The next person to slander Winnie the Pooh gets a broken hunny pot to the head.

That bear is a wholesome pile of hugs that does not deserve to have his good name ruined by racist nonsense left over from the bloody Cold War.

I may not want to hug any modern socialist leaders as much as I want to hug Stalin, but I’ll take a Pooh hug from the actual bear, he definitely needs a good snuggle for putting up with all this nonsense.

(And, y’know, our site mascot here is a bear, so we gotta stand up for our fellow bears, right?)

This. The next person to imply Pooh is a communist and mean that negatively, or use him to insult China, gets the fucking wall. After, of course, they are made to climb a bee tree and fill a hunny pot or two for him while dodging the disturbed bees. That nice bear needs a hug, not to be used as an insult.

(I don’t imagine he’d be particularly willing to read theory, or fight in a revolution, but once you explained to him that communists really just want society to progress to its next stage of being and for people to have greater equality and more collective decision making, I do think he’d be supportive of the cause and happy to provide hugs, manage the honey supply, and generally raise morale. But calling him a communist as an insult isn’t cool, even if I do think he’d side with whoever promises him enough hunny for everyone and equality for society as a whole, and communists are more likely than any other ideological alignment to promise that and achieve it.)

And these people claim communists make an economic system into a religion.

And the liberals treat the USSR as the be all and end all of communism, discuss the Cold War like it was a Crusade, treat communism as a Slavic ethnoreligion, and all the old “Godless Commies” nonsense reads like theocrats screaming about an opposing theocracy.

Ahh, neoliberals. Every accusation is a confession. Even the accusations they don’t fully understand or realise they’re making.

Yeah, I can understand that, in theory at least. My family’s never had that kind of wealth, Mum’s side were always dirt poor, we’ve never done well as a household but even at our poorest, we were still better off than Mum’s family has ever been since they’ve been in North America. Dad’s family… never did all that bad, came over more recently, his dad worked for the government, so they weren’t rich but they had stability and the basics, but it’s not like they have vast generational wealth.

Sure, we’re white and probably benefited from institutional racism, and we absolutely need to reckon with that, but, like, I don’t have any massive plantation shaped skeletons in the closet, we’ve always been working class. Certainly better off within that than a lot of folks, and minority status versus white privilege probably plays a role in that, but we’re not those wealthy WASP types.

Honestly, at times I wish we did have more wealth and privilege, then I could use it to do some good. Be the good kind of class traitor. But we don’t, so instead, I’m stuck with the conflict of “WASPs suck, and I look like one and do come from European colonial roots, but I’m trying my best to not act like my countrymen and to be supportive of a socialist revolution, not an obstacle to it.”

I’m cute with teddy bear ears and I give the best hugs, I promise!

(Not American, and I hate the stereotypical WASP mindset that most of them should be tossed in a gulag for, but… white Westerner, so not like most of y’all care about the specifics.)

Have you seen the Commie Kid video (complete with a silly “No Communism” sign the mum apparently had to put up) using Cold War fearmongering to sell the books to conservative parents of little kids?

I saw that and wished I could send the kid a copy of State and Revolution and the mum a clue-by-four.

The cool new toys are in the air, while ground troops are stuck with Cold War junk? That sounds about right for US war doctrine. The US Army doesn’t get new equipment it needs, it gets new equipment the military industrial complex manages to sell to the politicians, or whatever neat looking toys the high command wants to play with. (Tbf, a lot of modern national armies have this problem. But criticizing the US in particular for it is easy and arguably uniquely deserved, because they’re some of the worst when it comes to the MIC and the state encouraging rather than fighting corporate war profiteering.)

“Ooh, scary Democratic Centralism! You can’t possibly be actually suggesting to run a serious modern political party that way!”

“DemCen is an excellent strategy! Sounds like you don’t read enough Lenin, buddy. Need a source to read his stuff from? I can get you that, and a general communist reading list, if that’s why you don’t understand his methods.”

Close enough. Welcome back, Lenin.

Of course it would be you. It would always be you. Only you.

(Leninism works. Nothing else we’ve tried ever actually wins the class struggle for the workers. Of course it would always come down to needing another Bolshevik Party.)

“You could not prevent your inevitable failure, and where did that bring you? Back to me.”

Honestly, the entire Warsaw Pact is shown with the wrong borders and no consistency! To call out one of the most egregious cases, it shows East Germany and West Germany without the border wall!

Seeing as we had to pull out some of the Cold War era shit to invade Iraq in 2003

And Americans made fun of Russia for still having old Soviet equipment lying around and deploying it to Ukraine. But they’re suspiciously silent on all the Cold War era equipment the US still has lying in stockpiles and will probably deploy at some point. Which is really funny, seeing as America might not rely on Cold War era tech as much as Russia does, but their people are sure as hell still stuck in the Cold War and falling for the Red Scare.

(Although I do have a tendency to think old Cold War equipment is cool, and if military equipment unfortunately needs to be deployed, it does look neat in pictures and footage to see the old Cold War toys getting taken off the shelf and played with, y’know?)

I know I played Pajama Sam as a kid, but I definitely have way fuzzier memories of it than the Pooh Bear games I also had and played a lot more often.

I would absolutely play a game with cartoonish design, kiddie humor, and a serious leftist political theme that’s a small part of it but ever present. Real “baby Bolsheviks/is this a political party or a playgroup” vibes. Maybe Pooh Bear wouldn’t work as a theme, but I’d definitely enjoy a teddy bear theme for that. So many opportunities for a Soviet Bear joke! Concept/cover art could have a stuffed grizzly and stuffed panda bear recreating a pose from one of those infamous Soviet/Chinese friendship posters! Y’know, something like Kindergarten - a lot of the characters are kids, the art style reflects that, but while a lot of childish jokes and occurrences are involved, the underlying theme is absolutely Not Actually For Kids.

Awww, cute reaction. You know I gotta scritch behind your cute lil ears now, right?

Here, have a cute pup back.

Borders are messed up on this, the USSR isn’t shown as a single country, and the Celtic Isles are all sorts of wrong.

Well, he is hug shaped! And so are you, comrade!

One of my favourite instances of “was a caricature during the Cold War, is somehow more accurate nowadays” is Soviet made anti America propaganda. Especially the stuff about war, the Military Industrial Complex, and inequality. The caricatures were probably a little absurd when they were made. Today? Accurate, if harsh, satire.

I’m now imagining a gathering of Important People, who don’t hold the true power and just don’t know what’s going on - out of depth useless liberals, essentially. The adults at the big dinner table are squabbling over petty xenophobia and debating “obviously this nation’s problems aren’t our fault, and we all think the Soviets are still responsible somehow, but we can’t admit we still haven’t recovered from the Cold War and the people are starting to not buy “it’s the USSR’s fault” as much all these decades later, so who do we blame now?”

Meanwhile at the poorly supervised kids’ table… “My dad keeps comparing the President to Joseph Stalin. So I read some of Stalin’s books. And I don’t get the comparison. Stalin was way better at governing than that bobblehead.” “Yeah, that’s because your dad’s an idiot who can’t tell a communist from a fascist. Just like my mom. Useless, the lot of 'em. Here, you’ll like this.” “State and Revolution?” “Yeah. Lenin’s a good writer, and to understand why our parents say such silly stuff, you gotta learn to see things the way a state does, and that’s a good explanation of the principles involved.” And so on. “So, has anyone here actually read Capital and understood it?” “All I got is that Mom’s best coat is probably worth more than the contents of our linen cupboard and it has something to to do with labour and use value.”

(I’m also seeing a ten year old Lenin, and a bunch of kids on a playground waving signs, and a protest about a silly kid thing getting out of hand. It’s an adorable image. Little Bolsheviks are the cutest thing!)

Critical support to Comrade Buffalo!