smoking ππ£π¦πΎπ with 'iluMore from my crappy history prof:
I don't think I could disagree more with this! IMO the biggest failure of the USSR was forcing a nationalist Russification over its borders, rather than acting as a true Union of multiple Republics
Great-Russian chauvinism replacing korenizatsiia under Stalin was probably the biggest mistake the Soviets made in the long run
Calling the Cheka a "terrorist police force" is an interesting choice of words. I'm obviously no fan of the Cheka but what is it about them that's singularly "terrorist"? Usually that kind of wording is reserved for non-state actors
Torn between being pleasantly surprised that he's recognizing the Armenian genocide at all, and suspecting that he's only doing it to further his trend of demonizing the Ottoman Empire for Islamophobia purposes
Like yeah 100% a horrific tragedy but do you have to keep saying "Islamist" with such emphasis when you talk about it
Low bar but glad that he's accurately saying that the British and French dividing up the former Ottoman Empire arbitrarily is a primary source of a lot of the present-day violence in the Middle East. I was honestly a little worried he would blame most of it on Islam
In the name of every Irishman go fuck yourself lol
Suggesting now that Jewish eyewitnesses to the Ukrainian famine are more important because they "cannot be accused of Ukrainian bias"... that strikes me as a little fucked up. It's a bit adjacent to dual-loyalty stuff, isn't it? Kind of arguing that Jewish Ukrainians weren't real Ukrainians? I don't think you should talk about them like that man.
oh fuck off. im not sorry you didn't get your theocratic ethnostate, and you shouldn't be whining about it in an intro history course. get over yourself.
he wants to blame the fags for the decline of Christian society so bad. you can feel it bursting at the seams
it's so funny that he's talking about like, extremely basic progressive politics from 50 years ago by calling it "awkward" and "shocking" compared to (implicitly better) Christian values. like dude this is just kind of the foundation of modern liberal ideology. this is the default for most of your students. even the centrist lib students would read this and think you sound like a 1950s reactionary.
oh shut the fuck up you know full well colonization was explicitly supported by the Catholic church. can't even let people decolonize themselves with giving all the credit to colonialists. fuck sakes
clown shoes, man. give indigenous philosophy some fuckin credit
communism was defeated by the spiritual power of the Pope. one can only lmao
why did the war drag on sir. who was funding and arming the mujahideen sir.
"reportedly"
oh so he full-on doesn't believe in climate change huh
ah, there's the "Islam is an existential threat to Europe" I was waiting for.
is that what happened, sir? the terrorists just popped up out of nowhere and the European troops started fighting them? no reasons behind those terrorists' existence?
sir I have a question. how did the Shah come to power in the first place. What did the US and UK do in 1953 to protect their oil interests sir
very interesting choice of examples here. nothing to say about the Ulster volunteers, the Italian neofascists, the Falangist terrorists against Spanish democratization, or Israeli paramilitaries like Kach? it seems like it's only terrorism if done by a leftist or a Muslim.
Nyatalie
Libros Prestados@jake2 "Atrocities were committed by both sides". Is this the opening text of the new Star Wars movie?
Reviewing my notes and found that in his other class he does straight up deny that the Irish Potato Famine was in any way the fault of the British colonial government. Fuck off! People have been calling it a man-made famine since the year it happened!
John Mitchel, 18-fucking-60:
"I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a "dispensation of Providence"; and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."
cmon man you got Victorian era writers kicking your ass here. take the L
Charlie Stross@jake2 India has just joined the chat.
Hegelian Princess@jake2 like it shouldn't even be a controversial position if you don't have an axe to grind about the USSR! it's concretely what made the country collapse
@julieofthespirits I haven't read nearly enough historical analyses of the USSR as I would like (it can be difficult to find sources that aren't either ardently anti-communist or too loyal to the USSR's memory to criticize it properly), but I would be very happy to find out that my position is uncontroversial among serious historians! Glad you agree also
@jake2 I mean just like...the declarations of independence of the USSR's different constituent republics being what concretely led to its dissolution in the most immediate sense. The extent to which Stalin backtracking on Lenin's nationality policies was responsible for Georgian, Ukrainian, Baltic, etc. nationalisms gaining strength I suppose is more debatable but I would say the case here is also still pretty "strong"
@jake2 (On my list of things to read but Dzyuba's Internationalism or Russification? seems to be a major historical document here, if you're looking for sources)
@julieofthespirits oh, looks very interesting! I'll have to check it out.
@jake2 yeah! I haven't read the book myself so I don't know if I'll agree with its arguments or not, but at least it's an important document within these debates, apparently written in response to the debates over Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which rips
@julieofthespirits yeah at the very least it's notable that contemporary thinkers were noticing the same thing
@jake2 and even if you don't agree with what they say, reading sources from within the USSR is always 100% better than reading sources from outside the USSR, which never seem to move past "is communism good/bad"
@julieofthespirits oh for sure. Unfortunate we don't have that option when looking for histories written after the fall, lol
@jake2 whenever I dip into soviet dissident lit, it's always striking just how much it's less "do we want capitalism/communism" that's the focus and more just specific points of agitation like the treatment of the Crimean Tatars that occupied their energies
@julieofthespirits diversity of thought among different communists? But the Stalinists and the capitalists both told me that actually all soviet citizens followed the party line strictly!
@jake2 turns out that the world's biggest country was also extremely diverse and complex and couldn't be reduced to an undergraduate level ideological question. Who would've guessed!
@julieofthespirits honestly I think this guy just has a really weird and inconsistent definition of what "nationalism" and "multiculturalism" are. Seems to refer to ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism with the same term, and pose them both as oppositional to multiculturalism. Makes this weird contradiction where he's calling the USSR multiculturalist, but at the same time talking about its suppression of minority cultures in favor of a national hegemony, which doesn't sound very multicultural!
Rich