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"it's almost like the soviet union is just like a fascist oligarchy masquerading with a paint of red" - guest in this ep, ~26 min
it's pretty bad folks
disappointed Alice didn't hit the Soviet Button over that lmao
I just skipped around the episode and got to Alice saying Stalin was a terrible communist, and that tankies told her to read Stalin's theory which she totally did, and came to the conclusion that he wasn't a "theoretical communist", so uh... cool.
I mean Lenin did want to remove Stalin from his General Secretary position
Was that a settled question? Just taking a glance at the wikipedia page:
Historian Stephen Kotkin argued that the evidence for Lenin's authorship of the Testament is weak and suggested that the Testament could have been created by Krupskaya.[5] However, the Testament has been accepted as genuine by most other mainstream historians ... Kotkin's argument was specifically rejected by Richard Pipes
On Kotkin's page:
Kotkin pointed out that the purported dictations were not logged in the customary manner by Lenin's secretariat at the time they were supposedly given; that they were typed, with no shorthand or stenographic originals in the archives, and that Lenin did not initial them;[21][22] that by the alleged dates of the dictations, Lenin had lost much of his power of speech following a series of small strokes on December 15-16, 1922, raising questions about his ability to dictate anything as detailed and intelligible as the Testament[23][24] and that the dictation given in December 1922 is suspiciously responsive to debates that took place at the 12th Party Congress in April 1923.[25]"
Kotkin's isn't Grover Furr, he seems to otherwise be critical of communism, so I dunno.
Besides, Lenin wasn't King of Russia, he doesn't get to just decide who's allowed to succeed him or not. I'm not too familiar with how the Soviet government was organized internally, but I assume organs like the Central Committee and the Politburo would have played a role in questions like this.
I mean Kotkin not being Furr is a plus in his favor. I'd say Lenin certainly considered it and probably would have done so if not for his stroke, but that it doesn't mean much since the citation is iffy and Lenin certainly didn't remove Stalin from power before he died. He 100% could have wanted to, but well if wishes were horses
Yeah, that's why I mentioned it, if it was something by Furr it'd be more easily dismissed, but Kotkin seems to be a respected historian in western circles.
The TF crew's use of Soviet aesthetics is exactly that. It's safe because it's dead and gone. They've always been terrible on AES.
One of the Kill James Bond episodes had them proclaiming their support for Cuba (and maybe Venezuela, I don't remember), but maybe that's just the Abby-Alice-Devon combo in particular being cool. It's why I was surprised by Alice dropping this, I'd have expected it more from Liam or the guest.
Cuba and Venezuela are non-threatening.
It's like the leftists who proclaim support for Vietnam and denounce China despite Vietnam being arguably more revisionist.
Yeah, fair enough. This also reminds me of Zizek, he was on a Chapo episode a while back shilling his new book, and simultaneously praising Luis Arce and shitting on China and Venezuela, two countries which Bolivia under MAS is pretty friendly with.
Same thing with loudly supporting East Germany; yeah it sounds edgy and cool bc of all the narratives about it being a Stasi police state, but it doesn't hit the same as, say, upholding the DPRK or China which are being similarly propagandized, but in the modern day
Not listened to KJB, but good on Devon.
Was mostly thinking of TF where any mention of China automatically gets 'state capitalism' slotted in afterwards and was explicitly called reactionary in a recent episode.
TF is still a. very funny and b. very good at analysing (for someone finance illiterate like me) the nature of the economy in the west and why and how it produces the morbidities we are seeing.
They're just still western leftists.
I see. I’ve only listened to wtyp and they’ve said some stuff that seemed supportive of mao so I kinda hoped they were better on it. Oh well.
Trying to work out where on the line I am, namely "The issue with North Korea is that it has succumbed to Right Deviationism and it should return to the true position of Comrade Stalin"
Adam Something, another youtuber that became popular for such amazing takes as "elon musk is dumb" and "public transport and housing are good" is revealed to be an anti-communist? shocked
Adam Something
ah I recently had one of his videos come up on youtube, the dubai one. Relatively decent, shame he's posting cringe lol
his videos are fun and fine, at the end it's youtube entertainment and you shouldn't care too much what their hot take is like on the warsaw pact or w/e, they're allowed to be wrong
:yikes-1::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-2::yikes-3:
"The Enlightenment never reached Russia and the Soviet Union bore the imprint of the Tsar."
- Adam Something
Who the fuck is this anticommunist and why is he on the socialist engineering podcast?
He said Elon Bad and is therefore a socialist according to useless American leftists.
He has a channel that is basically „cars bad, trains good“ over and over and it’s fun to watch
He has a video about how he „escaped the alt-right“ so maybe he‘ll come around eventually
Whomst amongst us wasn’t a lib at some point
I fucking knew he was an anticommunist from watching his videos he majorly gave out those vibes
He also in his Hyperloop video talks about how he thinks modern day Russia is going to do terrorist attacks in Western Europe. Sort of wild stuff.
Yeah I thought that was weird, especially when like his whole point was that you could explosively destroy a hyperloop with nothing more then a high powered rife... And another point he had was that it would require massive land grabs of central California farms and ranches... which definitely seems more related then some Asiatic boogyman
Wait, didn't we already dunk on this a week ago... https://hexbear.net/post/135040
Oh, of course, it was a different guy with opinions on the Slavic brain pan
"The problem with the Chinese is they never had a secular enlightenment".
- One of Philosophy Tube's caricatures on her Confucius video
Maybe Alice could suggest it to Adam.
i literally just went over that and came to complain
fuuuuuuck this guy
Well that was probably one of the worst WTYP episodes I’ve heard 😬 It was funny when Liam kept trying to say anti Soviet shit and Alice kept pressing the Soviet anthem button. Less funny when Liam and especially the guest said full on anti-communist right wing propaganda and didn’t get Soviet anthemed.
Well I just heard Adam unironically say that the Soviets were fascist and none of the regular hosts offer any pushback to the comment, so I'm just not gonna watch this episode.
bit disappointing episode, there's so much structurally wrong with the actual building that i was looking forward to this episode, but all we got was "it's big and ugly", the last bit with the looney tunes end of the caucescu couple was funny tho so who's to say if the episode is good or bad
Yeah, they have dumb commenters telling them to drop the politics and 'just stick to sports', but I would like them to at least briefly cover some engineering and not just make an entire episode of "the communists air all their problems with communism, attempting to show they have a balanced view and a sense of humor" alternating with "guest throws out straight anti-communist/they-hate-freedom talking points".
The planning and demolition were more of the disaster than the building itself.
Demolition? I'm a bit confused, the building is standing to this day. I'm surely misunderstanding something here.
Haven't you heard? Adam Something studied Chinese political economy in university!
Having done the same, that's some high-octane ideology as taught in the US, at any rate. Somehow, I doubt it is that different in Central Europe.
Ya'll really malding over communists being critical of other communists in this one huh
"soviet union is a fascist oligarchy" isn't really a communist critique, that's peak liberal "the nazis and soviets were equally bad" shit
the USSR definitely was not fascist, but it did evolve into in oligarchy, especially into the 70s and 80s leading to its collapse.
When the only way to have power/accumulate material wealth is through climbing the party’s social ladder and staying on the good side of the people in power it seems to me like a natural development that power consolidates in the few that have control/sway over the party and say who gets what
The late Soviet Union wasn't doing too good, but that quote was in reference to the Hungarian Uprising (1956, Khruschev), and the Prague Spring (1968, early Brezhnev years), which would be before that period. If we go the route of shitting on :corn-man-khrush: for revisionism and saying his reforms were responsible for this eventual (d)evolution, then we'd have to say Stalin was cool, which the hosts would also disagree with, which means only Lenin was cool, which brings us to the classic "socialists are only cool when they die early on and don't get to do too much" take
idk you can hold the position that neither are great, and one is more badder than the other.
for example enacting/overseeing a genocide is not very pog
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Chechens_and_Ingush
Sure, Stalin did some fucked up stuff. But the issue is treating this as the individual moral failings of a specific leader, and not taking into account the conditions of the time. If Lenin didn't have medical problems and had lived, if Trotsky had taken over instead of Stalin, how differently would they have done things really? I remember some stuff about Trotsky admitting he'd have done a lot of the same stuff Stalin did (although I can't give you a citation, so it might have been bullshit).
Reading up on that, the deportation seems to have happened during WW2, due to concerns about potential insurgency and collaboration with the Germans. That doesn't excuse it, and it seems like this resistance never materialised (not that it would necessarily excuse it if it had), but the Soviets were fighting against a foe that openly sought their extermination, paranoia about internal rebellions is to be expected.
Going back to the pod, they do a bit of shitting on socialist realism, and praising how cool early Soviet art was and how homosexuality was decriminalized, until Stalin came along and ruined everything. That's a classic example of this kind of blame - it's big bad socially-conservative Stalin who personally fucked things up, there weren't any other forces at play in the Soviet Union at all.
I was a trot for a while and I definitely remember him making that point about Stalin. In Trotskys argument anyone who would have become leader would have become "a Stalin" because of material reasons. Though the amount of Trots who still think this rather than silly "If my dude was leader it would be all good" type shit is arguable.
Well said. I just say fuck the population transfers full-stop; and then ask "now what?" it usually stops people in their tracks who need people to crumble or deny when faced with bad shit. Deny them that binary when it comes to crimes and atrocities.
But yeah the shit about acting like the USSR had achieved social progression or something and then Stalin reversed it is so cheap and anti-materialist. Stalin pandered to the church for support during WW2 and with so many movers and shakers dead from the purges. The conservative institutions were deemed acceptable allies for the time. Doesn't justify it, doesn't mean all his or soviet societies more conservative tendencies are because of that at all, but it is part of the process that led to a roll back on a lot of socially progressive stuff
I was with them when they were talking about how top-down and Moscow-driven the Eastern European "revolutions" were. Not so much when they seemed to claim that every color revolution the Soviets ever put down was actually a totally natural political liberalization being lead by communists or that the Russian brain pan is incompatible with Enlightenment ideals.
speaks to how good the "no factionalism" rule on this website is, and how good the mods are at enforcing it
