EPTEastern Europe was far-right. Stalin/Lenin/etc used a populist worker movement to gain the support of the people and take power, and once they did they implemented a far-right totalitarian regime. This is basic history. Names != definitions.
Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 692
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StasisField
United States1086 Posts
Eastern Europe was far-right. Stalin/Lenin/etc used a populist worker movement to gain the support of the people and take power, and once they did they implemented a far-right totalitarian regime. This is basic history. Names != definitions. | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28706 Posts
On June 15 2024 02:40 Suibne wrote: That's exactly why their far right politics combined with what you describe make them extreme right. If a center-left party is corrupt or wants to erode the rule of law, then they do not become extreme right, because they weren't far right to begin with. This isn't rocket science. There has been a lot of talk of far right parties in Europe having some populist left wing policies. True, they sometimes talk about this. But this is a trait of extreme right. They talk about left wing socialist policies. But when it comes time to vote or implement, they go even further right than the conservative right does. I don't know why people keep falling for this. A populist anti-immigration party with democratic socialist policies sounds like a really good way to win votes, though. PiS isnt right wing economically. Socially regressive, anti democratic, anti immigration, populist, yes absolutely. But their economic policies are, from my understanding, more redistributive than those of KO/PO. This discussion mostly shows that the old left/right dichotomy is, in some instances, no longer useful. It works just fine when describing differences between say, a labor party/socialist party and a conservative or liberal party, but some of the newer populist (or even environmentalist) parties can be very inconsistent in what policies they pursue or implement. But if a party wants to increase the tax burden for the wealthiest while giving universal benefits, that's a pretty damn significant deviation from traditional right wing politics. | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28706 Posts
On June 15 2024 05:12 StasisField wrote: I mean sure, if you know nothing about Communism and believe names = definitions then yeah Eastern Europe was Communist and North Korea is a free and fair Democracy. What part of the USSR and its satellite states was Communist? Was there still a nation state and did social classes still exist? Then it wasn't Communist. Did the USSR implement a democratized economy by mandating all businesses are to be owned by the workers themselves? No? It was a controlled economy run by an ultranationalist totalitarian regime? Huh. I guess Eastern Europe wasn't Communist after all! Eastern Europe was far-right. Stalin/Lenin/etc used a populist worker movement to gain the support of the people and take power, and once they did they implemented a far-right totalitarian regime. This is basic history. Names != definitions. See I agree that authoritarianism and by extension totalitarianism is inherently right wing, but I also think certain economical policies are. I'd never describe a party fighting for an unregulated market economy with low taxes for the wealthy and few redistributive policies as leftist, no matter how pro democracy, pro immigration, liberal freedoms etc they are. Likewise I can't describe a party that prioritizes redistributive policies as right wing. | ||
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SC-Shield
Bulgaria832 Posts
On June 15 2024 05:12 StasisField wrote: Eastern Europe was far-right. Stalin/Lenin/etc used a populist worker movement to gain the support of the people and take power, and once they did they implemented a far-right totalitarian regime. This is basic history. Names != definitions. You need to read history more often. Eastern Europe WAS communist. Did it match all checkboxes of communism ideology? Probably not, but did so called communist states redistribute wealth, making sure there are no rich people and was private property banned until the very late stage of these communist countries? Absolutely. | ||
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Suibne
44 Posts
This argument really falls apart on four different levels. Also, when challenged about my statement, I CITED MY SOURCE. And no one even bothered to reply. And now I am being attacked for that statement. WTF And all those people who do this have a country label from eastern Europe. You guys need a reality check. You are being extremely biased and emotional. You need to STOP. Right now. This is NOT ok. Yes, I criticized your country. Stop being a snowflake. I also criticized a whole bunch of other things. I get it is a big thing now for people in eastern Europe to be highly sensitive to any form of criticism from people from western Europe. But you need to grow some fucking balls. And if you can't. You can always change your mind and go join Putin instead. Because being criticized is part of the deal of being part of the EU. If your country won't leave the EU to join Putin, book a one way ticket to Moscow instead. The Polish electorate changed their minds after 8 years of PiS and VOTED THEM OUT. Maybe you love PiS and are still really sad about it. But that's also the truth. The Polish voters deserve a lot of credit for at least being able to do this. Because Hungary surely hasn't done that. User was banned for this post. | ||
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StasisField
United States1086 Posts
On June 15 2024 05:56 SC-Shield wrote: You need to read history more often. Eastern Europe WAS communist. Did it match all checkboxes of communism ideology? Probably not, but did so called communist states redistribute wealth, making sure there are no rich people and was private property banned until the very late stage of these communist countries? Absolutely. If you think there wasn't a clear social hierarchy with social classes in Eastern Europe's Communist states then I don't know what to say. You're arguing against reality. Even the West agrees there were clear, distinct social classes in Eastern Europe, including a class of elites who received higher pay and had access to goods and services the other classes didn't. That's not Communism. Socio-Occupational Groupings Western analysts have divided Soviet society into four broad socio-occupational groupings. At the apex of this social pyramid were the elite or intelligentsia, followed by white-collar workers, blue-collar workers, and, last, agricultural workers. The Elite The uppermost socio-occupational group, the elite, included leading party and state officials; high-ranking military, Committee for State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti-KGB), and diplomatic personnel; directors of the largest enterprises (see Glossary) and of the largest educational, research, and medical establishments; and leading members of the cultural intelligentsia, e. g., academics, editors, writers, and artists. These groups received the most income and had access to goods and services that those lower in the social hierarchy found difficult or even impossible to obtain. Unlike Westerners, members of the Soviet elite were not allowed to amass great wealth and bequeath it to their offspring. When a member of the elite died, even luxury items such as a dacha (a country cottage) or an automobile could revert to the state. White-Collar Workers Soviet sociologists have grouped many ofthose who perform nonmanual labor into a category comparable to Western "white-collar workers." The approximately 25 million members of this group ranged from specialists who possessed high educational qualifications to administrators and clerks. The group included the majority of party and government bureaucrats, teachers, scientists, scholars, physicians, military and police officers, artists, writers, actors, and business managers. In the late 1980s, about 30 percent of white-collar workers belonged to the CPSU; the more prestigious occupations within this group had the highest percentage of CPSU members. White-collar workers on the average received higher wages and more privileges than the average Soviet worker, although physicians and schoolteachers who were just starting out earned less than the national average for all employees. Blue-Collar Workers and Manual Laborers The category of blue-collar workers included those who performed manual labor in industrial enterprises as well as those on collective farms and state farms engaged in transport, construction, and other nonfarming activities. In the late 1980s, blue-collar workers and their families made up about two-thirds of the country's population. The CPSU has always loudly proclaimed blue-collar workers to be the backbone of the state and the most honored segment of society. Although newspaper accounts and photographs glorified their labor accomplishments, blue-collar workers were masters in name only. Only 7 percent belonged to the CPSU, the ruling group, and their pay and benefits were close to the national average and considerably less than those of the elite. Agricultural Workers Agricultural workers, on both state farms and collective farms, formed the bottom layer of the social structure in 1989. They were the least well paid and the least educated, and they were severely underrepresented in the CPSU. Most agricultural workers performed unspecialized labor. Where specialization existed, it did so only to the extent that raising poultry or livestock demanded greater skill than growing crops. In general, mechanized agriculture benefited men more than women because men tended to operate the tractors while women continued to perform manual work. Although all farmers cultivated state-owned farmland, in 1989 farm workers were divided into two categories. State farmers were technically employees of the state. Working with government-owned machinery and seed, they received wages from the state for their labor. In contrast, collective farmers theoretically owned their machinery and seed and shared the proceeds from the produce sold. https://www.marines.mil/Portals/1/Publications/Soviet Union Study_4.pdf | ||
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Dan HH
Romania9135 Posts
On June 15 2024 05:12 StasisField wrote: I mean sure, if you know nothing about Communism and believe names = definitions then yeah Eastern Europe was Communist and North Korea is a free and fair Democracy. What part of the USSR and its satellite states were Communist? Was there still a nation state and did social classes still exist? Then it wasn't Communist. Did the USSR implement a democratized economy where businesses are owned by the workers themselves? No? It was a controlled economy run by an ultranationalist totalitarian regime? Huh. I guess Eastern Europe wasn't Communist after all! Eastern Europe was far-right. Stalin/Lenin/etc used a populist worker movement to gain the support of the people and take power, and once they did they implemented a far-right totalitarian regime. This is basic history. Names != definitions. Probably the part where housing and production wasn't privately owned. You're confusing communism with fully automated luxury gay space communism. Regardless, this isn't relevant to what was being discussed. When people say "far-right" they're pretty much never talking about economics. As far as social aspects go, Eastern European communist regimes were quite racist and conservative. But then again, Tories also had quite racist campaign slogans at the time. It's difficult to have an apples-to-apples comparison on this because we're in different stages of development and different stages of interacting with natives of other continents. In EE it's still kinda new to have someone from Sri-Lanka provide a service to you, people are still feeling it out, England or France started the multicultural process a lot earlier and are naturally further along. It's obvious that racist statements are a less grave violation of the social contract here than they are in Western Europe but I don't know how that translates into quantifying far-rightedness or whether it has more to do with lack of experience. The same trends apply as anywhere else, someone from Budapest is less likely to fall for and vote for Orban than someone from a village that interacts more with chickens than foreigners. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15723 Posts
Defining "left" and "right" is inherently troublesome and bogs down conversation because the terms were never well-defined to begin with. And they have meant different things at different moments in history. And all governments to ever exist have been a mix of both, so we can never attribute the success or failure of a given nation to either "left" or "right" policies. Better to practice more precise language and isolate the actual dynamic rather than concern ourselves with feeling like we need to defend either left or right as if it means anything. | ||
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StasisField
United States1086 Posts
https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004194748/Bej.9789004194458.i-234_003.xml | ||
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Excludos
Norway8156 Posts
It's no different from the US calling themselves a democracy today, despite lacking fundamental aspects that actually would make it as such. | ||
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Silvanel
Poland4733 Posts
On June 15 2024 07:49 StasisField wrote: Well, Dan, I might be inclined to agree if it wasn't for the fact the USSR was state capitalist https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004194748/Bej.9789004194458.i-234_003.xml Yay. Here comes Americans telling eastern-Europeans that they don't know shit, and they actually lived in capitalism. Again. | ||
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SC-Shield
Bulgaria832 Posts
On June 15 2024 07:36 Dan HH wrote: Probably the part where housing and production wasn't privately owned. You're confusing communism with fully automated luxury gay space communism. Regardless, this isn't relevant to what was being discussed. When people say "far-right" they're pretty much never talking about economics. As far as social aspects go, Eastern European communist regimes were quite racist and conservative. But then again, Tories also had quite racist campaign slogans at the time. It's difficult to have an apples-to-apples comparison on this because we're in different stages of development and different stages of interacting with natives of other continents. In EE it's still kinda new to have someone from Sri-Lanka provide a service to you, people are still feeling it out, England or France started the multicultural process a lot earlier and are naturally further along. It's obvious that racist statements are a less grave violation of the social contract here than they are in Western Europe but I don't know how that translates into quantifying far-rightedness or whether it has more to do with lack of experience. The same trends apply as anywhere else, someone from Budapest is less likely to fall for and vote for Orban than someone from a village that interacts more with chickens than foreigners. On the last paragraph, I think society, here in Bulgaria at least, is a lot more tolerant than e.g. 10-20 years ago. I know Bulgaria after fall of communism as I wasn't born during previous regime but I know for a fact that 90s were poorer economically. Nowadays people travel more with better economy and due to being part of the EU as well. As you say, when people experience other cultures, they start to accept a bit. Final note on the communism part as it's getting offtopic a bit as this is thread about Ukraine and Russia. I don't know a single person in Bulgaria who ever referred to communism as "far right" and I speak with enough people who were born durign communist time. Communism is accepted as left wing here. Maybe you focus on the authoritarian part, which seems to be defined as far right, sure. However, communism and in general when people talk about left vs right they refer to economy. This left vs right was relevant here in 90s and maybe until 5-10 years ago, but I agree with Drone that it's a lot more mixed nowadays, especially with populists. Again: - Most of people were of the same class - There was politburo class - friend/relative of someone important in power. These were given better treatment, including easier admission to university from what I've heard from people who experienced communism here firsthand. - Market was closed, main trade was between Comecon communist countries - No private ownership These points still make communism left wing in my eyes in terms of economy. | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5656 Posts
As a matter of fact, most "communist" countries acknowledged that. In the second half of the 20th century they started to refer to their systems as "real socialism". Even the first leaders of the USSR said that they first need to build a capitalist foundation in order to build communism in the future. As for the article cited by Suibne, he clearly didn't bother to read it. The paper used "far right" as an umbrella term comprising both extremist right (ER) and the populist radical right (PRR). His claim that "PiS is not far right because it is extreme right" makes no sense in that context. According to the criteria used by the authors, PiS could, maybe, be considered as a borderline case of PRR, but certainly not ER. Their populism was mostly limited to government handouts of various kinds and blocking illegal migrants/asylum seekers from being settled in Poland. They, however, allowed massive numbers of legal migrants from countries their voters would consider culturally incompatible to move to Poland. The article itself is very outdated. As per the appendix, it uses data up to 2012. Back then, the French elections were a battle between the left and the right, before the massive rise in popularity of Le Pen. The study didn't account for the rise in popularity of Netherlands' PVV, Austria's FPO, Germany's AfD, or Hungary's Jobbik's shift to the center, and many other trends. To use such outdated data as evidence that far right is more popular in the east of Europe is silly. Especially considering the results of recent elections, which show the opposite. | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28706 Posts
On June 15 2024 07:36 Dan HH wrote: Probably the part where housing and production wasn't privately owned. You're confusing communism with fully automated luxury gay space communism. Regardless, this isn't relevant to what was being discussed. When people say "far-right" they're pretty much never talking about economics. As far as social aspects go, Eastern European communist regimes were quite racist and conservative. But then again, Tories also had quite racist campaign slogans at the time. I agree that when people say far-right this isn't a description of economics, but rather about social issues/immigration/attitude towards democracy. I'm just kinda arguing that I think it's a branding that doesn't make all that much sense - because until you get to the 'far' right, the left-right spectrum mostly is about the economy/taxation/worker-employer conflicts. I'm not entirely sure why this happened tbh. In Norway, there's not really a conflict because our 'far right' party (in terms of immigration and other social issues, they're not in any way undemocratic though) also happens to be the party that is most right-wing in terms of economy. But we do have a commonly accepted left-right scale, where our mainstream parties would, in order be placed like this: Red('communists' -> Socialist left -> Labor party -> Center party -> Green party -> Christian democratic party -> Liberal party -> Conservative party -> Progress party. If we look at attitudes towards immigration and how these parties place themselves on social issues however, it would rather be something like Red/Socialist left / Green party / Liberal party (block that's furthest to the left), Labor party / Conservative party in the middle, Center party / Christian Democratic party (to be fair these guys are more pro refugees but more conservative on other issues) to the right, and the progress party being the rightmost group here as well. Now, every single time these parties are placed on a left-right scale, the first of these lists is the one people refer to - nobody considers the liberal party part of the left wing. But when describing 'far right', people largely tend to refer to the second attributes. I mean, the way language works is that the commonly accepted definition is the correct definition even if it doesn't necessarily make 'sense'. However, language also continuiously evolves, and I do think it might be the case (not something I can really confidently assert though) that historically, in the post ww2 era, there was a significantly enough strong correlation between anti government/anti tax/anti communism and being regressive on social issues/immigration for the 'far right' attribute to be both correct as a description of economic policy and of attitudes towards immigration/social issues (tbh this might accurately be pinned to religion). But I think the emergence of some of the new more populist parties really challenges the utility of left/right as a useful description of political attitudes, because their positions aren't ideologically consistent. I think 'reactionary' and 'authoritarian/anti-democratic' are more accurate. | ||
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SC-Shield
Bulgaria832 Posts
Russian President Vladimir Putin stated yesterday on television that nearly 700,000 Russian military personnel are currently engaged in the offensive in Ukraine, as reported by AFP. "We have almost 700,000 people in the area of the special military operation," Putin said during a televised meeting with soldiers recognized for their military achievements, using the official term for the operation that commenced in February 2022, according to AFP. Random source in English as I read it from native website initially: https://www.novinite.com/articles/226666/Putin Reveals Nearly 700,000 Russian Troops Engaged in Ukraine Offensive | ||
zatic
Zurich15355 Posts
Of course force quality is a different question but at least Putin isn't running out of Russians to shove into the grinder any time soon. | ||
Falling
Canada11369 Posts
A party with no markers of any other right politics: small government, low taxation, etc is right wing because virtue (or rather vice) of being racist. Systems built by members espousing Marxism are not left wing, but right wing by virtue of being tyrannical? This smuggles in the idea that the core of right wing ideology IS racism (as well as tyranny). Everything else is incidental. The more you believe in small government, the more racist you get. And the corollary would also be the case. The more left wing you get, the less racist you get... which might match some historical patterns, but is that necessarily true? No one espousing left wing views can possibly be racist? You believe nothing else except you are a racist and that makes you right wing? How so? Same, then with the authoritarianism claim. We seem to be smuggling in the idea that it is impossible for left wing government to be tyrannical. Wut. | ||
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Dan HH
Romania9135 Posts
On June 16 2024 02:02 Falling wrote: There seems to be some odd premises getting smuggled in here. A party with no markers of any other right politics: small government, low taxation, etc is right wing because virtue (or rather vice) of being racist. Systems built by members espousing Marxism are not left wing, but right wing by virtue of being tyrannical? This smuggles in the idea that the core of right wing ideology IS racism (as well as tyranny). Everything else is incidental. The more you believe in small government, the more racist you get. And the corollary would also be the case. The more left wing you get, the less racist you get... which might match some historical patterns, but is that necessarily true? No one espousing left wing views can possibly be racist? You believe nothing else except you are a racist and that makes you right wing? How so? Same, then with the authoritarianism claim. We seem to be smuggling in the idea that it is impossible for left wing government to be tyrannical. Wut. I'll (try to) clarify my part in this mess since you made some hints about it. Shield brought up the recent communist past of Eastern Europe as a counter-argument to the PBU's claim of EE being more far-right than Western Europe. I said the economic positioning of communists on the left-right spectrum is irrelevant and that they were quite racist and socially conservative. There was no implication that this makes the former communist parties far-right overall, that would be an inverse error on the reader's part that I didn't intend. The core ideology of what we now call "far-right" IS defending local identity against otherness. While these were parts of local communist ideology, they were not the core of it. My point was that the entire tangent about communism tells us nothing about the initial point of contention, and that the initial point of contention itself is kinda silly to quantify given the different contexts, stages of development, and experience with multiculturalism between Western and Eastern Europe. Now to go a little further, all of Europe has a significant share of the population that is vulnerable to far-right concepts and since EU almost cracked under the pressure of the Syrian refugee crisis, I'm not super optimistic that it will survive the inevitable climate refugee crisis in the coming decades. | ||
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Silvanel
Poland4733 Posts
Now I wouldn't presume that to be representative of whole Germany, but we also have sources like this: https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/25/shocking-levels-of-racism-rising-in-europe-finds-report In this article, they show data coming from European Agency for Fundamental Rights. According to it, black people of African origin are more than three times likely to be discriminated against in Germany than in Poland. Yikes. The article is fairly recent, October 2023. This concludes the topic for me. Can we go back to Ukraine war please? Talk of the day is: there is a group of Russian soldiers surrounded in Vovchansk. So far, all attempts to free them have failed. There are conflicting accounts about how many soldiers are surrounded. | ||
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Husyelt
United States837 Posts
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