Joseph Stalin was a communist leader friend with Leon Trotsky
Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote “In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything” in his book “Leur morale et la nôtre”*
In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, manipulation, bribery, spying, infiltration of other political parties, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to wield political power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can’t be restrained by normal morality"
Joseph Stalin took Trotsky’s advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his personal power.
Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev:: Communist intellectual. Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone and jailed thousands of innocents. Arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the killing of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges. Also executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.
Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine’s food. In the next months, 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of Ukrainians turned to cannibalism. When Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was.
All my life I’ve seen Stalin listed with people like Hitler and Pol Pot as murderous despots. How the hell are we “not talking enough about how bad he was?”
We’re on Lemmy. A not insignificant percentage of the crowd are tankies.
the thing I love about tankies is they hate the US as much as I do 🥰
At least we can be allied with tankies about that now. 1/3rd of the country is literally in a cult and 1/3rd doesn’t really care so long as gas prices stay low.
Tbh I love America to my core. This country is amazing, and if the government was fixed it would absolutely be the best country in the world.
oh yikes; you might be on the wrong instance there, too - I don’t think loving America is consistent with being solarpunk, fyi
Why is loving people and culture against solarpunk?
If someone claimed to be a solarpunk but said said they loved Nazi Germany, would you think there was some kind of inconsistency or hypocrisy there?
Solarpunk is politically opinionated, it’s not agnostic or neutral about its political and ethical positions (about climate, about colonialism, about capitalism, etc.) - solarpunk is very critical of the United States because of this.
I am not saying I love anything about the state, in fact I generally despise our state. You specifying Nazi Germany means you are referring to the state, otherwise one would just say Germany. Which, I also love the German people and culture. I also love virtually all peoples and cultures.
Virtually all states are abhorrent actors. Very few if any have a clean record. Are all the anime fans against solarpunk because of Imperial Japan? All the classical music fans against solarpunk because of European colonialism? Should states stop us loving culture and people? Should I just give up on my love of the world because of stupid governments?
I don’t think any “tankie” is going to have their minds changed by this post. Unless they’re a 90 year old Russian who has gone out of there way to avoid “western propaganda” they’ve already heard all these points a million times over.
If anything posts like these reinforce their identity because they can dunk on them with their prepared rebuttals to all of this.
True. Tankies are in a cult.
I live in Canada, the general vibe we get through our culture and education is that Hitler was #1 worst guy in history, everyone else was a close second.
This. Even in my psychology of genocide course in uni, a lot of it was focused on Hitler being the worst, and not much about Stalin.
Sort of related sort of not, I learned in the last few years how awful the British were, too. Different levels of awful, but I’m thinking because Canada is a commonwealth country and was pretty much run by the Brits back in the day, the Brits excluded from our education the bad things they did, ie to native Americans/First Nations people, Africa, etc. I didn’t learn about any of that… So I think what they wanted people to learn and what they wanted people to forget shaped what was taught in Canadian schools.
So, like many others, I was awed and excited by the royals. Now that I know what they’ve been trying to hide, meh.
All your life you’ve lived under capitalism and have been exposed to anti-communist propaganda, because to date communism has been the only successful alternative to capitalism.
Somehow OP thinks that a lifetime of anti-communism isn’t enough anti-communism.
It’s a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.
That’s the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don’t have the tools to distinguish them that well.
And that’s how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn’t so bad actually.
So as we’re dismantling capitalism we’re going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.
Look at main lemmy dev positing essays about how great Ussr was.
Edit: https://github.com/dessalines/essays
putins most obvious influence too, or maybe they just have a lot in common
Most of the focus is on how bad communism is, not how bad its leaders were.
Edit: people are assuming that I took a stance vis-a-vis communism but I’m really talking about where western propaganda focuses
There’s a spectre haunting stoly
*how bad a straw man version of communism is
Well that was my point.
I know. I seem to be the only one who upvoted you before you made the edit.
Thank you for being charitable. People are very angry on Lemmy this week for some reason.
because most of the atrocities that Stalin commited didn’t happen in Western world.