this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
1085 points (96.2% liked)
memes
15933 readers
3229 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Stalin 1936 constitution. Holidays for "enemies of the people" were unpaid and in a quite cold climate of Siberia. They also cared about fitness of citizens by ensuring no one has too much of food. And if you didn't like it, you get a free ride in a black car to the place of final rest.
Not true. The GULAG system, which is simply the prison system of the Soviet Union at the time, did pay inmates a wage while they worked there, this is common knowledge and you can check it up if you want to.
Really? The Gulags were all in Siberia? How about you actually check what you're talking about instead of spreading misinformation? From the Gulag museum:
www.gulag.online/articles/mapa-taborovych-sprav-gulagu-a-pribehu-ze-stredni-evropy?locale=en
Wow, a ton of Gulags were actually to the west of the Urals, not in Siberia, who would have thought. If only this information was widely available and public...
Huh? Life expectancy in the Soviet Union rose exponentially, it was below 30 years of age before the Russian Revolution and 60 by the time Stalin died. The diet of the Soviet citizen was by the 60s healthier than that of a US citizen. The CIA itself says this BTW, check out on google "CIA USSR nutrition", you'll find a 1983 document claiming, and I quote, "American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of rood each day but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious". Almost as if centering food production around the needs of the population instead of around the profit of food producers, gives a better result...
Just admit it: you don't have any fucking idea what you're talking about. You're repeating talking points you've heard on Reddit or TV without actually checking anything.
My former boss was in a gulag for most of his teens. He was not paid and to this day he has no idea what crime he was convicted of. He just knows he served time and was targeted by guards because he was Jewish and the Soviets were very bigoted.
Maybe take a second to ask yourself what your real life experience is with the USSR.
you mean exactly like US prisions? or my country.
No one is in a US prison who has not had the opportunity to be present at their trial or know why they are charged.
The nation I am talking about ceased to exist decades ago so whatever “your country” is it isn’t the USSR which is what we are talking about.
and i am telling you your prision system (and mine, but mainly yours) is worse than even the exaggerations portrayed as soviet gulags.
Not according to people I know who experienced both. In the USA you know your charges and you might not be enslaved.
The USSR was evil and racist. It’s one of the reasons why they failed.
the US prision system legally and literally enslaves people today. prisioners work in the US.
the US is evil and racist today. your gulags hold almost a quarter of the planet's entire prision population.
hence the “might not get enslaved”. You might not get enslaved in the US system. The USSR was enslaving all in the gulags.
As you have repeatedly backed the evils of an authoritarian racist system are you in a place to judge anyone morally?
Please change, we don’t need more people defending racism.
so thats a big change of tone here. my man the US system is the most brutal in the planet, especially for people outside of it. trump is only giving you a small taste of what you do to us. you can't put 20% of the planet in prision and take the moral high ground.
you guys are the only ones who need changing. the real racism is what you do to black people and latino immigrants TODAY. please look inside before trying to use propaganda to smear a country that hasnt existed for 4 decades as if that makes the west any less awful.
No it's what was said in a previous post. Your lack of reading comprehension in this case is worth noting in light of what follows which is incorrect and inane.
is us imperialism not a thing? is that incorrect?
or is it the brutality of your prisions?
Surely people going to jail for the wrong reason is something exclusive to the Soviet Union and not to all countries with a legal system? Like, damn, I feel sorry for your boss, but in dire circumstances such as those of the late 30s / early 40s in the USSR, excesses and abuses were sadly made because of the overwhelming conditions.
Your boss may have spent his teens in a gulag, but the fact that he lived to tell you that is because the Soviets managed to miraculously defeat the Nazis and prevent them from genociding the Slavic peoples they categorised as "Untermenschen" according to the infamous "Generalplan Ost", which implied genocide of almost all people between Germany and the Urals. If it wasn't for the Soviets, your former boss would have been murdered in a concentration camp by the nazis.
It isn't common for people to be sent to slave camps as a punishment for years without knowing why they were charged. That’sthe kind of evil unique to totalitarian shitholes like the USSR.
The same nation you are praising put him IN a concentration camp for no fucking reason other than potentially because of his race.
No, you don’t. You wouldn’t be supporting their evil actions in this case if you had any empathy.
You are making a lot of apologies for overt racism, why are you doing this and why do you think the USSR’s racism should be praised?
Ever heard of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo?
The Gulag episode lasted less than two decades, by the mid-50s it was a thing of the past and never resurfaced in the country. Almost as if it was a mass hysteria response to Nazi infiltration, and not born out of a desire to oppress people inherently. Again, at the peak of the Gulag system, the prison population was similar to that of modern USA. Much more authoritarian if you ask me
Yes, I'm praising this nation because even if it did mistakes, by industrialising eastern Europe and by eliminating Nazis it saved hundreds of millions of lives.
I'm not supporting the excesses of the Gulag repression, it's something that we can and should criticise. I'm supporting the rest of things of the country, which led to the saving of hundreds of millions of people from hunger, disease and Nazi genocide. The Gulag repression seems horrible until you realize the Nazis murdered 27 million Soviets at that time. It was an extreme measure carried out in extreme times.
I'm not. If he was jailed for his race that's wrong. You're just making too much criticism of the country thst saved Europe from fascism and which saved hundreds of millions of lives in the process.
I am not talking about WWII at all because it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. WWII was over for years by the time he was imprisoned for no apparent reason without a trial he attended.
You are bringing up WWII because there is no moral ground for you to support and justify the USSR’s evil actions otherwise so you keep hamming your irrelevant claim because otherwise you’ll have to accept the USSR wasn’t a good moral nation bit was really quite racist, evil and oppressive (all of which are true).
I brought up WWII because the peak of the Gulag system was starting on 1936, and by Stalin's death in the mid-1950s it had essentially disappeared, it was a system implemented during a time of extreme necessity due to dekulakization, maintained during WW2 and the Nazi hysteria of the late 1930s after the assassination of Kirov, and dismantled after Nazism had been eliminated from Europe.
The USSR was patently the least racist nation in Europe. While in my homeland of Spain education in Basque and Catalan was forbidden, the Soviet Union for the first time in history guaranteed the citizens of all the republics an education in the official language of their choice, leading for the first time to universal education in Ukrainian, Kazakh, Belarusian, or even minor languages such as Mari for those who spoke it and desired to be educated in such languages. In France, up to 1993, there were no public schools teaching children in Occitan language, and even now I don't think there's even one. Fuck, the "Union of Socialist Soviet Republics" doesn't even have a toponym or an ethnicity in its name, how many countries can claim the same?!
Look. I'm a Spaniard. In 1936, we had a fascist coup which resulted in a civil war between fascists and anti-fascists. The policy of the western world was to do nothing and to leave the war to itself while the Nazis and the Italian Fascists bombed the fuck out of my country's partisans (ever heard of Picasso's Gernika?). The only nation in the planet to help the antifascist struggle was the Soviet Union, which is the only source of Spanish antifascists of weapons, planes, tanks and military training against the fascists. It's crazy to tell me that the only nation that helped the fight against fascism in my homeland was "evil and oppressive". Your grandpa, a Jewish man, would have been murdered if it weren't for the Soviets. The very fact that you're here is because of the 27 million lives that the Soviet Union sacrificed in order to save Europe from Nazism.
No, it is entirely accurate. They did some good and a LOT of evil. Totalitarian states tend to be evil. They were no exception.
No my FORMER BOSS was in a gulag again without a trial which you seem to be avoiding discussion of.
My grandfathers fought the Nazis in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific. A great uncle fought in Spain and in Germany against fascists both times. MY ancestral history empowers me to fight the evils of totalitarianism, why doesn’t yours?
Obviously this is not true at all.
Sorry, mixed up grandpa and boss, hence the "the fact that you're here". The fact that you could have that conversation with your boss is because the Soviets gave everything to save him.
So all your family fought on the side of socialism against fascism and now you spit on their tomb by saying "socialism is just as bad"?
The Soviet Union was the most advanced and humane state of its time. Western Europe was murdering tens of millions through imperialism in the global south, the US had literal Jim Crow era laws against black people and was killing tens of millions through imperialism in Central/South America. If it weren't for the fucking Bolsheviks, the entirety of Eastern Europe would have been genocided by Nazis and the few remaining people colonised, never to industrialise. The Soviet Union was the first country to guarantee truly universal healthcare, education and pensions, and only then did Europe have to follow through for fear of revolution. Highest unionisation rates in the world, abolished houselessness and unemployment. It certainly had flaws, but it's literally the best it had to offer. For every Stalinist repression victim you quickly go dig up, I'll show you ten Africans murdered by French/Belgians, or a hundred Indians murdered by British.
My family fought against totalitarian systems not “for socialism”. The USSR wasn’t socialist and it never planned on becoming that after the communists lost the first election.
My family fought fascists and authoritarians. You back authoritarians who oppress the people. Do you see the difference?
Why do you think your whataboutism will work this time?
Are you a little bit slow?
In a form of a piece of lead in their heads, no doubt.
Where did I say ALL gulags were in Siberia, sweetie?
Stalin was alive in 60s? News to me.
Another tankie. 🙄
The diet bit is correct because Soviets typically have less meat and more veggies in their diet as well as less sugar.
What a stupid argument. Literally just asserting you're right based on nothing.
Another fascist. 🙄
Only for a brain dead tankie someone criticising Stalin and gulags is always a "fascist" 🤡
Criticizing them from a Nazi perspective, no doubt.
Another brain dead fascist 🤡
You could literally open up a book someday and check your info, gulag inmates were paid. Wages were lower than those of a free worker, but nothing like the modern slavery that the USA uses in its prison system for example.
By using the cliche of "forced labor to the cold Siberia", you're propagating misinformation about the system, willingly or not. The fact that the majority of Gulags were in fact not in Siberia is kind of a strong statement in that it shows that the intent of gulags was not that of mass-murder of dissidents (which is the claim anticommunists like you normally do). The vast majority of gulag inmates were actually not political dissidents, but normal criminals. The gulag system was the prison system of the USSR for all crimes. Why would you send your average criminal who stole from another person to a death camp instead of trying to reform them? Why did most of the deaths in gulags coincide with a famine that affected the entire Soviet Union during a war and not before or after that? Why did the Gulag system, at its peak during the mass hysteria against nazism, have a number of prisoners similar to that of the modern USA? Maybe if you weren't a propagandized misinformation spreader you could answer any of those questions. But no, you can't, because you haven't lifted the cover of one book in your entire life.
I brought up the 60s because the Soviet Union was essentially industrialised by then. In 1917, when the Bolsheviks get to power, the former Russian Empire was a predominantly agrarian country where 80+% of people worked the land and the life expectancy was <30 years, there was no industry to speak of. The civil war which the fascists started, and in which England, France and the USA invaded Soviet Russia for the sin of being communist and gave material aid and troops to the pro-tsarist fascists, and which came right after WW1, left the country in a state of utter destruction, and the economy didn't recover to pre-WW1 levels until 1929, the year when the first 5-year-plan was adopted. Industrialization of the Soviet Union was FAST as lightning, with GDP growths above 10% per year, the fastest industrialization process in history up to that point (and only surpassed by China to this day). But in 1941, as you may know, the Nazis invaded the country, and murdered about 27 million Soviet Citizens and essentially leveled the entire country west of Stalingrad. After 1945, the industrialization progress continued to its previous speed together with the reconstruction of the country, but it isn't until at least the 60s when you can say the country was properly industrialized. This is why I said the 60s, because comparing a predominantly feudal country in terms of food security to our modern standards is an exercise of either ignorance of bad faith. So tell me, are you arguing from ignorance or from bad faith?
That's what you should start with.
Check, you i.. Tankie. Or just check another response to your moronic post.
Listen, you moron: millions of people died in Siberia, murdered by your beloved Stalin. Denying this is like denying holocaust. Go and fuck yourself you genocide denier.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
You haven't read my comment because it's too long for your peanut brain, or refuse to address 90% of it because it goes against your propagandised beliefs. Have a good day, ignorant.
And there it is again. Dont you ever wonder why they had a constitution like this but treated their people like this. Do you have a window in your room? Can you check what happens to enemies of the state where you live? What happens again if you become disabled in our "civilized" societies?
have you ever wondered if you're being fed bullshit?
"Tankie's thoughts", page 423.
What you're doing is called a "thought stopper" or "conversation stopper". It is used in propaganda for hundreds of years.
I am pretty sure that would be a permanent condition you are suffering from.
When pressed, the anti communist reveals that insults and thought terminating cliches are all they have
Is your user name ironic?
See? You've got nothing but lazy insults.
Wow. You're showing very civilized behavior. Maybe i should rethink my stance. :D
Don't bother, you tankies are incapable of logical thinking.
You say that like you haven't been the one reduced to petulant insults.
I'm sorry that you have to insult me like that. There are many ways to train healthy discussion habits.