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[–] 22 points 2 months ago (72 children)

The soviets absolutely respected their anti-colonial stance, not only did they free Russia's colonies but they also contributed to anti-colonial movements. Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high. Atheism was pushed by the state, but protections on nationalities also protected right to religion. Political freedom was also much, much higher for the majority of society, who remain disenfranchised by capitalist systems.

As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries, and usually gay rights were at the forefront for capitalist countries. They were severely lacking compared to today, but compared to their peers, they were progressive.

I don't see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Don't forget how the West rewarded Alan Turing for his contributions during WW2 by castrating him for being gay. Or how the west linked homosexuality with pedophilia.

    Or a bigger example being Ronald Reagan letting AIDS run rampant in the LGBTQ+ community?

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  • [–] 19 points 2 months ago

    Yep, even with the homophobia of the early Soviet Union, they were generally at or near the top when it comes to queer rights in their peer countries. That's both depressing to think about, and also indicative of their own progressive nature as they sit in their historical context.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    A case of Homosexuality. Feifer, George. Justice in Moscow. Simon and Schuster, 1964. pp 207–8

      To return to the cases behind closed doors: There is an article in the code that I would have thought unnecessary; it deals with homosexuality.* Muscovites are so strongly heterosexual—so little titillating talk, so much real activity. One never sees obvious homosexuals in public places, and I had assumed that I would never see them in court. Russians seemed too healthy for that.
      The exception proved the rule. Late one afternoon I came across it in a wretchedly damp, low-ceilinged basement room in the form of two elderly men, fifty-five and sixty-one, the first with a full eighteenth-century peasant beard, the other in high boots and a tunic. Insensibly drunk, they had exposed themselves on a bitter November day in a park and made some sort of contact with each other. They listened in deep embarrassment while the court found them guilty; but “considering their ages, their families, their honest confessions, and their promises of future good behavior,” it decided not to deprive them of freedom but merely to fine them 20 per cent of their salaries for a year.
      The men sputtered thanks to the judge and left separately without exchanging a glance. A once-very-pretty, fortyish woman who heard the sentence with me shook her head incredulously. “I just don’t believe it. You mean they . . .? The two of them? Good God, what for?”

    * Article 121: Homosexuality.
      Sexual relations of a man with a man (homosexuality) is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to five years.   Homosexuality committed by means of application of physical force, threat, or in relation to a minor, or by taking advantage of a dependent position of the victim, is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to eight years.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 months ago

    Yep, they weren't great by any stretch, but the cartoonish idea that queer people were executed in the streets is horrendously false. Meanwhile, Turing was chemically castrated and driven to suicide despite being a hero, simply because he was gay.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Yeah man Joseph Stalin went around beheading baby protestor dissenter Uyghur priests and shoving them in his nuclear human shredder

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  • [+] -12 points 2 months ago* (63 children)

    The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe? They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia that still impact how those countries exist today. They even deported Tartars and Chechens. That's some pretty colonial stances. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism so it kinda became a "which flavor of colonialism do you want" game. That's literally what was the basis of the Cold War.

    No religions were not protected. They nationalized most church property from the get-go, they abolished muslim schools and actively forced people to stop learning Arabic and Hebrew which was pretty necessary for them to engage in their religion.

    As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries.

    They were not progressive at all, 7 years in prison is nowhere near progressive. You can literally just look up Article 121 Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_history_in_the_Soviet_Union what are you talking about?

    I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.

    Because it is reflective of the culture that was pushed. You're basically saying being queer was free and everyone was cool with it, today the sentiment in post-soviet countries is extremely negative, some of the worst on the planet. You don't get that shift overnight, that is a cultural standard that has been reinforced by a legal system for decades.

    On the flip side, even though the US went through the lavender scare and the AIDs crisis it was far better. It still is far better because of the cultural impact of those experiences, there is massive queer support in the US because of events like the Stonewall Riots. A plethora of people famous and rich in the US are openly queer, I can see queer couples when I look out my window and pride flags on most streets.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Just wait until you find out about what the US was doing in East and Southeast Asia at the time. There isn't a single criticism you can make of the USSR that the West wasn't doing bigger and more savagely.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Is it? Because it's the same point I made, yet you seem to be arguing against it.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago

    Human rights can only be measured against their historical context with any degree of validity. Our human rights today across the globe will be considered horrendously barbaric compared to a century from now. Placing the soviet union in its historical context makes it unambiguously an enormously progressive project.

    As for being all over the thread, that's neither here nor there. The points are the points.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago* (55 children)

    The Soviet Union did not "occupy" the other countries in the socialist bloc or otherwise. They had favorable trade relations, but were not colonial. Ethnic deportations were wrong, and did happen, but their peers were worse, for example see how Churchill treated Bengal. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was tremendously freeing, it wasn't a "parallel colonialism" but genuine anti-imperialism. You can only make this "parallel colonialism" argument if you ignore any and all hard evidence and numbers comparing interactions between western countries and their colonies, and the Soviet Union and formerly colonized countries.

    Regarding Hungary and Czechoslovakia, both had counterrevolutionary uprisings that were dealt with as any country would. Far-right elements took up arms against the left wing states, and as such these were contested by the Warsaw Pact countries. This isn't colonialism.

    As for queer rights, I specifically said their penalties were often more lax than capitalist countries at the time. Alan Turing was castrated and pushed to suicide, homosexuality was strongly punished in the west. In the Soviet Union, the 5 year mark was a maximum sentence, one that was rarely carried out. Hence it was more lax, and in some socialist countries like the GDR eventually free gender affirming care began to be rolled out, far ahead of trans acceptance in the west.

    As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism. This already throws out your point, but again, we were comparing the Soviet Union over its whole existence to their western peers over their whole existence, as peers. This is not a comparison of reactionary regimes, but socialist countries vs. their capitalist peers.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago (50 children)

    The claim I gave was that the Soviet Union was historically progressive compared to peer capitalist countries. I never said they were progressive compared to modern western countries when it comes to queer rights, and when it comes to women's rights, worker's rights, and more, the Soviet Union was more progressive than the US is today. You are shifting the goalpost to the idea that I said the Soviet Union was flawless even by modern standards, which I never said.

    Further, you again try to draw a direct line from a socialist federation of countries to the horrendously reactionary states that replaced them. There is no material basis for this, otherwise the Tsarist system would have continued culturally into the Soviet system. They clearly did not, the Soviet Union was enormously progressive compared to the Tsarist system, just like the modern reactionary states are far more reactionary than the Soviet Union was.

    You have no leg to stand on.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago (47 children)

    And my point to this is how these are viewed today. In post soviet countries LGBTIA+ is completely repressed, it is literally dangerous to be queer in some places not even openly queer, just queer.

    lol, lmao even

    How is a state that is now capitalist and reactionary the fault of USSR? This happened because of the absence of it! Do you liberals not have object permanence??

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago* (45 children)

    Nobody said the USSR shifted to be pro-queer. What was stated was that the USSR was consistently less anti-queer than the west, which is thanks to their overall higher levels of social progressivism. You either misread unintentionally, or are deliberately taking a bad-faith stance. I like to think it's the former, but only you can answer that.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Sweden still considered Homosexuality as a mental illness and was a country that practiced eugenics far into the 70s

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

    Ideas do not exist independently of their material conditions. By shifting from an analysis of material conditions and the social relations that spring from them to one of "culture," you are placing ideas outside of their context in material reality, and moving to the realm of supernatural thinking. In other words, this is pure idealism and is anti-scientific. Idealism has more in common with fascism than it does with socialism, so I really do think you should be careful. Fascists use the "culture" argument to argue against immigration, in favor of colonialism, etc.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    You aren't viewing the whole picture, though. You're abstracting the Soviet Union from its historical context and measuring it against standards of an entirely different historical era. Further, again, you are placing far too much of an emphasis on culture while treating it as though it exists independent from the society and the social relations compelled by it. This is an idealist argument, not a materialist one.

    Here's a simple exercise: why did women's rights dramatically expand upon the implementation of socialism?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    The economic basis of capitalism also reinforces the nuclear family, as you can treat domestic labor as unpaid labor for recreating the paid labor of the male worker. Socialism brought with it profound cultural changes as well as economic changes that put the Soviets ahead of the west, despite the west being capitalist for longer than Russia was.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (36 children)

    Meanwhile Alan Turing was castrated and driven to suicide. I said consistently, not permanently and in all cases.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (34 children)

    The soviet union does not exist today. The soviet union's treatment of homosexuals was far more leniant than western countries in general, which coincides with being enormously socially progressive when it comes to ethnicity and gender as well. Nobody is arguing that the soviet union of the 1930s was progressive when it comes to the LGBTQIA+ community if compared to the US today, but such a comparison is ludicrous to begin with.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (14 children)

    Work camps

    You mean prison. Work camp is nonsense used to demonise non western countries as barbaric (and often used in an attempt to evoke images of the nazi extermination machine even when they are not at all the same). Also what was progressive in the 40s 50s and 60s would be regressive by today's standard yet that doesn't mean it wasn't progressive for the time.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (12 children)

    Almost like progressive for it's time doesn't mean progressivenand perfect for eternity ?!?!?! Please read what people are saying before responding.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Whene did anyone say anything like that?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    The USSR was more progressive than the west at the time, that doesn't mean the west wasn't progressive at all or the the USSR was the only one? Are you sure you can read?

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago* (4 children)

    Your initial comment was stupid.

    "The USSR was way more progressive on racial equality, women's rights, workplace rights, anticolonialism etc but also they weren't perfect and thus can be equated with the west who were still actively engaging in colonialism, genocide, slavery, segregation etc" it's ridiculous. The USSR was one of the most progressive forces of the time the fact the west had minimal progression at the same time does not make them comparable.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago

    Okay that was actuality a great marketing campaign for Doomdays, I'm already hating the villain so much right now, I'm so fucking ready to see Thor and the gang beating Doom to death.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago*

    It's worth noting that the USSR ended the Gulag system in the 1960s while capitalist countries like the united states continue to use prison as a means for cheap (practically unpaid) forced labor. Soviet prisoners were also paid comparable wages to free workers not only out of principle but so they would not be severely disadvantaged once out of prison.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (16 children)

    Soviet prisons were generally more progressive than western prisons, especially considering western countries were largely colonial powers (and are now neocolonial powers). Soviets even viewed handcuffs as barbaric and paid prisoners wages comparable to outside wages, the compulsion for work was out of a belief that work itself is good. They didn't treat prison labor the same way the US does today, for pennies a day.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Oh shit, nice homophobia. Mask off for you? Either way, yes, the soviet prisons were progressive compared to western peers, especially considering they weren't committing genocide around the world like the west was. Read Russian Justice.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (14 children)

    Jesus christ take the cock out of you’re mouth.

    Nice homophobia bigot. Go fuck yourself.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (12 children)

    Still homophobic to say shit like that asshole again go fuck yourself.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    "I can't argue back at all because my arguments are shit and relies on strawmanning and making shit up!"

    Fucking debatebros, you're all terrible

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (7 children)

    How many times are you going to leave? I thought debate was over?

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (5 children)
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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)
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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    Using modern day culture in reactionary states as evidence for human rights in entirely different socialist states is, as I already said, horrendously wrong. Again, social rights dramatically expanded compared to Tsardom, and dramatically shrank after the dissolution of socialism. The idea that the modern reaction is evidence of a lack of human rights in an entirely different socioeconomic system lends itself more to biological determinism than to a materialist analysis.

    Further, you are again stating that you do not care about placing your analysis within historical context. You deem the present to be the bar to judge against, despite the fact that even the most progressive states today will be considered horribly reactionary in the future. This is why I stressed the importance of comparing to contemporary peers, because I am indisputably correct in that statement.

    You are trying to argue 2 falsehoods:

    1. There is no meaningful change in the human rights in society when the entire social form reverses.

    2. The Soviet Union should be measured against the arbitrary levels of present day human rights, not placed in its historical context.

    You don't have truths to defend, your entire argument rests on believing there to have been no meaningful change in social relations when the move from socialism to capitalism happened, and that these changes could be compared to modern capitalist countries.

    I did not make the argument that modern Russia is more socially progressive than the modern US. I made the argument that the historical Soviet Union was more socially progressive than the historical west, which is indisputably true. You cannot argue with my actual claim, so you have to move the goalpost.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago*

    It feels like you are struggling to understand historical events and entities as parts of historical processes. Yes the USSR did stuff we look back at and go, wow that was fucked up huh. That's to be expected as we have historically progressed from the point they were at. The USSR wasn't gonna undo centuries of social conditioning in a decade, that was not feasible. You can't thanos snap homophobia from existence by royal decree. I would have loved if the Soviet Union spawned into existence with all the values I have today but it didn't. It was birthed with all the prejudices of working people in Czarist Russia and had to eat away at them over time. Not only this, it came about in a world of prejudices and was consistently surrounded by them. They weren't going to have an ideological epiphany that severely broke from their tradition and world culture for no reason.

    You're doing historical anachronism

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    The Soviet Union even did trans state funded surgeries in Riga in iirc the 1970s. The Baltics and Leningrad were seen as the most progressive LGBT wise, and it wasn't likely to be tried for those crimes in any of those areas.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    I didn't know that, that's awesome! It only furthers the idea that had socialism continued, they would have continued to develop socially, rather than see the reactionary backslide alongside their dissolution.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe?

    Weird way to describe liberation from maxi Germany this way.
    Ah, wait, you bemoan the fact that those countries were not allowed to plunder Africa and Asia, don't you?

    They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia

    Suppressing NATO-backed nazis is good, actually. Not sure what you disagree with.

    That’s some pretty colonial stances.

    No, those are not. None of those things were enforcing relations of severely unequal exchange.

    Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism

    In what way was that colonialism when those actions actually had a decolonising effect?

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