I mean the big ones people like to point at (Rushia and fucking Nazi Germany) sure as shit weren’t doing communism or socialism
I don’t think anyone points at Nazi Germany as an example of a leftist system. They were literally fascist lol
Both Crowder and Shapiro have claimed this. They point out that the Nazi party was the ‘National Socialist German workers’ party’ and claim that’s enough for it to be socialist, and then also claim Russia is a communist country.
The USSR was a communist country. A normal use of that term is that a country communist is one that’s run by a communist party.
If you mean it didn’t achieve communism, well duh communism is a hypothesized society achieved through socialism where the state ceases to exist. No socialists, including the people of the USSR, would think that their nation-state has achieved communism as that’s oxymoronic. They would think of it as a transitional socialist state.
There’s a Hitler quote somewhere, in some letter that was like “we laugh at the fools who think our ideology has anything to do with the socialism of the bolsheviks”
There was another one where he says “I didn’t want to kill the Jews, but they’re all communists”
Someone with a better ability to keep track of sources than me probably knows where to find them
It’s always as a “See!! Socialism bad!!” but yep they were literally fascist, Rushia too and yet here we are with people still thinking communist Rushia was communist.
Jewish holocaust scholars don’t like it when you call the USSR fascist
Even the DDR wasn’t doing socialism. The public had to be all-in the idea, or they were discredited or arrested. It was an authoritarian autocracy acting in the name of socialism.
That is indeed what your capitalist NGOs tell you with unlimited funds.
Consider that socialism is about control over the means of production, of deposing the capitalist system, and that your dismissal of the DDR as socialist didn’t address that at all. Do you think it’s possible you’ve been lied to?
No, I think I’m far enough on the left to be aware of capitalist propaganda. In all fairness to you, my statement did not treat the subject with the appropriate nuance the subject should require.
The DDR was socialist. However, it was state socialism, which in my opinion is not ideal and not something we should strive to replicate. Yes, the means of production were “owned by the people,” but the state tasks itself with protecting the people. And therein lies the problem with state socialism - the state is easily commandeered by a corrupt minority who then uses the governmental apparatus to run an authoritarian regime. Precisely what happened in the DDR and the USSR.
We should be able to recognize the imperfections in prior socialist attempts, without immediately calling it “capitalist NGO propaganda.”