A certain user whom I have codenamed ‘BulldogMuhammad’ explained the joke with this little nugget of wisdom:
Despite their many differences, the KPD (Communist Party) and SPD (Social Democratic Party) of Weimar-era Germany actually managed a very successful period of cooperation against the conservative capitalists and reactionary monarchists in the early-mid-1920s.
… which ended with the ascension of the dictator Stalin in the USSR, and his associated bootlicker Ernst Thalmann in the German KPD. Marching orders from Comrade Stalin were that the Social Democrats and Democratic Socialists in the SPD were ‘social fascists’, and in some vague way even worse than regular fascists, and the only cooperation possible with the SPD was contingent on the SPD’s complete submission to the Soviet Union’s- sorry, the Germany Communist Party’s- goals.
After several years of this stonewalling and street fighting, the KPD heroically ensured the fall of the SPD and Weimar Germany as a whole to the fucking Nazis, and Stalin began ordering his proxies to cooperate with the Nazi regime.
First of all, I have never seen any evidence to suggest that the KPD and the SPD ‘managed a very successful period of cooperation’ against anybody at any time. Precisely the opposite was true:
As can be seen, it was not simply the orders of the Communist International that spurred the KPD into opposing the SPD. The Party’s very birth came as a result of profound disagreements within the German left: disagreements that were not simply theoretical, but deeply political in the form of the more moderate elements of the SPD’s support for [the Twoth Reich’s] involvement in the First World War.
During the revolutionary period and the early Weimar Republic years, the KPD also experienced oppression and violence as a result of SPD actions. Historian Eve Rosenhaft notes that after the Weimar Republic was established, the radical left, including the KPD revolted, “demanding… socialist programmes… Freikorps and paramilitary police under Social Democratic administration put down the disturbances in two months of bloody fighting.”⁷
Historian Eric D. Weitz similarly notes that “the SPD’s alliance with the police, the army, and the employers undermined its popular support, which redounded in part to the benefit of the KPD.”⁸ Of equal importance is Rosenhaft’s assessment that “the political division between the Communists and the Social Democrats that had emerged between 1917 and 1919 was reinforced by increasing divergences between the interests of different sections of the working class.”⁹
The wealthier, more skilled proletariat joined the SPD while semi‐skilled laborers became the rank‐and‐file members of the KPD. Thus, when one examines the later actions of the KPD’s declaration of the SPD as Social Fascists, one must understand that the reasoning did not suddenly develop as a result of the Comintern’s policy directives, but that the KPD had actually experienced oppression from the SPD. The KPD had evidence of the SPD working with the right and conceding fundamental goals of socialism, whereas it had yet to experience the far more brutal repression of the [Fascists].
(Emphasis added.)
Twoth of all, the KPD did not waste an enormous amount of time fighting social democrats, regardless of whatever the official party line might have been:
Historian Dirk Schumann largely concurs with Rosenhaft’s assessment of the KPD’s use of political violence, noting that “while Communists and Social Democrats hardly ever clashed in physical confrontations, both appeared on the scene as enemies of the right‐wing groups.”¹⁸ Thus, while the KPD leadership advocated opposition to the SPD and the [Fascists]. The reality on the streets, where political violence served as a potent form of expression for the proletariat, was that the left devoted its energies to fighting the right rather than each other.
Nevertheless, I have to admit: given that the Weimar Republic devoted far more energy to fighting the communists instead of the fascists, the KPD fighting the social democrats disproportionately is indeed a claim that is easy to take seriously.
It’s fine if you consider the Stalin administration to have been a disappointment overall, but the narrative that basically everything was going fine until Stalin had to come along and eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thereby letting sin into the world, is simply not useful. It also has the side effect of quietly exonerating the upper classes, as if they were a force of nature who can’t be blamed for anything. Then again, maybe that was BulldogMuhammad’s intention all along.
Imagine if somebody talked about other victims of colonialism this way. What would the world look like if everybody blamed Montezuma for the Spanish colonizers devastating Mesoamerica, perhaps with the excuse that Montezuma should have been nicer to his neighbours so that they wouldn’t collaborate with the colonisers? What sort of society would we have if everyone blamed Hendrik Witbooi for the Second Reich’s devastation of Namibia, or Omar Mukhtar for the Fascists trapping hundreds of thousands of his people in concentration camps? Is that the type of society wherein BulldogMuhammad and his ilk would prefer to live? I doubt it, but logically there is nothing preventing anti-Bolshevists from applying this same culpability not only to Stalin but also to Montezuma, Hendrik Witbooi, and Omar Mukhtar. All that anti-Bolshevists can do is put their feet down and say, ‘It stops here.’
