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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2022

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  • You’re getting “doggied” because of your idiotic reflexive assumptions, not because you’ve “cast doubt” on anything. To cast doubt, you would need arguments with evidence. There’s no evidence that suicide stats are being fabricated, you just assume they are because NK bad because news said literally 1984 so anything not bad must be fake. Most people are not this easily persuaded.


  • Sorry, maybe that was a little antagonistic. I think user bennieandthez answered your actual question pretty well, that to the extent these policies existed, they dried up during wartime. When the Nazis invade and have cells throughout eastern europe, narratives of ethnic harmony got flattened into a desperate struggle for the survival of all the Soviet people. I’m not sure what these practices looked like in the postwar period, but even after the victory, Soviet authorities likely focused on reconstruction of vital infrastructure over something seemingly superfluous like cultural centers and what not. There was likely less to go around in general. Stalin would go on to die in 1953, and his death caused paradigm shifts which may have caused these policies to fade from view.


  • https://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/terry-martin

    “Terry Martin is the author of The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the USSR, 1923–1939 (Cornell UP, 2001) and co-editor (with Ronald Suny) of A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford UP, 2001). In addition to questions of nationality and empire, he has written on religion, political and administrative history, Soviet neo-traditionalism, and the political police, as well as the Nazi-Soviet comparison. He is currently completing a book on the politics and sociology of state information-gathering in the USSR from the revolution through the death of Stalin.”

    This guy does not strike me as serious. Don’t waste brainspace on his drivel.

    I know it seems unfair to categorically dismiss someone’s thoughts like this, but it saves you so much energy. Any time you spend reading his historical fiction novels is time you could spend studying theory, or at least Soviet history from Soviet scholars. Or reading a better historical fiction novel, for that matter. Private publishing like this is frowned upon in academia for a reason. It allows you to say anything with a veneer of authority. The only reason you’re reading him is because he’s a Harvard professor, and that means less than nothing. It’s a finishing school for rich white kids, always was and always will be.



  • About the cultural revolution, yes, horrific and absurd crimes transpired against more or less innocent people, and the angry mobs shouting about reactionary science were generally wrong. If you were to read Chinese sources from the last few decades, they would form a consensus that the cultural revolution was a series of misguided responses to the challenges of industrialization. Mao in particular believed that economic development was a trivial factor in building communism, the primary factor being a protracted class war against bourgeois elements in society. In its own way, it’s idealism manifested. People are liberated through the satisfaction of their material needs, not the absence of their foes. A very wide net was cast concerning what counted as “bourgeois,” and a lot of people needlessly suffered from the reflexive desire to fight perceived class enemies. If you were to move to China, I’m quite certain you would be able to get your prescriptions filled. It’s not the sixties anymore.

    “Bourgeois science” is a real thing, however. All sciences reflect certain priorities and worldviews, whether they are effective or not. In fact, the “effectiveness” of a given science is judged through the lens of these priorities, and the question of what priorities are worth considering is ideological. I would stray away from thinking in terms of “is psychology reactionary?” and instead think “what elements of psychology are reactionary? Are there any that aren’t?”

    More on antispych stuff: people who subscribe to this belief system understand psychiatry as a mechanism by which people’s rights are usurped on the basis that the mentally ill or disabled don’t know what’s good for them, that their judgement has been clouded by the delusions their sick brains induce, and therefore others should make decisions for them. Psychiatric “medicine,” in this sense, becomes a mechanism of dehumanization. A person suffering from cancer could refuse treatment, and physicians would respect this. A psychotic who does the same thing has a slim chance of receiving the same grace. Some leftists think this way, others don’t. Either way, psychiatric medicine exists in China.