All of those countries are capitalist, though, how do they invalidate my point about post-Soviet countries?

Famously feminist paradises like modern Russia, Poland or Ukraine you mean? Don’t make me laugh, the drops in fertility rates in such countries aren’t due to feminism, women now have less rights than 35 years ago in said countries.

A good example would be the astonishing drop in birth rates in post-Soviet countries. Capitalism, by providing no safety nets, no childcare and no community, makes it very difficult and undesirable to have children.

China abuses the shit out of ethnic minorities as well (Uyghurs in the news most recently)

This is mostly western anticommunist bullshit. There is no big nation as multiethnic and as accepting of it as China to my knowledge. There was a terrorist problem in the province of Xinjiang, and after some big terror attacks in the 2000s and 2010s by radical Islamist groups linked to ISIS, the government created some reeducation camps (emphasis on reeducation), which have been closed since at least 2022. Terrorism disappeared, and Uyghur people live fully free lives. You wanna see a minority oppressed, go ask the citizens in the US being disappeared for the colour of their skin, or go ask the 1 in 5 black males in the US whom are subjected to the prison system.

Maybe we should all live in Norway. I hear they’re chill.

Norway ia a mini-petrostate living off the natural gas deposits on its coasts, and even then, it cannot even bring itself to sanction Israel by stopping investments from one of the greatest investment fund in the planet, the Norwegian pension fund.

Other than China being able to reverse-engineer our military tech?

I mean, that’s good, isn’t it? Or are you in favour of world dominance of the American military industrial complex? American weapons are primarily used to bomb brown children, the more they’re reverse-engineered the better

An approval rating is given for Russia too, with much stricter “criminal dissent” laws than China. Do you suspect that the western institution which made this graph is evil CPC propaganda? This data is literally portrayed in Statista, it doesn’t get more western capitalist than that.

Now, don’t forget I’m waiting for your condemnation of the capitalist atrocities against the Ukrainian population since 1990. Otherwise, to other commenters, you may appear as a dishonest propagandist leveraging Ukrainian suffering only to condemn things you already stood against.

It was not a dictatorship because it did not produce the material results you would expect from a dictatorship.

If it had been a system in power of a few people against the vast majority, as was for example monarchic feudalism (the state immediately before the USSR, the Russian Empire, being a good example of it), you would expect vast inequality leading to a two-class system with vastly different life metrics, wealth, and a degradation of the rights of the working people.

However, the Soviet Union had the lowest wealth inequality the region has ever seen, the highest earners were the highly trained professionals (not policitians as you may have been led to believe) and the salary difference were perhaps at most tenfold; access to healthcare was universal and free, as was education to the highest level, pensions for retirement were universal with men retiring at 60 and women at 55, homelessness was abolished and everyone had access to affordable housing (3% of monthly income on average), and everyone had the right to a job making unemployment nonexistant.

A system producing these outcomes is not the result of 4 generations of “benevolent dictators” from 1917 to 1991, it’s outrageous making such claims.

Xi Jinping is not a dictator by any stretch of the word. The Communist Party of China enjoys some of the highest government approval rates in the world, by a long shot, according to western sources:

Notice how Russia’s government approval rate is low. As a tankie myself, this is easily explained by the fact that they’re not communists, and in fact the government is shitting on everything that communism did in the region in the past century. Ukraine had no war with Russia during Socialism, and in fact was saved from Nazi Extermination and thrived under Soviet Rule.

Since you care so much about Ukrainians:

Surely, seeing the horrifying demographic crisis taking place in Ukraine for rhe past 35 years coinciding with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you condemn its contemporary capitalist government and want socialism back? If so, welcome aboard, comrade

The Soviet state did not even recognize inherent human rights

By guaranteeing access to education, healthcare, housing, retirement and work to everyone, the Soviet Union de-facto promoted human rights more than any other state at the time. You simply don’t care about the welfare state if you think those aren’t human rights in the most obvious sense. Whether some state “signs a declaration” is worthless, the important and measurable thing are the outcomes, and by any metric, the Soviets excelled in them.

The political repression isn’t great: suppression of rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, & movement; punishment of dissent; crackdown on unauthorized political activities

For all its faults, market-based liberal democracies don’t have that

You’re just a western supremacist if you truly believe that. The USA has literally bombed its citizens for their political opinions. It holds the highest prison population in the world by a long shot, comparable to the height of the Soviet prison system during World War 2. There are currently fascist henchmen legally disappearing citizens based on the colour of their skin, 25% of black men go through prison at some point in their lives…

And those are only the sins within the empire. Go ask a Palestinian, an Iraqi, an Irani, an Afghan, a Mexican, a Korean, a Vietnamese, a Cuban or a Congolese what they think of American support of human rights. Go ask an Algerian, a Malian, a Burkinabe what they think of French support of human rights. Go ask a Guatemalan, a Peruvian or an Ecuadorian what they think of Spanish support of human rights. The USSR, by fighting against colonialism and imperialism, was the de-facto biggest supporter of human rights in the world. Not having colonies was the ultimate expression of support for the equality of all humans.

Sure, there where excesses in repression in the USSR when they were under threat of extermination at the hands of Nazis according to Generalplan Ost. After WW2, the prison population was reduced to the lowest the region has seen (remember what came before and after the Soviet Union), and persecution was stopped as there was no longer a Nazi threat. Sure, excesses were made, but the country was under the heaviest duress possible, and it still managed to save a hundred million lives from poverty, disease, and outright extermination.

You don’t really believe in human rights if you don’t think that raising life expectancy from 28 to 70 years of age in 40 years isn’t a miracle.

I believe that in soviet times, less wealth flowed to the top, but that’s mostly because there was less wealth to start with

Wealth inequality in Tsarist Russia was infinitely higher than in Soviet times, and the country was much poorer. So no, that’s not the reason. The reason was ideology and politics.

People suffered and lived in poverty

People in the tsarist empire up to 1917 died at the ripe age of 28. By the 1960s, life expectancy had risen to almost 70 years of age. The country went from being a feudal backwater composed of 80% peasants in 1929, to being the second world power by the 1970s, with universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, the abolition of unemployment and homelessness, and the least wealth inequality the region has ever seen. The GDP levels reached by the late 80s weren’t recovered until the 2010s in most post-Soviet republics, and even now some of them like Ukraine never fully recovered from the devastation of the return to capitalism.

The original comment made very specific questions which I addressed. Furthermore, you went ahead and assumed that the top 1% consisted of a vanguard of politicians. Actually the top earners were highly trained professionals like university professors, popular artists, or high level researchers. But sure, I’ll address your concerns.

Didn’t the vanguard class of ruling elites oppress everyone else with their authoritarian power & political inequality?

If there had been an oppressive ruling class exploiting everyone else, there would be no material explanation for why healthcare was completely free and guaranteed for everyone, why education was completely free to the highest level, why jobs were guaranteed, why housing was guaranteed and costed on average 3% of the monthly income, why the overwhelming majority of workers were unionized and had power to replace directive personnel at their workplace through union… Had there been a chaste of bureaucrats exploiting the rest of the country, you’d expect at least to see a luxury industry from which they could obtain specially expensive goods such as luxury cars, yachts, designer clothes, luxury watches, luxury photo cameras… There was no such thing. I’m not saying there wasn’t ever corruption (as in any system), but the outcomes were the most egalitarian the world has seen, and even in eras of economic growth slowdown the purchase power of the average citizen went up significantly.

How does that economic system stop money and power from flowing to the top?

By having no top. In socialism, there are no capitalist owners, and the only way to make money is through having a job and its corresponding salary. If you don’t believe socialism reduces the flow of money from “bottom” to “top”, you can check empirical data. Top 1% in modern capitalist Russia has above 20% the total income of the country. In Soviet times, they possessed 4% of the total income. This is a marked reduction in the money flowing to the top.

If you are angry about capitalism, an economic system, why are you not angry about democracy, the political system that has failed to reign in the economic system?

Because democracy under capitalism is a lie. Having a powerful owning class whose interests oppose those of the majority ensures that the interests of the majority will be ignored.

Now you have answers

Charity is the opposite of socialism. Socialism ensures that everyone works and everyone can sustain themselves, charity is what happens in capitalism. I don’t want people to rely on the good will of others and on motherfucking food stamps to survive.

Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US. Just because “US=rich” doesn’t mean that poor people in the US aren’t having a fucking hard time, massive inequality leads to this. Yesterday I saw a reel about a food program called “ugly potato day” and +15k people queued for hours to get some produce… In a single city… The USA is fucked.

Like, sure, colonial regions have it worse, but the root of the problem is the same: western capitalism fucked their lives.

Most of the claims of relocation of Ukrainian children to Russian families come from the government of Ukraine, not from independent investigative journalism. The Ukrainian government has obvious reasons to do this atrocity propaganda. The Russian government itself justified the start of the war on similar grounds, arguing that Russian ethnics in eastern Ukraine were being genocided by Ukraine through forced Ukrainization and the banning of Russian language. I don’t take the Russian government seriously when it makes such claims because I haven’t seen much independent journalism confirming it, I apply the same reasoning to the claim of Ukrainian children being kidnapped en-masse and forcibly Russified.

As far as I know, there are only a handful of independently confirmed cases of Ukrainian children being sent to adoptive families in Russia, and most children evacuated by the Russian military have been returned to their families in Ukraine. There aren’t many cases of either because, as you may expect, in an attrition war in which the movements of the frontline are slow, there are very few children near the frontlines.

What are you talking about? How is the genocide under Trump any worse than it was during Democrats??

Some of the countries that have officially labeled Russia’s brutal invasion as a genocide include [list of geopolitical enemies of Russia]

France can’t even fucking recognize the state of Palestine until like a week ago, and now they’re authorities in genocide? Fuck them.

As for your points list:

#1 goes mostly from claims by the Ukrainian government. It is true that Russia has extracted children from the warzone and it is true that in some cases these children have been sent to adoptive families in Russia, which I heavily condemn, but it’s not a generalized thing and most confirmed extracted children have been returned eventually. The official numbers by the Ukrainian government aren’t confirmed by any investigative journalism and the invaded Ukrainian state has obvious motivations to claim abduction of Ukrainian children and violations of human rights. The Russian government makes similar claims of forced de-Russification of ethnic Russians in Donbas to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which I hope you don’t take seriously because it’s obviously state propaganda.

#2 A statement doesn’t make a genocide.

#3 Civilian deaths in the Ukrainian war, by any metric you want to use, are contained compared to any imperialist war carried out by the west. Civilian death ratio in the unlawful and horrifying invasion of Iraq was comparably much higher and it wasn’t a genocide in my opinion (probably not in yours either). However horrifying the invasion of Ukraine is, it responds to patterns of war between nations, not of genocide attempts against a population.

#4 Isolated instances of war crimes don’t imply a generalized intent to massacre civilians of a given ethnicity. War crimes are horrible and the perpetrators should be brought to justice, but again, the scale you bring of “hundreds” doesn’t respond to genocidal goals. Massacres of civilians take place in many wars (see Vietnam, Libya…) and are war crimes, but not every war crime is genocide.

Please, do not dillute the meaning of the word “genocide”. It’s meant to carry an extremely heavy connotation of attempt of total extermination of an ethnicity and culture, and throwing it around lightly is an injury to people suffering from it.

How are we more gaslighted against resistance with Trump? People are mobilizing in much higher numbers now, and they were quite literally shutting their ears during the Kamala campaign not to hear the names of genocide victims.

I suggest you don’t engage in lesser evilism with the west if you’re not willing to do with with geopolitics. Or if you’re willing to do it, then supoort China in the international geopolitics.

The only reason there is a “truce” is cause the Trump regime causes so much chaos they think they can get away with a hypernormalized fake truce

So an amelioration of genocide is insufficient to you? Good, it’s insufficient to me too, that’s why I suggest voting against democrats too