mycorrhiza they/them @ mycorrhiza @lemmy.ml

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282

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2 yr. ago

"We'll give you this money if you cut all your social safety nets, depress wages, and hand your resources over to foreign companies."

"Fuck, who could have predicted that our stipulations would stunt your economy and impoverish your workers? Welp... guess you'll have to stay poor and keep offering cheap sweatshop labor so we can sell the products at 10x the price overseas. Oh woe is us! Next time, we'd better do the exact same thing over again, proving that we learned from our innocent mistake!"

I'm heading out to meet friends. Don't take my silence for defeat lol. Hopefully someone picks this up where I leave off.

genocide its neighbors

Most historians — not communists, just regular academics — agree the famine was not a deliberate genocide. Read the preface to The Years of Hunger. The authors, R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, are neither communists nor supporters of Stalin. Theirs is one of the definitive accounts of the famine, referenced on Wikipedia and cited often in other academic works.

allying with the nazis

This is facebook meme-tier history.

First of all, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact (not an alliance) was signed, both parties expected to fight each other in the near future. Hitler viewed war with the Soviet Union as "inevitable." Stalin expressed similar feelings. The pact was a temporary delaying tactic that allowed the Soviets to prepare for war while Germany focused on other targets.

Second, Stalin approached Germany only after France and the UK had already rebuffed his 1939 offer to form an anti-fascist alliance. Stalin offered to send France and the UK a million troops in 1939 and was denied. Nonaggression with Germany was his only other option. Even the US state department confirmed this was Stalin's rationale for a nonaggression pact with Hitler: "The Soviets signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany after the British and French rejected Soviet offers to establish a military alliance against Germany"

Third, everyone else had already signed pacts with Germany at various points in the preceding decade:

1933 - UK, France, Italy, Germany - The four powers pact

1934 - Poland and Germany - Hitler-Pilsudski Pact

1935 - UK and Germany - Anglo-German Naval agreement

1936 - Japan and Germany - Anti-Comintern pact

1938 - September - UK and Germany - German-British Non Aggression Pact (Munich Agreement)

1938 - December - France and Germany - German-French Non Aggression Pact

1939 - March - Romania and Germany - German Romanian Economical Treaty

1939 - March - Lithuania and Germany - Non aggression ultimatum

1939 - May - Italy and Germany - Pact of Steel (Friendship and Alliance)

1939 - May - Denmark and Germany - Non aggression pact

1939 - June - Estonia and Germany - non aggression pact

1939 - July - Latvia and Germany - non aggression pact

1939 - August - USSR and Germany - Molotov-Ribbentrop Non Aggression pact — the only one liberals care about

Belligerents signed and broke pacts left and right.

First, the Kronstadt rebellion was 100 years ago and has nothing to do with the struggle of people today to improve their lives. Second, it happened in the immediate aftermath of a bloody civil war against the capitalist-backed white army, before the soviet government had even fully established itself. Lenin viewed the rebellion as an existential threat, and said as much in his letters at the time. Third, you just read a passage about the bloody annihilation of open, democratic socialist movements throughout the 20th century. The Kronstadt rebels demanded that the nascent soviet union become one of those. How do you think that would have ended? Two decades later, the nazis would invade the soviet union and attempt to genocide the russian people. How would that have gone in your timeline? Ultimately, in 2023, none of these questions matter. There are more pressing concerns than whether or not Lenin overreacted to the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. It's only ever brought up as a gotcha to shut down socialist discussion, most people who mention it have never read about it and don't give a shit about it as a historical event.

nah, "planet on fire" is a bit of hyperbole to describe a planet where we are sprinting past tipping point after tipping point on our way toward unrecoverable warming, ecological collapse, drought, famine, mass migration, resource wars, genocide, and ultimately the collapse of our complex, interconnected, fragile global economy.

Got what they deserved? Ukraine isn't winning. Both sides are locked in a stalemate. Maybe that's what you meant.

Even in the 90s, analysts understood that Russia viewed NATO expansion as an existential threat. Now missiles on the border can strike Moscow in 5 minutes. America nearly invaded Cuba under similar circumstances, during the Cuban missile crisis. The missiles were withdrawn from Cuba before that could happen.

I'll paste a quote from a book called the Jakarta Method, which details the US-backed mass killing of over a million communists in Indonesia:

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask: “Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported -- what the rich countries said, rather than what they did.

That group was annihilated.

That's social democracy — capitalism with safety nets. Socialism implies that workers control the means of production.

make a hexbear account and start a thread. link your thread here so we can see how it goes. I'm sure you'll do great.

the planet is on fire and a handful of companies control most of the global economy and most of the world's governments

Is there no western media you can think of which is critical of Capitalism? Maybe even someone you just cited?

Are you saying the west has trustworthy press because Parenti and Chomsky were allowed to publish books?

Please link to your source

9 day old thread, but North Korean defector testimonies are infamous for falling apart under scrutiny.

accused of being a rape apologist because I was insistent on the presumption of innocence

Good thing to insist on, but be prudent. Keep in mind that, at least on reddit, there's a tendency for every thread about rape to become a thread about false accusations. I wasn't there, but in general, sometimes people object not to the presumption of innocence but to people bringing it up.

a restricted and guided tour of some barbershops doesn’t really prove anything though, does it?

You’d think along the way they might pass a pedestrian with a Kim Jong Un haircut

I believe it's plausible. I give reasons why. You think it's implausible, and you give no reasons why. You're also really condescending while doing it.

intellectually dishonest how? I acknowledged it was speculation and gave my reasons.

extraordinary evidence

any evidence at all

much more unlikely

than a disproven story?

at least the haircut story has an anonymous source. You don't even have that.

actually, yes I do. someone told me. /s

an anonymous source is actually fine

...when they provide evidence.

Wikileaks publishes leaks. Their sources provide falsifiable documents, transcripts, photos, and footage — actual evidence we can follow up on. The Panama Papers were evidence. 2.6 terabytes of data. 11.5 million documents. Edward Snowden gave us evidence. He didn't just say "the NSA totally spies on you dude, trust me bro."

absurd conspiracy theory that the CIA actually runs RFA

Conspiracy theory sure, but how is it absurd? They're state funded, the CIA acknowledges it created them, they print a lot of unsourced claims about America's enemies, you can't find any information about their authors, etc. Ultimately I'm not sure it matters. Unsourced disproven bullshit is unsourced disproven bullshit, CIA or not. Either way, we can point to Radio Free Asia as an example of less-than-trustworthy US state media.

That claim includes a source

Yeah, an anonymous source. Did you look at it?

Why not just claim they eat babies or something equally horrific?

They do publish many horrific claims.

gets the same results in the end

No it doesn't. When your outlet is obvious propaganda, fewer people believe you. RFA's sheen of reputability was a huge factor in the haircut story's enormous reach in western media.

Hire a bunch of hatchet job propagandists

…the sort of people who would write this disproven haircut story and dozens of other goofy unsourced claims they’ve published, yes. You can even tell them to write normal stories too just to mix it up.

Convincing journalists to lie seems like a lot of work

Not if some or all of your journalists are US intelligence — Radio Free Asia began as a CIA front operation (google it), and might still be one.