• slartibartfast@lemm.ee
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      19 days ago

      And a lot of others. He wasn’t very discriminatory in that regard.

      Clearly in relation to killing others, but you’re too dishonest to follow the comment chain.

      • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        19 days ago

        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.

        • slartibartfast@lemm.ee
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          19 days ago

          I can admit he did some right.

          Can you admit he did some wrong without your comment being deleted or you eventually banned?

          • Bureaucrat [pup/pup's, null/void]@hexbear.net
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            19 days ago

            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.

          • Bureaucrat [pup/pup's, null/void]@hexbear.net
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            19 days ago

            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

            • Bureaucrat [pup/pup's, null/void]@hexbear.net
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              19 days ago

              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.

              • Bureaucrat [pup/pup's, null/void]@hexbear.net
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                19 days ago

                Yeah the more I learn about the sino-soviet split the more annoyed I get. It kinda reeks of colonizer brainworms. Then the chinese got those brainworms wrt Cambodia and Afghanistan. I know it’s more complicated than that and I’m being reductive as hell and it’s just now something I’m only kind of learning about so I know my views can change again, but as I see it now, it gives me the vibes of “we need them to live in suffering for a few decades more until we’re ready” (I heard blowback pod quote Molotov about “needing 5-65 years” and I’ve been looking for the quote ever since). I get that mentality, but it’s kind of just reformism with more steps.
                I do kinda get it though, it’s easy to say I would’ve done otherwise after several million dead and the first opportunity for peace in several decades.

          • Lyudmila [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            19 days ago

            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.

            • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              19 days ago

              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.

            • Bureaucrat [pup/pup's, null/void]@hexbear.net
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              19 days ago

              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.

          • blakeus12 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            19 days ago

            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?

          • quarrk [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            19 days ago

            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.

      • Bureaucrat [pup/pup's, null/void]@hexbear.net
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        19 days ago

        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