Stalin - classic or dud

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"

Just explaining, not condoning. Faith does not require intelligence.

But even if Communism is/was a tragic mistake or unreachable Utopia, it was based on a desire to improve the quality of human existence. What does W believe in other than more money for those who've got plenty already? Some faiths are intrinsically more virtuous than others.

as has been pointed out, in any case, "rove/cheney" (haha), for all their manifest faults, misdeeds and killings, have yet to kill tens of millions of people in the name of anything at all. and with any luck, no one will be interviewed fifty years from now and claim that it was worth killing however many muslims because a democratic utopia might have been realized.

And you'd be OTM. It reminds me of when Republicans ask "Isn't it worth it to torture some prisoners in order to gain valuable information and save lives?" Wrong question -- not enough evidence that torture actually has anything to do with preventing terrorism and saving lives.

Interestingly, the current interim administration in Russia**hardly what I'd
call orthodox, but okay, whatever**announced today that they'd developed an
advanced missile system unmatched in the world. It's all over the internet.
This demonstrates what I've been trying to point out, that with access to
inexpensive computers, as well as more robust mainframe platforms, real
progress is not only possible, but inevitable. Even you lot will recognize
the coincidental timing**just as cheney-rove has positioned himself in iraq,
Russia feels the need for a superior missile DEFENSE system. Not at all
surprising. The oil thing is such a red herring. Cheney-Rove doesn't care
about Iraqi oil. When they want oil, watch out Alberta. This iraq
interlude is just an attempt to attack the core of the former SU from what
they perceive as a vulnerable spot. Sorry. Busted.

Not that anyone has noticed this other than the interim administration in
Russia. Europe especially is full of chattering hyenas, not dissimilar to
this board-no it's Thompson, no it's hobsbawm, no it's the WSP, English
branch or American branch? Like it makes a difference.

Whatever.

Uh, do you actually know who "cheney-rove" *is*?

followed by a couple of paragraphs of insanity.

You a bad troll and we can have this conversation on our own, thanx.

-- The Man in the Iron-On Mask (noodle_vagu...), January 31st, 2006.

maybe communism in the abstract was about improving things for everyone, but i'm not sure russian communism was, in 1934.

but yeah in the uk i can see how it would look much more promising than the milk-and-water trade unionism of the parliamentary left.

Great rhetoric but demonstrably untrue.

that's good, too

I think W probably believes that his foreign policy will spread democracy and make America safer, that abortion is morally wrong, etc.

I firmly believe that W believes that "democracy" and "freedom" as experienced in the US are, at the very least, the pinnacle of human accomplishment to date. I wouldn't want to vouch for his whole administration, nor would I necessarily deny that he is open to "helping out his friends" along the way.

It's this conflating of religion (faith) and the particularities of American politics, culture, and economics that are what make him so dangerous.