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Cowbee@lemmy.ml 1 day agoConcentration camps were mass execution factories for Jewish people, LGBTQ, Communists, Socialists, disabled people, Slavs, and more.
The prisons in the GULAG system were genuine prisons, and the political prisoners were largely Tsarists, Fascists, Nazi collaborators, war criminals, and more, and political prisoners were a minority of those imprisoned in the USSR.
That’s like saying a fish and a tree have some similarities. It’s true, but at the same time fundamentally tries to draw far more similarities than implied.
barsoap@lemm.ee 23 hours ago
…like Ukrainian Red Army veterans who fought the Nazis, but didn’t like Moscow calling the shots afterwards. I see you’ve drunken that age-old propaganda wholesale.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 23 hours ago
You could be more specific than that, but when I say Nazi collaborators, I do mean them.
“On the other hand, in the Soviet occupation zone and later East Germany, denazification was considered as a critical element of the transformation into a socialist society, and the country was stricter in opposing Nazism than its counterpart.”
The Soviets took anti-fascism seriously.
barsoap@lemm.ee 23 hours ago
Gee that worked well in Germany didn’t it have a look at the polling results for the AfD.
Trouble being that in the east, antifascism was considered state matter, therefore, ordinary people did not get involved. In the west, it was a civil society issue. The SED de-politicised the population, “join the party and read the script or don’t get involved”, and now the east is severely lacking in civil society capacity to oppose fascism. Capacity to engage in politics in the first place, the east is run by West German politicians because East Germans just don’t bother to become politicians, they rather elect West Germans instead. And then they’re complaining that they’re not getting heard.
Nothing about what the Soviets did in the GDR was “taking fascism seriously”, unless with “take seriously” you mean “fertilise the ground”.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 23 hours ago
That’s a poor assessment, and looks down upon the people of East Germany as “stupid” and “compliant.” The West was never truly de-Nazified, but the East was absolutely de-“commiefied” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germany was purged of its Nazis, and then purged of its Communists. In purging the Communists, the resurging fascists go unopposed.