the thing I love about tankies is they hate the US as much as I do 🥰

I don't think any "tankie" is going to have their minds changed by this post. Unless they're a 90 year old Russian who has gone out of there way to avoid "western propaganda" they've already heard all these points a million times over.

If anything posts like these reinforce their identity because they can dunk on them with their prepared rebuttals to all of this.

It's a natural pendulum moment. We are flooded with anticommunist propaganda, so when you start lifting up the curtain and seeing more and more of the lies, you can start wondering what else was a lie.

That's the moment all sorts of ideologies jump out of the woodwork to recruit you, and given most of your education was a subjugating lie you probably don't have the tools to distinguish them that well.

And that's how you end up with people denying the holocaust or thinking covid is fake or saying Stalin wasn't so bad actually.

So as we're dismantling capitalism we're going to have to constantly help people find their footing in reality, including helping them reaffirm the parts of capitalist propaganda that were true enough.

This. Even in my psychology of genocide course in uni, a lot of it was focused on Hitler being the worst, and not much about Stalin.

Sort of related sort of not, I learned in the last few years how awful the British were, too. Different levels of awful, but I'm thinking because Canada is a commonwealth country and was pretty much run by the Brits back in the day, the Brits excluded from our education the bad things they did, ie to native Americans/First Nations people, Africa, etc. I didn't learn about any of that.. So I think what they wanted people to learn and what they wanted people to forget shaped what was taught in Canadian schools.

So, like many others, I was awed and excited by the royals. Now that I know what they've been trying to hide, meh.

Israel weaponized the Holocaust and drilled two falsehoods into everyone's head:

1. Jews were the only victims.
2. The Holocaust is a special genocide that hasn't happened before or since, is the worst crime in recorded history, and no one should dare question that.

This allows them to genocide Palestinians while calling everyone who questions their ethno supremacist expansionist colonial project a Nazi.

6 million Jews were murdered, out of 17 million victims.

Genocide of Indigenous Americans (1492–1832): it is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population, amounting to over 55 million people, died due to violence, forced labor, and disease after European colonization.

Mao Zedong (China, 1958–1961/1966–1969): Historians estimate that between 30-70 million people died due to famine, persecution, and forced labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Mongol Conquests (13th Century): Under Genghis Khan, it is estimated that 30-60 million people were killed, representing about 10% of the world's population at the time.

To name a few... Hitler was a monster, but he was hardly the worst monster.

Definitely this. This is what they chose the curriculum to cover more.

There’s a spectre haunting stoly

*how bad a straw man version of communism is

To be fair, having authoritarian government means you'll absolutely have an oppressive regime at some point.

If anything, Stalin was the one to cement authoritarianism as the system of power in USSR and make sure it cannot be reverted without massive issues in the form of separatism, civil disobedience, and more. The subsequent leaders could only open the valve of democracy so much without breaking the country apart.

So, it's not just leaders, it's the system of authoritarian power and imperialism. Communism and socialism must be democratic and directly managed by worker's councils, bottom to top (i.e. Soviet in its original sense), lest you fall into the same trap with any leader eventually.

Yeah, the Western world preferred to export violence, not keep it home-grown