Literally shaking rn

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Nazbol was right again baby

Who the fuck wrote this? This is inane, even from a purely academic viewpoint — every line can be taken apart for the nonsense and/or lie that it is. I assumed the author was some kind of no-name blogger or a Victims of Communism Foundation shill, but she actually won a fucking Pullitzer back in 2004.

Last week some leftcom on r/socialism quoted Applebaum at me all the time. Some ultras really need to learn to not fall into this "left" anti-communist trap.

I mean, it's the same bitch that shilled for NATO expansion right towards the Russian border.

Were they citing her book on the Gulag? Does that refute it?

I raise you further: archive.fo/NUXlk
This man is considered one of the leading minds of Soviet history.

Her newest book about the Holodomor, "Red Famine", where she argues that Stalin wanted to purposely starve out the Ukrainians but oddly enough none of the quotes in the book actually prove that, it's just proof of some regional mismanagement.

Things like that keep being published and it allowed anti-communists to just refer to these books as evidence/argument, it's extremly tedious. Recently debated someone on the Holodomor IRL (not that I particulary want to, but people can't argue about communism without the 100 gorillion) and his only argument was that the Holodomor was accepted as a genocide by many countries, therefore, I'd be equal to a Holocaust denier to argue against it.

Anne Applebaum is the worst. She’s probably the most popular writer on the Russian Revolution and the USSR in general as well.

Oh, another one of those "please don't do bolshevism wink wink it's really radical totally against capitalism DON'T DO IT lmaooo" articles to distract the workers from the genuine enemies of Capital and State.

… Are you sure? I can't believe this could be considered even remotely acceptable from anyone with more than a high school education. Considering what I've just read, I can safely assure that such nonsense would get her laughed out of the room in any French faculty of political science or social history.

Who?

Anarchists

I would have to know the inner workings of each Soviet design to really build a better argument towards this, but you get the general drift. It's not like any critique of Bolshevism I've seen has any merit more than critiquing them from the high horse that is modern countries, constantly denying the factors of a nation that's stepping out of fuedalism for gods sake.

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How does a country mechanistically change between two modes of production, and how is it even coherent that you define "socialism" as the Soviet experience on top of that?
Read Paresh Chattopadhyay

I can't finish reading this

Jesus fucking Christ. How the fuck did a person this openly dishonest win a fucking Pulitzer Prize? Then again, I'd also like to know how a person as intellectually lazy as Jordan Peterson got into the academia, but here we are.

The places being an anti-communist propagandist will take you.

I never meant a fully mechanical change, but through things like personal insurrection (kulaks), and ideological change. Preventing this shift was the mainstay of the Soviets.
Also
I'm not saying the Soviet model was perfect and avhieved all the things were pertinent to really getting to where we'd like to end up but still. There are efforts they made, disseminate them and find the good ones.

Marx's reference to a "lower stage" could not even be used to describe to any era of the Soviet Union. Some theorize that a Dictatorship of the Proletariat must precede that phase, and arguably for some, the Soviets had degenerated from that quite early.

washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/11/07/lessons-from-a-century-of-communism/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Somin

And some idiots still think WaPo is left-leaning

More:
Somin has been critical of eminent domain laws that permit governments to take over land by force.[31][32] He was critical of the court decision in Kelo v. City of New London and has defended eminent domain reforms undertaken by US states in the wake of the incident,[33] while arguing that such reforms may not go far enough in protecting private property rights.[34][35] Somin has argued that Detroit's abuse of eminent domain "deter[red] investment by undermining confidence in the security of property rights."[36]

What were you expecting?

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This is the future we live in, comrade

With what little he actually spoke of the topic, yes. Marx didn't consider the massive limitations on how a country could allocate resources efficiently with something like decentralization. Dictatorship of the Proleteriat has little objective value in the building of a country other than "da workers did it therefore: good (or the implied situation that their choices as a dictatorship will align with actual interests and needs.)" Yes the Soviets were bogged down by bureaucracy, didn't even Lenin say this? Some theorize sure, but I don't think they ever fully consider how bogged down the process gets involving worker management into every corner of regular life. There's a reason why Capitalist tendency pervades even the Soviets, efficiency.

I was expecting bias. I wasn't expecting outright lies.

the american revolution was, of course, an actual one, despite the same rich shits being in control of everything, only now they didn't have to say "god save the king"

This is the *purest* ideology I've ever seen, holy fucking shit

That's really bad. Could someone point all the things that are wrong and/or bizarre statements in that excerpt? I'll (try to) start.

>At the beginning of 1917, on the eve of the Russian revolution, most of the men who would become known to the world as the Bolsheviks had very little to show for their lives. They had been in and out of prison, constantly under police surveillance, rarely employed.
This sounds like it's implying they we're just lazy petty criminals and that's why they were in prison and under surveillance, and not that Russia was actually a brutal tsarist autocracy where being sent to a camp in Siberia was often the price you had to pay if you were caught organizing strikes, working within trade unions, working within forbidden political parties, distributing forbidden newspapers and books, etc. Basically tsar good boy and doesn't afraid of anything.

Pretty much the same as above. In exile? What a loser, right.

I don't know if this is true, but almost all I've heard about the provisional government is that they were huge fuck ups and that no one really thought they would be able to last very long. They also didn't end the war, didn't do land reforms, etc.

>the Great October Revolution […] was none of those things: not great (it was an economic and political disaster)
Just not true. Became the world's second super power, first in space, won WWII, and all that stuff, in like 30 years. If you can achieve all those things during such a short time and still qualify as an "economic disaster" then that term is absolutely meaningless. "Political disaster" is a lot more subjective and can mean whatever the fuck, really.

He was pretty fucking into russian politics at the time, so he probably did have an idea, actually.

Can't handle more than that. Please correct me or debunk the rest that I'm not knowledgeable enough to debunk.

Don't you know there's actually no difference between good and bad things, you imbecile, you fucking moron? But really though, is it just me or is this a common thing with neoliberals? Even people who are just like "hey maybe things would be slightly better if we changed these two or three things" inevitably get called utopian dreamers. It's impossible to imagine a world even just a little less shit than this one. You wanna, like, not send any more people to die in a war no one supports and that you've pretty much already lost anyway? You're a naive dreamer sketching out beautiful pictures of an impossible future.

Take a fucking guess. We live in a world where Service, Conquest, Pipes, Figes and Montefiore are 90% of all college courses involving Soviet history.

were*, fuck me

Dear fucking Lord, it's so painfully obvious that they never read a single fucking book about the topic. This isn't even a criticism or a polemic, it's flat-out propaganda. The author knows nothing of the topic, but it doesn't matter because his goal isn't to inform his readership anyway.

It says something that many people can more easily envision the end of the world than they can even the slightest change for the better.

Fixed

I was lucky and i got a reasonable trot (I think, I looked him up and he has tons on Trotsky, no one but Trots care about him that much) to teach my course, he was pretty reasonable. My TA even made the argument that Stalin was somewhat justified in the shit he did, though not fully, cuz of the need to beat back the Nazis.

They are the punching bags of capital.

lol

Your "critiques" are shitty and you can read a book anytime.

I wish it was true.

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So were MLK, Mandela, Voltaire, and literally every other anti-establishment political activist in an authoritarian country. One paragraph and already it’s fucking unbearable.

Man liberals I SWEAR its like they just don't even think

Her Pulitzer book is utter trash as well.

digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216&context=lawreview

Mind you, the review comes from an openly Jesuit university, and they trash it for being garbage logically.

lmao no

Will this be Porky’s undoing?

There is always hope.

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Are Jesuits extra salty about communism?

The comments section of the NYT is much more pro-communist then I ever imagined.

Is this the true power of liberalism?

Check the article's URL on Archive.is, maybe someone managed to archive the full article.

WE'RE COMING FO DAT TOOTHBRUSH

Opposite actually
Leader of the Jesuit order is currently a Marxist

Just a step above blog-tier. I wouldn't really put much stock into this.