this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
46 points (81.1% liked)

Memes

55046 readers
482 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] davel@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Your own source said he murdered a ton of people.

I didn’t provide any sources.

If you want to promote communism, don’t use a goddamn mass murderer to market it.

[–] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip -3 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

Killing bad people doesn't undo killing good people. This isn't the argument you think it is.

Hitler killed Hitler, didn't undo all the bad he did. And wasn't he a capitalist? Stalin wasn't a good person just because Hitler stabbed his own ally in the back, and the ussr started killing their former allies . Or are we pretending Stalin hadn't allied with the nazis in the beginning of the war, here?

[–] RiverRock@lemmy.ml 1 points 48 minutes ago

Quick question, what's this?

[–] BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 hour ago

Or are we pretending Stalin hadn’t allied with the nazis in the beginning of the war, here?

Westerners truly are the most propagandized people on the planet

[–] RiverRock@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Look man, I'm gonna tell you something you're probably gonna write off as Bad Guy Villain dialogue or an attempt to "brainwash" you:

Good People and Bad People don't exist in real life. They exist in movies and comic books written by people who grew up in societies less than a century out of the domination of various religions. These are magical, religious ideas about the nature of reality you've unquestionably accepted because that's what was in the entertainment you grew up on, same as the rest of us. But it's not real life. In real life, there's just People.

People are animals who seek comfort and propserity by making decisions within a predetermined range of possibilities, and that's it. No angels, no demons, no omnipoten god watching in judgement. The terms these religions use have no scientific wight or meaning, and Marxism is scientific. We are concerned with what can be observed and measured. Good and Evil don't mean shit when you're talking about observable reality, any more than Karma or Sin or any of the other mystical ways in which people have tried to make sense of the world in the past. Your way of analyzing reality and human beings is fundamentally mystical, hypocritical and disconnected from reality.

There is no person on earth who couldn't be classified as a "bad person". It's less than meaningless: it actually impairs understanding and paralyzes decision making, because there is no "Good" choice. All the hallowed saints of liberal civic religion were "Bad" people. MLK cheated on his wife. Ghandi was a fucking creep to his niece. Lincoln committed indigenous genocide. But they are venerated anyway because they were either effective at advancing the interests of those who are now powerful enough to culturally mandate their veneration, or were coopted by the powers they opposed in order to make harmless sanitized icons of their messy human existence. That's it. That's the entire calculus behind who you hold in esteem and who you hold in contempt. You like who you were told to like, and you hate who you were told to hate, without ever really considering why. If you were born in Soviet Russia, you would have the exact opposite opinion, as millions of Russians did and still do. The difference would be that approval of Stalin is much, much easier to make an evidence-based case for than mystical condemnation is.

It's like how liberals think that communist theory has some magical eldritch power that will instantly turn you into a communist if you read and understand it. It doesn't. It just presents a well-reasoned case, grounded in observable reality, for the abolition of the world-drstroying system of omni-exploitation we all suffer under. It starts with facts and works it's way towards a conclusion, rather than starting from a conclusion and working it's way backwards with carefully curated facts. And to a liberal, that might as well be magic. That's why you have all these cute little phrases like whataboutism that in practice simply mean "I refuse to consider what you are saying for longer than it takes to dismiss it out of hand with a gesture at some social rule built just for this purpose."

Your entire worldview has been constructed by bourgeois high priests not for the function of understanding the world, but crippling your ability to understand anything. It's a hermetically sealed library of pre-existing, neatly labeled boxes for messy realities to be roughly shoved into and examined no further. This is Idealism: the belief that there are eternal, ironclad categories that reality comports itself to. This is wrong: reality comports itself however it wants, and we invent the categories after the fact. The categories of Good and Bad people are as invented as the categories of Good and Bad music. People and music simply are, formed and determined by their relationship with the world around them. It is reality that determines itself, not our post-hoc ideas about it, and certainly not ideas from the medieval era.