So in 1945… what happened to Poland… since they legally succeeded from the USSR they were a free country again right?

In 1945, the soviets installed a friendly communist government in Poland, while granting it again the right to be an independent country, kind of proving that the objective from the start wasn’t “to conquer Poland because Russians are so evil”, but to not have enemies in their borders. There were purges of anticommunists as everywhere else in the soviet block.

Now I’ll ask you: in 1989 and forwards, with the Solidarity movement. Do you believe that’s a grassroots movement which spawned purely in Poland, with the only goal of freedom and democracy, and wasn’t in any way influenced by other countries? Hint: USA? The 1989 “revolution” was completely autonomous and legitimate and now Poland is finally a completely free state?

So actually it looks like Russia propaganda in the 1940s thanks to De Gaulle’s personal opinions on the matter

Funny how the purported opinion of polish citizens about Russia isn’t affected by propaganda, but the french polls are somehow.

You seem to be under some belief that the USSR never committed atrocities

I never claimed anything like that. I’m aware of the Katyn massacre and the purges of anticommunists in the USSR on a widespread level, just not particularly against Poland.

genocide levels of damage to Poland

Sorry, only Polish people actually believe that. There’s no international body as far as I know which makes any claim of genocide towards Polish by the USSR.

Tell me one I’m defending

they’re monsters

Great, now you’re not talking even of Russia as a country, but of Russians as a people, and calling them universally monsters, whether they’re peasants under the Russian Empire, workers in the Soviet Union, or citizens under the Russian Federation. Nice way to show everyone here that yes, your whole point here is Russophobia, not legitimate and credible analysis of history and societies.

Again, as I said, impossible to discuss with most Polish people, you’re not arguing from reason but from nationalism and racism. Good night, and good luck

My point is it should be

I used that link not from a Reddit thread, I just know the graph and the easiest way for me to find it was to google-image-search it, and it’s the first link that I could copy-paste, since it’s more productive imo to link a graph than an entire study, since it’s a comment section and not a scientific article.

So basically, your whole argument is, “the graph is kinda sus and I don’t trust the source, probably russian propaganda, I hate Russia and I hate Nazis”. Not the strongest rebuttal in my opinion.

Regardless. Notice how your phrase isn’t “I hate Nazis and I hate the USSR and I hate the modern Russian government”. You can make the distinction between Germany and Nazis, but you can’t make the distinction between the Russian governments at different times and the nation as a whole. This proves further my point that your hatred is more Russophobia than actual historical criticism of the actions of governments.

Suddenly you only go as far back as WW2, not to the German-occupied regions of Poland before and during WW1. We forget about those because they weren’t Russian, don’t we? Those pesky friendly Germans in western Poland, who cares, nothing happened before Nazism, the important thing are the evil Russians. But of course we remember the Poland under the Russian Empire! Because that actually aligns with the contemporary Polish foundational myth!

Never mind that the Bolsheviks granted Poland the legal right to secede in 1917 immediately after the October revolution, and Poland used that power to immediately proceed to invade the similarly recently independent Ukraine and even some soviet lands because of nationalist conceptions of historical borders. It’s somehow all the fault of Russians after all, isn’t it? Much better to forbid communist parties in Poland while you have literal Nazis in parliament using fire extinguishers against Jewish symbols!

What’s your point? Every rape is to be condemned and prosecuted. What isn’t fair is making up claims about the amount of rapes by a certain demographic and not backing that up with extensive evidence. That exactly what racist people do against immigrants, and that’s what Nazis did against soviets.

I can see it in my browser and my phone, but sure. It’s a poll showing how in 1945, 55% of French people claimed the USSR freed them from Nazism. In 2015 it’s 25%. That’s exactly propaganda.

When you are ready to spend 10% of the time you spend shitting on communism and the USSR, actually shitting on the Nazism which carried out actual genocide in your country, I’ll be ready to talk with you. I’m sorry that the Polish foundational myth is based on Russophobia and anti-communism, it’s impossible to have meaningful discussions of 20th century socialism with most polish people.

Good job evading the uncomfortable 90% of my comment. Since we’re at that point, I will proceed to evade 100% of yours, seeing how you’re not interested in discussing actual facts such as the reasons for the USSR to make a non aggression treaty with the Nazis after a decade of systematic rejection of military alliances by Poland, England and France.

Yes. Propaganda.

Got it bro, the actual Nazis aren’t the Nazis, neither the ones who eliminated the most radical oppositors to Nazism, but actually the ones that died 26+mn of trying to fight them. God, you anti-communist revisionists are exhausting.

The Bolsheviks actively collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis, right up until Operation Barbarossa

Ugh, not this Nazi talking point again… The Soviet Union pursued for all the 30s a policy called “collective security”, in which it desperately tried to achieve mutual-defense pacts with England, France and Poland because the soviets knew that their 15-year-old nation which had only just started industrializing since the end of the feudal and backwards Russian Empire, didn’t have a chance alone against the Nazis with their 150 year long history of industry (as would be seen later with the USSR suffering 26+mn deaths during the war, in places like Belarus 1 in 4 people died). The USSR wanted these mutual defense agreements to the point of offering to send 1 million soldiers to France and England if they agreed to mutual defense… which France, England and Poland denied because they thought Nazis would attempt their declared goal of eliminating communisnm and massacring the “slavic untermenschen”. After this was denied and it was obvious that the west would rather see the USSR invaded than reach a mutual defense agreement, they did the only possible course of action: delaying the war as much as possible to prepare for it and industrialize a bit more. That’s where the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact takes place, not before a decade of exhausting every possible negotiation route with France and England in opposition to Nazism.

The fact that the USSR then proceeded to (rather bloodlessly, around 50k deaths overall, very comparable to the oppression within the USSR itself) invade Poland, has to do with the USSR not trusting the Polish government. Why? In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution drafted an unprecedentedly progressive constitution which granted the right to self-determination and lawful secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire. That’s how many countries such as Finland or Poland suddenly gained independence lawfully and peacefully in a never-before-seen act of respect of the right of self-determination. What did Poland immediately proceed to do? Become fully nationalist, ignore the right to self-determination of other peoples, and invade Ukraine (and later the USSR) in an attempt to gain territories they considered theirs by historical right. When they had conquered a good chunk of modern Ukraine and Belarus, the Polish Government decided it was a good idea to start a war against the USSR, since the USSR was plunged deep into a civil war and didn’t have many resources or troops to defend itself, and some conquests and victories could grant them a positive peace agreement which granted the territories the Polish Nationalists considered theirs (while ignoring the right to self-determination that the Bolsheviks had granted them less than two years earlier). Poland was also happy to make peace and appeasement treaties with Nazi Germany as long as they could also get some territorial gains from Czechoslovak land.

Similarly, Finland in 1917 after gaining independence, was plunged into a civil war between communists and whites, which the latter won and proceeded to imprison communists in Finland who had supported the Reds, around 80k of which some 12k died (funny how nobody talks about that). The USSR had reasons to suspect of a possible alliance between the Finnish government and the Nazis, and proceeded to invade Finland. After the failure of the invasion, as you said, Finland joined the Nazis.

Blaming the USSR for entering a non-aggression treaty with the Nazis, when all western nations had done it, and after 10 years of the USSR trying to make mutual defense agreement with Poland, England and France, is at best ignorant, and at worst purposefully misinforming with an agenda. The USSR had reasons to suspect of Poland and Finland (especially given its history of constant betrayals by all European powers since the October Revolution, with 14 countries sending troops to aid the Tsarist loyalists against the Bolsheviks) and, while outright invasions may not be justified, it could all have been prevented if the western powers had actually agreed to fight nazism. It’s absolutely nuts to blame the USSR and call them “collaborators with Nazis” given the historical background of the two decades before the war, especially the latter.

Wow, so the released KGB archives show the tapes. I wonder what would happen if the Americans or the English did that too!

Hatred of Russians by eastern Europeans is due to 30+ years of anti-communist propaganda. The fact that poles hate the USSR which liberated more than the very Nazis who genocided millions of them, shows this. And it wasn’t the case 40 years ago.

Polls in France after WW2 showed 70%+ of people saying it was the USSR who saved them from Nazism. Nowadays, it’s 70% Americans. That’s what Hollywood and propaganda do.

So we both agree that the Stalinist Sovietunion and the KPD, which allied themselves with them arent left?

One country ended up with Nazis. The other ended up defeating the Nazis. I’d say the Bolsheviks did a better job, didn’t they? The fact that there was oppression against Mensheviks and SRs in the context of a civil war, doesn’t mean they’re anticommunists, they didn’t quite literally enable the Nazis in order to murder the ones who were more communist than them, but defeat them instead.

Want to find the blame for Nazism in Germany? The fault is primarily of Nazis, and then of Nazi enablers, and then of anti-communist leftists.

As did everyone. There’s no study showing that the amount of rapes per soldier by the soviets is higher than that of other nations.

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Trump is a Gaddafi? Trump wants to nationalize the main sources of wealth of the country, to redirect the profits towards the majority of the population, towards education and healthcare and infrastructure? Trump is a weird form of socialist who believes in something analogous in America to the Pana-Africanism and Pan-Arabism that Gaddafi promoted?

What the hell is that comparison?

The problem with the left everywhere is they don’t have the balls to actually take action

Wait, I thought the problem is that the communists are oppressive tankies. What’s the conclusion then, the left goes too far or it doesn’t go far enough?

They all talk about tolerance and how dialogue should make people change and be the politicians language. No. Certain things shouldn’t be tolerated. Fascism and nazism are two of those

Please tell me, which ideology do the famous and vilified “antifa”, the ones who actually go and punch Nazis, espouse? Are they lukewarm Dems, are they republicans? Or are they actual leftists, both anarchists and communists?

The problem is that the left is afraid of being seen as “authoritarian” so when a fascist comes and openly says they want to fuck democracy until it becomes a dictatorship, leftists just say “hey now, let’s sit down and talk”.

This is true in some cases, not in others. You can argue this is true for Salvador Allende in Chile, you can maybe even argue for pre-spanish civil war Second Republic, but you can’t argue this about Maoists or Marxist-Leninists. Those are as far to the left as it gets, isn’t it?

Maybe the problem isn’t with “the left not being active enough”, but with democrats in the US and socialdemocrats in Europe co-opting the left thanks to the power of mass media? Maybe the problem is the century of anti-communist propaganda that we’ve suffered?

the communist still considered the SPD to be the bigger threat and refused to march with them

…which was confirmed when they agreed with the Nazis… And when they collaborated with the Freikorps to crush, torture, and murder the communists.

And the SPD of the 1930 were by no means “liberals”. They were further to the left than any democrat has ever been.

Go ask Rosa Luxembourg, leader of communists in Germany and murdered at 47 at the order of SPD, how progressive and left the SPD was. “Left is when you agree to murder and torture communists”. Fucking revisionists man

I’m in Europe and things aren’t really better here… Putin on the east, LePen and Meloni on the west…

What I try to say is that taxes don’t pay for public infrastructure directly. The state creates an expenditure budget, and decides which taxes it’s gonna charge. The fact that many politicians don’t know better and conflate the two, has more to do with ignorance and believing the dogma of neoliberalism, than it has to do with the expenditure of public money and with taxation. Most politicians effectively treat taxes as if they do pay for the public infrastructure, but those concerns suddenly disappear when it comes to rescuing a bank, or to exceeding the military budget, and they remember that states can pay for that stuff without needing to collect that money through taxes in the first place. They even bother to remind us of that when it’s the case. In the 2010 Euro crisis, Spain (I’m Spanish) 60bn € in rescuing a set of Spanish banks. Our then economy minister, Luis de Guindos, kindly reminded everyone that “this isn’t going to cost a single euro to the taxpayer”. So yeah, they only remind us about which stuff “needs” to be paid for taxes when it’s actually important, such as healthcare, education or pensions, but they suddenly forget about that requirement when it comes to increasing military budget extraordinarily after budgets were approved, or to rescue a bank.

Your point about hyperinflation is a good one, and remember that I’m not claiming we should start creating infinite money for everyone. In the EU, for example, we have a theoretical budget deficit limit of 3% for many decades now. If you examine the historical reasons for this limit, it comes from a meeting some decades ago in which some higher-ups of the EU met for some hours to decide on a deficit limit, in the full reagan/thatcher period. They came out of the meeting with the number of the 3% limit, and also with the suggested 60% maximum debt as percentage of GDP. The 3% deficit limit was made up on the spot, literally in 30 minutes by a French economist called Guy Abelle, which he has admitted to later in life. The 60% debt was based on a study that compared the health of economies and their percentage of debt… until the study was found many years later to be faulty, because it had significant errors in the spreadsheets used to calculate that number, and upon correcting that there was no suggested number anymore… Look up “Reinhart and Rogoff mistake” on your favourite search engine. So yeah, those rules are absolutely made up and they don’t obey any experimental or scientific criteria. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be a limit to budget, but the conclusion I want to get across is that deficit isn’t a bad thing since it amounts to increasing the wealth of the public sector, and the limit of deficit should be calculated or even experimented with based on real, empirical data from real economies, and not what some old neoliberal farts decide in a meeting one evening.

I’ll finish with an analysis of a case of hyperinflation, that of Venezuela in the recent years. Venezuela is and has been for the past century an economy based on oil exports. In the year 2014, oil prices were reduced from $130 per barrel, to below half of that. In an economy reliant on oil exports, this meant that Venezuela’s purchase power to the outside world suddenly halved, with a corresponding immense drop in GDP. This is what originally led to a high inflation. Now, the price of goods for citizens is so high that they can barely afford them or not afford them completely. As a state with a central bank, you’re confronted with two choices: you leave things be, and people literally don’t have money to buy their basic needs; or you create money so that people can at least afford them for some time. The response was to create the money to alleviate the harshest consequences. This in turn enables the possibility that people can still buy products that are in shortage, which makes the price even higher, and the cycle restarts. The consequence, as we saw, was hyperinflation. But this hyperinflation wasn’t triggered by money creation, it was triggered by an external event, i.e. the drop to half the price of the country’s biggest export good and biggest sector of the economy. Of course the government could have decided to let the people starve, and there would have been only huge inflation and not hyperinflation, but is that really a solution? The goal is to prevent hyperinflation, or to minimize human suffering? Javier Milei, for example, seems to be currently on the path to “solve” the inflation problem in Argentina… By making the citizens so poor, that they can’t afford to buy the goods and services, so that the businesses can’t rise the prices. Sure, inflation goes down, but not by solving the economic underlying problems, and instead by creating immense amounts of suffering so that “the line can finally go down”.

I appreciate your willingness to listen, all of this seemed crazy to me just a few years ago, but everything makes so much more sens when analysing the economy from the point of view of modern monetary theory, and the predictive capabilities of the theory are so much better, it’s been proven so much during the COVID pandemic and the posterior inflation crisis.

You can absolutely reduce coal and gas without batteries. Hydro is a thing, nuclear also exists. Maybe it’s cheaper and more environmentally-friendly to disconnect some solar and some wind from the grid during excess peak production and keep the nuclear running, than having huge storage? Also you’re forgetting about the possibility for instant demand response, imagine things like AC units in summer or heaters in winter, where they could be turned on automatically during peak production to keep your house comfier for no cost.