I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
All of that stuff is still happening today and burying it as “in the past” is EXACTLY what I mean when I say it’s unexamined.
Let this sink in. The US is what you’d get if Nazi Germany stood for 250 years. The corrupt fascist heart still beats at the center, and it drives every decision this country makes.
It is NOT in the past.
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If Hitler had been successful in Eastern Europe, leaders and politicians today would be talking about them the same way we talk about American native groups. "Sure, what a tragedy it is, but that's all in the past now! We had to ensure that civilization and order spread across the region! There were some unfortunate casualties, but the number of graves show that it was relatively minimal, and those camps were merely for labor, not extermination! Look, how about we do a minute of silence out of remembrance of the people who used to stand where we're building this next mall? That's good enough, right?"
America is the prototypical example of a fascist state that won. "But they aren't doing that anymore!" No shit, most of them are dead. And, as Awoo states below, the government still is oppressing what remains of indigeneous communities.
Ever heard of colonialism and slavery? Amerikkka is founded in genocide and evil. Or was that not "blatant" enough for you?
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how pointlessly pedantic. the US does not "claim" new territory, because then it would be responsible for what happened on it. instead, it coups governments install ones that will sign over the public resources to US corporate interests for extraction and the US trains their military/secret police to undermine labor movements and execute environmental activists and labor organizers. neocolonialism is a word.
Can you explain what you believe this means?
Where do you think they learned their tactics? They got the idea of their concentration camps from the US reservation system, a system that still exists and still operates much like concentration camps, in an ongoing genocide on the people who's land you are talking about were not all "wiped out" they are still here and the genocide is still happening.
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How come you didn't reply at all to the comment with all sorts of stats about how the state continues to oppress the indigenous?
It's literally not a stretch, in his memoirs Hitler refers to the taking of Eastern Europe as his 'Manifest Destiny' and the clearing of the slavs as the clearing of his 'removedskins'. He mostly thought that the U..S. wasn't thorough enough, with the Boer War encampments being the direct experience that the S.S. would draw from to create the concentration camps.
It's not 'today's' reservations, because there was a major reformation and native rights movement that was tied into the larger civil rights movement in the 1960's, with it's own occupation movements, marches and sabotage groups, which I am sure you know about.
However, what is always interesting to me is that they only started winning cases and gaining significant independent rights with the neo-liberal turn of the 1970's and 80's, because they provided the blueprint for corporate-run independent entities. There is a reason that justices such as Niel Gorsuch are so big on native rights, because it gives a legal precedent for the creation and maintenance of powerful non-state entities within U.S. soil. I'm not going to argue if this is a good or bad thing, as it's very grey, but the goal of the conservative empowerment of reservations seems to be eventually allowing the legal precedent for the development of a U.S. Hong Kong, an entity that is part of the U.S. but not the U.S.
However that being said, when larger corporate interests are at stake, native rights always get thrown to the way-side.
if this were true you wouldn't compare the former to the latter because you'd know just how different they are.
Is this true? Césaire claims that Nazism grew more out of European colonial practices