How was it orchestrated if it wasn't intentional? That is now without a doubt when even the biggest fraud and an anti-intellectual recanted that view.
Whatever your view is on the motives producing the famine (current opinion is far from being the consensus you've alleged), the five year plan including collectivization was drafted in 1928 and the kulaks were already being persecuted in 1929. The consequences of the absurd demands placed on the peasants could have easily been forecasted at this point. That their deaths were instrumentalized toward some ostensible end (allegedly, the Juden were made into soap, which keeps people clean) is immaterial when they were knowingly sacrificed en masse. "Greater good" thinking is utilitarian delusion and, as this case itself shows, easily manipulable toward political goals of the elite using only weak justifications.
Fascism and anti-communism were both major forces throughout the World. Stalin predicted it exactly in his 1931 speech. He could not have been both right and needlessly paranoid as you are trying to portray here.
If your definition of "Fascism" is as nebulous as that used by Stalin (and Trotsky) as "the competing revolutionary movement which opposes my idea of a Communist insurgency", or worse yet "the bad guys" definition used since WWII, maybe. Fascism in the strict sense was confined to Italy, with National Socialism, Falangism, etc. being importantly distinct. A James Gregor's work is by far the most legitimate and careful description of Fascism in the US and a study of it will reveal important distinctions in the intellectual heritage, methods, and political goals of Fascism and other 20th century popular movements. Stalin's bloviating about "the Fascists" is barely different from Reagan's about "the Communists" - ie anything standing in the way of political ambitions.
I would not even be surprised if Trotsky was connected to the British secret service. He was after all an anti-Soviet agent of subversion. Even Lenin himself was very skeptical of him since the beginning.
Hitler himself was said to be impressed by his work:
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Despite the massive persecution of communists in fascist Italy Trotsky would go on and take a vacation there:
Trotsky was among the most influential anti-Soviets in the World, Orwell (a fellow Trotskyist) is to this day revered by the right everywhere in the World.
Sartre was anti-Soviet since at least the 50s. The entire Frankfurt school was anti-Soviet.
Ah now things are getting interesting.
So is your admiration for Communism rather just Stalinism? I'm not even exactly ideologically opposed to Stalin, I just think his methods were ridiculously wasteful and ultimately untenable. But you'll find that much of his achievements were totally out of line with what most think of the Left. He criminalized homosexuality and abortion, promoted upright conduct and sobriety, made overtures toward patriotism and religious feeling after the 1930s, even engaged in his own small-scale shoahcaust during the Zhdanovshchina. Mussolini expressed admiration for him having turned Bolshevism into "Slavic Fascism". Hitler respected him as well.
Trotsky was indeed a rat and is much more what tends to be associated with "Communism". Not only was Orwell influenced by him, so were many eventual Neoconservatives in their youth. There is a direct and unbroken lineage between the ideological imperialism of Trotsky's international revolution and the current set of wars being waged by the West in the name of ARE VALUES. Stalin's socialism in one country, in the other hand, is one more point of comparison between him and contemporary national movements (and even if there was no expressly racial element of his system, he, despite being Georgian, was something of a Russian chauvinist - this is evident as far back as his time as Comissar of Nationalities).
Now even more interesting is the Soviet Union in the mind of Western intellectuals. Likely because of the reasons enumerated above, along with several others, which make it clear that the strong, brutal, cold steel Soviet state was the exact opposite of the utopian fairy tale that these people envisioned for their "Communism", they abandoned it. "After the 1950s" is another important qualification, when Krushchev began his de-Stalinization campaign and revealed all of the "yuman rights" abuses (and outright mass murder) carried out by Stalin's state. It was clear to every beatnik soy cuck at that point that the Soviet Union was not the model they were aiming for. (You also mentioned that the Brezhnev years were uneventful and symbolic of decline, but consider the international system at this time. After the 1950s the Soviet Union had to exist effectively as an autarky. Stalin wasn't nearly so constrained and had the advantages of a decisive military victory to sustain him in his last years).
This is in start contrast with the early years of the Soviet Union, mind you. Even if Lenin himself was a frigid and cold-blooded man, the revolution he oversaw was notorious for the element of sexual licentiousness it carried. Sexual liberation was widespread after the revolution, and was even an explicit goal of the Bolsheviks:
the Bolsheviks joined and were the biggest promoter of the World League for Sexual Reform, attending its large congresses in Berlin in 1921, Copenhagen in 1928 and Vienna in 1930. The Bolsheviks’ position on homosexuality as put by their delegate Grigorii Bakkis in 1923 was:
The present sexual legislation in the Soviet Union is the work of the October Revolution. This revolution is important not only as a political phenomenon which secures the political role of the working class. But also for the revolutions which evolving from it reach out into all areas of life… [Soviet legislation] declares absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon—concerning homosexuality, sodomy and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offences against morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly as so-called “natural” intercourse.7
The previous issue of International Socialism included a positive review of Tariq Ali’s book The Dilemmas of Lenin.1 The review is right that in general the book offers an accurate telling of the Russian Revolution. But in one aspect Ali… Continue Reading →
isj.org.uk
...from some kind of socialist orgnization that looks on this favorably. This was very brash for its time, and is already very far along the path that produced the abysmal state of the modern sexual market.
Lenin, even if personally non-committal, was effectively the equivalent of a puritanical Protestant mother who "learns to love" her gay son. He also made increasing overtures toward privatization and agrarian reform before his death in 1924. He distrusted Stalin as much as Trotsky.
So if you're against Trotsky, against the Frankfurt intellectuals, what is it about Communism that recommends itself to you over Fascism (which before the influence of Hitler's hand in Italy did not promulgate any racial codes)?
There is a reason no major scholar holds that view, there is simply zero evidence for it. The move would make no sense anyways since he was not just his closest associate, but also the best friend. That is why Western pseudo-scholars claim it was a lone shooter similar to Oswald.
What do you mean? The purges were messy and extremely brutal, there was no incredible efficiency you are talking about.
Efficient in the sense that he was completely able to crush any semblance of action by the "conspirators", unless you want to consider the fact that he died eventually as the consummation of a 'plot'.
The Holocaust is the best documented genocide of all time. The Jews were also not shipped to any remote places since the death camps were always near the Polish ghettos. The Nazi hatred of the Jews was also not a secret, but the main pillar of the ideology.
I'm not even familair with the literature on Holocaust skepticism. Not like it's easy to find - it is suppressed with unmatched vehemence by the international Holocaust industry. Calling this "the best documented genocide of all time" is ridiculous when there's a tenebrous veil cast over all of it. Immediately obvious are problems with the extent of the killings (6 million? Probably not), the use of gas chambers, the nature of concentration camps (death camps or labor camps?), the motive (a few castigations in
Mein Kampf does not mean Auntie Semitism was the "central part" of National Socialism, despite all the repeated emphasis of this point in Holocaust Class).
My point was that even today great works of art are still made so comparing the cinema of old with today's cinema is indeed possible.
Regarding Polish cinema, the decline (though noticeable) wasn't as massive as I thought now that I am looking at it.
I went to the Czech movie database and only filtered the movies that have gotten 80%+ ratings (and the vast majority of people reviewing are uppity anti-communist liberals comparable to those on yelp) and 95% of them come from before 1990.
Though I didn't find an exact source of Shostakovich's quote I could believe it. It's a great paradox, most artists did not in fact like the regime (even the famous Czech director Forman who went on to produce great American movies like Amadeus or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest did indeed migrate from the East) yet were the chief benefactors of it.
I think any of these artists would find it laughable to claim that they were "benefactors" of the regime. Sure there's plenty of funding for the arts, which are hammered into the narrow form of Socialist Realism deemed acceptable by the state. If you don't obey these constraints, not only are you not getting funded, you're getting hounded by the authorities or killed. How is this preferable to the conditions set by the Third Reich, where only
entartete Kunst was actually banned but there was a certain freedom to work aside from that? The culture of Germany in the 1930s produced
Triumph of the Will, the philospophy of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, the novels of Ernst Jünger, etc. They performed well in their own right at the Olympics during these years.
Liberalism is a 100% white English made ideology and the fact some dude with a Jewish name was an adviser changes nothing.
Modern liberalism is a huge leap from John Locke and Adam Smith (even if they're a step along the decline). As mentioned above, Trotsky is as much their intellectual progenitor as these men.
(((Jeffrey Sachs))) doesn't just have a Jewish
name. He is ethnically Jewish and was the primary advisor for Russia's economic liberalization, in which the country's assests were sold off to men like (((Boris Berezovsky))). I'm not trying to say that the chosen people are the only ones responsible for the plundering of modern countries or that there's some kind of Talmudic conspiracy going on to the total exclusion of everyone else, but it's a fact that Jews are highly overrepresented in just about every process that cripples any given nation. Take a look at the CIA-backed coups in Chile, Iran, etc. you'll find the same thing.
