Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]

I bet this person drinks skim milk too lmao

Beautifully said my friend

I just want a picture of a got dang hot dog

Absolutely, absolutely.

“Boot brain” as in a fondness for licking boots due to a lifetime of propaganda…?

On the left it says something like “Soviet authority will only last two weeks!” and then on the right it says “15 YEARS - the USSR is finally established on the path to socialism”

It isn’t really cursive Cyrillic so much as just italic Cyrillic. I struggled with reading italics for a good while too, but eventually you get the hang of it.

Edit: Oh and the heads on the left are labeled “monarchist”, “cadet”, “eser”, and “menshevik”.

Honestly, I’m just expecting people to be taking anti-tracking measures already if that’s important to them. I linked to the actual CIA website really just because that verifies it as the actual document — if the document were instead hosted on a different website, especially on a spooky scary “tankie” website, then the people who actually need to read it would immediately dismiss it as fake.

Do you really think it’s that dangerous?

Did you happen to self-label as an anarchist before, by any chance?

I see, you’re absolutely right about that, beautifully said.

What does “brutal” mean in this context?

Here’s the link in clickable form

Me coming home from a half price books in Minnesota with a blu-ray of the anime version of And Yet the Town Moves, plus a Norwegian textbook for Romanians with a Norwegian-Romanian translation dictionary to boot, some gender studies books and leftist theory, something that I’m 99% sure was written by a cult leader, and Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

Edit: Oh shit I’m realizing this article is LITERALLY about that same Half Price Books I went to! Whaaat!

Understood, thank you.

Alright, “if you say so” is probably a bit dismissive of me. What I mean to say is that my impression is that decentralized systems are more flexible, but there’s probably some very obvious fact refuting this WRT the '30s famine, which is right behind me, isn’t it?

If you say so.

Well, /r/shittankiessay has existed since at least 2016, maybe earlier? I feel like the rise of the word “tankie” in mainstream political discourse really started around that point, and is reaching its peak of popularity in this decade.

I’m afraid you’ve blindsided me here. I can’t really say much other than that the idea that famine in the modern age is necessarily caused by an ample food supply not getting to hungry mouths, was something that I read somewhere I don’t remember, and still see repeated in various places now. Just look up the phrase “famine is a man-made disaster” and you’ll get a number of results about this idea, describing any number of historical or contemporary famines using more or less that exact phrasing. The idea is essentially that famines tend to have environmental/natural factors as catalysts, such as failed crops, but that food itself is not a scarce resource.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that any time someone goes hungry, that it was a deliberate act of an Eeeeevil Regime; but what this does mean is that I ultimately still feel like a more sort of decentralized or horizontal system should be able to better distribute food when a socialist project is still establishing itself and reorganizing or rebuilding its agriculture, right? As a certified know-nothing, though, I can’t really give any sort of coherent analysis on what specifically failed with the Soviet system, other than that it was Something and future socialist projects should Learn From It. I hear all these big words like “collectivization” and “mechanization” thrown around, but I just can’t really trust myself to really understand all the factors that were at play.

Though I believe that after their more notable famines in the Early Days™, the USSR and the PRC got pretty good at food security. So I guess that that learning from historical tragedies has already happened, on top of the factors relevant to the Early Days™ just no longer being relevant now.

I also know that a large portion of the famine in the DPRK was a result of outside sanctions, though I honestly can’t speak for how sanctions might’ve impacted famines in the early USSR.

※This anecdote is retold in a way that prioritizes the flow and emotions of the event, along with the gist of the event as it actually occurred.

I remember, and I think it was actually earlier this year on R*ddit before the whole migration thing happened, that I was basically accusing someone of being a “Stalinist”, right? And that person replied that Stalinism wasn’t really a thing — that Stalin’s development of socialist theory wasn’t really substantial enough to be considered as its own sort of movement or ideology or whatever.

Reading that, I felt a sinking feeling in my chest at the slow realization that my definition of “Stalinism” the whole time I’d been using that word, had really just amounted to, “thinking Stalin was overall a neutral-to-good leader”… Which I think we can all understand isn’t an even remotely concrete or useful definition of that word. That’s just like, a politician’s popularity in an opinion poll.

So I took a deep breath, placed my dainty little lady-fingers back on my laptop keyboard, and replied something like, “Alright, [grumbles], pssshure, I’ll concede that point and now feel a bit silly… But… But it’s still really terrible that you’re praising a figure like Stalin, considering that he was such a monstrous absolute dictator and–”

–My interlocutor then simply showed me the declassified document “Comments on the Change in Soviet Leadership”, which is hosted right on the CIA’s own official website. This document reads, “Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.”

Reading this, I can only imagine that I went red like the Soviet flag with embarrassment at the apparent scope of my own ignorance, while also laughing maniacally at the actual comedy gold that is the existence of a real declassified CIA document which straight-up just says “Stalin wasn’t a dictator and you’re talking out of your ass if you insist the contrary”.

My interlocutor continued, “And I know you were going to make a Holodomor argument next.”

I faintly mumbled with a sigh, _{"Am I really that predictable?"}

The interlocutor proceeded to demonstrate quite succinctly how many genuinely trustworthy sources dispute the claim that the Ukrainian famine actually was a genocide. These sources weren’t enough for me to reject the genocide claim entirely, but were enough to completely disprove my impression that there was any sort of scholarly consensus on the famine being genocide.

I bit my lip. “Well, even if it wasn’t deliberate…”, I said, “There always is enough food for everyone, and so all famine is a man-made disaster one way or another, caused by inadequate distribution of resources. So it was a failing of the Soviet system in any case.”

My interlocutor didn’t dispute what I’d written, and didn’t present any further points. Which means that I got the last word, and it seemed like my interlocutor had conceded that point to me, which for a competitive and prideful soul like mine should’ve aroused some feeling of “Hooray! I won!”, and yet… I just felt a bit silly. As if someone taller than me had just ruffled my hair and smiled, “Good job, kid;” or as if I were a lion cub play-fighting with its parent, who falls over at the slightest touch just to let me feel like my mews are actually mighty roars.

And this feeling was as addicting as it was unfamiliar and exciting. Like a sudden gay kiss on the cheek from one’s love interest, before xe disappears into a rain of myriad cherry blossoms.

It was in that moment that I realized two things:

Firstly, “the tankies” were in fact not all brainwashed imbeciles like I had previously been so thoroughly convinced. This was admittedly a realization I was already beginning to infer for other reasons.

Secondly, I enjoy being humiliated. Like, weirdly enjoy it. Saying asinine bullshit online and getting not only debunked but publicly revealed to be the “listens to video essays while playing Half-Life: Blue Shift” type of know-nothing pseudo-leftist feels so goddamn fucking good, I swear to all the deities worshipped on this fair Planet Earth.

Comrades, please. You have to dunk on me.

Yim yum!