Anarcho-Bolshevik

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.

Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.

The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262

When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.

This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.

— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145

@freagle@lemmygrad.ml and others are ‘simping’ for the USSR because that is the price that you have to pay for capitalism’s structural defects: it leaves us, the lower classes, in such destitute positions that we have nothing to lose by seeking alternatives.

It’s funny that you should mention that, because the main reason that I educated others on the subject was that I saw a Polish anticommunist trivializing the Fascist occupation just to make the Communists look worse.

https://lemmy.ml/post/14133689

I have never seen any outspoken anticommunists make an effort to properly educate others on the Fascist occupation. You just mention the ‘splitting of Poland’ over and over again like that’s good in its own right and we’ll automatically download all of the details from that fact alone. This isn’t how education works.

Apart from driving over and crushing their victims, the practice that earned the Blackshirts notoriety in Italy during Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s had been the killing of opponents by dragging them to their death. Given the numerous lorries available to them in Addis Ababa, both from the military and the [Fascist] government transport company, it was perhaps inevitable that they would use the same method during the massacre of Addis Ababa.

Kirubel Beshah, an Ethiopian witness who had been a student at the Teferi Mekonnin School and who after Liberation would teach mathematics there, reported, ‘Ethiopian blood flowed like water everywhere. Saddest of all was that at first they tied dead bodies to the back of their trucks, and pulled them along the road while shouting and singing, but later, they also started to tie the living to their trucks, so as not to waste bullets. It was very disturbing to see human bodies being torn to pieces alive, by stones and bushes.’²⁹

(Emphasis added. Source.)

Finland.

In a statement to the JTA, the ADL said the Wikipedia decision was part of a “campaign to delegitimize the ADL.”

How amusing, as if there were some shadowy cabal masterminding a coordinated attempt to bring down their memetic organization.

The only ‘campaign to delegitimize the ADL’ is its own kamikaze mission to mindlessly recategorize all opposition to a crappy régime as antisemitism while leaving actual victims of white supremacy in the dust. I predict that the ADL is either going to fall into obscurity or outright vanish after the last apartheid régime collapses.

The reason that MovingThrowaway said ‘Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary’ is that certain British socialists coined the pejorative ‘tanky’ to nickname communists who approved of the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Hungarian People’s Republic (and later, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), but hardly anybody uses the pejorative this way anymore.

In practice, application now varies widely, from approving of the Bolsheviki to opposing the Ukrainian government to suggesting that maybe North Korean politicians think and behave like ordinary human beings. The contemporary criteria are so variable that many would argue that the term is too vague to be useful.

Maybe I am… or maybe we’re all tankies now. What’s the difference?

The Lion of the Desert.

I frequented /v/, /int/, and a few other boards about one dozen years ago. Now the only things that I touch are a few of the archival websites, and even then only rarely. Occasionally I’ll visit an archive to look for images or clips, and more unoften I’ll look up a phrase or word out of curiosity, but that is the extent of it. I haven’t posted anything on the official website in a very long time (and I’ve never posted anything on the archival websites at all).