I’ve spent the last few years devouring Soviet history. Books, papers, blog posts, podcasts, all of it. I can’t get enough. Not to brag, but I do feel as though I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding about the USSR, its history, and eventual collapse. But I’ve also put the work in.
And yet, whenever I engage people I know IRL or online, I’m amazed by how doggedly people will defend what they just inherently “know”: that the Soviet Union was an evil totalitarian authority dictatorship that killed 100 million of its own people and eventually collapsed because communism never works. None of these people (at least the people I know IRL) have learned anything about Soviet history beyond maybe a couple days of lectures and a textbook chapter in high school history classes. Like, I get that this is the narrative that nearly every American holds in their heads. The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
This isn’t about me, I’m just sharing my experience with this. I’m just amazed at how Americans will be completely ignorant about a topic (not just the USSR) but will be utterly convinced their views on that topic are correct, despite their own lack of investigation into that topic. This is the same country where tens of millions of people think dinosaurs and humans walked around together and will not listen to what any “scientist” has to say about it, after all.
Thanks, was scrolling to see if someone had posted this yet or if it was my job
authored by Chinese students and scholars
who are all based in the west, i checked
I'm trying to be unbiased here.
as a side note, there's no such thing as unbiased. everyone is shaped by their class background and material conditions
ignoring the class character of those sources will wind up with an unexamined bias towards a bourgeois viewpoint, however international
Critiquing China from the left is ok. And what that looks like is acknowledging that there is racism present in China and there are marginalized groups who aren't being treated fairly. That needs to change, just like it needs to change in nearly every other country in the world. Marginalization of minorities remains a global problem, and China could be doing more.
BUT, there is little credible evidence to suggest that minorities in China are worse off than minorities in the US, or Scandinavia, or Japan, or Isreal, etc etc etc. In some respects, they may even be better off.
So yeah, it would be totally reasonable to take, say, an anarchist perspective, and criticize China as part of a broader concern about power structures. Criticism that paints China as "evil" is not criticism from the left and is, intentionally or otherwise, buying into Western anti-China propaganda.
let's be specific about what your claims are, marginalized is an incredibly low bar to clear when the US has been pushing lies about extermination camps
https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/xinjiang
It seems like a double standard to say that China may be indirectly marginalizing people, but at least it isn't operating extermination camps
The accusation is that they are operating extermination camps, though. That is the claim of various media and government-affiliated organizations in the west. That's what we're responding to.
I think there's some confusion that because we push back so strongly against red scare nonsense regarding China that we have no criticisms of the country.
This is not true. We do, it's the "critical" part of critical support. But in the context of the most deranged militaristic country in the world warmongering constantly the choice of when you voice those criticisms is very important. If you're not careful those criticisms actually strengthen the hegemonic conception that China is an evil enemy to be defeated at all cost.
So the issue myself and others here have isn’t that Uighurs may face discrimination, marginalization, etc. They might, I will admit I don’t know enough to comment one way or another.
The thing is, “marginalization” is most definitely NOT the narrative going on in western media. It is that China is specifically engaging in genocide and forced labor camps. Both of these claims are patently untrue with zero evidence; and even Michele Bachelet’s UN commission agreed on this.
That is the narrative we push back on here.
Can you or any liberal institution you know of point to an instance where America resolved the issue of organized terrorist attacks in a region without the use of invasion, drone strikes, and black sites? By all means, please tell us how you think China should have solved this issue instead.
I wouldn't say it's marginalization so much as it is being born into poor economic standing with limited upwards mobility, if that makes sense? China does try with it's affirmative action policies, but it's pretty hard to overcome when you're a visible minority and generally born in poorer provinces simply by demographic distribution.
americans are some of the only people in the world who genuinely believe their country's founding myths
Do they really know that stuff, though?
If they were truly aware, they’d tear down that evil fucking monstrosity and rebuild something better.
Like, that shit was worse than Nazi Germany. And no one even suggests doing the bare minimum and tearing up the constitution and demolishing the government?
I suggest they “know” of it, but are purposefully kept from actually examining what any of that really means and how it relates to their lives.
Like, that shit was worse than Nazi Germany
The only difference between Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum is that the former was successful
All of that stuff is still happening today and burying it as “in the past” is EXACTLY what I mean when I say it’s unexamined.
Let this sink in. The US is what you’d get if Nazi Germany stood for 250 years. The corrupt fascist heart still beats at the center, and it drives every decision this country makes.
It is NOT in the past.
Hitler grew up reading Karl May’s American western novels for young people, which featured tales of taming the “Wild West” through “Indian wars.” He also regularly re-read them into adulthood, even recommending them to his generals as sources of creative ideas. Writing in “Mein Kampf” in the 1920s, Hitler praised the way the “Aryan” America conquered “its own continent” by clearing the “soil” of “natives” to make room for more “racially pure” settlers and lay the foundation for its economic self-sufficiency and growing global power. Indeed, the concept of Lebensraum was coined and popularized by Friedrich Razel, who said his theory of colonization and racial replacement drew inspiration from the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” and its identification of “colonization of the Great West” as central to American history and identity.
Once the Nazis gained power in Germany, Kakel details how the American West became an “obsession” for Hitler and his closest followers, such as SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Their goal was to remake the demographics of Europe the same way the United States remade the demographics of North America. The Nazi leadership routinely referred to Eastern Europe as “the German East” or the “Wild East,” and its inhabitants as “Indians.” Admiring how the United States had “gunned down the millions of removed to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage,” Hitler spoke of his intention to similarly “Germanize” the east “by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as removed.” Echoing American justifications for westward settlement, he stated, “It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” His answer? “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America.” For Hitler, “Our Mississippi must be the Volga.”
As in the American case, Hitler used threats of war and then war itself to gain territory in the east. Then regular army troops, paramilitary units called “Einsatzgruppen,” and collaborating locals began killing, terrorizing and expelling inhabitants considered racially inferior. A “Hunger Plan” envisioned mass starvation, mainly of Slavs. Meanwhile, the SS drew up plans to expel all European Jews to a massive Judenreservat, or “Jewish reservation,” either in Madagascar (once British control of the sea lanes was defeated) or Siberia (once the Soviet Union was defeated). Most were expected to die of disease and starvation.
After the invasion of Poland, Germany quickly annexed part of the country and began the process of moving in ethnic German and other sufficiently “Aryan” settlers. Nazi propaganda showed photos of German colonists departing in covered wagons and described the lands to the east as the “California of Europe.” German newspapers featured headlines such as “Go East, Young Man!” — an imitation of Horace Greeley’s famous advice to American settlers to seek their fortune in the west. As for resistance by those being conquered, killed and cleared? Hitler compared it to “the struggle in North America against the Red Indians.” After all, he said, “who remembers the Red Indians?”
If Hitler had been successful in Eastern Europe, leaders and politicians today would be talking about them the same way we talk about American native groups. "Sure, what a tragedy it is, but that's all in the past now! We had to ensure that civilization and order spread across the region! There were some unfortunate casualties, but the number of graves show that it was relatively minimal, and those camps were merely for labor, not extermination! Look, how about we do a minute of silence out of remembrance of the people who used to stand where we're building this next mall? That's good enough, right?"
America is the prototypical example of a fascist state that won. "But they aren't doing that anymore!" No shit, most of them are dead. And, as Awoo states below, the government still is oppressing what remains of indigeneous communities.
Ever heard of colonialism and slavery? Amerikkka is founded in genocide and evil. Or was that not "blatant" enough for you?
Nazis blatantly and directly oppressed, captured , and murdered large swaths of people.
Where do you think they learned their tactics? They got the idea of their concentration camps from the US reservation system, a system that still exists and still operates much like concentration camps, in an ongoing genocide on the people who's land you are talking about were not all "wiped out" they are still here and the genocide is still happening.
Is this true? Césaire claims that Nazism grew more out of European colonial practices
For example, many meetings where I am start with an acknowledgment that the land we're on once belonged to a particular tribe of people who were wiped out.
A land acknowledgement isn't shit if it isn't backed by any action. It means jack shit to acknowledge that one is on stolen land and then do nothing to give the land back to those it was stolen from.
All it does is let white libs feel a little better about themselves for five minutes, and then wash their hands of any of the true consequences and outcomes of the genocide that gave them this land.
none of that is happening anymore
I think some indigenous peoples would disagree.
Forced relocation, residential schools, starvation, contaminated blankets, bounties and U.S. Cavalry troops may have been replaced by police shootings, incarceration, desecration of reserve lands, foster care, lack of infrastructure and services, and poverty as the tools of ethnic cleansing, but I argue the genocide continues today.
They're the smallest racial group at just 8 percent of the population but are the most likely to be killed by police at 1.9 percent of all police killings. They are also incarcerated at a rate 38% higher than the national average and victims of violent crime at more than double the rate of all other citizens, with 88 percent of those crimes being committed against women by non-indigenous peoples. Young people are 30 percent more likely than whites to be referred to juvenile court than have charges dropped, and children are removed from their homes by state social service agencies at a far higher rate than other children.
Obviously you probably know all of this so I'm writing it for the benefit of others. I don't think you gain at all by accepting the narrative that they've stopped. Changing methods doesn't mean it stopped. You're entitled to think otherwise but I really don't think you should soften your language on it, you lose out by doing so and you absolutely deserve better.
but there is absolutely not a genocide of native Americans happening today.
congrats on shacking up with a well off native from a well off native family, but their experience is not universal to their people nor is it universal to all the nations in the US. there is no chance you are operating in good faith by extrapolating one person's claimed experience into the reality of indigenous life in the US today.
i have worked with and developed friendships with individuals and families on the largest reservation (by size and population) in the US. young men, younger than me, were physically abused in school by their white public school teachers for speaking their native language and told it was the devil's language. in the fucking 2000s.
none of that gets into the absolute disregard for missing and murdered native women by settler law enforcement. or the ongoing resource theft of settler governments prevent natives from their water rights.
so yes, it is happening today.
The thing is, none of that is happening anymore
Racial slavery continues in the US prison system. Native Americans on reservations live in abominable conditions under US occupation and have their land and territorial rights regularly violated. Their treaties remain broken. Abortion rights are rolling backwards. The government in place almost exclusively benefits property owning white men.
You're expressing exactly the mindset we're criticizing in this thread.
The belief that "this is all in the past" is a key part of what was the dominant propaganda strategy for a long time (as opposed to the current push towards complete denialism): instead of completely denying the horrors of the past they gloss over them and teach about how this or that event "ended" them. The end result is people come out of high school with this idea of a horrible past that's still heavily whitewashed, believing they've learned the truth when they just got a watered down and sanitized version of it (which still manages to be horrific), and believing this all to be in the past.
Entire decades of cruelty and horror get turned into single sentences like "this gave way to the sharecropping system and its problems," with no elaboration on what those problems were or that it was ongoing up into the middle of the 20th century. Things like the coup and seizure of Hawaii by American mercenaries and marines get garbled into nonsense in textbooks. The century of pogroms and systematic exclusion and terror against PoC following the end of chattel slavery is glossed over or omitted completely, as is the way the enslavement of prisoners who were then leased to private interests quickly emerged as a way to continue the systems of the antebellum south.
And when the sanitized and content light horrors of the past are taught, every step of the way they take pains to make them seem more distant: horrors that persisted up through the 20th century get pushed back into the late 19th instead, the legal end of American apartheid is some distant and historic thing instead of something that happened in living memory and that much of the ruling class were already adults for, if it's mentioned at all forced sterilizations and mass ethnic cleansing are things that last happened in the 50s when both are alive and well with ICE and its concentration camp system.
In short, what people are taught in schools is little more than "things were bad, like definitely real bad and not good, as I'm sure you know. No I will not elaborate and besides that's all done with anyways, now moving on..."
none of that is happening anymore
coerced sterilization still happens to ndn people (& black people) across turtle island. blood quantum is a deliberately genocidal policy that the feds and their compradors maintain to this day in many (most?) recognized indigenous groups. gtfo with this settler-apologist bullshit
Hawaii is still being occupied, it didn't just go away
yeah I had another reply to this shithead where.I felt like I should've mentioned Hawaii, PR, Guam, Samoa, etc. etc.
the gall of these white supremacists. Thank you for your posting service comrade
That's a blatantly incorrect generalization. Americans know that the early settlers stole land, killed natives, owned slaves, spread disease, oppressed women, and set up a government to benefit land owning white men.
I'm afraid that's far from where the mythology ends. There were 14 presidents before Washington under the government of the Articles of Confederation, we don't talk about them because we might question circumstances under which that government was ended, which was basically a Federalist coup in response to an Agrarian Uprising and a cash grab by the rich. We don't talk about why Georgia was founded as a white's only state, why the Declaration of Independence came suspiciously on the heels of a British Court case bringing into question the legality of slavery in British territories, or how the concept of whiteness was linked with freedom of religion back in the days of Bacon's Rebellion. Seriously, I just deleted like a whole other paragraph so I wouldn't swamp ya.
might wanna start here. Real History: Myths of the Founding Fathers (FULL) Michael Parenti - YouTube
Slavery is never even mentioned as being at all relevant to the American Revolution.
My US History class started with the revolution (no mention of anything more than a couple years before) and only started talking about slavery in the lead up to the civil war. You’d have thought it was something that only appeared after the revolution, they act as if it was a completely unrelated issue, even though it was one of the leading causes.
But if you teach kids in school “The US was founded to stop Britain from taking our slaves away” instead of “No taxation without representation” they want to burn the whole place down and start over.
Oh yeah, the way we we're taught about the American Revolution and that time period just erases like a general undercurrent of uprisings. We're taught what fulfills the narrative and everything else is left by the wayside. Even stuff we fess up to like Native American "relocation" is more like a limited hang out that lets them gloss over some of the more wild laws and one sided violence that was and still is perpetrated.
Does this mean the America’s revolution against England was never justified?
Probably not. I mean fuck monarchies and all that, but that myth of a righteous revolution is definitely bullshit. One of the big reasons behind the increase of taxation was to pay for the defense of the colonies against other European powers while the colonies themselves were trading with them. I don't think there was really any "good" guys among the players between the Brits and the rich Colonists.
fuck monarchies and all that
didn't the english bourgeois revolution happen like a century earlier too?
Yeah, somewhere around there. That's less outside my wheelhouse though. I'm still trying to unlearn all the US mythology I was taught as a kid.
why the Declaration of Independence came suspiciously on the heels of a British Court case bringing into question the legality of slavery in British territories,
Does this show up in the journals or correspondence of any of the founders?
So I'm not aware of it, but there's a lot I'm not aware of either. There was a growing clash that was brewing between the colonies and England. People of the colonies were largely seen as uncouth-ish because of their slave owning ways while also England was starting to have to rely on slaves in their armies in the Caribbean ( it think) that they would then free because the colonists were unreliable. And so there was a lot of back and forth going on at the time around ending slavery, some because it was seen as below the standing of the people of England, some just to piss off the colonists. Somerset's case led to a handful of copycats, but probably one of the biggest events around slavery leading up to that time period of the Declaration was Lord Dunmore's Proclamation.
In April 1775, John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore and Virginia’s royal governor, threatened to free slaves and reduce the capital, Williamsburg, to ashes if the colonists rebelled against British authority. In the months that followed, Dunmore’s position became increasingly desperate. His troop strength fell to just 300 men and, on June 8, fearful of being attacked, he abandoned the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg for the safety of a British ship.
On November 7, 1775, Dunmore issued a proclamation that established martial law and offered freedom to slaves who would leave patriotic owners and join the British army: "I do hereby farther declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty, to his Majesty’s crown and dignity."
I think one of the big things to remember about this time is that it's not like now where everything is happening at the speed of the internet, which people often forget. Communication wasn't nearly as fast so things had to occur at much longer time scale. We kinda fall into a weird way of looking at the past as a number of dates and not really think about how many events had to happen over a period of time for the build up of human interaction that lead to those events. A bit like libs with the Russian/Ukraine conflict only beginning when Russia invaded.
btw I got a lot of this from Gerald Horne's The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. It's an incredible read on uprisings of the enslaved and how it ties into the American Revolutionary period. He starts looking at things about 100 years before the declaration and covers so much stuff that school had never even touched. Interestingly enough it kinda pairs pretty well with the pirate show Black Sails because of the importance of the Caribbean uprisings.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The 13th Amendment, still in effect (and therefore defended) is the "I'm not racist, but..." of the US constitution.
I'm sorry, but arguing that the history of a country that was built around a mythology of manifest destiny and white supremacy is irrelevant to the country's current actions of white supremacy and manifest destiny is pretty silly.
But if you'd prefer something more relevant. There's always The Jakarta Method.
No one is going to defend slavery? Bruh slavery is still legal in the US. It was never outlawed. Slavery never ended.
pointing to things a country did hundreds of years ago as proof of why it is evil today.
k. let's just do the last 20 years.
the death of a million+ people in Iraq and Afghanistan. the destruction of the Libyan state and immiseration of the people there. the social murder of a million+ people (mostly old, poor and black) domestically due to letting covid rip to
make line go upsave the economy. the social murder of millions more internationally to protect bill gates's intellectual property. the social murder and immiseration of countless people every year by treating housing and health care as commodities. the bolivian coup & subsequent empowerment of fascists there that murdered tens of thousands. the school of americas-trained death squads running guatemala. the coup in honduras in 2009. the blockade on cuba & venezuela that's murdered probably close to a million (if 90s iraq is any analog) and immiserated countless more. the us-backed brazilian coup that empowered christofascists there to burn the amazon and do their own genocide there.and it's not like 1873 to 2003 was any different, so maybe get your head out of your ass
Lol, what? Have you talked to anyone from... literally anywhere else? Most people believe the founding stories of their country that they're taught in high school.
Can’t wait for my kid to ask “but what if the people voted for communism” in class
I forget the details but I swear I saw a poll once where a plurality of Americans thought that "communism" and "dictatorship" were synonyms, which goes a long way towards explaining why most people think that being a communist means being pro-dictator and anti-democracy.
I mean that was basically the entire bait and switch that cold war propaganda did. They absolutely recognized that framing it as a battle between communism and democracy was a much easier sell to people.
Most people don't even realize that the idea of the Cold War was invented by the US.
objectively the most propagandized population in human history
Americans with literally any topic. And in their minds the fact that it’s like the default opinion just reinforces that it must be true. Not even a moment of hesitation that maybe it’s the default opinion because we utterly despise teaching anything besides business and trades.
Most of us come out of college with barely any deep understanding of anything in history. Just a Wikipedia glossary full of stubs.
Someone already posted the brainwashing vs moral licensing essay so I just wanna add that if an American takes an anti-imperialist stance on their history, then they are grievously implicating themselves and everyone they know.
Because if the US hasn't been fighting for freedom all this time, then what does that say about Americans? What does that say about you?
Most Americans prefer to avoid the question and the associated introspection because their lives are distant enough and comfortable enough that they can. Also, everyone understands what resisting the US entails, whether they'll admit it or not, and know to keep their head down or else.
Literally going through this right now and having an existential crisis about it
I don't know how to reconcile all this
We are ruled by a dictatorship of the bourgeois. Their crimes are not yours.
It’s tough to disassociate ourselves from our country. I’m not sure how to do it. Even now I get this gag reflex when people from countries ravaged by the USA announce that they’d gladly commit unlimited genocide on the first world, no matter how much they deserve it.
Isn't it usually an institutional genocide (kill the leaders) sort of deal?
Want to hear something embarrassing? I never even knew who Lenin was until I was 17...and I had to Google it myself. And I was actually well above average in school. The American education system is a fuck and there's so much I had to learn on my own.
It's funny, the education system was engineered to make us workers, but employers don't even want to hire us anymore and would rather stick to piling on more work to the people already hired, leaving a generation stuck with dead end minimum wage jobs at best even if they have master's degrees.
No the horse was Trotsky. What's the word for how a horse walks? Trot.
Which is kind of changing as more millennials and gen-z are getting more okay with not just simply hating basically all forms of anti-capitalism. Even taking time to get some random information while on their phones/social media from folks that are pro-leftist. I now find it easier to point to Lenin without dealing with all the "he was evil and killed people" lines. Stalin and Mao are still hard given that they seem to be more directly brought up in media/classes as being at Hitler levels. While they both went with some bad options (some of which was based on being given those options by advisers with bad understanding of a topic at the time), they did see how important it was to get caught up to western industrial nations quick as fuck.
It is hard to get to real critiques of which things didn't work or were correct but maybe could have been done better based on what we know now. Because lots of people don't want to hear anything as it (to them) is like Holocaust denial based on the very very black and white way they are treated in history classes and media. Though even both of them are getting a bit more critical support by those millennials and gen-z folks that go deeper. Also helps that more formerly classified documents from the US intelligence agencies from those times are finally getting old enough to declassify and release them.
Even Cuba is becoming less of a automatic trigger for being seen as some "purely evil nation". Though it being so close geographically to the US means the hawks will keep trying to find ways to paint them as such. The anti-communist people that fled are the real thing allowing the US to keep up the blockade and sanctions that are literally only in place to torture the people of Cuba into overthrowing their government. Those anti-communist Cubans here are enough of a bloc to be able to scare most candidates for state and federal elections from saying anything positive. We saw how Bernie saying a simple truth about how literacy under communism went way up was treated like he said we should just let Cuba take over the US or something. His point was that education should matter more here beyond the very bad policies that claim to push education but actually make it about numbers and not about real learning.
And nobody knows that Lenin was actually sent to Russia by Kaiser William to destabilize the Czar (his first cousin, protege, and former best friend) with the intention of killing Lenin and retaking Russia for the monarchs after acheiving his goal.
Not that uncommon, honestly. Like other than a couple of pictures of his face made scary, what else do you find without researching on your own about soviets or Soviet history? Western history focus on a maligned Stalin because Lenin was more popular and less divisive in history, so the chain of effect goes in reverse, with Stalin bring the archetype of evil and Lenin being associated (but less presented). This chain also sometimes extends through Mao also. So knowing Mao and Stalin is normal but knowing Lenin (aside from associations to Stalin) takes work
Gee, it sure is boring around here.
Quick, throw me at the liberal headquaters and while they're distracted by the dirt and screeching you can strike while they're scrubbing all the floors in Hyrule
I'm ready
And half the time we do provide good citations, which they will scrutinize to death
Wrong. They will say "I ain't reading all that" and ignore it.
Evidence for your claims, but it comes from a sketchy source?
“Umm sweaty you are a genocide putler apologist how dare you question my infallible sources”
Evidence against your claims, and it comes from God himself?
“Clearly, the good lord above has been brainwashed by the CCP”
What libs are you running into that scrutinize sources?
“Umm sweaty the author is Chinese and therefore wrong and brainwashed. No I am not racist.”
Jordan Peepeeson scim-read the manifesto before the Zizek debate, and I say scim-read (mind you, this is a pamphlet) because JP here tried to be picky about Marx not taking into consideration certain things as if the manifesto is the only work of Marx where all communist thought is summed up. JP also wrote "A Conservative Manifesto" thinking he's the Anti-Marx or some shit, which... he probably is to be honest because Marx was incredibly well read compared to this grifter.
The fact that people believe this isn’t surprising. But what is a little surprising to me is that, when confronted with a challenge to that narrative from someone they know has always loved history and has bothered to learn more, they dig their heels in and insist they are right and I am wrong.
Nationalism. Their nationalist mindset forces them to have an automatic negative reaction to anything that challenges it. Because they believe that their nation are the good guys and anything else that their nation labels "the enemy" is the bad guys. When you challenge the state's narrative on the bad guys, which they have accepted as correct and good, you are also challenging their decades of nationalism and by extension their support for their nation makes it feel like a challenge against them as a good or bad person (for supporting the good or bad guys).
The method to successfully make people question these things is to first create massive negative feelings about the state, this opens them up to questioning their nationalism and leads them to a crossroads between two choices. One is the reactionary RETVRN ideology in which a person doubles down on the idea that nationalism is good but not for the current state, it must be removed and replaced with a state that will RETVRN it to greatness. The other is internationalist ideology, in which people reject nationalism and start viewing states from a larger distance as citizens of the world instead of citizens of their nation.
I'm a stuck record on this but time and time again it comes down to this.
In 1981, Americans thought the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire that would battle the US for eternity.
In 1991, Americans thought the USSR's collapse was inevitable and obvious while questioning only why it didn't happen sooner.
"Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable."
well, counterrevolution in this case
it's even worse with the descendants of euro-immigrants. I know a polish guy, gay, super liberal, who is absolutely convinced of the most bloodthirsty and reactionary narratives about the USSR because he's from a polish family, and his polish grandma would never lie. If I'm talking about any kind of effort to improve society somewhat
he will go full 
and say "socialism is a good idea in theory, but never in practice, I should know, I'm polish, and both hitler and stalin genocided my people." He's generally a kind and friendly person who has been helpful on numerous occasions in the decade I've known him, but the second we start talking politics the gloves come off. He has a STEM background and gets paid fairly good, so I especially don't care for the way he talks about working class people like they're all ignorant trumpers who just need to learn to code.The Soviet's doing Katyn narrative is a religious part of Polish anti-communism.
Did they not do it? I was under the impression that Katyn massacre was carried out by the Soviets and could be considered a war crime but that doesn't merit any comparison with what the Germans did and that drawing a false equivalence between them is basically Nazi apologia.
Eye witnesses report that the Germans did it. The rope used to bind their hands was not a type made or used in the USSR. And the bullets in the bodies were of a German caliber.
Germany reportedly captured a labor camp holding Polish officer POWs near Smolensk and executed these prisoners captured from the Soviets at Katyn in 1941.
Then in 1943 just as Germany was about to lose control of the area, none other than Goebbels reported they had discovered a mass grave of soviet victims at Katyn.
The polish government in exile chooses to believe Goebbels without evidence.
So what do we make then of the Soviets and Russians admitting later on that it was the NKVD? This is a blind spot for me but just scanning Wikipedia (I know) it seems like Gorbachev era USSR admitted to the killings being ordered by NKVD. What would their motivation be for saying that if it weren't true?
Because Gorby was all about 'admitting Soviet mistakes' which mostly meant accepting Western narratives (which were not accepted by mainstream Soviet Russian historians, and were incredibly controversial) with the idea of 'bridging the gap' between East and West. Like when you read Gorbachev, you get the idea that he was a liberal western-style communist, who saw inefficient parts of a system that did have aspects of Russian chauvinism and said, 'Well we can do better, look at those Nordic social democracies, let's transition to be more like them.' And then proceeded to unintentionally set the stage for the entire thing to get blown up by the vastly empowered criminal class.
Also, his entire legitimacy kinda rested on being reactionarily anti-Stalin.
Thanks. I'll have to look deeper into the whole thing but yall have given me some good points of consideration.
I mean, it's been awhile since I read his biography, so I don't think he was stupid, it was a symptom of both forced errors on Stalin's part, his whole 'man of steel' imagery is very powerful in Russia still. But it's really reflective of where Russian ideology around communism was at, one of constant struggle against alien forces not by.your own design, unrecognizable and strange. A never-coming promise. Communication or lack of it is a huge theme in late Soviet early Federation artwork. Idk, I should really get back into reading this stuff myself. Post about what you find!
Gorbachev “admitted” to it but this admission wasn’t based on archival records. Rather the evidence the admission was based on was of an “indirect” nature.
Gorbachev might have believed it to be true or maybe it was a political decision to demonstrate a clear break with the former USSR and a politically opportune gesture of goodwill to a neighboring country that was going through a nationalist moment of anti-soviet sentiment.
Whatever his motivation, he wasn’t speaking from personal knowledge or even archival records but from “indirect” evidence that he professed to believe.
That is true but doesn’t definitively answer who Goebbels thought was responsible. A diary entry from a few weeks later on May 8, 1943 states:
Unfortunately German munitions were found in the graves of Katyn. The question of how they got there needs clarification. It is either a case of munitions sold by us during the period of our friendly arrangement with the Soviet Russians, or of the Soviets themselves throwing these munitions into the graves. In any case it is essential that this incident be kept top secret. If it were to come to the knowledge of the enemy the whole Katyn affair would have to be dropped.
Who knows how reliable Goebbels’ narrative here is. But either way, he is not out-and-out admitting Germany did it. He implies the Soviets did it, but with German equipment.
They dug up the site a few years ago and only found German shell casings.
IPN love doing failed exhumations, like the one when they dug up polish PM (London govt) and general Sikorski, who died in plane crash in Gibraltar in 1943. I don't know what they expected to find, a bullet with Stalin autograph in his head? All they found is that he died because his plane crashed. USSR didn't even had any motive of killing him, it happened after he and his government started cooperation with USSR, his death hindered that since the rest of his govt were filled with indolent anticommunist. Funnily enough the only ones who did had motive to off him were his govt pals and Brits, and Brits still don't want to reveal their archive about the case.
Poles are obsessed with Russia, every Pole that has ever died must have been the victim of a secret Russian plot
Funniest excercise ever is observing polish TV mentioning Russian Empire. On one hand it's Russian, and the tsars really opressed Poles quite hard, but on the other hand they were deposed by the ultimate commie evil! So the one tsar which do get lauded is the worst one of them all, Bloody Nicky, and the social structure and 'reforms" of late empire gets romanticized as hell.
Here is a chapter dealing with the Katyn massacre from the book Blood Lies by Grover Furr.
The book itself is a point by point takedown of Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder (an anticommunist rewrite of history that tries to equivocate between Stalin and Hitler) mainly just by following the book's own sources and finding none of them substantiate any of the claims made. I do recommend reading the whole of Blood Lies, but it is pretty long and the Katyn chapter should give you some idea of just how falsified the anticommunist orthodox narrative on the USSR is.
Coincidentally I was looking into this book just yesterday to decide if I should read it. I probably will. What are your thoughts on its quality? From what I read it sounds like the jury is still out its accuracy, even though it is effective at negating the western consensus anti-Stalin narratives, since he draws from primary sources.
I personally haven't come across a specific reason to doubt Grover Furr's truthfulness, but I have seen people express pretty strong opinions on it (but then again, that's exactly what the anticommunist orthodoxy would demand). Of his works I've only read Blood Lies, but it's kind of a special case because it's debunking a specific book from the book's own sources. So, even if you completely ignore every point Furr elaborates on with 'outside' sources, it still tears the communism=fascism narrative to shreds, and makes the point while doing so that Bloodlands is basically the pinnacle of anticommunist historiography.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at it, but yes, the Soviets / Stalin were responsible for Katyn. It’s not good, but Stalin is obviously a complex figure.
it's literally central dogma. You cannot find, nowhere, absolutely nowhere in polish media and publication, any doubt about that or even information that such doubts exist elswhere. Expressing such will probably meant civil death of a person, though nobody dared yet.
It was my impression that the Soviets definitely did do it, but it was all military officers for a government that collaborated with Nazis so it wasn't necessarily that big of a misdeed, like how anticommunists weep over the pit
Shouldn’t a techbro know that personal anecdotes are not evidence?
We need to write a doctoral thesis and even then it’s not enough.
But when they’re talking about how USSR bad it’s all “my grandma told me her dentist told her his ex girlfriend told him her husband told her a cab driver told him another passenger told them that they once saw Stalin strangle a Polish child to death with his bare hands”
Mass media has huge influence on people, it is unbelievable in what they can convince ordinary citizens.
It is not only US or it's stance on USSR, it is still happening all over the world. You can study this effect in real time right now.
My own parents don't believe me anything until they hear it on TV. And will never believe me if TV is claiming opposite.
I just dropped idea of truth, there are just some (probably corporate) interests and easy to manipulate sheeple.
My parents are also absolutely certain that I'm the one lying to them.
It doesn't matter. They're old and whatever they think about something has no material impact. It's just annoying when you have to have a conversation premised on a bunch of bullshit with no recognition of competing class interests. It's the curse of being a communist. .
Good lord this is a familiar feeling to me - not just parents, but friends too. They may not say outright that I’m lying, but they do think I must be leaving out information or otherwise am trying to “trick” them into a position.
Most Americans can't fuckin read. Low comprehension and ability to understand what they read. Half the country can't read above a 6th grade level so they just parrot what the government and mass media has been telling them for years. Also, dunning kruger effect is part of it.
Most Americans can't fuckin read.
If fucking only. ForwardsFromGrandma would be far less pernicious if they couldn't.
Half the country can't read above a 6th grade level
The content 6th graders are expected to read has escalated dramatically from decade to decade. Americans have no problem ingesting large, often sophisticated, written narratives. Reading comprehension isn't the problem.
The problem is that much of what we're presented with is bullshit. Garbage in, garbage out.
Getting through the Bible cover-to-cover is hard work. Grasping the various mysteries and allegories and heavily dated metaphors is harder still. You can have a masterful understanding of Biblical literature, of history and interpretation and theological significance. So fucking what? You're still using a fairy tale as a first principle. A doctoral thesis in Angelology might involve ten thousand hours of research in a dozen dead languages. Who cares, when the subject matter is pure myth? What does it matter that I can finally convincingly answer the question "How many angels can dance in the head of a pin?"
Also, dunning kruger effect is part of it.
Its the blind leading the blind. I read a textbook by Larry Summers while earning my masters at the University of Chicago. I can talk circles around your lay Marxist. I can Do The Math that makes neoliberal theory plausible. I get a job teaching this theory to my students, in between speaking gigs at business events and interviews on talk shows. Everyone gets to receive my erudite understanding. No one can question my genius.
But when the foundation is made of turds, so what? What does reading comprehension help you with?
Literacy isn't just reading words and knowing what they mean, it's being able to evaluate contradictory claims and integrate knowledge.
That requires research and experimentation, which is very different than literacy.
You're illustrating my point. You've linked to an abstract on a metric referencing data you haven't seen and analysis you haven't evaluated. You've successfully comprehended the contents of the resource without evaluating its accuracy or logical consistency.
an @ in the username, and removed by mod? dang, im real surprised.
Next you'll be telling us that there's more to the DDR than what's contained in The Lives of Others!
Which books do you particularly recommend?
I really like The Soviet Century by Moshe Lewin. Anything by J Arch Getty. Trotsky’s history of the revolution is pretty great. Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote a good history of the revolution + years after too (she’s a good revisionist historian and was instrumental in pushing back against the Cold War idea that the Nazis and Soviets were the same… but she does kinda have some anti-communist brainworms sometimes). Carlos Martinez has a really nice multi-part mega essay on the collapse of the USSR on the Invent The Future website. I haven’t read Losurdo’s book on Stalin but I will soon.
And most of what I’ve cited above (Lewin, Getty, Fitzpatrick, at least) are from historians who have the respect of the academic history profession, not Soviet apologists or anything.
have you read anything by stephen kotkin? i heard that his biography of stalin was good so I read the first few chapters but didn't end up continuing (edit: not because I had any problem with the book, I just didnt think i wanted to commit to a 1000 page biography right now). I'd like to know something about stalin that isnt from american high school textbooks or internet memes.
I appreciate the recommendations, I'll look into them and add them to my list
Kotkin is okay. I say with an eye roll.
At least his first book is. I am too often miffed at how he bemoans the fates of the Whites or lionizes the antisemitic scum who were leadership figures of the whites while playing "those evil commies" bits here and there. But he'll at least say through grit teeth that the whites did at least (although reality is that they did worse that) as terrible shit as the Reds were forced to do under war communism.
His portrayal of Stalin and the Bolsheviks is unflattering but more faithful to reality than what you'd read from other bourgeoise historians in the same field. There's always minor details here and there that're in contention to whether or not it happened such as whether or not young Ioseb was actually "beaten like a dog by his father" or received what would be a normal amount of corporeal punishment from one's parents at the time and place. Of course there's the other claims of portrayal done by other writers who've made it their goal to make young ioseb be perceived as a young bandit lordling of the village children when in reality he was more a book nerd and a scholarly dweeb.
It would be best to read into any historical communist figure through multiple lenses composed of primary sources so as to better grasp what is most likely historical truth out of a vast web of ephemeral lies.
I appreciate the insight. The reason why I don't really want to like, just read primary sources is that I'm not a historian (and only have very limited Russian) so I don't think I really have the training to interpret disconnected primary sources into something reasonable.
I don't know a lick of Russian outside of insults, cheers before doing shots, and random words used in Bolshevik lingo, but I make do getting elbows deep in random parts of the Soviet archives I find because I'm that boring of a person that I'd enjoy reading meeting minutes of cranky old men arguing about procedures.
It's just about investing the time into studying which is a lot easier if it's something you enjoy doing.
I've not read it yet, but people around here were pretty excited about the recent official translation of Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend.
I'll look into it, thanks. Losurdo looks very interesting just from his wikipedia page.
Carlos Martinez has a really nice multi-part mega essay on the collapse of the USSR on the Invent The Future website.
If I'm thinking of the same thing, that was also compiled in book form in The End of the Beginning
