So, over the past year I have learnt so much about the amazing achievements these men (and the party they were the leaders of) did that I was never taught. I’ve ‘semi-intentionally’ deprogrammed myself of so much anti-communism bullshit while having to live with that most still in the West, based upon misinformation, view them as ‘evil, 100 quintillion deaths, dictator, psychopath where muh freedoms’.
The reason I am focusing on Stalin and Mao in particular in this post is, to be very open, due to a truth-seeking hyperfixation that I must satisfy so I can move on to the next topic of intense, dopamine chasing, obsession. Yeah I love being me. Anyway, propaganda, mythologising, exaggerating and misattributed blame brushed aside, what is left?
I am quite knowledgeable of, thanks to some high quality M-L documentaries, educational videos and podcast episodes, the more obvious wrongdoings such as the Great Leap Forward killing of pests worsening the famine, purges of comrades who were legitimately innocent, re-criminalising homosexuality, support of Khmer Rouge and ethnic deportations to name a few.
I wouldn’t mind hearing more obscure examples, or a deeper analysis of the mistakes and unjustifiable actions I am already aware of. And as much as a few good book recommendations probably would give me the answers I crave, I am lowkey illiterate with long-form reading thanks to my ADHD (still waiting on meds after being diagnosed 8 months ago).
Mao and Stalin were born before the invention of sliced bread. Mao died before most women in the US could have a bank account and Stalin died before full desegragation in the US. just as a medieval peasant has a vastly different view of disease than a 19th century doctor, we have vastly different views on social matters than Stalin or Mao did. Socialism is one of the very few progressive ideologies. We dont seek to mythologize anyone or worship them in any way. We dont look at a paper written in the 1700s and think that we should base our life on it. We as socialists will do something wrong because of Mao and Stalins past in the same way physicians will do something wrong in the future because newton invested in the slave trade. I dont think theres a reason to fear this. ”But past socialists were homophobic!” but we are not the same society from the 1950s anymore
So they should have invented sliced bread. Got it.
I think this is a very good take.
That does not mean that you can’t learn from those mistakes.
It is about analysing the thought process and how someone like stalin and his government came to this conclusion. To not look deeper than surface level “lmao now it is obvious that homophobia is bad so who cares what stalin did?” Is entirely insufficient for a communist.
The repression of homosexuals was not even just a matter of “the times” and them being old men, but a desperate attempt at stopping all kinds of infiltration and conspiracies.
“Any study of how and why important political rights that had been won for same-sex love and women were reversed in the Soviet Union in the 1930s has to take into consideration the effects that encirclement, economic embargo and isolation sabotage, Civil War and other weapons of unrelenting attack by world capitalism had on this vast but economically underdeveloped country” Leslie Feinberg