Oh come on. You already know what they're going to say.
“Whataboutism!”
‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024
‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970
“Whataboutism!”
Off the top of my head, unambiguously neofascist video games include KZ Manager, Ethnic Cleansing, ZOG’s Nightmare (which the author made with an ‘FPS creator’), and the Angry Goy series. The market for explicitly neofascist video games is pretty small (at least for now), so, as you implied, it is rare for anybody to publish one.
invading poland side by side with the nazis
This would actually be a more accurate description of the Slovak Republic’s contribution to the Fascist invasion of Poland, though it is very rare to see anticommunists mention that even in passing. I wonder why. (Presumably they’d say that it is unimportant or uninteresting, of which—as I showed in my thread—it is neither.)
Why did I misread the title as ‘Lebensraum and the crumbling of American power’?
Yes, but I stopped updating the megathread because of the character limit. Seriously, I added so much content to the thread that our software couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve been thinking about using Github as an alternative, though I am inexperienced with that platform and I am unsure if others would want me to continue my compilation there.
Something tells me that if I invited anticommunists to check out a source with the self‐heroizing title of ‘RFvsMisinfo’, featuring a blood‐splattered photograph from the Munich conference and various sentences presupposing that any counterevidence is ‘Western propaganda’, they would feel more than a wee discouraged, too… just saying.
Sloppy propaganda aside, it is genuinely interesting to compare and contrast the Fascists’ dealings with other dictatorships of the bourgeoisie to their dealings with the people’s republics. It isn’t useful just for dunking on anticommies. For example:
And since somebody mentioned deportations of Jews:
Admittedly, I feel like a sicko for saying that these subjects ‘interest’ me… but hey, somebody has to get their hands dirty when studying these tragedies. It’s only fitting that the one doing the job most often would also be the one who can tolerate it the best.
An organization that bombastically calls itself ‘EUvsDisinfo’, splatters a diplomatic photograph with fake blood, and preemptively dismisses counterevidence as ‘pro‐Kremlin disinformation’ does not sound like something that has an interest in exploring this matter in good faith, but I can play along (for now). Simply put, your source leaves too much counterevidence unaddressed. This, for example:
The discussion in London took place on 24 April. Halifax also backed unilateral declarations. ‘A tri-partite pact on the lines proposed, would make war inevitable. On the other hand, he thought that it was only fair to assume that if we rejected Russia’s proposals, Russia would sulk.’ And then Halifax made this comment, almost as an afterthought: ‘There was… always the bare possibility that a refusal of Russia’s offer might even throw her into Germany’s arms.’⁸⁰ Was anyone listening? If you asked the British and French everyman’s opinion, war was already inevitable.
[…]
The failures of the previous five years to obtain agreements on collective security led Molotov to want to pin the French and British to the wall to make sure they would not leave the Soviet Union in the lurch against the Wehrmacht. This was not Soviet paranoia, it was Soviet experience. Would not any prudent diplomat in the same position, after years of being spurned, mistrust interlocutors like Chamberlain and Bonnet? Maiskii’s reports appear to have encouraged the Soviet government to invest in continued negotiations. The obduracy in Moscow derived from doubts about British and French intentions which Maiskii and Surits could not overcome, and that for good reason.
I know that I did not address everything in your link, but frankly I really doubt that you have the time, patience, or interest in reading a thoroughly sourced and exhaustive commentary on it. For simplicity’s sake I chose to focus on the denial that the liberal capitalists wanted a reinvasion of Soviet Eurasia.
Among the atrocities committed by the Portuguese, it is possible to list the massacres in Xinavane, Mueda, Mucumbura, Wiriyamu, Chawole, Inhaminga, among others. University of Coimbra’s Documentation Center “25 de Abril” has a rich collection about what happened in Wiriyamu, with a hundred articles and newspaper clippings from the most diverse countries that participated in spreading information about the acts of the Portuguese in the region. On Saturday, December 16, 1972, Portuguese soldiers killed approximately 400 Mozambicans in Wiriyamu. Today, in the old village of Wiriyamu, there is a monument with the bones of the victims.
Furthermore, there is evidence published by Le Monde Diplomatique (1972) that two South African pilots were hired as mercenaries by Portugal, and carried out secret chemical warfare missions against nationalist fighters in northern Mozambique. The operation was aimed at destroying the crops that would feed FRELIMO guerrillas, using the substance 2,4‐D, Dichlorophenoxyacetic Acid, which was among those used by the U.S. in Vietnam and World War II.
(Source.)
As a complement to the concentrationary policy of interning the African populations in large villages, the military hierarchy would use, from 1971 onward, the desperate option of “cleanup” operations, already largely implemented in Northeast Mozambique and on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi. These were meant to eradicate villages, exterminating all their inhabitants and emptying the territory to block the path of the guerrillas.
By the end of 1972 the “cleanup” operations along the Zambezi, from Mucanha and Mucumbura to Inhaminga, started to prefigure a wider genocidal strategy. […] Soon […] the 6th Commando Group arrived in helicopters, surrounded Wiriyamu and entered it. The people were lined up, men in one group, women in another. For the most part they were then shot, but others were herded into houses which were set on fire, while some of the children were kicked to death and other individuals were murdered in various atrocious ways. […] At the same time, the rural areas were bombed, eventually with napalm, before the launching of “cleanup” operations to exterminate the remaining populations, supposedly in contact with the guerrillas.
And the Estado Novo’s colonies were all in Afrasia (not merely Africa as such).
It really bums me out seeing somebody deny that the Iberian parafascists engaged in white supremacist violence. I am guessing that that is a product of the Portuguese education system rather than a conscious distortion, but still it really depresses me. It’s like nobody cares that the Iberian parafascists massacred Afrasians.
Why are you always posting propaganda from all of these obviously Russian‐backed sources?
Cut an anticommunist and an anticommunist bleeds?
Agreed. I know that the original poster isn’t siding with the Herzlians, but this is still in questionable taste.
Oh man, it’s been so long and I tried so many that I can’t possibly offer a certain answer… but a good candidate is JumpStart Preschool, which I (barely) remember playing on a Windows computer. Otherwise, it could have been The Busy World of Richard Scarry Busytown, Richard Scarry’s How Things Work in Busytown, Gus Goes to Cyberopolis, Fisher-Price Ready for School: Kindergarten, Fisher-Price Learning in Toyland, Fisher Price Great Adventures: Pirate Ship, or Nick Jr Play Math!
There are many more that I could name, like Oddballz, Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When it’s Dark Outside, Ozzie’s World, Sesame Street: Numbers, Mr. Potato Head Activity Pack, Play-Doh Creations, and Candy Land Adventure, but I am less sure of those. Finally, there are those titles that I simply can’t find again. There was a point‐and‐click program that mainly took place in a spaceship, and another one where a character said ‘I brush my teeth before I go to bed every night!’, but I’ll be damned if I can find videos of those.
I’m surprised that they made handhelds! I was always under the impression that Soviet video games were more like experimental curiosities than a visible industry. The situation was similar in the Anglosphere back in the 1950s and ’60s: there was not much of a market for them, so they were hard to find (unless you were a computer scientist).
Tut‐tut, I see that Clinton’s electoral failure in spite of winning the popular vote hasn’t moved somebody’s faith in the pseudodemocracy. Let’s briefly review the circumstances, shall we?
Starting with the national elections of 2000:
- Democrats have received more popular votes in 4 out of the past 5 presidential elections, yet only gained office 2 times. Despite winning the popular vote only once in the past 5 elections, a Republican has taken office 3 times.
- Democrats have received 24 million more votes for Senate than Republicans, yet have held a majority in the Senate in only 3 out of the last 9 sessions, while Republicans have had a majority in 4 out of the past 9 sessions.
- Democrats have received over 500,000 more votes for seats in the House of Representatives, yet have held a majority in that body for only 3 out of the past 9 sessions, while Republicans have held a majority in 6 of those sessions.
(Source and more evidence here.)
Trust me, an overglorified public opinion poll isn’t going to stop neofascism should the ruling class deem its institutionalization necessary. The Fascists ascended to power in the Kingdom of Italy and the Weimar Republic in spite of their want of votes.
It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.
Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.
The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.
— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262
When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.
This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.
— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145
@freagle@lemmygrad.ml and others are ‘simping’ for the USSR because that is the price that you have to pay for capitalism’s structural defects: it leaves us, the lower classes, in such destitute positions that we have nothing to lose by seeking alternatives.
It’s funny that you should mention that, because the main reason that I educated others on the subject was that I saw a Polish anticommunist trivializing the Fascist occupation just to make the Communists look worse.
https://lemmy.ml/post/14133689
I have never seen any outspoken anticommunists make an effort to properly educate others on the Fascist occupation. You just mention the ‘splitting of Poland’ over and over again like that’s good in its own right and we’ll automatically download all of the details from that fact alone. This isn’t how education works.
Apart from driving over and crushing their victims, the practice that earned the Blackshirts notoriety in Italy during Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s had been the killing of opponents by dragging them to their death. Given the numerous lorries available to them in Addis Ababa, both from the military and the [Fascist] government transport company, it was perhaps inevitable that they would use the same method during the massacre of Addis Ababa.
Kirubel Beshah, an Ethiopian witness who had been a student at the Teferi Mekonnin School and who after Liberation would teach mathematics there, reported, ‘Ethiopian blood flowed like water everywhere. Saddest of all was that at first they tied dead bodies to the back of their trucks, and pulled them along the road while shouting and singing, but later, they also started to tie the living to their trucks, so as not to waste bullets. It was very disturbing to see human bodies being torn to pieces alive, by stones and bushes.’²⁹
(Emphasis added. Source.)
In my experience, anticommunists tend to be pretty terrible at managing time. There were many German anticommunists in the 1940s who thought that the G.P.U. still existed.