May the people of Iran stay safe from Imperialist aggression.

Because they were removed for breaking the rules. Here’s SupraMario’s Modlog, which upon checking also shows a large history of bigotry, homophobia, islamophobia, slurs, and transphobia.

Pretty much! Now I kinda want to see a Marxist analysis of Rattatouie, haha.

That justification was made after the fact. The truth is that Japan was already going to surrender. This isn’t a conspiracy theory either, it’s modern historical consensus, even the US Navy’s museum admits so. The USSR had just taken Berlin and the Nazis surrendered on May 8, and declared war on Imperial Japan on August 8 after both Japan and the US had seen the Red Army pivoting to their East, towards Manchuria.

On August 9th, the Soviets invaded Japanese-controlled Manchuria, and Japan announced surrender on August 15th. The nukes were launched on the 6th and 9th of August, because the US didn’t want Japan to go Soviet, the US had plans of reforming Imperial Japan as a subsidiary Empire, maintaining Japan’s colonization of Korea and other Asian countries while profiting off of Japan, in a form of double Imperialism, and a Soviet Japan wouldn’t let that work. Their plan was thrown to dust with the Korean War that followed.

While publicly stating their intent to fight on to the bitter end, Japan’s leaders (the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the “Big Six”) were privately making entreaties to the publicly neutral Soviet Union to mediate peace on terms more favorable to the Japanese. While maintaining a sufficient level of diplomatic engagement with the Japanese to give them the impression they might be willing to mediate, the Soviets were covertly preparing to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea (in addition to South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) in fulfillment of promises they had secretly made to the US and the UK at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences.

Right on Wikipedia.

The comment you replied to, here, was specifically talking about how the Soviets liberated the world from the threat of the Nazis. Your counter was that some members of the Red Army committed atrocities against civilians, which is true but doesn’t negate that all armies were committing atrocities, and the Red Army took it the most seriously by executing rapists.

What’s your point, then? Would the Nazis winning the war be the “good guys” winning, in your eyes? Or are you under the mistaken impression that the war could have been won without the tremendous price paid by the Soviet people? You were the one that brought in the Russian Federation’s Army, trying to make a point that Russians are bad, period, no matter if they are liberating the world from the Nazis or not.

We were talking about the Red Army, not the Russian millitary in general. Is your point that sexual assault is genetic to Russians, or are you under the impression that Russia is still Socialist? The former would be racist, the latter would be a critical misunderstanding of Russian history.

Further, again, all armies commit assaults. This does not make any excess acceptable whatsoever, but it does mean we need to look at what the armies do internally to suppress it. We can see that the Ukrainian army is also guilty of sexual assault:

Amnesty International accessed the government-controlled territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions between January and November 2019. The organisation has had no access to the separatist-controlled areas, which fall beyond the scope of the report.

Official statistics on domestic violence, however unreliable and incomplete, show a spike of registered cases in the last three years. In 2018, there was a 76% increase in reported cases in Donetsk region and a 158% increase in Luhansk region, compared to the average of the previous three years.

Source: Amnesty International

Even before Russia got directly involved, the Ukrainian army was sexually assaulting the ethnic Russians in the Donbass region as they were shelling the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

Zionism is anti-semetic, ironically. The Zionists were anti-Yiddish and collaborated with the Nazis (yes, you’re reading this right). Further, the Zionist mythos depends on fostering anti-semetism abroad, so that there seems to be legitimacy in having a “safe country for Jewish peoples,” even if that country is a genocidal settler-colony.

I recommend reading To Stop Marx, They Made Zion.

Every army committed crimes against civilians, sadly, but the Soviets took that seriously enough to punish rapists with the death penalty. Other armies, like the Nazis, US, Japanese, etc did not punish their rapists to the same degree so as to serve as a deterrent.

Further, the Nazi propagandists used the facts of ethnic asians in the Red Army to propagandize about “mongol hordes coming to rape everyone,” which is of course racist, but nevertheless was enough to create the myth of the Red Army as exceptionally brutal as compared to the other armies.

No worries! It’s all good.

I never rewrote anything. There were many pacts between Western Powers and Nazi Germany before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, including non-aggression pacts from Nazi Germany with Estonia, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Britain, Italy, Denmark, and more. The Nazis broke the vast majority of these treaties, and it was only when war was on the horizon and the pleas from the Soviets to form an alliance against the Nazis that they conceded to the fact that the West was never going to willingly ally with the Soviets unless they had to.

Further, the large majority of those who lived in the USSR want it back. This is extremely well-documented, because 7 million people died due to the fall of the USSR and the economic crisis that came with that collapse, along with the elimination of the social welfare that people depended on.

The “meat shield” line is straight from Nazi propagandists using anti-Slavic racism (coincidentally, this line has carried over to today). The Red Army was very competent and didn’t rely on “wave tactics” as a part of their battle strategem.

This is nonsense anti-communism.

The Eastern Front was decisive in determining the outcome in the European theatre of operations in World War II, eventually serving as the main reason for the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis nations.[q] It is noted by historian Geoffrey Roberts that “More than 80 percent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front”.

Eastern Front (World War II)

As much as you may have hated it, the good guys won World War II, not Germany.

The Soviets were never “with the Nazis.” The Soviets spent years trying to get the West to form an allied pact against the Nazis, insteas the West gave the Nazis Czechoslovakia. The non-aggression pact was paid to buy time, as the USSR was a developing country and Germany a more developed one. Nazism and Communism are diametrically opposed and cannot coexist, in the years of the Nazis rise the Nazis murdered the Communists in Germany first, and the Soviets were constantly warning about the Nazi threat.

The surprise attack by the Nazis was swift, brutal, and with genocidal intent. They took land quickly, but were pushed back into a stalemate, and then rapidly the Nazi line collapsed. Lend-Lease equipment arrived after the Red Army had stabilized, it certainly helped but was not critical to the success of the Red Army, they weren’t crumbling. Repeating Goebbels “Russian hordes” anti-Slavic racist talking points doesn’t help you either, there are no records of “wave tactics” as was reported by the Nazis. Those records came largely from pre-Soviet Russian tactics, not the tactics of the Red Army.

They didn’t “fuck over” a bunch of countries either.

That’s a fair point to push back on. It wasn’t my intention to downplay the many brave US soldiers involved who were genuinely antifascist, but if my comments gave off that impression, then it’s good that you spoke up. My main critique of this comic isn’t even with the US, but with how (in my view) it treats liberalism and fascism as distinct, and not as the twins I understand them to be. The ending of the comic gives the impression that the former US was a bastion of antifascism and the modern US failed to get the memo, but the reality is that the fascists were always there, and the anti-fascists too. I wanted to add more materialism to the picture, and if in doing so I accidentally downplayed the role of the brave antifascists in the US Army that gave their lives fighting the Nazis, then I made my point poorly.

I’m aware, and am not trying to downplay that. My comment was about the US gov’s decision to bomb Japan, not to downplay the lives given by US soldiers in the fight against the Nazis.

No worries!

Their meaning, historically, has been identical. All 3 have been used against the same Communist parties, the same supporters of Actually Existing Socialism, the same Marxists. Personally, I see the desire among some left individuals to drive a wedge between the “tankies” and the “true/good/real Marxists” as a way for these people to shut down uncomfortable conversations with the overwhelming majority of Marxists around the world.

This process splits the “Marxists” that oppose AES, or advocate for reform over revolution, or support the Nordic Model, etc from the “evil” Marxists, the ones who support revolution, AES, and oppose Western Imperialism, giving a pass to the former because the former supports the status quo, which benefits Western Imperialism. Even if the overwhelming majority of practicing Marxists fit into the latter category, the former category are elevated in the West for their utility in supporting the system.

What this creates in the minds of those who think “tankie” isn’t a pejorative for Marxists is utter distortion of the real viewpoints and real stances of Marxists. The “good” aspects of Marxism get pushed onto the Western supporting “Marxists,” and a strawman is built up for the evil “tankies” that ends up being a mixture of interpreting genuine Marxist analysis in a negative light with absurd contradictions that don’t really exist.

I don’t think I’ll convince you, either, but it’s important for me to respond so that onlookers can at least see both points of view on the matter.

Again, “Tankie” is a pejorative for Marxist in the same vein as “commie” and “pinko.” All 3 were used against Communists historically, though pinko seems to have fallen out of fashion.

Marxism is a branch of Socialism. The other major branch is Anarchism, and both Marxism and Anarchism have many sub-branches. For example, I am a Marxist-Leninist, which is generally the ideology guiding Cuba, the PRC, former USSR, etc. These are not “corrupted,” they are real and thus face real problems that systems that only exist in the minds of dreamers don’t have to. Marx would scoff at such dreamers that let perfection be the enemy of progress. I have an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list you can check out, if you are curious and want to glance through it to get an idea of what Marxism-Leninism is all about.

Secondly, Animal Farm. If you have the time, I think it would be worth reading A Critical Read of Animal Farm by Jones Manoel, and On Orwell by Roderic Day. Animal Farm is a work of fiction, written by an anti-Marxist Socialist. Orwell worked directly with British Intelligence to out Socialists and Communists, and kept a list of people he suspected were Jewish, due to his anti-semetism.

Orwell is magnified by Western Countries because he’s useful, he’s someone that at least pretends to be Left but spent more time attacking the Left than anything. Even his comrades in arms in Spain, when he fought alongside the Anarchists against the fascists, questioned why he wasn’t fighting on the other side. Animal Farm is chiefly a story about how the Russian Working Class was stupid and illiterate, and thus destined to be taken advantage of and could never hope to understand Marxism. Orwell spends an absurd amount of time describing just how stupid the non-pigs are, as describing poor, working folk as incapable of knowing their own interests is his critique.

As for corruption, Marxist Socialism solves it with recall elections and broader extension of democratic input. Democracy in the workplace is utter fantasy in Capitalism, but is very real in Socialist countries. Even if this democracy often is flawed, and runs into the real problems that real, existing systems run into just like any other, it still forms a higher degree of public control.

Hope that clears some things up for you!

“Tankie” is just a pejorative for Marxist, though, like “commie” or “pinko.” Marxism is “authoritarian” in that it expressly calls for flipping the Capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie into the Socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, ie turning from a society where the Capitalists are oppressing the working class via the state into a society where the working class wields the state against the Capitalists.

This isn’t a real “dictatorship” in the modern sense, but a descriptor for where the balance of power lies, in the working class or Capitalist class, via Public ownership or Private ownership being primary. Socialism is still democratic, but will use the power of the state against the bourgeoisie. All states are authoritarian, what matters is which class is in control of the authority, and how we can move beyond class and thus the state.

Any reason you’re opposed to Marxism?