FrogFractions [he/him, comrade/them]

1. Mark Tauger documents it https://newcoldwar.org/archive-of-writings-of-professor-mark-tauger-on-the-famine-scourges-of-the-early-years-of-the-soviet-union/
2. This is the Polish invasion of the USSR in the early 1920s. Look at the parts of Ukraine and Belorussia they took, linguistic maps of that area, and compare to the regions taken back by the USSR under the MR pact. As for the brutality of the regime it’s not well covered in English language history, mostly it’s covered in polish, Ukrainian, and Russian language sources. I know Timothy Snyder covers it in bloodlands but he’s so closely aligned with the modern Ukrainian nationalist movement that I don’t like to recommend him. It should be easy enough to find some English language history of the militaristic polish regime of the 1930s.

Your anecdote is noted but what your anecdote claims is flatly contradicted by data.

I agree it is not a liberal democracy but I don’t think we mean the same thing by that.

Western liberal democracy is to serve the interests of capital and evidently that’s what it does.

Socialist democracy is to serve the interests of the people and according to poll after poll of Chinese people that’s what it is doing.

In terms of the machinery of democracy the data also is in high accordance with the claim that it features a high degree of integrity, data points I outlined above.

It’s true the CPC controls it’s membership but

(1) fully a third of elected officials are independent and many from the other parties for special interests

and (2) within the CPC faction system we see voices in the CPC ranging from Maoists to neoliberals so it’s not performing this function of limiting political voice as you claim but are you saying the 2-party system of the west doesn’t feature the same ideological limits? And in fact we see a much narrower political discourse in the west so clearly the limits imposed by the western liberal democracy 2-party system is actually performing that filter function aggressively than the CPC does,

and (3) a very large fraction of the population are members whereas in the west such a tiny fraction of the population are direct participants in democracy so even on the topic of membership of the CPC the Chinese model features far more inclusion than you see in the west.

The role of decentralizing power to the local and provincial levels is also very important in this discussion since it’s such a large and populous country. Like I’d agree at the national level the Will of the people is somewhat indirect since there is a hierarchical system where you vote at level A and level A elects level B so at the top of this pyramid Democratic voice is indirect but the politics that matters are mostly at level A and the consensus model of politics means that the indirect influence upon the top of the hierarchy is still much more meaningful than the pretense of the 2-party system where Teo neoliberal parties fight culture wars in lieu of politics.

It’s not a perfect democracy but it’s actually a very good one.

I think (2) is an important point by the way, when you wring your hands about the potential for CPC membership to limit political diversity you need to square that with the reality that you see much more political diversity within their system than the western liberal model even just within the CPC and ignoring the important role of elected independents.

No that’s some kind of internalized orientalism. When you say you’re Chinese do you perhaps mean an ethnically Chinese person from Taiwan?

When I say China is Democratic I am referring to

• their elections are not corrupt and reflect the votes of the communities
• their elected officials have a high rate of turnover when compared to the west demonstrating the people are choosing and importantly changing their minds about who they want in power. Compare to the US where 90% of elections are not competitive and so it’s the political patronage network of the Dems or GOP that decide 90% of elections, before we even discuss how meaningful a choice the 2-party system offers
• fully a third of elected officials are independents, and the faction system within the CPC plays the same function as party politics within the west
• the faction system within the CPC is actually more diverse than the party system in the west with factions ranging from die hard Maoists to neoliberals, so to say it’s a one-party state is superficial since factions play the same function within the CPC and to say the 2-party system of almost all of the west presents political diversity is laughable since in the west the political spectrum is one neoliberal party that is homophobic and another neoliberal party that isn’t homophobic; this accurately paints the picture of political diversity in the west which is fucking nothing compared to the diversity of political voices in China
• their elected officials are mostly not lifelong politicians such as in the west meaning in the west we really have a permanent oligarchy (such as Biden who has been part of the ruling oligarchy long enough that he voted against desegregation) whereas in China they elect people who are from the people
• that is to say, Chinese democracy is mostly of the people with some who then climb higher whereas western democracy is a set of lifelong permanent appointments and a remarkably high proportion of them are the children of lifelong politicians
• Chinese democracy is mostly devolved and local, eg city and provincial politics are what matters most, whereas western democracy is mostly centralized
• Chinese people report in poll after poll they see that their government is responsive to their will whereas westerners report the opposite
• Chinese people report a very high level of confidence in the integrity of their democratic processes and representatives when westerners report the opposite

When I say China is a democracy I mean it in the full sense of it, not some orientalized “China is very very mysterious and sinister” sense of it.

It’s not a perfect democracy at all and I won’t make that claim but it’s a very good one and it far outstrips the west in terms of being actually representative of the people in terms of voting patterns resulting in changes of public policy and in terms of diversity of political voices and in terms of actual integrity.

Not some orientalized “benevolent dictator” bullshit but that the people ELECT their leaders for the local politics that matter most and then those local politics elect the national body leading to a system of politics that represents the will of the people based on their right to vote.

Democracy.

The Waffen SS Ukrainian division was mostly destroyed but about 8,000 were rescued by the UK and many were resettled in Canada.

Anti-semitism in Canada was intense. Eg only 5,000 Jews were given asylum during the entire Hitler and post-WW2 era so being a Waffen SS Ukrainian was about as good as being a Holocaust survivor or a Jewish person escaping Hitler.

During an inquiry into this in the 80s, one historian wrote that showing an SS tattoo was a great way to demonstrate you were an anti-communist and therefore a valuable recruit. The plan was to cultivate a “5th column” of Eastern European nationalists as a means of undermining the USSR, ethnic-nationalism being a useful way to encourage separatism.

In fact Bandera back in the late 1920s was himself patronized by the militaristic and expansionistic interwar Polish government that wanted to expand into Ukraine and Belorussia. It’s this nationalist separatist network that the Nazis capitalized upon and following their defeat the Canadians and UK were simply picking up that torch.

There are many threads to this story.

To touch on them briefly:

• Bandera and his Polish-backed forces led a campaign of slaughtering livestock and horses and burning grain in the early 1930s which historian Mark Tauger identifies as one of the major human-based causes of the famine in the 1930s, in particular the devastation of the horse herds which were essential for transport and animal labor. Bandera did this with the intention of worsening the famine in order to incite resistance against the USSR.
• The expansionist Polish state of the early 1920s had a kind of lebensraum type ideology and saw Belorussia and Ukraine as part of a Greater Poland, so in the early 1920s they waged a war of aggression against the USSR which was in a state of weakness due to the civil war to seize large parts of Belorussia and Ukraine. They then reduced the local population to slave-like serfdom and imposed a regime of terror with dozens of daily public executions to “fight bandits” and imposed harsh Polonization measures such as forcing the use of Polish instead of local languages and only providing education to Polish speakers.
• Those are the territories that Stalin took under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact so whenever someone throws that in your face to claim a history of russian aggression against Poland be aware that the territory taken by Stalin was not Poland but was Ukraine and Belorussia. None of the areas taken here were polish in the ethnic or linguistic sense (with the small exception of Lvov which is still part of Ukraine today) so the MR pact being presented as Russian aggression intentionally obscures Polish revanchism for the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and seeks to deny the fascist militaristic and expansionistic state that Poland was in the 1930s.
• It was the brutal mistreatment of Ukrainians and Belorussians as serfs by a colonial Poland that Hitler pointed at when claiming the German minority in Poland was being mistreated to justify his invasion of Poland. In fact they were treated well and Hitler was lying but the brutality of Poland towards their eastern colonies gave him his justification for war that convinced the Germans.
• Also just because I’m on a roll here let’s mention that Poland was also happy to take a piece of Czechoslovakia during the Munich conference and in 1938 was de facto an ally of Nazi Germany and there is a very strong case to be made the the British were seeking to engineer a Polish-German alliance against the Soviet Union as part of their balance of power geopolitics and the British would have been very happy had the Germans launched Barbarossa alongside Poland in 1940.

Putin sneaks into your room at night and puts your hand in a glass of warm water that’s why as a grown ass adult you still wet the bed.

It’s not the 1960s anymore. Chinese democracy is more representative, responsive, and more power is locally devolved to communities than in the USA or any large western democracy.

I wouldn’t even call the USA a democracy anymore due to how gamed it is. I definitely would call China a democracy.

I’m a 20 year programming veteran and let me assure you that NOT ONCE has my work experience been verified.

Just lie. Fuck it.

how USSR despite its flaws did and exponentially better job at elevating the lives of the common person even while defeating a Nazi horde

I’m a western cracker but this is such a major thing for me.

All the accusations of corruption and self-interest etc are so obviously false. It’s so clear that the communists, or at least the revolutionary generation of Lenin and Stalin, and Che and Fidel, they truly believed in what they were doing.

Yes they cracked some skulls. They were ruthless and as philosophers they explained why they needed to be ruthless.

But they were not corrupt. They absolutely weren’t. They believed in communism and they were seeking to build it. They believed in equality, evidenced by the more equal society they created. They believed in anti-imperialism, evidenced by the personal sacrifices they made to fight it.

They were not corrupt.

Compare to someone like Churchill or Roosevelt or Truman. What were they fighting for? They were wealthy patricians fighting to maintain and build empires.

I want to stand with the communists. They’re more noble than the patricians.

I am a history nerd tragic and as a teen I couldn’t stop reading pop-history which was mostly chauvinist and ideologically pro-western / anti-communist.

Then I gradually progressed into more academic works which is when I discovered - to my genuine shock - how dramatically incorrect the popular account of history is and how much ideology shapes it.

Discovering that the popular western account of the eastern front was written by Nazi generals was an actual shock to me, and then reading David Glantz made me realize how skewed our account of history is in the west.

That opened my eyes wide open and I started reassessing everything from a perspective of “ok, what really happened?”

It’s been in full swing since Thatcher.

Don’t be smug about it though. Cooking might seem like an innate ability if you were raised with it but intergenerational poverty is associated with a lack of education about things like this and also a lack of access to quality food.

If you’re time poor from working shifts or multiple jobs

If due to social class or race or intergenerational poverty you lacked an education about food

If contemporary race and social class segregation means you live in a “food desert” that simply doesn’t sell fresh produce

Have empathy. Obviously this person is suffering and needs help.