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.
So much of ignorant baby leftist belief these days boils down to a baseline of “America always bad,” which then logically leads to “anyone opposing America always good,” which is how you get AnTi-iMpErIaLiStS supporting Russian imperialism.
my advisor grew up in the soviet union, he was in the science world so he played by a laxer set of rules (his beatles album that he bought on the black market with a month's salary would be confiscated but he wouldn't be thrown into prison for it, for instance), and it still sounded horrible
My aunt visiting from the Baltics to the USA in the 70s/80s broke down and cried when she saw American grocery stores, she couldn't believe it. An uncle was tortured by Soviets, and lived in paranoid fear in the USA thereafter. Just two small examples of many in my family. Really gets to me.
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
Bullshit all you want about Napoleon or William the Conqueror but you're about thirty seconds of searching from speaking to someone who drove a Trabant
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
This is even to some extent understood as doctrine _in the PRC_ now and has been for years: “Mao was 70 percent good, 30 percent bad” and while I quibble with the ratio the 30% is very much referring to the famines and the purges and the cultural revolution and…
I assume that's why conspiracy theories about Golden Ages that have been covered up are so popular in Russia, right now. Fomenko Chronology, Tartarian Empire stuff, etc.
Nobody's going to share their memories of bread lines in these fantasy histories.
The only thing I can think is that a lot of online tankies are too young to have seen the grave and utter horrorshow that was the USSR. Doesn’t excuse Chomsky though
I mean, unless you lived there, you are, too. Getting all your info about a country from its avowed enemy is no way to learn anything accurate.
Stuck between two propagandas :/
trying to do science in the USSR was politically waltzing through a minefield. Plenty of scientists spent time in gulags just for doing science. (Then let's talk about how many Soviet leaders were not ethnic Russian men.)
All except Sakharov. Hmm, wonder if his chosen area of research might have given him special value to the authorities, who desired real science and not puling sycophancy in this field and this field only... naw, that'd be crazy!
I studied it. I visited it. It was bad. The Russian Federation never really had a chance given that the only functional institutions were networks of secret police/cronies/criminals and the homegrown social sciences had been utterly corrupted by ideology.
My favorite thing in Moscow was ВДНХ, the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy which was so run down and bleak. I am sad I didn't take photos.
A few months back there was a thread on Twitter I saw by some left-leaning Tankie about how Democracy ultimately couldn't be trusted because because the average person couldn't be depended on to "vote in their own collective interest." I've never hit the block button so fast.
And how ruthlessly it tried to crush religion. A family friend described going to Russia after the USSR fell and church being packed so tightly their arms were pinned and the one person nearby who had an arm free was crossing the other folks around them, because people were so hungry to be there
If only there had been a widely watched reckoning on the left many years ago in which, say, Stalin apologists were confronted head on with the horrors of the USSR! Alas we have to go through it now.
It also ticks me off when people go, "Oh but it was just Stalin, Lenin and the others were amazing!" like. Um.
No, all these DICTATORS were awful, killing political opponents, and utilizing propaganda to ensure they remain in power.
(Though I will say, no issues with the film Death of Stalin, 10/10, all of the protagonists are shitty as fuck, the entrance scene Jason Isaac's character had was top tier camp, and watching it with a friend who grew up with stories about the realities of the USSR was an excellent decision.)
It is because they have spent decades huffing whatever farts the Russian MFA puts out, and do not actually give a shit about basic human liberty, only leftist aesthetic.
Because it's not under dispute. Aside from tankies, progressives and Democrats are in alignment that Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine deserves support. There's no minds to change.
Israel's genocide is a major sticking point because Biden et al support the aggressor. There are minds to change.
