Over brucellosis, an extremely contagious bovine disease?
Sure, lurking somewhere in the background, maybe. It sounds at least as plausible as, say, blaming illegal immigrants for the shortafe of affordable and declining real wages....
DC
On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
> Chris Doss wrote:
>
> I'm kind of curious as to how Ted knows this. Did he spend a lot of time in
>> pre-Revolutionary Russia hanging out with peasants?
>>
>
> As I've pointed out before, there's a great deal of contemporary social
> history documenting that the kind of "individuality" characteristic of the
> Russian peasant commune was the kind consistent with the role assigned to it
> by Sergei Kara-Murza in creating "the repressions of 1937-38".
>
>> 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.
>>
>> In 2000 the newspaper Duel published excerpts from the very instructive
>> memoirs of the lawyer B.G. Menshagin from Smolensk about how trials against
>> "enemies of the people" took place in their regions in 1937. He simply
>> relates, without embellishments, cases from his practice in which he was
>> appointed as a lawyer in such trials. In one instance, eight people --
>> leaders in the regional cattle-breeding administration, veterinarians, and
>> the secretary of the raikom -- were accused of sabotage. Three confessed;
>> the others did not. One, a science employee of the Moscow VNII or
>> experimental veterinary science, had been sent to the region to diagnose
>> "brutsellez" (CD – I don't know this word, I think it's some kind of
>> disease). Animals that have recently become sick show no external symptoms,
>> and the diagnosis is made on the basis of a reaction of the immune system –
>> upon injection with antiserum, an abscess forms, like that in the case of
>> smallpox inoculation.
>>
>> This employee and the others were accused of infecting livestock. The
>> witnesses at the trials were milkmaids; in their eyes, these saboteurs had
>> killed the best cows, which they had infected themselves and then sent to
>> the knacker's yard. One milkmaid said the following at the trial: "She is
>> such a good cow! He stuck her and the next day she fell sick! The abscess is
>> big." The other milkmaids spoke in the same vein: "Oh, she was such a good
>> cow, I'm so sorry for her. He stuck her and she died. He killed the cow."
>>
>> General meetings were called in all the collective farms and sovfarms and
>> the court was presented with a veritable tome of demands. They were all
>> approximately the same: "We ask the proletarian court to kill the bastards!"
>> How was it possible in such circumstances for a lawyer to be asked for his
>> expertise! All eight people were sentenced to be shot. The peasants were
>> genuine in their belief, and the judge and prosecutor were afraid to move
>> against the clearly expressed "will of the people," which had obtained such
>> an effective strength. The sentence is subject to no appeals! In the given
>> case the wives of the condemned gathered money and sent lawyers to Moscow,
>> where they were received by an assistant of Vyshinsky and quickly received a
>> pardon, but this happened in far from all instance.
>>
>> One can imagine that this mass "witch hunt" craze was generated by
>> interfactional contradictions in the Party elite that were made possible by
>> repressions with ritual accusations (sabotage, spying, etc.). But then a
>> separate mass sentiment arose, and it was used by the authorities to solve
>> pressing political tasks. Then, it was necessary to carry out the
>> complicated task of "calming things down" – to pull society out of its
>> passionate mood.
>>
>> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2006/2006-October/020858.html>
>
>
>
> Ted
>
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