How to combat the misinformation?
How to combat the misinformation?
While the article and scenario I linked and talk about are very specific I’d like to use this as a learning experience to be better armed when faced with something similar.
So I was scrolling through videos on tiktok responding to this “leftist” creator and one of the responses was from a reactionary guy I’m semi familiar with, familiar in the sense that I’ve seen responses to his nonsense. Anyway I went to check his account because I had never done it before and saw that he was a self identified Libertarian (bad start) and made videos on USSR history.
The latter worried me a lot and one of his most recent videos was titled “the Bolshevik revolution was evil,” and because I have no self preservation I wanted to see what his sources were. Lo and behold, he only cited this article which has some awful content. People in the comments were raving about how amazing his video was and it made me want to do a bit of a deep dive into if any of the “facts” in the article were in any way true. I just don’t know where to start.
Please mind the trigger warning at the beginning of the article as there are very graphic images and descriptions.
I think the questions are:
What are you hoping to accomplish by combating this misinformation?
and
What is more likely to happen than your ideal outcome?
It sounds like you're going to just get into an argument with ignorant reactionaries on the internet. You won't change their minds, they won't change yours, you won't show them how bullshit their arguments are.
My recommendation would be to not waste your time. You can inform a friend in real life that their sources are bullshit, and they will listen. But reactionaries aren't that way because they just have "wrong information." They're there because it gives them an excuse to be horrible, hateful people, and feel justified in doing so. You can't logic someone out of that position.
I’m honestly doing it for myself mostly. I don’t plan on making a response video to these folks as I know it’s a waste of time.
I have an idea for a personal project that factually documents chronological historical events in a given country and making sure I have everything covered is important to me.
Combating misinformation would be part of that, as in bringing up the “opposing argument” and providing an accurate account of what actually happened.
Not only would this be for my personal project but also for research papers I publish in the near future to help educate the public.
I hope that makes sense, if I need to clarify anything please let me know.
Oh ok. It's always a good idea to try and understand a situation better, but it's good you're doing it for yourself, not for them.
I guess if you can stomach it, going through their argument and comparing it and contrasting it with what actually happened would be a good start. Try and get a good understanding of the fundamentals of the situation, and look at multiple different sources, as well as events surrounding the topic (so in the case of the Bolshevik revolution, the events leading up to it, and the events afterwards), anti-com sources will often treat an event as if it happened in a vacuum, for no reason other than "an evil commie was being evil." But no event in history ever happened "for the evil" Every action has motivation behind it.
Sorry if my rambling isn't very helpful, I'm sure you'd just rather a list of sources, but I'm without mine at the moment.
I'm not a historian, but from a cursory reading of this article, I think these could be some starting points. (Going to post several comments, since Lemmy isn't letting me post my single long comment, it just keeps loading and loading and doesn't acutally send.)
Notice how for some parts, the only sources are quotes from Bolsheviks themselves, with a lot of talk around them to provide the wrong context, like this pretty amusing one at the start (putting them all inside spoilers because I don't like large paragraphs of reactionary drivel disrupting the flow of my comment):
long quote
Shortly before that communist revolution, in the summer of 1917 Lenin wrote a book, "The State and Revolution", outlining what his dictatorship would be like. Among other considerations, the future despot tugged at the grossest demagoguery and lashed out at parliamentary democracy:
"Deciding once in a certain number of years which members of the ruling class are to oppress and crush the people in Parliament: this is the true essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in the parliamentary constitutional monarchies, but in the most democratic republics."
Or this one; read carefully and you will notice that nowhere does this quote support the article's assertion in the paragraph right above it that the famine was done intentionally.
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One of the most dramatic episodes of Lenin's dictatorship was the Russian famine of 1921 and 1922, which affected some 27 million people and killed between 3 and 5 million, and which was caused, in large part, by the mass requisitions of grain ordered by the Bolsheviks, the so-called Prodrazvyorstka (copied and expanded by the Communists, like other things, from the Razvyorstka, the requisition of tsarist grain in the First World War). The requisitioned grain was often used for export. This extermination through hunger was not accidental or that the Bolshevik dictatorship tried to avoid: it was done intentionally and even sought with it an anti-religious purpose, as Lenin wrote in a letter from Lenin to the Politburo on March 19, 1922:
"Now and only now, when people consume themselves in famine-stricken areas and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most energy frenzied and ruthless and do not hesitate to quell the least opposition. (...) We must pursue the elimination of church property by any means necessary to secure a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). (...) All considerations indicate that we will not do it later, because at no other time, apart from desperate hunger, will it give us that state of mind among the general mass of peasants that would guarantee the sympathy of this group, or, at least , would assure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the fight for the elimination of church property, unquestionably and completely, will be on our side."
And right after that, they quote the black book of communism. Writing its title in French. I wonder whether that's a coincidence, or whether even they know that the black book isn't credible and try to hide that they're citing it. It should be well-known enough that it isn't credible that you don't need to do your own work investigating it and can dismiss it out of hand:
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This use of famines as a method of achieving political objectives had already been advanced by Lenin in 1891, when he refused to collaborate with a campaign to help the hungry in the city of Samara. According to Lenin, hunger has "numerous positive consequences", since "it destroys not only faith in the Tsar, but also in God" (quoted by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin in "Le livre noir du communisme", 1997).
Then there are quotes like this. You could of course try to check whether it is real and what is the context, but without looking that far, it seems like a reasonable course of action to take for a revolution desperately fighting for its survival. The article is framing this as some unique evil as if any other army wouldn't have killed deserters.
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The Red Army suffered 3 million defections in 1919 and 1920. The first year, 500,000 deserters were arrested by the Cheka, and almost 800,000 the second. Thousands of them were killed, and their families were often taken hostage and killed to blackmail deserters. A typical Cheka report stated the following:
"Yaroslavl Province, June 23, 1919. The uprising of deserters on the Petropavlovskaya volost has been quelled. The families of the deserters have been taken hostage. When we started shooting at one person in each family, the Greens started to come out of the woods and surrendered. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example."
Once you dismiss that part, there is the other half of the article, the one that alleges a lot of atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks.
I used tineye.com to reverse image search one of the pictures from that article, the one captioned "In the foreground, the body of the telegraph operator Ponomarenko in the Cheka of Kharkiv". Guess what I found? Look here. The pictures are at the bottom of this page, with the captions in the article being a translation of the Russian captions of the pictures in this thing. What is this thing? It seems to be a reprint/digitalization something captioned:
ОТДЕЛ ПРОПАГАНДЫ ОСОБОГО СОВЕЩАНИЯ ПРИ ГЛАВНОКОМАНДУЮЩЕМ ВООРУЖЕННЫМИ СИЛАМИ НА ЮГЕ РОССИИ, ЧАСТЬ ИНФОРМАЦИОННАЯ, 29 июня 1919 года, № 4338, г. Екатеринодар
СВОДКА СВЕДЕНИЙ О ЗЛОДЕЯНИЯХ И БЕЗЗАКОНИЯХ БОЛЬШЕВИКОВ № 19
which translates (sorry if I got something wrong, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about military terms, but the general menaing should be there):
PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT OF THE SPECIAL CONFERENCE UNDER THE SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCES ON THE SOUTH OF RUSSIA, INFORMATION DETACHMENT, 29 June 1919, № 4338, Yekaterinodar
REPORT ON THE EVIL DOINGS AND LAWLESSNESS OF THE BOLSHEVIKS № 19
So literal white army propaganda. Not exactly the most credible source.
This doesn't mean that there never were any excesses committed by the Cheka. But obviously the white army has an interest in depicting their enemy as extremely violent, excessive, and plain evil.
(part two)
Finally, the text, where they quote some actual authors. But not the page or even the book this is from, so basically impossible to verify and get some context. For the extreme claims they make, the burden of proof is on the article authors, not on us.
Anyway, let's look at what exactly they even say:
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In April 1919 Lenin signed a decree to create a concentration camp system copied by the Tsarist Katorga, which in 1916 numbered almost 20,000 inmates, according to figures published by Stephen G. Wheatcroft. The new network of concentration camps was named Glávnoie upravlenie ispravítelno-trudovyj lagueréi i koloni (Directorate-General for Labor Camps). It was the birth of the Gulag, the largest Soviet system of repression. The first of those camps had been established in 1918 at Solovki, on the Solovetsky islands of the Black Sea. Again the figures of the communist dictatorship ended up far exceeding those of tsarism in a short time: at the end of 1920 there were already 84 camps with some 50,000 political prisoners. In October 1923 there were already 315 camps with 70,000 prisoners. Those detained there were used in forced labor as slave labor. The prison population had very high death rates, due to the harsh conditions in these brutal detention centers, where prisoners were often starved or killed by their guardians.
After reading through the loaded language, it seems that they are surprised there are a lot of prisoners in the gulag during the civil war, and that the conditions were harsh. That's all they're really saying. Except, I guess, for this sentence:
The prison population had very high death rates, due to the harsh conditions in these brutal detention centers, where prisoners were often starved or killed by their guardians.
I vaguely remember reading that the gulags did not actually have very high death rates. I don't remember the source, unfortunately. It seems to be a rather popular claim, so if you're doing a debunking for yourself, you might want to try to find some reading on it.
The next two claims are ones where I'm not educated enough to know what actually happened. So, you might also want to research these two events.
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The strikes were also bloodied down. On March 16, 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory, where its workers had gone on strike six days earlier, accusing the Bolshevik government of having become a dictatorship: 900 workers were arrested, and 200 executed without trial. Violent repression, imprisonment, hostage-taking and mass murder were the methods most used by the Bolsheviks to quell these strikes, both in the factories and in the fields. On January 29, 1920, in the face of strikes by workers in the Urals region, Lenin sent a telegram to Vladimir Smirnov encouraging the use of mass murder against strikers: "I am surprised that you take the matter so lightly and do not immediately execute a large number of strikers for the crime of sabotage." These methods were even used to quell the protests of workers when they were forced to work on Sunday, as happened in Tula, a malaise that the Bolsheviks simply attributed to a "counter-revolutionary conspiracy forged by Polish spies." It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of rebel workers and peasants were executed between 1918 and 1922.
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In the late 1920s Lenin approved of the mass murder of 50,000 "white" and civilian prisoners in Crimea, shot or by hanging, in one of the largest massacres of the Russian Civil War. The victims of this crime had surrendered, according to Robert Gellately, after the Bolshevik promise that there would be an amnesty for them if they surrendered.
The Dimitry Pospielovsky guy they cite for the alleged brutality against the priests (paragraph below) seems rather questionable as a source.
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With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a systematic religious persecution began which would, throughout the history of the USSR, involve the murder of between 12 and 20 million Christians. In 1914 the Russian Orthodox Church had 55,173 churches, 29,593 chapels, 550 monasteries and 475 convents: the vast majority of them were closed and destroyed by the Communists. Something similar happened with the 5,000 Jewish synagogues and the 25,000 Muslim mosques that were in Russian territory in 1917. Before the Revolution there were also 112,629 priests and deacons and 95,259 monks and nuns of the Orthodox Church. The Communists unleashed brutal persecution against them. According to Yakovlev, some 3,000 priests, religious and nuns were already killed in 1918 alone with methods as brutal as those mentioned above. Many lay people were harassed, tortured, detained and killed. Historian Dimitry V. Pospielovsky reported the Reds' brutality against priests with cases such as the following:
Here's the Russian Wikipedia link for him (English Wikipedia doesn't have much), the guy worked for "Free Russia" and "Radio Svoboda". (Yes, I know Wikipedia is not a credible source, but I doubt they'd lie about the guy's affiliations.) Literal CIA outlets. Can be dismissed out of hand.
The other guy they cite is Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. Here's his Wikipedia. Maybe less unhinged than literal CIA, but still doesn't exactly seem unbiased. Can't dismiss every single thing he wrote out of hand per se, but considering the fact they don't cite book and page so that we could look at the context and the sources, the burden of proof is still on them.
long quote
If the Okhrana had been characterized by its brutal methods, the communist Cheka exceeded in every way the degree of cruelty of its tsarist predecessor. Among its methods of torture and assassination against political dissidents, Orthodox clerics and others considered enemies by the Bolsheviks, it is worth mentioning savages such as the following, documented by the Russian historian Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and by the State Archives of the Russian Federation, among others sources:
I hope any of this is helpful to you. At least that would mean that the hours I just spent on commenting on some worthless Spanish conservative site's drivel (notice that one paragraph where they excuse Franco in this very article) were at least somewhat worth it.
Wow thank you so much for this, I definitely wasn’t expecting something so thorough! This is incredibly helpful and I hope you’re doing alright as I know how taxing stuff like this can be.
and because I have no self preservation I wanted to see what his sources were.
Very relatable.
If you want to have a go at debunking stuff like this, I suggest you go at it piecemeal. A common tactic of (smarter) reactionaries is to do a barrage of easily verifiable false claims to make themselves seem knowledgeable and debunking every single one of them in one go gets very tiring. It's kinda why that youtuber Shaun has to make 2-3 hour videos against relatively small material, because the bullshit density is too high.
In this specific case, you could start from the last one (man-made famine) since I think it's the easier one to debunk and work backwards from there to more complex and abstract ones like "Lenin wanted dictatorship from the start," which will need some broader philosophical and historical discussion on the democratic nature of the USSR. I think I have a similar project to yours where I wanted to write my own perspective of the history of post-Columbian Haiti, which begun as a video idea, but I deeply underestimated the amount of effort that that will take. I already dropped all ambitions of making it a video, for example, since that'd bloat it even more with things I'm unskilled with.
It also depends on how acquainted you already are with history. If you've never done something like this before, a good place to start might be just the ProleWiki and the listed sources, and you can come back here with more specific questions about certain facts. Usually if a book is good it'll also cite other sources to either build upon or contradict, so your sources list will grow from there. It's certainly a lot of work, but very satisfying.
Edit: also, yeah, you're gonna read and see some horrifying stuff. I got used to it pretty quickly, but I can't guarantee it's always this easy.
Good luck comrade, and feel free to ask more questions!
Thank you, comrade. Everyone’s responses have been super encouraging and helpful which makes this whole endeavour way less intimidating and overwhelming. I’ll definitely be making use of ProleWiki and expand from there. Making a video series on world history is one of the projects I’d like to do in the near future and will be a big undertaking but I think it’s worth it, I just gotta brush up on my editing skills which is harder than it appears as you’ve said so yourself. My thing is to go continent by continent, each being their own “season” with an episode dedicated to each country.
Okay, those 'facts' in that article are quite extreme and absurd.
Right? Also, the fact that this tiktoker shared it with so many people as if it’s accurate is incredibly worrisome.