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Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism.

I already explained that the 1930s famine was caused by weather disaster combined with underdeveloped, feudal agriculture that managed to complete collectivization by the mid-1930s, which is why famine never happened again outside of wartime. I already explained that the ammunition used in Katyn was German manufactured, and the execution method common among the Nazis and unheard of among the Soviets. I’m aware that the Red Army intervened in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as was their legal right to stop fascist counterrevolution. None of this has anything to do with allegations of genocide or settler-colonialism.

It isn’t that I need handholding, it’s that you offer absolutely nothing but a hope that simply throwing buzzwords at someone that has done the due diligence of researching these topics as part of becoming a communist will mean anything to me. You need to actually present evidence, construct an argument, not entirely ignore factual information that goes against your fragile narrative. It’s disappointing at minimum because the conversation can never go anywhere if you operate purely on reflex.

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Tja@programming.dev ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yes, you already told those lies.

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- Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Did the Soviet Union secretly have industrialized agriculture, complete with combine-harvestors used at a mass-scale, before 1930?
  
  The shell casings found in Katyn proved definitively that the mass execution could not have been carried out before 1941, as the ammo had manufacturing dates. This squarely puts the Soviets out of reasonable responsibility, but to add onto that, the ammo itself was German, and the execution method common among Nazis.
  
  In both Hungary and Czechoslovakia, CIA-backed forces sought to increase ties with the IMF, overthrow socialism, and restore capitalism. These were not unified movements supported by the masses, but insurrectionary movements with support among the far-right domestically and imperialist bourgeoisie internationally. MI-6 armed Hungarian counterrevolutionaries, who set Nazis free from prison to aid in their efforts, who then went on to lynch Jews and communists in Hungary as widely reported even by the New York Times.
  
  This is all factual account, and simply labeling them as “lies” does not get us an ounce closer to the truth, it only reinforces how fragile your narrative is when you cannot meaningfully contest factual information accepted even by liberal historians, who work from the same basic set of facts to provide a more anti-communist version of history. They cannot directly state the absurd, like the idea that the USSR had developed agriculture in 1930, or that the shells found during an excavation of Katyn were manufactured in 1941.
  
  What is your goal, here? To legitimize your own views for an audience of nobody? To convince me of your views? Neither seems to be working for you.
  
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  - Tja@programming.dev ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yes, either every historian (Including soviet and Russians), and the freaking Russian duma is lying… or you are. Wonder which one…
    
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    BrainInABox@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    “Every historian agrees with me! (I assume, I’ve not read any of them)”
    
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    Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Did you forget where I linked liberal scholarly consensus? Here, let me restate my previous point. Even serious liberal scholars believe it to have been a combination of adverse weather conditions and mismanagement. For instance, Mark Tauger wrote:
    
    [data] indicate that the famine was real, the result of a failure of economic policy, of the ‘revolution from above,’ rather than of a ‘successful’ nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.
    
    Tauger believes it was a failure of economic policy, not an intentional attack on ethnic Ukrainians. The 1930s famine was a combination of drought, flooding, and mismanagement. Further, the Kulaks, wealthy bourgeois farmers, magnified matters by killing their own crops in the midst of a famine rather than letting the Red Army collectivize them. The Politburo was also kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:
    
    From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.
    
    Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.
    
    The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.
    
    Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALIN
    
    Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
    
    There are also isolated cases of starvation, and even whole villages [starving]; however, this is only the result of bungling on the local level, deviations [from the party line], especially in regard of kolkhozes. All rumours about “famine” in Ukraine must be unconditionally rejected. The crucial help that was provided for Ukraine will give us the opportunity to eradicate all such outbreaks [of starvation].
    
    Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
    
    Comrade Kosior!
    
    You must read attached summaries. Judging by this information, it looks like the Soviet authority has ceased to exist in some areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Can this be true? Is the situation in villages in Ukraine this bad? Where are the operatives of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate], what are they doing?
    
    Could you verify this information and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party about taken measures.
    
    Sincerely, J. Stalin
    
    Evidence doesn’t point to deliberately killing some of the Soviet Union’s most loyal citizens in the breadbasket of the entire USSR, when they desperately needed to advance agricultural production (and did).
    
    The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semitic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists. The Truth About Hungary by Herbert Aptheker heavily relies on citing western sources like the New York Times. Aptheker backs up his claims heavily.
    
    "The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”
    
    “But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”
    
    “Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)
    
    “The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”
    
    “A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:
    
    During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”
    
    Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives.”
    
    Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:
    
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    Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements. Dubcek wanted to sell out to the IMF, and restore capitalism. The idea that any of this was about “democracy” or “freedom” is silly, it was always about Cold War tactics to destabilize socialism.
    
    TL;DR imagine if the January 6th rioters were armed and trained by foreign governments, started lynching officials and Jewish people, and the US sent in the army to put down the insurrection. The MAGA chuds would claim that it was about “freedom” and “democracy,” but we all know that they just wanted Trump in office.
    
    Katyn gets pinned on the Soviets because Goebbels reported on it and it became a useful story, but the execution method was distinctly Nazi, ie killing men, women, and children from behind into mass graves. The ammunition was German-produced in 1941, and the rope used to bind the hands of the victims was German made. It was entirely characteristc of Nazi execution methods and with Nazi equipment.
    
    “Of 225 shells found in this grave, 205 are the German 1941 “Hasag” type, 17 are the German 1941 “Dürlach” type, 2 are of the unmarked 1930s Soviet type; and one is marked “B 1906.” Hence 98.67% of the shells are of 1941 German manufacture.”
    
    All of this is factually backed up, and acknowledged by western sources. Your insistence on rejecting facts in favor of feel-good fiction is how MAGA responds to uncomfortable truths. Again, what’s the point?
    
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