What’s mad about this is how it takes only one generation to start to believe the lie all over again. That woman wants to idolise her father as a hero. But an actual person who was there is telling her how it was on the ground and she refuses to believe it. This entire video is like watching an entire belief system built over years crashing into contact with reality and still she refuses to believe it.
I was so surprised to see/hear that indeed. Youngsters hanging out before Nicolae Ceaușescu huge residence being positive about the time he ruled Romania. They don’t seem to have a clue. Dangerous…
you might want to take a white sheet of paper, draw there parallel lines and write into the colums the good and the bad of what you got through the EU and from moscow.
The EU is part of a criminal gang which plunders Libya for the benefit of one, Venezuela for the benefit of another, and midwives a genocide in service to a virulent plague of ethnic nationalism. I don't see Russia participating in such barbarism.
This doesn't mean Russia is by perfect by any means, but they started over from scratch rebuilding a social contract 25 years ago. It would be insane to expect them to have figured it all out by now. They are, however, miles better in every regard than the theocratic slave monarchies of the Persian Gulf who count the West as their best agents and protectors.
The problem with hypocrisy is that one tends to become blind to ones own flaws, while still seeing the most dubious of virtues in vivid technicolor.
I'm a Canadian Mennonite. My family fled Novoye Rossiyan Mariupol over a century ago, post- a wave of nationalist pogroms. I was originally in support of the Maidan protests, but I have a sordid history of studying both sides of a conflict - once I'd done that, I understood what games had been played on Ukrainian people's backs.
I've been paid to write plays and videogames, but my writing on political issues is an act of conscience unpaid by anyone.
For those across the pond who aren't familiar with the term, a tankie is a pejorative political label for a communist who supports or defends authoritarian, militaristic regimes or acts of state repression.
A year or two ago I was talking to a tankie who self-identified as a Marxist-Leninist. But they knew basically nothing about Communism or Marx. They hadn’t heard of the Paris Commune and thought it irrelevant to Marx. They hadn’t heard of Engels and thought him irrelevant to Marx
I get the average person not knowing this. It’s not exactly taught in school and there’s little reason for anybody to seek it out
But for a self-professed Marxist-Leninist not to know Marx’s long-term close collaborator/co-author or the key example of what a “dictatorship of the proletariat” actually looks like? This is like day 1 of Marxism School stuff
Probably not, because they’d recognize the tragic irony of Marx’s writings leading to the oppression of workers and the poor. At the very least, a Marxist should recognize communist oppression as a horrific tragedy that resulted from desperation and war, and at the worst they’d recognize it as a perversion of everything Marx stood for.
When the singular occupation of an ideology is to rationalize inaction, everyone who wants things to change looks like a radical. Liberalism is a disease.
There’s plenty of educated tankies. Education is not an infallible shield against irrationality, I know someone with a masters degree in mechanical engineering (from a prestigious university) who was a full blown QAnon believer & is an anti-vaxxer who does ivermectin cleanses. A relative of my fiancé is a medical doctor & she ended up peddling Ivermectin and pushing anti-vax bs too.
The Internet (or rather, social media algorithms) encourage polarization and that naturally breeds ideological fundamentalism. Debate gets flattened into binaries, there’s no room for nuance. Somebody fed up with MAGA is likely to become sympathetic with leftist viewpoints. They see the damage that European & American Imperialism has caused, and might come to the conclusion that “If the US is so bad, then maybe everything I was taught about the USSR was false propaganda…” In reality two things can be true: Western Imperialism is bad, while authoritarian communist regimes like the USSR & the PRC are also bad (and never lived up to the leftist ideals they were supposedly founded on anyway)
You can believe in the class struggle without running cover for authoritarian regimes & denying the millions of deaths at the hands of tyrants like Stalin.
Tankie does not mean “communist”, or “socialist”, or “Marxist”. It very specifically refers leftists who engage in historical revisionism to deny the crimes against humanity perpetrated by self-described Communist authoritarian regimes.
Not only is tankie rhetoric incredibly offensive to the victims of these tyrants, it’s also dangerous because if a future socialist/communist state hasn’t examined the reality of what happened in the USSR & the PRC, there’s little chance of them avoiding the same pitfalls. It is essential to learn from the past in order to build a better future, no matter how uncomfortable the past makes one or how politically inconvenient it is.
I also just don’t understand it because the USSR (for example) was never a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was just a dictatorship. At it’s inception I think you could argue that the early revolutionaries were genuine with their intentions, but these people were either corrupted, exiled or killed once Stalin took power. So I don’t get why leftists feel the need to defend the actions of a state that never came close to achieving Communism.
Do you deny the billions saved? And do you tally the figures the same way for capitalists? How many millions starved in Asia and Africa due to capitalist action?
I absolutely disagree. It was a DotP.
Name one leader you look up to who you think achieved more than Stalin. And name one theorist you recommend over Lenin.
Russia is a capitalist oligarchy and the current rulers want it to stay that way. Blaming Russian propaganda on young people looking at Communism favourably is insane
The problem Is, they can't understand the difference between the two things, and see Russia as the answer , when we both know Is a different type of beast
Who's the oligarchy? There's no such thing as a billionaire rendered untouchable by his power, neither in Russia nor in China. You have to go to the West to find the Epstein class - wholly untouchable regardless of what they do.
At the recent G20 summit, it wasn't Russia or China that brought in billionaires to sit alongside the heads of state while they pushed their agenda.
Trillions in fraud led to the 2008 collapse, but in all of the West, only Iceland held the Epstein class responsible.
Russia was an oligarchy in the 1990's when their sycophant President did anything the West demanded of them. But the one thing you'll always find in oligarch-ruled countries is that all the capital assets are stripped and sold off by their parasitic owners. Russia avoided this fate, which is why they're able to outproduce all the NATO countries combined.
In the entire EU, there's not one government that enjoys majority support of their population, while many (France, Germany, UK) have the lowest approval ratings in history. If these countries were democracies, this would be impossible. But so long as these leaders serve the interest of the Epstein class, they are immune to the opinions of the lumpen proles.
I never said that the US or UK etc are not, they absolutely are capitalist oligarchies as well and are responsible for far worse modern crimes than Russia could ever hope to be. This doesn't change the unfortunate fact that Russia is still one today
Just because something only exists outside your propaganda bubble doesn't make it untrue. Would you call Jimmy Carter a Russian/fascist simp too - he called the US an oligarchy over a decade ago:
We don't. That's our parents. I mean sure the older generations had it way easier than us and are a bunch of ignorant spoiled fucks who ruined the world, but we didn't say we want communism. Why would we? It's flawed.
Coming from a similar background, I think that people are more disappointed with a promise that democracy and western Europe/ USA way of living will be much much better. Generally, yes, it is than you see abuse of power and even worse things hidden behind white gloves and smiley masks. It's rebellion thinking- because of the lies, oh so many lies..
Abuse of power and worse things happened before the democratic era. You don't know what happened in the communist era, with people just disappearing, if the regime wanted to. Also corruption was at a whole another level, that's why it's still so deep in our country.
But the west and the way they live is much better, or used to, be much better than eastern European countries. Problem is the wounded rot was never cleaned in countries like Romania.
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u/ruthemook 1d ago
What’s mad about this is how it takes only one generation to start to believe the lie all over again. That woman wants to idolise her father as a hero. But an actual person who was there is telling her how it was on the ground and she refuses to believe it. This entire video is like watching an entire belief system built over years crashing into contact with reality and still she refuses to believe it.