Stalin - classic or dud

i mean i buy that at one point in time he might've been interested in democratization but c'mon gmafb

What Mordy said.

From that thread its more than "at one point".

buried the lede -

The purges were good and correct. Class traitors, careerists and double dealers have no business in a communist party. pic.twitter.com/1oC5Uteryy

— Chris Aaron☭ (@EternalBolshie) August 19, 2017

that thread literally has the poster defend the great purge in which estimates suggest 600,000 people were killed

i think it's important to balance what he actually did with cherry picked dalliances in speeches/texts since actions spoke louder than words. xxp

fucking quit it julio

i guess it's useful to know who the tankies among us are tho since that's important context when discussing politics on other threads

neo-stalinism boggles my mind. read a fucking book for christ sake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOzYT4lcXuM

or like talk to someone who lived in the DDR or the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, or Cuba. Jesus

we went through Cuba when El Jefe died.

oh i recall, shouldn't have mentioned it haha

The 20th century didn't invent propaganda, but it did expand the number of highly trained practitioners and the number of venues for delivering it by a couple orders of magnitude. Stalin had a small army of devoted propagandists to rationalize and justify his actions and transform them into shining virtues. There isn't an especially large market (or appetite) for that stuff today, but it still exists and for those who are susceptible, it still does its job.

i guess it's useful to know who the tankies among us are tho since that's important context when discussing politics on other threads

concur. I have tankie friends and I treat them like I treat Trump-voting family - smile, nod, change the subject, they're too stupid to be argued with

my left wing pals tend to rip the pish out of tankies. It's usually the best way to deal with them other than just ignoring them.

Hey all I genuinely found some of that stuff in the thread interesting - sourced and commented on. Yes I saw all of the apologist crap below that but there was an account of stuff that you don't usually hear from that era. I haven't had the energy to engage with but I don't mean to cause offense, and obviously I am a communist sympathiser.

In the end its just a link though.

the 1936 constitution was infamous for bearing no resemblance whatever to the polity it attached to: i know you know this stuff when you haven't got yr adolescent edgelord hat on, trotsky wrote about it in books you lent me

historian zhukov is a well known reactionary nuisance

Have never met or interacted with a 'tankie' in my life, tbh.

me neither, know a ton of trots mind you

One problem with relentless propaganda, as we all can verify from personal observation of politics, is that every action and every decision is spun as equally excellent in its effect and profoundly moral in its constitution. Or, from the opposition pov, all are equally horrifying and morally bankrupt. They all get put through the same mill. In a landscape so flattened and robbed of distinctive features, it is very easy to get lost.

almost* prefer tankies to trots - somehow they seem more honest to me? * but not really

ugh, in the mid-90s i knew a whole gang of the pseudo-marxists in the RCP, which then became the libertarian take-churn machine spiked

(tho to be fair i don't know if they stayed with it all the way down the road)

(lol a french woman i know who had an affair w/one of them said he had the tiniest penis she had ever encountered)

One problem with relentless propaganda, as we all can verify from personal observation of politics, is that every action and every decision is spun as equally excellent in its effect and profoundly moral in its constitution. Or, from the opposition pov, all are equally horrifying and morally bankrupt. They all get put through the same mill. In a landscape so flattened and robbed of distinctive features, it is very easy to get lost.

― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, August 24, 2017 6:02 PM (forty-seven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. It's "the single greatest decision, the best action, tremendously good" vs "Fake news. Sad!"

the first woman i ever loved is one of the most prominent trots in scotland (not tommy sheridan)

i know you know this stuff when you haven't got yr adolescent edgelord hat on, trotsky wrote about it in books you lent me

OK, sure - certain other accounts (like that twitter thread) do pass me by, and that's a minefield (as er my revival clearly demonstrates), but I like to balance out from the way this stuff is written about by most ppl in the UK where the agenda behind it is to maintain the status quo in UK politics (Applebaum, Sebag Montefiore, people like that).

(not tommy sheridan)

ron howard voice: it was t

Love the ron howard voice meme

Stalin idk. He had a tough job and at least it's conclusively proved that leftist politics are nonsense, in the long run that was possibly worth it at thirty million dead or w/e?

Gonna say "too soon to call"

So what's new, everyone? Is Stalin cool now? Would he have won in a heads-up race against Trump? Just trying to stay on top of things here.

Stalin: one of history's great monsters, but is he the greatest?

Nope. Well established fact that Jimmy Carter is history's greatest monster.

Discovery channel virtual mockup dictator tourney of death

I won't hear a word against Robespierre though, what that poor boy had to put up with!

That's it Tom, ppl won't look at things in context.

Billy Wright was the greatest leader we never had

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9e/Davidlowrendezvous.png/330px-Davidlowrendezvous.png
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/fe/2b/0c/fe2b0ce590a910f5a8fa90ed869220c2--political-cartoons-honeymoons.jpg
Interesting (or maybe not!), contrast in depictions of Stalin. From Low's Alexender II type imposing strongman, that probably was probably more a symptom of UK Empire insecurity than Berryman's portrayal of him as the bonnie bridesmaid.

kotkin pt. 2 is out; only 1184 pages in hardcover

£15 for an e-book gtf! I might be forced to steal this I'm afraid.

thx for the tip - just ordered my copy. i'm really excited.

This is good on Akhmatova and Stalin, and Sappho, and the act of preservation.

thx for the heads up!

"Waiting for Hitler" is a great title

I just started Kotkin's vol 2 book earlier. I'm guessing he will later posit that he murdered both Gorky + Kirov.

The description of Yezhov as the type of street urchin who would pour kerosene on a cat's tail and light it up for amusement had me chuckling. What a completely grotesque character, "the little blackberry" doesn't quite do him justice!

"Yezhov not only drank," recalled Zinaida Glikina, a friend of Yezhov's wife, Yevgeniya. "In addition, he deteriorated and lost the visage of not only a Communist but of a human being."

he was under a lot of stress tbf

aye, being top NKVD dog was pretty stressful, and your chances of ever quietly retiring weren't too hot.

one of the many perplexing things about tankies how do they explain away the prominence of absolutely skin-crawlingingly awful people at the nexus of soviet power during his reign? I mean Beria almost makes Yezhov look like a nice wee guy

I stuck Kotkin's bio in my Amazon list, hoping one of my friends will take the hint :(

presumably the same way they justify everything else: instructions for making omelets xp

insistence that good ends justify using evil means. this line is taken by people of every political persuasion. it's an equal opportunity rationalization.