True, it gave them more time, which they misused andwasted, due to Stalin's crimes and errors.
>
>I agree that there was unbelievable heroism of the Soviet people, but they
>must have had some unbelievably military smarts too, for not only did they
>defeat the Nazis, but also overcame Stalin's mistakes.
Quite right. And the Soviets had some great generals: Chuikov, Zhukov, Rossokovsky, Yeremov--these are names of military honor in anybody's roll.
> I don't know. Seems more likely that some of what Stalin did was
>militarily smart, even some of the specifics that Justin notes, like not
>one step in retreat.
No, that allowed the Wehrmach to create huge pocket, capturing literally millions in the first weeks of the war.
>Or the Communist Party was "smart", smart enough to get around Stalin and
>win.
Some of the Party leaders made real contributions to the war: Zhdanov, whatever his later role as an ideological hitman, was a fine leader in Leningrad. Khrushchev helped to hold Stalingrad. Others did a good job elsewhere. But it's not clear that the "party" did a not as an organized entity. Stalin had made sure it wasn't one with the purges.
> I really don't want to try to rescue Stalin's rep, but I think what is more likely is that he was very evil, but had some smarts too, and the whole approach of finding that he could just do nothing right is understandable from a moral point of view , but does not square with events.
It's not what I'm saying. As you acknowledge:
>
>But I'll take the characterization that Stalin developed into a tolerable
>leader, because, I think Justin is correct to be stingy about complimenting
>Stalin.
>
OK.
Now, a change of subject:
>How about some discussion of why Stalin was an idealist ?
The Stalinist diamat is a dreary subject, and I know more about it than I care to. But the bottom line is that it idealist to assert the supremacy of the political over nature itself, as Stalin did with (a) genetics, in backing Lysenko, and (b) physics, in attacking quantum physics as idealist because it's hard to square with realism; as well as the supremacy of the political over economics, as he did in announcing the idea that socialism could be built in one backwards country.
>
>How was Nietzsche not an idealist ?
>
>
Nietzsche is complicated and fascinating. He is an antirealist, a "perspectivist." That is a sort of idealism. But Nietzsche's preferred perspective, although he would assert that it had absolute truth (nothing did for him) was materialist. read On the Genealogy of Morals, for example, where he gives a class analysis of the origin of morality and religion. N was also a materialist, indeed, an eliminativist, about the mind: he thought that thinking is brain activity. He rejected the existence of supernatural deities--actually in similar terms to Marx--"God is dead," not that "There is no God," but taht at this historical moment, it become decreasingly possibly to believe in him. --jks _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
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