Hey folks!
I’m writing this because funding for the Lemmy project has dropped to critical levels, which could seriously impact its future development.
Thanks to the generous support of our lemm.ee community, our server infrastructure costs are covered, and we even have a few months of runway. I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has contributed - lemm.ee wouldn’t exist without your help.
However, infrastructure alone isn’t enough. Our servers run Lemmy software, and without ongoing development, the platform cannot grow or even be maintained.
Lemmy is an open-source project with many contributors, but the vast majority of development work has been carried out by a small group of core maintainers. A few maintainers work full-time on the project, relying solely on donations and occasional grants to support themselves.
I’ve seen Lemmy development up close, and the maintainers have consistently gone above and beyond what I consider the standard for small open-source teams - they are constantly writing code, mentoring contributors, and keeping everything running. Their work is essential, and without continued support, it cannot be sustained.
If you value Lemmy, please consider supporting its maintainers directly. Every bit helps.
Please check out this post for more details about how to support the maintainers: https://lemm.ee/post/63034576
Thank you for reading, I hope you have a great weekend!
Afaik Stalin is resoposible for more deaths than Hitler. Hitler had concentration camps, Stalin had gulags. Neither was much better than the other.
The Nazis industrialized mass murder, and deliberately killed millions in the Holocaust. The Soviet prison system was in no way comparable to the Nazi concentration camps designed to murder and kill, this is Holocaust trivialization. Communism and fascism are entirely different, and conflating the two has roots in Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization and Nazi Apologia. The Nazis industrialized murder and attempted to colonize the world, the Soviets uplifted the Proletariat and supported national liberation movements such as in Cuba, China, Algeria, and Palestine. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.
I didn’t quite intend to put gulags and concentration camps on the same level. But there are some similarities, like being used to disappear political or ideological oponents.
Concentration camps were mass execution factories for Jewish people, LGBTQ, Communists, Socialists, disabled people, Slavs, and more.
The prisons in the GULAG system were genuine prisons, and the political prisoners were largely Tsarists, Fascists, Nazi collaborators, war criminals, and more, and political prisoners were a minority of those imprisoned in the USSR.
That’s like saying a fish and a tree have some similarities. It’s true, but at the same time fundamentally tries to draw far more similarities than actually existed.
Further:
This directly states that imprisoning fascists and executing millions of innocents are morally similar actions. This is Holocaust trivialization.
…like Ukrainian Red Army veterans who fought the Nazis, but didn’t like Moscow calling the shots afterwards. I see you’ve drunken that age-old propaganda wholesale.
You could be more specific than that, but when I say Nazi collaborators, I do mean them.
“On the other hand, in the Soviet occupation zone and later East Germany, denazification was considered as a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society, and the country was stricter in opposing Nazism than its counterpart.”
The Soviets took anti-fascism seriously.
Gee that worked well in Germany didn’t it have a look at the polling results for the AfD.
Trouble being that in the east, antifascism was considered state matter, therefore, ordinary people did not get involved. In the west, it was a civil society issue. The SED de-politicised the population, “join the party and read the script or don’t get involved”, and now the east is severely lacking in civil society capacity to oppose fascism. Capacity to engage in politics in the first place, the east is run by West German politicians because East Germans just don’t bother to become politicians, they rather elect West Germans instead. And then they’re complaining that they’re not getting heard.
Nothing about what the Soviets did in the GDR was “taking fascism seriously”, unless with “take seriously” you mean “fertilise the ground”.
That’s a poor assessment, and looks down upon the people of East Germany as “stupid” and “compliant.” The West was never truly de-Nazified, but the East was absolutely de-“commiefied” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germany was purged of its Nazis, and then purged of its Communists. In purging the Communists, the resurging fascists go unopposed.
That’s also why the whole of Germany is infested with fascist Zionists, and why the state is cracking down on those who oppose the genocide of Palestinians.
Did you just call me a fascist Zionist. As far as opposing the genocide is concerned I haven’t been cracked down on – maybe because I understand the cultural context. The government itself, btw, has always considered Israel’s annexations and settlements outside of the 1967 borders to be illegal.
They’re neither. What’s lacking is a cultural habit of self-rule. Complaining “why don’t the people on top do things properly”, that’s not compliant, that’s not stupid, but it’s also quite ineffective when you could run for office and do it better yourself.
The west’s denazification didn’t happen after the war, true – it happened '68, when kids started to ask their parents inconvenient questions. That never happened in the east. It could never happen in the east because the party insisted on its monopoly on politics.
Also it’s plenty well-documented of how the SED just didn’t bother to crack down on Nazi structures. Roughly 25% of SED members had a Nazi past, Plenty of boneheads starting in the 80s, later on they infiltrated the FDJ, in 1992 about 24% of GDR youth agreed with the statement “there were positive things about nationalist-socialist rule”. Have a wikipedia article to kick off your further research into the topic. Why is there only a German version? Because apparently noone outside of Germany actually gives a fuck about these things.
Gulag is the russian word for prison. It’s just really easy to make foreign words scary to racists.
The literal uniform wearing german nazis that convinced you of this counted unborn children due to declining birthrates.
According to wikipedia, no, it comes from the abbreviation of “Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps”, in Russian: Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й (ГУЛАГ).
If you would consult the chart, you will find “Correctional Labor Camp” under the O.G.P.U (as wikipedia also says). Of course, libs can’t tell the difference between CLC under the O.G.P.U and Colonies under the PC of Justice and will call both gulag.
Gulag = Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й (Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps)
Prison = тюрьма
Not a (Russian) native speaker, but still.
Just wow at this whataboutism, defending Stalin of all people.
Gulag is the Russian word for prison, where people die or get sent to the grinder.
There was this opposing candidate to Putin, where did he end up? Gulag.
Until Russia gets humane treatment for prisoners, the word gulag deserves the negative connotations it has.
Ever heard of Holodomor?
Have you?
This is a very mainstream Stalin biography by a Princeton professor.
Have you heard what the French did to Algerians?
Now you’ll say this is whataboutism, but if you always bring up an imaginary genocide like the Holodomor when someone talks about the USSR or Russia, but you never mention this actual mass murder when someone talks about France then you are a giant hypocrite.
The West was worse by their own metrics of bodycount.
The intentionality of Holodomor is debated, but calling an event that killed millions of people and scarred generations “imaginary genocide” or “Nazi propaganda” like the other commenter did is deranged.
The quote you posted is far from final. I won’t pretend to have the answer, but you presented one opinion as if it’s a mainstream and accepted view, when it’s not. Just Wikipedia shows multiple views, and I am sure that academic literature would present even more.
So let’s be realistic and admit that if academic consensus can’t be reached by historians by now, you don’t have the truth in your pocket as nobody else does, and we won’t figure it out in a Lemmy conversation.
The problem here is not that I don’t mention some unrelated atrocities by the western powers, it is you guys denying the ones by Russia and China among others. You just made my point.
I did not deny it; a leading Western Stalin scholar did. You simply chose not to educate yourself and instead spewed ignorant propaganda.
Likewise, you chose to ignore the other scholars who don’t support the same thesis.
child brain
There are enough links in this thread already showing that this is literally nazi propaganda that I think it’s fair to assume you’re a deliberate nazi instead of an idiot getting strung along
e: lol one page long user history and you can already find nazi apologia in it https://hexbear.net/comment/6022384
Maybe you should practice a big dose of humility, considering that one comment up you were making stuff up about what words mean, and now you are misinterpreting a single quote about a single opinion about the holodomor that focuses purely on whether it was intentional or not.
Calling it “Nazi propaganda” is just complete nonsense.
To reiterate, “enough links in this thread” refers to one out of 16 views listed in a Wikipedia page, which for sure is not an exhaustive list of all scholars’ views. Nowhere is to be found that holodomor is “basically Nazi propaganda” and the fact you think anybody questioning your uninformed opinion is a Nazi apologist is just a mental shortcut you are taking to protect your views from any level of scrutiny.
Maybe deal with the fact that you simply are not equipped to discuss this topic.
So this user thinks Ukraine are Nazis and Putin did right by attacking them.
I am supposedly a nazi apologist by this logic (???).
When in fact, it is you who denies Holodomor and perverts the facts about Ukraine war. You who turns a blind eye to Putin and… Stalin(???).
Looks like troll factory to me so useless to argue.
The Soviet archives having been opened since the fall of the union, you’re an especially fucking stupid person and/or a nazi zealot.
Yeah, their cult’s position on Ukraine is simply atrocious. They cannot deal with the fact that Russia is an imperialistic nation and since Ukraine is supported by US (if we can say that) this makes it easy for them.
This is why if you discuss that in Ukraine 15k civilians died since 2022 only they will tell you that they are all Nazis, or that it’s Ukraine fault, because they use them as shields (same claim Israel does, but guess where they stand on that), or something like this.
This attitude is then completely reinforced by being in a echo chamber with extreme peer pressure and silly moderation, so one’s opinion keeps being constantly entrenched.
As a communist myself, my diagnosis is that that population is mostly 20-something westerners who grew up in the political vacuum post-1991 and adopted uncritically views of the cold war. Most of them probably feel an inherent guilt by living in countries where they benefit from everything they swear against, and the online cosplay as a revolutionary is their way to cope and self-identify as a person living by their own morals.
My suggestion is to block generously.
Sure.
Many of them seem to be kids, judging by their posts and tasteless meme / emoji usage.
But don’t forget that Putin’s troll factories are a proven fact and the employees are spread throughout the internet. I would not be surprised if this is just what some of these guys do for a living.
If they do, they are really bad at it. They are basically a close community and they got isolated even in a tiny community like (the wider) Lemmy.
I do remember a fun anecdote where a post was shared from a propaganda website, one of those that would appear here. The article was clearly faked, the alleged “Ukrainian Nazi profile” on Instagram didn’t exist, the same news couldn’t be found in Russian (only in English) and the text was the same across 3-4 random websites. They were discussing it seriously of course, but between them, which again, to me suggest more an echo chamber rather than a deliberate effort to push propaganda.
Either way, I did block generously :)
Edit: it was easy to find from my modlog, since I was banned for “Nazi apologia” of course. https://lemm.ee/post/37342752
Removed by mod
While I’m not Russian, bu accusing a Slav of being racist against Slavs sure is hillarious.
Afaik: written abbreviation for as far as I know: used when you believe that something is true, but you are not completely certain. Internet, email and texting conventions.
See the thing is, you don’t know shit
a bunch of off-topic yakking related to your comment but detracts from the overall post.
1, how the West treats the word gulag - as seen by your application equivocating them to nazi death camps - is not reflective of reality of it being applied as a catch-all term for prisons.
2, the highest deaths that occured in the Soviet penal system occured during ww2 with source of deaths primarily stemming from nazi POWs
3, the commonly cited numbers of deaths that occured in the Soviet penal system comes from an openly flawed and biased methodology chosen exclusively to fabricate a false reality that equivocates nazi fascism with Soviet communism, which was further boosted by the CIA during the cold war to smear their ideological opposition’s image. The real numbers have been revealed with the opening of the Soviet archives after the fall of the Soviet Union, allowing actual historians to access primary sources to clear up the cold war era historical revisionism that obscured our understanding of the truth for the past 80 years.
4, this is not to say the system ran in that era is flawless. It in fact had blemishes and flaws that stemmed from the monstrously brutal tsarist regimn that the Soviets overthrew. That said even at its worst during the second world War its own brutality is dwarfed by the American penal system from back then to this very moment.
Here’s an article that discusses “double genocide theory”, which dissects the fact that equivocating the worst excesses that occured under the Soviet Union as being anything remotely near the monstrous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the German Nazi regimn is to commit and engage in Holocaust denialism
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
Here’s an excerpt from a book that lightly delves into the numbers, but there’s plenty of other information floating around as well.
https://hexbear.net/post/136521?scrollToComments=false
Now let’s be clear. I was talking death counts. And I do believe that the Nazis were worse. I saw Auschwitz and Birkenau camps and those are sights that I will never forget. I get chills just remembering it. So please do be cautions who you call holocaust denier.
But we are still comparing two evils here. One is greater, one is lesser. But “lesser” evil doesn’t necessarily mean the evil was small.
optimistically prison reform and eventually abolishment would be the best course of action altogether. There’s really no shades of grey in stating that the penal system as we’ve known it through out history has been and currently is a barbaric institution of vindictive cruelty by man against their fellow man. That said, i’ll return to the comparison you’re making and emphasize again you’re making a false equivocation between the two. It would be more accurate to compare the former Soviet penal system to the American penal system than it would be to compare the former Soviet penal system to the former Nazi German genocide camps. There were no Soviet Auschwitz Concentration Camp, no Soviet Birkenau Concentration Camp, no Soviet Sisak Concentration Camp, no Soviet Salaspils Concentration Camp, no Soviet Vyritsa Children’s Concentration Camp, etcetera and so forth down the list of monstrous acts perpetrated by the nazi regimn. That is what I mean by saying you’re perpetuating the double genocide theory an thusly perpetuating holocaust denialism. When you make a throwaway sentence such as ‘Afaik Stalin is resoposible for more deaths than Hitler. Hitler had concentration camps, Stalin had gulags. Neither was much better than the other.’ you do the footwork of the neo-nazis on their behalf while you yourself may think and believe otherwise. I think you’re an intelligent and a kind person. I just want to ask you to think twice before making such throw-away comments in our increasingly reactionary rightist world that we’re unfortunately existing in.
There seemsn to be a misunderstanding. What I tried to say wasn’t “Hitler is not bad, because Stalin was also bad”. What I tried to say is Hitler was bad and so was Stalin. Each in their own way. And neither of them should be glorified.
You’re still engaging in false equivocation that ultimately lessens the crimes of the fascists. Let’s try putting it in a different manner: Hitler was bad and so was FDR. Each in their own way. And neither of them should be glorified.
A completely ridiculous statement yet both countries engaged in targeted ethnic campaigns that unjustly interred sections of their populations in concentration camps. Sure FDR helped defeat nazi Germany and free people from nazi concentration camps akin to Auschwitz and Birkenau, but glorifying him undermines his own crimes against humanity.
Hitler and FDR both had concentration camps. Hitler and Churchill both stole food and caused mass famines among the ethnic peoples they occupied. Hitler and Mościcki both benefited from the Munich betrayal and partitioned Czechoslovakia amongst the vultures of Central europe. So on and so forth a list of completely ridiculous statements that falsely equivocate the actions of fascists with that of capitalist countries thus ultimately lessening the magnitude of the crimes they perpetuated.
This is exactly what it comes off as whenever someone engages in false equivocation of the crimes of the fascists.
Quoting Thomas Mann,
You’re repeating nazi propaganda deliberately created to be holocaust denial so honestly fuck how you feel about yourself. If someone has a robust and well supported reason to call you a holocaust denier why the fuck would you respond with a hollow ‘how dare you’
Do self crit
You will note I never denied nazi crimes in any of my comments. I just don’t deny communist crimes either.
Fucking moron. YoU WiLl nOtE I didn’t accuse you of denying nazi crimes. I accused you of repeating nazi propaganda and committing blood libel.
You’re not denying nazi crimes. You’re minimizing and justifying them by lying about their enemies. The next step of the logic you’re parroting is that their cause was correct.
You are right, the USA and the UK were the lesser evil compared to the Nazis, but we should never forget their crimes against humanity, just as we should never forget the flaws of the Soviets, still, the USSR was the lesser evil in the Cold War.
Glad we are clear on that, not sure why you brought up Nazi apologist talking points before like:
It’s important that you visit memorials erected to in the memory of the Victims of Communism, sometimes there are hundreds of names there. I once checked a near one, and decided to google some of the names of the people the evil russkies took to the Gulags. It’s so weird how often they were Axis soldiers accused of heinous war crimes! But Axis soldiers could never! Must have been fabricated!
edit:
These real people are on actual Victims of Communism (VoC) websites, and after just 5 minutes of searching, I found the crimes they were tried and found guilty of.
Case 1
In 1942, he was appointed district leader in the Budapest District XII organization of the Arrow Cross Party, and from October 15, 1944, he served in the armed party service. Between November 28, 1944, and January 14, 1945, he participated in the apprehension, robbery, assault, and unlawful execution of several hundred people considered Jewish in District XII of Budapest and on the Buda bank of the Danube.
Case 2
From June 1942 to January 1943, he served as the deputy commander of the 101/5 forced labor company. On the Eastern Front, he treated forced laborers cruelly and ordered his subordinates to do the same. Through his intervention, the so-called “leper section” was created, to which only sick forced laborers were assigned. He was dissatisfied with their work performance, so he denied them food and medical care. As a result of his actions, only 22 out of the company’s 260 personnel survived.
Case 3
Following the Arrow Cross takeover, he became a party serviceman and then deputy to Géza Horváth, the IX district party leader. However, Illés exercised the actual power in the district. He decided the fate of the people brought into the district Arrow Cross house. He interrogated the persecuted under severe abuse and then, under the pretext of transporting them to the ghetto, gave the order for their execution. On December 19, 1944, he conducted a raid on St. Stephen’s Hospital with several party servicemen, from where they abducted 40 people and handed them over to the party servicemen of District II, who executed them on the banks of the Danube. All valuables were taken from the people brought into the Arrow Cross house, of which Illés kept a record. On one occasion, he had a cartload of stolen goods transported from the house at 39 Lónyai Street.
We don’t have such monuments over here. But I know for a fact that communist regime in my country inprisoned or persecuted also members of the nazi resistance movement as well as soldiers fighting the nazis abroad. I have no issues with actual nazis getting punished for what they did.
The point was this: the Victims of Communism numbers people throw around in debates are highly inflated since it contains unborn children and Nazi war criminals as well.
Removed by mod
Yes, I’m aware nazis and communists were not the only ones doing terrible stuff. That doesn’t make it right
Removed by mod
Clearly. And I’m aware these are not on the same level. Not a perfect analogy for sure, but still a place people went to die to.
Nazis camps were also not all the same. Auschwitz was a labor camp for example - which yes, still had gas chambrers and ovens. But then there was the like of Birkenau not far from there and thats where people were actually sent to die. It is clear which of those is more evil, but you can’t say one of them wasn’t evil just because the other was more evil.
Are you saying those that you brought up were fine, because nazi ones are worse?