this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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Americans using their global opponents which they demonize in all their media as insults is an all too classic trope.
I am sure we are all extremely well informed on Stalin because of our unbiased media.
Yes, the US has red scare propaganda.
Historians exist outside of the US, though. We have decades and decades of non-US, non communist-scare historical research to know what the USSR and Stalin did. If you don't want to recognise the errors of the past, you will repeat them. If the most you can do is aim for Stalin's USSR but 2025 version, then you're as much an enemy of the people than capitalists are.
red scares have been a global phenomena, not one isolated to the US. Pointless red baiting in response to what Trump being a fascist is about what I've come to expect from Bernie, the guy who can't call it a genocide.
Declassified CIA documents from the time even say that Stalin was not so much of an autocrat as commonly mythologized.
Oh? What are you referring to?
Research done by people whose purpose wasn't to produce red-scare propaganda (I don't know how I could have worded that better, I'm not a native speaker)
Basically, I live in a country where the communist party used to be very powerful. Red scare has been a thing here, but leftism was strong in the country, and lots of historians here have published good quality researches about the USSR
Fun fact though: our """communist""" party is now between centrism and neoliberalism. Their alliance with the socialist party destroyed anything it had to do with communism
Such as?
We're not all from the US, but yes all the western block got anti-Ussr colored info. Still there is little you can find that can make a critical mind see Stalin as anything but a dictator. There are things you can admire in Marx, Trotsky and even Lenin, but if you cannot see how Stalin hijacked the revolution to make his own autocratic empire that while somewhat communism flavored, was structurally not that different of a fascist state, then you are willfully blind. The leader worship, the paranoia, the constant surveillance, those have no place in a communist society.
It is those aspects precisely that make Sanders equate the republicans to stalinists. I think the comparison is apt.
Stalin did massively advance Russian science and industrialization. But he did so at a massive human toll. Also his role in fighting Hitler is so minimized that people think he colluded with Hitler when the USSR basically defeated Hitler by themselves at Stalingrad and America swooped in afterwards.
The USSR did the greater part in defeating nazi Germany, seriously nobody who knows a thing about the fall of the 3rd Reich could deny that. They did so at a huge cost in soldiers and material. This is something that the world should thank the people of the USSR for, their sacrifice was terrible. However it was not Stalin defeating the nazi's single handedly. His troops and officers did, nor did Stalin do this out of the goodness of his heart or through personal heroics. It was a fight for survival.
The Nazis lost at Stalingrad. Only after their defeat and being pushed back, America swooped in and took over Europe before Russia could.
Then they saved the Nazi scientists and officers and gave them top positions in NATO.
Oh I'm not disputing that one bit. But was Stalin in Stalin in Stalingrad at the time personally leading the defense? Or was that Russian soldiers and officers?
Also Russia did much of the same when it comes to scientists http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl/inostr-yazyki/nemets/Uhl_Stalins_V-2_2001.pdf
Yes but also no. The Russians used Nazi scientists to kickstart their own rocket programs under strict supervision. They extracted knowledge to educate their own scientists and then sent the Nazi folks back to Germany.
The US and Europe however gave Nazi officers and scientists high ranking positions and influence over their politics.
Indeed a serious difference.
No, he really didn't
Hitler did play a big role in killing Hitler. That much is true.