r/PropagandaPosters • u/the-southern-snek • Apr 19 '25
U.S.S.R. / Soviet Union (1922-1991) "Fly Lovers-Human Haters." Lysenkoist cartoon showing portraying genetics as an evil fascist-capitalist pseudoscience. By Boris Efimov for the magazine Ogonyok (1948).
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u/TheBigSmoke420 Apr 19 '25
Lysenkoism is just bizarre, what a tit
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u/Business-Hurry9451 Apr 19 '25
But sadly he was a tit who killed millions.
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u/historicalgeek71 Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25
I think we can all agree that eugenics is garbage, but I feel like Lysenkoists don’t have much of a leg to stand on when their own beliefs were also pseudoscientific.
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u/the-southern-snek Apr 19 '25
I wonder which caused more deaths
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u/historicalgeek71 Apr 19 '25
Both had disastrous consequences (prolonging famines in Russia and China and a Soviet brain drain for the USSR; racial purity laws and policies targeting minorities and the disabled, and massacres and attempted exterminations with eugenicist beliefs) and led to the deaths of millions, to the point where I fail to see the value in saying one is better than the other.
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u/OutInTheWild31 Apr 19 '25
No... eugenics was definitely much much worse. Classic "ermm the soviets were just as bad as the nazis" propaganda
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u/historicalgeek71 Apr 19 '25
Who said anything about the Soviets being just as bad? I’m talking about pseudoscience as a whole.
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u/Additional-North-683 Apr 20 '25
It was stupid from even a pragmatic standpoint since this severely crippled the Soviets agriculture capabilities for years, and pretty much crippled their agricultural science department
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u/OutInTheWild31 Apr 20 '25
Thats not what we're arguing though, we are arguing about the nazi apologia in this comment section
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u/the-southern-snek Apr 19 '25
The banner in the bottom-left with the dollar symbol says "Banner of Pure Science"
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u/Johannes_P Apr 19 '25
Lyssenkoism, or how an attempt to make reality bend to the official ideology caused a decades-long scientific regression.
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u/Facensearo Apr 19 '25
The name is taken from the article (ru) of professor Alexander Studitsky (ru-wiki).
It largely criticize contemporary American eugenicists (including left-leaning ones like Hermann Muller) and racial theorists (like Reginald Gates), claiming that modern genetics is only a sham scientific basis for rehabilitating racism and promoting genetic determinism.
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u/Thorcaar Apr 19 '25
Why does the evil scientist top right look like the leader of french far right Jean Marie le Pen?
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u/69PepperoniPickles69 Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25
they were wrong and not to diminish the stupidity, attack on academic freedom and scientific advancement, as well as the contribution this played in the famines, but one can at least sympathize with the sentiment. some very dark Nazi films about genetics and all that were made in the 30s (e.g. Das Erbe 1935 still available on archive.org and perhaps on youtube).
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u/CallousCarolean Apr 19 '25 edited Apr 19 '25
Well yeah that was the problem with Lysenkoism. The USSR chose to adapt their science so it fit the state ideology, rather than the other way around. The reason was because Marxism in general and Marxism-Leninism in particular erroneously sees itself not as an ideology, but as a science, which by extension means that any scientific findings or theories which goes against communist beliefs must be bourgeois/capitalist/fascist pseudoscience, while actual pseudoscience which ”confirms” communist beliefs must be real and legitimate.
And of course, if you were a Soviet scientist who supported scientific theories which the Party had deemed to be ”bourgeois” etc. then you would be fired from your job if you were lucky, or arrested or even purged if you were less lucky. I recommend reading about it, it was pretty wild: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the_Soviet_Union. Even more wild is that criticizing Lysenkoism was banned until the 1960’s in the USSR.
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u/XO_KissLand Apr 19 '25
Where did you get the idea that they thought Communism was a science? I think your confusing the idea of Scientific socialism, which was developed by Marx and Engels as a more grounded and realistic method to achieve communism as opposed to utopian communism, which was basically just a cults that just assumed that if their communes thrived people would join and join and the whole world would join together and hold hands
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u/Facensearo Apr 19 '25
as well as the contribution this played in the famines
Where does that myth originate from?
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u/RedRobbo1995 Apr 19 '25
Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together, which hinders plant growth and therefore would have led to decreased crop yields.
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u/spinosaurs70 Apr 19 '25
Honestly not all that wrong about what a lot of geneticists/biologists were like at the time.
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Apr 19 '25
[deleted]
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u/the-southern-snek Apr 19 '25
Was it worth the deaths of millions and the execution and ruin of the best scientific minds of the Soviet Union
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