this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Lefty Memes

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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.

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Rules

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0. Only post socialist memes


That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)


0.5 [Provisional Rule] Use alt text or image descriptions to allow greater accessibility


We require alternative text (from now referred to as "alt text") to be added to all posts/comments containing media, such as images, animated GIFs, videos, audio files, and custom emojis.
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That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.


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That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).


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The only dangerous minority is the rich.


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We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.

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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.



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[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 32 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Consider that Germany was in far more dire straits economically, and Hitler's approval was crazy high even towards the end of the war (something like 60 or 70%). So the entire time the opposition was outnumbered.

In comparison, Trump's approval is around 45%.

[–] plyth@feddit.org 24 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Look up the history. Hitler wasn't elected by a majority but appointed by an elite and then killed the opposition. There was massive opposition before, including street battles. But that's also why he got the dictatorial power. Apporoval means nothing if people obey executive orders.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Could you link some sources for that massive resistance? Wikipedia says there was very little organized resistence for most of his rise to power, and the regime was SO popular amongst the populace, it prevented even anti-nazi's in the intelligence services from acting on their underground networks.

What we're seeing with the current fairly widescale open resistence is far beyond anything that happened in Germany.

[–] LeninOnAPrayer@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti. There is a free pdf file of it with some searching I know.

Edit: https://welshundergroundnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/blackshirts-and-reds-by-michael-parenti.pdf

Found it. You read this and it's gonna sound a lot like modern day.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Eh, generally not a fan of Parenti, as he gives far too much of a pass to authoritarian marxist-leninists regimes for my comfort.

Thanks for the going through the legwork to share the link, though.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 15 points 3 days ago

From what I recall from Behind the Bastards, a major part of Hitler's bloc was the upper middle-class. Shopkeepers, factory managers, so on. It basically came down to the opportunity to eliminate wealthy Jews, and taking their stuff - fancy furniture, buildings, their businesses, ect. The destruction of the Jews was a matter of greed that happened to fit hand-in-glove with racist ideology.

[–] masquenox@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The scale of the opposition would be difficult to quantify - the whole reason liberals hand power to fascists in the first place is to violently suppress dissent against the status quo, after all.

Italy gives a clue, however - almost the entire north of Italy was liberated by antifascist Partisan movements (before the US and UK suppressed them, of course.) The same thing happened in Greece - and Greece had turned fascist even before Italy and Germany did.

So yeah... Hitler's (supposed) "popularity" should be viewed with the same suspicion as Putin's.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

So yeah… Hitler’s (supposed) “popularity” should be viewed with the same suspicion as Putin’s.

Fair enough, though I could also see Hitlers public approval rating being real for a few reasons.

  1. Unlike Putin & Trump, Hitler seemed to give frequent economic concessions to industrial workers to prevent dissent.
  2. Their economy did improve (due to imperialist conquest and ransacking obv, which most of the population didn't seem bothered about)
  3. His supporters seemed to suffer the same cognitive dissonance cult-like worship that MAGA currently suffers under (despite their economic conditions getting worse in the US), but perhaps on a much wider scale.

I'm not well read enough on Greek or Italian fascism to know if Mussolini or Metaxas were worse at quelling dissent or keeping the non-targeted groups 'happy', but from what I recall of Mussolini, his conquests were far less successful than Hitler's, which may have limited his economic ability to keep people pacified in the same way.

[–] plyth@feddit.org 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Resistence is too late. There was opposition before the nazis gained power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsbanner_Schwarz-Rot-Gold

German site says 2.5 million members were organized mostly by SPD, with 250,000 in the elite units.

They are mentioned as opponents to the SA:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Roter Frontkämpferbund of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews.

By the time Hitler assumed power in January 1933, SA membership had increased to approximately 2,000,000

Strangely there is no information about the conflicts. This is what I found, on the site of the communist units who also fought the nazis.

Since the strategy of the SA was to fight and provoke, violent encounters between the RFB and SA soon became a part of everyday life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roter_Frontk%C3%A4mpferbund

What we’re seeing with the current fairly widescale open resistence is far beyond anything that happened in Germany.

If it is not clear, it's the other way round.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago

I wasn't aware of the scale of those opposition parties, the Reichsbanner in particular. I also can't really find much info on their conflicts pre-1932, I assume they are only written about in German? Definitely an interesting topic to delve into.

Cheers for sharing the solid research :)

[–] Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 13 points 3 days ago

Once white people are getting vanned for lack of patriotic fevour I'm sure Trumps ratings will increase, too.