This. Even in my psychology of genocide course in uni, a lot of it was focused on Hitler being the worst, and not much about Stalin.

Sort of related sort of not, I learned in the last few years how awful the British were, too. Different levels of awful, but I'm thinking because Canada is a commonwealth country and was pretty much run by the Brits back in the day, the Brits excluded from our education the bad things they did, ie to native Americans/First Nations people, Africa, etc. I didn't learn about any of that.. So I think what they wanted people to learn and what they wanted people to forget shaped what was taught in Canadian schools.

So, like many others, I was awed and excited by the royals. Now that I know what they've been trying to hide, meh.

It doesn't have anything to do with Lemmy. American education has always given a pass to Stalin, probably because he was an extremely helpful ally in WW2. We are taught in America that WE saved the world when we entered WW2, but the reality is that the Soviet Union lost many, many more lives at the hand of the Nazis than the other allies, including America. The Soviet Union's contribution was easily as significant as America's. When the Soviets finally defeated the Nazis in Russia, and started marching toward Germany, one Nazi general said "If they treat us half as bad as we treated them, were in big trouble."

So coming out of the war, school curriculums taught about the current cold war propaganda, but Hitler was the bad guy they focused on, not the guy that helped us beat him.

the thing I love about tankies is they hate the US as much as I do 🥰

I don't think any "tankie" is going to have their minds changed by this post. Unless they're a 90 year old Russian who has gone out of there way to avoid "western propaganda" they've already heard all these points a million times over.

If anything posts like these reinforce their identity because they can dunk on them with their prepared rebuttals to all of this.

Definitely this. This is what they chose the curriculum to cover more.

Israel weaponized the Holocaust and drilled two falsehoods into everyone's head:

1. Jews were the only victims.
2. The Holocaust is a special genocide that hasn't happened before or since, is the worst crime in recorded history, and no one should dare question that.

This allows them to genocide Palestinians while calling everyone who questions their ethno supremacist expansionist colonial project a Nazi.

6 million Jews were murdered, out of 17 million victims.

Genocide of Indigenous Americans (1492–1832): it is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population, amounting to over 55 million people, died due to violence, forced labor, and disease after European colonization.

Mao Zedong (China, 1958–1961/1966–1969): Historians estimate that between 30-70 million people died due to famine, persecution, and forced labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Mongol Conquests (13th Century): Under Genghis Khan, it is estimated that 30-60 million people were killed, representing about 10% of the world's population at the time.

To name a few... Hitler was a monster, but he was hardly the worst monster.

It's a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.

That's the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don't have the tools to distinguish them that well.

And that's how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn't so bad actually.

So as we're dismantling capitalism we're going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.

I wouldn't say that an alcoholic in his 70s who died from cerebral hemorrhaging was assassinated.

Stalin spent the last 15-20 years of his life getting blackout drunk every single night. He also forced all of his top ministers and generals to join him in this drunkenness.

The full story is wild.

Then when Stalin died, everyone sort of knew that he was having a medical emergency, and they left him laying on the carpet to die for hours.

Which is also a wild story.

Adolf Hitler? The art student?

I'm sick of these kind of characters. I think we should kill Hitler.

Read the book bro, that's not at all what he argues

Nah, a normal person would have said 'inspired by Lenin'. OP is either dumb as rocks or AI.

The prison system in the soviet union was pretty similar to the system in place by the tsar - gather the problems up, send them to siberia. A new system that gestates in the womb of the old will have to struggle to shake these things, or whatever marx said.

but nah man, stalin invented prisons, go off