Comment on Is it me or is everyone in hexbear insane?
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 2 months agoThe vital context is wielding state power against internal threats. Which literally every state must do to continue to exist. It’s not whataboutism to point out that the state you currently live in is currently doing far worse, for far worse reasons in a context where your criticism can only be used for anticommunism.
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
The problem is the violence of the totalitarian regimes you defend harms innocents too, which is why serious communists shouldn’t advocate for that kind of power abuse any more than they should advocate for Western imperialism. It’s not that hard.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Nobody is advocating power abuse. One of the books I try to get people to read, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia contextualizes the scale of and why/how such abuses occurred in a much more useful criticism than “communism bad Stalin evil, that’s why you can’t ever do anything about rightists organizing against the state”.
A good accompaniment to illustrate what it looks like and what the consequences are when the left fails to take appropriate action once in power is The Jakarta Method
FlorianSimon@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
That’s precisely the extent of my criticism. Understanding stalinism instead of just demonizing it is a good thing, if only to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But the end doesn’t justify the means. Apologism is not OK.
It’s OK to take a stance against power abuses, and vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Suppression of the right were necessary, however the relative freedom given to locals to carry it out resulted in people using it to settle old scores or non-ideological people to advance politically within the party. While dekulization enabled them, those actions were orthogonal (and actually hindered) the aims of dekulization.
Whether that can be labeled
We had that struggle back when Kruschev sent the tanks into Hungary and every western leftist org was falling over each other to denounce the USSR. Meanwhile nazis were being put in charge of police forces in South America to do crimes against humanity against indigenous and communist elements and hundreds of thousands were being massacred in South Korea.
Turns out the tankies were right. Denouncing the enemies of the state you live in just serves to carry water for imperialism.