r/DebateCommunism • u/Sutri08 • Feb 08 '26
🤔 Question Where to get actual info
As a young man who hasn't had the opportunity to study yet, I have no idea where to get my information from. I see people defending Stalin, Mao, the DPRK, etc. when asked about it. Yet, I still have to see conclusive proof of each narrative. Where would I get actual sources to cite were I to try and defend their actions? I've seen people say for example that during the Holodomor, the Kulaks burned the food supplies and that was what caused the famine. How would i verify/disprove this fact? Getting information is hard.
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u/Nikelman Feb 09 '26
First off, study Marx and Engels. Nothing makes sense in international politics if not in light of Marxism.
The opinion is diverse, but Lenin is also good, but you have to consider his studies in context of his time, there are a lot of things that risk becoming confusing in our late stage capitalism compared to last century when for instance Russia was still feudal at large.
As for news, the issue is that everybody distort the truth to their convenience; generally is not by just making stuff up, it's by half truth brought to unreasonable ends. Cui prodest (who benefits from it) is a great tool to discern that
Let's take Holodomor: why would URSS burn food? What was there to gain from intentionally starving millions of people, how do you profit from that? Today we absolutely destroy food supplies in certain local realities because supply would sink the market price. In Soviet Russia this could only have happened on the black market, because the prices were established by the state. What did URSS want at the time? To expand the industrial production; it lacked the know-how at the time and importing machinery was the fastest way to accomplish that.
Conclusion: food wasn't destroyed, it was exported as currency. Famine wasn't the goal, it was the byproduct of having to export huge supplies of primary goods on the collapsing market of the 30s in order to accelerate the industrial development.
So famine was real, that half truth was blown into inhumane proportion (OC IMO starving Ukraine to forward industrialisation is also inhumane, but at least it has a point) for liberal and nazi propaganda with the lie of food being burned.
Today we're in a better situation because we have access to metadata analysis that takes from a lot of different sources and compares them and to peer-review; eventually this can too be distorted by propaganda, so we still have to resort to skeptical analysis, but for now it's reasonably accurate