Re: on why are you a bunch of racist pricks?

On 8/23/2026 11:55 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Aug 2026 16:37:21 +0100, Julian <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>>
>> Concerning the long leftist tradition of disposable peasants....
>>
>> "The deadliest man-made and politically driven famines in history were
>> caused by extreme state policies, forced collectivization, and
>> intentional food requisitioning.
>>
>> The largest include the Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961) with 15 to 55
>> million deaths, and the Soviet Holodomor (1932–1933) which killed millions.
>>
>> Major Man-Made and State-Induced Famines
> 
> It is odd to me that you blame the systems and not the dictators who
> ran them.  But that coincidence of their pairing is often used to
> bolster rightie thinking.  As if the system made them tyrants instead
> of the tyrants ruining the system.

The system not only allowed, it encouraged the tyrants.

"If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time 
guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been 
told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in 
Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron 
rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they 
would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a 
ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal 
(the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed 
beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible 
circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping 
for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of 
Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes 
would have gone off to insane asylums.

Yes, not only Chekhov’s heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning 
of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic 
Workers’ Party, could have believed, would have tolerated, such a 
slander against the bright future? What had been acceptable under Tsar 
Aleksei Mikhailovich in the seventeenth century, what had already been 
regarded as barbarism under Peter the Great, what might have been used 
against ten or twenty people in all during the time of Biron in the 
mid-eighteenth century, what had already become totally impossible under 
Catherine the Great, was all being practiced during the flowering of the 
glorious twentieth century — in a society based on socialist principles, 
and at a time when airplanes were flying and the radio and talking films 
had already appeared — not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place 
only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts 
standing over millions of defenseless victims."

The Gulag Archipelago

https://x.com/AI_Solzhenitsyn/status/2091503798195724672