No, the pogrom thing was Makhno recklessly handing out guns in the name of, uh, autonomy, I assume, and then some of those people getting together (independent of any direction from Maknho) going and doing ethnic cleansing on whichever ethnicity they disliked before Makhno’s people circled around to putting down the rightwing death squad that they were responsible for. I know Makhno personally targeting ethnicities isn’t a true story, I just think that he was immensely negligent and idealistic on the issue of arming populations and it resulted in some of the most needless deaths imaginable in vulnerable communities.

Are you referencing the pogroms of Menonite colonists who literally came up from Germany to settle Ukranian land for their lebensraum?

I bear some skepticism that such things would be worse under Lenin, since he was pretty progressive on gender equality, compared to someone who is implied to have personally engaged in gangremoved.

Sure so Narimanov quite literally sent Lenin letters while he was the head of the Azerbaijan Soviet complaining that the Red Army was literally SAing women out there.

Another good example is Tryapitsyn, who literally commanded murder rape battalions who committed so many atrocities that culimnated in the Nikolayevsk incident. Japan after hearing of it (because his forces slaughtered Japanese in much of that point in time) sent a letter to the Central Committee telling them to put a leash on their dog. The Central Committee did put a leash on their dog, but Japan was the nail in the coffin not of a campaign of murder/SA that the Central Committee knew about but the fact that he was also an annoying little fucker who liked to question orders and complain about Soviet policy. So they killed him by firing squad.

Much of this information comes from the scholarship of the last release of Soviet archives that the Russian Federation released, and is compiled by Alexey Tepylyakov (RU Link) in his 2017 paper “Hundreds of Girls Became Women”: Mass Sexual Violence by the Partisans of Siberia and the Far East 1918-1920" (RU Link).

Haha I actually have to hand this one to you, because I was sure you were talking about the mythology of Makhno the Jew Killer given the progroms bit. The Pogroms bit is the one that’s Zenz style gossip given modern appraisals. Voline was correct.

From a modern perspective most of this period is quite literally horror. The Reds were not much better on this front, in fact quite worse given the way the Red Army sourced soldiers and what those soldiers did in turn. The Whites and Ukrainian Nationalists were the absolute worst.

Makhnovschina overperformed in the sense that they employed guerilla warfare with a local force that had the buy-in of locals for essential supplies. They rapidly fell apart outside of their limited territory as they stole from peasants there rather than receiving support. This allowed the Whites to maintain and rebuild their forces in Western Ukraine.

I’m sorry like the Bolsheviks or the Whites didn’t steal from peasants? The Bolsheviks and the Whites literally stole people from the villages to fight in their armies under threat. Real you join our battalion or we rape and murder your women while you watch then we kill you type shit. The Black Army was the only actual all-volunteer self defense force.

They similarly built up peasant communes that were actually very insular and selfish, pushing an odd version of independence and self-sufficiency that, on one hand, declared no obligation to feed workers in cities (Bolsheviks called this a petty bourgeois aspect of the peasantry) while also being entitled to the products of the city factories, coordinating with Makhnovists to steal equipment. They actually combined these entitlements in their sentiments, declaring that they had no need to pay for equipment they could take when they needed to. This was guaranteed to eventually deplete the areas they controlled of industrial capacity and create a series of endless petty infights.

It was also the major source of contention with Bolsheviks, who began labeling them as “bandits” in their propaganda. Bolsheviks, above all, recognized the necessity of feeding factory workers and ensuring the continued function if factories, hence war communism based on quotas and then taxes. Areas controlled by Makhnovists tended to work directly against this, killing or kicking out the Bolshevik tax man, actually stealing equipment and resources from cities to go support “the commune”. They treated cities like foreign territories, and enemies. This is in addition to going off on their own as small (but many) autonomous groups and declaring truces over, stealing weapons, literally blowing things up, and recreating an oppositional fighting force.

This is a consequence of top down vs bottom up thinking. Literally see the part of my post about how the second industrial revolution created this mess to begin with. The city model is literally based in expropriation of the country-side from time immemorial and the second industrial revolution only made cities worse and more dependent. The Bolsheviks bathed the country sides with blood, and sure they had to, but lets not pretend there was some grand greater good, it’s because the Bolsheviks had nothing to actually offer the country side. Their political power resided in cities that couldn’t produce their own food. It was the worst political problem they inflicted on themselves and some of the worst Stalinist repression came from the fact that they murdered so many peasants that the countryside was so whittled down the definition of Kulak by the 1930’s became anyone who quite literally owned a butterchurn. That’s frankly embarrassing.

Furthermore lets cut the bullshit okay? This is just devolving into a typical argument cycle and I’m just going to end it here. Whenever this line of argumentation comes up people who cannot understand or admit to the faults of the Bolsheviks (and I’m not saying Makhnovischa was faultless here at all), are all trying really fucking hard not to say “It was OUR PROPERTY.” All you’re arguing about is who rightfully owned those things that the Black Armies took are we not?

We can talk about the negatives of how each army and society conducted itself, but I’m not going to have a typical black-red rules lawyering property dispute with you. It’s pointless, stupid, and unbecoming. Everyone “stole” during that time for whatever definition of “steal” you can think of. I don’t believe in private property. Reds crying “you ‘stole’ my means of war production” is again frankly embarrassing for communists who believe that the proletariat should own the means of production. It relies on an incredibly technical, overly strict and point in time definition of proletarian unique to the political needs of Bolsheviks. Peasants weren’t proletarians to the Bolsheviks because their political power came from cities. Frankly it’s embarrassing that to this day people are caught up in this nonsense given that peasants at the time had like a decade or so of not being literal slaves and most of them were still sharecroppers. Likewise it was literally because the second industrial revolution wasn’t completed in Russia by the time of the Russian revolution and so there was no mechanized agriculture to speak of, which literally turns the assumption that farm workers e.g. peasants aren’t proletarians on its head. It was a unique trick that the Bolsheviks played to get them out of a jam because their own ideology had internal contradictions simply by coincidence of timing. Lenin was smart but he wasn’t clairvoyant and he doubled down on this bullshit. Stalin quadruple downed on it. This is literally one of the reasons for the Sino Soviet split and Mao was fucking right that peasants are proletarians.

Makhno is a pretty sordid example from a modern perspective (with the abuse he facilitated)

This is literally Zenz style gossip if you look at any modern studies of the period.

You simply hate to see it

Yeah unfortunately it’s the truth. Ben-Gurion’s guile was the only fucking force keeping the pandora’s box of Revisionist Zionism under lock and fucking key. Ben-Gurion was not a good dude himself, but he played the West well. If Jabotinsky won in the Zionist World Organization, every non-Jew in “Greater Isreal” would have been exterminated by Ariel Sharon by 1970.

Actually I’ll pay him one more complement before my summary execution. His legacy of Labor Zionism is a drain on the American Imperial state and it’s Israeli proxies to this day. While Kibbutz’s have no semblance of real socialist ideals left in them, their extreme political durability and their inhabitants demand for their continued relatively luxurious welfare has been a real drain on the financials of the empire. Isreal is supporting tons of unproductive remote dirt farmer towns, which prevents them from using that money more effectively to further their aims.

It also goes unmentioned in her account how many of the anarchist cells that were being “purged” were openly destroying and murdering the emerging Soviet state.

Being frankly honest, this is just the history of reprisal and counter reprisal starting from the Russian revolution. If you read my post here and look into the history of the Russian civil war, it’s very plainly spelled out.

The Bolsheviks criminalized this as wrecking which allowed them to propagandize future Marxist-Leninists against understanding a more neutral version of the history of conflict between the two groups. Many anarchists feel exactly what you describe here about the Bolsheviks actions towards Maknovischina during the Revolution – the only real difference is that the Bolsheviks were successful at snuffing them out.

As an ancom couple of maybe trite observations from the POV of modern anarchists rather than rehashing centuries old debates:

Many anarchists are deeply unserious people about actual politics and building a society. The things that many of them like about anarchism are this misleading idea of “no rules”, they are effectively antisocial or better crystalize the meaning anti-society.

There are anarchist tendencies that effectively nurture their preconceived notions about the background unsatisfaction most people have with their lot in life. Tendencies like anarcho-egoists, anprims, etc. that allow people to romanticize their own feelings.

Lastly very few anarchists tend to understand what anarchism is, just like many people fail to understand what communism is. Anarchism in it’s purest form is about finding the fairest way of building a collective society while respecting everyone as individuals. It is philosophically an ideology that is trying to find the philosophical and practical underpinnings of coalescing individualist and collectivist into one comprehensive view in a bottom up fashion. A nice metaphor for this is that in physics many people are trying to unite classical physics with quantum mechanics to create a comprehensive theory of physics, rather than two separate fields of study. Anarchists want their societies to have unconcerned unanimous support of how the society is governed. Anarchists are not willing to compromise a their platforms. So that makes it difficult to work through problems that other political movements can take “shortcuts” in. In short if you think about this through the lens of standard democratic centralism, Anarchists do not accept a rule of simple majority, they will only accept unanimous consent.

Anarchists that do not understand this, typically hate communists reflexively depending on their platform or who they hang out with. Anarchists that do understand this, typically hate communists due to communism’s prescribed nature of the problem and solution coupled with the tendency for socialist societies who attempted to build communism to prioritize their implementation at the cost of everything else, as well as failure of communist countries to truly liberate certain groups and use them as political pawns when its expedient.

I think a lot of this hate comes from the reality of the development of humanity in the 20th century. The second industrial revolution essentially forced all developing countries of the time into societies that were in practice extremely hierarchical, extremely parochial, and extremely focused on extracting production of out of individuals. Anarchists see this as a negative development in both the liberal and socialist worlds, and due to street cred of anarchism as the “no rules” punk philosophy Western anarchists, many of whom that have never known hunger or poverty relative to their global South or Eastern European counter parts, typically see liberals as the less worse choice because capitalist liberalization did allow for more individualism at it’s apex.

Lastly there is a real history of bad blood between the primary standard bearers of socialism in the USSR and anarchists. The bolsheviks regardless of the morality or solidarity of their actions were some of the best political operators of the 20th century. They were able to take a rump committee of a besieged and nascent political movement and transform it into a global political powerhouse. Some of the best political operators in the world worked on Bolshevik standards, Lenin, Stalin, Kim, Tito, Sankara, Mao initially and (I’m gonna get flack for this but it’s fucking true because of what he was able to fucking pull off politically if you actually read history) Ben-Gurion. The problem is bolshevism is ruthless, and it cannot stand competition. It must be the only voice in the room. That’s how it works, that’s why it was effective. And in that efficacy lays the simple fact that Bolsheviks betrayed the largest anarchist organization during the Russian revolution.

Makhnovshchina was the pinnacle of anarchist success on the world stage. Their lands were ruled by their people. They had repelled not only German colonists but the German backed puppet regimes spouting racist and cosplay style Ukrainian Nationalism They fought a multi-front war between the Whites and the Reds. To the point where they beat back the Whites to an unfavorable position in the East and that the Reds were so depleted they had no choice but to ally with Makhno. The Black army over performed as a military force and Makhnovshchina over performed as a society forged in war time, that never had to implement war communism and forced conscription. And for all of this the Bolsheviks rewarded them by baiting them out of position under the guise of being allies, and stabbing them in the back, and liquidating all their hard work. Many bitter anarchists read this history, the success of Marxist-Lenninism as the strangulation of anarchism in its crib.

It’s sensational to talk solely about burqa’s and niqab’s, but this applies to motorcycle helmets and balaclava’s too, of course.

But this is simply just hide the intent of the law. As others have pointed out in below advertising and performance art is allowed. So Gucci Burkas are a-okay legally speaking as they advertise the brand.

Likewise if you look into the issue, Switzerland has also by referendum banned the building of minarets 10 years ago. Both referendums were spear headed by Walter Wobman, a right wing MP whose literal political positions are both anti-migrant and anti-“Islamization”.

These things are so transparently racist that you can disprove these talking points about “equality under the law” for face coverings by a few clicks and some light reading.