I agree, German kids could have resisted, there was the White Rose and shit, and let’s not forget the thousands of leftists thrown into the camps. It’s not like people didn’t know what they were doing was wrong, they just didn’t want to take the risk of opposing the regime like the peers did. And to forgive them, punishes those who did resist. That’s why Nazi collaborators deserve a swift execution along side the true believers.

It allowed them to intercept ships to check if they were slave trading. While they were inspecting the ship, the British officers could use the pretext to find other things wrong, ie smuggling, piracy, desertion, ect. Then they could seize your property or arrest you in some cases. Sort of like how American cops can use a busted taillight to pull you over, then arrest you if he find drugs during that.

The navy did also free a significant number of slaves this way too so it wasn’t just an abuse of power, but it also signaled to everyone that Britain was the dominant naval power in Europe now.

While this was not the sole reason, it should be noted that English anti-slavery laws gave their navy a pretext to board and search vessels for “inspections”. With the UK quickly becoming the world’s dominant naval power, this gave them lots of power over foreign shipping and trade, especially in the Atlantic.

I’d agree generally. One of the most difficult obstacles for global communists to overcome in the last century is that Stalin tied the project of building communism (globally) with the national interests of the USSR. A lot of communists obviously didn’t feel very comfortable with letting internationalism take a back seat to just always supporting Moscow and let the capitalists do the whole “reds are traitors who want to sell out their nation” propaganda a lot more effectively. The Sino-Soviet Split is another example of this, where Russian national interests won out over international solidarity.

Though about Bukharin, I can’t say for sure how things would have turned out if he and the Right Opposition came out on top in the power struggle. I really like Bukharin personality, he seems like a good guy, smart too. Things like collectivization would have been more “relaxed” under him than Stalin definitely, and he probably would have been able to just bribe the peasant kulaks into cooperating rather than going full class liquidation on them like Stalin. I bet Bukharin economy would have likely been really impressive if it was allowed time and space to develop since he seemed to understand in a Marxist sense that Russia didn’t get the benefit of prior capitalist accumulation and could do more to address that than just brute forcing the problem with massive, labor-intensive projects like Stalin did (with terrible health and safety regulations as well)

The major issue is that you still have the fuckin Nazi invasion happening in the 1940s, and without Stalin’s aggressive campaign of industrialization it’s possible a Bukharinist USSR just gets rolled over and genocided if that slower paced industrialization campaign means a weaker war economy. Things got pretty close a few times even with a hard ass like Stalin in charge. Plus to be fair in that global situation, stoking nationalism against foreign invaders does make sense even if it’s not strictly communist.

That’s one of the modern arguments modern Russians like to use to defend Stalin at least. They say “Bukharin would have dragged out collectivization until the 1950s, so we would have lost the Great Patriotic War and all died.” But whose to say WW2 even goes the same way with Bukharin running things. It’s possible Bukharin’s more “lenient” leadership could have convinced the west to actually negotiate collective security agreement against Nazi Germany in good faith. Then the Nazis could be stopped at Sudetenland if something like the Franco-Soviet Mutual Assistance Treaty was taken seriously.

historical possibilities of that period of time are really fascinating

I agree, think stuff like the Leningrad Affair was incredibly stupid on Stalin’s part. Like bruh you’re gonna die soon anyway maybe don’t purge thousands of your most popular cadres? Those guys would have been useful a few decades down the road.

Party should have thanked Stalin for his service throughout the 30s and 40s and then forcibly retired him post war in favor of Malenkov. Instead they let his brain melt which gave the Khrushchevites an opportunity to trash his entire legacy for a little temporary popular support, all while compromising the greater ideological project.

Hindsight is 20/20 and all though, and sticking with Stalin till death for stability’s sake probably looked like the best option at the time after the most destructive war in human history

Soviet Storm: WW2 in the east is pretty cool

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwGzY25TNHPC_SsXFcIH-ba0nWuNbHOM6

These guys also make great weekly videos about WW2, “in real time”

https://youtu.be/TRvzqDzgmPQ

9/11 was an occult ritual to destroy gender

ah yes, the famous twin towers of gender

Gorbachev wasn’t a full liberal he was a reformist and basically wanted social democracy. The liberal opposition that he at first championed with glastnost quickly outflanked him while the Soviet conservatives also hated him. His naivete and ineptitude destroyed the country by allowing liberal and nationalist forces (Yeltsin and his cronies) to tear the union apart from under his unsteady feet. The August coup was an attempt by the conservatives to force Gorbachev to fucking do something to save the country (several states had already declared independence at this point), but he couldn’t even be assed to take a side so the conservative had to try to throw together a new government overnight.

So he’s less of a sell out (that fits Yeltsin better) and more of a person who was just completely incapable of recognizing the situation and was overcome by more decisive forces.

guard is great you get to be like those historically incorrect descriptions of the Soviet Union, sending unarmed masses to soak up the bullets with their cheap bodies while your commissars shoot everyone who even thinks of running away. Great fun.

that is the risk you take when you run the country as a tyrannical hereditary monarchy. Your whole family becomes a problem.

It was an incredible invasion that took a ton of planning and effort on everyone involved. Still one of the greatest military achievements of all time. It hastened the fall of the Nazis by at least a year and took some pressure of the Soviet front. Though strategically by 1944 the Soviets were well on their way to winning and the Western allies got way more than would be “fair” in proportion to Soviet causalities and everything. The desire not to see Stalinist Mainland Europe (hell based) did certainly encourage the allies to get moving by 1944. But honestly I don’t think they were deliberately delaying or anything, it took a few years for the western allies to get their shit together to pull off a big invasion like that.

honestly not a bad tactic. I hate how so many Americans carry this guilt around towards unpaid bills and shit even if they are being ripped off or scammed. The most cowed people on earth with that stuff, they’ll work themselves to death paying a debt when the rational thing to do is to tell any creditors to fuck off. Feel like society would improve significantly if Americans used their guns to shoot more creditors.

literally don’t even pay it like seriously I’d rather move or shoot the lawyer in the face.

F451 is good. I personally love Brave New World and it relates to modern society wayyyyyyy more that 1984. Huxley is the King of Dystopian SciFi and also on his deathbed he asked to wife to give him acid so he could die while tripping balls. Absolute legend.

Here my one and only experience with PSL:

There was a large scale teacher strike in the state and some anarchists set up a table at the rally. The anarchists let PSL drop off some flyers at the table so the anarchists could hand then out for them. I got one which said there was a meeting that weekend.

I show up a little early ~5-10mins , and of course no one is there. I wait around for about 20 minutes and finally someone, a white lady, shows up. She swears she’s not the only member and the rest are in the way. We have some small talk about the strike and probably another 10 minutes later a van pulls up. What follows is the most “American leftist moment” of my life.

First guy to get out is a young white guy. Once his feet hit the ground, he immediately take a massive hit from his modkit and blows a quite impressive sized cloud. Then a old white guy get outs and starts unloading boxes of…guess what? Newspapers. The 3 sit down and we’re all given newspapers. It becomes clear to me now this is everyone that is going to show up.

Remember how there was a teacher strike in my state? Well we immediately launch into a discussion about Assad, Syria, chemical weapons and imperialism since that’s the front page news of their newspaper. This dominated the majority of the meeting but we all agreed that the US should fuck off. We have a quick 10 minute discussion about the strike before everyone has to leave.

Overall org rating: Better than trots because at least they don’t support imperialism in the newspaper

Anyone who uses the term “caucusoid extraction” deserves to have his caucusoid brain extracted from his skull Shutter Island style.