I suppose to a certain degree that’s true, I just don’t trust the personal account of a Nazi that has been known to lie and that contradicts archival evidence.

This community likes to remind everyone that no communist country was allowed to just be communists in peace. So there was no “proper” communist country.

I was arguing against this point in particular.

Yep.

Yep, Wikipedia is written largely by westerners using western consensus, even if such consensus has inaccuracies or better information is available post-opening of the soviet archives. You can even see it uses the Gulag Archipelago as a source, despite it being a work of fiction.

Yep, Marxism is communist.

Yep, they also called themselves social democrats. State capitalism is such a loaded term that it’s better to identify it by its class character.

I don’t have “power” anywhere. Having issues with Marxists is still generally a bad thing that should be a broken rule.

I agitate for the sake of creating new comrades.

Shutting out the voices of leftists is the rule in the meme? Sounds like we should break that.

Calling leftists “almost completely unhinged” is more of a self-tell than anything.

The point of 200 years together being listed is that we know that he’s a liar and a conspiracy theorizing anti-semitic Nazi, so trusting his word alone on socialism makes no sense. We have every reason not to trust him and no reason to trust him, especially when he contradicts archival evidence on how prisons in the GULAG administration functioned.

As for soviet prisons, they varied quite a lot depending on severity of the crime and location, with many being pretty progressive for the time. Visitation, open air prisons, and a focus on rehabilitation was common. I already linked Russian Justice, but you should absolutely read it.

If their problem wasn’t with the communism but instead with the hatred they get, then Hexbear.net is good, which uses an allow-list for federation. It’s a very chill instance to use.

Again, communists and Nazis are diametrically opposed.

Equating communists with Nazis is a form of Holocaust trivialization called “Double Genocide Theory.”

Marxists absolutely have advice on how to organize, the problem is that it’s very regional. Some parties are good, others are horrid, but the basics are to find a good organization local to you and join it. Protesting, reading theory, doing direct action and mutual aid, unionizing and striking, all are good ways to organize.

None of us “simp” for the PRC or DPRK, and certainly not for the Russian Federation. We support socialist countries and critically support those working against the US empire.

The term itself comes far after the actual 1930s famine and the Holocaust itself. Famine is already a word in Ukrainian, and was common before collectivizing agriculture. The term itself was coined by Ukrainian nationalists that opposed the socialist system and drew on Nazi propaganda.

Thanks comrade!

Whew, that’s a lot of alts.

The communist party is run by the working classes and derives its power from popular support. The people oppressed by communist parties were overwhelmingly fascists, landlords, and capitalists.

Here’s what you say is “no answer except a quote from his ex-wife:”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.

Here’s a real quote:

>The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hit1er was stupid and did not use this weapon.

From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:

In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.

According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and “strangled” the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people (“непроизводительный народ”) who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews’ own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, “200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica.”