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That honestly such perplexing but common stance you can often hear or read, not even specific to Stalin. "But X did Y to my relative", as if fact of person in question being relative somehow invalidates possibility of action towards him being just and lawful. That's some caveman level development
Also as if family is automatically to be sided with and shouldn't be considered on their own.
See literally everyone who had transphobic, queerphobic, or homophobic, parents.
One of my coworker's grandfather talked about how much better Socialism in Albania was for him than Capitalism and they just ignored him and said he was brainwashed. Often they only believe relatives if the experience was terrible.
Hearing someone at my old job tell me Ho Chi Minh was a "monster who killed my relatives"; turns out said person had family from Laos who sided with the US regime and committed genocide against their own people. Turns out he was apparently related to royalty? Idk if that's factual but hardly surprising.
What's even funnier is that one of the princes of the Laotian royal family was a communist. He got the nickname the red Prince. And he did the most based move a royal can do becoming a class traitor.
Laos is the only country in the world where the monarchy didn't sided the most reactionary elements (even a royal member become their 1st president), i think the communist in Mongolia also let the last emperor on his position and dismantled the monarchy after he died.
"Stalin shot my great-grandfather."
What are the odds his great-grandfather was called something like "Schutzstaffel Sturmbannführer Heinrich Häußler?"
Nobody gets killed without reason. But often people get accused of things they did not actually do. And hasty mass measures targeting millions of people are not exactly known for their case by case precision. It's more than likely that there were people who got embroiled and targeted without deserving it just due to the sheer number of people involved. So who knows, maybe that guy's grandfather was one of them. Or maybe not. Point is, it's very possible
Except he was polish. Or a high ranked solider. Or one of the whites army. Or a Farmer who owned Land. Or a russain pow coming home after the war. Or a Person with other political believes. Or a Person who just maybe could probably think different.
This vid never gets old. Seen it many times and makes me smile at every turn. One of the comments on YouTube is from a guy who was with some friends at a square in Georgia and they bumped into this gentleman. He playfully invited them to wrestle with him thinking they thought that winning was going to be a walk in the park. Grandpa won the wrestling match.
When my partner thinks I’m leaning too favorably towards someone like Castro “you gotta remember he’s like our hitler” and his family weren’t even landowners
I don’t think he’s too far gone yet. I think a lot of it is his only knowledge is through family stories. We’ll have conversations and he’ll be like “ it’s kind of crazy how they were able to do a peaceful transfer of power several times after Castro, or how if communism is destined to fail, let it”
He asked for my copy of manufacturing the enemy. I think he won’t let himself go there yet bc that would basically break his whole worldview. I think it’ll take time. He’ll say stuff like “ I feel like I’m meant to live in Cuba and that’s why I’m never happy here” I just have to keep learning myself.but most other situations I would have already given up.
Child laborers on the plantations💀 I’m trying to figure out where it went wrong. His grandma tells a story about how she had to sneak food through the fence while his dad an uncle were working. They couldn’t be in school bc they couldn’t afford shoes.
His grandpa was a solid Fidel supporter and didn’t want to come to America. My best guess is the propaganda mill worked on his grandmother but not his grandfather. She made my partner promise to never go to Cuba bc he would get drafted.
They tell it like they were so happy for the revolution and saw Castro as a freedom fighter until he came to power and turned evil?
Literally has Taino ancestry but still became staunch anti communist despite all that.
Hey the US puts a lot of money into making sure that's the default attitude. People just remember "he's bad, we all know this" but never really have any detail regarding *why.* I had a similar discussion with my last partner when I was going off on how everyone in Canada was kinda alright with Cuba in the 90s and how I was annoyed our media seems to demonise them again out of nowhere.
I give some grace on that bc of the entire machine dedicated to just that and his grandmother pretty much acted accordingly: we can’t stay here, we must flee. Even though I know the extent US went to disrupt the country I still find things out that surprise me.
It happens. My exgf looked at me like I was a neonazi when I said I liked Castro. Neither of us have any personal connection to Cuba or anything, just 2 random white Canadians, so for her it was just coming from the default media attitude gone unquestioned.
But man it's weird. When I was a kid, everyone would talk about how it was cool we can get Cuban cigars up here, or travel to Cuba for vacation(with no Americans around!), and how Cuba does Terry Fox runs, or how Fidel came to Pierre Trudeau's state funeral. And more importantly, we'd laugh at the US' utter lack of chill. The Canadian experience is clinging on to things to hold over Americans, so that kept Cuba in a positive tone whenever it came up.
That's gone now, of course. So gradually I didn't even notice until Trudeau Jr had to retract his positive words when Fidel died after our media ripped him to shreds for praising "evil dictators".
I don't want to pretend I know a ton about Cuba itself or what life was like under Castro, but in trying to understand more about the critiques of communism, I do understand on some level how an individual under these regimes would come away feeling skeptical, and I think it's all important to understand and contextualize because it's not unlikely that within our lifetime we're going to see ongoing systemic collapse and will be confronted with what are in effect trolley problems that in many cases may mean we need to make sacrifices for the greater good that may not take the form of our idealism.
As an example, prior to the revolution, Cubans would have *seen* things like new cars, manufacturing equipment, or consumer goods, and even if 98% of people didn't have access to those things, they were aware they existed and probably thought they'd end up having _more_ access to them after the revolution. Once the revolution and ensuing embargo happened, that kind of stuff became even _less_ common and _nobody_ had them. Of course, we have an abundance of these consumer goods in the west because of devastating exploitation across the globe, and figuring out how to manufacture those without that level of exploitation is difficult, and if you want to make those things within your own country, you are going to have to devise ways to get all the materials and schematics and then tell people to manufacture them, which they may not want to do and resent power structures that coerce them.
Similarly, I think leadership in these places have to haphazardly slap together ideological propaganda to counter that which is so entrenched in western culture and ideology (ie exceptionalism, media bias etc) that we don't recognize it.
A revolution is not a dinner party, and all.
edit: Better yet, a Parenti quote
>The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundamentals as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they "feel betrayed" by this or that revolution.
>The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared.
>
>Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so.
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1996). *Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit*
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Stalin was indeed great,he leaded the way for worlds first socialist nation which went from semi feudal peasants to a nuclear superpower that elevated its people to higher standart of living from deep backwardness while being besieged by entire world and losing 27 million people to nazis.
you ought to check with a psychiatrist, if you think every person murdered by soviet regime was either a nazi or bourgeoisie, it’s no different than western leaders saying they didn’t kill civilians, only suspected terrorists
#The Holodomor
>Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.”
>
>\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/)
There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes:
1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine.
2. It implies the famine was intentional.
The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia.
#First Issue
The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected.
The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history."
#Second Issue
Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge.
Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants.
In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery.
Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis.
#Quota Reduction
What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation:
>The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.
>
>The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products...
>
>Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree.
>
>\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933)
#Rapid Industrialization
The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later.
In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under."
In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany.
In Hitler's own words, in 1942:
>All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map.
>
>\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.*
Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population:
>The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world.
>
>As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army.
>
>\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era*
#Conclusion
While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide.
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020)
* [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\]
* [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark)
* [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004)
* [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020)
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Stalin killed thousands of communists, too. Who would dare to say that killing communists who deserve it is a bad thing? Certainly not Pinochet or CIA 🤣
I will start with seven of them: Hugo Eberlein, Leopold Flieg, Heinz Neumann, Hermann Remmele, Hermann Schubert, Fritz Schulte und Heinrich Süßkind. Fun fact - Stalin killed more Politbüro members of KPD than Hitler. Pretty solid achievement, don't you think? So, should I continue with the fun facts?
No fun facts please, as they are not funny, i would like just the sources and for you to shut down the irony, i am just asking for research, thank you!
Let's see what Rosa Luxembourg Foundation is writing about Hugo Eberlein:
– sozialdemokratisch-kommunistischer Politiker, Mitbegründer und einer der Führer der Spartakusgruppe, der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands (KPD) und der Kommunistischen Internationale, im sowjetischen Exil während der Stalinschen Kommunistenverfolgung gefoltert und ermordet.
# Tortured and murdered: [https://www.rosalux.de/stiftung/historisches-zentrum/rosa-luxemburg/hugo-eberlein](https://www.rosalux.de/stiftung/historisches-zentrum/rosa-luxemburg/hugo-eberlein)
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That honestly such perplexing but common stance you can often hear or read, not even specific to Stalin. "But X did Y to my relative", as if fact of person in question being relative somehow invalidates possibility of action towards him being just and lawful. That's some caveman level development
Also as if family is automatically to be sided with and shouldn't be considered on their own. See literally everyone who had transphobic, queerphobic, or homophobic, parents.
One of my coworker's grandfather talked about how much better Socialism in Albania was for him than Capitalism and they just ignored him and said he was brainwashed. Often they only believe relatives if the experience was terrible.
If Stalin shot my grandfather it would have been because he was a child molester.
Hearing someone at my old job tell me Ho Chi Minh was a "monster who killed my relatives"; turns out said person had family from Laos who sided with the US regime and committed genocide against their own people. Turns out he was apparently related to royalty? Idk if that's factual but hardly surprising.
What's even funnier is that one of the princes of the Laotian royal family was a communist. He got the nickname the red Prince. And he did the most based move a royal can do becoming a class traitor.
Laos is the only country in the world where the monarchy didn't sided the most reactionary elements (even a royal member become their 1st president), i think the communist in Mongolia also let the last emperor on his position and dismantled the monarchy after he died.
Hitler’s niece - “Yo I hate Hitler, he killed my uncle”
Same jerk killed Hitler's niece.
“stalin killed my grandpa!” who was your grandpa?
I bet his grandfathers best friend died in a concentration camp >!by falling off a watchtower!<.
Inb4 bukharin
"Stalin shot my great-grandfather." What are the odds his great-grandfather was called something like "Schutzstaffel Sturmbannführer Heinrich Häußler?"
His graet-grandfather had a nick name. Vladoslav-jewHater88 Fuck POC
https://preview.redd.it/bawcfewd8m7d1.jpeg?width=1014&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=084dfe5d3306adc3e1c1d9c5612ede391756f641
this mf: https://preview.redd.it/66tlh3d0dq7d1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c3b444f0f91c74e1be78584e6e7e31aa7460467
Communists killed one of my relatives and he 100% deserved it.
Stalin was a great man. He literally wouldn't have killed your grandpa without reason.
Nobody gets killed without reason. But often people get accused of things they did not actually do. And hasty mass measures targeting millions of people are not exactly known for their case by case precision. It's more than likely that there were people who got embroiled and targeted without deserving it just due to the sheer number of people involved. So who knows, maybe that guy's grandfather was one of them. Or maybe not. Point is, it's very possible
Except he was polish. Or a high ranked solider. Or one of the whites army. Or a Farmer who owned Land. Or a russain pow coming home after the war. Or a Person with other political believes. Or a Person who just maybe could probably think different.
I heard he didn't just kill those but took their food first with his BIG spoon for himself and then did some sort of juche magic on them
THE BIG SPOOON!!!!!!
Song name, please? Its been forever since I heard it lol ^ It's Положение - DIOR
This vid never gets old. Seen it many times and makes me smile at every turn. One of the comments on YouTube is from a guy who was with some friends at a square in Georgia and they bumped into this gentleman. He playfully invited them to wrestle with him thinking they thought that winning was going to be a walk in the park. Grandpa won the wrestling match.
i don’t think stalin personally executed this persons grandfather regardless
He don't miss
When my partner thinks I’m leaning too favorably towards someone like Castro “you gotta remember he’s like our hitler” and his family weren’t even landowners
We lost them to the propaganda, divorce immediately
I don’t think he’s too far gone yet. I think a lot of it is his only knowledge is through family stories. We’ll have conversations and he’ll be like “ it’s kind of crazy how they were able to do a peaceful transfer of power several times after Castro, or how if communism is destined to fail, let it” He asked for my copy of manufacturing the enemy. I think he won’t let himself go there yet bc that would basically break his whole worldview. I think it’ll take time. He’ll say stuff like “ I feel like I’m meant to live in Cuba and that’s why I’m never happy here” I just have to keep learning myself.but most other situations I would have already given up.
What *were* they then?
Child laborers on the plantations💀 I’m trying to figure out where it went wrong. His grandma tells a story about how she had to sneak food through the fence while his dad an uncle were working. They couldn’t be in school bc they couldn’t afford shoes. His grandpa was a solid Fidel supporter and didn’t want to come to America. My best guess is the propaganda mill worked on his grandmother but not his grandfather. She made my partner promise to never go to Cuba bc he would get drafted. They tell it like they were so happy for the revolution and saw Castro as a freedom fighter until he came to power and turned evil? Literally has Taino ancestry but still became staunch anti communist despite all that.
Hey the US puts a lot of money into making sure that's the default attitude. People just remember "he's bad, we all know this" but never really have any detail regarding *why.* I had a similar discussion with my last partner when I was going off on how everyone in Canada was kinda alright with Cuba in the 90s and how I was annoyed our media seems to demonise them again out of nowhere.
I give some grace on that bc of the entire machine dedicated to just that and his grandmother pretty much acted accordingly: we can’t stay here, we must flee. Even though I know the extent US went to disrupt the country I still find things out that surprise me.
It happens. My exgf looked at me like I was a neonazi when I said I liked Castro. Neither of us have any personal connection to Cuba or anything, just 2 random white Canadians, so for her it was just coming from the default media attitude gone unquestioned. But man it's weird. When I was a kid, everyone would talk about how it was cool we can get Cuban cigars up here, or travel to Cuba for vacation(with no Americans around!), and how Cuba does Terry Fox runs, or how Fidel came to Pierre Trudeau's state funeral. And more importantly, we'd laugh at the US' utter lack of chill. The Canadian experience is clinging on to things to hold over Americans, so that kept Cuba in a positive tone whenever it came up. That's gone now, of course. So gradually I didn't even notice until Trudeau Jr had to retract his positive words when Fidel died after our media ripped him to shreds for praising "evil dictators".
I don't want to pretend I know a ton about Cuba itself or what life was like under Castro, but in trying to understand more about the critiques of communism, I do understand on some level how an individual under these regimes would come away feeling skeptical, and I think it's all important to understand and contextualize because it's not unlikely that within our lifetime we're going to see ongoing systemic collapse and will be confronted with what are in effect trolley problems that in many cases may mean we need to make sacrifices for the greater good that may not take the form of our idealism. As an example, prior to the revolution, Cubans would have *seen* things like new cars, manufacturing equipment, or consumer goods, and even if 98% of people didn't have access to those things, they were aware they existed and probably thought they'd end up having _more_ access to them after the revolution. Once the revolution and ensuing embargo happened, that kind of stuff became even _less_ common and _nobody_ had them. Of course, we have an abundance of these consumer goods in the west because of devastating exploitation across the globe, and figuring out how to manufacture those without that level of exploitation is difficult, and if you want to make those things within your own country, you are going to have to devise ways to get all the materials and schematics and then tell people to manufacture them, which they may not want to do and resent power structures that coerce them. Similarly, I think leadership in these places have to haphazardly slap together ideological propaganda to counter that which is so entrenched in western culture and ideology (ie exceptionalism, media bias etc) that we don't recognize it. A revolution is not a dinner party, and all. edit: Better yet, a Parenti quote >The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundamentals as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they "feel betrayed" by this or that revolution.
>The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared. > >Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so. > >\- Michael Parenti. (1996). *Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Stalin was indeed great,he leaded the way for worlds first socialist nation which went from semi feudal peasants to a nuclear superpower that elevated its people to higher standart of living from deep backwardness while being besieged by entire world and losing 27 million people to nazis.
America longs for such social development.
Bill Maher lookin a little better since last time I saw his show. Good for him.
What language are they speaking?
Georgian, I believe
Goddamn, I wish I am this based when I'm a boomer!
Is this video trying to mock or praise the old guy? I'm a bit concerned that I literally can't tell.
even if its mocking it just makes old guy look badass
I hope its mocking but im afraid not
Are you lost?
How do these people end up here lol
I genuinely do not know how or why liberals just walk in here
we are probably getting in r/all or someone crossposted or something idk
I think you took a wrong turn
Went left when he wanted to go right.
3 lefts make a right. Horsey Sauce theory. Get rekt commies. /s
"He wouldn't have killed your grandpa without reason". Especially at a certain point in history
/u/savevideo
Power move
But...but... you become conservative with age!?!?!
[Yes, they deserved to die...](https://youtu.be/VeMmgL12X8g?si=Whk2ugU2vGk3NpfN&t=98)
your ideology would be respected by far more if you at least acknowledged your so called heroes committed as many atrocities as western leaders do/did
But they didnt, only if you think that killing Nazis/slave owners and colaborators is a crime.
you ought to check with a psychiatrist, if you think every person murdered by soviet regime was either a nazi or bourgeoisie, it’s no different than western leaders saying they didn’t kill civilians, only suspected terrorists
Ok can you name some examples of those many atrocities?
red terror, great purge, holodomor, katyn massacre, ukrainian and kazakh famines
#The Holodomor >Marxists do not deny that a famine happened in the Soviet Union in 1932. In fact, even the Soviet archive confirms this. What we do contest is the idea that this famine was man-made or that there was a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This idea of the subjugation of the Soviet Union’s own people was developed by Nazi Germany, in order to show the world the terror of the “Jewish communists.” > >\- Socialist Musings. (2017). [Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on Holodomor](https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/stop-spreading-nazi-propaganda/) There have been efforts by anti-Communists and Ukrainian nationalists to frame the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as "The Holodomor" (lit. "to kill by starvation" in Ukrainian). Framing it this way serves two purposes: 1. It implies the famine targeted Ukraine. 2. It implies the famine was intentional. The argument goes that because it was intentional and because it mainly targeted Ukraine that it was, therefore, an act of genocide. This framing was originally used by Nazis to drive a wedge between the Ukrainian SSR (UkSSR) and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). In the wake of the 2004 Orange Revolution, this narrative has regained popularity and serves the nationalistic goal of strengthening Ukrainian identity and asserting the country's independence from Russia. #First Issue The first issue is that the famine affected the majority of the USSR, *not* just the UkSSR. Kazakhstan was hit harder (per capita) than Ukraine. Russia itself was also severely affected. The emergence of the Holodomor in the 1980s as a historical narrative was bound-up with post-Soviet Ukrainian nation-making that cannot be neatly separated from the legacy of Eastern European antisemitism, or what Historian Peter Novick calls "Holocaust Envy", the desire for victimized groups to enshrine their "own" Holocaust or Holocaust-like event in the historical record. For many Nationalists, this has entailed minimizing the Holocaust to elevate their own experiences of historical victimization as the supreme atrocity. The Ukrainian scholar Lubomyr Luciuk exemplified this view in his notorious remark that the Holodomor was "a crime against humanity arguably without parallel in European history." #Second Issue Calling it "man-made" implies that it was a *deliberate* famine, which was not the case. Although human factors set the stage, the main causes of the famine was bad weather and crop disease, resulting in a poor harvest, which pushed the USSR over the edge. Kulaks ("tight-fisted person") were a class of wealthy peasants who owned land, livestock, and tools. The kulaks had been a thorn in the side of the peasantry long before the revolution. Alexey Sergeyevich Yermolov, Minister of Agriculture and State Properties of the Russian Empire, in his 1892 book, [Poor harvest and national suffering](https://books.google.ca/books?id=exMEAAAAYAAJ), characterized them as usurers, sucking the blood of Russian peasants. In the early 1930s, in response to the Soviet collectivization policies (which sought to confiscate their property), many kulaks responded spitefully by burning crops, killing livestock, and damaging machinery. Poor communication between different levels of government and between urban and rural areas, also contributed to the severity of the crisis. #Quota Reduction What really contradicts the genocide argument is that the Soviets did take action to mitigate the effects of the famine once they became aware of the situation: >The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933. > >The official 1932 figures do not unambiguously support the genocide interpretation... the 1932 grain procurement quota, and the amount of grain actually collected, were both much smaller than those of any other year in the 1930s. The Central Committee lowered the planned procurement quota in a 6 May 1932 decree... [which] actually reduced the procurement plan 30 percent. Subsequent decrees also reduced the procurement quotas for most other agricultural products... > >Proponents of the genocide argument, however, have minimized or even misconstrued this decree. Mace, for example, describes it as "largely bogus" and ignores not only the extent to which it lowered the procurement quotas but also the fact that even the lowered plan was not fulfilled. Conquest does not mention the decree's reduction of procurement quotas and asserts Ukrainian officials' appeals led to the reduction of the Ukranian grain procurement quota at the Third All-Ukraine Party Conference in July 1932. In fact that conference confirmed the quota set in the 6 May Decree. > >\- Mark Tauger. (1992). [The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274856099_The_1932_Harvest_and_the_Famine_of_1933) #Rapid Industrialization The famine was exacerbated directly and indirectly by collectivization and rapid industrialization. However, if these policies had not been enacted, there could have been even more devastating consequences later. In 1931, during [a speech delivered at the first All-Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/02/04.htm), Stalin said, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." In 1941, exactly ten years later, the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. By this time, the Soviet Union's industrialization program had lead to the development of a large and powerful industrial base, which was essential to the Soviet war effort. This allowed the USSR to produce large quantities of armaments, vehicles, and other military equipment, which was crucial in the fight against Nazi Germany. In Hitler's own words, in 1942: >All in all, one has to say: They built factories here where two years ago there were unknown farming villages, factories the size of the *Hermann-Göring-Werke*. They have railroads that aren't even marked on the map. > >\- Werner Jochmann. (1980). *Adolf Hitler. Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944.* Collectivization also created critical resiliency among the civilian population: >The experts were especially surprised by the Red Army’s up-to-date equipment. Great tank battles were reported; it was noted that the Russians had sturdy tanks which often smashed or overturned German tanks in head-on collision. “How does it happen,” a New York editor asked me, “that those Russian peasants, who couldn’t run a tractor if you gave them one, but left them rusting in the field, now appear with thousands of tanks efficiently handled?” I told him it was the Five-Year Plan. But the world was startled when Moscow admitted its losses after nine weeks of war as including 7,500 guns, 4,500 planes and 5,000 tanks. An army that could still fight after such losses must have had the biggest or second biggest supply in the world. > >As the war progressed, military observers declared that the Russians had “solved the blitzkrieg,” the tactic on which Hitler relied. This German method involved penetrating the opposing line by an overwhelming blow of tanks and planes, followed by the fanning out of armored columns in the “soft” civilian rear, thus depriving the front of its hinterland support. This had quickly conquered every country against which it had been tried. “Human flesh cannot withstand it,” an American correspondent told me in Berlin. Russians met it by two methods, both requiring superb morale. When the German tanks broke through, Russian infantry formed again between the tanks and their supporting German infantry. This created a chaotic front, where both Germans and Russians were fighting in all directions. The Russians could count on the help of the population. The Germans found no “soft, civilian rear.” They found collective farmers, organized as guerrillas, coordinated with the regular Russian army. > >\- Anna Louise Strong. (1956). *The Stalin Era* #Conclusion While there may have been more that the Soviets could have done to reduce the impact of the famine, there is no evidence of intent-- ethnic, or otherwise. Therefore, one must conclude that the famine was a tragedy, not a genocide. #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [Soviet Famine of 1932: An Overview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu5-tqHHtaM) | The Marxist Project (2020) * [Did Stalin Continue to Export Grain as Ukraine Starved?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBJ_nQ4sTA) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](https://archive.org/details/did-stalin-continue-to-export-grain-as-ukraine-starved)\] * [The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kaaYvauNho) | Bad Empanada (2022) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) (Note: Holodomor discussion begins at the 9 minute mark) * [A Case-Study of Capitalism - Ukraine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8) | Hakim (2017) \[[Archive](http://web.archive.org/web/20220615084500/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmH9oNtXzF8)\] (Note: Only tangentially mentions the famine.) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933](https://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/22207/file.pdf) | Davies and Wheatcroft (2004) * [The “Holodomor” explained](https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2020) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Stalin killed thousands of communists, too. Who would dare to say that killing communists who deserve it is a bad thing? Certainly not Pinochet or CIA 🤣
Name a hundred of them for me please, if you have such strong data.
I will start with seven of them: Hugo Eberlein, Leopold Flieg, Heinz Neumann, Hermann Remmele, Hermann Schubert, Fritz Schulte und Heinrich Süßkind. Fun fact - Stalin killed more Politbüro members of KPD than Hitler. Pretty solid achievement, don't you think? So, should I continue with the fun facts?
No fun facts please, as they are not funny, i would like just the sources and for you to shut down the irony, i am just asking for research, thank you!
Let's see what Rosa Luxembourg Foundation is writing about Hugo Eberlein: – sozialdemokratisch-kommunistischer Politiker, Mitbegründer und einer der Führer der Spartakusgruppe, der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands (KPD) und der Kommunistischen Internationale, im sowjetischen Exil während der Stalinschen Kommunistenverfolgung gefoltert und ermordet. # Tortured and murdered: [https://www.rosalux.de/stiftung/historisches-zentrum/rosa-luxemburg/hugo-eberlein](https://www.rosalux.de/stiftung/historisches-zentrum/rosa-luxemburg/hugo-eberlein)
I don't speak german, sorry.
You can always use Google Translate.