Crossposted from https://thebrainbin.org/m/germany@feddit.org/t/1945027
A small town in eastern Germany banned the installation of new Holocaust memorial plaques that mark the last known residence or workplace of Jews and other victims of the genocide.
The motion was proposed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)…
CNN using ‘East German’ in the headline as if East Germany still exists and is somehow to blame for this is incredibly cynical.
You know who wouldn’t have let this happen? The German Democratic Republic. But its forcible annexation into the Nazi successor state next door, resulting in its flooding with capitalist propaganda even as the quality of life collapsed under shock doctrine, is why there is such a resurgence of far-right politics in the east. Once again, the forcible, antidemocratic destruction of communism in Europe by the US Empire reveals itself as one of the greatest disasters in history.
Maybe, but that state failed. Perhaps even due to exploitive practices organised by Moscow
Maybe.
That aside: wild take.
🙄
Soviet rule killed tens of millions. And was not democratic.
Are you saying Gorbachev should not have pursued glasnost or perestroika?
That the Berlin Wall should not have come down?
That Vaclav Havel was wrong to say, “[T]he sooner, the more quickly, and the more peacefully the Soviet Union begins to move along the road toward genuine political pluralism, respect for the rights of nations to their own integrity and to a working—that is a market—economy, the better it will be, not just for Czechs and Slovaks, but for the whole world.”?
Commies killed trillions!
I know you are joking but this is actually true. Carl Marks while he was the dictator of Russia killed six septillion people.
You really need to lay off the Black Book of Communism, a book which even the authors themselves have recanted.
Mfw I still belive “Black Book of Communism” numbers.
Yes. I think the mass death, destitution and loss of QoL caused by shock doctrine - which would not have occured without Gorbachev - was actually a bad thing. I think it’s bad when we do something that creates a bunch of child prostitutes, but I suppose you’re allowed to disagree on that one.
I wonder why the socialists in charge in East Germany felt like they might need to have some control over who enters crosses the border from a country full of nazis who, very recently, killed all of their comrades.
Let’s see: Nazis in Germany post-war were hired and brought directly back into:
but other than all of that though!
(And that’s not even mentioning the Nazis and collaborators which made up the origins of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, the “Victims of Communism Foundation” which grew out of the fascist-filled anti-Soviet “Captive Nations Lobby” headed by OUN-B Nazis from Ukraine, and all the Operation Aerodynamic, Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise, Operation Beladonna, Operation Lynx, etc etc.)
Given that, I find the berlin wall to be pretty reasonable.
That user still hasn’t replied to this lmao but is doing to all the others, and still linking wikipedia articles without any insight as of why
It’s so typical. I usually just call them out when I see them do it to others. It’s funny how often they just go radio silent - Or they otherwise either decide to pick one specific thing to hone in on, or they will play obtuse or they will start to google for more articles that support their claims, but they haven’t read them themselves - Something this guy does in this thread “Read the footnotes in the article I linked you”. Yeah buddy, you definitely studied all the references yourself. (And I did bring up some of the footnotes, which they also haven’t addressed lol.)
I got a comment removed for being “uncivil” when I pointed out someone was doing this. It’s apparently such a core part of the character of liberals that pointing out the action is considered rude.
Don’t take this the wrong way but you might be in the wrong instance. Also, colonialism.
How so? I’m not promoting any extreme viewpoints, and Lemmy.ml is the primary instance of Lemmy so surely ought to be welcoming
That seems very OT. No-one in this thread is advocating colonialism, AFAICT.
promoting the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is an extreme viewpoint.
Where did I “promote the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”? You’re talking out of your hat.
You’re promoting it as an alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat. East Germany went from a proletarian democracy under dictatorship of the proletariat to a bourgeois democracy under dictatorship of capital when reunification happened.
Do you not see the contradiction there?
Like I said: point me to where I did that. Oh, you can’t, because I didn’t.
there is no contradiction
you only believe there is because you don’t know what the term means and refuse to investigate and learn
no
—Pat Sloan, in the Introduction to Soviet Democracy
you just don’t know what these words mean and you think they’re bad things. read a fucking book and stop acting like a smug.
Unless it has changed recently, signing up requires copying a sentence from a communist text. This should hint at the views typically held here.
This is the instance run by Lemmy’s developers. And like them, a lot of the users here are communists, or at least other leftists.
I too hope that you won’t take this the wrong way, but you might feel more at home on another instance, with more like-minded individuals.
I see. Thanks for explaining.
I’m fine with that. Many of the replies in this thread, though, seem to be from “big-C” Communist (authoritarian/denialist/Stalinist) perspectives, rather than “small-c” communist or leftist ones. IMO there’s a big difference.
Appreciate it. I’ll bear it in mind before cross-posting in future.
We actually are communists. To say that “Stalinists,” “Soviets,” or “authoritarians” (lord knows what you mean by “denialist”) is absurd.
By far most communists in the world are Marxist-Leninists, and that’s what we are. Most Western communists/Marxists are not, but they are a small minority in the grand scheme of things. And there is a big difference: one has had several successful revolutions, some of which have survived to the present day, the other never has.
That’s just simply objectively not true, and US global economic sanctions have killed over 28 million people in the last fifty years alone, according to the Lancet.
Soviet people’s democracy was radically democratic in a way that no bourgeoise parliamentary democracy ever has been or ever could be. A cursory understanding of the origins and history of US ‘democracy’ makes it clear how completely absurd the notion is. The government is a committee for managing the affairs of the rich, and it has been since the very first moment that the worthy businessmen of the colonies gathered in each others mansions to split the profits of their stolen lands and conspire on how to keep the working class under control. The people of the United States have never decided a single thing in all of history, and the people of its subjugated colonies and vassal states have never even had the luxury of participating in its sham electoral pageantry.
There has never been a more brutally authoritarian, bloodsoaked nation than the United States, and the USSR is not only not close, is not only the opposite, but its violent dismemberment and the carving up of its society and economy by the US worldwide secret police actually did kill tens of millions of people - 16.9 million excess deaths by 2019 in fact, again according to the Lancet.
Furthermore, here is a map of the 1991 referendum on whether to keep the USSR
As you can see, an overwhelming supermajority of the population were in favor of keeping the Union together. However, Boris Yeltsin’s CIA-aided, illegal dissolution of the USSR was forced through with extreme violence, during which over two thousand counter-protesters were killed - including members of the state parliament, the democratically elected body that tried to stop him!
Here's the House of Soviets after Yeltsin ordered tanks to open fire on it after the parliament impeached him and tried to block his illegal dissolution of the Union.
But we were talking about Germany, so did you know? A higher proportion of judges and government ministers were (‘former’) members of the Nazi party in 1973, than the proportion of active Nazis in the Third Reich in 1943? Did you know the first head of NATO, Adolf Heusinger, was Hitler’s Chief of Staff? Or how about that West Germany had a social club for Wehrmacht soldiers that had invaded Africa.
Here's their badge!
The Nazis didn’t lose the war except where the USSR got to them, everywhere else they were seamlessly integrated back into the western financial capitalist empire from which they had spawned. Lebensraum was inspired by Manifest Destiny and paid for by British and US banks. And now, US state media gets to come along, point at the results of their brutal political intervention, of their pet reactionaries trying to erase the history of a previous brutal military intervention, and by implication blame it on the nation they destroyed.
What a lot of whataboutism. You didn’t directly answer a single one of my questions.
Look at the footnotes here.
CNN? The same CNN that is being blocked by the White House?
Look at the “Origins” tab of the Wikipedia article on whataboutism you linked and sit with your feelings for a second.
I’m familiar with its origins. My feeling is: I used the word accurately.
"The tactic behind whataboutism has been around for a long time. Rhetoricians generally consider it to be a form of tu quoque, which means “you too” in Latin and involves charging your accuser with whatever it is you’ve just been accused of rather than refuting the truth of the accusation made against you. Tu quoque is considered to be a logical fallacy, because whether or not the original accuser is likewise guilty of an offense has no bearing on the truth value of the original accusation.
Whataboutism adds a twist to tu quoque by directing its energies into establishing an equivalence between two or more disparate actions…
The association of whataboutism with the Soviet Union began during the Cold War. As the regimes of Josef Stalin and his successors were criticized by the West for human rights atrocities, the Soviet propaganda machine would be ready with a comeback alleging atrocities of equal reprehensibility for which the West was guilty."
doesn’t mean shit, just a crappy excuse to spout a lot of bullshit made up in your head and using “whataboutism” to deflect any criticism or points being made that contradicts your fantasy.
“Whataboutism” has a specific meaning. I used the word correctly.
No, he has proven that your claim that the Soviet Union was not democratic was wrong, providing an explanation and specific examples. Furthermore, he compared the number of deaths attributed to the Soviet Union with the figures for other states.
That’s not whataboutism at all, and pointing out how utterly ignorant you are of even the most basic information about the subject under discussion, and how that led to you asking a bunch of irrelevant questions based on your absolutely incorrect assumptions is answering the questions behind your questions.
Besides, I see you didn’t even bother to reply to the person who did answer all of your questions specifically with well sourced answers.
Seems more like you’re trying to shit on communism and disingenuously spread long-debunked horse shit propaganda than like you’re trying to have any genuine discussions.
I asked 3 questions.
Instead of answering any, CascadeOfLight posted an irrelevant rant about US sanctions, Yeltsin, West Germany in the 1970s, Lebensraum, etc.
That is absolutely whataboutism.
Point me to exactly where someone “did answer all [my] questions specifically with well sourced answers”.
Oh, you can’t, because no-one did do that.
The fact that you think it is irrelevant says much more about you than I fear you realize; I do hope one day you can actually engage with a different version of reality than what you’ve initially been presented with and engage with it scientifically.
Here https://lemmy.zip/comment/29096459
let’s see how you twist that into whataboutism
Blocked by Cloudflare :/
Skill issue.
Right, so its disingenuousness and not merely ignorance or naivete.
Whataboutism is a concept cooked up by a british columnist in order to dismiss IRA criticism of actions taken by the british army. It was then popularised by a zionist to dismiss palestinians.
Also, you’re using it wrong. “Whataboutism” is not just “whenever someone mentions anyone doing anything” it is especially not “whataboutism” when someone gives context to actions and accusations.
Yes. I think you are aware enough to understand how disingenuous your argument is.
Tens of millions? Where who and when?
Look at the footnotes here.
Stalin killed trillions with his comically sized spoon by eating all the grain of Ukraine
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The 1932–33 famine was not a genocide by any stretch of the imagination, except in the imagination of the Banderite fascists, who coined the term holomodor in the 1980s to evoke comparison to the Holocaust. But they are not comparable, because 1) the famine wasn’t intentional, and 2) more people died per capita in other parts of the Soviet Union than in Ukraine, and in particular more per capita in Russia proper than in Ukraine. The notion started as fascist, anti-communist double genocide propaganda, and you’re still propagating it today, over a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Thanks for the reminder that I’m old as fuck.
Given that most serious genocide scholars regard the Holodomor as a genocide, you’re simply wrong.
The double genocide article you posted links to the Holomor denial article, which describes your behaviour:
‘Holodomor denial is easily distinguished from serious scholarship, and “generally consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades,” often accompanied by accusations of foreign influence, Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.’
Blocked. Genocide denial crosses the line.
Yes, many “serious” scholars in the imperial core regard it as a genocide, but outside of that minority, scholars around the world do not.
Welcome to Lemmy, your first exposure to voices outside of the capitalist/imperialist echo chamber that most of us had ever been exposed to.
Since you’re so fond of wikipedia articles
Why do you insist on downplaying the holocaust?
linking to a wikipedia article and calling Holodomor a genocide is fucking pathetic of you. It’s just double genocide theory which is a form of genocide trivialization and undermines the severity that genocide carries
Lmao this guy trusts wikipedia as an unbiased source on political questions.
It states “as high as 148 million” and then uses This online article as a source - An article that is incredibly flawed, but also an article that is discussing death by starvation and counts those as “state killings”. The academic work in the article is questionable, to say the least, and it is odd to use a source discussion famine to support claims of “killings” - Especially without adressing it. Following the same methodology the modern western governments are responsible for billions of deaths.
We could go through every source and the general methodology and find issues all the way throughout (Like quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski lmao wtf, so much for “unbiased” or “neutral”), but I won’t waste my time, because I know to people like you the idea of dismissing wikipedia is akin to heresy to a spaniard in the 1700’s.
edit: I should also mention the “as low as 10-20 million” is equally fraught and disingenuous. If we are going to count something ridiculous like some random dumbass on the internets claims, then we ought to do the same for the low estimate - Which would be about 0 then.
edit: Forgot to mention that youre talking specifically about soviets, while referring to an article that’s just generally about “communist mass killings.” Seems like you don’t know what you’re talking about and you just search for any article to back you up when pressured, without actually understanding the content of the article. Typical, but still sad.
One has to wonder on the methodology of the article, what constitutes a “communist” mass killing? It makes allusions to both the USSR and PRC, neither of which claimed or claims to be communist, but rather socialist. If the authors of the article can’t even get such a basic thing right, then I have little faith in the quality of the rest of it.
I didn’t want to waste my time reading the drivel closely, but I could see the other source of the 148 million claim included the Khmer Rouge - a regime installed and backed by the US. How does that fall under “communist”?
I do not believe you have done that yourself.
I did, and you have ignored it.
Lol. Any real sources on tens of millions of deaths under soviet rule?
You think mass killing is funny?
Go to the footnotes in the link I posted.
Look mang you really have been kinda disingenuous and frankly incurious.
You need to look into the methodology used in the black book of communism, the lengths they went to tack on as many zeroes as possible, the fact that they include German nazi soldier deaths from ww2 as part of the numbers alone - does that really not make you feel like… a little curious as to the angle? Its use as a propaganda piece? Can you be as critical of the millions of deaths attributed to capitalism? Imperialism? Do you levy such criticisms… ever?
“their evil communist propaganda, our good and noble capitalist truth”
I do hope you look into the origins of “whataboutism” like the other posters said, if you can stop your knees from jerking for but a moment. Speaking human to human here.
I think they’re funny when they only exist in the imaginations of people like you, lmfao.
Right, so no sources.
Sheer denialism.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/28031524
Respond to this you actual fucking fascist coward
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Coward