Any Stalinists around these parts?

Post Reply New Topic

I've always been a secret admirer of Uncle Joe(Josef Stalin, or course ). Even though he is by far the most hated historical tyrant in all of the western world(especially amurca); far more so than Hitler. But why is he viewed as worse than Hitler? I'm not convinced the reason is simply because he killed more people than Hitler. I suspect there is something about his character and his political philosophy that people find so insatiably revolting. What I know is that he was an extremely vindictive person with a hatred of people overall and a violent temper. Discuss....

Why would you admire anybody that murdered tens of millions of people?

Нет.

Well for one, I don't admire his crimes that you speak of. But I can separate a person from what they do. Many people admire Hitler despite their disgust for what he did during WWII.

Admire what? His mustache? His charming personality?

How can you separate a person from what they did in life?

Stalin was a vicious tyrant. Even the former Soviet Union later distanced itself from him.

I too have a very strong vindictive streak and a desire to get back at the world for treating me and other people so poorly.

But I seek more insight into why he's more reviled than Hitler...

I'm what other socialists would pejoratively call a "Stalinist". Nobody actually calls themselves "Stalinists" because there's no such thing as "Stalinism", only Marxism-Leninism, as Stalin made no significant theoretical contribution. What capitalist media calls "Stalinist" is usually whatever they feel like, even if it's blatantly un-Marxist. (The DPRK, for example.) They just use it as a buzzword.

The stuff about his "hatred of people" and "violent temper" is preposterous and unfounded. The number of people executed during his thirty years as the GS was more around 800,000 (mostly common criminals) and had little to do with Stalin personally. The "tens of millions" described in Western materials is the result of absurdly ascribing all kinds of deaths completely out of the government's control to Stalin's evil plot. Like famine caused by kulaks (rich capitalist peasants) destroying/hoarding/selling on the black market of crops (rather than have them collectivized), or prisoners dying under Nazi occupation.

...But I'm not really interested in arguing about that right now, so I'll just say: Yes, there are a few of us around.

This, mainly. Stalin was worse than Hitler in that literally nobody in the entire Soviet Union, not even members of his own family, could see their safety guaranteed for any amount of time. He once had apartments built for the political elite, and had them outfitted with special access doors for the secret service so he could have people dragged off to be tried or murdered on suspicion of subversive activities. At times, one anecdote says, there was a realistic chance of being killed or sent off to a prison camp worse than many concentration camps if you told the local baker you didn't like one of Stalin's policies.

Under Hitler, some people could have a good guarantee of life - blonde women, commissioned artists, non-design factory workers and local collaborators. Under Stalin, there was literally no-one with any sense of security. From the poorest peasant or factory worker to his personal secretary, everyone ran the immediate risk of death upon upsetting Stalin. Even during the later years of the Soviet Union, one in every two hundred people were informants, and you could never know who they were. That breeds a kind of manic paranoia. You can't even tell if your own wife is going to rat on you and have you executed, and much like renaissance-era witch hunts, a lot of people reported their neighbours so they could have a larger slice of the meagre (famine in the Ukraine, anyone?) cake. Did anyone read 1984? The Soviet Union must have felt like that.

He was insidious in social life, paranoid about everyone around him, irrational in justice and opportunistic in politics.

Good to know. Keep in mind that I'm not talking about political theory as much as I'm talking about political practices. Am I correct to assume that you are an authoritarian socialist rather than a democractic socialist? I do not, however, think that the anecdotes about Stalin's temper are unfounded. Especially given what he want through growing up.

With Hitler, there was always someone there in German society who was willing to risk arrest and execution to conspire to remove or assassinate him. The most famous case being the Stauffenberg bomb plot. With Stalin, there was such an iron grip on the country that there is no evidence of genuine assassination conspiracies - only imagined plots that inspired the purges and mass murders to sate Stalin's paranoia.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I don't think he is more reviled than Dolphy.
I think the Nazis still rate as the lowest.

on mister-poll

http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/206215/resultsWorst person ever results hardly scientific but still telling.

Who are you hanging out with that like Hitler better than Stalin?

Presumably, the original poster is hanging out with people who'd pick "gassing the Jews" when offered the choice between gassing the Jews and starving the Ukrainians. Neither are very tempting.

I don't think he was paranoid at all. He loved power, loved being in power, and did what was necessary to maintain his power. Instilling fear in people is a way to coerce them to obey you. And the insecurity he created among his people, especially those in the upper echelons of power and those who were close to him, prevented any opposition to him from successfully organizing.

What I find so truly vile about Hitler was the very fact that his regime was that the man relished injustice and came up with the most idiotic and delusional fantasies to rationalize it. The terrible injustice of the Nazi regime and the fact that Hitler singled out certain groups of innocent people for suffering and death makes him the lowest scum in existence.

If there is no such thing as Stalinism, why would people call you that? Stalin was a revisionist. He was not a Marxist or a Leninist.



Yes. That part is true. Even anticommunists and supporters of corporate capitalism, like President Obama, are regularly called communists. However, the American media (in particular) are pretty far to the right (based on global standards).



If, as you said, there are no Stalinists, why are you now claiming to be one?

He was a Red Fascist gangster thug. His regime was the Russian Mafia writ large.

That sick monster not only killed a lot of innocent people, but he ran his country into the ground. The Moscow Subway does not justify the gulags and the disaster he made out of Russian and Ukranian agriculture. He changed Russia from a country that could feed itself into a semi-arid wasteland that had to steal the food from the mouths of other peoples.

ruveyn