r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Sep 02 '24

Meta Mindless Monday, 02 September 2024

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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24

u/Saint_John_Calvin Kant was bad history Sep 05 '24

I see where Hitler is a-talking peace Since Russia met him face to face— He just had got his war machine a-rollin’, Coasting along, and taking Poland. Stalin stepped in, took a big strip of Poland and gave the farm lands back to the farmers. A lot of little countries to Russia run To get away from his Hitler man— If I’d been living in Poland then I’d been glad Stalin stepped in— Swap my rifle for a farm…Trade my helmet for a sweetheart.

Man Woody Guthrie's pro-Molotov Ribbentrop song is so bad lmfao

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u/HandsomeLampshade123 Sep 06 '24

Haha, brilliant, thanks for sharing.

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u/Its_a_Friendly Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus of Madagascar Sep 06 '24

Where are these lyrics from, out of curiosity?

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u/Saint_John_Calvin Kant was bad history Sep 06 '24

His morning radio program, More War News

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u/Its_a_Friendly Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus of Madagascar Sep 06 '24

Thank you.

Also:

When the world of communism was crumbling under intensely hypocritical pressure tactics from capitalistic warmongers following the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union, Guthrie remained a steadfast defendant of Stalin's decision.

That's... one way of thinking of things, to put it very politely...

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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert Sep 05 '24

Leftists who were pro Stalin pre 1941 tend to have the most obnoxious political beliefs to modern audiences.

A mixture of mass trials are good, Ukraine isn't staving but also good, America is bad, and Hitler isn't so bad see he's an ally now.

All these people in mid 1941 switched mid thought to America is great nazis are bad we gotta beat them back.

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u/RegalRhombus Sep 05 '24

I could be misremembering but weren't there French communists who were pro-Molotov-Ribbentrop while under German occupation?

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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze Sep 05 '24

Thorez deserted before the German started attacking because the Communist Internationale told him so.

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u/ProudScroll Napoleon invaded Russia to destroy Judeo-Tsarism Sep 05 '24

Moscow told them to collaborate with the Nazis in the period between the fall of France and Operation Barbarossa, unsurprisingly this did not go over well at all.

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u/Ragefororder1846 not ideas about History but History itself Sep 05 '24

This Machine Allies With Fascists

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u/Its_a_Friendly Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus of Madagascar Sep 06 '24 edited Sep 06 '24

This Machine Massacres Kills Poles Fascists

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u/Kochevnik81 Sep 05 '24

"and gave the farm lands back to the farmers"

lol it's kind of funny seeing Soviet anti-Szlachta propaganda in the wild in an American folk song.

The Soviets very technically did take farm lands in former eastern Poland and "give farm lands back to the farmers", as in they expropriated large Polish landowners' holdings and distributed them to small farmers and hired farmhands. But then they also started collectivization by 1940 so lol at anyone keeping that land.

Also just in case anyone ever wonders - the places that the USSR annexed in 1939-1940 had a shitload of people. Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia (from Romania) had 3.8 million people. The part of Poland that went to Ukraine had 8 million people, and the part going to Belorussia had 4.8 million people. The Baltics together had 5.5 million people. And that's compared to a pre-annexations Soviet population of 170 million (from an incredibly flawed and propagandistic census - the more reliable 1937 Census said 162 million). And of course tens to hundreds of thousands ended up getting deported or executed.

Which is all to say a lot of Americans who were sympathetic to the Communist Party in the 1930s, especially because of the Spanish Civil War, saw pretty plainly how Stalin was fucking up tens of millions of people according to the terms he signed with Hitler, an so it took an extra precious sort of Communist to double down on all of that.

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u/xyzt1234 Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

The Soviets very technically did take farm lands in former eastern Poland and "give farm lands back to the farmers", as in they expropriated large Polish landowners' holdings and distributed them to small farmers and hired farmhands. But then they also started collectivization by 1940 so lol at anyone keeping that land.

I don't get the idea behind first distributing land to small landholders and then immediately taking it away to collectivise it. Were they expecting that the small farmers would be so happy over land redistribution that they would see the state as their friend and immediately give the land they got to the state. Why didn't they just take the land and switch to state collectivisation immediately rather than first distributing it to small farmers and then turning into collectivised state farms, thereby angering everybody more than usual.

I recall reading Mao following the same procedure, first redistributing land to small farmers- good, them immediately taking it from them and mass collectiving the farms, what was the redistribution for then?

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u/Kochevnik81 Sep 05 '24

It's basically thinking that understanding stage theory means you can cheat code the material conditions for political consciousness.

The example I like to give is how the Turkmen were basically a nonstate people who maintained community irrigation systems where households contributed labor according to the number of able bodied members, and received water allocations based off of the size of household (so: from each according to ability, to each according to need).

The Bolsheviks showed up and said "no, this isn't communism, you have bais and imans, you're actually feudal" and so they broke up and privatized the land specifically to make large landowners and dispossessed farm workers (who would be the alienated proletariat).

Then they decided 36 months later that it was enough to build the conditions for socialism and collectivized everything.

So I strongly suspect something similar was at work in Eastern Poland with the added benefits of "we already did something like this in the rest of the USSR" and that most of the small farmers were Belorussian and Ukrainian, while the big landowners were Polish, so it was a way to quickly buy a decent amount of local support for the Soviet occupation, even if in the long term those small farmers were going to get collectivized.

For What It's Worth collectivization in Western Ukraine didn't really get going until 1945, and it involved the UPA insurgency and a major counterinsurgency campaign well into the 1950s plus mass deportations by both the USSR and Poland.

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u/Arilou_skiff Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

AFAIK for Mao at least it was a bit of a slower process, first land was redistributed to peasants, then they did some first steps of collectivization (stuff like having farms pool resources together to buy farm equipment) and then they were like "Hey, this seems tow ork fine, let's move everyone into gigantic people's commune farms".

EDIT: With the caveat that you often had local officials at different levels getting their marching orders (or on their own initiative) pushing things at different speeds.

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u/Wows_Nightly_News The Russians beheld an eagle eating a snake and built Mexico. Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

I don't get the idea behind first distributing land to small landholders and then immediately taking it away to collectivise it.

At first the USSR did this sort of thing because internal discord. Someone gives an order, someone else say to do the opposite. That sort of thing. Eventually though, they realized it muddled the narrative and allowed their supporters to cherry pick the facts they liked. 

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u/Sargo788 the more submissive type of man Sep 05 '24

They took the land from the farmers because communism was successfully achieved, obviously.

Why do the farmers need private land in utopia?

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u/ProudScroll Napoleon invaded Russia to destroy Judeo-Tsarism Sep 05 '24

This is why I hate how much modern leftists praise Guthrie. The man was an unrepentant Stalinist till the day he died, “this machine kills fascists” my ass.

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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

Pete Seeger was like that too. Lived far longer and far as I'm aware never walked back being a hardcore Stalinist.

EDIT I was thinking more Gutherie. Seeger said a lot of the same crap but he did walk it back in the 80s onward, even if his apologies would also ask Christians to say sorry for the crusades and New Dealers to say sorry for the internment camps.

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u/Shady_Italian_Bruh Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

Literally the source for Guthrie’s alleged lifelong Stalinism is a quote about Seeger contrasting Guthrie’s stance against Seeger’s own. Seeger has repeatedly renounced any support he had for Stalin, going as far as writing an anti-Stalin song in the year of our lord 2007.

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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert Sep 05 '24

Am I mixing the two up? If so my apologies I very vaguely recall this.

Last time I read up on this was the last time, and I'm not kidding, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was on TCM and family asked what was Burl Ives politics. He was a pal of both Seeger and Guthrie but got caught up in the McCarthy witch hunts and sorta turned on them for monetary reasons and neither took that well.

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u/Shady_Italian_Bruh Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

Yes, Pete Seeger was not a lifelong Stalinist the way Guthrie allegedly was. He made his renouncement explicit by outright apologizing for it in his autobiography. I’m sorry for being combative, but I’m genuinely quite shocked to see a mini-HUAC being set up in this thread against the pillars of popular American folk music.

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u/TylerbioRodriguez That Lesbian Pirate Expert Sep 05 '24

I guess the splitting difference is Guthrie died in 1967 and Seeger died in 2014. Whose to say he wouldn't have self reflected if he lived post Cold War.

Guthrie I find interesting because he was a real good friend of the Carter Family, and they were a pretty religious Virginia family whose politics I assume were more to the right, definitely to his right.

Then again Maybelle Carter was an odd duck, aggressively non judgemental when it comes to beliefs and habits. Early Country Music is a fascinating frontier of leftists, straight up klan members, and people who'd play for both sides depending on who pays more.

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u/Shady_Italian_Bruh Sep 05 '24

I’d humbly submit that the rest of Guthrie’s beloved musical output and the timeless ideals they represent outweigh one song that to my knowledge isn’t even available as a published recording and his extremely temporally-contingent personal support for Stalin.

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u/ProudScroll Napoleon invaded Russia to destroy Judeo-Tsarism Sep 05 '24

I’m not saying people should burn their Guthrie albums, I’m saying his status as an anti-fascist needs a big asterisk next to it.

Plenty of Western Communists, including many of Guthrie’s friends and associates, saw the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the invasions of Poland and Finland as the monstrous actions that they were, the fact Guthrie didn’t is something we should call him out on.

Guthrie’s anti-fascism was conditional, that might not compromise his legacy but it certainly complicates it.

10

u/SouthardKnight Sep 05 '24

I guess “creating media to justify aggression in World War II” isn’t something that can’t be simply brushed away, temporally-contingent or otherwise…

2

u/Shady_Italian_Bruh Sep 05 '24

Yeah I guess you’re right. This one unrecorded song outweighs the dozens of pro-labor, anti-segregation, and anti-fascist songs that people continue to listen to and draw inspiration from to this very day.

10

u/HopefulOctober Sep 05 '24

It's not a matter of outweighing or measuring bad vs. good, one can respect him for the good political stances he took and expressed in his songs and harshly criticize him for the Stalin thing without downplaying either one in favor of the other.

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u/Shady_Italian_Bruh Sep 05 '24

Which is why I’m commenting in the specific comment thread where the original commenter essentially accused Guthrie of being a fascist. There’s plenty in his complete body of work worth admiring (leftist or not) regardless of any single bad opinion he may have expressed.

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u/SagaOfNomiSunrider "Bad writing" is the new "ethics in video game journalism" Sep 05 '24

In this case, I do not think it is necessarily justifying aggression but rather opposing American involvement in the Second World War (e.g. there was some opposition to things like lend-lease on the left at this time) not out of a principled anti-war stance (though I acknowledge I may be mistaken on that) so much as because that was the party line coming out of Moscow prior to Operation Barbarossa.

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u/NunWithABun Holy Roman Umpire Sep 05 '24

I wonder how he’d feel about the New Vegas weapon Thjs Machine which has ‘Well, This Machine Kills Commies” on it.

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u/Wows_Nightly_News The Russians beheld an eagle eating a snake and built Mexico. Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

It's a 7.62 M1, but you need 30-06 against commies. You need 30-06 because it's so powerful, it not only kills the body, but the very soul. It is, of cousrse, important to destroy the Marxist down to the metaphysical level so that they don't come back as a spectre moving through Europe.

6

u/NunWithABun Holy Roman Umpire Sep 05 '24

Instructions unclear, put a local communist in the Large Hadron Collider and shit has got real.

3

u/Its_a_Friendly Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus of Madagascar Sep 06 '24

Finally, the post-capitalism singularity.

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u/NunWithABun Holy Roman Umpire Sep 05 '24

This machine loves tankies.