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Cowbee@lemmy.ml ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Some do, they just claim Hamas is equally evil for resisting genocide, the good 'ol “two wrongs don’t make a right” adage.

As for East Germany, would you mind stating how your thesis about the government taking an active role in rooting out Nazis somehow made the East more open to fascism isn’t a statement on East Germans being incapable of ruling themselved, and just going along with whoever? You linked literature, sure, but avoided addressing that the West never de-Nazified yet East Germany was thoroughly purged of Communists? Rather than blaming the rise of fascism in modern eastern Germany on the previous antifascist government and the dull acceptance of the eastern Germans due to alienation from politics, why not take an active look at the dynamics at play as the West took over the East?

As for Psychology, no, it isn’t idealism, but your analysis was. In the absence of materialist analysis, you shifted to an assertion that existing in different modes of production shuts off the higher instincts of man. It is true that material conditions shape the ideas of man, but you pivoted that to the idea that existing in a Socialist state dulls the mind, which doesn’t have materialist backing.

Socialism is not “the same fucking river” as Nazism, not to any capacity. I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds, it’s a good introductory book and a quick read.

As for Nazi Germany’s approval ratings, that’s not really true, as clearly Holocaust victims weren’t polled. Support for Socialism both within post-Socialist states and currently Socialist states is best explained by the real material achievements they made for the Working Class, as one western study said of China:

Although state censorship and propaganda are widespread in China, these findings highlight that citizen perceptions of governmental performance respond most to real, measurable changes in individuals’ material well-being. Satisfaction and support must be consistently reinforced. As a result, the data point to specific areas in which citizen satisfaction could decline in today’s era of slowing economic growth and continued environmental degradation.

I’ll leave you with a Parenti quote I think is fitting, from the same book I recommended:

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.

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