Actual .ml experience (from a guy who has different opinions):
have a different opinion
some marxist-lenninist (or multiple) replies with a massive paragraph with several citations with primary sources proving your opinion incorrect
realise you were wrong the entire time
become a marxist-lenninist
Also like come on, I’ve seen you around on .ml and all you want is to stir things up and ignore the evidence that other people provide, or say it’s just wrong without providing any alternative sources.
multiple tankies reply in unison at the beat of a drum, dropping high school memes and insults, misinterpreting what’s being said and refusing to listen or even bother to prove anything wrong
I sincerely can’t find it. I know it’s a huge thing over there to “ask for links or it didn’t happen”, but I changed accounts and even unblocked the instance while trying to look it up. I think my entire post history got scrubbed along with the ban, which I find hilarious, because how do I prove it happened if the admins deleted the whole thing? lol
Another user definitely pointed out evidence for why the gulag archipelago is fiction you just seemed to not want to engage with it. I had that exact conversation with an ex-friend of mine and I had to tell him why Solzhenitsyn is a piece of shit and unreliable for the truth. This video sums him and that book up perfectly.
Here’s what you say is “no answer except a quote from his ex-wife:”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.
From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:
In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.
According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and “strangled” the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people (“непроизводительный народ”) who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews’ own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, “200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica.”
The point of 200 years together being listed is that we know that he’s a liar and a conspiracy theorizing anti-semitic Nazi, so trusting his word alone on socialism makes no sense. We have every reason not to trust him and no reason to trust him, especially when he contradicts archival evidence on how prisons in the GULAG administration functioned.
As for soviet prisons, they varied quite a lot depending on severity of the crime and location, with many being pretty progressive for the time. Visitation, open air prisons, and a focus on rehabilitation was common. I already linked Russian Justice, but you should absolutely read it.
Yep, Wikipedia is written largely by westerners using western consensus, even if such consensus has inaccuracies or better information is available post-opening of the soviet archives. You can even see it uses the Gulag Archipelago as a source, despite it being a work of fiction.
See how Zionists don’t get banned despite defending an ongoing genocide
Are they really Zionists, though? I’ve been accused multiple times (twice yesterday and once today) of allegedly supporting genocide. I can actually point out people in the comments here crying Nazi at everyone they disagree with.
This whole “you genocide sympathiser!” shit is getting old. It’s cheap mud-slinging without basis.
Yes, there are Zionists in Lemmy. Anyone believing that Israel as an ethnostate in stolen land has the right to exist is a Zionist. Plenty of people believing that
Not in my experience. Those are few and in between, and highly downvoted. The rest of the time, it’s empty accusations to try to win an argument by vilifying and poisoning the well. The times I’ve been accused have never been in earnest or good faith.
“Conspiracy theory” for libs is anything that deviates from western state propaganda.
To paraphrase Michael Parenti: teachers and farmers, when they unionize they meet in rooms, and discuss their interests, goals, their plans and their actions to reach these goals, what propaganda they need to create, this is obvious to everyone. But when I suggest that the rich and powerful do the same, they call me a conspiracy theorist.
Tankies love the russian and Chinese governments and take everything they say at face value. (.ml instance owner is pro-russia iirc). They are not socialist or communist, but authoritarians. Support for them is what irks me, not the socialist ideals.
Ok, I’ll try and explain the way I see it using an example.
We, in the west, live in a bubble of western propaganda, the same way people in Russia live in a bubble lf Russian propaganda and people in China live in a bubble of Chinese propaganda. Let’s even disregard for a moment the fact that the USA, through arts, films and music, being the largest economic and therefore cultural hegemon of the past century up to today, has influence over everyone else.
When Russia started the war against Ukraine, the Russian propaganda gave as a casus belli to its population the “information” that Ukraine was genociding Russians in Eastern Ukraine. These affirmations stem from the Ukrainian civil war happening since 2014, in which the government and some pro-Russian rebels were fighting in eastern Ukraine, so the Russian government leveraged this and the fact that Russian as a language was removed from the studying plans in Eastern Ukraine, and made big claims of genocide of Russians, propagated all over Russian media. To many Russians within this bubble, all the reputable news sources, journalists, institutions and human right organizations, were giving this information, so they naturally believed it, and if people contradict this, they’re genocide deniers!
As a westerner: what should I do? Take the genocide claims at face value because otherwise I’m a genocide denier? No. I should look at the situation, look, importantly, at independent journalistic work and material evidence coming from the region, and reach a conclusion based on evidence and not on “claims”. There are plenty of Russian testimonies in Russian TV of how they were tortured in Ukraine, how they weren’t allowed to speak their language, how they were bombed for years by Ukraine… But those are just that, testimonies without material evidence. So, do I believe the claims? No, I don’t, I don’t believe Russians were being genocided in eastern Ukraine. I believe that Ukraine, much like my own country of Spain in Catalonia, was violating the right to self determination of people in Eastern Ukraine, and Russia amplified these claims by a factor of 10 and called it a genocide. I’ve seen with my own eyes with the information, independent journalistic work, and video and photographic evidence, what genocide looks like as is being carried out In Palestine, and nothing like that has been proven for Russians In Eastern Ukraine.
I can now repeat this analysis for the western claims of genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, and reach the same conclusion that nothing remotely like in Palestine is happening, so there is no Uyghur genocide. Is this “taking Chinese propaganda at face value”?
Is this “taking Chinese propaganda at face value”?
Well… no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that’s because their names stand out; there just aren’t that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
the documentation from both state and independent news reporting groups inside Ukraine (and to the extent we have them Russia
the patterns of behavior Russia has historically used to justify their imperialism that are reflected in their current actions
the truly overwhelming number of reports and analyses from long-established dedicated & well respected international groups who report on this
And that’s I suspect what you have done too.
But… when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it’s very much occurring. There’s overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it’s a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia’s claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it’s internally inconsistent reasoning.
I feel like this is why we need to stick with primary sources whenever we are debating with liberals . Liberals don’t trust any news source coming from Russia, China etc (which I’d actually say is a rational fear considering there education) but western news sources time and time again have been proven to lie and not base any of there arguments on the truth.
If we want to actually argue points to liberals or other people we need to use primary sources that can’t be disbuted by saying “that’s Chinese communist propaganda”. Although that does represent another problem in that primary sources are usually harder to read, or are very long and most people probably aren’t willing to read through it to verify it’s authenticity themselves, which does create a vector for misinformation. Although I still think it’s better than secondary sources that liberals will just deny.
My .ml experience:
Actual .ml experience (from a guy who has different opinions):
Also like come on, I’ve seen you around on .ml and all you want is to stir things up and ignore the evidence that other people provide, or say it’s just wrong without providing any alternative sources.
My actual .ml experience:
🤷♂️
I’m genuinely interested, can you provide a link if that example is still up?
I agree that insulting you is not a good resolution or a nice thing to do.
I sincerely can’t find it. I know it’s a huge thing over there to “ask for links or it didn’t happen”, but I changed accounts and even unblocked the instance while trying to look it up. I think my entire post history got scrubbed along with the ban, which I find hilarious, because how do I prove it happened if the admins deleted the whole thing? lol
All i got was a quote of his ex-wife and an evaluation of another book. So please stick to the facts.
from the modlog it looked like you got a 4 day ban for citing a work of fiction as fact and crashing out in the replies when challenged on it
I had asked for a source that the book is fiction and got no answer except a quote from his ex-wife.
Another user definitely pointed out evidence for why the gulag archipelago is fiction you just seemed to not want to engage with it. I had that exact conversation with an ex-friend of mine and I had to tell him why Solzhenitsyn is a piece of shit and unreliable for the truth. This video sums him and that book up perfectly.
Here’s what you say is “no answer except a quote from his ex-wife:”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.
Here’s a real quote:
>The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hit1er was stupid and did not use this weapon.
From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:
200 Years together is a completely different book and an ex-wife as a single source is not enough for me.
Okay, let’s assume his storys in the Gulag books are fictipn. What is your general opinion on gulags under Stalin?
The point of 200 years together being listed is that we know that he’s a liar and a conspiracy theorizing anti-semitic Nazi, so trusting his word alone on socialism makes no sense. We have every reason not to trust him and no reason to trust him, especially when he contradicts archival evidence on how prisons in the GULAG administration functioned.
As for soviet prisons, they varied quite a lot depending on severity of the crime and location, with many being pretty progressive for the time. Visitation, open air prisons, and a focus on rehabilitation was common. I already linked Russian Justice, but you should absolutely read it.
This sounds a little different.
Yep, Wikipedia is written largely by westerners using western consensus, even if such consensus has inaccuracies or better information is available post-opening of the soviet archives. You can even see it uses the Gulag Archipelago as a source, despite it being a work of fiction.
We will not be able to agree. But you can believe what you want. I do too.
The .world experience:
Are they really Zionists, though? I’ve been accused multiple times (twice yesterday and once today) of allegedly supporting genocide. I can actually point out people in the comments here crying Nazi at everyone they disagree with.
This whole “you genocide sympathiser!” shit is getting old. It’s cheap mud-slinging without basis.
Yes, there are Zionists in Lemmy. Anyone believing that Israel as an ethnostate in stolen land has the right to exist is a Zionist. Plenty of people believing that
Not in my experience. Those are few and in between, and highly downvoted. The rest of the time, it’s empty accusations to try to win an argument by vilifying and poisoning the well. The times I’ve been accused have never been in earnest or good faith.
“evidence”
A 150 page conspiracy theory ain’t a prove. Also defending Israels crimes against humanity is not the same as advocating for a reasonable solution.
“Conspiracy theory” for libs is anything that deviates from western state propaganda.
To paraphrase Michael Parenti: teachers and farmers, when they unionize they meet in rooms, and discuss their interests, goals, their plans and their actions to reach these goals, what propaganda they need to create, this is obvious to everyone. But when I suggest that the rich and powerful do the same, they call me a conspiracy theorist.
Lol tankies will take everything from Putin and xi and eat it up like it is the eternal truth.
If you can’t admit that, then you are not better than the consumers of said “western state propoganda”. At least they get to think for themselves.
“Michael Parenti = le evil Asiatic country!!!”
I dunno that dude.
My problem is not with “evil asian countries”
Tankies love the russian and Chinese governments and take everything they say at face value. (.ml instance owner is pro-russia iirc). They are not socialist or communist, but authoritarians. Support for them is what irks me, not the socialist ideals.
Ok, I’ll try and explain the way I see it using an example.
We, in the west, live in a bubble of western propaganda, the same way people in Russia live in a bubble lf Russian propaganda and people in China live in a bubble of Chinese propaganda. Let’s even disregard for a moment the fact that the USA, through arts, films and music, being the largest economic and therefore cultural hegemon of the past century up to today, has influence over everyone else.
When Russia started the war against Ukraine, the Russian propaganda gave as a casus belli to its population the “information” that Ukraine was genociding Russians in Eastern Ukraine. These affirmations stem from the Ukrainian civil war happening since 2014, in which the government and some pro-Russian rebels were fighting in eastern Ukraine, so the Russian government leveraged this and the fact that Russian as a language was removed from the studying plans in Eastern Ukraine, and made big claims of genocide of Russians, propagated all over Russian media. To many Russians within this bubble, all the reputable news sources, journalists, institutions and human right organizations, were giving this information, so they naturally believed it, and if people contradict this, they’re genocide deniers!
As a westerner: what should I do? Take the genocide claims at face value because otherwise I’m a genocide denier? No. I should look at the situation, look, importantly, at independent journalistic work and material evidence coming from the region, and reach a conclusion based on evidence and not on “claims”. There are plenty of Russian testimonies in Russian TV of how they were tortured in Ukraine, how they weren’t allowed to speak their language, how they were bombed for years by Ukraine… But those are just that, testimonies without material evidence. So, do I believe the claims? No, I don’t, I don’t believe Russians were being genocided in eastern Ukraine. I believe that Ukraine, much like my own country of Spain in Catalonia, was violating the right to self determination of people in Eastern Ukraine, and Russia amplified these claims by a factor of 10 and called it a genocide. I’ve seen with my own eyes with the information, independent journalistic work, and video and photographic evidence, what genocide looks like as is being carried out In Palestine, and nothing like that has been proven for Russians In Eastern Ukraine.
I can now repeat this analysis for the western claims of genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang by the Chinese government, and reach the same conclusion that nothing remotely like in Palestine is happening, so there is no Uyghur genocide. Is this “taking Chinese propaganda at face value”?
Well… no, not exactly.
Your approach to helping to see truth through the miasma of the narrative is, as you present it, reasonable if unavoidably inherently biased - independent journalists are largely going to be presenting the western Ukranian perspective, just by dint of volume (nobody puts them in prison just for being critical of the Ukrainan commanders (the nuances of that are a different discussion that is also important).
Side note about russian independent journalists
I can name many independent russian journalists, but that’s because their names stand out; there just aren’t that many allowed to exist, and their jobs are incredibly dangerous and memorable. Many of them are unironic proletariarian heroes. (Favorskaya and Kreiger, both of Sotavision, are the two that spring most readily to mind, both having been recently sentenced). They stick in the memory because of their rarity and how messy their fates tend to be.
(I am also (and I want to be clear not in a dismissive way I am just genuinely unclear what you are referring to) very curious as to what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?)
I have done a similar thing, where I have based my opinion on careful research of my own interactions with Ukranians and the work of academics familiar with the situation as well as:
And that’s I suspect what you have done too.
But… when I do the same thing for the claims of genocide in China, I arrive at the conclusion it’s very much occurring. There’s overwhelming documentation from many many sources on the topic, and much as with the Ukranian conflict, the majority are going to be western aligned simply because (despite the fascist push for control of western media) independent and critical media is not suppressed in the west, but it very much is in china (to any comparable degree) (the list of independent Chinese journalists is longer than in Russia, which tracks it’s a much larger country, but their lives are often no less fraught). In different ways than in Russia, but nontheless the narrative is extremely strictly controlled.
Why then do you treat the mountain of inherently biased evidence for Russia being wrong as acceptable and reasonable, but when many of the same organizations you will have used to dismiss Russia’s claims say there is a genocide in china, they are dismissable?
Setting aside that a genocide does not have to look like whats happening in palestine (ask me about native american genocides I can go on for a while), it’s internally inconsistent reasoning.
I feel like this is why we need to stick with primary sources whenever we are debating with liberals . Liberals don’t trust any news source coming from Russia, China etc (which I’d actually say is a rational fear considering there education) but western news sources time and time again have been proven to lie and not base any of there arguments on the truth.
If we want to actually argue points to liberals or other people we need to use primary sources that can’t be disbuted by saying “that’s Chinese communist propaganda”. Although that does represent another problem in that primary sources are usually harder to read, or are very long and most people probably aren’t willing to read through it to verify it’s authenticity themselves, which does create a vector for misinformation. Although I still think it’s better than secondary sources that liberals will just deny.
I’m pretty sure I’m banned from .ml.
Badge of honour.
I’m jealous. I have them defederated but I wish I could disconnect from all their users.
“Different opinion” lol complete bullshit as usual
i’d insert