There is something really twisted about how tankies will go around spreading not just genocide denial, but straight up genocide glorification and celebration of the worst war criminals in the human history, but then turn around and say "I'm just an innocent blorbo 👉👈 All I want is free healthcare and people hate me for no reason???" and get hundreds of thousands notes
This is how you get american teens lecturing eastern europeans about "real communism" they learned from memes and breadtube videos
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"Oh my intractable wound
My homeland is not a suitcase
and I am not a traveler
I am the lover and the land is the beloved
Hail the people of Lebanon who remain steadfast in the south"
Mahmoud Darwish
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
Lebanon
1970
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‘Socialism has never worked’?
What do you call Russia, China, and Cuba functionally eradicating homelessness and illiteracy in their respective spheres within a few years of the massive upheaval of revolution, and radically improving the living conditions of millions after generations of poverty?
What do you call the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen and emerging victorious?
What do you call the Soviet Union holding out for four decades of sustained military and economic warfare against the greatest military and economic superpower the world has ever known?
What do you call Vietnam defeating the greatest military empire the world has ever known in its anti-imperialist resistance campaign?
What do you call China emerging from the 20th Century as the most populous country on earth with the highest GDP?
What do you call China reducing daily covid numbers to double digits in a population of 1.4 billion?
What do you call Cuba thriving after six decades of brutal embargoes?
What do you call Cuba passing the most progressive and practically protective legislation for family and LGBT rights in a world historical moment marked by increased LGBTphobia among the Western powers?
What do you call the people of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe shrugging off the muck of ages to usher in an era of progress, all while Western powers conspire to sabotage them at every turn while growing fat off the earth they’ve scorched?
I’d ask what history books you’re reading, but I know that you’re not reading any, and the only information you have on the subject is spoon-fed into your colonised mind by the people’s enemies, whose vested interest in fabricating events is readily apparent to any who bother to look into these things.
‘Socialism has never worked’? It has been one of the dominant political-economic models of the past century, and has made drastic strides on every front despite its relative infancy and constant opposition from Western superpowers. If you fear socialism, what do you really fear? Socialism is the people. Socialism is me; socialism is you; socialism is all of us, together.
‘Socialism has never worked’?
Socialism has always worked. Socialism is working right now. We will see socialism work again, always.
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In the terrible winter of 1932–33, brigades of Communist Party activists went house to house in the Ukrainian countryside, looking for food. The brigades were from Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, as well as villages down the road. They dug up gardens, broke open walls, and used long rods to poke up chimneys, searching for hidden grain. They watched for smoke coming from chimneys, because that might mean a family had hidden flour and was baking bread. They led away farm animals and confiscated tomato seedlings. After they left, Ukrainian peasants, deprived of food, ate rats, frogs, and boiled grass. They gnawed on tree bark and leather. Many resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. Some 4 million died of starvation.
At the time, the activists felt no guilt. Soviet propaganda had repeatedly told them that supposedly wealthy peasants, whom they called kulaks, were saboteurs and enemies—rich, stubborn landowners who were preventing the Soviet proletariat from achieving the utopia that its leaders had promised. The kulaks should be swept away, crushed like parasites or flies. Their food should be given to the workers in the cities, who deserved it more than they did. Years later, the Ukrainian-born Soviet defector Viktor Kravchenko wrote about what it was like to be part of one of those brigades. “To spare yourself mental agony you veil unpleasant truths from view by half-closing your eyes—and your mind,” he explained. “You make panicky excuses and shrug off knowledge with words like exaggeration and hysteria.”
He also described how political jargon and euphemisms helped camouflage the reality of what they were doing. His team spoke of the “peasant front” and the “kulak menace,” “village socialism” and “class resistance,” to avoid giving humanity to the people whose food they were stealing. Lev Kopelev, another Soviet writer who as a young man had served in an activist brigade in the countryside (later he spent years in the Gulag), had very similar reflections. He too had found that clichés and ideological language helped him hide what he was doing, even from himself:
I persuaded myself, explained to myself. I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We were realizing historical necessity. We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain for the socialist fatherland. For the five-year plan.
There was no need to feel sympathy for the peasants. They did not deserve to exist. Their rural riches would soon be the property of all.
But the kulaks were not rich; they were starving. The countryside was not wealthy; it was a wasteland. This is how Kravchenko described it in his memoirs, written many years later:
Large quantities of implements and machinery, which had once been cared for like so many jewels by their private owners, now lay scattered under the open skies, dirty, rusting and out of repair. Emaciated cows and horses, crusted with manure, wandered through the yard. Chickens, geese and ducks were digging in flocks in the unthreshed grain.
That reality, a reality he had seen with his own eyes, was strong enough to remain in his memory. But at the time he experienced it, he was able to convince himself of the opposite. Vasily Grossman, another Soviet writer, gives these words to a character in his novel Everything Flows:
I’m no longer under a spell, I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me? And the truth is that I truly didn’t think of them as human beings. “They’re not human beings, they’re kulak trash”—that’s what I heard again and again, that’s what everyone kept repeating.
— Ukraine and the Words That Lead to Mass Murder
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