I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point
Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down
Nobody is advocating power abuse. One of the books I try to get people to read, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia contextualizes the scale of and how such abuses occurred in a much more useful criticism than “communism bad Stalin evil, that’s why you can’t ever do anything about rightists organizing against the state”.
A good accompaniment to illustrate what it looks like and what the consequences are when the left fails to take appropriate action once in power is The Jakarta Method
That’s precisely the extent of my criticism. Understanding stalinism instead of just demonizing it is a good thing, if only to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But the end doesn’t justify the means. Apologism is not OK.
It’s OK to take a stance against power abuses, and vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.
the end doesn’t justify the means
Suppression of the right was necessary, however the relative freedom given to locals to carry it out resulted in people using it to settle old scores or non-ideological people to advance politically within the party. While dekulization enabled them, those actions were orthogonal (and actually hindered) the aims of dekulization.
Whether that can be considered justification or apologia isn’t constructive IMO. Personally though, I just consider it an error in the way it was carried out.
Similar issues (and resulting sentiments) are observed in the wake of Mao giving villages the freedom to set up their own courts and try landlords and others.
It’s […] vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.
We had that struggle back when Kruschev sent the tanks into Hungary and every western leftist org was falling over each other to denounce the USSR. Meanwhile nazis were being put in charge of police forces in South America to do crimes against humanity against indigenous and communist elements and hundreds of thousands were being massacred in South Korea.
Turns out the tankies were right. Denouncing the enemies of the state you live in just serves to carry water for imperialism.
By using the kind of the repression they used on the public, they proved they were no better than the capitalists they despise so much.
Someone that actually cares about left-wing politics cares a lot more about the outcomes than which faction comes ahead. Politics aren’t a game of Risk. Actions have consequences, and humanity as a whole loses when innocents get killed by brainwashed idiots.
If stalinist Russia is what utopia is supposed to be, I’m not interested, thank you.
