Tut‐tut, I see that feddit.org has blacklisted lemmygrad.ml members, which explains why Enkrod overlooked my comment on the Western Allies’ lackluster excuses for liberation.

Of course, I could have made my comment longer, such as specifically mentioning how the Western Allies maintained Fritz Schaeffer as Bavaria’s minister president. That wasn’t a secret either.

I’m surprised that nobody defended the Western Allies’ takeover of former Axis empires yet. I am going to write this to prevent any attempts:

The Western Allies reused the Empire of Japan’s system of forced prostitution.

Italian anticommunists pardoned Fascists while punishing thousands of partisans; there was no equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials for the Italian Fascists; the liberal bourgeoisie refused to prosecute Fascists for their atrocities in Ethiopia; and there were continuities between Fascism & the post‐1945 Italian police.

When the Western Allies took Algeria from the Axis, they let the fascists continue running the internment camps; important elements of the Fascist era survived in postwar France.

The U.S. Army continued keeping Jews in the Axis’s concentration camps (‘We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.’ — Harry Truman, Sept. 1946); West Germany’s régime was polluted with surviving Axis personnel; fascist elements survived in West Germany.

Somebody could argue that there was no alternative to the Western Allies, but plenty of partisans were active in France, for example, and the Eastern Allies could have reached every Axis‐occupied region given enough time.

I’ll freely concede that the Western Allies were better than the Axis… but that’s not exactly saying much.

I wouldn’t joke about this, honestly. It’s too depressing.

Among the atrocities committed by the Portuguese, it is possible to list the massacres in Xinavane, Mueda, Mucumbura, Wiriyamu, Chawole, Inhaminga, among others. University of Coimbra’s Documentation Center “25 de Abril” has a rich collection about what happened in Wiriyamu, with a hundred articles and newspaper clippings from the most diverse countries that participated in spreading information about the acts of the Portuguese in the region. On Saturday, December 16, 1972, Portuguese soldiers killed approximately 400 Mozambicans in Wiriyamu. Today, in the old village of Wiriyamu, there is a monument with the bones of the victims.

Furthermore, there is evidence published by Le Monde Diplomatique (1972) that two South African pilots were hired as mercenaries by Portugal, and carried out secret chemical warfare missions against nationalist fighters in northern Mozambique. The operation was aimed at destroying the crops that would feed FRELIMO guerrillas, using the substance 2,4‐D, Dichlorophenoxyacetic Acid, which was among those used by the U.S. in Vietnam and World War II.

(Source.)

As a complement to the concentrationary policy of interning the African populations in large villages, the military hierarchy would use, from 1971 onward, the desperate option of “cleanup” operations, already largely implemented in Northeast Mozambique and on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi. These were meant to eradicate villages, exterminating all their inhabitants and emptying the territory to block the path of the guerrillas.

By the end of 1972 the “cleanup” operations along the Zambezi, from Mucanha and Mucumbura to Inhaminga, started to prefigure a wider genocidal strategy. […] Soon […] the 6th Commando Group arrived in helicopters, surrounded Wiriyamu and entered it. The people were lined up, men in one group, women in another. For the most part they were then shot, but others were herded into houses which were set on fire, while some of the children were kicked to death and other individuals were murdered in various atrocious ways. […] At the same time, the rural areas were bombed, eventually with napalm, before the launching of “cleanup” operations to exterminate the remaining populations, supposedly in contact with the guerrillas.

(Source herein.)

And the Estado Novo’s colonies were all in Afrasia (not merely Africa as such).

It really bums me out seeing somebody deny that the Iberian parafascists engaged in white supremacist violence. I am guessing that that is a product of the Portuguese education system rather than a conscious distortion, but still it really depresses me. It’s like nobody cares that the Iberian parafascists massacred Afrasians.

Why are you always posting propaganda from all of these obviously Russian‐backed sources?

I shouldn’t have chuckled at this.

Cut an anticommunist and an anticommunist bleeds?

You joke, but many antisocialists seriously think that this is a good argument in favor of capitalism.

How does somebody try communism?

You mean this? I searched that entire list and there is no evidence whatsoever that American antisocialists collaborated with Fascists. Name one example.

Just because the American ruling class refused to hold a major tribunal for Italian Fascists, let Axis personnel continue running concentation camps, relinquished its commitment to justice at Nuremberg, intentionally recruited thousands of surviving Axis employés and collaborators for anticommunism, relied on Axis servicemen for intelligence, gave former Axis employés comfortable jobs in post‐1945 Japan, staffed South Korea’s police with Axis employés, hired Axis criminals for a space programme, defended Axis war criminals in courts, sanitized antisemitic fascists, discretely internationalized fascism, used a Slovakian fascist as an asset, collaborated with fascists to manipulate Italian politics, nurtured a lobby full of Axis collaborators, staffed the NATO with former Axis officials, declined to uproot German Fascism, became unconcerned with neofascist shrines, worked with neofascists to crush Turkish communism, let Axis personnel infiltrate the Republican Party, saluted Waffen‐SS employés, and allows hundreds of monuments to Axis collaborators, doesn’t mean that it failed to destroy fascism.

Show me one example—just one—of an American antisocialist knowingly protecting, endorsing, or reusing an Axis war criminal.

While I do prefer the Russian Federation over Ukraine’s régime, I am reluctant to term this preference ‘support’, unless you think that dismissing various demonizations of the Russian Federation counts as such. Materially, I’ve never supported the Russian Federation with anything, but I do defend it against demonizations since demonizations are exactly what make lower‐class people think that it’s okay to continue wasting their tax dollars on a neoimperialist client state: the Ukrainian government.

As much as I loathe the Russian government, its invasion of Ukraine was not a naked power grab in the style of WWI, but the inevitable consequence of the Western bourgeoisie breaking its promise not to continue expanding eastward. The Western bourgeoisie has spelled out for decades its long‐term goal of balkanizing the Russian Federation, and many Ukrainian neofascists have done likewise. Such a partition would only benefit the Western upper classes at the lower classes’ expense.

For me, the goal is not so much to ‘support Russia’ per se as it is to weaken neoimperialism and hopefully convince others to stop giving up their resources to a neoimperialist client state when those resources could be better spent on services and products that we need here and now as lower‐class North Americans. I suppose that somebody could argue that I’m splitting hairs here since opposing neoimperialism effectively means supporting the Russian Federation, but I think that saying ‘I support Russia’ would be too vague and misleading to be helpful.

I never wanted to know what it would have looked like if Luke joined the Dark Side in Return of the Jedi, but now we have our answer.

One of the propaganda lies of the wealthy physicians who control the American Medical Association was neatly exposed by Congressman Andrew Biemiller of Wisconsin on July 13, 1950 (Congressional Record, page 10117):

There is the slander campaign against national‐health insurance which calls it socialized medicine despite the fact that the AMA well knows it is not socialized medicine at all. Part of this campaign is the attempt to use the completely discredited alleged quotation from Lenin that “socialized medicine is the keystone of the arch of the Socialist state.” The AMA has been called upon to either document or stop using that quotation, many, many times. Its officials have admitted that the quotation cannot be documented. Experts at both the Library of Congress and the University of Chicago have declared there is no such statement in the known works of Lenin. Yet the quotation continues to be used in published material, in public speeches, and in political assaults. The use of such falsehoods is typical of the AMA approach to issues of public health, and they can no longer be defended on the lame grounds of ignorance of the truth. They are willful perversions of the truth. (Italics are mine.—M.K.)

Isn’t there something monstrous about the idea that men of power and wealth will try to block much‐needed health insurance for the poor by dangling the scarecrow of a phoney Lenin quotation? And even if Lenin had said this, what would be its relevance forty or forty‐five years later? Must millions of Americans be barred forever from adequate medical care because of something Lenin wrote? How crazy can we become?

— Morris Kominsky, 1970

I promise that Russia will lose the war tomorrow.

Oh man, it’s been so long and I tried so many that I can’t possibly offer a certain answer… but a good candidate is JumpStart Preschool, which I (barely) remember playing on a Windows computer. Otherwise, it could have been The Busy World of Richard Scarry Busytown, Richard Scarry’s How Things Work in Busytown, Gus Goes to Cyberopolis, Fisher-Price Ready for School: Kindergarten, Fisher-Price Learning in Toyland, Fisher Price Great Adventures: Pirate Ship, or Nick Jr Play Math!

There are many more that I could name, like Oddballz, Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When it’s Dark Outside, Ozzie’s World, Sesame Street: Numbers, Mr. Potato Head Activity Pack, Play-Doh Creations, and Candy Land Adventure, but I am less sure of those. Finally, there are those titles that I simply can’t find again. There was a point‐and‐click program that mainly took place in a spaceship, and another one where a character said ‘I brush my teeth before I go to bed every night!’, but I’ll be damned if I can find videos of those.

I’m surprised that they made handhelds! I was always under the impression that Soviet video games were more like experimental curiosities than a visible industry. The situation was similar in the Anglosphere back in the 1950s and ’60s: there was not much of a market for them, so they were hard to find (unless you were a computer scientist).

What’s an S‐abuser?

This representation is so accurate that it’s not even funny.

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.

Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.

The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262

When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.

This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.

— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145

@freagle@lemmygrad.ml and others are ‘simping’ for the USSR because that is the price that you have to pay for capitalism’s structural defects: it leaves us, the lower classes, in such destitute positions that we have nothing to lose by seeking alternatives.