If we’re being intellectually honest, we actually do have to hand it to Stalin that he did many good things. You’re proving the meme correct because I guarantee you don’t hold any other world-historical figure to the same standard.
We participate in good faith criticism of ourselves and each other all the time. Along with historical figures who share our views. We just don't abide bullshit statistics from made up sources that are pushed by organizations like the Victims of Communism to serve imperial interests and whitewash Nazi crimes.
What's your idea for addressing the problem of Russia's emerging petty bourgeois using anti-semitic violence to protect their power? I'm sure you have a good faith, reality based solution to offer.
I tried that but I still ended up with a general strike, conscripts beating their officers to death, and widespread mutinies in the navy. People keep whining about food and wages. I don't know what these people want. It's like nobody wants to work anymore. I'm thinking about printing more copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
So you see the way good faith interaction works is that it requires you don't start out with being an insufferable asshat. People like you keep coming in, say some smug cliché, respond with more smug clichés whenever users try to engage with you, and then finally you act indignant when people treat you like you treat others. Please learn what "self-crit" is and then do it.
Liberals don’t understand that everything they think they know about socialism and the USSR is just a handful of smug cliches. They don’t realize they are even doing it because they know so little about the subject
It’s never specified whether these purges are killings or incarcerations, or just being removed from their position or from the party.
There were periods of excess and mistakes when purging reactionary and treasonous elements in the military and party during a few periods of acute crisis, but a lot of those dudes were legit reactionaries and tsarist remnants as well.
Lots of good Bolsheviks did get got out of disagreements and power struggles and I think that’s a legitimate criticism and great tragedy, but when you talk about these injustices specifically - it’s much narrowed down compared to what figures Liberals throw out.
Try hundreds not millions or whatever, scale is way off
Lmao do you think we're democrats or something? We can critique political leaders whose ideology aligns with our own, that critique is just more substantial than saying "joe steel bad 100 gazillion" because, again, we're not american liberals.
I wish Stalin had been better on queer rights. Reinstating sodomy laws was shitty. I think he fucked up when he assumed fair play from the US and stopped supporting socialist movements internationally. I think it's sus as fuck that he kept urging Mao to work with the fascists, especially when later developments in Asia follow a pattern of the USSR being much too hands off. I get being harrowed by decades of war and capitalist siege, but that same experience should make him realise they couldn't get to the "rebuilding" phase until they were actually safe.
Lysenkoism was cringe as hell.
While the gulags were far better than the prison systems in the west, had a much lower recidivism rate, a higher rate of survivability, a better standard of living an so on, they were still incredibly horrendous. "Better than the west" is a bar that is so low it might as well be in hell.
I won't get banned for this because critiquing anyone is completely fine, as long as the critique is actually sound and you don't act like a jackass. Something that cannot be said for people like you. Saying "100 million stalin gulag" isn't "critique" it's propaganda and saying it like you do is also just annoying. From the way you interact with others it's clear you're dishonest and you look down on people who disagree with you.
edit: other bureaucrats are free to add more if they fear their own accounts getting hit with the mods comically large ban spoon for daring to critique our great leader
The point about Mao really got me. The nationalists betrayed and slaughtered the communists on multiple occasions because Chiang Kai-Shek was pissy that the workers liked them more. And every time someone asked the USSR for advice, they were like "just work it out, trust me" like ???
I think that significantly contributed to modern China's views on foreign interference and language about others meddling in their domestic affair. And the hundred years of colonial pillaging, of course.
Yeah the more I learn about the sino-soviet split the more annoyed I get. It kinda reeks of colonizer brainworms. Then the chinese got those brainworms wrt Cambodia and Afghanistan. I know it's more complicated than that and I'm being reductive as hell and it's just now something I'm only kind of learning about so I know my views can change again, but as I see it now, it gives me the vibes of "we need them to live in suffering for a few decades more until we're ready" (I heard blowback pod quote Molotov about "needing 5-65 years" and I've been looking for the quote ever since). I get that mentality, but it's kind of just reformism with more steps.
I do kinda get it though, it's easy to say I would've done otherwise after several million dead and the first opportunity for peace in several decades.
Yeah. I went back and listened to the afghanistan season right after and realising the chinese had worked with the US against the soviets there too was a real blow to the heart
Check this out: good faith criticism of Stalin coming from a Hexbear admin. We don't ban people or remove their comments just because we disagree with them. We wait til they start slinging slurs or say something so outrageously in bad faith that there's nothing worth continuing.
Letting Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria operate and purge without accountability or oversight were three major examples of wrongdoing.
While his motivations were anti-eugenicist in nature, Stalin's backing of Lysenko's Neo-Lamarckist agricultural programs were a huge misstep which negatively impacted food security in the socialist world for decades.
Okay, there's two I'm sure you'd agree with. Now it's your turn.
In order to agree with you they'd have to know wtf you're talking about, but since they're just browsing Wikipedia for random contextless facts of dubious validity motivated purely by vague "Stalin = Hitler" rhetoric that's been pre-baked into their brain, I don't think we can get that far.
uhhh but this isn't critique you're not acknowledgeing the billion people he killed you're just using big words to sound smart! where is the cirtique? just say he killed all ukrainians bet you cant because you cant criqitue stalln!
uj/ Until this thread I thought the meme about "discussing theory with liberals vs. discussing it with other leftists" was too self-congratulatory, but now I realise it's just facts.
Letting Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria operate and purge without accountability or oversight were three major examples of wrongdoing.
Under Beria arrests numbers fell down by 95% and executions by 99%. One of them is not like the others, and you should perhaps shed the popular but unfounded khrushchevism-montefiorism on this case.
You're totally correct and I apologize for the lack of clarity in my statement. Beria was absolutely a more measured and sensible man than the others, there's no denying that and you're absolutely correct that the numbers do corroborate the facts. He absolutely was smeared and was largely held responsible for Yezhov's crimes, rather than any he himself committed. The supposed evidence of his personal misdeeds was largely fabricated.
I still believe he was given far too much latitude to operate in his role without sufficient oversight. That he was far more restrained in his actions than his predecessors is a testament to his own more judicious nature, rather than an example of sufficient oversight of his role.
Basically, I mean to say that while he wasn't personally excessive in his actions, someone else in his position and with the same freedom to act indiscriminately may have continued to act as his predecessors did. A bullet dodged, rather than an example of appropriate harm reduction. Hopefully this makes more sense!
Grover Furr "Khrushchev Lied", while the book is mainly about Stalin, what originally prompted Furr to write it is he noticed that Khrushchev blatantly lied about Beria, decided to investigate entire speech and point after point he disproven entire speech (except one point he couldn't prove of disprove).
stalin did a lot of bad shit, and made many, many, mistakes.
i won't get banned for this because hexbear isn't the evil shithole that everyone over on lemmy.world makes it out to be. we can just recognize the successes and failures of past historical leaders.
Nukes are scary and at that point the soviets had been fighting since 1918 (at the earliest, before that they were imperial citizens in a war and before that they were doing civil war stuff I'm sure)
This is why it's every comrade's civic duty that, in the event that you are presented with a functioning time machine, you go back and let Stalin know that the US only had materials to build two nukes, and they'd just used both of them.
If you spend more time here you will find that good faith criticisms happen all the time. It just has to be both in good faith and coming from an educated perspective.
Popping into a thread to say, “yeah well have you considered Stalin Bad?” merely because someone mentioned a good thing about Stalin is cringe and annoying.
Yeah, I think most people do consider it considering we all steeped in the fucking Cold War propaganda in our formative years.
The more you learn about Stalin — even those periods which are the least flattering — the more sympathetic the picture becomes. I don’t think many MLs think he was literally Jesus, but a human who did far more good than bad; and a higher proportion of good, I might add, than any of his Western peers.
What the fuck do you think the concept of "critical support" means or implies, you ignorant cracker fuck oh my god what do they teach you settlers these days
Intellectual honesty is when you make vague unfounded claims and broad statements about moral values that are immediately contradictory to what you're doing in the very same moment. If you then get pissy when people aren't taking things seriously then you're being very intellectual
Clearly in relation to killing others, but you’re too dishonest to follow the comment chain.
If we’re being intellectually honest, we actually do have to hand it to Stalin that he did many good things. You’re proving the meme correct because I guarantee you don’t hold any other world-historical figure to the same standard.
I can admit he did some right.
Can you admit he did some wrong without your comment being deleted or you eventually banned?
We participate in good faith criticism of ourselves and each other all the time. Along with historical figures who share our views. We just don't abide bullshit statistics from made up sources that are pushed by organizations like the Victims of Communism to serve imperial interests and whitewash Nazi crimes.
Ahahaha
Good faith and hexbear, ahh what a joke.
Thanks for the laugh.
What's your idea for addressing the problem of Russia's emerging petty bourgeois using anti-semitic violence to protect their power? I'm sure you have a good faith, reality based solution to offer.
Have you considered light reform to the tax system?
I tried that but I still ended up with a general strike, conscripts beating their officers to death, and widespread mutinies in the navy. People keep whining about food and wages. I don't know what these people want. It's like nobody wants to work anymore. I'm thinking about printing more copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Shit, hate it when that happens. My book says you have to now ally with the actual fascists and let them seize power. Anything else would be illiberal
So you see the way good faith interaction works is that it requires you don't start out with being an insufferable asshat. People like you keep coming in, say some smug cliché, respond with more smug clichés whenever users try to engage with you, and then finally you act indignant when people treat you like you treat others. Please learn what "self-crit" is and then do it.
Liberals don’t understand that everything they think they know about socialism and the USSR is just a handful of smug cliches. They don’t realize they are even doing it because they know so little about the subject
Case in point
numero duo
It’s never specified whether these purges are killings or incarcerations, or just being removed from their position or from the party.
There were periods of excess and mistakes when purging reactionary and treasonous elements in the military and party during a few periods of acute crisis, but a lot of those dudes were legit reactionaries and tsarist remnants as well.
Lots of good Bolsheviks did get got out of disagreements and power struggles and I think that’s a legitimate criticism and great tragedy, but when you talk about these injustices specifically - it’s much narrowed down compared to what figures Liberals throw out.
Try hundreds not millions or whatever, scale is way off
well feel free to fuck off and never return then, nobody asked for your presence and we certainly don't appreciate it
Utterly boring.
Here you go liberal, from your favorite source!
Lmao do you think we're democrats or something? We can critique political leaders whose ideology aligns with our own, that critique is just more substantial than saying "joe steel bad 100 gazillion" because, again, we're not american liberals.
I wish Stalin had been better on queer rights. Reinstating sodomy laws was shitty. I think he fucked up when he assumed fair play from the US and stopped supporting socialist movements internationally. I think it's sus as fuck that he kept urging Mao to work with the fascists, especially when later developments in Asia follow a pattern of the USSR being much too hands off. I get being harrowed by decades of war and capitalist siege, but that same experience should make him realise they couldn't get to the "rebuilding" phase until they were actually safe.
Lysenkoism was cringe as hell.
While the gulags were far better than the prison systems in the west, had a much lower recidivism rate, a higher rate of survivability, a better standard of living an so on, they were still incredibly horrendous. "Better than the west" is a bar that is so low it might as well be in hell.
I won't get banned for this because critiquing anyone is completely fine, as long as the critique is actually sound and you don't act like a jackass. Something that cannot be said for people like you. Saying "100 million stalin gulag" isn't "critique" it's propaganda and saying it like you do is also just annoying. From the way you interact with others it's clear you're dishonest and you look down on people who disagree with you.
edit: other bureaucrats are free to add more if they fear their own accounts getting hit with the mods comically large ban spoon for daring to critique our great leader
The point about Mao really got me. The nationalists betrayed and slaughtered the communists on multiple occasions because Chiang Kai-Shek was pissy that the workers liked them more. And every time someone asked the USSR for advice, they were like "just work it out, trust me" like ???
I think that significantly contributed to modern China's views on foreign interference and language about others meddling in their domestic affair. And the hundred years of colonial pillaging, of course.
Yeah the more I learn about the sino-soviet split the more annoyed I get. It kinda reeks of colonizer brainworms. Then the chinese got those brainworms wrt Cambodia and Afghanistan. I know it's more complicated than that and I'm being reductive as hell and it's just now something I'm only kind of learning about so I know my views can change again, but as I see it now, it gives me the vibes of "we need them to live in suffering for a few decades more until we're ready" (I heard blowback pod quote Molotov about "needing 5-65 years" and I've been looking for the quote ever since). I get that mentality, but it's kind of just reformism with more steps.
I do kinda get it though, it's easy to say I would've done otherwise after several million dead and the first opportunity for peace in several decades.
Blowback was kinda heartbreaking this year because the Chinese brain worms w/r/t Vietnam and the Soviets really caused harm in that region.
Yeah. I went back and listened to the afghanistan season right after and realising the chinese had worked with the US against the soviets there too was a real blow to the heart
Check this out: good faith criticism of Stalin coming from a Hexbear admin. We don't ban people or remove their comments just because we disagree with them. We wait til they start slinging slurs or say something so outrageously in bad faith that there's nothing worth continuing.
Letting Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria operate and purge without accountability or oversight were three major examples of wrongdoing.
While his motivations were anti-eugenicist in nature, Stalin's backing of Lysenko's Neo-Lamarckist agricultural programs were a huge misstep which negatively impacted food security in the socialist world for decades.
Okay, there's two I'm sure you'd agree with. Now it's your turn.
In order to agree with you they'd have to know wtf you're talking about, but since they're just browsing Wikipedia for random contextless facts of dubious validity motivated purely by vague "Stalin = Hitler" rhetoric that's been pre-baked into their brain, I don't think we can get that far.
uhhh but this isn't critique you're not acknowledgeing the billion people he killed you're just using big words to sound smart! where is the cirtique? just say he killed all ukrainians bet you cant because you cant criqitue stalln!
uj/ Until this thread I thought the meme about "discussing theory with liberals vs. discussing it with other leftists" was too self-congratulatory, but now I realise it's just facts.
Under Beria arrests numbers fell down by 95% and executions by 99%. One of them is not like the others, and you should perhaps shed the popular but unfounded khrushchevism-montefiorism on this case.
You're totally correct and I apologize for the lack of clarity in my statement. Beria was absolutely a more measured and sensible man than the others, there's no denying that and you're absolutely correct that the numbers do corroborate the facts. He absolutely was smeared and was largely held responsible for Yezhov's crimes, rather than any he himself committed. The supposed evidence of his personal misdeeds was largely fabricated.
I still believe he was given far too much latitude to operate in his role without sufficient oversight. That he was far more restrained in his actions than his predecessors is a testament to his own more judicious nature, rather than an example of sufficient oversight of his role.
Basically, I mean to say that while he wasn't personally excessive in his actions, someone else in his position and with the same freedom to act indiscriminately may have continued to act as his predecessors did. A bullet dodged, rather than an example of appropriate harm reduction. Hopefully this makes more sense!
Yes, absolutely.
Got any good reading for my Beria-brainworms?
Grover Furr "Khrushchev Lied", while the book is mainly about Stalin, what originally prompted Furr to write it is he noticed that Khrushchev blatantly lied about Beria, decided to investigate entire speech and point after point he disproven entire speech (except one point he couldn't prove of disprove).
Very cool, thanks!
i'll step up to the plate, i guess.
stalin did a lot of bad shit, and made many, many, mistakes.
i won't get banned for this because hexbear isn't the evil shithole that everyone over on lemmy.world makes it out to be. we can just recognize the successes and failures of past historical leaders.
happy?
Nukes are scary and at that point the soviets had been fighting since 1918 (at the earliest, before that they were imperial citizens in a war and before that they were doing civil war stuff I'm sure)
This is why it's every comrade's civic duty that, in the event that you are presented with a functioning time machine, you go back and let Stalin know that the US only had materials to build two nukes, and they'd just used both of them.
Probably also give him some schematics for ICBMs and other stuff. Give him modern potatos, I'm sure they yield more. Also a refutal of Lysenkos bs
At that rate, probably throw in some bell hooks and Feinberg texts while we're at it
If you spend more time here you will find that good faith criticisms happen all the time. It just has to be both in good faith and coming from an educated perspective.
Popping into a thread to say, “yeah well have you considered Stalin Bad?” merely because someone mentioned a good thing about Stalin is cringe and annoying.
Yeah, I think most people do consider it considering we all steeped in the fucking Cold War propaganda in our formative years.
The more you learn about Stalin — even those periods which are the least flattering — the more sympathetic the picture becomes. I don’t think many MLs think he was literally Jesus, but a human who did far more good than bad; and a higher proportion of good, I might add, than any of his Western peers.
What the fuck do you think the concept of "critical support" means or implies, you ignorant cracker fuck oh my god what do they teach you settlers these days
What do you think he did right?
Intellectual honesty is when you make vague unfounded claims and broad statements about moral values that are immediately contradictory to what you're doing in the very same moment. If you then get pissy when people aren't taking things seriously then you're being very intellectual