I keep seeing all the other leftist spaces filled with Stalin apologists and those who think he did nothing wrong (even to the point of denying the Holodomer) so I hope this isn’t a space filled with those types of people
Someone naming themselves "Imbased" and promoting the holodomor nazi propaganda is exceptionally suspicious. Every anarchist I personally know in real life and not just solely on the internet recognises this was a natural famine distorted and given a name that sounds like the holocaust in order to play down the events of the holocaust.
Promoting holodomor is in itself and act of minimising the holocaust and rehabilitating the nazis.
Whether you're legit or not, this is an all-the-left space and attempting to promote sectarianism is not cool and counter-revolutionary.
There are a lot of hardline mls here, but they know cough that we gain NOTHING from shitty pointless petty squabbles about shit that doesn't matter to growing the left and achieving our common goals
Right comrades?
remember why we're here.
if not letting this poster repeat Nazi propaganda literally designed by Goebbels to justify Operation Barbarossa is squabbling then so be it
Here's a thought, maybe articulate your side and explain things calmly instead
that works the first couple times and then you need to use copypastas because it's exhausting
You absolutely do not need to because it doesn't matter, at all, at aaaaalllll
Go yell at chuds about it instead
Helping your comrades and your local community does, as does practicing and improving your own ability to agitate educate and organize
Go yell at chuds
what if it's more useful to educate anarchists since they actually seem to care about people but are steeped in anticommunist propaganda
Tbh I doubt you or much other people on this space organize, most online leftist spaces I’ve seen are just doing it for the memes and don’t actually care about helping oppressed people, I doubt this space is going to be much different tbh.
Actually from your post history you seem to care more about moderating this internet community and plugging your podcast then you do actually doing anything irl, so I don’t think even you can lecture the Stalinists on this issue, you’re complaining about squabbles but starting them and saying it doesn’t matter but responding as if it does, at least be more honest with your engaging than this or I won’t take you seriously
pay special attention to that "poisoned well" link. Anne Applebaum wrote the entry in Encyclopedia Brittanica for tHe HoLoDoMor, a term invented later on for the famine by fascists
pointless
I'm glad these things don't matter to you but there are lives at stake.
As a class, does bickering about something that will not affect how we do action and grow the left help us become more powerful or raise class consciousness?
I’m not asking about what’s true but what’s effective
I'm not letting the majority cis white male pressence on this site tell me what and what isn't effective.
Fighting visciously over definitions is pointless, the suffering of people’s at the hands of imperialists is not, but the two are in no way linked.
You owning someone online who was talking shit about DPRK does not in any way help the people of DPRK nor does it help the working class at large.
That’s why it’s pointless.
Educate people, if you can’t teach our comrades and build solidarity with Them who the fuck exactly are you thinking you’ll sway with this?
It's not up to you to tell me what's important and what's not.
There was a natural famine happening at the time and people were starting to starve in central Asia, particularly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Part of the problem was that for generations, a new class of peasants had begun to form who were able to buy and own land, gradually displacing the former feudal system where most of the land was used by peasants for distant landowners who weren't really interested in the region.
This new landlord class (kulaks) basically perpetuated the same feudal system, with other peasants continuing to work for them on the land they acquired. Naturally this exacerbated wealth inequality in the region and gave the landlord class relative privilege and control over the peasant workers.
When the famine hit and people started to starve, the landlord class was relatively insulated from the problem, even being able to hoard food and resources. As the workers became more desperate, they were willing to work for less food, which allowed the landlords to hoard more, which made the workers position more desperate, causing them to be willing to work for less, and so forth in a snowball effect.
All of this was pretty normal for the region. It was a problem, with the relatively wealthy hoarding wealth and the workers becoming increasingly desperate to work for them in the middle of a natural disaster, but it was a problem central Asia had been dealing with for hundreds of years, if not longer. The new landlordism wasn't particularly parasitic when compared to feudalism, but it was parasitic nonetheless.
When people started starving to death the government stepped in and started organizing collective farms, redistributing land and hoarded resources to the peasants so that they could work for and feed themselves in a more efficient, equitable model for everyone.
The landowning class however, like capital controlling classes throughout history, weren't satisfied to work for themselves and allow the peasants to work for themselves alongside them.
Their response was to start sabotaging the collective farms, and to begin raiding and destroying depots where food was being distributed to starving people, as well as burning fields, grain silos, and slaughtering livestock, including breeding stock and egg and dairy producing stock.
Even anti-Communist propagandists like Robert Conquest (whose propaganda was cited extensively during the Cold War before most of it was debunked and he was forced to recant his claims over and over again) claim that the landowning class destroyed about 96 million head of cattle, and possibly twice as much tonnage of grain and other foodstock, completely wrecking the food production capacity of the region in the middle of the famine and exacerbating the problem beyond anything seen before.
The death toll is vastly overblown by those who want to make it out to be a genocide perpetrated the the Soviet government against her own people. The aforementioned Robert Conquest initially claimed a completely unrealistic 20-30 million deaths, before revising his claim by several million just years after his now infamous propaganda piece was published, and again as low as 13-15 million deaths decades later when his claims were immediately and categorically disproven by the opening of the Soviet archives.
As genuine investigative research continues to debunk claim after claim made by propagandists like him, the numbers continue to dwindle and the legacy of the self-proclaimed "Cold Warriors" is continuously eroded. To this day, the Ukrainian government claims ~4 million cases of starvation in the region during that period, completely disregarding blatantly false "research" conducted from a time before evidence was even available.
Eventually before his death, Conquest was forced to admit that there was no way the Soviets could have caused the famine, although he stubbornly refused to admit that they did anything to prevent it or that the land-owning capitalist class destroying 2-4 million tons of food for every starving person and wrecking the productive capacity of the region might have been responsible, despite this being the inevitable conclusion of his lifelong body of work, ironically vindicating the Soviets through desperate attempts to portray them as villains.
Decades of propaganda and its consequences are hard to undo however, and these indisputable, verifiable facts of recorded history are never welcomed in certain circles. The western public consciousness truly is a poisoned well, and facts alone aren't enough to undo that damage.
credit to /u/spookyjohnathan
This place is based on left unity and anti-sectarianism. Although there are probably more MLs than anarchists, the main goal here is to make every comrade feel safe, valid and accepted. Struggle sessions can and do occur, but you are by no means obligated to participate in them. Also for god sake why is everyone defending Stalin or talking about history in the replies of a post that is just plainly not asking that.
this is a safe leftist space, just don't bring up china and you're good. anarchist btw
Not conducting proper struggle on ideology present leaves the reality that there is reactionary ideology present. This makes it an inherently unsafe space for the most marginalized in the community.
There is a c/anarchism. I've never checked it out, but I doubt you'll find much Stalin stuff there
:anarchy: There's some good conversations happening occasionally, but you will absolutely be dogpiled by rabid tankies if you criticize their 'anti-imperialist' darlings like the DPRK n shit... Kinda exhausting but I've got a bit of hope left.
