#stalin line

[theworldatwar]

German Panzers break through the ‘Stalin Line’ at Schitomiv in the Ukraine 1941

[artem-land]

The Historical and Cultural Complex Stalin Line

[bookloversofbath]

The Invisible Flag: A Report :: Peter Bamm

The Invisible Flag: A Report :: Peter Bamm

[gloopytits-chaosmod]

I think when certain people talk about "reactionary elements that sabotaged the historical so and so" they really just want to say "jews" because their analysis of said "reactionary elements" is shallow as dirt and the takeaway is usually that sneaky shadowy figures who oppose the Goodness of Our Vision do Bad Things from The Shadows with Help From Abroad to Undermine der Nationalcharakter unt nachlassen der DEUTSCHE ARBEITER

you sound like nazis. if you didnt get MY subtext.

[collapsedsquid]

Is a thing where we are all pummeled with messages that X did the Y, the most heinous thing whatever can you believe it and from experience anyone who pays enough attention to see this shit knows that all this is often so decontextualized and who can really know what happened and what the reasons are and if they actually deserved it so we all *shrug* and opinions do not change.

But then some thing bad happens to someone you believe you know something about, someone famous and people go "hang on, it happened to that guy? I know things about that guy! That something could happen to that guy, who it would be ridiculous to say he deserved what happened to him? Who it would be exceptionally careless to make a mistake about? I think I need to take a closer look at this and maybe change my opinion!"

And then you get the counter-wave of discourse "So you only care about these crimes because something bad to someone famous!" and yeah that is annoying and can speak to some short-sightedness but also just is part of the inequities of fame itself.

[st-just]

It's honestly incredibly funny (to me and basically no one else) that the USSR was way closer to a Dictatorship of the Engineer than, as far as I'm aware, any actual fascist state (not necessarily that close objectively, but).

Like obviously this has exactly zero political relevance today, but it would be really funny if it suddenly did.

[valivijay]

Thiru. MK. STALIN, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu

[unfortunately-a-fangirl]

[neonhotelsign]

I’m being vague because I’m an unconfrontational cunt but I don’t like when people talk highly of Stalin at all.

He was a joke of a leader a hack, an authoritarian piece of shit and the way he ran his cabinet was a joke. When you bring two authoritarian fascists up in a discussion and you try to posit the scenario as one being better than the other ur already playing a losing game

One authoritarian is NOT better than the other because they are BOTH bad because they’re authoritarians. Stalin was bad because he was an authoritarian and killed a lot of people, he was a great poet but what does that mean when it comes to running a county? Evidently nothing because he died and so did the Soviet Union

attachment to the Soviet Union is rooted in fantasy and ahistorical bias takes, and it’s extremely frustrating to see it talked about so nonchalantly, especially since a lot of the people who bring this up as a problem have either been studying world history, have been directly affected by authoritarianism or BOTH but are dismissed because oh you said something bad abt communism YOU are the enemy now and we will humiliate you and kill you for it because you said something that sucked the air out of the room. Not because it was wrong but because it made people feel something potentially warranting thought against their chosen ideology

A lot of white Americans as well as Americans who are just unaware due to lack of study, have this really baffling admiration of the Soviet Union and Stalin. It’s weird to me, because Stalin was a dictator

Maybe it’s just embedded in my genetic memory but being Mexican and Puerto Rican, I don’t like when someone walks into my house and tells me what to do and a lot of people online are very in love with this idea and it’s not a good thing. It’s invasive. It’s alienating.

Mussolini was a leftist socialist too and his people tore him apart because he was an authoritarian and invented modern fascism as we know it. Authoritarianism often goes beyond the border of left and right politics because it’s about power and using that power for gain

It doesn’t rlly matter what people label themselves online or offline in terms of ideology, because if you think having a “good” political view is all you need to be good, that’s stagnation and complacency, and no growth GOOD OR BAD comes from that

[notasapleasure]

I just sprinted around the park with two unimpressed dogs to get back for a Farrell penalty and a fucked line-out????? AAAAAAAAAAA. AAAAAAAAAAA.

[deaddee-anime-brownfanlady]

[iwieldthesword]

I need to talk about this because it's making me feel insane.

Last week, my white leftist goyisch friends sat me, a wholeass antizionist Jew, down for a "talk" because they "needed to check in about Palestine" and make sure "our values aligned before we hung out again". They apparently needed to "suss out" where I stood on Palestinian rights, despite having had several conversations about Palestine and them being some of my closest friends. They needed to check, to search for and uncover my true values, because I had said some "disturbing things" that had made them "suspicious".

Disturbing things included:

Supporting IfNotNow which is a "liberal zionist organization" because it normalizes Jewish heritage in the Levant

Not bringing Palestine up enough, despite them also not bringing it up (this was apparently a test)

Mentioning that the Houthi's flag talks about cursing all Jews

Saying Stalin was antisemitic because of the "all the paw-grihms"

...and apparently other things they wouldn't specify, but had been tracking for months.

To clarify, I am an antizionist Jew from three generations of antizionist Jews. I have been vocal in my support of Palestinian liberation and in my condemnation both of Israel's actions and its violent founding as a state, and of zionism in many of its forms. I am a regular donor to Palestinian and Jewish NGOs and advocate for Jewish antizionism in person, at temple, and online. I have been talking about Palestinian liberation before they could point to Gaza on a map. But they needed to make sure, they needed to "suss out", they needed to check. And it's notable that the majority of moments that made them suspicious of me were times where I talked about antisemitism: not about Palestinian liberation, not about Israeli decolonization, not about anything actually relevant to Palestine. It was talking about antisemitism that made them check to see if I was a cryptozionist.

One of the most pervasive and insidious forms of antisemitism is the idea that Jews are inherently untrustworthy and suspicious. You have to constantly be on guard, track what they say and do, "suss out" the real truth. You have to keep them in line and and watch them carefully because they're liars and sneaks, and if you're not looking closely they'll return to their real values (and drag you down with them). This is where the idea of "cryptozionist" comes from and what it's directly building off of: the inherent untrustworthiness of Jews and the need to check. Because no matter how close you become you can't actually trust them, and any upstanding gentile should make sure to avoid associating with Jews before "sussing out" their real allegiances and intentions. You have to make them turn out their pockets, just in case.

I'm the first and only Jew they actually were friends with; I know because they've told me (strangely proud of it in the way white Americans are proud of that kind of thing). They've asked me questions about Judaism and fawned over how beautiful and unique it was for me to be connected to my community and culture. Pre-October 7th, one of them had even mentioned being interested in coming to services at my temple. She still has my copy of our siddur. But now she needed to "check" before she could be seen with me in public. Which is what it was: it wasn't a "you're my friend and I need to give you some feedback because you're fucking up" kind of intervention (which is normal and important to have), it was a trial. It was a last chance for me to prove to them that I'm clean-enough that they could afford to risk being seen with me in public, just in case someone noticed them fraternizing with a hypothetical Enemy and their leftism was compromised. It was a test to make sure that I behave properly when required to, that I'd play along and do what I'm told and turn out my pockets if asked (because any refusal would validate the notion of having something to hide). And above all it was an opportunity for them to reaffirm their own cleanliness by putting my imagined immorality in its place.

I did what I needed to do: I smiled. I apologized. I "didn't know that". I "appreciated the feedback". I turned out my pockets because what else could I do? They'd decided who I was and what I believed, regardless of what I said or did, so there was no point in explaining that they were wrong about me. If I had told them they were being antisemitic, it would just have been proof that they were right. Caring about antisemitism is a dogwhistle in the spaces they've chosen: it's not a real form of oppression, it's a tactic for sneaky, lying Jews to weasel out of admitting their true alliances. There was nothing I could say.

Nothing's really changed for me. I'm going to continue my activism for Palestinian liberation rooted in my culture and my faith. Antizionism is still not antisemitism. But I got a reminder that many white goyisch leftists fundamentally just don't trust Jews, and that the activist spaces they're in not only exacerbate their antisemitism in an increasingly insular echo chamber, but also allow them to finally vent their internalized bigotry in a socially-acceptable way. In my former friends' eyes, what they did was activism—disavowing a Jew (and making me feel humiliated, scared, and unclean in the process) as a cathartic stand-in for doing fucking anything for actual Palestinian liberation—but for me it was a grief that I'll be feeling for a long time: not only over losing friends I loved and trusted, but also over my sense of belonging and security in leftist spaces.

[let-them-fight]

"I have stood knee deep in mud and bone, and filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall.

I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout.

I have dug trenches for the refugees;

I have murdered dissidents where the ground never thaws, and starved the masses into faith.

A child's shadow burnt into the brickwork.

A house of skulls in the jungle.

The innocent, the innocent, Mandus, trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved!

This is your coming century! They will eat them Mandus, they will make pigs of you all and they will bury their snouts into your ribs and they will eat. your. hearts!"

ngl I’ve never played amnesia. but the monologue at the end of a machine of pigs never leaves my brain

[weekoldeggsalad]

Hey baby girl

I'll be Stalin and you can be my world

[mariacallous]

Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.

In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”

His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.

These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.

These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.

[valivijay]

Thiru. MK. STALIN, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu

Stalin

DMK

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu Politics

Chief Minister

Vali Art

India