Full disclosure, I live in Africa and don’t have a dog in this fight. I like proper discourse and it’s alright if I and another person disagree on something, what is important is that we communicate and understand where the other is coming from. The ultimate goal is the satiation of needless and avoidable suffering for all minds.

I’ve only been on Lemmy for a few days but across any sub I’ve noticed any criticism of China or the CCP is met with immediate downvotes and anything remotely positive of the US or really any western country whatsoever meets a similar fate.

Anything pro-African is mostly neutral but in essence ignored, no upvotes, no downvotes, no comments.

Has anyone else noticed this? Am I completely off base here? And is there anything else here that seemingly gets downvoted automatically. It would be sad to see the fediverse and Lemmy be nothing more than just another echo chamber on the web.

Finally, I am posting this assuming it will also be downvoted to hell based on the title alone and that itself will be some monochrome of truth of the situation here.

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
    04·
    2 months ago

    Wikipedia since I haven’t read history about this. I know it’s not a reliable source but without doing a deep dive, what is lol. And sending people to the gulag wasn’t much better than death, so counting the deaths there too you get 3.3 mil. But the precise number hardly matters. Not even the most favorable view matters outside of academia. It happened, it’s a mountain of bodies. It simply cannot be excused or rehabilitated. You must say “this was very bad, it must never happen again”.

    And I’m sure you all would, but then how can you in the same breath rehabilitate the man at the head of the government that did it?

    If you want to promote the (undoubtedly many) good things about Stalinism you’ll need to repackage, rebrand, rebrand it. Call it early Sovjietism or something.

    But part of it is that we as humanity still lacks a good answer about what to do about how the “calculus of power” can subvert anything. There will always be sociopaths, narcissist and schemers that pay lip service while min-maxing their own gain, no matter the ideology or religion. There is no doubt that the worst people did the best during the purges. It must have been an easy promotion bonanza. Denounce, report, promote, repeat. Easy soviet-style rank-maxxing lol. The theory of communism is incomplete without an good answer to this.

    Anyway that thread shocked me and gave me a new (worse) perspective on the whole “Liberals vs Tankies” culture war. Maybe the fundamental crisis is that we lack any theory or ideology that can lead us out of the current mess. All existing ideologies have demonstrably failed, and maybe we’ve reached the limit of what an average person can reasonably learn and understand and execute. People subconsciously know this so as things get more desperate, there is rising intellectual pain or tension and desire that “but something has to work!” and I just want to believe in something!! So people make themselves believe and ignore or rationalize the glaring problems and increasingly shut the door to discordant noises.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 months ago

      Wikipedia shows the figure I gave for the purges, not 3.3 million. The deaths in the gulag system should not at all be counted with those related to cracking down on corruption and terrorist organizing (ie the purges), as a huge portion happened during World War II due to starvation. The Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket, and this caused mass famine that hit prisoners the hardest. The soviet prisons were actually fairly progressive for their time, see Russian Justice for that.

      The problem with your framing, that we “must never let this happen again,” is that it assumes deliberate malpractice by the Soviets. The purges were a response to real infiltration, corruption, and terrorism, such as the assassination of Kirov. Your characterization of the purges as “soviet rank-maxxing” are absurd and baseless, it was a period of intense paranoia due to the successful assassination of one of the top soviet figures and the discovery of terrorist cells within the Soviet Union. The purges were widely supported by the public, it was not a period of terror.

      The deaths in soviet prisons during World War II were causes by the Nazis, not the Soviets. Deaths due to dekulakization, which your Wikipedia article references, are analogous to the deaths of slave owners in the United States. Liberation of the peasants was paid for with the blood of the kulaks, bourgeois semi-slave owners.

      There’s also the question of “Stalinism.” Stalinism does not exist outside of specific socioeconomic policies under Stalin, it isn’t an actual ideology. Marxism-Leninism is an ideology, and Stalin’s contributions to it are largely limited to advancements on the national question and linguistics. The bulk comes from Marx and Lenin, and moreso Engels than Stalin.

      You were given good answer to all of these questions in that thread. The Marxist position isn’t that “Stalin did nothing wrong,” but that western framing of Stalin is incredibly biased. Your Wikipedia article does this well, it blames Stalin for deaths inflicted by the Nazis, and it capes for semi-slavers, fascists, and terrorists. Stalin of course made mistakes, and there was excess committed under Stalin, there is no doubt of this. However, you take the incorrect stance that Stalin was more bad than good, and do so by also caping for the same semi-slavers and fascists Wikipedia did. This is why historiography is important, and why dispelling the “black myth” around Stalin is important.

      I highly recommend Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo cites near exclusively western sources, and explains both why Stalin is so hated, and why Stalin is so loved as well. It’s a history and critique of Stalin’s legend more than the man himself, which is important considering how much the figure is distorted by historiography.

      You admit to not knowing the history, maybe take that as a chance to dig into it?

      • freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish
        31·
        2 months ago

        Cowbee bringing the receipts, as usual. You’re efforts are aprpeciated

      • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
        01·
        2 months ago

        Look, even if I’d accept all of those explanations as given - at the end of the day close to a million people still were executed.

        The death penalty is morally incorrect, at the very least because we know any justice system makes mistakes and you’ll execute innocent. And when killing people en-masse like in the purge, there will be a lot of innocents. It might have been deemed unavoidable in 1940, but from today’s perspective it is unacceptable, inexcusable, despicable, disgusting.

        So - do you *really *think you can convince any emotionally stable person outside your little ivory tower with this Stalin rehabilitation thing? Do you think it makes people more or less likely to want to join a communist revolution were Stalin has been rehabilitated?

        And even if you are utterly convinced of being in the absolute right here - you must see how incredibly easy you make it for neoliberals to utterly destroy you on this. Easy and total victory. What a monumental task and waste of propaganda resources it would be to convince people of “rehabilitating Stalin”. A right wing think tank could not find a better issue to push into communist communities! A perfect own goal! Is this really the hill you want the hope for a new revolution to die on?

        Honestly…

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 months ago

          The purges were not simply Stalin lashing out. The purges were done by the broader Soviet government, in response to a real threat. The majority of cases simply resulted in an expulsion from government, it wasn’t a naked goal to execute a certain quota of people. There was a real crisis on hand, and the Soviets responded with legal action, those found guilty of treason or other crimes punishable by death (such as murder, severe sexual assault, antisemitism, etc) were sentenced accordingly.

          I have no idea what you mean by “ivory tower.” The global south has a far more nuanced perception of Stalin than the west does. My stance on Stalin is a common stance among Marxist-Leninists, that he was more good than bad, especially when measured honestly and accurately against contemporary monsters like Churchill.

          And no, it isn’t easy for Neoliberals to “destroy” us communists. When the Red Scare club of Stalin’s black legend is wielded against us, we can do one of the following:

          1. Agree with the Red Scare version of Stalin, throwing existing socialist history and victories under the bus to “save face,” which backfires and makes socialism entirely unconvincing, and relies on lying to the working classes just to agree with people that already hate us

          2. Accurately appraise Stalin and put him in the correct historical context. Honestly tell people of his successes and mistakes, without flinching. This is the practice that does result in advancement and spreading of communist ideas.

          When picking between lying by regurgitaging Red Scare mythos and taking a principled, historically accurate stance, it’s clear that the latter is the only acceptable option. We cannot grow the movement through lies, we need to meet the people honestly, which involves honest engagement with past failures and successes. This does not mean conceding the point to bourgeois historiography.

          Essentially, it isn’t the communists giving an honest and accurate account that hurts the movement, it’s the people trying to distance themselves from socialist history and alienating themselves from historical struggle. Experience shows this, which is why Marxism-Leninism is resurging while anti-AES branches of Marxism are faltering.

          Here’s the excellent Marketing Socialism by Nia Frome:

          When I was a kid I also believed ‘communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons.’ Now I think we make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. Not least because someone will almost always bring up Stalin no matter what we call ourselves.

          Stalin is a powerful trope. His name stands for the perverse emergence of injustice from the overzealous pursuit of justice. It’s dramatic irony, a morality tale about how power corrupts. That mythic trope stands as a barricade for socialism no matter what kind of spin you put on socialism.

          The ritual denunciation of Stalin on “the left”:

          1. presents a utopia of socialism without antagonism, flatters first-worlders and academics,
          2. spares people the unpleasantness of interrogating how their ideas about the past were formed, and
          3. makes a virtue of losing and waiting.

          First-worlders get to feel better about themselves if they believe that all the socialist revolutions that took place in the third world “weren’t really socialist.” The same goes for denigrating national liberation of ex-colonies as bourgeois, Bonapartist, etc. Intellectuals get to feel more important if they believe really existing socialism “failed” because of faulty ideas. This lends itself to an interpretation of history where ideas are the motive force, and fidelity to the text is paramount. It’s not surprising that they would also trash “developmentalism” as “merely” bringing food security, electricity, literacy, education, industry, healthcare, job security, etc.

          What are the crimes normally attributed to Stalin? The show trials, the purges, the gulag, forced collectivization… in other words: state violence. The socialisms that define themselves in opposition to Stalin therefore downplay state violence as much as they can. This yields a socialism that’s just trying to sell itself to people like any other commodity. Disavowing negativity/terror means ignoring that the USSR made the world a better place partly by scaring porkie.

          The question of who’s doing violence to whom, and to what end, is the fundamental problem of politics. It’s capitalism’s answer to this question that makes us hate it so much. “Nobody does violence to anybody” sounds good, but it’s not actually a political position. Political positions require charting out a plausible course from where we are now into the glorious future ahead, and that path goes through socialist states. Statehood is (a monopoly on legitimate) violence. Thus, the demonization of Stalin is the demonization of socialist statehood itself.

          In other words, pretending our new thing is sui generis and doesn’t have anything to do with “Stalinism” doesn’t actually mean we’ll face different problems, or have better solutions. Stalin faced problems that were generic to socialism. Socialism isn’t just an infinitely malleable brand in need of better marketing, it’s a class project with definite and durable contours. We don’t actually transcend these problems just by calling ourselves something else, just like we don’t transcend capitalism by calling ourselves post-capitalist.

          Anticommunism is most efficiently compressed and transmitted as demonization of Stalin, and it stands in the way of Americans joining any possible global left wing project, since it prejudices them against left authority everywhere (but especially overseas). International solidarity requires that we abandon great power chauvinism. Hatred of Stalin reinforces great power chauvinism, therefore defending Stalin weakens it.

          If we decline to draw from the entire history of socialism-in-power in favor of utopian socialism or pragmatic liberalism, the range of results we can obtain will be limited to those achieved by utopian socialism (evanescent communes) and pragmatic liberalism (hellworld).

          Read the Losurdo text I linked.