Inspired by recent discussions, I think Hexbear has a lot of good information about socialism but I wonder if the relentless defense of AES on Hexbear means shooting ourselves in the foot, since many potential leftists have been thoroughly primed to react negatively to AES states?
We’re not getting our messages out when progressive instances have already pre-emptively blocked us and calling us “tankies”.
People are being turned away without even taking the opportunity to read some of the stuff here, because they already have a pre-conceived notion about Hexbear being filled with “crazy tankies who defend totalitarianism”.
I know there have been a lot of propaganda and fabrication being perpetuated about socialist countries, and it feels “right” to defend them against these false accusations, but I wonder if this is doing more harm than good for the present day nascent socialist movement, at least in the Western countries?
We can remain on the current course and feel indignant about the tankie accusations, but will forever remain as a niche “tankie” community.
Or, we can open ourselves up, by toning down the admiration for the socialist states so we are not being treated as hostile by the other instances, and thus opening up the opportunities to have productive interactions with users (and potential leftists) from other instances?
(I do have my own position, you probably know which one it is, but I’m willing to hear from others and reevaluate my own opinions if needed).
EDIT: Thanks to everyone who responded. All points are well taken. Thank you.
I think it was weird to try to blame it on the Nazis, but summarily executing a particular collection of Polish military officers during wartime is -- considering the level of Holocaust collaboration in the Polish government and the Soviets being subjected to Nazi genocide -- something requiring much more justification to establish as actually bad than I have ever seen someone bother with.
Yeah I can’t say I really give a shit about a bunch of polish military officers in WW2 whatsoever
You know it's easy, cheap, and free to say "it's a bad thing to summarily execute 20,000 prisoners."
No one is saying that others didn't do much worse contemporaneously, and no one is asking you to care at some deep level about these crimes. It's about establishing socialists as people trying to build a better world and not just bloodlusting psychopaths.
When your own population is decimated by genocide and you are actively fighting a war against the perpetrators of the genocide, killing a few thousand cops and military who were enthusiastic collaborators in and perpetrators of that genocidal project seems to me like a perfectly reasonable security measure. Conversely, staffing prison camps adequately to contain those thousands of trained and highly murderous people while you are already running ragged trying to fight the Nazis seems like it would be a strategic error. Frankly, if there were people among their number who were interested in opposing genocide, they should have defected.
I'm curious what the actual number is, incidentally, since looking it up it seems like ~5k corpses were found. I won't say that I've done an exhaustive search, but I'm inclined to believe 22 thousand is a theological number more than anything at this point, as notoriously happens with any socialist or socialist-like project, including ones that I strongly condemn like decolonized Khmer Rouge, who were clearly unjust butchers once they removed colonial forces and yet their killings are still exaggerated by an order of magnitude.
These people were captured in September 1939 and executed by May 1940. You don't get to lay the Holocaust and German crimes in Barbarossa at their feet; the timeline doesn't work out.
I mean it was constructed out of declassified Soviet documents. You can try to debunk those as forgeries and haggle on whether or not it was the Nazis that did it or if it was only 7,000 summary executions or what not, but I think the easier and much more valuable thing to do is to argue that you're not the Soviet Union and that their predilection for summary executions has absolutely no relevance to your own political aspirations.
You're correct on this, I forgot how early it happened. Then there is merely the impending threat of annihilation that the Nazis were open about seeking for the East, further substantiated by the slaughter of ethnic minorities in German-occupied Poland, which many Polish municipal politicians, etc. were party to, to say nothing of the killing in Germany and its other occupied territories.
Come now, don't speak to me like I'm a Holocaust denier. If it's in the archives, it's in the archives, but what specifically is in the archives? How was it constructed? Furthermore, what got the officers imprisoned where they were and were all of those kept at those sites killed? If the prisons were just emptied, what happened to the personnel who worked there, were they just reassigned or did the prisons begin to be refilled immediately?
As I said before, it's possible that it was terrible, but I've never seen someone seriously engage with why it was done in order to establish why it should not have been done.
In any revolution, to say nothing of such an existential conflict as the Soviets in WWII, there are going to be summary executions. They are not an aspiration -- we all admire the rehabilitation accomplished by the CPC -- but if what is logistically keeping you from succeeding is the human rights of fascists, success is much more important.
I mean they were summary executions; those are prima facie terrible absent some pretty some massively compelling evidence (member of the Waffen-SS), right? Isn't that what the whole "abolish the police" thing is about? Isn't that what the whole George Floyd protests were predicated on?
Like if were going to come out and say "It's fine to summarily execute thousands of people, many of whom are civilians, purely on the basis of logistic and political convenience", then it doesn't matter what actual historical crimes any AES regime committed; we're openly giving ourselves permission to carry out repression like that in the future, and these potential future crimes are the only ones anyone we're talking to actually cares about. That's my point.
All I'm saying is, if our political platform has a massive undercurrent of "were are going to shoot a whole lot of you once we get power", we don't get to act surprised when we have absolutely 0 political success, electoral or otherwise. Like it's funny that Chris Matthews has brainworms that Bernie is going to be running death camps in central park. On the flip side it's absolutely soul-crushing that 70% of the population shares those brainworms. And that's for Bernie Sanders, much less an actual socialist candidate.
And to your last point, if you actually find yourself in some do or die position as part of some revolution, having to make some incredibly difficult choice, you still can. Having a platform of peace land and bread doesn't preclude you from doing anything in the future as necessary.
Did you miss the part where Polish fascists under Nazi occupation were already rounding up and slaughtering Jews and other minorities? What makes a Nazi collaborator better than SS?
The principle element of "abolish the police" from the standpoint of an anti-imperialist looking at America is that the police function as a sort of colonial occupation apparatus within minority communities that does virtually nothing else in those communities but maintain a brutal oppression for the purpose of economic extraction and the maintainance of a white supremacist ideology. The fact that cops effectively engage in the summary execution of, at minimum, over a thousand people a year in this country is principally bad because it is to support that project.
In a hypothetical American Social Revolution, a portion of the people who are now cops probably would need to be killed for simple logistical and threat-mitigation reasons, though of course rehabilitation is the goal and detaining most of them safely would probably be possible in most cases. Cops [and deputies], more than military or any other group that isn't a private gang (like the Klan) are the group that this is true for than any other, since they do in some places operate as rightwing death squads and are a self-selection for the most malignant personalities that can maintain an organized group and do violence themselves.
If you think killing a Polish mayor who rallied his town to immolate Jews (or killing a soldier who did the immolating) is similar to the killing of George Floyd, I have nothing to say to you.
So shoot those Polish fascists. Don't shoot the Polish liberal college professor you've got in your custody as a proxy.
So if it were random, unaligned summary executions, that would be okay? Cause from my point of view summary executions of innocent people is intrinsically bad, regardless of what theoretical framework we decide to explain them with.
Is there a particular Polish mayor the Soviets killed in Katyn that you had in mind, or are you constructing a contra-factual counter-example out of whole cloth?
Maybe, maybe not! Like you said it's not certain. Just a probability. It'll depend on the material conditions on the ground at the time.
So don't put it on your fuckin platform like it's something you hope to do.
Is that what happened? I've been asking questions towards that end that you ignored.
You say "innocent" but we haven't established that they were innocent or even that that was more probable than them siding with fascists.
There was an infamous case of a Polish mayor that I was alluding to (actually I think there were a couple), but they were on the German side of the border because the point is that there were natively Polish pogroms and we know that even after the war, sections of the Polish population were taking any excuse to commit genocide on any minority (e.g. Germans during the postwar relocations). I know some claims about demographic information, but I know of only like one or two individual identities of people killed in Katyn.
I've only seen that put on an ML platform in anarcho-bidenist memes and that one tasteless and self-deprecating joke about communists in Disco Elysium. No one is saying "Let us aspire to kill as many people without trial as possible", you are battling a phantom in your brain that I can do little to help you overcome, unless you are just finding a way to concern troll about atrocity propaganda