Huh?

How many times are memes of this rhetoric going to be posted and reposted?

Desperate*

Why does this say 25 per cent instead of 25 percent?

Just get the Jan 6 rioters on call, I’m sure they’d be happy to help with that

Explain how demand elasticity affects both countries please. I expect Trump uses these tariffs as a scare tactic for countries who depend greatly on exports to America, but i don’t know how elasticity of demand plays in.

Well it was nice conversing as always. Have a good night… Afternoon?

despite clearly holding anti-AES views, you don’t actually shut out any and all evidence.

Thanks, i try my best to always argue in good faith and remain open-minded. Only if that were the spirit many went into discussions with.

I am older than you (unless you went back to school). I see genuine hope in you becoming a Leftist eventually

Yeah you’re older. I’m 19. Although i don’t know about me being a leftist someday haha. Maybe it’s not entirely far-fetched since it was only a couple years ago i held conservative views, but we’ll see.

Further, I am going to go ahead and plug Blowback again

I’ll be sure to check it out!

USian like I am

I’m not American - I’m British and Nigerian. The former i obtained by birth, but we have our own atrocities as well.

I think if you were focused on reaching an understanding, rather than immediately framing me as some entirely unreasonable person that thinks Stalin was a perfect saint free from sin, we would be having much shorter convos.

I’ll try my best in the future.

evidently it seems you think it’s good enough to recommend to others

Wdym by “think it’s good enough to recommend to others”? I haven’t recommended it to anyone i know. Unless you’re talking about that one thread yesterday. In that case, i do plan to finish it as soon as my exams are done

Ok, so we agree in the end other than on the point of whether those 700k+ people were killed or not - at least you seem to think they weren’t.

It’s a stalemate.

Secessionist sentiments in the united states were not nearly as big a thing as they were for soviet republics who faced economic and civic turmoil for decades.

A better comparison would be if after the US civil war, America fell apart entirely. That’s the only reasonable comparison i can accept.

Just 2 comments ago you were saying millions were killed,

Any million number was referring to the greater Stalinist terror not explicitly the purges. That was my mistake (which is a direct result of you arguing me towards tiredness if i might say).

From the Wikipedia article i initially cited on the graves found:

Between 5 August 1937 and 17 November 1938 the scale of killing reached its apogee. In a series of 12 national operations the NKVD executed at least 680,000 men and women. Original source in Russian That is the documented total: the real figure is almost certainly higher. In preparation for mass murder on such a scale the NKVD People’s Commissar Yezhov instructed his subordinates throughout the Soviet Union to identify areas not far from the major urban centres where thousands of bodies could be quickly concealed. This was described by the late Arseny Roginsky. Also in Russian

One of the problems you have that gets in the way of your own understanding is a seemingly permanent wish to take my words in the worst way possible,

I don’t always want to do that, you denying the facts leads me to.

What makes a system capitalist if not markets, private ownership, and wage labor? Self-identification does not determine economic reality.

The revisionism I’m referring to is: Your claim that the Soviet justice system “frequently didn’t actually execute” those sentenced to death is false. Archival NKVD data shows that most of the 700,000 sentenced to death were executed.

Your claim that the purges were primarily about “Trotskyists". The Great Purge targeted high-ranking Party officials, innocent civilians, and the Red Army, NOT just saboteurs. E.g., Stalin purged 80% of his military leadership before WW2. Were all of them traitors?

If Soviet archives themselves acknowledge hundreds of thousands of executions, how is that a “Western lie"? If the KGB’s own documents contradict Stalinist apologists, why should we trust modern revisionists instead?

Why a migraine?

China itself refers to its system as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” indicating that they acknowledge capitalist mechanisms within their socialist framework. I didn’t say China is capitalist (although it is technically correct to say that at present China is state-capitalist with hopes of transitioning to full on socialism), I only said Deng introduced capitalist elements to offset economic downturn which, if i may remind you, resulted in the quadrupling of China’s GDP. Calling it market socialism is a matter of nomenclature alone.

You’re still making revisionist claims in your analysis of Soviet history, but i don’t even know if i have the strength to go on as it’s just back and forth.

Marxist-Leninist Socialism with Dessalinist characteristics

I didn’t know buddy had his own personality cult😆

Okay, i won’t speak on things i don’t know too well, i will however call out the blatant lies in your comment.

Deng didn’t add “Capitalist reforms,” he pivoted to a Socialist Market Economy

This is a lie! Deng explicitly introduced market reforms, privatization, and allowed foreign investment. If it wasn’t capitalism, why does China today have billionaires, stock markets, and private enterprise?

Execution was relatively rare in comparison.

Another lie! The Stalinist purges killed millions. Denying this is blatant historical revisionism. Vasily Blokhin the chief executioner of the NKVD and one of the most prolific executioners in world history has more than 7,000 executions to his name. Are you denying this clear evidence? Also, don’t get me started on the massive number of graves that were discovered

The simplest answer is that they had reactionary, sometimes fascist rising nationalist movements.

So now Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans, and Armenians suddenly became fascists? Idk, i feel this is a very dishonest take, but who knows what justification you have for this stance.

The USSR didn’t collapse so much as it was killed.

And yet Gorbachev and Yeltsin moved to swiftly reform or completely dismantle the system. Couldn’t it be that they thought the system to be outdated? You do realize that the main reason many grew tired of the Soviet way of doing things was because of Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms putting pressure on the USSR to dissolve right?

These numbers are more positive among older populations that actually lived there, times are harder now for most post-Soviet states.

So why haven’t they tried to reinstate the USSR?

What chapter are you on in Blackshirts? They get into almost all of this in deeper detail.

I’m well into the second chapter

The alternative? A genocidal Empire that tried to crush the Soviets at every chance, and ultimately succeeded

This still has whataboutist undertones. The USSR also crushed uprisings (Hungary, Prague Spring), supported brutal regimes (Afghanistan, East Germany), and committed mass killings (Holodomor and the Great Purge).

Okay, so I’ve got a couple of issues with your response. First of all, the referendum only polled 9 out of the 15 republics. The other six boycotted it since they were already pushing for independence. Moreover, within months, nearly every republic declared full independence. If they truly didn’t want to secede from the USSR, would they have declared independence?

Secondly, I don’t think nostalgia is a good gauge of what people want. Individuals have a tendency to romanticize the past especially during hard times. For example, many citizens of African countries revel in reminiscing about the colonial era due to economic hardships faced today. Is that what they truly want? Probably not. It is usually due to poor knowledge of colonial history that they have these sentiments.

Furthermore, I’m well aware that the US is a despicable country, and my increasing knowledge about its history only fuels my hatred of it, but you’re bordering on whataboutism if the standard for the most progressive movement of the 20th century is being “not as bad as the US” which is a pretty low bar.

Edit: You can’t compare the confederacy - a slave-owning rebellion fighting to preserve human bondage to the soviet republics - nations seeking independence from an authoritarian superstate. If you really want to compare the USSR with the US civil war, it would be better to compare it to the 13 colonies fighting for independence from the British crown.

Besides, you still didn’t address the core argument: If Soviet rule was truly beneficial, why did so many nations (at least 5) risk war and economic collapse to escape it?

You’re deflecting. If the USSR was truly a voluntary workers’ paradise, why did nearly all of its republics leave at the first opportunity? You’re avoiding that question by pointing to U.S. wrongdoing, but the reality is that Soviet republics didn’t just ‘entertain’ secession like Texas, they actively fought for it and succeeded.

Comparing minor secessionist sentiments in Texas to the complete collapse of a superstate is absurd.