I’m surprised the anti-tankie crowd hasn’t adopted it to a much greater degree than the occasional reference.
While the Liberals are largely ignorant about history, I think categorizing the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as the same thing is a bridge too far even for them. This is why they focus on abstract critiques like “authoritarianism” or “totalitarianism.” These allow you to discard any alternative to the status quo without having to argue that the people who liberated Auschwitz are exactly the same as the people who built it.
edit before I read purpleworm’s reply:
Most of the time when Liberals are shitting on Communism and making grossly ahistorical claims (e.g. calling Putin or Trump a Communist), they are operating in the realm of rhetoric. The history is immaterial to them. They know from decades of programming that Communist is a cheap insult and they’ll use it whenever a strained analogy presents itself.
The type of disillusioned Liberal who is actually searching for the point where the United States strayed from the path righteousness, the type of Liberal who would use a symbol like this to differentiate themselves from the standard bearers of American decay, is not operating on this level of slop rhetoric.
tbf a lot of people do still say exactly that, equivocating between Soviet antisemitism and Nazi antisemitism and accusing the Soviets of just continuing to run the camps and so on.
I haven’t see them be asked what they meant by the latter and they don’t exactly cite sources, but I think they’re referring to the camps continuing to be used as temporary housing for the inmates during the end of the war and in its immediate aftermath, which is a pretty heinous way to mislead people.
While the Liberals are largely ignorant about history, I think categorizing the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as the same thing is a bridge too far even for them. This is why they focus on abstract critiques like “authoritarianism” or “totalitarianism.” These allow you to discard any alternative to the status quo without having to argue that the people who liberated Auschwitz are exactly the same as the people who built it.
edit before I read purpleworm’s reply:
Most of the time when Liberals are shitting on Communism and making grossly ahistorical claims (e.g. calling Putin or Trump a Communist), they are operating in the realm of rhetoric. The history is immaterial to them. They know from decades of programming that Communist is a cheap insult and they’ll use it whenever a strained analogy presents itself.
The type of disillusioned Liberal who is actually searching for the point where the United States strayed from the path righteousness, the type of Liberal who would use a symbol like this to differentiate themselves from the standard bearers of American decay, is not operating on this level of slop rhetoric.
tbf a lot of people do still say exactly that, equivocating between Soviet antisemitism and Nazi antisemitism and accusing the Soviets of just continuing to run the camps and so on.
I haven’t see them be asked what they meant by the latter and they don’t exactly cite sources, but I think they’re referring to the camps continuing to be used as temporary housing for the inmates during the end of the war and in its immediate aftermath, which is a pretty heinous way to mislead people.
I think they mean that arrested Nazis were at first put into their own camps.
No, the reactionaries that I’m talking about were definitely talking about Jews (etc.)