Stalin - classic or dud

this is really the thread that keeps on giving

xp

most of the time ilx liberals are dicks to anyone stating something that goes against their ideology

but it looks like 34-49 million deaths can be directly linked to stalin, while globalresearch.ca says the us gov't as a whole has killed about 20 million in "victim nations" since the second world war

but

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051

remember that time Gerald Ford killed 49 million people

james garfield, history's greatest monster

nah that'd be William Henry Harrison, he managed to murder ~40 million people in just one month!

re: that globalresearch.ca link, i am not really buying the idea that we can group korean war casualties with e.g. ppl who have been killed in wars in which the u.s. supported one side like the israel-palestine conflict, label them people "america has killed," and put the resulting number right next to the atrocities of stalin and hitler

Every american president has done things just as bad as stalin.

Stalin did bad things. Every American president has done bad things. Some of the bad things done by Stalin and American presidents are of equivalent badness. Therefore, you are correct, but only if you use the reasoning I have just given.

If you meant to say "every american president has done things just as bad as the worst things stalin did", then you'll have a much tougher sale. Of course, Stalin had a much longer run compared to any American president, so he had the leisure to accumulate a much longer list of horrible actions.

maybe rodimus just meant that every American President has done things just as badly as Stalin ie made horrible management decisions, been blinded by ideology, made shitty compromises etc.

i am not really buying the idea that we can group korean war casualties with e.g. ppl who have been killed in wars in which the u.s. supported one side like the israel-palestine conflict, label them people "america has killed," and put the resulting number right next to the atrocities of stalin and hitler

yeah and those drones are just doing killing brown and black people by themselves too.

drone strikes haven't killed anywhere near the number of people Stalin did

Counting games.

sure, 100 people, a million people what's the difference

The drone deaths amount to a mere drop in the bucket next to the more than a million Cambodians & Vietnamese civilians killed by US B52 bombing under LBJ and Nixon, with Nixon easily taking the numeric lead over LBJ in the bombing non-combatants department.

^^^

Hilarious to see all of these counting games being used to somehow absolve, or to pass over the deaths of millions across the world and over decades as 'we didn't do it'.

Yeah a few black people in Yemen last week, tens killed in Baghbad some other month. Sure yeah BUT Stalin AND Hitler.

time for some counting games theory

1/375

Its not a competition!

aaaanyway on a different subject - reading the Kotkin bio, I was previously unaware of Lenin's little pas-de-deux w Germany during WWI, constantly trying to appease them, forestall an invasion etc. and it makes me wonder if folks have ever connected this with Stalin's disastrous prevarication with Hitler and subsequent shock at actually being invaded. It's not entirely clear if Stalin was privy to all of Lenin's machinations (like the "secret" aspects of the Brest-Litvosk treaty), much less approved of them, but it does make me wonder if Stalin's blind spot for German aggression was informed by Lenin's miraculous ability to narrowly avert disaster in the previous war.

Hilarious to see all of these counting games being used to somehow absolve, or to pass over the deaths of millions across the world and over decades as 'we didn't do it'.

did you see the post that started all this nonsense

ie every US president ever = Stalin

this counting game only goes up to 51

the whole statement that set off the firestorm was that "every American President did things as bad as Stalin". that statement started any "counting games"

xxxpost lol dammit Shakey

It's not entirely clear if Stalin was privy to all of Lenin's machinations (like the "secret" aspects of the Brest-Litvosk treaty), much less approved of them, but it does make me wonder if Stalin's blind spot for German aggression was informed by Lenin's miraculous ability to narrowly avert disaster in the previous war.

It's possible. Then again, Stalin wasn't fighting American-supported Mensheviks in Siberia or whatever either.

OK, I saw that - but then how is J.D.'s "resulting number" stuff any different?

there are literally zero u.s. presidents who killed as many ppl as stalin did, even the ones who belong in the war criminal hall of fame like andrew jackson or nixon

admittedly i'm not using the globalresearch.ca method of pretending that battlefield casualties in a UN police action are comparable to the holocaust

But like you said even if you counted that up its not like the US were there - they just supported one side, so that's ok.

Quite innocent to merely support a coup in Chile as the Chilean generals carried it out.

Dante had circles of hell in which the damned were punished according to the gravity of their sins, you know. Ugolino wasn't in the same circle as Brutus and Cassius.

no one's absolving US presidents' of their crimes xyzzzz__, just noting that they are different both in nature and in scale to Stalin's.

that's what bethune was trying to do anyway. by saying "american Presidents were just as bad", that forces you to get into a conversation about "degrees of bad" which is a bad look to many people and then the discussion just falls part (or at least that's the aim)

my point isn't to absolve anyone or "pass over" any deaths, just to point out that these are all v. different situations and it's possibly more than a bit misleading to point to a half-century of foreign policy, much of which was atrocious or misguided, and say that it all adds up to "the u.s. has killed 20 million people," period.

fwiw i'm p critical of u.s. foreign policy in general, and find much to criticize in every postwar president, even the better ones.

xyzzzz, get back to us on this as soon as someone starts arguing that Nixon was "innocent", or that any US president has not given orders that would be heinous crimes if they had not been committed "for reasons of state".

OK, tbh I haven't read enough of this thread (and LOL I don't know if I have the strenght). Some of the posts set me off.

My reason for the revival was that essay on Deustcher. That biog of Stalin could be...something. The deaths might not be a um, straight story.

This was true even when it came to Stalin, and it was perhaps one reason why many found his biography of Stalin so troubling. Stalin had ordered the murder of Trotsky, along with so many others, and in Deutscher’s hands, Stalin is a monster—but he is not simply a monster and Deutscher tried to understand Stalin’s motives. “It is not necessary to assume that he acted from sheer cruelty or lust for power,” Deutscher wrote in his biography. “He may be given the dubious credit of the sincere conviction that what he did served the interests of the revolution and that he alone interpreted those interests aright.”

I haven't read that one, just Montefiore (Court of the Red Tsar) and now on this Kotkin one. Fascinating figure from any angle.

An excellent book about the "team" or "gang" dynamic of the inner circle of power within The Bolsheviks is Fitzpatrick's On Team Stalin, which I'll probably read again while waiting for the 2nd Kotkin volume - which he seems to be endlessly fucking about with.

I read her Russian Revolution book twice, because it is a classic.

in Deutscher’s hands, Stalin is a monster—but he is not simply a monster and Deutscher tried to understand Stalin’s motives. “It is not necessary to assume that he acted from sheer cruelty or lust for power,” Deutscher wrote in his biography. “He may be given the dubious credit of the sincere conviction that what he did served the interests of the revolution and that he alone interpreted those interests aright.”

ideology is the handmaiden to atrocity

Autocrats act to strengthen their own position, in part by seeking to strengthen their nation's power and government's stability. The two aims, both the personal and national, become hopelessly entangled. Stalin's actions can be seen in either light and to a degree the resulting interpretations of his power-seeking and self-protection will be both correct and incorrect simultaneously.

The purges and show trials are a good example of this. They solidified his personal power, but because he and his inner circle were the government, they also solidified the government's power and stability. This unchallenged power was used to full effect during WWII.

it is pretty funny that during the military purge he told Marshal Budionny - who was a bit of an eejit, “Don’t worry: they’re only arresting the clever ones”

one of kotkin's insights produced by access to the soviet records is that behind closed doors stalin and lenin talked like they did to the public - they believed everything they said. it's pretty clear as well that terminating the NEP was entirely an ideological act and presumably if you are interested in strengthening a nation and stability you don't starve millions of people in a misguided pursuit of true communism. the nazis diverted support and money from the frontlines to the death camps late in the war; which isn't to say that they could've beaten the allies if they had their priorities in order but again ideology is what animates the greatest atrocities. to kill millions of people you have to believe in something that makes their deaths worthwhile.

The interviewer asked “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?”

Eric Hobsbawm, who died yesterday aged 95, replied instantly; “Yes”

ideology is the handmaiden to atrocity

Lets never have ideology then. That's good.

Ideology created the government Stalin ruled and ideology gave it whatever legitimacy it had, so that starving millions of people in the name of that ideology can be seen as a perverse effect of a practical imperative: not to undermine the very ideological foundation the government stood upon. Our own liberal-democratic ideology condemns this as antithetical to good government, but we do not threaten our ideological underpinning by making this condemnation, whereas the Stalinist government would have seen major concessions to bourgeois liberalism as tantamount to overthrowing themselves.

Lets never have ideology then. That's good.

whew who knew it was so easy

and the world will be as one

fp'd for mindcrime

er thoughtcrime

shit

^^^secret queensrÿche fan

Totting up deaths is pretty fucking gross u guys