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Edit: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
We now have literal “Soviets were godless barbarians” arguments. The revolution is never perfect enough, is it? Wish there was a time machine to send people back to moralize about doing what needs to be done and Christian moral goodness to the leaders of a nascent revolution being ruthlessly attacked on all sides. I’m going to reserve my tears for the thousands of dead Jews and millions of starving and dying peasants.
Maybe we can have a struggle session over dead teenage Nazis from WWII next time.
I don't like this. While it was probably necesarry to kill the royal family to avoid a counter-revolution or a government-in-exile, that does not mean we should make death, murder or the fear of those about to be murdered into something to laugh at.
Yes the Tzar was a murderous bastard encouraging pogroms and generally just a guy who got off easy, this photo doesn't really convey that to me. It seems like it's just laughing at something awful that happened to a family. Did the family deserve it? Yes. That doesn't mean we should make the act into something funny. Violence is necessary, but it shouldn't be glorified.
I don't think it's a black & white thing, but this image crosses my line anyway. Feels wrong.I also don't like it, mostly because i fuckin hate wojak and every one of these images is incredibly ugly.
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The difference is that we are here depicting actual people that was in this actual situation as crying wojaks and the guy who shot them as the yes-chad. It's pretty clear the intent is to ridicule and glorify.
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I think stuff like
is fine because 1. It's a Nazi and 2. It's not a real person. I think 
is fine because it was a bunch of partisans getting retribution during wartime. They had no time or resources for a fair trial and they knew the people they executed anyway, so the evidence was pretty clear.I think the reason that image crosses my line is because it depicts a traumatic event that happened to actual people, and some of those people didn't really have the agency to do anything else. I'm not sad the Romanovs are dead, and I think the overthrow and owning of a doofus failson named Nicky is something that should be celebrated, but I just don't think that justifies mocking people in their last moments. Had things been different then some of them might've gotten the Puyi treatment, it's sad that that wasn't possible. I'm not losing any sleep over it - they are caviar as their people were starving and dying at the front - but that doesn't mean I think it should be turned into an object of ridicule.
It reeks of aesthetic communism. Like some chuds support the USSR because they think the holodomor was real and they think it was a good thing. They just like cool mosin nagant, human wave death machine, lol kill people. That's what that image reeks of.
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Aesthetic communism is when you support the actual, real life actions of an actual, real life revolution.
I think stuff like
is fine because 1. It's a Nazi and 2. It's not a real person.I know a bunch of dead Nazis in a pit that would disagree with that second statement.
I think
is fine because it was a bunch of partisans getting retribution during wartime.Sounds very similar to Russia in 1918
Maybe it’s a response to the 100 years of liberals sobbing their hearts out for a murdering pogroming failson and his murdering pogroming family.
But no, I just like killing people. That’s it.
I don’t want to be hostile but I’ve got years of disingenuous libs grinding my patience down
Comrade, no reason to interpret this in the worst possible way. This wasn't meant as an insult to you or an attack on you.
Reducing this to me saying "the soviets were bad, their revolution was bad" is incredibly bad faith, or at the least incredibly reductive.
I'm sorry I've made you feel as though I think you think killing is good. It was not my intention, though I struggle to see how I created that experienceI guess it’s because that’s usually implied whenever a critique of the Romanov execution.
And I don’t mean to imply that you’re against the Soviets, I just find calling the execution “aesthetic communism” anathema.
I think talking about “killing” in a vacuum is meaningless. I’m sure most people would be against it in the abstract, but I think killing monarchs in a revolution is a justifiable action. I don’t feel insulted by anyone saying I support the Romanov execution, because that would be true, but by the implication that I support killing for the sake of it. It’s hard not to read that into the last paragraph of the comment I replied to. I certainly don’t think it takes bad faith to interpret it that way.
With the whole federation thing, it’s really hard to tell between genuine criticisms and liberals concern trolling. I’m sorry for the initial reaction.
And I don’t mean to imply that you’re against the Soviets, I just find calling the execution “aesthetic communism” anathema.
I don't think the execution was aesthetic communism.
I dislike the picture you posted, and I tried to put into words why I felt it crossed my line. One of the reasons for that was that it gave me the vibe of being something an aesthetic communist would like - I don't know if you've ever met the type, but they're kinda weird. They're stalinists because of western propaganda, not in spite of it. I can see how my phrasing made it seem like I was accusing you of being such a type, and that was not my intent. I'm sorry.I think talking about “killing” in a vacuum is meaningless. I’m sure most people would be against it in the abstract, but I think killing monarchs in a revolution is a justifiable action. I don’t feel insulted by anyone saying I support the Romanov execution, because that would be true, but by the implication that I support killing for the sake of it. It’s hard not to read that into the last paragraph of the comment I replied to.
I agree on the first part, I'm sorry about the second part.
With the whole federation thing, it’s really hard to tell between genuine criticisms and liberals concern trolling. I’m sorry for the initial reaction
I get it, though I also experienced this before federation (new account now, who dis?) and saw it happen as well. Wether it's wreckers or libs, we end up being on edge, and then this happens. It's regrettable but it is what it is. Thanks for your apology about your initial reaction.
While it was probably necesarry to kill the royal family to avoid a counter-revolution
Gestures broadly at the Russian Civil War that happened anyway.
Here's a rule for those of you at home, don't machine gun kids.
Look at Mussolini's granddaughter now. They didn't finish the job.
If she's presents anything more than an annoyance on Twitter I'm sure the Italians will flip her right-side up.
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There are still Stuart and Bonapartist pretenders, the presence or absence of heirs isn't what determines if you have an armed Royalist insurrection against you, as evidenced by the fact the civil war continued long past the murder of the royal family.
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That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
Say what you will about the CPC but at least they correctly realized that Pu-Yi didn't need to eat a bullet to head off any issues, and that was even after he collaborated with the Japanese.
the kids were an issue that could have been mitigated
the rest of them got what they fucking deserved
the kids were an issue
Badumptiss
the rest of them got what they fucking deserved
Metaphysical pablum.
i have no fucking idea what any of that means
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Obviously the kids of a deposed ruler represents far more of an issue than regular children in a country.
Right it was some great great cousin of the Tsar that opened the Soviet Union up to the west leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and not some hereditary nobody.
I seriously don’t think non-revolutionaries far after the event have a leg to stand on to critique the actions of the Bolsheviks from some Ivory Tower of morality.
I mean, they fail even a basic "ends justify the means" test given that Russia is currently a hyper-capitalistic dystopia so yeah, I don't think my critique of the path they set down is in fact ill-posed.
Capital, in all it's algorithimic and anti-humanistic glory is the supreme enemy, not some guy wearing a funny hat in a bunch of medals . The french killed their funny hat guy and 10 years later they had an Italian in an even funnier hat running things, so this notion that we can just kill our way into socialism by executing certain lineages seems a bit daft.
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misrepresent what I said by claiming that I want to “kill our way to socialism”
Well let's strip out the euphemistic cover to the following.
Bolsheviks took out an easy path to anti-revolutionary activity and stopped the flower of evil from flowering
What specifically did that involve? A smidge of killing possibly?
That arguments even worse, it takes it from "killing the kids solves a current problem" to "killing the kids may solve possible future problems", and if that's the standard, then it's never not justified killing kids, as you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues.
That argument is completely absurd. Just because you can always posit some possible future where some kid is going to cause issues doesn't mean it's likely.
I don't want to pull the "I'm a statistics professor card", but I'm literally a statistics professor so unless I see an integral over a sample space in the denominator I don't want to hear about likelihood, and especially not when someone's half-baked narrative of possible possibilities gets treated as meaningfully bearing on that likelihood.
Like are we just throwing that word around or is their some objective method that apparently everyone else knows about for now to compute these probabilities and arrive at these conclusions.
Yeah it's called guesstimating
There's no way to objectively calculate the worth of an innocent person's life anyway, so you can't really put it into a formal equation. Sometimes you just have to make decisions based on incomplete information, I don't see what the problem is. It's not like I want to kill kids, but if I evaluated that there's a high enough chance that it could save a high enough number of lives, I'd pull the lever on that trolley problem 100%. What am I, a Kantian?
If seems to me that if we're willing to acknowledge that our subjective estimation of probabilities aren't necessarily any good at predicting actual outcomes we could not only save ourselves a ton of trouble handwringing over what level of perceived benefit justifies turning on the orphan mulcher, it would also go a long way to ensuring we don't accidentally make common cause with the people who do enjoy mulching orphans.
You can pretty easily draw a thoughline from the slapdash deployment of political violence to the elevation of ghouls like Beria to the head of the organs of state.
Having royal family members can provide some legitimacy to the insurrections.
Are we idealists with a great man view of history now? Do we think these symbols actually hold real power to sway a insurrection's success one way or the other?
Eh, I think it was necessary. I think the argument Robespierre made against Louis was also cogent for the Romanovs
The notion that printed symbols on a paper can change whether or not you should machine gun kids is silly, please refer back to the previous rule.
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I'm not asking you to feel bad that it happened, I'm just making sure we're all on the same page about not machine gunning children.
I'm just making sure we're all on the same page about not machine gunning children.
I'm honestly shocked that this even has to be said here, let alone that apparently so many really aren't on the same page that machine-gunning children is both wrong and unjustifiable.
Eh, I know it's a minority position on the left but that's why it's a drum I beat every time it comes up. Unironically forced me back into religion when I realized that leftist politics without axiomatic moral grounding results in disaster.
Now I go to leftist meetings to avoid being useless and Quaker meeting to avoid being terrible.
I don't know, if the marxists or anarchists I work with irl ever said that kind of shit, I wouldn't work with them anymore (and we have discussed the topic). Simple as a that. Personally, I'm an atheist and haven't come up against any contradictions between my leftism and my morality or humanism. But if religion is what it takes for people to recognize that killing kids because of some hypothetical future scenario is wrong and will never be justified, then I say keep the churches full.
Agree ti disagree then
How are we supposed to convince people of our vision of a better world if we can't even get the easy stuff like "don't murder children" down? Christ even the liberals have the sense to pretend to feel bad about drones strikes on weddings when pressed.
I also think murdering children is bad. I think the specific situation with royal family of a monarchy is significantly different. Reducing my opinion to "machinegun kids lol" strikes me as very bad faith.
Either way I don't really think what you and I think of the murder of a royal family more than 100 years ago matters enough to get into an argument that can only sour relations. Seems unproductive. I apologise for making the mistake of stoking this argument.I'm not looking to sour relations and am not going to take your position on the matter personally, and it's not that you stoked this argument, it's that I'm actively evangilizing a humanism first leftism. I think as soon as machine gunning kids enters into the political toolkit, regardless of what problems it resolves, we've lost the plot. Whatever nuance you want to inject into the scenario is fine, but at the end of the day it does boil down to you thinking that under certain circumstances it's acceptable, so I don't think I'm unfairly characterizing your position at all.
It doesn't seem to me like you're evangelizing a human first leftism. It seems to me like you're reducing a complex argument to "you're celebrating the killing of kids, and you think kids should be killed" you've compared it to the dropping of atomic bombs on two cities.
Again I'd sincerely urge you to read Robespierres arguments against king Louis. It is not a question of punishing an individual, but eradicating a system. Those children existed as parts of that system, and would in most circumstances always exist as that. Pretending like the fear of counter-revolution being fomented once again decades later around the figure of a royal heir as some statistical unlikelyhood, is absurd when we can see exactly that having happened throughout history. As you said yourself there are still bonapartists, orleanists and the like. There's no romanovists. While the orleanists are ridiculous now, they did previously and successfully lead a counter revolution. The bonarparists did as well.
In this sense the fear of the children becoming some later legitimising fixpoint for reaction is not some person "peering into the future", it is us peering into the past. Those children did nothing wrong, but by virtue of the system they were at the top of, they would forever be threats to the USSR. In this way those children were as much a victim of the system as anyone else dying senselessly.literal infanticide becomes a political necessity as a product of MONARCHY
If they wanted their children to be safe, then they should not have forced them to be the sole inheritors of a brutal dictatorship
political necessity
Just because people stomp up and down about 'political necessity' doesn't actually conjure that ideological abstraction up into material reality. China didn't machine gun Pu Yi and incidentally, their communist party is still running the show. I don't know how difficult it is not to machine gun a 13 year old, and no amount of "you made me do this" are going to change the fact that we're the ones making the (erroneous) decision to machine gun 13 year olds.
Kind to people, ruthless to systems, folks.
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The notion that anyone can peer into the future and see all the possible outcomes to a sufficient degree of certainty to claim that the only possible outcome is to kill the kid is also very silly and Madeline Albrightesque.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children. It's terrible, but Tsar Nicholas shouldn't have created a situation where he made the existence of his family so dangerous for everyone else.
We can be absolutely certain that the possibility of reinstating the monarchy would be very bad for lots of Jewish children.
Shooting a specific Royal lineage doesn't change anything about the possibility of reinstating the Monarchy. The white's didn't evaporate after the executions in the same way that the coalitions didn't evaporate as soon as soon as Louis XVI got the chop, and the House of Windsor doesn't quake at the thought of the current Jacobite pretenders. . The notion that the fate of the revolution hangs in the balance of Alexei's life is some grade A great man theory nonsense.
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No, it wasn’t the only possible outcome but still a quite probable one.
Somehow I don't think they made this decision after siting down with a slide rule and a bunch of actuarial tables, so I don't know how they arrived at that balance of probabilities.
In reality it's more like cops defending their use of deadly force in any circumstances. They reckoned it had to be done, and their judgement is all that's needed to justify it, and now everyone else has to object to or rationalize their decision.
Ah it's about that... Yeah death for me will always be a last resort. Because if it's glorified then we will be no better. We use death as a last ditch to resolve Contradictions.
The Russian Civil War ended when the Bolsheviks depicted the Whites as the cringe wojak and themselves as the Chad wojak.
At first I wasn't going to upvote but I have to give props for kicking off a struggle session over the Romanovs
Tune in next week for the Hexbear pity parade for veterans
Again??
It’s about time for that, don’t you think?
I am so tired
I don't get people that say they miss pre-federation, because these were the pre-federation vibes to me. People willfully misinterpreting another user, assuming the worst and digging their heels in, in order to score a dunk on a fellow leftist. There's no libs in this thread and we're still fighting.
In these situations in my experience it helps a lot to use "I statement" rather than "you". So instead of saying "you're reducing my argument to saying 'killing kids is good'" then saying "I feel frustrated, because my argument has been reduced to that of 'killings kids is good'". It's basic I know, but it does a lot for keeping hostility low.
Would you look at the time?
