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A guy I know, real nice guy but super liberal, was telling me how his Cuban grandfather suffered under Castro. Sure enough, when he got into more details, it turns out his grandfather was a wealthy landlord whose farmland got collectivized and he only had to go to jail after he got very vocal about trying to get people to oppose the revolution (in which he was very much the minority BTW, his own friend turned him in)
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Reminds me of when a Finn told me about how the Soviets killed his grandad...and I was like...yeah? 😏 how come? 🥺🥺🥺
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Grandfather’s friend: Dude this is cringe, you need go serve time to think about what you just posted
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Im curious if there's even an attempt to reconcile that in your friend's brain or did he just kinda wave it away?
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We didn't have much chance to discuss it in depth. He was hosting a local event where selected speakers take about 5 minutes to speak on a subject they are passionate about and he invited me to speak. I told him I wanted to talk about ending the embargo on cuba (which I did) and he said, oh that's ironic because I will be opening the event by celebrating our right to free speech and saying how my grandfather didn't have that right in Cuba. We both laughed and agreed we onviously don't agree on some things, then just focused on boring procedural stuff about the event. At the actual event he elaborated the details I included in op but not with the exact same words I chose
To be clear I don't think he supports embargoes or sanctions and certainly doesn't support war or invasions, but he just doesn't like communism at all and believes a lot of misinformation about communist led governments
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Even the school textbooks in Western European diaspora that often publish false information to slander successful Communists admited that the Cuban working class support Fidel Castro against the Pig of Bay invasion. The Pig of Bay invasion by the Cuban emigrants was staged by the US government who falsely assumed that the Cubans oppose Castro's rule and the failure of the invasion was from the false belief that the Cuban commoners that stayed in Cuba are unhappy with the new Communist government. The Western European diaspora school textbook attributed the mass support of Castro by the Cuban lower class to deception, but this assumes that the Cubans cannot compare the new communist rule with the previous Liberal puppet regime or that democracy cannot work unless the European emigrants have authoritarian rule over the people of color.
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I have a relative that lived in the USSR and they didn’t complain about being imprisoned or questioned, they complained that Nazis destroyed their old village, they complained that there was not as much food (note: as much, not none)during the war, issues that people face during war, not during times of poor leadership.
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So the problem is clearly war, which is 100% understandable.
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Same thing about the (I'm pretty confident it's fake) stories about people who would escape gulags by using another escapee as food - if you're willing to kill and eat another person, you probably should be in a gulag!
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Gulag stories just all sound like a teenager trying really hard to write an edgy CreepyPasta
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tbf there are a few reasons why someone who didnt deserve it would suffer in a socialist country but those reasons are typically external, like embargoes
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I said basically this to my friend group politics chat and then had 3 different friends all try and quibble with me about it.
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Get 3 new friends
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Yeah my familly left the USSR in the 20s less because of oppression and more because of their incorrect beliefs that America was a golden palace. My grandpa used to laugh about how his dad would complain that food costs money and that the company town was basically feudalism in America. Yet here I am, working in the coal mine just like my ancestors. Part of me yearns for the mines, and enjoys it more than my days off. My depression keeps me from feeling anything but hard work is still satisfying.
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leave my Tom cat alone , he is my favorite cat XD
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Can I have a serious question? Are you guys real? Or am I just not on the joke?
I do not like US, but being someone from country controled by USSR. There were ton of people arested just for publicaly saying "Goverment bad".
Please don't discredit me, compared to US, I would be considered socialist and by US right wing maybe communist, but claiming that USSR or current Russia are your friends seems insane.
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Yes, Lemmygrad is explicitly communist.
Countries weren't controlled by the USSR, they were a member state of the USSR and had input on democratic central planning and decisions. Please feel free to provide documentation if you feel that my worldview is incorrect.
Modern Russia and the USSR are two entirely different issues.
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I'll push back on this maybe they were controlled by the ussr. However like, is thst not better than the alternatives. The local bourgeoisie were so good? Or the nazis? Or thr Americans? Sovereignty is a myth and mostly harmful to the citizens of places that have it. Like, what freedom does it bring people that their government can decide how to opress them?
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I'm sorry but you need to consider that you simply have been lied to about your own history.
Fairly criticizing the government in the USSR--just like in China, just like in North Korea, and so on--is not illegal.
What these countries do crack down on is when fascists, capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work actively to try and destroy, divide, and sabotage them.
The vast majority of people the USSR killed or imprisoned (a number far smaller than what we are told), were actively trying to destroy the USSR, and all the lives of millions of common people who were benefitting from this new system. Why when capitalists kill whoever they see fit, they can call them "traitors", "treasonous", or "terrorists", but when socialists do something far more restrained and humane they are seen as devils?
Well, because, capitalist propaganda has strangled the world discourse, especially the last 30 years. The United States and its allies have spent the last century not only trying to destroy every socialist state but to muddy the waters, lie, and character assassinate its enemies. Everything from gulags, the Holodomor, WW2 war doctrine, the Great Purge, and everything before and after has been radically distorted by capitalist and fascist liars.
I believe you that in your heart you are a socialist. So please listen to me when I say: do not trust the lies about your socialist brothers and sisters that were invented by capitalist and fascist snakes who want to destroy everything you would build.
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claiming that USSR or current Russia are your friends seems insane
The USSR is gone. It's not around to be anyone's friend. This means that communists who talk highly of the USSR are analysing the USSR and concluding that it was the greatest experiment in raising living standards in history. (Maybe that's now China, but it's going to be a difficult and possibility incoherent comparison.)
Compare the standard of living before and after the Soviets gained power. Success is the only word for it, even if they're are valid criticisms. (Do not do that silly thing where you compare life for the average person at any time in the Soviet Union with the life of the most decadent and rich person in the US. That's not logical.)
I doubt there are many communists who see Russia as a friend. What you see instead are communists acknowledging that Russia is fighting US imperialism. Considering how much death, tragedy, and destruction the US brings and has brought to the world, any work against the US is a net positive for humanity.
(To preclude misunderstanding, no I am not saying that people dying in the Ukraine war is a good thing. Except die hard Nazis. They can get fucked. It's up to the reader to decide where they think the Nazis are.)
I want to emphasise and follow up something that KiG V2 said:
What these countries do crack down on is when fascists, capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work actively to try and destroy, divide, and sabotage them.
Liberals tend to read things like this and say that it is a 'conspiracy'. But think about it like this: if we know one thing for a fact, it is that "capitalist opportunists, and foreign intelligence agents work[ed] actively to … destroy, divide, and sabotage" the USSR until they won. The capitalists won. They got what they wanted. They got what the communists were saying that the reactionaries wanted all along—the end of the USSR.
Now we have 30 years of evidence of how capitalists would run the regions of the USSR differently. If you can compare what life in the USSR looked like before and after the Soviets gained power, you can also compare what life was like before and after the Soviets lost power.
So what happened after the Berlin wall fell? Can you honestly look at the statistics, the records, the economy, the stories, and say that life got better?
If you can, I'd ask you to look again at all segments of society, not just the lucky few in the middle and upper classes. If you think life got worse after the USSR (it did—living standards plummeted), ask: what changed? You, too, will answer that for all it's flaws, the change was from socialism to capitalism and that socialism was by far a superior system for the mass of people.
(PS using 'insane' as a way of criticising something is ableism.)
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Yes, we're real communists.
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If it were me I would simply not say the government was bad and avoid jail time. This really doesn't seem so hard to me.
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Do you have any proof or detail for your claim? Your claim sound like the many disproven slanders against the Communists that is accepted as fact in the school textbooks and "educational" documentaries in Western European diaspora countries. I know that Venezuela under the former Socialist president, Hugo Chavez, tolerate slanders and baseless conspiracy theories against the Socialist government and that "Putin's police guards" allow people to freely sing Ukrainian anthem in Moscow without restrainment. The NATO did stage the 1989 False Flag massacre and write a false narrative that contradicts the original photo evidence by their Western European diaspora journalists (https://web.archive.org/web/19970329011405/http://www.cnd.org:8022/June4th/massacre.html) in China alongside the plothole of why the Chinese citizens somehow did not know about the repression before the 1989 false flag terrorism.
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They are just scared idiots who are worried about the future of the world and instead of admitting that their is gray to the world they have taken an easy answer of saying the "other option" (because black and white is all people can think in) was perfect and that they could be 100% happy and never complain about anything ever cause surely communism would be perfect.
They are happy to ignore the rough edges because they aren't actually living it. Not to say it couldn't be a better system but that it would be one that needs work and effort to be best to its citizens.
Both capitalism and communism arrested its citizens for dissenting against the system they were in but this seems fucking ignorant of reality from people who put in half a thought on this at best.
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If there is 'gray to the world' does that mean you accept that there must be a positive as well as a negative side to the USSR?
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Your final sentence is pure projection.
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Yeah this is mischaracterisation. I do not necessarily agree with the Marxists anymore but this doesn't reflect what all Marxists believe at all.
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In my country, communist killed so many people for political reasons. They ruined so many people's lives. They stole landowners land and ruined it. They denied people from studying because their parents owned a shop or a company. They condemned or executed czech RAF pilots who escaped from Czechoslovakia when nazis occupied it to fought against nazis and communists did it to them because the pilots fought against nazis with the British army and Great Britain was now enemy of USSR. Communist executed woman called Milada Horáková (who were also active in underground resistance against nazis). They executed her because she was in other political party and communists banned all other parties except communist party. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milada_Horáková People who profited from communism the most was people who informed the secret police about who said something negative about communists. From wikipedia article about that secret police:
...obtained forced confessions by means of torture, including the use of psychoactive drugs, blackmail, and kidnapping.
Other common practices included telephone tapping, permanent monitoring of apartments, intercepting private mail, house searches, surveillance, and arrests and indictment for so-called "subversion of the republic".
Some of the practices that communist were using were taken from nazis or even worse than the nazi ones. We had our version of gulags in Czechoslovakia. Their purpose wasn't to kill people like in the nazi concentration camps, but working conditions were similar or even worse that in the nazi concentration camp. This is just few random things that I've had on my mind and it's just a fragment of what communists did in Czechoslovakia and very similar things were happening in other Soviet block countries. I don't believe anybody who lived in communism could create meme like this, because working communism without dictatorship and abusing of human rights is a pure utopia. So yes, millions of families suffered and still suffer under communism and in most cases, it's not their fault. And yes, communism bad.
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I'm gonna need some higher quality sources than Wikipedia for this one.
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They're usually at the bottom of the Wikipedia article.
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For what exactly? It's things that even communists in the Czechia do not deny, it's like general knowledge here. For example for the work camps in Jáchymov where prisoners were forced to mine uranium, I was there year ago. I saw what remains from the camps. There was a museum with some photos, list of people who died there and which ones were political prisoners. There was letters that prisoners were smuggling from the camp to inform their families that they are alive. There were also video interviews with people who survived it. What I find the most convincing is the testimony of people who lived in communism in Czechoslovakia. Many people who survived the work camps are still alive and there is a project called "Memory of the nation". In this project, people are interviewing the old people who lived in communism. I personally done it once, I interviewed mr. Brožek. There are over 16000 people who were interviewed and when you listen to it, when you see the old people talking about the monstrosities they experienced or when you even do the interview, it's really convincing. I do not believe that these people all made it up or that somebody told them to say that. As I said, there's nobody denying it. And in Czechoslovakia there were basically no communists arrested or punished after the revolution, so I belive that if it was made up, somebody would say it's made up. Also you can't pay that many people to lie. I'm pretty sure that in 20 years when all these people will be dead, people will start to deny it, but now when all these people are alive and lots of them had family members or friends executed, falsely sentenced or persecuted in other ways, nobody will say it's not true. Also strangely, communist party was never banned, even after revolution, but in the most recent elections in 2021, they had 3,6% of the votes. That also proves that nobody wants communism in Czechia after 40 years of their dictatorship. Here is the link for the Memory of the nation project, it's in czech, but you can use the translate page feature and most of the interviews are also avaivable in text form, so you should be able to translate them: https://www.pametnaroda.cz/cs/archive
EDIT: Also, I was in the archive in Prague where lots of documents are stored, mostly StB folder of people they were were watching for various reasons. There are tons of material and I don't think anybody would want to fake it, it would be lot of work for no real reason.
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Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source to the extent that college professors automatically failed student's assignment that cited wikipedia. Why can you not cite other sources like the many propaganda that NATO commonly distributed for free on the internet?
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When Poland was occupied by communists after the second world war, it was pretty bad. There was very little food, if any at all in stores. I remember specifically that the only thing being in stock in stores was vinegar because the shelves were empty. Everything of value Poland produced, like food, went to the USSR. The only import Poland got were things like matchsticks.
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What a nonsense.
occupied by communists after the second world war
Polish communists occupied their own country?
There was very little food, if any at all in stores.
You might have heard about, you know, the war and the real occupation, nazi one. Requisition, destruction, mass murders, death camps. I wonder why that stopped. Who ended it.
I remember specifically
Unless you are 95 years old i doubt it was "you specifically". And also:
I remember specifically that the only thing being in stock in stores was vinegar because the shelves were empty
At least get your propaganda sorted out, dumbass, those were two different separate pieces, the vinegar one was about the 80's (and equally false as the other one).
Everything of value Poland produced, like food, went to the USSR. The only import Poland got were things like matchsticks.
As evidenced by the rapidly rebuilding and repopulating country being made entirely of matchsticks. Yawn. Seriously at least get something less boring, go read some IPN book or something for more plausibly spun propaganda instead of taking your historical knowledge from Jebzdzidy.
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What were conditions like everywhere else in the world after the biggest war the world had ever seen?
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Everything of value Poland produced, like food, went to the USSR.
Let's see some sources to support this bold claim. I'll wait.
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"I remember specifically"... Damn, I'm sorry you had to survive on only vinegar and matches, grandpa 🤣
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Sounds like the stories I've heard from people of that generation in west Germany. Things didn't get better until the Währungsreform of 1948, and didn't get markedly better until the US dumped in money (with strings attached mind) via the Marshall Plan. Europe was decimated by the war, regardless of which class was in charge.
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Then why didn't 3 million people died out straight way like what British did to bengali people (I am from bengal btw).
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Ahh yes, so we should have just let the naxais have the place. That would obviously have been preferred
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Słuchaj, pierdolisz. PolandIsAStateOfMind napisał wszystko co trzeba, jedynie piszę abyś był świadom że paru polskich komuchów tu jest którzy są chętni do zwalczania typowych głupot jakie ludzie jak ty lubią rozprzestrzeniać.
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A Poland immigrant in Canada had testified about Communist rule in Poland, so I can expand on your story. There was free food under Communism, but people need to wait in a long line because the Soviet Union used the financial institutions from the Western European countries for the recovery after World War 2. Since the Western Europeans want to sabotage Communism, their institutions attempted to overchange the Eastern European countries with huge debt for the financial assistance and this debt-trapping is the current practice of the Bretton Woods institutions like World Bank and International Monetary Fund to create third world problems in former European colonies. Also when there are evidence that a person is subverting Communist rule, the Communist government will conduct search within a more reasonable ethical boundary than the police search in the US.
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This kinda whitewashes a lot of terrible shit that happened behind the Iron Curtain. Many Romanians suffered under the tyrannical rule of Ceaușescu, or the Yugoslavians under Tito. For many good honest proletariats, especially during the latter days of the Soviet Union, suffering was about the only thing being evenly distributed.
Now certainly, you can point much of the blame at Soviet leadership of the time who were content to allow these monsters to remain in power as long as quotas were met, as opposed to a particular failing of any political system, but I'd never go as far as to belittle people who were starving.
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How many gigazillion people did the Soviet Union kill this time? Get your psyop outta here.
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Sorry bud socialist QOL indicators called they want their better food/tech/hospitals/schools/wealth distribution/sex/art//leisure/social progressivism/self reported happiness back.
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That Romanian dude (fuck that name) was an insane right winger not "communist." Please fuck off and try again.
Ok I typed that before finishing- his statement got more stupid!
Tito is nearly universally beloved by former-Yugoslavians. Ask them. Not the Nazi ones, the normal ones. You will find few harsh words against him. They did not all love him, but few hated him. And the rule of Tito and Yugoslavia is CERTAINLY preferable to the hellscape that neoliberalism (brought, kindly, by the US and western EU post soviet and then Yugoslavia collapse) has wrought upon that part of the world.
Also the deaths towards the end of the Soviet Union cannot ALL be attributed to the west, but, then again... the west did absolutely undermine time after time after time the Soviet government. And certainly past like 1990 that massive spike in deaths, much of it suicide, WAS basically a EU and US joint mass genocide upon the Russian people and other former Soviet states. They could've helped, they could've done anything, but instead they forced further despair and eventually forced the handing over of formerly publicly owned properties, entire industries sometimes, to what we like to call now "Russian oligarchs." We created those guys who robbed their country and countrymen fucking blind. Imagine living 50 years in the great Soviet Union, born after WWII. You live there, see amazing feats from your country, and then one day it all comes tumbling down and Americans and your collaborating brethren are over on the side buying up and shiti-fying (I made a word) your formerly glorious country that you had some part in creating. And we did that. The "west" ripped apart a great experiment in socialism, not perfect by any means, but infinitely more noble than ultra capitalist genocidial US, etc. And they did it a smile on their faces and a silent understanding that "the Russians had brought this on themselves, really. tut tut They never should've even bothered trying to create a better world!"
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You can say whatever the fuck you want about Ceaușescu or Tito, but the opinion polls don't lie, most Romanians and post Yugoslavs today preferred life under socialism, and no amount of made up atrocities seems to have changed their mind on that.
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I will say that Ceucescu (however the fuck you spell it lol) was pretty awful, his abortion policies were like the worst imaginable, but USSR and Yugoslavia were decent examples of socialism
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