On Neutrality

There is no such thing as an unbiased history. Principled media criticism doesn't end with identifying a bias, you have to present a case for how that bias informs or motivates an interpretation of the historical record, and then whether the facts support that interpretation.

I am absolutely biased. I firmly believe that capitalism is killing this planet, and it has nothing to do with whether capitalists are good or bad people. There are inevitable consequences that result from the organizing principles of a capitalist society, namely the increasingly hostile division of the world into the camps of capitalists who own the workplaces and resources we apply our labor to and dictate how those resources are thrown into motion by our labor, guided only by their own profit motive, and the camp of the vast majority who have nothing for sale but their own labor, and must comply with the dictates of this capitalist class in order to gain access to the means of survival that are being withheld as leverage by this capitalist class.

As a result of this analysis, I can very clearly articulate the rationale and motivation for every horrible atrocity carried out by capitalist states, because those atrocities are necessary for capitalism to function as intended. This organization of society, where we organize all of society's productive forces around satisfying the profit motive of a small number of capitalists, usually to the exclusion of the advancing the interests of the vast majority who actually do the labor, is an incredibly fragile organization. This system of subordinating our interests to the interests of a small ownership class cannot persist if the vast majority ever unites in solidarity, refuses to participate in this system, and organizes society around their own interests instead. This is simply because there are far more of us being exploited than there are exploiters. So in order to maintain this organization of society, it is required that the masses are divided against one another. From this tension, you have a capitalist class who sees it as advancing their own interests to enslave one race and teach the people they are savages. You see wars of conquest against weaker nations, and this conquest is spun as a matter of national pride and the success of our superior culture against the scary evil foreigners who will subsequently be put to work in work camps and sweatshops for some private business. You see well funded hate media institutions like Fox News and Breitbart who constantly stoke and inflame racial hatred, bigotry, fierce partisanship, xenophobia, intense nationalism, and so on.

These are all rational evils that draw clear motivations from the way capitalist society is structured, and are motivated by a desire to maintain the power of this hierarchy.

Similarly, you see a rationale for capitalist nations to use their powerful military might to dismantle any socialist experiment that tries to show that a different world is possible. There's the economic rationale, which sees that private enterprises under capitalism are premised on a model of perpetual growth and expansion, which means that any nation who tries to assert their sovereignty and closes their markets to private enterprise is seen as a threat to their business model. And you also have the propaganda rationale, which notices that if any socialist nation succeeds and establishes itself as a legitimate model for organizing society, that would then undermine the legitimacy of the capitalist class who needs the masses to believe that its in their best interests to leave organizing production in the hands of the capitalists, because their power and profits require that the vast majority participate in the economy under the terms that they set. From this, you see a desperate need for those in the capitalist class to dismantle these projects, you see the rational for a global United States military presence which constantly terrorizes and sabotages any government that doesn't comply with the interests of private enterprises, and you see the motivation for the ruthless and unending slander of socialist projects from a capitalist class who desperately needs people to believe that "the cure is worse than the disease," so that no one ever attempts to emulate these experiments and revolt against them.

But when the crimes of socialist states are brought up, this analysis of rationale doesn't enter the discussion. It's much harder to reckon with the historical record of these states, because the actual crimes and mistakes of these experiments are mixed in with a mountain of bullshit and slander. But when talking about something atrocious like the Holodomor and the idea of a deliberate, man-made famine used to carry out a genocide against Ukrainians, if you ask the people who peddle this narrative, "Well, what was the rationale behind carrying out this crime? Do you believe that these crimes are somehow an inherent part of the organizational principles of socialism?" You can make that analysis of capitalism, of colonial empires, of Nazi Germany, but when you get to an analysis of the USSR and other socialist states you usually just get some yarn spun about how communists are just evil dictators who lust for power and love killing people because they are Disney evil *shrug*.

I'm not going to deny that no crimes ever happened at the hands of these governments, but what I am asking is to take an analytical, broad analysis of these systems, and what historical and material forces they were responded to and were forced to grapple with.

I think Parenti puts this point very well:

"When the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua ten years ago filled with ideals and hopes for their nation and their people, they discovered a very awful thing. And it wasn't about themselves even though they had to do it to themselves. It was about that capitalist encirclement. They discovered that they needed a secret police. They discovered that they needed a security police. Because all around them, coming in from two borders and within their own society were acts of sabotage, espionage, attack, mercenary invasion, and the like. And they understood that if the revolution was going to survive, it would have to build up instruments of state power. Instruments coercion even. And these instruments by the way can make mistakes. And these instruments can not only mistakes, they can commit serious crimes.

If there had been no invasion, if there had been no attack, if there had been no white guard army burning villages, there wouldn't've been a red army of that size. There wouldn't've been a Stalin, there wouldn't've been a KGB. If there hadn't of been a CIA there wouldn't of been a KGB. If there hadn't been a NATO encirclement there wouldn't of been a Warsaw Pact. And to lose sight of that fact is to lose sight of an essential force of what was going on over those 70 years, or 10 years. And if you want to know what the Soviet Union went through in the early years, just look at what Nicaragua went through in these ten years, and then multiply that by ten. Every single one of these countries were targeted. They were targeted by missiles, they were targeted by acts of espionage, they were targeted as they say by economic embargo, and all sorts of other forms of repression. They were targeted by incredible propaganda barrages, and the like. Unrelenting, unremitting. The most targeted socialist country in the world was not Nicaragua, not even Cuba, it was the Soviet Union. All those missiles were pointing at the USSR. They still are, and they're still building those missiles, and they're refusing to negotiate those missiles. Mercenary armies, destruction of the productive facilities of society, more invasion, more sabotage, economic boycott, economic embargo, monetary embargo, technological embargo..."

So this point about the rationale and necessity of these institutions is often glossed over, because an honest reckoning of the historical record would require acknowledging the unrelenting aggression of these capitalist states. An honest reckoning of the historical record would involve recognizing the impossible position that the people of these countries were put in. They were in charge of creating the first workers government in the history of the world, with no blueprint of how to do so, all while needing to fend off some of the worst repression and international aggression in modern history. Of course they made mistakes in that project, and any principled communist will be honest about what those mistakes were so we can learn from them and develop better, more resilient organizing principles, with institutions that are more accountable to the people they're designed to serve, avoiding the traps of a stagnating bureaucracy that can be hijacked by opportunistic careerists, and are more resilient to abuse and criminal behavior.

But things like the Holodomor, the idea that the Soviet government deliberately starved their own people for fun, is just Nazi propaganda. It was an attempt to minimize the Holocaust and draw a moral equivalency between themselves and the Soviet Union for diplomatic reasons. If you ever attempt to interrogate the rationale as part of a broader analysis of the USSR, the ideas of the Holodomor become non-sensical. If this was a strategy of the party leadership, why is it never repeated anywhere else? What benefit do they get? Every other member nation of the USSR has a relationship characterized by mutual exchange and development. The Soviet 5 year plans were drafted with the input and final say from the people involved at all levels, from members of local soviets who were subject to recall at anytime and representatives of the labor unions who would be doing the work. The development from these 5 year plans are an example of some of the most successful rapid-industrialization projects in modern history, and are responsible for transforming nations that were 70%-80% agrarian peasant farmers into a global economic superpower in just a few decades, and this industrialization resulted in incredible improvements in quality of life for the masses, and raising the life expectancy by decades. People lived fuller, healthier, more complete lives because of the worker's government of the Soviet Union. They abolished child labor, they were guaranteed healthcare, sick leave, vacations, a 40 hour work week, living wages, disability benefits, retirement benefits in old age, workplace safety regulations, basically all of the modern labor rights we take for granted today were a result of the worker's government of the Soviet Union guaranteeing those rights for themselves, and showing the world what an economy that was designed to serve the interests of the workers instead of serving the interests of the capitalists could look like.

So what is the rationale for abandoning these development plans, which were thoroughly democratic and incredibly successful, and instead hatching some cockamamie plan to murder Ukrainians for... dubious benefit? I mean, if you're forcing labor then it seems weird to do that via genocide, and they already have a well established and incredibly successful blueprint that guides their economic development in a democratic fashion. I certainly see the rationale for Nazis to lie about a genocide, and for that lie to be revived to be used for Cold War propaganda. What we do know is that this was a region of the world that suffered regularly from drought, famine, and uneven development, with a famine occurring roughly every couple decades. One of these famines occurred in the early years of the Soviet Union, at a time when most of the nation was still recovering from war and destruction, and the economy was still fairly disorganized with parts under private control and parts under public control, and these competing interests clashed and resulted in Kulaks destroying their own grain, as well as attacking the collective farms that they were competing with, in an attempt to drive up prices by creating more scarcity. This made the famine much worse than it otherwise would've been. But what we also know is that once production was more firmly established, and organized around public plans that were designed to satisfy the needs of the masses rather organized around the profit motive of private enterprises, no similar famine happened throughout the duration of the Soviet Union. And we don't have to rely on Soviet accounts to confirm that. The CIA has admitted in their internal documents, which have since been declassified now that the Cold War has been over for a few decades, that throughout the Cold War the average soviet diet had slightly more calories than the average American diet, and that the Soviet diet was more nutritious on average. So despite the fact that famine and drought are natural for that region and happened with regularity before the Soviet Union was established, after the Soviet Union was established natural famines were completely eliminated, with the sole exception being a single, natural famine that occurred early on when the nation was still recovering from war and had yet to establish production on a wide scale.

What I do know is that my father is alive today because of the tireless efforts of the Soviet Union and labor rights organization fighting for the rights of workers. Before the Soviet Union was established, places like the US and the rest of the industrializing world were a nightmare for workers rights. Child labor was common and needed to support families, workplace safety standards were abysmal, it was completely normal for workers to be expected to work 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week. People were worked to the bone, and when your body was too crippled to work anymore you simply lost your job and thrown out on the street to starve. It was only with the establishment of the Soviet Union and the precedent they set on the world stage that finally made the capitalist ruling class willing to agree to concessions with their unions and labor rights organizers. It was the terror that their own people might try to emulate the Soviet Union and revolt against the factory bosses and coal mining town magnates that caused them to cave to legislation that established a minimum wage, social security retirement benefits, worker's compensation and disability benefits, and every other right that we take for granted today.

Without these things, when my dad got crippled on the job he would've been kicked to the curb and left for dead. I have a father because of the brave people who fought and died for those rights.

So no, I don't think I have any obligation to be "neutral," or to find sources that attempt neutrality by catering to both sides of the argument. Unbiased journalism is not pretending both sides are equally valid. "Unbiased journalism is reporting the facts even if those facts include that one side is irredeemably awful. False neutrality is propaganda."

And also, to finish off with a quote from Elie Wiesel,

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."