>From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
>
>Look, I'm as anti-Stalinist as any and more than most,
>but I don't see how saying someone is not, in some
>sense, insane is apologetic. In my line of work, which
>includes criminal defense, insanity is a _defense_. It
>suggests that the "defendant" didn't knwo what hewas
>doing, didn't know it was wrong, or couldn't help
>himself from doing it. None of those things apply to
>Stalin, although we cannot be sure about the second.
>Maybe S believed his own propaganda, and so had false
>beliefs that the people he had starved, purged,
>tortured, shot, and imprisoned, were all wicked and
>dangers to socialism,a nd so it wasn't wrong.
My own hunch is that Stalin, surrounded as he was by people who told him what he wanted to hear. eventually grew to believe his own propaganda. I think this phenomenon is probably quite common among people surrounded by yes-men.
>Btw, as to Chris' notion that we cannot be objective
>about Stalin, that is quite right, but that's not an
>objection. He's not objective about Stalin either.
>he's a sort of defender because he is a fan of the fSU
>that Stalin, as much as anyone created. I'm not so
>much, which is why I am an anti-Stalinist.
I wouldn't say I'm a "fan" of the USSR. It had its bad points and good points. If saying it had good points means I'm a "fan," fine. The USSR had zero poverty. Almost everybody was poor, but no one was in abject poverty. This is just true. There were no chiildren begging on the streets of Moscow in the 1970s, unlike today.
I think I could be quite happy living in the USSR in the 60s or 70s. I would be eating shitty food and drinking piss beer for the most part and not have much in the way of luxury items, but then again I would have no worries about my economic future whatsoever and have lots of leisure time. Is that better than post-1991 Russia, or worse, or better or worse than the 2003 US for example? I don't know. It's apples and oranges, a matter of taste.
I admit to having conflicted feelings about Stalin. I think everybody in Russia has conflicted feelings about Stalin. He killed a hell of a lot of people. He also transformed the Soviet Union from a backward shithole into a high-tech superpower. What that man managed to accomplished is truly amazing, breathtaking. It boggles the mind. Stalin was a builder, probably the greatest builder in history, as well as being possibly the greatest destroyer. He broke a hell of a lot of eggs, and made one hell of an omelette. He is a very complicated historical figure.
btw
>there is some revisionist history on Caligula that
>indicates that was a capable imperial administrator,
>or anyway that the empire was competentlt administered
>as long as it wasn't something that attracted the
>empreror's personal sexual interest.
I expect Pugliese to forward a series of URLs detailing why such people are apologists for Imperial Rome. :) Revisionist dogs!
BTW I agree with yout Tiberius comparison. I still think though that the best historical parallel for Stalin is Peter the Great. Stalin was Peter the Great with electricity and railroads, and I think history will eventually regard him as such.
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