Oh come on. You already know what they're going to say.
“Whataboutism!”
‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024
‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970
“Whataboutism!”
As long as none of the civilians is a white cishet capitalist man, who cares?
invading poland side by side with the nazis
This would actually be a more accurate description of the Slovak Republic’s contribution to the Fascist invasion of Poland, though it is very rare to see anticommunists mention that even in passing. I wonder why. (Presumably they’d say that it is unimportant or uninteresting, of which—as I showed in my thread—it is neither.)
Why did I misread the title as ‘Lebensraum and the crumbling of American power’?
Yes, but I stopped updating the megathread because of the character limit. Seriously, I added so much content to the thread that our software couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve been thinking about using Github as an alternative, though I am inexperienced with that platform and I am unsure if others would want me to continue my compilation there.
Something tells me that if I invited anticommunists to check out a source with the self‐heroizing title of ‘RFvsMisinfo’, featuring a blood‐splattered photograph from the Munich conference and various sentences presupposing that any counterevidence is ‘Western propaganda’, they would feel more than a wee discouraged, too… just saying.
Sloppy propaganda aside, it is genuinely interesting to compare and contrast the Fascists’ dealings with other dictatorships of the bourgeoisie to their dealings with the people’s republics. It isn’t useful just for dunking on anticommies. For example:
And since somebody mentioned deportations of Jews:
Admittedly, I feel like a sicko for saying that these subjects ‘interest’ me… but hey, somebody has to get their hands dirty when studying these tragedies. It’s only fitting that the one doing the job most often would also be the one who can tolerate it the best.
An organization that bombastically calls itself ‘EUvsDisinfo’, splatters a diplomatic photograph with fake blood, and preemptively dismisses counterevidence as ‘pro‐Kremlin disinformation’ does not sound like something that has an interest in exploring this matter in good faith, but I can play along (for now). Simply put, your source leaves too much counterevidence unaddressed. This, for example:
The discussion in London took place on 24 April. Halifax also backed unilateral declarations. ‘A tri-partite pact on the lines proposed, would make war inevitable. On the other hand, he thought that it was only fair to assume that if we rejected Russia’s proposals, Russia would sulk.’ And then Halifax made this comment, almost as an afterthought: ‘There was… always the bare possibility that a refusal of Russia’s offer might even throw her into Germany’s arms.’⁸⁰ Was anyone listening? If you asked the British and French everyman’s opinion, war was already inevitable.
[…]
The failures of the previous five years to obtain agreements on collective security led Molotov to want to pin the French and British to the wall to make sure they would not leave the Soviet Union in the lurch against the Wehrmacht. This was not Soviet paranoia, it was Soviet experience. Would not any prudent diplomat in the same position, after years of being spurned, mistrust interlocutors like Chamberlain and Bonnet? Maiskii’s reports appear to have encouraged the Soviet government to invest in continued negotiations. The obduracy in Moscow derived from doubts about British and French intentions which Maiskii and Surits could not overcome, and that for good reason.
I know that I did not address everything in your link, but frankly I really doubt that you have the time, patience, or interest in reading a thoroughly sourced and exhaustive commentary on it. For simplicity’s sake I chose to focus on the denial that the liberal capitalists wanted a reinvasion of Soviet Eurasia.
Among the atrocities committed by the Portuguese, it is possible to list the massacres in Xinavane, Mueda, Mucumbura, Wiriyamu, Chawole, Inhaminga, among others. University of Coimbra’s Documentation Center “25 de Abril” has a rich collection about what happened in Wiriyamu, with a hundred articles and newspaper clippings from the most diverse countries that participated in spreading information about the acts of the Portuguese in the region. On Saturday, December 16, 1972, Portuguese soldiers killed approximately 400 Mozambicans in Wiriyamu. Today, in the old village of Wiriyamu, there is a monument with the bones of the victims.
Furthermore, there is evidence published by Le Monde Diplomatique (1972) that two South African pilots were hired as mercenaries by Portugal, and carried out secret chemical warfare missions against nationalist fighters in northern Mozambique. The operation was aimed at destroying the crops that would feed FRELIMO guerrillas, using the substance 2,4‐D, Dichlorophenoxyacetic Acid, which was among those used by the U.S. in Vietnam and World War II.
(Source.)
As a complement to the concentrationary policy of interning the African populations in large villages, the military hierarchy would use, from 1971 onward, the desperate option of “cleanup” operations, already largely implemented in Northeast Mozambique and on the eastern shore of Lake Malawi. These were meant to eradicate villages, exterminating all their inhabitants and emptying the territory to block the path of the guerrillas.
By the end of 1972 the “cleanup” operations along the Zambezi, from Mucanha and Mucumbura to Inhaminga, started to prefigure a wider genocidal strategy. […] Soon […] the 6th Commando Group arrived in helicopters, surrounded Wiriyamu and entered it. The people were lined up, men in one group, women in another. For the most part they were then shot, but others were herded into houses which were set on fire, while some of the children were kicked to death and other individuals were murdered in various atrocious ways. […] At the same time, the rural areas were bombed, eventually with napalm, before the launching of “cleanup” operations to exterminate the remaining populations, supposedly in contact with the guerrillas.
And the Estado Novo’s colonies were all in Afrasia (not merely Africa as such).
It really bums me out seeing somebody deny that the Iberian parafascists engaged in white supremacist violence. I am guessing that that is a product of the Portuguese education system rather than a conscious distortion, but still it really depresses me. It’s like nobody cares that the Iberian parafascists massacred Afrasians.
Why are you always posting propaganda from all of these obviously Russian‐backed sources?
I shouldn’t have chuckled at this.
Cut an anticommunist and an anticommunist bleeds?
See, when I complained on Nightdive’s Discord server about map glitches that have not been rectified in twenty‐nine years, the excuse that somebody gave to me was that fixing those glitches would result in compatibility issues with other source ports (which would be especially noticeable if attempting multiplayer).
Here is what I wrote:
Is there something in the contract stating that the current designers aren’t allowed to fix old bugs that nobody—and I mean nobody—enjoys?
I mean, the wall running and the silent BFG trick, yeah, but… inaccessible secrets?
Here is the response that two official developers gave me:
So a chunk of the developers for this port are people who have been programming and modding Doom for 20+ years. As such, we tend to err on the side of caution on fixing specific behaviours because we know the knock on effects of trying to fix them, Technical debt is a problem we are trying to avoid, essentially.
If we change something, we have to maintain that change and all systems it affects.
and mod support is on the table, so anything we change has the potential to break 70000 mods[.] unfortunately Doom seems very much built on a table made out of very thin wafers
I replied that while I did not know if that was a sacrifice worth making, I could at least understand why they were making it. Somebody replied,
if it wasnt worth it, doom purists would just be playing (g)zdoom
Agreed. I know that the original poster isn’t siding with the Herzlians, but this is still in questionable taste.
It has been a while since I watched anybody try the first Call of Duty, but there were several instances where the Soviets shot retreaters, and I vaguely remember the Soviet missions depicting the ‘human wave’ stereotype in a few scenes. I’d have to watch a longplay to be sure. The Soviet missions were not nearly as angsty as Company of Heroes 2, but there were some irksome moments.
Oh man, it’s been so long and I tried so many that I can’t possibly offer a certain answer… but a good candidate is JumpStart Preschool, which I (barely) remember playing on a Windows computer. Otherwise, it could have been The Busy World of Richard Scarry Busytown, Richard Scarry’s How Things Work in Busytown, Gus Goes to Cyberopolis, Fisher-Price Ready for School: Kindergarten, Fisher-Price Learning in Toyland, Fisher Price Great Adventures: Pirate Ship, or Nick Jr Play Math!
There are many more that I could name, like Oddballz, Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When it’s Dark Outside, Ozzie’s World, Sesame Street: Numbers, Mr. Potato Head Activity Pack, Play-Doh Creations, and Candy Land Adventure, but I am less sure of those. Finally, there are those titles that I simply can’t find again. There was a point‐and‐click program that mainly took place in a spaceship, and another one where a character said ‘I brush my teeth before I go to bed every night!’, but I’ll be damned if I can find videos of those.
I’m surprised that they made handhelds! I was always under the impression that Soviet video games were more like experimental curiosities than a visible industry. The situation was similar in the Anglosphere back in the 1950s and ’60s: there was not much of a market for them, so they were hard to find (unless you were a computer scientist).
Apart from driving over and crushing their victims, the practice that earned the Blackshirts notoriety in Italy during Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s had been the killing of opponents by dragging them to their death. Given the numerous lorries available to them in Addis Ababa, both from the military and the [Fascist] government transport company, it was perhaps inevitable that they would use the same method during the massacre of Addis Ababa.
Kirubel Beshah, an Ethiopian witness who had been a student at the Teferi Mekonnin School and who after Liberation would teach mathematics there, reported, ‘Ethiopian blood flowed like water everywhere. Saddest of all was that at first they tied dead bodies to the back of their trucks, and pulled them along the road while shouting and singing, but later, they also started to tie the living to their trucks, so as not to waste bullets. It was very disturbing to see human bodies being torn to pieces alive, by stones and bushes.’²⁹
(Emphasis added. Source.)
In my experience, anticommunists tend to be pretty terrible at managing time. There were many German anticommunists in the 1940s who thought that the G.P.U. still existed.