[Transcript]
Yes. There is never any excuse for helping Nazis. There is no amount of bullshit you can spew to make that OK retrospectively. The Soviets didn’t just make an alliance with the nazis, they used that alliance as a chance to invade and snag vast amounts of land from other countries while Europe was too busy to stop them. This tankie propaganda that they had no other choice is utter bullshit, and it should be called out for the intellectual diarrhea that it is.
Stalin allied with the nazis to enrich the USSR. He, and every other tankie and useful idiot that support his actions, are nothing more than nazi apologist scum who ought to be lined up against the wall with the rest of the fascists. The deaths that the USSR faced when Hitler finally turned against them were well deserved, and I have no pity for filth wiping each other out, because nothing erases the stain of looking at race supremacists and thinking “yeah, I want some of that”.
extremely willing to forgive Nazis and collaborators afterwards
You say that, and yet, here you are, forgiving nazi collaborators.
Ok so the USSR approaches Britain and France saying “jeeze, this Hitler guy who keeps talking about genocide is a bit spooky. Wanna do something about it?” and France and Britain are non commital because they think they’ll be in a better position if they appease Hitler for a while longer.
Poland sinks it, because they’re more freaked out about the USSR than the Nazis who literally want to work them to death as farm animals which is… wild. So the USSR ends up signing a NAP with Nazi Germany, the same stance that everyone not explicitly allied to the Nazis has, agreeing to let them kill whomever they like if only they do it in “their” borders.
Using the time bought they rapidly, and one notes here pretty brutually, industrialise. Fight the everliving shit out of the Nazis once they have an industrial base and support in a war against them (the original fucking goal of the tripple alliance talks). USSR solidiers spill the majority of blood in Europe, theirs and Nazis. They’re not saints, it’s an army.
After the war, when countries like France are busy forgiving police collaborators and giving them their jobs back, the soviets are killing a lot of Nazis.
Stalin sucked in so many real ways, the USSR failed the utopian vision it was founded on in so many real ways. Calling Stalin a Nazi collaborator is just fucking wild. The Nazis were very explicit in their plans to genocide Slavs, that is what triggered the initial talks. Nobody in the USSR was under any illusions as to where they stood with the Nazis, the brutual policies of rapid industrialisation and militarisation were a result of being abandoned by the rest of Europe because the fucking aristocracy running the horror show preferred Nazis to communists.
your argument isn’t any different this time than before. idc if you think stalin was forced into it, he still worked with nazis and that fucking makes him a nazi collaborator. you don’t get to “but, but” about it. don’t give me that bullshit that he didn’t have a choice, lots of people were given the choice and chose death over working with nazis, including a french teenage girl. but go on about how poor widdle stalin couldn’t do what a teenager could.
you make me fucking sick. at least we know what fucking choice YOU’LL make when trump comes knocking on your door to inform on your neighbors.
(Source.)
I think that this information needs to be repeated here for emphasis:
But inside the [Axis]-occupied USSR there were not just one or two Lidices. There were hundreds. Mass killings of the Lidice type took place at Rasseta (372 dead), Vesniny (about 200 dead, mainly women and children), and Dolina (469 dead, again mainly women and children), to name only three. In the Osveya district in northern Belorussia alone, in the single month of March 1943, [Axis soldiers] and collaborationist troops devastated some 158 villages, according to Times of London correspondent Alexander Werth. “All able bodied men [were] deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered,” Werth reports. This pattern of massacre and scorched earth warfare was repeated again and again throughout the war on the eastern front.
[Axis] warfare against partisans was consistently brutal throughout Europe, and the [Axis powers] and their collaborators committed numerous violations of the “laws and customs of war,” such as torture, mass killings of innocent persons in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and murder of hostages across the Continent. It was in the East, however, that such killings reached a truly frenzied level. At Odessa, for example, the [Germanic Fascists] and their Romanian collaborators destroyed 19,000 Jews and other so-called subversive elements in a single night in retaliation for a partisan bombing that had killed about a dozen Romanian soldiers. Axis troops rounded up another 40,000 Jews and executed them during the following week. The SS used gas wagons disguised as Red Cross vans to kill about 7,000 women and children in the south, near Krasnodar. At least 100,000 Jews and Slavs were slain at Babi Yar, near Kiev, and so on, and on, and on.²
It is entirely possible that this anti-Bolshevik did not have civilians in mind, but the way that the Axis treated (unarmed) Soviet soldiers was hardly better:
It was into this cellar—a series of small cells and corridors—that the Auschwitz SS led the Soviet “commissars” that fateful night in early September 1941. As they were forced down the stairs, the POWs saw some 250 other prisoners sprawled across the floor, invalids from the infirmary who had been selected to die with them. Once the last Soviet prisoner had been crammed into the cellar, the SS threw Zyklon B crystals inside and locked the doors.
On contact with the warm air and the captives’ bodies, highly toxic prussic acid was released and desperate screaming started, carrying all the way to the adjacent barracks. The gas quickly destroyed the victims’ mucous membranes and entered their bloodstream, asphyxiating them from within. Some dying men stuffed bits of clothing in their mouths to block the gas. But none survived.¹⁶⁵
[…]
The Auschwitz SS had stumbled across the prototype of the death factory.¹⁶⁸
Its first lethal test came in mid‐September 1941, when the SS gassed some nine hundred Soviet POWs in the Auschwitz crematorium.¹⁶⁹ As the prisoners arrived, SS men told them to undress and then forced them into the morgue, supposedly for delousing. SS men now slammed the doors shut and threw in the gas pellets. Commandant Rudolf Höß watched once more: “After the insertion, some screamed ‘gas,’ followed by mighty howling and pushing toward the two doors. But they withstood the pressure.” It took several days, he added, to burn all the bodies.¹⁷⁰
In 1942, however, Vlasov was just the man that the political warfare faction was looking for, and the creation of an army of Soviet defectors under [Axis] control using him as a figurehead became its central preoccupation for the remainder of the war.
“The Germans started a form of blackmail against the surviving Russian war prisoners,” war correspondent Alexander Werth notes. “[E]ither go into the Vlasov Army or starve.” The overwhelming majority of Soviet POWs refused the offer, and about 2 million POWs who were given the choice of collaboration or starvation between 1942 and 1945 chose death before they would aid the [Axis]. But many thousands of Russians did join the invaders as porters, cooks, concentration camp guards, and informers, and later as fighting troops under [Axis] control.⁷
At first, the Dachau SS killed outside the bunker, as it had done on previous occasions, but as the number of victims increased, it moved the executions to its shooting range in Hebertshausen, about a mile and a half away. Here, Camp SS men forced the Soviet soldiers to strip naked and line up. Everything happened at great speed. A commando of SS men pounced on those in the first row, with five SS men grabbing one prisoner each, dragged them around a corner, and shackled them to posts. Then an SS squad opened fire, often shooting wildly at the helpless victims.
(Source.)
This is just a small, small selection of the abuses that more than twenty-seven million people suffered at the hands of the Axis and its collaborators. That anybody can say that these deaths were ‘well deserved’ absolutely astonishes me… as much as I loathe the Polish government and the Poles who collaborated with the Fascists, I would never say that the brutal colonisation of Poland was ‘well deserved’. Ever. It would almost be like saying that the brutal colonization of the Americas was ‘well deserved’ because certain tribes signed treaties or sometimes outright collaborated with the European invaders, as during the fall of the Aztec Empire.
It is unoften that I demand an apology from anybody. Many of the wrong things that I share them saying are so typical that I don’t expect any. But this really is such a horrifying and blatantly unacceptable sentiment that nobody (least of all an anticapitalist) should ever express it unjokingly. It is fine to be disappointed in the German–Soviet Pact, and maybe we could argue that it was unnecessary or lead to more harm than good, but this remark completely crosses the line, so I want an apology from @_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus.
Lots of people chose death over working with Nazis! Stalin had no excuse!
Maybe under the broadest possible definition of “working with the Nazis” (i.e., having any diplomatic relations whatsoever) it is true that Stalin was a “collaborator,” but that would render the definition so broad as to be meaningless. Was Chamberlain a Nazi collaborator? We all know the answer is yes, but this person wouldn’t say so. They definitely wouldn’t say all the people who died during the Blitz deserved it.
Also, maybe a French teenager can show heroism by choosing death over surrendering her comrades to the Gestapo, but Stalin is in no such position. It’s not like he can personally surrender to save his countrymen. Doing so would actually doom them. He was the leader of the Soviet people, not a single resistance fighter. Bad analogy.
“Better to die on one’s feet than ever degrade oneself by living like a dog. Any sort of compromise or buying time with awful people is worse than just being slaughtered by them.”
-Someone who has never had a gun pointed at them or millions of their countrymen before.
Also someone who, guaranteed, lives like a dog by their standards under capitalism, yet has not killed their landlord, electricity monopolist, and local skinheads. Almost as if it’s easy to talk a bunch of action movie bullshit when it’s not your own life on the line.
it’s also someone who has so deeply internalized nazi ideas that they truly think all you need to resist an invader is pure will. and not y’know, armies and guns and factories and stuff.
But that is the indoctrination in children’s cartoons of Western countries and traditional Japanese isekai fiction stories. The children indoctrination of Pax Americana fiction stories is that ignorant kids and lazy young people who failed by their choice can defeat foreign invaders by using childish approaches that failed in their daily life. The belief that a lazy spoiled white person who failed in life can overcome war by willpower and choice also alone justify victim blaming. An exception to the victim blaming policy is when you can blame the hard working innovative Communists for convincing the invisible hand to elect fictional scary red masterminds as rulers of lazy Capitalists.
idealist brainrot
literally an objectivist viewpoint lmao
Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’
These people never say that Britain et al giving up Czechoslovakia and appeasement is ‘collbabarating’ with the Nazis
Also would they had rather that the Nazis took all of Poland? ask the jews, roma etc in the Soviet controlled regions if that would have been preferable
If that person wants to choose death over actually successfully defeating the Nazis then…
That Germany was very likely going to invade Poland was hardly a secret. Why else would the USSR have two weeks before offered Britain & France to send in a million of its troops to kill the baby while it was still in the crib? And why did they wait until that offer was refused before signing a non-aggression pact with Germany, a week before Germany invaded?
“Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time,” said [Major General] Lev Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. “This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks.”
“It was clear that the Soviet Union stood alone and had to turn to Germany and sign a non-aggression pact to gain some time to prepare ourselves for the conflict that was clearly coming,” said Gen Sotskov.
It was only two years later, following Hitler’s Blitzkreig attack on Russia in June 1941, that the alliance with the West which Stalin had sought finally came about - by which time France, Poland and much of the rest of Europe were already under German occupation.
The USSR had known for years that Nazi Germany was going to eventually try to destroy it. The Anti-Comintern pact had been signed six years before. Destroying communism was one of Nazi Germany’s primary goals, which is why first they came for the Communists. The USSR agreed to the Pact in order to buy itself time to built up its military for the inevitable invasion attempt by Germany.
FYI, @AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml, last time I checked, @-ing a user in a post doesn’t work. It has to be in a comment.
That’s the thing, though: it doesn’t matter to @_cryptagion@anarchist.nexus that London and Paris rejected an antifascist alliance with the Soviets and that Moscow probably just wanted to delay the capitalist reinvasion that it constantly feared and then suffered 1.8 years later. He truly believes that the Soviet Union would have been better off suffering the reinvasion in 1939 and possibly collapsing as a result than making any deals with Berlin.
Assuming that the Soviet Union would have survived this hypothetical, early reinvasion, I’d imagine that anti-Bolshevists would still bash the Soviet Union for being unready and not doing more to protect millions of innocents. The implication here is that gambling with millions of innocents is no big deal.
@-ing a user in a post doesn’t work. It has to be in a comment.
I know. Anarchist.nexus blocks lemmygrad.ml so it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. Somebody is eventually going to tell him about this thread.
I recognize the name. His main account is on dbzer0. He’s been here and active for about ten months, and by now he’s probably already been corrected on this, with receipts. Possibly more than once. Possibly more than once by me. It’s bad even by .world standards:
There are three or four dbzer0 users for whom it seems will never believe anything less then the most maximally, cartoon-villainry evil communism, no matter how much evidence is presented otherwise.
Edit to add: He’s also the sole mod for !tankiejerk@lemmy.dbzer0.com and its successor, https://anarchist.nexus/c/tankiejerk.
Every single one of those 27 million.
I am honestly wondering now if this guy is a prank caller, because a remark that is this wilfully careless strikes me as a little on the nose. Does he seriously believe this or is he only out to make anarchists look bad? Either way, subcommunities only harm their own image when they respect him.
Yep, he’s one of the biggest and loudest anti-communists on that entire instance.
Figures, I gave them a short comment and now FundMECFS can’t stop talking about it, despite not responding to me and a dbzer0 mod asking them to stop repeating cold war nonsense.
holy shit cowbee was this a coordinated, sustained campaign by the lemmitor anti-comintern or just the luck of the draw? shoo, iii, RaivoKulli, ChairmanMeow… how the hell you held your own against an seven-headed hydra of sustained bullshit… 🥇
https://lemmy.ml/post/34312059
$ curl -s "https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/post?id=34312059" | jq -r '.post_view.unread_comments' 402
I guess all us admins were AWOL for that one 😞
Dunno, lol! That was a long thread, but it seems it went well overall. I wasn’t the only one there, for sure, so it’s not like I did it all by myself!
One of my debate against a tankiejerker: “But the British and French would never force Stalin to sign a peace treaty with Hitler just so the USSR can buy enough time for military preparation against the Fascists!”
Tfw you hate the USSR, as a western leftist™, so much that you end up supporting the nazis.
Example no.452542775 why “leftist” is a worthless term.
That person is thinking like a fascist and should be treated accordingly.
I know this sub’s scope includes anarchists, but there’s no way a Trot, Hoxhaists or Maoists would ever say something like this. Given that Lemmy is full of anarchists and incoherent-capitalism-sceptics, does this grouping make sense?
And I know ‘tankie’ is a meaningless catch-all now, but I thought anarchists at least had the consistency to only label anti-Stalinists as tankies, not actual literal Stalin.
A lot of reddit “communists” are communists of the Marxist-Leninist-Breadtubist variety, who have never even considered reading a work of communist theory or of communist history. They are libs except they probably have a Che Guevara shirt because they saw a youtube video about how cool and handsome he was.
how cool and handsome he was
tbf, he was very cool and handsome, still, gotta get that theory.
You must not speak nonsense!
Love how the whole thing just ends with a oRaNgE mAn bAd lmao