The USSR was definitely less-anti-black (by which I mean it basically wasn’t anti-black, as multiple African Americans who visited there attested), but there was surely some element of racial chauvinism in the policies that involved internally deporting ethnic groups.
Edit: Even if you want to give them a pass on the Volga Germans because Austria gave them a concerning precedent, internally-deporting Koreans on the basis that they might become Japanese spies is just ridiculous.
Edit: Even if you want to give them a pass on the Volga Germans because Austria gave them a concerning precedent, internally-deporting Koreans on the basis that they might become Japanese spies is just ridiculous.
These actions did not occur because of racism. They occurred because of national-cultural concerns as well as internal security concerns.
I’m interested in the national-cultural concerns, but the “internal security” concern is exactly what I am citing as functionally being racism, on a similar basis to the Japanese internment camps in America being “internal security” but functionally racism.
You are at best being a pedant, because I don’t really give a shit here if it’s based on blood quanta (it was not) or something else. It was still a crass generalization of an entire race ethnic group, impugning on their characters and mistreating them in a manner that can only be justified by chauvinism and killing thousands in the process.
The soviet treatment of many different ethnic minorities is very much worthy of criticism, I don’t think any one here would argue with you on that.
It’s just not racism, and conflating the two isn’t just wrong, it actively undermines trying to understand specific social reasons for why these prejudices come about, which is why I called it anti-materialist.
I started with lmao though, because I don’t need an argument, you’re a grown person who should be capable of a small correction on definitions without immediately getting strung out, and these are definitions which are easily Google able.
You have yet to present an argument for your initial case (just more conclusions) and your reaction is substantially more aggressive than mine was or is. Your instruction to “Grow the fuck up” is thereby hard to take seriously.
I can’t say whether you are struggling or not with developing an argument for why the two are substantively different, but in case you are I will add a little to my perspective to give you more material to work with:
You know how changing the name of something does not change the thing itself? Pointing to two things have different names is not very helpful for explaining why they are different, and indeed even if you can explain differences between two things, that does not mean in a given scenario those differences matter. Western racism and Soviet ethnic chauvinism have different historical roots (with more than zero overlap, but anyway) and presented in different scenarios, which produced different rhetoric and different precise boundaries (e.g. there were ethnically non-Korean people of mostly-Korean ancestry), but they were still based on making wild generalizations about another people and their culture (and remember the OP is speaking in the present tense, where there is a much stronger ethnic element to racism directed at e.g. African Americans than there was 150 years ago) in the direction of distrusting them and justifying removing their agency to do as you will with their lives, even at the cost of many deaths and much more suffering, because what they have been turned into is only a person on a secondary level to the humanity of the accepted groups.
The two systems are not literally identical and it probably wouldn’t have hurt to hedge my word choice in anticipation of someone using the distinction to imply a larger difference than there really was, but that is far from proving that the distinction is that significant in this context, and furthermore you will have a hard time making the case that, whatever legal language it was draped in, there was not still a significant element of actual, literal racism underlying it, because racism by any reasonable definition did indeed exist in the Soviet Union and produced terrible actions by both the people and the government at various points in time. I am not saying Stalin was the big Soviet promoter of racism, and a lot of it came either distantly or immediately from western influences, but regardless of these factors it still bore an important presence and used the semi-enlightened language of the socialists when the drivel of explicit blood and soil types wouldn’t fly.
Soviet treatment of Tatars or Kyrgyz people wasn’t stellar, either. At best, forcing them to “settle” and renounce their “savage” ways of living. The ussr inherited a lot of national and racial hierarchies that went largely unquestioned the same way that racial hierarchies went unquestioned in the west until later in the 20th century. Just because they didn’t have chattel slavery or plantations it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a racial dynamic to tsarist Russia, and later, the USSR.
A key part of critical support and credible analysis of past projects means understanding the shortcomings regarding subaltern people in AES states, and how they could’ve been addressed, had they had the tools we have right now.
The USSR was definitely less-anti-black (by which I mean it basically wasn’t anti-black, as multiple African Americans who visited there attested), but there was surely some element of racial chauvinism in the policies that involved internally deporting ethnic groups.
Edit: Even if you want to give them a pass on the Volga Germans because Austria gave them a concerning precedent, internally-deporting Koreans on the basis that they might become Japanese spies is just ridiculous.
These actions did not occur because of racism. They occurred because of national-cultural concerns as well as internal security concerns.
I’m interested in the national-cultural concerns, but the “internal security” concern is exactly what I am citing as functionally being racism, on a similar basis to the Japanese internment camps in America being “internal security” but functionally racism.
It is important to understand the distinction between ethnic discrimination / xenophobia and racism.
There have been issues with the former across time, but it is not the same as contemporary racism in the Americas and western world in general.
You are at best being a pedant, because I don’t really give a shit here if it’s based on blood quanta (it was not) or something else. It was still a crass generalization of an entire
raceethnic group, impugning on their characters and mistreating them in a manner that can only be justified by chauvinism and killing thousands in the process.Nothing pedantic about it. You are just misusing terms, and getting weirdly hostile when corrected about it, but go off I guess.
Honestly conflating the idea of “race” and ethnic group like you just did is so anti-materialist, it’s remarkable you ever wandered into this space.
Does the enlightened Marxist have an argument or do they only have conclusions?
Lmao
The soviet treatment of many different ethnic minorities is very much worthy of criticism, I don’t think any one here would argue with you on that.
It’s just not racism, and conflating the two isn’t just wrong, it actively undermines trying to understand specific social reasons for why these prejudices come about, which is why I called it anti-materialist.
I started with lmao though, because I don’t need an argument, you’re a grown person who should be capable of a small correction on definitions without immediately getting strung out, and these are definitions which are easily Google able.
Grow the fuck up
You have yet to present an argument for your initial case (just more conclusions) and your reaction is substantially more aggressive than mine was or is. Your instruction to “Grow the fuck up” is thereby hard to take seriously.
I can’t say whether you are struggling or not with developing an argument for why the two are substantively different, but in case you are I will add a little to my perspective to give you more material to work with:
You know how changing the name of something does not change the thing itself? Pointing to two things have different names is not very helpful for explaining why they are different, and indeed even if you can explain differences between two things, that does not mean in a given scenario those differences matter. Western racism and Soviet ethnic chauvinism have different historical roots (with more than zero overlap, but anyway) and presented in different scenarios, which produced different rhetoric and different precise boundaries (e.g. there were ethnically non-Korean people of mostly-Korean ancestry), but they were still based on making wild generalizations about another people and their culture (and remember the OP is speaking in the present tense, where there is a much stronger ethnic element to racism directed at e.g. African Americans than there was 150 years ago) in the direction of distrusting them and justifying removing their agency to do as you will with their lives, even at the cost of many deaths and much more suffering, because what they have been turned into is only a person on a secondary level to the humanity of the accepted groups.
The two systems are not literally identical and it probably wouldn’t have hurt to hedge my word choice in anticipation of someone using the distinction to imply a larger difference than there really was, but that is far from proving that the distinction is that significant in this context, and furthermore you will have a hard time making the case that, whatever legal language it was draped in, there was not still a significant element of actual, literal racism underlying it, because racism by any reasonable definition did indeed exist in the Soviet Union and produced terrible actions by both the people and the government at various points in time. I am not saying Stalin was the big Soviet promoter of racism, and a lot of it came either distantly or immediately from western influences, but regardless of these factors it still bore an important presence and used the semi-enlightened language of the socialists when the drivel of explicit blood and soil types wouldn’t fly.
Soviet treatment of Tatars or Kyrgyz people wasn’t stellar, either. At best, forcing them to “settle” and renounce their “savage” ways of living. The ussr inherited a lot of national and racial hierarchies that went largely unquestioned the same way that racial hierarchies went unquestioned in the west until later in the 20th century. Just because they didn’t have chattel slavery or plantations it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a racial dynamic to tsarist Russia, and later, the USSR.
A key part of critical support and credible analysis of past projects means understanding the shortcomings regarding subaltern people in AES states, and how they could’ve been addressed, had they had the tools we have right now.