• Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    5 months ago

    Learning the warsaw pact wasn't formed until years after nato was an eye opener for me.

    • Vncredleader [he/him]
      ·
      5 months ago

      East Germany was not even a thing until after NATO formed. The reality of it all is fucking insane in how plainly laid out it all is

      • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]
        ·
        5 months ago

        "the horrors of the Berlin Wall"

        Twenty years into an anglo American occupation of the capital

        • VILenin [he/him]M
          ·
          5 months ago

          NATO could have ended the Berlin Wall at any time by simply denazifying West Germany and leaving behind a neutral state.

        • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          5 months ago

          For some reason I had always thought the Berlin wall was the line between East and West Germany. Every time I heard it, from school or elsewhere, it was implied to be that way

          It was only recently that I really checked and learned that Berlin was firmly in East Germany, and that the border was several hundred kilometers away. It very suddenly made sense after that as to why an armed enclave of one's self-declared sworn enemies would be encircled by a wall

          • 7bicycles [he/him]
            ·
            5 months ago

            Berlin really did come around to bite Germany in the ass. You got cash for living in the west, cause, you know, kinda sucks, and also you were exempt from the draft. Which obviously attracted a shitloads of leftists, artists and the like that have shaped berlin into its current perception which has pissed off conservatives since it became a thing

            • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              5 months ago

              It did split Berlin, but it didn't split Germany. The East/West German border was quite a ways west of Berlin. West Berlin was a small American enclave deep within East Germany

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      I wish these Democrats would ask a Communist once, just once, what they think about post-USSR Russia. It is blatantly clear they are operating in sloganeering-mode. They know Communism has a negative connotation in the US and think by branding everything they hate as Communism they can achieve short-term political victories. It isn't even a matter of historical illiteracy (even though they are drowning in their illiteracy). They simply don't care one way or another. Instead of engaging in political education, or educating themselves, they'd rather just lean into typical American misconceptions about history. They are deeply unserious people.

      The Soviet Union was buried the year I was born, and all these motherfuckers can do is run on Cold War tropes which are older than I am.

      NGL though, I can see why fascists like Jackson Hinckle see the Republicans as fertile ground when Liberals act like this.

      • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        5 months ago

        They are 100% advertising-brained and anything beyond slogans and "optics" is completely lost on them.

        • KnilAdlez [none/use name]
          ·
          5 months ago

          It is unknown if Lincoln read the letters or replied.

          I'm confused, isnt Lincolns reply (or the ambassador's reply that Lincoln agreed with) below Marx's letter on the webpage?

          • Vncredleader [he/him]
            ·
            5 months ago

            The office responded with a little "thank you" which was from John Quincy Adams' son. That was all. Lincoln almost certainly did not read let alone vet each response to election congratulations. I have no idea why people keep saying they corresponded or are "pen pals". If Lincoln read anything Marx wrote it would be his articles for Horace Greenly who Lincoln loved and read constantly, but that's about it. it's a small thing but how this one factoid has become an entrenched exaggeration bugs me

            • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]
              ·
              5 months ago

              i think it's because we learn much of history as regional vertical slices and stuff happening around the same time or figures being contemporary doesn't come through to the casual student.

            • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
              ·
              5 months ago

              Oh my god, thank you. I'm also tired of how it gets phrased. Marx and Lincoln didn't have correspondence. Marx sent him a congratulations letter because he admired Lincoln. The reply was generic and probably something sent to everyone who sent a congratulations. Lincoln probably got hundreds of thousands of similar letters and it's highly unlikely he saw Marx's letter or even knew about it.

              You're right, if he knew of Marx it would have been through the New-York Tribune. There's a good chance that Lincoln read Marx's coverage of the Crimean War, since it was basically the only coverage in English available to Americans.

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    5 months ago

    I don't get how someone can be this stupid and not drown when they try to take a shower.

  • Tankiedesantski [he/him]
    ·
    5 months ago

    to stop the advances of a Soviet dictator into Europe

    Gee it would really suck if there was a well documented historical plan drawn up at Churchill's personal behest to stab the USSR in the back before Hitler had even died.

    "We were planning to Pearl Harbor you in self defence" is a hell of an argument to make.

      • Kaplya
        ·
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        The Red Army would have been welcomed as the liberators by Western Europeans, where many of their bourgeois governments had already fled or ended up collaborating with the Nazis. It was the communist partisans, local resistance and the Red Army who drove the Nazis out.

        That is, if America didn’t conveniently enter Western Europe to fight the Nazis by 1944, when the Nazis had already suffered their decisive defeat the year before and were already on the retreat from the east.

        • Dolores [love/loves]
          ·
          5 months ago

          it'd have taken months-->year longer and tens-->hundreds of thousands of soviet lives. the soviets really didnt want to and quite appreciated the western front, their main complaint being it took too long for Overlord to go off

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]
        ·
        5 months ago

        It was the stance of the Soviets under Stalin that something like that would be a Bad Idea, because the Soviets probably would not have survived such an endeavor. I think it's debatable that they should have found some way to secure all of Germany, even if there was limited military conflict with the other Allies, for the sake of denazifying and a more economically viable GDR. Such an effort could easily have turned into a WW2.5 that the USSR would probably lose, so that's the "debatable" part.

  • plinky [he/him]
    ·
    5 months ago

    The history is written by the victors, and who do the victors hire to write said history curious-sickle

      • GarbageShoot [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        Renegade Trotsky, folks, he's a very bad man. The sympathizers to the Opposition Bloc, they are "Hot to Trot" to start another Great War when we Soviets just finished with two wars. You know what I say, folks? "Hold your horses!" What we need is to avoid war so that we can develop from the conditions that Swiss Cheese Nicky left our Soviet Socialist Republics with. We need time! We can't go off half-cocked after those traitors in the SPD murdered dear Rosa and that other guy . . . Bernard? Very dear friends of mine and they were betrayed!

  • TechnoUnionTypeBeat [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    5 months ago

    What fucking sends me about this recent thing is that what Trump said is that he wouldn't step in to help NATO if they didn't start funding NATO more, which has been his line since the 2016 election, yet every lib acts as if it's a sudden stunning declaration of love for Putin or some shit

    • neo [he/him]
      ·
      5 months ago

      Listen. You can't just expect a lib to comprehend the tiniest bit of nuance. Unless it's to explain why, actually, kids in cages at the border is a Good Thing when Biden does it.

  • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    5 months ago

    It's been a wild couple of years, watching the average republican CHUD become more sympathetic to the USSR than the average wine tasting liberal. How is this reality? What is going on?

    • barrbaric [he/him]
      ·
      5 months ago

      Chuds just do what they're told. If Fox News and Alex Jones told them communism was awesome they'd agree. It's why propaganda is so effective.

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
        ·
        5 months ago

        They'd have to phrase that in a very particular way, or some critical mass of media people would have to all spout the same message at once. I'm thinking of how Tomi Lahren nearly lost her career for being moderately pro-choice, or how Dave Rubin kept saying too many positive things about gay marriage

        I think a better way of phrasing it is chuds will agree with whatever the oil billionaire media says, and it's only ever going to say a small range of things.

        • barrbaric [he/him]
          ·
          5 months ago

          Totally, it'd only happen if the oil billionaire cabal went woke (or were, say, purged...).

    • kot [they/them]
      ·
      5 months ago

      I think theyre about the same honestly, they just hate the soviets for slightly different reasons. Chuds and libs belong to different offshoots of the same capitalist ideology, it's really not a surprise.

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        5 months ago

        Oh yeah, by "more" sympathetic I didn't mean actually liking them, just more willing to engage the topic with nuance and actually examine the USSR more earnestly than their lib counterparts, which has been very strange to see. I think it might help that they just hate it because they're told to, while libs hate it because of "authoritarian dictators" which is something the CHUDs are a fan of.

        • kot [they/them]
          ·
          5 months ago

          Personally I find it to be the opposite. Chuds tend to start incoherently frothing at the mouth at the mere mention of communism, while libs will repeat some propaganda they heard why communism is bad, but thats just my experience.

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Honestly, I'm cool with this: fight stupid with stupid.

    If they keep calling us the real fascists, we call them the real leftists. White supremacists? Literally just reverse SJWs. Fascists want to tell people what to do, just like the left. Also, the right used to call themselves 'national SOCIALISTS' so they even admitted to being no good commies in the past.

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
      ·
      5 months ago

      Problem with that is that I've seen nazis go to Trump rallies trying to do some recruitment, and the fucking hogs straight up to their face call them fucking commies and to get out of there before they stomp their asses.

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him]
        ·
        5 months ago

        If that is the case, then just say "look, even Trump supporters know a commie when they see one!"

        We just have to hide our power level and trick a bunch of idiots.

  • TheGamingLuddite [none/use name]
    cake
    ·
    5 months ago

    There's such a disconnect between the national DNC political class and their actual voters, the average American either does not know what NATO is or thinks it's the same as the EU and the UN. This isn't getting anyone to the polls lol.