Socialism_Everyday

Quoting RSF, the western politicized organization that refused to comment on the illegal arbitrary detention of a Spanish journalist in Poland. The organization classifying England's "Press Freedom Index" as satisfactory while all sorts of reporters bring up the massive repression against anti-zionism in all media. Surely that Montpellier-based organization with branches exclusively in western countries could not be used as a political tool!

You have literally never spoken to a Chinese person living in China, and it shows.

Oppressed people won't tell anyone anything that can be used against them, western or not

Look. I understand you've been exposed to decades of anti-China propaganda, but this is fucking wild. In my university department I've been fortunate enough to direct the master's and bachelor's theses of some 10 Chinese students. I've discussed politics with most of them, between 2020 and 2024 for a frame of reference. We're talking highly trained young men and women from a variety of backgrounds and provinces. None of them has had any problem talking to me about politics, other than "I'm not really interested" for some of them. Out of those students, only one chose to pursue a career in Germany (highly developed, rich country in Europe), the rest moved back to "authoritarian, evil, oppressive" China.

The one who chose to stay in Germany told me that he came to Europe considering himself an opposition supporter against the government of China, but that when he saw the politics in Europe, he started to be a lot more charitative towards the Chinese government and he's not so clear about his position anymore. Another student told me she couldn't understand how the German government did nothing while hundreds of thousands of citizens were needlessly dying of COVID because it didn't want to infringe too much on "the economy".

Tell me now: how many actually Chinese people living in China have you spoken with?

Dumb take. The data portraying that comes from western institutions like Pew Research or the Ash Institute

I agree, but how is that relevant to China? It pretty consistently has the highest government satisfaction rates in the world.

Edit: and before you accuse me of Chinese propaganda, that's data from western organizations like Pew Research or Ash Institute

About 10% died in the gulags per these figures

How many died outside gulags in this timespan, though? The Soviet Union lost 25 million people altogether during WW2, many millions of those from hunger and disease due to horrifying conditions all over the country after the 1941 Nazi invasion. 25 million over 150mn is around 17%. Gulags themselves weren't particularly deadly, it's the whole Nazi invasion that triggered mass death

What was the stats on US functional illiteracy rates?

The successful democracy that couldn't ever implement the overwhelmingly popular universal healthcare?

Nazis are Nazis, you don't need external interference claims (not questioning the claim itself) to arrest them all and dissolve the party. The reality is that this only gets done to leftist parties in Europe.

250 years of a successful democracy

Lmfao. Jim Crow was a successful democracy? Literal slave ownership before that? Invasion of Iraq was successful Democracy? Bombing of Vietnam?

Many Nazis also signed up with good intentions to the Werhmacht

By the logic of @ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world, Ukraine, as a US puppet, wouldn't continue fighting if US and Russia declare peace.

The Ukrainians haven't been profiting from anything in Ukraine since 1990.

Inflation-adjusted GDP PPP in 1990 was $1.2 trillion, it collapsed after the dismantling of the Soviet system, and by 2022 it still hadn't recovered to 2/3rd of what it was in Soviet times as it was below $800bn. And this is even before taking into account the massive inequality that was created at the time and has perpetuated itself. Sadly, Ukrainians have suffered immensely in the economic sphere since 35 years ago.

Hexbear is an internet forum. I don't know how or why you expect high quality discourse on an anonymous memes forum. ML is predominant in hexbear, yeah, and it's thankfully one of the places of the internet where you don't have to preface every discussion of the USSR with 5 paragraphs on how horrifying repression was.

Through MLs though, I've encountered the deepest sources I've seen on this. I've seen the website of the Gulag museum, the dicussion on the Вдудь Russian channel when he interviews victims of Gulag in Kolyma, the discussion in the book "People's Republic of Walmart" that deals partially with Soviet economic planning, the books "Economic History of the USSR" and "Farm to Factory" discuss it, and there's a deep discussion in "Human Rights in the Soviet Union" by Albert Szymanski, in the final chapters. The "Stalin Eras" saga of the "Proles Pod" podcast has a long discussion of the events leading to the repression, too, if you're interested.

Is that enough discussion that I've been exposed to exclusively from ML sources? Or not?