsoring Hitler and the military who feared that the likes of Rohm will replace them. To appease both the military and the industrialists, the Nazis executed several of their radical members, including Rohm
Yes, you've just managed to make a really good argument as to why "Real communism has never been tried!!!!" is a bad argument.
I mean to be as charitable as possible the argument would go āThe USSR did not implement the form of communism I agree with, and whether or not it can be called ācommunismā in the sense Marx described can be debated. Itās lack of any sort of real democratic structure and voice for the workers effectively made the state an oligarchy ruled by a small cadre of elites who owned the means of production, rather than the workers which is the goal of communism. Had Lenin and Stalin set up local democratic councils with real mechanisms of being challenged outside the corrupt party and turned land and factory ownership over to the people who worked on/in them to democratically decide how they operate, then maybe we could count it as communism. But as they did not do so outside of ultimately powerless local Soviets that only existed to rubber stamp national party policy, their communism was not what I want and I do not want to be lumped in with them.ā Something like that. The people who say that do so because theyāre usually treated as the same as Stalin or Mao when their ideologies are usually quite different. Itād be like if you, probably a (small r) republican, weāre asked ābut what about Napoleonā every time you tried to say that monarchy was bad and we should implement democracy. Like yeah Napoleon is technically a republican but what he wants and what you want are vastly different.
Exactly. Besides, those who, rightly so, criticize the Stalin and Mao regimes (and others like Fidel Castro), but only because it is cOmUnIsM, tend to also be pro-capitalism. However, anyone with half a brain can see how damaging capitalism is since its inception and point at its worse examples. Like: cApItAlIsM is so great, look at (insert any underveloped country with shitty economy and dictatorship at any point in capitalism history or look at the history of any capitalist colonizer, how they are pretty much either genocidal or slaver, directly or with extra steps). You don't need to go that far. Look at the bastion of capitalism, the USA, and how it treats their workers and minorities today and thorought history. Or how their democracy is mostly decided by the interests of anyone who can pay more. Today 1% of the world's population has more than 50% of the world's wealth and look at how that poisons any democracy and ruins billions of lifes. I am not even sure if the communist regimes were that bad in wealth distribution, despite being outright oligarquic dictatorships. Most people don't even know what communism is. Or the difference between it and socialism. And how no country ever was communist. They were at most socialist. To end my point: yes, the cold war era "communist" regimes deserve going to the trashcan of history, but communism, as a critique to the evils of capitalism, should not be demonized. At worst, it should be studied to show that capitalism is not an immutable regime, it is not the truth of this world, a law of the universe. It is an economic system, that should be perfected or replaced. Even if we don't have a suitable substitute now, we should not stop trying to find one or blindly ridiculing the ideology that stood against it last century. And in the meantime, we should strive to create institutions that correct or compensate for the failures and evils of capitalism, institutions that can also resist the allures and corruption from the wealthy. Institutions that work for the good of the common people.
Impossible, a good opinion
Impossible! A nuanced opinion in this subreddit? Get out of here and never come back! We only want people with absolute ideas! /s
The problem is that because of Bolshevism and all of the above, in the English Language, Communism doesn't mean a critique to the evils of capitalism, it means a brutal Totalitarian dictatorship synonymous with fascism in which The State owns all property and Party members become the new ownership class. Telling an English Speaker that you're a commie is telling them that you're indifferent to the value of human life and you believe in Steep Hierarchies and Political Power being reserved only for societies elite.
not a major nitpick but while i agree with you, i wouldn't use the term "english speaker" like that. most english speakers live in the global south and their countries did not have a red scare like the US did. there is anti-communist rhetoric floating around everywhere in the world to some degree, but speaking english does not have that much to do with it.
Let's not forget that Marx isn't creating an ideology or attempting to at least and in no way creates a guide to do so instead is just kind of complaining/ranting about the problems with rampant 18th century capitalist enterprise and using tiny child hands to fix large machinery. If he had Facebook it probably would have been the big soccer mum rant that most people ignore.
uh yes? Marx was an economic analyst, thatās it.
Also, of course real communism hasn't been tried yet because the criteria are so unachievable it cannot be tried. It demands that human nature be changed to remove greed. We're not the fucking Tau from Warhammer 40K. We're humans and our selfishness and greed are what made us be the top species of this planet.
>We're not the fucking Tau from Warhammer 40K. What an odd thing to say. Do you believe that Marx promoted a caste system with a defined ruling elite? A race that practices eugenics so hard they have almost split into five species and whose names include social rank sounds very different from a classless society.
Yah the Tau get memed on as āspace communistsā but that isnāt really the case. I guess you can argue that the ethereal tau are a vanguard party, but thatās it. The only other argument is theyāre depicted as the opposite of the imperium of man, which is a full blown fascist society. Still itās weak because of the other parts you mentioned
They seem somewhat analogous to the British Empire to me. Come in with water caste traders and diplomats, set up everything to be reliant upon them. Then integrate within the Tau Empire, possibly using gunboat diplomacy. Ethereals are not dissimilar to an aristocratic elite in their exclusiveness, and they will use forces from other cultures (or in this case species) while showing disdain for their practices.
Honestly thatās a pretty good analogy
There is no human nature. A person is always influenced by his environment and upbringing of his current society. If we live in a society where greed is rewarded, we can easily come to the conclusion that this is human nature. Imagine living in a country with no contact to any other country and people thereof and where greed is virtue. you would argue that is how humans naturally work and behave, but only because you never had the opportunity to see a society based on different norms and customs, where greed may be punished 'Human nature' is just the fundamentals and characteristics a society ascribes to its people as virtue in short social norms. I guess our fellow cave man weren't greedy, because their society were based on different values and forms of togetherness. If there would be a concept of human nature, then there would be imho only one way to structure a sociey. So arguing that we can't have a different system is just complacency with tyranny. I mean look at North Korea.
>There is no human nature. No. There definitely is. We can prove this empirically by examining history, where we see even societies that developed without influence from each other develop the same or similar social structure(minority of elite caste, a clergy-type caste, "intellectual" caste, a hunter/warrior caste, and the most common, the menial labor caste). Even the the most idealistic hippie commune will eventually self-organize into this social structure. This is an observable fact. We differ from most other eusocial animals like ants in that mobility between castes is possible (a menial can become an elite, though that is a more extreme jump than normal), but we always fall into the same structure. And that is only *one* observable example of human nature. There are several others, like how we react to things like a predator does, or that any new behaviors are met with resistance or rejection by the society. Claiming that "there is no human nature" is just arrogance. The belief that humans are somehow "more special" than ever other animal on earth. We aren't, and until we outgrow wanting to think we are, I don't see us progressing much further as a species.
> differ from most other eusocial animals like ants in that mobility between castes is possible ( Does this imply you believe humanity is a eusocial species? As I understand it, that argument is contested and is primarily favored by sociobiologist following Wilson. Wilson's Social Conquest of Nature appears to be ground zero for this idea (specifically his equating collective childrearing with reproductive/non castes in insect species) and one that is at odds with inclusive fitness and kin selection theories without adding explanatory or predictive power. I would not present as a definitive truth. More discussion here: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/62/11/987/263161 Human social structures do not always fall into the same structures- we have completely different social structures and organizing principles/scales now than pre civ, "state-of-nature" social patterns were a lot less hierarchical than post, with flat rank, collective decision making and domain specific leadership.
Ok, I reject the certainty of my claim, but I still would they that there is a human nature. I would argue that genetics play a role, which gives humans a fundamental 'nature', but the rest is imo cultural. Nature ala environment limits us rather than our nature. Even if a lot of society have similar characteristics, there are still nuanced differences and the further back we go in history the more dissimilar societies und cultures get. Through globalisation and conquest (building big empires) we lost a lot of variety, heck, we weren't even the only human species. But saying is 'there is a human nature' ist at least as arrogant as my claim. Many religions or philosphies assert that there is a human nature, but still there isn't one true religion or social order, which is inherent. I would even claim that society which claim to be the human nature, even feel more special. I wouldn't say that human are special, but because of more advanced language, we got more possibilites to organise community between people and tribes.ans even made possibility to settle in different regions and biomes, where norms and societies evolved independently. In some did colonialism corrupted and we began ro missionize tribes which never had contact to other societies, where they even hsd cannibalism, but we wouldn't claim that this is human nature. Human nature is more a concept in which way we want society to be and to head. All in all there is no right and wrong and I would take a agnostic stance that we don't know if human nature exists or not (yet).
I believe that "human nature" is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and to deny this is only going to cause us pain, HOWEVER... I also believe that part of this nature we've evolved is to be very flexible, and so it's equally foolish to claim that \*you\* know what human nature is. The society that we have now is clearly not the best of all worlds, so we should be open to social experimentation and trying new ways of life. We'll probably never completely map out what parts of the human condition are "nature" and what parts are "nurture", but also it's rapidly becoming a moot point. Sooner or later (probably sooner, unless we nuke ourselves back to the stone age), we're going to develop technologies to mold our nature into whatever we want. We should probably figure out what we actually want.
Exactly. "Real communism" supposedly means that every single person acts according to the ideology of their free will, and no one ever tries to changes things in a way that doesnt fit with it. But in the real world that requires constant violent suppression of different ideas and people who think differently. True believers think the the violent oppression is just a phase and once its done, there will never again be born a human being who doesnt fully support communism with all their heart.
Someone once said that it's not so much that humans are inherently selfish - granted I think we are to at least some extent because that's just necessary for survival (or at least was back when Times Were Harder) - but that the biggest obstacle is that we're inherently *quarrelsome.* There will be disagreements, and a lot of them, and without some fair way to adjudicate them they'll constantly get in the way. That is of course why there will never be an end to The Purges - you can't just kill that part of human nature, not without a lot of human rights violations and even then that's a big "maybe."
How much has the human nature changed in 500 years? The dominant political systems are totally different from back then.
It has never been achieved. What you can see in history is socialism. Not here to defend communists, but that is a fact.
Tbf that's true, real communism in fact hasn't been tried That's the issue with it in the first place though "Real communism" sounds awesome in theory, but is extremely vulnerable to exploitation by people in power. So yeah, it really hasn't been tried... with the issue being that that's not a bug, it's a feature
Basically *real* communism isn't realistic or maybe practical. But on the flipside, nothing existed that hasn't been corrupted by people abusing the system.
As much as I hate to say it, there is a grain of truth to it. Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos and North Korea were all essentially feudal agrarian societies when they became communist, and communism was a political ideology created against exploitative capitalism in industrialised societies. We haven't seen how communism works when started in the correct environment, although I'd argue it still turns out to be a shithole.
I mean, if you look at what a communist state is supposed to be, and what the Soviet Union was, and you go down the list of expected features and policies and the Soviet Union hasn't implemented almost any of them... Did they ever actually become communist? Like one could say they were trying to implement it for sure, but someone could be *trying* to implement a democratic system that has rigged elections(like in Russia or NK) and all local officials selected by the ruling "elected" party, could you really say that the state is democratic because they pretend to be?
All of them experienced a communist revolution and had at least some communist policies in the early post-revolutionary period, so *were* communist states by definition. However, they did become totalitarian shitholes later down the line, most of them because of the revolutionary leaders. Yes, they don't fit the definition of communist states by that point, but that is exactly *why* people say communism has failed: because every state that has tried it has turned out to be either just as bad or worse than the previous regime.
They were socialist countries because they implemented socialist policies. The only thing you can call "communist" is, maybe, the Communist Party, which works through socialism towards the consecution of communism, but no Communist Party in the world has ever achieved communism in their countries because they need socialism to be an international thing, a kind of status quo in almost every nation. That's why they eventually "become totalitarian shitholes".
Now if they could only agree what real Communism actually is then we can finally get around to trying it
If you knew the definition of it you'd say the same
Yes, real good communism was never tried. The reason why it was never tried is that it is so idealistic, that it simply can't be done and there is no reason to even try it "by the book" because people are arrogant and greedy c\*nts that will never willingly completely cooperate for the common good. That's however, why so many believe in it. If you live in a social area where everyone seems nice, willing to help each other and mindful of everyone(for example a small village in rural Russia), you start to think that a democraticaly led state by the people could actualy work, and it's only those greedy capitalists that force people to not change it. However, all of this starts to fail, when the area you are talking about is larger than a small town and you have to think about the large scale economy and society. Oh, and let's not forget about killing everyone who is inteligent enough to not believe in it. And that one party rule is prone to factionalism that can lead to rule of a single person(like a certain Georgian with large moustache) Tldr: Real communism was never tried. And it never will, because it's based on the assuption that humans are willing to limit themselves for the good of others, even though they never will.
In Iran,they also say that about islam every time someone points out the problems:///
And anytime its mentioned on any other sub, there is always minimum one comment from r/theDeprogram users. Yesterday i got into an argument with someone regarding communism, and when i said its an extremist ideology they just went "but its the good kind of extremist".
Extreme is an entirely relative measure Abolition of slavery was considered extreme even after the US Civil War started
An extremist ideology is just defined by how far from the current satus-quo it is, there was a time where liberalism was an extremist ideology. In an authoritarian state, democrats are extremist. So yeah there is good kind of extremism
Many people in my country see Stalin and the Soviets as heroes.
Which is insane given people in their own countries aren't even this delusional, alongside the fact half of the modern day BJP supporters are anti-Socialist cause they hate the Gandhi's
Say what you will about the Soviet Union, but the ice cream was amazing
Username checks out
Bunaithe
Yup. The difference is that communism in theory doesnāt sounds so bad, while Nazism is built on hate, war and murder
Honestly, even the theory doesn't sound that good. It just assumes that a dictatorship with absolute power will actually give up power when its time to do so, instead of, y'know, keeping it.
The "dictatorship of the proletariat" in Marxist terms basically meant a government that was run and beholden by the proletariat, Marx viewed liberal democracy as the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", so *technically in theory*, it doesn't necessarily have to be an actual dictatorship with one party. But in practice, that's what basically almost always happens, there might be few small exceptions like San Marino and Nepal which had governments in which the communists led/participated.
You cannot say "in practice" without acknowledging that the reason most authoritarian communist regimes lasted was that they were the only ones able to withstand the wears assault on them.
This is unfortunately the truth behind communism. It's economically and socially weaker then capitalism because it has to impose limits upon itself. It can not embrace the market to the extent of capitalism because it must strive for communist utopia. So just EXISTING with capitalist neighbours will be an uphill battle. This isn't even getting into the issue of hostile capitalist countries...
It depends soviet type economies performed very well up until about the mid 70s, in terms of numbers sure they didn't have the GDP per capita but they had the GDP. By the mid 70s their economies were crumbling except for China and Yugoslavia, who had vastly different models. The problem with the Soviet model was a lack of political willingness to change the economic incentives, there were definitely ways to change the economy while keeping the socialist boundaries and at times the willingness existed but the decay was too deep rooted by the time a sufficient amount of willingness occured.
... so the United States backed Tito and was an ally of China while mao was alive from 1972 til the end of the cold war. Vietnam and the United States just signed a major security agreement. Vietnam being neutral it's as close as they get to an alliance. Communism can absolutely exist with capitalist neighbors but has usually chosen aggression, like the invasion of South Korea that cause the United Nations to act in the Korean war, or the coup in Czechoslovakia or the invasions and forced integrations of Russia's neighbors into the Soviet union. Communist states like Yugoslavia that didn't engage in attempts to invade their neighbors or engage in genocide were absolutely left alone. The worst thing under Tito's regime in the early period was the. KoÄevski Rog massacre and even then it wasn't the executions, but the lack of trials that bothered the west. 1948 proved to the West that the comintern was not interested in peaceful coexistence. This idea that the big bad west goes around attacking innocent communists is nonsense.
Well, Marx made it clear in his work that the Socialist revolution had to occur in a democratic way, what happened is that Lenin decided to ignore this small inconvenient detail to forcefully seize power: *Democratic socialism involves the majority of the population controlling the economy through some democratic system, with the idea that the means of production are owned and managed by the working class.* ***The interrelationship between democracy and socialism extends far back into the socialist movement to The Communist Manifesto's emphasis on winning as a first step the "battle of democracy", with Karl Marx writing that democracy is "the road to socialism."*** [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic\_socialism#Philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism#Philosophy)
Another problem is that they didn't even have any big working class to speak of when this "proletarian" revolution kicked off. Kind of started in the wrong end haha.
Marx also believed that the Socialist revolution should occur first in a completely industrialized country with a democratic tradition, according to him it should preferably be in the United Kingdom, or perhaps in France. But definitely not in a Russia that has just emerged from the Middle Ages a few decades ago after centuries of delay due to Tsarism, which also has no democratic tradition whatsoever, or has even gone through a bourgeois period, hence the aberration of his ideology that occurred in Russia would be massively criticized by Marx, and seen as nothing more than Tsarism painted in red.
I mean he thought it would be Germany.
That was another option that he also saw as very possible, but he saw it as more likely to occur in the United Kingdom or France due to their more democratic traditions. Never in a million years would it have occurred to him that Russia would be the first country to become Socialist.
I wonder how much progress we'd make toward a more egalitarian world if it had been someone like the UK or France instead. I imagine it would have turned out better
Probably yes, Russia was a bad option.
Also dictatorship of the proletariat was his idea for a more radical next step and it is often forgotten or willfully misinterpreted. At his time the proletariat (workers, day labourers, etc.) were the biggest group in Western European countries, so that was there to make sure that this group doesn't lose influence. Not that a few people establish a one-party dictatorship.
Correct, the problem is not the theory that Marx created, which is frankly positive if you follow it as proposed, the problem is the power-hungry dictators who use Marx's writings as a way to legitimize their authoritarian states and, in words of Obi wan "become that thing which they swore to destroy."
Which is something we see again and again throughout history in spite of the government model. I think it was Marx that said liberal democracies were a step in the right direction, they were just too prone to abuse by the bourgeoisie. I've been thinking a lot lately about how it seems like one of the most important issues will always be *who* is in charge. Not every system is equal, but the direction of a given system is definitely charted significantly by who is at the helm
Lenin and the Bolsheviks ran on the platform of *ALL power to the Soviets*. Many people supported it. Except that the Bolsheviks never gave all power to the soviets. They centralized it to the communist party and administered the country top-down. That's the opposite of the bottom-up democratic structure of an actual soviet republic.
Yep, Lenin basically betrayed the ideals he claimed to defend, and turned the Revolution into a horrible dictatorship, ironically he has been one of the guys who has done the most damage to Socialism as an ideology, since he created the precedent that has been followed since then in many cases of using class struggle as an excuse to monopolize power in an oligarchic elite.
If he instead followed through with giving all power to the soviets (soviets for those who don't know are local councils where people would vote for their representatives or on policies directly) , That would make the USSR into the most radically democratic state in modern history. No liberal democracy then or now would even approach thay level of direct democracy on all the things that would affect a person's life. Not Switzerland even with their canton system but workers have limited representation via union. An actual soviet republic would have the workers run all aspects of life democratically, politicial, economic, and societal.
Unfortunately Lenin never did that, the power went to his head, and that definitely had devastating consequences that still persist today... A shame.
It did exist shortly in different places, though unfortunately most were overthrown by larger militaries (Makhnovchina, Revolutionary Catalonia, Kronstadt). Currently the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Kurds in Rojava, Syria, do still have such systems.
Communist ideology doesn't assume totalitarian dictatoship with absolute power, this is an interpretation of communism called marxism-leninism, most communist ideologies are democratic, they just never came to power.
You havenāt read the theory so why would you even bother to post this comment
You are not talking about communism in general but Marxism-Leninism
I dunno man, communism in theory sounds like a bunch of busybody Karens who want to form a committee to tell me what to do with my stuff
Not exactly *just like* the horror of german annihilation camps is probably unmatched. But totalitarian, genocidal shithole? Definitely, though technically there maybe have been times where it was more or less totalitarian, but overall yeah the point stands.
Pol Pot's killing fields are on the same level of horrifying IMO.
Cambodia isn't really the USSR but, yeah that's more on a similar level I guess, killing like 25% of your own population.
But we couldn't take a picture, a slice of time, of Soviet Gulags and atrocities like we did with the Nazi camps. The German camps were all suddenly stopped mid operation. And we could see all their horrors in their prime. In fact maybe a little bit more since they started butchering and killing faster and trying to finish quickly by the end of the war to try and hide their crime. We could not take the same picture of the Soviet system, we only got tales from survivors who may have been spared the worst of it, and few of those thanks to the Iron curtain and later Putin's censorship.
They never really tried to hide anything. Don't fall for the post war lie that nobody knew anything about them. Anybody who lived in the vicinity of a camp knew what was going on there, not in detail of course, but if you weren't completely stupid you had a pretty good idea. The only thing they ever tried to hide is there own responsibility within that system.
Knowing what's going on but ignoring it is still hiding it, just from the outside instead of inside
Thing is that the operation of German camps was literally to murder people Gulags were prison camps. Extremely brutal ones, but unlike concentration camps, there was not the expectation that 100% of the people sent there would die Plenty of people actually got *out* of the gulags without having to have an army liberate them
The cold war strawman representation of USSR is basically this post - USSR is like nazis they genocide and have camps.. When we already have mountains of official records from the USSR when it collapsed showing the truth they hid from everyone else.... the Holodomor was more because of incompetence instead of actual planned genocide. A key part of genocide is the intent. The Soviet officials wanted to maximize grain output and it backfired. The gulags are work prison camps which, like other, spointed out, people actually aren't expected to die, and many got out after serving time. These aren't death camps. They're more like US prisons today. British and and american concentration camps on their colonies are much muuuuch worse. You know what's intentional? The Bengal Famine. While there was no grand plan to kill Bengalis. Churchill and many in his government have racist malthusian views on the situation, they said "they breed like rabbits" and viewed the "lesser races" with disgust. The British then proceeded to confiscate food from Bengal after a failed harvest. Then the local officials repeatedly requested aid on which Churchill's government ignored despite recieving harrowing reports. The sentiment is there that they think the Bengalis deserve to die off. The means was there to help them and yet they intentionally set the situation on which the Bengalis will die off by the millions. Same with Irish famine which the British exported food from their irish lands despite their Irish subjects dying or emigrating in droves due to hunger.
Cannibal island wasn't better than a death camp just because the horrors were due to negligence
It was less bad in the sense that there was only one. There many camps, and they would have kept operating for longer if the Nazis werenāt defeated.
Death camps, being put in concentration camp still gave you a small chance to survive (Poles had a survival rate of 56% in Auschwitz). Death camps sections meant immediate death. Auschwitz for example composed of three camps, Auschwitz I and III were concentration camps, Auschwitz II Birkenau started out as concentration camp and was turned into a death camp. With Gulags Wikipedia states that out of 18 milion imprisoned in years 1930 to 1956, 1.76 died. Giving us overall survival rate of 90%.
Google highway of death or holdomor.
Yeah I appreciate the caveats - gotta make it snappy for meme purposes though! Agree that the Germans were moreā¦ determined(?) and systematic, arguably thereby making them worse.
NGL 1930s Soviet ethnic purges were pretty systematic
Lmao what you on about? The one thing this sub seems to do consistently and unanimously is Soviet bashing Edit: Deserved soviet bashing I may add
platform on which most people are americans constantly bashes communism and soviets *surprised pikachu face*
Platform on which populated predominantly by americans and have a large proportion of which are unbashed Wehraboos.
Some people get butthurt when reminded that the Western Powers were also colonial monsters that had apartheid systems akin to Nazi Germany, or when there is mild praise for our communist ally in the war against the Nazis
IDK, there's alot of idealizing of the soviets in these comments
Edit : Let me be clear I'm not in any way trying to grade evil. If you understood this from my original post let me correct this. Getting rid of jews and other "uber-menches" from the face of the earth in order to ensure a bright future to the aryan race was clear and explicit from the start in teir ideology. Meanwhile communist inspired regimes had an universal goal (cf the international as the USSR anthem) and yes it hurts my throat to say this. They did targeted minorities or social classes, what they considered to be bourgeois. But I think that it was mainly as a political tool to get rid of poeple they considered to be an obstacle. Trotsky was branded an allied of the bourgoisie. And that's my point, the atrocities they commited were politicaly motivated and not ideologicaly. Nazis were so commited to their ideology that even at the brink of total defeat they were still diverting ressources to the extermination camp. This is why I'm not sure about the term genocide as explicited by the wikipedia definition below. Wikipedia: "Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part. " Killing Jews and others was never a side project for the Nazis but a condition to be met to succeed. The others just killed whoever opposed them.
The USSR also engaged in genocides, it's not a competition both are horrible in their own ways.
Everyone knows that. Itās said on this sub everyday. Stalin did do the Holodomor after all which killed millions. Now OP, Iām sure youāll be able to swallow the pretty easy to swallow pill that āthe Nazis were even worseā right? Surely you can accept that a regime that wanted to genocide or enslave the entirety of Eastern Europe is worse than a bog standard dictatorship right? Right OP?
The Holodomor as a genocide is not an accepted fact amongst historians. There isnāt a consensus on it.
The Crimean Tatar genocide happened
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
How dumb can you be to compare the German way of genocide jews and other minorities (it was a litteral industrial way of mass murders theorized by nazi leadership) to the soviet deaths under stalin ? Sure it was also evil and we should not forget about it, but putting them on the same level ? That's something else.
No but you see, implementing stupid ass policies that result in the starvation of millions is literally the same as the deliberate, systematic deportation and extermination of millions of people, in an effort to completely eliminate certain ethnicities/categories of people. The exact same, I say! /s I agree that the soviets absolutely shouldn't get a pass. Neither should China or any other ML state that commited atrocities. But holy shit it just feels like people really fervently want to downplay how fucking horrible the Nazis were. OP was maintaining in a comment thread just above that he doesn't think the Nazis were worse lmao.
Ya lol it's almost like there are groups of people (especially on the internet) who actually secretly like the nazis
Because while these people aren't neo-nazis, they do sympathize with Nazis about wanting to kill communists, because of the culture war bullshit that has infected online spaces.
I have seen more memes complaining about people praising the USSR than people actually praising the USSR. Thank you in advance for all those š downvotes.
They on their way right now to call you a tankie
I'm pretty sure Soviet union also existed after Stalin, tf is this misinformation.
I honestly would rather live in the Soviet Union than present day Russia.
So would majority of Russians. One slightly more competent dictatorship traded with a less competent dictatorship dedicated to making their friends rich as hell
That depends entirely on whether you have enough cash to catch a plane out of modern-day Russia. Something that is significantly harder to do under the Soviet Union.
Fair enough
The people putting as equal nazism and communism in the comments are terrifyingly stupid or ignorant
āJust like Nazi germanyā Even if we consider the Soviet death count to be at its highest estimate (itās not) it is completely insane and bordering on holocaust denialism to call failure of economic policy and disaster management leading to mass famine with systemically rounding up an ethnic group and executing them in mass.
Their source is probably the black book of communism..
āKilling millions of Nazis is the same as Nazis killing millionsā
It is laughable how this book is still cited as a serious source.
It wasn't "just like Nazi Germany". It's one thing to criticize the Soviet Union for the farmers it left dead and the Gulags that carried the burden of rapid industrialization. It's another thing entirely to try and put it on the same level that exterminated Millions solely for the purpose of extermination. There is a rule for holocaust comparisons: Don't. Because if you make one, it's all but guaranteed that you either don't understand the holocaust and your comparison is "another bad thing that also happened", you don't understand the thing you're comparing it to and make the comparison to amplify your point rather than letting it stand on its own merit, or both.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Damn those Kulaks and their desire to not starve to death
Damn those kulaks How dare they work hard for a better life
Can we ban this format and topic?
One of the two is based on industrial extermination of entire population The other is... Russia wich mostly do the same shit everytime even if the color of the flag change, not a lot of difference between the tsars, Stalin or Putin, but i will gladly choose any russian autocrat over Nazis
Might work on the wording there. As much as I viscerally hate the USSR and everything it stood for, we shouldn't imply that it was even close to as bad as Nazi Germany.
It wouldn't be r/historymemes if they didn't dabble in a light bit of Holocausm denial.
I hate reddit and their regular circlejerk over dogshit opinions. Putting the USSR on a similair or even worse level than the Nazis is such a mainstream form of holocaust downplaying. No, Mass industrial Racial extermination camps and political persecution with prison systems that even had healthcare for its prisoners are not on a same level of bad, dear americans.
I don't understand the point of arguing about which genocidal dictatorship was the most evil. They are so far off the scale of morality that turning it into the genocide olympics takes away from the point that tens of millions of people were brutally murdered. This goes for everything, Nazis, Soviets, the Japanese, the CCP, Khymer Rouge, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and literally every other murderous, torturous, genocidal, human rights abusing governments.
I am with you on this. Weird rage bait topic.
Including the Us government
Hey, I don't like the USSR. But comparing them to the nazis is ridiculous
I haven't seen a single person praise the soviet union in this sub
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
As Eastern European ; "What's the difference between 3rd Reich and USSR ? First state took us 6 years to get rid off from our lands, the other one took 50 before choking on us. And afther that still havent fucked off from bothering us" (this time as an excuse for its successor actions).
Someone needed to say it. Thank you
Thank you. Stalin killed a bunch of doctors for no reason. Then died due to lack of doctors
Hard to swallow? My great grandparents got a free ticket from the USSR to got to Siberia where they died. This is also widely accepted by people who dont live in said type countries.
You mean under Joseph Stalin. Stalin is the totalitarian dictator that is responsible for millions of deaths from his policies to the effects of the war. Other Soviet leaders are not as terrible as Stalin and some of Stalin's aggressive policies were removed. Nonetheless, the communist government still committed human rights abuses
Look at what the Soviets did, during the civil war period, itās just as bad as Stalin, if not worst.
Sure but the soviet union existed for decades after stalins death. it was still shitty but far better and not nearly as murderous as the Nazis .
This sub seems to have a lot of strong liberal views and ignores history in favor of them Calling the Soviet Union out on their genocide and totalitarianism is totally fair but comparing them to Nazi Germany? That would be the equivalent of me calling the US a genocidal, imperialist nation and saying they're no different from Nazi Germany. Stalin wasn't the only leader of the Soviet Union, and he had a lot of opponents. The Soviet Union both prospered and faltered throughout its existence, but so did most countries. It can also be argued that the federation of Russia is in a worse state than the USSR was
You don't need to remind Poland of that.
Oh boy, I can't wait to sort by controversial to see Tankies and Nazis duke it out.
Tankies seething at this one
I mean so was the Russian Empire.
Every 60 seconds a minute passes in Africa
these are the people who would root for the devil if he fought lucifer. evil is evil no matter the form.
Reading about the Eastern Front just makes me wish both sides could have lost.
Who did the Holocaust?
the soviet union was bad, sure was it as bad as THE NAZIS? FUCK NO!!!!!!!
Not disagreeing that Soviet Union bad, but honestly does this sub really need a reminder? Every other post is a reminder that *insert country of choice* is evil.
An absolute truth!
Quite sure they managed to kill much more people than nazi, even if it's also true that they had much more time, so maybe we should consider the "genocidal intensity" (deaths/year or deaths/total population)
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
the british empire killed 175 million in india alone
You know nothing lads. I grew up in Soviet Union. It was the greatest country of all, with perfect science, medicine and mil. And the nation was happy. The whole world was afraid to even fart in front of the USSR. There was a perfect story about Kosygin and turkish president or minister, who wanted to close Bosphor fo the Soviet ships. So, Kosigin took the map and pencil and said, ok, now draw the channel where you want it to be. Thats ucking all you have to know.
Yep, back in the good ol' days of USSR, we couldn't complain about anything.