Anti-commiism is pro-fascism. There is no middle ground.
There is always something in the middle. These extremes are dividing people
What’s in the middle is just fascism with extra steps. You’re either on the side of people or you’re on the side of wealth. There isn’t a third option.
People are already divided into the exploiting and the exploited class. They can only choose which one of them they side with.
No in times of revolution you pick a side.
It’s just anti-communist propaganda.
It was terrible! Hordes of rampaging communists everywhere, leaving a trail of schools and hospitals in their wake.
It is scary, to capitalists.
The racism with the russian doll tops it off too.
Some people were so terrified of having apartments that they made up a guy and then got really mad that their made-up guy died.
It’s amusing to me how so many people hate communism in places that would have been wiped off the map by the nazis if it wasn’t for communist resistance.
They battered the nazis then built a shit load of housing for people to live in. Bastards!
We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it
That’s why a bunch of people were excited for the Soviets to come, because they were excited to be liberated from the Nazis! Now, the Soviets also sucked, so yeah, in fact they were bastards as well. Beating up the Nazis is good but doesn’t give you a free ticket for commuting horrific crimes. Building apartments is not really one of those crimes though. It’s really not so crazy to hate both Nazis and Soviets
It’s really not so crazy to hate both Nazis and Soviets
Putting the Soviets and Nazis on the same level is plainly ridiculous to the point that in many cases it constitutes a form of holocaust denial(or trivialisation).
This. Equating purges, holomodor whatever with the literal holocaust (that western leaders like Churchill were ignoring when first told of hitlers plans) is straight up a form of holocaust trivialization, to me it’s a form of holocaust denial. People don’t often equate the war crimes of the Japanese empire with the Nazis like they do with Soviets for some reason (that some reason being that Japan mainly carried out their crimes against China, also a socialist country at the time)
The term Holomodor was coined in the late 1980s by Banderite fascists for the specific purpose of equivalating the early 1930s famine with the Holocaust. That’s why one shouldn’t propagate the term’s usage.
Thanks. Idek how to spell it. I may be not be formally educated but I am American so I have an excuse
Hating two things is not the same as putting them at the same level, and I mean to do no such thing. I don’t think you would claim that hating a lesser evil in addition to a grater evil is an example of trivialisation.
What would make you hate a force for decolonization and workers’ rights?
The key error made by people in your position, and I know this because it used to be my position, is thinking that the foggy soup of tropes and cliches pounded into us from birth by western media in any way approaches a scientific or unbiased assessment of an entirely different way of organizing society and human life than the one whose propaganda we grew up immersed in (and whose existence has caused a mass extinction event).
The bane of my own habits.
Hating two things is not the same as putting them at the same level
True at the most basic level in the same vein of saying 2 things can be bad. Yes it is possible for 2 things to be bad but no one who ever says this ever means it in that way it is nothing but thought terminating cliche if not expanded upon. The same is true here leaving out the other major ideological power of the time leads the framing to the implication that it sits above the other 2 evils (who are then equatable in comparison).
and I mean to do no such thing
Even if you didn’t mean to the way you chose to frame your comment clearly implies some level of equation between the soviet nondescript horrific crimes and the Nazis in comparison the the capitalist powers who are absent from your comment.
I don’t think you would claim that hating a lesser evil in addition to a grater evil is an example of trivialisation.
Again on a base level this is true but in the framing of your comment there is clearly a level of equation (even if unintentional).
no one who ever says this ever means it in that way
I enjoy how my very existence is counter-proof, but I do appreciate that you we’re exaggerating and I shouldn’t interpret you quite that literally.
I get that you call it thought-terminating, I understand that you would want a more detailed explanation from me, and sorry for not bothering to give one. My goal is not to argue with you, you have not convinced me that I have equated the two and I am not ready to spend the time to convince you of the opposite, I just want to say that I don’t identify with the accusation.
What “horrific crimes” did the soviets commit? Free healthcare and education? You’re making it seem like they were equivalent to the Nazis.
What “horrific crimes” did the soviets commit?
Guaranteed housing. It genocided the landlords.
I’m not sure if my phrasing was unclear or if that many people actually consider hating two things with equating them. Either way, I did not mean to equate them, just to state the reasonability of hating both!
The horrific crime at the top of my mind when writing my comment was the Katyn massacre.
Katyn is interesting because the method of execution was widespread among the Nazis and unheard of among the soviets, NKVD included, and that German ammo was found on the gravesite, with manufacturing dates indicating that the soviets could not have committed the massacre. The Nazis “find” the site and then the narrative crops up that the soviets committed it, but the evidence found points to the Nazis.
Personally, I can’t think hating the first worker state is reasonable, especially not in the same breath as one of the most extremely genocidal bourgeois dictatorships in history. Even if the Soviets were responsible for Katyn, there is still such a wide gulf between the two. The Soviets were ultimately a progressive force around the world.
Thinking, for no reason, about the Wikipedia page for the Korean War where it says that massacres were committed by both sides. As evidence for this, it cited some DPRK killing at a hospital during the war (~100 dead) with the Bodo League Massacre carried out by the South Korean dictatorship that kicked off the war in the first place (~60,000-200,000 dead).
But you know, the smart thing to do is to hate both sides for their violent ways.
Liberal false consciousness is fucking pernicious.
Not to mention the Jeju Island Massacre and the later Gwangju Massacre. The workers in the ROK have what they do manage to have despite the chaebol and US semi-colonization through incredibly bloody resistance struggles and militant trade unionism. The DPRK already won much of that simply by not being in the colonized half of Korea.
I’m well aware of the disagreements about who’s responsible, my impression was very much that the evidence points towards the Soviets, but I won’t pretend to be knowledgeable enough to argue it with you.
Excuse me for bringing up both the Nazis and the Soviets in the same breath, I’m sure you see how follows from the premise of the original meme. I don’t want to downplay any progressive effects on the world that the Soviets have, for me good simply does not cancel out evil but coexists confusingly alongside it. The Soviets have done enough bad for me to hate the whole even if there’s plenty of good in there, and I don’t blame other people or nationals of invaded countries for doing the same.
my impression was very much that the evidence points towards the Soviets
This is actually a common misconception that is maintained and spread for obvious reasons. The “official” version relies on everyone already accepting it as true and proceeding from there.
The reality is that there is EXACTLY ZERO evidence that Soviets did it and all evidence is compatible or strongly suggests German guilt. All the “evidence” the proponents of Soviet guilt cite is either circular citations or proven forgeries.
You can read an exhaustive analysis of all relevant evidence here:
The book is structured such that Chapter 1 already presents the full argument, then the next few chapters scrutinize the unimpeachable evidence in detail, and then the next few present some secondary and confirmatory evidence.
It’s not about good and evil, it’s about what class benefitted. There’s no such thing as “good” or “evil,” that’s not how the locomotive of history moves forward. Instead, history progresses alongside the class struggle. The reason I defend the Soviet Union, and so many socialists do as well, is because it is the first socialist state where workers became the new ruling class. I don’t pretend the Soviet Union was perfect, but I don’t hide my intention to support the working classes taking control the way the soviets did.
Put simply, the Soviet Union made the lives of their own workers and peasants much better, and supported national liberation movements the world over as well.
It’s really not so crazy to hate both Nazis and Soviets
HORSESHOE THEORY LET’S GO BABYYYYYYYY
Oh now it makes sense why they push horseshoe theory so much!
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The terror of having needs met!
What if they build buildings so fast that they construct their way over the border in the middle of the night and come over here and grief me?
I am trembling and quaking in my boots every day waking up in this place I live in, knowing that the evil filthy authoritarian oppressive communism built it. I do not have the freedom of forking over thousands to a private landlord!
is the museum being sarcastic ?
not really, czechia has even banned communism in some sort, they are heavily anti communist countries.
Anti-capitalism being made straight up illegal. Grotesque.
Anticommunism: Ideas so good, they’re mandatory
Is one those tourist trap museums like the Bansky one that are in every city in Europe?
If you want to see how free housing could be terrifying, read Manna by the late great Marshall Brain.
Or maybe you could just tell me the thrust of your point instead of instructing me to read an entire book?
It’s called making an allusion or reference. Summaries are easy enough to look up if you don’t want to put in the time to read the whole thing. But honestly, it’s something anyone should read. It’s one of the few novels I’ve read that I can truly describe as prophetic.
I don’t need a lecture, apparently you’re not aware that when you recommend something to somebody, you should at least give them a vague idea of what the subject matter is and why they should be reading it.
But for the lazy:
spoiler
The novel explores the effects of mass automation on society. And unlike some sci fi novel set in a far distant future, it’s set in the present. This isn’t the Bulterian Jihad a thousand years in the future. It’s set in the here and now in our world.
In Manna, the machines don’t rise up and take over the world. Paperclip maximizers don’t run out of control and kill everyone. AI alignment isn’t even a problem considered in the novel. The novel explores the societal effects of the tech working completely as designed.
Automation gets deployed more and more. What jobs remain become increasingly dehumanized. Increasingly jobs are just literally being a meat robot for the computer. When working at a place like McDonalds, you put on a headset. The restaurant’s computer system tracks you through the day, micromanaging your time down to the second. It tracks every minor work action you perform. This starts in restaurants and customer service, but ultimately grows out from there to nearly all wage and salary jobs. This novel was written in the 2000s, but it predicted a lot of the algorithmic debasement we’ve seen with companies like Uber, Lyft, and Amazon and the slopification of jobs such as programming. Jobs also become more and more scarce, and the credit rating system becomes ever more onerous and interconnected. Pretty soon almost every employer is sharing the same employment records. If you get fired too many times, the central system blackballs you and you become unemployable.
This mass automation results in the vast majority of the population of the US being rendered destitute. Either to avoid rebellion or out of some limited sense of morals, the ownership class comes up with a solution. We don’t get UBI. We get fully automated
luxurycommunism.The same automation that impoverished the populace also makes it very cheap to construct mass-produced buildings. The federal government scoops up vast swathes of empty land in places like Western Kansas and the Nevada desert. This is where the surplus population is warehoused. The government uses automated construction to build giant high rise complexes hundreds of miles from any work opportunities or population centers. They’re basically giant dorms in the middle of nowhere. You have a simple space with a bed, desk, and entertainment. You live with a roommate. You eat in a communal cafeteria. The buildings are maintained, the interiors cleaned, and the food all prepared through automated systems. These aren’t prisons per say. The people in them aren’t being punished. They’re simply being stored somewhere where they won’t bother the wealthy. Imagine a vast building the size of a city’s downtown and many stories tall. A single building capable of housing millions in a vast windowless labyrinth. This is the reality for most of the population. You get a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, a nutritionally sufficient diet and unlimited access to tv, video games, etc. Bread and circuses on a mass scale.
And moving to one of these facilities is not voluntary. If you lose your job, you have a short window to find another, demonstrate some other source of income or independent wealth, or be ticketed and arrested for vagrancy. The old vagrancy laws are brought back in force, and the vast majority of the population ends up being dumped into these facilities.
Once there, escape is nearly impossible. There are no walls or armed guards. But the only real way out is to have someone on the outside come and sign paperwork saying they’re willing to support you financially. You’re allowed to walk out the door and meander the trails around the buildings. But if you wander too far, a sentry robot comes up and starts giving you vague warnings about it being dangerous to go further. Keep going and you’ll find yourself knocked out by a tranquilizer dart and wake up back in your dorm room. And there’s no real way to apply for work. The few people with jobs on offer aren’t looking for people trapped in these facilities. Unless you have some caring financially independent relative willing to take you in, you’re trapped in the government dorms forever.
The novel describes how this was a deliberate choice to manage the excess population. The characters mention that the facilities are built tightly enough and isolated enough that if the destitute in these complexes ever rose up in rebellion, the government could just drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on them. They could completely eliminate the excess population in an hour with no collateral damage to anything else. Individual dorms are sex-segregated, and those couples that do still manage to form report that any attempts at having children are unsuccessful. They conclude that birth control drugs must be in the food or water.
In Manna, automation finally forces the US to build a proper welfare state. But automation also makes it possible to do so cheaply. And the US has never been known for its compassionate treatment of the destitute. The government doesn’t leave everyone to starve. It just warehouses everyone, keeps them from reproducing, and lets the problem solve itself in time. You never have to fear physical deprivation. You will not starve or die of exposure. But you lose absolutely any bit of control or agency over your own life. The government isn’t supporting you. It’s storing you somewhere out of the way where you can’t cause any trouble.
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For the people who these houses were built for, absolute poverty, devastation, and squalor preceded mass-produced housing. World War II was incredibly devastating in Europe, leaving millions without a home at all. The communists took on the enormous task of meeting this monumental need, and did so enormously well.
For the unhoused, a solid apartment with basic necessities and the ability to keep out the rain and cold is often the difference between life and death. Communists saved millions of lives.
I think broadly, the life-saving and pro-human efforts are simultaneously so important to our cause as communists but also difficult to articulate. A death statistic is easy; you just count the bodies. A life statistic is harder. There’s rising life expectancies and lowered child mortality, but fundamentally it’s really difficult to find people and point them out and say “in the alternate timeline where communists weren’t there, this person would be dead.”
One example that’s really clear, for instance, is communism’s opposition to fascism. Without this opposition, Eastern Europe, China, and likely the rest of the world would have been enslaved/genocide by the nazis and imperial Japan, at least for an extended period. The USSR’s opposition to nazism was so life-saving that Western Europe almost went communist, if not for the Marshall Plan. But this one is very transparent. Pointing out the importance of having an apartment vs being homeless from war and poverty, as you have highlighted, are all much subtler.
Yep! Like you said, the death statistics are, even if often manipulated, fairly easy to see. What’s far more difficult to elaborate on is the impact of housing, of free healthcare. There’s also the quality of life improvements, like free education and mass literacy programs. Literate people take literacy for granted, the sheer way life opens up with the written word is not to be made light of, and sometimes literacy rates multiplied by as much as ten times in some regions of the USSR.
Nazi.world at it again
Show much freedom thanks to Reagan… 🙄
we have neocons on lemmy now?
Okay how this account is no banned yet?
I don’t think people got Your sarcasm.
I thought it was obvious sarcasm as well until I read their followup comments
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are you talking about USA and ICE? but they dont have free housing there
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good and evil is a childs way to infer the world.
And yeah communists mostly killed reactionaries, landlords, nazis, etc
Do you think good and evil are meaningful explanations for the outcomes of societies, or do you think the underlying mode of production and distribution is a better indicator of who prospers and who suffers in a given society?
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That doesn’t answer my question. What decides who prospers and who suffers? Good and evil, or the way a society produces and distributes?
In the socialist bloc, the lives of the working classes, the industrial workers and peasants, were enormously uplifted. Like the example above, housing was a high priority for socialist states, who used a mass housing campaign on a scale unprecedented in history. Life expectancy in Russia doubled in the span of a couple decades from the low 30s. Literacy rates also skyrocketed to 99.9%, when in some regions native languages weren’t even alphabetized. All of these are examples of the gains of socialism.
If the workers generally won out, who suffered as compared to before? The aristocracy, nobility, landlords, and capitalists did. On an unprecedented scale, their prior places of privledge were ruthlessly attacked, their armies killed, and those who resisted were rather mercilessly gunned down. Their property was appropriated for the new ruling class, the working class.
My point here is that societies are not good or evil. What determines who benefits most in society is largely what class dominates society and runs it in their own interest. The socialist countries are exceptional not because they are morally just, but because the ruling class for the first time in history was also the majority of society, rather than a tiny minority.
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I am not arguing from a position of a supernatural good and evil, but from the simple basis that I support the working classes, who form the broad majority. The Czech Republic, with the rest of the socialist bloc, represented the working classes, while the US supports a tiny number of imperialist capitalists above all else.
As for copy-paste, I did no such thing. I’ll own up to it being propaganda, in that I am nakedly a communist trying to convince people of the necessity to move on to socialism, but that doesn’t mean what I said is incorrect. You can read, I also believe you can answer my questions.
oh god, another englightened centrist who’s actually just a fucking nazi. where do these breed?
It’s you who are deciding what’s happening now in the USA is evil and what happened in the Czech Republic was good.
Firstly, the only way that you can claim that what was going on in Czechoslovakia was worse than what is going on now, is it you think that people in Czechoslovakia were treated worse than the people that NATO holds under colonial subjugation, invades, and genocides.
Secondly, let’s be honest, people in Czechoslovakia had some of the highest living standards on the planet. If you disagree, do please explain how much worse their lives were than, for example, those of the people forced to live in bantustans.
Not being allowed to plunder Africa and Asia is not suffering.
Do you think concocting a cartoonish strawman is very convincing for the people who are increasingly sympathetic to socialism and communism?
The problem is that it worked in the US for many decades. It’s the ghost of the capitalist powers fear mongering away to prevent citizens from taking control of their own labor.
Yep, which is why we have to organize!
