Anarchism

You can lie to yourselves all you want. Anarchists remember the backstabbing very well and the real reason why they couldn;t fight back efficiently. I'm not here to discuss with tankies though. Plenty has been written about this stalinist revisionism already.

My dude, the vast majority of Republican tanks were provided by the Soviet Union. Let's take a look at the Wikipedia article about tanks in the Spanish Civil War shall we: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tanks_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War#Tanks_supplied_by_foreign_powers

Locally produced tanks: 24-32

Soviet tanks: 331

French/Polish tanks: 64

Paraguayan tanks: 1

So out of the 420-428 tanks deployed by the Republicans, more than 75% came from the Soviet Union. This is not "backstabbing." If the Republicans didn't want the Soviet Union to "interfere" with their civil war, they could have fun with their 89 tanks versus the Francoists' 280 tanks. Yes, when you accept material aid from another country, that country has a say in the trajectory of your political project. That's literally how all aid works. The Soviet Union was not a charity. If the Republicans did not want the Soviet Union to interfere with their political project, they could've just rejected the material aid. But to accept the substantial material aid and then cry about Soviet interference is called being ungracious. It's called biting the hand that feeds you.

"Totalitarian" is a totally made-up, meaningless distinction. There is no conceivable metric by which you could call any socialist state "totalitarian" that wouldn't apply a hundredfold to the US Empire. Seriously, this conversation cannot continue unless you read Blackshirts and Reds, it sums up every point I could make to argue with you with much more depth and eloquence. If you have the slightest pretention to intellectual seriousness, go and read that. Then, once you have, message me and I'll send you a link to season 3 of a podcast called Blowback, covering the Korean war. I think you'll find it informative.

I've taken a harsh tone with you, because you need to be jolted out of this fundamentally incorrect mindset. But if you read what I've suggested and actually process the information, if you try to understand the societies you harshly criticize in the depth and richness of their actual existence and not the literal Saturday morning cartoon evil version you've had ingrained in you by a multi-trillion dollar propaganda campaign, you'll arrive at the same opinions I have now - including feeling the way I do about people espousing the views you have done. Until you understand that no "western" country has EVER come closer to socialism than the USSR, China, Cuba or the DPRK (or even had the merest potential to) you are not only useless to the international cause of the workers but an active detriment, a stooge of the Empire that is currently enslaving humanity. That might only manifest as irritating, trivial anticommunist memes on a backwater internet forum, but it still might as well be fought against, and if there's the slightest chance you can be educated into a helpful comrade then I might as well try.