Something to make people think about it while they try to solve the cognitive dissonance, or to Atleast make them view it more than a simple totalitarian state where everything was bad and even the grass was white

  • LaBellaLotta [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    3 days ago

    Yeah I think most Americans are blissfully unaware of the facts about who actually shed most of the blood to grind down the Nazi war machine.

    Those figures SHOULD have an effect on any thinking person who goes around believing it was the U.S. that beat the Nazis.

    If that doesn’t have any effect on them there’s probably some underlying shit they believe that you aren’t gonna unpack if they’ve already been able to delude themselves to the level of “the soviets paid most of the human toll to end the Nazi war machine BUT ACTUALLY they are moral equivalents when you think about it”

    Can’t change every mind!

    • Sickos [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      The American propaganda response to that is that it’s because the Soviets were completely untrained conscripts and just threw bodies into a meat grinder instead of training or arming or protecting or industrializing or innovating or strategizing and that those deaths were meaningless. It’s just another non-falsifiable orthodoxy.

      Parenti quote + Woody Guthrie time.

      In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.