Bijou Drains
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I do not wish to cause more difficulty for you Alan, but how is it that TS’s contribution #234305, did not illicit the same response?
I would also appreciate some guidance from you about about how Socialists can call out the rank hypocrisy of war mongers without breaching the posting guidance.
Another attempt to deflect TS, perhaps you could just answer the question, or shall we leave it to the readers of this forum to guess the reason why you applaud the “volunteers” but are reluctant to join them?
TS- “ More than 70,000 Russians have volunteered for the armed forces since September 21st. That’s more than Australia’s total military manpower. The poor Ukrainian Nazis, they don’t stand a chance”
Interesting that TS trumpets the worth of the volunteers for Putin’s “fight against the Ukrainian Nazis”, yet he doesn’t take the chance to join the volunteers himself. As we all know the Russian army are actively seeking overseas volunteers.
Perhaps TS is only interested in fighting “Nazis” from the safety of his bedroom.
Well done TS, you have added casual homophobia, to being a general gobshite, xenophobe and rejoicing in insults to people with learning disabilities (and perhaps being an incel). I would suggest, that this and your ongoing slavish adoration of any dictatorial figure (Putin, Stalin, Lenin, Xi, Kim Jong un, etc) and a good dash of misogyny (which no doubt you have in spades), means that you are the perfect fit for a volunteer for Putin (and his capitalist enterprises). So rather than add another epithet, COWARD, get yourself off to Russia and join the conflict you support.
But perhaps your rhetoric is, as I and those who read your messages know, is just so much horseshit.
Socialist? Your not even a Socialist’s shirt tail.
“TS, the difference between the conflicts you mention and the Russian –”
Bojo’s Brains turns stupid up to 11. Congratulations, you get a participation trophy! I hear they’re doing try-outs for the special Olympics. Give it some thought.”
TS, when it comes to witty repartee you’re not exactly Oscar Wilde, are you? Still, those aren’t required qualifications for cannon fodder.
When you off to the front line?
Think about it bonny lad, if you get yourself over to Russia and sign up you might even find some awestruck Russian to help you lose your virginity!
Although many of the people “planted” in Ulster were from Lowland Scotland, a very high number were Border Reivers (the troublesome folk who never really obeyed the laws or “borders” which the state tried to create between Northern England and Scotland). Elizabeth 1st and James 1st & 6th tried to get rid of them by expelling them over to Ulster, although studies showed that many of them found themselves back in their ancestral lands.
Names that are very common in the Northern Ireland Protestant Population are also common Reiver names (Johnston (and various spellings), Armstrong, Robson, Beatty, Hamilton, Graham, Elliott, Ridley, Charlton, Milburn, etc.). Lots of famous Northumbrians share the same surnames.
In my dialect (Geordie), many words are common to Lowland Scots, Ulster Scots and Northumbrian (including Geordie/Mackem/Pitmatic). Most of them came from old Northumbrian, which gives the lie to the idea of a “Scotish” nation. Most of “Laland Scots” is based on Anglo Saxon late Northumbrian languages.
Language, a bit like culture is constantly evolving and developing. Capitalism uses that difference to divide us rather than allow our differences to be celebrated and understood.
TS, the difference between the conflicts you mention and the Russian – Ukraine conflict is (and this is really important) that the Russians are actively recruiting and asking for support from the likes of yourself.
You actually have the opportunity for you to put your words into action! Here, finally, the opportunity arises where you can show the world that you are more than just a stuffed shirt full of cliches. TS, you can be the epitome of the “New Soviet Man” that Lenin and Stail eulogised. The selfless new man who is willing to sacrifice his life for good causes, as exemplified by lines from the poem “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” by the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky:
Who needs a “1”?
The voice of a “1”
is thinner than a squeak.
Who will hear it?
Only the wife…
A “1” is nonsense.
A “1” is zero.You, TS, you can show the world that you are beyond the individual, beyond the “1”, you are part of the collective.
The collective good of the Russian people is calling you. Do what you are imploring the young men of Russia to do, join the Russian military. Can you imagine how proud you with your gun in your hand and your helmet on your head. You, TS, demonstrating to those vile and contemptuous members of the SPGB that you have the courage of your conviction, that you are happy to lay your life down to support the cause you believe in. (The accumulation of vast amounts of capital for the Russian ruling class).
Because if you don’t sign up, I for one will think that you are just another poser, trying to boost his perilously low sense of self esteem by associating with something big and powerful. Your interest in politics being no more that a vain attempt to show to the world that has so far ignored you, that you really are windswept and interesting, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately TS your another of those bar room rebels. There was plenty of them in left wing circles back in the day. Full of Guinness and rebel songs at closing time, but you never saw them down The Falls Road with an Armalite.
However luck is with you. If you read the article I linked, the Russian state is encouraging volunteers from the Middle East, etc. they don’t seem to be worried about language skills. So show the courage of your convictions and get yourself off to the front line. Or are you, as I suspect, another keyboard warrior who would fill your little pants if you ever came across real trouble.
Either send us a picture of you on the front line or stop pretending to be the hard man.
Hey True Scotsman, if you are so keen on sending workers to the front line to die in the cause of Putin’s “Anti Imperialism”, why don’t you join the fun. Or is it that you’re full of shit!
Mud and rocks, not on my fetish list. Now if you had mentioned……
(ps. I know the origin of the term fetish)I had a feeling you might make an appearance at this point Birdy boy. Hope you are well you old Scouse rascal!
“I think I’m right in saying that Douglas Home was never a member of the Conservative Party and was the last non-Tory Labour Prime Minister.”
What I should have said was the last Non Conservative Party or Labour Party Prime Minister.
Douglas Home was a member of The Unionist Party
The thing about the Labour Representation Committee is that it was a committee of Labourist MPs. It became the Labour Party in 1906 but the only members were Labour MPs, which included ILP, Fabian Society Members, etc. Individuals could not join that Labour Party as such and the separate groups maintained completely independent organisational structures. In that sense it was similar to some electoral pacts that occur in other countries with some joining and leaving, or a bit like the groupings that occur in the European Parliament.
It was only in 1919 that the Labour Party effectively became the recognised political entity that is known today.
The whigs and Liberals had similar development into political parties and their is an argument that the Tories didn’t become the Conservative and Unionist Party only formed in the 1960s, as until that point the Conservative Party (England and Wales) was separate to the Unionist Party (Scotland). I think I’m right in saying that Douglas Home was never a member of the Conservative Party and was the last non-Tory Labour Prime Minister. A good trivia question that I’ve used before.
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?
