USSR In Secondary School

While getting taught about the big mean scary USSR in secondary school, was anyone else here weirdly and not really sure why rooting for them in the back of their minds when different crises and events were being taught?

This was long before I called myself a Socialist or really understood anything about it. I just weirdly rooted for the USSR and got pissed at the way it's downfall was described - like how it talked about how great it was that everyone in East Germany started drinking coke and eating mc donalds (not a joke, it actually said this to conclude the topic of the USSR).

For the record, I'm not even a tankie now.

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marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/intro.htm
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Ya man I always kinda rooted for them even when I wasn't a communist and I still believed in the 30 gorrillion meme. There was always something about communism I found inspiring.

Dude they taught that to me in school too

Also they called china communist

Kinda, but I always had a tendency to root for the side people said I shouldn't. I can't help sympathizing with people who try to take on the entire world even when it's Trump.

I remember a primary school history book stating that in the USSR the state decided where you lived, what your job would be, where you worked and whom you would marry. In high school they provided a more nuanced picture, albeit a still very negative one. One of my high school teachers actually talked about the Bolsheviks in a fairly romantic sense, as people who wished to build a better world and had tremendous dreams for humanity but had it all turn to dust in their hands as per pic related.
As for me, I was a total Soviet apologist as a kid because I was a "Socialist" (SocDem) and felt compelled to defend them. As no one in my school knew anything about history, I could usually easily win debates by turning to whataboutism concerning the USA's crimes.

I had a pretty good history teacher to be honest. He actually covered the labor movement in US history and once actively commented on the whole "you turn more right wing as you get older" with "honestly it's been the opposite for me."
He was pretty accurate with "communism is a system that the USSR never achieved and never claimed to have achieved but arguably was trying to achieve."

Also I got to crash the stock market in class once so that was fun.

My teacher covered some of the labor movement like Mother Jones and unions but glossed over any communism.

I mean it probably helped that i had the same teacher for both US history and world history.

That's rough man. One reason I'm scared to have a kid is all the bullshit they'll try to teach the little fuck, though if the runt's anything like me they'll be unable to speak their mind and call the teacher a faggot.

They also described the DPRK and China as good examples of Marxism.

I always rooted for them, even our schools show them as the well "good" guys
but then again i hate the west for what they did to my country and want them all to burn

Which country are you in?

Kind of. I became a communist before I ever got taught about the USSR, so a lot of the time I had openly questioned the material we were given.

Evidently, this is where I also learned that many people I met don't care and just hate communists and communism for no reason beyond being taught what I was questioning myself.

To respond to the question: yes but not because it was 'in the back of my mind.'

What age did you become a communist?

I've always had a soft spot for socialism

Helps that my family is lefty

My grandma is a super staunch anti-communist and thinks that democracy is the opposite of communism. My mom is a "progressive".

Even though I'm in the US I dont recall anyone saying anything bad about the USSR. They did lump Stalin in the axis powers by mistake but at the same time they portrayed Russia winning against Germany as a good thing so they made them out like the good guys or neutral. No talks of gulags or Russia killing anyone was brought up.

Cool.

We studied Mao's China in school.

We were taught about the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and all that. Mao was Hitler and Stalin combined! It was quite interesting though. The Cultural Revolution wasn't that bad, even though they taught us it was silly, I remember thinking it was well intentioned and a good way to change society rapidly.

Mao was legitimately a complete retard when it came to governing though.

This.

14 or 15. Pretty sure 15, though I'm not sure.

I was not rooting for them in the back of my minds. I was so autistic that after being taught about these big meanies, I went home and read the communist manifesto. The next day, I was openly cheering for the commies.

In my history textbook there was an extract of the diary of a Chinese peasant in the middle of a famine, as a way to explain how was life in Maoist China.

The diary was from 1920. I still laugh at times when I remember it.

No I was that kid who weirdly rooted for the Nazis and even then I was a dumb kid who just liked the aesthetics. Not sure what this has to do with actual theory.

I first started getting taught about the USSR in 8th grade. When I was learning about it I really started to admire Lenin but just like you I didn't call myself communist.

you still are a nazi though

you did nothing wrong. They were the good guys

I used to live in the Soviet Union when I was a kid.

Fast forward to today, not long ago, my son showed me the school-issued history book.
There were people lining up in front of a supermarket. It was subtitled as something about USSR unable to provide food because of communist inefficiency.

Now there was a kid in the picture who looked like my son and the class noticed that. He showed me and to my surprise it was actually me. It was I who waited there on the line to get bread. But the thing is, when I did that, the Soviet Union didn't exist for quite sometimes. It was democratic Russia under the enlightened leadership of Boris Yeltsin now.

So much for teaching kids the truth about the USSR.

too bad I didn't know shit then

Gotta love all of the conservatives who think Orwell was on their side. It's hilarious to me.

the pigs were meant to represent jews btw

wew

Kek. Thats before Mao was even around right?

What was it like in the USSR?

Wew

about 20 years before

No shit.

Absolutely kekilicious

Kek

Can't remember, since I was of a single digit age
All I know is that at a certain points things got worse.
Parents were jobless, school had to close down, things you took for granted, like food, were no longer available.

I remember my history teacher "condemning" communism by using some shitty ice cream analogy.

Basically told us communism was bad because with communism you only get 1 choice of icecream, whatever the state says, whereas with capitalism you get all the choices you want.

Worst part was, I believe him for years. Fucking shame.

I've been taught "communism means same wage for everyone" in secondary school from a retarded christian liberal teacher

revisionists BTFO

I thought there was guaranteed employment?

Yes, granted by a state that no longer existed

Thats a valid critic of oligarchical state capitalism I suppose.

Around when was this?

Nah, I was a leftcom at that time trying to reconcile my communism with anti-USSR sentiment.

1992

the fucking analogies to communism always take the cake.

When the teacher said the USSR was communistic and my friend pointed out it wasn't, she said "socialism doesn't negate communism". And of course there's the usual spiel about religion being outlawed and the 500 trillion victims. The same teacher once told a story she "heard from a friend of a friend" about how the KGB prevented a Jewish woman from circumcising her baby, I don't remember how that fairy tale got resolved but the alleged woman found herself eventually in the USA with her child.

Jesus Christ, these are people with degrees, allowed to teach in schools. I don't blame anyone for being so misinformed after attending a public school. And ancaps dare to say that there's a "leftist" agenda at work to indoctrinate the kids.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

I did that too. I think it was really just my urge to root for "the underdog" which even my child self could see was the USSR.

The point was that the stories they tell are completely detached from reality.

the teacher was Jewish

It was real in her mind.

apparently to american hicks

i remember my history teacher telling me that communism is when everyone gets paid exactly the same regardless of your job (doctors got the same pay as janitors), and that the government picks your job for you the moment you are born. "so some people born to be janitors would end up as doctors"

you are an idiot

They did decide that (in Bulgaria atleast). your job would be decided by what your father was doing. If your father was a farmer. You would be a farmer.

Where is a good place I can learn about the history of the USSR? Think The Greatest Story Never Told but for Russia.

Trotsky's the revolution betrayed?

I will look into it, thanks.

marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/intro.htm

My English teacher actually explained in clear terms that Orwell was a socialist and basically gave us a run-down of the entire era and Orwell's beliefs. She was a better history teacher than our history teacher tbh. She's one of the main reasons I'm a commie now.

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In both systems people are born to be janitors, except one has it as his divine American birthright and destiny, and another by evil commissar and big government doing stuff meddling.

It made me hate state socialism, but I also learned about the lack of unemployment etc and recessions etc.

At the same time I was studying 1984 in English. So this was pretty fucking cool.

Wow you guys had some detailed education. They didn't even teach about communism or capitalism in my schools, in fact outside of US involvement (pearl harbor and internment camps) and Hitler/Mussolini/Stalin being dictators they didn't really cover much of WWII. Most of what I knew from history back then was from the history channel and natgeo.

Although I will give my teacher credit, she did go over how bankers caused the great depression and vietnam was pretty much genocide

You do realise that Orwell was a libertatian socialist right?

SOME FOLKS ARE BORN

Why would you root for a place from where everyone and their mom wants to escape from? Do you have some sort of getting tortured in a gulag fetish?

As a kid I was quite sensitive to manipulation and "persuasive techniques," say, in the media. I was obsessed with some autistic idea of intellectual integrity. What I heard about the USSR had the distinct whiff of propaganda, so I had to learn some of the finer points on my own.

Funny thing, I happened to read The Revolution Betrayed before Animal Farm, so I knew enough of the historical context to notice when the teacher misapplied the allegory and to write a paper at an other-than-superficial level, the only one not vacuously echoing back the "communism is great in theory but doesn't work in practice" takbir, for which I got a B. So, yeah…

Yeah even as a small child I had utopian socialist ideas about how society should be run.

I was always predisposed to leftism, I guess

I still have mixed feelings on Orwell. He had a big effect on me becoming a commie, but I accept he was a bitchmade snitch at the same time.

Mao confirmed for Nazbol

Kek
Orwell was painfully explicit towards the end, making the pigs virtually indistinguishable from the farmers. The subtext, properly read, is every bit as critical of the "farmer" system itself.The whole book screams a leftist critique to anyone with a basic familiarity with leftism, and even if you aren't, Orwell's fucking wikipedia page tells you he was a socialist.
It's almost as if the people writing these curricula are deliberately trying to mangle the political consciousness of successive generations. Hmmm….

Yes, I always knew I didn't really have to work and the rest of society could rear me like my own mom and dad.