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[+] 26 points 1 year ago (21 children)
  • [+] -10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Ok, I'm on it:

    When they were founded

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  • [+] -14 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    "Kill all Jews" and "kill all kulaks" have both killed enough people that this is a distinction without a difference.

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  • [+] 29 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [+] -10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Then why did the Soviets kill so fucking many people? And don't get me started on our old friend Mao Zedong. The pursuit of socialist ideals under vanguard parties has caused enough mass murder across enough regimes that it's part of what you sign up for under authoritarian communism.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    The 1930s famine was a combination of dramatic weather problems in pre-industrial agriculture, kulak's killing their livestock and burning their grain in order to resist collectivization, and mismanagement. The Communist Party of Ukraine hid how bad the famine was getting from the politburo, which made the problems even worse as it delayed aid. It wasn't intentional, and after the 1930s famine the USSR was food secure outside of World War II, when the Nazis took Ukraine (the USSR's breadbasket) and intentionally attacked farmland.

    Mao faced similar issues with famine, large-scale weather problems coupled with mismanagement. Neither famine was intentional, so framing it as "mass murder" erases that once both countries industrialized, life expectancy doubled as compared to pre-famine, pre-socialist conditions. Famine was just incredibly common before industrializing farming, and the communists, when in power, provided high quality healthcare and land redistributiob, education, etc.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Kulaks were not a “people,” they were owners of private property, specifically farmland, who had serfs work the land. They lived off of the exploitation of others. They were the feudal rough-equivalent of the petit bourgeois class. So of course they weren’t going to embrace socialism or land collectivization, or having to work a day in their lives.

    This is what happens to all of us who’ve lived a lifetime of anti-communist propaganda. Unless you take the time & effort to go back and examine all of that received wisdom, you’ll continue believing that Kulaks were a people genocided by the evil Slavic Bolsheviks. And then we have to—as patiently as we can muster—explain the same basic things to people over and over again.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Not the same, dude.

    Like, nit necessarily good, but not the fucking same.

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  • [+] -7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    There are plenty of important differences, but "will not lead to mass death and forced labor, including along ethnic, religious and national lines" is not one of them. I get your instinct to want to say it is, but the number and scale of genocidal or genocide-parallel crimes committed under Stalin speaks for itself.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Im not in favor of either, but they are not remotely the same. Even the ethnic and cultural aftershocks are different.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I mean, I made my case in my comment chain with _cryptagion, so if you believe my characterization is wrong can you provide an explanation of why?

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