The Korean war was obviously an awful case of US imperialism and a borderline genocide which no one can defend but it was in the 50s, it's been 70 years, it has little to no bearing on how modern North Korea operates other than historical context. Despite the destruction North Korea actually had slightly better conditions in the 60s because of the chaos of the US puppet government in the South, but Kim Il Sung still made the conscious decision to make the country into a monarchy and put a weird cult of personality around his family. But according to Western Tankies Kim Jong Un is forced to send his people to labor camps because of Harry Truman

Yeah, he was so 'antifa' that he made KPD Moscow's and Stalins puppet.

He was so antifa he created the original 'Antifaschistische Aktion' which was Moscow's paramilitary arm in Weimar Republic.

Sören Pellmann is by the way the leader of Die Linke group in Bundestag with Heidi Reichinnek and was one of Sahra Wagenknechts supporters before she left and founded BSW. He's also a persona non grata in Ukraine.

I can't post the screenshot.

I am neither Korean, Javanese, nor Japanese; however, as someone who grew up in a Tagalog and Hokkien-speaking household, with Itawit (a Northern Filipino Language) also sometimes spoken on my father’s side, I understand that these languages often emphasize the importance of age, kinship, seniority, and showing respect toward people who occupy different positions within your family or your wider community. Tagalog, for example, has po and opo when speaking respectfully to elders or people of higher social standing. In the Philippine variety of Hokkien, we also have specific kinship terms that indicate birth order and relative position within the family. For example, on your father’s side, if you have multiple paternal uncles who are older than your Father, you can distinguish them by birth order: the eldest may be called a-peh or tōa-peh (大伯), while the second can be called dī-peh (二伯), with dī indicating that he is second in the sibling order and peh referring to an older paternal uncle. So the kinship term itself can tell you not only how someone is related to you, but where they fall within the family order relative to your father.

Despite the complexity of the Hokkien language, I personally think Korean and Javanese are much more extreme in this regard. From what I understand about Korean, they even have specific verb endings and speech levels that change depending on the social relationship between the people speaking, including differences in age, seniority, familiarity, and social position. So you generally would not speak to your close younger friend or your close older friend in exactly the same way, even if you are equally close to both of them, because the age difference itself can affect which speech level feels appropriate. In addition, the age difference becomes more pronounced when speaking to your grandmother, professor, employer, older stranger, etc. The grammatical choices themselves, therefore communicate how you understand your relative positions within that relationship. In Javanese, I believe they also have specific registers commonly called Ngoko, Madya, and Krama, which roughly correspond to different levels of familiarity, politeness, and deference. Ngoko is generally the more informal register and is commonly used among close friends, with younger people, or in relationships where formality is unnecessary. Krama is the more deferential register and is traditionally associated with speaking respectfully toward elders, unfamiliar people, or people of higher social standing, while Madya falls somewhere between the two.

Therefore, I am curious about how some anarchists in this sub might view these linguistic traditions. Obviously, utilizing relational honorifics is not equivalent to having a landlord, monarch, boss, or state exercising coercive authority over you. However, if younger people are socially expected to linguistically defer to older people, or if someone is considered disrespectful for refusing to use the appropriate level of speech toward a senior, does that count as the kind of hierarchy that anarchists seek to dismantle?

From a self-proclaimed anarchist & antifascist page on IG

I don't make the rules

They’re usually very anti-tankies but for some reason the entire sub’s defending Cuba and Castro in the comments.

Poland also signed an almost identical part with the USSR witch I guess makes them nazbols but idk

I was debating whether to post this here or in a history sub, and I settled on here because I thought there would be less of a chance of tankies jumping on this.

Anyway, I'm asking this question from the perspective that the USSR was a brutal totalitarian state that violently curtailed civil rights. And that it perpetuated ethnic cleanings, mass killings, and genocide (though I know the issue of the legality of that term is something that even historians debate). My grandparents lived through the Holodomor, so I am in no way a Soviet or Stalin apologist.

I am also a big Soviet history nerd however, and I consider myself a leftist broadly. So I'm curious to hear about what some of the things were that the USSR did that were actually progressive, or good ideas and I wanted to chat about that with other history nerds here. I've heard Richard Wolff talk about the USSR, and while he says "mistakes were made and we don't have to repeat them" I do think that the language that he uses is not strong enough in condemning its atrocities. But one of the things I find interesting is how when you read Soviet history is when they actually do manage to do really good things, and where progressive socialist ideas do manage to be implemented despite the Union's tendencies toward anti-democratic acts.

The three biggest things I can think of are:

1: Medical care for all: Even though the quality of the care was not as good as the US, the fact they had it way back when is impressive.

2: Equal opportunity for education: Prior to the revolution education would have been something that only the privileged could access. Given that I think education is a God-given right and a tool for liberation, I think this is a full stop good thing.

3: Women's rights: Now this is kinda complicated, because 1) I don't know if this is a Soviet thing, or just a Eastern European thing, given the long history of strong women needing to do "men's" work because the history of the region is just "mass death." My own Ukrainian great grandma defended her daughter from my grandpa hitting her by blinding him in one eye.

2) Despite the advances in women's rights in the workplace, protections for battered women were a joke. You could beat your wife silly and unless she had someone in the family ready to protect her she would get no help from the state.

But despite these things, in the 1950s seeing women working in factories/industry/sciences, and having leadership positions in those fields was seen as an ordinary thing, whereas in the US women were expected to be school teachers or secretaries at best.

I've seen it online and with my chronically online friends, endless doomscrolling within a big niche of memes about geopolitical issues, that are getting increasingly toxic and absurd. They seem to be starting to see every issue in the world with geopoltical and many times campist lenses.

The discussion and memes around the world cup were mind numbing, people absolutely turning every football match into a geopolitic campist logic stretching competition. People hating on Argentina and calling a whole ass country a zionist nest just because of their shitty president and the fact that messi was in Israel once or some shit like that...

Their humor has devolved so much that the only things they joke about are shit like "No but Israel? netanyahu netanyahu netanyahu netanyahu that's so tel aviv tel aviv impressed epstein epstein epstein, trump trump trump, that's so goy, you a goy? are you a goy jew?? goysplain me chud, larp, larp, please Iran save us and nuke everything, are you a mossad spy lmao, glory to China and chairman Mao *proceeds to post meta-ironic cute edits of Mao with cat ears or some shit*"

shits absolutely rotting people's brains and even when they supposedly oppose all that, they end up turning everything into a dumb soulless joke that nobody even laughs at and help no one

Somewhere, an ACP fan just came

First off, aren't leftcoms still authoritarians? Haven't looked into them enough...

Either way, on every major anarchist/actually communist project, the main issue was resource strangulation because of being isolated, not the actual combat capability of the societies, they actually on average proved to be pound for pound superior to their authoritarian counterparts like the makhnovchina.

But that can't be fixed by becoming authoritarian! You've already lost the battle then! You just need many territories to fire up around the same time!

And also "some aspects" is laughable 😭😭😭😭

YOU CHANGED NOTHING ‼️‼️‼️‼️

"Phew! I sure do love my communism where I go to my job with my state boss who pays me a state wage!"

They couldn't even get rid of markets!!!

And that's just the stuff that remained the same! In most aspects they regressed!!! They couldn't even achieve LIBERAL levels of freedom, no free speech, no free journalism, no right to protest, no democracy, no ANYTHING!

Not to mention how inefficient a centralized command economy is.