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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Want to hear something embarrassing? I never even knew who Lenin was until I was 17...and I had to Google it myself. And I was actually well above average in school. The American education system is a fuck and there's so much I had to learn on my own.
It's funny, the education system was engineered to make us workers, but employers don't even want to hire us anymore and would rather stick to piling on more work to the people already hired, leaving a generation stuck with dead end minimum wage jobs at best even if they have master's degrees.
Was always told Lenin was an evil man and that’s where it ended lol
I learned that he was a pig called Snowball or something
no he was the horse
No the horse was Trotsky. What's the word for how a horse walks? Trot.
Which is kind of changing as more millennials and gen-z are getting more okay with not just simply hating basically all forms of anti-capitalism. Even taking time to get some random information while on their phones/social media from folks that are pro-leftist. I now find it easier to point to Lenin without dealing with all the "he was evil and killed people" lines. Stalin and Mao are still hard given that they seem to be more directly brought up in media/classes as being at Hitler levels. While they both went with some bad options (some of which was based on being given those options by advisers with bad understanding of a topic at the time), they did see how important it was to get caught up to western industrial nations quick as fuck.
It is hard to get to real critiques of which things didn't work or were correct but maybe could have been done better based on what we know now. Because lots of people don't want to hear anything as it (to them) is like Holocaust denial based on the very very black and white way they are treated in history classes and media. Though even both of them are getting a bit more critical support by those millennials and gen-z folks that go deeper. Also helps that more formerly classified documents from the US intelligence agencies from those times are finally getting old enough to declassify and release them.
Even Cuba is becoming less of a automatic trigger for being seen as some "purely evil nation". Though it being so close geographically to the US means the hawks will keep trying to find ways to paint them as such. The anti-communist people that fled are the real thing allowing the US to keep up the blockade and sanctions that are literally only in place to torture the people of Cuba into overthrowing their government. Those anti-communist Cubans here are enough of a bloc to be able to scare most candidates for state and federal elections from saying anything positive. We saw how Bernie saying a simple truth about how literacy under communism went way up was treated like he said we should just let Cuba take over the US or something. His point was that education should matter more here beyond the very bad policies that claim to push education but actually make it about numbers and not about real learning.
Not that uncommon, honestly. Like other than a couple of pictures of his face made scary, what else do you find without researching on your own about soviets or Soviet history? Western history focus on a maligned Stalin because Lenin was more popular and less divisive in history, so the chain of effect goes in reverse, with Stalin bring the archetype of evil and Lenin being associated (but less presented). This chain also sometimes extends through Mao also. So knowing Mao and Stalin is normal but knowing Lenin (aside from associations to Stalin) takes work