Redistributing food so that the poor don't starve during a recurring famine is not genocide :monke-rage:

Letting the poor starve so that a handful of kulaks can gouge the dying poor IS genocide

:ukkkraine: :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:

https://archive.ph/eI9AF

  • Redbolshevik2 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Westerners don't believe this stuff because they're poor misled people, brainwashed by the all powerful media. They believe this stuff because they're racists who believe they live in a superior civilization, and find it plausible when they hear that someone Over There murdered a kajillion people for no reason. It's only natural, they don't have superior Western Values Over There.

    You can see this chauvinism shining like a beacon on every baby leftist in the West. At first, they're likely to believe that the West is straight-up morally superior to all of its enemies. If they manage to push past this stage (the vast majority don't), they're almost certainly going to get mired in a second stage: "Well sure the West has done a lot of terrible things, but that's just how it is everywhere." The chauvinism runs so deep that, being confronted with the abject horror that is the true face of their civilization, they would rather project that outward onto everyone than face the reality.

    The moral outrage they feign when you push back on this stuff is not because it "sounds like Holocaust denial" or whatever, it's because questioning it is a direct assault on them and the moral superiority of Glorious Western Civilzation.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      This is why Masses, Elites, and Rebels is a must-read.

      Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

      • Redbolshevik2 [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah I've basically spent the last half year reckoning with the implications of that essay.