Yes it fucking was a colony. Calling somewhere “independent” and puppeting it while maintaining all colonial extractions is not freedom from colonialism.

You only learned the country’s name this week, and your entire understanding of this topic is from wikipedia. I am very much willing to give them, Burkina Faso and Mali an opportunity to be better, or not. At which point I will adjust my opinion.

Nigerian

At least get the name of the fucking country right. You’re naming the wrong ass country.

Every single african nation that today is no longer a colony achieved so through either a coup or revolutionary regime. What exactly are you expecting people to do? Vote colonialism out? How childish.

You either have to believe the new state is becoming a colony of Russia(it obviously isn’t), or accept that its improved from the colonial arrangement and that’s what makes it attractive to make deals with Russia.

Russia gets plenty out of it without doing anything colonial. The export deals France had were basically stripping the country of all of its wealth, Uranium and Gold in particular, which Niger are nationalising.

Russia will certainly get some beneficial deals out of their help offered but don’t have to make themselves as bad as France to come out on top of this, and in fact simply the act of weakening France and by extension the rest of the western bloc is a win for them by itself. I don’t see Russia as anywhere near as good as the Soviets were but the Soviet strategy was basically “liberate african countries entirely in order to weaken the west who are the colonial holders of these countries”. The history of soviet liberation of africa is also the primary reason many in africa still hold a lot of positivity to Russia, even though the two are not remotely comparable.

Watching France lose control of its remaining colonial holdings while the French population simultaneously cause chaos at home is a pleasure I did not expect to get until at least 2030.

You’re skipping the 11 other parties that are banned. Very free.

AC unit you grew up with

Lmao grew up with? Most of us have never used AC at all in europe. Here in the UK no homes have AC. The issue is that people are installing it now because of climate change and the result is massively higher energy use.

This isn’t just mildly interesting. We should be considering methods of air cooling that do not use any carbon in order to avoid aircon usage becoming a contributor to the climate problem as things get hotter and hotter.

Every single left wing party in ukraine was banned, and my friends in the country were arrested for being socialists. Speech in the country can not be considered free and opinion can not be measured accurately at the current moment in time. It would also be sort of foolish to attempt this with the country split into 4 regions between Ukraine proper, Crimea and the two Donbas republics. Ideally you would include all of them in that data, and if we went back in time and looked pre-2014 (when the civil war started) we’d see a lot of support in those regions. But now? Everything is a mess and I wouldn’t trust either states at war to give us reliable data.

I of course don’t consider the factions pursuing a restoration of the Russian empire to have anything to do with socialism either. For the record.

Educated people in general have to say on politics the same things that I said earlier, but they are very nostalgic over less criminalized popular culture, better technical education and rules being followed. So am I to some extent actually.

In Moscow? You’re not being fair. Educated people in the soviet union from Moscow lived extremely well and have very positive views. Engineers, scientists, etc will all say positive things. You know as well as I do that hundreds of video interviews will confirm this. Be fairer, claiming that everyone that supports the ussr among the over 60s is just uneducated is definitely untrue. This particular video series is in Moscow and this lady is exactly what I am talking about.

You can’t live in Moscow and say this is untrue. You’re being unfair.

No recollection at all, I’m 1996, but since transition from USSR to modern Russia didn’t happen in an instance, in various institutions and organizations you can still see in some ways how it was. More in my childhood than now, but still.

Brought up in shock therapy then.

if you weren’t in denial.

I’m not in denial. I’m asking you to be fairer. The data does not support your position. You know as well as I do that 75% of the country consider the soviet era to be when the country was at its greatest (and that this is easily verifiable from many sources), and you know damn well that 75% of the country aren’t all uneducated people. You are not being fair.

Educated people in general have to say on politics the same things that I said earlier, but they are very nostalgic over less criminalized popular culture, better technical education and rules being followed. So am I to some extent actually.

In Moscow? You’re not being fair. Educated people in the soviet union from Moscow lived extremely well and have very positive views. Engineers, scientists, etc will all say positive things. You know as well as I do that hundreds of video interviews will confirm this. Be fairer, claiming that everyone that supports the ussr among the over 60s is just uneducated is definitely untrue. This particular video series is in Moscow and this lady is exactly what I am talking about.

You can’t live in Moscow and say this is untrue. You’re being unfair.

No recollection at all, I’m 1996, but since transition from USSR to modern Russia didn’t happen in an instance, in various institutions and organizations you can still see in some ways how it was. More in my childhood than now, but still.

Brought up in shock therapy then.

if you weren’t in denial.

I’m not in denial. I’m asking you to be fairer. The data does not support your position. You know as well as I do that 75% of the country consider the soviet era to be when the country was at its greatest (and that this is easily verifiable from many sources), and you know damn well that 75% of the country aren’t all uneducated people. You are not being fair.

I live in Russia and you do not.

Which area of Russia do you live in and what do the local people over 60 that actually lived in the USSR have to say? I already know of course and could post video interviews of such, but perhaps you could tell the thread what those people say.

Forgive me for assuming but I’m willing to bet you’re in your teens or twenties, making you at best 10 years old when it ended, meaning you have little to no actual recollection of what living and working was like. I could be wrong of course.

Of course nobody wants the same shit, I don’t want the same shit either, I know for sure that the hard left of mszp sit around where I am. Things can be so much better.

And? Socialism does not mean not having a multiparty system. I get that you’re trying to imply that approving of a multiparty system or a market economy is somehow evidence of being against socialism but both of those things exist under socialism. Yugoslavia was a market economy in eastern europe under socialism.

According to the absolute majority of respondents (54%), the majority of Hungarians had a better life under the Kádár regime (pre-1990) than today

The Kádár regime was the communist government.

there were even more respondents (61%) who said that the conditions for individual financial prosperity were more favorable under the Kádár regime.

lol

It is also worth noting that almost two-thirds of Hungarians (63%) said that there was predictable order and social peace under the Kádár regime

lmao

I like this research. Thanks for sharing.

EDIT:

The older an age group, the higher the proportion was of those who agreed that the majority lived better before the regime change. A significant correlation can be observed when looking at the educational background: citizens with lower education tend to believe that most Hungarians lived better under Kádár. Among the lowest qualified citizens, 62 and 27 percent are the share of the two sides, but even according to the relative majority of graduates (45%), most Hungarians lived better before 1990 than today.

So the older the Hungarian the more likely they are to believe that things were better under communism. So the people that actually lived in communism support it even more. Oh and the more educated people are the more likely they are to support that position too. I think the age thing will explain why the stat is slipping over time, the people that actually lived in communism are the people that support it more, and as they are dying they are being removed from the data.

These polls are really out of date. These numbers have since improved substantially in capitalism’s favour.

Feel free to give citations that are better than 2010-2016 lmao.

Implying capitalism does not regularly do mass killings.

7 out of 11 countries believe the end of the USSR harmed their countries rather than benefited them

Reflecting back on the breakup of the Soviet Union that happened 22 years ago next week, residents in seven out of 11 countries that were part of the union are more likely to believe its collapse harmed their countries than benefited them. Only Azerbaijanis, Kazakhstanis, and Turkmens are more likely to see benefit than harm from the breakup. Georgians are divided.

Hungary: 72% of Hungarians say they are worse off today economically than under communism

A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country’s economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country’s switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary’s integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.

Romania: 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism

The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.

Germany: more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR

Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an “illegitimate state.” In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.

28 percent of Czechs say they were better off under the Communist regime

Roughly 28 percent of Czechs say they were better off under the Communist regime, according to a poll conducted by the polling institute SC&C and released Sunday.

81% of Serbians believe they lived best in Yugoslavia

A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -”during the time of socialism”.

Majority of Russians

The majority of Russians polled in a 2016 study said they would prefer living under the old Soviet Union and would like to see the socialist system and the Soviet state restored.

The above memes are almost always made by Americans, whose brains are riddled with red scare brainworms and are completely devoid of any knowledge or understand of what the left thinks in Europe because Americans do not have a left.

Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that’s fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.

The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.

How’s that boot taste?

Mate I do not give a flying fuck what any of these people with zero power are. I care about actually achieving shit. Fortunately I live in the UK where this bizarre sectarianism has absolutely no presence, thank fuck for that.

If you lived in the UK you’d be against the head of the RMT union currently striking the UK railroads, who publicly calls James Connolly his political hero and is an obvious marxist-leninist. You’d be against Jeremy Corbyn, because he defends the Soviet Union and always has, he also promotes the Black Panthers who defended north korea (if you look in the corner of the video around 2:00 there’s even a cute little soviet cccp statue). You’d be against Diane Abbott, because she’s publicly defended Mao on national television. You’d probably find something to be against John Mcdonnell who has said his job is to overthrow capitalism on the BBC, probably because he’s quoted Mao and read his little red book in parliament?

My point here is that you’ve got to get a grip. We don’t do this bizarre shit over in the UK because there’s literally no point, there is no communist revolution just around the corner, the conditions do not exist for it. What matters is what we can achieve RIGHT NOW, when a revolution is actually on the cards then we can decide what that revolution should actually fucking look like. In the meantime these people are all mild lukewarm elected MPs as socdems that just want to give people more welfare and improve basic living standards, but you would call them evil tankies for any of these things.

If you don’t build at least SOME power now you will have absolutely none when the conditions deteriorate enough for a real revolution, and if that is the case it will be fascism that wins, not any sect of the absolutely non-existent left in your country.

What you’re viewing above is how radical you need to be just to establish and maintain lukewarm european welfare and social safety nets. Get that into your head and you might actually stop the aussie government dumping migrants into concentration camps and help improve people’s lives for fuck’s sake. You should know better than this anyway, half the union leadership of australia are marxist-leninists, and the other half are trots. What union are you in? I’ll tell you whether you need to throw your union leader under the bus for some fucking do-nothing liberal because of your sectarianism obsession. Are you even in one?