How Communist Revolutions are created
So many replies to this topic are just ‘everything sucks because humans are horrible’.
I could understand a kid making angsty comments like that, but it’s just embarrassing when a grown-up does it.
Hardly anybody in this thread seems to have arrived at the conclusion that maybe some lower-class people have an interest in and nostalgia for the Eastern Bloc because capitalism is becoming increasingly intolerable.
It reminds me of the chumps who condescendingly explained to feminists that misandry is a serious problem on par with white supremacy and that not all men are awful. What a way to miss the point. Telling a lower-class person that communism is actually horrible doesn’t fix anything and neither does reminding an unhappy feminist that there are some good men in the world.
Such is the nature of left antisemitism: you must always read between the lines.
For example, a user by the name of Anarcho-Bolshevik once commented ‘Every Jew is like a precious lamb to me. (Except for Netanyahu and anybody who supports him… those people are awful.)’
You shall see, gentlemen, that this is, without question, the single most antisemitic comment ever written, for a few simple reasons:
- Calling Jews ‘precious’, which puts a price on them, so she or he is actually saying that all Jews are commodities. Strike one.
- Comparing Jews to animals frequently intended for consumption, thereby implying that she or he wants to eat all Jews, as anybody could logically deduce from that. Strike two.
- Saying that anybody who supports Netanyahu is awful, but supporting the war on Gaza supports Netanyahu, and 99.99% of Jews are Zionists, which means that they support the war on Gaza, so she or he is really saying that all Jews are awful. Strike three.
Now you will understand the reasons which have led countries to persecute and isolate those leftists marked by the stigma of their antisemitism. The domination of such leftists within society is disturbing and dangerous for the destiny of the nation.
I finally had my first Seder yesterday. It was also the first time that I had matzah, matzo ball soup, wine, and gefilte fish, all of which I enjoyed having. I tried to imagine myself being an ancient Hebrew who hastily escaped chattel slavery, but it was difficult when there was so much commotion in the room.
Above all, the Seder was about mourning the situation in Gaza, how they have little to eat and only salt water to drink. We took turns reading from a pamphlet about the situation there and why we could not in good conscience have a celebratory Seder like most other Jews would normally have. We weren’t miserable during the event, but being conscious of Palestinian suffering made the Seder very different: we all knew that Gazans were still going to be in agony after the Seder was over.
Despite the noise in the room (in between and after reading from the pamphlet), I managed to have a couple of conversations with the other guests. The one to my right was taciturn, but we talked a little about the Spanish State and the Jewish history there and in Morocco.
The one to my left was more energetic, and we talked about modern history, like the status of gay Jews in the Third Reich. I told him that I may well have written the first article specifically on the subject, and I wrote on a napkin where he could find the topic—https:lemmy.ml (I wish that I had been more specific)—and my telephone number. Later he agreed to take me home and we talked about historical conspiracies and other events in modern history, like the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia and how Imperial America forgave most of Fascist Italy’s WWI debt, which amazed him. He hasn’t tried to contact me yet, but I wish that we could speak again.
I love Gabor Maté’s sense of empathy and the calmness with which he approaches everything. He can take an interest in just about anything, see positives that many others miss, and understand others’ points of view without necessarily advocating for them either. He is a lot like Werner Herzog.
I love this quote:
So look, here’s what I would say to you: it’s true what I said, that all the speaking that I’ve done, or other people have done internationally, all the advocacy that you may have done, all the letter writing and petitions that you may have signed… have not saved a single finger of a single Gazan child. Some might say that we have failed. Don’t believe that for one second! You have not failed! The very fact that in the face of all the propaganda and all the withholding of truth, so many people’s hearts are broken, that’s a sign, that’s a tribute to humanity. And if your heart is broken, that’s a tribute to you. Even if you feel broken-hearted, and helpless, and hopeless, and in despair, don’t let that get to you. Because you have a larger goal here, which is to contribute to the light and the truth in the world as best you see it. And that is a long-term… struggle. It’s a long-term calling. And all of us can contribute to it.
This reminds me of a game over screen from Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome, when the Roman player loses to the Hunnic CPU:
Your ineptitude has brought an end to 1,000 years of glorious history. Rome has fallen. The empire has come to an end. Welcome to the Dark Ages. The Huns are lauding you as one of their greatest generals.
In a shouting match debate with Norman Finkelstein, Rabbi Shmuley said the Winston Churchill defeated the Third Reich, which is funny because Churchill hisself said that the Red Army ‘t[ore] the guts out of the’ Wehrmacht.
It is part of the defense, yes, because our movements were responsible for achieving the concessions that the Fascists had to undo.
Nazism is a Capitalist response to left wing organization in order to violently suppress it, and ensure the existing ruling class does not lose power.
Well, not exactly. I can see why many of us have this oversimplified view of Fascism (it was my own for a while), but as respectable as our numbers were in the Kingdom of Italy and the Weimar Republic, we were still too minor to ensure a revolution. Rather, preventing capitalism’s collapse by any means necessary—saving it from its own contradictions—was the ruling class’s main motive for institutionalizing Fascism. Listen to this monologue by Michael Parenti or read Daniel Guerin’s Fascism and Big Business for the details.
If the Herzlians simply wanted to get rid of Hamas, they could have used a wide variety of less destructive methods to achieve that goal. See the psychological warfare of the Malayan Emergency for examples.
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Generally anticommunists insist that the German–Soviet Pact of 1939 was vastly more important. The most important event of the twentieth century even, if not the single most important event in the universe’s roughly 13.7 billion years of existence, period.
I am not kidding when I say that I have seen far more equivalences made between communism and German Fascism than I have seen references to the Axis’s atrocities on the Eastern Front.
A user just moved the goalpost to the time when the U.S.S.R. traded some raw materials in exchange for firearms and other machinery (which it later used to help defeat the Axis). One can imagine another counterarguing that this credit deal hardly enabled the Third Reich’s bellicism; that, if anything, it likely only lead to the Axis’s defeat as it allowed the Soviets to prepare for the armed conflict. Ask yourself if that sounds identical to the liberal bourgeoisie’s appeasement.
The Third Reich’s trade with the Kingdom of Romania between January and November 1940 surpassed its trade with the Soviet Union. I would be surprised if the Soviets did indeed deliver ‘about 75%’ of the Third Reich’s imports: only 34% of the Third Reich’s oil came from the Soviet Union; it looks like the Kingdom of Romania was a much more important source of Fascism’s black gold.
The non-aggression pact that was signed well after Nazi germany had signed pacts with Britain and France?
While not directly related to the pacts, the British Empire exported significant quantities of scrap to the Third Reich. In fact, the British Empire served as the Third Reich’s primary source of imported raw materials in the 1930s. I cannot say much about pre-1940 France’s economic relations with the Third Reich, but you sparked my curiosity on that subject.
fuck anyone who diminishes the sacrifices of the Soviet Union against the Nazi tide, it’s barely notch above outright holocaust denial.
Added to this, 75.3% of Europe’s Jewish refugees found refuge in the Soviet Union during World War II, Lithuanian Jews welcomed the Red Army in 1940, which had the highest number of Jews of all the Allied armies, and (my favourite) Soviet policies lead Transnistrians to resist antisemitism, even during Axis occupation.
Oh. That is a good point. You really showed me how wrong I was. I wish that I were as smart as you.
It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.
Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.
The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.
— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262
When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.
This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.
— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145
No, the relations between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich were an alliance. The relations between the Slovak Republic and the Third Reich were an alliance. The German–Soviet Pact was 1.8 years of neutrality, which the Western Axis broke by launching the largest and deadliest invasion in all of history, yet for some reason antisocialists seem far more interested in the Pact than the invasion.
We can spend all day condemning the German–Soviet Pact to the lowest depths of Hell and overrate its importance to be greater than every other event in history combined. It won’t get us a damn bit closer to understanding the circumstances that made it a likely outcome. Because unlike you, I take tragedies seriously by thoroughly examining their causes as well as their effects. That is why I taught people about the Pact from the Fascist bourgeoisie’s point of view whereas generic antisocialists have bupkes to say about that subject.
So?