The reason of the confusion is clear.
The US propaganda has always equated Communism and totalitarianism.
It is bonkers that people in the USA cannot distinguish between an economic system and a political system.
Those two are distinct things. True communism is very democratic. But reading the Communist manifesto is heretic in the US and you are left with what your leaders tell you.
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist.
Right wing totalitarian dictators also use starvation of their own people as means of control.
What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn’t gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction.
Food for thought: study the political system in China, you’d be surprised how it’s actually more democratic than the current USA. Yes, the CCP controls the nominations. Now, tell me if there is true plurality in the US, two right wing parties selecting their candidates without any real popular input.
Really you’ve been bamboozled to think there is real democracy in the US.
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist
Hard disagree. Universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, lowest wealth and income inequality in the history of the region, guaranteed housing and abolition of homelessness and unemployment, life expectancy skyrocketing from a meager 28 years to 70 in the span of 40 years, abolition of private business, redistribution of land to peasants, and saving Europe from Fascism really seem like communist traits to me. There were defects and policy failures during some of the hardest times in history, don’t get me wrong, but simply by achieving all of those wonderful goals without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism, that’s very communist to me.
What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn’t gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction
The US has had, for decades, the highest prison population in the world, both in absolute and relative terms. In absolute terms, the US has nearly as many prisoners as the USSR did during WW2, the historic highest for obvious reasons (25 million Soviet citizens were killed by Nazism). You have literal fascist police disappearing people based on the colour of the skin, and the US has literally bombed black people for their ideology in US soil.
You’re damn high in American exceptionalism and anticommunist propaganda.
without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism
That’s only because the USSR lobbied hard in the UN so that colonialism is defined as having overseas colonies. The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire.
The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary 1956, where it crushed a revolution which was not against communism, the revolutionaries were in fact communists, they just wanted to be free of Soviet occupation.
Not debating the accomplishments of the USSR though, it was definitely and improvement on the Russian Empire.
The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire
The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary
You’re spitting in the graves of the tens of millions of murdered by colonialism by comparing it to intervention in Hungary. Colonialism isn’t “maintaining an aligned bloc”, colonialism is the plunder, enslavement and murder of millions in the name of wealth and resource extraction. Go tell the tens of millions of enslaved Africans, of murdered Congolese and Native Americans and Palestinians how what happened in Hungary was colonialism. Disturbing the definitions of western colonialism in order to dunk on communism is honestly a disgusting attitude that trivializes the suffering of the millions upon millions of wretched of the Earth.
Find me anywhere where the USSR did 1% of the horrifying shit that the Brits did in India.
Holodomor. Katyn. Gulags. Literal alliance with the Nazis.
You disgust me, up on your high horse, clutching your pearls and discounting millions dead because theyre politically inconvenient for the economic system you glaze. You accuse other people of spitting while you piss with your Shapiro-like disingenuity. Gross.
Holodomor
Yeah, a bad famine happened in the USSR between 1930 and 1933, no need for a scary special word to refer to it. Famines were commonplace in the region up to that point, and this one was the result of unforeseen difficulties in the first successful collectivization of land in human history. It was not intended or targeted, unlike the repeated famines in India under British rule. As I’ve explained in other comments, it was a tragedy that took place during the necessary rapid collectivization of agriculture that enabled the industrial revolution which saved Eastern Europe from extermination by Nazis.
Katyn
Katyn and similar incidents in Poland number in the tens of thousands of victims, most of them military and law enforcement. It’s not like Poland didn’t have expansionist ambitions that needed to be fought against.
Gulags
Gulag is just the name of the prison system of the USSR. The fact that many people died in the Gulags during WW2 is consequence of the food shortages that Nazis themselves caused in the USSR during their invasion:
Literal alliance with the Nazis
This is simply ahistorical and untrue. In 1936 already, the Soviet Union was the only country to send weapons, munitions, tanks and aviation to Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War against fascism, fighting the Nazis in proxy war. Regarding Molotov-Ribbentrop, this deserves its own comment, so I’ll post it below this one
Regarding Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)
“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.
"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
i love uma
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You don’t see any state run bread lines do you?
That’s because they’d rather you starve, but the mafia has soup lines waiting for you.
You don’t see any state run bread lines do you?
You do, they’re called food pantry lines, and they tend to be run by churches in my experience
There are still plenty of local government run food pantries too, since I have to spell this part out in crayon for some people…
If the food pantries are run by churches, then they are not state run, meaning you do not see state run food pantries.
If the food pantries are run by churches, then they are not state run
What if the state is subsidizing the church through tax credits, grants, and subsidies?
The state has no control over the food at the pantries beyond basic health standards. The state cannot force me to give out bread when I run a soup kitchen. It can encourage me to continue with charitable acts with tax credits and subsidies, but it cannot force me to.
The state has no control over the food at the pantries beyond
My brother in Christ there is literally a department of agriculture at the federal level and every single state. To say the state has no control over food in pantries you have to ignore water rights and farm tax credits and crop subsidies and trade restrictions and registration in pesticides and that’s just on the production end.
I live in a city where people are routinely arrested for distributing food to the homeless.
The state clearly has enormous control over what gets produced, where it is distributed, and who eats it. Even what price its sold.
I’m not American, but my uneducated ass believes America is basically a theocracy. The president has to pretend that he does everything in the name of god, you have to swear your official vows on the bible, every hotel has a bible, every child in school has to pray to the god-emperor every morning, your money says “in god we trust”, your churches are payed for by tax-evasion.
So then, what renains to be the difference between “state run” and “church run” benefits really?
Well let’s break your points down.
1: The president does not need to pretend everything is done in the name of god. One party does this to appeal to a religious base.
2: You do not need to swear into office on a bible, many have sworn in on nothing at all or other holy books.
3: Every hotel is provided a bible (and often a book of mormon) by that company. This is because the company many of these hotels are owned by is a mormon company. Many hotels do not have bibles in them now.
4: Children are not required to pray in the morning, unless you attend a religious school specifically. If you mean the pledge, that is also optional and not done in many schools.
5: In God We Trust is an odd case yes. It was added in the 1950’s to “combat socialism.”
6: Churches are not required to pay taxes because they are also charities that perform good acts for the poor. Other religions claim this benefit as well.
