A good example would be the astonishing drop in birth rates in post-Soviet countries. Capitalism, by providing no safety nets, no childcare and no community, makes it very difficult and undesirable to have children.

An approval rating is given for Russia too, with much stricter “criminal dissent” laws than China. Do you suspect that the western institution which made this graph is evil CPC propaganda? This data is literally portrayed in Statista, it doesn’t get more western capitalist than that.

Now, don’t forget I’m waiting for your condemnation of the capitalist atrocities against the Ukrainian population since 1990. Otherwise, to other commenters, you may appear as a dishonest propagandist leveraging Ukrainian suffering only to condemn things you already stood against.

It was not a dictatorship because it did not produce the material results you would expect from a dictatorship.

If it had been a system in power of a few people against the vast majority, as was for example monarchic feudalism (the state immediately before the USSR, the Russian Empire, being a good example of it), you would expect vast inequality leading to a two-class system with vastly different life metrics, wealth, and a degradation of the rights of the working people.

However, the Soviet Union had the lowest wealth inequality the region has ever seen, the highest earners were the highly trained professionals (not policitians as you may have been led to believe) and the salary difference were perhaps at most tenfold; access to healthcare was universal and free, as was education to the highest level, pensions for retirement were universal with men retiring at 60 and women at 55, homelessness was abolished and everyone had access to affordable housing (3% of monthly income on average), and everyone had the right to a job making unemployment nonexistant.

A system producing these outcomes is not the result of 4 generations of “benevolent dictators” from 1917 to 1991, it’s outrageous making such claims.

Xi Jinping is not a dictator by any stretch of the word. The Communist Party of China enjoys some of the highest government approval rates in the world, by a long shot, according to western sources:

Notice how Russia’s government approval rate is low. As a tankie myself, this is easily explained by the fact that they’re not communists, and in fact the government is shitting on everything that communism did in the region in the past century. Ukraine had no war with Russia during Socialism, and in fact was saved from Nazi Extermination and thrived under Soviet Rule.

Since you care so much about Ukrainians:

Surely, seeing the horrifying demographic crisis taking place in Ukraine for rhe past 35 years coinciding with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you condemn its contemporary capitalist government and want socialism back? If so, welcome aboard, comrade

Most of the claims of relocation of Ukrainian children to Russian families come from the government of Ukraine, not from independent investigative journalism. The Ukrainian government has obvious reasons to do this atrocity propaganda. The Russian government itself justified the start of the war on similar grounds, arguing that Russian ethnics in eastern Ukraine were being genocided by Ukraine through forced Ukrainization and the banning of Russian language. I don’t take the Russian government seriously when it makes such claims because I haven’t seen much independent journalism confirming it, I apply the same reasoning to the claim of Ukrainian children being kidnapped en-masse and forcibly Russified.

As far as I know, there are only a handful of independently confirmed cases of Ukrainian children being sent to adoptive families in Russia, and most children evacuated by the Russian military have been returned to their families in Ukraine. There aren’t many cases of either because, as you may expect, in an attrition war in which the movements of the frontline are slow, there are very few children near the frontlines.

What are you talking about? How is the genocide under Trump any worse than it was during Democrats??

Some of the countries that have officially labeled Russia’s brutal invasion as a genocide include [list of geopolitical enemies of Russia]

France can’t even fucking recognize the state of Palestine until like a week ago, and now they’re authorities in genocide? Fuck them.

As for your points list:

#1 goes mostly from claims by the Ukrainian government. It is true that Russia has extracted children from the warzone and it is true that in some cases these children have been sent to adoptive families in Russia, which I heavily condemn, but it’s not a generalized thing and most confirmed extracted children have been returned eventually. The official numbers by the Ukrainian government aren’t confirmed by any investigative journalism and the invaded Ukrainian state has obvious motivations to claim abduction of Ukrainian children and violations of human rights. The Russian government makes similar claims of forced de-Russification of ethnic Russians in Donbas to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which I hope you don’t take seriously because it’s obviously state propaganda.

#2 A statement doesn’t make a genocide.

#3 Civilian deaths in the Ukrainian war, by any metric you want to use, are contained compared to any imperialist war carried out by the west. Civilian death ratio in the unlawful and horrifying invasion of Iraq was comparably much higher and it wasn’t a genocide in my opinion (probably not in yours either). However horrifying the invasion of Ukraine is, it responds to patterns of war between nations, not of genocide attempts against a population.

#4 Isolated instances of war crimes don’t imply a generalized intent to massacre civilians of a given ethnicity. War crimes are horrible and the perpetrators should be brought to justice, but again, the scale you bring of “hundreds” doesn’t respond to genocidal goals. Massacres of civilians take place in many wars (see Vietnam, Libya…) and are war crimes, but not every war crime is genocide.

Please, do not dillute the meaning of the word “genocide”. It’s meant to carry an extremely heavy connotation of attempt of total extermination of an ethnicity and culture, and throwing it around lightly is an injury to people suffering from it.

How are we more gaslighted against resistance with Trump? People are mobilizing in much higher numbers now, and they were quite literally shutting their ears during the Kamala campaign not to hear the names of genocide victims.

I suggest you don’t engage in lesser evilism with the west if you’re not willing to do with with geopolitics. Or if you’re willing to do it, then supoort China in the international geopolitics.

The only reason there is a “truce” is cause the Trump regime causes so much chaos they think they can get away with a hypernormalized fake truce

So an amelioration of genocide is insufficient to you? Good, it’s insufficient to me too, that’s why I suggest voting against democrats too

By all metrics, the genocide has slowed down in scope. It’s obviously insufficient and the genocide truly won’t be over until the settler colonial entity is driven out of the region, but what we are seeing isn’t a worsening of the genocide due to Trump as libs predicted.

Your willingness to only engage in lesser-evilism with western genocidal regimes is very telling.

No one actually believes he ended the war

There is no war, there is an ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the settler colony of Israel.

And yes, the genocide very much didn’t end unfortunately, and it won’t end until Isntreal is driven out of the region. But it has been ameliorated. By all accounts, dem supporters constantly were ranting about how “not voting for Kamala worsens the genocide”, and this is, factually, not what we’re seeing.

Trump has purposefully made the genocide in Ukraine far worse

There isn’t genocide in Ukraine, there is an inter-imperialist war going on in Ukraine. Using the label “genocide” to every conflict is very harmful to people like Palestinians who are actively being starved en-masse and kept out of reach of basic medicine, healthcare and even fucking drinking water.

Furthermore: how many different parties are in the EU? How many EU countries are rising GDP expenditure in military to 5%? Democracy under capitalism is an illusion

If you have to vote between a candidate who wants to build 5 concentration camps and another candidate who wants to build one

So you support China in their liberation of Tibet from feudal serfdom? You support the Soviet Union destroying Nazism despite the excesses made in the gulag years? Or do you only extend this courtesy to capitalist imperialist regimes?

in general go much slower

Tell that to Palestinians, the truce has been implemented famously not during democrat rule.

The Trump term has literally seen a truce to the genocide in Palestine. This isn’t an endorsement of Trump, he’s a fascist piece of shit, but to those constantly bickering about genocide being worse under Trump, where are you now?!

how long did it take Europe to shed absolute monarchism? Centuries

Yes, but history progresses at accelerating rates as societies develop. Humanity spent tens of thousands of years being hunters-gatherers, the neolithic and agricultural revolution brought forth much faster changes, then feudalism, and ultimately capitalism and the industrial revolution.

The USSR was a nice idea, but it took less than half a century for it to succumb to bureaucratic corruption

I’m not sure what you’re talking about, care to explain?

Arguably, it was even deeper autocratic corruption than in Western democracies.

Only arguably so if you go against material evidence, in my opinion. Universal free healthcare and education to the highest level, guaranteed right to housing, abolishment of unemployment, high level of worker rights, respect and promotion of the local cultures and languages to an extent unparalleled until that point in history, women’s rights (more Soviet female engineers by the 1960s than in the rest of the world combined and highest rates of female representation in organs of power), extremely high rates of unionization, quality of public transit and urban planning… None of that points, in my opinion, towards deep autocratic corruption. If there had been a deep autocratic corrupted regime, politicians would have had higher wages than professors of universities, artists or researchers, wealth inequality wouldn’t have been the historical lowest in the region and the lowest in the world. So, what do you mean by autocratic corruption?

We could achieve, incrementally, the same results as through toppling and rebuilding society

That’s not how historically systems have changed. The owning class will not let you remove exploitation by voting, in as much as the kings and queens of old went through the guillotine to remove them from power. When you get massive leftist voter turnout, you either get an Allende situation (I’m Spanish, we had a similar thing during the Second Spanish Republic in 1936), or a Syriza situation, historically. You can also check the case of Mosaddeq in Iran for that matter, the list is endless. The western global empire won’t allow a peaceful, democratic transition to socialism.

Now you have a system with class interests + charismatic manipulation. I want to move to a system with only charismatic manipulation. That would already be significantly better, and I have no answer as to how to remove charismatic manipulation politically

Erasing established power at one point in time does not prevent it from rising again in a new form

By changing the material and historical conditions you can change that, though. Europe has spent centuries without slavery or absolutist monarchy within its borders, because the material conditions that favored such regimes have expired. The material conditions enabling capitalism class society are also expiring.

The fact that there are not two classes in communism is the primary reason. When you don’t have a powerful minority with opposed interests to those of the powerless majority, the majority becomes powerful.