I have a friend who is by all accounts very socialist but was absolutely horrified when I claimed that the USSR was not “bad” and that many of the deaths it is blamed for have a much more complicated reason. They also called me a tankie, much to my despair as it really displayed to me how many brainworms they have. They also were fairly close to calling me a genocide denier 💀
This person is a freshman in college and I’d like to try and help them unlearn these ideas. They are queer and Canadian,and they also thought Vaush was great if that’s helpful at all. Does anyone have any accessible resources to help them unlearn what they’ve been taught about the USSR?
they also thought Vaush was great
sounds like they won’t be willing to read anything you give them. probably a lost cause unless they wanted to understand where you were coming from instead of calling you a “tankie” … which at this point is just an anti-communist slur, and has no relation to its historical development. Sounds like your friend is an anticommunist “leftist” … you could try Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti, but I doubt your friend wants to learn. Might be best just to stand your ground and let them come to you at some point if they want to understand reality vs. the bourgeois narrative of history
I doubt your friend wants to learn
This is really what it comes down to: you have to be willing to question your brainworms to remove them, and most people aren't.
My idea for this is either:
- Start extremely small. If they talk about gommunism no food and breadlines, ask them when exactly this happened and then, if appropriate, show them the CIA document that says citizens of the U.S. and USSR ate about the same amount of calories in the 80s. If they talk about how Cuba is a commie dictatorship, ask them if it is today and then, if appropriate, show them a short article on Cuban elections. Don't focus on then being wrong -- they'll always have more talking points or can dismiss whatever you show them -- focus on how they are being sold a narrative, not actual history/events. They aren't ignorant, they're being lied to. This might get them to reassess more and more of their worldview. Or,
- Start them on media criticism through Citations Needed or Manufacturing Consent (I'd recommend that over Inventing Reality because it's substantially the same but has a recognizable author). This stuff is far enough from a realistic look at AES states that they won't outright reject it, and if they take to it it'll teach them to stop taking corporate media at face value. That's a huge first step when it comes to reassessing views on different countries.
They actually went for the big red Holodomor button, not even the little stuff people like to start off with yk?
But as a strategy I think just disproving the smallest myths might work? Since then I can set up the narrative that it was honestly a fairly normal country to live in and it wasn’t a hell scape, which I think is a good place to start? I’ll give Citations Needed a listen first tbh since I’ve never listened to it sadly- that way I can I give it to someone else as a genuine listener rather than just a thing to throw at them! Thanks for the advice comrade :)
Are they the sort that might be swayed by, say, the fact that even anti-communist historian Robert Conquest revised his opinion on the "Holodomor" after the release of the Soviet Archives and since then no longer believes it was a deliberate attack on Ukraine?
EDIT:
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
https://spme.org/spme-research/analysis/clemens-heni-the-prague-declaration-antisemitism-with-a-democratic-face/7822/
https://www.villagevoice.com/2020/11/21/in-search-of-a-soviet-holocaust/
Absolutely will look into In Search of a Soviet Holocaust! Thanks for the recommendation comrade!
They actually went for the big red Holodomor button, not even the little stuff
Unfortunately, Holomodor shit is basically in the mainstream historical narrative now (at least in the imperial core). Look at all the European countries issuing condemnations of it. Unless someone reads about the period in a university-level history class they're going to be susceptible to it.
They also called me a tankie...
they also thought Vaush was great...
I have to be honest, there is a reason your friend hates the USSR. They are not a socialist or really a leftist. They are a liberal.
If you are basing their leftism on the fact that they support "progressive" things like lgbtq and they think "the nordic countries are the ideal model." They are what Stalin considered the moderate wing of fascism. There is a lot more de-brainworming that needs done than you are suspecting.
Any person that uses the term "Tankie" as some kind of insult (I don't consider it one myself, I would wear it proudly) is not someone who has any sympathy to class consciousness or the leftist struggle. Which speaking of, if you want to start pointing them in the right direction, you need to start by building a sense of class consciousness within them.
How you do that will vary by person, but starting with intersectionality and the role that capital plays may be a good starting point for this person. Make sure they understand that the politicians they think are on their side :capitalist-woke: don't actually care about them and only virtue signal for their vote. From there, break it down on how many of the goals and ideals they want are something that existing political parties within a capitalist system will not tolerate. You need to really hammer home the idea that their goals are something they will never be allowed to vote for and explain why. Move forward from there... eventually introducing them to the communist manifesto if they are actually receptive to your talking points. Once you can get them broken out of the propaganda box their mind is in, they will be able to open their eyes to the absurdity of modern political discourse. It is all just swimming in the same right-wing pond.
Best of luck, but it sounds like you have an uphill battle. They may not realize things until they feel betrayal, or the squeeze of material conditions for them to realize the system is their enemy.
Yeah…I think I put too much faith in them :/ they’re a rad lib at best. But I might as well try right? I mean I’ll be a history teacher soon so im trying to think of it as a teachable moment.
It's always worth the effort as long as they are not hostile or going to give you stress.
I always remind myself that I used to be a total lib. While the reasoning may differ amongst people, what did it for me was the slow erosion the concept of a functioning society around me. I got into deeply believing that here in the US the Democrats were "the good guys" or something close to it. The key is paying attention, and not compromising on your goals. The 2020 primaries is what fully radicalized me when I saw just how insanely dirty the Democrats were willing to play to destroy Sanders. The most frustrating part of that timeline was how it seems most people didn't pay enough attention to what was happening because the Democrats showed their ass to me. I also found that friends who were on the left with me gave up on their ideals and goals just so they could feel like "winners".
I had reached a point where I saw that they were willing to lose to Republicans than side with leftists and from that point forward, the "propaganda box" I described started to crumble apart. I started to see both parties as two sides of the same coin, and when I decided to give the manifesto a look its what brought everything into focus. To me the Democrats are a fake opposition party, and liberalism is one of the most absurd ideologies in existence, that is willfully ignorant of the past and future in favor of maintaining the current evil that they see "as good as it could possibly get".
Today I feel surrounded by radlibs at work that consider themselves "radical". The hyper-individualism of identity politics is fueling liberalism into overdrive instead of funneling people into solidarity. Truthfully I don't know what will happen in the coming future but I am inclined to think that most Americans will not change or have a revelation because they are too comfortable and unwilling to fundamentally change things out of fear. They would rather slowly slide into oblivion, because at least that is a certainty, and changing course isn't.
He actually got converted by Vaush away from leftism and got completely re-programed. He got into leftism as a fad for himself and turned into a cowardly liberal later. He unlearned communist thought which just tells me he was an opportunist.
Him and I are not friends anymore for other reasons but his politics was a big one.
and they also thought Vaush was great
Step back, and start by explaining them they like to listen to a transphobic creep who harassed an autistic woman among lots of other creep stuff.
Then you can show them some Parenti or whatever content NOT from grifttube.
There's no need for them to ASAP think the USSR was "good" (ie not cartoonishly evil); the real goal is that they reject their default big mixture of liberalism/chauvinism/anglo-exceptionalism/anti-comunism.
If they manage to do so and they look at the USSR and say "shit, we were so close, if only amerikkka had imploded 50 years earlier", you won.
Be patient, be cordial, stand your ground but don't resort to irony and/or "big spoon" memes.
Understood! I just want them to rethink their liberal tendencies. I’ll definitely be bringing out some Parenti, since he seems easily digestible.
Not sure if they like Vaush now but it was something they said a few years ago and considering their tendencies I wouldn’t be surprised if they ate all his excuses about being autistic since they themselves are on the spectrum :/
A thousands time :this:. Try the Yellow Parenti video, or if they read, get them on Blackshirts and Reds. Parenti is the USSR-bad brain dewormer for people who are moving left and have hit a wall of where to go after they realize the libs aren't left enough for them but "Communism bad."
Blackshirts and Reds should be required reading for this individual, it’s practically tailor made for them
Given how easily this person resorted to namecalling I wouldn't necessarily go with the "patient explaining" approach because it communicates that the way they're treating you is okay. I would call that out and tell them thay I'm gonna restrict my willingness to talk to them until they find a better way to handle their ignorance when talking to me. I would also not consider them a comrade - their knee-jerk response to historical fact in support of AES was to melt down and start namecalling. No comrade of mine acts that way. That's a liberal that wants a leftist aesthetic (not surprising they're a :funny-clown-hammer: fan) and you should treat them as such.
Anyways, if they eventually apologize or respect the fact that you know shit they don't, I'll also say that Blackshirts and Reds is the one to go with for "baby's first anti-anticommunist book".
Yeah, you’re right, they aren’t a comrade, but they are at least someone I generally consider a friend and so while it’s probably a lost cause, I’d like to put the work in to educate them. I will probably start with discussing the fact that they were concerned I was a tankie, and, as someone in here said, ask them what that means to them and how it’s any different from old Red Scare propaganda.
As another person pointed out, it might be a lost cause. Maybe you could try to ask them how their views on "tankies" are meaningfully different to the image the Red Scare conjured up? If you get them to see they're falling victim to a new generation of the red scare their grandparents were subjected to, you might have a slim chance to get them to see the light. Just understand that for your voice of reason, there's also a hundred psychos saying the exact opposite, so as soon as you think you've made any progress they will go back and be bent back into shape.
lol if theyre at the point of calling you names id just call them a pedophile for liking :funny-clown-hammer:
Just wanted to say thanks for all of this guys! Absolutely going to be trying to use this info, since I’m sick of hiding the fact that I’m a communist tbh
Plus I might as well since the girl that I’m dating and I both wanna read more theory 👉👈
Show them the infamous yellow parenti lecture, you gotta start by undermining the western narrative they have swallowed before you start giving them the counter-narrative
Ok so I looked it up- I didn’t realize it was named after the fact that it looked and sounded like it was filmed in a Gatorade bottle- I wasn’t sure why it was called the yellow parenti lecture but this wasn’t my first guess LMAO
Here's the big bomb he drops, you might try sending your friend just this clip if you are worried they'd tune out listening to the entire lecture. Edit: It's only 1:05 in length
https://youtu.be/eoxT1UwTM3I
Your gatorade bottle line gave me a good laugh. And yeah somebody left the VHS tape out in a hot car or something lol, I'm just glad it somehow made it onto the internet. But that's why there's the meme of "yellow parenti" you might see get tossed around here.
Also available as a podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-yellow-speech/id1548405028?i=1000581342121
Thanks for the link, I haven't listened to the lecture for a hot minute and youtube burns my phone battery too fast to listen to it at work, it'll be fun to listen to it again in audio-only my next shift. Much appreciated.
For me it took several years. I learned several things about the USSR one by one that softened my opinion of it. I don't even remember what order I learned these things in, but here they are.
- the USSR had a lot of things that the Russian Federation and other post-soviet nations don't (like universal healthcare and free college).
- the USSR's collapse plunged a lot of people into poverty, and the opportunistic privatization that happened in the wake of that plunged even more people into poverty.
- Yeltsin shelled parliament and suppressed popular protests.
- polling data in the USSR showed that most citizens wanted to remain in the USSR at the time of its dissolution.
- the whole "Stalin and Hitler made a pact" mythology that the bourgeoisie like to push is bullshit. The USSR was the last nation, not the first, nor the only, to make a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and they were basically doing it to buy time and move all their critical military infrastructure and factories East to hold off operation barbarossa.
- the Winter War between USSR/Finland only happened because Finland didn't want to let the USSR purchase or trade land with them, so the USSR could better prepare themselves for Nazi Germany's invasion. Even though the USSR was offering more acres of land in exchange than they were hoping to buy from the Finnish in the first place. Also after the Winter War the Finnish immediately became patsies of the Nazis and gave them intelligence.
- the USSR only invaded (a by that point borderline fascist and highly uncooperative) Poland to create a bigger buffer zone between the USSR and the advancing nazis.
- gulags paid their prisoners and were more humane than the American prison system.
- 14 nations intervened in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the White movement, which to me proves the desperation of the international bourgeoisie to prevent the USSR from coming into existence in the first place.
- fascism was basically capitalism's immune system response to the soviet union continuing to exist, and the international bourgeoisie, especially England and America, played a huge role in re-militarizing Germany and helping the nazis during the interwar period.
- the USSR rejected the marshall plan because it would have forced them to privatize their economy and put them in debt to the USA. Not because they wanted to start the cold war for no reason.
- the USSR tried to join NATO in 1954 but wasn't allowed. Yet the year after that, West germany was allowed in, even though they had just got done doing the holocaust 10 years earlier.
- Churchill wanted to immediately re-arm nazis and use them to invade the Soviet union (operation unthinkable) but this idea was scrapped thankfully.
- Operation paperclip and Operation bloodstone are way way way worse than operation Doviakhim, despite people trying to pretend they're mirror images of each other. the USSR kidnapped several hundred low-level German scientists and engineers and used their expertise to help rebuild after WW2. Meanwhile the USA took several high ranking nazi war criminals like Adolf Heusinger and put them in the CIA, NASA, NATO, and the EU commission.
- the KGB never tried to spread socialist revolution around the world. it just kept spontaneously happening in all these different nations in the global south because the working class was fed up. However, the CIA did spread anti-communist counter revolution around the world. Yet the liberals want us to believe that the cold war was two sides, with perfectly symmetrical motivations.
- the USSR lost 20 million people fighting fascism while the USA basically waited as long as they could to enter the war while selling weapons to both sides.
- holodomor genocide is an anticommunist atrocity propaganda created and spread by nazi collaborators. Stalin was literally giving Ukraine and Bengal food aid during the 1930s, ironically when Churchill was doing his best to starve Bengal on purpose.
- if Stalin's homophobia and other problematic aspects of his legacy is supposed to make me ignore everything above and I'm supposed to be anti-communist on that reason alone, then why should I support the liberal democratic party of the USA, which has a record of upholding slavery before and during the civil war?
- way more stuff that isn't coming to mind right now.
It basically was a long process of unlearning a lot of "red fascism" mythology about the Soviet Union. Each time I unlearned something, I was less surprised. I went from going "wow I can't believe I'm defending the USSR against unfair slander." to "of course that was just another lie they told me. why would it have been anything else?"
It's hard to teach other people this stuff, especially because of the Russian/Ukrainian war and all the NATO propaganda surrounding that. Even before then, though, it was an uphill battle. Because people hear their whole life that the USSR was a starving hellhole ruled by despots and torturers and here comes some naive person (or treasonous commie psycho) telling them, no, here's a bunch of facts contrary to everything they know. It just makes me sound like a "Kremlin shill" or something in their minds. After all, how can the experts and reliable sources be wrong? People think that because you can trust the government not to lie to you about how many calories are in a serving of milk, that you can also trust them about state enemies. That's the mistake.
Very good comment, will be adding this to a list of talking points once I compile my lesson plan of sorts!
Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard
https://averdade.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Livro-28-DOUGLAS-TOTTLE-%E2%80%93-FOME-FRAUDE-E-FASCISMO.pdf
(too long to send your friend, but you could read it and take notes to share)Also, read the preface of the Years of Hunger
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=329819E9CE86B9AFB7B59DC3C3E3D796Oh also they think the Holodomor was real and there’s an equally brainwormed Finn in the group chat too.
Meh, explore canadian shenanigans. Like suppression of indigenous strike over pipeline, or 80s (70s?) strikes with trudeau daddy
If you're in college, you could justify being an annoying nerd and lecturing him about the circumstances behind the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which is where the term "tankie" originally came from. Probably pointless, but I don't know, I guess it depends on how invested you are and how miserable it becomes to talk to them.
Lmao I am not in college but I will be a highschool teacher so I’m trying to think of this person as a student and not an annoying reactionary friend lmao
Linking a social fascist to pravda.ru is basically selling them the rope. They'll feel so satisfied by calling it propaganda.
