by the way please share this post because i’d really like some people to reconsider using communist symbols and labels, especially the hammer and sickle / soviet flag, because i have seen lots of things like this:
and there’s several posts here about not using imperial japan flag or nazi imagery because of the mass crimes these symbols are associated with, but none about the flag under which my country and my family, and many others, have suffered.
i know tumblr is very american-centered, and not many people here care about the history of countries that are not the united states or white western europe, but seeing the above imagery can really hurt some people.
if you are a young person who just decided that communism was synonymous with “perfect justice utopia”, please reconsider because it wasn’t exactly like that for people whose lives were actually directly/undirectly altered for the worse because of your “harmless intellectual ideology”. please ask yourself why you use symbols and flags under which literal ethnic cleansings and discriminatory crimes were commited, under which disabled people (or “invalids”, how we were called in my country) have suffered. the working class was outwardly praised but secretly starved to death. women were used behind false statements of equality.
you’re a little bitch if you think pretending to be one of the people that fucked up my country and family is “badass” or “edgy”, and if you hope “communism will win”.
Btw, I really don’t understand where western communists got the idea of equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ folks in soviet union… Like damn, post-soviet countries have a great misogyny, homophobia and transphobia problem, AND THIS IS COMING FROM AN AFAB QUEER FROM A POST-SOVIET COUNTRY
I’m sorry, I’m tired of hearing “oh, your country is so bad, you haven’t legalized gay marriage, you are so homophobic and misogynistic, why should we help you protect yourself!!1!1!”, and then those same people praising soviet union as a paradise. Where tf do you think all of those problems, that are, mind you, especially common in post-soviet/socialist countries, came from? Don’t you see a pattern here? Why the western, so-bad-capitalist part of Europe legalized gay marriage, has low levels of misogyny and has laws that protect minorities, and post-soviet countries are struggling with that? Maybe because homophobic laws of soviet union that literally jailed or put openly non-cishet people in mental institutions? Maybe because of misogynistic mindset that was extremely common in soviet union? No, women were not treated as equal, they were treated as cheap workers who you can pay less and not give a good education because they will become mothers and wives nonetheless :) No, queer folks were not treated as equal, they were treated as mentally ill sub-humans.
Bonus point: people from soviet countries struggled just to preserve their national identity. There can’t be any mass riots for gay rights, if you are jailed and/or killed for creating art in your native language, researching the history of your land, that soviets tried to hide, and speaking about their crimes. And I’m not talking about only about 20s or 30s here. This thing was relevant in the 60s, 70s, 80s and all the way till the collapse of soviet union. Post-soviet countries are independent for a bit more that 30 years, and we are fucking trying, okay? I will be speaking about Ukraine right now, but the situation with misogyny and homophobia here is already better than it was in 2014, for example. There are new laws that defend women (Istanbul Convention), and activists are currently trying to push government to accept civil partnerships, so gay couples could have at least part of the rights that married hetero couples have (we can’t legalize gay marriage right now because for that you need to change the constitution, and it is prohibited during the war).
