I’d love to see those Hexbears have an answer for this!

  • Dr_Gabriel_Aby [none/use name]
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    01 year ago

    I can understand getting fooled and believing all the bad stuff about Mao and Stalin, but I genuinely don’t understand how libs treat Lenin like a great evil. They can’t even give Lenin the “his revolution got out of hand when he died” point. I really don’t see what Lenin did that was extreme. The provisional government was about to be overthrown by reactionaries and they already attempted so before the October Revolution. He took power by popular support and most of his factions enemies were foreign to Russian soil.

    • panopticon [comrade/them]
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      1 year ago

      Another one I’ve seen is blaming Lenin for the Russian Civil War and thus hanging all the war deaths on him as well as the deaths from the subsequent famine. He did advocate for turning the imperialist war into a revolutionary (edit: civil) war, so it’s not completely absurd, but how many would have died if Russia had stayed in WWI? Insert the Mark Twain quote about the two reigns of terror.

      • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
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        01 year ago

        Remember that netflix docu series about the tsar family where they intercut a recreation of their execution with a historian calling it(paraphrased) the most hideous and bestial crime of the 20th century?

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]
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      1 year ago

      Well, to paraphrase Molotov, Lenin was even more harsh than Stalin, particularly to his allies. During the height of the revolution and civil war, if he got a letter from a peasant claiming communist party corruption or malfeasance in an area, he would deputize a university professor and some students to go check it out, and if evidence was found of that corruption or malfeasance to their satisfaction (which had no real legal precedent) they had the discretion to either eject them from the party or, depending on the severity of the offense, just straight up execute them, no trial. Which happened fairly regularly. It was not a case of “We have investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing.”

      Even if you think the evidence standards were lax in the USSR during Stalin’s time (which imo they were basically the same as pretty much everyone else’s at the time, they were just far more aggressive at pursuing legal actions against high level party members and generals) at the helm, he still always had trials before executing people, even going as far as trying people in absentia, something that Lenin would have considered a ridiculous liberal facade.

      Don’t get me wrong, these were harsh people, but in comparison to the consequences that would face them and the millions peasants they led if they failed, I don’t think they were unnecessarily harsh.

      • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
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        01 year ago

        Even if you think the evidence standards were lax in the USSR during Stalin’s time (which imo they were basically the same as pretty much everyone else’s at the time

        Yeah people who complain about this don’t compare 1930s Soviet courtrooms to 1930s U.S. courtrooms (because that would be whataboitism, not, you know, having perspective). Think of all the people who had confessions beat out of them or got railroaded on the flimsiest of evidence. Think of all the black people who never made it to the courtroom at all.

        • VILenin [he/him]M
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          01 year ago

          You don’t understand, the real tragedy is that powerful people had to face consequences for their actions. USSR bad because everyone was executed, but also USSR bad because the elite (lol) was never punished ever

    • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
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      01 year ago

      Think Kropotkin-style anarchism. “Libertarian” used to refer to anarcho-communism–communism without states, hierarchies, and so on–until Rothbard and company started using it to mean laissez-faire capitalism during the 20th century. Some anarchists will still call themselves libertarian socialists or left-libertarians (not to be confused with “bleeding heart libertarians” or “liberaltarians,” which are as awful as you’d expect).

        • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
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          01 year ago

          Yeah, that was their deliberate plan. Rothbard wrote:

          For the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy. ‘Libertarians’ had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we have taken it over.

          He was successful to the point that very few people use it in the old sense anymore, unfortunately. This is especially true in amerikkka

          • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]
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            1 year ago

            Probably worth pointing out that Hitler talks about doing the same thing with the word socialism.

  • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]
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    01 year ago

    Us, if we fall for their lies again

    What “we”? You’re just a bunch of liberals playing dress up, your political involvement is just a performance that stops when you log out of reddit and vooote for Genocide Joe. No connection at all to the political legacy of the anarchists who risked life and limb for humanity.

  • SweaterWeather [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    The evolution from “Stalin didn’t help enough” to “Stalin didn’t help at all” to “Stalin actually killed them” regarding the Spanish Civil War is fucking wild.

    Editing to fix my dog ass grammar

    • AntiOutsideAktion [he/him]OP
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      1 year ago

      Meanwhile in the original thread I’m arguing with ‘an historian’ claiming Stalin sent ‘his army’ there in a sentence that presented it equally to both Hitler and Mussolini

      I’m convinced that instance has the most tedious people on the planet

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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    01 year ago

    Anarcho-bidenists have this weird habit of talking about themselves like they are Jewish or something in the sense of having a history of brutal persecution, even if the speaker in question is just some white guy from a liberal family with absolutely no connection to those historical anarchists except for that they now also call themselves an anarchist. Is really weird and LARPy.

    • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
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      1 year ago

      Its a way for boring people who hate reading to tap into that “the communists KILLED my PEOPLE” narrative, its like a politcal personality starter pack. You get an underdog “subversive” ideology, a formative tragedy and an eternal enemy!

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
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    01 year ago

    There were plenty of anarchist and libertarian socialists in the Soviet Union that weren’t insurrectionist counter-revolutionary opportunists that thought the best time for them to seize power and hit the full Communism button without building anything to actually achieve it was during times of duress, such as the civil war, the build-up to then during the second world War, the post-war rebuilding period in former fascist countries, the post-war rebuilding period in a reunified country freed from imperialist conquest, and so forth.

    If I was as historically illiterate and ideologically ignorant as the person that made this and all the clapping circus seals applauding this, I would say something completely out of line like “in the history of left unity, anarchism and libertarian socialism has only attempted to emerge into the world in the form of a cancerous tumor on the Communist movement and never has nor is able to emerge into the world on its own feet.” A completely unfair and intellectually dishonest statement that ignores the existence of anarchist communes in both the Sino and former Soviet states and erases their contributions to the defense of humanity and the revolution they made in fending off the imperialists and fascists and their contributions to the benefit of humanity and the revolution in their work among the people.

    Also love the casual racism against Asians by depicting Mao with slit eyes.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
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    1 year ago

    Unsure where the author of this meme has heard either Lenin or Stalin call for left unity? Both were pretty clearly and consistently hostile towards Anarchism/Libertarian Socialism as well as what we’d call modern Social Democratic tendencies.

    Only not including Mao because I havent read enough Mao and Khruschev because I honestly don’t expect him to have written or spoken in particular about left tendency conflicts.

    Really funny to just put “intellectuals” under Mao though.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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      01 year ago

      Lenin did kind of revere Kropotkin, but you are right that it was explicitly part of their organization that “there is one party line, not two” and that the vanguard must behave in a unified fashion following the results of a vote or other method of decision-making.

      • Alaskaball [comrade/them]
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        01 year ago

        and that the vanguard must behave in a unified fashion following the results of a vote or other method of decision-making

        This is democratic centralism: Freedom of debate - Unity of action.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
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      1 year ago

      If they wanted a remotely accurate meme they should have put “no unity with counter-revolutionaries” as the dialogue, since that at least gets at the core divide and argument of the conflict, both then and now.

      Edit: Actually the more I look at it the funnier it gets, like theres no Kronstadt? You put “factory councils” over like the one specific thing everyone gets to hear about and have to have an opinion on? What is this, a crypto-Trotskyist meme?

      • Nagarjuna [he/him]
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        01 year ago

        One of the (more legitimate) grievances put forward by the anarchists is that the bolsheviks ended elections in the soviets and replaced elected delegates with Bolshevik appointees. During the Civil War and consolidation it made sense, but the fact that the soviets weren’t democratize again during peace time was a failing (although, obviously, the time between the Civil War and the German invasion was brief). I think that’s probably what it was in reference to?