Jack of Hearts posted:

Did you guys know that the Soviet Union never invaded Poland?

Jack of Hearts posted:

Did you guys know that the Soviet Union never invaded Poland?

quote:

There is a great deal more evidence to support what I say – much more than I can present here, and no doubt much more that I have not yet even identified or located.

CommieGIR posted:

Ahahahahaha, its literally Mises.org level bullshit.

Jack of Hearts posted:

I'm hoping swampland is willing to serve as a pseudo-jrod until the original article gets back.

CommieGIR posted:

Bu..bu....but praxeology!

Jack of Hearts posted:

Stalinists have their own axiomatic system from which all of their further reasoning follows.

"Axiom the first: Stalin was cool as poo poo."

Vivian Darkbloom posted:

I was thinking about this and I feel like it's sort of true that anti-Stalinists start from a position of "Stalin was a ruthless, paranoid dictator" because there is a lot of evidence pointing to him being a ruthless, paranoid dictator. There's a risk of begging the question here which is why we have to look at the evidence, but in general there does not seem to be a lot of reasoning for questioning that position. We shouldn't treat it as axiomatic but it's different than a worldview assuming Stalin was super duper evil so he must have done exclusively evil things.

This doesn't rule out the possibility that Stalin's subordinates, completely without his knowledge, committed some of the crimes we've been discussing. God knows he had enough of them shot for that sort of thing. Of course, if we take every Stalin-era conspiracy plot seriously it looks like the Soviet government was chock-full of conspirators, working every angle imaginable. Not a great conclusion either way.

Sorry my writing is so stilted and weird, I've been writing a thesis.

Frosted Flake posted:

The Soviets suffered 800 000 casualties and lost thousands of vehicles during Operation Bagration. Their supply lines were extended and logistics had expended huge reserves of ammunition, food and fuel. I don't think it's fair to think they could have just waltzed into Warsaw. Warsaw held out against the Germans for weeks in 1939, how could an exhausted Red Army be expected to overcome that obstacle at the very end of an operation?

Effectronica posted:

Does Grover Furry or whatever his name is say anything about Stalin's personal relationship with Beria? Frankly, I think that relationship alone makes Stalin essentially criminal, without looking at anything else he did.

az posted:

Speaking about personal relationships, Stalin's dealings with his family and friends, such as his wives, children, best friend and adoptive family should clue in even the most morally retarded observer that he was a certifiable sociopath. Hint, most of them died at his orders or because of his actions, and many of those who survived suffered heavily. Cool guy Stalin.

Effectronica posted:

I think it's pretty normal to disown your son for getting captured and only talking about him again after learning he committed suicide in a POW camp.

az posted:

Speaking about personal relationships, Stalin's dealings with his family and friends, such as his wives, children, best friend and adoptive family should clue in even the most morally retarded observer that he was a certifiable sociopath. Hint, most of them died at his orders or because of his actions, and many of those who survived suffered heavily. Cool guy Stalin.

Effectronica posted:

I think it's pretty normal to disown your son for getting captured and only talking about him again after learning he committed suicide in a POW camp.

HorseLord posted:

This isn't actually true but whatever.

az posted:

Both of his sons were wrecks that would stutter in his presence because they were so afraid of him, and the only child he cared about, Svetlana, would later try to get away from him in panic after the family house cleaning had started to pick up speed with her mother's suicide. But he was a swell guy all around I mean that was just the times right??

HorseLord posted:

This isn't actually true but whatever.

KiteAuraan posted:

Trotsky was cool and did nothing wrong.

Avshalom posted:

rscott posted:

Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle? I mean, even Lenin said that he was fuckin nutso and shouldn't be his successor (unless my Robert Tucker Lenin anthology is full of poo poo) but a lot of poo poo Nazis said about the USSR was taken at face value because it reinforced a narrative that Western nations found beneficial.

swampman posted:

Thanks for the post. Making it quick Furr underlines an important fact of the famine in the Ukraine of 1932-33: the famine was not just in the Ukraine, it was enormous famine that affected a lot of Russia. People in the cities were starving just like rural peasants. The Politburo could not let the cities starve, but felt compelled to intensify the search for stores of grain, and end the illegal trade of grain speculation, since they could only understand the human factors of the famine. This combined with the basic fact that there were "counterrevolutionary" elements - kolkhozes and individual peasants alike hiding grain, or attempt to redefine it as "seed grain" - led many people to act with extreme cruelty, just as, for example, many American police today behave with extreme cruelty to enforce laws that are supposed to benefit the public. I personally think whatever they would have done, they would be accused of cruelty. Considering that the USSR absolutely needed to industrialize to survive World War 2, feeding the workers and cities was not optional.

One thing that is rarely mentioned in the grain collections is that the grain was not collected and whisked away, but was redistributed immediately - but fairly. I can come back later today and get deeper into this point with citations, if you like.

HorseLord posted:

Ahh, Lenin's "testament". That thing is most famous because it supposedly indicates that Trotsky was heir apparent, but even that guy denied that interpretation and affirmed that choices of leadership were a matter of inner party democracy. Then you look it up and read it and all Lenin even said was that Stalin was too rude to be an effective secretary.

(Lenin was mad Stalin yelled at his wife on the phone.)

quote:

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.

quote:

Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

Jack of Hearts posted:

Pretty cool of OP to invite a critical response, then almost immediately abandon ship.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

He's relocating his arguments until his opponents finally get bogged down with an inevitable stupid argument, then he's going to make a massive unstoppable push.

Famethrowa posted:

One thing I've never been able to wrap my head around with internet marxists--of all the people to wrap yourself in a loony logic pretzel about, why in the world would you pick Stalin???

I can almost understand Lenin apologists, since his murders follow marxist ideology, but Stalin defied just about every pillar of "true" marxism with his every action.

Of all the hills to die on

Famethrowa posted:

It's amazing to see Stalin's propaganda and blame shifting working 80 years later on starry eyed internet comrades (and bad historians like Furr)

Ratoslov posted:

Grover Furr sounds like a nom-de-plume for someone writing Sesame Street erotic fanfiction.

Famethrowa posted:

One thing I've never been able to wrap my head around with internet marxists--of all the people to wrap yourself in a loony logic pretzel about, why in the world would you pick Stalin???

I can almost understand Lenin apologists, since his murders follow marxist ideology, but Stalin defied just about every pillar of "true" marxism with his every action.

Of all the hills to die on

KiteAuraan posted:

What are you gonna do? Defend Pol Pot? I mean, he made a literal killing field. And Mao, well, Mao was fat and kinda an uggo.

-Troika- posted:

People on these forums have actually defended Pol Pot before, as well as denied the Cambodian genocide.

-Troika- posted:

People on these forums have actually defended Pol Pot before, as well as denied the Cambodian genocide.