My point being that actual CIA propaganda was a godsend to MLs. They can use the existence of it to deny anything bad about their movement

The most nuanced discussion I’ve seen of communist crimes is in ML circles. Deportations of ethnic Koreans and Crimean Tatars in the USSR, excess repression during the eve of WW2, freedom of speech and discussion in the late USSR… All of that receives extensive detail discussion in ML works such as Albert Szymanski’s “Human Rights in The Soviet Union” and “Is The Red Flag Flying”, long discussion in “People’s Republic of Walmart” with an entire chapter devoted to repressions in the USSR, and an in-depth analysis in Robert C. Allen’s “Farm to Factory” and Alec Nove’s “An Economic History of the USSR”. I’ll update you when I read Domenico Losurdo’s book on Stalin.

The fact that we don’t uncritically swallow anti-communist propaganda fiction works such as The Gulag Archipelago, and refuse “historians” who worked with guesswork before the opening of the Soviet archives doesn’t mean we deny atrocities. The point is that despite big mistakes in the construction of REAL socialist states, they’ve still been the most emancipatory and anti-imperialist projects on the face of the earth, and have brought untold good on the people who lived under them

You can’t explain why the same thing happened in Capitalist countries

This is false, though. a few capitalist countries, particularly in western Europe and in North America, industrialized at the expense of the rest of the world through colonialism and imperialism since the 1800s, but since the end of WW1, only a minority of capitalist states have actually developed and industrialized, most of them being small European nations still. No fast industrialization with massive life quality boosts happened anywhere in Latin America or Africa, and in Asia only in US puppet regimes utilized as weapons against China. If India had applied the policies that China or the USSR did, hundreds of millions of lives would have been saved from disease and starvation over the past 100 years.

Laugh my fucking ass out. You libs are so oblivious to the countless sins committed by the west. As late as 1960 France was butchering some million Algerians for the unforgivable sin of wanting independence, but sure, China, the country which carried out the greatest industrial revolution and elimination of poverty the world has yet seen, is so much worse.

I’ll agree when you fight for the abolition of all western countries for their crimes against humanity.

Are you aware that the programmers behind Lemmy are Marxists? I don’t personally like Dessalines because of transphobe comments, but you can’t avoid the fact that this fucking platform itself is made by Marxists.

As for putting in the work, what do you think I’m doing in commenting here?

“Allow western anticommunist propaganda to become the only political content in a political forum and to be severely overrepresented vs. the actual damage done by the west, or else you’re a whataboutism”

Agreed, but as I said, I unfortunately don’t know much about femboys in the USSR.

You’ve done some wonderful cherrypicking. That section of the article links to the Vergonha article:

France has also continuously refused to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and native non-French languages in France continue to be denied official recognition, with Occitans, Basques, Corsicans, Catalans, Flemings, Bretons, Alsatians, Savoyards and other langues d’oïl speakers still having no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands

Compare that with Uyghur:

The Uyghurs are one of the 56 recognized ethnic groups in China and Uyghur is one of the two linguae francae of Xinjiang, along with Standard Chinese. As a result, Uyghur can be heard in most social domains in Xinjiang and also in schools, government and courts

Back to France:

In 1972, Georges Pompidou, the President of France and a native of an Occitan-speaking region, declared that “there is no room for regional languages in a France whose fate is to mark Europe with its seal”.

In 1992, after some questioned the unconstitutional segregation of minority languages in France, Art. II of the 1958 French Constitution was revised so that “the language of the Republic is French” (la langue de la République est le français). This was achieved only months before the Council of Europe passed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which Jacques Chirac ignored despite Lionel Jospin’s plea for the Constitutional Council to amend Art. II and include all vernacular languages spoken on French soil. Yet again, non-French languages in France were denied official recognition and deemed too dangerous for the unity of the country, and Occitans, Basques, Corsicans, Catalans, Flemings, Bretons, Alsatians, Nissarts, and Savoyards have still no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands. The text was again refused by majority deputies on 18 January 2008, after the Académie française voiced their absolute disapproval of regional languages, the recognition of which they perceive as “an attack on French national identity”.

On 27 October 2015, the Senate rejected a bill for the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, preventing the adoption of a constitutional reform that would have given a degree of official status to regional languages such as Occitan.[39] On 8 April 2021, the Breton MP Paul Molac tried to pass a law to protect minority languages, and this law was passed by the French Parliament in Paris.[40] However, the French Minister of Education, opposed to the teaching in minority languages, asked the Conseil Constitutionnel to declare it unconstitutional. This led to the law being constitutionally struck down on 21 May 2021

The use of regional languages in local governments is still severely contested. In 2022, some local councils in the traditionally Catalan-speaking department of the Pyrénées-Orientales, such as Elne, passed a modification of their statutes to allow the intervention in Catalan language by their elected members, as long as they provide an exact oral translation in French, as well a written French translation of the session.[42] Despite being considered a symbolic gesture, the prefect of the Department, arguing that the political rights of French speakers will be violated, appealed to justice to repeal these initiatives. In April 2023, the Administrative Court of Montpellier sided with the Prefect, thus declaring illegal the decisions of the local councils.

Regarding the segment where you quote “bilingual education” the article on said schools numbers:

A total of 62 such primary schools existed as of 2016, as well as four high schools, teaching 3,614 students in total

Tell me again how much worse Uyghur language is being treated than Occitan. For reference, there are about 13 million native speakers of Uyghur and there are 12 million ethnic Uyghur in China, meaning literally almost all of them speak it. There has clearly been a prolonged effort to maintain the language.

I haven’t heard about that at all

That’s the entire point of why tankies like me bring up such topics. When Europeans insist in the “superiority and democratic rule” of Europe vs. say China, it’s because we remain oblivious to the sins of our own countries while we’re constantly bombarded with propaganda against socialist projects. You can get started with the Wikipedia article on Occitan Language if you’re interested.

I don’t care what France is doing when I’m talking about China

Thats the entire point. There is immense propaganda about China while we literally don’t know what happens in the neighboring country. If there were an equal amount of contributions in .world about repression of Occitan as there is about China, I would make it less of a point to bring it up constantly. It’s not deviating, it’s not letting anti-China discourse dominate in the platform

“CIA propaganda” is the other ML buzzword

If you really wanna get informed about it, Gabriel Rockhill literally just published in Iskra Books an extensive analysis of the ways the US State Propaganda Apparatus affects media, arts, political organizing… There are literal entire books written about it if you wanna get educated.

It’s a cultural genocide

That’s the western claim, but Xinjiang is a special province of China called “autonomous region”, with more powers to local politics than most others. Uyghur people can study Uyghur language at school (unlike for exmaple Occitanian people in France) and their culture is preserved. You wanna see a cultural genocide in real time? Look up the population of Occitanian speakers over the past 100 years and the French policy towards Occitanian.

No, you’re European, still counts

There’s also the question of the nomenklatura and the army. It cannot be denied they enjoyed privileges

Oh it cannot be denied? There must be some pretty strong numeric data suggesting that. Care to share?

Western liberal democracies […] preserve more individual freedoms than leninist states do

Ask that to Vietnamese, Iraqi, Libyans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Burkinabe, Algerians… Turns out that the western liberal democracies don’t preserve individual freedoms, they only export more of the authoritarianism abroad and keep the situation easier at home because the richer working class is less prone to murdering them!

It’s good the Soviet Union after Stalin tried to improve the standard of living

After? With Stalin, life expectancy went from 28 to 55 years of age, land collectivization was successfully carried out (not without difficulties), and massive literacy campaigns taught everyone to read. Again, not because of Stalin in particular, because history isn’t made by one person and he wasn’t an absolute dictator the way you believe he was.

You’ve completely ignored my point of how it is possible that the USSR got 5 benevolent dictators in a row maintaining the highest welfare state and lowest inequality in the history of the region.

“I live in the most powerful and harmful empire but I reject any system opposing it” amounts to supporting it

I’ll repeat: you can thank the Bolsheviks from saving your bloodline from extinction.

I’d be more charitative to your comment if it couldn’t be summarized as “liberalism is when human rights and enlightenment, Leninism is when le evil dictator with iron fist”.

Your analysis of what constitutes a dictatorship or a democracy is simply anti materialist.

The country that guaranteed universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed housing, the abolition of unemployment, guaranteed retirement pensions, and maintained the historically lowest inequality levels in the region is a dictatorship to you. This is only possible if your understanding is that, for 70 years, the USSR had a succession of benevolent dictators unlike anything else the world has seen for some reason. No dictator elsewhere at any time has achieved remotely anything like that, but somehow FIVE in a row in the USSR maintained the highest welfare state in history.

To you, democracy is strictly defined as “the existence of a multi party system with periodic representative elections”. This is a faulty understanding of who makes decisions in class societies. There cannot be democracy in class society. Tell me an example of an existing democratic country to you.

Not only but majorly, especially outside the USSR, which took the brunt of the excessive repressions in the period between 1939 and 1942.

Sorry your relatives were fascists. My great grandfather got murdered by the reds in Spain and I don’t cry anticommunism on the internet because he probably deserved it. I only feel bad about having fascist ancestors.

Again: you have ancestors because of the Soviets.

I’m a Spaniard myself, if you ask some of my ancestors, “con Franco se vivía mejor”. You know, under a fascist dictatorship. So no, the “argument from authority by old people” isn’t convincing to me.

I wish the Soviets had liberated my country from fascism too, unfortunately my country is on the other side of the continent and the Soviet aid during the Spanish Civil War was insufficient (likely due to being the only country to sell weapons to the antifascists while Nazi Germany bombed them and the rest of the world looked the other way).

I can argue with you in at all because you’re alive thanks to the USSR. Almost all Warsaw pact peoples were liable to Nazi extermination, if you belong to the few who were not, it’s not a good argument either. “Nazis wouldn’t have exterminated me!”