Tolkien agrees with you!

(as a (shockingly anticolonial) bit, but still!)

History proved Stalin right here, as is often the case. The regional governments fucked over the USSR MASSIVELY throughout its existence largely out of individual self interest and corruption

It should be mentioned that such local identities werent (and have never, to my knowledge) been abandoned without force either directly, like France’s eradication of local languages and dialects; liberal educations’ destruction of the lower class cultures or indirectly like by threatening people with the “natural” processes of eviction and/or starvation if they refuse to leave their home areas; by forcing kids into education, often away from home developed by global north thinktanks only applicable to (very limited) specialist jobs in the cities

i’m not sure if there’s any better copies existing online unfortunately, i pulled the quote from the copy on internet archive

But it was in his intercourse with children that Marx was perhaps most charming. Surely never did children have a more delightful playfellow. My earliest recollection of him is when I was about three years old, and “Mohr” (the old home name will slip out) was carrying me on his shoulder round our small garden in Grafton Terrace, and putting convolvulus flowers in my brown curls. Mohr was admittedly a splendid horse.

-Eleanor Marx, “A Few Stray Notes on Karl Marx” in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels p.250

and the bubble’s been getting bigger the whole 9 years

as someone who still masks, its beyond depressing to see half my family and friends written off even by communists as “acceptable losses.”

like even, basically all the communists ime, online and offline, are antimaskers. They might say or think that they aren’t but in practice, they are antimaskers. They refuse to wear masks; they go to restaurants (and invite others); they host superspreading home parties and go to concerts and to dance classes and clubs and bars and on and on with not a single thought for their own health, much less those with weaker immune systems–and if any of this is brought up they look offended, like it’s YOUR fault there’s a plague and YOURE in the wrong for not wanting to die or spread death to ur family.

Antimaskers won.

damn to think that image has haunted my dreams for over four years now

oh huh something I was reading a book about recently. In addition to everyone else’s excellent comments I wanna point to James Harris’ The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System because it completely upends the traditional scholarship of the purges.

Here is a libgen link to it: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=E10CBD3C52CDF7D5D258AC666D67FAB6

I’m gonna copy the description from libgen to emphasize I’m not editorializing when i sing the book’s praises:

Political histories of the Soviet Union have portrayed a powerful Kremlin leadership whose will was passively implemented by regional Party officials and institutions. Drawing on his research in recently opened archives in Moscow and the Urals—a vast territory that is a vital center of the Russian mining and metallurgy industries—James R. Harris overturns this view. He argues here that the regions have for centuries had strong identities and interests and that they cumulatively exerted a significant influence on Soviet policy-making and on the evolution of the Soviet system.After tracing the development of local interests prior to the Revolution, Harris demonstrates that a desperate need for capital investment caused the Urals and other Soviet regions to press Moscow to increase the investment and production targets of the first five year plan. He provides conclusive evidence that local leaders established the pace for carrying out such radical policies as breakneck industrialization and the construction of forced labor camps. When the production targets could not be met, regional officials falsified data and blamed “saboteurs” for their shortfalls. Harris argues that such deception contributed to the personal and suspicious nature of Stalin’s rule and to the beginning of his onslaught on the Party apparatus.Most of the region’s communist leaders were executed during the Great Terror of 1936–38. In his conclusion, Harris measures the impact of their interests on the collapse of the communist system, and the fate of reform under Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

In very dry, academic writing, with constant, painstaking reference to the archival sources, Harris lays out facts building to his conclusion that there was a massive USSR wide conspiracy, and as the NKVD was sent in to uncover it the conspirators covered it up harder (including using the non-violent purges to purge non-corrupt officials, scientists, managers, workers). The conspirators systemically distorted production potential of their territory; repeatedly, in several different regions, leaders encouraged overestimation of the quantity of ore, and often the quality of ore deposits. Some of the copper and coal they claimed would be the basis of soviet industry literally couldn’t even be used for industrial production. Hundreds of millions of rubles were wasted on facilities, and the conspirators covered it up harder (for example, scientists who disagreed with inflated guesses were–purged by the clique!). This conspiracy wasn’t a Nazi plot, or a trotskyist plot, or an SR plot, or a tsarist plot–all of this was done to cover up regional authorities’ incompetence and corruption (which dated back to literally 1917).

This excerpt from the conclusion is a good summary of his conclusions:

I would only add that by “not permitted to cite “objective reasons” for economic problems” Harris means "they had lied so, so much over the last 15 years that when Stalin ordered for much lower, more reasonable (based on the numbers central had) quotas but demanded absolute fullfilment of them, the regional authorities still couldn’t meet quotas and explaining why would reveal their conspiracy.

Another highlight was the financial commisariat giving the gulags less than 10% of the money the centre ordered them to (it took years for the centre to find out, thousands died). Yet another highlight was the Ukrainian regional authorities (which ofc , death to him, was high up in) using central orders for dekulakization to eradicate any peasants they felt unruly (they made a profitable partnership with the ural factory managers who needed forced labour). Similarly, regional authorities used coercion in collectivization even in periods when the centre was repeatedly ordering them not to.

an apple slice a week keeps the fall-wasps happy too

It exists in all children, regardless of location or culture.

Tho I think your issue is conflating teasing with bullying (the latter is more systematic, long term and doesn’t tend to arise outside of totalising institutions like school, work, bourgeois family, etc).

Ahistoricism is not good theory. When you study cultures outside of state formations and burgher societies you find a much wider variety of behaviour, and a greater degree of acceptance of ‘weirdness’, both on an economic level (e.g. various anishinaabe families and even individuals having idiosyncratic ways of harvesting maple sugar, saying “do it properyl” isnt socially acceptable), an aesthetic one (see the vast varieties of clothing that natives chose to wear in the earlier phases of colonialism 1600-1800, for example), or personal or spiritual choices (e.g. some of the prophets of the Nuer in Sudan ate excrement or ashes, some spent hours arranging seashells into neat patterns). You’ll also see variation in cosmologies, and people accepting random teenagers just saying “all the elders stories are wrong, I know how the world was actually created” with little more than an eyeroll. One of the best examples of the acceptence of difference (and why even outside of just being a decent person its important) is the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa (younger brother and main theorist and agitator behind Tecumseh’s war). He was basically useless most of his life. He maimed himself early in life failing to shoot a bow properly. He spent the better part of a decade doing the Shawnee equivilant of couch-surfing and bumming food off everyone else while aquiring a drinking problem. He was still socially accepted, if not trusted with any particularly important tasks. Then, one day, he drank a fuck ton and had a vision and turned into an anti-colonial prophet/propagandist. In our society, people would go “lol drunk failure go away”. In his society, people listened and he helped mobilise one of the biggest anticolonial wars against the US.

They explained it all pretty well imo

greeks set up colonies along the entirety of the mediterranean sea from the west shore to the east and from the north to the south. They were settler-colonising in this way from around the 400s or 500s BC until they got owned by the romans

GOOD post

i was excited (for more primary sources until i read

But he was expelled from the party the following year [1959] over his criticism of the Great Leap Forward, an industrialization program championed by Mao that led an estimated 30 million to 40 million people to die of starvation in three years. During his 20 years in exile, Li was imprisoned in a labor camp and spent eight years in solitary confinement.

He’s not even there for the most interesting (and most in need of good contemporary primary sources!!! Everyone and their mother has written about the civil war!!!) period who cares about this guy

I do not think writing fiction for entertainment art is “falsifying history”.

If the setting is “historical” or “realistic” it is imo, bc, as I said above, you have to present history reductively, as a compelling, coherent narrative and with the unknowns smoothed out or filled in by imagination. (And all that is assuming the writer has done research into the topic—most artists dont)

The history of knowledge of druids, witches, the middle ages, the middle east and more demonstrates how distorted views can become when the tendencies of capitalist media are allowed to run rampant. Anti-indigenous racism are more serious examples of how these distortions can be harmfulm.

More general fiction outside of “historical fiction” isnt what the post is about, so idk why youre bringing it up. If theres dragons, magic, etc and it doesnt take place in “real life” people are significantly less likely to confuse stuff in it for real facts about histories or cultures.

giving this entire entertainment sector to the capitalists to falsify history in the way they want it with literally no counter balance.

As I understand it, that’s a large part of why the firewall exists isnt it? So that the western created ideological products dont become the cultural mainstream?

Im glad you liked it