Tankies are right wing. Watch them make excuses for Russia and say NATO should pull out of Ukraine. Watch them say a Trump presidency is better than the alternative.
I used to consider myself quite a socialist but tankies really straightened me out by taking side of Russia and Soviet Union of which I’ve experienced the horrors off first hand myself. There is socialism without cancers like Kremlin and CCP but the whole thing has been ruined and hijacked by these idiots just like alt-right ruined conservatives.
I’ve been reading “the dispossessed” by Ursula k le guin, and I’m becoming increasingly interested in anarchy. Where should I look for more information on it?
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was pretty inspiring to me
(I’ll also add that Anna Funder’s Wifedom make Orwell seem a bit fucked in his personal life. I haven’t read it yet, just had convos with people who did. Seems maybe Homage to Catalonia could have been a better book if he was less of a mysogynist)
I’m traveling around south east asia working remotely and staying in small expat communities for a few years at a time (long term visas are still hard). There are a lot of small communities all over the place here in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Laos, Cambodia. I’d hesitate to call them anarchist per se because it’s still kinda overseen by local authorities when it comes to crime and visas etc. but it’s pretty close otherwise!
That being said I don’t know how anarchism could be sustainable at scale without a major cultural reset, so I’m not sold on the idea it would work for giant homogenous places like China or US.
I think I’m anarchist in terms of personality, but I’m not quite there politically. Like you, I’m not quite sure how to get there from here. If we do things like mutual aid and support unions, I don’t think we’ll go wrong, and that could end up leading to anarchism at some point in the future.
Where I’m anarchist in personality is that I fundamentally don’t understand why you would want to be an authoritarian. When I first read 1984 in high school, and there’s the bit from O’Brien about how the system is there for power as an end to itself, I didn’t understand why anybody would want that. I can kinda see power as a way of gaining a comfortable life for yourself–usually at the expense of others–but not as its own end. I still don’t understand it, but have come to accept that there are people like that.
Some of those people are draped in thin blue line flags, and some of those people are draped in a hammer and sickle.
Yup, though it seems like we missed our chance at this long time ago. Can you imagine what would have to happen for US or China to split up in this day an age? That’s world-war territory and tbh I’d rather have what we have now.
Stalin criminalised homosexuality with a punishment of five years prison labour. Go ahead and repeat that fact on Hexbear, and see how many “radical leftists” are willing to make excuses for a homophobe
Isn’t this just an argument that left-right is a bad categorisation?
Tankies are authoritarian socialists. The american right are authoritarian and socially conservative individualists. Anarchists are libertarian socialists. American libertarians are also individualists.
There are lots of other dimensions too, but the left-right designation has been kind of useless at least since communists started fucking over anarchists in various parts of Eurasia in the first half of last century…
No, it’s an argument that not everybody who claims to be left is actually progressive. Not everybody who promotes ownership of means of production by the people actually cares about human rights.
Criminalising homosexuality was a mistake, and a consequence of a process of rolling back on some of the cultural progress achieved during the 1920s in the USSR due to fear of a situation like the pushback against early collectivisation efforts after the end of the New Economic Policy era. Nobody on hexbear will excuse this. What they will tell you is the massive boost in literacy during Stalin’s rule, especially among women; the guarantee of employment by the state, the immense equalisation of wages, the total elimination of private property through the collectivisation of agriculture and industry, the guarantee of free healthcare and education de jura and de facto, the world-unprecedented industrial growth and improvement of the economic situation of citizens of the Soviet Union, the massive push towards unionisation of workers and participation in policy through party membership, and the most intense struggle against fascism that costed 27 million Soviet lives.
Now, you named one right wing policy, I named a list of communist policy, please explain me how the overall is “right wing”
I wonder if that literacy rate ratio change was the result of the mass exodus and death as poor people starved in the late 20s through 30s as a direct result of the 1920s USSR economic changes which failed to provide means of centralized agriculture management. I don’t actually know for certain, but maybe.
One thing I will give them is that women were allowed to work as far back as in the early revolution.
Right Wing is usually defined as conservative and regressive, which definitely applies to CCP and Russia erosion of democracy and rolling back of human rights, and also definitely aligns with the Maga low taxation, less government services, deconstruction of NATO, etc. Tankies supported Trump, btw, his face was being promoted all over Hexbear.
No, because that’s revisionist propaganda. The USSR had proposed mutual-defense agreements with Poland, France and England, which all of them rejected. The USSR offered to enter a war against nazism as a response to the Munich agreements and the annexation of Czechoslovakia by nazis and Poland, but France and England (and obviously Poland) didn’t want that. The Soviets went as far as to offer sending ONE MILLION soldiers to France, together with artillery, aviation and tanks, on exchange for a mutual-defense agreement with France and England. As was later discovered through released embassy wires, the French and English ambassadors were instructed not to make a peace agreement with the Soviets under any condition, but to pretend to be interested and to prolong the negotiations for as long as possible… presumably expecting Nazis to invade the Soviet Union, given that communists were their self-declared enemy and they held racial motivations to eliminate “the Slavic Untermenschen”. It was convenient, letting the Nazis deal with the communists (since England and France had failed to eliminate Bolshevism during their invasion of Russia in the Russian Civil War), two birds with one stone.
The Soviet Union, which had only begun industrializing in 1928 with its first 5-year plan, compared to the century-long history of industrialization of Germany, simply didn’t have the material means to single-handedly fight nazism in 1939. This is further proven by the fact that, after the invasion of the USSR by the Nazis, 27 million Soviet lives were lost in the struggle against fascism. They DESPERATELY needed every single year they could buy, and they DESPERATELY needed to avoid facing the Nazis in a one-on-one struggle. Without the lend-lease program, and without the western front, who’s to say if the Soviet Union would have simply succumbed to Nazi Germany, and the horrifying additional extent of genocide that Nazis would have been able to perpetrate.
In case you don’t believe me personally, I’ll leave you another comment below this one with quotes of western politicians and diplomats of the period, showing the revisionism that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact has been subjected to.
“ It is clear that Stalin had two courses open to him. He could seek a general coalition against Hitler, or he could come to an understanding with Hitler at the expense of the Western democracies. Stalin’s policy was guided by a profound conviction of the ultimate hostility of Nazi Germany, as well as by the hope that if the capitalist Powers became locked in mortal conflict, the Soviet Union might remain aloof, gaining strength while they tore one another to pieces. Certainly the principle of self-preservation lay at the heart of Moscow’s calculations ”
Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Chapter 20, The Soviet Enigma pub 1948.
“ In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ”
(Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“ It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ”
Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
“ One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ”
Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
“ We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ”
Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)
“ *It must be said that the Soviet Government, having little confidence in swift military aid from the Western Powers, chose to protect its borders, however odious such a pact might seem. One perceives in their choice the determination to secure time—time they evidently believed we were not prepared to give them.”
Édouard Daladier (French Prime Minister), Address to the French Chamber of Deputies, Late August 1939
“ It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ”
Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)
“ British officials, for all their outrage, concede that Stalin, with no firm pledge of Allied assistance, and regarding Poland as a foregone victim, decided that if the Red Army must eventually face Hitler, it should not be without first gaining some strategic space—and time ”
Joseph P. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to the UK, 1938–1940),Private Correspondence, September 1939
Hopefully, you won’t accuse such sources, i.e. western diplomats and politicians who actually experienced WW2, of being tankies
“ It is clear that Stalin had two courses open to him. He could seek a general coalition against Hitler, or he could come to an understanding with Hitler at the expense of the Western democracies. Stalin’s policy was guided by a profound conviction of the ultimate hostility of Nazi Germany, as well as by the hope that if the capitalist Powers became locked in mortal conflict, the Soviet Union might remain aloof, gaining strength while they tore one another to pieces. Certainly the principle of self-preservation lay at the heart of Moscow’s calculations ”
Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Chapter 20, The Soviet Enigma pub 1948.
“ In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ”
(Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“ It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ”
Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
“ One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ”
Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
“ We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ”
Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)
“ *It must be said that the Soviet Government, having little confidence in swift military aid from the Western Powers, chose to protect its borders, however odious such a pact might seem. One perceives in their choice the determination to secure time—time they evidently believed we were not prepared to give them.”
Édouard Daladier (French Prime Minister), Address to the French Chamber of Deputies, Late August 1939
“ It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ”
Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)
“ British officials, for all their outrage, concede that Stalin, with no firm pledge of Allied assistance, and regarding Poland as a foregone victim, decided that if the Red Army must eventually face Hitler, it should not be without first gaining some strategic space—and time ”
Joseph P. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to the UK, 1938–1940),Private Correspondence, September 1939
Hopefully, you won’t accuse such sources, i.e. western diplomats and politicians who actually experienced WW2, of being tankies
Stalin is a conflicting historical figure, who is neither a monster nor a savior, and so the way you describe him would differ depending on the angle of the conversation.
If the talking point is the rights of the LGBT+ people (or, really, people’s rights overall sometimes), there’s no excuse for him there, and I’m pretty sure Hexbear is not quite the place for a homophobic rhetoric.
But they may point out in other terms that under Stalin’s rule the economy got insanely boosted, the WW2 was won, and many megaprojects used to this day were constructed.
You can’t say the same things about Churchill, there was no massive equalisation of wages in England during his rule, nor a planned economy guaranteeing a job to anyone who wanted a job, nor a collectivisation of agriculture and of the means of production, nor a state-backing of unions, nor an immense push towards literacy and women’s rights and education…
Regarding corruption, I made a little writeup a while ago about why corruption is systematically overestimated in the USSR which, if you’re arguing from good faith, you won’t have a problem checking out. There was active fight against corruption in the Soviet Union (as you can see by the sign on the picture), the so-called “chistka”, i.e. purges of party members, were part of said campaigns, and citizens could legally organise committees to review the functioning and accounting of local public services and institutions.
Regarding “lowering wages”, you’re simply wrong. That’s just from the 60s, but material wealth of people rose at unparalleled speed in the USSR, faster than any country before that. And when the USSR economy stagnated in the 70s, real median wages kept rising at around 3.5% yearly
Stalin is a conflicting historical figure, who is neither a monster nor a savior
His one and only redeeming deed was that he finally, eventually, only after being stabbed in the back by his former ally Hitler, fought against him by throwing millions of russians at them and thanks to US support managed barely to win.
In every other way he was a total monster, directly responsible for an amazing amount of human suffering that still lingers today in modern day Russia. If Communism had something good in it, Stalin personally ruined it for pretty much everyone for a long time.
Already establishing? What does that even mean, lol
Stalin also didn’t promote national capital - aside from the fact the word “capital” does not reflect quite the same thing in the context of socialism, the policy of “socialism in a separate country” is nothing more than a reaction to the failure of world revolution. He continued international partnerships with socialist countries and participated in The Communist International.
Soviet Union did not genocide Jews and was not tied to Holocaust. The alliance with Nazis only held through the first stage of WWII as long as it was seen more as a contained European issue. It is true, however, that Soviet Union participated in occupation of Poland.
It means the USSR was already industrializing – and Stalin made sure that process would be (1) tightly controlled by the state & (2) would benefit primarily the imperial core of Russia.
If you think capital does not bear relevance to the development of the USSR, you have not understood Leninism.
The USSR killed Jews en masse, mostly as elements of a ‘cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’ (clear antisemitic dogwhistle) or simply as Jews. He also directed his cabinet to collaborate with the Nazis in their holocaust, firing Litvinov as FM and installing Molotov with clear instructions to comply with the Nazis. Heck, even Khrushchev admitted that Stalin died on the cusp of engineering a holocaust of his own. I will refrain on commenting how he treated other minorities.
no they have right wing ideals. they just use left wing terminology to push a right wing worldview.
edit: suddenly it seems tankie is about equality and support for the little guy, and more comically anti-imperialist. hmm I wonder where the word “tankie” comes from…
The ideals: collectivisation of the means of production and of agricultural land, guaranteed employment, guaranteed housing, free universal healthcare and education to the highest level, guaranteed public pensions, equalization of wages between jobs, push towards unionisation, defence of LGTBQ and women’s rights, defence of indigenous movements and racial minorities, anti-racism, anti-imperialism…
All of that was soo bad under Stalin it’d be hilarious if it wasnt for the millions of easily prevented deaths and all the easily ore entable suffering.
As in “we are anti imperialists, unless we’re the ones doing the oppression”. Honestly, ime, a common position amongst global south immigrants getting their first high-ish salary in Europe. All about wealth redistribution until you realise you can fly back home and live like a king off those inequalities.
Tankies are right wing. Watch them make excuses for Russia and say NATO should pull out of Ukraine. Watch them say a Trump presidency is better than the alternative.
I feel like Russia is further right than the US.
Socially for sure but economically it might be debatable. They have universal healthcare after all.
Thanks now the stereoscope thing makes sense. I was freaking out thinking people were putting politics in medicine
I used to consider myself quite a socialist but tankies really straightened me out by taking side of Russia and Soviet Union of which I’ve experienced the horrors off first hand myself. There is socialism without cancers like Kremlin and CCP but the whole thing has been ruined and hijacked by these idiots just like alt-right ruined conservatives.
You could try anarchism instead
Problem is Anarchism is hijacked by people who want to destroy specific governments.
I’ve been reading “the dispossessed” by Ursula k le guin, and I’m becoming increasingly interested in anarchy. Where should I look for more information on it?
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was pretty inspiring to me
(I’ll also add that Anna Funder’s Wifedom make Orwell seem a bit fucked in his personal life. I haven’t read it yet, just had convos with people who did. Seems maybe Homage to Catalonia could have been a better book if he was less of a mysogynist)
Yeah, I’m quite fond of it!
I’m traveling around south east asia working remotely and staying in small expat communities for a few years at a time (long term visas are still hard). There are a lot of small communities all over the place here in Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Laos, Cambodia. I’d hesitate to call them anarchist per se because it’s still kinda overseen by local authorities when it comes to crime and visas etc. but it’s pretty close otherwise!
That being said I don’t know how anarchism could be sustainable at scale without a major cultural reset, so I’m not sold on the idea it would work for giant homogenous places like China or US.
I think I’m anarchist in terms of personality, but I’m not quite there politically. Like you, I’m not quite sure how to get there from here. If we do things like mutual aid and support unions, I don’t think we’ll go wrong, and that could end up leading to anarchism at some point in the future.
Where I’m anarchist in personality is that I fundamentally don’t understand why you would want to be an authoritarian. When I first read 1984 in high school, and there’s the bit from O’Brien about how the system is there for power as an end to itself, I didn’t understand why anybody would want that. I can kinda see power as a way of gaining a comfortable life for yourself–usually at the expense of others–but not as its own end. I still don’t understand it, but have come to accept that there are people like that.
Some of those people are draped in thin blue line flags, and some of those people are draped in a hammer and sickle.
Maybe China and the US shouldn’t be giant and homogeneous.
Yup, though it seems like we missed our chance at this long time ago. Can you imagine what would have to happen for US or China to split up in this day an age? That’s world-war territory and tbh I’d rather have what we have now.
Drag hopes California secedes
Tankies are factually left-wing. Their actions, however, sometimes play into the deck of right-wingers when they try to fuck around with the system.
Stalin criminalised homosexuality with a punishment of five years prison labour. Go ahead and repeat that fact on Hexbear, and see how many “radical leftists” are willing to make excuses for a homophobe
Isn’t this just an argument that left-right is a bad categorisation?
Tankies are authoritarian socialists. The american right are authoritarian and socially conservative individualists. Anarchists are libertarian socialists. American libertarians are also individualists.
There are lots of other dimensions too, but the left-right designation has been kind of useless at least since communists started fucking over anarchists in various parts of Eurasia in the first half of last century…
No, it’s an argument that not everybody who claims to be left is actually progressive. Not everybody who promotes ownership of means of production by the people actually cares about human rights.
Tankies aren’t left.
People have said that plenty on .ml. The only response I saw was people saying that was a bad move from Stalin and he should not have done that.
Criminalising homosexuality was a mistake, and a consequence of a process of rolling back on some of the cultural progress achieved during the 1920s in the USSR due to fear of a situation like the pushback against early collectivisation efforts after the end of the New Economic Policy era. Nobody on hexbear will excuse this. What they will tell you is the massive boost in literacy during Stalin’s rule, especially among women; the guarantee of employment by the state, the immense equalisation of wages, the total elimination of private property through the collectivisation of agriculture and industry, the guarantee of free healthcare and education de jura and de facto, the world-unprecedented industrial growth and improvement of the economic situation of citizens of the Soviet Union, the massive push towards unionisation of workers and participation in policy through party membership, and the most intense struggle against fascism that costed 27 million Soviet lives.
Now, you named one right wing policy, I named a list of communist policy, please explain me how the overall is “right wing”
I wonder if that literacy rate ratio change was the result of the mass exodus and death as poor people starved in the late 20s through 30s as a direct result of the 1920s USSR economic changes which failed to provide means of centralized agriculture management. I don’t actually know for certain, but maybe.
One thing I will give them is that women were allowed to work as far back as in the early revolution.
Right Wing is usually defined as conservative and regressive, which definitely applies to CCP and Russia erosion of democracy and rolling back of human rights, and also definitely aligns with the Maga low taxation, less government services, deconstruction of NATO, etc. Tankies supported Trump, btw, his face was being promoted all over Hexbear.
You mean the war with Hitler? That the URSS started with Hitler?
Edit:
No, because that’s revisionist propaganda. The USSR had proposed mutual-defense agreements with Poland, France and England, which all of them rejected. The USSR offered to enter a war against nazism as a response to the Munich agreements and the annexation of Czechoslovakia by nazis and Poland, but France and England (and obviously Poland) didn’t want that. The Soviets went as far as to offer sending ONE MILLION soldiers to France, together with artillery, aviation and tanks, on exchange for a mutual-defense agreement with France and England. As was later discovered through released embassy wires, the French and English ambassadors were instructed not to make a peace agreement with the Soviets under any condition, but to pretend to be interested and to prolong the negotiations for as long as possible… presumably expecting Nazis to invade the Soviet Union, given that communists were their self-declared enemy and they held racial motivations to eliminate “the Slavic Untermenschen”. It was convenient, letting the Nazis deal with the communists (since England and France had failed to eliminate Bolshevism during their invasion of Russia in the Russian Civil War), two birds with one stone.
The Soviet Union, which had only begun industrializing in 1928 with its first 5-year plan, compared to the century-long history of industrialization of Germany, simply didn’t have the material means to single-handedly fight nazism in 1939. This is further proven by the fact that, after the invasion of the USSR by the Nazis, 27 million Soviet lives were lost in the struggle against fascism. They DESPERATELY needed every single year they could buy, and they DESPERATELY needed to avoid facing the Nazis in a one-on-one struggle. Without the lend-lease program, and without the western front, who’s to say if the Soviet Union would have simply succumbed to Nazi Germany, and the horrifying additional extent of genocide that Nazis would have been able to perpetrate.
In case you don’t believe me personally, I’ll leave you another comment below this one with quotes of western politicians and diplomats of the period, showing the revisionism that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact has been subjected to.
“ It is clear that Stalin had two courses open to him. He could seek a general coalition against Hitler, or he could come to an understanding with Hitler at the expense of the Western democracies. Stalin’s policy was guided by a profound conviction of the ultimate hostility of Nazi Germany, as well as by the hope that if the capitalist Powers became locked in mortal conflict, the Soviet Union might remain aloof, gaining strength while they tore one another to pieces. Certainly the principle of self-preservation lay at the heart of Moscow’s calculations ” Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Chapter 20, The Soviet Enigma pub 1948.
“ In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“ It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
“ One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
“ We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)
“ *It must be said that the Soviet Government, having little confidence in swift military aid from the Western Powers, chose to protect its borders, however odious such a pact might seem. One perceives in their choice the determination to secure time—time they evidently believed we were not prepared to give them.” Édouard Daladier (French Prime Minister), Address to the French Chamber of Deputies, Late August 1939
“ It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)
“ British officials, for all their outrage, concede that Stalin, with no firm pledge of Allied assistance, and regarding Poland as a foregone victim, decided that if the Red Army must eventually face Hitler, it should not be without first gaining some strategic space—and time ” Joseph P. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to the UK, 1938–1940),Private Correspondence, September 1939
Hopefully, you won’t accuse such sources, i.e. western diplomats and politicians who actually experienced WW2, of being tankies
“ It is clear that Stalin had two courses open to him. He could seek a general coalition against Hitler, or he could come to an understanding with Hitler at the expense of the Western democracies. Stalin’s policy was guided by a profound conviction of the ultimate hostility of Nazi Germany, as well as by the hope that if the capitalist Powers became locked in mortal conflict, the Soviet Union might remain aloof, gaining strength while they tore one another to pieces. Certainly the principle of self-preservation lay at the heart of Moscow’s calculations ” Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Chapter 20, The Soviet Enigma pub 1948.
“ In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“ It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
“ One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
“ We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)
“ *It must be said that the Soviet Government, having little confidence in swift military aid from the Western Powers, chose to protect its borders, however odious such a pact might seem. One perceives in their choice the determination to secure time—time they evidently believed we were not prepared to give them.” Édouard Daladier (French Prime Minister), Address to the French Chamber of Deputies, Late August 1939
“ It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)
“ British officials, for all their outrage, concede that Stalin, with no firm pledge of Allied assistance, and regarding Poland as a foregone victim, decided that if the Red Army must eventually face Hitler, it should not be without first gaining some strategic space—and time ” Joseph P. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to the UK, 1938–1940),Private Correspondence, September 1939
Hopefully, you won’t accuse such sources, i.e. western diplomats and politicians who actually experienced WW2, of being tankies
Comment has “no bad vibes” vibes
Literally the first phrase is a condemnation of the criminalisation of homosexuality
Stalin is a conflicting historical figure, who is neither a monster nor a savior, and so the way you describe him would differ depending on the angle of the conversation.
If the talking point is the rights of the LGBT+ people (or, really, people’s rights overall sometimes), there’s no excuse for him there, and I’m pretty sure Hexbear is not quite the place for a homophobic rhetoric.
But they may point out in other terms that under Stalin’s rule the economy got insanely boosted, the WW2 was won, and many megaprojects used to this day were constructed.
No he’s a monster. You don’t stop being a monster because you also did good alongside the evil.
Being lucky oil prices went up (same for Putin) and people thinking it’s your magic leadership lol.
The oil prices boomed around WW2, while the highest wave of economic growth in the Soviet Union was in the 30’s.
It is Khrushchev and following leaders that benefitted from oil
You could say the same things about Churchill who certainly wasn’t left wing.
You can’t say the same things about Churchill, there was no massive equalisation of wages in England during his rule, nor a planned economy guaranteeing a job to anyone who wanted a job, nor a collectivisation of agriculture and of the means of production, nor a state-backing of unions, nor an immense push towards literacy and women’s rights and education…
Equalisation of wages in the USSR: Lets lower all wages to the lowest of them all and introduce corruption as an obligation to survive!
Handy tool against dissidents too, corruption.
Regarding corruption, I made a little writeup a while ago about why corruption is systematically overestimated in the USSR which, if you’re arguing from good faith, you won’t have a problem checking out. There was active fight against corruption in the Soviet Union (as you can see by the sign on the picture), the so-called “chistka”, i.e. purges of party members, were part of said campaigns, and citizens could legally organise committees to review the functioning and accounting of local public services and institutions.
Regarding “lowering wages”, you’re simply wrong. That’s just from the 60s, but material wealth of people rose at unparalleled speed in the USSR, faster than any country before that. And when the USSR economy stagnated in the 70s, real median wages kept rising at around 3.5% yearly
Ha ha ha corruption was baked in the system, ask anyone who actually lived there and don’t get your information from facebook or lemmy ml.
I wonder why you push so hard for this revisionism, it was just a brutal dictatorship, wages went up under Hitler too lol.
And those two things you mentioned have nothing to do with his political alignment
His one and only redeeming deed was that he finally, eventually, only after being stabbed in the back by his former ally Hitler, fought against him by throwing millions of russians at them and thanks to US support managed barely to win.
In every other way he was a total monster, directly responsible for an amazing amount of human suffering that still lingers today in modern day Russia. If Communism had something good in it, Stalin personally ruined it for pretty much everyone for a long time.
Replace Stalin with Hitler and you understand how insane you sound. (Oh and ditch the part about winning ww2)
Hitler took an already established economy and rearranged it towards national capital while killing Jews en masse and initiating a World War.
Not quite comparable.
Stalin took an already establishing economy and rearranged it towards national capital while killing Jews en masse and allied with Nazi’s.
Already establishing? What does that even mean, lol
Stalin also didn’t promote national capital - aside from the fact the word “capital” does not reflect quite the same thing in the context of socialism, the policy of “socialism in a separate country” is nothing more than a reaction to the failure of world revolution. He continued international partnerships with socialist countries and participated in The Communist International.
Soviet Union did not genocide Jews and was not tied to Holocaust. The alliance with Nazis only held through the first stage of WWII as long as it was seen more as a contained European issue. It is true, however, that Soviet Union participated in occupation of Poland.
It means the USSR was already industrializing – and Stalin made sure that process would be (1) tightly controlled by the state & (2) would benefit primarily the imperial core of Russia.
If you think capital does not bear relevance to the development of the USSR, you have not understood Leninism.
The USSR killed Jews en masse, mostly as elements of a ‘cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’ (clear antisemitic dogwhistle) or simply as Jews. He also directed his cabinet to collaborate with the Nazis in their holocaust, firing Litvinov as FM and installing Molotov with clear instructions to comply with the Nazis. Heck, even Khrushchev admitted that Stalin died on the cusp of engineering a holocaust of his own. I will refrain on commenting how he treated other minorities.
no they have right wing ideals. they just use left wing terminology to push a right wing worldview.
edit: suddenly it seems tankie is about equality and support for the little guy, and more comically anti-imperialist. hmm I wonder where the word “tankie” comes from…
“TaNkIeS hAvE rIgHtWiNg IdEaLs”
The ideals: collectivisation of the means of production and of agricultural land, guaranteed employment, guaranteed housing, free universal healthcare and education to the highest level, guaranteed public pensions, equalization of wages between jobs, push towards unionisation, defence of LGTBQ and women’s rights, defence of indigenous movements and racial minorities, anti-racism, anti-imperialism…
So anyway, here’s the second-most-senior admin of lemmy.ml:
“And that’s why Stalin was so good”
All of that was soo bad under Stalin it’d be hilarious if it wasnt for the millions of easily prevented deaths and all the easily ore entable suffering.
Lol
Source: my ass
Besides, what’s with Stalin? I’m talking you about my ideals, not of the ideals of a Georgian man who died 70 years ago
Wow that’s some swift goalpoast changing, now it isn’t about the USSR anymore lol.
As in economic equality and support for disadvantaged groups?
Only to those who fall in line, else they get the tank again.
As in “we are anti imperialists, unless we’re the ones doing the oppression”. Honestly, ime, a common position amongst global south immigrants getting their first high-ish salary in Europe. All about wealth redistribution until you realise you can fly back home and live like a king off those inequalities.