• HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    80
    ·
    9 months ago

    If you knew anything about Soviet Union, you’d know that number is correct. During 50s, SU started Project Red Loop, in which people were given immortality serum and repeatably killed in various ways, to test it’s military potential. Some test subjects were killed over 50k times.

    fuck everything else, this guy’s spittin. soviets defeated death but used it to do more murder.

  • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    64
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    No matter how outlandish the Black Book death count is, its always way less than even a conservative estimate of deaths caused by capitalism. The British Empire alone tops these numbers

  • iByteABit [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    39
    ·
    9 months ago

    Stalin is still to this day stealing your food with his giant spoon straight from his grave, the communist elite are more fascist than Hitler ever was stalin-comical-spoon

    • What_Religion_R_They [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      Whenever people share sources like this “from a university” I just look at the directory they shared from.

      https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/ It didn’t disappoint this time

      apparently it was collated by a dead ghoul (rest in piss) called Rudolph Rummel, who dedicated his life to this. Unsurprisingly he also supported the mass murder of Iraqis by the US government.

      • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        I looked this guy up assuming that he might have arrived via Operation Paperclip, but no, despite his name he was actually born in Ohio.

        He tried to argue here that “democracies don’t make war” and then said the US doing covert action against other countries doesn’t count because “actchually the countries they targeted weren’t democracies, and it was okay because gobbunism bad, also the CIA is bad and not democratic but they wouldn’t do those things if they had more Democracy smuglord” Like he actually tried to redefine “war” as armed conflicts strictly between international-community-1international-community-2 so that any suffering the US inflicts on other countries is justified because they are Spreading Democracy™ and aren’t actually wars because the victim countries aren’t “democracies.”

        Also apparently the US Civil War wasn’t a war because the Confederacy “was not recognized by any major Power, which means that it was not recognized as an independent state.”

  • Trudge [Comrade]@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    9 months ago

    Soviet Union destroyed underwater Samthi people with their hyperflux capacitators and you hexbears are just laughing!???!?

  • BlessedDog@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    9 months ago

    I’m a leftist, but I dont understand why people keep dickriding the soviet union, people were poor and a lot of people were killed and sent to Siberia, like my grand uncles. Most people who praise the soviet union never lived it.

    Stop defending a fake socialist state that is long gone, and work towards a better future according to your ideologies!

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      41
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      without the USSR, Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals would still be a fascist empire under the reign of Hitler’s moronic children and most minorities would have been exterminated. in 2021 63% of Russians, and 84% of those under 55 (that is, those who actually lived under it) regretted the dissolution of the USSR. the USSR was a counterbalancing force for global imperialism and colonialism and helped many countries on the road to independence from the inbred monarchies of Europe, and when the USSR declined in the 1980s and fell soon after, the pressure on the global bourgeoisie mostly evaporated, meaning they could worsen conditions for the working class mostly without consequence as they had no major alternative to look on to, leading to the current desperate conditions for many workers in the imperial core - not to mention the record debt levels of peripheral countries as they are exploited by the United States. the fall of the USSR was an utter disaster for eastern Europe and Russia, leading to a massive decline in conditions for workers, massive amounts of poverty, a reduction in the life expectancy, and child prostitution as people struggled to survive - thus proving that the shift from socialism to capitalism was a huge mistake for the working class.

      so shut the fuck up, you demented fucking weasel. if your grand uncles were murdered in Siberia, then I will Fortnite dance over their graves because they were probably reactionary dipshits. it’s statistically unlikely that they were though, as the gulags have been propagandized by the West to appear worse by several orders of magnitude than they actually were according to the real historical data we possess (and not works of fiction by dipshits) it wasn’t a “fake socialist state”, you’re a fake fucking leftist. go join your jack-booted, swastika-tattoo’d buddies in eastern Europe that you love so much who are destroying their countries with nationalistic fascism, and get the fuck out of the Left.

      • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        in 2021 63% of Russians, and 84% of those under 55 (that is, those who actually lived under it) regretted the dissolution of the USSR.

        Here, ill do op’s reply for them

        “Thats just because they miss being an empire!!! English people miss the British Empire too!”

        This is of course, chauvinistic and reductive, but its the reponse ive seen.

        • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          9 months ago

          It’s also unfalsifiable (unless you can read people’s minds) and ignores that severe drop in material conditions that came in the wake of the USSR’s dissolution.

          • 420stalin69@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            9 months ago

            I saw a documentary about Gogol Bordello recently which made me so sad because I actually loved their “Gypsy punk” pan-immigrant-experience punk shtick but he was like “we fled communism, in 1994” and like fuck man you were literally fleeing capitalism.

            He also included a scene where he performed a song with Ukrainian soldiers who just happened to have clarinets and accordions ready for the occasion, and another scene where he played to Ukrainian “gypsys” at a special refugee center just for “Gypsy’s”, itself a disconcerting fact, and in this scene I noticed they were lighting the scene with car lights. The car lights pointing directly into the face of the refugees who were watching him play guitar, you could even see them squinting at the pain of it but they kept watching and clapping anyway for some reason and like holy fucking shit he’s dead to me now.

            • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              9 months ago

              If you told this story with all of its absurd details but changed some of the proper nouns, people would eat it up as an example of the evil communist regime’s buffoonish propaganda.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      9 months ago

      Literally every major Soviet historian of any standing aside from charlatans like Applebaum or Conquest agree the Soviet Union took a collapsed society of illiterate feudal peasants and transformed them into a literate industrial superpower with skyrocketing standards of living

      Sorry they didn’t create utopia on earth while dealing with one genocidal capitalist army after another, I’d like to see what US living standards look like after losing 27 million people and 1/3rd of the industrial and agricultural land destroyed, which is what the Soviets were dealing with after WW2

        • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          Correct, and it’s never even been bombed, its just like this. This the society (or lack thereof) that our capitalists chose to build during their brief window of de facto world domination

          • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            9 months ago

            This the society (or lack thereof) that our capitalists chose to build

            That’s such a horrifying truth. Total world domination, trillions of dollars of wealth and all for a world where even people who are doing well can’t buy a house and is headed for environmental disaster

      • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        Applebaum is not a historian, FYI. She is a journalist with no training or education in academic historical studies. Of course she loves to tout that she’s a “historian”, but it’s just not true and even bourgeois historians like Kotkin love to dunk on her.

        Her book on the famine just involved her being a stenographer for various Ukrainian neo-Nazi historians, for example.

    • Bassword [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      The USSR wasn’t perfect but it did turn a monarchical peasant state into an industrial superpower, liberating millions in the process. It was literally unprecedented, only China really compares since.

      It also defeated Nazism.

      Most people who praise the soviet union never lived it.

      Most people who lived in the Soviet Union want it back, the statistics support that.

        • Venus [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          31
          ·
          9 months ago

          Not much how bout you

          If your grand uncles aren’t completely made up, and if they were actually convicted of some shit in the USSR, it was probably completely heinous. It’s a safe bet. By extension, you would be a terrible person for defending them. If they are completely made up then you’re a terrible person for obvious reasons.

          Either way, please report to the pit barbara-pit

          • BlessedDog@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            9 months ago

            What’s your connection to the USSR, why do you keep defending it? Did you live a luxurious life in the Soviet Union?

    • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      I’m a leftist, but

      LIB

      Most people who praise the soviet union never lived it.

      You didn’t either

      edit: lmao, based on your banner you’re Finnish, succdem who was taught in school about ebil Stalin gorillion dead detected

    • 420stalin69@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      edit-2
      9 months ago

      The big three in the fight against fascism were Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt.

      The only one who didn’t enrich his own family through being in power was Stalin.

      The gulag system wasn’t pretty but the death rate, excluding WW2 famine years, is about the same as the modern US prison system. I would agree even that is too harsh and they could have been kinder but the error you make is to believe the massively repeated but factually untrue claim that it was equivalent to the Nazi concentration camps. It wasn’t that bad, it was as bad as modern US labor prison farms. Believing it was another kind of Nazi state concentration camp system is tantamount to Holocaust denial.

      The USSR simply wasn’t the caricature that over a century of propaganda has convinced you it was. You need to realize that for a century the USSR was the enemy so the elites in the west in class-based institutions such as Harvard spent a century talking about how awful it was.

      Of course the people who stood the most to lose were convinced it was awful and importantly they held the power in the west to convince those who stood the most to gain that it was awful.

      If you look at the facts, the USSR took a barely even industrializing economy where half the people were living either as de facto serfs or in urban poverty and just two generations later everyone had a middle-income job, half the population had not just a city apartment but also a country cottage, and the biggest problem people complained about was the insufficient quantity of televisions to satisfy consumer demand. What a fucking horrible system.

      It was also far more democratic than you’ve been led to believe with power devolved to a local level that allowed local communities to largely run their own affairs via workers councils and democratic influence working from the bottom up with those workers councils exercising control over the level above, and that level upon the next highest etc.

      Bottom-up democracy while you’re used to seeing top-down democracy which is enough of a difference for you to simply see a dictatorship because you’ve never bothered to actually read for yourself except for the class-serving accounts that elites in Harvard want to present to you.

      • BlessedDog@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        Refreshing to see someone here write an actual argument instead of hurdling insults.

        I agree, you can’t compare gulags to the Nazi concentration camps. In 2 days, some 21 thousand Estonians were taken to gulags in Siberia, which was roughly 3% of Estonia’s then population. Around 3 thousand of them perished on those camps before they started letting people return home in '56. However, the fact that it was arguably less deadly than the holocaust, does not make it any more acceptable, it was not a good thing, it was cruelty, so many innocent people.

        I agree with you on some level, the soviet union was not all bad, there were good things as well, such as the availability of housing. My grandma actually lived (until recently due to health issues) in one of the apartments she got in the soviet union because she was a crane operator like my uncle and helped build Annelinn.

        • 420stalin69@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          I appreciate the politeness and take that as a signal of good faith so I’ll respond to you with good faith too.

          The problem with the “horrible gulags, all those innocent nationalists imprisoned after WW2” thing is that

          1. It’s called the “double genocide” theory which is an emotional argument trying to tie the German atrocities with the Soviet system in an emotional way.
          2. Estonia was not simply occupied by the Nazis, it was occupied so it’s not the same as Hungary but it wasn’t like Poland either. There were many collaborators. Given the scale probably there was some injustice but to pretend the post-WW2 cleaning up after fascism wasn’t part of that is also denial. It’s wrong to pretend they were simply nationalists or that they were being forced to participate in the Holocaust of Jews and Slavs against their will. A great number actively participated and part of the problem with this nationalist victim narrative you’re embracing is that it seeks to obscure and deny or at least forget that fact and pretend they were nothing more than victims, innocents. Probably some were, it was rough justice in a chaotic time, but collaborating with the Nazis by Estonians wasn’t forced and was often enthusiastic. Denying that is also Holocaust denial.

          Going case by individual case probably you’ll find some injustice but 3% being collaborators in need of processing and denazification is entirely believable. If only the west had been that thorough in denazifying west Germany.

        • ghost_of_faso2@lemmygrad.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          9 months ago

          In the grand scheme of things three thousand dead is nothing. Napeleon lost half his army simply retreating from his failed invasion of Russia.

          Would those 3 thousand people still be alive if the Nazis didnt try to genocide Russia? Of course they would, blame the right people.

            • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              9 months ago

              If your point of conparison is utopia – no one is harmed by any decision, ever – even one broken family is an atrocity.

              If your point of conparison is peer states, or what could have been reasonably done under the real-life circumstances, then yeah, 3000 people pales in conparison to the overall human cost of WWII.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          Refreshing to see someone here write an actual argument instead of hurdling insults.

          Shut the fuck up, you aggrieved piece of shit. This is what they were responding to:

          I’m a leftist, but I dont understand why people keep dickriding the soviet union, people were poor and a lot of people were killed and sent to Siberia, like my grand uncles. Most people who praise the soviet union never lived it.

          Stop defending a fake socialist state that is long gone, and work towards a better future according to your ideologies!

          i.e., low-effort flaming, and you talk like it’s unthinkable people would respond in kind. Do you often make a habit of lecturing strangers on politeness after you walk up and spit on them?

          In the eyes of liberal historiographers, every criminal in the USSR, every fascist collaborator, every petty-bourgeois tyrant becomes a victimized innocent who Stalin personally killed because he had a Tourette Syndrome where his tics were murder and kidnapping. There is no other reason anyone could possibly be put by the government in a place they wouldn’t like to be in the context of a civil war or a genocidal invasion.

          Go fuck yourself, go back to masturbating about syndicates and, on the off-off chance that you succeed, prepare to have ten million other shitheads like you declare that you aren’t a real socialist because anticommunists told them you aren’t.

          Most people praise the Soviet Union never lived in it because the vast, vast majority of people who commented on it never lived in it. Most people who attack it never lived in it by the same token. However, most of the people who lived in it for any meaningful length of time praise it, as survey after survey produces (see other responses in this thread).

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      9 months ago

      work towards a better future according to your ideologies!

      My ideology calls for a full restoration of the Soviet Union, the creation of a Soviet America, the creation of the Soviet equivalent for each country, and ensuring every backwards reactionary dipshit gets sent to a reeducation school so they can simultaneously learn technical and life skills they need or want to have a successful and fulfilling life while getting all their anti-communist brainworms pulled out of their skulls.

    • ∞🏳️‍⚧️Edie [it/its]@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      9 months ago

      I’m not sure which part of This Soviet World I should extract and send in this comment. I guess I’ll go for the gulags, chapter 14 in the book. But please! PLEASE! And I know you’re a lib, but can you do me this favour: read it, it is a really really good book. It will take a few hours, but it’s an easy read. I made an EPUB of it (there is also a link to a PDF scan if you would rather use that).

      quotes

      Dr. Mary Stevens Callcott, the American penologist who has studied prisons all over the world and who has had the unique experience of visiting the larger part of the Soviet camps, including those for the worst—and for political—offenders, has commented both in her book Soviet justice[1] and in conversations with me personally, on the “amazingly normal” life that differentiates these camps from prisons in any other part of the world.
      She notes the freedom of movement over large areas of territory, the very small amount of guarding, the work done under normal conditions—seven hours for ordinary labor to ten for men whose tasks, such as driving a truck, permitted frequent rests during work. She could find no speed-up; laws of labor protection operated as in factories. Wages were the same as those outside, with deductions for living expenses; all above this could be sent by the prisoner to his family, saved or spent as he chose. “No uniforms with their psychological implications, no physical abuse; isolation only in extreme instances. Privileges and special rewards replace the system of special penalties.” Among these special rewards are the two weeks’ vacation in which the prisoner may leave the camp, and the opportunities given for his family not only to visit him but even to live with him for extended periods. Normal human association goes on; men and women meet and may even marry while serving sentence, in which case they are given separate quarters.
      What most impressed Dr. Callcott, however, was the type of men in charge of these camps, and the relation they had to the prisoners. She tells of going through the Moscow-Volga Canal camp with its director. Prisoners hailed him with obvious pleasure and informality. A girl rushed up to detain him by seizing the belt of his uniform lest he get away before she could tell him something. A teacher whose term was about to expire expressed a wish to stay on and work under him. There were only five officials in the central administration office of this camp of many thousand prisoners; all the work, including most of the guarding, was done by the convicted men themselves. “In fact,” said Dr. Callcott, “I could never see what kept men in this camp unless they wanted to stay there. No convicts I have known would have any difficulty if they wanted to break away.” Both prisoners and officials, of whom Dr. Callcott asked this question—she talked with prisoners freely without the presence of officials—replied they didn’t run away because if they did, “nobody in my working gang would speak to me when I came back. They would say I disgraced them.” There are, however, a certain number of incorrigibles who run away repeatedly, and these are given somewhat closer guarding for a time. Political prisoners, she noted, were treated like everyone else, except that those who had been persistent and dangerous in their attacks on the government were sent further away from the possibility of connection with their past associates. In all her conversations with these “politicals,” she was unable to find one who had been sentenced merely for expressing anti-Soviet views. All were charged with definite action against the government.
      “I did everything I could to destroy this government,” one such man frankly told her, “sabotage of the most serious kind. But the way they have treated me here has convinced me that they are right.”
      Another prisoner, who had been in Sing Sing, San Quentin, as well as in jails of England, Spain and Germany, before he was picked up by the Soviets for grand larceny, had been reclaimed by the Baltic-White Sea Canal. He had done a bit of engineering in his youth, and was promptly given a chance to work at this specialty. He won a medal, pursued his studies further, and was doing brilliant work on the Moscow-Volga Canal when Dr. Callcott met him. To her query about his reformation he replied:
      “In the other countries they treated me like a prisoner, clapped me in jail and taught me my place. Here they clapped me on the back and said ‘What can we do to make you into a useful citizen?’” Dr. Callcott conversed with many men now high in Soviet industry who had previously been reclaimed by the labor camps. Nothing in their attitude or that of those about them showed any stigma remaining from their prison life. “Of course, when it’s over, it’s forgotten,” one of them said to her. “That,” says Dr. Callcott, “is real restoration.”

      [1] This book sounded interesting, so I am actually in the process of making an EPUB of it. If I were done with it, I might have chosen to throw it at you.

    • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      I’m a leftist, but I dont understand why people keep dickriding the soviet union

      Why does a thread mocking absurd death tolls with an even more absurd margin of error come off ad “dickriding” to you?

    • kot [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      Because most of the shit you just said are straight up lies. Socialism turned a war torn backwards feudal country into a spacefaring world power. People’s lives improved immensely (unless they were either bourgeois or some kind of nazi collaborator)

      • Hohsia [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Legend says that Stalin aimlessly filled up the prisons and gulags to the point where the streets were essentially empty. Those in prison? Shot dead. After this was done, he sat in a back room, twirled his mustache and laughed maniacally while the communism death toll counter went to work. Further, anyone seen on the street moving was shot on command like the red light green light game in squid game—that’s unfortunately what communism does and why we must fight for freedom and democracy. Note how I didn’t even mention anything about the large spoon he had built to steal all of the grain. There’s not enough time in the world to list the atrocities, but if you do enough research, you’ll be able to find the truth.

        You seriously still think communism and the act of distributing resources equally isn’t evil?

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    cap-think “Slavery? We stopped that so it’s ok now, those numbers don’t matter.”

    bugs-stalin “Ok cool, we stopped purges and gulags so it’s ok now, none of those numbers matter anymore. Only numbers that exist today like lifespan, health and living standards increases each year matter now, the modern numbers.”

    porky-scared