Had a heated argument with a tankie who glorified stalin and lenin. So fucking tired. The worst thing he’s a discord mod of a good streamer, and i left the server because i can’t be there anymore. Context: i’m russian whose grand-grandparents were repressed and forcibly relocated. Left Russia several years ago because i didn’t want to support the aggressive war in Ukraine. And his american (no offense to amreicans tho) ass tried to explain me that stalin is an actual hero who singlehandedly saved Europe from fascism, and all repressed were rich “bourgeois land owners” (actually, no. but even if yes, that’s a terrorism). Then he and other user started posting stupid tankie memes. Ofc they ignored my questions how LGBT+, religious groups and small nations were treated and deleted the message. I’m sick of that shit. Needed to vent somewhere.
i don’t get how people are so resistant to the notion that their great grandparents were probably assholes.
mine weren’t even rich/landed. just your garden variety abusive drunks. hell, near as i can figure, one of my grandfathers was massively part-of-the-problem ulster scot who, for whatever reason, fled to the new world.
the whole story is wildly muddled, but knowing his sectarian allegiance and where he was from paints the broad strokes. guy was dead before i was born, and though no one says so, the only stories i ever heard were ones that made him unkind, even to family.
being an asshole isn’t genetic. seems to me the only reason to defend ancestors is because you assume eugenics’ is correct, or because you’re trying to defend some inheritance claim.
i bet if we lived in a society where inheritance was more equitably distributed, nobody but the most brain dead weirdos, like monarchists and eugenics weirdos would give a shit about their great grand whoever unless they actually created something, like art.
I wonder if part of it comes from the awareness that the average westerner has a very cushy life, so we get solace in knowing our ancestors must have lived harder, and therefore ‘earned’ our position for us. Totally detatched from the reality that suffering in and of itself is not a moral good. Calvinism and its consequences, etc.
There’s a strong subtext to the “Irish slavery” argument that the “slavery” was good character-building for Irish-American culture.
Even if you come from a less affluent country like mine they make sure to blame everything bad ever to the to Soviet Union, so as long as you can shit talk politicians on the internet people assume it’s Utopia, just as the landlord grabs most of their paycheck and they can’t even go foraging in their childhood homes anymore because everything is privatized and no trespassers are allowed.
Even if your great grand whatevers were fine folk, it’s still a thought terminating cliche to pull the “that regime was bad for my family” card. I have a lot of ancestors that were from the US southeast, I’m sure plenty of them got fucked up by the Union during the Civil War, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Confederacy losing was good. Hell, I have grandparents that fled Eastern Europe during WWII because they found out they were on a Soviet list. But I have the mental maturity to understand that the nascent Cold War had a scope way beyond my family.
I love my grandma but I also became aware that she participated to the colonization of Algeria and I’m not proud of it and I’m never defending her on this. Sometimes people are weirdly defensive about their familly, I don’t understand why they don’t treat it as part of growing up to stop idolising meemaw
My grandmother was one of the worst people I’ve ever known. Definitely in the top five. She did not have an easy life, but it’s no excuse for the miserable person she decided to be. She had plenty of time to correct her behavior and had many people around her providing infinite patience. It was no surprise she didn’t have any friends at her funeral, only relatives.
I don’t know why people have this problem where they can’t realize their family members can be good parents/siblings/cousins/whatever, but terrible to everyone else. Or that good people can be shitty parents.
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