memes

Since you care oh so much about what other people think, particularly from the people that actually lived in communism, you will 100% change your view if the majority of them have a positive opinion right? Yes? Yessssss? (I doubt it, but let's get some real data in here shall we?)

7 out of 11 countries believe the end of the USSR harmed their countries rather than benefited them

Reflecting back on the breakup of the Soviet Union that happened 22 years ago next week, residents in seven out of 11 countries that were part of the union are more likely to believe its collapse harmed their countries than benefited them. Only Azerbaijanis, Kazakhstanis, and Turkmens are more likely to see benefit than harm from the breakup. Georgians are divided.

Hungary: 72% of Hungarians say they are worse off today economically than under communism

A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country’s economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country’s switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary’s integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.

Romania: 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism

The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.

Germany: more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an “illegitimate state.” In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.

28 percent of Czechs say they were better off under the Communist regime

Roughly 28 percent of Czechs say they were better off under the Communist regime, according to a poll conducted by the polling institute SC&C and released Sunday.

81% of Serbians believe they lived best in Yugoslavia

A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -”during the time of socialism”.

Majority of Russians

The majority of Russians polled in a 2016 study said they would prefer living under the old Soviet Union and would like to see the socialist system and the Soviet state restored.

The claims you have read in reddit comments are almost always made by Americans, whose brains are riddled with red scare brainworms and are completely devoid of any knowledge or understand of what the left thinks in Europe, because Americans do not have a left.

Let's end on something a bit more scientific than polls of people's feelings:

Socialist countries objectively provide a better quality of life to their populations than capitalist countries when compared at an equal level of development

In 28 of 30 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes.

I think that should just about cover it all. I don't think any of this will change your mind because you're clearly ideologically committed to your anticommunist brainworms, but someone with more intelligence and less stubbornness might happen by that has fewer personal failings.

Big "I'm going with the constitution and the rule of law" energy

We should have a Jennifer Rubin emote. I would use it all the time

reactionaries like you believe everything the CIA says today, then disbelieves everything they declassify 60 years later. Which is funny, since they only declassify things once they're low stakes, and have fallen out of public attention, and no longer matter strategically. If the CIA said "we have nothing to do with this coup against socialists in Latin America" 60 years ago, you'd have believed them. But if today they were like "yeah we totally did that shit." suddenly you're willing to call them The Lie Machine. You believe them whenever they are lying, and you disbelieve them whenever they finally admit the truth. This is because you believe what is convenient to your reactionary anti-worker national chauvinist ideology.

people who lived through it

most people in the USSR voted to preserve it

I actually agree with you that this is not that great of a source. It debunks the claim that the USSR starved its people in general but does not show the time of Stalin. There are of course many comrades here who can point to how Stalin didn't starve the USSR either, but the point still stands.

More Kahazkhs died in those famines than Ukrainians but nobody talks about that because the CIA hasn't been funding Kazakh Nazis for the better part of a century

Stalin used starvation as weapon quite effectively.

The idea that Stalin intentionally committed genocide in Ukraine is literal Nazi propaganda that was in turn pushed by right-wing groups in the US. Great article on it here:

It may not be sheer coincidence that faminology took wing just after the OSI was commissioned in 1979. For here was a way to rehabilitate fascism- — to prove that Ukrainian collaborators were help­less victims, caught between the rock of Hitler and Stalin’s hard place. To wit, this bit of psycho-journalism from the 33 March 24 Washington Post, in a story on accused war criminal John “Ivan the Terrible” Demjanjuk: “The pivotal event in Demjanjuk’s childhood was the great famine of the early 1930s, conceived by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a way of destroying the independent Ukrainian peasantry … Several members of [Demjanjuk’s] family died in the catastrophe.”

Coupled with the old nationalist ca­nard of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” faminology could help justify anti-Semitism, collabo­ration, even genocide. An eye for an eye; a Nazi holocaust in return for a “Jewish famine.”

Just as the Nazis used the OUN for their own ends, so has Reagan exploited the famine, from his purple-prosed com­memoration of “this callous act” to his backing of the Mace commission. Faced with failing fascist allies around the world, from Nicaragua to South Africa, the U.S. war lobby needs to boost anti­-Communism as never before. Public en­thusiasm to fight for the contras will not come easy. But if people could be con­vinced that Communism is worse than fascism; that Stalin was an insane mon­ster, even worse than Hitler; that the seven million died in more unspeakable agony than the six million …. Well, we just might be set up for the next Gulf of Tonkin. One cannot appease an Evil Em­pire, after all.

The article is from 1988 by the way, in case you were wondering about the reference to the Contras.