CascadeOfLight [he/him]

I know it’s difficult for you, but please try to read more than the first six words of my comment. I’ll await your better-informed response.

Are you trying to own me by bringing up even more good things the Red Army did??? Whatever, thank you for further proving my point comrade!

I was trying to make the question simple for you, but I see you can actually do basic research when you want to (even though you still haven’t answered the simple yes or no question). Do you understand that without the Red Army, none of this that could have happened? That the Nazis would have killed everyone at all of those camps, and then kept moving eastwards, killing more and more people and plundering more and more land and resources, with absolutely no one to stop them? Are you getting this?

The Red Army could only exist because of the massive industrialization program implemented by the communist party of the USSR. No communists = no factories = no tanks = no end to the Nazi slaughter. The only system that has ever built industry at that pace, is the system of five-year plans issued by a central planning body with the authority to command how resources and workers are allocated! No other system in history has even come close! And even then, working at almost the fastest pace in human history, the USSR barely had time to build an army before the capitalists opened the gates of hell on them. So isn’t it a little arrogant to just assume that you know better than they did how they should have organized themselves to be able to do that, while also somehow just never needing to apply authority in any way?

Yeah having just said that, after two days of shouting at an entire clan of brick walls I am starting to flag a little, but still, from time to time it’s good practice to sharpen your arguments against the bluntest whetstones you can find.

I YET HUNGER FOR BATTLE, FEED ME LIBERALS

I’m not entirely sure what you’re trying to say in the first part

that’s a LOW bar. pre-communist times are a very low bar. nobody here argued that russian life was better before the sfsr

The literal entire argument is that Russian life didn’t improve enough under the USSR as compared to a fictional anarchist alternative, such that communists are indistinguishable from fascists. That is the entire crux of the argument in this 400+ comment section. If it’s a low bar, then how come no non-communist third world country ever had even close to that kind of explosive increase in life expectancy and quality?

when were we comparing that? when were we justifying the US?

I don’t understand what you don’t understand. You brought up Texas incarceration and death rates, and their contemporary characterization as horrific, and then compared them to USSR imprisonment rates as some kind of gotcha that the communists were unusally inhumane in their prison system even compared to the barbaric US, so I pointed out that as a beneficiary of imperialism the US doesn’t need as brutal punishment in its own territory, it can reserve its oppressive violence for all its vassal fiefdoms in South America - such as, for instance, El Salvador.

where’d your series of questions about the purging of the statisticians go?

Huh??? I asked those questions and you just didn’t respond to them or provide any evidence for your assertion, you just moved the conversation on to different points and I followed along. You and the other guy have a habit of just ignoring questions you can’t answer so I just let it slide. But again, what are you talking about purging statisticians? You know that word has a specific meaning of being expelled from the communist party, right? It’s not just a synonym for ‘being killed’, so what statisticians are you talking about that were in the communist party and got expelled for, I’m guessing, “showing statistics that Stalin didn’t like”?

Answer this true or false statement: Did the Red Army liberate Auscwitz?

It’s a simple question, just pick an answer. It’s especially easy because I’ve already shown you a photo of what happened.

THE USSR ENDED THE HOLOCAUST

TRUE OR FALSE

Here’s the Red Army liberating Auschwitz, which I assume you would prefer didn’t happen

Removed by mod

reason: Red Fash propaganda posters? WTF.

Damn, good to know that gay rights are fascist

Edit: My post above was quietly unremoved after I posted this, maybe this time the mod will actually deign to look at some of it

Damn, I wonder what events occurred betwen 1930 and 1953 that would have caused a spike in both occupancy of Soviet prisons, and the death rate in them.

1942, I wonder what was happening in that year?

Anyway, nice cherry-picked comparison, let’s take a look at the actual mortality statistics:

Well would you look at that, as soon as the genocidal Nazi threat against the Soviet people was destroyed, their life expectancy almost instantly doubled from pre-communist times. I believe neutral demographs would call that the second highest rate of increase in life expectancy in human history.

So a prison system in the incredibly wealthy imperial core, where the denizens can raise themselves up on the plundered blood and gold of South America and later the entire third world, has a lesser need for incarceration than a nation under siege from an entire planet of enemies who would stop at nothing to sabotage and destroy their state, and then enslave and murder their people. And the US has absolutely zero external threats on its entire continent - how did that happen again?

And how’s the US prison system going now?

(It’s the highest incarceration rate in the world, and by a looooooong way.)

And why are we only focusing on one communist state? Let’s take a look at another one:

It’s China, with the first highest rate of increase of life expectancy in human history. As a bonus, here’s a comparison with India’s historical life expectancy - almost the perfect experiment, as it gained independence around the same time as the PRC was established, had a similar climate and demographics, but did not have the benefit of communist central planning:

Simply taking the integral between these two curves and multiplying up by their populations means that the Chinese people were collectively afforded literally tens of billions more years of human lifespan - thanks entirely to the communist party and the communist people who supported it - making Mao Zedong the greatest humanitarian of all time.

Removed by mod

Calling into question the functioning of someone’s brain is pretty neuronormative.

I’m not being that serious though, because I also can’t find any example of someone being ableist to you beyond calling you stupid (it was me, I did that).

Hexbear has probably the lowest tolerance for ableism of any place I’ve seen on the internet. The raiding parties you see coming into your instance to bash liberals on the internet and correct their disinformation are not really representative of the tone of conversation on the actual instance itself between people who aren’t spoiling for a rumble, not that I would expect ableism even then. The mods of Hexbear are very strict about that kind of thing, so watching clown-to-clown communication between you and your buddy as you just outright lie on the internet about the nature of another online community, in a farcical echo to how your forebears fabricated lies about socialist states, demanded comment.

Clearly the tankie brain cannot comprehend criticism from the left…

Not ableism

The millions and millions of peasants and workers who formed the absolutely committed base of the communist party yes. Here’s a question for you: HOW did the Bolsheviks gain power? When the Tsarist regime was crushing and oppressing the workers, and after the February revolution when the bourgeoise transitional state was gearing up for another round of WW1, HOW did the Bolsheviks come out on top? Was there a magic crown they grabbed to take control of the revolution? Did they use communist mind control? So “the peasants … democratically rejected [the] bolshevik clergy [sic] over and over again through the soviets back in 1919” ^[1] but the bolsheviks just overruled them… how?

This is the problem with a liberal-idealist understanding of the world which is not based in material reality, you don’t think about things like that. The bolsheviks won BECAUSE they had the full, furious support of dozens of millions of workers and peasants, without which they could not possibly have defeated the White army or constructed a socialist state. The Soviet people worked tirelessly to build a society of technological wonders as well as the military power needed to defend it against a world of capitalist enemies. Enemies like the Polish fascists who invaded the USSR in 1921, annexing a massive region that was (and is today) part of Belarus and Ukraine. Do you think retaking these areas (and saving their populations from the advancing Nazis) was wrong of the USSR? Do you think these territories should be part of Poland today? Should Belarus and western Ukraine be re-annexed to the Polish state, which held them for less than twenty years?

Ukrainians

Six million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army in WW2, making up 23% of the Soviet Union’s entire armed forces. The insignificant handful of traitorous fascist worms who sabotaged their own nation, collaborated with the Nazis and gleefully massacred Jews (and Poles!!) do not represent the Ukrainian people. This is what the ‘Ukrainian Nationalists’ have to say about their time ‘resisiting the communists’:

Which is the kind of thing the Red Army put a stop to.

Finns

Here I agree with Rosa Luxemburg: Granting Finland independence and not supporting the morally correct side in its civil war was objectively a mistake. The Red Army should have marched on Helsinki in 1918 but Lenin and the bolsheviks were too committed to the policy of the right of nations to self-determination, so they let it be taken over by nationalists who would go on to aid the Nazis in the siege of Leningrad that killed 1.5 million people. Don’t look up the insignia used by the Finnish air force until 2020.

And the US used it’s military power to end Imperial Japan - I guess that makes the US “anit-colonial” now, too?

Literally yes, that was an anti-colonial act, except that they immediately replaced Japanese imperialism in the eastern Pacific with US imperialism. Also what really drove the Japanese to surrender was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. The Japanese had hoped the USSR would act as a neutral arbiter for a conditional truce between them and the US, but when it was clear the USSR was going to roll up the fascists wherever they found them, the Japanese unconditionally surrendered to the US specifically to avoid the possibility of a communist takeover. The US then immediately put Japanese military leaders (i.e. war criminals) to work against the communists in the Phillipines, Korea, Vietnam and everywhere else in South-East Asia. Actions you presumably support, as those war criminals were deployed first and foremost against the worst of all liberal boogeymen, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Did you know the US invasion killed around 20% of the population of the Korean peninsula?

And? Are you perhaps suffering from some kind of insecurity, tankie?

Let me know when an anarchist gets to space.

Books:

• This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong
• Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo
• Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard by Douglas Tottle
• and if you really have the stomach for it, Blood Lies by Grover Furr - I warn you though, it’s nearly 600 pages with heavy sourcing and referencing so your attention span might be challenged

Thanks, and to add even further, this had global effects too

High living standards and strong workers’ rights and compensation in the USSR forced capitalist nations around the world to make concessions to their workers. Once the USSR had been destroyed, the concessions could be rolled back and the profits guzzled by the capitalists.

Oh, so you care about bourgeoise multiparty elections for control of a state? Which is it, are all states evil or are some actually okay, now that you think about it? Perhaps the ones you live in and have assimilated all the cultural norms of? What a curious coincidence.

Ah yeah, I forgot the anarchist counter to communist arguments, not being able to read.

Here’s some pretty pictures for you to look at - Chinese life expectancy

and Chinese solar panel production

If the human species still exists in a thousand years, it will be thanks to the communists of China

didnt they fight the boers at one point

That’s true and good, but even then, in the process they also invented the concept of the concentration camp. I mean, rounding up civilians into cramped, unsanitary conditions with little food so that they all die of disease is a pretty obvious idea, but they systematized and came up with the euphemism for it.

And US republicans say they believe in freedom above all.

Nonsequitur, of course everyone says they believe in freedom, including you, the difference is whether their actions lead to it, which the Communist Party of China’s have done.

I figured it would be this story, I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t some other phantasm you’d conjured up. Pornography is illegal in China (as it should be). These women were writing erotic novels that crossed the legal boundary into pornography, however that’s judged, and selling them. There is a thriving market for gay erotica that skirts the pornography law, and a thriving scene for ‘pornographic’ novels that aren’t being sold for money, the problem is when you try to secretly sell the latter. As a result, 22 people have been arrested for essentially tax fraud, out of a population of 1,400,000,000.

And why would China be anti-LGBT? Like most of the third world, China has some cultural conservatives with anti-LGBT views, but also like in most of the third world, these were installed by colonizers forcing westernization and Christian morality upon them. China has a long history of LGBT acceptance and even celebration in its pre-modern history, such as the ‘passion of the cut sleeve’ (go look it up). The crucial difference is that unlike in the western world, they don’t have a massive, powerful, fundamentalist religious lobby that can dictate policy and force them back in the wrong direction. The Chinese youth are unsurprisingly more progressive than their elders, so as time goes on attitudes should soften more.

But this brings up another important point: without a state, what are you going to do with all the homophobes? Do you think you could have a peaceful anarchist revolution in the United States and everyone would just stop hating gay and transgender people by themselves? Do you think the reactionaries of the US won’t need to be imprisoned until they can be educated into not hating the gays? Do you think you won’t need a special body of armed men to forcibly suppress the urge to lynch which lives in the heart of a large fraction of USians? What is the anarchist mechanism for actually transforming the world as it is now, into the world we want it to be, without apparently inconveniencing anyone? You can’t answer this of course, because anyone who thinks about it long enough and actually references history becomes a communist.

Me when I’m an anarchist who cares about state gold reserves.

Anyway, it was payment for the

• 242 aircraft,
• 703 pieces of artillery,
• 731 tanks,
• 1,386 trucks,
• 300 armored cars
• 15,000 heavy machine guns,
• 500,000 rifles,
• 30,000 sub-machine guns,
• 4,000,000 artillery shells,
• 1,000,000,000 machine gun cartridges,
• over 69,000 tons of war material, and
• over 29,000 tons of ammunition

That the USSR provided. Should they have given it for free? Should they have not given support at all? Would it have been better for the Republicans to just accept they were going to lose anyway and die with their gold? Would you prefer that gold to have been captured by the Fascists?

Besides, the actual greatest gold heist of the century was during Indian independence, when their entire gold reserves were airlifted to the UK in exchange for… nothing. Which I’m sure you knew about, having devoted a proportional amount of your time to looking into the actual crimes of capitalist nations as you have the fictional crimes of socialist ones.