Crossposted from https://thebrainbin.org/m/germany@feddit.org/t/1945027
A small town in eastern Germany banned the installation of new Holocaust memorial plaques that mark the last known residence or workplace of Jews and other victims of the genocide.
The motion was proposed by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)...
East Germany was more legitimate then the other Germany.
Heidenau, that's the name of the town.
CNN using 'East German' in the headline as if East Germany still exists and is somehow to blame for this is incredibly cynical.
You know who wouldn't have let this happen? The German Democratic Republic. But its forcible annexation into the Nazi successor state next door, resulting in its flooding with capitalist propaganda even as the quality of life collapsed under shock doctrine, is why there is such a resurgence of far-right politics in the east. Once again, the forcible, antidemocratic destruction of communism in Europe by the US Empire reveals itself as one of the greatest disasters in history.
Maybe, but that state failed. Perhaps even due to exploitive practices organised by Moscow
You know who wouldn’t have let this happen? The German Democratic Republic.
That aside: wild take.
antidemocratic destruction of communism in Europe
🙄
Soviet rule killed tens of millions. And was not democratic.
Are you saying Gorbachev should not have pursued glasnost or perestroika?
That the Berlin Wall should not have come down?
That Vaclav Havel was wrong to say, “[T]he sooner, the more quickly, and the more peacefully the Soviet Union begins to move along the road toward genuine political pluralism, respect for the rights of nations to their own integrity and to a working—that is a market—economy, the better it will be, not just for Czechs and Slovaks, but for the whole world.”?
Commies killed trillions!
Soviet rule killed tens of millions.
You really need to lay off the Black Book of Communism, a book which even the authors themselves have recanted.
Soviet rule killed tens of millions. And was not democratic.
Mfw I still belive "Black Book of Communism" numbers.
Are you saying Gorbachev should not have pursued glasnost or perestroika?
Yes. I think the mass death, destitution and loss of QoL caused by shock doctrine - which would not have occured without Gorbachev - was actually a bad thing. I think it's bad when we do something that creates a bunch of child prostitutes, but I suppose you're allowed to disagree on that one.
That the Berlin Wall should not have come down?
I wonder why the socialists in charge in East Germany felt like they might need to have some control over who enters crosses the border from a country full of nazis who, very recently, killed all of their comrades.
Let's see: Nazis in Germany post-war were hired and brought directly back into:
- Official posts within the federal government and its ministerial cabinets
- into the upper judiciary and magistrates
- into local governance
- elevated and hired into immense wealth in industry and finance, or just kept where they already were in industry and finance
- hired into forming the Nazi core of the West German intelligence and secret police agencies (which would become today's German agencies) under the protective auspices of the OSS/CIA; who made extensive use of their networks of executioners and collaborators to prop up US-backed dictatorships and cartels and use as anti-communist stay-behind guerilla terrorists by the CIA and NATO (and brought into the CIA and FBI themselves, and into MI6 and Mossad)
- into German academia and universities as faculty and professors,
- to write western history books at the behest and with support of the US Army and OSS/CIA to sanitize their own crimes
- all those hired into NATO and into the EU
- into positions of power in West Germany (and all the NATO countries, helping in and helped by Gladio violently purging the communists) in such saturation and such impunity that it caused the formation of left wing militant groups that would assassinate and kidnap them.
but other than all of that though!
(And that's not even mentioning the Nazis and collaborators which made up the origins of Radio Free Europe/Liberty, the "Victims of Communism Foundation" which grew out of the fascist-filled anti-Soviet "Captive Nations Lobby" headed by OUN-B Nazis from Ukraine, and all the Operation Aerodynamic, Operation Paperclip, Operation Sunrise, Operation Beladonna, Operation Lynx, etc etc.)
Given that, I find the berlin wall to be pretty reasonable.
That user still hasn't replied to this lmao but is doing to all the others, and still linking wikipedia articles without any insight as of why
It's so typical. I usually just call them out when I see them do it to others. It's funny how often they just go radio silent - Or they otherwise either decide to pick one specific thing to hone in on, or they will play obtuse or they will start to google for more articles that support their claims, but they haven't read them themselves - Something this guy does in this thread "Read the footnotes in the article I linked you". Yeah buddy, you definitely studied all the references yourself. (And I did bring up some of the footnotes, which they also haven't addressed lol.)
I got a comment removed for being "uncivil" when I pointed out someone was doing this. It's apparently such a core part of the character of liberals that pointing out the action is considered rude.
Soviet rule killed tens of millions. And was not democratic.
Don't take this the wrong way but you might be in the wrong instance. Also, colonialism.
Don't take this the wrong way but you might be in the wrong instance.
How so? I'm not promoting any extreme viewpoints, and Lemmy.ml is the primary instance of Lemmy so surely ought to be welcoming
Also, colonialism.
That seems very OT. No-one in this thread is advocating colonialism, AFAICT.
promoting the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is an extreme viewpoint.
Where did I "promote the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie"? You're talking out of your hat.
You're promoting it as an alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat. East Germany went from a proletarian democracy under dictatorship of the proletariat to a bourgeois democracy under dictatorship of capital when reunification happened.
a proletarian democracy under dictatorship of the proletariat
Do you not see the contradiction there?
You're promoting [dictatorship of the bourgeoisie] as an alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Like I said: point me to where I did that. Oh, you can't, because I didn't.
Don't take this the wrong way but you might be in the wrong instance.
How so? I'm not promoting any extreme viewpoints, and Lemmy.ml is the primary instance of Lemmy so surely ought to be welcoming
Unless it has changed recently, signing up requires copying a sentence from a communist text. This should hint at the views typically held here.
This is the instance run by Lemmy's developers. And like them, a lot of the users here are communists, or at least other leftists.
I too hope that you won't take this the wrong way, but you might feel more at home on another instance, with more like-minded individuals.
Unless it has changed recently, signing up requires copying a sentence from a communist text. This should hint at the views typically held here.
I see. Thanks for explaining.
a lot of the users here are communists, or at least other leftists.
I'm fine with that. Many of the replies in this thread, though, seem to be from "big-C" Communist (authoritarian/denialist/Stalinist) perspectives, rather than "small-c" communist or leftist ones. IMO there's a big difference.
I too hope that you won't take this the wrong way, but you might feel more at home on another instance, with more like-minded individuals.
Appreciate it. I'll bear it in mind before cross-posting in future.
Many of the replies in this thread, though, seem to have come from Stalinist or Soviet (authoritarian/denialist) perspectives, rather than communist or leftist ones. IMO there’s a big difference.
We actually are communists. To say that “Stalinists,” “Soviets,” or “authoritarians” (lord knows what you mean by “denialist”) is absurd.
By far most communists in the world are Marxist-Leninists, and that’s what we are. Most Western communists/Marxists are not, but they are a small minority in the grand scheme of things. And there is a big difference: one has had several successful revolutions, some of which have survived to the present day, the other never has.
That's just simply objectively not true, and US global economic sanctions have killed over 28 million people in the last fifty years alone, according to the Lancet.
Soviet people's democracy was radically democratic in a way that no bourgeoise parliamentary democracy ever has been or ever could be. A cursory understanding of the origins and history of US 'democracy' makes it clear how completely absurd the notion is. The government is a committee for managing the affairs of the rich, and it has been since the very first moment that the worthy businessmen of the colonies gathered in each others mansions to split the profits of their stolen lands and conspire on how to keep the working class under control. The people of the United States have never decided a single thing in all of history, and the people of its subjugated colonies and vassal states have never even had the luxury of participating in its sham electoral pageantry.
There has never been a more brutally authoritarian, bloodsoaked nation than the United States, and the USSR is not only not close, is not only the opposite, but its violent dismemberment and the carving up of its society and economy by the US worldwide secret police actually did kill tens of millions of people - 16.9 million excess deaths by 2019 in fact, again according to the Lancet.
::: spoiler Furthermore, here is a map of the 1991 referendum on whether to keep the USSR :::
As you can see, an overwhelming supermajority of the population were in favor of keeping the Union together. However, Boris Yeltsin's CIA-aided, illegal dissolution of the USSR was forced through with extreme violence, during which over two thousand counter-protesters were killed - including members of the state parliament, the democratically elected body that tried to stop him!
::: spoiler Here's the House of Soviets after Yeltsin ordered tanks to open fire on it after the parliament impeached him and tried to block his illegal dissolution of the Union. :::
But we were talking about Germany, so did you know? A higher proportion of judges and government ministers were ('former') members of the Nazi party in 1973, than the proportion of active Nazis in the Third Reich in 1943? Did you know the first head of NATO, Adolf Heusinger, was Hitler's Chief of Staff? Or how about that West Germany had a social club for Wehrmacht soldiers that had invaded Africa.
::: spoiler Here's their badge! :::
The Nazis didn't lose the war except where the USSR got to them, everywhere else they were seamlessly integrated back into the western financial capitalist empire from which they had spawned. Lebensraum was inspired by Manifest Destiny and paid for by British and US banks. And now, US state media gets to come along, point at the results of their brutal political intervention, of their pet reactionaries trying to erase the history of a previous brutal military intervention, and by implication blame it on the nation they destroyed.
What a lot of whataboutism. You didn't directly answer a single one of my questions.
That's just simply objectively not true
Look at the footnotes here.
US state media
CNN? The same CNN that is being blocked by the White House?
Look at the "Origins" tab of the Wikipedia article on whataboutism you linked and sit with your feelings for a second.
I'm familiar with its origins. My feeling is: I used the word accurately.
"The tactic behind whataboutism has been around for a long time. Rhetoricians generally consider it to be a form of tu quoque, which means "you too" in Latin and involves charging your accuser with whatever it is you've just been accused of rather than refuting the truth of the accusation made against you. Tu quoque is considered to be a logical fallacy, because whether or not the original accuser is likewise guilty of an offense has no bearing on the truth value of the original accusation.
Whataboutism adds a twist to tu quoque by directing its energies into establishing an equivalence between two or more disparate actions...
The association of whataboutism with the Soviet Union began during the Cold War. As the regimes of Josef Stalin and his successors were criticized by the West for human rights atrocities, the Soviet propaganda machine would be ready with a comeback alleging atrocities of equal reprehensibility for which the West was guilty."
What a lot of whataboutism.
doesn't mean shit, just a crappy excuse to spout a lot of bullshit made up in your head and using "whataboutism" to deflect any criticism or points being made that contradicts your fantasy.
"Whataboutism" has a specific meaning. I used the word correctly.
No, he has proven that your claim that the Soviet Union was not democratic was wrong, providing an explanation and specific examples. Furthermore, he compared the number of deaths attributed to the Soviet Union with the figures for other states.
That's not whataboutism at all, and pointing out how utterly ignorant you are of even the most basic information about the subject under discussion, and how that led to you asking a bunch of irrelevant questions based on your absolutely incorrect assumptions is answering the questions behind your questions.
Besides, I see you didn't even bother to reply to the person who did answer all of your questions specifically with well sourced answers.
Seems more like you're trying to shit on communism and disingenuously spread long-debunked horse shit propaganda than like you're trying to have any genuine discussions.
That's not whataboutism at all
I asked 3 questions.
Instead of answering any, CascadeOfLight posted an irrelevant rant about US sanctions, Yeltsin, West Germany in the 1970s, Lebensraum, etc.
That is absolutely whataboutism.
I see you didn't even bother to reply to the person who did answer all of your questions specifically with well sourced answers.
Point me to exactly where someone "did answer all [my] questions specifically with well sourced answers".
Oh, you can't, because no-one did do that.
Here https://lemmy.zip/comment/29096459
let's see how you twist that into whataboutism
Blocked by Cloudflare :/
Right, so its disingenuousness and not merely ignorance or naivete.
Whataboutism is a concept cooked up by a british columnist in order to dismiss IRA criticism of actions taken by the british army. It was then popularised by a zionist to dismiss palestinians.
Also, you're using it wrong. "Whataboutism" is not just "whenever someone mentions anyone doing anything" it is especially not "whataboutism" when someone gives context to actions and accusations.
CNN? The same CNN that is being blocked by the White House?
Yes. I think you are aware enough to understand how disingenuous your argument is.
Tens of millions? Where who and when?
Look at the footnotes here.
Stalin killed trillions with his comically sized spoon by eating all the grain of Ukraine
The 1932–33 famine was not a genocide by any stretch of the imagination, except in the imagination of the Banderite fascists, who coined the term holomodor in the 1980s to evoke comparison to the Holocaust. But they are not comparable, because 1) the famine wasn’t intentional, and 2) more people died per capita in other parts of the Soviet Union than in Ukraine, and in particular more per capita in Russia proper than in Ukraine. The notion started as fascist, anti-communist double genocide propaganda, and you’re still propagating it today, over a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union.
over a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Thanks for the reminder that I'm old as fuck.
The 1932–33 famine was not a genocide by any stretch of the imagination
Given that most serious genocide scholars regard the Holodomor as a genocide, you're simply wrong.
double genocide
The double genocide article you posted links to the Holomor denial article, which describes your behaviour:
'Holodomor denial is easily distinguished from serious scholarship, and "generally consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades," often accompanied by accusations of foreign influence, Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.'
Blocked. Genocide denial crosses the line.
Since you're so fond of wikipedia articles
Why do you insist on downplaying the holocaust?
linking to a wikipedia article and calling Holodomor a genocide is fucking pathetic of you. It's just double genocide theory which is a form of genocide trivialization and undermines the severity that genocide carries
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I do not believe you have done that yourself.
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I did, and you have ignored it.
Lmao this guy trusts wikipedia as an unbiased source on political questions.
It states "as high as 148 million" and then uses This online article as a source - An article that is incredibly flawed, but also an article that is discussing death by starvation and counts those as "state killings". The academic work in the article is questionable, to say the least, and it is odd to use a source discussion famine to support claims of "killings" - Especially without adressing it. Following the same methodology the modern western governments are responsible for billions of deaths.
We could go through every source and the general methodology and find issues all the way throughout (Like quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski lmao wtf, so much for "unbiased" or "neutral"), but I won't waste my time, because I know to people like you the idea of dismissing wikipedia is akin to heresy to a spaniard in the 1700's.
edit: I should also mention the "as low as 10-20 million" is equally fraught and disingenuous. If we are going to count something ridiculous like some random dumbass on the internets claims, then we ought to do the same for the low estimate - Which would be about 0 then.
edit: Forgot to mention that youre talking specifically about soviets, while referring to an article that's just generally about "communist mass killings." Seems like you don't know what you're talking about and you just search for any article to back you up when pressured, without actually understanding the content of the article. Typical, but still sad.
One has to wonder on the methodology of the article, what constitutes a "communist" mass killing? It makes allusions to both the USSR and PRC, neither of which claimed or claims to be communist, but rather socialist. If the authors of the article can't even get such a basic thing right, then I have little faith in the quality of the rest of it.
I didn't want to waste my time reading the drivel closely, but I could see the other source of the 148 million claim included the Khmer Rouge - a regime installed and backed by the US. How does that fall under "communist"?
Lol. Any real sources on tens of millions of deaths under soviet rule?
Lol
You think mass killing is funny?
Any real sources
Go to the footnotes in the link I posted.
Coward
I think they're funny when they only exist in the imaginations of people like you, lmfao.
Right, so no sources.
- You: Sources?
- Me: [Points to article with dozens of reputable sources.]
- You: Right, so no sources.
Sheer denialism.
Germans when literal genocide: 😍
Germans when their Liberal symbolism is removed: 😡
Germans are efficient.
They're simply making place for new stumbling blocks for the holocaust they're supporting now.
Nazis don't like being reminded of their ugly
They don't like others being reminded of it.
The CDU saying "what firewall?" not for some generic conservative issue but for straightforward Nazi whitewashing sure is a choice.
It starts back up slowly...
Considering how completely in the tank for Zionists the previous government was I can't say I'm surprised many german people have turned back to their old ways...
How does your comment make sense?
It is possible to continue memorialising holocaust victims AND to condemn the genocide in Palestine.
The Holocaust is specifically commemorated to garner support for Israel. Any other genocide committed by Germany receives no attention nor does anything except the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
The West has turned the Holocaust into a convenient event they can use to guilt trip people into supporting genocide. Holocaust museums even support the genocide in Palestine and call those who oppose it antisemitic. It has turned into the biggest farce.
For more info: Holocaust Education is for Israel
Actually Oct 7 is the new holocaust. That's the hinge point that Israel wants the narrative to pivot on.
The old holocaust is now inconvenient to Israel because of it's obvious and overt parallels to what's happening to Palestinians.
Israeli propaganda wings aren't just ignoring rising Nazism and holocaust denial; they're practically in full collaboration with it.
It's kind of wild to claim that the holocaust is only commemorated to garner support for Israel.
It's kind of wild to claim the opposite despite the amountains of evidence.
What do you call this? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/7/us-holocaust-museum-removes-anti-genocide-post-amid-gaza-atrocities
Thank you for the down vote. Yes I realize that obviously this case the museum should not have taken down that post. It is however quite another thing to claim that the only reason such a large genocide is taught about is to garner support for Israel. You can learn about and recognize that a genocide took place while also recognizing that another is taking place in Gaza. Your "mountains" of evidence btw has currently been one news article and a YouTube video.
It's not just one instance and once again you're ignoring everything else in the comment with it.
https://youtu.be/i0OkIVyBBVs
