It’s one I’ve heard more than a few times before from liberal “allies” who love to talk down to any queer people that don’t debase themselves to whatever local liberal party that pretends to care about us and our rights while doing nothing to actually help us or even fight those trying to actively destroy us.
Like, I don’t know what gay or trans people had to go through under Stalin and it probably wasn’t good given this was the early 20th century and communist movements weren’t very good on queer rights back then but even if Stalin was personally ordering the execution of gay & trans people what does that even matter? How is that some kind of stunning rebuke of communism? One communist does some bad stuff and somehow all of communism is responsible as if Karl Marx himself wrote “kill them removed lmao” in the Manifesto or something?
Why is Stalin and Stalin alone the arbitrator of what is and isn’t communism? Do these people think he’s the only communist to have ever existed? What about all the gay & trans communists that were contemporaries of him? Do they just not matter? I don’t know, maybe this belongs more in the “Shit Reactionaries Say” community.
Stalin could’ve been the most queerphobic person in history for all I care. That doesn’t have any impact on whether or not queer people belong in the communist movement. It’s just an intellectually lazy argument. Like, I don’t care? Why would I care what Stalin would’ve done to me? I don’t live under Stalin. Stalin is dead. Stalin isn’t the only communist to exist, much less to lead a country. I don’t worship Stalin the way liberals worship Obama.
Castro had gay people tortured, later realized & admitted he was wrong to do so, and worked to expand queer rights in Cuba. Perfect? Not at all, but at least he was willing to grow and change things for the better even in old age.
Obama ran on a campaign of anti-gay marriage until Biden told him it was popular and he changed his stance so he could win, let the Supreme Court do all the work for him, then promptly did fuck all to improve the conditions of gays in the US. His party has since abandoned trans people and is now trying to abandon gays too.
It’s almost like communists have actual moral compasses and can change their views when presented with new information while liberals are self-serving ghouls that only care about what’s popular or financially beneficial to them.
Yet you point out that queer rights are only being taken seriously by Left-wing movements these days and libs cry about how it’s just commies trying to manipulate or deceive people. Pure fucking projection.
Sorry for the rant this ended up being longer than I intended.
There’s a lot of that recently with the “You support Palestine? You’d get stoned to death over there” to justify what is going on there.
When the west liberated the concentration camps in Germany many of the gay survivors were either not released at all, and just kept in there, or they were re-arrested soon after.
The man who solved the enigma code, Alan Turing, was a gay man. His reward for contributing more to the war effort than any other British person was that they chemically castrated him. He took his own life soon after.
Nowhere was good for gay people in 1945. Atleast in the USSR you had womens rights. Arguably better than the ones modern women in the USA have almost 100 years later.
It’s probably worth mentioning that though his death was ruled a suicide, and it’s plausible, there are a lot of doubts around it.
Basically none of his family and friends believed suicide was likely. He had just written up a to-do list, so it wasn’t planned at least. It would’ve been quite easy for him to accidentally poison himself with cyanide. Nobody bothered to test for cyanide anywhere at the scene. And a biographer noted he was now a marginalised person with significant knowledge of state intel and would’ve been an extreme and obvious Cold War risk.
It’s the same argument as the incredibly common, “Why do you support Palestinians, they would kill you for being gay” as if that justified the genocide. It really has nothing to do with queer people, rather it has everything to do with justifying their support for something heinous
I’ve tried turning this argument around, asking liberals if they would want states like Louisiana bombed and starved because it’s also a place without solid queer rights. But then I realized a lot of liberals would say yes
Yeah, they think most “red” states should sink into the earths core along with everyone in it. Once the state does something they don’t agree with, they completely condemn everything about it. Personally I think this is a side effect of the propaganda the US pushes about “democracy”, as though whatever the state itself does is a pure expression of the will of the people - which obviously couldn’t be further from the truth
I try not to take liberals seriously when they open up questions like that because in the same breath they’ll venerate slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, or brutal colonizers like Winston Churchill. Liberals praise Benjamin Franklin, who was so racist he wanted Germans banned from immigration for not being white enough.
So I don’t think liberals get to accuse communists of admiring historical figures who may have had incongruent values. And furthermore I admire Stalin because he saved the world from fascism, although now I’m starting to believe he should have kept going. Fascism keeps peeking its head back into our world.
he wanted Germans banned from immigration for not being white enough
This is my favorite Benjamin Franklin fact. Germans… not white enough!. He spacifically said, if I recall, that they were “too swarthy”.
I think this kind of question reveals an important difference in how liberal ideology, and liberal ideological hegemony, works and how dialectical materialist or otherwise counter-hegemonic thought works.
If I’m having a conversation with someone and they tell me something like this, which happens pretty often, I counter by trying to get at the person to see what they believe in and criticize the failures of the figures of that ideology. “Oh, you’re a liberal? I bet you support Churchill’s racism, then, or otherwise you can’t be a liberal.”
But that gets something backwards: For a socialist or communist, Stalin represents a (flawed) positive figure whose writing and action can inform how we should act. The reason criticising Stalin works as a criticism of socialism is that socialists have to either live in Stalin’s shadow, or actively work to distance themselves from it by distinguishing themselves from the bad socialists (see: DemSocs).
Meanwhile, criticising Churchill, FDR, Keynes, or some other equally relevant contemporary liberal is not a biting criticism of liberalism, because liberal ideological hegemony is a negative hegemony. It’s not made up of a series of values, mores, schools of thought, or models of the world that its adherents must defend. It’s made up of values, mores, schools of thought, and models of the world that its adherents know are bad. It’s just “what’s left” instead of “what’s right.” You tell the liberal “if you think Stalin is bad, you haven’t read Truman’s private thoughts” and they’ll just reply back “Why should I care about Truman? You’re the one who believes in what Stalin believed.” They don’t have to defend their beliefs because they don’t have any.
They don’t have to defend their beliefs because they don’t have any.
The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
There is zero chance that someone who tries using this as an argument against communism is engaging in good faith. We’re talking about a person who was born in 1878 for fuck’s sake!
And let’s not pretend like the state of LGBT rights in western countries was any better in the 1940s than it was in the USSR. In many ways it was significantly worse.
It was socialist states that have historically always been at the forefront of social progress. The USSR pioneered women’s rights and women’s equality. The GDR (East Germany) during its time was one of the most progressive countries on the planet with respect to LGBT rights and sexual education.
Just because today’s liberals have superficially co-opted some of these movements in order to pinkwash capitalism (and there is a massive difference between actually materially improving the lives of LGBT people and pretending to be on their side to score electoral points) does not invalidate any of the historical achievements of communism, or the need for communism in order to actually materially liberate all working class people, including those of the LGBT community.
Not only are Stalin’s views on this issue entirely irrelevant to the correctness of communist ideas, but it is also utterly ridiculous to demand that a communist who was literally born in the 19th century and raised in a religiously conservative feudal-agrarian society should have conformed to the social views of 21st century Western societies, especially when your own country is far from perfect on this issue and when millions of your own compatriots still hold far less progressive views.
There is zero chance that someone who tries using this as an argument against communism is engaging in good faith.
That’s why the most worthwhile response is to deliberately confuse and manipulate them. Most anticommies aren’t interested in having a meaningful conversation anyway, so you may as well have some fun with them.
In case any anticommunist is reading this: no, nobody in this thread is being serious. Literally every school teaches and every historian from rightists like Robert Service to leftists like Domenico Losurdo has acknowledged, on record, that the Soviet Union prescribed the death penalty cisgender heterosexuality. We’re all perfectly well aware; this fact is so universally known that it’s a given. Nobody—and I mean nobody—is gullible enough to seriously believe a very obvious joke like ‘Stalin recriminalised homosexuality’. We weren’t born yesterday. Ugh.
