• spacesweedkid27 @lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    2 things:

    1. The victors write history

    2. After Lenin the USSR was not really communist anymore but more really a totalitarian state that didn’t believe in the values of communism. Just like China.

    Everything would probably have been better if Lenin didn’t die so fast and then Trotsky would have ruled.

    • Kerred@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago
      1. The victors write history

      Flashback to stories of Rus conquests written by the Rus that said the people asked to be conquered

      • idiomaddict@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        To be clear, the alternative here is Stalin. There are like only five people who would be worse choices

    • Depress_Mode@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “History is written by the victors” is a tired cliché that doesn’t always hold up super well if you spend a moment to consider it.

      Who conquered Rome? Surely, it was a people remembered for their great military prowess, right? Nope, still commonly remembered as barbarians thousands of year later.

      The Mongols had one of the largest empires in history, and yet in much of the lands they conquered, they’re remembered as being monstrously ugly brutes, which is where words like “mongoloid” and “mongrel” come from.

    • Not_mikey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Stalin believed in the values of communism, he just also believed everyone was out to get him. Economically he followed Lenin’s plan of nationalization and collectivization even more zealously then Lenin would have. Lenin wasn’t as paranoid as Stalin and probably wouldn’t have killed and gulaged millions of “suspicious” people but he was still very much a dictator and was willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals, same with Trotsky.

      With any of them the super structure of the state and how it’s organized may vary a bit, but it would have all been built off a nationalized and collectivized base. Whether you want to call that base communism is up to you, but you can’t say one is and one isn’t.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Lenin did put plenty of people in Gulags. Communism = fascism.

        • Not_mikey@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          He did but not nearly as much as Stalin.

          Equating soviet style communism and fascism completely ignores the base. Yes the structure of the government is similar but in fascism the underlying economic system is still capitalistic and market based, while in Soviet style communism it is nationalized and planned. It also ignores ideology, fascism is about asserting national and racial supremacy to the detriment of inferior races, communism is about seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie and giving control to the proletariat. Even if the government structure is similar, the policies those governments enact are wildly different. Thats like saying reddit and lemmy are the same because they both work on up voted content percolating up.

          • Aux@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, right, fascism is so capitalistic! This is why Mussolini forced labour unions and nationalised 75% of the Italian economy. What a capitalist!

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Just like China.

      And Cuba. And North Korea.

      One of those funny coincidences that keeps happening.

      To be perfectly clear: I’m not strongly opposed to what any “14-year-old white girl” means when she promotes communism. I understand leftist goals as distinct from what these countries actually did. But the fact these countries had those goals, and then did this shit instead, demands a better explanation than ‘that doesn’t count.’ Especially when leftist philosophy has a lot to say about liberals and capitalism inevitably producing terrible outcomes.

      • MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        All of those countries made great strides in accomplishing great things for their people actually, and you’ve just been lied to about them and their history repeatedly from the time of your birth, to the point that you don’t actually know jack shit about any of them but you think you do? You’re the 14 year old clueless girl in this scenario, thinking that Cuba is some evil dictatorship because you were told that lmfao.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Just like China.

          Which is also a dictatorship.

          Turns out literacy or whatever doesn’t cancel out being a dictatorship.

          • MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            It’s a dictatorship of the proletariat in the same sense that America is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In other words, it’s significantly more democratic than America, in that the people have far more control over their government, which is why it achieves better outcomes. The government is more responsive to the people than in countries like America, which is totally and utterly irresponsive and therefore not democratic at all. Cuba is also significantly more democratic than the U.S. and other liberal “democracies”.

            • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              It’s a dictatorship of the Castro family, in a way America’s representative democracy isn’t one at all.

              It was literally modeled on the Soviet Union, well after all y’all insist the Soviet Union stopped doing anything communism-ish and was a straight-up dictatorship. Again - quoting the initial mook I replied to - “just like China.”

              Boring goddamn tankies think it’s a zero-sum game where one thing being bad means the other must be flawless.

              • MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                From the CIA’s assessment

                Even In Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organi- zation of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and I t seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain. However, 1t does not appear that any of the present leaders will rise to the stature of Lenin and Stalin,so that it w i l lbe safer to assume that developments in Moscow will be along the lines of what is called collective leadership, unless Western policies force the Soviets to stream- line their power organization.

                https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf

              • MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                The USSR also wasn’t a dictatorship in the way that you imagine and even the CIA admitted that it wasn’t, that was always just a lie they made up.

                China is not a dictatorship in the way that you imagine either, and is, as I already explained more democratic than the liberal “democracies”.

                Kind of wacky to claim that Cuba is a dictatorship of the “Castro family” when their elected president who is term limited is not a part of the Castro family, but again you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about and are just parroting lies that you were spoon fed since you were a baby.

                • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  Fidel is dead and Raul is 90 and you’re playing gulag apologia.

                  We will never speak again. Waste someone else’s time.

                  • MrBusinessMan@lemm.ee
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                    1 year ago

                    Oh no somebody almost pierced the ridiculous cocoon of propaganda that you’ve carefully swaddled yourself in! Better stick your fingers in your ears and go “la la la” until they go away! That’s how you know that your opinions were arrived at with logic and serious research, and not just absorbing and accepting the constant brainwashing of your bourgeois society.

                    Fun fact American prisons are worse than gulags and have more prisoners except for maybe at the height of WW2 you dumb fucking oaf.

                    For people reading this who aren’t , like you, utterly determined to believe every lie you’ve ever been told about Americas “enemies”, here’s a little video explaining how elections and democracy works in Cuba. Recently through democratic processes they passed the most progressive family law code in the world btw while LGBT rights are under attack in the US regime.

                    https://youtu.be/2aMsi-A56ds?si=wx4T5gYyr8iM5I6Y

    • TheLordHumungus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Trotsky was as much a tyrant and potentially even more blood would have been spilled. Trotsky was a strong proponent of war communism which was brutal towards the Russian civilians.

    • tpihkal@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Until the next tyrant came along. It’s a system that is always bound to fail.

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It is a system that never gets transitioned to fully. It doesn’t fail because it has basically never existed. If I invade your house, kill your father, and make you call me the milk man, that doesn’t make me a milk man.