"Its the Lesser Evil"

Slammer meme for palate cleanser

25 comments

I wonder. I left Reddit to stop using American services. I was warned back then that Lemmy is only good for tech news and literal communists. I was very skeptical, but all the meme communities seem to be promoting hammer and sickle symbols. Last time I spoke out about it I was immediately banned from the community. This is so weird. Why are people standing behind hammer and sickle? It's a horrible symbol with a horrible history, but many seem enamoured with it. Why? It's illegal to use it where I live, just like it's illegal to wear swastikas and heil hitler. It's not at all a controversial law, never been protested, people just know our history. Why are Americans so quick to wear Soviet insignia?
edit: spelling
- The Soviets instituted the death penalty for possessing an antisemitic book.
  Soviet policies lead Transnistrians to resist antisemitism, even during Axis occupation.
  The Red Army had the highest number of Jews of all the Allied armies.
- Without the Stalin and the Soviet Union you wouldn't even fucking alive you ungrateful little shit
- The soviets were based, actually. They defeated the Nazis and the world wil never forgive them for it.
  
  Were they? What does that mean to you? I'm assuming you're from US or somewhere very detached from any actual Soviet influence (please correct me if I'm wrong).
  Their army was "based" in my country for many decades... As in, had military bases, after attacking us together with Hitler. They even had a nice victory parade together. They helped defeat the Nazis after first helping them start the war, and then turned half of the world into a sad totalitarian prison.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military_parade_in_Brest-Litovsk
  I hope you can reconsider.
  
  It was extremely obvious war was coming with the Germans eventually, as much as the USSR would've loved to avoid it to build up their capacity more, I'm sure. Germany was filled with anti-communist propaganda, they arrested and killed a lot of their own communists, a lot of their antisemitic propaganda associated the Jews with communists (the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory that continues in conservative circles to this day). Germany and Japan literally made an anti-communist pact in 1936 that Italy later joined. They were on opposite sides of the Spanish Civil War, etc.
  They tried to ally with the West first but weren't able to because the West didn't like communism, and preferred to just go with the policy of appeasement to avoid a war without having to ally with the USSR. So they ended up making a non-aggression pact with Germany to protect themselves. It's the same reason they expanded their border area, to protect themselves and give them the time for the inevitable future conflict they knew was coming with the Nazis. Remember, they were still recovering from World War 1 and various civil wars. At first, they tried to do it through a treaty so their troops could move through Poland voluntarily to help defend against Germany, but they refused.
  And let's not forget that the US does the same thing, but worse, expanding their military bases not for defensive reasons but for imperialist reasons, all around the world.
  
  "Would have loved"... "Expanded their border area"... That sounds so innocent. Inappropriate words for what that regime represented and what they did with the countries they colonized. The terror, genocides, poverty, famine and the sheer gray hopelessness of life for generations. It's surreal reading people who praise them because they were "not as bad as Nazis". Firstly - disputable claim. But even if you grant that (which many survivors of WWII would be reluctant to do)... that's as low a bar as you can set.
  I understand that this is mostly posted/read by young Americans, rather privileged and removed from the subject matter. I'm hoping you can reconsider your positions - probably not now, but maybe some time in the future. Try to see this from the perspective of all those "buffer countries" full of non-people born into "zones of influence" where it's ok to "expand your border area". It's extremely soulless.
  But at least this Lemmy instance hasn't banned me (so far) for hating communism :)
  
  What genocides? There's the Holodomor, but historians don't agree that was a purposeful targeted famine, so much as failed policy and bad luck. That's like saying the Great Dust Bowl was a famine against the Midwest. They were a new society trying a new form of government and production for the first time after multiple wars. Famine happened all the time during the tsar's rule, and stopped happening after the World Wars, when the USSR figured it out. Even the CIA at a certain point said that they ate as much in the USSR as they did in the US, just healthier lol.
  And sheer grey hopelessness of life? From the society that went to space first, that revitalized numerous liberation movements around the world like Cuba and Vietnam, that helped women gain equality in the fields of science and technology? They weren't perfect and did plenty of things wrong but weren't anything close to the Nazis like you seem to be implying.
  In fact, most people would have preferred the USSR didn't dissolve in the countries it was in. And speaking of poverty, the dissolution of the USSR was way worse for those countries.
  
  I don’t see how a Union that prevented another Polish famine and helped reconstruct Poland was worse than an anticommunist empire that exterminated at least 1.8 million Poles in a settler-colonial project and would have annihilated millions more had the Axis won, but then again, I have nothing against Poles either. Sorry that you have no respect for your own people, I guess.
  I understand that this is mostly posted/read by young Americans, rather privileged and removed from the subject matter.
  Guess what, I can still find Poles like @Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml and @PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml who aren’t anticommunist at all. You want a fucking medal or something? You aren’t anything special.
  
  You get really hung up on borders. Let me ask you something: when did Poland become an independent nation?
  
  It marked the withdrawal of German troops to the demarcation line secretly agreed to in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and the handover of the city and its fortress to the Soviet Red Army.
  You do realize non-aggression treaties are not the same as being allies, right? And it was broken only 2 years later. And a condition of the pact was for the nazis to withdraw from the area?
  Also there's the fact that you're using fucking Wikipedia as a source. How pathetic.
  
  At this point I guess we're both using fucking Wikipedia. My bad, I must have selected the wrong version. I'll try to link to regular Wikipedia next time! :) Meanwhile, no need to be hostile.
  Seriously, though - I think the Sources section in Wiki is plenty rich if you want to go and dig deeper or challenge the factuality of the wiki article itself (which I don't think you are, but again, correct me).
  You are introducing the term "allies" to the discussion, so feel free to define it as you will. Soviets did invade Poland in 1939, and we remember how they treated Warsaw Uprising, what they did in Katyń, and what they did to people who fought for Polish independence. It was really nothing new vs. what pre-Soviet Russia was doing to us.
  I need to go get some sleep, goodnight everyone.
  
  Wikipedia’s intentional distortion of the Holocaust.
- Eesti Lemmy baby misses their soviet glory days
  
  I don't understand this comment :)

25 comments