emizeko

For me it took several years. I learned several things about the USSR one by one that softened my opinion of it. I don't even remember what order I learned these things in, but here they are.

• the USSR had a lot of things that the Russian Federation and other post-soviet nations don't (like universal healthcare and free college).
• the USSR's collapse plunged a lot of people into poverty, and the opportunistic privatization that happened in the wake of that plunged even more people into poverty.
• Yeltsin shelled parliament and suppressed popular protests.
• polling data in the USSR showed that most citizens wanted to remain in the USSR at the time of its dissolution.
• the whole "Stalin and Hitler made a pact" mythology that the bourgeoisie like to push is bullshit. The USSR was the last nation, not the first, nor the only, to make a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and they were basically doing it to buy time and move all their critical military infrastructure and factories East to hold off operation barbarossa.
• the Winter War between USSR/Finland only happened because Finland didn't want to let the USSR purchase or trade land with them, so the USSR could better prepare themselves for Nazi Germany's invasion. Even though the USSR was offering more acres of land in exchange than they were hoping to buy from the Finnish in the first place. Also after the Winter War the Finnish immediately became patsies of the Nazis and gave them intelligence.
• the USSR only invaded (a by that point borderline fascist and highly uncooperative) Poland to create a bigger buffer zone between the USSR and the advancing nazis.
• gulags paid their prisoners and were more humane than the American prison system.
• 14 nations intervened in the Russian Civil War on behalf of the White movement, which to me proves the desperation of the international bourgeoisie to prevent the USSR from coming into existence in the first place.
• fascism was basically capitalism's immune system response to the soviet union continuing to exist, and the international bourgeoisie, especially England and America, played a huge role in re-militarizing Germany and helping the nazis during the interwar period.
• the USSR rejected the marshall plan because it would have forced them to privatize their economy and put them in debt to the USA. Not because they wanted to start the cold war for no reason.
• the USSR tried to join NATO in 1954 but wasn't allowed. Yet the year after that, West germany was allowed in, even though they had just got done doing the holocaust 10 years earlier.
• Churchill wanted to immediately re-arm nazis and use them to invade the Soviet union (operation unthinkable) but this idea was scrapped thankfully.
• Operation paperclip and Operation bloodstone are way way way worse than operation Doviakhim, despite people trying to pretend they're mirror images of each other. the USSR kidnapped several hundred low-level German scientists and engineers and used their expertise to help rebuild after WW2. Meanwhile the USA took several high ranking nazi war criminals like Adolf Heusinger and put them in the CIA, NASA, NATO, and the EU commission.
• the KGB never tried to spread socialist revolution around the world. it just kept spontaneously happening in all these different nations in the global south because the working class was fed up. However, the CIA did spread anti-communist counter revolution around the world. Yet the liberals want us to believe that the cold war was two sides, with perfectly symmetrical motivations.
• the USSR lost 20 million people fighting fascism while the USA basically waited as long as they could to enter the war while selling weapons to both sides.
• holodomor genocide is an anticommunist atrocity propaganda created and spread by nazi collaborators. Stalin was literally giving Ukraine and Bengal food aid during the 1930s, ironically when Churchill was doing his best to starve Bengal on purpose.
• if Stalin's homophobia and other problematic aspects of his legacy is supposed to make me ignore everything above and I'm supposed to be anti-communist on that reason alone, then why should I support the liberal democratic party of the USA, which has a record of upholding slavery before and during the civil war?
• way more stuff that isn't coming to mind right now.

It basically was a long process of unlearning a lot of "red fascism" mythology about the Soviet Union. Each time I unlearned something, I was less surprised. I went from going "wow I can't believe I'm defending the USSR against unfair slander." to "of course that was just another lie they told me. why would it have been anything else?"

It's hard to teach other people this stuff, especially because of the Russian/Ukrainian war and all the NATO propaganda surrounding that. Even before then, though, it was an uphill battle. Because people hear their whole life that the USSR was a starving hellhole ruled by despots and torturers and here comes some naive person (or treasonous commie psycho) telling them, no, here's a bunch of facts contrary to everything they know. It just makes me sound like a "Kremlin shill" or something in their minds. After all, how can the experts and reliable sources be wrong? People think that because you can trust the government not to lie to you about how many calories are in a serving of milk, that you can also trust them about state enemies. That's the mistake.

Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war against them in 1969. He called the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.

The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and participating children were photographed by Chicago police.

“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”

Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member Norma Amour Mtume told Eater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.

from https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party

Every time I speak of the haters and losers I do so with great love and affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up!

• Whitey Bulger: protected by the FBI for decades while being the biggest heroin importer in the northeast
• Freeway Ricky Ross: supplied by the CIA with coke from the Contras, in a relationship mediated by a DEA informant
• Golden Triangle heroin trade: controlled by the CIA for decades after the Korean War, arming and protecting manufacturers and traffickers, with heroin flown on CIA planes
• The French Connection: French gangsters were protected by the CIA and allowed to import heroin to their primary market, the US, in exchange for keeping the port of Marseille out of the control of French communists
• La Corporacion: the biggest Bolivian cocaine cartel, the "GM of cocaine", started with the cooperation and protection of the CIA according to a DEA agent whose investigations into them were repeatedly thwarted by the State Dept and CIA
• Ronald Stark: the world's biggest manufacturer and supplier of LSD for a period after its criminalization, sole supplier of late-period Brotherhood of Eternal Love, threw parties at the US embassy in Brussels, sent letters using their letterhead, and when he was finally arrested in Italy, the judge in his case accused the CIA of protecting him

The drug war has always been a hoax. There are more drugs in the US now than there were when prohibition started. The cops have always been in on it.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/126p3ys/san_jose_police_union_director_charged_with/jebbmyy/

when communism is made off-limits in the popular consciousness, the only response to crises of capitalism people can imagine is fascism.

• The History of US and British Support to Mussolini’s Fascism https://janataweekly.org/the-history-of-us-and-british-support-to-mussolinis-fascism/

• How Mussolini once worked for British intelligence https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mussolini-idUSTRE59D4MW20091014

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

from https://np.reddit.com/r/BlackWolfFeed/comments/qfxafp/570_deere_john_letter_feat_jonah_furman_102521/hi2mepb/

Okay so like, this family, a father, mom and daughter, move into their grandma's empty house, and discover that the Dad's weird Brother has been camping out there. It's established in a flash back that the Brother hooked up with the Mom right before she married the Dad and she's still kinda horny for him. Also the Brother was some kind of super crazy sex pervert who did so much sex pervert stuff that he felt he had exhausted all the pleasures the Earth had to offer and so bought some kind of demonic Rubik's cube from some dude cuz he heard a legend that if you solve it you gain access to some other dimension of pure pleasure. So he takes it to his grandma's house and solves it and it turns out it summons some fucked up torture demons who come from a dimension where pain and pleasure are the same thing so they just take him and torture him a bunch, but he sorta gets into it a bit, kinda. Also like he can't die so they just like torture him till he's a big pile of living viscera.

Anyway back in the present, the Dad accidentally spills some blood on the floor of of the room his Brother summoned the demons in and that allows the Brother to come back from the demon world, but he's still a living pile of guts. He is able to talk to his horny sister-in-law though and tells her he can become a normal dude again if he can drink a bunch of blood so she goes out and picks up dudes at bars and brings them back so the gross guts guy can eat them and become less gross. The daughter finds out about this and freaks the fuck out, steals the Rubik's cube and runs away, but passes out from how freaky it all is.

She wakes up in the hospital and solves the Rubik's cube and the demons show up and are like "sweet we can torture you till you're kinda into it" and she's like "I think you want my pervy uncle" and they're like "sure help us find him and we'll just torture him forever and he'll kinda be into it". So like she goes back home and her Dad's been killed by her sex pervert uncle but now he's wearing her Dad's skin and she summons the demons who they take both her perv Uncle and Mom away to torture land and she runs away and tries to throw the Rubik's cube away, but some weird hobo who's been in the background of the movie the whole time shows up and grabs it, turns into a flying demon, and brings it back to the merchant dude who gave it to the sex pervert Uncle guy in the first place and then he gives it to some other sex pervert guy.

The End.

i have more fish and tape and will,, power than youre intire organisation

She just died? Wow. I didn't know that, I just uh... you're telling me now for the first time. She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman... whether you agree or not, she was an amazing woman, who led an amazing life. I'm actually sad to hear that. I am sad to hear that.

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.