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[–] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

LOL. I love that your picture is a tight shot, forced perspective on a single thing with absolutely zero context. We can't tell if we're inside or outside the fence in that picture. It's truly the most artful expression of your position.

As for Stalin not getting cut from the party, we have someone claiming that the party would have committed pogroms against the Jews except that Stalin died before they could do it, so I guess it's fair game to say that they would have cut him from the party but he died before they could do it.

Anyway, it's kind of difficult to cut the commander-in-chief who defeated the Nazis and sacked Berlin, even if in the last 5 his progressive brain disease coupled with fighting the most insidious racist group in the world led him to take actions against Jewish institutions because he believed (correctly) that the international Zionist movement was a reactionary bourgeois movement aligned with Western super powers and hostile to communism

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 child)

    “claiming that the party would have committed pogroms against the Jews except that Stalin died”

    No no no. You keep getting that completely wrong. There were many many pogroms in Russia. They happened. Jews were tortured and killed.

    The only thing Stalin DIDNT finish before he died was complete elimination of the Jewish people in Russia.

    The pograms happened many times.

    You said that wasn’t the communists faults.

    I replied with essentially “the Soviet people committed pograms, the Soviet leader also ordered pogroms.

    How can you say it wasn’t the fault of the communist when the communist leaders and communist people did pogroms?

    I also wouldn’t compare it to US police to prove it isn’t racism.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    How can you say it wasn’t the fault of the communist when the communist leaders and communist people did pogroms?

    You are the definition of bad faith.

    Listen, the porgroms you are talking about are well documented. They were NOT carried out by the Bolshevik party nor by the Communist Party. They were carried out by the White Army (the Tsarist loyalists), the Ukrainian National Army, "rogue" groups within the Red Army (I'll get to this in a second), and various Russian peasant militias.

    With the exception of the pogroms carried out by the Red Army, NONE of these are pogroms being committed by the communist party. If you can't admit that, then I don't know why you expect anyone to respect your positions.

    For the pogroms carried about by the Red Army, NONE of them were ordered by the party nor by the top military leadership within the Red Army. They were carried out by literally elements of the military that went rogue and the party, under the leadership of both Lenin and Trotsky held a ZERO TOLERANCE policy regarding anti-semitism and counter-revolutionary violence. They disciplined the soldiers that carried out the pogroms because they were EXPLICITLY NOT THE ORDERS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY. The soldiers who did it were literally executed.

    And then Stalin took power. Not while these pogroms took place. AFTER the pogroms. Stalin took power AFTER the pogroms you're talking about. And what did Stalin do? He literally created the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

    I also wouldn’t compare it to US police to prove it isn’t racism.

    Again, you're absolutely arguing in bad faith, deliberately choosing to ignore the actual meaning of my words, which was that the Doctors Plot was incredibly small, was predicated on a specific legal accusation of a criminal conspiracy which was initiated by a specific claim through written testimony of a witness attesting to the criminal conspiracy. It may or may not have been a real criminal conspiracy, and we can argue and debate the use of force in the prosecution of the case, but it's not like Stalin just woke up one day and said "I wish to slake my bloodlust by killing those I hate the most" nor did the party make a decision to, for example, make a specific ethnicity into a scapegoat for the purposes of creating a nationwide ethnostate, enforce ethnic purity, or rally the Russian people to a national cause. None of these things happened. There was evidence of a criminal conspiracy, of organized crime, and there was a state response.

    So back to your question:

    How can you say it wasn’t the fault of the communist when the communist leaders and communist people did pogroms?

    Because communist leaders did not do pogroms. You're going to have to provide evidence for your claim. And "communist people" are not a thing. Peasants living under the Tsar that were anti-semitic were the exact same peasants that were anti-semitic when they were now governed by the communist party. The peasants that did pogroms were not "communist people". They were just anti-semites, and the communist leadership, the party, and all of their power, was used to STOP the anti-semitism and the pogroms. The communists literally executed the leaders of pogroms.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 child)

    You have Herculean patience. I would have told them to fuck off after like 3 comments

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago

    It's all an opportunity to educate the audience (and honestly myself, I learn more and more every time these things happen, I have to do more and more research to both validate and invalidate what I believe/understand and what my opponent is claiming)

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    It’s not bad faith. I don’t think communism is inherently bad. I don’t even think it’s worse than capitalism. I’m just saying it hasn’t been great with racism either. Communist countries also kinda suck all the time too. China is a horrible police state. So is America.

    It doesn’t look like the problem is capitalism or communism. The problem is tyrants and oligarchs

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (1 child)

    It’s not bad faith.

    Well now we have to go all the way back to your original position to see if you've been moving the goal posts.

    Quite a bit of overlap, especially with how much Nationalism and racism goes into the major Communist power groups.

    That's your original claim - Much racism goes into the major Communist power groups.

    I said the Communist power group (i.e. the Bolsheviks / the Communist Party) in the USSR worked against racism. You said:

    I think you’re forgetting quite a few pogroms

    Meaning that to support your claim that the Communist power group in the USSR had much racism, you bring as evidence the fact that the Communist power group in the USSR committed quite a few pogroms.

    I then provided, as evidence against your claim, evidence of formal, official, and structural anti-racist actions taken by the Bolsheviks right from the beginning including the punishment by death of those members of the Red Army who went against orders and committed pogroms against Jews.

    You then said:

    Stalin didn’t like Jews and was on his way to build camps himself. The doctors plot was leading up to that.

    Which is essentially saying that one man, who was an important but deeply fucked up leader of the party held bigoted views, which is not evidence for the party having much racism but rather evidence that people who are raised in a racist society maintain their bigotry even in the best of times. But more importantly its evidence that despite being the leader of the party and despite claims that he was going to build his own concentration camps for Jews, it never actually happened, which is evidence against your claim that there was "much racism in Communist power group". The Doctors Plot, as we've discussed, is one of the many many many violent purges driven by Stalin's schizophrenia and enabled by his war-time powers. And when someone essentially fires into a crowd and hits 10 people, 2 of whom are Jewish, it's not really evidence of antisemitism, and if 2 of them were black, it wouldn't be evidence of racism. There's PLENTY of better evidence for Stalin's antisemitism and how the party did huge damage to the Jewish community in the USSR, but you haven't raised any of it because you don't know any of it.

    And then you say that while the party may have cut out the antisemites before Stalin, Stalin was never cut from the party. This is your claim that the party itself was racist because they didn't cut Stalin. Whereas the historical record shows that Stalin's paranoia and progressive brain disease drove him to brutal lengths of self-preservation that no one in the party could withstand, and it lasted about 5 years.

    5 years out of 70 is an aberration, not a fundamental quality. It's the exception that proves the rule.

    But then you go back to:

    There were many many pogroms in Russia. How can you say it wasn’t the fault of the communist when the communist leaders and communist people did pogroms?

    But you provide no evidence. I am left to believe you are talking about the pogroms I already addressed. There's the Doctors Plot and the purging of the JAC, which I contextualized in the larger pattern of paranoid purges driven by specific fear of criminal conspiracies during an aberrant period of leadership after the most brutal war in their history and part of the sundowning of a specific person with too much power.

    Those other pogroms I have already established WERE NOT the fault of communist leaders. But this is where the bad faith comes in. You originally said Communist power groups. Now you're saying communist leaders and communist people. The GROUP itself, that is to say, the PARTY, has a clear historical pattern of resisting, punishing, even repairing racism, despite the fact that nearly every member of the society, which includes all party members, were raised in a racist society. The power group, as you say, was actively working against racism. The Russian peasants that committed pogroms were executed by the party as punishment for doing something the party understood to be wrong.

    By moving from "Communist power groups have much racism" to "the peasants in communist countries did racist things", you are arguing in bad faith. By saying "a single leader did racist things and would have done more if he hadn't died" you think you're providing evidence for the whole power group having much racism when you're proving the exact opposite. Because if the power group had much racism, they would have been doing those racist things before and after that 1 leader and they didn't.

    I’m just saying [Communism] hasn’t been great with racism either.

    And yet, it was Cuban communists that fundamentally changed the material conditions of black people in the country for the first time in history. It was Cuban communists who supported the fight for black liberation in South Africa when no capitalist country would. It would take a capitalist country (Sweden) 10 years before they realized that supporting Mandela was the right thing to do.

    The one child policy in China explicitly targeted the ethnic super majority, not the minorities. It specifically protected and promoted the development of minorities. Unlike nearly every capitalist country in the world destroying the language and culture of ethnic minorities as part of their strategy of assimilation, China recognizes over 57 ethnic minorities and their languages and is among the handful of countries in the world that has established internal governments that give large ethnic minorities autonomy in self-governance explicitly to preserve cultural practices, religion, language, and tradition.

    The Communist Party of Vietnam succeeded specifically because it collaborated with and protected ethnic minorities and didn't use them as scapegoats to produce national unity. The constitution in 1946 formally codified that all ethnic minorities were to have equal rights and privileges. Compare this to the US in 1946 and it's OBVIOUS that the Communist Party of Vietnam was literally decades further along in anti-racism than the US was.

    Laos started off on the right foot, but I agree that they're replicating a lot of the ethnic exploitation that Western capitalists do.

    Communist countries also kinda suck all the time too.

    Communist countries have literally ended colonial rule by foreign powers, lifted over a 800M people out of abject poverty, invented new medicines and vaccines that they released to the world entirely for free, improved outcomes in health, education, nutrition, and violence for the majority of their people. The quality of life for the majority of people in every single country that had a communist revolution was greatly improved.

    China is a horrible police state. So is America.

    And yet, China's incarceration rate is 120 per 100k and the USA's incarceration rate is 580 per 100k. The USA also has a parole and probation system that is literally 200% bigger than it's prison system (by headcount). China doesn't have anything like that. So the USA's police state is actively managing about 1700 people per 100k, while China's police state is actively managing about 120 per 100k.

    Saying that both China and the USA are horrible police states is like saying that both China and the USA have a gun violence problem (the USA has a gun violence problem about 1000x larger than China does).

    So yeah. I would say you're arguing in bad faith. You have no real understanding of history, let alone racism or communist parties. You cherry pick facts to benefit your narrative. You make broad generalized claims and then try to claim you don't have the time to provide anything else. You move your goal posts without admitting it. And you make false equivalencies that fit your world view without any regard to facts.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    The communist people hated Jews and killed Jews for being Jews, the communist leaders hated Jews and killed them for being Jews.

    Now if you want to say that wasn’t the communist being racist then nothing is

    “Stalin was deeply paranoid” his motivation doesn’t concern mean. He disliked Jews. He was vocal about that. He thought jews were coming to overthrow him. Hitler thought Jews were destroying the economy. Being crazy doesn’t make you less racist.

    He was very vocal about his hatred of Jews and shortly before he died he was planning to exterminate them.

    You say I’m cherry picking? I said there was multiple examples. I named one and you said that didn’t count, so I named another and you said that didn’t count either. It’s not cherry picking I flat out said I wasn’t going to keep naming examples because you just keep saying they don’t count because Stalin was crazy. So was Hitler, so is every racist.

    The leaders, the people, hated and killed Jews.

    China is a terrifying police state as well. They have their own internet, limit freedom of speech, have capital punishment bans, and concentration camps. You can’t even say your leader looks like Pooh bear. I can say trump looks like a slug.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    You're just unabashedly bad faith, aren't you.

    The communist people

    Do not exist. There's no such thing as "the communist people". Communism is not a nation, it's a doctrine, a political movement. When a state becomes communist, its people do not become communist people any more than when a state becomes capitalist do its people suddenly become capitalist people.

    Now if you want to say that wasn’t the communist being racist then nothing is racist.

    Yeah, that doesn't even logically follow. At this point you're just trying to avoid giving any ground at all in any way and you're willing to say foolish things to ensure you don't have to face reality.

    I don't have to keep doing this with you. You can stop any time.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Joseph Stalin systematically destroyed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He killed them.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago

    Yes, among the many purges Stalin ordered, the purge of the JAC was another one of the terrible things Stalin did. I would say that, considering Stalin was deeply paranoid and had many such groups purged and killed that it's a tall order to say he killed the members of the JAC for racist reasons. Again, he created the JAC in the first place. His reasons for killing the members of the JAC was not "they're Jews and I hate Jews". His reasons for killing the JAC were the same reasons he had for killing many other leaders and groups in the USSR - he believed they were conspiring against him and the communist revolution. I know it's easy to cherry pick facts and then make a story about them, Stalin did not actually single out Jews for purging. They were just one of the many political factions that Stalin attacked. He was legitimately insane by the end of his life and he did horrible things. But none of that actually supports your original goal posts that the communist party of the USSR was a racist power structure that executed pogroms. Again, all the evidence points to the party working against the historical racism that were in the people and power structures and correcting course when inevitably there were failures.

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