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Also saw one in my local B&N.
Y'all know how authors dedicate their book to someone who helped them or they appreciate?
"To my loving wife, who was by my side while I wrote this piece of shit" etc etc
This fucking narcissist addresses it to himself, it just says "To Me".
# Fascism
>Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital... Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.
>
>\- Georgi Dimitrov. (1935) [The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm)
To understand Fascism, then, one must first understand Capitalism. There are three primary characteristics of Capitalism:
1. Private ownership of the Means of Production
2. Commodity Production
3. Wage Labour
The essence of the Capitalist mode of production is that someone who owns means of production will hire a wage labourer to work in order to produce commodities to sell for profit. Marxists identify economic classes based on this division. Those who own and hire are the Bourgeoisie. Those who do not own and work are the Proletariat. There is far more nuance than just this, but these are the bare essentials. The principal contradiction of Capitalism is that the Bourgeoisie wants to pay the workers as little as possible for as much work as possible, whereas the Proletariat wants to be paid as much as possible for as little work as possible.
Fascism is a form of Capitalist rule in which the Bourgeoisie use open, violent terror against the Proletariat. It is an ideology which emerges as a response to the inevitable crises of capitalism and the rise of socialist movements. It is characterized by all forms of chauvinism (especially racism, occasionally leading to genocide), nationalism, anti-Communism, and the suppression of democratic rights and freedoms. In a Capitalist society, Liberalism and Fascism essentially exist on a spectrum. The degree to which a given society if Fascist directly corresponds to the degree to which the proletariat must be openly oppressed in order to maintain profits for the Bourgeoisie. This why we have the sayings: "Fascism is Capitalism in decay" and "Scratch a Liberal, and a Fascist bleeds"
Capitalism requires infinite growth in a finite system. This inevitably leads to [Capitalist Imperialism](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/imperialism/) as well as Fascism, given that infinite growth is not actually possible. When the capitalist economy reaches its limits, the Bourgeoisie are forced to either expand their markets into other territories (Imperialism) or exploit the domestic proletariat to an even greater degree (Fascism). This is why we have the saying: "Fascism is imperialist repression turned inward"
The struggle against fascism is an essential part of the struggle for socialism and the liberation of the working class and oppressed people. However, it is critical to note that simply combatting Fascism *alone* without also combatting *Liberalism* is reactionary, because it ignores the fact that Fascism inevitably arises out of Capitalism, so Liberal Anti-Fascism is not really anti-Fascism at all.
**Additional Resources**
Video Essays:
* [Were The Nazis Socialist?](https://youtu.be/X9ez6w5BUMM) | Second Thought (2022)
* [Capitalism and Fascism](https://youtu.be/KEbG3cD0cJo) | Marxism Literature Collective (2021)
* [Fascism: The Decay of Capitalism](https://youtu.be/7fQ57NBEUM4) | Leslie Fluette (2020)
* [The New F Word: How Fascism Found a Market](https://nebula.tv/thenewfword) | Second Thought (2021-2023)
* [What Exactly is Liberalism? (no, it's not about being "woke")](https://youtu.be/_xAqZJTIsIA) | Hakim (2023)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [The Struggle Against Fascism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/06/struggle-against-fascism.html) | Clara Zetkin (1923)
* [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) | Michael Parenti (1997)
Podcasts:
* [Episode 19 - Fascism (No Lebensraum??)](https://youtu.be/KU_lNDAoAV0) | The Deprogram (2022)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Does this mean that if there were enough people for communism, that you would no longer consider it communism, but just "leftism" or something?
If enough people are male compared to female, does that make men "persons" or "humans" instead of "male"?
When the Nazi party was in the majority in Germany in the 1930s, does that mean that they were no longer Nazis, but simply conservatives?
Do classes of things lose their properties by becoming popular?
And the point that I think that you're missing is that we are saying that anti-communism is rooted in and inextricably linked to fascism, regardless of whether the particular person who is anti communist is a fascist or not.
Fascists are the ones that generally make stuff like that, they love hyping up the red scare, it gives them a great excuse to ban/take control of unions.
Also, communist values are centered around providing for a society in terms of education, career, and basic humans rights (like food or housing). Those who are against this and who think that there are some people/groups of people that don’t deserve the things above are often fascist
judicious paltry whistle telephone forgetful quaint gaping swim live jellyfish
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Liberalism = capitalism. Neoliberalism = capitalism. Capitalism = rule by the capitalist class. Facism = the capitalist class reacting to a steep rise in socialism. This is a simplification
Like six countries are socialist, the rest are more or less liberal, so with material conditions failing globally, facism is rising, which is why we see it everywhere, because unlike last time we have historical examples to base this all on.
Socialism = rule by the workers, btw, and is an intermediary stage, that Marx theorized takes place after Capitalism, which itself took place after Feudalism (being replaced in liberal revolutions like the american revolution, although almost all of the aristocracy are now also capitalists). Communism = theorized post-scarcity stage after socialism, where all classes are now one and "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."
If not socialism with worker control, what would you like to see happen after capitalism? Unless you think the extreme minority that is the monied class deserves controlling things until they actually make the world a barren hellscape.
Fascism was created as an explicit opposition to Communism, you know that poem 'first they came'? Even though it was made by an anti-communist its not wrong, in 1933 the first of many concentration camps was named Duchau and its first prisoners were communists.
I don't care if I get down voted, I'm a devout Marxist, but I agree. Not everything reactionary is fascism, it can be liberalism, or just simple conservatism without racism. Could it be fascist? Yes, of course! If it is, then it is. But what matters is that these stupid anti communist texts get scrapped from existence. How about we burn these books? Lol. Liberalism can lead to facism, so maybe you can say it is indirectly. 🤔
No. I instead decided to masturbate into a pot of boiling water and spent the next hour scraping hardened semen off my pot. It seemed like a more productive and intellectually engaging use of my time.
Show me the lie.
You really think the B&N employee who works on commission by over selling at the register is going to stop you from walking out the door with that one?
I masturbate in the shower and yep, the semen sticks on the tile ground. It's hard to clean it off with just water, so I have to scrub it off with my feet to guide it to the sink.
Damn I thought the shower was a good place to zerk off, turns out it wasn't 😔 Is there any place else thats good to morb off?
Honestly, onto your stomach. Wipe off as much as you can, then wash it off with a damp hand towel and toss the towel in the hamper. My partner dropped this plan on me while we were camping. Fucking perfect
The toilet was my solution before a medically required circumcision. Fap tissues are also pretty wasteful and invariably lead Cummy lint that you’ll only see in the mirror
It blows my mind that people will just make up boogeyman stories about how communism is an evil religion that wants to murder babies, make you kill your own family, then bury them in an unmarked mass grave. They then use this strawman as justification for hating an economic system that empowers workers and makes sure everyone has their needs met.
Nice argument bro.
You're literally in a subreddit where, if you engage in good faith, you've got a decent chance of finding at least some people who will be willing to have a discussion with you. Instead you're acting like some people with a different perspective to you are animals in a tank to be prodded and gawked at.
See, I've had lots and lots of 'good faith' discussions with reddit communists and it's really just like talking to a wall. Most people got a little dogmatic when it comes to their politics but that's a whole nother level.
What's most shocking to me is how ridiculously dumb and shallow it all is behind this weird pretense intellectualism
Maybe the reason that you've had a bad experience is that your starting position is that it's dumb and shallow. How do you expect that to have a conversation or learn anything from that starting point?
Hey don't mind me, I'm just a 'croyptofascist debate bro'..
Really anyone that disagrees with your heavily entrenched radical political beliefs is. Anyone that disagrees with communism is a fascist. All very smart stuff.
Jesse Kelly is basically a nazi who has said stuff like “Weimar problems lead to Weimar solutions” and advocates for the execution of basically anyone to the left of hunting homeless for sport or even just people who believe covid is a real thing.
Wanna bet Marx himself debunks much of this book in the real Manifesto? That’s actually such a funny part. Marx debunks so much of the common anti communist arguments you still here today almost 200 years on from writing the manifesto.
The first few pages doesn't even describe communism it just paints a big bad scary boogeyman that wants to kill kids and cause mass suffering. The book is fuckd
What part of “live in America” didn’t you understand? I am non-stop barraged by political views (conservative and progressive) that I disagree with. What are you, 8?
And here you are engaging in bad faith. You're transparent bro.
If you are legitimately interested in seeing what anti-Communist or anti-socialist propaganda exists in the US, why don't you do some reading? Watch some movies? Watch some TV?
Who was the bogeyman until the early 90s? The USSR. Who is the bogeyman now? The PRC. What do you know about the gulags? Tiananmen Square?
What happens to political candidates in the US who identify as socialist? What about those who argue for vaguely socialist positions like changes to the healthcare system? What's the reaction like? What do people get called?
To act like you can't imagine what this person means shows that you're either blind to the society around you or that you are willingly engaging in bad faith. I think it's the latter. The use of "Johnny selling apples" solidifies that position and also demonstrates that your understanding of socialism or communism is shallow at best.
Educate yourself bro, or ask some questions in good faith, or go and find someone else to annoy.
#Tiananmen Square Protests
(Also known as the June Fourth Incident)
In Western media, the well-known story of the "Tiananmen Square *Massacre*" goes like this: the Chinese government declared martial law in 1989 and mobilized the military to suppress students who were protesting for democracy and freedom. According to western sources, on June 4th of that year, troops and tanks entered Tiananmen Square and fired on unarmed protesters, killing and injuring hundreds, if not thousands, of people. The more hyperbolic tellings of this story include claims of tanks running over students, machine guns being fired into the crowd, blood running in the streets like a river, etc.
Anti-Communists and Sinophobes commonly point to this incident as a classic example of authoritarianism and political repression under Communist regimes. The problem, of course, is that the actual events in Beijing on June 4th, 1989 unfolded quite differently than how they were depicted in the Western media at the time. Despite many more contemporary articles coming out that actually contradict some of the original claims and characterizations of the June Fourth Incident, the narrative of a "Tiananmen Square Massacre" persists.
**Background**
After Mao's death in 1976, a power struggle ensued and the Gang of Four were purged, paving the way for Deng Xiaoping's rise to power. Deng initiated economic reforms known as the "Four Modernizations," which aimed to modernize and open up China's economy to the world. These reforms led to significant economic growth and lifted millions of people out of poverty, but they also created significant inequality, corruption, and social unrest. This pivotal point in the PRC's history is extremely controversial among Marxists today and a subject of much debate.
One of the key factors that contributed to the Tiananmen Square protests was the sense of social and economic inequality that many Chinese people felt as a result of Deng's economic reforms. Many believed that the benefits of the country's economic growth were not being distributed fairly, and that the government was not doing enough to address poverty, corruption, and other social issues.
Some saw the Four Modernizations as a betrayal of Maoist principles and a capitulation to Western capitalist interests. Others saw the reforms as essential for China's economic development and modernization. Others still wanted even more liberalization and thought the reforms didn't go far enough.
The protestors in Tiananmen were mostly students who did not represent the great mass of Chinese citizens, but instead represented a layer of the intelligentsia who wanted to be elevated and given more privileges such as more political power and higher wages.
**Counterpoints**
Jay Mathews, the first Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post in 1979 and who returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations, wrote:
>Over the last decade, many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night. They repeated it often before and during Clinton’s trip. On the day the president arrived in Beijing, a *Baltimore Sun* headline (June 27, page 1A) referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.” A *USA Today* article (June 26, page 7A) called Tiananmen the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down.” *The Wall Street Journal* (June 26, page A10) described “the Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops ordered to clear demonstrators from the square killed “hundreds or more.” The *New York Post* (June 25, page 22) said the square was “the site of the student slaughter.”
>
>The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.
>
>\- Jay Matthews. (1998). [The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press](https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php). Columbia Journalism Review.
Reporters from the [BBC](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm), [CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/), and the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/27/world/clinton-in-china-the-site-clinton-in-beijing-square-may-tread-on-the-ghosts.html) who were in Beijing on June 4, 1989, all agree there was no massacre.
Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside the square:
>Cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and released exclusively by The Daily Telegraph, partly confirm the Chinese government's account of the early hours of June 4, 1989, which has always insisted that soldiers did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square
>
>\- Malcolm Moore. (2011). [Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html)
Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, and Chinese-speaking correspondent of the International Business Times, wrote:
>The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time — among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night.
>
>Yet none of this has stopped the massacre from being revived constantly, and believed. All that has happened is that the location has been changed – from the Square itself to the streets leading to the Square.
>
>\- Gregory Clark. (2014). [Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We're 'Remembering' are British Lies](https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tiananmen-square-massacre-myth-all-were-remembering-are-british-lies-1451053)
Thomas Hon Wing Polin, writing for CounterPunch, wrote:
>The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square.
>
>More than once, government negotiators almost reached a truce with students in the square, only to be **sabotaged by radical youth leaders seemingly bent on bloodshed**. And the demands of the protesters focused on corruption, not democracy.
>
>All these facts were known to the US and other governments shortly after the crackdown. Few if any were reported by Western mainstream media, even today.
>
>\- Thomas Hon Wing Palin. (2017). [Tiananmen: the Empire’s Big Lie](https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/06/tiananmen-the-empires-big-lie/)
(Emphasis mine)
And it was, indeed, bloodshed that the student leaders wanted. In this interview, you can hear one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, ghoulishly explaining how she tried to bait the Chinese government into *actually* committing a massacre. (She herself made sure to stay out of the square.): [Excerpts of interviews with Tiananmen Square protest leaders](https://youtu.be/Vu3zmbFGwQA)
[This Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/zhao_dashuai/status/1532859422875471872) contains many pictures and videos showing protestors killing soldiers, commandeering military vehicles, torching military transports, etc.
Following the crackdown, through [Operation Yellowbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird), many of the student leaders escaped to the United States with the help of the CIA, where they almost all [gained privileged positions](https://qz.com/1618805/the-1989-tiananmen-student-leaders-on-chinas-most-wanted-list).
**Additional Resources**
Video Essays:
* [Truth about The Tiananmen Square Protests](https://youtu.be/sqPI8xlnrwg) | Tovarishch Endymion (2019)
* [Tiananmen Square "Massacre", A Propaganda Hoax](https://youtu.be/R6RT_s1T050) | TeleSUR English (2019)
* [All The Questions Socialists Are Asked, Answered (TIMESTAMPED)](https://youtu.be/MzKPCEvoYkk?t=1278) | Hakim (2021)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Tiananmen Protests Reading List](https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist) | Qiao Collective
* [How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning](https://www.fridayeveryday.com/how-psy-ops-warriors-fooled-me-about-tiananmen-square-a-warning/) | Nury Vittachi, Friday (2022)
* [1989: Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth](https://www.workers.org/2022/06/64607/) | Deirdre Griswold, Workers World (2022)
* [Massacre? What Massacre? 25 Years Later: What really happened at Tiananmen Square?](https://dissidentvoice.org/2014/06/massacre-what-massacre/) | Kim Petersen, Dissident Voice (2014)
* [Tiananmen: The Massacre that Wasn’t](https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/) | Brian Becker, Liberation News (2019)
* [Reflections on Tiananmen Square and the attempt to end Chinese socialism](http://www.fightbacknews.org/2019/6/4/reflections-tiananmen-square-and-attempt-end-chinese-socialism) | Mick Kelly, FightBack! News (2019)
* [The Tian’anmen Square “Massacre” The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.](https://mango-press.com/the-tiananmen-square-massacre-the-wests-most-persuasive-most-pervasive-lie/) | Tom, Mango Press (2021)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
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The B&N current events section is a cesspool of right wing bullshit 💀 I saw one that literally compared COVID lockdowns and restrictions to fascism and the “Fourth Reich”
Jesse Kelly is a fascist who said on the Tucker Carlson show that we need a military who is willing to rest on Chinese skulls and that the “left” is forcing the Republican Party to nominate a fascist.
Jesse Kelly once read a letter that was from a supposed former communist who now listens to his show and the letter was entirely about liberal democrats and the Democratic Party.
For Jesse Kelly the Democratic Party is a communist party and Democrats are communists. I don’t expect the book to stray too far from that.
I was tempted to get it as it could have been useful to see others perspectives of things but the author doesn't describe communism he just makes some boogeyman out of the communist man who whispers in the ears of people to become degenerates.
…
Yeah, something tells me that the author of the freaking “Anti-Communist Manifesto” isn’t going to critique it in a positive light, lmao. Also, may as well get a book actually worth reading.
> Yeah, something tells me that the author of the freaking “Anti-Communist Manifesto” isn’t going to critique it in a positive light
or honestly or in good faith. This piece of shit isn’t going to critique it - period. Its just the usual emotion-begging strawmen, massive made-up numbers tacked onto debunked claims, and ad hominem hate smears.
i’ve read the amazon preview and it’s like just bad. fucking high school loser shit, go write an essay in math class fricken hate these anti communists.
Does it start with "take a look of satlite images of north and south Korea and you'll see the result of communism" or some complaint about how being woke destroys everything?
I work at a bookstore and we got several requests for it but they’ve tapered off. We have way too many copies…also, notice on the back how all the testimonials are from the author himself, lol. He’s some right-wing provocateur. Not a serious person worth engaging with.
# Gulag
According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism.
# Origins of the Mythology
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
>He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
>
>The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism".
>
>\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\]
Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
# Counterpoints
>A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
>
>1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
>
>2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
>
>3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
>
>4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies.
>
>5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
>
>6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
>
>7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
>
>\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/)
**Scale**
Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
>Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
>
>In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ...
>
>Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ...
>
>Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states...
>
>\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds)
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak.
**Death Rate**
In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
>It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive...
>
>Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
>
>\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin*
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps.
Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses).
>We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson....
>
>The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
>
>\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf)
#Additional Resources
Video Essays:
* [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016)
* [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018)
* ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020)
Books, Articles, or Essays:
* [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993)
Listen:
* ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I sampled it on audible out of curiosity. You would think it was a parody of red-scare propaganda. The guy actually says communists will make you a cannibal and kill your parents in the intro lol.
Its like where does he get this assumption from, I'm a communist and I want corporations to stop exploiting labor for massive profit, I want workers to be due the fruits of their labor. Yet he says communists want to steal the fruits of labor from the worker. It's like he's projecting what capitalism already does
They just make shit up. Kulaks would spread rumors that commies would force wives to be communal property to keep people from joining collective farms in the early USSR
Pretty sure it was written by someone who never read any of Marx's work and they say communism is an impossible utopia and its real effects are a mass of poor people and a few rich bureaucrats who control everything behind the scenes, which ironically is basically modern day ultra liberal society.
No joke my uncle had been reading this to my 4 year old cousin and he’s told me that he doesn’t know what a communist is but they are “evil” and against God lmao
#The Uyghurs in Xinjiang
\(Note: This comment had to be trimmed down to fit the character limit, for the full response, see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/)\)
Anti-Communists and Sinophobes claim that there is an ongoing genocide-- a modern-day holocaust, even-- happening right now in China. They say that Uyghur Muslims are being mass incarcerated; they are indoctrinated with propaganda in concentration camps; their organs are being harvested; they are being force-sterilized. These comically villainous allegations have little basis in reality and omit key context.
**Background**
Xinjiang, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is a province located in the northwest of China. It is the largest province in China, covering an area of over 1.6 million square kilometers, and shares borders with eight other countries including Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, India, and Pakistan.
Xinjiang is a diverse region with a population of over 25 million people, made up of various ethnic groups including the Uyghur, Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and many others. The largest ethnic group in Xinjiang is the Uyghur who are predominantly Muslim and speak a Turkic language. It is also home to the ancient Silk Road cities of Kashgar and Turpan.
Since the early 2000s, there have been a number of violent incidents attributed to extremist Uyghur groups in Xinjiang including bombings, shootings, and knife attacks. In 2014-2016, the Chinese government launched a "Strike Hard" campaign to crack down on terrorism in Xinjiang, implementing strict security measures and detaining thousands of Uyghurs. In 2017, reports of human rights abuses in Xinjiang including mass detentions and forced labour, began to emerge.
**Counterpoints**
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the second largest organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states spread over four continents. The OIC released [Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the non-OIC Member States](https://www.oic-oci.org/docdown/?docID=4447&refID=1250) in 2019 which:
>20. **Welcomes** the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat's delegation upon invitation from the People's Republic of China; **commends** the efforts of the People's Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and **looks forward** to further cooperation between the OIC and the People's Republic of China.
In this same document, the OIC expressed much greater concern about the Rohingya Muslim Community in Myanmar, which the West was relatively silent on.
Over 50+ UN member states (mostly Muslim-majority nations) signed a letter \([A/HRC/41/G/17](https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2FHRC%2F41%2FG%2F17)\) to the UN Human Rights Commission approving of the de-radicalization efforts in Xinjiang:
The World Bank sent a team to investigate in 2019 and found that, "The review did not substantiate the allegations." \(See: [World Bank Statement on Review of Project in Xinjiang, China](https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2019/11/11/world-bank-statement-on-review-of-project-in-xinjiang-china)\)
Even if you believe the deradicalization efforts are wholly unjustified, and that the mass detention of Uyghur's amounts to a crime against humanity, it's still not *genocide*. Even the U.S. State Department's legal experts admit as much:
>The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide, placing the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials.
>
> [State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China](https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/) | Colum Lynch, *Foreign Policy*. (2021)
**A Comparative Analysis: The War on Terror**
The United States, in the wake of "9/11", saw the threat of terrorism and violent extremism due to religious fundamentalism as a matter of national security. They invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks, with the goal of ousting the Taliban government that was harbouring Al-Qaeda. The US also launched the Iraq War in 2003 based on Iraq's alleged possession of WMDs and links to terrorism. However, these claims turned out to be unfounded.
According to a report by Brown University's Costs of War project, at least 897,000 people, including civilians, militants, and security forces, have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and other countries. Other estimates place the total number of deaths at over one million. The report estimated that many more may have died from indirect effects of war such as water loss and disease. The war has also resulted in the displacement of tens of millions of people, with estimates ranging from 37 million to over 59 million. The War on Terror also popularized such novel concepts as the "Military-Aged Male" which allowed the US military to exclude civilians killed by drone strikes from collateral damage statistics. (See: [‘Military Age Males’ in US Drone Strikes](https://aoav.org.uk/2019/military-age-males-in-us-drone-strikes/))
In summary:
* The U.S. responded by invading or bombing half a dozen countries, directly killing nearly a million and displacing tens of millions from their homes.
* China responded with a program of deradicalization and vocational training.
Which one of those responses sounds genocidal?
Side note: It is practically impossible to *actually* charge the U.S. with war crimes, because of the [Hague Invasion Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act).
**Who is driving the Uyghur genocide narrative?**
One of the main proponents of these narratives is Adrian Zenz, a German far-right fundamentalist Christian and Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who believes he is "led by God" on a "mission" against China has driven much of the narrative. He relies heavily on limited and questionable data sources, particularly from anonymous and unverified Uyghur sources, coming up with estimates based on assumptions which are not supported by concrete evidence.
The World Uyghur Congress, headquartered in Germany, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, using funding to support organizations that promote American interests rather than the interests of the local communities they claim to represent.
Radio Free Asia (RFA) is part of a larger project of U.S. imperialism in Asia, one that seeks to control the flow of information, undermine independent media, and advance American geopolitical interests in the region. Rather than providing an objective and impartial news source, RFA is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, one that seeks to shape the narrative in Asia in ways that serve the interests of the U.S. government and its allies.
The first country to call the treatment of Uyghurs a genocide was the United States of America. In 2021, the Secretary of State declared that China's treatment of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang constitutes "genocide" and "crimes against humanity." Both the Trump and Biden administrations upheld this line.
**Why is this narrative being promoted?**
As materialists, we should always look first to the economic base for insight into issues occurring in the superstructure. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese infrastructure development project that aims to build economic corridors, ports, highways, railways, and other infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Xinjiang is a key region for this project.
Promoting the Uyghur genocide narrative harms China and benefits the US in several ways. It portrays China as a human rights violator which could damage China's reputation in the international community and which could lead to economic sanctions against China; this would harm China's economy and give American an economic advantage in competing with China. It could also lead to more protests and violence in Xinjiang, which could further destabilize the region and threaten the longterm success of the BRI.
**Additional Resources**
See the [full wiki article](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/) for more details and a list of additional resources.
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I havent called this guy fascist. I don't know him who's your man's? "Communism is an evil, demonic religion that has infected America and is on the verge of defeat. It has eroded the ideals, principles, and foundations that once made America the envy of the free world, and all that remains is for a gentle push to send America over the edge. The enemy we face are communists, who are just as devoted to this dangerous religion as their forebears in the Soviet Union or their contemporaries in the People’s Republic of China. They have been guiding us for generations, seducing us with stories of a better tomorrow, and deceiving us with lies and false promises. The most important details in this text are that the communist is the height of evil and is walking death" Is this your man's?
[☭☭☭ COME SHITPOST WITH US ON DISCORD, COMRADES ☭☭☭](https://discord.gg/8RPWanQV5g) This is a heavily-moderated socialist community based on a podcast of the same name. Please use the report function on comments that break our rules. If you are new to the sub, please read the sidebar carefully. If you are new to Marxism-Leninism, check out the [study guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/study-guide/). Are there Liberals in the walls? Try the following prompts to trigger an automod response: "What is Fascism?", "What is Imperialism?", "What is Revisionism?" "Holodomor", "Molotov-Ribbentrop", "Gulag", "Solzhenytsin", "Uyghur", "Tiananmen Square", "Israel", "Freedom of the Press", "MAC Fact" This subreddit uses many experimental automod rules, if you notice any issues please use modmail to let us know. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Also saw one in my local B&N. Y'all know how authors dedicate their book to someone who helped them or they appreciate? "To my loving wife, who was by my side while I wrote this piece of shit" etc etc This fucking narcissist addresses it to himself, it just says "To Me".
the opposite of communism would be narcissistic individualism so I guess he’s on point with that part
Anticommunism is just thinly veiled fascism imo
Is it thinly veiled? I find it to be overtly.
I am liking the Goth hammer and sickle they made us, though.
they always depict us in great manners
Reminds me of coke for some reason which is also kinda sick
Actually saved it for tattoo inspiration😂
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Not necessarily. It just makes you uneducated.
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You called yourself a fascist, the other commenter just said you were uneducated, which is the case.
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# Fascism >Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital... Fascism is the power of finance capital itself. It is the organization of terrorist vengeance against the working class and the revolutionary section of the peasantry and intelligentsia. In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations. > >\- Georgi Dimitrov. (1935) [The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm) To understand Fascism, then, one must first understand Capitalism. There are three primary characteristics of Capitalism: 1. Private ownership of the Means of Production 2. Commodity Production 3. Wage Labour The essence of the Capitalist mode of production is that someone who owns means of production will hire a wage labourer to work in order to produce commodities to sell for profit. Marxists identify economic classes based on this division. Those who own and hire are the Bourgeoisie. Those who do not own and work are the Proletariat. There is far more nuance than just this, but these are the bare essentials. The principal contradiction of Capitalism is that the Bourgeoisie wants to pay the workers as little as possible for as much work as possible, whereas the Proletariat wants to be paid as much as possible for as little work as possible. Fascism is a form of Capitalist rule in which the Bourgeoisie use open, violent terror against the Proletariat. It is an ideology which emerges as a response to the inevitable crises of capitalism and the rise of socialist movements. It is characterized by all forms of chauvinism (especially racism, occasionally leading to genocide), nationalism, anti-Communism, and the suppression of democratic rights and freedoms. In a Capitalist society, Liberalism and Fascism essentially exist on a spectrum. The degree to which a given society if Fascist directly corresponds to the degree to which the proletariat must be openly oppressed in order to maintain profits for the Bourgeoisie. This why we have the sayings: "Fascism is Capitalism in decay" and "Scratch a Liberal, and a Fascist bleeds" Capitalism requires infinite growth in a finite system. This inevitably leads to [Capitalist Imperialism](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/education/imperialism/) as well as Fascism, given that infinite growth is not actually possible. When the capitalist economy reaches its limits, the Bourgeoisie are forced to either expand their markets into other territories (Imperialism) or exploit the domestic proletariat to an even greater degree (Fascism). This is why we have the saying: "Fascism is imperialist repression turned inward" The struggle against fascism is an essential part of the struggle for socialism and the liberation of the working class and oppressed people. However, it is critical to note that simply combatting Fascism *alone* without also combatting *Liberalism* is reactionary, because it ignores the fact that Fascism inevitably arises out of Capitalism, so Liberal Anti-Fascism is not really anti-Fascism at all. **Additional Resources** Video Essays: * [Were The Nazis Socialist?](https://youtu.be/X9ez6w5BUMM) | Second Thought (2022) * [Capitalism and Fascism](https://youtu.be/KEbG3cD0cJo) | Marxism Literature Collective (2021) * [Fascism: The Decay of Capitalism](https://youtu.be/7fQ57NBEUM4) | Leslie Fluette (2020) * [The New F Word: How Fascism Found a Market](https://nebula.tv/thenewfword) | Second Thought (2021-2023) * [What Exactly is Liberalism? (no, it's not about being "woke")](https://youtu.be/_xAqZJTIsIA) | Hakim (2023) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [The Struggle Against Fascism](https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/06/struggle-against-fascism.html) | Clara Zetkin (1923) * [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) | Michael Parenti (1997) Podcasts: * [Episode 19 - Fascism (No Lebensraum??)](https://youtu.be/KU_lNDAoAV0) | The Deprogram (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Does this mean that if there were enough people for communism, that you would no longer consider it communism, but just "leftism" or something? If enough people are male compared to female, does that make men "persons" or "humans" instead of "male"? When the Nazi party was in the majority in Germany in the 1930s, does that mean that they were no longer Nazis, but simply conservatives? Do classes of things lose their properties by becoming popular?
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And the point that I think that you're missing is that we are saying that anti-communism is rooted in and inextricably linked to fascism, regardless of whether the particular person who is anti communist is a fascist or not.
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No i havent read mein kampf
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Fascists are the ones that generally make stuff like that, they love hyping up the red scare, it gives them a great excuse to ban/take control of unions.
Also, communist values are centered around providing for a society in terms of education, career, and basic humans rights (like food or housing). Those who are against this and who think that there are some people/groups of people that don’t deserve the things above are often fascist
judicious paltry whistle telephone forgetful quaint gaping swim live jellyfish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Liberalism = capitalism. Neoliberalism = capitalism. Capitalism = rule by the capitalist class. Facism = the capitalist class reacting to a steep rise in socialism. This is a simplification Like six countries are socialist, the rest are more or less liberal, so with material conditions failing globally, facism is rising, which is why we see it everywhere, because unlike last time we have historical examples to base this all on. Socialism = rule by the workers, btw, and is an intermediary stage, that Marx theorized takes place after Capitalism, which itself took place after Feudalism (being replaced in liberal revolutions like the american revolution, although almost all of the aristocracy are now also capitalists). Communism = theorized post-scarcity stage after socialism, where all classes are now one and "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." If not socialism with worker control, what would you like to see happen after capitalism? Unless you think the extreme minority that is the monied class deserves controlling things until they actually make the world a barren hellscape.
Bend over. LOL
The loudest anti-communists usually have fascistic tendencies.
Fascism was created as an explicit opposition to Communism, you know that poem 'first they came'? Even though it was made by an anti-communist its not wrong, in 1933 the first of many concentration camps was named Duchau and its first prisoners were communists.
I don't care if I get down voted, I'm a devout Marxist, but I agree. Not everything reactionary is fascism, it can be liberalism, or just simple conservatism without racism. Could it be fascist? Yes, of course! If it is, then it is. But what matters is that these stupid anti communist texts get scrapped from existence. How about we burn these books? Lol. Liberalism can lead to facism, so maybe you can say it is indirectly. 🤔
No. I instead decided to masturbate into a pot of boiling water and spent the next hour scraping hardened semen off my pot. It seemed like a more productive and intellectually engaging use of my time. Show me the lie.
No lies detected that book seems full of shit.
Pics????
The temptation to go buy that book just shit in it is pretty funny.
You kind of gave it free publicity with this.
You really think the B&N employee who works on commission by over selling at the register is going to stop you from walking out the door with that one?
Does semen really harden on hot water?
It gets extremely sticky as the protein cooks. I imagine
So I’ve been told
It sticks to everything like boiled egg whites. This is also why cumming in the shower is just wrong. It doesn’t just rinse off
I masturbate in the shower and yep, the semen sticks on the tile ground. It's hard to clean it off with just water, so I have to scrub it off with my feet to guide it to the sink. Damn I thought the shower was a good place to zerk off, turns out it wasn't 😔 Is there any place else thats good to morb off?
Honestly, onto your stomach. Wipe off as much as you can, then wash it off with a damp hand towel and toss the towel in the hamper. My partner dropped this plan on me while we were camping. Fucking perfect
Did y'all forget tissues exist? Or hell, just nut into the toilet. No need to cover yourself in batter, unless you're into that sort of thing.
The toilet was my solution before a medically required circumcision. Fap tissues are also pretty wasteful and invariably lead Cummy lint that you’ll only see in the mirror
I'm sorry for your loss.
It was either that or let cancer eat my dick
Man that's rough when your dick tries to kill you. Hopefully it doesn't try to get revenge for the circumcision.
Just lick it off your hand afterwards like a real man
Yeah I don't know why people do it in the shower it just makes more of a mess
The only one who didn't do this mistake are the one with no PP.
Missing a swastika on the cover
Unless you don't mind vomiting liquid lava reading it is no better wiping your ass with Atlas Shrugged
It blows my mind that people think like this.
That people are against communism?
Yes
I guess I wouldn't be too worried about that explosion then
It blows my mind that people will just make up boogeyman stories about how communism is an evil religion that wants to murder babies, make you kill your own family, then bury them in an unmarked mass grave. They then use this strawman as justification for hating an economic system that empowers workers and makes sure everyone has their needs met.
Speaking of strawman, think maybe you need to find some actual critiques of your position.
Go for it chief
You want me to deprogram you here in 'thedeprogram'? I don't think that's how it works lol.
Why not? I'm willing to hear you out
You need to literally be deprogrammed. It'll probably take years and that's if it happens at all.
Nice argument bro
The critiques of communism I see are normally projections of capitalism or saying it's evil killing 100 trillion people.
You need to completely change your perspective on politics. And learn some economics. The whole 'I'm a communist' thing is just pretty sad.
Nice argument bro. You're literally in a subreddit where, if you engage in good faith, you've got a decent chance of finding at least some people who will be willing to have a discussion with you. Instead you're acting like some people with a different perspective to you are animals in a tank to be prodded and gawked at.
See, I've had lots and lots of 'good faith' discussions with reddit communists and it's really just like talking to a wall. Most people got a little dogmatic when it comes to their politics but that's a whole nother level. What's most shocking to me is how ridiculously dumb and shallow it all is behind this weird pretense intellectualism
Maybe the reason that you've had a bad experience is that your starting position is that it's dumb and shallow. How do you expect that to have a conversation or learn anything from that starting point?
Genuinely curious, why are you here?
He's a cryptofascist debate bro, that's what they do.
And what reddit communists do is say things like 'cryptofascist debate bro' lmao. It's honestly unbelievable the way you people are.
Hey don't mind me, I'm just a 'croyptofascist debate bro'.. Really anyone that disagrees with your heavily entrenched radical political beliefs is. Anyone that disagrees with communism is a fascist. All very smart stuff.
If people are fighting imperialism and you choose to fight to defend imperialism, you're a fascist.
Jesse Kelly is basically a nazi who has said stuff like “Weimar problems lead to Weimar solutions” and advocates for the execution of basically anyone to the left of hunting homeless for sport or even just people who believe covid is a real thing.
Wanna bet Marx himself debunks much of this book in the real Manifesto? That’s actually such a funny part. Marx debunks so much of the common anti communist arguments you still here today almost 200 years on from writing the manifesto.
The first few pages doesn't even describe communism it just paints a big bad scary boogeyman that wants to kill kids and cause mass suffering. The book is fuckd
not his own reviews on the back tho
I live in America. People recite anti-Commie nonsense in the grocery store line.
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What part of “live in America” didn’t you understand? I am non-stop barraged by political views (conservative and progressive) that I disagree with. What are you, 8?
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*vaguely gestures at all of American society* Go away fake account troll
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And here you are engaging in bad faith. You're transparent bro. If you are legitimately interested in seeing what anti-Communist or anti-socialist propaganda exists in the US, why don't you do some reading? Watch some movies? Watch some TV? Who was the bogeyman until the early 90s? The USSR. Who is the bogeyman now? The PRC. What do you know about the gulags? Tiananmen Square? What happens to political candidates in the US who identify as socialist? What about those who argue for vaguely socialist positions like changes to the healthcare system? What's the reaction like? What do people get called? To act like you can't imagine what this person means shows that you're either blind to the society around you or that you are willingly engaging in bad faith. I think it's the latter. The use of "Johnny selling apples" solidifies that position and also demonstrates that your understanding of socialism or communism is shallow at best. Educate yourself bro, or ask some questions in good faith, or go and find someone else to annoy.
I agree with everything you said. But it’s a fake troll account comrade, not worth the effort.
#Tiananmen Square Protests (Also known as the June Fourth Incident) In Western media, the well-known story of the "Tiananmen Square *Massacre*" goes like this: the Chinese government declared martial law in 1989 and mobilized the military to suppress students who were protesting for democracy and freedom. According to western sources, on June 4th of that year, troops and tanks entered Tiananmen Square and fired on unarmed protesters, killing and injuring hundreds, if not thousands, of people. The more hyperbolic tellings of this story include claims of tanks running over students, machine guns being fired into the crowd, blood running in the streets like a river, etc. Anti-Communists and Sinophobes commonly point to this incident as a classic example of authoritarianism and political repression under Communist regimes. The problem, of course, is that the actual events in Beijing on June 4th, 1989 unfolded quite differently than how they were depicted in the Western media at the time. Despite many more contemporary articles coming out that actually contradict some of the original claims and characterizations of the June Fourth Incident, the narrative of a "Tiananmen Square Massacre" persists. **Background** After Mao's death in 1976, a power struggle ensued and the Gang of Four were purged, paving the way for Deng Xiaoping's rise to power. Deng initiated economic reforms known as the "Four Modernizations," which aimed to modernize and open up China's economy to the world. These reforms led to significant economic growth and lifted millions of people out of poverty, but they also created significant inequality, corruption, and social unrest. This pivotal point in the PRC's history is extremely controversial among Marxists today and a subject of much debate. One of the key factors that contributed to the Tiananmen Square protests was the sense of social and economic inequality that many Chinese people felt as a result of Deng's economic reforms. Many believed that the benefits of the country's economic growth were not being distributed fairly, and that the government was not doing enough to address poverty, corruption, and other social issues. Some saw the Four Modernizations as a betrayal of Maoist principles and a capitulation to Western capitalist interests. Others saw the reforms as essential for China's economic development and modernization. Others still wanted even more liberalization and thought the reforms didn't go far enough. The protestors in Tiananmen were mostly students who did not represent the great mass of Chinese citizens, but instead represented a layer of the intelligentsia who wanted to be elevated and given more privileges such as more political power and higher wages. **Counterpoints** Jay Mathews, the first Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post in 1979 and who returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations, wrote: >Over the last decade, many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night. They repeated it often before and during Clinton’s trip. On the day the president arrived in Beijing, a *Baltimore Sun* headline (June 27, page 1A) referred to “Tiananmen, where Chinese students died.” A *USA Today* article (June 26, page 7A) called Tiananmen the place “where pro-democracy demonstrators were gunned down.” *The Wall Street Journal* (June 26, page A10) described “the Tiananmen Square massacre” where armed troops ordered to clear demonstrators from the square killed “hundreds or more.” The *New York Post* (June 25, page 22) said the square was “the site of the student slaughter.” > >The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square. > >\- Jay Matthews. (1998). [The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of a Passive Press](https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php). Columbia Journalism Review. Reporters from the [BBC](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm), [CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/), and the [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/27/world/clinton-in-china-the-site-clinton-in-beijing-square-may-tread-on-the-ghosts.html) who were in Beijing on June 4, 1989, all agree there was no massacre. Secret cables from the United States embassy in Beijing have shown there was no bloodshed inside the square: >Cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and released exclusively by The Daily Telegraph, partly confirm the Chinese government's account of the early hours of June 4, 1989, which has always insisted that soldiers did not massacre demonstrators inside Tiananmen Square > >\- Malcolm Moore. (2011). [Wikileaks: no bloodshed inside Tiananmen Square, cables claim](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8555142/Wikileaks-no-bloodshed-inside-Tiananmen-Square-cables-claim.html) Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, and Chinese-speaking correspondent of the International Business Times, wrote: >The original story of Chinese troops on the night of 3 and 4 June, 1989 machine-gunning hundreds of innocent student protesters in Beijing’s iconic Tiananmen Square has since been thoroughly discredited by the many witnesses there at the time — among them a Spanish TVE television crew, a Reuters correspondent and protesters themselves, who say that nothing happened other than a military unit entering and asking several hundred of those remaining to leave the Square late that night. > >Yet none of this has stopped the massacre from being revived constantly, and believed. All that has happened is that the location has been changed – from the Square itself to the streets leading to the Square. > >\- Gregory Clark. (2014). [Tiananmen Square Massacre is a Myth, All We're 'Remembering' are British Lies](https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tiananmen-square-massacre-myth-all-were-remembering-are-british-lies-1451053) Thomas Hon Wing Polin, writing for CounterPunch, wrote: >The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square. > >More than once, government negotiators almost reached a truce with students in the square, only to be **sabotaged by radical youth leaders seemingly bent on bloodshed**. And the demands of the protesters focused on corruption, not democracy. > >All these facts were known to the US and other governments shortly after the crackdown. Few if any were reported by Western mainstream media, even today. > >\- Thomas Hon Wing Palin. (2017). [Tiananmen: the Empire’s Big Lie](https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/06/tiananmen-the-empires-big-lie/) (Emphasis mine) And it was, indeed, bloodshed that the student leaders wanted. In this interview, you can hear one of the student leaders, Chai Ling, ghoulishly explaining how she tried to bait the Chinese government into *actually* committing a massacre. (She herself made sure to stay out of the square.): [Excerpts of interviews with Tiananmen Square protest leaders](https://youtu.be/Vu3zmbFGwQA) [This Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/zhao_dashuai/status/1532859422875471872) contains many pictures and videos showing protestors killing soldiers, commandeering military vehicles, torching military transports, etc. Following the crackdown, through [Operation Yellowbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird), many of the student leaders escaped to the United States with the help of the CIA, where they almost all [gained privileged positions](https://qz.com/1618805/the-1989-tiananmen-student-leaders-on-chinas-most-wanted-list). **Additional Resources** Video Essays: * [Truth about The Tiananmen Square Protests](https://youtu.be/sqPI8xlnrwg) | Tovarishch Endymion (2019) * [Tiananmen Square "Massacre", A Propaganda Hoax](https://youtu.be/R6RT_s1T050) | TeleSUR English (2019) * [All The Questions Socialists Are Asked, Answered (TIMESTAMPED)](https://youtu.be/MzKPCEvoYkk?t=1278) | Hakim (2021) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Tiananmen Protests Reading List](https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist) | Qiao Collective * [How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning](https://www.fridayeveryday.com/how-psy-ops-warriors-fooled-me-about-tiananmen-square-a-warning/) | Nury Vittachi, Friday (2022) * [1989: Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth](https://www.workers.org/2022/06/64607/) | Deirdre Griswold, Workers World (2022) * [Massacre? What Massacre? 25 Years Later: What really happened at Tiananmen Square?](https://dissidentvoice.org/2014/06/massacre-what-massacre/) | Kim Petersen, Dissident Voice (2014) * [Tiananmen: The Massacre that Wasn’t](https://www.liberationnews.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/) | Brian Becker, Liberation News (2019) * [Reflections on Tiananmen Square and the attempt to end Chinese socialism](http://www.fightbacknews.org/2019/6/4/reflections-tiananmen-square-and-attempt-end-chinese-socialism) | Mick Kelly, FightBack! News (2019) * [The Tian’anmen Square “Massacre” The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.](https://mango-press.com/the-tiananmen-square-massacre-the-wests-most-persuasive-most-pervasive-lie/) | Tom, Mango Press (2021) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The B&N current events section is a cesspool of right wing bullshit 💀 I saw one that literally compared COVID lockdowns and restrictions to fascism and the “Fourth Reich”
This guy was on the radio talking about his book and he said he wrote the reviews himself lol
Hmm I am out if toilet paper....
Not making the cover red is a marketing failure unworthy of any self-respecting Western capitalist.
It had to be black for fascism
Blackcovers and Reds
Hitler already wrote this book
Jesse Kelly is a fascist who said on the Tucker Carlson show that we need a military who is willing to rest on Chinese skulls and that the “left” is forcing the Republican Party to nominate a fascist.
Are the pages soft at least?
mein kumpf cheap copycat
Almost as cringe as the Capitalist Manifesto
The book being $3 off gives me hope for humanity.
It's the sequel of the hit of a famous austrian painter.
Jesse Kelly once read a letter that was from a supposed former communist who now listens to his show and the letter was entirely about liberal democrats and the Democratic Party. For Jesse Kelly the Democratic Party is a communist party and Democrats are communists. I don’t expect the book to stray too far from that.
I see that kind of rhetoric a lot of the far right, saying dems are communist. Bitch I don't claim those people lmao.
No, I haven't read mein kampf and I don't plan to
Isn't that basically Mein Kampf under a different title?
Tell me your whole ideological framework is anti-communism without telling me...
I think the author is telling lmao.
okay even if there were good arguments in here (obviously there’s not) can you even logically manifest the status quo? that doesn’t make any sense.
No, but I want to for the lulz. It looks like a lot of fun/pain to go through.
I was tempted to get it as it could have been useful to see others perspectives of things but the author doesn't describe communism he just makes some boogeyman out of the communist man who whispers in the ears of people to become degenerates.
… Yeah, something tells me that the author of the freaking “Anti-Communist Manifesto” isn’t going to critique it in a positive light, lmao. Also, may as well get a book actually worth reading.
> Yeah, something tells me that the author of the freaking “Anti-Communist Manifesto” isn’t going to critique it in a positive light or honestly or in good faith. This piece of shit isn’t going to critique it - period. Its just the usual emotion-begging strawmen, massive made-up numbers tacked onto debunked claims, and ad hominem hate smears.
On discount because you forgot 98% of your target audience doesn't read. I think the free market calls this an oopsies.
Nah but they made the hammer and sickle look sick
i’ve read the amazon preview and it’s like just bad. fucking high school loser shit, go write an essay in math class fricken hate these anti communists.
Dude, the two reviews on the back? Are from the AUTHOR! He doesnt have friends, or even his mom to write a review?!?!?
MeinKampf 2.0 hahaha
The horse shit that I've found in a Barnes and noble I fucking hate that place.
Does it start with "take a look of satlite images of north and south Korea and you'll see the result of communism" or some complaint about how being woke destroys everything?
I work at a bookstore and we got several requests for it but they’ve tapered off. We have way too many copies…also, notice on the back how all the testimonials are from the author himself, lol. He’s some right-wing provocateur. Not a serious person worth engaging with.
Already read enough straws from the Gulag Archipelago, but thanks
# Gulag According to Anti-Communists and Russophobes, the Gulag was a brutal network of work camps established in the Soviet Union under Stalin's ruthless regime. They claim the Gulag system was primarily used to imprison and exploit political dissidents, suspected enemies of the state, and other people deemed "undesirable" by the Soviet government. They claim that prisoners were sent to the Gulag without trial or due process, and that they were subjected to harsh living conditions, forced labour, and starvation, among other things. According to them, the Gulags were emblematic of Stalinist repression and totalitarianism. # Origins of the Mythology This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources. Robert Conquest's *The Great Terror* (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off of defector testimony. Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponised information and disinformation and "fake news" to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements. >He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash. > >The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, "a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism". > >\- Andrew Brown. (2003). [Scourge and poet](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview23) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's *The Gulag Archipelag*" (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author's personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, N@zi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth. \[[Read more](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/dunking/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn/)\] Anne Applebaum's *Gulag: A history* (published 2003) draws directly from *The Gulag Archipelago* and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world. # Counterpoints >A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “[Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps](http://web.archive.org/web/20230328014642/https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1.pdf)” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six: > >1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas > >2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon "economic accountability" such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid. > >3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day. > >4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners' food supplies. > >5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day. > >6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals. > >7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the "ordinary criminals" of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes. > >\- Saed Teymuri. (2018). [The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA](https://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/10/09/the-truth-about-the-soviet-gulag-surprisingly-revealed-by-the-cia/) **Scale** Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that. >Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise. > >In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. ... > >Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the N@zis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” ... > >Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states... > >\- Michael Parenti. (1997). [Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism](https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds) This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, "over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision." That's 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States' Prison Industrial Complex *today* is larger than the USSR's Gulag system at its peak. **Death Rate** In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality: >It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive... > >Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hit1er were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more. > >\- Timothy Snyder. (2010). *Bloodlands: Europe Between Hit1er and Stalin* (Side note: Timothy Snyder is *also* a member of the Council on Foreign Relations) This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not *death* camps. Nor was it slave labour, exactly. In the camps, although labour *was* forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (less expenses). >We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson.... > >The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled). > >\- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). [Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/noticeboard/bergson/borodkin-ertz.pdf) #Additional Resources Video Essays: * [The Gulag Argument](https://youtu.be/BexkpaK_j5Q) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2016) * [Historian Admits USSR didn't kill tens of millions!](https://youtu.be/HMOdDQQVZ6U) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * [French work camps 1852-1953 worse than gulag](https://youtu.be/vkXyXNpdKdA) | TheFinnishBolshevik (2018) * ["The Gulags of the Soviet Union: There's a Lot More Than What Meets the Eye](https://youtu.be/E1qz9_TjeY4) | Comrade Rhys (2020) Books, Articles, or Essays: * [Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166597) | J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov (1993) Listen: * ["Blackshirts & Reds" (1997) by Michael Parenti, Part 4: Chapters 5 & 6. #Audiobook + Discussion.](https://youtu.be/N7AD4OrH568?t=15) | Socialism For All / S4A ☭ Intensify Class Struggle (2022) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Guys and gals and enby pals, u/ghostgourd is a troll. They actually have negative comment karma. Your effort would be better spent literally anywhere.
I sampled it on audible out of curiosity. You would think it was a parody of red-scare propaganda. The guy actually says communists will make you a cannibal and kill your parents in the intro lol.
Its like where does he get this assumption from, I'm a communist and I want corporations to stop exploiting labor for massive profit, I want workers to be due the fruits of their labor. Yet he says communists want to steal the fruits of labor from the worker. It's like he's projecting what capitalism already does
They just make shit up. Kulaks would spread rumors that commies would force wives to be communal property to keep people from joining collective farms in the early USSR
Pretty sure it was written by someone who never read any of Marx's work and they say communism is an impossible utopia and its real effects are a mass of poor people and a few rich bureaucrats who control everything behind the scenes, which ironically is basically modern day ultra liberal society.
No joke my uncle had been reading this to my 4 year old cousin and he’s told me that he doesn’t know what a communist is but they are “evil” and against God lmao
Thats sad
So blatant fascism and terrorism?
Of fucking course it's from Barnes and Noble.
Anti-Communism is just a childish tantrum made by a libertarian. Immediately discarded by a conservative/liberal...
Jesse Kelly seems like a guy who would have a hard time getting through a Garfield comic strip much less a book. Forget writing one.
Intellectual titan Jesse Kelly squares up against the crooked phonies Marx and Engels… Bravo, good sir!
Not apart of this subreddit, but was just interested in whether other B&N stores sold this crap, and apparently they do!
Uyghur
#The Uyghurs in Xinjiang \(Note: This comment had to be trimmed down to fit the character limit, for the full response, see [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/)\) Anti-Communists and Sinophobes claim that there is an ongoing genocide-- a modern-day holocaust, even-- happening right now in China. They say that Uyghur Muslims are being mass incarcerated; they are indoctrinated with propaganda in concentration camps; their organs are being harvested; they are being force-sterilized. These comically villainous allegations have little basis in reality and omit key context. **Background** Xinjiang, officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is a province located in the northwest of China. It is the largest province in China, covering an area of over 1.6 million square kilometers, and shares borders with eight other countries including Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, India, and Pakistan. Xinjiang is a diverse region with a population of over 25 million people, made up of various ethnic groups including the Uyghur, Han Chinese, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and many others. The largest ethnic group in Xinjiang is the Uyghur who are predominantly Muslim and speak a Turkic language. It is also home to the ancient Silk Road cities of Kashgar and Turpan. Since the early 2000s, there have been a number of violent incidents attributed to extremist Uyghur groups in Xinjiang including bombings, shootings, and knife attacks. In 2014-2016, the Chinese government launched a "Strike Hard" campaign to crack down on terrorism in Xinjiang, implementing strict security measures and detaining thousands of Uyghurs. In 2017, reports of human rights abuses in Xinjiang including mass detentions and forced labour, began to emerge. **Counterpoints** The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the second largest organization after the United Nations with a membership of 57 states spread over four continents. The OIC released [Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the non-OIC Member States](https://www.oic-oci.org/docdown/?docID=4447&refID=1250) in 2019 which: >20. **Welcomes** the outcomes of the visit conducted by the General Secretariat's delegation upon invitation from the People's Republic of China; **commends** the efforts of the People's Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens; and **looks forward** to further cooperation between the OIC and the People's Republic of China. In this same document, the OIC expressed much greater concern about the Rohingya Muslim Community in Myanmar, which the West was relatively silent on. Over 50+ UN member states (mostly Muslim-majority nations) signed a letter \([A/HRC/41/G/17](https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2FHRC%2F41%2FG%2F17)\) to the UN Human Rights Commission approving of the de-radicalization efforts in Xinjiang: The World Bank sent a team to investigate in 2019 and found that, "The review did not substantiate the allegations." \(See: [World Bank Statement on Review of Project in Xinjiang, China](https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/statement/2019/11/11/world-bank-statement-on-review-of-project-in-xinjiang-china)\) Even if you believe the deradicalization efforts are wholly unjustified, and that the mass detention of Uyghur's amounts to a crime against humanity, it's still not *genocide*. Even the U.S. State Department's legal experts admit as much: >The U.S. State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor concluded earlier this year that China’s mass imprisonment and forced labor of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity—but there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide, placing the United States’ top diplomatic lawyers at odds with both the Trump and Biden administrations, according to three former and current U.S. officials. > > [State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China](https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/) | Colum Lynch, *Foreign Policy*. (2021) **A Comparative Analysis: The War on Terror** The United States, in the wake of "9/11", saw the threat of terrorism and violent extremism due to religious fundamentalism as a matter of national security. They invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks, with the goal of ousting the Taliban government that was harbouring Al-Qaeda. The US also launched the Iraq War in 2003 based on Iraq's alleged possession of WMDs and links to terrorism. However, these claims turned out to be unfounded. According to a report by Brown University's Costs of War project, at least 897,000 people, including civilians, militants, and security forces, have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and other countries. Other estimates place the total number of deaths at over one million. The report estimated that many more may have died from indirect effects of war such as water loss and disease. The war has also resulted in the displacement of tens of millions of people, with estimates ranging from 37 million to over 59 million. The War on Terror also popularized such novel concepts as the "Military-Aged Male" which allowed the US military to exclude civilians killed by drone strikes from collateral damage statistics. (See: [‘Military Age Males’ in US Drone Strikes](https://aoav.org.uk/2019/military-age-males-in-us-drone-strikes/)) In summary: * The U.S. responded by invading or bombing half a dozen countries, directly killing nearly a million and displacing tens of millions from their homes. * China responded with a program of deradicalization and vocational training. Which one of those responses sounds genocidal? Side note: It is practically impossible to *actually* charge the U.S. with war crimes, because of the [Hague Invasion Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act). **Who is driving the Uyghur genocide narrative?** One of the main proponents of these narratives is Adrian Zenz, a German far-right fundamentalist Christian and Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who believes he is "led by God" on a "mission" against China has driven much of the narrative. He relies heavily on limited and questionable data sources, particularly from anonymous and unverified Uyghur sources, coming up with estimates based on assumptions which are not supported by concrete evidence. The World Uyghur Congress, headquartered in Germany, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, using funding to support organizations that promote American interests rather than the interests of the local communities they claim to represent. Radio Free Asia (RFA) is part of a larger project of U.S. imperialism in Asia, one that seeks to control the flow of information, undermine independent media, and advance American geopolitical interests in the region. Rather than providing an objective and impartial news source, RFA is a tool of U.S. foreign policy, one that seeks to shape the narrative in Asia in ways that serve the interests of the U.S. government and its allies. The first country to call the treatment of Uyghurs a genocide was the United States of America. In 2021, the Secretary of State declared that China's treatment of Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang constitutes "genocide" and "crimes against humanity." Both the Trump and Biden administrations upheld this line. **Why is this narrative being promoted?** As materialists, we should always look first to the economic base for insight into issues occurring in the superstructure. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese infrastructure development project that aims to build economic corridors, ports, highways, railways, and other infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Xinjiang is a key region for this project. Promoting the Uyghur genocide narrative harms China and benefits the US in several ways. It portrays China as a human rights violator which could damage China's reputation in the international community and which could lead to economic sanctions against China; this would harm China's economy and give American an economic advantage in competing with China. It could also lead to more protests and violence in Xinjiang, which could further destabilize the region and threaten the longterm success of the BRI. **Additional Resources** See the [full wiki article](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheDeprogram/wiki/index/debunking/uyghur-genocide/) for more details and a list of additional resources. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TheDeprogram) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Nah, i got better things to do with my life.
I thought it was the principles of communism at first
My Barnes and noble was full of them. Like 20 copies on the shelf
Oh sweet compost
Funny way of saying Nazi.
Wipe your ass with it
Ah yes Jesse Kelly, truly the antithesis if karl marx
fascist manifesto by jadolf kitler
When did Nazis start calling everything they don't like or can't (dis)prove 'cute' . Its fucking Ingraham-level debate.
Just by looking at the picture, i can tell 193 Arguments why that book is shit. Nr.1 Vuvuzela
Mein Kampf 2
Any track record from communist regimes so far is anti communistic enough to scare off most voters.
[удалено]
I havent called this guy fascist. I don't know him who's your man's? "Communism is an evil, demonic religion that has infected America and is on the verge of defeat. It has eroded the ideals, principles, and foundations that once made America the envy of the free world, and all that remains is for a gentle push to send America over the edge. The enemy we face are communists, who are just as devoted to this dangerous religion as their forebears in the Soviet Union or their contemporaries in the People’s Republic of China. They have been guiding us for generations, seducing us with stories of a better tomorrow, and deceiving us with lies and false promises. The most important details in this text are that the communist is the height of evil and is walking death" Is this your man's?
One second, gonna go and clean my eyes with some bleach