Russian Tensions
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Alan:
Like the old peoples say: It’s already ironed
This is the real accurate concept of liberalism and Neo liberalism. We have also defined the real concept of Nazism/Fascism
I was called names first starting with a “fascist” a “fool” and “sickening”. Go back and check for yourself. Given that reception is it any wonder my tone shifted? Perhaps a little introspection is called for on behalf of your fellow liberals, and blame spread a bit more evenly.
This is the real concept of Fascism/Nazism. It is not the Stalinist/Trotskyist conception which is completely wrong and they support the concept of the dictatorship of the vanguard party to lead, a concept that came from Ferdinand Lasalle, one of the peoples that opposed Karl Marx. Like someone said: We are all Lasalleans
Hi Alan,
I appreciate the hard work you put in and the difficulty in moderating what can be a very lively forum. A bit like being a ref in a local league, without the ref you can’t have a game.
In the spirit of cooperation and harmony therefore I will refrain from calling True Scotsman a Smeggy Bell End, I will simply allow his postings to reinforce my viewpoint.
I did review this topic thread, TS.
“Damn your pro-capitalist, murderous crap!” was the first epithet thrown at you in message 232797
Message 232822 where you replied “Spoken like a true coward.” to the comment “We shun it as mass murder, whatever the colour of the flag.”
7. You are free to express your views candidly and forcefully provided you remain civil.
Now heed the rule.
“In the spirit of cooperation and harmony therefore I will refrain from calling True Scotsman a Smeggy Bell End, I will simply allow his postings to reinforce my viewpoint.”
So does Bojo Brains get chastised and have to sit in the naughty corner with me now?
“I explained the constitutional position of the Polish government that refute’s Furr’s case that there was not a government.”
And you’d be wrong. This from “Great Britain, The Soviet Union and the Polish Government in Exile” Chapter 2.
“The Polish government decided to move to neutral Rumania with the intention to proceed to France and there to re-establish its operation…The seemingly uncomplicated passage through Rumania, however, turned out to be a controversial matter culminating in the downfall of the prewar government…On Sept 18…Each minister (of the Polish government) was asked to resign and pass through Rumania as a private citizen. When the Poles refused to comply they were interned…For practical purposes there was no government after September 17, since the interned officials could not function as the constitutional authority.”
You have used Wikipedia as your source. It is not reliable, especially regarding ww2 and the Soviet Union.
“You suggest that Poland’s government should have relocated to the USSR. How did that pan out?”
It would have been the honorable thing to do.
“No point in continuing your revisionist history conspiracy. The Katyn Massacre was perpetuated by the Soviets. The documents are there and accepted as genuine by scholars and more importantly the Russian government.”
No, it was the Nazis. The “scholars” are careerists and liars more worried about job prospects and axes to grind than the truth.
“Furr is an out-lier and most likely an outright liar.”
He has tenure in a separate field and therefore is not in fear of losing his job as would happen to any “Soviet scholar” who dared address the truth of the matter.
“He is pseudo-historian cherry-picking his evidence to prove a hypothesis instead of following evidence to develop one.”
He does nothing of the sort. If you are so sure of your position I challenge you to contact him and challenge him directly rather than snipe at him behind his back. He answers emails.
“The CPGB was following the instructions of Comintern in being anti-war at first. Actually, it was pro-war initially but reversed its position to anti-war when told by Comintern.”
As I’d suspected. What of it?
““Should the Soviet Union have allowed the Nazis to occupy the entirety of former Polish territory? Yes or no?”
My answer is the same as if Germany had invaded Britain. It is the same as I have for the Ukrainians facing occupation by Russia which I have already stated. The answer is yes.”
Well, thankfully you weren’t in charge. You know of Generalplan Ost and you say “yes”. Unbelievable.
“There are many ways of resisting oppression by civil disobedience when there is a determined opposition.”
Lol, the Nazis would just put you in an oven. Civil disobedience doesn’t work with genocidal fascists.
“Thomas More has already mentioned Denmark’s response where Jews went unmolested and did not need to wear the yellow star.”
They just didn’t have time to get around to them. But they would have. You know that, right?
“No point in referring to GPO and the Holocaust and other secret plans as justification for the war. Those were not the motives but the consequences of it.”
Huh? the Holocaust and Ost are why the Nazis had to be defeated on the battlefield.
“The Nazis managed to maintain control with the propaganda line that it was a war of defence, just as all other belligerent nations do.”
There you go again, being a liberal. Russia is actually Nazi Germany, don’t you know?
“If the enemy does not fight, Goebbels would not have been able to convince Germany to make war.”
Alan’s pro-tips. When attacked by Nazis roll over and die. Great advice. Lol
Regarding Grover Furr a little bit of research tells us that by his own admission “My first field of specialization is medieval studies. I don’t have any formal certificate that would qualify me to do research on the history of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time.”
What he actually means by Medieval Studies is Medieval literature studies.
Just to clarify from an Academic pint of view, there is a difference between the academic standing between UK University granting Professorship and the US system. Traditionally in the UK, a professor has an endowed chair whereas in the US a professor is usually a senior lecturer. The university which Professor Furr teaches Medieval English Literature (Montclair State) is not in the top 100 US University rankings and is ranked between 400-500 in terms of one US ranking system.
That is not an attempt to decry Professor Furr, but to contextualise his work, much like in the way Furr encourages his readers on his web pages.
I haven’t had a great deal of time to run through Furr’s work (my own need to earn a crust being a pressing concern today). However reading through a few of his articles and on line postings. His main thrust seems to be no that there was mass repression and political murders, but that he was not aware of this, following on the view of J. Arch Getty that the disputed the idea that the repressions of the 1930s had been actions planned in advance by Stalin. Similarly he puts forward that the Ukrainian 1932-33 famine was a man made famine. Stalin, he puts forward was the arch democrat, it was he who discovered the crimes of Yezhov and when he found out Yezhov was executed and that he replaced Yezhov with Beria in all good faith.
There is more but I have ordered some of Furr’s books and I will try to get through them and offer a degree of critique.
With regards to Khruschev, his aim was to hobble the democratic reforms that Stalin was planning to implement and that Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, etc. “accepted, even if unwillingly, the secret subtext of the “Secret Speech” and assented to it.” (Furr’s own words).
My first response to this is that it bears a bit of a resemblance to the arguments put forward by Hitler apologists, i.e. that Hitler didn’t know about the holocaust. Now before TS blows a gasket, I am not saying that it is the same thing, I am saying that the apologists for Hitler used a similar argument about the events.
What is interesting that Furr does not deny the mass repression, or that there was a famine in Ukraine, but rather that it wasn’t Stalin’s fault.
So taking up the example of the great purges, Furr acknowledges that there was great terror and that unjustified state killings took place (let’s face it, if that wasn’t the case, why did he have Yezhov shot). He was hoodwinked by Yezhov, that Yezhov over reached his powers and Stalin did not know about this. This begs the question, if Stalin was this great leader, why did he not know about it. If a modern day political leader was unaware of the fact that 100s of thousands of his citizens had been assassinated, saying “Sorry but I didn’t know it was happening” would not really be considered as a good excuse for the failing.
Similarly if Stalin the leader of the great Soviet state capitalist system didn’t “deliberately plan” the Ukrainian famine, but rather it occurred either by mistake or natural circumstances. It begs the question why did Stalin not avoid the mistake in the first place or if it was a natural disaster why did he not plan a contingency. It is also interesting (and I have looked through the data) that no famine took place in any of the similar geographic areas, Rumania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, etc. Was the Ukrainian famine such an improbably localised natural disaster?
Let’s take this a bit further, take for instance The Trial of Twenty the Twenty one, which is well known of and was fully reported in the USSR press (we have copies of it in our HO library and archive no doubt). In that trial the following people were found guilty and were all proclaimed members of the Right – Trotskyist bloc that supposedly intended to overthrow socialism and restore capitalism in Russia,
1. Nikolai Bukharin – Marxist theoretician, former head of the Communist International and member of the Politburo
2. Alexei Rykov – former premier and member of the Politburo
3. Nikolai Krestinsky – former member of the Politburo and ambassador to Germany
4. Christian Rakovsky – former ambassador to Great Britain and France
5. Genrikh Yagoda – former head of the NKVD
6. Arkady Rosengoltz – former People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade
7. Vladimir Ivanov – former People’s Commissar for the Timber Industry
8. Mikhail Chernov – former People’s Commissar for Agriculture
9. Grigori Grinko – former People’s Commissar for Finance
10. Isaak Zelensky – former Secretary of the Central Committee
11. Sergei Bessonov
12. Akmal Ikramov – Uzbek leader
13. Faizulla Khodjayev – Uzbek leader
14. Vasily Sharangovich – former first secretary in Byelorussia
15. Prokopy Zubarev
16. Pavel Bulanov – NKVD officer
17. Lev Levin – Kremlin doctor
18. Dmitry Pletnyov – Kremlin doctor
19. Ignaty Kazakov (ru) – Kremlin doctor
20. Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky (ru)
21. Pyotr Kryuchkov – secretary of Maxim Gorky
This begs the question, if this was genuinely the case, and if Yezhov was as culpable as Furr claims and if Khruschev, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, etc. did plan to subvert democracy for their own personal gain, who was the person who appointed them?
It’s a bit like a football manager saying it wasn’t his fault that the team was rubbish. Who bought the players.
Yezhov was appointed to replace Yagoda (no 5 on the list). So in terms of appointing Yogoda (according to Furr’s already admitted take on things) Stalin had messed up (that’s why he was executed), but Stalin compounded his incompetence by appointing Yezhov! and I didn’t even mention Beria.
It has an echo of Donald Trump explaining that the top people he had appointed turned out to be idiots, well who appointed them Donald? If all of these corrupt and venal bureaucrats existed in the Stalin era, then who appointed them?Just a thought here. We know TS idolises Stalin and calls him a great leader of socialism (a contradiction in terms).
However, Putin does not claim to be a socialist at all. The symbols of his state are the Tsarist double eagle (with St. George) and the flag of Imperial Russia.
Putin is openly Orthodox.
If Stalin’s name has again come to the fore, it is as a saint of the Russian Church, in ikons and holding a cross, with angels overhead. Also, St. Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian equivalent to Francis of Assisi, has been pronounced patron saint of nuclear weapons.
Now, if TS is an atheist, and if he respects analytical socialist thought, and claims that that is why he likes Stalin, then these things must be loathed by him. Stalin holding the cross of Christ!
But, on the other hand, if it is human abasement and kowtowing to authority that he ties his Stalinism to, then he will be ok with it.The Greens as war-mongerers. We knew they weren’t against capitalism but personally I didn’t expect they would go this far;
But there you are. Maybe they want the tanks to be powered by renewal energy.
Ps can’t we move the marginal (to this thread) dealing with TrueStalinist to a new thread of its own.
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