Petrol posted:

that reminds me, when i went to see the star war the other day, one of the trailers they showed was for the new marvel black panther movie, and guess what they used for the soundtrack (a terrible remix to boot)

can't believe they had the nerve to rip off

Must you go out of doors? Not necessarily.

Caesura109 posted:

I don't think there are much parallels between Castro and Che's struggle and the Cold War USSR expansion into neighboring states. Supporting struggles is one thing, but the expansionism into, say, Afghanistan is what I meant by 'bourgeois anti-imperialism'.

I meant that the Soviet Union's significant material support of liberation movements in South Africa, Cuba, etc is also smeared as imperialism. Afghanistan in particular is a much more complex topic and I don't really know enough on the topic to provide a defense one way or another, but the late Soviet Union doesn't have to be an infinite expanse of blemishless perfection for its legacy to still be worth defending imho.

xipe posted:

E:
The Soviet central committee knew it was a trap before engaging

https://www.google.ie/url?q=http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/113260.pdf%3Fv%3D8ff47ec7b273101b558ee74818ff43f5&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwj9_9OgjqTYAhWHA8AKHacqAdQQFggLMAA&usg=AOvVaw1hyrc7wpDMNxEns1nj7HOZ

Good read, it gives a great picture of the policy motivations in Afghanistan at the time, ie not imperialist. Interesting to see how they were consistently against aggression, especially with consideration towards the common people, and how they repeatedly chastised Taraki and Amin for executing all their opponents and being such bad revolutionaries

Edited by burritostan (Dec. 25, 2017 17:58:22)

Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B : What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q : “Some agitated Moslems”?

On the matter of Russian imperialism, here's another good essay to supplement the CoCT post rolaids was indicating (more direct link to that here).

Caesura109 posted:

Also does anyone have good links on the Khmer Rouge, like a general history but not from an Amerikan perspective.

this is one of my pet interests, the best book i've found in explaining the 'why' of DK is Michael Vickery's Cambodia 1975-1982, which can be downloaded along with most of his other publications here: http://michaelvickery.org/

his take is that DK was not marxist, but represented a utopian peasant movement, showing similarities to some of the early Spanish peasant anarchists during the civil war as well as people like Nestor Makhno. he supports his conclusion through materialist analysis, and so far he's the only person i've come across who has applied that kind of analysis to cambodia(the field is fairly small and mostly made up of liberals and straight up anticommunist types). a book that is not as good as explaining the 'why' of things but gives a good general overview of what happened generally(including aspects of the state that Vickery doesn't cover like foreign policy) is Ben Kiernan's The Pol Pot Regime. my impression is that Kiernan is a sort of left liberal but he's more honest than most of the other liberal historians in the field(doesn't show a cold war inherited anti vietnamese bias, recognises that the CPK weren't normal marxists, etc). Kiernan also talks a bit about the concept of there being a genocide, but that's because he's a genocide scholar, so it's in his academic interest and he also might not be too objective about it. Vickery never apparently agreed that there was a genocide, mostly based on his estimates for the death toll being quite low compared to Kiernan's, but the population figures for Cambodia at the time are basically unknown and based purely on estimate so imo the debate as to whether it's a 'genocide' or not is pretty vague and not that interesting to me particularly. Neither of these books talk that much about the Khmer Rouge after they were ousted from power, although Vickery's website does have stuff that deals with that a bit. But I haven't read very much on that yet.

Caesura109 posted:

And even if Western Soveitology is riddled with lies, aren't their basic crimes and abuses of power that one can rationally and unbiasedly attribute to the single-party revolutionary government of the USSR? Furr does himself no favors at all and comes of as a crackpot when he says something along the lines of "there is no evidence Stalin committed crimes".

so is your point "some nkvd agent stitched up his neighbour in 1936 to advance his career, therefore communism bad" or is it "killing landlords in the street was bad"

because the first one i don't really care because its a fact of life and the second one gets my enthusiastic endorsement, remove exploiters from the earth

xipe posted:

It was therefore false to generalize from this experience which was never experienced.

Regarding the USSRs annexation of East Poland saving millions of Jews, does anyone have any insight into why antisemitism became rampant again in the 60s? Like did the reforms of Polish October pave the way for the reactionary antisemitic government? What were the failings of Polish socialism that allowed for this? There's been good discussion ITT and others on here of why antisemitism has reared up in former Communist bloc countries but it seems like in the case of Poland it was an ongoing issue even during the Cold War. I admit I don't know a ton about the PPR.