I dont totally know the history here but just to be clear, the Red Army did this no more than the Western allies did correct?
The soviets didn’t. Japan though…
At the very least, even if he’s not into bad shit, its weird to flaunt your horniness in your username like that, especially in such a redditsh way. (exceptions made for @HornyOnMain@hexbear.net whom we love dearly)
The word is everywhere in weeb circles. I refuse to use it because if you’re an adult you can just use the actual words when talking about sex.
“Lewd” is an oddly infantilizing euphemism, it’s a word you’d use when talking about sex to someone who still giggles every time you say “penis”, to whom sex is a naughty word. That’s the vibe that that word gives me and why I don’t like it.
Is there anywhere I can read more about the Wikipedia thing? Preferably more recently since the other article I can remember from Reuters is from 2007 lmao
Honestly, its possible thats the article I saw? So it might be old information. I’ll keep that in mind for next time especially since yeah, I dont have the article handy and havent been able to find it when I went looking.
Here’s the link to the 2007 for future reference. Most of the results that show up on Google are from Wikipedia itself (like this one) which comes with its own problems.
The biggest point to note, however, is that Wikipedia relies on third-party sources to back up their claims, and being a primarily english-speaking, west-hosted service, a lot of these sources will be sometimes biased and sometimes from authors who straight up make shit up. I found this Reddit post on r/communism from ~2yrs ago of a user who scrutinized the sources on its page for Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens and found many anti-communist authors present.
I want to piggy-back off this, since I got in a wiki-hole last night that found me reading about the Doctor’s Plot. Along with Jewish artists being killed, post war Stalin, wiki would have me think, was a truly virulent anti-semite.
Anyone have more info about this that isn’t tainted by anti-communist wiki-editors? What actually happened any why? I’m not here to have Stalin’s saintly image upheld and the only thing he did wrong was stop at Berlin, but I’m hoping to have a better understanding of this period.
Maybe more importantly, I understand that when people, myself included, defend the USSR, we’re not defending it wholesale and uncritically, though against western lies it can seem so, but try to come from a place of understanding the conditions that brought about the decisions that were made, and that in our own post-revolution experience, we wouldn’t simply do exactly as the Soviets did, because our own conditions will be drastically different.
From https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/01/12.htm :
Anti-Semitism
January 12, 1931
Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States
In answer to your inquiry :
National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.
Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.
In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.
J. Stalin January 12, 1931
First published in the newspaper Pravda, No. 329, November 30, 1936
My friend who brought me to the ML side of things (i still technically call myself a Luxembourgist but whatever, I’m effectively an ML at this point) told me that the thing with the Doctor’s plot is that it was genuinly kind of a legitimate bad on Stalin’s part, but it wasn’t motivated by genuine antisemitism, just old man paranoia. But idk thats a sourceless claim from a third party I bet someone else will come along with something better.
Espresso Stalinist has their flaws, but they hosted an interesting write-up about it https://espressostalinist.com/2014/08/24/the-doctors-plot/
Riumin’s actions seem really suspect throughout the events
edit: oh and here is Bill Bland’s book on the topic. https://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1991/10/doctors-case-death-stalin.pdf
I will say the “rootless cosmopolitanism” campaign is pretty tropey and gross
Red Army did this no more than the Western allies did correct?
absolute or per capita? there’s no honest comparative assessments to my knowledge, and lingering perceptions of soviet violence on civilians is permanently tainted by late-war nazi propaganda.
but talking absolutely, if the american GI and soviet soldier had an identical propensity for abuse, more would’ve been done on the eastern front, with so many more soviet soldiers deployed on a wider front occupying more territory. and i’m not sure we should think the occurrence of war crimes was identical, the motives of reprisal & revenge didn’t exist as strongly for people from new england than soldiers that might’ve been from regions that suffered massacres and sexual violence for years under axis occupation. it’s ugly to think about but i really wouldn’t be surprised if soviet soldiers were crime-ing at a bit higher rate for that reason. i read an account that directly tied an incidence of violence (that was punished with execution) with a leave to their liberated home village & hearing about the atrocities that occurred there.
