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.
My tendency towards avoidance is getting to me, but luckily the degree to which you lean on personal accusations gives me better reason to ignore it.
Between the quote from Beria and the section I quoted before, screening for "Will each of these people immediately take up arms against us in the likely event of Germans kicking in the door and enabling slaughter like German occupied Poland is already seeing?" makes sense. I clearly had a defective understanding of the issue and I still don't really understand it, but your pathetic sneering may as well be about "the people's stick" for how compelling I find it.
No, you established that I have a weird reaction to the subject of Katyn, but I criticize the Soviets all the time and in fact probably have harsher criticisms of Lenin than most of the MLs on this board (and at least a slightly more articulated criticism of Stalin), and indeed I talk about these subjects every now and then, but it only gets so far and I only have so much patience for repeating myself just to fucking virtue signal that I'm not part of Stalin's personality cult or whatever. I have no interest in making such appeasements to a shithead concern troll like you.
"Starving" is a weird verb to pick here. Sure wonder why the guy that Definitely Doesn't Have Ahistorical Criticisms of Stalin would use that
Also:
Absolutely go fuck yourself. In the very same section I said "the kulaks who were shot had it coming and then some". Marx was speaking abstractly and I spoke in part in terms of his quote, but I also applied it, and your attempts at a manipulative framing of what I said to directly accuse me of the contrary are pathetic.
You're the one that brought it up as "regrettable". The subject didn't even cross my mind until you acknowledged it as an actual bad outcome.
Of the 400 who were to be shot by this metric who were eventually spared, how many of them actually did take up arms against the Soviets? They serve as a nice, though albeit imperfect control group over how valid this methodology actually was.
Because I've got you here and because this always comes up and because you're less annoying than 90% of the other ML's on here, I'm going to ask: What makes me a concern troll? What makes this concern trolling? They're quite clearly sincerely my views so I don't see how the typical definition of concern troll regarding disingenuous applies.
So what does this mean? Honestly, no gotcha.
Or to put it differently, is there any possible way for anyone having the positions on this I do an advocating for it not to be concern trolling?