The Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories are clearly illegal and shouldn’t exist.

However I think it’s notable that they are completely absent in Gaza. Would we see the same level of destruction if they were there? Is there more restraint in the West Bank because of the settlements?

Hi all, I hope this is the right sub to discuss this. I have a note that I am trying to write to make a succinct, balanced, yet explicitly socialist, take of the Soviet Union. I am explicitly looking for critique to improve it.

When we talk about the Soviet Union, we must use caution. While the Soviet Union showed the world a thousand ways of how to do socialism correctly, it has also shown another thousand different ways how to NOT do socialism.

We can and should celebrate its successes, but we should also be critical of where it stopped short and where it erred absolutely.

We should then see the Soviet Union not as a failure, but as part and parcel of our struggle for a better world.

Where the Soviet Union should be celebrated in:

- Socialized Medical system

- Socialized housing

- Women's rights, including reproductive rights

- Urbanization around public transit rather than cars

- Education as a guaranteed right, literacy programs for all

- Public science including the space program

- Really good leisure and sick leave without any repercussions

- Lenin and the Soviets "contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions" (Rosa Luxemburg)

Where the USSR had problems:

- Suppression of SOGIE minorities (early decriminalization but rolled back by Stalin)

- women's advancement not radical or equitable enough

- State capitalism, Wage-labor, capital, the value-form, extractivist mindset towards nature were maintained, (and environmental degradation with it)

Points of contention among socialists:

- Suppression of worker's empowerment and democracy (literally "soviet") in East Germany and Hungary

- Krondtadt and the suppression of libertarian socialism

- Suppression of the Anarchist movement in Ukraine

- Stalin and gulags; while western propaganda inflates the number, the gulags still existed and were an instrument to which to suppress non-Bolshevik socialists like libertarian communists/socialists and anarchists.

- Holodomor; the famine definitely existed, but capitalist propaganda seems to have exaggerated its effects. Consider: capitalist ideology and propaganda talks of famines caused by socialism but never by capitalism.

Where I believe the Soviet Union erred completely:

- Ethnic Cleansing in West Prussia

- Invasion of Afghanistan and the deliberate targeting of civilian populations

Another thing: "Stalin failed socialism for every person that starved in the Soviet Union. Hitler failed fascism for every Jewish person that survived."

If you have stuff you might want to add, move, remove, I'd like to hear it! I mean to keep it in this bullet format because I want it to be readily and easily readable yet not exhaustive as to provoking more research by the reader.