While the article and scenario I linked and talk about are very specific I’d like to use this as a learning experience to be better armed when faced with something similar.
So I was scrolling through videos on tiktok responding to this “leftist” creator and one of the responses was from a reactionary guy I’m semi familiar with, familiar in the sense that I’ve seen responses to his nonsense. Anyway I went to check his account because I had never done it before and saw that he was a self identified Libertarian (bad start) and made videos on USSR history.
The latter worried me a lot and one of his most recent videos was titled “the Bolshevik revolution was evil,” and because I have no self preservation I wanted to see what his sources were. Lo and behold, he only cited this article which has some awful content. People in the comments were raving about how amazing his video was and it made me want to do a bit of a deep dive into if any of the “facts” in the article were in any way true. I just don’t know where to start.
Please mind the trigger warning at the beginning of the article as there are very graphic images and descriptions.
I think the questions are:
What are you hoping to accomplish by combating this misinformation?
and
What is more likely to happen than your ideal outcome?
It sounds like you’re going to just get into an argument with ignorant reactionaries on the internet. You won’t change their minds, they won’t change yours, you won’t show them how bullshit their arguments are.
My recommendation would be to not waste your time. You can inform a friend in real life that their sources are bullshit, and they will listen. But reactionaries aren’t that way because they just have “wrong information.” They’re there because it gives them an excuse to be horrible, hateful people, and feel justified in doing so. You can’t logic someone out of that position.
I’m honestly doing it for myself mostly. I don’t plan on making a response video to these folks as I know it’s a waste of time.
I have an idea for a personal project that factually documents chronological historical events in a given country and making sure I have everything covered is important to me.
Combating misinformation would be part of that, as in bringing up the “opposing argument” and providing an accurate account of what actually happened.
Not only would this be for my personal project but also for research papers I publish in the near future to help educate the public.
I hope that makes sense, if I need to clarify anything please let me know.
Oh ok. It’s always a good idea to try and understand a situation better, but it’s good you’re doing it for yourself, not for them.
I guess if you can stomach it, going through their argument and comparing it and contrasting it with what actually happened would be a good start. Try and get a good understanding of the fundamentals of the situation, and look at multiple different sources, as well as events surrounding the topic (so in the case of the Bolshevik revolution, the events leading up to it, and the events afterwards), anti-com sources will often treat an event as if it happened in a vacuum, for no reason other than “an evil commie was being evil.” But no event in history ever happened “for the evil” Every action has motivation behind it.
Sorry if my rambling isn’t very helpful, I’m sure you’d just rather a list of sources, but I’m without mine at the moment.
You’ve been very helpful so don’t worry about that!
The hardest thing for me right now is stomaching reading all the lies and falsehoods but I need to start somewhere, and with practice it gets easier.
Starting with the before is definitely my best bet, at least with the Romanovs or even before them. I guess I just have a weird fear that when researching I’ll read and waste my time on unreliable sources. I do have access to places like JSTOR so I know that’s a decent place, plus I’m sure the Prolewiki would be a good place to turn to as well.