What is the most powerful flying bug? This poll is closed. |
|||
---|---|---|---|
🦋 | 15 | 3.71% | |
🦇 | 115 | 28.47% | |
🪰 | 12 | 2.97% | |
🐦 | 67 | 16.58% | |
dragonfly | 94 | 23.27% | |
🦟 | 14 | 3.47% | |
🐝 | 87 | 21.53% | |
Total: | 404 votes |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:But he sort of did, by saying "70% right, 30% wrong" and eliminating the Gang of Four and Hua he did essentially the same as the Secret Speech and removing the Anti-Party Group. It's a difference in degree not in kind. yeah but he largely pinned the excess on Lin bao and the Gang of Four and never wholly repudiated Mao like Khrushchev did to Stalin, hence why mao’s portrait remained hanging across the country whereas the Soviets tried to scrub Stalin away. also one of deng’s four cardinal principles was continuing to uphold Mao Zedong though
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 16:56 |
|
|
# ? May 17, 2024 02:08 |
|
Enjoy posted:are you saying that there is some essentially nazi trait that flares up in a proportion of all humans and has to be violently purged because that's a completely anti-materialist take some people are about as dumb as you and need to be reeducated.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:00 |
|
70%good/30%bad is pretty different from kruschev's entire campaign of trying to dismantle the entire legacy and legitimacy of stalin and the whole apparatus of the state that existed before his death. Whether or not the gang of four claim to be the true inheritors of the state or not doesn't necessitate that Deng reject Mao and the revolution and the state apparatus ala kruschev.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:00 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:But he sort of did, by saying "70% right, 30% wrong" and eliminating the Gang of Four and Hua he did essentially the same as the Secret Speech and removing the Anti-Party Group. It's a difference in degree not in kind. "sort of did"? Come on now. And no, it is nowhere the same. There's a continuous and shared assessment of the history of CPC with a common and historical critique. Revisionism, on the other hand, was devastating to the CPSU. e: Raskolnikov38 posted:yeah but he largely pinned the excess on Lin bao and the Gang of Four and never wholly repudiated Mao like Khrushchev did to Stalin, hence why mao’s portrait remained hanging across the country whereas the Soviets tried to scrub Stalin away. also one of deng’s four cardinal principles was continuing to uphold Mao Zedong though also this
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:00 |
|
alright, if you insist I can try dual thread drifting for a bit. People here say Gorbachev and cos decision were influenced by liberal idealism and had he and his cohort been purged and ideologically disciplined leaders been in place, the USSR wouldn't have fallen apart. But why is it that at that particular historical moment, so many liberal-influenced leaders were in charge in so many eastern block nations? Why were they able to rise and not the hardliners? Isn't it because of the economic pressure and internal changes in class composition? AFancyQuestionMark has issued a correction as of 17:03 on Apr 16, 2024 |
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:00 |
|
Source: New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/world/middleeast/ukraine-aid-israel-iran-war.html Ukraine Sees ‘Hypocrisy’ in Western Allies’ Defense of Israel By Marc Santora and Matthew Mpoke Bigg Reporting from Kharkiv, Ukraine, and London April 15, 2024 For people in eastern Ukraine, where nightly barrages of drones from Russia outpace the military’s overwhelmed air defenses, the response by Western allies to Iran’s aerial assault against Israel this weekend produced uncomfortable comparisons. The militaries of the United States, Britain, France and others stepped in to help Israel defend against the fusillade of more than 300 Iranian drones and missiles, nearly all of which were intercepted. A similar number of aerial weapons are fired at Ukraine on a weekly basis, its officials say, with many of the drones in those attacks designed by Iran and now produced by Russia. Since the start of this year, Russia has fired 1,000 missiles, 2,800 drones and 7,000 guided aerial bombs at Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Sergiy Kyslytsya. While Washington and other allies have provided Kyiv with some powerful air defense weapons, they have not directly confronted Russian forces, and Ukrainian officials have long argued that the supplied weapons are insufficient to counter the threat from Moscow. In the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where 1.3 million people live with nightly air raid alarms, many people expressed anger and disappointment over the weekend that Ukraine’s allies, wary of provoking Russia, don’t give it the same protection as they did Israel. “When rockets fly in Israel, the whole world writes about it,” said Amil Nasirov, a 29-year-old singer. “Here, rockets are flying, and we don’t have American bombers that are saving the sky like over Israel.” “It’s very stupid; it’s hypocrisy,” he added. “And it’s like some devaluation of Ukrainian lives.” Ukraine has begged since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 for more tools to close its sky to Russian missiles. But the first Patriot missile systems from the United States and Germany — the only proven defense against ballistic missiles — did not arrive until the spring of 2023. Ukraine also pleaded for F-16 fighter jets, which the Biden administration, which must approve any transfers of the American-made planes, long resisted providing them out of concern that Moscow would see it as an escalation. It eventually relented, but Ukrainian pilots are still training on the systems and they are not expected to fly in the skies above Ukraine until this summer. Ukrainian officials noted the role that fighter jets played in defending Israel as a sign of their importance in air defense. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the response to the Iranian attack was clear evidence that “the world has everything necessary to stop any missiles, Shahed drones, and other forms of terror,” referring to the Iranian-made attack drones that have been a large part of Russia’s arsenal. “The whole world sees what real defense is. It sees that it is feasible. And the whole world saw that Israel was not alone in this defense — the threat in the sky was also being eliminated by its allies,” Mr. Zelensky said in his latest nightly address...
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:01 |
|
Deng criticized which is not only fine but encouraged so long as you aren't a stupid lib about it and also he didn't repudiate all the good done. Khrushchev just tried to bury Uncle Joe lol
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:02 |
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:deng didn’t throw Mao and the party’s historical legitimacy under the bus It is funny that Mao being 70/30 is treated as obvious propaganda by liberals when its merely the recognition that leaders are fallible without destroying what he stood for
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:03 |
|
Orange Devil posted:It is said that, just before the Sino-Soviet split, Nikita Khrushchev had a tense meeting with Zhou Enlai at which he told the latter that he now understood the problem. “I am the son of coal miners,” he said. “You are the descendant of feudal mandarins. We have nothing in common.” “Perhaps we do,” murmured his Chinese antagonist. “What?” blustered Khrushchev. “We are,” responded Zhou, “both traitors to our class.”
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:04 |
|
the hardest line in political history imo
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:05 |
|
if I were ever bodied this hard I would have to purge myself
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:12 |
|
KomradeX posted:It is funny that Mao being 70/30 is treated as obvious propaganda by liberals when its merely the recognition that leaders are fallible without destroying what he stood for Obama was 70% good 30% bad
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:14 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:People here say Gorbachev and cos decision were influenced by liberal idealism and had he and his cohort been purged and ideologically disciplined leaders been in place, the USSR wouldn't have fallen apart. It's a combination of factors that here and Marx thread usually come around and get discussed with differing emphases depending on what comes up. Might take up some filtering, but nobody clearly cuts a single reason or overall motivating factor, because there is not. The collapse of the political formation of the CPSU was an important factor? Of course. So were the technical deficit in the capabilities of scientific planning, the astounding incompetence at foreign affairs that led to the end of the COMINTERN and the Sino-Soviet Split, which among other disastrous consequences, deprived the Soviet Union of important mutual favorable trade agreements. Then add in NATO doctrine of containment and economic sabotage by its agencies which, for example, exploited the aforementioned technical deficit by shipping in semiconductors designed to gently caress up the industrial machinery of West Siberian oilfields. The trading restrictions (in some cases outright embargo) meant very difficult terms of commerce and thus in harnessing capital flows. Etc etc etc
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:16 |
|
one big driver is that a lot of the "easy" economic wins were in the rear view mirror after industrialization and people were casting about for how to keep up the growth and asking questions about whether central planning etc etc was still the right answer
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:18 |
|
Actually Khrushchev was just a dumbass that tried to gently caress with the economy and it didn't work, while central planning was being constantly hosed with and sabotaged preventing them from doing anything meaningful.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:24 |
|
slave to my cravings posted:Obama was 70% good 30% bad Thats exactly what Liberals if they're being fair believe
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:24 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:alright, if you insist I can try dual thread drifting for a bit. there were actually a lot of hardliners in charge of the soviet bloc in the 70s and 80s, poland, romania, and east germany remained hardliner to the bitter end. the rise of liberalism and reformism in the soviet bloc imo largely stems from two things. firstly, these governments were imposed on the nations of eastern europe by the soviet union after ww2 and therefore had lots of legitimacy issues in their eyes of citizenship for their entire existence. however, with the backing of the soviet union and the red army, hardliners were able to keep their hands on the tillers of state until the deaths of brezhnev and andropov. gorby comes to power and starts throwing legitimacy and power to the reformers across the soviet bloc while making it clear to the hardliners that he isn't going to lift a finger to save them (although brezhnev was the one to refuse to send the red army in to back up jaruzelski in poland). liberals and reformers were thus able to gradually wrest control of the states away from the communists and/or ferment national resistance to communist rule. the collapse of communism in other countries however spelled the end of the hardliner regimes who were economically and politically dependent on the bloc for their continued existence
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:27 |
|
also, relatedly, do people agree that the charges of trotskyist/leftist/rightist espionage, industrial sabotage and etc. that were presented at the big 30s moscow trials were trumped up? because that's kind of an important dimension to this discussion imo
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:28 |
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:there were actually a lot of hardliners in charge of the soviet bloc in the 70s and 80s, poland, romania, and east germany remained hardliner to the bitter end. the rise of liberalism and reformism in the soviet bloc imo largely stems from two things. firstly, these governments were imposed on the nations of eastern europe by the soviet union after ww2 and therefore had lots of legitimacy issues in their eyes of citizenship for their entire existence. however, with the backing of the soviet union and the red army, hardliners were able to keep their hands on the tillers of state until the deaths of brezhnev and andropov. gorby comes to power and starts throwing legitimacy and power to the reformers across the soviet bloc while making it clear to the hardliners that he isn't going to lift a finger to save them (although brezhnev was the one to refuse to send the red army in to back up jaruzelski in poland). liberals and reformers were thus able to gradually wrest control of the states away from the communists and/or ferment national resistance to communist rule. the collapse of communism in other countries however spelled the end of the hardliner regimes who were economically and politically dependent on the bloc for their continued existence yeah but why did the hardliners need to wrestle for power? what made liberals so appealing in comparison? that's where the major economic pressures and class composition factors come in, and that's the actual root cause imo
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:31 |
|
DJJIB-DJDCT posted:Well for the purposes of clarifying things, the texts I was trained in, and still keep hard copies near my desk are: these are not the texts that i expected the canadian artillery school to be using, to be honest
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:39 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:also, relatedly, do people agree that the charges of trotskyist/leftist/rightist espionage, industrial sabotage and etc. that were presented at the big 30s moscow trials were trumped up? because that's kind of an important dimension to this discussion imo lol lib
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:40 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:also, relatedly, do people agree that the charges of trotskyist/leftist/rightist espionage, industrial sabotage and etc. that were presented at the big 30s moscow trials were trumped up? because that's kind of an important dimension to this discussion imo its important to remember that cspam is first and foremost a shitposting forum but yes there was no trotiskyist sabotage ring of millions of people operating in the ussr. that said trotsky did keep contacts with high profile soviet politicians and leaders after his exile so there were definitely some breadcrumbs around to prevent the whole thing from being entirely fantasy
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:44 |
|
gradenko_2000 posted:I'm not trying to riff on AFancyQuestionMark but it's adorable to think that a discussion on Stalinist purges would be considered horrendously off-topic in a thread that's had derails over the Romanian campaign of 1916, British colonial homosex, and the definition of air superiority vis-a-vis air supremacy. euphronius posted:don’t forget the analysis of politics as religion in Roman North Africa (my favorite so far ) I was probed when Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean came up, but you just jogged my memory that Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity, and Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Education: The Oxford Classical Curriculum really tie everything together. Americans take note: the key to an empire on which the sun never sets is channeling the power of barely repressed homosexuality. The problem is that Matt Schlapp, Marcus Bachmann, and Lindsey Graham don't have the right stuff. They had potential, sure, but it was misused and they were miseducated. First, Bachmann and Graham studied psychology (I wonder why...) instead of something that would invigorate them. For Schlapp, it was just about impossible to find out what his BA from Notre Dame was in, but it appears to have been "History and Government". That's a boilerplate Young Republican education. The folly of misspent youth! These men could have been your American Gordons. Schlapp went to graduate school for Public Policy, Bachmann for "Community Counseling", and then a PhD with "a concentration in clinical psychology." Graham got a JD. They are, in other words, boring conservatives with a dull as dishwater education, that tamps down their queenish tendencies instead of bringing them to the fore. To really get an empire builder, a Rhodes, a Gordon, a James Brooke, you need something more theatrical, They didn't have the proper education to cultivate the qualities that could make them great men, and they didn't have a queen they could use as a socially acceptable substitute for love for a woman, so it all falls so flat. Observe: Now, suppose that these Americans, instead of studying psychology and "history and government", had to put on a "theatrical production in the Grecian style" their freshmen year for the upperclassmen? Might that have pushed them further along the path to greatness? Suppose that instead of reading some boring bullshit policy whatever, or law, or, in Bachmann's case, "his thesis at CBN University was titled 'Child Care Dilemma,' and concluded that full-time, nonparental day care 'may increase the insecurity' of children younger than 18 months. It incorporated a biblical perspective and included quotations from Scripture." They had instead studied, real literature, like Puerilities: Erotic Epigrams of The Greek Anthology: "Elegiac lyrics celebrating the love of boys, which the translator terms Puerilities , comprise most of the twelfth book of The Greek Anthology . That book, the so-called Musa Puerilis, is brilliantly translated in this, the first complete verse version in English. It is a delightful eroticopia of short poems by great and lesser-known Greek poets, spanning hundreds of years, from ancient times to the late Christian era." Which, if it wasn't clear, could have sparked an ambition for something greater than tax cuts and utility privatization in these men: XLIII CALLIMACHUS Little I care for your popular cyclical poem: Such thoroughfares I thoroughly despise. So I detest a boy who makes himself common, Nor do I drink from public water supplies. Yes, you are handsome, Lysanias, terribly handsome. “And someone else’s!” instantly Echo replies. Would Lindsey Graham think only of giving Republican donors public utilities if he had read this instead of law? Or, when hearing "public water supplies", would he sink away into sweet reverie, returning determined to win the love of some Lysanias or Ganymede by serving the American empire in the burning sands? Conversely, would Schlapp be so desirous for wars in the Middle East, that separate men from their young companions, had he been versed in the Illiad?: Return to me directly you have swept the Trojans from the ships. Even if thundering Zeus offers an opportunity of winning glory for yourself, you mustn’t take it. You must not make war without me against these warlike Trojans—you will only reduce my glory . . . Ah Father Zeus, Athena and Apollo, I pray that not one Trojan may get away alive, not one, and not a Greek either, but we two [dual] survive the massacre and unfasten Troy’s holy battlements alone. Finally, would Bachmann devote all of his effort to the study of suppressed urges, if, say, he was familiar with the story of Achilles and Troilus? From Davidson's The Greeks and Greek Love, "The basic story is a simple one, but very neat and tidy. Troilus is an underage Boy. He takes a horse and goes to fetch water at a fountain house outside the city walls. Achilles is waiting for him... Although the details of where and how he actually kills the boy are variable, one feature is fixed: Troilus is on horseback and Achilles runs him down on foot... Indeed it seems from one image that he cut the boy’s head off and waved it in the face of his brothers... Out of all Achilles’ exploits at Troy, Clitias has chosen to picture this one, not glorious at all, but a feat that has the advantage of showing to a viewer the unique quality the poets never tire of celebrating: Achilles’ phenomenal speed... It is also the feat that will lead to his death, for Clitias has shown Apollo watching in some agitation... Either the crime itself, or the fact that Achilles took the boy to the sanctuary of Apollo, or even killed him on Apollo’s altar is what finally led to Achilles’ death, according to one prominent tradition... And it was an outraged Apollo who guided the arrow that would kill him... All terribly neat... Achilles’ most amazing ability, his speed, is precisely what undoes him, and when Apollo shoots him, where does the arrow pierce him? In the foot... This is a detail well established at an early date... Later mythographers did not really grasp its significance and told stories about the ankle as Achilles’ only point of vulnerability, something that Homer and the earlier poets do not mention... Achilles is certainly not invulnerable—that’s why his mother goes to so much trouble to get him a piece of armor—but the symbolic significance of Achilles, “swift in foot,” being fatally wounded in the foot needs no further explanation... The arrow guided by Apollo quite literally pins the fastest man on the planet to the ground, it stops him dead... " "There is irony then in the fact that on each handle of the Francois Vase Achilles’ corpse is carried from the battlefield at a run... His own legs quite useless to him now, he depends on those of Ajax, the Quick and the Dead... The story that Achilles was in love with Troilus is told first in the second century sc in the impossibly obscure and allegorical prophetic “monodrama” of Cassandra (Alexandra), “quite the most repellent poem to survive from antiquity,” composed in iambic trimeters and ascribed to the Hellenistic poet Lycophron... The prophetess is apostrophizing, addressing now her little brother, young Troilus, whom she sees in strange visions of the future: “Lion-cub you, who shot the wild dragon with fire-bearing love-charm of arrows, and wouldn’t let go of smitten him, holding him in snares inescapable, for a scant loveless time, yourself untouched by the man you had subjected, you will bloody your father’s altar cut off at the head.” “Untouched,” literally “unwounded,” i.e., unattracted to Achilles, is a play on the paradox of the “captor” “captivated”; it could easily be read more graphically, “unpenetrated.”... An ancient reader offered some helpful notes in the margin of the text: Troilus had taken refuge in the sanctuary to escape Achilles’ advances... Unable to get him to come out, Achilles goes in and kills him... A commentator on Virgil’s Aeneid adds more detail: “Led on by his love for Troilus, Achilles held out to him some doves, of which the boy was very fond, but as he reached out to take them, he was captured by Achilles and died in his arms.” This is all very late, but the abduction, the doves, and hence probably the love motif appear in paintings of the scene as early as the sixth century... I think it would be impossible for a Greek, knowing Achilles’ tendencies and seeing an image of him as a Stripling chasing down a Boy, not to adduce an erdtikos motivation... " My belief, I hope you agree, is that we cannot make the American less warlike. As with Achilles, these urges are deeply rooted. We can, however, direct those urges (and others) to some higher purpose. We can use our Schlapps, Grahams, and Bachmanns as arrows in our quiver. Rather than directing their energy towards banal projects, like Quiverfull, given the right education, we can point them in the right direction and let them loose. As Davidson says, "It is this duality that makes Achilles the Greekest of heroes, loving his own side as much as he hates the enemy, a perfect inspiration for all Greek hoplite warriors, lovingly devoted to those alongside and nursing equal hate for those ranged opposite: the enemy, the Other, the Barbarian. Perhaps when they thought of Achilles it would not seem as strange to the Spartans and the Cretans as it does to us to offer sacrifice to Eros before going into battle." Make America Grecian Again.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:44 |
|
Liberals constantly commit acts of sabotage without being aware of it because they expect the world to be as frictionless as their own thoughts.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:45 |
|
DaysBefore posted:lol lib so were they real? did bukharin and trotsky lie to me? i just want to know
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:45 |
|
The rumors about neo-nazi not being good at holding ground might have been true. https://t.me/ukraine_watch/20669 quote:‼️🇺🇦🏴☠️ Right Sector Nazi Brigade disbanded after fleeing from positions in Chasov Yar
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:45 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:yeah but why did the hardliners need to wrestle for power? what made liberals so appealing in comparison? that's where the major economic pressures and class composition factors come in, and that's the actual root cause imo we are going the "people wanted levi's" again route aren't we a very significant factor to ponder is that most referenced Anglo literature about the subject deals with sourcing and historiography that is misrepresentative of the material conditions on the ground
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:46 |
|
DJJIB-DJDCT posted:I was probed when Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean came up, but you just jogged my memory that Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities, Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity, and Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Education: The Oxford Classical Curriculum really tie everything together.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:47 |
|
slave to my cravings posted:Obama was
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:50 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:so were they real? did bukharin and trotsky lie to me? i just want to know besides Losurdo, the next author whose work you should read is Grover Furr
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:52 |
|
Leandros posted:loving hell how much more grim can this conflict get. Is there something to be said about the complete despair inducing a lack of dopamine that gambling can compensate for? Maybe you can't put yourself in that headspace. But I can assure you, no one, and I mean no one, gambling away their piss poor soldier wages honestly believes they will be around to enjoy what little money they saved up at the end. Ask the dead soldiers who didnt gamble, who didnt use drugs, who didnt drink or smoke, what it got them in the end. We fight this war to the last Ukrainian soldier. None of them will survive this conflict. What could be a better use of their little resources, in the final moments of their lives, before they all die supporting our geopolitical ambitions. There is a reason drugs and prostitution are what soldiers and sailors in conflicts choose to spend their money on, and its not personal moral failure. That happened when society sent them to die.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:54 |
|
DJJIB-DJDCT posted:"It is this duality that makes Achilles the Greekest of heroes, loving his own side as much as he hates the enemy, a perfect inspiration for all Greek hoplite warriors, lovingly devoted to those alongside and nursing equal hate for those ranged opposite: the enemy, the Other, the Barbarian. Perhaps when they thought of Achilles it would not seem as strange to the Spartans and the Cretans as it does to us to offer sacrifice to Eros before going into battle." i am reminded of the cold war cia men who thought of themselves as the greeks and the communists as the persians which led them to do some very cool things for their country
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:56 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:Maybe I am an idiot and Great Man Stalin really was the crucial factor, but idk, the evolution of actual USSR state policy was a result of experimentation and adjustment to conditions of the ground, brought about by collective planning by the government bureaucracy. There wasn't really any great unifying theory dictated plan imposed from top down. It was my understanding that collectivization, private ownership and markets came in and out of favor multiple times as a response to organic developments its not Great Man theory. boiling down a continental sized state to "one guy" is loving stupid. stalin represented a portion of soviet society that was committed to building socialism and his getting to be the leader was reflective of that. gorbachev represented a portion of soviet society that was committed to liberalizing the USSR and his leadership is representative of that.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 17:57 |
|
Stalin kissed other men on the lips
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 18:04 |
|
I recall reading stories on how the Waffen SS units would underperform regular Wehrmacht units most of the time too. Seems like no lessons were learned.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 18:05 |
|
mila kunis posted:its not Great Man theory. boiling down a continental sized state to "one guy" is loving stupid. stalin represented a portion of soviet society that was committed to building socialism and his getting to be the leader was reflective of that. gorbachev represented a portion of soviet society that was committed to liberalizing the USSR and his leadership is representative of that.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 18:09 |
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg_Mjg2D3ng quote:don't give a gently caress, I say I want (Ha-ha) geopolitical hardbass lmao
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 18:09 |
|
I recently read an account by a high up Menshevik guy (Dan) of his experiences during the civil war. The harassment/repression of the party members described there, even the eventual Cheka arrests, imprisonment and exile seemed to me to be mostly very lenient and justified considering the civil war context, foreign imperialist intervention and extreme reactionary violence at the time. The worst stuff described was clearly caused by individual petiness, war-time uncertainty and general bureaucratic dysfunction. I came away with a very positive impression of the Bolshevik "repression" apparatus. That's what makes it so hard to square for me that it was decided to dial up the brutality in the 1930s, during a time of peace and when the economic conditions were so much better in comparison. What made them go from letting mensheviks roam around freely in their prison block and otherwise operate freely on the outside, with the worst punishment being exile or internal displacement, to shooting trotskyists and bukharinites en mass? Things seemed to be going well, why not just expel them from the CPSU? I just don't get it
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 18:10 |
needs more labels
|
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 18:11 |
|
|
# ? May 17, 2024 02:08 |
|
AFancyQuestionMark posted:so were they real? did bukharin and trotsky lie to me? i just want to know Raskolnikov38 posted:its important to remember that cspam is first and foremost a shitposting forum but yes there was no trotiskyist sabotage ring of millions of people operating in the ussr. that said trotsky did keep contacts with high profile soviet politicians and leaders after his exile so there were definitely some breadcrumbs around to prevent the whole thing from being entirely fantasy The great purge was a consequence of Lenin being unable to lead the party through this sensitive period. After civil war, intervention, NEP, dekulakization (a mini civil war all by itself) and industrialization, a major reorganization of the CPSU was going to be the least to do. In simpler terms, many members of the party were so in order to work in the government, continuing functions from the tsarist period. There was no way to reconstruct everything at once in those conditions - one such example being military officials that didn't care much for autocracy but not necessarily liked the Bolsheviks. Given the ridiculous difficulties faced, there was bound to be a political effort to ensure the condition of vanguard. Trotsky wanted blood as early as possible and Lenin had to personally tell him to chill the gently caress out. What Stalin had in spades that Trotsky did not was political acumen. Trotsky was brilliant, a formidable theoretician, but was a literal case of unable to read a room to save his own life. Stalin, a survivalist as well, never was going to tolerate an opposition that was seen as collaborative with the threats to the Revolution. Here is where fellow communists criticize Stalinism the hardest, as it was unable to provide a proper answer to the collective development of party organization. Stalinism, regardless of results, liquidated the party roster and created the conditions for men like Khrushchev to thrive. It's an approach that can be understood given the many, many difficulties of the time and the general clusterfuck that happened; it delivered in the purpose of safeguarding the Union, accomplishing its objective, but was not a viable long-term way forward for the development of the party.
|
# ? Apr 16, 2024 18:11 |