Communists - That time when 100 million people died wasn't REAL communism, comrade

[Guardian G.I.]

I'm gonna revive this thread with a follow-up to my previous post from 2017 about Russian communists/Stalinists.

As I already mentioned, these people are largely ex-Soviet old farts with a terminal case of nostalgia. In many ways, they are complete opposites of American university student "communists", and it should be described in greater detail.
I should note that I'm not talking about people in the so-called Communist Party of the Russian Federation - these are more like left-wing populists with occasional Stalin portraits thrown in. Most hardcore Russian commies (Stalinists - there are pretty much one and the same) are outside the CPRF.

Spoiler: Long

1. Russian Stalinists are rabid imperialists and nationalists, especially towards countries pissed off at Russia for Soviet misdeeds and crimes like Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine. Russian communists throw away any pretence of proletarian internationalism if there's a need to hate those fascist Russophobic bastards. They believe the territories of Eastern Europe, Ukraine in particular, are rightfully Russian territory and deny any self-determination of people like Ukrainians. They look down on their national cultures and think promoting them is basically anti-Russian.
Lenin's policy regarding non-Russian ethnicities was completely opposite of this, by the way - he was the one who advocated for the creation of ethnic Soviet republics in non-Russian territories of the former Empire and the promotion of their respective languages and cultures, unlike Stalin, who originally wanted Soviet Russia to annex and assimilate them all.
2. Russian Stalinists, as I've mentioned in my old post, are very militarist. They are really itching for a fight and despise international diplomacy, which they regard as appeasement of enemy aggressors. Can you imagine leftist students in America calling for aggressive war against someone? I can't.
Furthermore, Russian Stalinists ignore the fact that war is a messy affair. For them, it's simply kicking ass, without any fine details like "combat losses", "attrition" and "guerilla warfare". Those fucking Ukrainians dared to go against Russia in 2014? Russia should have invaded them all! It's not like it would actually involve fighting the whole Ukrainian army, policing the occupied territory, dealing with partisans and all that bullshit, right?
Historically, said line of thinking got Russia into several highly embarrassing defeats, like the catastrophic New Year's Eve assault on Grozny during the First Chechen War in 1995.
3. Russian Stalinists are very xenophobic. They are absolute collectivists - they furiously hate those who differ from them in any notable way: Jews, foreigners, young people who dress differently from them, people who live better than them etc. I won't even go into detail on their homophobia - "queer communists" from America won't survive a meeting with Russian communists.
Slightly related fun fact - in 1978 the Central Committee of the CPSU mistook an organization of LGBT activists from West Berlin for "youth communist activists" and invited them to Moscow. You can imagine the reaction of their KGB and Communist Party attendants on their arrival. To save their careers, the attendants had to hide the West Berliners' true identity from their higher-ups.
4. Russian Stalinists are often bloodthirsty. They love the idea of killing the people they hate. They dream of being an all-mighty NKVD officer exterminating the "enemies of the people". They think every problem like crime, corruption or terrorism can be solved with mass executions and collective punishment. However, since collective punishment always affects innocents, it doesn't make the affected group of people truly obey - it only pisses them off even more. Stalinists obviously ignore that fact.
Furthermore, shooting people is an emergency measure. It can be excused in situations like WW2, where the Soviets were in a very desperate situation and were fighting for survival, but in peacetime? A political system that require purges just to function properly isn't really viable.
Russian Stalinists still think such a system can be successful in modern conditions and think another Socialist Revolution isn't something unthinkable today (yeah). In the recent years, they've become quite anti-Putin and dream of replacing the Russian Federation with another Soviet Union, which will obviously be like the mythical Stalinist Soviet paradise they defend.
5. Russian Stalinists are obsessed with conspiracy theories. One of their favourites, for example, is denial of American Moon landings - the Soviets were #1 in space, so there's no way those dumb Americans could into space. Like all conspiratards, they deny or simply ignore all evidence to the contrary.
Since quite a few of these guys hate Jews, they downplay the scale of the Holocaust or deny it outright. If they don't deny it, they claim the Jews deserved it.
6. Russian Stalinists, as well as all Sovietophilic old farts in general, are slaves to their nostalgia. Nostalgia is a very inaccurate thing, because we remember not exact situations from the past, but abstract good feelings related to them. These people do not question them and put these good feelings in centre of their political views.
7. None of well-known Stalinists on the Russian Internet were even born when Stalin was alive. How unexpected, isn't it?
Here are the birth years of some Stalinist apologetics my dad likes (he's a hardline communist): Dmitry "Goblin" Puchkov - 1961, Klim Zhukov - 1977, Boris Yulin - 1967, Yelena Prudnikova - 1958. Everyone were born in Khruschev or Brezhnev era.

Tl;dr: American lefties are pacifist pansies compared to these people.

 

[Slap47]

Go ahead with communism, not because I think it'd work, but I'm a sadistic enough of an SOB that I want to watch the world burn. I'm serious, if millennials are this exceptional and believe it'll work, go ahead and destroy the world that you'll be running one day.

They're all people that glorify corporations and mindlessly hate authority based solely on racial grounds.

If anything, you'll end up with some kind of bizarro fascism that forces people to be mixed race.

 

[ICametoLurk]

If anything, you'll end up with some kind of bizarro fascism that forces people to be mixed race.

Yeah well daily fucking reminder that the USSR fought a mini war against China and was this close to nuking the fuck out of it. Soviet propaganda considered the Chinese to be fascists and had papers published that likened the Chinese model to nazi Germany. That is to say Commies hate heretics more than capitalists and liberals.

Fascism and Russian Bolshevism are not exactly the same but they are closer to each other than any other ideology and are the most similar to each other. Fascism grew out of far left radicals in Italy and when Mussolini came to power the Soviet press jerked him off and saw him as a kindred spirit. Mussolini said Russian Bolsheviks are his closest ideological allies and Italy was the first country to formally recognize the USSR (oh and had Trotsky stay with them a bit to piss off France showing how progressive they were) . I the 1920's Karl Radek made a speech to the Comintern about how the Nazis were super cool dudes who needed to be supported and that they were right to want to fuck up all the Jew Bankers and that the treaty of Versailles was a bad thing. Bukharin praised the Nazi party for modeling itself after the Bolshevik party. Basically Fascists are a heretical Bolshevik offshoot and has more in common with Bolsheviks than with Conservativea or reactionaries Fascists being very anti conservative initially.

All those little shitty "Communist" states in the third world were basically Fascist ethnocentric racist, nationalist and antimodernist and fully retarded in the case of Cambodia Juche is Furherpinzip 2.0 Ho Chi Minh was more a nationalist than a communist or a Nationalist who used communists and anti imperialism to gain independance and followed the prevailing intellectual currents of his time. Modern China ( as opposed to Maoist China which the post Stalinist USSR also considered red fascist) is fascist according to actual corporatist structure of its economy and political system it's entirely revisionist doesnt give a fuck about internationalism or revolution or any such shit (gave money to the philippines government and not the Maoist rebels) and is more similar to fascism than liberalism conservatism reactionaries or Bolsheviks

 

[millais]

Anglos can never do it right. They actually lost the Bush War on the ground, not only in the "hearts and minds" of the rural population. The protected villages concept that MACV tried to implement in Vietnam did not work in Rhodesia either, and they never could secure the Zambezi River border. Until the very end, there was a constant trickle of terrorists and weapons from the Zambian staging bases. Fireforce is all well and good, but they never had the numbers nor the coverage to hold the border.

They actually had a fighting chance at reaching a Western-amenable political solution by appointing the Bishop Muzorewa as a black puppet leader shortly after UDI, but Ian Smith waited too long and squandered any credibility and legitimacy that the Bishop might have had among the indigenous population.

 

[ICametoLurk]

 

[Dolphin Lundgren]

"Joke's on you, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm but he actually liked Communism"- every stupid Communist on Tumblr when you bring up Animal Farm as criticism for communism.

Real comments I've seen on the topic. It's embarrassing.

 

[Dr. Tremolo]

I still repeat that 1984 was not satire. It showed how communist reality looked like pretty accurately, the biggest differences that they had superior surveillance technology and the system was global, thus the world stagnated in the 1940s because there was no West to take inventions from (the movie adaptation was brilliant in portraying that visually by using a WW2-era look).

 

[Teri-Teri]

Thinking about it... did the Germans purposely send Lenin back to Russia in order to cause mayhem and destruction?

 

[MadDamon]

To be honest I kind of wanna see what if these bunch of kids really go through with communism in a small valley outside of any human reach. Then show it on the tv and we can vote who's gonna break down first, and when will the raping and cannibalism gonna happen.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

"Joke's on you, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm but he actually liked Communism"- every stupid Communist on Tumblr when you bring up Animal Farm as criticism for communism.

Real comments I've seen on the topic. It's embarrassing.

Orwell was an avowed Democratic Socialist. In the sense he supported the idea of a welfare state. Neither Animal Farm or 1984 are explicitly about Communism, but they are about the specific brand of totalitarian statism which is an inevitable byproduct of going full Red. Whether this makes Orwell naive or not is up for debate, but in his travels and experience he saw firsthand the terrible income inequality in the British Empire at large so I can at least understand his reasoning for some of his politics.

 

[Dolphin Lundgren]

Orwell was an avowed Democratic Socialist. In the sense he supported the idea of a welfare state. Neither Animal Farm or 1984 are explicitly about Communism, but they are about the specific brand of totalitarian statism which is an inevitable byproduct of going full Red. Whether this makes Orwell naive or not is up for debate, but in his travels and experience he saw firsthand the terrible income inequality in the British Empire at large so I can at least understand his reasoning for some of his politics.

That makes sense. Every time you bring up Animal Farm to a Communist sympathizer they claim it's not a message against Communism because he was a Democratic Socialist. I could be a bit off because I haven't read it in years, but I always thought it was was related to the Reds.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

but I always thought it was was related to the Reds.

It is. Orwell hated Stalin and the Soviet Union. His thing with democratic socialism was the "democratic" part, where he believed the people should use the democratic system to regulate the economy in their own interest (i.e, keeping monopolies from running everything). He hated dictatorship, which is what most communist regimes were.

Basically, he disliked any form of total control of the masses, regardless if it came from corporations or from the government.

 

[Dolphin Lundgren]

It is. Orwell hated Stalin and the Soviet Union. His thing with democratic socialism was the "democratic" part, where he believed the people should use the democratic system to regulate the economy in their own interest (i.e, keeping monopolies from running everything). He hated dictatorship, which is what most communist regimes were.

Basically, he disliked any form of total control of the masses, regardless if it came from corporations or from the government.

Orwell should rise from the dead and slap some sense into these people who romanticize Communism. In a way people who praise it the way they do could be the same as insanity. Since the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

Orwell should rise from the dead and slap some sense into these people who romanticize Communism. In a way people who praise it the way they do could be the same as insanity. Since the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

If Orwell were alive today I think he'd have much greater concerns than a couple tankies whining on twitter. He'd probably be really disgusted with how corporations are in bed with governments to control everything.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

I still repeat that 1984 was not satire. It showed how communist reality looked like pretty accurately, the biggest differences that they had superior surveillance technology and the system was global, thus the world stagnated in the 1940s because there was no West to take inventions from (the movie adaptation was brilliant in portraying that visually by using a WW2-era look).

"Joke's on you, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm but he actually liked Communism"- every stupid Communist on Tumblr when you bring up Animal Farm as criticism for communism.

Real comments I've seen on the topic. It's embarrassing.

The Road To Wigan Pier is basically where Orwell started to red pill himself on Socialism.

 

[Teri-Teri]

that was the plan, yes. the kaiser and his generals hoped that his return would further radicalize the anti-tsarist elements in russia and incite an uprising, which is exactly what happened. thanks to lenins revolution, they got a peace treaty (brest-litovsk) with russia that was extremely favorable to the german empire.
of course they didn't plan to lose the war in the west, which resulted in brest litovsk being overturned and all the german gains reversed, so in the end it was all for nothing

It ended up backfiring them really hard and changed the history forever.

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

It ended up backfiring them really hard and changed the history forever.

Germans always have their plans backfiring on them and fucked them over in the end.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

Three prominent examples would be Russia (the Romanovs), China (the entire fucking world) and Cuba. While Cuba was about "businessmen," they were mostly the American Mafia. In all three cases, they did actually get rid of the detested aristocrats and foreign invaders (and a lot of other people too) and ended up with something worse, although arguably China was the most successful of the three in the long run (largely by abandoning Communism).

Communism has always been a vehicle for a dispossessed middle classes to overthrow the elite in power and replace them in that role. Whenever you boil it down, the proletariat and other true ideologues are always used as stooges or useful idiots in the revolution in order to overthrow the elites in power, and then when the dust settles those positions or ones akin to them are then occupied by loyal party members and cronies.

The same happened though to a lesser extent with the Nationalist Socialist movement in Germany, people often forget that Hitler and the inner party circle used the brownshirts and the Freikorp in order to gain political power, and then once the party had reached a level of power and political legitimacy the most radical socialist sections of the SA were either imprisoned, killed, disbanded and disenfranchised or exiled outright. Ernst Rohm was the main person who was killed because of his power over the SA, but even afterwards Hitler had the Gestapo and the SD hunting for rogue members of the SA who had escaped Czechoslovakia and other countries and attempted to assassinate him, due to his betrayal of the true revolutionary socialist ideals of the movement by aligning himself with the remnants of the old Prussian Aristocracy and the wealthy industrialist in Germany.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Communism wouldn't be so bad, since the faggot commies on the Internet would get shot right after the bankers and CEOs do (assuming they even survive the revolution) and the guys who replace them wouldn't be much worse than them. And unlike in democracy where you can vote for some corrupt politician or someone who has no chance of winning, in communism you can vote for a corrupt politician whose voice means nothing, like elections in the USSR, China, and North Korea. Doesn't sound bad to me. And since most communist societies are just reflections of the pre-communist society there (Soviet Union is just the Russian Empire with different thugs in charge, China is just Imperial China with different thugs in charge, Cuba is a generic banana republic but with different thugs in charge, etc.), I can conclude communism in the West wouldn't so bad, and I wouldn't mind swapping out Mr. Noseberg and his Wall Street crew for Commisar Cletus and Commisar Jamal.

 

[Slap47]

"Joke's on you, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm but he actually liked Communism"- every stupid Communist on Tumblr when you bring up Animal Farm as criticism for communism.

Real comments I've seen on the topic. It's embarrassing.

Orwell believed that the workers should own the means of production and he supported the collectivization that happened in Catalonia in 1936. He was an anarchist and was fine with "revolutionary councils" using militias to reduce "enemies of the revolution" to slaves and commit what anarchists call "spontaneous mass murder".

The Stalinists actually wanted to maintain the Spanish Republic and convert it into a communist government They had to constantly purge anarchists to stem the tide of revolution and slowly subverted their influence with the techniques perfected by Stalin in the 1920s.

Orwell was a commie but he was aware of the dangers of the state and its ability to shape societies. Orwell is interesting precisely because he was a commie. He was the jaded true believer.