Wikipedia is where liberal nerds go to slapfight, inconsistently using various rules to push their agendas. There is, for example, someone that spends a ton of her time fighting Nazi apologetics on Wikipedia that would otherwise still be there and she receives a lot of pushback. While her task is just, ask yourself why she needa to do it in the first place. Why is Wikipedia so friendly to Nazi apologetics? Why is it so hostile to corrections of it? Do you think the reasons might apply to other articles?
Wikipedia will mislead you on topics with more room for politics. It is fine if you want to use it to learn some math or something, but on anything social or political you should assume it has been written by someone sympathetic to Nazis and instead read books before forming any opinions.
Wheatcroft (who you have already cited) and Davies have some good overviews based on thr archives. Instead of using selected quotes provided by Wiki editors, I would recommend reading the source material. And then compare it, critically, to the intended message from Wikipedia.
Sure, it might have some contentious pages, but it does get edited by people who care enough. Just like the article you linked says.
And you said it yourself the source I used was fine. If I misinterpreted the quote or of there’s more to the story you can clarify that and I’ll correct myself.
Sure, it might have some contentious pages, but it does get edited by people who care enough. Just like the article you linked says.
Why does a page need to be contentious to be biased and misleading? As you yourself demonstrate in this thread, media literacy and criticism are not widely adopted.
I already asked you some simple challenging questions that addresses this. Can you think about answering it? Why didn’t you already answer it? Why do you make me repeat myself?
And you said it yourself the source I used was fine.
I told you to read the actual books by Wheatcroft and Davies and suggested applying the mildest or critical thinking. Do you believe you are doing that right now or arw you being defensive and deflecting from critique?
If I misinterpreted the quote or of there’s more to the story you can clarify that and I’ll correct myself.
It seems you have missed the point entirely. Citing Wikipedia is like saying your mom you something once. Nobody has the onus of disproving what mommy told you. It is your job to actually study something before adopting the pretense that you understand it.
To do otherwise is arrogant and dishonest. And as we can see here, you are tryjng yo flip the onus and would like to believe you are right about what mommy yold you untio someone corrects you. Of course, as we have seen in this thread, when someone takes the time to do that, you respond in bad faith and deflect. All you’re really doing is building stratagems for being lazy and wrong.
Are you surprised when you aren’t taken seriously?
Citing Wikipedia is like saying your mom you something once
Not it’s really not. And like you and I both said the numbers quoted aren’t incorrect or come from a non-factual source. So saying this man killed a lot of people is not something incorrect. Regardless of your political ideologies or affiliations. So what critical thinking do you want me to employ here? Even if I read the book, what context would I be missing?
Someone else in this thread tried giving me the same message. Recommended a few books to me. One of them was written in the 30s so before a lot of the shit Stalin did. Another one literally backed up the numbers I quoted. So what are you and every other person in this thread arguing with me about here? Are you simply trying to tell me that wikipedia isn’t reliable? I would disagree as
nothing you or anyone else has said has led me to believe that my understsnding of this topic is incorrect, but I’ll leave you to your opinion in the matter. Just because you take issue with some articles that has millions of articles from a community built site does not delegtimize it in my eyes. Are you trying to tell me that Stalin did not cause a lot of deaths? That’s not really an argument up for debate as its well documented that he was.
No sort of serious review. Known to keep outright bad and highly (and intentionally) misleading material even after it is conclusively proven to be wrong. Have stuff like ‘Radio Free [something]’ listed as good sources.
The only stuff that you can trust Wikipedia on is math, basically, and even then only because they provide the proofs, and even then they also keep errors found in their sources with no notes on the matter.
If we’re being intellectually honest, we actually do have to hand it to Stalin that he did many good things. You’re proving the meme correct because I guarantee you don’t hold any other world-historical figure to the same standard.
We participate in good faith criticism of ourselves and each other all the time. Along with historical figures who share our views. We just don’t abide bullshit statistics from made up sources that are pushed by organizations like the Victims of Communism to serve imperial interests and whitewash Nazi crimes.
Lmao do you think we’re democrats or something? We can critique political leaders whose ideology aligns with our own, that critique is just more substantial than saying “joe steel bad 100 gazillion” because, again, we’re not american liberals.
I wish Stalin had been better on queer rights. Reinstating sodomy laws was shitty. I think he fucked up when he assumed fair play from the US and stopped supporting socialist movements internationally. I think it’s sus as fuck that he kept urging Mao to work with the fascists, especially when later developments in Asia follow a pattern of the USSR being much too hands off. I get being harrowed by decades of war and capitalist siege, but that same experience should make him realise they couldn’t get to the “rebuilding” phase until they were actually safe.
Lysenkoism was cringe as hell.
While the gulags were far better than the prison systems in the west, had a much lower recidivism rate, a higher rate of survivability, a better standard of living an so on, they were still incredibly horrendous. “Better than the west” is a bar that is so low it might as well be in hell.
I won’t get banned for this because critiquing anyone is completely fine, as long as the critique is actually sound and you don’t act like a jackass. Something that cannot be said for people like you. Saying “100 million stalin gulag” isn’t “critique” it’s propaganda and saying it like you do is also just annoying. From the way you interact with others it’s clear you’re dishonest and you look down on people who disagree with you.
edit: other bureaucrats are free to add more if they fear their own accounts getting hit with the mods comically large ban spoon for daring to critique our great leader
The point about Mao really got me. The nationalists betrayed and slaughtered the communists on multiple occasions because Chiang Kai-Shek was pissy that the workers liked them more. And every time someone asked the USSR for advice, they were like “just work it out, trust me” like ???
I think that significantly contributed to modern China’s views on foreign interference and language about others meddling in their domestic affair. And the hundred years of colonial pillaging, of course.
Check this out: good faith criticism of Stalin coming from a Hexbear admin. We don’t ban people or remove their comments just because we disagree with them. We wait til they start slinging slurs or say something so outrageously in bad faith that there’s nothing worth continuing.
Letting Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria operate and purge without accountability or oversight were three major examples of wrongdoing.
While his motivations were anti-eugenicist in nature, Stalin’s backing of Lysenko’s Neo-Lamarckist agricultural programs were a huge misstep which negatively impacted food security in the socialist world for decades.
Okay, there’s two I’m sure you’d agree with. Now it’s your turn.
In order to agree with you they’d have to know wtf you’re talking about, but since they’re just browsing Wikipedia for random contextless facts of dubious validity motivated purely by vague “Stalin = Hitler” rhetoric that’s been pre-baked into their brain, I don’t think we can get that far.
uhhh but this isn’t critique you’re not acknowledgeing the billion people he killed you’re just using big words to sound smart! where is the cirtique? just say he killed all ukrainians bet you cant because you cant criqitue stalln!
uj/ Until this thread I thought the meme about “discussing theory with liberals vs. discussing it with other leftists” was too self-congratulatory, but now I realise it’s just facts.
stalin did a lot of bad shit, and made many, many, mistakes.
i won’t get banned for this because hexbear isn’t the evil shithole that everyone over on lemmy.world makes it out to be. we can just recognize the successes and failures of past historical leaders.
If you spend more time here you will find that good faith criticisms happen all the time. It just has to be both in good faith and coming from an educated perspective.
Popping into a thread to say, “yeah well have you considered Stalin Bad?” merely because someone mentioned a good thing about Stalin is cringe and annoying.
Yeah, I think most people do consider it considering we all steeped in the fucking Cold War propaganda in our formative years.
The more you learn about Stalin — even those periods which are the least flattering — the more sympathetic the picture becomes. I don’t think many MLs think he was literally Jesus, but a human who did far more good than bad; and a higher proportion of good, I might add, than any of his Western peers.
What the fuck do you think the concept of “critical support” means or implies, you ignorant cracker fuck oh my god what do they teach you settlers these days
Intellectual honesty is when you make vague unfounded claims and broad statements about moral values that are immediately contradictory to what you’re doing in the very same moment. If you then get pissy when people aren’t taking things seriously then you’re being very intellectual
Unfortunately, because Stalin didn’t go to medical school as a small child and perform open heart surgery on a grandmother in Tashkent in 1912, he was required to stand down and let Hitler take over the world.
Stalin’s greatest crimes were his failures to discover and implement penicillin and the polio vaccine, directly making him at fault for everyone who died of any disease or old age in the Soviet Union.
Because this is your 2nd comment, I’m assuming you hopped over to .ee from .world. I hope you don’t get banned so you can actually learn something. In the meantime, please send us your pacifist manifesto.
If you truly believed that then you’d be a vegan hermit living in the mountains, and you’d be doing all you could to strike those who crossed your indefensible number
Parenti is a good place to start. Blackshirts and reds is a good place to start with Parenti.
I loathe Chomsky, but he’s good for libs like you I guess. Palatable, though he’s more than likely just gonna make you an insufferable radlib. If you can do basic self-crit then read manufacturing consent.
This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong is good too. Required reading really.
This series about authoritarianism is nice too https://jacobin.com/author/marcie-smith
There’s no single place I can point you to though. Education isn’t simple or easy, but being curious is. Not just taking everything you assume to be true for granted is important, and feverishly searching for keywords on wikipedia when your views get challenged is not the signs of someone with a solid intellectual foundation for their worldview. When you encounter heterodox opinions, take the time to consider that those that hold them have, like you, grown up in the same environment and so they’ve heard the same things you have. They do not think what you think because they haven’t heard what you have heard. They think differently because they have heard what you have heard and then they decided to look into it. Be curious, be humble when you get challenged and if you have no basis for thinking what you’re thinking, figure out why you think that. To quote a great man: “No investigation, no right to speak.”
I recommend frequenting the hexbear newsmega where plenty of good sources and analysis of current events can be found.
Edit: At the very very least just fucking use your own favourite source and learn about the black book of communism. Or just click the sources given for the many claims you make and actually read them. It’s biased as hell, but at least you’re engaging with someone engaging with second-hand sources, instead of reading the editorialized summary some neo-nazi cooked up for you
Thanks for the suggestions. I found a free copy of This Soviet World. I skimmed through a bit of it and it has some interesting talking points but it’s a bit dated. It was written in 1936. Stalin did a lot after the fact and we learned a lot after the USSR fell.
That’s extremely vague and could easily describe Nazis, who, as others have stated, absolutely deserved to be killed. Do you have any names? Events? Places? Timespans? Anything beyond unnamed “political opponents” and “military figures”?
According to declassified Intel from the soviet union after it’s fall there was a recorded amount of deaths of 3.3 million with approximately 1 million of them being on purpose and the rest due to neglect. You telling me they were all Nazis?
Which declassified intel? Again with the vagueness. Got a link to this intel so we can all read it and decide for ourselves what it says instead of just taking your word for it?
Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1999). “Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word” (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (2): 315–45. doi:10.1080/09668139999056. “During 1921–53, the number of sentences was (political convictions): sentences, 4,060,306; death penalties, 799,473; camps and prisons, 2,634397; exile, 413,512; other, 215,942. In addition, during 1937–52 there were 14,269,753 non-political sentences, among them 34,228 death penalties, 2,066,637 sentences for 0–1 year, 4,362,973 for 2–5 years, 1,611,293 for 6–10 years, and 286,795 for more than 10 years. Other sentences were non-custodial”
So, from those quotes from a book you haven’t read, the number killed would be 800,000 over a period of 30 years. And around 10 million imprisoned. Over 30 years, so on average less than 400,000 per year in a country with a population of around 150 million. And this is including much of the fallout of the civil war and overlaps with WWII.
This led to a lower incarceration rate than the United States today.
Note also that the term “political” is used to discriminate the sentences and this is presumably what is being conflated with a politically motivated “Stalinist” purge. But how do you know that it is? Was Stalin in power in 1921? What counted as political? What of the bureaucracy or the party? Or was it just all Stalin and his big evil pen signing millions of sentences?
Austin Murphy’s book The Triumph of Evil (Page 74):
Long Quote
The claim that Stalin and other Soviet leaders killed millions (Conquest, 1990) also appears to be wildly exaggerated. More recent evidence from the Soviet archives opened up by the anticommunist Yeltsin government indicate that the total number of death sentences (including of both existing prisoners and those outside captivity) over the 1921-1953 interval (covering the period of Stalin’s partial and complete rule) was between 775,866 and 786,098 (Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, 1993). Given that the archive data originates from anti-Stalin (and even anticommunist) sources, it is extremely unlikely that they underestimate the true number (Thurston, 1996). In addition, the Soviet Union has long admitted to executing at least 12,733 people between 1917 and 1921, mostly during the Foreign Interventionist Civil War of 1918-22, although it is possible that as many as 40,000 more may have been executed unofficially (Andics, 1969). These data would seem to imply about 800,000 executions. The figure of 800,000 may greatly overestimate the number of actual executions, as it includes many who were sentenced to death but who were not actually caught or who had their sentences reduced (Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, 1993). In fact, Vinton (1993) has provided evidence indicating that the number of executions was significantly below the number of civilian prisoners sentenced to death in the Soviet Union, with only 7,305 executions in a sample of 11,000 prisoners authorized to be executed in 1940 (or scarcely 60%). In addition, most (681,692) of the 780,000 or so death sentences passed under Stalin were issued during the 1937-38 period (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993), when Soviet paranoia about foreign subversion reached its zenith due to a 1936 alliance between Nazi Germany and fascist Japan that was specifically directed against the Soviet Union (Manning, 1993) and due to a public 1936 resolution by a group of influential anti-Stalin foreigners (the Fourth International which was allied with the popular but exiled Russian dissident Leo Trotsky) advocating the overthrow of the Soviet government by illegal means (Glotzer, 1968). Stalin initially set a cap of 186,500 imprisonments and 72,950 death penalties for a 1937 special operation to combat this threat that was to be carried out by local 3-man tribunals called ''troikas" (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993). As the tribunals passed death sentences before the accused had even been arrested, local authorities requested increases in their own quotas (Knight, 1993), and there was an official request in 1938 for a doubling of the amount of prisoner transport that had been initially requisitioned to carry out the original campaign “quotas” of the tribunals (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993). However, even if there had been twice as many actual executions as originally planned, the number would still be less than 150,000. Many of those sentenced by the tribunals may have escaped capture, and many more may have had their death sentence refused or revoked by higher authorities before arrest/execution could take place, especially since Stalin later realized that excesses had been committed in the 1937-38 period, had a number of convictions overturned, and had many of the responsible local leaders punished (Thurston, 1996). Soviet records indicate only about 300,000 actual arrests for anti-Soviet activities or political crimes during this 1937-38 interval (Davies, 1997). With a ratio of 1 execution for every 3 arrests as originally specified by Stalin, that figure would imply about 100,000 executions. Since some of the people sentenced to death may have already been in confinement, and since there is some evidence of a 50,000 increase in the total number of deaths in labor camps over the 1937-38 interval that was probably caused by such executions (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993), the total number executed by the troika campaign would probably be around 150,000. There were also 30,514 death sentences passed by military courts and 4,387 by regular courts during the 1937-38 period, but, even if all these death sentences were carried out, the total number remains under 200,000. Such a “low” number seems especially likely given the fact that aggregate death rates (from all causes) throughout the Soviet Union were actually lower in 1937-38 than in prior years (Wheatcroft, 1993). Assuming the remaining 100,000 or so death sentences passed in the other years of Stalin’s reign (i.e., 1921-36 and 1939-53) resulted in a 60% execution rate, as per the Vinton (1993) sample, the total number executed by Stalin’s Soviet Union would be about 250,000. Even with the thousands executed between 1917 and 1921, it is plausible that the number of unarmed civilians killed between 1917-1953 amounted to considerably less than a quarter million given that thousands of these victims may have been Soviet soldiers (Freeze, 1997), given that some may have been armed bandits and guerrillas (Getty, 1985), and given that at least 14,000 of the actual executions were of foreign POWs (Vinton, 1993). A USA former attache to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, has stated that the number executed was really only in the tens of thousands (Smith, 2000), and so it is very likely that the true number of unarmed civilians killed by the Soviet Union over its entire history (including the thousands killed in Afghanistan more recently) is too small for the country to make the top ten in mass murders.
Where’s your outrage at capitalists then, cac? The magnitude of capitalism’s four fucking times your bullshit settler’s-encyclopedia-sourced figure; but you can only fix your face to talk about the spooky scary (extinct) soviets.
And a lot of others. He wasn’t very discriminatory in that regard.
Which black book are you pulling your numbers from and how high will they be this time?
Wikipedia.
Wikipedeez nuts
you may not be old enough to have heard this in school, so let me do it now:
wikipedia is NOT a reliable source.
alright cuh is loweffort trolling twas fun while it wasn’t obvious
That was the most underwhelming ending to that gif. And you missed the opportunity to make it a 5 second countdown with that username.
Since we’re talking numbers, do you have a negative number of braincells? Most of us don’t make the emojis lib
What your shitposting isn’t homemade?
Speaking as an outsider, what is your opinion on intelligence?
This needs to be a tag line. Lmao Wikipedia, fucking hell at least read a book first before embarrassing yourself
Tf is wrong with Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is where liberal nerds go to slapfight, inconsistently using various rules to push their agendas. There is, for example, someone that spends a ton of her time fighting Nazi apologetics on Wikipedia that would otherwise still be there and she receives a lot of pushback. While her task is just, ask yourself why she needa to do it in the first place. Why is Wikipedia so friendly to Nazi apologetics? Why is it so hostile to corrections of it? Do you think the reasons might apply to other articles?
Wikipedia will mislead you on topics with more room for politics. It is fine if you want to use it to learn some math or something, but on anything social or political you should assume it has been written by someone sympathetic to Nazis and instead read books before forming any opinions.
Wheatcroft (who you have already cited) and Davies have some good overviews based on thr archives. Instead of using selected quotes provided by Wiki editors, I would recommend reading the source material. And then compare it, critically, to the intended message from Wikipedia.
Sure, it might have some contentious pages, but it does get edited by people who care enough. Just like the article you linked says.
And you said it yourself the source I used was fine. If I misinterpreted the quote or of there’s more to the story you can clarify that and I’ll correct myself.
Why does a page need to be contentious to be biased and misleading? As you yourself demonstrate in this thread, media literacy and criticism are not widely adopted.
I already asked you some simple challenging questions that addresses this. Can you think about answering it? Why didn’t you already answer it? Why do you make me repeat myself?
I told you to read the actual books by Wheatcroft and Davies and suggested applying the mildest or critical thinking. Do you believe you are doing that right now or arw you being defensive and deflecting from critique?
It seems you have missed the point entirely. Citing Wikipedia is like saying your mom you something once. Nobody has the onus of disproving what mommy told you. It is your job to actually study something before adopting the pretense that you understand it.
To do otherwise is arrogant and dishonest. And as we can see here, you are tryjng yo flip the onus and would like to believe you are right about what mommy yold you untio someone corrects you. Of course, as we have seen in this thread, when someone takes the time to do that, you respond in bad faith and deflect. All you’re really doing is building stratagems for being lazy and wrong.
Are you surprised when you aren’t taken seriously?
Not it’s really not. And like you and I both said the numbers quoted aren’t incorrect or come from a non-factual source. So saying this man killed a lot of people is not something incorrect. Regardless of your political ideologies or affiliations. So what critical thinking do you want me to employ here? Even if I read the book, what context would I be missing?
Someone else in this thread tried giving me the same message. Recommended a few books to me. One of them was written in the 30s so before a lot of the shit Stalin did. Another one literally backed up the numbers I quoted. So what are you and every other person in this thread arguing with me about here? Are you simply trying to tell me that wikipedia isn’t reliable? I would disagree as nothing you or anyone else has said has led me to believe that my understsnding of this topic is incorrect, but I’ll leave you to your opinion in the matter. Just because you take issue with some articles that has millions of articles from a community built site does not delegtimize it in my eyes. Are you trying to tell me that Stalin did not cause a lot of deaths? That’s not really an argument up for debate as its well documented that he was.
No sort of serious review. Known to keep outright bad and highly (and intentionally) misleading material even after it is conclusively proven to be wrong. Have stuff like ‘Radio Free [something]’ listed as good sources.
The only stuff that you can trust Wikipedia on is math, basically, and even then only because they provide the proofs, and even then they also keep errors found in their sources with no notes on the matter.
Removed by mod
Any number greater than 1 is indefensible.
Pretty sure any number of Nazis is entirely defensible.
Clearly in relation to killing others, but you’re too dishonest to follow the comment chain.
If we’re being intellectually honest, we actually do have to hand it to Stalin that he did many good things. You’re proving the meme correct because I guarantee you don’t hold any other world-historical figure to the same standard.
I can admit he did some right.
Can you admit he did some wrong without your comment being deleted or you eventually banned?
We participate in good faith criticism of ourselves and each other all the time. Along with historical figures who share our views. We just don’t abide bullshit statistics from made up sources that are pushed by organizations like the Victims of Communism to serve imperial interests and whitewash Nazi crimes.
Ahahaha
Good faith and hexbear, ahh what a joke.
Thanks for the laugh.
Lmao do you think we’re democrats or something? We can critique political leaders whose ideology aligns with our own, that critique is just more substantial than saying “joe steel bad 100 gazillion” because, again, we’re not american liberals.
I wish Stalin had been better on queer rights. Reinstating sodomy laws was shitty. I think he fucked up when he assumed fair play from the US and stopped supporting socialist movements internationally. I think it’s sus as fuck that he kept urging Mao to work with the fascists, especially when later developments in Asia follow a pattern of the USSR being much too hands off. I get being harrowed by decades of war and capitalist siege, but that same experience should make him realise they couldn’t get to the “rebuilding” phase until they were actually safe.
Lysenkoism was cringe as hell.
While the gulags were far better than the prison systems in the west, had a much lower recidivism rate, a higher rate of survivability, a better standard of living an so on, they were still incredibly horrendous. “Better than the west” is a bar that is so low it might as well be in hell.
I won’t get banned for this because critiquing anyone is completely fine, as long as the critique is actually sound and you don’t act like a jackass. Something that cannot be said for people like you. Saying “100 million stalin gulag” isn’t “critique” it’s propaganda and saying it like you do is also just annoying. From the way you interact with others it’s clear you’re dishonest and you look down on people who disagree with you.
edit: other bureaucrats are free to add more if they fear their own accounts getting hit with the mods comically large ban spoon for daring to critique our great leader
The point about Mao really got me. The nationalists betrayed and slaughtered the communists on multiple occasions because Chiang Kai-Shek was pissy that the workers liked them more. And every time someone asked the USSR for advice, they were like “just work it out, trust me” like ???
I think that significantly contributed to modern China’s views on foreign interference and language about others meddling in their domestic affair. And the hundred years of colonial pillaging, of course.
Check this out: good faith criticism of Stalin coming from a Hexbear admin. We don’t ban people or remove their comments just because we disagree with them. We wait til they start slinging slurs or say something so outrageously in bad faith that there’s nothing worth continuing.
Letting Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria operate and purge without accountability or oversight were three major examples of wrongdoing.
While his motivations were anti-eugenicist in nature, Stalin’s backing of Lysenko’s Neo-Lamarckist agricultural programs were a huge misstep which negatively impacted food security in the socialist world for decades.
Okay, there’s two I’m sure you’d agree with. Now it’s your turn.
In order to agree with you they’d have to know wtf you’re talking about, but since they’re just browsing Wikipedia for random contextless facts of dubious validity motivated purely by vague “Stalin = Hitler” rhetoric that’s been pre-baked into their brain, I don’t think we can get that far.
uhhh but this isn’t critique you’re not acknowledgeing the billion people he killed you’re just using big words to sound smart! where is the cirtique? just say he killed all ukrainians bet you cant because you cant criqitue stalln!
uj/ Until this thread I thought the meme about “discussing theory with liberals vs. discussing it with other leftists” was too self-congratulatory, but now I realise it’s just facts.
i’ll step up to the plate, i guess.
stalin did a lot of bad shit, and made many, many, mistakes.
i won’t get banned for this because hexbear isn’t the evil shithole that everyone over on lemmy.world makes it out to be. we can just recognize the successes and failures of past historical leaders.
happy?
If you spend more time here you will find that good faith criticisms happen all the time. It just has to be both in good faith and coming from an educated perspective.
Popping into a thread to say, “yeah well have you considered Stalin Bad?” merely because someone mentioned a good thing about Stalin is cringe and annoying.
Yeah, I think most people do consider it considering we all steeped in the fucking Cold War propaganda in our formative years.
The more you learn about Stalin — even those periods which are the least flattering — the more sympathetic the picture becomes. I don’t think many MLs think he was literally Jesus, but a human who did far more good than bad; and a higher proportion of good, I might add, than any of his Western peers.
What the fuck do you think the concept of “critical support” means or implies, you ignorant cracker fuck oh my god what do they teach you settlers these days
What do you think he did right?
Intellectual honesty is when you make vague unfounded claims and broad statements about moral values that are immediately contradictory to what you’re doing in the very same moment. If you then get pissy when people aren’t taking things seriously then you’re being very intellectual
You heard it here: the Bolsheviks stopping the distribution of anti-Semitic literature and the mass-killings of Jews is indefensible.
Unfortunately, because Stalin didn’t go to medical school as a small child and perform open heart surgery on a grandmother in Tashkent in 1912, he was required to stand down and let Hitler take over the world.
Stalin’s greatest crimes were his failures to discover and implement penicillin and the polio vaccine, directly making him at fault for everyone who died of any disease or old age in the Soviet Union.
eat shit nerd lmao
ok so you condemn every single world leader in history then?
Because this is your 2nd comment, I’m assuming you hopped over to .ee from .world. I hope you don’t get banned so you can actually learn something. In the meantime, please send us your pacifist manifesto.
Oh I hope I do get banned. It’s a badge of pride to be banned from hex.
Given .ee’s notoriety for Wehrmacht apologia, i expect that badge to have a skull and runes on it.
What happened to your veneer of intellectual honesty and good faith participation in your earlier comments?
Looking at most .ee users that have been banned in the modlog and it’s all just for being cringe dorks that fail to have a basic social interaction
Gotta dunk on you chuds at any chance.
oh god no not the uno reverse card my brain can’t handle it
word of the day ass usage, how do you do fellow leftists ass usage, uhhh can I get one marihuana in exchange for money ahh usage
cracker’s misuse of AAVE ahh usage
ah I love a good dogpile
Local Georgian man discovers weird trick to fight anti-semites and the social structures that are the root cause of antisemitism.
Liberals hate him!
Wait so who’s the one person you can kill before you become indefensible?
Everyone gets their one guy they can beat to death with hammers before it stops being cool.
serious question: how do u feel about cops killing people?
Same as I do about cops who aren’t killing people, I hate them.
You must hate yourself then
lol shut up turkey
If you truly believed that then you’d be a vegan hermit living in the mountains, and you’d be doing all you could to strike those who crossed your indefensible number
In other words, this you?
Oh please cry more and comment on all my stuff again, this is delicious.
:
deleted by creator
Wish I was banned.
Actually no, I wish you were all dead. Would be a more productive outcome than simply not having to interact with you.
Brother it’s been 2 days and I’d forgot about you
Indefensible in that you dorks never have an answer to it, yes
Eleventy gorillion people if I remember correctly
Pretty sure it was 11.5 gorillion.
Like who?
Political opponents, military figures. A lot of people that would have threatened his rule.
Yeah we already mentioned the nazis
yeah, the nazis, we mentioned them
I’m pretty sure there were more than just Nazis in his kill list. The Old Bolsheviks for example.
Well seeing as how your “pretty sure” is from wikipedia, I don’t really give a shit what you think
Then what should I be reading?
Parenti is a good place to start. Blackshirts and reds is a good place to start with Parenti.
I loathe Chomsky, but he’s good for libs like you I guess. Palatable, though he’s more than likely just gonna make you an insufferable radlib. If you can do basic self-crit then read manufacturing consent.
This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong is good too. Required reading really.
This series about authoritarianism is nice too https://jacobin.com/author/marcie-smith
There’s no single place I can point you to though. Education isn’t simple or easy, but being curious is. Not just taking everything you assume to be true for granted is important, and feverishly searching for keywords on wikipedia when your views get challenged is not the signs of someone with a solid intellectual foundation for their worldview. When you encounter heterodox opinions, take the time to consider that those that hold them have, like you, grown up in the same environment and so they’ve heard the same things you have. They do not think what you think because they haven’t heard what you have heard. They think differently because they have heard what you have heard and then they decided to look into it. Be curious, be humble when you get challenged and if you have no basis for thinking what you’re thinking, figure out why you think that. To quote a great man: “No investigation, no right to speak.”
I recommend frequenting the hexbear newsmega where plenty of good sources and analysis of current events can be found.
I doubt you’ll read any of that though, so just go ignore this comment instead https://hexbear.net/comment/168034
Edit: At the very very least just fucking use your own favourite source and learn about the black book of communism. Or just click the sources given for the many claims you make and actually read them. It’s biased as hell, but at least you’re engaging with someone engaging with second-hand sources, instead of reading the editorialized summary some neo-nazi cooked up for you
Thanks for the suggestions. I found a free copy of This Soviet World. I skimmed through a bit of it and it has some interesting talking points but it’s a bit dated. It was written in 1936. Stalin did a lot after the fact and we learned a lot after the USSR fell.
That’s extremely vague and could easily describe Nazis, who, as others have stated, absolutely deserved to be killed. Do you have any names? Events? Places? Timespans? Anything beyond unnamed “political opponents” and “military figures”?
According to declassified Intel from the soviet union after it’s fall there was a recorded amount of deaths of 3.3 million with approximately 1 million of them being on purpose and the rest due to neglect. You telling me they were all Nazis?
Which declassified intel? Again with the vagueness. Got a link to this intel so we can all read it and decide for ourselves what it says instead of just taking your word for it?
Wheatcroft, Stephen G. (1999). “Victims of Stalinism and the Soviet Secret Police: The Comparability and Reliability of the Archival Data. Not the Last Word” (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 51 (2): 315–45. doi:10.1080/09668139999056. “During 1921–53, the number of sentences was (political convictions): sentences, 4,060,306; death penalties, 799,473; camps and prisons, 2,634397; exile, 413,512; other, 215,942. In addition, during 1937–52 there were 14,269,753 non-political sentences, among them 34,228 death penalties, 2,066,637 sentences for 0–1 year, 4,362,973 for 2–5 years, 1,611,293 for 6–10 years, and 286,795 for more than 10 years. Other sentences were non-custodial”
So, from those quotes from a book you haven’t read, the number killed would be 800,000 over a period of 30 years. And around 10 million imprisoned. Over 30 years, so on average less than 400,000 per year in a country with a population of around 150 million. And this is including much of the fallout of the civil war and overlaps with WWII.
This led to a lower incarceration rate than the United States today.
Note also that the term “political” is used to discriminate the sentences and this is presumably what is being conflated with a politically motivated “Stalinist” purge. But how do you know that it is? Was Stalin in power in 1921? What counted as political? What of the bureaucracy or the party? Or was it just all Stalin and his big evil pen signing millions of sentences?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin#cite_note-13
You haven’t read the source you’re citing. I learned this trick in 6th grade. I grew out of it in 8th. It’s a cheap trick and incredibly obvious.
Yeah I read the summary of it. You’re welcome to explain why you think it’s wrong.
Austin Murphy’s book The Triumph of Evil (Page 74):
Long Quote
The claim that Stalin and other Soviet leaders killed millions (Conquest, 1990) also appears to be wildly exaggerated. More recent evidence from the Soviet archives opened up by the anticommunist Yeltsin government indicate that the total number of death sentences (including of both existing prisoners and those outside captivity) over the 1921-1953 interval (covering the period of Stalin’s partial and complete rule) was between 775,866 and 786,098 (Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, 1993). Given that the archive data originates from anti-Stalin (and even anticommunist) sources, it is extremely unlikely that they underestimate the true number (Thurston, 1996). In addition, the Soviet Union has long admitted to executing at least 12,733 people between 1917 and 1921, mostly during the Foreign Interventionist Civil War of 1918-22, although it is possible that as many as 40,000 more may have been executed unofficially (Andics, 1969). These data would seem to imply about 800,000 executions. The figure of 800,000 may greatly overestimate the number of actual executions, as it includes many who were sentenced to death but who were not actually caught or who had their sentences reduced (Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov, 1993). In fact, Vinton (1993) has provided evidence indicating that the number of executions was significantly below the number of civilian prisoners sentenced to death in the Soviet Union, with only 7,305 executions in a sample of 11,000 prisoners authorized to be executed in 1940 (or scarcely 60%). In addition, most (681,692) of the 780,000 or so death sentences passed under Stalin were issued during the 1937-38 period (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993), when Soviet paranoia about foreign subversion reached its zenith due to a 1936 alliance between Nazi Germany and fascist Japan that was specifically directed against the Soviet Union (Manning, 1993) and due to a public 1936 resolution by a group of influential anti-Stalin foreigners (the Fourth International which was allied with the popular but exiled Russian dissident Leo Trotsky) advocating the overthrow of the Soviet government by illegal means (Glotzer, 1968). Stalin initially set a cap of 186,500 imprisonments and 72,950 death penalties for a 1937 special operation to combat this threat that was to be carried out by local 3-man tribunals called ''troikas" (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993). As the tribunals passed death sentences before the accused had even been arrested, local authorities requested increases in their own quotas (Knight, 1993), and there was an official request in 1938 for a doubling of the amount of prisoner transport that had been initially requisitioned to carry out the original campaign “quotas” of the tribunals (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993). However, even if there had been twice as many actual executions as originally planned, the number would still be less than 150,000. Many of those sentenced by the tribunals may have escaped capture, and many more may have had their death sentence refused or revoked by higher authorities before arrest/execution could take place, especially since Stalin later realized that excesses had been committed in the 1937-38 period, had a number of convictions overturned, and had many of the responsible local leaders punished (Thurston, 1996). Soviet records indicate only about 300,000 actual arrests for anti-Soviet activities or political crimes during this 1937-38 interval (Davies, 1997). With a ratio of 1 execution for every 3 arrests as originally specified by Stalin, that figure would imply about 100,000 executions. Since some of the people sentenced to death may have already been in confinement, and since there is some evidence of a 50,000 increase in the total number of deaths in labor camps over the 1937-38 interval that was probably caused by such executions (Getty, Ritterspom, and Zemskov, 1993), the total number executed by the troika campaign would probably be around 150,000. There were also 30,514 death sentences passed by military courts and 4,387 by regular courts during the 1937-38 period, but, even if all these death sentences were carried out, the total number remains under 200,000. Such a “low” number seems especially likely given the fact that aggregate death rates (from all causes) throughout the Soviet Union were actually lower in 1937-38 than in prior years (Wheatcroft, 1993). Assuming the remaining 100,000 or so death sentences passed in the other years of Stalin’s reign (i.e., 1921-36 and 1939-53) resulted in a 60% execution rate, as per the Vinton (1993) sample, the total number executed by Stalin’s Soviet Union would be about 250,000. Even with the thousands executed between 1917 and 1921, it is plausible that the number of unarmed civilians killed between 1917-1953 amounted to considerably less than a quarter million given that thousands of these victims may have been Soviet soldiers (Freeze, 1997), given that some may have been armed bandits and guerrillas (Getty, 1985), and given that at least 14,000 of the actual executions were of foreign POWs (Vinton, 1993). A USA former attache to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, has stated that the number executed was really only in the tens of thousands (Smith, 2000), and so it is very likely that the true number of unarmed civilians killed by the Soviet Union over its entire history (including the thousands killed in Afghanistan more recently) is too small for the country to make the top ten in mass murders.
Well according to declassified intel they were all concentration camps guards each and every one of them
Where’s your outrage at capitalists then, cac? The magnitude of capitalism’s four fucking times your bullshit settler’s-encyclopedia-sourced figure; but you can only fix your face to talk about the spooky scary (extinct) soviets.
4000 times, actually, and 12 times even the Black Book’s grossly inflated numbers for all communist countries!