How to combat the misinformation? NSFW

I think the questions are:

What are you hoping to accomplish by combating this misinformation?

and

What is more likely to happen than your ideal outcome?

It sounds like you're going to just get into an argument with ignorant reactionaries on the internet. You won't change their minds, they won't change yours, you won't show them how bullshit their arguments are.

My recommendation would be to not waste your time. You can inform a friend in real life that their sources are bullshit, and they will listen. But reactionaries aren't that way because they just have "wrong information." They're there because it gives them an excuse to be horrible, hateful people, and feel justified in doing so. You can't logic someone out of that position.

I'm not a historian, but from a cursory reading of this article, I think these could be some starting points. (Going to post several comments, since Lemmy isn't letting me post my single long comment, it just keeps loading and loading and doesn't acutally send.)

Notice how for some parts, the only sources are quotes from Bolsheviks themselves, with a lot of talk around them to provide the wrong context, like this pretty amusing one at the start (putting them all inside spoilers because I don't like large paragraphs of reactionary drivel disrupting the flow of my comment):

:::spoiler long quote

Shortly before that communist revolution, in the summer of 1917 Lenin wrote a book, "The State and Revolution", outlining what his dictatorship would be like. Among other considerations, the future despot tugged at the grossest demagoguery and lashed out at parliamentary democracy:

"Deciding once in a certain number of years which members of the ruling class are to oppress and crush the people in Parliament: this is the true essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in the parliamentary constitutional monarchies, but in the most democratic republics." :::

Or this one; read carefully and you will notice that nowhere does this quote support the article's assertion in the paragraph right above it that the famine was done intentionally.

:::spoiler long quote

One of the most dramatic episodes of Lenin's dictatorship was the Russian famine of 1921 and 1922, which affected some 27 million people and killed between 3 and 5 million, and which was caused, in large part, by the mass requisitions of grain ordered by the Bolsheviks, the so-called Prodrazvyorstka (copied and expanded by the Communists, like other things, from the Razvyorstka, the requisition of tsarist grain in the First World War). The requisitioned grain was often used for export. This extermination through hunger was not accidental or that the Bolshevik dictatorship tried to avoid: it was done intentionally and even sought with it an anti-religious purpose, as Lenin wrote in a letter from Lenin to the Politburo on March 19, 1922:

"Now and only now, when people consume themselves in famine-stricken areas and hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses lie on the roads, we can (and therefore must) pursue the removal of church property with the most energy frenzied and ruthless and do not hesitate to quell the least opposition. (...) We must pursue the elimination of church property by any means necessary to secure a fund of several hundred million gold rubles (do not forget the immense wealth of some monasteries and lauras). (...) All considerations indicate that we will not do it later, because at no other time, apart from desperate hunger, will it give us that state of mind among the general mass of peasants that would guarantee the sympathy of this group, or, at least , would assure us the neutralization of this group in the sense that victory in the fight for the elimination of church property, unquestionably and completely, will be on our side." :::

And right after that, they quote the black book of communism. Writing its title in French. I wonder whether that's a coincidence, or whether even they know that the black book isn't credible and try to hide that they're citing it. It should be well-known enough that it isn't credible that you don't need to do your own work investigating it and can dismiss it out of hand:

:::spoiler long quote

This use of famines as a method of achieving political objectives had already been advanced by Lenin in 1891, when he refused to collaborate with a campaign to help the hungry in the city of Samara. According to Lenin, hunger has "numerous positive consequences", since "it destroys not only faith in the Tsar, but also in God" (quoted by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek and Jean-Louis Margolin in "Le livre noir du communisme", 1997). :::

Then there are quotes like this. You could of course try to check whether it is real and what is the context, but without looking that far, it seems like a reasonable course of action to take for a revolution desperately fighting for its survival. The article is framing this as some unique evil as if any other army wouldn't have killed deserters.

:::spoiler long quote

The Red Army suffered 3 million defections in 1919 and 1920. The first year, 500,000 deserters were arrested by the Cheka, and almost 800,000 the second. Thousands of them were killed, and their families were often taken hostage and killed to blackmail deserters. A typical Cheka report stated the following:

"Yaroslavl Province, June 23, 1919. The uprising of deserters on the Petropavlovskaya volost has been quelled. The families of the deserters have been taken hostage. When we started shooting at one person in each family, the Greens started to come out of the woods and surrendered. Thirty-four deserters were shot as an example." :::

Once you dismiss that part, there is the other half of the article, the one that alleges a lot of atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks.

I used tineye.com to reverse image search one of the pictures from that article, the one captioned "In the foreground, the body of the telegraph operator Ponomarenko in the Cheka of Kharkiv". Guess what I found? Look here. The pictures are at the bottom of this page, with the captions in the article being a translation of the Russian captions of the pictures in this thing. What is this thing? It seems to be a reprint/digitalization something captioned:

ОТДЕЛ ПРОПАГАНДЫ ОСОБОГО СОВЕЩАНИЯ ПРИ ГЛАВНОКОМАНДУЮЩЕМ ВООРУЖЕННЫМИ СИЛАМИ НА ЮГЕ РОССИИ, ЧАСТЬ ИНФОРМАЦИОННАЯ, 29 июня 1919 года, № 4338, г. Екатеринодар

СВОДКА СВЕДЕНИЙ О ЗЛОДЕЯНИЯХ И БЕЗЗАКОНИЯХ БОЛЬШЕВИКОВ № 19

which translates (sorry if I got something wrong, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about military terms, but the general menaing should be there):

PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT OF THE SPECIAL CONFERENCE UNDER THE SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCES ON THE SOUTH OF RUSSIA, INFORMATION DETACHMENT, 29 June 1919, № 4338, Yekaterinodar

REPORT ON THE EVIL DOINGS AND LAWLESSNESS OF THE BOLSHEVIKS № 19

So literal white army propaganda. Not exactly the most credible source.

This doesn't mean that there never were any excesses committed by the Cheka. But obviously the white army has an interest in depicting their enemy as extremely violent, excessive, and plain evil.

and because I have no self preservation I wanted to see what his sources were.

Very relatable.

If you want to have a go at debunking stuff like this, I suggest you go at it piecemeal. A common tactic of (smarter) reactionaries is to do a barrage of easily verifiable false claims to make themselves seem knowledgeable and debunking every single one of them in one go gets very tiring. It's kinda why that youtuber Shaun has to make 2-3 hour videos against relatively small material, because the bullshit density is too high.

In this specific case, you could start from the last one (man-made famine) since I think it's the easier one to debunk and work backwards from there to more complex and abstract ones like "Lenin wanted dictatorship from the start," which will need some broader philosophical and historical discussion on the democratic nature of the USSR. I think I have a similar project to yours where I wanted to write my own perspective of the history of post-Columbian Haiti, which begun as a video idea, but I deeply underestimated the amount of effort that that will take. I already dropped all ambitions of making it a video, for example, since that'd bloat it even more with things I'm unskilled with.

It also depends on how acquainted you already are with history. If you've never done something like this before, a good place to start might be just the ProleWiki and the listed sources, and you can come back here with more specific questions about certain facts. Usually if a book is good it'll also cite other sources to either build upon or contradict, so your sources list will grow from there. It's certainly a lot of work, but very satisfying.

Edit: also, yeah, you're gonna read and see some horrifying stuff. I got used to it pretty quickly, but I can't guarantee it's always this easy.

Good luck comrade, and feel free to ask more questions!

Okay, those 'facts' in that article are quite extreme and absurd.