• Sundial@lemm.ee
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      11 days ago

      I did in a different comment jn this thread. This person told me to read alternate sources such as Blackshirts and Reds. I did. It just backed up what I was reading on Wikipedia.

          • ThermonuclearEgg [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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            11 days ago

            They don’t think that Blackshirts and Reds was backing up what you read in Wikipedia when you (allegedly) would have been reading quotes like the following, and didn’t even comment on them. You didn’t even have to actually read the book to see these, they’re right here on WikiQuote.

            During the Cold War, the anti-communist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

            During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism didn’t work” is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

            If anything, the breakup of the communist states has brought a colossal victory for global capitalism and imperialism, with its correlative increase in human misery, and a historic setback for revolutionary liberation struggles everywhere. There will be harder times ahead for even modestly reformist national governments, as the fate of Panama and Iraq have indicated. The breakup also means a net loss of global pluralism and more intensive socio-economic inequality throughout the world.

            Now, I’ll freely admit I haven’t read it, but since you say you have, and the full text is right here for all of us to see whether you’re being honest about it, would you be so kind as to point out a specific quote that supports your claims?

            • Bureaucrat@hexbear.net
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              11 days ago

              They say chapter five uses “the same numbers” as the ones they’ve quoted, which is funny since they haven’t quoted any numbers.