‘You know, Mr. Nice, it’s not view. It’s the view of Mr. Jesenski. He preaches to this day, and he’s still supported by many politicians both in the US and Europe, that Russia has to be broken up the same way as the Soviet Union was broken up in its time. The Soviet Union was broken up into 15 parts and the plan is to break up Russia into eight or ten different countries. You know that Russia includes some far eastern countries, European republics, other regions.

‘That’s not my view, it’s the view of Mr. Jesenski, I’m telling you again. I personally am against it. I am against what was done with the Soviet Union. If the same is done to Russia, it is not us who will suffer. You will suffer. You in Europe will then understand what is going on in Europe, and that’s why I am firmly convinced, and I’m ready to subscribe to this paragraph today, that greatest misery that can happen is the destruction of Russia. And there are those who are aspiring to do that. If not today, then tomorrow, but they are playing with fire.’

— Nikolai Ivanovic Ryzhkov, 2004

They won’t be getting any sympathy from me.

I still remember when they compared me to a Holocaust denier for compiling evidence that anticommunists massacred millions of people… in other words, they believe that asserting that anticommunists killed millions is also equivalent to denying that anticommunists killed millions (of Jews).

The other quibbles in the thread are mostly problems that they could have easily solved themselves if only they weren’t too fucking lazy to read properly (something that ECS struggles with in general); the comparison to Holocaust denial was especially memorable for me because there are just so many ways that it’s wrong. I think that I deserve an apology for that one.

…wow.

Well, coming from the same asshole who was famous for both‐sidesing fascism and communism, I guess that I shouldn’t act too surprised that she would both‐sides European colonialism and African indigenity either.

I feel the same way about neofascists as I do about angry snakes. They’re just obstacles; no more, no less.

It’s interesting to note that, while many discourage comparing the meat industry to the Shoah, many survivors and writers have themselves compared the Shoah to the meat industry. Jack Sittsamer, for example, said that many Jews marched to the Mielec Airport ‘were herded into box cars, like cattle.’ Jacques Stroumsa summarized the Reich’s concentration camps as ‘intended to completely destroy the human personality and to reduce it to a number tattooed on the skin, like animals in a slaughterhouse.’

While I find it extremely unlikely that armed forces will end the meat industry, the increasing popularity of meat alternatives will surely reduce its size to the fringes and render it a margin of its former self (as it should be).

On a visit to Oryol in 1946, [Stalin] walked the streets accompanied by hundreds of citizens. When they thanked him for having defeated the Germans, he replied modestly: “The people defeated the Germans, not I.”

Originally ‘genocide’ did not refer to literal massacres, but actions that inhibited nationalism, hence why some people now say ‘cultural genocide’ to clarify that they are not referring to violence. To further complicate matters, sometimes the ethnic aspect is overlooked completely, and it becomes a crude synonym for ‘mass killing’. It’s an ambiguous term with a great deal of emotional baggage, which is why anticommunists like overusing it so much.

I know that some indigenous groups recommend using the term, but in the mainstream ‘genocide’ is used very selectively and rarely in reference to the people that the Anglosphere oppressed, so I still prefer using other terminology.

Populicide, mass killing, mass murder, (mass) slaughter, systematic killing, and massacres.

ETA: replaced a word.

If anything, it’s more worthwhile to engage with theory noobs vaguely sympathetic to communism than it is to waste time on confirmed anticommunists. Usually when the latter try to ‘debate’ with me, I reply with ‘Good point. You really showed me how wrong I was. I wish that I were as smart as you.’ which is my more polite alternative to saying ‘fuck off’. Any debate where somebody’s goal is ‘winning’ is not a debate worth having.

Now theory noobs, on the other hand, those people are worth engaging. Judging by their futile arguments with capitalist apologists, they’re already more‐or‐less sympathetic to communism, or at least ‘the idea of it’, so the door’s unlocked for you. The problem is that their politics are very undeveloped: they can’t explain why the people’s republics resorted to ‘authoritarian’ measures, or how they were better than the anticommunist régimes that preceded them, or even why they existed at all, so they resort to crude shortcuts like ‘well, those states weren’t socialist’ (which may indeed be true, but it’s a dull counterargument that gets us nowhere).

That’s where you can come in. Politely correcting them or expanding on their points is going to develop them more than any argument with a capitalist apologist ever could. More than likely, you’ll be introducing brand new information to these people, and that will hold their interest. I vaguely remember (possibly misinterpreted) a documentary that discussed Imperial Russia and hyperinflation. When I learned about the defects of Imperial Russia, the turn to Bolshevism was suddenly much easier to understand, even if I still didn’t quite agree with it.

Act natural. Don’t overwhelm them with too many resources (link spam) or paragraphs at once. If they ask why you approached them and not the anticommunists that they were trying to debate, you can reply with ‘Because I know that you’ll listen.’