#stalin
http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,770539,00.html
While Trotskyism and permanent revolution are flawed ideologies that should be opposed by any rational Marxists, our comrade has a great analysis on the bread and circuses employed in a capitalist society to tranquilize the workers and masses in an industrialized society. This is in no way shape or form an advocacy of Trotskyism.
“Capital does not like the working man to think and is afraid….It has therefore adopted measures. … It has put up automats in each station and has filled them with disgusting candied gum. With an automatic movement of the hand the people extract from these automats pieces of sweetish gum, and they grind it with the automatic chewing of their jaws… . It looks like a religious rite, like some silent prayer to God-Capital.“
Haha leftist communist KFC man says bubble gum machine bad. Except, this same phenomenom can be seen within parasocial relationships practiced between the proletariat and figures such as instagram influencers, twitch streamers, youtubers, and aspects of pop culture. It is remarkable how coping mechanisms such as gaming and participation of social media can be seen as a modern kafkaesque religious ritual.
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Starving and homeless children in Russia in the 1990s, who often became victims of substance abuse, sexual abuse and were actively involved in crime. These scary photos are reminders that the West considers Russia in the 90s “democratic, free and detached from totalitarian communism.”
The capitalism implementation in Russia during the 90’ was probably the biggest capitalism failure of all times. Yeltsin implemented the economic policies applauded by the neoliberal institutions (FMI, World Bank, etc.) With mass privatisations, welfare destruction, destatalisation, destruction of social rights etc. The results were terrifying from all point of views:
As always happens in capitalism there were cartels, trusts etc. That formed a class of oligarchs that put themselves above the State leading the policies towards their interest against the interest of the people. Mostly represented by the Semibankirschina.
-Dramatically drop of life expectancy arriving at 7 years drop in less then a decade for men.
-Dramatic rise in mortality.
-Dramatic rise in self destructive behaviours like drugs and alcohol abuse.
-Mass depression
-Low birth rates due to financial instability and uncertainty
-crime rates rise with entire pieces of the country controlled by organised crime
-Moral crisis well represented by the dramatic increase of prostitution ( Prostitution that was de facto absent during most of Soviet times especially under Stalin but that started again with Gorbachev)
-The debt default of 1998.
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The US invaded Korea first by setting up a collaborationist government against the popular will of the Korean people that forcibly kept alive the horrors, tactics, and even the command of the Japanese occupation. Compare this to North Korea, which not only was given free reign by the USSR to organize their own councils and organization, but which also used land reform and state planning to end landlordism and almost quadruple industry within a few years. Had almost every building in city not been completely bombed and millions murdered, the DPRK would be at an incredible level of development today. It is also important to remember that 20% of the North Korean population were slain by the imperialist lapdogs and that most infrastructure and living areas were firebombed to ashes. It is hard for the imperialist lapdogs such as MacArthur and those who believe in western propaganda to empathize with the North Korean model of democratic centralism, when the possibility of nuking the North Korean people were considered by the US authorities all in the name of neoliberal imperialism. Liberals will praise the United States for devising security laws such as the PATRIOT Act while berating North Korea for its democratic centralism after facing brutal oppression from the imperialist Japanese and the exploitaion by the imperialist Americans.
TLDR: Asians are seen as subhumans by white liberal Americans. They nuked Japan’s civilians. Twice. Still justify both bombings to this day. They wanted to nuke Korea’s civilians. They wanted to nuke Vietnam’s civilians. And people wonder why China is so “aggressive” about protecting itself? Maybe they’ve seen a pattern in history? When will the abhorrent Western imperialism and chauvinism end?
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Valentina Bukhanevich-Antonova’s summer dress, 1938/39
Antonova (1907-1993) was wearing this dress when she was arrested, and continued to wear it continuously for an entire year during her stay in three Moscow prisons. She was part of the “Great Purge” of the Stalinist era, during which millions of people, particularly political party members, were arrested for arbitrary reasons, such as being part of an opposition or nationalist group, or even sustaining brief contact with someone who had already been denounced and arrested.
Antonova’s dress shows extreme wear, but also an effort to maintain a sense of decency in her horrific surroundings. The hem and sleeves, for instance, show many attempts at patching up holes and tears, undoubtedly done on the sly. Antonova was ultimately not convicted, and released in 1939 [x].
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by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What’s it about?
It’s about a bunch of techie prisoners in a gulag who are tasked to make a machine to identify an individual from his voice print, something that scientists can’t even do today with any degree of reliability.
Throughout the book, Solzhenitsyn focuses on the personal lives of each of the people involved: the prisoners; the prison wardens (themselves prisoners of a sort); the government ministers; the civil service officers; and the wives and families of the prisoners who will probably never see them again.
Is Stalin in it?
Yes. There’s a famous, intentionally uncomfortable chapter where Solzhenitsyn sees things from Stalin’s point of view, although if you’ve read Game of Thrones and humanising brutal dictators is too much, you should present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“I have a new appreciation for the essential dignity of the human animal.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“Nothing good ever came out of Russia.”
Should I actually read it?
Yes. What might sound kind of depressing is actually an uplifting story of how humans can form communities and survive under extraordinarily adverse conditions.
“The Republican Left Thank the Russian People for Their Help in Our Struggle”
Republican Spain
1937
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Stalin was a pro at retouching photos to make himself look better and erase his enemies. Click to read the full fact.
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The marriage of convenience ladies and gentlemen. Damn war really does make strange bedfellows.
Follow this blog for history humor on your dash
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The deportation of the Karachais began in the USSR on November 2, 1943, as a result, 69,267 people (15,980 families) were evicted. In total, during the pre-war and wartime, 79 thousand people of Karachai nationality were deported. Most of the repressed - more than 43 thousand people, including 22 thousand children - died on the road, as well as in places of resettlement. In modern Karachay-Cherkessia, November 2 is considered the day of deportation of the Karachai people. And May 3 is annually celebrated in Karachay-Cherkessia as the Day of the revival of the Karachai people.
“The idea of the project was to capture the faces, expressions of the eyes of people, to show that they are not broken, that they have returned, have preserved their customs and traditions,” the author of the project, Marika Khubiyeva, told the “Caucasian Knot” correspondent.
Source:https://www.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/341933/ © Caucasian Knot
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Question for the day: how many people in history of civilization have been as bad or worse at sex as Stalin? I don’t mean in the “physical sex life was bad” sense, i.e. he’s a notorious P&V kind of guy. I mean in the “hardcore statism sex is bad and this is why people did horrible things” sense. Stalin had the best sex life of anyone in history. (I mean, last I checked, anyway.)
(He also invented the kaleidoscope, for some reason. I dunno.)
About Russian Orthodox: I was doing a ton of research about the Cold War and came across this church that was destroyed by Stalin in order to construct the “ideal communist society”. Religious oppression was a significant part of the turmoil felt by the Russian people before and during the Cold War and I wanted to find a way to show that in this piece.
It took a few different mediums before the idea came to carve it straight into the wood, but once it hit me I grabbed a pocket knife and ran with it. Carving the outline of the cathedral into wood became the perfect way to show not only a semi-abstract version of the church, but also allowed it, from different angles, to almost disappear into the wood background. A perfect ode to the near destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole and the thousands that died along with it during this time.
“Those that, with the beginning of the Great Alliance’s crisis, started drawing parallels between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany had been severely criticized by Thomas Mann. What characterized the Third Reich was the “racial megalomania” of the self-proclaimed “master race”, which had carried forth a “diabolical program of depopulation”, and before that the eradication of the culture of the conquered territories. Hitler stuck to Nietzsche’s maxim: “if one wants slaves, it’s foolish to educate them like masters.” The orientation of “Russian socialism” was the precise opposite; massively expanding education and culture, it had demonstrated it didn’t want “slaves”, but instead “thinking men”, therefore placing them on the “path to freedom.“ Consequently, the comparison between the two regimes became unacceptable. Moreover, those that made such an argument could be suspected of complicity with the fascist ideology they sought to condemn.”
- Dominic Losurdo, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend
Dead Stalin, free Borsht http://ift.tt/1gv8mwe
I hope it was one of the pink Ukrainian kinds, that woulda really stuck it to Soso
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A bearish view of Putler’s Ukraine
Sa ne uitam la ce zice istoria ca va face Putin..
