Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Of course not - the likes of Rothbard or Rand will never be caught dead close to the mass-graves their ideological grifting helped to dig.
I make a hard distinction between leftists and political racketeers masquerading as leftists right until they get the power they crave. I place everything spawned by the Bolsheviks in the latter category.
There is nothing unique or new about this distinction.
Rand wrote about the Nazis and fascists.
She didn't like them.
So are you saying that your brand of leftism was spawned before the Bolsheviks—i.e. over 100 years ago?
What do you think about Karl Marx, a 19th century political philosopher, IIUC?
She sure liked their methods.
The French didn't invent left or right - they just invented a useful shorthand to distinguish between the two.
The most successful socialists on the planet used fascistic methods.
Such as?
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, probably Tito and Castro, arguably Pol Pot, Guzman, arguably the PFLP.
Perpetrating mass-murder against the working class doesn't conform to any worthwile description of the term "socialism" - so that disqualifies everyone on your list except Tito and Castro. And I'd describe them purely as nationalists.
They might say things like "triage," "greater good," and "ends justify the means";
or as the Vietnam vet joke goes: "You don't know, man! You weren't there!"
Kerensky failed.
Lenin died.
Trotsky lived in a client state of the Capitalist US Empire.
Stalin got things done, and Brezhnev, for whatever his faults, continued it.
https://youtu.be/QuN6GfUix7c?t=409 (cued, for about a minute)
(and the thing supposedly in Camaroon apparantly didn't happen)
It's almost like they will say anything to justify the status quo - perfectly in line with all those seeking to enforce it.
Only if you believe "got things done" includes almost handing the Soviet Union over to the nazis through his criminal mismanagement of the Red Army and/or forcing a murderously hamfisted, top-down industrialization program on the working class that the actual soviet councils would have achieved in a far, far more efficient manner without massive amounts of bloodshed and famine if the Bolsheviks hadn't hijacked them and turned them into glorified rubberstamping bureucracies in their bloody counter-revolution back in the early 20s.
You should be careful of "Great Man" fallacies. They are usually perfectly ahistorical. Whatever the Soviet Union achieved, it didn't achieve them because of Joseph Stalin - it achieved them in spite of him.
Well said. 😁🙂