Thanks, comrade! 🫡

Trying to do my part to help the good fight.

Independent scholars across China, the USSR, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and North Korea all documented millions upon millions upon millions of deaths from engineered famines, purges, forced labor camps, and political executions.

Who are these “independent scholars?” No modern historian using data from the soviet archives, or other such reputable source, believes that there were “engineered famines” in socialist countries. Famine existed, and was in all cases a common phenomenon pre-socialism, ended by the communists. The highest plausible death total from purges in the soviet union is around 700,000, though actual analysis shows that this number is simply those condemned to death, when it was common for the soviets to walk back death condemnations, meaning total executions is far below. The majority of deaths in socialist prisons came from starvation during World War II, when the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s bread basket.

Adding on to this, Cambodia’s “agrarian communism” isn’t recognized by the overwhelming majority of Marxists as actually socialism. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge denounced Marxism, and they worked with the US Empire, being stopped by the Vietnamese communists.

To the contrary, millions of deaths from engineered famines have been proven by capitalists, such as the Bengal Famine by Churchill. Churchill had this to say:

I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.

There is also the capitalist Nazi Germany, which inflicted the holocaust, murdering tens of millions in around a decade.

Whether the exact total is 60 million, 80 million, or more, the sheer magnitude is confirmed far beyond the Black Book.

The sheer magnitude is confirmed to have been far less both in ratio and in total than capitalism.

Facts: Communist governments were responsible for mass mortality on a historic scale.

To the contrary, communist governments have been responsible for mass uplifting in life expectancy and poverty eradication on a historic scale. From the USSR:

To the PRC:

Communists have been responsible for doubling life expectancy, tripling literacy rates, eradicating poverty, rapidly improving production and distribution, democratizing society, and far more.

I believe presently most instances use Matrix for this.

The US Empire has been collapsing for a long time. Trump didn’t turn ICE into gestapo, it already was. Christian nationalism rose as a consequence of imperialist decay, and a necessity to turn austerity inwards as the spoils of imperialism are drying up. What we can do is organize to establish socialism, by joining orgs such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

It cannot be stressed enough that the rise of the far-right is a consequence of the material reality of dying imperialism. The US Empire, post-World War II, has been the world hegemon and plunderer of the global south, the largest exporter of death and genocide. As the global south is decoupling from the US Empire and developing, this is causing an internal shift towards oppressing the US populace more to protect the superprofits from imperialism lowering.

The 1990s, in recent history. The dissolution of the USSR was catastrophic, both for those living in the socialist side of the world and those without.

It’s dissolution was a dramatic setback in the global transition to communism. 7 million people are estimated to have died indirectly as a result of that, and we spent the next decades in bleakest reaction to it.

The Black Book of Communism was debunked by its own writers. Conquest was described as obsessed with reaching 100 million, and to do so he included Nazis killed during World War II, non-births as deaths, made up numbers, dramatically exaggerated existing events, and more. Citing the 100 million number in the modern day when even those that helped invent that claim have since denounced it isn’t particularly historically truthful.

Even including famine, and the mass starvations in soviet prisons during World War II (when the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket), life expectancy doubled in the USSR compared to pre-socialist levels:

Literacy rates went from 20-30% to 99.9%, healthcare and education were made free and dramatically expanded, and Russia itself went from semi-feudal to space in half a century. Socialism was an incredible success, even if there were flaws and struggles along the way.

The soviets were absolutely better than the Nazis, the Nazis committed mass genocide and tried to wipe out jewish and slavic peoples. This is teetering into Double Genocide Theory, a form of holocaust trivialization. The soviet union was a massively progressive movement over its history while the Nazis were brutal butchers.

Yea that one bugged me a lot. There were literal nazis let out of prison, and lynchings of Jewish people and communists. Trying to downplay the anti-semitism was sad to see.

The USSR wasn’t an empire, no, and the 1930s famine was a tragedy, but wasn’t intentional nor inflicted.

The USSR was a socialist federation. It wasn’t dominated by finance capital and late stage capitalism, and as such did not share the same drive capitalist countries have to export capital and plunder internationally. The USSR had no colonies nor neocolonies.

As for the 1930s famine, it was caused by a combination of factors, including adverse weather conditions, and bourgeois farmers called “kulaks” burning their crops and killing their livestock as protest against collectivization. There was no intention to cause a famine, nor to steer an existing famine, and as such it was a tragedy but not a genocide.

But let’s assume that all of his claims are true, since both the soviets and the west spied on eachother a lot. So even if MI6 trained some hungarian it had a mere effect compared to the huge grass-roots uprising in various cities by the commoners.

Your source confirms that MI6 aided the fascists. The west took advantage of far-right elements and aided them, they didn’t invent new far-right elements. CIA propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe stoked grassroots resentment against the communists, combined with MI6 training and arming former members of the Arrow Cross Party. This strategy of taking existing levers and massively tilting the scales and facilitating them, forcing more radical action, is the way color revolutions typically play out.

The “fascist elements” author was expelled for a time by the CIA in suspicion of being biased towards the communists.

Reality aligns with the communists, any honest journalist would be found guilty of such bias. Anna Louise Strong was also punished for honestly reporting on the socialist sphere as a Statesian. The CIA and US State Department find it unacceptable when journalists report positively or sympathetically towards communists and socialists, and pull various levers to silence them.

Another CIA document which doesn’t believe there was a rise of fascism.

Former far-right elements made up a portion of the communist government and millitary, as this was only a decade out from World War II. The fact that they were retained doesn’t mean they weren’t fascists, or that they had pulled a full 180. Just a decade prior, Horther’s regime had been gleefully assisting the Nazis, such a complete turnaround is impossible in such a short span of time.

“Anti-semitism was marginal. From sources I checked, anti-semitic acts and various messages did happen and come up (mainly in the countryside), they were more sideline occurences that did not come to shape the overall tone of events.”

Downplaying the infestation of anti-semitic pograms described as especially bad in Hungary. The “freedom fighters” restarted the pograms, and would mark the homes of Jews with black crosses, for nightly executions by the fascists. The fact of the matter is that the counter-revolutionary moment was starting and facilitating pograms, while the communists had stopped them.

Just by seeing how many antisemite people every country has even now, it is reasonable to assume that these incidents weren’t way above than the average. However Stalin and Brezhnev used antisemitism extensively under their rule

Anti-semitism was punishable by death penalty in the USSR, this is largely Red Scare fearmongering. In fact, the soviets were accused of being jewish supremicists, hence the hysteria around “Judeo-Bolshevism.” The USSR was the opposite of anti-semitic:

Source: Works, Vol. 13, 1930 - January 1934 Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954

"National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle.

Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism. In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty."

• J. Stalin January 12, 1931

On the other hand, killing communists by the revolutionaries was definitely a more common thing. Imagine as a young student seeing the Communist Party win with a huge blue ballot election fraud, implementing brutal planned economy tactics which lead to country-wide famine (my grandma as a child seen newspaper as a rich person’s item, life was so brutal), your people being deported to Gulag just because they dared to even question the dictatorship in any way, instilling fear by the ÁVH, political members being executed on false charges, etc. and not having the urges to kill hardliner stalinists with a lead pipe. Ofc killing people are awful, but brutal times can bring out the extremes of some people.

Linking a right-wing anti-communist think tank for the majority of your sources, and cherry picking tragic mistakes in order to justify killing communists is awful. Planned economy aided food production, and fascists were jailed, that doesn’t justify murdering leftists.

The soviet prison system was actually very progressive for the time. Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice. Similarly, the soviet stystem of democracy was dramatically expanded on what came before it, documented by Statesian journalist Pat Sloan in Soviet Democracy. Coming out of World War II, when Hungary had sided with the Nazis and gleefully participated in the holocaust, political struggle was rife. As such, trying to erase the fascist elements from a post-World War II Hungary is a process that takes more than a mere decade (as we see with the reintroduction of lynchings and pograms by the countet-revolutionaries).

That CIA document happened way after 1956, and the CIA was caught in a surprise after the revolution have began. They were only doing small intelligence gathering before that.

The CIA did not spark the revolt, but they assisted with it, as did MI6. As shown earlier, CIA propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe stoked grassroots resentment against the communists, combined with MI6 training and arming former members of the Arrow Cross Party. This dramatically emboldened the fascists and radicalized them, steering and fostering an environment for counter-revolution.

Also if the CIA would have funded this uprising then the revolter party wouldn’t have been a socialist lead party by Imre Nagy.

The west has a proven track record of supporting liberalization and undermining socialism, which is what Imre Nagy was doing, along with allowing the lynching of Jews and communists. There were progressive elements in Nagy’s faction, but these progressive elements were outweighed by the overall fascist nature of the movement, and as such the worker councils established during 1956 need to be understood within that context. Similar to Kronstadt, fascists took advantage of anti-communist “left” dissent to steer a grassroots movement into a darker, terroristic direction.

Overall, your goal here seems to be to downplay antisemitic lynchings, paint lynching communists as a good thing, and try to pretend that the soviets were brutal monsters, all while linking right-wing anti-communist propaganda outlets. This whitewashes literal Nazis. According to polling, 72% of Hungarians are worse off than under socialism, being proud of resisting such a liberatory system is deeply confused.

Yep, I wrote about that more in-depth here. What I’m talking about is the modern usage of the term, especially here on Lemmy.

I’ve yet to be called a tankie.

Denouncing all existing socialism, present and historical, doesn’t meaningfully put you to the left of western liberalism unless you’re actively building socialism in another way.

I also think Marx could have gone a little harder

In what way?

I’m just not going to pretend that the few states that pretended to try communism didn’t also do horrible shit.

No communist party over a socialist state has claimed to have reached communism, nor do so-called “tankies” deny that there are struggles, flaws, and problems run into by existing socialism. These flaws come from existing in reality, and to use the ideal version of socialism, perfect, free from any blemish or struggle, as a club against existing socialism is a deeply western tendency.

It stems from the historic failures of western communists to actually succeed in revolution, coupled with the chauvanism culturally instilled in us westerners that tells us that nobody can be better than us, no matter how bad we are.

The ones called “tankies” don’t believe Stalin never made mistakes or did nothing wrong. We uphold current and formerly existing socialism, such as the USSR, as genuinely progressive movements, and leaders like Stalin as socialist leaders.

Comparing Trump to Stalin is funny, actually, because no matter the mistakes and errors Stalin made over his decades as the leader of the soviet union, he was never a genocidal imperialist. Looking at what the US Empire, helmed presently by Trump, is doing in Palestine, Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, and the entire global south, it’s obvious that Trump is far more of a negative impact on the world.

Of course, Stalin made mistakes, and committed errors, but as the leader of the soviet union helped facilitate doubling of life expectancies, tripling of literacy rates, huge scientific and industrial advancement, free education and healthcare at an expanded access, and more. The soviet union was dramatically better for the workers and peasants than Tsarism, and was better than modern-day capitalism.

Equating the soviet achievements and mistakes entirely to Stalin is also more of a liberal, “great man” critique. Stalin was a leader, yes, but the tremendous gains made by socialism were built by billions of workers and peasants. So too were mistakes and struggles run into along the way. Trying to blame all of the failings of socialism on Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc. is to also place all of their successes on their shoulders. Both are equally wrong frames of analysis.

So yes, “tankies” are just those that uphold existing socialism, not your strawman.

“Tankie” isn’t a position, it’s a pejorative for those that support and uphold existing socialism.

That would be very interesting, yes I would be! And welcome back, comrade!

The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semitic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists. The Truth About Hungary by Herbert Aptheker heavily relies on citing western sources like the New York Times. Aptheker backs up his claims heavily.

"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”

“But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”

“Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)

“The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”

"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:

During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”

Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."

Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:

Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about “democracy” or “freedom” is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.

TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about “freedom” and “democracy,” but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.

Trump is a symptom of the late-stage imperialist system the US Empire is in, not a unique figure dramatically changing the course of history.

Adam Smith was a political economist examining capitalism (and made several errors along the way that Marx corrected, such as utterly confusing fixed vs. circulating capital). Ford also only “pushed” for 40 hour, 5 day work weeks because worker organizing was fighting for it.

The creation of capitalism wasn’t from an idea about a new system, but from the rise of inventions like the steam engine and industrial production leading to commodity production becoming the basis of production and distribution, as compared to more agrarian production and small manufacturers.

The US Empire grew to imperial dominance post-WWII. It was seen as a good ally only to the west. 9/11 was the excuse, not the cause of the empire’s genocide in Iraq and subsequent plunder, and the recession wasn’t caused by 9/11 either, but was a natural element of capitalism’s regular boom/bust cycle.

With or without 9/11, the US Empire would still be a gradually dying empire hated by the world.