LeninsRage [he/him]

  • 1 Post
  • 31 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 12th, 2020

help-circle

  • It’s very strange, you can tell the writing for this game is all-timer level great because people can have wildly divergent interpretations of the game’s ultimate tone. It’s either one of the most depressing and defeatist games ever made, or one of the most optimistic and hopeful. And both interpretations are equally valid.

    (I’m more in the optimism camp, for the record).






  • Literally no one here is arguing that Ukraine is good, but the actual leftists (as opposed to national chauvinists) here are arguing that this is unmistakably an inter-imperialist war and not some convoluted “the invasion of Ukraine is anti-imperialist because Russia is on the imperial periphery of a super-imperialist bloc” bullshit argument.

    I’m someone who can absolutely advance arguments that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was caused by outside imperialist circumstances. But now that it has happened, and is actual fact? There is zero “critical support” of Russian aggression here. The only legitimate communist position in this scenario is for Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike to turn their guns on their own generals. Will that happen? No. But that’s the fucking position the Bolsheviks themselves took from the start, not some ridiculous stance about how actually the Kaiser was right to resist all along and criticizing the German war effort is bad.







  • He might do extensive research for each season of the podcast but in this one there is very much a gaping hole that could have been filled by reading Red Petrograd.

    He at least did a good job of emphasizing how every non-Bolshevik faction completely fucked up their position in between February and October 1917, thus throwing support to the Bolsheviks. But he pretty firmly turned against the Bolsheviks in his narrative after October in a very Orlando Figes kind of way. Thankfully he is covering how the Whites continue to be so incompetent and reactionary that everyone else has no choice but to support the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil. But a major tell is that he puts a lot of emphasis on the Bolsheviks dissolving the Constituent Assembly, ignoring how if the Constituent Assembly was even remotely relevant to the interests of the masses it would not have been so trivial to dissolve it.




  • The Nazis had to continuously pursue their revanchist aims and win in order to maintain popular legitimacy. The German economy was also disastrously overheated and on the precipice of catastrophic collapse, which was only prevented by going to war, getting insanely lucky against France, and then plundering continental Europe for needed raw materials and wealth. The Nazis had maneuvered into a position where they had to go to war for their regime to survive, by design.

    They also, like all fascists, were ideologically incapable of objectively evaluating the perceived strength of their enemies. Hitler gambled that Britain and France would back down again, and gambled again that the Wehrmacht had the capability to defeat them quickly.




  • These public trials and executions were held to the overwhelming approval of the public, pretty much for the purpose of mollifying widespread popular fury toward former Batistiano thugs and terrorists who had made the masses suffer and killed their relatives for years. Historians believe they most likely prevented a bloodbath of mob justice that would have killed hundreds more indiscriminately, and the trials were the method by which the revolutionaries established their authority and re-established some semblance of rule of law.

    If you were tried and executed because of these trials, it’s because you were a close collaborator with the murderous Batista regime. “Police chief of Santa Clara”, yeah, I fucking bet he was.