The Soviet Union had some high end treat production issues, but it was also a place where the granddaughter of a serf could holiday in a jet aircraft and sip pina coladas on a beach resort while taking a break from her high energy physics degree. All free or close to it.
I genuinely cannot distinguish between liberal yankees earnestly trying form a thought out of our shitty education and actual leftists telling a joke. Like, I could see myself writing something like this as a teenager. Maybe not something this dumb, but similar.
As an Old, reading this is giving me one of those "our schools have really failed us" feelings.
Not a bug, but a feature. "The USSR was when everyone had to share the same spoon, but Big Mean Stalin got the biggest spoon", is exactly what 90s education taught kids.
Incidentally, one of the reasons that period of history was so much of a Cool Zone stemmed from the endless "Shit they didn't tell you in high school" bizarre revelations you could pull out of the era. Its easy to just get your brain lodged in 30s/40s/50s era history because so much shit was happening at the dawn of global industrialization.
“World War 2 started because Hitler and Stalin were best buddies and wanted to split up the world together, and they only started fighting cause they were both too evil to even get along” was literally what I was taught in high school
I didn't even learn about it. It was a shock to learn that they invaded Poland together. Huge swathes of WWII simply never entered my consciousness. It went something like this (see if you can list all the untruths):
Hitler took Czechoslovakia because the Czechs were ok with appeasement. They found out that it didn't work. Stupid idiots.
Hitler then took Poland because Polacks were morons and charged tanks with cavalry.
Hitler then took France because the French were too weak and demoralized to fight.
Then there was the great victory at Dunkirk!
Then the great victory of the Battle of Britain.
Then the USSR was invaded, but no idea why. When I became an adult and started studying the whole war, this was one of the big unanswered questions. It looked like Hitler had Europe wrapped up, why would he do something stupid like this? (Hint: the entire point of the war was for the Germans to seize the food- and energy-producing areas of the USSR.)
Then, Stalingrad was a great loss, but how I was fuzzy on.
Somewhere in here the French resistance, which was made up of artists, writers, and an attractive woman. Absolutely no violent rednecks who provoked reprisals AT ALL.
Then, D-Day, the most momentous thing that ever happened in American history! Basically, the war started June 6, 1944.
USA USA USA
Then Germany fell, and Patton should have taken Berlin but was stopped by the cowards in command.
The end.
No, really, that was it. That's what I knew for a long time.
I guess I was lucky. I had a very conservative World History teacher in 10th grade who went to great lengths to explain what the Russians had experienced for the decades leading up to WW2.
My history teachers were a series of a business owner, a slumlord, and then a former law clerk with a hard-on for Sam Alito.
TBF there is a certain own of libertarians in pointing out that they’d have no issue with the USSR if the Soviets had purchased all the capital in Russia rather than gaining it via revolution.
The gang coincidentally inherits controlling shares in the 6 largest corporations while on an ecstacy binge.
Those people take pride in their ignorance, it's amazing
Again, history has been re-written. The Soviet Union was once well-respected as a world power by people in the west, then fucking Reagan happened. Just fucking look at how people in the 60s viewed who defeated hitler. Agony agony hell world
"Look, I know this, I'm a middle-aged white man who has never been challenged on my views (the views that i dare to inform others about anyway)."like "boomer" being "white" is also a state of mind, I've found.
There is a kernel of truth here. One of the more important results from Capital is that capitalism actually furnishes the conditions for its own replacement precisely through the tendency for monopolies to form. These monopolies take over industries or even entire economic sectors. The elimination of competition and the resulting internal organization is none other than a planned economy, and the reduction to just a few owners actually makes revolution easier as all that would need to happen is the formal change in ownership from private to public hands.
Radhika Desai talks about it at 36:45 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlQfmjLd978&t=36m44s
the reduction to just a few owners actually makes revolution easier
It’s also what makes the downwardly mobile petit bourgeoisie a well-primed vector for fascism. Their immediate class interest is not not be proletarianized, which can only be achieved by unseating the shrinking number of CapTAiNs oF InDusTRy and redistributing their power amongst themselves. And of course, their class solidarity is fickle and quickly collapses without a clear enemy to focus on, which is also why fascism tends to burn through scapegoats and escalate to genocide.
Gentlemen please let me share with you the latest results of my mind palace experimentation
