I don’t think it’s unique but I’ve had it for a while and figured it’d be good to share.
I’ve been thinking about the Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent communist revolutions that followed and it baffled me how demonized they are. Yes, I know it’s due to rampant anticommunism but taking away that aspect it feels no different from the French Revolution that is way less hated.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a weird small uptick in people defending the French monarchy, Marie Antoinette specifically, but for the most part people seem way less opposed to the French lobbing off heads with a guillotine versus the Bolsheviks gunning down the Romanovs. Is it because there were children killed? But children were killed by the French revolutionaries too, so what gives? Not for nothing but getting shot to death seems a little less brutal than getting your head cut off. I’m not judging the French for this decision either, I understand why it needed to happen and so does history, at least the history I learned in school.
Is this hypocrisy because the Bolshevik revolution happened in more recent history? Again, I know anticommunism is the major factor it’s just hard to rationalize the hatred outside of red scare propaganda.
It’s just so wild to me that nobody really cares about the French monarchy dying via guillotine but weep real tears for the Tsar. I mean, my mom watches history shows (those dramatized ones, mostly) and she came to me about how sad their deaths were and how good of a dad Nicholas II was, how he seemed like such a nice man. It was, and still is, jarring as hell but I didn’t know what to say at the time considering I was less educated and a high schooler. I know that damn Anastasia movie did major damage as well. Sucks that the songs are bangers.
Anyway I think that’s my whole thought on this subject. Please share any insights any of you have on this as I’d love to hear it and perhaps learn more!
It pains me how accurate your last sentence is. Even when I was a libertarian and later liberal, I was pretty intelligent from a young age and I remained very skeptical when in high-school in Texas, they always drilled into our heads that “communism doesn’t work”, even in fucking English literature class of all goddamn places, and I remained skeptical, especially because even when I was like 8 years old, I would look up and google and wikipedia topics that interested me, like communism, death, the afterlife, science, paleontology.
Maybe it wasn’t so obvious back then, and I might be giving myself too much credit. But it always infuriated me even when I was anti-communist, that people say blatant bullshit anti-communist like that. I figured that if communism “didn’t work” on at least some level, the Soviet Union and China wouldn’t have hundreds of millions of citizens and western supporters while also having kick-started dozens of revolutions across the globe, and communist parties and rebel groups wouldn’t still exist to this day.
I’m sure my teachers in middle and high-school meant well on some level, and the Texas board of education sucks ass and probably forced or indoctrinated them into repeating capitalist lies, but it still hurt that we were forced to swallow capitalist boot.
I graduated in Plano, and that was a direct quote from a high school teacher. At least we made it here, comrade. It’s a shame so many others won’t.
You’re from Plano? Sweet, I’m from DFW/NRH! Maybe we could pm and shoot the shit together irl.