The Election that Ruined Everything(And if it Never Happened)
5 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLiI6kXZkZI
lmao this video just seems to slowly descend into anti-leftist bullshit, it's bizarre. The majority of the video is fine, but he just seemed to get hung up on
He straight up says a future in which Russia maintains it's Imperial borders(under the Provisional Government) is a better one. So a future in which, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Finland, etc, all fail to receive independence is cool because there's no scary Communism for the West to use as a bogeyman, meaning they would have been able to institute lukewarm, semi-socialist policies instead of shooting down anything even remotely socialist.
I mean he's not wrong, but he just seems to place the blame on Soviet Russia, instead of the pathetic weasels in the West that used the USSR as a cop-out so they didn't have to institute any policies that helped the Middle and lower classes. I'm sure even in this alt-history, the Western politicians/Capitalists would have found a way to cater to the rich/themselves anyway.
They had their independence for 20 years max before they were then absorbed and stuck through several cultural genocides and famines perpetuated by the USSR. In a seperate timeline, with a weakened central authority they may have been able to negotiate their own independence without the need for bloodshed.
This is Alternate History, but its not a big surprise that the USSR was just as brutal, if not more so because of Stalinism, than the Imperial regimes.
I am well aware of their unfortunately brief independence's, but many of the nations had technically never existed prior to their 1918-ish independence's, and had only recently begun to form unique national identities in many of the cases(Estonia for one example); so it is very likely that even just petty land squabbling alone, would have seen the death's of their independence movements without leadership from the top.
The famines that plagued the Soviets at the time, had also plagued Russia for virtually the entirety of its existence, with the only truly unique Soviet one being the Holodomor, which is still to this day debated in terms of if there was actually any malicious intent, or of the Soviets were just simply being greedy by taking Ukraine's(and Kazakhstan's) food(two of the few regions largely unaffected by the droughts), to export it to other regions of Russia that needed it(akin to UK's actions during the Potato Famine).
In the case of the Holodomor, it occurred during a particularly bad series of droughts, and during the height of Collectivization within the Soviet Union, which meant that there was serious upheaval in terms of how agricultural production worked; and since Ukraine and Kazakhstan, two massive producers of Grain, were among the hardest hit in terms of death by the famine, one could come to the conclusion that their death toll looks genocidal in scale simply due to their large populations, and larger reliance on the key food items affected by the famine. One must keep in mind that "Collectivization" targets the rich landowners*Kulaks in this instance), rather than those that work the farms, and I very highly doubt that those "Kulaks" would have been more much more generous with their food than the Soviet leadership had been.
In saying that, I am by no means minimising the fault of Stalin and his cronies, since regardless of their intent, they had a massive role in those death tolls, but I am simply saying that even if the USSR never existed, we would have still seen similarly large death tolls if I had to guess.
Cody is terrible on leftism of all kinds. His videos on "What if Marxism never existed" and "Stalin ruined everything" are riddled with 20th century propaganda and misunderstanding of leftism.
He also did a debate where he just resorted to "muh human nature" for his argument as to why marxism was bad.
He seems like a very biased armchair liberal. However his stuff can be good if it covers ancient empires or very specific ideas.
I've only seen a handful of his ancient and/or early-late modern history videos(prior to this one) so it's pretty gross to find out he's been consistently using his rather large platform and following to spread his own personal prejudices. It's one thing for right wing morons to have their little video blog channels that spout this stuff(since their bias is front and center), but it's another entirely for someone to use their channel that, at face value, has no personal biases, to push their anti-leftist commentary in such a subversive way. Bothers me endlessly due to how insidious it is.
I mean it's a fun channel, but jeez
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