You could be a fan of both, like me! Soviets made absolute beauties, and importantly, they made them cheap and mass produced. Imagine a HUNDRED THOUSAND T-55s with APDS, what a beauty. For reference, those tanks first saw combat against Israel if I'm not mistaken ;)
- Posts
- 8
- Comments
- 851
- Joined
- 3 mo. ago
- Posts
- 8
- Comments
- 851
- Joined
- 3 mo. ago
Block me already, Mussolini enjoyer
I will never understand anarchists, if I can read and enjoy Kropotkin as a Marxist-Leninist, what the fuck prevents you from reading and enjoying Parenti
Someone who sees through cold-war anticommunist propaganda and defends the anti-imperialist and massively progressive Actually Existing Socialist states (USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam...) instead of belonging to the "compatible left" that doesn't actually have a history of successful struggle against capitalism and imperialism.
People will be called tankies for defending the socialist figures and projects which get vilified in western discourse precisely because of their success against capitalism and fascism (Fidel, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh), whereas anticommunists will only praise historical figures and projects who failed (Allende, Rojavas, Spanish anarchists) because their metric is not actual improvements to quality of life of people but ideological purity.
Tankie started out as a pejorative word against communists with the attempt to associate them with militarism. Notice how other leftists don't call liberals "dronies" for supporting Obama despite the drone attacks on civilians in the middle east, don't call fascists or Nazis "campies" despite the extensive usage of concentration camps, and don't call capitalists "colonies" despite the widespread colonialism, such violent terms are only reserved to socialists. I consider myself a communist and I reclaim the label "tankie", since it was actually Soviet tanks (T-34s mainly) which destroyed Nazism and saved hundreds of millions of lives in Europe from extermination.
Sakha just wanted to give it's oil and minerals to Moscow. Yakutia just wanted desperately to learn Russian
You could ask those questions to the populations themselves. Where did they have better rights: under tsarism, under Bolshevism or under capitalism. If you care, you could listen to Sardana Nikolaeva being interviewed in the Actually Existing Socialism about the topic and commenting on the massive benefits and respect to native populations under socialism compared to now, let alone tsarism.
Obviously Russia was robbing them blind, and holding them back.
Robbing them blind of what? Holding them back how? By not allowing them to participate in the western capitalist plunder of the rest of the world? Now Estonia gets to have a service society that will collapse with the rest of the EU since it dismantled whatever industry it built during the soviet period!
Same as most other republics and Warsaw pact nations. GDP explosions after ditching the red parasite
Absolute fucking bullshit, the three countries to have benefitted after the dissolution of the Eastern Block have been Estonia, Poland and Czech Republic. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgyzstan, Moldova... Essentially every nation has had lower growth rates in capitalism than in socialism, and certainly a fucking horrifying demographic crisis caused by unemployment, drugs, violence, lack of healthcare, suicide... The dissolution of the eastern block has literally been the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century in Europe after WW2.
Ukraine had borders just fine when Soviets invaded them
Ukraine didn't fucking had borders before 1917, are you fucking kidding me? Great job focusing on Belarus, a country of 10mn inhabitants, because it's the only possible example you can grasp yourself to lmao, the rest of countries literally show the opposite trend.
As for "holodomor", great job comparing literal genocide at the hands of French to an unwanted famine consequence of rapid collectivization (which was necessary to industrialize fast, as proven 10 years later by Nazism, of which Ukraine was saved thanks to Socialism).
Honestly, you're such a bad fucking faith actor.
Again, you literally don't understand fascism then. Systems are analyzed by their outcomes.
Being better at violence doesn't make you more left
Being better at violence against fascism and imperialism definitely makes you more left, though. Actual praxis and results are to me the definition of successful leftism, not the realm of ideas. The lack of proper violence against such regimes leads to a destruction of the left wing.
Your argument boils down to "might makes right" and could be expanded to classify social democracy as "more left"
Social democracy also regularly turns to fascism when it needs to, it's definitely lacking violence against fascism, amazing that you'd say this in 2026. I fucking wish our mighty social democracies in Europe fought against Israeli fascism and USA fascism, unfortunately they're buddies!
(after all, it's left of the global status quo and its citizens are the happiest on average)
By excluding imperialism from the measure of average happiness, you're committing a sampling error. That would be like polling monarchs of medieval Europe to ask whether monarchy is the system making people happier. Ask the people in India and Sri Lanka and Peru extracting the resources of the goods social democracies consume and sewing the clothes we wear how happy they are with social democracy.
Sure, it frequently decays into fascism, but so did the USSR
So, we have one example of a Marxist-Leninist state decaying to fascism (after saving Europe from Nazism) and several examples of countries not doing this (China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba). How about we engage in honest criticism of the flaws of the Soviet model that led to its dissolution in order to prevent that from happening again?
If you seriously think a fascist society could have universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, lowest levels of economic inequality in the history of the region, guaranteed housing and jobs, lack of exploitation of other countries, respect for minorities (ethnic and otherwise) and for people with disabilities... you simply don't understand fascism.
Enough to suppress tankies*. They won't eliminate opinions from the capitalism-compatible left. Go ahead and praise European Socdems and war budgets in Europe, you won't get banned for doing that
Anarchist Catalonia, modern Rojava, more than a few pre-Columbian North American societies, the Paris Commune of 1793
Pre-columbian societies aside (you can't turn history around), all the rest ended up in fascism/monarchism/failed state in a matter of how many years/months?
And you can care about results without having historical results
Yes, you can do that if your goal is moral purity or intellectual amusement and not the material improvement of the lives of actual people. All other system changes you've proposed are just changes of ruling class and production system due to the slow motor of history and development, except for the socialist revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba. We literally have the recipe that works, why do you reject it?
Having a concrete, achievable plan to get results is good, but you also want to make sure that the results you're striving for are just
Agreed. That's why I praise the immense increases in welfare and quality of life in actually existing socialist countries, both historical and ongoing.
Socialism and fascism are mutually exclusive, though. Mussolini, Franco and Hitler were extremely quick to eliminate socialists because they were aware of this.
Don't base your analysis of reality off jokes
Why would they only explore legal options? Trump is a fascist, a felon and a pedophile
The democrats could have literally shot Trump during Biden's mandate, the fact that Trump was allowed to exist as a political candidate is just further evidence that the "checks and balances" only exist to stop progressives and they'll do nothing about fascism
Ok so what do you describe yourself as ideologically?
Also, thinking of it: you give Mussolini the right to describe the ideology he created. Why don't you give Lenin the same right and call the USSR a socialist state?
Cool, useless definition then?
Not even kidding, if you apply that definition, every modern state is fascist
the so-called private sector depends entirely on the state to enforce private property claims. the state issues corporate charters. the state "regulates" these corporations to ensure they benefit the state.
So, all modern states are fascist?
Cool, engage with Mussolini then lmfao
Inspired on my knowledge of the Spanish fascist dictatorship as well as Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds and Umberto Eco's 14 characteristics of fascism.
But simply tell me, how do you explain the prevalent role of the private sector in all fascist regimes?
Tanking the definition of fascism from a fascist because it's convenient to your "all states are actually the same" ideology is also bad faith, especially when you explicitly ignore the differences in outcomes between different modes of governance.
To you it's a theoretical/philosophical debate about what's more pure, to me it's a matter of whether people get to have food, housing, healthcare, rights and education (which you explicitly ignored)