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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33157 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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My experience has been that normie conservatives basically all hold that Hitler and Stalin were equally or near-equally bad, and that fascism and communism are equally bad.

Yes, normie cons always held this view, and now normie libs hold it too (even more so due to current events in Eastern Europe).

On the left people will absolutely argue that communism is good

"left" as online people with hammer and sickle (and often rainbow, trans and Palestine flags), not as anyone remotely close to respectability.

occasionally you get someone who will argue that Stalin, while very bad, wasn't as bad as Hitler

Yes, this is the other mainstream respectable academic view. The 50's are over, you will not any more find Stalin's admirers in the academia and respectable professions(excepting Grover Furr)

Including professed Marxists like Zizek, here is his take on difference between Stalinism and Nazism

(most people would see killer who forces you to bow before him and lick his boots before he kills you as not lesser evil than ordinary killer who just does the deed withou any ceremony, but YMMV)

I think that a lot of young people today are very sympathetic to communist ideas especially in Latin America. I don't understand why, probably due to lack of growth, high unemployment, especially among young people.

For me it is unimaginable because I grew up in the USSR and we all hated it. Yet, a lot of old people are nostalgic towards the Soviet times. They had hard time to adapt to competitive system. I can understand that. Transition had to be done in more thoughtful manner. In Russia it is probably even worse due to widespread corruption and inequality.

We had to study communist ideology, read Marx and other works already at the primary school. It was very boring. I don't understand how people can find them inspiring at all. At the same time other teachers let us know, in short passages, what was wrong about the Soviet system. Biology teacher told about Lysenkoism, others mentioned deportations and so on. I think that we all grew up more like Kolgomorovs, knowing well what to say to authorities to survive, while retaining a different perspective in private. When Gorbachev started his glastnost (openness), the gates opened and the Soviet system could not survive.

I don't believe that this is a case with all communistic countries today. Maybe Cuba is similar but in North Korea people are probably too brainwashed and not sufficiently educated to be willing to reject communism.

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