Stalin - classic or dud

I suspect that for all his intellectual window-dressing the real reasons why he stayed in the party are sociological and psychological - the difficulty of leaving something in which you have invested a lot of emotional capital.

The whole Militant debacle springs to mind. Which said, Derek Hatton deserves to be thrown out of anything and everything (including - but not limited to - shops, public parks, windows).

O RLY?

http://www.beheard.com/beheard/images/items/1842120069.jpg
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/users/vfolkenflik/VRF%20Sources/george-orwell.jpg

Why are we so hung up on Hobsbawm? This thread is meant to be about Stalin, FATHER OF THE WORKERS!

http://www.thebricktestament.com/judges/index.html

Ignatieff: “In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?”

Hobsbawm: “This is the sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible. . . . If I were to give you a retrospective answer which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, ‘probably not.’”

Ignatieff: “Why?”

Hobsbawm: “Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I’m looking back at it now, and I’m saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure.”

Ignatieff: “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?”

Hobsbawm: “Yes.”

Okay, yes, enough Hobswbawm.

Fuck that pock-faced, moustachioed little dictator. The shit he pulled in Poland is unforgiveable.

-- Cathy (cathyleec...), January 31st, 2006.

no, not enough. this is hard to unpack, but first off about half of those dead died in the USSR itself, which under stalin purged its own officer corps AND THEN SIGNED A PACT WITH HITLER, so the two things -- stalinism and the numbers of dead -- are not unconnected.

also there is a diff between the enforced famine in the ukraine and the liberation of france, or is that just too insane for you?

As it is, I'm just left saying: Bethune, you're an idiot. Others have already said it, but seriously.

Have you read ANYTHING about the history of computing in the USSR? Or are you just too smart to believe anything you read? What's your yardstick for determining the integrity of a source of information?

Also NB cheney-rove thus far have not lined up men, women and children, tied them together two by two, and then shot every other one in the face so that the falling corpses cause the spared to be forced into a trench, which is then filled in while half its occupants are still breathing. Not to defend lying or warfare but hey at least they ain't breaking new barriers in inhumanity to man in an attempt to save ammunition.

It is hard to unpack, yes. And a little hard for me to relate to personally, because I don't believe in the ideals of communism so bringing about a communist utopia wouldn't be worth even one pointless death to me. However, in the context of WW2, if you see the aim of the alliance purely as defeating Nazism, that is a cause most people would consider worth fighting for, at any cost. But is people's evident repulsion at Hobswbawm's comments because you don't believe any cause is worth such a high death toll, or just that the success of communism wasn't?

It is perhaps not a very helpful way of thinking about things. If asked, was the defeat of Nazism worth the bombing of Hiroshima, Dresden, Nagasaki, Berlin etc, I'm not really sure what I'd say. I'd probably say "ask me a different question".

Among other charming crimes committed by Stalin: The wholesale expulsion of the Ossetians. The imperialist invasion of Finland.

Now the devil was a-readin' in the good book one day,
How the Lord created Adam to walk the righteous way.
It made the devil jealous,
He turned green up to his horns,
And he swore by things unholy,
That he'd make one of his own.

So he packed his two suitcases full of grief and misery,
And he caught the midnight special going down to Germany.
Then he mixed his lies and hatred with fire and brimstone,
The the devil sat upon it,
That's how Adolf was born.

Now Adolf got the notion that he was the master race.
And he swore to bring new honor and put mankind in its place.
So he set his plans in motion and was winning ev'rewhere,
'Til he p and got the notion
for to kick that Russian Bear. (chorus)

Yes, he kicked that noble Russian, but it wasn't very long,
Before Adolf got suspicious that he had done something wrong.
'Cause that Bear grabbed the Fuehrer and gave him an awful fight,
Seventeen months he scrapped the Fuehrer,
Tooth and claw, day and night.

Then that Bear smacked the Fuehrer with a mighty armored paw,
And Adolf broke all recods running backwards to Kharkov.
then Goebbels sent a message to the people ev'rywhere,
That if they couldn't help the Fuehrer,
God don't help that Russian Bear.
(chorus)

Then this Bear called on his buddy the noble fighting Yank,
and they sent the Fuehrer running with his ships and planes and tanks.
Now the Fuehrer's having nightmares 'cause Der Fuehrer knows darned well,
That the devil's done wrote "Welcome" on his residence in [Hell].
(chorus)

i don't think the two things are comparable, but the 50m deaths hobsbawm counted -- well, how many of these were people killed by the germans? it's kind of material, because if, say, 750,000 british and americans died to prevent further nazi carnage, i don't see how that's the same thing as stalin deliberately killing millions of people during peacetime.

it's not about abstract idealist stuff like 'the success of communism' by the time you get to, well, lenin, it's about concretely assuming the reigns of power of an enormous empire. leave marxist utopianism (which i'm open to!) at the finaldn station left luggage.

Considering the behavior of the Western democracies, I can't really blame Stalin for the pact. he needed time. All the available intelligence pointed to war starting much later than '39, The Wermacht didn't want to go to war before '43.

uhhh, ok, except that the pact involved carving up poland over which britain and france had said they'd go to war.

re being a communist in 1934 -- i probably would have been but read thee some borkenau (a contemporary commentator) or indeed trotsky or mandel on why the stalinist international fkn HELPED BRING ABOUT facsism in germany.

Anybody ever read about the hilarious ideological somersaults the PCF did between '39 and '43? 'Premature anti-fascism' is one of my alltime favorite bits of cant.

I've got to take issue with that. It colours our reading of Hobsbawm, but no more than A.J.P. Taylor's long association with Beaverbrook or Niall Ferguson's long association with being an utter cock colours our reading of their work. A lot of Hobsbawm's work is hugely technically accomplished, and his analyses are open to be challenged like anybody else's. There aren't any neutral historians, are there?

I'm not defending Hobsbawm's views anymore. It seems a bit pointless seeing as I don't share them.

funny, i'd never thought bethune could be a girl. what an awful sexist i am. subconsciously thinking someone discussing politics that way could only be a man... tsk tsk tsk.

This is genuinely interesting. We will subscribe to breaking eggs to make an omelette provided it's defeating Nazism, but when it comes to making a brighter future, we wont. I will frankly admit to a great deal of pessimism with regard to both the perfectability of human nature and humanity's capacity to rationally order the minutiae of the economy. The 'invisible hand' doesn't exist in a vaccuum or an ideal state. It's modified by culture and law and custome, etc... That may sound like a fudge equivalent to Trotskyites and Stalinists splitting hairs over Marxist ideology, but I think that a modern Marx would still recognize the incredible power of Capitalism and be likely to predict that the advent of communism may take more time than the hopeful 19th century expected.

yes france and britain did sell out czechoslovakia (though i suppose at one remove -- there was no equiv of the katyn massacre).

White, yes, I was making the leap of defeating the axis powers = defeating Nazism/Fascism. You can substitute any other massacres committed by the Allies in Europe, there are plenty to choose from, unfortunately.

can you not see a difference between massacres in the course of a war against the nazis and stalin's massacres and forced famines?

xpost re the breaking of eggs -- exactly.

I had to stop myself from using the eggs/omelette analogy earlier on because I thought it was a bit crass but, yes, it's difficult for a few eggs not to get broken - especially when making such an enormous and unwieldy omelette!

Is it like the difference between a forced and an unforced error?

otmfm. i find it astonishing that someone as bright as hobsbawm is so naive as to think the workers' paradise was right around the corner, give or take 20 million dead.

!!! suddenly feel terribly old...

x-post

(only by a few months, AleXTC!)

It's called "having faith" and "believing in something"