this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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Thanks, this is the kind of response I was looking for. I'll look into what you said further.
With the image that Stalin has in the west, I think it alienates people when he's not condemned. I can't think of a singe leader that we should praise (Mandela maybe?) if anything we should praise ideas not people.
people need to be educated not coddled. conceding to and legitimising liberal/right wing revisionist history is a strategic error for any communist or communist movement.
If you don't directly challenge false, bourgeois narratives, then they are used as ammo against related subjects. "Stalin was a butcher of 100 million," if accepted, means the Soviet Union was a horrible failure as well. This means Socialism was a horrible failure in the Soviet Union. This cascading power of bourgeois narratives presents real radicalization.
Take another example. Stalin synthesized Marxism-Leninism. As a Marxist-Leninist, there is no avoiding Stalin when talking with liberals. Despite my belief that Marxism-Leninism is correct, I cannot avoid the topic of grappling with Stalin's existence.
As Marx said, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."