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?
u/archivist_of_lewds
Uh huh
IIRC it gets deployed against every ontologically evil designated enemy. I know it was deployed against Iraqis during the first Gulf War, with Hillary Clinton claiming Saddam was issuing his troops with Viagra specifically so they could [redacted] more. This is me misremembering, see replies.
I know it was deployed against Iraqis during the first Gulf War, with Hillary Clinton claiming Saddam was issuing his troops with Viagra specifically so they could [redacted] more.
I don’t doubt r**e was a claim made against Iraqis too, but it’s the absurd claim about soldiers taking babies from incubators that most sticks out in my memory when it comes to Iraq and the first Gulf War. However, Hilary Clinton talking about soldiers being given viagra was definitely about Gaddafi. Keep in mind who was in power when those respective conflicts were happening.
Hillary Clinton claiming Saddam was issuing his troops with Viagra specifically so they could [redacted] more
Wasn’t that Gaddafi? The timeline doesn’t match, since Viagra wasn’t even on the market until the late 90s (hard to forget the time hack Viagra jokes were suddenly everywhere). Also, why would Hillary have said anything? H.W. Bush was president then.
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
the red army was the ONLY army in WW2 that punished soldiers who did this. Usually by a bullet to the head by the nearest political officer.
i think the amerikkkans hanged some black soldiers, but that might’ve been during WW1 and they were basically just lynchings
https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 this is an interesting article about the way nato basically spun all the SA the red army did into the standard anti-communist points of: “hordes of asiatics doing horrible crimes constantly”
in the end though, show me an army that doesnt r#pe and i’ll show you the unit manual for Starcraft 2, sadly
