‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024

The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970

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Cake day: 2019年8月27日

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  • I’m surprised that they made handhelds! I was always under the impression that Soviet video games were more like experimental curiosities than a visible industry. The situation was similar in the Anglosphere back in the 1950s and ’60s: there was not much of a market for them, so they were hard to find (unless you were a computer scientist).


  • It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.

    Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.

    The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

    — A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262

    When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.

    This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.

    — Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145

    @freagle@lemmygrad.ml and others are ‘simping’ for the USSR because that is the price that you have to pay for capitalism’s structural defects: it leaves us, the lower classes, in such destitute positions that we have nothing to lose by seeking alternatives.



  • Apart from driving over and crushing their victims, the practice that earned the Blackshirts notoriety in Italy during Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s had been the killing of opponents by dragging them to their death. Given the numerous lorries available to them in Addis Ababa, both from the military and the [Fascist] government transport company, it was perhaps inevitable that they would use the same method during the massacre of Addis Ababa.

    Kirubel Beshah, an Ethiopian witness who had been a student at the Teferi Mekonnin School and who after Liberation would teach mathematics there, reported, ‘Ethiopian blood flowed like water everywhere. Saddest of all was that at first they tied dead bodies to the back of their trucks, and pulled them along the road while shouting and singing, but later, they also started to tie the living to their trucks, so as not to waste bullets. It was very disturbing to see human bodies being torn to pieces alive, by stones and bushes.’²⁹

    (Emphasis added. Source.)



  • In a statement to the JTA, the ADL said the Wikipedia decision was part of a “campaign to delegitimize the ADL.”

    How amusing, as if there were some shadowy cabal masterminding a coordinated attempt to bring down their memetic organization.

    The only ‘campaign to delegitimize the ADL’ is its own kamikaze mission to mindlessly recategorize all opposition to a crappy régime as antisemitism while leaving actual victims of white supremacy in the dust. I predict that the ADL is either going to fall into obscurity or outright vanish after the last apartheid régime collapses.


  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre you a 'tankie'
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    3 个月前

    The reason that MovingThrowaway said ‘Almost none of us were alive when Khrushchev rolled tanks into Hungary’ is that certain British socialists coined the pejorative ‘tanky’ to nickname communists who approved of the Warsaw Pact intervention in the Hungarian People’s Republic (and later, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic), but hardly anybody uses the pejorative this way anymore.

    In practice, application now varies widely, from approving of the Bolsheviki to opposing the Ukrainian government to suggesting that maybe North Korean politicians think and behave like ordinary human beings. The contemporary criteria are so variable that many would argue that the term is too vague to be useful.




  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mldo you use 4chan?
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    3 个月前

    I frequented /v/, /int/, and a few other boards about one dozen years ago. Now the only things that I touch are a few of the archival websites, and even then only rarely. Occasionally I’ll visit an archive to look for images or clips, and more unoften I’ll look up a phrase or word out of curiosity, but that is the extent of it. I haven’t posted anything on the official website in a very long time (and I’ve never posted anything on the archival websites at all).


  • Most other prisoners of the early camps were soon set free again—not because of outside intervention, but because the authorities felt that a brief period of shock and awe was normally enough to force opponents into compliance. As a result, there was a rapid turnover in 1933, with the places of released prisoners quickly filled with new ones.

    The duration of detention was unpredictable. Prisoners who expected to regain their freedom after a few days were mostly disappointed, but it was rare for them to remain inside for a year or more. Longer spells were served in the bigger, more permanent camps, but even in a large camp like Oranienburg, around two‐thirds of all prisoners stayed for less than three months.244

    The result was a constant stream of former prisoners back into German society, and it was these men and women who would become the most important sources of private knowledge about the early camps.

    (Emphasis added. Source.)



  • Somehow I doubt that the millions of us in the lower classes who suffered from his régime would be that restrained.

    In any case, it isn’t a question of one individual’s prescription. It is more a question of historic inevitability and necessity. I can’t say anything for sure, but should the lower classes directly confront Donald Trump and Mike Pence one day, I have a feeling that we’ll be just as forgiving as lower‐class Italians were of Benito Mussolini. Only a guess, though.