• @eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3325 days ago

    Maaaaaaybe the USSR isn’t the best example of a better society we want to be building.

    I’m watching the whole ideological-purge thing happen in the US and it kinda sucks.

      • Lightor
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        -124 days ago

        How does one go about building their own government/economic system?

          • Lightor
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            23 days ago

            Yeah, it wasn’t one guy on Reddit lol. Why haven’t you started the revolution?

            And y’all wonder why people rag on .ml.

            • @BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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              022 days ago

              The whole point was that I don’t reject successful revolutions while not having achieved anything myself. That’s you dog.

              • Lightor
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                021 days ago

                I never rejected anything, maybe try reading again and this time not just seeing what you want. And what was successful before doesn’t mean it will be successful today. People just don’t understand context or nuance. That’s you dog.

      • @rational_lib@lemmy.world
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        -125 days ago

        I’ve played civilization and I’m pretty sure there’s other forms of government besides Communism and Monarchy that have low corruption, albeit lacking the ability to force the citizens into war on the leader’s whim.

        • @m532@lemmygrad.ml
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          1125 days ago

          Isnt civilization the game where “democracy” has 0 corruption? I think its kinda biased and not exactly based on reality

        • @CalipherJones@lemmy.world
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          24 days ago

          Corruption is a matter of individuals rather than the form of government. Any human system is bound to be corruptible since it involves humans.

          I think a strong anti corruption culture is the best defense against it.

    • @ptee@lemm.ee
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      -824 days ago

      Both extremes on display those examples, seems like they both end up in the same place in the end. Maybe it would be reasonable to use any system that is a mix of things, instead of focusing on pure capitalism or communism.

      • Cowbee [he/they]
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        1224 days ago

        There’s really no such thing as a pure system, any mix is still going to have either the public sector as principle or private, ie which controls the state, large firms, and key industries. There’s no way to keep them “balanced,” one will have power over the other, and its best for it to be the public sector.

  • @oyzmo@lemmy.world
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    1925 days ago

    Socialism allows for both public and private ownership, individual freedoms, and democratic decision-making, while still aiming for social equality. Communism, in contrast, tends to involve total state control and often limits personal freedoms.

    • Cowbee [he/they]
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      24 days ago

      Both Capitalism and Socialism have room for public and private ownership, the difference is which sector controls the state, large firms, and key industries. The Nordic Countries are dominated by Private Capital, ie it is Capitalist, while the PRC is dominated by Public Ownership, ie it is Socialist.

      Communism limits the personal freedoms of the bourgeoisie. All Communism is, is a more developed and global form of Socialism, where the small firms that once were private have all grown into the public sector or collapsed.

    • @BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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      924 days ago

      Tell me you’ve never read anything about communism that wasn’t written by anti-communists without telling me you’ve never read anything about communism that wasn’t written by anti-communists.

    • @m532@lemmygrad.ml
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      625 days ago

      Limits personal freedoms only for the owning class. If you’re not a landlord or ceo you have nothing to fear.

      • @Liberteez@lemm.ee
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        25 days ago

        Tell that to the masses Lenin, Stalin, and Mao killed

        I support communes, and Anarcho communism sounds lovely. Once authority is involved, they tend to fail

        • Cowbee [he/they]
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          1025 days ago

          The Black Book of Communism was debunked long ago, from including Nazis killed during World War II as “victims of Communism” to literally making up numbers to get to 100 million dead to being outright disproven once the Soviet Archives were opened up.

          There were excess deaths, but Communist leaders weren’t mindless butchers, either. And with the introduction of Socialism came numerous benefits for the working class, like a doubling of life expectancy, tripling of literacy rates to 99.9%, free and high quality education, healthcare, and childcare, an expansion in women’s rights, a democratization of the economy, and much more.

          Anarchism is a beautiful idea, and I used to be one. However, I am more convinced of Marxism, namely because we have more data that shows the success of Marxism, and because hierarchy and centralization are requirements for expansive infrastructure projects like high speed rail and for complex production, such as for smartphones.

          I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist Reading List you can check out, if you’d like to learn more.

        • @m532@lemmygrad.ml
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          524 days ago

          Yeah I didn’t consider the nazis but they are just lackeys for the landlords and ceos so I mentally put them in there. Ofc nazis have to fear communism too.

  • @void_turtle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    25 days ago

    The desire to dominate and the willingness to act on it has existed in a fraction of the population since before humans were human. This is the root of all evil, capitalism is a specific manifestation of this impulse that has only existed for some 400 years. If your analysis starts and ends at “capitalism bad” you miss the vast majority of oppression that has existed or will exist.

    • @BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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      325 days ago

      What’s your evidence for your the root of evil is that some people just have an “evil” gene theory?

      • @void_turtle@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        25 days ago

        I never mentioned genetics, strange that you would bring it up. Sex isn’t even fully determined by genetics, something as complex and fragile as your personal values certainly can never be reduced to genetics.

        Humans brains are stochastic and the values we eventually settle on depend both on our environment and on somewhat random walks through possible values. Some people will land on violent domination as a social strategy just through randomness. I believe an environment where everyone is cared for and has the ability to flourish will minimize the people who randomly end up on violent domination, but it is not possible through environmental changes to completely prevent this. Thus we cannot allow any positions of power, since those will attract and eventually be captured by people who have chosen domination as their preferred strategy.

      • @storm@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        124 days ago

        Seems to me that about once a generation people allow the states they live in (and corporations they work for) to concentrate power to a point where it cannot be overlooked anymore? Kinda feel like you already have an answer you want tho (apologies if that’s not the case).

      • @Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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        25 days ago

        Human nature. We need living people to tell us what happened the last time something happened society-wide, else we forget and repeat the same mistakes. It’s the whole hard times make strong men thing. It’s on about an 80 year cycle. The good news is that we’re right at the point in the cycle where real changes are easy to make.

        Read the book The Fourth Turning for many examples of the pattern repeating.

          • @Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net
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            24 days ago

            So’s the 👌hand sign, I suppose I’m going to get dogpiled for that too?

            Look outside, (big ask for this website), we’re literally in hard times made by weak men.

            I swear, this site is worse than 4chan about groupthink. Someone uses a slightly weak example or a cancelled idiom and all your minds just shut off and you start parroting your self selected propaganda.

  • @Mark12870@lemmy.world
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    123 days ago

    It is terrible to see so many comments here celebrating communism. Communists were ruining our country (Czechia) for over 40 years and led it to economical collapse. When we tried to reform the regime in 1968, the Russians invaded to stop it. Communism doesn’t really work, and it has already been proven.

    Also, I have to say the country worked in a bizzare way. The government robbed everyone of their property, so in return, people were stealing from public supplies.

    So please try to study something first about communism in Eastern Europe before you start to celebrare this regime.

  • @AidsKitty@lemmy.world
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    -925 days ago

    I see we are reaching for “full retard” today. If you love communism go and live in a communist country.

    • Cowbee [he/they]
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      25 days ago

      That’s the plan! Though I want to aid in turning my own country Communist, as that would benefit the most people globally, or at least take down the US Empire.

      Ableism aint cool either.

      • @atmorous@lemmy.world
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        -425 days ago

        Read my comment on this post. Think Capitalism mixed with Socialism would be good alternative for everyone

        • Cowbee [he/they]
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          1025 days ago

          I responded to it, but I want to respond to this as well. There’s really no such thing as “mixing” Capitalism with Socialism. Private and Public property can be mixed, but what determines Capitalism or Socialism is if the former is the principle aspect of the economy, or the latter. By principle, I mean which controls the state, large firms, and key industries.

        • @pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz
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          25 days ago

          That’s what most European countries (social democracies) are doing. Safety net so you don’t randomly become homeless (you keep getting a part of your salary for a while, and even without any money there are enough places to sleep for all homeless people, at least in Austria), free healthcare, …

          • @m532@lemmygrad.ml
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            525 days ago

            There’s no socialism in social democrats, only capitalists doing concessions so the people don’t demand socialism

            • @pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz
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              -325 days ago

              I’m going to university for 27€ per semester while getting free healthcare and subsidised housing and lunch. If I were to become homeless I could go to a shelter for sleeping and food. Additionally you get a certain percentage of your salary (starting at ~80%, becomes less as the months pass, but it’s plenty of time to find a new job) after getting fired. Schools are free and there are basically no private schools because there’s simply no need, public education is good. After childbirth you also get money until you can work again, for up to 3 years. There are regulations against monopolies and cartels. Etc etc.

              imo this is the ideal system

              • @m532@lemmygrad.ml
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                524 days ago

                "My men enslave people in africa to get rubber and murder them if they dont gather enough rubber and then we ship it here and then we have lots of rubber in belgium and the suffering happens somewhere else where I’ll never be

                imo this is the ideal system"

                - king of belgium, probably

                • @pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz
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                  -324 days ago

                  What about not enslaving people?

                  And of course people in weaker economies get paid less, they also need less since everything is cheaper.

              • Cowbee [he/they]
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                624 days ago

                The whole problem is that your system is built on the backs of super-exploiting the Global South. You’ve exported the bulk of the hard labor that allows you to live comfortable lives, and maintain it through the domination of private financial Capital.

        • Cowbee [he/they]
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          1325 days ago

          I disagree with that being an intrinsic quality shared genetically by all of humanity, burned into our DNA. Rather, our ideas are shaped by material conditions, and thus different aspects are expressed more and less in different systems, ergo selfishness is not an iron-clad law.

          Further, my point is more about asking why Communism can’t work because people are selfish. To me, that’s a telltale sign of not engaging with Marxist theory or how AES states are run.

        • @culprit@lemmy.ml
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          25 days ago

          Science shows that humans as a species have been able to develop and thrive due to cooperative pro social instincts. This has been proven in studies of children. Our greed driven society beats this inherent impulse out of people to ‘prepare them’.

          • @vga@sopuli.xyz
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            -125 days ago

            Sure, cooperation is clearly an evolutionary trait also, and seems like a much more useful one than greed. It seems that socities need a bit of both to thrive, or do you have examples of known societies that worked primarily on co-operation, even for the leaders?

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
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      3225 days ago

      If we accepted the arguments that humans are selfish, then it’s an argument for communism and not against it. We should be creating social systems that encourage socially positive behavior and inhibit socially destructive behavior. Capitalism is like taking a drunk to a happy hour at the bar. The fact that people keep repeating this trope shows complete and utter lack of critical thinking on their part.

    • Nemo's public admirer
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      25 days ago

      I think it can work because of the same

      I know that selfishness will make atleast some try to do any evil for a profit.
      Capitalism is highly risky then.

      Better to highly regulate it or try to develop out of it, right?

    • @m532@lemmygrad.ml
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      425 days ago

      If someone is selfish and global working class and class conscious, they’ll work towards communism for their own selfish gain.

    • ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ
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      -1225 days ago

      if we have learnt one thing from the past it is that hammer and sickle countries are in dire need of agriculture products.

  • @CalipherJones@lemmy.world
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    -124 days ago

    Sad to say, but humans are the root of evil. Atrocities have been done in the name of all sorts of things, but it’s always humans carrying it out.

        • @culprit@lemmy.ml
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          524 days ago

          According to American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Kristen Ghodsee, efforts to institutionalize the “double genocide thesis”, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), in particular the push at the beginning of the 2007–2008 financial crisis for commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme social inequalities in both the Eastern and Western worlds as the result of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. She says that any discussion of the achievements by Communist states, including literacy, education, women’s rights, and social security is usually silenced, and any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Joseph Stalin’s crimes and the “double genocide thesis”, an intellectual paradigm summed up as such: “1) any move towards redistribution and away from a completely free market is seen as communist; 2) anything communist inevitably leads to class murder; and 3) class murder is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.” By linking all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee posits that the elites hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could “threaten the primacy of private property and free markets”.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory#Memory_politics_and_the_Holocaust_in_Eastern_Europe

          • @storm@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            -324 days ago

            I should have clarified that I’m not against socialism, just the hierarchy of states. We should instead pursue more egalitarian socialist expressions like social ecology or kinds of anarchy.

            • @culprit@lemmy.ml
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              324 days ago

              making the perfect the enemy of the good

              this is you rn

              socialism >> communism is a evolving process, but every time it starts growing and developing, capital asserts itself to dominate and destroy it

              the only Actually Existing Socialisms today have nuclear deterrents to avoid this fate, they also have to develop counter-intelligence defenses because just nuclear weapons are not enough to protect from all the myriad threats that capital engages in towards anti-socialist >> anti-communist goals

              if you can not understand this material reality of history, and use it to analyze the struggle for liberation in this world, you are lost

    • @person1@lemm.ee
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      -424 days ago

      I’m going to take a wild guess that posters and downvoters in this thread don’t live in actual communist countries. Endorsing hammer and sickle is just as bad as endorsing swastikas…

      • Cowbee [he/they]
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        424 days ago

        The portrayal of the Communists and Nazis as “twin evils” exaggerates the sins of the Communists in quantity and quality, while minimizing the sins of the Nazis in quantity and quality, in order to show them as relatively equal problems. In other words, its Nazi apologia, and historical revisionism. Read Blackshirts and Reds.

        The Nazis executed the Communists, Socialists, gay people, trans people, disabled people, Jewish people, Slavic people, and many, many more. It wasn’t simple opposition, it was a racially supremacist ideology.

        The Communists executed Tsarists, fascists, and terrorists to the state. They did not create a systematic industrialized murder machine like the Nazis did in order to keep up with how many people they needed to kill.

    • Cowbee [he/they]
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      625 days ago

      Soviet propaganda is a good thing, and it’s on the mark here. Socialism is necessary and Capitalism is clearly on the downhill.

      • Anarcho-Bolshevik
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        423 days ago

        Hardly anybody in this thread seems to have arrived at the conclusion that maybe some lower-class people have an interest in and nostalgia for the Eastern Bloc because capitalism is becoming increasingly intolerable.

        It reminds me of the chumps who condescendingly explained to feminists that misandry is a serious problem on par with white supremacy and that not all men are awful. What a way to miss the point. Telling a lower-class person that communism is actually horrible doesn’t fix anything and neither does reminding an unhappy feminist that there are some good men in the world.

        • Cowbee [he/they]
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          423 days ago

          Yep, plus we need to factor in the fact that in these studies, there are non-working class people polled. Ie, bourgeoisie that enjoy new luxuries and privledges they did not have before. Of course they will say Capitalism is better.

          Polling just the working class majority, we can expect even more definitive results pointing to a longing for the stability and safety of the Soviet system.

        • Nemo's public admirer
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          25 days ago

          I think so.
          Weren’t they better than the Tsarist rule?

          Like, public healthcare, education and other policies leading to high literacy rates, longer lifespans, low infant and mother mortality etc.

          And if we compare them to the other major powers at the time, aren’t they better than those since they made progress without colonies?

          • @pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz
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            -425 days ago

            What if you were one of the unfortunate ones who simply got starved? If you criticised the government, or if someone simply accused you of being against the system? What if you weren’t even against the system but simply had a higher position (for example in the military, or as a politician) before your country was made part of the USSR? What about the huge lanes in front of grocery stores when they got new food?

            Why were there such huge protests, and why did they have to be bloodily shut down? All owning class people?

            • Cowbee [he/they]
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              924 days ago

              Lets examine these.

              1. Food security got much better in the Soviet Union over Tsarist Russia, which is a huge part of why life expectancy over doubled from the start of the Soviet Union gradually as they focused on agriculture, housing, and healthcare for the working class.

              2. Criticism of government wasn’t an executable offense unless you were forming terrorist cells or causing legitimate political instability, such as Trotsky, who did both.

              3. The millitary was not purged of everyone in it, those found to be Tsarist collaborators or part of the Tsarist White Army were punished for their crimes against the people. Not all of them were executed, imprisonment was also quite common.

              4. It is better to feed the people than let them starve. World War II and the years right after it were especially brutal, as the Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket, causing mass food shortages. 20 million Soviet people lost their lives to the Nazis, but thankfully the Red Army beat the Nazis.

              There, generally, were not huge protests. I’d like to know which ones in particular you are talking about, but protest wasn’t that common as until the later years, government approval was fairly high.

              • @pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz
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                -524 days ago

                ad 1.: much worse than in western counterparts

                ad 2.: my great grandfather was sent to a gulag for criticising the DDR’s government

                ad 3.: another great grandfather didn’t do anything except being an officer in the Hungarian military, so he got killed in the communist revolution (1956)

                DDR 1953

                Hungary 1956 (fighting for democracy and freedom), peaceful student protest was shot at, police and Hungarian army supported the protesters, they got a new president who promised multiple parties and free elections, as well as leaving the Warsaw pact. The USSR sent tanks to end the revolution by killing protesters, the new president was killed too, many people in the military (doesn’t matter if they supported joining the movement for freedom and democracy or wanted to stay in the USSR) got killed.

                Prague 1968 peaceful movement for human rights and basic freedoms -> USSR sent troops to end it

                • Cowbee [he/they]
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                  824 days ago
                  1. Wrong, actually, if you trust internal CIA reports.

                  2. Anecdotes, especially familial ones, are not a replacement for expansive data taking. I have no idea what your great-grandfather was sent to prison for, nor is a single case like that representative of the entire USSR.

                  3. The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was infested with anti-semetic pograms. MI6 funded, supplied, and trained the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries. These counter-revolutionaries were allied with fascists who were lynching Jewish people and Communists.

                  "The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”

                  “But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”

                  “Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)

                  “The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”

                  "A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:

                  During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”

                  Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."

                  Further, the CIA also backed Hungarian resistance forces:

                  Prague in 1968 was a similar fascist uprising in both cases there were some elements of progressive protest, but these were greatly overshadowed by the fascist movements.

                  I’m not making any accusations here, I want you to elaborate more, but legitimately it sounds like you’re saying your family members were fascists or fascist sympathizers. I want you to clear their names, because Hungary absolutely fought on the side of the Axis in World War II, and the 1956 counter-revolt was against the Communists.

            • @BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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              724 days ago

              People like you really should be forced to live under the conditions of pre-Soviet Russia. If literal feudalism and a life expectancy of thirty is so great to you, you should have to live it yourself

              • @pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz
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                -724 days ago

                I’m not saying that was good either, but middle European countries started with a similar situation and got much farther. I recognise the USSR as a lesser evil than tsarist Russia, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. More like an upgrade from 2/10 to 4/10 while other countries went paths that lead to 8/10

                • @BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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                  724 days ago

                  I’m not saying that was good either, but middle European countries started with a similar situation and got much farther.

                  No they didn’t.

                  but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

                  K. Your line for what counts as “good” is completely arbitrary and vibes based.

                  while other countries went paths that lead to 8/10

                  No they didn’t