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Bro doesn't even have a single friend that isn't in the Trump administration eulogizing him, lmao.
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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Chapotraphouse
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I've got a (D) relative who worked their whole life for the MIC - who gets along just fine with (R)s, curious
- who dropped the "I don't hate the people I just hate their government" line about China and it got me thinking.
What happened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Massive collapse in life expectancy and standard of living, explosion in drug abuse and alcoholism, prostitution, child abuse, well-positioned capitalists and underworld figures snapping up the people's assets for ~~pennies~~ kopeks on the ruble, just complete disaster. What the hell do they think is going to happen to one billion Chinese if the CPC is replaced with a capitalist ruling class?
And for that matter, how would your average USAian react to a Chinese saying, I don't hate the American people I just want to liberate them from their capitalist government and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat? Truly a lack of awareness and aptitude for projection that continues to stagger me.
This has actually been twisted in the west. Most people haven't even heard about this (economic violence isn't violence to libs), and the ones who heard blame it not on restoration of capitalism, but on "the crumbling of the system because communism failed". Most people call it "the collapse of the Soviet Union", not "dismantling" as you did.
Yup, the capitalist revolutions that defined the dissolution of the USSR were disastrous in so many respects. The cost of these revolutions was millions of premature deaths. Things like living standards, income, mortality, etc. took years/decades to recover. So much progress was lost.
It also makes you rethink a lot of young people talking about "My parents fled XYZ...". A lot of these stories are of people fleeing the devastation caused by neoliberal shock therapy and capitalist revolution in post-Soviet states.
I hope that left-libs who are on the fence about AES would be sympathetic to this framing. But lord knows that many conservatives would be excited by that history replaying again in AES like China, DPRK, Vietnam, Venezuela, etc.
By Paul Cockshott's estimates., the former USSR has seen 10-12 million extra deaths in the 30 years following the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution. It's really a total war scale of destruction and misery, a terrible humanitarian crisis.
Bulgaria peaked its population with about 9mn during socialist times, nowadays they've lost a third of that and are at 6.5mn. What a wonderful way to completely hollow out multiple countries. Also millions of Poles, Czech, etc fled the misery created by capitalism. Hakim has a powerful video talking about the demographic crisis of Eastern Europe.
Libs will tell you everything about their compassion and love for poor and heroic Ukrainians, but Ukraine has been the poorest European country for 2+ decades, causing millions of premature deaths, and nobody gave a single flying fuck for the people who had to endure that. My Ukrainian coworker to this day doesn't like to eat noodles because for a period of her childhood her father was unemployed and they literally couldn't afford anything but that.
This. It's not taught in classrooms. In fact, the teachers of their own volition teach students that "communism will never work" yet they of course didn't prepare us to explain why capitalist Russia is somehow also the bad guy again 30 years after the USSR is no more
You must remember that Americans are also susceptible to bigotry as well as capitalism.
after the USSR collapsed, Putin changed its name back to Russia. Then that evil commie invaded Ukraine to spread communism because he hates our freedom
Oh absolutely tovarisch, I have to remind myself not to call it a collapse, failure, etc.; I am just as propagandized as the rest.
That's the funny thing is that your average chud thinks China is trying to invade to do just that.
I know this is next-level pedantry but I can't let it go.
Not at all, I appreciate it. I figured there was a smaller unit but I was in the true poster's mindset and wasn't going to look it up.
I struggle with this all the time. The disaster the boomers brought to the USSR was regularly on the evening news. I know this because I was a kid and saw them watching it. I remember it, so I assume they do, which probably isn't actually a good assumption to make. All the boomers I know are obsessed with watching the news, but I don't know why because they seem profoundly uninterested in thinking about the news. Really this is just the consequence of boiling their brains in 70 years of red scare bullshit. There's too much racism for them overcome.
Consuming the news but not wanting to discuss or analyze or reflect, that is a good observation. It seems almost obvious but I hadn't looked at it quite that way before. I've certainly observed and seen it discussed here how one might carefully, painstakingly have a conversation with someone like that and feel like you have made some progress, then the next day or the next time a similar story comes up, it's like they've completely had the reset button pushed.
These same people will celebrate invading countries in the global South to 'liberate' them, and then not care that our military decimated their country and we placed sanctions on them so now they're starving to death.
After the end of the Afghan occupation, there were sanctions on Afghanistan but apparently through some Asian developed system, people were able to donate funds to Afghanistan to prevent famine. The same people crying about the fate of the Afghan people under the Taliban couldn't give a damn about the Afghan people starving to death.
Then you have ghouls like Giuliani celebrating that people are starving and being forced to sell their organs in Iran because it was evidence that sanctions were working, and people were cheering
The tweet above, while probably meant in jest, is horrifyingly apropos
With the US forces withdrawing from Afghanistan a few events stick out to me. Missile-striking a man and IIRC his children because he was doing door to door deliveries of meals or water to people who needed aid. The attack at the Kabul airport that killed I think north of a hundred people, but all Western media talked about was ThE tHiRtEeN as they wanted to wave the bloody shirt over the service members that were killed. That also may have involved occupation forces firing into the crowd, which they definitely would want to cover up.
I remember our media class going after Brandon for pulling out, but hey!, this was already negotiated, set up under Trump 1st term, and it's good to end a 20 year occupation! Plus the ANA was collapsing and Taliban rapidly advancing territory so what even could the US and Afghan govt have done. And yeah sanctioning Afghanistan after the withdrawal is just damning people to starve.