Yep. Basically a religion. Like conservatism and capitalism. They can not fail. Only be failed.
It really is absurd how the metaphorical party line hasn’t changed in the past 100 years. Everything is preordained, except for anytime our noble forces fail, in which case it’s an aberration and The Conspiracy Of The International Bourgeoisie
Yep. Theories are a fine thing to have. But you have to test them. And if they fail every time they’re tested then you need new theories. And barring that. The fact that things have changed so much between the time the theories were crafted and now. Large portions certainly are not relevant as they used to be if ever at all.
I dont know the context, the only word I realoze is AES as in encryption, which makes it kinda funny, but probably not correct.
“AES” is ‘actually existing socialism’. To tankies, this means things like “The Soviet Union”, “The PRC”, “North Korea”, and “Venezuela”
Wow you’re an acronym now, congrats
From last time I searched my name on the tankie instances:
I’d be interested in what you have to say against the black panther party, if you have the time.
The only thing I said against them was that they didn’t accomplish much in practical terms, which apparent translated to an undying hatred according to tankie morons who love to talk about me, lol.
wild
Fucking hell, one person explicitly states they want you to die. Absolutely unhinged.
At least it’s in Ukraine. That doesn’t help, but it’s certainly something.
I’m nowhere near as well known to the tankies as PugJesus and still have recieved multiple “go die in Ukraine retard” type comments. Politeness really isn’t a tankie strength.
Which is why we need to recognize when they at least take into account our support for Ukraine. It’s not much, but it’s something.
terminally online agitator
HB wouldn’t know nothing about that, lol
“Claims to adore Marx, but seems to decry every single movement to put his ideas into practice”
Didn’t Marx disown the Russian Revolution and other violent attempts at implementing communism? Y’know, the very factions these guys put on a pedestal?
No, Marx didn’t live long enough to see the Russian Revolution, and Marx was certainly not adverse to violent revolution. Though he mused that some sufficiently democratic bourgeois societies might be capable of a peaceful transition to socialism, it was certainly not the focus of his writings. Funny enough, he did suggest that Russia was the least ready for socialism of all the major European nations.
Marx, however, believed that development into a bourgeois capitalist society was a necessary prerequisite for a socialist dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolsheviks were a radical departure from this line of thinking, proposing both that the peasantry were a revolutionary class and that a capitalist mode of production was not necessary to transition to a socialist workers’ state. In addition, the Bolsheviks, despite their claims, were quite anti-democratic, which goes strongly against the spirit and letter of Marx’s writings.
Removed by mod
The Bolsheviks were quite well aware that socialism would be impossible in just Russia because it was pre-capitalist, and were banking on the success of the German Revolution to establish socialist supply chains. This is why with the failure of the revolutionary in Germany, the NEP was considered a tactical retreat.
A ‘tactical retreat’ here meaning ‘exactly what they overthrew the right-SRs and eliminated the Mensheviks for supporting’, except now, conveniently, all in the control of the Bolsheviks. Hell, half the reason that the NEP was implemented was because the peasantry were resisting collectivization, and the other half was that the ‘war communism’ of the civil war period had been fucking ruinous; not a well-considered ideological decision. Not only that, but the NEP was extremely short-lived, far too short to build up industry to the standards of a capitalist mode of production, and if it was up to Lenin, it would’ve been even shorter-lived.
Considering the Bolsheviks literally invented Democratic Centralism and made the USSR into a democracy, its definitely not fair to call them “anti-democratic”.
Democratic centralism is not democratic, and the USSR definitely was not fucking democratic in any real sense.
You should post this to [email protected]
Nah. Here it’s topical. Elsewhere, it’s just attention-seeking. Who gives a shit about online drama between tankies and a non-tankie poster? People on a comm for online tankie drama, maybe, but not people in a normal meme sub.
Its home is here.
Besides, it’s like 7 months old at this point.
I can’t even make sense of the screenshot even after reading it carefully twice. I’m just reacting to the headline. Hear me out:
I generally am anti-tankie, but I do have my own private theory, for which I have absolutely no evidence, that part of the reason Stalin came to be in charge of the USSR was because US intelligence was manipulating events to land him the role, partly because he was guaranteed to turn the whole thing into a murderous hellscape and prove that communism wouldn’t work.
It is exactly the type of action we like to do with other leaders of the same type of vintage in all kinds of places. Saddam Hussein, Pinochet, you know the drill. And, we show a consistent pattern of trying to kill any socialist/communist leader who comes to power who isn’t a maniac who is going to drive the whole system off a cliff. Good examples there are Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. But the ones who are disasters, people like North Korean leaders, we leave alone. We clearly like the bad ones and actively try to get rid of the good ones.
I think the US government, certainly in the mid-20th century, really liked communist leaders who were going to make their people suffer. And I think back in the early heyday of US intelligence, when it wasn’t really countered with that much effective counterintelligence from the Soviets, it wouldn’t have been insurmountably difficult to ensure that a really bad one would get nominated to be in charge, and it would have been perfectly in line with our MO.
But the ones who are disasters, people like North Korean leaders, we leave alone
It’s because they have nukes. An autocrat you understand is much better than whatever would follow when it comes to nukes.
Castro was much more dangerous because he was courting the USSR, and the USSR wanted to put nukes in Cuba, so that needed to be stopped.
US foreign intelligence pre WW2 was really an entirely different beast than the post war version.
Yeah, it barely existed. British Intelligence was well developed, but not the US. GP gives far too much credit to the ability of US intelligence to do much of anything.
There are a number of problems with this.
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Stalin’s path to power was paved before Lenin was even dead, and it was paved by the cooperation of large amounts of the Party itself. Short of the idea that a huge number of the Bolsheviks were secretly in the employ or the useful idiots of US intelligence in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Civil War in the early 1920s and it just… never came out, the idea is a non-starter.
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The US didn’t even have a central intelligence agency until after WW2. We were not exactly puppetmasters. Most of our intervention before that was very overt.
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Soviet counterintelligence was brutal from the start. Soviet espionage techniques were, in general, superior to the US’s until the Cold War was in full-swing.
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Chavez did drive the whole system off a cliff, predictably, by engaging in the common populist pastime of replacing the previous system with clientism instead of anything resembling a functional system.
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I don’t think anyone understood the sheer depths to which Stalin would drive the SovUnion, but also, many of Stalin’s atrocities themselves were clearly foreshadowed by the actions and words of the Bolsheviks even before Stalin came to power. Stalin almost certainly made things worse than they would’ve otherwise been, but would the general contours of it change? A million more or less - as the apocryphal Stalin quote goes, what is that, but “a statistic”?
- I have no idea the history, you might be right. I just know Stalin came out on top and he was exactly who the US would have wanted to have come out on top.
- True true.
- Yeah, but brutal doesn’t mean good. Brutal is usually bad, because it means you can’t get any real loyalty. Too soft isn’t good either, but I feel like Soviet counterintelligence was mostly just randomly killing people you decided they were “bad” and punishing people to get information, both of which are often counterproductive.
- I was talking about the 2002 coup which I think is credibly believed to be US-backed. All Chavez’s crazy authoritarian stuff came after that, as far as I’m aware. I thought until years and years after that, he was just doing normal Latin American politics with communism, with a marked level of success and popularity.
- I think Stalin was by far the worst and most brutal of all the Bolsheviks. If it had been Trotsky and Lenin, I think things would have been way different. Seeing touches of Castro or Chavez in Trotsky, and touches of Saddam Hussein in Stalin, is part of what leads me to the type of thinking that makes me think maybe the US was pulling for Stalin.
Like I say, I have absolutely no idea and certainly no evidence for it. Just saying it would line up perfectly, if there were any evidence.
Stalin came out on top and he was exactly who the US would have wanted to have come out on top.
The US just likes strong leaders, because it’s a lot easier to work with one individual than an entire party or democratic system.
Yeah, but brutal doesn’t mean good. Brutal is usually bad, because it means you can’t get any real loyalty. Too soft isn’t good either, but I feel like Soviet counterintelligence was mostly just randomly killing people you decided they were “bad” and punishing people to get information, both of which are often counterproductive.
The Sovs were actually quite intricate in setting up blackmail, threats, hostage situations, leveraging useful idiots, making it an offense NOT to inform, etc etc etc. And the way they made Soviet society work, there wasn’t the freedom of movement or association that espionage benefits from in non-totalitarian countries.
I was talking about the 2002 coup which I think is credibly believed to be US-backed. All Chavez’s crazy authoritarian stuff came after that, as far as I’m aware. I thought until years and years after that, he was just doing normal Latin American politics with communism, with a marked level of success and popularity.
Chavez basically immediately went all-in in 1999 on hollowing out Venezuela’s institutions and replacing all positions of power with his cronies.
I think Stalin was by far the worst and most brutal of all the Bolsheviks. If it had been Trotsky and Lenin, I think things would have been way different. Seeing touches of Castro or Chavez in Trotsky, and touches of Saddam Hussein in Stalin, is part of what leads me to the type of thinking that makes me think maybe the US was pulling for Stalin.
I think you give too much credit to Trotsky and Lenin. They were both very big on the Bolshevik single-party state being run via terror.
I read up a little bit more. I think you are right and I will have to abandon my pet theory. Oh well. It was a fun theory.
It was far from an absurd thought! Allied intelligence during WW2, for example, considered that an assassination attempt against Hitler might be counterproductive because they considered Hitler more a handicap to the Nazis than a help.
Yeah it’s interesting how many people seem to think that Lenin and Trotsky were the good guys and things would have been so different if Stalin hadn’t risen to power.
Almost all of the terrible things Stalin did were started by the earlier Bolshevik leaders. They were all blood-soaked tyrants. The difference is that Stalin perfected their methods.
The United States was far more concerned with the stability of europe than the politics of european heads of state in the aftermath of World War 1 which saw the collapse of multiple european empires. The Russian Civil war started during World War 1 and ended in 1922 when the USSR was finally formed.
The United States, (or rather US corporations uniquely unravaged by World War 1), were at the time investing heavily in German rearmament to dodge Versailles. The Soviet Union and the German Republic were nominally allies in the 1920s, so in a sense you could say the United States saw the benefit of Stalin stabilizing the USSR.
But I wouldn’t go so far as to say America has much of a stake in Stalin, or was even rooting for him until approximately 1941.
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Idk, Fidel might not meet your definition of maniac, but he threw enough gay people and political dissidents into “work” camps (where you were worked to death, but “totally not death camps”) for me to call him a maniac.
Sure, later he said whoopsie daisies, but imo to do it in the first place he had to be a maniac.
I don’t think Castro was a maniac by any means, but I think he does show that uncontested power is a dangerous thing to wield. All your preconceptions and prejudices become principles, and anyone working against them is clearly and ontologically evil.
Well we’re just going to have to agree to disagree, I have errands to run IRL so I can’t stay and argue too long about his maniacal nature or lack thereof. Instead I’ll leave you with this list of maniacal shit he was responsible for I just found through a quick search.
It’s enough for me to count it, whether it’s being a maniac or power making you act like a maniac, it feels like splitting hairs and I’m comfortable agreeing to disagree.
Prayer doesn’t work God’s will. Prayer works gods will. 100 win.
