Okay, regardless of what political tendency you end up at, you really have to understand that none of those things are true. This is just a matter of history.
The USSR was not fascist, it was as far from fascism as any political system can possibly be. It was fundamentally anti-imperialist and was by far the most important actor in the defeat of European fascism in the 20th century, as well as in supporting national liberation movements across the world afterwards. Its collapse was devastating to workers’ and indigenous peoples’ rights globally.
Similarly, the USSR not only did not commit any genocides, not only was not antisemitic, but was essentially the only thing standing in the way of the total extermination of every single person from west Poland to Siberia by the German Nazis’ genocidal colonial expedition. Red Army prisoners of war were the first to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and Red Army soldiers liberated it and stopped the Holocaust. The idea that the USSR committed genocide, whether by ‘intentionally causing famine’ or by any other means you may have heard, is a lie that provably originated with Joseph Goebbels himself, and was amplified by the media empire of US fascist William Randolph Hearst.
If you want any books or articles to read about any of this then I’ll happily provide them, but understanding the real history of the first socialist nation is absolutely crucial to both understanding the world as it is now and imagining how it can be changed for the better in the future.
It doesn’t “make me feel better”, it’s the objective historical truth.
There is a true sequence of events that actually happened in real life. That sequence can only be determined by the evidence left behind, the collecting and interpreting of which is a painstaking and fallible process - but through rigorous investigation the true history of the world CAN be reconstructed.
However, if you’re not the one investigating, then you have to assess the reconstructions presented by those who do. What biases do they have? Who is funding their research? In what context have they chosen to present it? Who disagrees with them, what are their alternative conclusions, what is the difference in quality of evidence and analysis?
And so I have to ask you, how did you come to your understanding of history? How many books have you read? By who? What have you heard and where? Who was telling you? What evidence did they present?
WHY ARE YOU SO SURE YOU’RE RIGHT?
What evidence have you personally been presented that gives you absolute confidence in your worldview? I can show you why I believe what I believe about history, can you show me why you do? For western anticommunist leftists, the answer is usually “No”, because your understanding of the history of existing socialism has been carried over whole-cloth from your lifelong capitalist indoctrination.
If any of this jogs you into a realization that your historical understanding is not based on any kind of solid evidence or research, I’d be happy to recommend some sources. More than happy in fact, I’d be thrilled! Read! You have to read history! If you don’t, your attempts to change the world will fail! Would you try to build a house without reading about the properties of wood, steel and concrete? How can you try to build a movement to improve the world without investigating those who went before you? Do you think you can just ‘freestyle’ it?!
Anyway, I’ll leave one book here in case it piques your interest - Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti - which was crucial to developing my personal understanding of the actual place of the USSR in world history, as well as understanding the material basis of fascism in capitalist society and why it is the direst mortal enemy of communism. You can take my suggestion to read it or you can ignore it, but either way at least be honest and don’t lie to yourself about the sources of your beliefs.
Secondly, I hope you understand the different between the USSR and the Russian Federation, but regardless
Can you explain this image?https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7048d9a2-f0c1-441f-acbb-ee58ad1f3a4d.jpegAs in, is your understanding of the world able to generate an explanation for this image here? If I were to explain it, I would say: NATO-backed Nazis took over Ukraine in a violent coup, started persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Russian-speaking minority in the Donbas region leading to a civil war, which Russia begrudgingly joined - eight years late - on the morally correct side. Russia tried de-escalating for nearly a decade, and even once the war started in earnest it could have ended just two months later in April 2022, but Zelensky tore up a peace deal on the orders of the west leading to the pointless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians - all in the name of being able to kill Ukrainian Russian-speakers. As a kicker: Zelensky’s mother tongue is Russian, he learned Ukrainian later.
The “”“problem of overshoot”“” is that the human species is still in the death grip of capitalism. The task of preserving a habitable world is not being ignored because humanity is just too stupid to understand how to do it, but because it’s incredibly profitable for a tiny handful of extremely rich and powerful people to enforce the current course by any means necessary, including extreme violence - or indeed, funding academics to point the blame at anything but themselves. “It’s just human nature!”
I would respond to the problem of ‘over’ shoot by ‘exactly’ shooting the capitalists in their rotten hearts, with the help of an army of communist soldiers.
In this episode, Sal Mercogliano - a maritime historian at Campbell University (@campbelledu) and former merchant mariner - discusses the current situation in and around the Red Sea and should the US continue to protect ships in the region or shift and focus on US-flagged or allied vessels....
I don’t know if it’s the one you’re thinking of, but there was one registered in Hong Kong that got hit - but on closer inspection, it had been owned by a British company before being ‘sold’ to a Hong Kong shipping company… that had opened a couple of weeks earlier and only had that one ship. So in fact, it shows the detail of the intelligence used by Yemen to select targets that they were able to see through that ruse.
I’ll spell it out for you a little clearer, since you don’t seem capable of understanding it on your own.
Your entire attitude fucking screams “I have nothing good going on in my life, so I’ve adopted an extreme viewpoint that easily allows me to feel superior to others”.
You see this shit on all sides of the political spectrum. An example you’re likely familiar with and hate would be fanatical/fundamentalist Christians. Nothing truly going right with their life, so they adopt a belief system that gives them an outlet for their hate/anger/frustration where they don’t have to feel bad about it because they are targeting the “bad guys”.
Someone who was in a good place in life wouldn’t be posting shit online calling for putting people in fucking gulags.
You can use all the excuses and mental gymanstics you want, but at the end of the day, you’ve adopted an idealogy where extreme actions are justified and right to take against your “enemy”, and where anyone even slightly advocating for you to slow your roll is instantly redefined as an “enemy”.
You just did that. You start spouting shit about Americans, and when the guy said he wasn’t one you just said that he effectively was one anyway and kept down the path you were already on. That’s absurd.
Anyway, your entire defense for your statements here is that your bad guys are the real bad guys. That’s the beginning and end of it. That type of self righteousness is something to be feared, not something to be championed because you’ve “found the right target”.
Please note, I’ve not made any statement on whether you’re wrong or right in your targeting. That’s a separate discussion.
It has been demonstrated time and time again in historical record the world over, that the fervor of people like you can and will be abused, and shifted towards wider and wider classifications of “targets”.
Anyway, I hope your life situation improves enough someday that you no longer find the need to be a self-righteous asshat on the internet calling for people’s torture. I’m blocking you, so I won’t be around to see it.
Point 2. Leftists would not allow posts from ableist neoliberal ghouls to be posted on their instance
Point 3. Ableist neoliberal ghouls post on dbzer0
Point 4. dbzer0 does not remove the posts of ableist neoliberal ghouls
Therefore, synthesizing the points above, dbzer0 is not leftist.
Bonus point: when shown the ableist screed posted on their “leftist” instance, the admin responds not with some kind of apology or good-faith discussion but rather reddit-logo tier debatebro snark.
“UM, RULE 3?” “OH, I DIDN’T REALIZE THAT-”“OKAY, GOOD TO KNOW THAT-”smuglord
Honest question, what do you even get out of this project? What do you think you’re accomplishing? What positive effect do you think you can have when you’re deploying this dismissive, abrasive tone to anyone trying to engage with you? A problem post has been pointed out on your instance - one among many that form a significant trend - and your ONLY response is to zero in on the person criticizing you to glibly invoke “the rules” to try and shut them up. How about explaining why your instance lets post like this stay? How about reflecting on why people say things like
Really makes you wonder if there are some ideological problems with their particular brand of “leftism” that it is so immensely compatible with open chauvinism like that.
instead of just demanding that they stop saying things like that? At this point, what specifically do you even believe that makes you care about being called “not a real leftist”?
Once again completely ignoring the content of the post from OP in favor of policing procedure and decorum. Pure fucking LIBERALISM mao-wtf
Again, what do you even believe?? If you defend positions that boil down to “you only want a revolution cause you have a bad life and are envious” then what’s left of “leftism”? And do you defend the post, either its content or its tone? You haven’t said a single thing about it except to complain about how other people are talking about it.
If you need to go to the hospital, you can call an ambulance that will be able to quickly and easily reach you due to there not being any car traffic. (The utterly ludicrous cost of US healthcare is its own separate problem)
Going to the countryside? Take a bus to the outskirts, or even out into the country itself, and cycle to a particular spot. Going to or from a club? Take the metro, take the bus, maybe even (depending no the strictness of ‘no cars’) a taxi, which you can afford on special occasions with the literally tens of thousands of dollars you’ll have saved by not needing to buy, insure, repair and fuel a car.
You have to also understand that for a car-free society to even be on the table, a number of other social changes will have to have been made too. So just arguing that going without cars is impossible due to the limitations of the car-centric society that currently exists is just circular reasoning. There SHOULD be ways to do the things you’ve listed without using a car, and the reason there aren’t is BECAUSE of cars.
What if an ambulance gets stuck in traffic? What if a road’s blocked by an accident? Or because it’s being repaired or relaid because of all the car traffic over it?
What if all the ambulances are occupied tending to one of the ~2,500,000 people injured in car accidents each year?
I think they’re saying that liberal “democracies”, as soon as they need to, will use the exact same censorship that they claim “autocracies” use, and which not using is the entire source of their supposed moral superiority.
Shut the fuck up stupid piece of shit, go slam your head in a car door. Other comrades are gonna put up with your bullshit and try and educate you but I’m in ad-hominem mode.
Looking through your comment history you truly are the most trivial motherfucker I’ve encountered in a while. Coming in here and running an absolutely default smug liberal redditor dialogue tree.
You are not an “”“intellectual”“”, you’re an LLM trained on a fiftieth generation facsimile of a bad impression of a teleporter accident between Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. You would fail the Turing test. My fellows are trying to raise you to sentience, but personally I’d keep you in a museum as proof that p-zombies do exist.
Your next line is “UM ACKTUALLY- UM IN THE DICTIONARY-” instead just stop posting.
Lenin would theorize that Marx failed to take into account how getting stoned would inevitably lead to having the munchies, and so would make the addition to Marx’s work that ‘when getting stoned and watching creepypasta, a real man should have a bag of doritos to hand’.
If the leaks and rumors are true, Beijing stands ready to launch a new and radical solution to the economy’s property crisis – a government takeover. What the authorities refer to as “a new model” would replace the old emphasis on ownership with more rentals and use government funds to buy up bankrupt properties so that...
I WARNED YOU ABOUT STATES BRO!!!
Denmark Will Allow Ukraine To Fly Its F-16s Into Russia Proper (simpleflying.com)
Ukraine will be able to use Danish and Dutch F-16s to strike into Russia, while Belgium is saying only for use in 1991-border Ukraine....
Yemen's Houthis say They Targeted US Warship and Vessel 'Destiny' in Red Sea (gcaptain.com)
President Biden announces a series of tariffs on green energy products from China. (lemmy.ml)
Xi Jinping blasts US/NATO for bombing China's embassy in Serbia (www.youtube.com)
deleted_by_moderator
The nation of Colombia saw its moment to do the funniest thing possible. (hexbear.net)
The nation of Colombia saw its moment to do the funniest thing possible....
What's Going on with Shipping - Have We Lost the Red Sea? What Should be the US Strategy Against the Houthis? (www.youtube.com)
In this episode, Sal Mercogliano - a maritime historian at Campbell University (@campbelledu) and former merchant mariner - discusses the current situation in and around the Red Sea and should the US continue to protect ships in the region or shift and focus on US-flagged or allied vessels....
If Ukraine loses war, it will be 'end of Western hegemony', warns UK's Boris Johnson (www.youtube.com)
cross-posted from: lemmygrad.ml/post/4354593...
Chinese scientists increase F-22 fighter jet’s radar signature 60,000 times with new detection method: study (www.scmp.com)
archive.is/4LbGN
Labour could axe all hereditary peers from House of Lords, reports suggest (www.standard.co.uk)
Labour plans to axe all hereditary peers from the House of Lords, reports have suggested....
Holy shit, lemmitor's annoying liberal self righteousness is off the charts (hexbear.net)
I step out of Hexbear and into another instance for once and immediately get this shit lmao...
People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One (www.wired.com)
Germany Looks to Stop the Far Right From Assuming Power (www.nytimes.com)
Ukraine war: G7 threatens sanctions if Iran sends Russia ballistic missiles (www.scmp.com)
Archive link
Famous words from Uncle Karl (hexbear.net)
Xi (Foolishly) Plans Communist Answers For China’s Property Crisis. [Forbes] (www.forbes.com)
If the leaks and rumors are true, Beijing stands ready to launch a new and radical solution to the economy’s property crisis – a government takeover. What the authorities refer to as “a new model” would replace the old emphasis on ownership with more rentals and use government funds to buy up bankrupt properties so that...