Your regular reminder that I personally loathe Noam Chomsky for the reprehensible things he said in apologia for the Khmer Rouge - and has never really taken back. He was no friend to the Cambodian people.
(Not to mention his stance on Ukraine).
It's a bit funny because how quick the left usually is to cut people loose for failing purity tests, but there's always the few who manage to get into the state of grace where the test must be wrong.
Tbh the left is pretty fucking awful at enforcing the “supporting Russia/genocides committed by vaguely leftist seeming countries” purity test nowadays
I really, really winds me up with folks valorize the USSR. I really do not think most folks understand the sheer scale of horror and baseline violence society operated under, how totally pervasive the kleptocracy was, how incompetent it was, how vicious it was, or how nationalistic and expansionist.
What always gets me on that is, like Maoists, this is still a "y'know we can just call up people who lived there, right? Primary sources are right here still with us, regular-ass people for whom this wasn't abstract?" issue
Exactly. Literally, just go and speak to any folks from Poland, or Estonia, or Ukraine and find out just how great* and utopian** being part of the USSR was
* extremely not great
** extremely not utopian
When we were leaving Soviet Ukraine in 1989, a neighbor told my parents that over all the years we lived in our building, the local head of police questioned all of our neighbors about our family's behavior, drinking habits, partying habits, visitors, friends. We were the only Jews in the building.
Besides, y'know, being 47 and so I watched the whole collapse of the Eastern Bloc in real time, I had a Chinese history prof in college who'd been Sent Down, that was a LESSON
My best friend told me a story about how folks in his family would get a fresh orange once a year (like, one fresh orange per person per year) and save the peels to suck on for as long as they still had flavor.
Truly listening to anyone from the USSR is an education.
I mean, talk to Muscovites even, even in the capital it was shit for plenty of ‘em. Having to buy your own anesthetic on the grey market before surgery. Using needles repeatedly without sterilizing for a classroom of kids getting boosters. Coworkers of mine shared these stories as mundane.
Yup and a lot of them did all of us the great service of writing shit down or recording it. It's harder to find cuz AI bullshit now but it's all still out there.
