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.
Very relatable.
If you want to have a go at debunking stuff like this, I suggest you go at it piecemeal. A common tactic of (smarter) reactionaries is to do a barrage of easily verifiable false claims to make themselves seem knowledgeable and debunking every single one of them in one go gets very tiring. It’s kinda why that youtuber Shaun has to make 2-3 hour videos against relatively small material, because the bullshit density is too high.
In this specific case, you could start from the last one (man-made famine) since I think it’s the easier one to debunk and work backwards from there to more complex and abstract ones like “Lenin wanted dictatorship from the start,” which will need some broader philosophical and historical discussion on the democratic nature of the USSR. I think I have a similar project to yours where I wanted to write my own perspective of the history of post-Columbian Haiti, which begun as a video idea, but I deeply underestimated the amount of effort that that will take. I already dropped all ambitions of making it a video, for example, since that’d bloat it even more with things I’m unskilled with.
It also depends on how acquainted you already are with history. If you’ve never done something like this before, a good place to start might be just the ProleWiki and the listed sources, and you can come back here with more specific questions about certain facts. Usually if a book is good it’ll also cite other sources to either build upon or contradict, so your sources list will grow from there. It’s certainly a lot of work, but very satisfying.
Edit: also, yeah, you’re gonna read and see some horrifying stuff. I got used to it pretty quickly, but I can’t guarantee it’s always this easy.
Good luck comrade, and feel free to ask more questions!
Thank you, comrade. Everyone’s responses have been super encouraging and helpful which makes this whole endeavour way less intimidating and overwhelming. I’ll definitely be making use of ProleWiki and expand from there. Making a video series on world history is one of the projects I’d like to do in the near future and will be a big undertaking but I think it’s worth it, I just gotta brush up on my editing skills which is harder than it appears as you’ve said so yourself. My thing is to go continent by continent, each being their own “season” with an episode dedicated to each country.
Do keep us posted! Even excerpts from the script “alpha” might be cool for some feedback.
I 100% will!