I was debating with a lib who argued that Lenin was a murderer and kept talking about how 200,000 people died in the Red Terror. I responded by saying you could say the same thing about the founding fathers, after all, all those civilians wouldn't have died if some rich landowners just payed their taxes.
Anyway, how do you guys respond to liberals when they shit their pants about stuff like this?
Yes :yes-sicko:
Serious answer is the October rev was about as bloodless a coup as you’re ever going to see. It was the counter revolution and civil war that led to all the deaths. If the reactionaries just went along with it, none of that would have happened.
In Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain wrote
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Ask them how many people died to the brutal Czarist regime. Ask them how many Jews were killed in pogroms, spurred on by the Czar printing "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Ask them if they know that the revolution started when the Czar ordered troops to fire on a Women's Day march. Ask them how many lives would be worth securing a world without that.
If I've been unable to avoid engaging with a lib, then I personally like to attack the farce that liberals call peace
We're just a peaceful, freedom-loving nation, founded on genocides, which now cages the greatest portion of its people in the world and still defends handing its healthcare capacity to the most brazen exploitation scheme in the world. We force tons of vulnerable people to sleep outside despite having more than enough housing for them already finished, and then we send pigs to knock down the shelters they make for themselves
And I'm supposed to believe that we were on the right side of the cold war?
I can't stand people who reject Marxism because they don't like the idea of "class conflict" and they'll say things like "yeah but there are good billionaires and bad poor people". OK, whatever, you're still just in denial of reality. Because the class war is going on all around you all the time, and it has nothing to do with individuals. The rich as a class are using their wealth and power to gain more wealth and power at the expense of workers. It's as obvious as any other scientific fact. But libs don't want to see that conflict, probably in no small part because they're not the ones who bear the brunt of it (assuming we're talking about well-off libs in the global north, I mean).
I've had conversations that go like this:
Me: "Humans are part of the natural world, right?"
Lib: "Right."
Me: "And the natural world can be scientifically understood, right?"
Lib: "Right."
Me: "And so humans can also be scientifically understood, right? Like, medical science has made massive advances in the last hundred years, for example?"
Lib: "Right."
Me: "And so human societies can also be scientifically understood, right?"
Lib: "Wrong. Humans are too complicated to understand like that."
Me: "Because black holes are simple in comparison to human societies?"
One conversation I had like this veered into millions of people dying in the USSR, but I was ready. I said that these deaths took place after the devastation of the Russian Civil War, after the USSR was invaded by the USA and other imperial powers (liberals never, ever, ever know about this), and that later on even the CIA admitted that Soviets generally ate better than Americans. I could have thrown in that the Holodomor is Nazi propaganda, but it wasn't necessary—the lib I was talking with recognized quickly that I knew a lot more about this than he did. Libs are fundamentally disadvantaged here because, aside from a surface-level disapproval of all things communist, they don't want to know more about it. After all, if they actually read about this shit, they might start to realize that they themselves are the enemies of modern history!
They also get super angry if you say things like: gravity can be understood, evolution can be understood, human society can also be understood. They just don't want to talk about it, at which point I inform them to get in touch with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Then I realize that a much better communist wouldn't bother with these kinds of arguments and would have instead liberated twenty american cities by now.
Libs are fundamentally disadvantaged here because, aside from a surface-level disapproval of all things communist, they don’t want to know more about it. After all, if they actually read about this shit, they might start to realize that they themselves are the enemies of modern history!
a key point and well made
Yeah the trump card we have is that we know the history better than pretty much anyone else we will ever come across.
You say that 200,000 dead is an atrocity because he should have killed twice as many.
Don't debate libs unless you can make them look stupid, or if you know that there's a chance of reaching someone else who's watching.
Or if they're someone you have to deal with regularly, push the hardest line you can without making them completely shut you out. Even if they don't accept it, and they probably won't, you'll still be undermining their worldview and normalizing actual leftist positions, to say nothing of the effect that simply being told something over and over has on memories.
In my experience, the strongest rhetorical focus is on just random mundane shit like the Soviet entertainment industry or the different organizational experiments that China carried out at the local level over the 50s and 60s, because for a lot of people their entire understanding of bad country comes from pop culture propaganda and liberal histories of a few leaders, beyond that they're not seen as real places with real people that did real things and actually had lives. To your average lib the USSR is just like a fucking photograph of an apartment building in winter tiled over and over while a schoolteacher voice talks about how it was bad and unfree and everyone was sad because they didn't have TacoDonalds crispy mountain dew burgeritos and nintendo and got sent to live underground if they complained, so anything that conveys the fact that it was not, in fact, a fucking cartoon dystopia helps break down their conditioning.
My experience too. Because no one who actually believes the atrocity propaganda believes it after careful study of the facts. They wanna hate communism so they accept the 100 billion number and aren't going to listen to anything you say otherwise.
reminds me of this passage
The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.
from https://redsails.org/false-witnesses/
I think that's the purpose of the propaganda push for "communism killed 100 million" during the cold war. Convince Americans communists will kill X number of people, then you're justified in killing X-1 to stop them.
Most of us started in this despicable state. Something breaks open that psychic prison, or we wouldn’t have this forum at all.
I shatter my teeth, do a John Oliver impersonation, and present them with a bunch of communist atrocities then say "I lied! It was actually the US armed forces that committed this massacre. This is a communist atrocity," then I just rinse and repeat
Then when they start whining about whataboutism I just ask why they don't want the US to be destroyed just like communist countries if both of them commit the same atrocities
I have said to people I know that yeah, the Terror was problematic but overall Stalin "killed" less people than LBJ or Eisenhower, just to name two off the top off my head. At that point people just get incredulous and don't want to talk about it anymore.
The advanced lib response to this is to say “that is neither here nor there” or “whataboutism.”
whataboutism as if you can criticise any system in a way other than in comparison. When liberals criticise communism they implicitly are saying capitalism is better
You left out the starvation of Afghanistan, which he has total authority to stop, even now. 1 million children projected to starve because he decided to give the $8 billion to the 9/11 families (THEY WERE FUCKING FINANCE WORKERS; THEIR FAMILIES WERE NOT AND ARE NOT FUCKING POOR).
Holy shit let's go brandon. Fucking absolute monster and the way libs will defend his every breath is sickening to me.
don't forget to count unborn children under Biden's regime. I don't mean abortion, but add those, too.
yeah but they sort of drown you out in volume of made up sources then accuse you of genocide denial
There is no difference between good and bad things. Violence is violence, regardless of it's a slave rising up, or a slave owner keeping slaves down.
This is a non-serious answer.
Just throw their own dumb deflections back at them: "Never let perfect be the enemy of good"
with the Wikipedia artikle on astocity propaganda .
:cereal1: tf u talking about there's no wikipedia article on---
:cereal2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda
from the intro:
According to Paul Linebarger, atrocity propaganda leads to real atrocities, as it incites the enemy into committing more atrocities, and, by heating up passions, it increases the chances of one's own side committing atrocities, in revenge for the ones reported in propaganda.[5]
I can't put my finger on it but this take feels reddit brained and NATO-pilled, anyone else want to weigh in and help me work thru it?
I'm imagining "Accusing China of killing 200 million people at Tianamen Square made them actually go on to kill 200 billion people later" type shit, it just feels very much like accusing countries of acting like individuals which falls into great man theory quickly
Accusing China of killing 200 million people at Tianamen Square made them actually go on to kill 200 billion people later
I interpreted it as:
Accusing China of killing 200 million people at Tianamen Square made the the United States actually go on to kill 200 billion people later.
but after re-reading several times I think it actually says both.
