YOU WON. YOU FUCKING WON THE COLD WAR. YOUR IDEOLOGY HAS DOMINION OVER THE WHOLE EARTH. THIS IS THE WORLD YOU MADE. THIS IS THE WORLD YOU WANTED. THIS IS WHAT YOU TRIUMPHING LOOKS LIKE.
I wouldn't challenge my friends who are computer engineers when they talk about technology and coding. I wouldn't challenge my chemist friends on chemistry. But history is one of those things where normies can just say "nuh uh" and have an equally valid opinion as me without doing any research more than a CNN article and wikipedia summary.
Goddamn have you hit on a pet peeve of mine. Especially because I love history and always have. Even long before I was a commie, fucking couldn't get enough of it. I may have been an annoying af libertarian nerd, but even then I was totally open to learning new things about history and changing my mind. But history is the one area where Americans are absolutely convinced their understanding of it is not only correct, but unchallengeable. Like I can spend 10 minutes outlining how the "Stalin killed 20 million" thing is total bullshit, and every American who isn't a commie will just say you're wrong because they just know communism kills. And no they will not provide any evidence or even consider reading more on the matter.
We need a ten thousand word essay to say one nice thing about communism and they just need one single :brainworms: to say one cliche to counter it in their mind. Angloids are the most propagandized people on the planet.
I have an interesting situation where certain people I know consider me the “History Guy” and defer to me whenever I explain topics.
Explaining anything that has to do with communism/socialism and for some of them that suddenly goes out the window. “Historical context? Nah, the Soviet Union failed because communism human nature no innovations no prosperity bla bla”
Libs be like "Ok, we have this story where some dudes burned all the food, but get this, they're the good guys."
"They had the collaborate with the Nazis to get their own nation-state. Because ethnicity should be the basis of government."
There’s also philosophy. Literally thousands of years of philosophers wondering what it means to be human, only for Joe McGee claiming that capitalism is simply human nature.
But history is one of those things where normies can just say “nuh uh” and have an equally valid opinion as me without doing any research more than a CNN article and wikipedia summary.
All opinions are equal under liberal democracy :yea:
I'm entitled to literally any opinion I just make up on the spot.
honestly computers are bullshit and your layperson's guess is probably about as accurate as whatever ideologically obfuscated nonsense the engineers learned in college
I'd love to hear about how learning how to re-order a b-tree is ideologically obfuscated.
They complain about the horrifying and "unprecedented" behavior of the modern capitalist Russian state, as if it's somehow uniquely ghoulish. No. The Russian Federation is certainly a ghoul, a wraith of what came before, but the Great Satan was the vampire that bit it in the first place.
Liberals claim to be the flag bearers of truth and science, but they flip to completely ahistorical red scare bullshit the second they think it might win over one of their conservative friends.
To be fair, most people in western countries use the word communist to simply mean "when bad government things happen and there's a dictator." They don't actually mean Russia and Eastern Europe have a liquidated capitalist class and social control over production, they mean bad countries are doing bad things they don't like. Libs would call Trump a communist, remember? Also a lot of people (Americans) literally do not realize Russia and the USSR were different countries with different governments. It gets really weird when I talk to people born after 2000 who still call Russia communist. They weren't even alive for Cold War propaganda, so how does it reach their heads? Their parents?
also probably some kind of refusal to admit capitalist countries can be adversarial with one another
It gets really weird when I talk to people born after 2000 who still call Russia communist. They weren’t even alive for Cold War propaganda, so how does it reach their heads? Their parents?
That or cultural osmosis, Russians have been the bad guys in movies since the first Cold War and Hollywood never stopped even after it was over
idk they can't even get things right about the Native Americans they share a country with, or in many cases they live within their state or county.
pretend
No, they are actually complete morons who don't know ANYTHING about the world beyond their driveway
Same energy as:
"Why slavery is colonialism Africa unequal treaties so genocide poor coups? Must economic exploitation be racism Africans' stolen relics fault apartheid!"
Translated:
"Why is Africa so poor? Must be Africans fault!"
slavery, colonialism, unequal treaties, genocide, coups, economic exploitation, racism, stolen relics, apartheid
You spelled out in the body text quite plainly why they pretend they aren’t liberal/capitalist. A critical look at Eastern Europe, let alone the whole world, under capitalism is quite the refutation of their worldview.
In fairness, their schools haven't been able to afford new history textbooks since 1982.
I'm sure the free market will swoop in and solve that problem!
Does anyone know of any good resources for learning about the imposition of capitalism on the former USSR in the 90s and 00s? I find it really troubling how quickly and easily the Soviet system seemed to be dismantled, and I want to know more about it
Parenti in Blackshirts and Reds has good segments on it, but it's prolly not the sort of depth you're looking for.
Tony Wood's Russia Without Putin is good on this. The first several chapters dig into how the Soviet system offered fertile soil for the growth of neoliberal capitalism via shock therapy. It doesn't touch as much on the Gorbachev years, though.
In a similar vein, Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? has a few chapters unpacking a similar form of shock therapy that occurred during the fall of the GDR at the start of the 90's. For both, their end was a spectacular display of capitalist vultures picking apart artificially de-valued public properties and enterprises with zero regard for the citizens dependent upon them. This was done swiftly and brutally, resulting in widespread destabilization of the economy with waves of massive unemployment, poverty, and general disempowerment of the proletariat.
