A pic I took in a protest in FranceMaddest_Hatta t1_jdetuin wrote
Reply to comment by No-Bus-4529 in A pic I took in a protest in France by rdwarz
Yeah, those people don't know shit about the regime that flag represents. I hate it when westerners romantisize communism.
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdewblo wrote
Man I wonder if there is any historical precedent or major wars that would make French people particularly receptive to communist ideas. It would be a real shame if that was directly tied to a revolutionary tradition that actually begins in France. It would be even worse if those communists were associated with the objectively progressive act of pulling the rug out from French colonial projects
Maddest_Hatta t1_jdeyms5 wrote
The flag that the dude is waving has nothing to do with the 2 months of "communism" that France had. If it was a plain red flag, you could've had some argument there. But waving a symbol of an oppressive regime that has taken the lives of millions is not something anybody should support, don't you agree? There's a reason why the USSR fell apart. It was a red apple with a rotten core.
rhalf t1_jdf1jnl wrote
"There is a reason why US is falling apart. It's a capitalist apple with a rotten core".
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdf1uo4 wrote
We will get back on track once we are able to reign in the banks and drive out all the petty fiefdoms that amount to Americans cutting off one another's kneecaps.
Maddest_Hatta t1_jdgwbub wrote
Where did I mentions US? Where in the picture do you see their flag?
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdf0u99 wrote
The Soviet Union saved the lives of countless French people in freeing them of the Vichy puppet regime and the holocaust.
>There's a reason why the USSR fell apart.
And communists must learn form this and have been learning from this. It was a inevitable for the sclerosis of Soviet society, but still an extreme tragedy. Nobody can look at the Post-Soviet situation as a whole and call it success story with a straight face, especially when compared against the route that China was able to take.
>But waving a symbol of an oppressive regime that has taken the lives of millions is not something anybody should support, don't you agree?
I'm a patriot, American, and my own country has also taken the lives of millions, but I don't admonish people for having a connection to our flag that is still meaningful for us in our own context and life. The communist flag, flags, have a meaningful history woven into the liberty of the French people. It's part of their patriotic tradition.
When you have crimes in your past you take responsibility for them and overcome them, that doesn't require a fundamental break with it being our history and our past. But that's not even how I would fundamentally characterize the sum history of Official Communism™, which has been and continues to be a success.
>The flag that the dude is waving has nothing to do with the 2 months of "communism" that France had. [the Paris Commune]
It has everything to do with it.
Walking_billboard t1_jdf5e9p wrote
So your basic theory is if you remove everything that the flag symbolizes then its fine? Sounds like the same thing the people waving the rebel flag would say.
Its the literal symbol of the murderous regime.
And, for the record, the US never murdered millions of people. We have crimes-a-plenty (looking at you S. America) but don't conflate them.
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdf6tln wrote
>And, for the record, the US never murdered millions of people.
This is such a laughably absurd lie, what the fuck? What the actual fuck is wrong with you people?
Millions dead in Vietnam. Millions dead in the "War on Terror" across the Middle East. God knows how many millions dead on account of our colonial history - Chattel Slavery and the expulsion of the peoples here before us. Objectively, you're an ignorant person - don't try to play a cutsie little numbers game when our closet is drenched in blood.
The East turned around under the communists and did in decades what took centuries for the West. And yeah, bursting out of thousands of years of subsistence farming into industrial modernity is not fun, but you are only correct on one thing - that there is no conflation, they crossed the bridge far more humanely, and it's not even fucking close. That's what it symbolizes.
JordanJP t1_jdg9n74 wrote
"did in decades what took centuries for the west" idk man it's almost like they had a whole ass history of what not to do that other people tried first. Now they don't even have to do that, they just steal intellectual property and other stuff via putting malware on electronics before they even get shipped.
"bursting out of thousands of years of subsistence farming into industrial modernity" was that before or after China decided to try and get rid of sparrows and ended up causing a famine that killed 15 million people by the lowest estimate?
"crossed the bridge far more humanely" remember when they executed clearly well educated individuals like yourselves because they thought anyone more educated than a farmer would eventually become subversive? Or was it by the CCP's own estimated 2 million killed and 7 million disabled in the Cultural Revolution? or deciding to oppress Uyghurs and put them in camps?
Honestly you sound like someone who would be arguing your case all the way up to being executed and kicked into a ditch by Red Guards for being a member of the educated bourgoisie.
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdgfy5j wrote
10 million - Genocide in the Congo
Over 3 Million Vietnamese dead expelling French & American colonizers
Irish Potato Famine 1 million dead.
15 Million Dead from pointless inter-imperialist Conflict of WW1
12 Million African slaves trafficked in Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
1 Million dead from immediate conflict against "Terror" in Iraq alone.
56 Million dead - Settling of the Americas
100 million - Colonial enslavement of India
???? millions - General rape of Africa
Black Hole calls the kettle black.
Maddest_Hatta t1_jdgvzdt wrote
Would it be OK if I start waving the National Socialist Party flag if I say "yeah but now nazis have learned from past mistakes and won't kill people from other races"? There is 0 reasons for French people nowadays to wave the USSR flag. If they have ideas how to use communism in a better way, they should come up with a different flag.
I'm very happy for you Americans that you've learned from your mistakes in history.. but the USSR never did. For the countries in Eastern Europe it was 40 years of oppression. Four decades of hunger, labour camps, ethnic cleansings and brainwashing. So forgive me if the sight of that flag makes my blood boil just as much as when I see a nazi flag.
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdhvqgk wrote
No.
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
Nazi ideology was premised on an economic gamble to genocide 10s of millions of people - a war economy for looting and raping, primarily, "subhuman" Slavic peoples and land in the Soviet Union. There is no realistic comparison to be made, Nazis started the Holocaust, Communists ended it, it's just that simple. The Nazis brought a puppet regime to France to kill and slaughter disabled and jews, the Soviets drove those looters and jew-gassers and bandit piracy into the dustbin of history. Simple, simple, simple. There is nothing in that to be redeemed, all successful things they did (e.g. infrastructure) were mere investments to genocidal ends. Nazism has no accomplishments - no positive contribution to mankind - no complicated history - no respectable striving - it lived for the thrill of death itself and was rightly put down like rabid dogs, for which tens of millions more would have died if not for the rapid industrialization taken in the Soviet Union under Fucking Papa Joe Stalin and the heroism of the Red Army resisting Nazism's degenerate rabid inhuman plans.
The Soviets brought the first man into space. America put a man on the Moon. The Nazis made pillows from the human hair of jews. Simple. The Soviets made a strong country, and Marxism Leninism continues marching on across the world to this day. Nazism turned a country into rubble in little over a decade, with nothing to show for it but pain. Simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
>So forgive me if the sight of that flag makes my blood boil just as much as when I see a nazi flag
Forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to liberal nonsense and a practical form of Nazi rehabilitation. You make my own blood boil.
Maddest_Hatta t1_jdi9oie wrote
I never said that I supported nazis. Clearly you didn't get what I was saying. It is also clear to me that you are not aware of the ethnic cleansings that "Papa Fucking Joe Stalin" did. In fact, you have absolutely no clue how the regime was operating its states back then. There was absolutely no freedom in any sense of the word. You want to go on vacation in another country on the other side of the iron curtain? Nope. You want to leave the country? Nope. You'll be shot as soon as you try to cross the border and escape. Election day comes. Guess how many options you have to vote. That's right! Only one - the communist party. And even though you have only one option and the vote doesn't matter, it's mandatory for you to go and "vote". A western tourist became your friend and gave you a walkman as a gift? Militia is confiscating it and you're brought in for questioning. How come you have something that is not sold in your country? You shouldn't have that. You shouldn't be listening to western music. This means you're planning to escape. Your whole family is now put on a watchlist. You have a relative who managed to escape to a western country? You're blacklisted. You can't study what you want. You can't have certain jobs. Best you can work as a low level factory worker. And that's if you're lucky and if the relative who escaped is not that close to you. Otherwise you go to a labour camp so you can learn to love the regime and die in the process. You invested your life savings and everything you had to build a factory or a small production facility? You get a call that you need to be interviewed by the police and when you go there you disappear. Factory/business becomes "state owned", your family is blacklisted and their house and everything inside is taken away.
Don't tell me how much "good" that regime brought. My family lived through it. The communist parties in each country in Eastern Europe were just as bad as the nazis. Stalin was sending ethnicities he deemed "unworthy" to remote labour camps and worked them to death. He was just as mad as Adolph. And I won't even start with his "wonderful" troops in the Red Army and how they acted. Same animals as the nazis.
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdic0ln wrote
I understand perfectly well what you are saying. Objectively it is rehabilitating Nazism. There's no way around that.
E.g.
>The communist parties in each country in Eastern Europe were just as bad as the nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory
Communists do not make pillows out of hair of jews. If you think these parties are equivalent you should be accused of Holocaust denialism or at minimum holocaust obfuscation, it's simple Nazi apologism and it contributes to a real ongoing project in Europe to rehabilitate Nazi collaboration. To say that the Red Army is the same animals as Jew-Gassers is absolutely a sign of relative Nazi sympathy, because at that point, hey, maybe your country's historic freedom fighters chucked some jews in an oven and enabled some of the most atrocious crimes of the 20th century, but it was all for National Liberation, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgaria_during_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
It's inhuman, it's not respectable or aligned with reality in a meaningful sense. There are simple facts of history - France was under the thumb of Nazism, 80% of Nazi soldiers died on the Eastern Front, and thus the bulk of responsibility for freeing France falls to the Soviets. Simple!
And further, you know very fucking well there is no unified opinion of the Soviet era, or if you don't, it's amazing how you have been lied to. 45% of Georgians still approve of Stalin. 70% of Russians. 79% of Armenians say the dissolution of the Soviet Union was harmful. 61% of Kyrgyz, and 56% of Tajikistanis agree. A third of Bulgarians approve of communism to at least some extent. All of this data is pulled from Pew, Gallup, etc. You're not being honest on how divisive this legacy this is, there are millions of people with just as much if not more "lived experience" than you who nonetheless still give a net positive appraisal as I do.
You shotgun out a mix of real issues, myopic slander, and nonsensical bourgeois liberal gibberish. But for the real issues - you'll notice at no single point have I actually denied that there were problems - there are many issues, there are aspects not worth defending, there is a reason it's not still around and that can't be attributed to malice or personal failings - those are why I support the turn China has made, they were correct during the Sino-Soviet split, history has proven them correct by making them the last major ML State standing, they continue to be ascendent and that is why they are the target of so much smear and fear.
northernCRICKET t1_jdhh1u4 wrote
This is some revisionist history. France was liberated by the allies, not the Soviet Union. Countries "liberated" by the Soviet Union were subsequently imprisoned behind the iron curtain by their so called saviours. There's a reason that ex Soviet countries like Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states do not trust Russia, the Soviet Union or anything to do with their legacy of antiintellectualism, famine and oppression.
Cardellini_Updates t1_jdhu425 wrote
hazie t1_jdg7rb6 wrote
I've seen some bad arguments for communism (all of them, basically), but this is a new and particularly ridiculous one.
Was going to say the worst but honestly it's not even close.
Creative_Elk_4712 t1_jdfn8f9 wrote
It’s not that they “romanticize communism”. It means and it has been a different thing politically here than what it’s connected to in your country. Respect the differences
Maddest_Hatta t1_jdgwi32 wrote
I feel like I've wrotten this 10 times now but the flag in the picture is of USSR. The meaning of it doesn't magically change because it's waved during a protest in France.
Creative_Elk_4712 t1_jdiisme wrote
I got it but if you look at flags of communist parties in Western Europe..also Communist symbolism is really simple, red, h&s, a star, some other agrarian and factory and symbols
nagylab t1_jdf16l8 wrote
So true!
rhalf t1_jdf17tk wrote
A lot of what the west accomplished was built using revolutionary and communist ideology, so I'm not surprised people romanticize it. Soviet Union's and China's Marxism-Leninism is probably what you mean when you say "communism".
lil-rong69 t1_jdg83w7 wrote
Nah, I’m thinking pol pot style where they got rid of all currency. Genius. Must be a communist utopia there. might visit soon to learn a thing or two.
Maddest_Hatta t1_jdgw6es wrote
Since the guy is waving the USSR flag, I think it was implied that I was talking about that "flavour" of communism.
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