• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      The Red Army was responsible for 90% of Nazi deaths, and took Berlin. The Soviet Union paid by far the biggest price in winning World War II, and was by far the most responsible for ending it. I’m not going to apologize for being a Marxist, it sounds like you wished the other side won World War II.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          The Eastern Front was decisive in determining the outcome in the European theatre of operations in World War II, eventually serving as the main reason for the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis nations.[q] It is noted by historian Geoffrey Roberts that “More than 80 percent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front”.

          Eastern Front (World War II)

          As much as you may have hated it, the good guys won World War II, not Germany.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              2 days ago

              Every army committed crimes against civilians, sadly, but the Soviets took that seriously enough to punish rapists with the death penalty. Other armies, like the Nazis, US, Japanese, etc did not punish their rapists to the same degree so as to serve as a deterrent.

              Further, the Nazi propagandists used the facts of ethnic asians in the Red Army to propagandize about “mongol hordes coming to rape everyone,” which is of course racist, but nevertheless was enough to create the myth of the Red Army as exceptionally brutal as compared to the other armies.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  2 days ago

                  We were talking about the Red Army, not the Russian millitary in general. Is your point that sexual assault is genetic to Russians, or are you under the impression that Russia is still Socialist? The former would be racist, the latter would be a critical misunderstanding of Russian history.

                  Further, again, all armies commit assaults. This does not make any excess acceptable whatsoever, but it does mean we need to look at what the armies do internally to suppress it. We can see that the Ukrainian army is also guilty of sexual assault:

                  Amnesty International accessed the government-controlled territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions between January and November 2019. The organisation has had no access to the separatist-controlled areas, which fall beyond the scope of the report.

                  Official statistics on domestic violence, however unreliable and incomplete, show a spike of registered cases in the last three years. In 2018, there was a 76% increase in reported cases in Donetsk region and a 158% increase in Luhansk region, compared to the average of the previous three years.

                  Source: Amnesty International

                  Even before Russia got directly involved, the Ukrainian army was sexually assaulting the ethnic Russians in the Donbass region as they were shelling the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

    • Xoriff@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I’m anti-tankie as the next guy. But pick up a history book. Soviet Russia did a huge amount of the work during WW2.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          The Soviets were never “with the Nazis.” The Soviets spent years trying to get the West to form an allied pact against the Nazis, insteas the West gave the Nazis Czechoslovakia. The non-aggression pact was paid to buy time, as the USSR was a developing country and Germany a more developed one. Nazism and Communism are diametrically opposed and cannot coexist, in the years of the Nazis rise the Nazis murdered the Communists in Germany first, and the Soviets were constantly warning about the Nazi threat.

          The surprise attack by the Nazis was swift, brutal, and with genocidal intent. They took land quickly, but were pushed back into a stalemate, and then rapidly the Nazi line collapsed. Lend-Lease equipment arrived after the Red Army had stabilized, it certainly helped but was not critical to the success of the Red Army, they weren’t crumbling. Repeating Goebbels “Russian hordes” anti-Slavic racist talking points doesn’t help you either, there are no records of “wave tactics” as was reported by the Nazis. Those records came largely from pre-Soviet Russian tactics, not the tactics of the Red Army.

          They didn’t “fuck over” a bunch of countries either.

            • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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              2 days ago

              I never rewrote anything. There were many pacts between Western Powers and Nazi Germany before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, including non-aggression pacts from Nazi Germany with Estonia, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Britain, Italy, Denmark, and more. The Nazis broke the vast majority of these treaties, and it was only when war was on the horizon and the pleas from the Soviets to form an alliance against the Nazis that they conceded to the fact that the West was never going to willingly ally with the Soviets unless they had to.

              Further, the large majority of those who lived in the USSR want it back. This is extremely well-documented, because 7 million people died due to the fall of the USSR and the economic crisis that came with that collapse, along with the elimination of the social welfare that people depended on.

              The “meat shield” line is straight from Nazi propagandists using anti-Slavic racism (coincidentally, this line has carried over to today). The Red Army was very competent and didn’t rely on “wave tactics” as a part of their battle strategem.

              This is nonsense anti-communism.

        • Xoriff@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          I didn’t say I was anti-marxist. I’m anti-authoritarian. In all it’s forms.

          • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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            2 days ago

            All it’s forms? So you oppose national borders? Private property ownership? Do you think Donbas should be allowed to leave Ukraine?

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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            2 days ago

            “Tankie” is just a pejorative for Marxist, though, like “commie” or “pinko.” Marxism is “authoritarian” in that it expressly calls for flipping the Capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie into the Socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, ie turning from a society where the Capitalists are oppressing the working class via the state into a society where the working class wields the state against the Capitalists.

            This isn’t a real “dictatorship” in the modern sense, but a descriptor for where the balance of power lies, in the working class or Capitalist class, via Public ownership or Private ownership being primary. Socialism is still democratic, but will use the power of the state against the bourgeoisie. All states are authoritarian, what matters is which class is in control of the authority, and how we can move beyond class and thus the state.

            • Xoriff@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Oh really? My bad. I’ve always heard it used specifically to talk about corrupted implementations of Marxism. E.g. Animal Farm.

              Err, maybe I’m confusing Marxism and socialism.

              I’m still not exactly clear on how any of it avoids corruption. At the end of the day, somebody decides whose street gets paved first.

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                3 days ago

                Marxism is a branch of Socialism. The other major branch is Anarchism, and both Marxism and Anarchism have many sub-branches. For example, I am a Marxist-Leninist, which is generally the ideology guiding Cuba, the PRC, former USSR, etc. These are not “corrupted,” they are real and thus face real problems that systems that only exist in the minds of dreamers don’t have to. Marx would scoff at such dreamers that let perfection be the enemy of progress. I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can check out, if you are curious and want to glance through it to get an idea of what Marxism-Leninism is all about.

                Secondly, Animal Farm. If you have the time, I think it would be worth reading A Critical Read of Animal Farm by Jones Manoel, and On Orwell by Roderic Day. Animal Farm is a work of fiction, written by an anti-Marxist Socialist. Orwell worked directly with British Intelligence to out Socialists and Communists, and kept a list of people he suspected were Jewish, due to his anti-semetism.

                Orwell is magnified by Western Countries because he’s useful, he’s someone that at least pretends to be Left but spent more time attacking the Left than anything. Even his comrades in arms in Spain, when he fought alongside the Anarchists against the fascists, questioned why he wasn’t fighting on the other side. Animal Farm is chiefly a story about how the Russian Working Class was stupid and illiterate, and thus destined to be taken advantage of and could never hope to understand Marxism. Orwell spends an absurd amount of time describing just how stupid the non-pigs are, as describing poor, working folk as incapable of knowing their own interests is his critique.

                As for corruption, Marxist Socialism solves it with recall elections and broader extension of democratic input. Democracy in the workplace is utter fantasy in Capitalism, but is very real in Socialist countries. Even if this democracy often is flawed, and runs into the real problems that real, existing systems run into just like any other, it still forms a higher degree of public control.

                Hope that clears some things up for you!

              • TheRealKuni@midwest.social
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                3 days ago

                No, you’re not wrong. They’re muddying meaning of the word “tankie.”

                “Tankie” does not mean “commie.” Not all commies are tankies.

                • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                  3 days ago

                  Again, “Tankie” is a pejorative for Marxist in the same vein as “commie” and “pinko.” All 3 were used against Communists historically, though pinko seems to have fallen out of fashion.

                  • TheRealKuni@midwest.social
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                    3 days ago

                    That is reductionist and overly simplistic. Just because they are all pejorative does not mean their meaning is identical. Not all communists are “tankies.”

                    (But I know very well we need to agree to disagree on this, because I don’t think there’s any value in trying to convince you.)