Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 3 months agoYour portrayal of them just being made into regular peasants seems to me viewing the whole affair with more than rose colored glasses.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories:[4]
Those to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police. Those to be sent to Siberia, the North, the Urals, or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property. Those to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts.
By most people’s reckoning in most of planet earth they stole the lawfully earned property of kulaks and either murdered them or otherwise destroyed their lives. Treating them worse than most developed nations treat burglars and thieves.
If someone shot your grandpa and your uncle, send half your people to Siberia to die out there, and sent the other half to prison locally of course you would flee with whatever you could carry and of course you would at that point be an enemy of the regime that destroyed your life.
So if the original commenter’s great grandparents were kulaks who “suffered at the hands of the soviet union,” they deserved it.
I don’t understand your justification for what is ultimately pretty horrific treatment foisted on people ultimately just participating lawfully in society up until that point.
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Source four on this wikipedia article is Robert Conquest, an antihistorical Cold Warrior if there ever was one - and most of the rest of that article doesn’t even do the courtesy of citing a hack. It’s just section after section of “this section has no sources”, who wrote this garbage?
Slaveowners were “just participating lawfully in society” too. Society sanctions a lot of incredibly damaging and amoral behavior, and when the repressed take power there is no reason why they should be expected to give their oppressors a pass just because it was legal at the time.
michaelmrose@lemmy.world 3 months ago
America didn’t go from legally sanctioning a behavior to murdering the people today who were behaving lawfully yesterday even if they were immoral fucks. If you don’t understand that then you don’t understand how normal societies run.
SSJMarx@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Tell me, how well did Reconstruction go? Were the former slaves elevated to the status of citizens equal to their former masters?
No. The great post-Civil War failure of America was its failure to defend the gains made by the freed slave population, allowing the previous ruling class to swoop back in and reassert their power in a nearly-identical form to how it had been before. Sharecropping instead of slavery. This failure demonstrates quite succinctly why any social or economic justice movement cannot simply win the war - it must also continue to defend itself after the war, and that defense will by necessity take the form of repressing those members of the former ruling class who cannot accept the new status quo.