emizeko

joined 5 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Marxism is dialectic, it rejects absolute pure categories. Things sort of exist on a spectrum but sort of don't. The way Marxists use categories is to understand that everything is connected to each other through a series of quantifiable interconnected steps, but that something is always dominant, and this dominant aspect is what determines the overall quality of the thing in question.

If you're trying to shove everything into a pure category of absolutely worker, absolutely capitalist, then this is just a useless endeavor. When we talk of "worker" or "capitalist," we don't mean it as if these are pure categories, where a worker can't ever own capital, or that a capitalist can't ever do labor. They may do these things, they may exist somewhere in between. But clearly at some point, certain characteristics become dominant over others. Clearly Jeff Bezos's class interests are not the same as a minimum wage worker, as the latter likely has next to no capital while the former has far more capital than he could ever, by his own labor, afford.

There is no reason to try and shove this person you're describing into a specific absolute box. If they're a salaried worker who runs some very small business / self-employment on the side as supplemental income, you could just say they're a worker with petty bourgeois characteristics. You don't have to say they're absolutely "petty bourgeois" or a "worker". You can just describe that they have characteristics of multiple categories. No reason you cannot do this.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/vcbu0m/a_question_about_the_marxist_class_structure/icdkond/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Libs don't know any basic history. They claim Hitler "allied" with the USSR because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, ignoring that:

  1. Hitler openly declared his intention to invade the USSR in Mein Kampf and the Soviet archives show us Soviet leadership was well aware of this. It's absurd to suggest they ever had any sort of mutual trust that could be considered an "alliance" since the Soviets were convinced Germany was planning to invade them. Only a year after the pact which is supposedly an "alliance," the Soviet government declared the Wehrmacht as "the most dangerous threat to the Soviet Union." Soviet spies also repeatedly even reported on potential invasions, with Richard Sorge even reporting the exact date of the invasion. Western media likes to portray this 1939-1941 period as an "alliance" where the Hitler breaking the pact was a "sudden shock" to the Soviets, when in reality, the Soviets were paranoid of being invaded, they all were convinced they were going to be invaded, and historians universally agree they were trying to militarily prepare for an invasion.
  2. The Munich Agreement signed by western powers such as France and UK also agreed to partition Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler. Was this an alliance? No, it was appeasement. In hindsight, appeasement was the wrong decision, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20. The Holocaust did not begin until 1941, years after both these agreements, and you can't know if someone will break the agreement until they already broke it. In other words, knowing this was a bad decision required seeing into the future. If Hitler never carried out a Holocaust, and WW2 was completely avoided, then we wouldn't be looking back on history with things like Molotov-Ribbontrop pact and the Munich Agreement so poorly.
  3. Appeasement could have been avoided in its entirety if UK and France agreed to have a mutual defense treaty with the USSR to contain Germany. The USSR proposed this to the UK and France, but were ignored (source). If you are a weakened country from war, your powerful neighbor has openly stated they wish to invade you, and no one wants to form a military alliance with you, how do you possibly defend yourself? Through appeasement of course.
  4. Appeasement did at least delay WW2. The Soviets were very weak from WW1 and their civil war. They needed time to build up their industry, and this should not be understated. You can see a graph here of how fast they were industrializing. Given how close the war between Germany and the Soviets were, without delaying the war, the Soviets might have lost, meaning that this pact delaying the war is arguably one of the most humanitarian political decisions ever carried out, since it prevented the Holocaust from spreading to all of eastern Europe. To quote Stalin, "What did we gain by concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany? We secured our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing our forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack on our country despite the pact. This was a definite advantage for us and a disadvantage for fascist Germany."
  5. Some will say the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is worse than the Munich Agreement because the partition of Poland also included a joint invasion. But nothing in the agreement actually calls for an invasion. The Soviets could've not entered de facto Polish territory at all and still the agreement would not have been voided. It only called for "spheres of influence," meaning that both powers would not try to stretch any of their political influence beyond certain defined boundaries. So the Soviet entry into Polish de facto territory should be treated as a separate question to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact itself.
  6. Indeed, the Soviets did end up militarily entering de facto Polish territory in response to seeing the Germans invade Poland. But what you aren't told is that much of this territory either belonged to Soviet Russia or Ukraine prior, and that Poland took this territory after embarking on an imperialistic conquest, viewing themselves as the rightful inheritors of the Polish empire that existed some centuries prior, so they tried to expand their borders to take land that was the same as that empire.
  7. What cities did the Soviets invade? If you name them, you quickly find none of them are actually part of Poland today. They were only held by Poland for an incredibly brief period of time, after Poland's invasion of Ukraine and Russia, and prior to the Soviets taking the land back, not even 2 decades, about 18 years. The only exception is Bialystok and a few small towns around it, which did go beyond what the Poles originally took, but the Soviets restored this land pretty quickly after the Poles complained. The Soviets had no intent to "conquer" or "occupy" Poland, but just took their land back which rightfully belonged to them in the first place.
  8. Take Lviv for example. Lviv was controlled by Ukraine, and the declared capitol of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Poland invaded and the government retreated into exile, and then held this land for 18 years until Soviet Ukraine with the rest of the Soviet Union took it back. It seems to set a weird precedence to insist a country invading another to restore its empire from centuries ago is justified, but that one country using its military to take back land stolen not even a quarter of a lifetime ago is actually the evil one.
  9. Poland was settling large amounts of Poles into the territory it took and oppressing the Ukrainians there, rounding them up and putting them into concentration camps. Naturally, this made Poland take interest in Nazi ideology, and came under heavy influence of Nazi Germany. To quote Boris Shaposhnikov from the time, "Poland is already [drawn] into the orbit of the Fascist bloc while seeking to demonstrate supposed independence of its foreign policy."
  10. Soviet entry into Polish occupied territory also provided a pathway for Soviets to begin evacuating Jews from the Holocaust. To quote James Rosenberg, "of some 1,750,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping the Axis since the outbreak of hostilities, about 1,600,000 were evacuated by the Soviet Government from Eastern Poland and subsequently occupied Soviet territory and transported far into the Russian interior."
  11. While the Soviets eventually did cross into actually rightfully Polish land, this was only when Germany had already taken it over and attacked the USSR, and Germany was carrying out the Holocaust at this point. Meaning, the Soviets liberating Poland from the Nazis is a good thing, and they should be grateful for it, and owe a debt to the Soviet army.
  12. Even some western powers were in agreement that the Soviets were right in the expanding in order to contain Hitler. Churchill, for example, would even admit that the Soviet entry into the Baltics was a positive thing because it could help contain Hitler (source). So it's really a new-age historical revisionism to act like nobody knew Hitler had expansionist tendencies and that the Soviets were not in the right trying to contain it.

To summarize: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was one of the most humanitarian political decisions in human history. Soviets were trapped in a corner with no allies willing to help them and knowing German expansionism was coming, which would spread the Holocaust throughout all of Eureasia, and they made the hard decisions necessary to stop it, as well as liberating territory unrightfully occupied by Poland that rightfully belonged to several other republics, notably Ukraine. There are millions of people's lives we can point to who were directly saved by this, but potentially tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, who would've died if the Germans managed to defeat the Soviet Union.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/CommunismMemes/comments/vf79er/an_old_political_cartoon_im_sure_theyd_make_a/icuhcvb/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Liberal economics is not a science but based on bad philosophy and assumptions about human psychology, dreamt up by "economists" with no background in psychology nor based on any empirical research, which have never been demonstrated in practice. Not only aren't they demonstrated, but they build mathematical models on top of these assumptions, but if the assumptions are meaningless, all the models are meaningless.

If you point this out, they will tell you, "sure, these assumptions aren't literally true, but they're just approximate." But in any rigorous science, if you approximate something, you're expected to calculate your error bars, so you can have an idea of just how approximate it is. If you don't, then for all you know, the error bars can be so big it has no relation to the real world. No liberal economist can tell you any way to actually determine how inaccurate their assumptions are, so you end up with a lot of maths, but none of it points back to anything real.

Conveniently, though, their maths just so happen to always work out to prove the conclusions they started with: free markets are inherently good, state controls are inherently bad. They have never updated their theories after witnessing their complete failure in eastern Europe, they in fact try to rewrite history to pretend like it was state controls that destroyed Russia's economy and free market anarchy that saved China's, which, as this video shows, the most basic overview of the facts shows to be the exact opposite of what happened.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/v8n50b/how_china_actually_got_rich_by_the_gravel/ibrgh7h/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Marxists do not claim people should just work for society because of some selfless feelings, Marx was personally annoyed with people who constantly said this and commented on it himself:

Communists do not oppose egoism...The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc...the Communists by no means want to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general", selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.

—Marx, The German Ideology

The reason Marx saw a post-capitalist society as having socialized production, where people work for society, is because they have to. But, I know what you're thinking, "that's authoritarian!" But you'd be misunderstanding, he did not believe people would work socially because the government would tell them to at gunpoint or that owning a private business would be against the law.

No, he thought they would work socially because any other sort of economic arrangement would simply not be possible. Even if you changed the laws to allow for starting a private business, you still could not start one, because it would just not be something feasible people could do.

Why? Because Marx observed that in all capitalist societies, private enterprises always grow in scale, and the proportion of small businesses to big is continually shrinking. The more this goes on, the smaller the proportion of businesses owners to workers in a society becomes, the more and more small businesses go bankrupt and people the business owners then become regular workers.

Why does this happen? Because the government outlawed private businesses? No, because as businesses grow in size, the smaller businesses that can't keep up eventually just can't compete and are less efficient and go bankrupt.

Not only this, but as businesses get bigger, the barrier of entry constantly rises. Can you start a small business in your basement to compete with Samsung? Of course not, you need hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to even begin to compete!

Again, it's not the government making it illegal to own a business. It's the physical conditions of everyday life making it simply impossible to own one no matter what the laws say.

It is a misunderstanding of Marxism to think that what Marx had in mind was just to make all private businesses illegal. Rather, the vision he had was to nationalize the "big industry" which has already grown so large that there is hardly much competition anymore anyways, and then to use it to try and speed up economic development, because this will make more of the small business sector grow into big businesses, and then eventually they too can be nationalized.

Hence, Marx argued for a gradual, "by degree" nationalization process, alongside encouraging rapid economic development, "the development of the productive forces." Not just making all private enterprise illegal.

People would work for this big industry because there would simply be no other industry to work for and it would not be physically possible for them to start a small business even if the laws allowed them to.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/v5p1pe/forcing_people_to_work/ibjupi2/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"Left unity" is pointless. If you have a total of 5 leftists in your country, it doesn't matter if they all unify, they're still powerless. People seem to have this delusion that if only Marxists and anarchists stopped fighting, they could come together in countries like the US and take power, but in reality, this is more likely to be the result.

It's also completely backwards. No revolution has been carried out by only class conscious communists. Communists have to learn how to appeal to the masses, and the masses then have to support it. This is the problem, the highly class conscious communists will always be in small numbers, and will never have the numbers on their own, even if they all unify together.

Historically, the socialists and communists that come to power are rarely even the result of "unity", but it's always one specific section overtakes everyone else by storm. That's because some organization figures out a way to rally the masses, and once you get the masses on your side, all other organizations get in line or get destroyed.

The problem is not lack of left unity, but lack of any organizations that have figured out a way to rally the masses. Nobody has figured out how to overcome all the anti-communist brainwashing and to have a message that appeals. It's only been successful in colonized countries but not in the colonizer countries.

People who act like there's some simple solution that we're just all too stupid to see, like, "if we just all stopped fighting we'd win the revolution!" are not appreciating just how difficult the problem is. The reason communists have not succeeded in colonizer countries is not because they're all missing something "so simple", but because the problem is fucking hard, and they have a mountain to climb.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/v705lj/left_unity_specifically_with_post_leftist_anti/ibjsokd/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Liberal conception of "human rights" is just so stupid.

You have the "right" to own things, but you don't have the right to the means to actually own things, so in practice you might own nothing, but who cares? This piece of paper says it's your "right" to do so!

You have the "right" to free speech, but you don't have the right to an actual platform, i.e. the right for your speech to actually be heard. If the system doesn't like what you say, they can just kick you from all platforms. You have the "right" to shout as loud as you want as long as it's in a place no one can hear you, so you don't actually have the right for your speech to actually mean anything.

That's how all liberal "rights" are. They're in practice useless, because you have the right to something in principle, but don't have the right to actually use that right, you just have the right in some vague, ethereal, almost magical sense, disconnected from reality, and many indeed view it as magic, saying these "rights" are handed down by God almighty and not social constructions.

Because you can't actually use these "rights" in practice, then in the real world, they only serve as justification for restricting people's freedoms. Why does this corporate giant get to censor dissenters? Because they have the "right" to do what they want with their platform! Why do billionaires get the "right" to control hoards of wealth and other people's labor? Because they have the "right" to do so! Why does this landlord get to tell me how I should live when I'm the one taking care of the actual apartment and living here? Because they have the "right"!

It's a funny thing, because it is very reminiscent of divine right of kings. Since many people genuinely believe these rights come from God almighty, then suddenly, Jeff Bezos's rule becomes sanctioned by God almighty. It's not much different than saying, the king has the authority to control the nation's wealth and its people, because the "right" was given to them from on high!

from https://np.reddit.com/r/CommunismMemes/comments/v5np64/liberals_and_libertarians_say_we_will_starve_yet/ibbdjhq/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The reason libs do this is because they're so extremely dogmatic that they don't even see their ideology as an ideology anymore but simply a "fact", and thus they don't see their political and economic system they advocate for as having anything to do with ideology but is merely based on "facts", so they ultimately see capitalism and support for capitalism as being devoid of any ideology. If there is no ideology involved in the justification, construction, or maintenance of a capitalist society, then you can't blame any ideology if people die in it. In fact, these people just view capitalism as "natural", and therefore, if anyone dies, it might be sad, but they died of "natural causes". Millions dying of a preventable disease because the system did nothing to respond to it, this can't be attributed to failures of liberal ideology, because to them, it's more comparable to like deaths from a hurricane. It's a natural disaster to them and nothing more.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/v4n3nr/neolib_says_that_socialism_is_a_failed_ideology/ib7ii8i/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Westerners are the most propagandized people on the planet. While, yes, something like CCTV is clearly biased, people who watch CCTV can at least tell you it is biased and admit they are getting info from a particular point of view. Westerners have a tendency to not view their propaganda as biased at all, but merely as "facts" and "common sense". They don't even see the BBC, PBS, RFA, VOCMF, CNN, MSNBC, etc, as a particular point of view with its own agenda. They just gobble it up as the unbiased truth.

It's why there are so many subreddits, Discord servers, etc, which have a rule that bans "talking about politics", but then somehow this rule never seems to apply to western media propaganda. They will randomly start China bashing and if you disagree they will accuse you of talking about politics and ban you. Because to them, these absurd headlines about China are not a particular point of view pushed by their media for geopolitical reasons but is simply a "fact" with no political content.

It's why they will accept tons of media being filled with western propaganda, like movies and games that include modern military equipment often working directly with the US military to make them and being required to depict the US military positively and to allow the US military to edit and remove anything from the movie or game, they see this as not "political" but if a game removes something because of outcry from Chinese fans or there is some leftist message put in a game, they will decry it as "bringing politics into my video games!"

The word "propaganda" in and of itself has a bit of a foreign connotation in English, by that I mean that it's often associated with things from foreign countries and not from your own. People tend to see "propaganda" as "something foreign countries have" and not something they have to worry about.

No matter how hard you try, for the vast majority, you cannot even get them to consider the possibility that maybe a media organization created directly by the US government through an act of Congress with an explicitly stated purpose of pushing ideas to disparage countries like China might be an incredibly biased source and might have be inclined to push narratives to further a geopolitical agenda, and when his only citation is an "anonymous" source maybe you shouldn't take it too seriously.

This is pretty much impossible to even get them to consider. It's like they have some blocker in their brain that makes it nearly impossible for them to even entertain this idea in their head.

It's also why they call us things like "wumao" and "Russian bot", because since they believe their media is simply "fact", they legitimately believe it's not even possible to actually disagree with it. That means if you claim to disagree with it, in their mind, you must be lying. And why would you lie? Because you must be paid to do it!

It's even further the reason why they are so ready to support invasions, sanctioning, bombing, etc of other countries, because in their mind, since no one can truly disagree with western propaganda except those who are paid for it, they genuinely believe the people of these countries all themselves agree with western propaganda. They think while the Chinese government, for example, pushes one narrative, in reality, all the citizens of China secretly believe the western narrative and are begging for their white saviors to "liberate" them.

It's why they say "I support the people but not the government of China", because they genuinely think they are saviors of the Chinese people from their evil government and the Chinese people secretly want to be "liberated" by them. But I have seen this façade break down very quickly in the rare instances that they actually talk to a Chinese person, they don't agree with their beliefs, and then the yankee accuses the Chinese person of being a "brainwashed ultranationalist" simply for not hating their own country and its achievements.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/uwwvqn/interesting_i_wonder_what_that_source_is/i9usz08/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

He explains it well. It is so frustrating to argue with libs who make arguments so old that literally Marx himself responded to them. I get the impression that Marxists already won the debate back in the 19th century and the liberal tactic has just been to pretend the debate has never happened, to continue repeating centuries-old arguments over and over again as if they've never been responded to, and to discourage anyone from looking into Marxism or reading Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.

—zhenli真理 comments on Why we say Read Theory; From A Marxist-Leninist Perspective

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Whether a country is a democracy or not depends on whether its people are really the masters of the country. If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

TBD: determine source of this alternate translation, I believe it is from a press release about the 2021 conference where Xi Jinping gave this speech

from https://redsails.org/xi-on-democracy/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

A Marxist understanding of capitalism leads to anti-imperialism. Anti-imperialism is understood by detractors as a simple rhetorical dressing over simplistic heuristics like “reflexive anti-americanism,” “history repeats itself,” and “the military-industrial complex needs contracts,” but all of these are reductive. Marxists understand that human political leadership in the imperial periphery, whether enlightened or tyrannical, will only be antagonized by empire for one single possible reason: it is getting in the way of market penetration. This is phrased succinctly by Kevin Dooley when criticizing Noam Chomsky’s support for a military alliance between the Kurds and the USA in Syria: “The difference between [Chomsky’s] position and a hard-line anti-imperialist position isn’t tactical. What he’s arguing is simply a violation of anti-imperialist principles based on a fundamentally different understanding of what can drive the empire to act in the world.” [16]

The accusation that anti-imperialists are unconcerned with human rights deserves a sharp rebuke. The USA was born of slavery and genocide, dropped atomic bombs as a matter of political brinkmanship, imported Nazi scientists and installed war criminals like Klaus Barbie and Nobusuke Kishi around the world to defend and advance anti-communist positions [17], and enthusiastically supports gruesome butcherers today. Simply put, Capital has destroyed innumerable countries and murdered hundreds of millions directly and indirectly. It is precisely a concern for the rights of humans that should make one immediately skeptical of any humanitarian posturing by Capital. Anti-imperialism not only means support for the important pro-social projects of states like Cuba, Vietnam, and China; it also means critical support for non-socialist states such as Iran and Russia. Critical support acknowledges that, though instituting various indefensible policies, enemies of empire are not being antagonized because of said policies. The only thing that can drive empire to act in the world is capital accumulation.

from https://redsails.org/why-marxism/

 

careful, you can get lost in these stories they are kind of a train wreck. the worst one I've read about so far was (cw: torture) the attackers who tortured a guy for an hour with a heavy drill and made his four-year-old daughter watch

 

one of many great paragraphs:

The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda (in Gramscian: organs of coercion and consent). We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

 

Libs don't know any basic history. They claim Hitler "allied" with the USSR because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, ignoring that:

  1. Hitler openly declared his intention to invade the USSR in Mein Kampf and the Soviet archives show us Soviet leadership was well aware of this. It's absurd to suggest they ever had any sort of mutual trust that could be considered an "alliance" since the Soviets were convinced Germany was planning to invade them. Only a year after the pact which is supposedly an "alliance," the Soviet government declared the Wehrmacht as "the most dangerous threat to the Soviet Union." Soviet spies also repeatedly even reported on potential invasions, with Richard Sorge even reporting the exact date of the invasion. Western media likes to portray this 1939-1941 period as an "alliance" where the Hitler breaking the pact was a "sudden shock" to the Soviets, when in reality, the Soviets were paranoid of being invaded, they all were convinced they were going to be invaded, and historians universally agree they were trying to militarily prepare for an invasion.
  2. The Munich Agreement signed by western powers such as France and UK also agreed to partition Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler. Was this an alliance? No, it was appeasement. In hindsight, appeasement was the wrong decision, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20. The Holocaust did not begin until 1941, years after both these agreements, and you can't know if someone will break the agreement until they already broke it. In other words, knowing this was a bad decision required seeing into the future. If Hitler never carried out a Holocaust, and WW2 was completely avoided, then we wouldn't be looking back on history with things like Molotov-Ribbontrop pact and the Munich Agreement so poorly.
  3. Appeasement could have been avoided in its entirety if UK and France agreed to have a mutual defense treaty with the USSR to contain Germany. The USSR proposed this to the UK and France, but were ignored (source). If you are a weakened country from war, your powerful neighbor has openly stated they wish to invade you, and no one wants to form a military alliance with you, how do you possibly defend yourself? Through appeasement of course.
  4. Appeasement did at least delay WW2. The Soviets were very weak from WW1 and their civil war. They needed time to build up their industry, and this should not be understated. You can see a graph here of how fast they were industrializing. Given how close the war between Germany and the Soviets were, without delaying the war, the Soviets might have lost, meaning that this pact delaying the war is arguably one of the most humanitarian political decisions ever carried out, since it prevented the Holocaust from spreading to all of eastern Europe. To quote Stalin, "What did we gain by concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany? We secured our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing our forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack on our country despite the pact. This was a definite advantage for us and a disadvantage for fascist Germany."
  5. Some will say the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is worse than the Munich Agreement because the partition of Poland also included a joint invasion. But nothing in the agreement actually calls for an invasion. The Soviets could've not entered de facto Polish territory at all and still the agreement would not have been voided. It only called for "spheres of influence," meaning that both powers would not try to stretch any of their political influence beyond certain defined boundaries. So the Soviet entry into Polish de facto territory should be treated as a separate question to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact itself.
  6. Indeed, the Soviets did end up militarily entering de facto Polish territory in response to seeing the Germans invade Poland. But what you aren't told is that much of this territory either belonged to Soviet Russia or Ukraine prior, and that Poland took this territory after embarking on an imperialistic conquest, viewing themselves as the rightful inheritors of the Polish empire that existed some centuries prior, so they tried to expand their borders to take land that was the same as that empire.
  7. What cities did the Soviets invade? If you name them, you quickly find none of them are actually part of Poland today. They were only held by Poland for an incredibly brief period of time, after Poland's invasion of Ukraine and Russia, and prior to the Soviets taking the land back, not even 2 decades, about 18 years. The only exception is Bialystok and a few small towns around it, which did go beyond what the Poles originally took, but the Soviets restored this land pretty quickly after the Poles complained. The Soviets had no intent to "conquer" or "occupy" Poland, but just took their land back which rightfully belonged to them in the first place.
  8. Take Lviv for example. Lviv was controlled by Ukraine, and the declared capitol of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Poland invaded and the government retreated into exile, and then held this land for 18 years until Soviet Ukraine with the rest of the Soviet Union took it back. It seems to set a weird precedence to insist a country invading another to restore its empire from centuries ago is justified, but that one country using its military to take back land stolen not even a quarter of a lifetime ago is actually the evil one.
  9. Poland was settling large amounts of Poles into the territory it took and oppressing the Ukrainians there, rounding them up and putting them into concentration camps. Naturally, this made Poland take interest in Nazi ideology, and came under heavy influence of Nazi Germany. To quote Boris Shaposhnikov from the time, "Poland is already [drawn] into the orbit of the Fascist bloc while seeking to demonstrate supposed independence of its foreign policy."
  10. Soviet entry into Polish occupied territory also provided a pathway for Soviets to begin evacuating Jews from the Holocaust. To quote James Rosenberg, "of some 1,750,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping the Axis since the outbreak of hostilities, about 1,600,000 were evacuated by the Soviet Government from Eastern Poland and subsequently occupied Soviet territory and transported far into the Russian interior."
  11. While the Soviets eventually did cross into actually rightfully Polish land, this was only when Germany had already taken it over and attacked the USSR, and Germany was carrying out the Holocaust at this point. Meaning, the Soviets liberating Poland from the Nazis is a good thing, and they should be grateful for it, and owe a debt to the Soviet army.
  12. Even some western powers were in agreement that the Soviets were right in the expanding in order to contain Hitler. Churchill, for example, would even admit that the Soviet entry into the Baltics was a positive thing because it could help contain Hitler (source). So it's really a new-age historical revisionism to act like nobody knew Hitler had expansionist tendencies and that the Soviets were not in the right trying to contain it.

To summarize: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was one of the most humanitarian political decisions in human history. Soviets were trapped in a corner with no allies willing to help them and knowing German expansionism was coming, which would spread the Holocaust throughout all of Eureasia, and they made the hard decisions necessary to stop it, as well as liberating territory unrightfully occupied by Poland that rightfully belonged to several other republics, notably Ukraine. There are millions of people's lives we can point to who were directly saved by this, but potentially tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, who would've died if the Germans managed to defeat the Soviet Union.

 

Q: Somebody told me that whites used to pay to throw balls at blacks at the circus. Is this true?

 

[story is from 2012]

MIAMI (Reuters) - For almost three decades after Fidel Castro took power, Cuba’s budding intelligence service fielded four dozen double agents in a world-class operation under the nose of the CIA, according to a new book by a veteran CIA analyst.

 

long live the Bolivarian revolution

 

:maybe-later-kiddo:

 

this is the lost episode of Frost/Christman and now that I see the guest it all makes sense

 

incidents occurred in the 1990s, story is from 2009

In the interview, Hiss described how his doctors would mask the removal of corneas from bodies. "We'd glue the eyelid shut," he said. "We wouldn't take corneas from families we knew would open the eyelids."

 

pokémon foucault to the polls

 

for anyone who wasn't around for the dustup when r/ContraPoints declared war on the old subreddit, here's a sample of the moderation team's style:


I've asked you

TWO

Extremely clear questions.

ONE:

CAN YOU ABIDE BY OUR COMMUNITY'S RULES?

and

TWO:

WERE YOU TRYING TO CALL ME A LIAR?

These are questions I asked YOU.

You can answer them -- or not.

And you can participate here.

Or not.

The moderation team of /r/ContraPoints is the moderation team of /r/ContraPoints.

YOU are NOT on it.

Before 35 minutes ago, you'd never participated in our community.

How we run our community is our business, and the business of the people who participate here in good faith.

We don't allow disrespect; We don't allow verbal or emotional abuse; We don't allow people to brigade our subreddit and post off-topic posts and metadrama.

What YOU think you know about our moderation team is informed solely by third-hand hearsay and screenshots released by someone abusing their position, edited and therefore cherry picked to support a narrative.

That narrative is abusive.

It will not be allowed.

No one will be allowed to come here and back-seat run our subreddit, or light torches and brandish pitchforks.

So now,

THREE Questions:

The first two still must be answered,

and

AM I PERFECTLY CLEAR THAT YOU ARE NOT A MODERATOR OF THIS SUBREDDIT?

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