It's interesting how the only criticism anybody can drum up is "tens of millions dead," but nobody bats an eye at the death toll of capitalism, capitalist countries, and their endless war machine/endless interference in other countries via funding coups or outright assassinations in support of harmful leaders who will play nice with the corporations.

Your link describes discussion of labor camps as if it's some long lost relic of a bygone era - but slavery of inmates is, right now, legal and prevalent in the US subsidizing private industries for pennies on the dollar. It references the conditions of the camps, but plenty of current US inmates face subhuman conditions and treatment. You imply that everybody suffered all the time under the Soviets, but a far from insignificant number (depending on how you do the numbers, with more support for the USSR than we have for our own government this past decade or so) remember the USSR fondly, or at least as better than their current governments.

All the things y'all constantly belt about to argue socialism is the great evil of the world is shit we do now that you support as long as it benefits private entities instead of public. I'm not going to argue that everything was perfect, or that nobody was corrupt, but I WILL argue that y'all spend a lot of time defending those same imperfections and corruptions under capitalism with this lazy weak ass "but fixing it would be spooky scary socialism" argument. Per the common reasons people call socialism a failure, so is capitalism. That's why leftists call for, as you call it, "prettied up" socialism - not to fool people, but because what we're doing now is FAILING EVERYBODY and tripling down on funneling even more of our economy to 1-3% of the population hasn't helped anything so it's time for something different and realistic change is gradual, not "seizing the means of production" overnight. Practically, we find a functional balance like the rest of the "first" world.

To co-opt my criticism of zionists defending genocide with the "1,200 dead" figure: If tens of millions dead under socialism makes you so mad, just wait til you hear about the hundreds of millions dead under capitalism.

((I don't know anything about how to do the thing notating an image so in the off chance it helps someone: Drake No/Yes Meme DrakeNo - tyranny.gov DrakeYes - tyranny.com ))

The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist.” The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists.” This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). [5] We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.

this is directly preceding it. Even if I accepted your frankly hilarious black book of communism death tolls, the argument here is that the soviet union and China still greatly improved the lives of the average citizen compared to what came before while facing huge problems that you would crumble upon immediately upon encountering, like imminent war from the west that they predicted and prepared for correctly. As far as your other claim, it's not nearly so simple as you make it out to be:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/21/why-do-so-many-people-miss-the-soviet-union/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ebrd-transition-survey-idUSKBN1422U2/

edit: also, nia frome is a trans woman