volodya_ilich

joined 3 months ago
[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Ok, that's really good insight, so it boils down to France not respecting the 1935 treaty by refusing to declare Czechoslovakia as a victim of aggression?

As a Spanish, I can relate too well (sadly) to the part where the president of Czechoslovakia says "I did not dare to fight with Russian aid alone, because I knew that the British and French Governments would make out of my country another Spain", I assume they're talking of how the Soviet Union was the only country to sell weapons to Republican Spain in their fight against fascism, even as the Nazis and Italian Fascists were militarily and economically helping the reactionaries in Spain, and how France and England didn't do anything under the guise of "non-interventionism".

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 2 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

Sorry, I was going with Wikipedia there, care to elaborate more on what happened then?

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 0 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

invading poland side by side with the nazis

Again, literal Nazi revisionism. The invasion of Poland was mostly a peaceful process, and the only aim was to establish pro-communist forces in the area that would ensure Poland would join the USSR against the Nazis when the Nazis attacked. The same was attempted in Finland, and what do you know, Finland actually did join the Nazis during the Continuation War. And what do you know, the USSR retreated its troops from Poland after WW2.

Poland could have entered a military alliance with the USSR for the former 10 years, Stalin went as far as offering to send ONE MILLION soldiers, together with aviation and artillery, to military allies if France, England and Poland joined in a military alliance against the Nazis. But I guess they would rather see the Nazis massacre the communists first. That strategy didn't work out as planned now, did it?

They didn't want to get rid of the Nazis

This is incredibly ahistorical revisionism. The USSR prepared for the war against Nazi Germany for many years before it started. In the second half of the 1930s, seeing the Nazi rising to power (Nazis being overt enemies of Communism, as proven by what they did to Communists and to Unions in their controlled territories), they ramped up the weapon production and their military industry, and I'll say it again in case it didn't register: they spent the entire 30s seeking out military alliances with France, England and Poland against the Nazis. They offered military help to Czechoslovakia in 1938 during the Munich agreements in which Sudetenland was given to the Nazis.

Why do you think they had a NAP?

They had a non-aggression pact because Germany was an established industrial power for 100+ years at that point, while the USSR had had 19 years from 1921 after the Russian Civil War and WW1 to rebuild the country and to industrialise. They desperately needed every year they could get to reduce the industrial gap between them and the Nazis, as proven by the immense human cost to the USSR in the war against Nazis.

The Soviets literally saved Eastern Europe from an even worse fate, at immense cost of human lives (25+ million human lives lost in the USSR to Nazism), god knows how many millions more of Slavs (and other groups like Jews and Roma) the Nazis would have genocided if it hadn't been for the Soviets. Have some respect before spewing anti-communist, nazi propaganda here, please.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 3 points 13 hours ago

because they wanted to do imperialism

You're just showing you don't know what "imperialism" is. The USSR never engaged in resource exploitation or unequal exchange with other countries, its terms of trade were always comparatively fair, especially if you compare those to the terms of trade of the western world.

The USSR didn't have any imperialist ambitions. For fucks sake, the literal first thing the Bolsheviks did in 1917 after the October Revolution, was to implement a constitution which gave the full right of self-determination and unilateral secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire, it's literally how Poland gained independence, as well as many other countries like Finland or Ukraine. What did Poland immediately do: invading Ukraine and modern Belarus and attacking the RSFSR during the Russian Civil War because of its expansionist nationalist desires of going back to Polish-Lithuanian borders. Maybe that helps explain why the USSR didn't trust Poland not to join the Nazis, especially after 10 years of Poland, France and England rejecting to form military alliances with the USSR against Nazis? Finns, after the winter war, quite literally joined the Nazis in the continuation war, going all the way to participating in the siege of Leningrad.

After the war, all of these countries that the USSR invaded went back to being their own countries as the USSS retreated all its troops. Such imperialism, amirite? The influence of the USSR in the politics of Eastern European countries after WW2, isn't any greater than the influence of the US in western Europe, so unless you're claiming that the US was carrying out imperialism in western Europe (and would have carried it in Eastern Europe too if it weren't for the USSR), then no, the USSR didn't carry out any imperialism.

immediately started spewing whataboutism

You literally have no idea what "whataboutism means, I gave a detailed explanation on why calling the Molotov-Ribbentrop a "deal with the Nazis", and stopping there without further context, is revisionist and honestly very close to Nazi propaganda. You're just saying "whataboutism whataboutism" because you're actually incapable of refuting anything I've said.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

I mean, that's fucking amazing. Seriously, thank you.

Since it's mostly just text (and links, which are also kinda text), maybe it would just be easier to have a pastebin or something?

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Yeah, kinda insane how mask-off the "euvsdisinfo" thing is. At least they did the thing better with the Adrian Zenz and Uyghurs, using established media as a smokescreen to hide the fact that it was all Radio Free Asia. But I guess the US propaganda apparatus is bound to be more refined.

Thank you for the links to your other posts, interesting stuff. I don't think you're a sicko. To me, it's important to analyse the actual history of the systems we defend (and the ones we want to emancipate from) in order to better understand what we're fighting for, what we're fighting against, and how to avoid certain mistakes in the future. It's great that we have people like you in the movement.

Have you compiled all of this information (meaning these short-format, well-sourced posts) somewhere easy to access?

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

Source: euvsdisinfo

We are the East Stratcom Task Force, a team of experts with a background mainly in communications, journalism, social sciences and Russian studies.

We are part of the EU’s diplomatic service which is led by the EU’s High Representative

"Your comment is state propaganda! Here's some state propaganda from my side to discredit it!!" Oh I wonder, why would a European state agency directed by Josep Borrell (Social Democrat party of Spain, the PSOE), well-known NATO cocksucker (he was in the government when the Spanish government pushed the referendum to join NATO after 4 years of pro-NATO propaganda), want to create anti-communist and Russophobic propaganda?

If you read my comment, I'm not denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, I'm framing it in context. All that the article you sent says, is "Russian nationalists sometimes also put context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so everyone who puts context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is reproducing what Russian nationalists say!!"

The article vaguely points to a few dubious claims* of "USSR sending Jews to Germany" (USSR being the most progressive country against antisemitism back in its time, eliminating former pogroms in the former Russian Empire, and with overrepresentation of Jewish people in government and science, and even going as far as creating a Jewish Autonomous Oblast for Jewish people who might have felt like moving to a region with higher Jewish representation). It also makes a few claims of "tech transfer" between Nazi Germany and the USSR (ignoring why the USSR would want technology to defend itself from Germany and ignoring that the US had plenty of factories in Nazi Germany for example). And it completely ignores the existence of the Collective Security attempted for the 10 prior years by the USSR.

You're just choosing to ignore everything I said in my comment because "Russian nationalists sometimes try to put context to Molotov-Ribbentrop". I'm literally a communist, I'm the first and foremost hater of fascist Putin. The fact that Russian nationalists stoke the USSR occasionally for nationalist purposes (while removing any socialist ideology from their claims to keep it nice and capitalist), doesn't mean they can't sometimes make a better historical claim to some events by pure chance.

*Edit: the "USSR SENT JEWS TO NAZI GERMANY" claim apparently refers to a "few hundred" people, including Jews, that requested asylum in the USSR from Nazi Germany and were denied asylum and returned to Nazi Germany. I don't think EU countries, who are now rejecting Russian refugees (let alone from northern Africa or middle east) by the thousands, have the high moral ground to complain about this

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

No, I'm denying your framing of it

Edit: you've added two paragraphs to your comment, I'll answer to that tomorrow

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 6 points 1 day ago

Don't worry, western Europe is doing its thing. It's electing fascists like Putin to create even more such wars. It's the preferred alternative to Socialism for neoliberals, conservatives and social-democrats anyway

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (16 children)

You missed the part in between where they made a deal with the nazis

I didn't miss that part because there was no "deal with Nazis". Nothing as bad as the Munich Agreement signed the previous year by England, France and Germany among others, allowing Hitler to occupy the Sudetenland, a land with more than 3mn people in Czechoslovakia (to whom the Soviet Union offered assistance but Romania and Poland denied pass to Soviet troops, possibly influenced by the fact that Poland also did a grab of land of Czechoslovakia). The USSR spent the entire 30s trying to push for a military alliance with England, France and Poland to stop Nazism, but they all refused because a good liberal would rather have Nazis first exterminate communists. Stalin went as far as offering to station 1 million troops, together with aviation and artillery, in France, in case Stalin invaded, to which England and France refused. Feel free to study the so-called "collective security policy" pushed by the USSR in Europe against Nazism.

The Soviet Union had been in a civil war until 1921 (right after a devastating WW1/, and before that it was a preindustrial nation. It had a whopping 19 years to rebuild the country from scratch and to industrialise, compared to the 100+ years of German industrialization. They desperately needed every single year of industrialization they could get in order to gain some advantage against the industrially superior Nazis, as evidenced by the 25+ million casualties the USSR suffered against the Nazis despite material help from the US. Making an agreement to postpone the war after every country in Europe refuses to enter a military alliance against Nazis just because you're a communist country, is just the logical action to defend your citizens.

Please stop pushing revisionist nazi propaganda. Without the USSR, the slavic population of Europe, including Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian, as well as many other ethnic groups, would have been genocided in vastly superior numbers than they were.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago

What are you trying to say with this graph? That distribution of wealth is better when it is distributed amongst less than 1% of the population of they call themselves proletarian?

You haven't interpreted the graphs correctly. That the share of the top 1% got reduced during USSR times is what the graph is showing, and it was much greater before and it's much greater after. The remaining population had a bigger share of the total wealth of the country during socialism than they did before or than they do after. Please re-read the graphs.

Or that it is somehow better if standard of living goes down for everyone just because the then nonexistent ressources are shared equally?

But that's not what happened, and you would know if you had read about the topic before making claims out of your ass. The wealth of the USSR and its citizens grew MASSIVELY during its existence. The country went from a preindustrial, almost feudal backwater, with 80+% of population being farmers working the fields with manual labor, to the second world power. The gains in living quality for citizens were absolutely massive. Free healthcare, education and public retirement pensions for everyone, millions of living units were built yearly, and were rented to families for an average of 3-5% of their income making homeless disappear, everyone was guaranteed to have a job available if they wanted to work with the average time to finding a job being 2 weeks, real consumption rose, during the worst years, at a rate of 3% per year... If you really want to study the evolution of soviet quality of life, I recommend you the book "Human Rights in the Soviet Union", by Albert Szymanski. Please, refrain from making false claims about the material living conditions in other countries that you patiently haven't made any effort to inform yourself about.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago

If you're saying this ironically because you think Putin is a communist, you're extremely misguided about the current political situation in Russia.

If you're endorsing communism, based

 

Sup fellas.

I'm a Spanish guy who, for the past decade, has been getting increasingly radicalized. I've been mostly so far interested in reading because I wanted to have a solid theoretical background and learn more about the Ws and Ls of communism, from a theoretical and a historical perspective, and while I'm still very much into reading socialist literature, I want to take the step to organizing and activism locally. I was just wondering if anyone here has any resources for any Communist/Socialist/Marxist organisation in Spain or with presence in multiple western-european countries that anyone can recommend me to contact.

Thanks a bunch!

 

Martin Luther King was a well-known activist for Black peoples' and worker's rights. After many years of fighting racism and oppression from the establishment, he shared insights on some of his findings of the unjust opposition to rightful change, which may surprise a few of us who are still learning about his figure:

"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

We've recently seen widespread liberal rejection of grassroots progressive movements such as Black Lives Matter, the protests against western collaborationism in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and many so-called "progressives" dedicating more time to finding the mistakes committed by non-western regimes than those of their own nations, and calling "Tankies" to those who are a bit further to the left than us. Let us consider if we ourselves are the moderates that Dr. Luther King was talking about, and let's push for the change we actually want rather than bickering about who's "too far to the left"

 

Last week, I found a used book in a store, called "what the Soviet worker receives besides their salary" (or something like that, translated it literally from my language). It's a short, 40-pages pamphlet written in 1959 by the then Soviet Minister of Finance, A. Zveriev.

On a section regarding housing, the pamphlet claims: "The workers and employees of the USSR pay insignificant rent compared to that paid by workers in capitalist countries. If in the latter, the rent expenditure absorbs 25 to 30% of the family budget, in the USSR, the rent including communal services doesn't rise, on average, above 4 to 5% of the family budget".

Leaving aside how much they paid in the USSR for rent, I want to dedicate a moment to examine this 25-30% expenditure of the family budget in rent in developed capitalist countries. I looked up the data for my western-european, developed country, and for the bottom 50% of families by budget, the housing expenditure actually ranges from 45% to 35% of the family budget in 2023 (latest data available).

Let's forget about the fact that family budgets can't be compared from 1959 to now because nowadays there are more workers per household as a consequence of the mass-incorporation of women in the workplace and young adults staying with their parents because of housing prices. Even if we forget about that, after 65 years of technological and scientific progress, in which the population of western capitalist countries has actually stabilized, the prices of housing as a percentage of family budgets have risen by about 50%, compared to the numbers given in an anticapitalist pamphlet written by a literal Soviet finance minister.

There is no reason for this other than the commodification of a HUMAN RIGHT such as housing. If Cuba and the USSR solved housing for everyone 50+ years ago, there's no actual, physical or economical problem preventing us from doing so. It's purely a desired consequence of our current system.

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