Is this some kind of layered irony? The fuck is he trying to say here?
This was a line actually parroted by some 'loyal Communists' during the Stalinist era who were, themselves, thrown into GULAG. That they must've done something to deserve it, or, otherwise, that their case was a mistake (such mistakes happen, comrade, no big deal!), but everyone else in GULAG deserved it for being reactionary dogs who went against The Party.
Monarchists in every society are hard to stamp out, it would seem - they just regard different finery and titles to be worth kneeling before. "If only the Tsar knew, if only the Great Leader knew!"
Wild. I don’t know bad empanada’s views on many things but if this is a serious statement he’s fucking deranged. It’s just hard for me to fathom that someone could actually say this unironically.
I only know him vaguely by reputation as a tankie talking head and Holodomor denier, and it looks like his Twitter account got deleted (and Wayback doesn't have the tweet, though search engines still show it). Unfortunately, nothing that has been historically said by Stalinists, however deranged or outdated, surprises me out of tankie mouths.
The context of the statements gets shown better in The Death of Stalin.
When you can get purged at any time by the state, you say things like this because prison time can quickly turn into a death sentence if you say the wrong thing
"Long live Stalin!" [bang]
At some point, you have to realize that bootlickers really just love the boot that much.
Plenty of GULAG memoirs recount that most people were not licking the boot like that - the people who were already processed and in the camps but still talking like that were true believers - or true sycophants, if there's a difference in this case.
It’s a riff on “Stalin did nothing wrong” hyperbole.
So what’s he trying to communicate? I can’t find any meaning that makes sense beyond the literal one, which seems extremely deranged.
They're saying that if you believe in the system so hard, you understand it can make mistakes, and that some mistakes are a necessary evil in the system. Their situation, though they may actually be innocent, is acceptable to them on those terms, because they truly believe it's a mistake. They're willing to die for that mistake to prove that they are that loyal to the country and its ideals, however deranged that might be.
Arriving at that conclusion means they must have considered a possibility where Great Leader might be wrong. Verdict: guilty as hell.
Dunking on Tankies from a leftist, anti-capitalist perspective.
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