Stalin - classic or dud

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I love the way that Bethune is convinced that the solution to all of communism's failings is: cheap laptops. Clearly he/she has never worked in IT.

― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Friday, 24 March 2006 08:18 (eighteen years ago) link

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Solo_drink_Australia.jpg/150px-Solo_drink_Australia.jpg

― paradox, Friday, 24 March 2006 10:40 (eighteen years ago) link

Only a centrally-planned effort will be able to manage an economy as complex as china's.

i love it!

― Real Goths Don't Wear Black (Enrique), Friday, 24 March 2006 10:46 (eighteen years ago) link

Did someone get hold of a bit of Enver Hoxha's DNA and clone him?

― Dadaismus, the Male Poster (Dada), Friday, 24 March 2006 10:51 (eighteen years ago) link

I love the way that Bethune is convinced that the solution to all of communism's failings is: cheap laptops.

Hardware is only one of the keys to successful implementation--software remains embargoed by cheney-rove. It's harder to reverse engineer. But this is beside to point. As clearly explained above China has abandoned orthodoxy. As a result, the people suffer.

― bethune, Friday, 24 March 2006 17:24 (eighteen years ago) link

"clearly explained"

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 24 March 2006 17:50 (eighteen years ago) link

bethune how come you never want to regale me with stories of your grand times in the Soviet socialist paradise, rubbing shoulders with the comrades and apparatchiks you obviously so clearly identify with and love? Also looking forward to hearing about your wonderful years spent in the Chinese countryside.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 24 March 2006 17:53 (eighteen years ago) link

have you ever even talked to an actual factual person that lived under the communist regimes of China or Russia?

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 24 March 2006 17:54 (eighteen years ago) link

As I've acknowledged, there were occasional rough patches--but nothing that compares to the cheney-rove nightmare we're all labouring under (sometimes via cheney-rove's satellite lapdog, the EU).

― bethune, Friday, 24 March 2006 18:05 (eighteen years ago) link

the cheney-rove nightmare we're all labouring under

I'd like to hear more about your struggle. Plz. be specific.

― pixel farmer (Rock Hardy), Friday, 24 March 2006 18:16 (eighteen years ago) link

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~vbonnell/images/da_zdrav.jpg

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 24 March 2006 18:20 (eighteen years ago) link

http://www.xeni.net/images/boingboing/sars_thumb.jpg

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 24 March 2006 18:22 (eighteen years ago) link

http://www.liter.kz/files/Tovarish.jpg

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 24 March 2006 18:31 (eighteen years ago) link

Turn on your TV tonight; the nightmare is well-documented

Maybe I shouldn't have said "turn ON your TV" but rather switch the channel from american idol or put down the PS2 controller.

― bethune, Friday, 24 March 2006 18:57 (eighteen years ago) link

I said I'd like to know more about YOUR struggle. Your specific nightmare -- how you get from one day to the next in this vale of tears without giving up and opening a vein.

― pixel farmer (Rock Hardy), Friday, 24 March 2006 19:02 (eighteen years ago) link

Your specific nightmare -- how you get from one day to the next in this vale of tears without giving up and opening a vein.

he listens to lots of gang of four and rage against the machine records?!?

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 24 March 2006 19:04 (eighteen years ago) link

Don't forget the Che t-shirts. Great coping mechanism.

― phil d. (Phil D.), Friday, 24 March 2006 19:08 (eighteen years ago) link

obviously he finds a great deal of solace in surveying the filth of our uninformed opinions on his inexpensive societ laptop.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, 24 March 2006 19:25 (eighteen years ago) link

i rage against rage against the machine records

― Dadaismus, the Male Poster (Dada), Friday, 24 March 2006 19:27 (eighteen years ago) link

bethune cheney-rove growth = self destructive but why the laptop fetish

http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&q=solow+computer+paradox&meta=

― cerebos, Friday, 24 March 2006 22:25 (eighteen years ago) link

serious question to bethune what do you make of dag solstad?

― The Vintner's Lipogram (OleM), Saturday, 25 March 2006 00:59 (eighteen years ago) link

What a bizarre question. But then, I was pished.

― The Vintner's Lipogram (OleM), Sunday, 26 March 2006 01:20 (eighteen years ago) link

five months pass...

about halfway through this now, kind of a harrowing read.
http://www.powells.com/review/2004_07_06.html

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 28 August 2006 15:09 (seventeen years ago) link

Pretty sharp review.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 28 August 2006 15:48 (seventeen years ago) link

bethune is/was the best/worst troll ever.

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Monday, 28 August 2006 17:09 (seventeen years ago) link

he never read your sinclair either, obv

http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/clones/russian.htm

― The Real DG (D to thee G), Monday, 28 August 2006 17:58 (seventeen years ago) link

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.”

somehow i'd missed this first time around. that is a truly disgusting quote. what a fucking moron.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Monday, 28 August 2006 23:57 (seventeen years ago) link

martin amis' "koba the dread" is a pretty annoying book, but it's semi-classic just for the part where he evicerates the "world of tomorrow" envisioned by lenin et al (though not by marx, perhaps) with one line: "ten seconds of sober thought will decisively inform you that such a place is not heaven but a species of hell; that such a place is alien to us; that such a place is non-human."

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 00:01 (seventeen years ago) link

Then on the page facing that quote is a picture of Nicky Wire looking off into the distance, I assume.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 00:02 (seventeen years ago) link

Equally vivid is his handling of the first portion of Orlov's book that was confirmed by documents — the story that Abram Slutsky, the head of the International Department of the NKVD, who officially had "died at his battle post" after suffering a heart attack, had in fact been poisoned in the office of the ruthless deputy head of the service, Mikhail Frinovsky.

!!!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 02:15 (seventeen years ago) link

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/pl/1/1a/Slutsky_aa.jpg

― s1ocki (slutsky), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 02:18 (seventeen years ago) link

The noble lineage in his brow...

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 02:29 (seventeen years ago) link

i have no idea why shakey mo linked to that review.

― a rapper singing about hos and bitches and money (Enrique), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 07:27 (seventeen years ago) link

What Amis is saying in that quote looks like a re-wording of "shitting on people is human nature, innit?" I don't wholly disagree, but if that's the best argument you've got against Communism...

― Pier Paolo Semolina (noodle vague), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 08:47 (seventeen years ago) link

not even, though; he's saying even if this utopia were possible, it would not be desirable.

― a rapper singing about hos and bitches and money (Enrique), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 08:49 (seventeen years ago) link

GOD FORBID WE LIVE IN A WORLD WITHOUT ME BEING FAMOUS

― Pier Paolo Semolina (noodle vague), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 08:51 (seventeen years ago) link

uh there's also the subordination of all forms of intellectual enquiry to the will of the politburo.

― a rapper singing about hos and bitches and money (Enrique), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 08:53 (seventeen years ago) link

I don't read that implication in the quote above, tho obviously it might be there in the book. I get a whiff of Pangloss, tho.

― Pier Paolo Semolina (noodle vague), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 08:58 (seventeen years ago) link

Martin Amis' Koba The Dread is more-or-less a booklength review of The Great Terror by Robt Conquest (also author of the linked review above).

― m coleman (lovebug starski), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 09:46 (seventeen years ago) link

I just linked the review cuz I'm reading the book and have been thinking a lot about this period lately and this is the thread about Stalin - is that really so strange?

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 14:46 (seventeen years ago) link

(and not entirely coincidentally, the review has a nice bit about western revisionists/apologists for the Stalinist regime, which is apt in light of Bethune's nonsense on this thred)

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 14:47 (seventeen years ago) link

ah fair play then.

i get the sense that stalinism was a much bigger problem in the uk than in the states (where i gather trotsky was big dog in the '30s). as a result it's still less about telling the historical truth than present-day politics.

so simon ballbag montefauntleroy's take is *bound* to be (this is my reading) more an attack on the left *in general* than anything else.

― a rapper singing about hos and bitches and money (Enrique), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 14:55 (seventeen years ago) link

"robert conquest"??

― Euai Kapaui (tracerhand), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 15:05 (seventeen years ago) link

the review goes into that aspect of it, but so far (300+ pages in) Montefiore makes no mention of the western left or even Stalin's larger role on the world stage - his focus is incredibly specific, almost hermetically sealed. It is ALL about the machinations of Stalin's "court" and the internal politics/relationships in Stalinist Russia. Lefties - of both the US and UK variety - are never mentioned. Montefiore's agenda seems to be of the more benign, academic variety, ie, making the most of newly available documents to provide an authoritative overview of a previously highly disputed period.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 15:06 (seventeen years ago) link

"robert conquest"??

Yup. That's his real name.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 15:08 (seventeen years ago) link

and em, pinkski, this graf from "robert conquest"'s review seems to at least challenge your thesis that stalin was just another leader, whose policies and obsessions would have been taken up by someone else had he not existed:

For example, newly uncovered high-level political documents from 1931 to 1934 finally destroy the argument, canvassed even quite recently, that there were no disputes in the post-1930 Politburo — that Stalin ruled unopposed. This is crucial to both historical and biographical insight: it confirms that Stalin's fight to retain power was not only a struggle against the people but also, and concomitantly, a struggle against any signs of independence, or even wavering, within his own apparat.

i mean he has never seemed like some putin-type functionary or a simple product of his system anyway, but this would appear to shed new light on that in any case

― Euai Kapaui (tracerhand), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 15:08 (seventeen years ago) link

there's a lot of complicity with Stalin's magnates - Kaganovich, Molotov, Zhdanov, Voroshilov - but he didn't really "rule unopposed" until after the Terror/Party purges had severely cowed everyone around him, and the country as well. Stalin greatly expanded the basis of fanatical party loyalty as a prerequisite to political (not to mention actual physical) survival, and while he didn't do it alone all the documents with his signature and his orders on them indicate pretty indisputably taht he was the major guiding force. Beria and Yezhov were more than willing to lend their own bloodthirst to the cause, but they didn't execute hundreds of thousands on their own, without Stalin's explicit direction and approval.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 15:20 (seventeen years ago) link

bethune:
>This environment is turning increasingly hostile.
>Most of you aren't serious anyway.

We've been waiting for you. Welcome aboard!

― Squirrel_Police (Squirrel_Police), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 22:27 (seventeen years ago) link

I'm resisting the urge to post the crazier bits of this bio, like the anecodte from Kruschev about Yezhov showing up to a Politburo meeting, fresh from the torture chambers at Lubianka, with blood from the "Enemies of the People" on his cuffs and trousers.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 22:33 (seventeen years ago) link

robert conquest wrote the great terror: a reassessment which has pretty much become the standard reference for its title subject. he wrote the original edition back in 1968, and the "reassessments" are based on soviet records not available when it was originally written. it is one of the more interesting and frightening books i have ever read, not only b/c of its description of what was going on w/n the USSR during the purges but also b/c of the examples conquest provides of western apologetics for same (both during the purges and afterwards [when more details had become known]).

if our "friend" bethune is still here, he'd obviously abhor the thing.

― Eisbär (llamasfur), Tuesday, 29 August 2006 23:32 (seventeen years ago) link

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