1stGear posted:

This is going into the treacherous swamps of Alt-History, but I do wonder how WW2 would have played out if Germany didn't invade the USSR and instead just focused on keeping England besieged and fighting in North Africa. Could Britain and the US have won against a European Axis that was entirely focused on them?

Mia Wasikowska posted:

trying to find a w for adolph here

Rosa Luxemburg posted:

The best proof is the Ukraine, which was to play so frightful a role in the fate of the Russian Revolution. Ukrainian nationalism in Russia was something quite different from, let us say, Czechish, Polish or Finnish nationalism in that the former was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture, except for the reactionary-romantic poems of Shevschenko. It is exactly as if, one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante[3] should want to found a new Low-German (Plattdeutsche) nation and government! And this ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students was inflated into a political force by Lenin and his comrades through their doctrinaire agitation concerning the “right of self-determination including etc.” To what was at first a mere farce they lent such importance that the farce became a matter of the most deadly seriousness – not as a serious national movement for which, afterward as before, there are no roots at all, but as a shingle and rallying flag of counter-revolution! At Brest, out of this addled egg crept the German bayonets.

dead gay comedy forums posted:

one of the most scumbrained and criminal hatchet jobs done by social-democrats and libcoms was to reinvent Rosa into this "adversary" of Lenin. Much of her critique was also enmeshed by a profound support and desire to see the Soviet Union through.

I posted here about it, I disagree with that specific assessment of hers because, at least to me it seems that way, because there was no differentiation in reporting to what the Rada (what she is attacking) was and the Soviets, because both words can be translated to council.

What I think Lenin was absolutely correct was that the Union had to end the Great-Russian attitude to really break and bury Tsarism, even though Rosa is also correct in her assessment regarding those issues. It did work: Lenin was made folklore by many other peoples in the Soviet Union. And well, it must be emphasized that Rosa's point carries special validation because of hindsight in the present circumstances; after all, the Ukrainian SSR voted massively in favor of the continuation of the Union and the continuation of the socialist project.

January 6 Survivor posted:

alright let's not get him probated again, because every time it happens something big immediately also happens in the ukraine.

Anyway how about something this thread will SURELY enjoy?



from here but also the article is behind a paywall because democracy, as we know, dies in darkness

my bony fealty posted:

Russia has killed what, half? as many civilians in over 2 years as Israel did in 2 months?

Some Guy TT posted:

very disappointed in u deimosrising i never took you for such a rabid antisemite

Weka posted:

Here's the latest UN report. Some people think there were just massive amounts of civilian deaths in Mariupol that aren't counted here but I haven't seen good enough evidence to agree.

https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/two-year-update-protection-civilians-impact-hostilities-civilians-24.pdf

Weka posted:

Both sides have some motivation to hide military deaths, but they have motivations to share civilian deaths, because it makes the other side look bad. It's possible I suppose that civilian deaths in territory held by Russia are being undercounted because of a lack of access.

The reporting from earlier by the Russian MoD is not to far off Mediazone's reporting once you take into account Wagner and the previously seperate LPDR & DPDR casualties. I haven't checked recently.

Ardennes posted:

I never saw an action film about a guy using a backhoe, though. They don't know even have their own Funko pop.

Ardennes posted:

The whole hulldown thing was stupid even back in the 80s, one of the key features of a tank is mobility and you sacrifice that in a potential battlefield where there would have been a ton of CAS/artillery/ATGMs flying around. It is even worse now with drones.

I would say the real mistake the Soviets/Russians made with the T-72/90 is reserve speed, which was a result of trying to maximize their forward gears for rapid advances. It is fixable (the Czech put in a different transmission), but it is a doctrinal remnant. The T-80 has a acceptable(ish) reserve speed and perhaps why the Russians are talking about building new models.

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

That’s part of the danger of these NGOs. Using gay rights to spearhead USAID or NED initiatives is going to blow back on the community even of only a tiny group are compradors actively working with the west.

Regarde Aduck posted:

they probably did but didn't think it was a big deal

much like the American religious right are basically funding a load of culture war stuff here in the UK and everyone knows it but doesn't care

Homeless Friend posted:

Ardennes posted:

Granted, the rebels also don't make much sense either, it is like literally couple thousand guys versus the government. If they were so evil, why doesn't literally anyone else in the galaxy give a poo poo?

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t10AXLuTUEM

They really believe that Nazism is spread by vibes, even though the scene starts at a loving staffing agency.

All of the women have master's degrees and professional jobs, but the men are thuggish losers who couldn't hold down a job at Walmart before the coming of the Fourth Reich.

Star Wars is very simple, in a way. There was a clone army to do all the fighting. For the middle class, there was no downside to the expansion of the state or whatever else, because they had all of the benefits of a war economy without any of the sacrifices. Not just some families getting lucky with asthma and bone spur differs, or Space National Guard - with a clone army, literally nobody in society bears any burdens, it's the easiest sell in the world.

Which is why Lucas saying it was about Vietnam kind of breaks down, because Obi Wan and Luke talk about the Clone Wars in a New Hope like it's something that mattered, but since nobody had skin in the game, there's no reason for it to be a cultural trauma or whatever.

fizziester posted:

“The period ahead could be very painful for the country, and we shouldn’t be held hostage by mistakes. Two hats are better than one. A government of national unity would be a good thing for the country. And with more people involved, there will be fewer chances to make mistakes,” he added.

Nix Panicus posted:

Purges make sure you don't get overrun with moderate libs, but you still have to develop thinkers of your own to continually develop and carry out your ideology, and failure of one aspect will inevitably lead to the failure of the other.

Weak ideological theorists lead to the libs taking over, and the libs taking over leads to weak ideological theorists in a lovely spiral.

The Soviets flourished (minus the war) because Stalin was a committed communist who built a system of committed communists to carry out the demands of communism.

The Soviets floundered because Gorbachev was a moderate who allowed moderates to carry out the demands of liberalism

Its good to fire the people who don't support your underpinning theory of governance! They gently caress everything up otherwise!

supersnowman posted:

I don't know much about it but the number of stuff they managed to invent/build mean the education system could not be 100% poo poo for sure.

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

It could be as simple as material incentive. You can understand that value is created through other people's labour and everything, but when you're running a state factory for a salary, and can imagine helping the Whiz Kids with Shock Doctrine so it becomes your factory, understanding exploitation through a Marxist lens presumably means you can also imagine instead of making four times, or ten, times or whatever, as much as the workers, you could be, well, a capitalist owner and get much, much, wealthier through their labour.

It's like the Wicked Popes. They understood the dimensions of sin, but they were still having orgies in the Vatican. Hell, it seems like it titillated them to break taboos their education had made them aware of. It was more imaginative depravity than just people sitting around following base desires. So, educating people in how capitalist exploitation works, could become a how-to manual if you are not paying attention to who is in a position to use or abuse that knowledge. It takes institutional discipline to keep Borgias, and Gorbachevs, away from power.

e: Also highly recommend that book China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949–Present which discusses this in detail.

gradenko_2000 posted:

the short answer is that the shock therapy leading up to the Tiananmen Square protests, and the protests themselves, was the culmination of China both allowing liberal ideology to be studied and extolled, and then putting parts of it in the driver's seat

insofar as Deng was the one that let them take the reins, he was also the one who saw that it was going to destroy the country, and backed off from it, and crushed it

China survived its dabbling with liberalism. The Soviet Union did not.

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

Democracy as an abstract ritual, not collective decision making over the allocation of resources in a society. We can't vote about going to war, or ending a war, but we're supposed to fight in it because...? We like this system where we have no say so much?

Muammar Gaddafi, The Green Book posted:

If parliament is formed from one party as a result of its winning an election, it becomes a parliament of the winning party and not of the people. It represents the party and not the people, and the executive power of the parliament becomes that of the victorious party and not of the people. The same is true of the parliament of proportional representation in which each party holds a number of seats proportional to their success in the popular vote. The members of the parliament represent their respective parties and not the people, and the power established by such a coalition is the power of the combined parties and not that of the people. Under such systems, the people are the victims whose votes are vied for by exploitative competing factions who dupe the people into political circuses that are outwardly noisy and frantic, but inwardly powerless and irrelevant. Alternatively, the people are seduced into standing in long, apathetic, silent queues to cast their ballots in the same way that they throw waste paper into dustbins. This is the traditional democracy prevalent in the whole world, whether it is represented by a one-party, two-party, multiparty or non-party system. Thus it is clear that representation is a fraud.

Bardamnu posted:

What did Bobby say about Israelis? I forget?

Ardennes posted:

They don't really mention it (for good reason) but I know a lot of Russians were shocked when they went to the US and learned you had to pay out of the nose for health care, wages were already garbage for the cost of living, and you barely got any time off; no one informed them about the real world.

Europe of the 2020s isn't that much better either; the cost of living is pretty ridiculous and wages are depressed.