Nothing absurd about giving up the land to the people, the very land their ancestors unjustly gained and practiced slavery (serfdom) on. Stalin was openly preparing for a military conflict at least as early as in 1931 (We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make up this gap in ten years. Either we do it or they will crush us.-Stalin 1931) and there was just no time left for the vestiges of feudalism to remain intact for much longer.
I do not buy this justification and it sounds like the standard excuse furnished every time a brutal action is needed to realize a political ambition: "human rights" or "greater good".
Again, the relevant five year plan was developed in 1928 - 13 years before Germany attacked and still long before it was in any kind of position to with the Versailles disarmament in place, the Weimar parliament in gridlock, and the German Communists being a major political force. In 1928, the NSDAP was still a very marginal political force and Italy was and remained undeveloped enough to be incapable of independent action. I can't buy "we need to strip the peasantry bare and leave them to die because we need all of their output now" as a legitimate explanation. I doubly can't buy the "your ancestors were slaveholders" argument, especially given its specious use in modern day America, even more so considering the descendants of these slaves were the ones sacrificed at the altar of industrial productivity.
It wasn't even that collectivization was an especially productive system. The kolkhozes were just set up to rob the countryside.
I subscribe to the explaination offered by Mises in 1927:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error” -Mises
Fascism is essentially a reaction to the growth of Marxism in Europe. It's an emergency makeshift called in by the liberal elite itself. Hitler was a huge anglophile and many fascist leaders would use liberal free marketeers to help them administrate the economy (liberal finance minister Hjalmar Schacht, liberal finance minister Alberto De Stefani or the infamous adviser Milton Friedman).
JFL so effectively:
the competing revolutionary movement which opposes my idea of a Communist insurgency
or "fascism is capitalism in crisis"
Of course Mises would view it as a 'makeshift', since Fascism was ultimately subordinated to a degree by liberal forces. This does not make it a mere negative image of Liberalism or Marxism, but rather a ideologically autonomous force with its own genesis. It was a flawed system, but the narcissistic Marxist interpretation would have it that the 20th century national movements were merely the reactionary response to its own unique positive truth, all subordinated under the name "Fascism". In actuality, the corporate structure of the Fascist state was meant to streamline and express the needs of distinct but cooperative sectors of the state economy, an heir to the syndicalism of Georges Sorel and even providing something of a reworking of feudal principles rescued from pre-liberal history. The economy, state, and society were to be organized as a set of pluralistic guilds encouraging participation at every level from citizen, worker, and employer.
Of course, the ambitions of doctrinal Fascism were not exactly realized. But this was due to the constraints the state inherited and the international situation in which it had to work - same reason you don't get 'real' Communism or a 'truly' free market.
Everybody respected Stalin. The criminalization of homosexuality was not out of spite, it was the default policy everywhere in the World at the time. In fact I am not aware of a single quote where Stalin attacked homosexuals. It is also usually viewed that the increase of religious freedom during the war was for pragmatic and not ideological reasons.
Everybody? How about, uh, Churchill, for one?
“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”.
No Cards, No Flowers
I have heard that too but I think it's more of a libertardian cop out than anything else. Trotskyism was most likely popular among the youth back then and the switch to conservative liberalism wasn't too difficult since Trotskyism is basically all about individualism and "freedom" (right wing values). Libertadians are always trying to disassociate the liberal ideology with war so they have all of these conspiracy theories about how it's the communists/NWO running the show and what not.
Contemporary national movements are fascist and liberal in their core. Most of these people are basically liberal conservative extremists who still spout the same nonsense about Anglo values of freedom, pseudo conservative virtue signaling (like the hatred of the homosexuals) and racial chauvinism. Stalin could be in my view however compared to nationalistic nation builders like Lincoln, Bismark, Ataturk or de Gaulle.
Bolded is exactly the point I wanted to make, in addition to the nexus occurring around their 'democratic' imperial projects.
As for the evolution itself, it's well documented. James Burnham and Irving Kristol are two major examples of neocons formerly active in Trotskyite organizations.
But I'm going to have to strongly contest calling individualism and 'freedom' "right wing values". This is politicalspectrum-tier materialism that reduces 'left vs right' to a measure of economic liberalization. Many taxonomies have been attempted here, but as I see it the 'Right' is characterized by the recognition of natural hierarchies, respect for inherited tradition and religious wisdom, personal stolidity, a circular view of time, essentialism, and a prescriptive set of codes to prevent the excesses of human nature. The 'Left' on the other hand, is characterized by a view of linear progression, historical immanence, a faith in human perfectability, equality, and emphasis on social construction and education -
liberte, egalite, fraternite.
Liberalism, the Enlightenment, Capitalism, etc. are all products of a massive social and intellectual movement
leftward in the 18th Century. It is all fundamentally the product of the same wordly utopianism that led to Marxism and all its myriad branches since. Marx even himself thought capitalism superior to feudalism and an intermediate step in the metamorphosis leading eventually to Communism. It is obvious in what relation this stands with sexual liberation. Engel's polemics against the 'oppression of women in the bourgeois family' are informed by exactly the same tendency that informed the moral laxity of liberals like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, both quoted here in a succinct passage:
There is a flipside to this tradition of seeing sodomy as the enemy of the natural economy of the household: The counter-tradition of liberal economics founded by Adam Smith challenged the household model by seeing economics as rooted in the free trade of goods between households and nations. Precisely because Smith was more receptive to previously condemned or taboo economic activities like trade and manufacturing, he was also more open to sexual liberalism.
Smith’s friend Alexander Dalrymple is now thought to have written an anonymous tract, Thoughts of an Old Man (1800), recalling that the founder of modern economics believed that “sodomy was a thing in itself indifferent”—a radical thing to say even in private at a time when sodomy was a capital offence, condemned by church and state.
…Smith’s new and somewhat inchoate ideas were pushed further by Bentham, who in an unpublished essay observed that sodomy “produces no pain in anyone” but “on the contrary it produces pleasure.”
…It’s no accident that in 1787 Bentham wrote a “Defence of Usury,” which tried to convince Adam Smith to take a more benevolent view of the hitherto morally sanctioned economic activity. On the subject of both usury and sodomy, Bentham’s inclination was to take Smith’s liberal impulses to their logical end. Bentham was in favour of consensual adult acts (be they sexual or economic) that led to greater happiness, whether they violated pre-existing taboos or not.
Fascism was not even a strictly Right wing movement. Mussolini was a major figure in the Italian Socialist Party and Fascism initially borrowed heavily from contemporary socialist theory. This is reflected even in the work of Giovanni Gentile, the preeminent theoretician of Fascism and who shared with Marx a major influence in Hegel's idea of the immanent logic of history, even writing an early book on Marx's relationship with Hegelian theory.
Your source is a Trotskyist website and as all Trotskyists they engage in obscurantism and call Stalin a counter-revolutionary. Lenin was himself an opponent of "free love":
On “Free Love”
This is one part of Lenin’s reply to Inessa Armand’s plan to publish a pamphlet for women workers. Lenin says that the section on women’s’ “demand for free love” should be eliminated because it is a “bourgeois, not a proletarian demand.” In other words, “what matters is the objective logic of class relations in affairs of love,” not subjective hopes.
Does the term “free love” really express the interests of the proletarian in “freedom from material (financial) considerations in love,” and freedom “from material cares”? The answer is no. What, then, does this term express? Lenin points out that “in modern society the most talkative and noisy ‘top strata’ mean by ‘free love’” such things as “freedom from earnestness in love,” “freedom from childbirth,” and “freedom to commit adultery.” Therefore, he finds the slogan of “free love” to be a demand of bourgeois women.
Lenin distrusting Stalin is a myth promoted by Trotsky himself and now even Western scholars are beginning to see that the so called "Lenin's testament" was a fraud:
Again, I am totally indifferent to Lenin the man as he thought of sexual liberation. It remained true that the early days of the Soviet Union were characterized by a remarkably high degree of sexual freedom.
from Grigory Batkis, a text submitted to the World League for Sexual Reform (same one mentioned in the last post):
The Sexual Revolution in Russia
Homosexuality was decriminalized (then recriminalized under Stalin in 1934 as I said - instead of being 'in line with the times' it was just a revocation of a radical anachronism).
Alexandra Kollontai was a major figure in the Soviet women's movement. She's written about at length in E Michael Jones'
Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control. She was a very 'modern' type of feminist for 1920.
From the Russia Beyond site:
Kollontai promoted a concept of the ‘new woman’ – one freed from the oppression of marriage, household work and the business of raising children; all these chores must be taken on by society and state. They would take on children’s education (including sexual), urge a move toward a nationwide catering industry, collective housing, foster care and so on. For Kollontai, love was to be freed, too – civil partnership would take the place of traditional marriage.
The early Soviet Union was morally rootless and remarkably degenerated in matters of this kind. It's to Stalin's credit that he fixed this. A major point that gives his social policy a significantly "Rightist" element compared to other Bolsheviks.
A cursory search about the testament and I only found one source claiming forgery, VA Sakharov's 'Forgery of the Lenin Testament'. Only other complaints were that Trotsky gave a tendentious account of some of the passages.
I won't claim to be an expert on this history, but it seems like you're going out of your way to controvert accepted opinion. This was pretty obviously one of the most brutal and obfuscated periods of the 20th century and you'd have it that all of the indictments of Stalin were part of a massive propaganda campaign that has a uniqu and ever-burning hatred for the totally dead-and-buried ideology of Stalinism, but somehow treats the Third Reich fairly in spite of a much clearer motive against it held by much more obvious agents.
That is mainstream history now. Stalin was either poisoned or had a stroke but in either case the doctor's help was severely delayed by about a full day.
Even if Stalin was poisoned (doubt it), it would have been by a totally different set of people than the ones he executed on an unprecedented scale and it happened at the very end of a remarkably long life all things considered.
There is basically none, it's mostly this just this fringe Italian neonazi with no degree Carlo Mattogno.
Holocaust denial is illegal in a few countries only. Nobody is suppressing such research in the USA and in many other countries. This is a cop out.
Naive to think research isn't being suppressed just because people don't get jailed in the US. James Watson, who elucidated the 3D structure of DNA and was a remarkably eminent scientist, was sacked from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories because he questioned the tacitly enforced narrative of race being a' social construct', pointing instead to evidence that showed a racial basis for cognitive differences. This is in ostensibly 'apolitical' matters such as the basic elaboration of life's mechanistic workings. Now consider how the control of historical consensus is treated.
But no bro, not just Mattogno, skepticism is very active here:
en.wikipedia.org
There's the famous infographic about the census of the European Jewry only counting several million people before the war, yet six million people were supposed to have been killed in Germany + adjoining territories alone. I really don't care too much though, and it's sufficient for me to note that the Holocaust is weaponized and shoved down the throats of every Westerner from kindergarten on, while the Holodomor is perfectly open to debate in academia..
Not all art was politically driven, in fact as someone from Eastern Europe I rarely find any communist propaganda in Eastern European movies or music. Not to mention the artists would make more money than the top communist officials including the general secretary himself.
Not in the later years, but there was a centripetal process of artistic freedom that occurred after Stalin. Under his rule, I'd be interested to see some outstanding examples of visual art or literature that didn't correspond to the principles of Socialist Realism.
You'd have to be over 30 to have a direct memory of which regime ruled the country you're in. And by the 1980s, they were much more culturally open than in the Stalin years.
This one is subjective but I'd go and say nothing of particular cultural value was made and much was lost, even Junger was banned from writing.
Was he? Didn't look like it. Even though he was in open conflict with the NSDAP and routinely scorned them, he was not treated with any semblance of harshness:
- 1939, Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs)
- 1942, Gärten und Straßen
- 1943, Myrdun. Briefe aus Norwegen
- 1945, Der Friede. Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas und an die Jugend der Welt
Where is the huge leap though? Modern liberalism (economically speaking) is a mix of the Austrian School and Keynesianism, both direct sons of the old classical liberalism.
See my exposition above.
That is what you are clearly implying. White Anglo Saxons are overrepresented in everything too. The Jews have had a very successful history just like the Anglos so no wonder these are the people who are in charge not to mention American Jews are usually blue eyes white skinned people racially almost no different to any other European. This is your typical American Jew taking a DNA test
Nothing close to a comparison. Yes, I realize WASPs are also notorious saboteurs, but Jews routinely stand out as being truly overrepresented. A very small fraction of the general population, highly active in internationalism, finance, and propaganda. Overrepresented in elite schools mainly due to nepotism. Thing is, I don't claim they're acting independently of the rest of the cosmopolitan elite - they just happen to be very, very suited to this milieu. The utopian spirit of Judaism is related to the above discussion of forced and directed 'progress'.
As far as genetics, a simple ancestry test can identify marker associated with the Ashkenazi, who were very reproductively insular during their time in Europe. Again though, this isn't even a point I wish to emphasize.
Only thing worse than an ethnicoper is someone who comes into a thread just to say "I DON'T LIKE IT IN HERE" 4 times.
