Don’t go to r/EuropeanSocialists apparently, worst mistake of my life.

Feel very sad for all the people wishing to learn more about socialism and getting roped into trash like this.

  • SovereignState
    9•2 years ago

    https://www.stalinsociety.com/news/homosexualityintheussr

    LGBT rights are only “Western values” whenever the imperialists can weaponize homonationalism against the villain nation of the day. Most nations had no such misgivings about LGBT people prior to European colonialism, when white devils and barbaric Christian understandings of gender and sexuality spread like a plague through Africa and the East.

    In the times of Stalin, LGBT rights were no-one’s values except LGBT people. No east, no west, no north and no south. But this article is pretty good at contextualizing it imo. Labeling Stalin as anti-LGBT makes no sense whenever there is no widely acknowledged “pro-LGBT” to compare him to, and the alternatives are Nazi death camps or western Gay-bashings and bar-burnings.

    • @GloriousDoubleK
      2•2 years ago

      So is it more sensible to say that they just didn’t engage in much meaningful way legislatively?

      • SovereignState
        4•2 years ago

        I would say yes. As much as I wish socialist-scientific consensus was beyond the capitalists’ at this point, it was just the same. Slap a law on it and call it done. Contextualizing it is important, though – they were in the Orthodox religious hegemon of Eastern Europe, the Nazis had destroyed by far the most extensive and progressive scientific literature and institutions of the day related to LGBT people, setting understanding back decades if not centuries, etc. Calling Stalin personally homophobic and dismissing him wholesale for it is sorta missing the wood for the trees (or however that saying goes lol) within the context of the time period and general “scientific” consensus at the time relating to LGBT people and our struggle.

        Even out of this rubble and ruin, socialist governments inspired by the Soviet Union end up far beyond capitalist nations wrt understanding LGBT issues… the GDR was more progressive than modern Germany in some regards, Cuba is blowing the U.S. out of the water when it comes to pushing legitimate grassroots acceptance, and China continues to drop new legislation pushing forward the dialogue on LGBT rights, all in direct opposition to the conservative parts of their cultures, which is inspiring.