A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
I feel like talking about Stalin is like walking on eggshells... You don't want to go, "Stalin's death toll is overexaggerated, in my opinion he didn't kill enough people!!!" because that will make the average person instantly stop hearing you
What's the best way to talk about Stalin in a sensitive way that doesn't trigger a fight or flight response?
I was incredibly drunk on a train and I tried to have this discussion for reasons I don't remember. Thank you for asking, and thank you to the other posters for providing the information. I'm better armed the next time I'm too drunk on a train.
Like AES education in general, it’s good to put things in context. It also depends heavily on who are you talking to. Leftcoms / trots? Anarchists? Liberals? MLs? My approach would be different with everyone.
An approach that a few revisionist (in a good way) sovietologists use is talking about the class issues and struggles of early Soviet Russia. As well as the context of being isolated on the international stage. In this way you can show that the hardships of that time were caused by existing conditions, not materialized by one man. The problem that I’ve found with this approach is that often you end up giving a lecture on the history of Soviet Union.
If you would like more specifics let me know!
I'm currently reading Losurdo's book on Stalin. It has some incredible information that you can arm yourself with to better defend your points.
In general I've learned to not initiate such conversations in a vaccum but to respond to people if they are spewing nonsense, but in a calm manner. People who are uneducated on a topic and have been led to believe something their entire lives are really open to hearing their entire worldview be changed on a whim, you need to subtlely get them to a point where they would want to hear you out.
If you're talking with western libs start with a comparison to Churchill:
'You think Churchill was a good guy for his part in beating the Nazis right'
'Yep'
'Despite that he was directly involved in perpetrating a genocide that killed millions(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943)?'
'Uhhh'
'Well don't you think that Stalin who was even more instrumental in defeating the Nazis, and while he may have had policies that led to unnecessary deaths is also worthy of praise? and perhaps your admiration of Churchill and contempt for Stalin is influenced by propaganda rather than an neutral analysis of both's intentions and actions?'
Some are too propagandised to even consider it, some more critical thinking and curious may actually consider their preconceived notations are wrong and do some reading
You can also hit them with things like, 'The over-demonisation of Stalin and the USSR in official US/western history has been driven by literal Nazi propaganda'
'Nazis like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Halder#Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht a Nazi general who post-war became lead consultant to the US Army Historical Division is responsible for such things as the myth of the clean Wehrmacht', that 'the soviets were worse than the Nazis', 'Stalin personally ordered human wave attacks that's the only way the Untermensch soviets could beat the superior aryans, certainly not through any sort of tactical and strategic brilliance' etc'
'What's that you didn't even know this guy existed and had such an effect on the history you were taught? wowee don't you think then there maybe other notions and opinions that you hold as being gospel truth despite never examining their source?'
ofc this requires a at-least somewhat receptive intolocutor
The comparison to Churchill (or FDR) is a good starting point. When libs talk about these "heroes," their positive accomplishments are what's important, and any genocide, segregation, forced displacement, etc. that they had a hand in is a mere uncomfortable blemish on a generally good record. They were products of their time working in imperfect systems, they made some progress in some places, their replacement would have been worse, etc.
I say that's about how I view Stalin -- 70% good, 30% bad -- except his state was generally pursuing worthy aims instead of Churchill or FDR, who were presiding over and expanding exploitative empires.
There are usually two directions the conversation goes from here:
Get a sign outside of your house that says:
“in this house we believe in; science, Black Lives Matter, ACAB, Trans rights, Stalin did nothing wrong”
and then use that as a springboard into the discussion with your neighbors!
Stalin stopped at Berlin though... Haha.
Domenico Losurdo for the most modern approach. Better yet, compare his book on Stalin with his book on Liberalism.
I just don't get into debates about Stalin. Governments are run by people, not one person. I take the 70/30 line on Stalin. 70% good 30% bad. Most of the "bad" stuff are errors resulting from the conditions of the time, errors that we do not need to make again.
I've come to conclude that it's impossible to have constructive discussions about Stalin with western liberals (and most leftists, too). There's just way too much cultural programming to break through, and you just put yourself at risk of being written off as a crazy person. You're better off talking about the Soviet Union's actual record of human development from the 20's through 50's, and just sidestep the subject of who was nominally in charge during that period.
Lately I've been going with some variant of this (not that it comes up often):
Accusations against Stalin, when they're not totally ahistorical black book of communism double genocide theory nonsense, always focus on specific things he did like using secret police. The problem is, secret police are not an inherently good or evil thing, they are simply one of the tools in the toolbox of a 20th century government.
Consider our own. We have a dozen different organizations in our government that would absolutely qualify as "secret police" under any reasonable definition, but we always describe them euphemistically. "Plainclothes officers", "Intelligence Agents", etc. We do this because we are taught that the incredible violence done by certain states to pursue their goals is legitimate, and that the same violence done by other states to perpetuate their goals is not.
What separates states is not the methods by which they did things, but the goals and results of those methods. Stalin's government, for all of its mistakes, by and large perpetuated violence against the previous ruling class in order to promote equality and progress. The kulaks were not an ethnic minority that were targeted out of irrational hatred the way that fascists were targeting Jews at the same time, they were capitalists who owned everything and hoarded wealth and who needed to be dispossessed of that wealth in order for the Soviet peasants to be freed from their generational poverty and economic repression.
To take a totally random example here, New York Mayor Mamdani currently has a policy of taking away land from slum lords. He has proven to be more willing to do this than previous New York mayors, and his policy is inherently backed by the threat of violence by the NYPD against any slum lord that resists. Stalin was that person in his context and at a much larger scale, and was willing to cast a much wider net in order to achieve his goal more quickly - which we can argue about whether that was a mistake, because it got innocents caught in it, but we cannot argue was an inherently progressive, egalitarian goal which produced incredible results - the elimination of extreme poverty, and the defeat of fascism.
If they already know that the genocide is a thing and the US has done wars for "oil" then I have a slightly different approach - be brazen but charming. (Please let me know if you would like me to elaborate).
the last part is important. this played a big part in how i stopped being a lib. be firm but respectful.
Very much interested.
Thank you, will try to when I get the chance and time (it is essentially appealing to their intelligence with regards to imperialism but still being firm what it acceptable grounds for discourse with yourself - you transgress (in their eyes) but you do it with a smile).
No, the thanks belongs to you, and I'm trying to evolve.
I'm not going to have time so I'm just going to write this quickly. (Most, if not all, of this will not be new to you. And this is for real life rather than online.)
So it goes something like this...
Understand that charm happens when a person feel they are valued
We are going to take the genuine position that people are generally intelligent enough, and they intelligently seek narratives that they perceive is beneficial to them (from a marxist perspective, benefits their material conditions pertaining to their class). We will be appealing to their valued intelligence
Understand we may not "convince them" but that is not the purpose here, it is about establishing acceptable boundaries of discourse using prinicples they have agreed to ie a sort of immanent critique
Number 3, however, is not about "winning them over through establishing their hypocrisy"
Think of 3 like this: we may talk one way to parents, another way to your boss, another way to coworkers, another way to friends etc. It's not hypocritical to do so. They are different "languages" we use for effective daily communication. We are establishing the acceptable anti-imperialist "language" with yourself.
Understand you are going to transgress and that you're not going to do it by "sneaking" it in; remember number 2 - they are intelligent
So working with the fact they already consider "the genocide is real" and that the US goes to war for oil, we can then with them establish:
The above is the outline. Arm yourself if not done already - someone's already mentioned this - reading both books by Losurdo: on Stalin, and on Liberalism.
You have now set the tone of what is acceptable discourse around you and remember a key rule: positive achievements beats explaining the negative of atrocity propaganda. Everytime you feel you have to explain the latter hit them with a good outcome (eg holodomor - it's not good enough simply to say it's Nazi propaganda, it is much more important to say it was the last famine + socialist countries had more calories per person cosumed that capitalist countries with similar stage of development + took wealth from rich farmers and gave it to the poor)
All the while you are doing this you are appealing to their intelligence of seeing through current propaganda and appeal to the collectiveness that many people are in the same boat as them which led them to the pro-stalin conclusions. Stop short just shy of sycophancy; it is charm not subservience we are aiming for.
Hope that helps.
It helps a lot. I'm kind of dealing with a lot and having all this organized in short form with bullet points, rather than trying to find the time and peace and quiet to do that is a huge boon to me, and I suspect others (I haven't read through the rest of the thread yet, I'm about to have to hop offline, but wanted to take the time to respond. Here, I'll add you took a huge amount of time organizing these thoughts and typing them out, so the least I can do is take time to respond, read, study, and employ these ideas, if not all at once in a conversation, in bits and pieces, so as not to overwhelm any audience given).
Thank you for the time, effort, and general generosity and good will. I'm grateful.
🫡
we just have to start telling people the truth. they might not like it but thats the only way.
i saw this australian communist say that she hates stalin so i told her that if it werent for stalin her country would likely have been a sex colony for the Japanese Empire. i saw a girl from hong kong defend charlie kirk so i reminded her that less than 100 years ago she would be sexually exploited for her ration of opium by british expatriates and that will soon be her fate again if she doesnt stop defending white supremacy. whenever an eastern european person says they hate stalin you have to tell them that they would have been a slave for a german family if they were LUCKY if it werent for stalin. less than 6 months ago i was full on believing all sorts of NATO propaganda and i only changed bc communities like this opened my eyes.
my opinion is to SAY IT LIKE IT IS. dont be afraid to plant that seed of thought in someones mind. thats what happened to me and how i stopped being liberal.
NGL I think this would just make people think you're insane and shut down to whatever you're saying/dismiss you, like flat earthers or conspiracy theorists
you’re really looking down on your own ideology/history if this is crazy to you.
I don't think that's what was said.
this would just make people think you’re insane and shut down to whatever you’re saying/dismiss you...
NGL, that's how it actually is, here and I'd about given up on my parent until our last verbal conversation, when I said something to the effect of, "I don't give a damn about the immigrants, gays, trans, lazy, black people, or anyone else. They're not the ones hurting us, it's the gazillionaires, pedofiles, human traffickers and Wall Street that are hurting us, and everyone else I just mentioned."
They said, "Yep," and I don't know if it was to end the conversation on the subject or if they actually agreed, but it's a start.
Edit to clarify, the conversation was about the wild claims and blame put on the people I mentioned, not that I don't give a damn about the actual people.
It's something for sure. My parents grew up in the third world so they are aware of imperialism and economic exploitation, but they still tend to blame illegal immigrants and lazy people
I feel like people my age and younger aren’t as propagandized about Stalin as previous generations (having most of our history classes revolve around the civil war and the western front of WWII), so generally anything I say about him is “huh I didn’t know that.” I personally find more friction when it comes to DPRK because of propaganda created and disseminated while people my age have been alive.
Usually Stalin comes up when I’m agreeing with a concept someone has by giving a Stalin quote, then telling them it’s a quote from Stalin. Eventually the goal is to get them to either read theory or watch me give a “be a communist with me” power point style presentation.
I like to point out that the USSR did the bulk of the fighting in defeating Nazi Germany. That alone doesn't intrinsically mean the USSR was good (technically one shitty power can fight another, like when the US starts fighting Imperial Japan), but if somebody believes the Nazis were terrible as they should and as is common among western liberals, then positioning the USSR as the actual savior in that equation seems like a step up from the aggrandized contributions of the western allied states, especially the US who comes in at the tail end and acts like it always hated Nazis. Even though it continued to work with them after the war, even though the Nazis modeled their discriminatory policies after Jim Crow laws, etc.
It's not a direct point about Stalin, but he was the one at the helm during that period and certainly played a part in ensuring the USSR was more than ready when Nazi Germany attacked.
In other words, if somebody is very entrenched, sometimes a good starting point is springboarding off of what they already believe. "You think Nazis are bad? Good! Here's the guy who headed up the state that destroyed them." "You're a Christian and believe in the teachings of Jesus? What about when Jesus said 'I was hungry and you gave me to eat.'?" "You believe in the sanctity of life? Then what's up with the US murdering kids in another country, huh?" And so on.
Personally I find it pointless to defend Stalin specifically unless speaking with anti-Stalin comrades.
If you're talking with liberals there are far more crucial points of contention to address before trying to rehabilitate Stalin; you have to convince them capitalism & liberalism is bad, then that Western media & academia lies about socialism, then that socialism is good, then that socialism works, and then that the USSR was socialist before you can start talking about Stalin or you're not gonna get through with them IME.
Under Stalin the Soviets defeated Hitler and liberated Eastern Europe from Nazism. Under Stalin the Soviets built up a backward, mostly agrarian society into a modern industrial, space-faring, nuclear superpower.
Yeah... Trying to defend a dictator that tortured, murdered and deported tens of thousands of people from my country and countless more from others sounds kinda dumb..
a dictator that tortured, murdered and deported tens of thousands of people from my country and countless more from others
The thread is about Stalin, not Hitler, Churchhill, or any US president in its history, or colonial leader more broadly.
You should really read up about his deeds from the people his regime was oppressing...
You mean read from anti-communists (imperialists, capitalists, fascists) about how the mean communist was stopping them from world domination some of the time?
Anyways, here's something you can read on Stalin: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Stalin:_History_and_Critique_of_a_Black_Legend
Wtf are you on about?? Go to the east europe and talk to literally anyone
No, what are you on about? You keep alluding to vague bullshit but have absolutely nothing to back it up.
So you are saying my grandparents were not deported?
Yes, that's for sure what I'm saying, as I've obviously met your grandparents and know them personally. Say hi to them for me BTW.
Sarcasm in the face of your absurd rhetoric aside, if they were deported by a socialist state, odds are in favor of it being for a good reason. I don't listen to anecdotal anti-communist drivel passed down to their children. They generally aren't hearing an accurately told story. For example, people who were landlord types and got forced out or had to "flee communism" or whatever, can be pretty deceptive about why it happened. This is a real thing that happens, I'm not being speculative here.
So no, you can cease and desist with thinking you get to speak for an ideology and practice involving millions of people because your grandparents said some shit to you. It's funny how that works. When somebody's grandparents are racist or whatever, it's like, "waow, awkward, guess they can be like that, they're just ignorant because of the times they grew up in". But when somebody's grandparents are anti-communist, suddenly everyone is supposed to take them at their word as representing everything that was done by communists during a certain time period. Absolute nonsense. Absurder still, we're supposed to take seriously the words of someone who isn't even the grandparent themself in their own words! A person alleging to have such grandparents, who is telephone game passing along a story and on the internet of all things. Goofball things.
~10 000 people in my tiny country alone is totally anecdotal and surely just some sort of fluke... Probably just American propaganda and all those still living are just having a mass hallucination.. Yeah old people stuff..
Anyways I am not against socialism.. I think equality is important and the western system sure is not the good that it says it is.
That aside USSR sure wasn't good either. Taking over independent countries who are doing their thing the way they want and then forcefully suppressing their culture and way of life is not good in my books. It is totally fine to defend socialism, but defending a de facto murderous dictator is not. And of course I can't ask about their crimes from my aged people.... They didn't live then you know.... My grandmother did, she was a farmer until guys with guns came in the night.. What nice fellas am I right? Definitely not a red flag... There is a common saying among the oldies here that would roughly translate to "nazis sucked, but russians were literal monsters".
Which seems a longer telephone line to you - me listening to people who lived through it or me listening to you who seemingly has never set a foot in the eastern block?
There is a common saying among the oldies here that would roughly translate to “nazis sucked, but russians were literal monsters”.
Sounds made up lol. Like something a Cold War NATO type would come up with:
Shit propaganda. GTFO of here.
Yeah!! Lets forcefully take over all the small countries, import all their natural resources to the mainland so we, the cultured, can live in paradise!!!
Hooray for slavery!
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Fun fact, if you claim to support socialism, but then join in with the empire's talking points in demonizing efforts to actually do it, you are indistinguishable from an imperialist. No amount of saying "I'm actually really on its side" changes that. Being an ally of an abstraction doesn't mean anything.
But these "talking points" really happened... USSR was NOT a good thing... Communism ≠ USSR... All that industry they built was built on the blood of the conquered. Maybe you should not do that?
Fun fact you can do communism without slavery. Why do you insist that an atrocious attempt in the past is the only way?
You can't make people equal and society classless when you shove tens of thousands into backcountry to do the work.
I can make stuff up too. My great grandfather actually warned me about you. He said that someday a deceiver called wooferTwo would come into my life. This was after his dog was stolen by the original wooferOne. He knew what was up. RIP grandpa.
Not answering my questions though... You can google the deportations, you can't google why in the fuck you would think that slavery is a sign of great communism
You could also read what I directly linked you earlier and evidently didn't read a word of it. But yeah, if I googled "anti-communism", I'm sure I could find plenty of sources alleging a lot of terrible things about it, like ones written by the western empire and by fascists and their intelligentsia. It's almost like in power struggle, if you don't defeat the exploiting classes, they will slander and fight you instead of just giving in to a better world. Did you know the USSR was invaded by western powers very early in its life? Far before it had time to do most of the atrocities that anti-communists claimed it did. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany was largely left alone by some of those same powers until late in WWII (or even had connections between). Why do you think that is, hmm?
So, what are your sources on that? Are we just out here chugging state-department lies and cold-war era fabrications about political enemies from the same state that had segregation and constant extrajudicial killings? US Police killed more than 10k from just 2013 to now. Let's not go into deaths by US military intervention or the history of European colonialism..
deported tens of thousands of people from my country
Let's hear what country! I am willing to bet it was also transformed from an agrarian state to a fully industrialized one in this time too.
"my source is i made it the fuck up!"
Every single time.
I think his quote about unemployment is pretty eye opening.
I led with that once and it certainly did keep the conversation going longer than I expected.