Comments by "PeterC" (@peterc4082) on "This YouTuber Viciously Attacked Me" video.

@dorinpopa6962 Some people liked the USSR because of several reasons. 1. Nostalgia. They were younger. Things were rosier back then. 2. They were party members. Some were privileged. Same happened in Poland where PZPR people were very fond of the old communist system. 3. They came from WW2 and later Stalinist purges. Things looked up after those ended, comparitively speaking. Prior to that were the 20s and 30s which were just as bad. 4. They had few points of reference. They were isolated in the USSR and were told that conditions were terrible everywhere else, especially in the capitalist world. You only have to read what Lenin and Stalin wrote about the capitalist exploiters. 5. The period after the collapse of the USSR was very turbulent. There was crime. There was inflation. The currency became worthless. Savings became worthless. People lost their jobs. There was unrest. There were wars such as in Chechnya. All in all one can see why some pined for the old USSR. USSR gave them a sense of purpose. It was an ersatz religion. The space programme. The nuclear weapons. The defilades with the tanks and ICBMS. All the propaganda. All of that made people nostalgic and positive toward those years. It's true that Russia was very undedeveloped but so was much of the world. Europe had tremendous strides in literacy and development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Development, progress and industrialisation would have eventually come to Russia. We saw it come to the west and that prevented communism from taking hold. Populations were growing but the infant mortality rate and life expectancy were significantly HIGHER. The authorities would lie about epidemics even of childhood diseases. Books and media were censored. It was a terrible place and time to live in. Currently populations decline because that happens in developed nations. People simply don't have more kids when things improve and education levels improve. Finally who industrialised the USSR? My great grandparents worked in St Petersburg before the revolution in a factory which built trains. It still functions to this day. The bread in those days had raisins in it. Food was plentiful. The tsars had already started to industrialise. But who industrialised the USSR more completely? The West. People like Henry Ford did. Lend Lease won the war for the Russians. The Russians looted also what they could from more industrial parts of their new empire, such as Poland. You pine for the USSR, but it were the capitalists who made the USSR industrial. The Russians copied so much western tech.
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@JohnDoe-xs5gv We traveled and interacted with Russians, dude. Fsck man there was a RUSSIAN military base near my father's home town. My mother traveled to the USSR in the 60s. We knew these Soviets better than you will ever.
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@TheExtremeIRON Being a factory worker with terrible living and working conditions morphed into being a factory worker with maternity leave, sick leave, long holiday leave, overtime pay, day care for kids, medical insurance payments, home loan subsidies, occupational health and safety regulations etc. Farm life in Russia in the 1800s wasn't as bad as it's made out to be. It was what it was for the time. Things would have improved regardless as even the tsar was modernising and tech became cheaper. Things like vaccinations were appearing. Things are bad in the third world but they were least bad in the developed parts of the third world, take a country like South Africa, or even Namibia or Botswana where the life of a miner is quite reasonable. Oh but you''ll say, they developed silicosis or TB, well so did Western miners and everyone in the west lived surrounded by asbestos in the 50s. Things change and they improve with time. The West drove the development of many things. Even now if you look at 99% of medicines out there, they're western. Russians copied or purchased many of those under communism. With the whole world being like USSR we'd be backward and still trying to figure out how to treat high blood pressure or diabetes.
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@TheExtremeIRON Capitalism actually improved lives. Yes there was some subsidiarity in it. Christian democracy and Catholic subsidiarity started to improve conditions in Germany in the early 20th century. There were also improvements in human rights and labour protections all across the continent in the 20th century. That's why communism had a hard time. They switched to identity politics. The se-xual revolution and so on. Repressive tolerance of Herbert Marcusse and the Frankfurt School.
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@TheExtremeIRON These things are also being implemented in the developing world. I live in South Africa although I'm a dual EU/SA citizen. Here (SA) many people now enjoy rights that previously whites enjoyed. Things like maternity leave, long holidays, overtime pay, etc. These came earlier however to the west, back when Daimler could implement these, their cars had few Chinese components or none at all. The thing is that these things were implemented in the West post WW2, back when Europe/US were still manufacturing. It's only now that we find that they're becoming less affordable. But China is manufacturing only since the 90s in appreciable amounts. The issue now is that Europe has too much socialism and even cheap Chinese labour can't compensate. But this is from the Frankfurt School. I didn't really say capitalism itself was some sort of Arcadia. I'm saying that the West using the economy/political model it had and I think Christian Democratic subsidiarity compliments capitalism very well, eg free Sundays, was what drove development. We were able to for example develop vaccines and new methods of agriculture which feed the Global South populations and reduce infant morality rates. What did the Soviets give us. NOTHING. As a black South African mine worker would tell you, FOKOL. All we have which is good, is because of non-communist states.
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@pequenoperezoso3743 Anyone who supports the EFF in South Africa can't be a serious historian or well read, he is a troll and a grifter. I live in SA and the EFF are what would turn SA into Zimbabwe. Bad E. is a troll and a bad actor. His work is not objective and is political red propaganda. It's polemical and sophist in nature.
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It's not hard. What did the USSR give us? NOTHING but misery. Take medicine for example. 99% of the meds we use today, things I prescribe daily for my patients, are or were developed/discovered in the West. Same for most other forms of technology. USSR gave us nothing but misery. They rabble roused and funded wars everywhere. They dumped AK47s everywhere so that a country like South Africa is flooded by these things. And the tankie Metratron is arguing against is a big EFF supporter in SA. Most South Africans will tell you that guy is totally clueless.
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scold-y4f Stalin got a bad rep. Actually under Lenin the Bolsheviks were already un-aliving 10,000s of people. Stalin was one member of a criminal gang who got in with Trotsky, Lenin, Beria, Dzierzynski, etc. Felix D at least put a lot of fellow commies out to pasture as well. Even Stalin was afraid of him. But all of these people were bad. Even Khrushchev signed warrants.
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That Tankie guy is a complete sophist. He throws out insults but there is little substance to his objections. What are HIS qualifications?
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@dorinpopa6962 I'm sorry but the mass unalivings have been well documented and there is ample evidence of them. You're hallucinating. I'm sorry but the USSR was a terrible sh-t hole. It was an oppressive system which stole property and un-alived people. You should study some soviet archives. Google the work of Vladimir Bukovsky who studied these archives before they were SEALED again. Yes they are still sealed.
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@dorinpopa6962 You also have to face it. A good number of Soviet losses in WW2 were due to their own actions and not due to the Germans even. USSR did not care about human life. You can see how Putin does things today. He learned those lessons back then. Russians don't care about their own, but it was especially bad under the commies.
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@IbnRushd-mv3fp I just looked at that BadEmpanada guy and he must be a grifter. He supports the "EFF" in South Africa, which is not even a real marxist party but a troll party. Also a pro ANC guy. Terrible person who really hates black people in Africa.
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@ghostthelizard We left in 1982. I can relate. One should never trust tankies. They use fake data to argue for things which were not so in the 20th century.
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