Recently had to watch this movie at school. There are parts where you need subtitles.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr7J9ErzM6I[/media]
I also had some thoughts about how people make jokes about communism (and fascism) like "hurr everything is backwards" and I think it makes people forget about the horrors communists did.
Great documentary. Watched it like three times. I really do recommend everyone to watch it.
How objective is this documentary? I don't want to watch it if it's an American propaganda fest.
Quite an interesting video. It's always nice to see stuff like this that's usually skipped over in favor of Nazism and how badass the americans were.
I've previously watched this and wrote up some minor issues I had with it.
[quote]2:49- “Harmony can only be reached after certain groups of people are killed”
Incorrect, Lenin and most communists believe in the liquidation of classes that are counter to the revolution. Liquidation of classes does not mean killing the members of that class, it means the integration of that class into the proletariat. When there has historically been significant economic or forceful resistance to this, it was responded ot in kind.
3:08- “Whenever communists come to power [Lists communist nations]…they kill 10% of the population”
Mass generalization, and narrow definition of communism.
3:35- “Hang 100 kulaks….-Lenin”
There’s never been any evidence that anyone was actually hanged in response to this order. However, I’ve previously stated this very order as evidence of Lenin’s excessive state suppression, and is evidence against him.
~4:00- “Those who resisted were shot...massacres against peasants…nobody knows how many died, but we’re talking about 10 million or more”
I’m assuming at this point he’s referring to the Red Terror. Resistance was not met by execution, nor was it met really with suppression. Only sabotage and armed, open revolt was met with such. The Red Terror was in response to the White Terror- the monarchists and liberals were equally terrible in their methods. The highest estimates of the death toll of the Red Terror is a million. I do not try to justify this.
Then Stalin. And I don’t think we need to get into this, Stalin was an evil fuck. However, I know there’s a strong case to be made that Holodomor, the famine in Ukraine, was not active genocide, nor was it intentional. I’m not educated on the subject, so I can’t argue it well. The “national/ethnic repression” talked about around ~5:00 was over-exaggerated. The ethnic republics gained greater freedom and autonomy even under Stalin than they had under the Tsar, and Ukraine in particular was given far better treatment than any non-Russian Soviet because of its close relationship with Russia and it being home to many of the Bolshevik revolutionaries.
By no means am I attempting to justify the brutal actions of Lenin, and definitely not those of Stalin, but I want to point out that this is a biased piece of propaganda that seeks to give a biased message, and to be aware of that. In only 5 minutes I’ve found multiple inaccuracies and falsehoods, and because I know far less about the Stalinist period of the USSR, I can not find any many beyond this point. The truth of the matter was that the USSR was brutal, but we need to attack it for what it was and not what it wasn't.
11:00- “Soviet society was the first communist society on Earth”
Historically incorrect, as well as incorrect by Marxist standards. Both the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the Paris Commune were established before the Soviet Union. Marxist argue that humans lived in primitive communism for centuries before the advent of greater civilization. Additionally, the USSR was not communist- that’s incorrect terminology intentionally linked in the West for propaganda purposes that anyone who can read political philosophy/theory can see. The USSR was socialist (or state capitalist, depending on your political position).
11:30- “Birth of the new man is the ultimate aim of Marxism. Breeding a new evolutionary form of human being, who will think, look, and act differently”
I’m sorry, but this is just blatantly twisting things. Marxism does not seek to “evolve to a new human being” and produce a “new man”- Marxism wishes to see our already existing, naturally productive selves rid of limitations through existing economic systems and their products. This is not a “new man”, this is the existing man, who will not think, look, or act different except that he will be participatory, active, and less restrained. The same measure can be said of the Enlightenment’s goals and views on humanity. They then, by some measure I can’t even comprehend, try to link this idea of liberating the human spirit to the eugenic national purity of Hitler’s national socialism.
12:15- “both systems are at war with human nature as it is. At war with nature…human nature”
Completely subjective, and also incorrect. Hitler’s national socialism did not seek to change human nature and did not discount the conventional western-capitalist view of it, but rather embraced it as part of national socialist ideology, as it was in most fascist societies. It was this view of humanity that lead many Marxists to categorize fascism as a bastardized form of class-conglomerate capitalism. Marxism, on the other hand, recognizes that humans will be naturally collective when they are not affected by systemic limitations. This is not contrary even to the western-capitalist concept of human nature. Leftists will often argue that human nature is inherently collective- there is no war on human nature, merely a different concept of it.
13:30- “for some reason, national socialism did not work out…”
Well, give it 20 more years and I’m not sure that you would be saying that, actually. Not because it’s a good, functioning system, but because it would have been forced that way. National Socialism was not having anything in the way of becoming successful, except for the invasion by everyone. I’m not justifying national socialism, I’m saying that it’s BS that they can say it wasn’t working- it was working well for those who benefited from it.
~14:00- “Both left…millions of murdered people…was it coincidence?”
No, but the motives and reasons were entirely different.
14:20- “Only socialists publicly advocated genocide in the 20th century…”
Wrong. Eugenicists who were not socialists were also game to this plan, and those who committed the Armenian genocide surely were no socialists. National socialists were not socialists, and the Soviet Union did not advocate genocide nor practice it (at least not on purpose).
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That's really as far as I got writing my complaints down.
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