Honestly though how the fuck do people eat 3500 calories a day, are you just eating all day long? I can barely force myself to break 2000.
Without seeing how they arrived at those numbers, I’m going to assume they aren’t accounting for food waste. They might be using food “sold/purchased.”
i do 3000 calories of cardio a week and find it hard to eat only 2k. I started counting my calories about half a year ago and I was eating 3k/day. I cut it down to 2k and tried to make better diet choices and lost about 30 lbs, but I’m really fricking hungry all the time due to how much I exercise.
I’m going to stick with the countless eye-witness reports and first hand experiences of older people who lived through it over the American lie machine pretty much any day of the week.
reactionaries like you believe everything the CIA says today, then disbelieves everything they declassify 60 years later. Which is funny, since they only declassify things once they’re low stakes, and have fallen out of public attention, and no longer matter strategically. If the CIA said “we have nothing to do with this coup against socialists in Latin America” 60 years ago, you’d have believed them. But if today they were like “yeah we totally did that shit.” suddenly you’re willing to call them The Lie Machine. You believe them whenever they are lying, and you disbelieve them whenever they finally admit the truth. This is because you believe what is convenient to your reactionary anti-worker national chauvinist ideology.
people who lived through it
most people in the USSR voted to preserve it
Big “I’m going with the constitution and the rule of law” energy
We should have a Jennifer Rubin emote. I would use it all the time
Did you request it at !emoji@hexbear.net?
I’m sure the “constitution and rule of law” types are against the illegal dissolution of the Soviet Union. Right?
Since you care oh so much about what other people think, particularly from the people that actually lived in communism, you will 100% change your view if the majority of them have a positive opinion right? Yes? Yessssss? (I doubt it, but let’s get some real data in here shall we?)
7 out of 11 countries believe the end of the USSR harmed their countries rather than benefited them
Reflecting back on the breakup of the Soviet Union that happened 22 years ago next week, residents in seven out of 11 countries that were part of the union are more likely to believe its collapse harmed their countries than benefited them. Only Azerbaijanis, Kazakhstanis, and Turkmens are more likely to see benefit than harm from the breakup. Georgians are divided.
Hungary: 72% of Hungarians say they are worse off today economically than under communism
A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country’s economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country’s switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary’s integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.
Romania: 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism
The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.
Germany: more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR
Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an “illegitimate state.” In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
28 percent of Czechs say they were better off under the Communist regime
Roughly 28 percent of Czechs say they were better off under the Communist regime, according to a poll conducted by the polling institute SC&C and released Sunday.
81% of Serbians believe they lived best in Yugoslavia
A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -”during the time of socialism”.
The majority of Russians polled in a 2016 study said they would prefer living under the old Soviet Union and would like to see the socialist system and the Soviet state restored.
The claims you have read in reddit comments are almost always made by Americans, whose brains are riddled with red scare brainworms and are completely devoid of any knowledge or understand of what the left thinks in Europe, because Americans do not have a left.
Let’s end on something a bit more scientific than polls of people’s feelings:
In 28 of 30 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes.
I think that should just about cover it all. I don’t think any of this will change your mind because you’re clearly ideologically committed to your anticommunist brainworms, but someone with more intelligence and less stubbornness might happen by that has fewer personal failings.
I can’t find it right now but Ghodsee regular brings up in interviews that a (I think) World Bank study of post re-united Germany showed that unification was so disadvantageous to the former GDR that years later the population’s children were stunted in height at levels typically found in countries that experienced famine, or something like that.
Yeah. It’s a lot to go through and a lot more than I was expecting. I’m open to being wrong here, most of the people I’ve met don’t seem to indicate anything similar to the above, but that could still be broadly anecdotal. Certainly a lot to think about and read up on here, and I’m not anti communist at all, but I think that WWII alone is enough for me to be anti-Stalin and make me less likely to believe that his people were treated well. I could be wrong there too.
I’ll point out though that I’m not making an argument. It’s literally impossible to “undermine” someone’s experience unless they’re lying about it. And I’m more likely to believe someone about their experience over the numbers which describe what their experience should have been. I still see some humility in that, but I would understand if not everyone does
Nice job cherry picking some random CIA document! Btw, it’s from 1983, thirty years after Stalin died. You made an honest mistake, I’m sure.
Stalin used starvation as weapon quite effectively. 4-5 miillion died in the 1930s, mostly Ukrainians.
More Kahazkhs died in those famines than Ukrainians but nobody talks about that because the CIA hasn’t been funding Kazakh Nazis for the better part of a century
Stalin used starvation as weapon quite effectively.
The idea that Stalin intentionally committed genocide in Ukraine is literal Nazi propaganda that was in turn pushed by right-wing groups in the US. Great article on it here:
It may not be sheer coincidence that faminology took wing just after the OSI was commissioned in 1979. For here was a way to rehabilitate fascism- — to prove that Ukrainian collaborators were helpless victims, caught between the rock of Hitler and Stalin’s hard place. To wit, this bit of psycho-journalism from the 33 March 24 Washington Post, in a story on accused war criminal John “Ivan the Terrible” Demjanjuk: “The pivotal event in Demjanjuk’s childhood was the great famine of the early 1930s, conceived by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a way of destroying the independent Ukrainian peasantry … Several members of [Demjanjuk’s] family died in the catastrophe.”
Coupled with the old nationalist canard of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” faminology could help justify anti-Semitism, collaboration, even genocide. An eye for an eye; a Nazi holocaust in return for a “Jewish famine.”
Just as the Nazis used the OUN for their own ends, so has Reagan exploited the famine, from his purple-prosed commemoration of “this callous act” to his backing of the Mace commission. Faced with failing fascist allies around the world, from Nicaragua to South Africa, the U.S. war lobby needs to boost anti-Communism as never before. Public enthusiasm to fight for the contras will not come easy. But if people could be convinced that Communism is worse than fascism; that Stalin was an insane monster, even worse than Hitler; that the seven million died in more unspeakable agony than the six million …. Well, we just might be set up for the next Gulf of Tonkin. One cannot appease an Evil Empire, after all.
The article is from 1988 by the way, in case you were wondering about the reference to the Contras.
If it’s all Reagan’s fault, why did this cherry-picked post say the Soviets were being well fed in 1983?
You should take a look at this infographic. It answers all of your questions.
I mean, no one’s gonna post a 30 page paper from a social science journal in the memes comm.
If you’d like a more nuanced discussion, you’re welcome to read The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 by Davies and Wheatcroft (arguably the most detailed scholarly study and account of the Soviet Famine) and discuss it with the site on the literature or askchapo comms.
What a powerful argument, clearly 35 years later this article has pushed countless others to uncover the truth behind the Ukrainian famines.
Or, perhaps if the Holodomor is still recognized as a man-made famine, that this article’s author is mistaken.
So much for Stalin’s citizenry having enough to eat.
Did someone allege genocide?
Prisoners in the United States jumped from 120,284 in 1923 to 210,418 in 1933. (Source (p. 210))
Executions increased to 197, the highest number in US history, in 1935. (Source)
The U.S. forcibly deported one million of its own citizens to Mexico in the 1930s. Source
Since you’re probably using an intentionally ridiculous US estimate, I’ll use an intentionally ridiculous Russian estimate and say that seven million people died from the Great Depression. This Russian estimate uses the same intentionally ridiculous methodology of the U.S. one.
Put together, why isn’t this enough to declare that a genocide happened in the U.S.?
When did this become binary?
