Stalin - classic or dud

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

What u should do is work out the average worth of the dead in each group

https://www.iraqbodycount.org/

there is an argument for sites like this though, but measuring the death tolls of atrocities like you are playing trump cards is bollocks.

against each other*

Nonetheless, defending Stalin is stupid.

captain save-a-stalin over here

Easy from over there tbf

on the one hand:

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.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, 4 April 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on the other:

corbynbro‏ @no_talent_shan Feb 14
Replying to @investmntwanker

peace negotiations have stalled after I repeatedly asked "which one was Stalin? the hot one?" in a diplomatic meeting

This is sorta interesting:

If you think Stalin was a "dictator" please read this thread on how he fought to democratize the government of the Soviet Union.

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

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