Zuzak

I don't think they're implying anything like that? A Russian source talking about a bad thing Russia did is generally more reliable than a CIA source saying the same thing, since there's less incentive to make stuff up.

"Lol, how could people in the past be so dumb? Anyway, I'm off to give cluster bombs to some Nazi paramilitary groups."

RFE also "objectively" had nothing to do with the CIA for nearly 20 years after it was created, at which point it turned out the CIA had been funding it all along. But now we know they've stopped because they said they did, and anyone suggesting that they're not editorially independent is a paranoid loon, just as they would've been in the 50's and 60's.

Some of us don't believe that the people whose job it is to lie stopped lying because they said they did. Suggesting that the CIA is still doing things that they did regularly and successfully kept hidden in the past is not a conspiracy theory.

I support whatever this is so idk what that makes me

Real Volkssturm hours

Adding "jailing pacifists for speaking out" to the things dronies openly support, along with forcing others to fight when they're not willing to, poisoning civilians with generations of birth defects, and giving cluster bombs to Nazis.

The moral high ground, ladies and gents

Yet more confirmation that the West regards Ukrainians as subhuman, and that they know they're not getting the territory back. Generations of birth defects, the unexploded bombs that cluster bombs leave behind, more and more people being drafted and shoved into a meat grinder in a war that's already lost, just so some American ghouls can make a bit of extra cash off their Raytheon stocks.

None of this was worth it. But it's going to keep happening. The US will keep arming Nazis and pushing war over diplomacy and destabilizing everything until something is done to get rid of those bastard war profiteers and the ghouls who lied us into Iraq and Afghanistan.

This shit's so fucking stupid. Can't wait for the chickenhawks to call me a bad person while sitting behind their keyboards demanding others be forced to fight in their stead.

Random observation but I find it kind of interesting how the talking points anti-tankies tend to bring up are things that, even if the worst allegations are accepted, are relatively minor compared to some other events you could bring up. I've heard so much about Tienanmen Square under Deng, but much less about the Cultural Revolution under Mao. And the Hungarian Revolution and the Prague Spring happened under Khrushchev and Brezhnev respectively, when there's much worse stuff you could bring up about Stalin.

I can't help but think that this conflicts with the supposed definition of tankie of just knee-jerk defending anything someone does if they wave a red flag. If that were actually true, wouldn't you focus on the most extreme examples by the most extreme leaders? The fact that there's so much focus on people like Khrushchev and Deng, who were both more moderate than their predecessors, seems more like the point of the word is specifically to attack people who might have a more favorable view of those more moderate figures, while being critical of their predecessors' actions.

Which is to say, tankie isn't actually meant to be directed towards someone who knee-jerk defends anyone with a red flag, but rather, it's meant to be directed towards someone who defends anything at all about anyone at all with a red flag, by accusing them of being the former. In other words, it's a word that demands the exact kind of knee-jerk response it's supposedly criticizing, just in the other direction.

In fact, it's particularly interesting that these accusations of ideological rigidity and blind loyalty are in reference to Khrushchev, who did nothing but criticize Stalin, and Deng who controversially said that Mao was "70% good, 30% bad." I don't think it's even possible for someone to defend everything done by both Stalin and Khrushchev

The original meme listed communist movements and people, which are what this edited meme is referring to. It's possible for fascists to pretend to be socialists, but the things and people referenced were not that.

Libs out here proudly being like

It's probably still less stupid than asking whether the clearly labelled excerpt from a clearly labelled book and author is copied "from some source"

US life expectancy in 1940 was 62, almost double that of China. The state of medical knowledge and technology doesn't matter if the people don't have access to it, as was the case with many Chinese, especially rural people. What actually made up a large part of the difference was not antibiotics but vaccines, which were around well before WWII, but Chinese people had virtually no access to them. Under Mao, China implemented something called the Barefoot Doctors program, through which large numbers of doctors were trained quickly and sent out to rural regions, relying primarily on Western medical knowledge, though they also used some traditional herbal remedies due to the massive amount of medical supplies needed to expand care across all of China. The program was a success and resulted in the sharp rise around 1968, when it was implemented.

Another factor was land reform and increasing food security. Yes, the GLF was a failure, but before the communists came to power, famines were an extremely common occurrance. Rural Chinese were suffering under extreme poverty and brutal exploitation under the landlords (really more like fuedal lords), and the communist uprising redistributed the land which allowed farmers to keep more of what they produced.

Generally, there were a lot of improvements in the lives of rural Chinese that were very basic and obvious. Anyone who went and observed their conditions could plainly see things that needed to be changed. But no other faction - the KMT, the invading Japanese, the European colonizers, the Qing, etc, hell even the communist party before Mao wasn't interested in trying to reach them, as I mentioned. The reason Mao got so much support from them, and the reason that he knew they could be radicalized, is because he actually took the effort to go out and live among them and listen and learn about what their lives were like.

Those reasons are why, despite the failure of the GLF (which we can discuss if you like), I would still argue that there have been a lot of material improvements for the people of China which wouldn't have happened under any historical faction but the communists. Notably, Chinese life expectancy has now surpassed that of the US, while China has emerged as a major economic and geopolitical power, despite having once been one of the poorest countries in the world.