Oh yeah, “real communists” were killed by the evil tankies that established the highest welfare state and lowest inequality in the history of the region.

There’s also the question of the nomenklatura and the army. It cannot be denied they enjoyed privileges

Oh it cannot be denied? There must be some pretty strong numeric data suggesting that. Care to share?

Western liberal democracies […] preserve more individual freedoms than leninist states do

Ask that to Vietnamese, Iraqi, Libyans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Burkinabe, Algerians… Turns out that the western liberal democracies don’t preserve individual freedoms, they only export more of the authoritarianism abroad and keep the situation easier at home because the richer working class is less prone to murdering them!

It’s good the Soviet Union after Stalin tried to improve the standard of living

After? With Stalin, life expectancy went from 28 to 55 years of age, land collectivization was successfully carried out (not without difficulties), and massive literacy campaigns taught everyone to read. Again, not because of Stalin in particular, because history isn’t made by one person and he wasn’t an absolute dictator the way you believe he was.

You’ve completely ignored my point of how it is possible that the USSR got 5 benevolent dictators in a row maintaining the highest welfare state and lowest inequality in the history of the region.

“I live in the most powerful and harmful empire but I reject any system opposing it” amounts to supporting it

I’ll repeat: you can thank the Bolsheviks from saving your bloodline from extinction.

I’d be more charitative to your comment if it couldn’t be summarized as “liberalism is when human rights and enlightenment, Leninism is when le evil dictator with iron fist”.

Your analysis of what constitutes a dictatorship or a democracy is simply anti materialist.

The country that guaranteed universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed housing, the abolition of unemployment, guaranteed retirement pensions, and maintained the historically lowest inequality levels in the region is a dictatorship to you. This is only possible if your understanding is that, for 70 years, the USSR had a succession of benevolent dictators unlike anything else the world has seen for some reason. No dictator elsewhere at any time has achieved remotely anything like that, but somehow FIVE in a row in the USSR maintained the highest welfare state in history.

To you, democracy is strictly defined as “the existence of a multi party system with periodic representative elections”. This is a faulty understanding of who makes decisions in class societies. There cannot be democracy in class society. Tell me an example of an existing democratic country to you.

Not only but majorly, especially outside the USSR, which took the brunt of the excessive repressions in the period between 1939 and 1942.

Sorry your relatives were fascists. My great grandfather got murdered by the reds in Spain and I don’t cry anticommunism on the internet because he probably deserved it. I only feel bad about having fascist ancestors.

Again: you have ancestors because of the Soviets.

I’m a Spaniard myself, if you ask some of my ancestors, “con Franco se vivía mejor”. You know, under a fascist dictatorship. So no, the “argument from authority by old people” isn’t convincing to me.

I wish the Soviets had liberated my country from fascism too, unfortunately my country is on the other side of the continent and the Soviet aid during the Spanish Civil War was insufficient (likely due to being the only country to sell weapons to the antifascists while Nazi Germany bombed them and the rest of the world looked the other way).

I can argue with you in at all because you’re alive thanks to the USSR. Almost all Warsaw pact peoples were liable to Nazi extermination, if you belong to the few who were not, it’s not a good argument either. “Nazis wouldn’t have exterminated me!”

At least it existed for 70 years and saved a hundred million lives from hunger, disease and Nazi extermination. Your leftism existed for a total of 0 years.

I’d gladly go to a Soviet Union if it existed, unfortunately it didn’t survive the capitalist subversion attempts I explicitly mentioned.

No need to get angry about confronting the reality that you don’t have actually existing historical leftist figures in power that you can praise. If Rosa Luxembourg had gotten to power and hadn’t been murdered by Nazis and Social Democrats, you’d hate her too.

Ah, I see, there are no real examples of “cool, let’s get started” leftists building millions of housing units, so you’re comparing an actually existing state having to deal with capitalist and fascist subversion in a world dominated by capitalism, with idealistic nonexisting societies. That’s your problem right there. You’re welcome!

Yeah, you grew up in an ex Warsaw Pact country, not in a Warsaw Pact country. Keep blaming the problems of capitalism on the system that you had 35 years ago. If it weren’t for the USSR, your ancestors would have likely been exterminated by Nazis.

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

My dismissal of the supposed “genocide of Russians in eastern Ukraine” doesn’t come from sources denying it, it comes from the sources claiming it not providing compelling enough evidence that it’s happening. To me, individual testimonies aren’t enough to determine there’s a genocide, and that’s really all the evidence available in the case of Xinjiang pointing towards genocide.

The Uyghur minority was, firstly, excluded from the single child policy precisely because they were a minority, and in this period acquired the majority status in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. A wave of ISIS related terrorist attacks stroke China in the 2000s and early 2010s, and the government reacted to it by doing a big reeducation campaign in the Xinjiang province which, with its significant Muslim population, was the region where most attackers came from.

This reeducation, mostly consisting of vocational training (also linked to the Belt and Road initiative going through Xinjiang, and the development of the region), was compulsory for many. In the west this looks morally abhorrent, but to Chinese people, it’s not so strange a concept. Many Chinese people spend their teenage years in boarding schools in which they study from 9 to 9 and in which they sleep, so living in an education center isn’t that big of a deal in many Chinese people’s opinion.

As of 2022, the reeducation campaign finished, the camps were closed, and life returned to normal in Xinjiang. Even western state sources like BBC confirmed the closure of the camps, of course with their rhetorical “but at what cost / what’s next”.

The “evidence” of genocide, as per the International Amnesty inform (the most trustworthy source in my opinion), again consists of “anonymous interviews”. I don’t doubt there have been cases of police abuse (ACAB after all), but extending that to the definition of genocide is hurtful to people suffering actual, demonstrable genocide such as Palestinians.

Lastly, I’ll respond to this:

what you mean by material evidence - things like photographs or 1st party accounts?

Essentially information that can be falsified in nature. Pictures can be proven to have been taken at a location and time and to be unedited. Data (such as that of the Ministry of Health of Gaza) including names and identification of actually demonstrably existing people. What I don’t consider material evidence are things that aren’t falsifiable, such as testimonies (especially anonymous ones), reports of the type “it seems/it has been seen”…

Quit stinking up the revolution with your CIA indoctrinated understanding of “authoritarianism” and your non materialist way of understanding history. To you, European social-democracy isn’t authoritarian because you happen not to live in the lands affected by neocolonialism.

You support western colonialism which is orders of magnitude worse than anything you mentioned.

It’s not a war, it’s a genocide.

Greta was protesting for the release of anti-genocide protestors, some of whom are 40+ days into a hunger strike in jail.

Always been*