• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      95
      ·
      11 months ago

      Liberals are upset that Russia continues to exist as a single unified state, and not a balkanized conglomeration that can be more easily manipulated and controlled.

        • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          51
          ·
          11 months ago

          Should be worth recalling that the original intent of NATO was to prevent German industrial machines from combining with Russian extractive industry. Now its sort of a moot point, since China has replaced Germany and the US as the industrial workhorse of the world. Perhaps if the Sino-Soviet split had ended sooner (or had never occurred in the first place), the USSR would still be standing and the Americans would have been the ones to collapse in the late 80s.

  • Elon_Musk [none/use name]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    83
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I’m no history buff, but… “The USA had no meddling with the end of the Soviet Union” doesn’t sound right.

    edit: I did a quick check on one of the people commenting there and they post heavily in the Airforce sub and are a history major…

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      53
      ·
      11 months ago

      Yeah that’s not true at all and also the US absolutely put the final nail in the coffin with the 1996 Russian election. That’s the one where the Russian Communist Party was about to get voted back into power, so it’s commonly understood that western powers meddled in that election to get Boris Yeltsin as president. The US also got Russia to rewrite its constitution to expand the position of president, and then the US handpicked Putin

      • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        30
        ·
        11 months ago

        US absolutely put the final nail in the coffin with the 1996 Russian election.

        The KPRF had a majority in Congress and, if Gennady Zyuganov were elected, Russia would align itself 100% with China. I doubt he would restore the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact, but I could see Russia financially supporting left-wing parties in Europe and being a little less reactionary.

        • Greenleaf [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          11 months ago

          Yes! IIRC electorally, it looked like the Russians were just going to elect socialists and communists (with some socdems sprinkled in there). In order to prevent that, the US supported Yeltsin consolidating power within the executive and making the legislature relatively powerless.

          It’s a good thing were no unintended consequences later on associated with having a powerful president…

    • kot [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      60
      ·
      11 months ago

      Liberals subscribe to “authoritarian” theory, where nazism and communism are the same because they are “authoritarian”. They don’t understand class analysis because they don’t believe classes exist, and they deny that bourgeois “democracy” is authoritarian.

    • PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      46
      ·
      11 months ago

      But they both have leaders that sometimes tell other people what to do, and their militaries look scary because they wear different outfits than our military so that makes them the same nerd

  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    55
    ·
    11 months ago

    “Most communists agree that the soviet union was absolutely horrible btw. The group you’re thinking of calls themselves tankies. They fully believe Stalin(and Mao) was actually a good person and all of the bad didn’t happen, and was propaganda from the US. I guess bc they think if America is bad, that must mean the USSR was good! In reality they both fucking suck.”

    Where do these people meet communists? The Vaush livestream chat?

    • GnastyGnuts [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      38
      ·
      11 months ago

      They’re doing a “leftist” version of the “international community” line that neolibs have, where by “most communists” they just mean the wretched little scrotums in NATO countries that self-identify as leftists.

      Something these breadtube cranks seemingly can’t grasp is that the majority of actual leftists (whatever flavor, but it seems to me like most are either ML or Maoist) live outside of North America and Europe. Or maybe they just dismiss them all as tankies brainwashed by the seductive allure of dark and evil authoritarianism, lookin’ all hot and domineering and shit, whispering all seductively from the shadows “use the big spoon, baybee”.

    • Sephitard9001 [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      11 months ago

      They’re just making it up from half remember Vaush rants they’ve seen. First, the group they’re thinking of do not call themselves tankies, other people do. Second, none of those tankies would say “all of the bad didn’t happen”. The way they’re typing also convinces me it’s a lib adult pretending to be a kid.

  • Maaj [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    54
    ·
    11 months ago

    …I don’t think most of the people posting in that reddit thread are Gen Z. That shit was kinda disturbing.

  • dmonzel@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    11 months ago

    One person in there has completed an exhaustive poll of three people under the age of 35 to determine that “USSR bad”. What a tool.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      55
      ·
      11 months ago

      Poland has become a bastion of European reactionary ideology for a bunch of reasons. Most of it happened deliberately by a coalition of capitalists who ran a color revolution and a fake, pro-west labor union (called solidarity of all things. And one of those capitalists who wrecked everything was George Soros of all people. Despite his reputation among right wing conspiracy idiots, he’s been throwing money at anti-communist causes his whole life. It’s a genuine tragedy.

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        33
        ·
        11 months ago

        MFW 4chan is likely more likely to be Soros funded than we are.

        But that’s actually good information and might explain why porky-happy has become capitalist-woke in the public eye. If they’re going to lose some of the culture wars, it’s best that they do so on their own terms, or at least become the leaders of the resistance against themselves.

        • 420stalin69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          11 months ago

          I think it’s because the crushing inequalities of capitalism are so obvious that it’s comfortable to adopt the mantle of non-threatening equalities.

          Not that corporate America ever actually fights for those equalities of course. Just that it’s convenient to embrace certain equalities to obscure other inequalities.

          Like, idealized gay rights and idealized racial justice don’t actually threaten capitalism so long as the answer to gay rights and racial justice is restricted to beaming some good vibes so they beam those good vibes at will, and trans rights well depending on brand identity that can be ok as well but importantly only once it’s ok for the bottom line that’s when it becomes a useful shield to be used against the crushing reality of wealth inequality.

      • shroobinator@lemmygrad.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Do you have any reading on Solidarity? I’m reading The Shock Doctrine right now and Naomi Klein speaks positively of them and negatively of the USSR in their interactions, even though Poland was obviously not in the USSR. (Which was kinda sussy to me)

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          11 months ago

          There’s really not a lot of literature on this in English from a leftist perspective. But I’ve read “From Solidarity to Sellout: The Restoration of Capitalism in Poland” by Tadeusz Kowalik and it’s pretty good. Kowalik argues that Solidarity did initially begin as a worker controlled union that was acting in protest to Polish austerity measures at first, but was co-opted by foreign interests and capital by the 90s.

          The funny part about reading that book is I remember thinking that what happened to Poland is what liberals accuse socialists of doing. As in, the accusation that a communist party acts as a new capitalist class and everything stays the same but gets worse. A lot of former party officials and Solidarity leaders just swapped places to become the new elite capitalist class in the new Poland.

        • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          11 months ago

          solidarnosc was originally based on legit issues of crisis and pretty minuscule (especially compared to every period after 1989) drop in the life quality, but was also strongly rooted in all manners of reactionary sentiment - petty bourgeosise sentiment, catholic anticommunism, growing liberalism in inteligentsia circles, very successful western propaganda and outright CIA funding (it wasn’t even first colour coup attempt in PRL, there were at least 2 others before).

          Problem is, that looking at what happened later, you can’t defend even the legit part of worker participation. It was never really run by workers, it was just a colour coup, and seamlessly turned into extremely antiworker organisation which actively participating in the deindustrialisation of Poland, breaking up the workers power (they are still doing that! 34 years later!) and in consequence the horrors of transformation and the 34 year descent into the deepest anus of neoliberalism and anticommunism. Workers and worker leaders were discarded like used condoms at the first sign of getting concessions from the government - which, notably, happened after perestroika started to run havoc in entire European socialist bloc.

          And about the so called “solidarność left” that emerged from it? First, they were sidelined all the time, second, they were at best socialdemocratic anticommunists, and third, when they tried something their leader died in very mysterius car accident.

    • SoyViking [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      43
      ·
      11 months ago

      Pro-western propaganda has relativised the horrors of fascism and made Poles of all people believe that living in a socialist country was just as bad as living under the Nazis’ genocidal occupation regime.

      This Nazi apologia was grafted unto a substrate of butthurt Polish nationalism that existed well before the Soviet Union and is rooted in Poland’s history of first being a major kingdom, then being carved up by neighbouring empires.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      11 months ago

      The estimated rate of child trafficking multiplied ~fourfold and there were excess deaths comparable to the Great Famine despite the much more highly-developed infrastructure

    • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      I’m old enough to remember the 90s. It’s really gross but (cw: human trafficking?)

      spoiler

      I remember the endless jokes about “mail order Russian brides”. It was just this weird phenomenon that no one bothered to examine, just laugh about. Only now do I realize that conditions in the former USSR were so awful that you had so many women that were so desperate they would do anything - including marry some American loser sight unseen - just to get out of there. Really gross stuff.

      Also, take a look at any measure of economic output in the eastern bloc from the 80s through the present. In the 90s there’s this massive dip that only gets to the ~1990 level in recent years. Like in Russia, you could take where the economy was in 1990 and assume very mediocre growth, and they would be better off now had the USSR stuck around just by the numbers (and that’s before considering how unequal the pie is split now vs how things were under communism). Obviously some countries like Czechia and the Baltics fare better, but they’ve been plugged into the imperial core for nearly 30 years now.

      • Rod_Blagojevic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        I saw all of this on the evening news, everyday for years, when I was a kid. It always leaves me baffled when the topic of the Soviet collapse comes up and boomers (who saw the same news) act like this was a victory for the people of the USSR.

        What the fuck are they talking about? I think they’ve so thoroughly dehumanized these people that all of the terrible shit they saw on the news just didn’t seem like a big deal. I guess if all of the images of post collapse deprivation were going to be impactful they wouldn’t have been broadcast.

        • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          I think Americans were so deeply propagandized about the USSR that they believed any real suffering the people endured under capitalism was a balloon party compared to what life was like under communism in their imaginations. Absolutely insane shit like “if they find you own a Bible you are immediately executed”.

          And for the more economically “sophisticated”, I remember hearing a lot of “well the Soviet economy was so inefficient that some pain must come along with restructuring, but they will be better off in the end”.

      • S_204
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        On the Russian bride thing… I used to work in arctic Canada. I was once in a very remote community in Nunavut and talking to the guy who ran the grocery store. He had a photo of him with a gorgeous bride in his office and given he was a seriously ugly mother fucker, I inquired about the photo - how long have you two been married, where was it (didn’t look like the big capital City of Rankin inlet LoL) type of stuff. Conversation opened up allowing me to ask how they met…his answer floored me. He flat out said ‘brought her over from Russia’ as the response for how they met.

        This guy lived in essentially Canadian Siberia and was able to procure a wife that would unquestionably get a lot of porn hub views if she had a page. It’s been years and I still find it so curious. Wonder if they’re together or she’s got her landed immigrant status and bailed on him.

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    The dissolution of the Soviet Union and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. In fact, I’d wager that the Sino-Soviet split was just as bad too.

    I’m sure in the alternate universe where neither happened, a lot of would be white supremacists are feeling real humble now instead.