volodya_ilich

Forcing a people to be part of your system against their wishes

Source: Ukrainian nationalist propaganda.

The Ukrainians wanted independence. They literally fought for it and lost

A part of the population in a small region of Ukraine wanted anarchism, and was promptly defeated by communists in the context of a civil war against fascism because anarchy doesn't work. Ukrainians should thank the soviets for the ensuing industrialisation that allowed the defeat of the Nazis, a sparse set of agricultural communes would have been exterminated by Nazis. Anarchists simply don't understand this, and refuse to understand the historical and material conditions that surround them in favour of idealism, which is why their projects don't live long enough to see widespread adoption anywhere.

Excusing genocide

The lack of prior attempts, the lack or motives, the lack of intent, the fact that it was a famine in a particular event of land collectivisation, and the fact that there was no continuation over time, prove it wasn't a genocide. I'm not excusing genocide because there wasn't, I'm criticising poor collectivisation policy which led to famine both inside and outside Ukraine.

Excusing imperialism

Consolidating socialism in a region isn't imperialism, which you'd know, again, if you had read any socialist literature. But you'd rather go with your vibes-based Reddit leftism.

The fact that you speak of Ukrainians as "people to subjugate" really tells of how little understanding you have of the topic. Comparing a historically colonial region like Ireland, to an area literally liberated and given a nationality, borders, education in their language and press in their language such as Ukraine, is absurd. You have no fucking idea what imperialism is, and it shows very severely. Go read a book lmao

Ukraine was literally saved from Nazism and from Russian/Polish imperialism by the USSR, but you're a fake socialist who's never read a fucking book, who glorifies useless leaders who never got to power and never had to face the realities of class war, and replicates US state department propaganda

It's honestly disgusting that you go talking about "genocides" that you have absolutely done 0 research on, using numbers as a political tool and comparing unintended famine deaths to actual genocide such as Holocaust or Gaza.

Thanks for not answering to the rest of the comment though, you obviously can't argue against the USSR saving millions of lives and your lack of care for the oppressed in the global south

Non intentional genocides

Imagine not knowing what genocide means.

caused disproportional death

The USSR saved tens of millions of lives. The life expectancy in imperial Russia was around 30, by the 50s it as 60, and they stopped Nazism which would have genocided as many Slavs as they possibly could.

Olof. Sorry he didn't subjugate enough

Oh wow, a western leftist who doesn't understand unequal exchange, imperialism, and the yoke that Europe imposes on the global south, colour me surprised. Well, maybe I'm being too generous, and you just don't care about the lives of the Asians and the browns that die in the plantations and factories of the products your perfect social democracy consumes!

"Holodomor" is a newly coined term to categorize a famine as a genocide. A famine took place in the early 30s in the USSR as a consequence of failures during THE FIRST ATTEMPT IN HISTORY of collectivizing agriculture, which led to millions of deaths both inside and outside Ukraine. You guys never mention the deaths in Central Asia and in Russia proper, because it's not convenient to your narrative.

The reality is that while there was a famine in the USSR, and it disproportionately affected Ukraine, there is simply no evidence to talk of intent. The dekulakization process was a difficult period of Soviet history, but the famine took place between 1930 and 1933 and largely disappeared afterwards, with no other such event in Ukrainian history happening ever after during Soviet rule. There is no motive against Ukrainians (a worker's state killing workers isn't a smart thing), there is no evidence of motive, and there is no evidence of intentionality, calling the USSR famine of 1930 "Holodomor" is (a western manufacture)[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Holodomor&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3] of atrocity propaganda against communism, and to boost russophobia. The famine was a disaster and a failure of soviet policy, but calling it "genocide", or saying that it was targeted against Ukrainians, is simply insulting.

The Soviet Union, like it or not, saved Ukraine from the Russian Empire, and later from the Nazi invasion. The number of people who died in famines pales with the millions of lives that were saved from Nazi occupation and the ensuing extermination of the Slavic "untermenschen", had there been not a Soviet Union there would simply be no Ukraine to speak of right now.

Look, you accuse me of not reading

That's because you haven't, your entire analysis is vibes-based, and the only references that you could possibly point towards in these topics are reddit/.world comments that you've read and assimilated because they're compatible with your US State Department propaganda anticommunist views.

When a government forceful controls others, its imperialism

When an actually-existing socialist state ensures a degree of homogeneity in policy and objectives in its area of influence, it's not called imperialism, it's called geopolitics, which are a sad truth of class war. But sure, keep praising leaders who achieved absolutely nothing because they were killed as soon as they were about to enact the slightest socialist policy. Go on, suck off Allende's cock (who resulted in Pinochet), the Spanish Second Republic (which resulted in Franco), and your dear Swedish loser whose movement and ideas were so grassroots that they died with him. Because to you anticommunist leftists, the only valid leftist movements are those that die prematurely and don't have to face real-world conditions. You compare theory with reality, and when the dire reality of class war doesn't adequate to your moralism, you reject it.

Also its laughable to say it fought hardest against imperialism

It's laughable if you haven't read a book in your life about actual Soviet policy, economic relations, and the meaning of the word "imperialism".

I dare you to tell that to a Ukrainian friend

Your friend has the luxury of considering themselves Ukrainian thanks to the fucking Soviet Union. Ukraine had up until the formation of the Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics in 1917 been a people without representation split between Poland and the Russian Empire. The first Bolshevik constitution gave all the nations and peoples of the Russian Empire full and unilateral right to secession and independence. Poland became independent this way and immediately invaded the newly established Ukrainian People's Republic (first time in history that Ukraine had a representation and an administration of itself, courtesy of the Bolsheviks). Lenin himself fought other socialists like Rosa Luxembourg in order to enable an independent Ukraine, as opposed to the homogenous "socialist national identity" that they proposed, this is a historical fact.

The Bolsheviks, during the Russian civil war, fought Poland and gave back Ukraine's territories to its people, and Ukraine was established as an independent republic within the USSR. In the following decades, and for the first time in its history, the citizens of Ukraine would gain access to education and the possibility of choosing an education in Ukrainian language, a majority of the published literature and newspapers were published in Ukrainian, and just 40-odd years after Ukraine's first ever autoctonous administration and representation, a Ukrainian would become the president of the Soviet Union.

I dare you to tell that to many of the countries it used to control, both directly and indirectly

The fact that over the past 30 years, a russophobic and anticommunist nationalist sentiment has been fostered in Ukraine, as has been in most of Eastern Europe since the advent of capitalism as a political tool against Russia, doesn't invalidate any of that, and the fact that Ukrainians generally feel that way doesn't automatically make it right, in the same sense that American exceptionalism is a general sentiment in the US and it's wrong. As an example, most Polish people view the crisis of the 80s (which gave rise to Solidarity) as a consequence of Soviet meddling in their economy. The reality of the consensus of serious economists who study this issue is that Poland went, against the advice of the Soviet Union (proving again that its "iron grip" in the eastern block wasn't such), went into debt with western banks and financial institutions and paid the consequences.

Russia/USSR was/is

The fact that you even compare the two shows how little idea you have of what you're talking about. Modern capitalist Russia is a liberal democracy on a downwards spiral towards fascism, the Soviet Union was a worker's state and didn't exert imperialism. The trade terms of the USSR were generally beneficial to the countries that traded with it (see Cuba's crisis in the 90s after trade with the USSR stopped), USSR was a net exporter of raw materials and fossil fuels which it did at international prices even within the COMECON. If you have studied unequal exchange, this means that the Soviet Union was subsidising other states because of the imbalance in international prices of raw materials vs manufactured, high added-value goods. The USSR assisted immensely in anti-imperialist struggle: wars of Korea and Vietnam, Chinese revolution, Cuban revolution...

What you're doing here is proving that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and you consider yourself a leftist but you've done no study of the material history of socialism and you parrot the talking points of the US State Department.

Thanks. That said, those peasants were armed and trained by US forces.

The kind of socialism you call state owned capitalism is the one that saved Europe from Nazism, the one that set the standards for free healthcare, working hours, worker rights, free education and pensions, the one that fought the staunchest against imperialism, and the one that allowed for its countries to stop being western colonies.

"The kind of socialism I like is the one that dies as soon as its leader is murdered" doesn't sound like a particularly strong kind of socialism to me.

You call yourself a socialist but you have a very, VERY tenuous understanding of the way to fight fascism and the way to achieve meaningful socialist progress. This tells me that you haven't actually done much at all in reading of socialist history, socialist attempts, and the struggle against fascism.

The reality is that if more people voted consistently [...] politics would actually shift left towards popular policy

No, it wouldn't, because that's never been the case. The leftist policy approved in the 20th century in liberal democracies isn't a consequence of people voting consistently, it's a consequence of intense struggle of the workers through unionisation movements, and the compromise of the governments in the west in fear of a widespread socialist revolution in Western Europe (which also explains why such policy was much more tenuous in the US) following Eastern Europe during the decades of maximum growth in the Eastern Block.

Fascism has never been fought by liberal democracy and votes. Fascism has been defeated by communist movements and armed struggle. Fascism is an advanced stage of capitalism in which the bourgeoisie, in fear of losing their privileges, prop oppressive far right nationalists into the governments either democratically or through coups, as in the case of Nazi Germany, Fascist Spain and Italy, or Pinochet's dictatorship. Nazism in Europe was defeated through the tremendous struggle of the Soviet people who lost 25 million lives in the war against Nazism.

We won't vote our way out of fascism. We won't vote our way into leftist policy. The US tried with Bernie and it didn't work. Greece tried with Syriza and it didn't work. Spain tried with Podemos and it didn't work. The only weapon against fascism and in favour of socialism is mutual aid and organization.