It was still undertaken by the Bolshevik-led nascent Russian Soviet Republic (which in turn became the USSR), wasn't it? And while Kronstadt did occur during the civil war timeline, the rebels were disillusioned, Soviet-supporting former Red Army fighters; it's not like these were actions taken against tsarists....
And their rebellion meant they were now yet another side in that civil war not fighting the Tsarists who only had the opportunities they did due to WWI leaving all state power at the time in the hands of reactionary psychos who wanted every Slavic peasant dead. Which never would’ve happened if people had listened to Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the first place. Criticize Lenin, sure, but his life was one of making the best possible choices he could think of from the day his brother died, and generally those choice were dramatically better than literally any peer you could compare him to.
If someone calls themselves a socialist, they have an obligation to actually investigate how that power has been wielded, and not simply to offer automatic support for any power that attains it and calls itself socialist. I'll sing the praises of any successful socialist project that attains power and then wields it for the genuine increase of the workers' democratic power/participation, and utilises its military in a genuinely defensive manner. But you don't get a blank cheque if you call yourself "socialist" and then devolve into the same violent repression & invasiveness as the capitalist/imperialist states. Using the word as a self-descriptor doesn't convey carte blanche.
Good thing nobody's doing that. A strange non-sequitur statement as a response to my post, though.
The Khmer Rouge is one of the only things from the Cold War where the Soviets actually come out looking good, because they actually opposed the Khmer Rouge because the Khmer Rouge's main ally was China and China and the USSR had fallen out over severe ideological differences. (The USSR was course correcting hard after Stalin which caused China to label them as being revisionist traitors)
The PDPA was in control of Afghanistan before and after the death of Amin. The popular revolution in Afghanistan started before Amin and existed after Amin. Removing Amin from power does not overthrow the popular revolution; indeed, the popular revolution never chose Amin to lead them in the first place: he reached his position by assassination.
And to automatically accept any anticommunist propaganda that sounds like a critique from the left, rejecting anything else as naivety, sure, sure.
Like your own country. Or mine. OK.
So it's imperialism to attempt to prevent another power-- from the other side of the world-- from taking over a friendly country next door.
Yes, I'm sure the government installed by a foreign military and which sat solely at that military's tolerance felt 100% in control of Afghanistan's agenda. Not as if said military had just made it abundantly clear that if you do stuff they don't like (such as pursuing a non-aligned cold war policy), you disappear.
"The US would've done worse!" is irrelevant to the point in discussion. We're discussing what actually happened. I believe that whenever a hypothetical implies something you don't much like, you call it a "counter-factual" and refuse to discuss it, IIRC?
Absolute bollocks. You've inferred a sense of continuity from the fact that the puppet came from the same party (completely irrelevant), to insinuate that nothing more meaningful happened than the removal of one man.
My own country had at least decriminalised my existence a decade prior. Not so your "liberatory" state.
Nope. It's imperialism to take over that "friendly" country yourself and then justify it by saying someone else would've done it instead.
The vast majority of what you're speaking of here was done by Karmal over the objections of the Soviet Union, completely obliterating your point.
Oh, the Soviets objected to Karmal's summary executions and violent purges of Kalqists. There was no objection to the realignment of the government, with non-aligned socialists removed from power or heavily demoted, & various other government buildings seized at the same moment Amin was assassinated (funny-- if this was about one man, why was that necessary, I wonder?) And that "objection" hardly counts for much, considering they put him there and sat back while he did it anyway, acting as his national security force all the while.
I'm just sarcastically shining your own liberal pathology back at you. Very surprised that you find it grotesque. You should have noticed the "/s" the first time. And then the second.
Yes, I saw the /s. The comment started with "very nice that....", so the sarcasm tag indicates that you don't find it "very nice". Or are you now trying to claim it was double-sarcasm?
What absolute drivel. I do not believe that all policy goals are morally equal, or that they should be judged at such. And nothing I've said in this thread whatsoever requires that to be true.
Don't be obtuse.
By the way, your lack of support for the lesser evil against the Tsar is very privileged and selfish.
You were being sarcastic... about being sarcastic. OK, sure, whatever. Putting aside the fact that you've already spent many a post excusing racial/religious persecution when perpetrated by a self-described "socialist" power in China, so there's a track record already of looking the other way when it comes to hard-right persecution perpetrated by self-described "socialist" States.
'excusing' is precisely what I did not do about that.
You shouldn't. At least not on that particular point. Assuming the worst about everything else is a bit weird.
No, I was sarcastically telling you that the details of process matter more than the result.
There was some denial, too, but I remember you also justifying the existence of the camps in order to counter "extremism".
And when they fail to live up to their supposed principles in such egregious ways, time after time after time, when does it start being weird to assume the best?
Some might call a decade of occupation a bit more than a "detail", but I digress. What result is that? The marked increase in civil unrest? The decade-long civil war that followed intervention? Where is the glowing result I'm supposed to be grading them on instead of focusing on methodology?
"Something different is happening than what is being claimed" is not 'an excuse' for what is being claimed. ffs
