[lbo-talk] Stalin, democrat

[Jim Devine]

Chris Doss quoted:
> "A very important feature of the "Stalinist
> repressions" consists in that the actions of the
> government were met with mass support, which it would
> have been impossible to either organize or imitate. It
> would also have been impossible to carry out such
> repressions if the personnel of the enforcement
> agencies and the victims themselves had not accepted
> them as legitimate (although each victim likely
> considered his particular case to be a mistake). This
> is obvious not only because there were hardly no
> attempts made by people to protect themselves from
> repressions, even by those who had the means. In the
> repressions against the high military command death
> sentences were given to victims by their colleagues,
> who at the next stage would become victims themselves.
>
> "When we talk about the repressions, we avoid looking
> at one obvious, but unpleasant, fact. The repressions
> of 1937-38 to a great extent were created not by state
> totalitarianism, but by a profound _democracy_. But
> not a democracy of civil society of rational
> individuals, but the archaic one of the peasant
> commune. This is an enormous dark force, and when it
> is allowed to carry out its will, innocent heads roll.
> For it is easy for the peasant commune to believe in
> plots and the secret power of aliens, of "enemies of
> the people." When such hatred, possessing the power of
> an epidemic, rules the peasant commune, every witch
> will burn. And the Russian peasant commune is not
> crueler in this, than, for example, that of Western
> Europe -- it simply occured there earlier than it did
> among us."

this is the "democracy" of scape-goating. It's also a matter of the
Party leadership giving little bits of power to its underlings to
repress and to loot.
--
Jim Devine / "Sanity is a madness put to good use." -- George Santayana.