According to American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Kristen Ghodsee, efforts to institutionalize the “double genocide thesis”, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of communism (class murder), in particular the push at the beginning of the 2007–2008 financial crisis for commemoration of the latter in Europe, can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme social inequalities in both the Eastern and Western worlds as the result of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. She says that any discussion of the achievements by Communist states, including literacy, education, women’s rights, and social security is usually silenced, and any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Joseph Stalin’s crimes and the “double genocide thesis”, an intellectual paradigm summed up as such: “1) any move towards redistribution and away from a completely free market is seen as communist; 2) anything communist inevitably leads to class murder; and 3) class murder is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.” By linking all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism, Ghodsee posits that the elites hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could “threaten the primacy of private property and free markets”.
I should have clarified that I’m not against socialism, just the hierarchy of states. We should instead pursue more egalitarian socialist expressions like social ecology or kinds of anarchy.
socialism >> communism is a evolving process, but every time it starts growing and developing, capital asserts itself to dominate and destroy it
the only Actually Existing Socialisms today have nuclear deterrents to avoid this fate, they also have to develop counter-intelligence defenses because just nuclear weapons are not enough to protect from all the myriad threats that capital engages in towards anti-socialist >> anti-communist goals
if you can not understand this material reality of history, and use it to analyze the struggle for liberation in this world, you are lost
It’s either socialism or barbarism. That’s why we are back here again.
And unfortunately, USSR falls smack damn on the barbarism side of that divide
you’re just mad they stopped the holocaust
…how could that possibly be your takeaway from what I said? I literally never even compared them to the Nazis, just said they weren’t socialist enough
reading between the lines
Indisputably the opposite, the Soviet Union was the first big Socialist state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory#Memory_politics_and_the_Holocaust_in_Eastern_Europe
I should have clarified that I’m not against socialism, just the hierarchy of states. We should instead pursue more egalitarian socialist expressions like social ecology or kinds of anarchy.
this is you rn
socialism >> communism is a evolving process, but every time it starts growing and developing, capital asserts itself to dominate and destroy it
the only Actually Existing Socialisms today have nuclear deterrents to avoid this fate, they also have to develop counter-intelligence defenses because just nuclear weapons are not enough to protect from all the myriad threats that capital engages in towards anti-socialist >> anti-communist goals
if you can not understand this material reality of history, and use it to analyze the struggle for liberation in this world, you are lost