Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
If you look at the holodomor I think it’s hard to continue painting the Soviet Union as having uplifted the proletariat. Soviets starved their people to achieve rapid industrialization - a tradeoff that most of those who died would probably not have agreed with. IIRC most historians say that collectivization was a horrible failure and was not good for the working class.
First hand accounts of life during stalinism make it clear that people had to develop weird mannerisms to avoid making it seem like they were disloyal/anti-party; basically everyone walking on eggshells all the time.
What in the everlasting embrace of god. Soviets, who - I’ll admit - simply chose to work people to death painted as the good guys? The same soviets that starved, beaten and let people freeze to death? The same that put people in cattle wagons and rode them out to syberia in nothing more than clothes they had on their backs?
The USSR was perhaps the single most progressive movement in the entire 20th century. It was not free from flaw, of course not, but in total it was a massive leap forward for the Working Class not only within the Soviet Union, but its very existence forced western countries to adopt expanded social safety nets (along with the efforts of leftist organizers within these countries).
From a brutal, impoverished backwater country barely industrialized, to beating the United States into space, in 50 years. Mid 30s life expectancies due to constant starvation, homelessness, and outright murder from the Tsarist Regime, doubled to the 70s very quickly. Literacy rates from the 20s and 30s to 99.9%, more than Western Nations. All of this in a single generation.
Wealth disparity shrank, while productivity growth was one of the highest in the 20th century:
Supported liberation movements in Cuba, Palestine, Algeria, Korea, China, Palestine, and more. Ensured free, and high quality healthcare and education for all. Lower retirement ages than the US, 55 for women and 60 for men. Legalized, free abortion. Full employment, and no recessions outside of World War 2. Defeated the Nazis with 80% of the combat in the entire European theater. Supported armistice treaties that the US continuously denied.
The bad guys won the Cold War, and they did so by forcing the USSR to spend a huge amount of their resources on keeping up millitarily, as the United States had much more resources and could deal with it that way.
I’d have to challenge that “the bad guys won the Cold War” rhetoric. If the USSR was as successful as your argument claims, why did so many Soviet republics seek independence?
Moreover, it directly compares, say, the Soviet treatment of Estonia with the fascist slaver regime over Cuba that the Soviets helped overthrow, or the Israeli treatment of Palestinians via genocide. It equates what can’t be equated. Further, that means that the US Confederacy should have been allowed to leave purely on the basis of wanting to. It’s not a real point, it’s cheap.
If you keep going with Blackshirts and Reds, it gets to the events surrounding its dissolution, such as the botched coup attempt, liberalization in order to try to make up for spending so many resources on the Cold War, and more, though not a full picture. If you genuinely want to know more after you finish Blackshirts, I recommend Parenti’s 1986 lecture, which is even more entertaining because Parenti is a fantastic and passionate speaker. I’d throw on Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? as an additional articls, around 30 minutes to read, going over the merits of the Soviet Economy and why it was dissolved.
All of that is well and good, but not enough to say that the Soviets were the good side. It’s also necessary to truly look at how disgustingly evil the United States is, and for that I recommend the podcast Blowback. If you listen to Blowback, there will be nothing but hatred and disgust of the highest order for the United States, from lying about WMDs to thoroughly destroy Iraq, to dropping more bombs on Korea than in the entire Pacific Front of World War 2, to countless war crimes intentionally done to make populations suffer and no longer support their governments just to make it stop.
Okay, so I’ve got a couple of issues with your response. First of all, the referendum only polled 9 out of the 15 republics. The other six boycotted it since they were already pushing for independence. Moreover, within months, nearly every republic declared full independence. If they truly didn’t want to secede from the USSR, would they have declared independence?
Secondly, I don’t think nostalgia is a good gauge of what people want. Individuals have a tendency to romanticize the past especially during hard times. For example, many citizens of African countries revel in reminiscing about the colonial era due to economic hardships faced today. Is that what they truly want? Probably not. It is usually due to poor knowledge of colonial history that they have these sentiments.
Furthermore, I’m well aware that the US is a despicable country, and my increasing knowledge about its history only fuels my hatred of it, but you’re bordering on whataboutism if the standard for the most progressive movement of the 20th century is being “not as bad as the US” which is a pretty low bar.
Edit: You can’t compare the confederacy - a slave-owning rebellion fighting to preserve human bondage to the soviet republics - nations seeking independence from an authoritarian superstate. If you really want to compare the USSR with the US civil war, it would be better to compare it to the 13 colonies fighting for independence from the British crown.
Besides, you still didn’t address the core argument: If Soviet rule was truly beneficial, why did so many nations (at least 5) risk war and economic collapse to escape it?
The small few that were boycotting it each deserve more investigation than a single Lemmy comment thread. The simplest answer is that they had reactionary, sometimes fascist rising nationalist movements. It isn’t sufficient to say that they boycotted it, therefore the USSR was evil, it’s more accurate to say that it needs investigation. I can’t do the intricacies of their nationalist movements any justice in a Lemmy thread other than telling you that they exist.
Secondly, yes, they did vote to leave months later. The mess with the botched coup, the existence of a weird new political position that stood against the Soviet balance of power in a way that messed up the economy (long story as well), and privatization had already been at play and came to a head months later. The USSR didn’t collapse so much as it was killed.
As for Soviet Nostalgia, that’s just the term. Look at the polling data, the questions specifically ask about economic situations or if it was bad that the Soviet Union fell. These numbers are more positive among older populations that actually lived there, times are harder now for most post-Soviet states. After the fall, an estimated 7 million people died due to the collapse of social safety nets and the destruction of the economy. Capitalism was and is disastrous for these nations, whose metrics are only just now approaching their Soviet Levels, such as life expectancy, while metrics like wealth disparity and poverty are massive.
What chapter are you on in Blackshirts? They get into almost all of this in deeper detail.
As for US bad, I’ll ask you to name a more influential country than the US or the USSR during the 20th century. In terms of sheer impact, the USSR was by far the most progressive. The alternative? A genocidal Empire that tried to crush the Soviets at every chance, and ultimately succeeded. It isn’t just a “low bar,” the United States is perhaps the single most evil country to ever exist outside of Nazi Germany, and the Soviets opposed both.
The USSR’s republics didn’t just debate independence, they actually left. If it was just “internal politics,” why did every non-Russian republic take the first opportunity to break away?
The Texas/California comparison is a weak false equivalence. The USSR suppressed nationalist movements (read on the Hungarian Revolution), while the U.S. allows open political discourse.
It’s the only equivalency there can be between the two countries; unlike the Soviet Union, the United States was not formed by colonial absorbtion of neighboring nations. The closest thing there is, is the Mexican land grab in the 19th century and Europe has a long history of nationalist movements being suppressed, so the Soviet Union is not unique in that regard.
And, just like the USSR, the US has a track record of not allowing political discourse that threatens its hegemony; the Black Panthers, Pinochet, and Cuba are probably the most glaring examples.
You’re deflecting. If the USSR was truly a voluntary workers’ paradise, why did nearly all of its republics leave at the first opportunity? You’re avoiding that question by pointing to U.S. wrongdoing, but the reality is that Soviet republics didn’t just ‘entertain’ secession like Texas, they actively fought for it and succeeded.
Comparing minor secessionist sentiments in Texas to the complete collapse of a superstate is absurd.
Bit of a cheap pivot, isn’t that? Not all nationalist movements are good, many are highly reactionary, even fascist in nature. On the whole, Soviet foreign policy was cleary in the interests of the working class, from helping Cuban workers liberate themselves from the fascist Batista regime, to helping Algeria throw off the colonizing French, to helping Palestinians resisting genocide, to assisting China with throwing off the Nationalists and Imperialist Japan.
Moreover, it directly compares, say, the Soviet treatment of Estonia with the fascist slaver regime over Cuba that the Soviets helped overthrow, or the Israeli treatment of Palestinians via genocide. It equates what can’t be equated. Further, that means that the US Confederacy should have been allowed to leave purely on the basis of wanting to. It’s not a real point, it’s cheap.
USSR walked into Poland to “save” it, shot it in the back, started massive executions of polish people, cooperated with Nazi Germany, stole most of resources, glorified brutalizing people, forced glorification of Lenin, made everyone stand for hours in lines to get basic products like flour or meat, made everyone distrust everyone because, their armies seen civilians as playthings with a little better approach to farm families…
I do not claim USSR had only bad influence. But there is no way in hell anybody who knows history can call them good guys. They had their own agenda.
And yeah, they marched against Nazi’s and won, but when was that? Ah, yes, only after Nazis betrayed them and failed. From this point onward, it was great way to make other countries back off from USSR whille making sure Nazis - already weakened by failed invastion of USSR and constant war with UK, USA and rebels - won’t be able to reorganize and strike again.
The Soviets tried several times to form an alliance with Britain and France against the Nazis prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression treaty. The west, of course, denied it, as they were friendly with the Nazis. The Soviets hated the Nazis, and the Communists in Germany were the first the Nazis killed, and saw an enemy in “judeo-bolshevism.”
Harry Truman had this to say:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
Poland. The Nazis invaded Poland, and then the Soviets waited and tried to get the Western Powers involved. They did not, so weeks later the Soviets went in to prevent the Nazis from taking all of Poland. Of course, the Polish people saw the Soviets as aggressors, but at the time the Polish government had already collapsed, there remained nothing more than to be overtaken by the Nazis.
Social services. I think it’s very silly to complain about feeding those who need it. There were stores, and there were farms as well, and to fill in the gap there were social services. The US has also had Bread Lines, this isn’t an especially evil thing to do. Moreover, the Soviet Economy had stable and unceasing growth until its dissolution, outside of World War 2, despite having 50% of dwellings destroyed by the genocidal Nazis.
No idea what you mean by “made everyone distrust everyone.”
Again, the Soviets and Nazis hated each other from day 1. Read Blackshirts and Reds, you only need the first couple of chapters in an already short read.
I don’t think it’s a cheap pivot at all. If you want to say “look at all these places where the people there wanted freedom!” While completely ignoring that they were violently surpressing those same scenarios within their own annexed territories? That’s just willful blindness.
How familiar are you with, for example, Estonian nationalism? How familiar are you with its treatment within the USSR? These were not at all the same conditions as, say, Algeria.
It is, because “authoritarian” is a nebulous word not based on any actually reality, used to try to refer to both the USSR and Nazi Germany as if they are similar in any way.
China, Russia and the US are all authoritarian states and none of them are your friends. Why is it controversial for me to say people should not worship or prop up states that only wish to subjugate their citizens to hoard power to a select few of elites?
Conflating this belief with Nazism or Holocaust trivialization is ridiculous, dishonest and juvenile.
China, Russia and the US are all authoritarian states and none of them are your friends
I guess it would be hard to be friends with a country, it’s quite big… with lots of people.
Jokes aside, this is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. You’re more concerned with sounding like a good person rather than investigating the truth. Using the word authoritarian, just like how many liberals use the word fascist or tankie, is just a way to generate self-flattering, psuedo-intellectual discussions based on pure idealism.
The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China,
The fundamental disagreement lies here. The Chinese government does not serve the working class. Modern China is not a communist state and suffers the exact same problems the US suffers from.
The fundamental disagreement lies in your shameful ignorance of the subject you’re attempting to provide opinions on. Modern China is a socialist state where the working class holds power, but capitalist relations have not yet been abolished. That’s what socialism is, it’s a transitional state between capitalism and communism.
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
None of these things happen in capitalist states, and we can make a direct comparison with India which follows capitalist path of development. In fact, without China there practically would be no poverty reduction happening in the world.
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.
I’m not into that authoritarian stuff. Worshipping a fascist authoritarian state is not a leftist make.
Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
If you look at the holodomor I think it’s hard to continue painting the Soviet Union as having uplifted the proletariat. Soviets starved their people to achieve rapid industrialization - a tradeoff that most of those who died would probably not have agreed with. IIRC most historians say that collectivization was a horrible failure and was not good for the working class.
First hand accounts of life during stalinism make it clear that people had to develop weird mannerisms to avoid making it seem like they were disloyal/anti-party; basically everyone walking on eggshells all the time.
What in the everlasting embrace of god. Soviets, who - I’ll admit - simply chose to work people to death painted as the good guys? The same soviets that starved, beaten and let people freeze to death? The same that put people in cattle wagons and rode them out to syberia in nothing more than clothes they had on their backs?
The USSR was perhaps the single most progressive movement in the entire 20th century. It was not free from flaw, of course not, but in total it was a massive leap forward for the Working Class not only within the Soviet Union, but its very existence forced western countries to adopt expanded social safety nets (along with the efforts of leftist organizers within these countries).
From a brutal, impoverished backwater country barely industrialized, to beating the United States into space, in 50 years. Mid 30s life expectancies due to constant starvation, homelessness, and outright murder from the Tsarist Regime, doubled to the 70s very quickly. Literacy rates from the 20s and 30s to 99.9%, more than Western Nations. All of this in a single generation.
Wealth disparity shrank, while productivity growth was one of the highest in the 20th century:
Supported liberation movements in Cuba, Palestine, Algeria, Korea, China, Palestine, and more. Ensured free, and high quality healthcare and education for all. Lower retirement ages than the US, 55 for women and 60 for men. Legalized, free abortion. Full employment, and no recessions outside of World War 2. Defeated the Nazis with 80% of the combat in the entire European theater. Supported armistice treaties that the US continuously denied.
The bad guys won the Cold War, and they did so by forcing the USSR to spend a huge amount of their resources on keeping up millitarily, as the United States had much more resources and could deal with it that way.
I’d have to challenge that “the bad guys won the Cold War” rhetoric. If the USSR was as successful as your argument claims, why did so many Soviet republics seek independence?
The answer is that most didn’t seek independence originally. The referendum on the preservation of the USSR, shortly before its dissolution, wanted it to persist. in looking at Soviet Nostalgia, most say they were better off under Socialism than Capitalism and say the dissolution was a bad thing.
Moreover, it directly compares, say, the Soviet treatment of Estonia with the fascist slaver regime over Cuba that the Soviets helped overthrow, or the Israeli treatment of Palestinians via genocide. It equates what can’t be equated. Further, that means that the US Confederacy should have been allowed to leave purely on the basis of wanting to. It’s not a real point, it’s cheap.
If you keep going with Blackshirts and Reds, it gets to the events surrounding its dissolution, such as the botched coup attempt, liberalization in order to try to make up for spending so many resources on the Cold War, and more, though not a full picture. If you genuinely want to know more after you finish Blackshirts, I recommend Parenti’s 1986 lecture, which is even more entertaining because Parenti is a fantastic and passionate speaker. I’d throw on Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? as an additional articls, around 30 minutes to read, going over the merits of the Soviet Economy and why it was dissolved.
All of that is well and good, but not enough to say that the Soviets were the good side. It’s also necessary to truly look at how disgustingly evil the United States is, and for that I recommend the podcast Blowback. If you listen to Blowback, there will be nothing but hatred and disgust of the highest order for the United States, from lying about WMDs to thoroughly destroy Iraq, to dropping more bombs on Korea than in the entire Pacific Front of World War 2, to countless war crimes intentionally done to make populations suffer and no longer support their governments just to make it stop.
Okay, so I’ve got a couple of issues with your response. First of all, the referendum only polled 9 out of the 15 republics. The other six boycotted it since they were already pushing for independence. Moreover, within months, nearly every republic declared full independence. If they truly didn’t want to secede from the USSR, would they have declared independence?
Secondly, I don’t think nostalgia is a good gauge of what people want. Individuals have a tendency to romanticize the past especially during hard times. For example, many citizens of African countries revel in reminiscing about the colonial era due to economic hardships faced today. Is that what they truly want? Probably not. It is usually due to poor knowledge of colonial history that they have these sentiments.
Furthermore, I’m well aware that the US is a despicable country, and my increasing knowledge about its history only fuels my hatred of it, but you’re bordering on whataboutism if the standard for the most progressive movement of the 20th century is being “not as bad as the US” which is a pretty low bar.
Edit: You can’t compare the confederacy - a slave-owning rebellion fighting to preserve human bondage to the soviet republics - nations seeking independence from an authoritarian superstate. If you really want to compare the USSR with the US civil war, it would be better to compare it to the 13 colonies fighting for independence from the British crown.
Besides, you still didn’t address the core argument: If Soviet rule was truly beneficial, why did so many nations (at least 5) risk war and economic collapse to escape it?
The small few that were boycotting it each deserve more investigation than a single Lemmy comment thread. The simplest answer is that they had reactionary, sometimes fascist rising nationalist movements. It isn’t sufficient to say that they boycotted it, therefore the USSR was evil, it’s more accurate to say that it needs investigation. I can’t do the intricacies of their nationalist movements any justice in a Lemmy thread other than telling you that they exist.
Secondly, yes, they did vote to leave months later. The mess with the botched coup, the existence of a weird new political position that stood against the Soviet balance of power in a way that messed up the economy (long story as well), and privatization had already been at play and came to a head months later. The USSR didn’t collapse so much as it was killed.
As for Soviet Nostalgia, that’s just the term. Look at the polling data, the questions specifically ask about economic situations or if it was bad that the Soviet Union fell. These numbers are more positive among older populations that actually lived there, times are harder now for most post-Soviet states. After the fall, an estimated 7 million people died due to the collapse of social safety nets and the destruction of the economy. Capitalism was and is disastrous for these nations, whose metrics are only just now approaching their Soviet Levels, such as life expectancy, while metrics like wealth disparity and poverty are massive.
What chapter are you on in Blackshirts? They get into almost all of this in deeper detail.
As for US bad, I’ll ask you to name a more influential country than the US or the USSR during the 20th century. In terms of sheer impact, the USSR was by far the most progressive. The alternative? A genocidal Empire that tried to crush the Soviets at every chance, and ultimately succeeded. It isn’t just a “low bar,” the United States is perhaps the single most evil country to ever exist outside of Nazi Germany, and the Soviets opposed both.
For the same reasons California or Texas keep entertaining independence ballot initiatives every 4 years; internal politics.
The USSR’s republics didn’t just debate independence, they actually left. If it was just “internal politics,” why did every non-Russian republic take the first opportunity to break away?
The Texas/California comparison is a weak false equivalence. The USSR suppressed nationalist movements (read on the Hungarian Revolution), while the U.S. allows open political discourse.
It’s the only equivalency there can be between the two countries; unlike the Soviet Union, the United States was not formed by colonial absorbtion of neighboring nations. The closest thing there is, is the Mexican land grab in the 19th century and Europe has a long history of nationalist movements being suppressed, so the Soviet Union is not unique in that regard.
And, just like the USSR, the US has a track record of not allowing political discourse that threatens its hegemony; the Black Panthers, Pinochet, and Cuba are probably the most glaring examples.
You’re deflecting. If the USSR was truly a voluntary workers’ paradise, why did nearly all of its republics leave at the first opportunity? You’re avoiding that question by pointing to U.S. wrongdoing, but the reality is that Soviet republics didn’t just ‘entertain’ secession like Texas, they actively fought for it and succeeded.
Comparing minor secessionist sentiments in Texas to the complete collapse of a superstate is absurd.
Did they support liberation movements in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland etc etc?
Bit of a cheap pivot, isn’t that? Not all nationalist movements are good, many are highly reactionary, even fascist in nature. On the whole, Soviet foreign policy was cleary in the interests of the working class, from helping Cuban workers liberate themselves from the fascist Batista regime, to helping Algeria throw off the colonizing French, to helping Palestinians resisting genocide, to assisting China with throwing off the Nationalists and Imperialist Japan.
Moreover, it directly compares, say, the Soviet treatment of Estonia with the fascist slaver regime over Cuba that the Soviets helped overthrow, or the Israeli treatment of Palestinians via genocide. It equates what can’t be equated. Further, that means that the US Confederacy should have been allowed to leave purely on the basis of wanting to. It’s not a real point, it’s cheap.
Really? Cheap pivot?
USSR walked into Poland to “save” it, shot it in the back, started massive executions of polish people, cooperated with Nazi Germany, stole most of resources, glorified brutalizing people, forced glorification of Lenin, made everyone stand for hours in lines to get basic products like flour or meat, made everyone distrust everyone because, their armies seen civilians as playthings with a little better approach to farm families…
I do not claim USSR had only bad influence. But there is no way in hell anybody who knows history can call them good guys. They had their own agenda.
And yeah, they marched against Nazi’s and won, but when was that? Ah, yes, only after Nazis betrayed them and failed. From this point onward, it was great way to make other countries back off from USSR whille making sure Nazis - already weakened by failed invastion of USSR and constant war with UK, USA and rebels - won’t be able to reorganize and strike again.
There’s a lot of historical inaccuracy here.
Harry Truman had this to say:
Poland. The Nazis invaded Poland, and then the Soviets waited and tried to get the Western Powers involved. They did not, so weeks later the Soviets went in to prevent the Nazis from taking all of Poland. Of course, the Polish people saw the Soviets as aggressors, but at the time the Polish government had already collapsed, there remained nothing more than to be overtaken by the Nazis.
Social services. I think it’s very silly to complain about feeding those who need it. There were stores, and there were farms as well, and to fill in the gap there were social services. The US has also had Bread Lines, this isn’t an especially evil thing to do. Moreover, the Soviet Economy had stable and unceasing growth until its dissolution, outside of World War 2, despite having 50% of dwellings destroyed by the genocidal Nazis.
No idea what you mean by “made everyone distrust everyone.”
Again, the Soviets and Nazis hated each other from day 1. Read Blackshirts and Reds, you only need the first couple of chapters in an already short read.
Soviets also played a big role in helping India achieve independence which is one major reason why relations between India and Russia are so good to this day. https://actofdefiance.wordpress.com/2022/09/05/soviet-support-for-indian-independence/
I don’t think it’s a cheap pivot at all. If you want to say “look at all these places where the people there wanted freedom!” While completely ignoring that they were violently surpressing those same scenarios within their own annexed territories? That’s just willful blindness.
How familiar are you with, for example, Estonian nationalism? How familiar are you with its treatment within the USSR? These were not at all the same conditions as, say, Algeria.
Not my fault people are conflating them
It is, because “authoritarian” is a nebulous word not based on any actually reality, used to try to refer to both the USSR and Nazi Germany as if they are similar in any way.
Words don’t have meanings!
China, Russia and the US are all authoritarian states and none of them are your friends. Why is it controversial for me to say people should not worship or prop up states that only wish to subjugate their citizens to hoard power to a select few of elites?
Conflating this belief with Nazism or Holocaust trivialization is ridiculous, dishonest and juvenile.
Any flavor of authoritarianism is bad. Full stop.
I guess it would be hard to be friends with a country, it’s quite big… with lots of people.
Jokes aside, this is the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. You’re more concerned with sounding like a good person rather than investigating the truth. Using the word authoritarian, just like how many liberals use the word fascist or tankie, is just a way to generate self-flattering, psuedo-intellectual discussions based on pure idealism.
deleted by creator
Everyone I Don’t Like is Authoritarian: A Guide to Online Political Discourse
Big brain time
I did a le maymay on the Internet. I am le smarts.
You sure pwned me. I’ll concede to your infinite intellect. I know when I’m bested.
This is not true
Can you name a single non-“authoritarian” state, please?
We’re gonna do hands across america again, but this time we’ll complete the damn chain and fascism will be DONEZO
The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
The fundamental disagreement lies here. The Chinese government does not serve the working class. Modern China is not a communist state and suffers the exact same problems the US suffers from.
The exact same problems
Good thing you mentioned modern China since obviously the warlord era of China was obviously better. It all went downhill since the Xia dynasty.
The fundamental disagreement lies in your shameful ignorance of the subject you’re attempting to provide opinions on. Modern China is a socialist state where the working class holds power, but capitalist relations have not yet been abolished. That’s what socialism is, it’s a transitional state between capitalism and communism.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
None of these things happen in capitalist states, and we can make a direct comparison with India which follows capitalist path of development. In fact, without China there practically would be no poverty reduction happening in the world.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty
As a result, even as mainstream western media openly admits, Chinese government enjoys broad public trust and support:
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/
Time for some learnin’
Or perhaps you do
You conflated them, though. It may not be originally your fault, though, that dishonor goes to figures like Joseph Goebbels.