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I'm curious about how well-informed most Americans are about the Soviet Union. Do they know that it was once a place where ordinary people were accused of crimes without evidence, taken away without a trial, and never seen again? Do they know that this generally happened because of the smallest suspicion that a person was not fanatically loyal to the government, rather than a violent criminal? Do they know that a million people were killed this way? And do they know that the Soviet Union was one of many places like that?
I expect that the Soviet Union doesn't seem particularly relevant to younger generations of voters, but isn't this the sort of lurid history that did interest them as adolescents? And don't older voters remember the Cold War?
I think the sad reality is: Criticism of the Soviets by now has been reduced to just a surface level "feeling" of their tyranny. Basically a thought of what made it tyrannical was the lip services to communism and the red flags - not understanding the actual problems underneath. In the worst case, some people even openly say, that it's just that they put the wrong people into the Gulag, to then post memes about throwing lefties out of helicopters.
I think history has shown by now, both the Soviets' criticism of US imperialism, and the West's criticism of Soviet human rights abuses has always had huge hypocrisies within, both systems very much capable of the crimes of the other. We need another international class based movement, that doesn't get caught up in national interest like that.
Part of the problem is the cold war propaganda was so laser focused on "communism bad" that much of why the USSR was bad was lost. The older generation still have a knee jerk reaction to the word communism that right wing media frequently exploits to generate a cheap emotional reaction by accusing any group they don't like of being communist. Meanwhile the real horrors of the USSR are largely ignored lest people start drawing parallels with current events.
Yes, Americans have somehow come to believe that, among the things the USSR did, providing housing and education to ordinary people is bad, while disappearing people based on their political opinions to be killed or worked to death in gulags is good.
I wonder how many Americans know that this was the reality in Chile, after the USA funded and supported a coup that killed the elected president in the only truly stable and functional democracy of South America at the time, in order to instate a ruthless dictator.
My former boss did time as a kid in a gulag. He spent years there. He could not tell you what he did. He is Jewish so it could be that but it was post Stalin.
The settler-states need to be de-Nazified.
HitlerPig's leashholder, Putin, began his career in the late-stage Soviet Union's KGB, when things were so so corrupt, chaotic, wrecked, etc. that they simply collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence.
Putin knew how to navigate the chaos and even use it to his advantage, and now he's plunging us into political and economic chaos so he can exploit and loot us, with HitlerPig and Musk as his muscle.