Stalin - classic or dud

I don't think these people are exactly Bush admin lackeys:

http://iraqbodycount.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=cffe318d74f5e5222e778f6f0517a744&submit3=Enter+Site

And I'm pretty sure they're including people killed by insurgents.

Eek. No. He was. Really.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/itn/article/0,2763,184815,00.html

Some will say that Living Marxism won the "public relations battle", whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN's victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment.

But history - the history of genocide in particular - is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Muslim and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.

http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/greater_europe/document.2005-11-21.8955930068

In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors.

Kronstadt.

I wonder do Gulag deniers and Holocaust deniers ever get together to recreate the Hitler-Stalin pact?

Nonetheless, you're talking about the total number of people killed as a result of an ill-considered and perhaps immoral military excursion, and even including the people killed by the insurgency the number is dwarved by what Stalin did.

Oswald Mosely? He was pretty shoddy.

http://www.joneslanglasalle.com/en-GB/

You'd have to compare death tolls as a percentage of the population. The 19th Century didn't do too bad: US Civil War; genocides of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Maoris; famine in Ireland; deaths brought about by industrialisation in various countries: disease, malnutrition, workplace accidents. Just off the top of my head that. Human beings have always been a lot better at killing each other than they are at looking after each other.

extrapolation...tomorrow

bringing about the workers' revolution by cratering the value of their houses!

Dude did have some good soundbites.
He also gave us a lot of stats to think about.

(didn't stop him from trying, unfortunately) :-(

'tmoftewc' was by the anti-stalinist e.p. thompson, you fucking poindexter.

-- Cathy (cathyleec...), January 30th, 2006.

... el hobsbo meantime very much IS a stalinist; he remained in the party after 1956. qed.

no wai; the whole thing is that there wasn't much to stalin -- no hitler, he. the russian revolution -- never a runaway success -- went bureaucratic and stalin was the helmsman. it's not down to his personality though.

I have often heard this comment attributed to Stalin, but always detached from any context or publication... does anyone have a reliable source for it?

http://images.art.com/images/products/regular/10126000/10126167.jpg

Indeed. He even signed for a billionaire Russian capitalist.

He remained in the party, to much criticism, because he continued to believe in its ideals. That doesn't make him a Stalinist. Is every member of the Labour Party a Blairite?

There's a nice interesting Guardian article about Hobsbawm here, which explains his position quite well:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/artsandhumanities/story/0,12241,791760,00.html

well, yes they are, in the sense i'm using (see other post about the meaning of 'stalinist'). if you remained in the party you tacitly supported the party's attempts to stifle debate (eg in the 'reasoner' which ep thompson co-edited) -- which makes you a stalinist. or a supporter of the SU, whatever.