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>> From: andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
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>> 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.
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> 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.
Gosh, the poor guy. Surrounded by yes-men, unable to discern the truth from reality... why, the man must have been _powerless_ to resist.
> 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.
Call me a deluded bourgeous, but something about freedom of travel, access to all kinds of luxury items, a much freer and open society, nicer clothes, computer networks, cheap books of an infinite variety makes the US of 2003 seem a lot nicer than the USSR of the 60s or 70s.
> 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.
This is like saying "Hitler gave us industrialized mass murder, but he gave us the Volkswagen. Can't call him evil."