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Comment on Hexbear federation megathread
quindraco@lemm.ee 1 year agoIf you think it’s unfounded calling hexbear members nazis, I don’t think you’ve ever been to a hexbear thread. The most recent hexbear post I encountered was explicitly anti-democracy, which was only atypical in that usually hexbearians skip the explicit labeling and jump right in.
I genuinely invite you to try and find a single hexbearian who supports the right of trans people, cis people, or both to autonomy, i.e. voting. Try it. Try to find one that isn’t all-in on being pro-dictatorship.
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Pseudoplatanus22@hexbear.net 1 year ago
We’ll defend Stalin, but not specifically for his record on Gay rights. It’s what we call Critical Support. Likewise with our support of Russia, although it’s important to understand why we have come to this consensus. This post gives a broad overview of our views on the Russo-Ukrainian war, but to truly understand our worldview would take years of immersion not only in our space, but other leftist spaces, and would require some reading. I’d recommend State and Revolution and Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin to start with, as I’m that way inclined, though others would point you in different directions. Ultimately however, it all comes back to Marx’s Capital.
420blazeit69@hexbear.net 1 year ago
From many Hexbear threads on the topic of LGBT rights in the Soviet Union (and Warsaw Pact countries), here’s my understanding:
- The pre-Soviet Russian Empire criminalized homosexuality.
- The first Soviet constitution “decriminalized” it in the sense that it wiped away the laws of the old Empire and instituted new ones that did not include criminalizing homosexuality. I don’t personally think (and I think this is the Hexbear consensus) that was an intentional choice; it probably just got left out because it wasn’t a priority in the midst of a revolution, civil war/invasion by a half dozen capitalist powers, and the monumental task of building a modern state (and the first socialist state) out of the ashes of WWI and late-feudal Russia. Note that plenty of legal scholars would disagree on the theory that legislative bodies write laws (or don’t) very deliberately.
- Stalin re-criminalized homosexuality. Zero people on Hexbear support that, and I’m not aware of any existing socialist state that does, either (the CPC line on Stalin, for instance, is “70% good, 30% bad”).
- In the 80s, some Warsaw Pact countries (possibly just East Germany) were on par with or ahead of the West on LGBT rights, policies that came to an end with the dissolution of the USSR.
- Post-Soviet Russia is a capitalist state likely more corrupt and undemocratic than even the U.S., and I’ve seen no Hexbear user defend it, much less its reprehensible stances on LGBT rights. What you will see, however, is discussion of Russia’s actual intentions (not propaganda like “Putin is a mustache-twirling villain who does bad things for no reason”) and its role as a counterweight to NATO hegemony.
It’s also important to consider the USSR’s stance on LGBT rights in context of the rest of the world – they were still wrong to oppress LGBT people, but no one else was doing much better, which indicates those bad policies were not some unique aspect of socialism. Cuba, for instance, just passed a Family Code that has LGBT protections far ahead of anything the U.S. has at a national scale, and the public support programs of socialist countries (housing, education, labor protections, etc.) are significant benefits for any marginalized community even if not expressly intended as such.
wintermute_oregon@lemm.ee 1 year ago
[deleted]420blazeit69@hexbear.net 1 year ago
BTW thank you for the civil conversation.
spoiler
The “it is fair to say that the USSR stance was no different than the stance of the United States during the same time” stance would get a lot of agreement on Hexbear. We’ll go to bat for the many good things the USSR did, but we’re more than happy to criticize it (or China, or Cuba, etc.) where appropriate. One of the most-cited books on Hexbear – Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti (big recommend, by the way) – has at least a whole chapter (maybe even a whole section, can’t remember) on criticisms of the USSR.
Super jealous you’ve been to Cuba – hope I can go one day!
GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Stalin being personally homophobic and supporting homophobic legislation is bad and absolutely true (unlike many characterizations of him and others), but taking him as a historical figure and considering things like leading the liberation of the death camps and destruction of Nazi Germany, along with an overall massive increase in the Soviet quality of life and doing other things like famine relief in India and supporting communists around the world, we must recognize him as a historically progressive figure.
Pseudoplatanus22@hexbear.net 1 year ago
What are you talking about? It’s the most explicitly pro-trans space I’ve ever seen. If your idea of autonomy is restricted to voting, that’s your problem. We believe in actual democracy, as in the voice of the people. Can you point me to a democratic system you aspire to which doesn’t ultimately exist to look after the interests of capital? That’s the problem we have with what you call democracy. The Nazis were promoted into power by establishment politicians to do exactly the same thing: protect the interests of capital by eradicating communists and trade unionists. The mass murder of Jews, Roma, LGBT people, and many other groups, was neither here nor there to the industrialists who backed the Nazis.
We will always react negatively to being called Nazis, because it’s so far from the truth as to be utterly laughable, if it weren’t so offensive to the members of our community who would have been oppressed by the Nazis, and who often are oppressed by modern bourgeois liberal democracies.