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Love the downvotes on this. Perfect propaganda so well funded. But now it’s not commies it’s ‘tankies’
Communism is okay, as long as its the purely theoretical version of it that suburban Westerners invent in their mind
[Cuba has been prohibited from entering the chat]
A Trotskyist has since entered the comments to prove your point
I downvoted because it’s a bad meme, not a bad message
Agree to disagree on that. But when it comes to slowdive, as per your comment history, we are in complete alignment. Saw them at Fuji Rock last month and it was the best show I’ve seen in ages. They totally killed it.
My partner family lived in communist Romania. They almost starved when the communists stole their fields to collectivize them and then they misused them. Not only that but the “securitate” (Romanian KGB) created real fear between everyone. This was the real problem of communist Romania, not the foreign intervention. Eventually people got tired of leaving in a state of terror and they overthrew the government.
There’s a Spanish book about Communism and the Spanish civil war. In Spanish is “Dime quien soy” something like “Tell me who I am”. It talks a lot about people that really believed in the communist idea but that got killed because of Stalin being a dictator.
Edit: To all of you downvoting me. None of you have addressed the trust issues that the “securitate” created in the Romanian society. Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin’s delusion. I’m not saying that communism is completely evil but Romania was far from a paradise.
And I’m from Poland. The government reversed the decision to collectivize agricultural land in 1956, lowering the amount of state owned farms from 10000 to 1500 after Bierut died.
By 1996, when the last one was privatized, there were roughly 2000 of them at the start of the campaign in 1992 with a total of about 3750 thousands of hectares of a (current) total of 14630 - a quarter of farmland in the country.
Yet Poland, with its mostly private agriculture, was known for the worst supply situation in the Eastern Bloc. Gotta love the hand of the market, especially since the west imposed high interest rates on loans taken in the 70s (as countries do between each other). The government of the 90s, deciding that it was going to get richer faster with the market rather than a planned economy it was barely wanting to have it (as the “communists” of the PZPR were largely just nationalists), went through market reforms and what happened? Prices shot up, poverty increased to dramatic amounts, unemployment was over 20% for a part of the 90s (not even including those who had given up on looking for a job), organized crime started roaming the streets and doing stuff like killing mom’s childhood friends… and of course the farmlands themselves, since this is the topic, became desolate towns with antisemitic graffiti, a 60+ year old average age and nothing going on for them to this day.
But you probably think this is cool and good. After all, the people there can work their asses off at more than 40h/week at a workplace they have even less say in than in the west, to pay German prices for goods of a quality you’d find in the bargain bin here, a food that will kill you over time, and come back home to froth at the mouth about how the “LGBT Lobby” is trying to turn their kids gay while then going on rants against the oh so free government and opposition because they’re “all thieves” anyway… and against foreigners. After all, they’re only following the logic of the market and doing what the west wants of them (i.e. keep the wages low and profits high).
Dude, I talked about (1) how they stole a small piece of land barely enough to feed a family and (2) the terror regime of the communist era. Then you starter rambling about all the foreign intervention.
In my original post I didn’t say that it wasn’t there. I just talked about the internal issues of communist Romania (and also USSR) which mostly was point 2. The state of constant fear that people lived in.
If you think that it was all good. Why does your country hate Russia so much? Do you think that the Russians sang lullabies to the Romanians and that they loved them so much?
Edit: let me add more context that you avoided on purpose:
While this might be true, a key reason behind these results is an institutionalized amnesia regarding communism in Romania, which has not allowed an adequate society-wide debate able to inform the Romanian public. This is because the current political leadership is to a considerable extent formed of former communists, their relatives and business associates, who have no interest in revealing and punishing the crimes of communism, in which they were, to varying degrees, involved.
The only thing on foreign intervention in my reply is the reference to loans, which were taken by the Polish People’s Republic, and indeed the Romanian Socialist Republic - the 80s were a period of austerity to repay foreign debt to continue purchasing specialized goods from the west - that is undeniable.
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“Stole a Piece of Land barely enough to Feed a Family”. Anecdotal evidence, one of which I have no evidence of being true or not, and is besides the point of “Communism bad, because they ‘stole’ my grandma’s land”.
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“The State of Constant Fear” is also anecdotal reference, one which is even harder to verify and can be claimed just as easily as “a very large amount of people are supportive of revolution to overthrow the government because they don’t go and vote”
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Aha, the classic. If “Russia” (you clearly mean the USSR, but probably think modern day Russia is the same thing) is so evil and despised across the former Warsaw Pact, why is it still popular in East Germany? In Bulgaria? In Serbia? Even, before 2014, in Ukraine? And besides, what does Russia matter? Does the viability of a political ideology depends on if a state is popular around the world or not? Were that the case, Kingdoms would have been abolished centuries before the French revolution and religion would be gone by now.
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“context I avoided on Purpose” No, it’s nonsense you added, and a common tale told around these parts of the world. What do you think Donald Tusk, the Kaczyński brothers, Lech Wałęsa and Bronisław Komorowski, all major political figures of the post-1990 era in Poland all have in common? They were in the opposition to the PZPR. And nowadays the most common political ammunition between parties in Poland is to accuse each other of communism. This is moronic! “Oh he was in the communist party and that’s why he’s corrupt!” is fucking nonsense - and what’s communist about market reforms, joining the EU, befriending America, like the Alliance of the Democratic Left did in Poland in the early 2000s? (and lost 3/4 of their voters after that).
Blame all the problems on socialism all you want, and I know you will, but how long will this continue? 20 years? 50 years? And you want to dig further and uncover more and more “crimes”. All this’ll do is find out that to expand the “Crimes” of communism, you have to go “the fascists from WW2 are innocent victims, actually”
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“Communism and collectivization were in the closet making babies, and I saw one of the babies, and then the baby looked at me.”
- this dude’s great-Grandpa in law
Oh look I talk about the terror regime during communism but users are too busy torturing their relatives to even care about the internal issues of communism.
My girlfriend in the early 90’s was a Croat refugee after the USSR got couped. Her family fled so that the newly emboldened fascists in Yugoslavia didn’t murder them.
We met working at customer service job for an overseas company. She would always tell me that she works twice as hard here as she did back home; and we don’t even get paid enough to live here.
That’s a real person with real first-hand experience of the before-and-after of the Soviet Union dissolved. I can text her right now. Your pee-paw’s pee-paw in law who lost his plantation to the people can come at me if he wants to talk. But I doubt they’re even alive still; assuming they existed in the first place.
Update: I called her, and she’s living on Okinawa now, with two adult sons! And her partner seems to be out of the picture…
@[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], ANYBODY, send help! I cannot afford plane tickets right now!
Ah yes, communists, famous for not debating in intricate technical detail amongst themselves the internal issues of attempts at actually existing socialism.
Who are you who is so wise in the ways of science?
I think I’ll take statistics over your propagandistic anecdote
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/communist-nostalgia-in-romania/
But-but-but his family had the egg monopoly and the evil dictator Ceausescu stole it from them! Every egg in Romania!
So, you swap the order of the paragraphs to make your point. Do I look stupid to you. I know how to open the link that you posted.
My bad you’re correct I accidentally pasted the paragraphs out of order
Here you go;
According to a recent poll, many Romanians remain nostalgic for communism, over two decades after dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown. The INSCOP Research poll revealed that 44.4 percent of the respondents believed that living conditions were better under communism, 15.6 said that they had stayed the same, while only 33.6 claimed that life was worse back then. When asked about dictator Ceausescu, 47.5 of the respondents claimed that he had a relatively positive role in Romania’s recent history, while 46.9 said that his role was rather negative. The recent poll was conducted between November 7 and 14, 2014, on a sample of 1,055 participants, with a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
A 2010 poll conducted by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy provided similar results. Of the 1,460 respondents, 54 percent claimed that they had better living standards during communism, while 16 percent said that they were worse. Moreover, 49 percent claimed that Ceausescu was a good leader, 30 percent believed he was neither good nor bad, while 15 said he was bad. The survey has a 2.7 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level.
How does that change the point made and the actual Romanian people’s experience living under communism?
Kulak!
Remind me, who was Romania allies with during ww2? And what did they do to Jewish people in the areas outside of Romania that they helped the nazis invade and occupy?
“I regret the demise of Communism—not for me, but when I see how much my children and grandchildren struggle. We had safe jobs and decent salaries under Communism. We had enough to eat and we had yearly vacations with our children”.
- 68-year-old retired Romanian mechanic, quoted in George Jahn, “In Romania, Turmoil Fuels Nostalgia for Communism,” Washington Post, January 11, 2011.
Can you use quote syntax in Markdown instead of code blocks please?
It’s harder to scroll through a code block on mobile
None of you have addressed the trust issues
Many pro-comunists were killed by Stalin’s delusion.
Sorry, we are not adressing crocodile tears shed in bad faith by anticoms. Reddit is that way ->
This is not reddit, you murderous commie.
You’re a kulak
Turned an imperialist monarchy where the majority of the population were illiterate into being the first nation of humans in space and defeating the Nazis within a few decades?
Turning a country fresh from a century of humiliation in to the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity and virtually eliminating poverty?
Seems like it works to me
You hexbears and gradists are so bent on this autocratic ‘dictatorship of the prolitariat’ idea that you could almost replace all energy needs by just hooking up a dynamo to Marx turning around in his grave.
We’re fully aware that DoTP is a transitory step in the path to full stateless classless communism, I’m just engaging with conceit the meme makes to dispute the point those who make ‘cOmMuNiSm oNlY wOrKs On PaPeR’ arguments think they’re making
I get it. My point is different. Communism has never been realized, therefore there’s nothing to say about it’s functionality.
Systems-by-whatever-name led by communist parties work.
That’s fine if you think that, but it’s not really communism, as defined by Marx.
That’s the point, they are not communist states, just people misusing the name communism
How does Marx define communism?
Well in the full extend you could read das Kapital, or an abridged version of it.
But the remedy that he seeks is an international uprising against the possessive class and the dissolution of the power of capital. Unfortunately every ‘communist’ state is just an autocratic state role-playing communism. Sometimes with their own monarchy (north Korea) some more oppressive, some outright capitalist (China).
Communism has never been realized,
Exactly, hence why those making ‘cOmMuNiSm oNlY wOrKs On PaPeR’ arguments and this meme are actually about socialist states which is what I am defending in my first comment, that is blatantly clear from context
Nah not really. I mean China is clearly blatantly capitalist since Deng Xiaoping. And there was little ownership of the means of production by the prolitariat in Soviet Russia.
So not really communist.
I’m not going to get into a pedantic debate with you about the exact labelling of the ideology of these states, what is important and you’re intentionally being obtuse about is that these systems differ(ed) from bourgeois western liberal ‘democracy’ and is the subject of the meme being discussed
And there was little ownership of the means of production by the prolitariat in Soviet Russia.
What? What’s your source for this?
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The problem with those transitory step countries is that it has a ruling class with very different class interests and the same money funneling just like in a capitalist state which basically guarantees that they will never be socialist.
You see no difference in a government made to be a mediating entity between private interests where the source of power lies, and a government that’s self interested and is where power lies? You see nothing but a flattened “they both did taxes and the leadership class has privileges”?
No, taxes are quite helpful to maintain public infrastructure for example. What I’m saying is that every time one of those transitory governments have popped up the leadership ends up ruling the population with an iron fist and horrible corruption that has benefitted mostly the ruling party and rarely anyone else. Pretty much exactly like a capitalist state but with gulags and no voting.
And why is that?
Loling at the idea that “99.9 percent of the population should be able to participate in democracy but the class that’s been oppressing us shouldn’t for a decade or two during the transition” is “autocracy”
What are you, some kinda anarchist?
More trotskyist.
Wow, much much worse, lmao
I wanted to cross-post this to lemmy.ml’s memes community, but you did that already. The libs are coming in, beautiful lmao.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
Let’s forget that the USSR was considered a superpower at some point
It’s the West’s fault that Mao and Stalin, et al killed millions.
Don’t make me tap the sign
While communism hasn’t got a fair try. Either because of external forces or internal corruption.
Let’s not act like it’s some utopia. Every attempt has immediately turned into a full on dictatorship with the worst intentions.
Why is that? Because it seems completely incapable of dealing with the greed, violence, and general evil that makes up much of human nature.
Let’s face it, if humans were “good” any government would work.
Pretty much every single time a revolutionary socialist movement has taken power it has improved literacy, child mortality, wealth inequality, nutrition, and just about any other quality-of-life metric you can name. Get the fuck out of here with your “human nature” bullshit. Communism always works.
Omg an actual “human nature” argument in the wild.
How does capitalism deal
with the greed, violence, and general evil that makes up much of human nature[?]
On one hand, sanctions seem to only hurt the citizens of the countries they’re aimed at. Oftentimes this results in more deaths or food scarcity.
On the other, what is someone to do when something like the Russian invasion happens if you’d like to harm the offending nation and prevent further aggression/abuse? I legitimately do not know, and would love a take on some alternatives for punishing those kinds of things. I don’t think America does it right, especially when it takes very little to see who’s offenses we turn a blind eye to and who we demonize.
This is me acknowledging upfront that I’m typing back to some sort of chatgpt-like AI bot. Aintnoway this is a person. I’m drawing this conclusion based off the complete fucking irrelevancy of this question in the context of the OP meme.
Here’s a spicy meatball for you: America is basically always the fucking “bad guy” historically, minus literally two times both of which it took waaaaaaayyyy too long to finally intervene. 100 years in the case of the union army finally ending chattel slavery in the US and years + a provoking attack in the case of fighting world-wide fascism. Every other war or military action the US has done, broadly without exception, has been evil shit, bad, solely for the interests of US capital (first) and/or allied nations such as the UK, France, etc. and their capital and imperial interests.
So, the obvious question then is: who the fuck does the US think it is to be the great arbiter of truth?
The country that bombed an entire northern half of a nation so heavily that no buildings existed basically? And for what? Wanting a democracy more aligned with the USSR and/or China? (DPRK or North Korea if this isn’t obvious).
Or the country that dropped two unnecessary atomic bombs on Japan basically with the intention of scaring the shit out of the USSR? And why did the USSR need scaring? Why did all those Japanese civilians need to be vaporized? Because, again, the USSR was explicitly opposed to US capital interests and this was simply unacceptable. The US gov would (and still does) happily vaporize millions of people if trade networks and access to resources can be maintained.
Hey here’s a relevant one to ponder considering the Russia/Ukraine conflict: you mean the country that funded a group of mostly psychopaths and religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan and the general region in the 1970-1980s who ran across that country murdering, raping, doing truly unspeakable shit, basically forced Soviet intervention in an attempt to maintain some semblance of a government. And then several decades later led basically directly to the 9/11 events and two more decades of the US ruthlessly bombing and murdering and supporting the same warlords… you’re telling me this country that would befriend and support people like bin Laden gets to say who’s the “bad guy” in the world?
So, off the bat, the US’s opinion is less than dogshit in value. Even dogshit would be disgusted at stepping in the US’s opinion.
If there ever to be any sort of intervention for some sort of righteous cause it absolutely has to start with the US sitting the fuck out of any negotiations, talks, votes, whatever. The US has proven too many times for 100 years+ that it absolutely cannot be trusted to do ANYTHING good. It will poison any discussion- something becoming very clear and apparent to world leaders who are now often seeking to bypass the US and use countries like China as an intermediary.
But you have open discussions, UN votes and such, you find the facts of the situation, and you figure out what the most “just” end to a conflict is.
It gets sketchy from there because I’m basically never going to justify bombing countries. It’s not happening. I could potentially see justification for a UN sanctioned removal (assassination) of especially toxic leaders… but the problem there, of course, is complicated by so many questions: “do we have access to all the relevant facts? What is the CIA (or to be totally fair: Russia or Chinese intelligence) hiding from us? How did the person/political group gain power? Trace it allllllll the way back. Who benefits from their downfall or continued time in power? Who loses? Is this just more US bullshit (always the first and main question from me)?”
Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi in Libya, bin Laden, Pol Pot, my list can continue, are all specific reasons that I find it very very very hard to believe the ANY US state dept condemnation and “justification for war.” Even fucking Putin is the direct fucking result of US interference and meddling that eventually caused the dissolution of the Soviet Union (in part anyway) and the resulting catastrophic, what I’d call a genocide, mass privatization and selling off of public property for pennies on the dollar of its actual value in former Soviet states which resulted in a shitload of suicides, material conditions plummeting, and, eventually, “strong men” like Putin rising up and seizing it from the puppets the US put in power.
So when it comes to the Ukraine/Russia stuff, all I can do, with all the historical context, is say “well, this was expected.” I really do feel bad for normal people caught up in the bullshit. I just think many Americans fail to grasp a very plain and simple truth: the American government is the reason for the shit in Ukraine. Whether you think Putin has a point or that he’s doing infinite genocide, it doesn’t matter, he’s there, those countries exist, because of meddling from the fucking United States. My main concern is less-so over a border conflict (which honestly I do not give a half fuck about- help evacuate Ukrainians who don’t want to be Russian and then cede the eastern parts to Russia. Why do Europeans care again? Oh yeah, orcs, bad guys, etc. never mind!) but more focused on Americans learning fucking something after the same thing happening a hundred times. Stop fucking meddling and stop creating reasons for war! And stop fucking falling for the state department lines like “well, maybe we did do some bad stuff! But Putin is doing it NOW! So we gotta stop him!” No. No, we never have to do anything. It’s a false dichotomy. It’s bullshit sold to tug on your poor American exceptionalism feefees and make you go “yeah, we blundered around. That was bad. But we meant well! Putin is just an evil orc-man!” I know it’s hard as fuck for Americans to accept that we are the bad guys, we did and do the bad shit, and that more meddling will never undo or fix OR EVEN HAS THE TRUE INTENTION OF “FIXING” situations once they boil over. That’s hard to accept, it sucks knowing that people before you put dominos in place and the least-bad option for you is mostly to stand back and let shit happen. If you try to put more dominos in or stop some from toppling, I can promise you based on all available history, those dominos are millions of people’s lives and you’re just setting up more to die no matter any sort of intentions you may have (which are probably wrong and misguided anyway).
I mean, I’d read your comment, but you asserted i was a bot and were a cunt, so I suddenly lost interest.
Good luck with your book, I hope to read it when your tone is more tolerable.
Don’t kid yourself, you wouldn’t read it anyway.
Ooh! I love it when they tone police like this. Nothing says “I’m definitely right” quite like refusing to read anything that might contradict your position just because someone was rude on the internet.
I don’t even see how I was being rude. It’s more of a joke or whatever you might call it to say “someone’s questions and/or actions are so out of line that I believe a bot is posting.”
Maybe it’s not a good joke, or funny or whatever, which is fine, but I don’t agree with the assertion that I was being overly rude. I think he’s just irritated someone came in and listed a bunch of pretty much irrefutable shit and destroyed his little attempt to change the conversation.
If you type like a bot, I’m gonna call you a bot. I outlined my reasoning which was “your question had absolutely nothing to do with the OP’s meme.”
I apologize when I’m wrong, so I won’t be apologizing here.
I don’t know what the removed portion says, whether that’s on my end censoring or just rules around here, but feel free to DM me what was after “were a” and before the comma. I’m curious what I was being.
Lemmy has a slur filter. It replaces them with
*removed*as you saw
America has invaded soooo many countries. They have no right to sanction anyone for anything.
Hello friend,
So sanctions not only apparently have an effect of primarily hurting civilians, they do and this is part of why the U.S. loves using them so much. Their tried-and-tested geopolitical strategy when dealing with countries who disobey them is a several front war. One aspect of their warfare is pushing the citizens of the country not only to die to weaken it economically and hurt morale and stability, but to push them to oust their own government. This is of course in tandem with propaganda, usually to suggest that the economic hardship brought on by the sanctions is the fault of their own government’s system, the “regime,” etc.
The Russian invasion is a poor example because this is a justified invasion in response to U.S. provocation, and because the U.S. wants to destroy Russia whether or not its civilians suffer. If we can see how, for example, how the collective anti-imperialist forces of the world have dealt with the belligerently murderous U.S., the strategy has been to try and deprive them of siphons they use to rob countries and fuel their war machine. China/Russia has done this simply by offering viable trade alternatives to dealing with the West, as one example. Military action is another route, as we have seen Niger and Ghana oust their Western puppet governments militarily. The war in Ukraine is also an example; NATO kept creeping forward, and fascists in Ukraine kept escalating violent attacks in the Donbas, so as much as Russia tried diplomacy for 8 years they eventually had to do something.
One good thing about truly aggressive/abusive countries, as history shows, is that they destroy themselves as much as they are destroyed by external retaliation. Part of the strategy to corral the U.S. is to not overplay their hands, do what is necessary (cut the siphons and stop new ones from forming), and let the rabid dog froth it out til it consumes itself.
Of course, in a just world order it would also make sense to punish the leaders who orchestrate such conflicts, but until the UN and the Hague are actual representations of world democracy and justice and not by and large just ways that the U.S. consolidates and legitimizes its power and punishes its enemies, this will be impossible.
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