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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Nah comrade, really bad argument imo. People’s lives don’t stop mattering just because they’re near some larger tragedy. Each and every one of those 3000 peoples’ existence has the same weight as your own. It’s impossible to comprehend when you read about an unbelievable number of people dying but it’s true. If there are reasons they died then focus on those but saying “3000 dead is nothing” is just honestly really fucking thoughtless.
My point was in a proper analysis of this situation you dont blame the people being genocided for actions that are a response to people enacting a genocide on there own people, such as in the case we’re talking about where the soviets sent people who where enthusiastically selling out there neighbours to be transported to german ovens and gas chambers en masse; when such social conditions are enacted by the Germans and there collabartors there is no response that doesnt end in innocent people dying in some way.
The USSR did not create these conditions or social reality, I wont blame them for not making the perfect choices given that.
Thats why 3000 dead in this specific context is nothing; give your sympathy to the hundreds of thousands of people who died in German, Polish and Ukranian concentration camps before the USSR sent anyone away and your scorn for the people who put the USSR into this situation.
Okay so yeah exactly what I said, focus on the reasons for them dying and not discounting 3000 lives as nothing then talking about Napoleon losing half his army (?)
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.
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).
21 thousand Estonians were taken to gulags in Siberia
You can’t criticize this without asking “well why were they sent away?” It’s like criticizing anyone else who’s been imprisoned without asking “well what did they do?”
There were (and are) fascist sympathizers in Estonia. Fascist sympathizers all over Europe worked directly with the Nazis. What would you have done with those sympathizers if fascists declared a genocidal war on the socialist state you’re in charge of? Did the WWII-era USSR have the resources to do your better plan?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Nah comrade, really bad argument imo. People’s lives don’t stop mattering just because they’re near some larger tragedy. Each and every one of those 3000 peoples’ existence has the same weight as your own. It’s impossible to comprehend when you read about an unbelievable number of people dying but it’s true. If there are reasons they died then focus on those but saying “3000 dead is nothing” is just honestly really fucking thoughtless.
My point was in a proper analysis of this situation you dont blame the people being genocided for actions that are a response to people enacting a genocide on there own people, such as in the case we’re talking about where the soviets sent people who where enthusiastically selling out there neighbours to be transported to german ovens and gas chambers en masse; when such social conditions are enacted by the Germans and there collabartors there is no response that doesnt end in innocent people dying in some way.
The USSR did not create these conditions or social reality, I wont blame them for not making the perfect choices given that.
Thats why 3000 dead in this specific context is nothing; give your sympathy to the hundreds of thousands of people who died in German, Polish and Ukranian concentration camps before the USSR sent anyone away and your scorn for the people who put the USSR into this situation.
Okay so yeah exactly what I said, focus on the reasons for them dying and not discounting 3000 lives as nothing then talking about Napoleon losing half his army (?)
3000 broken families is nothing?
Send the bill to Germany.
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.
Shut the fuck up, you aggrieved piece of shit. This is what they were responding to:
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).
You can’t criticize this without asking “well why were they sent away?” It’s like criticizing anyone else who’s been imprisoned without asking “well what did they do?”
There were (and are) fascist sympathizers in Estonia. Fascist sympathizers all over Europe worked directly with the Nazis. What would you have done with those sympathizers if fascists declared a genocidal war on the socialist state you’re in charge of? Did the WWII-era USSR have the resources to do your better plan?
Wow I wonder why Estonians who collaborated with Nazis were arrested
Fuck off smuglord