this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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It's easy to say if one has never lived under communism rule. Stalinism caused the Holodomor in Ukraine and starved to death 2-7 million people. Mass deportations of people in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and many other countries in Eastern Europe. Federated platforms? Forget about it. Everything is controlled by the state. Do you want to say something that the government doesn't like? You can, but then you are off in a concentration camp (gulag) or sent to Siberia. Almost every family has a history of one of its family members being sent or imprisoned because they said something bad about communists / had a farm and could feed themselves with the products from their farm or land. On the contrary I would recommend to read The Animal Farm. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
The famine in the 30s was caused by natural causes and spiraled to greater heights because of collectivization, but this ended famines.
The Soviet system was similar to federated platforms. It was government controlled, in a somewhat federated manner. Read Soviet Democracy.
The GULAG administration was a prison system, not concentration camps. Read Russian Justice.
Orwell was a fan of Hitler, hated workers, and in Animal Farm specifically his biggest critique was that Russian Workers are stupid and destined to be taken advantage of. Read On Orwell and A Critical Read of Animal Farm.
Oh yes, my friend, I knew someone would repeat me this soviet narrative. I urge you to read about Mr. Jones or watch a film about these events. Regarding gulags, it’s the same as telling me about concentration camps built by the Nazis. They also claimed it was just for labor, you know. I see you are well prepared with communist materials, it’s the same as entering communist class in the Soviet Union and expecting they will share the truth.
From a researcher who actually examined Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR in the 90s (PDF link, see pg. 1041):
These weren't death camps, these were prisons. You can read elsewhere in the same article about how most of the people in them had been convicted of non-political crimes every country in the world prosecutes. Just like in many other countries, people would serve their sentence and be released.
The article also notes how the vast majority of mortality in the Soviet prison system was attributable to the hardships imposed by WWII (also from pg. 1041):
Comparing this to the Nazi system that was directly designed to exterminate people is no more than roundabout Nazi apologia.
There have been millions of Mr. Joneses so you’ll need to be more specific. In the meantime,
.
Those aren’t arguments, they’re vague, empty rhetoric.
They mean Gareth Jones.
No, now you're doing holocaust minimization by supporting Double Genocide Theory. Read Blackshirts and Reds.
Gareth Jones pointed to excessive grain appropriations and the “export of foodstuffs” by Soviet authorities as a cause but that it was “not so much the Soviet Government as the world crisis, which is to blame.”
Yeah, good luck convincing one anticommunist to read any of Michael Parenti’s books. You’ll have an easier time pulling teeth.
To be fair, I have done it at least twice on Lemmy. Maybe I should go into dentistry instead, though, lol