Crow posted:what I wanna know is why 50 million dead?? HEllo, that's weird. Just sayin.
i often like your knowledge and your insight often mr Crow, you are a far more studied man then myself. But i can't help notice this ever-present ironic detachment, typified by this response here.
It's a response to a popular conservative/liberal truism and that's all well and good but it's not a justification or explanation of historical events that actually unfolded, just some silly culture war bullshit.
fiz posted:he fucked up spain imo
you forgot poland
discipline posted:IWC how do you wiggle past the tens of millions americans who starved to death as a result of capitalism during the 30s in the USA oh you don't have to because nobody writes about that as the blood of millions on the hands of hoover and FDR
I don't wiggle past it. I am sceptical as to whether tens of millions died, although i'm open to accepting it if something is written about it. I acknowledge that capitalism has killed tens of millions. Again though, you are arguing with a strawman. I am aware of liberalisms failures, I am sickened by the pointless suffering that all those people had to go through (in my country as well, 1930s australia produced pretty much nothing but wool and wheat and got decimated by the depression). The famines in India engineered or allowed by Britain from the 19th century through to WW2 in Bengal, the criminal barbarity that they inflicted upon Ireland, the drug addiction forced upon China at gunpoint, the desperate, sprawling megacities being created at the moment.
The gap between the rhetoric and practice/history of liberal capitalism was what drew me into LF in the first place, i'm not evilweasel.
None of this invalidates the fact that Communist regimes inflicted incredible barbarity on people, with a leadership that not only accepted but often engineered these disasters to fairly dubious ends. And what scares me is that if we look at it from a distance, things like the Holmodor really do have justifications rooted in the class analysis of Marxism. How do we deal with that? How can we understand these vast human tragedies while supporting and advocating an ideology that led to them and, seemingly, could easily lead to them again through the party-led enacting of Marxist principles.
I know you'll read something like this and still say that it's rooted in liberal principles, way of thinking etc. etc. and perhaps that's true, i'll cop that. It's just something i (and perhaps many people) struggle with, that's all.
PS: i do realize there's a hypocrisy in the way we apportion blame and responsibility to autocratic or liberal leaders. I suppose part of it is because Stalin explicitly ordering the crushing of the peasantry seems to have a more brutal immorality than FDR's failure to prevent starvation and poverty......the chain of command and causation is a little simpler to understand.
Edited by Ironicwarcriminal ()
discipline posted:IWC how do you wiggle past the tens of millions of americans who starved to death as a result of capitalism during the 30s in the USA oh you don't have to because nobody writes about that as the blood of millions on the hands of hoover and FDR
can you give me a peer-reviewed source on how many died, i doubt it's in the "tens of millions"
Edited by swirlsofhistory ()
like the fact that wrecking in the soviet economy, especially in the extremely-vital mines, was really serious and dangerous for a country surrounded by imperial states and spurned creditors (for example, France never accepted that the huge Tsarist debts were null and void due to the new Soviet Government, and eventually Russia had to repay them. The Soviets repaid old Tsarist bonds to speculators 1987). Imagine you spurning a creditor out of a lot of money and immense resources. Gee whiz I wonder if you'd have to defend yourself and make sure your economic house was in order.
an American engineer named Jack Littlepage worked in the USSR from 1927-1937. Littlepage was no communist (he said he "did not like Bolsheviks", in fact he resisted a good package from Soviet recruiters because of stories he heard about foreign engineers being trapped in the USSR), but he wrote an interesting book about his experience, called In Search of Soviet Gold:
“I never took any interest in the subtleties of political manoeuvring in Russia so long as I could avoid them; but I had to study what was happening in Soviet industry in order to do my work. And I am firmly convinced that Stalin and his collaborators took a long time to discover that discontented revolutionary communists were his worst enemies.”
at the time, he thought that it was just extreme corruption on behalf of his superiors. Overtime, he realized it was more than that:
Littlepage also wrote that his personal experience confirmed the official statement to the effect that a great conspiracy directed from abroad was using major industrial sabotage as part of its plans to force the government to fall. In 1931 Littlepage had already felt obliged to take note of this, while working in the copper and bronze mines of the Urals and Kazakhstan. The mines were part of a large copper/bronze complex under the overall direction of Pyatakov, the People’s Vice Commissar for Heavy Industry. The mines were in a catastrophic state as far as production and the well-being of their workers was concerned. Littlepage reached the conclusion that there was organised sabotage going on which came from the top management of the copper/bronze complex.
Littlepage’s book also tells us from where the Trotskyite opposition obtained the money that was necessary to pay for this counter-revolutionary activity. Many members of the secret opposition used their positions to approve the purchase of machines from certain factories abroad. The products approved were of much lower quality than those the Soviet government actually paid for. The foreign producers gave Trotsky’s organisation the surplus from such transactions, as a result of which Trotsky and his co-conspirators in the Soviet Union continued to order from these manufacturers.
Theft and corruption
This procedure was observed by Littlepage in Berlin in the spring of 1931 when buying industrial lifts for mines. The Soviet delegation was headed by Pyatakov, with Littlepage as the specialist in charge of verifying the quality of the lifts and of approving the purchase. Littlepage discovered a fraud involving low quality lifts, useless for Soviet purposes, but when he informed Pyatakov and the other members of the Soviet delegation of this fact, he met with a cold reception, as if they wanted to overlook these facts and insist he should approve the purchase of the lifts. Littlepage would not do so. At the time he thought that what was happening involved personal corruption and that the members of the delegation had been bribed by the lift manufacturers. But after Pyatakov, in the 1937 trial, confessed his links with the Trotskyist opposition, Littlepage was driven to the conclusion that what he had witnessed in Berlin was much more than corruption at a personal level.
Okay, so maybe this is just some American guy that wanted to take part in a narrative drama or whatever, we may never know. (though he was driven from the USSR due to his association with a guilty party at the trials, so i don't know what his motive would be exactly to confirm this narrative rather than create a more self-centered hysterical one!)
but the supposed wrecking that occurred during this time strangely reflects the circumstances the Bolsheviks found themselves in shortly after the revolution, when terroristic plots, crowd-massacres, and assassination of elected officials was rocking the new nation. Though the Bolsheviks were very open to seeing their constituents and foreign nationals, this also led them to be easily murdered. The situation became so bad, that Dzerzhinsky basically directed into being the first organization of state security, the Cheka, in response. Though this last assignment would mean Dzerzhinsky would sleep and work in the same office, and never see his family again (who, before the revolution, he would risk life and limb to see and take care of, dodging police ambushes and state security), so I'm not exactly sure it was the 'blood-thirsty Bolsheviks' carrying out an evil scheme to murder everyone. That's just me though
so there is already a long history of a state born under siege. theres a nice lil Churchill quote in Killing Hope:
"Were they at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war -- shocking! Interference -- shame! It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial -- Bang!"
Sidenote: In light of predator drone bombing, how many of those 'Soviet Russians' do you think were innocent civilians?
and this constant and relentless attack on the new nation culminated NOT in the ascension of Stalin and his bloodbath, but in the Second World War, in which the USSR lost something like 25 million fucking people. And despite whatever silly narratives you picked up, like the USSR didn't expect it (when the Soviets tried desperately to ally with the UK and France before their hand was forced and they signed a Nonaggression Pact with the Nazis to buy some time), or those ridiculous Enemy at the Gates-type hollywood stories, or something like this, I'd think maybe you'd have to give the Soviets some credit for thinking that people wanted to annihilate their state and wipe out their infrastructure and enslave their people. You know, kinda what happened in the 90s.
but maybe we should talk about the fact that for many decades, the GULAG system was the site of pure speculation on behalf of the West, that there was NO concrete evidence of what it really was, how big it was, and how many people were political prisoners. because if there would have been concrete evidence (which there is now from the archives), you'd see that the political prisoners made up a minority of GULAG prisoners, most were violent criminals.
and people died in the camps, its horrible, they died. do you know how many people died? from 1934-1953, 1 million people died in the labor camps. and that's awful, it's tragic and it's not good. do you know how many of those people died during the hellish years of the War? when entire peoples were starving to death, when everyone was on extreme rations? when 25 million people were killed? 60% of the total figure, 620,000 souls. can you wrap your mind around that? do you have a good idea how bad things were, from your dry books and boring college lectures? how bad things were to make 620,000 people just a typical statistic? 630,000 people starved to death in the two-year siege of Leningrad. and yet, in the GULAGs, during some of the coldest years on record, in Siberia, the death toll of prisoners never climbed to double digits (except for one year, 1943 with 17%, the year of Stalingrad and the breaking of the Siege of Leningrad, a desperate year for sure).
so you tell me, what do you know about a nation of 170 million people, 80 years ago? i know very little, i know what makes sense in this context, i know what happened to my family and what they saw. but i know even better than that what sort of narrative you bad boys make about other people. people you've never met, people that you have to almost completely conject from your imaginations, people you feel kinda bad in a detached way about bombing. i'm on to you wallaby sons of bitches and so you better show some respect.
Blimey.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:Crow posted:
what I wanna know is why 50 million dead?? HEllo, that's weird. Just sayin.
i often like your knowledge and your insight often mr Crow, you are a far more studied man then myself. But i can't help notice this ever-present ironic detachment, typified by this response here.
It's a response to a popular conservative/liberal truism and that's all well and good but it's not a justification or explanation of historical events that actually unfolded, just some silly culture war bullshit.
haha my favorite thing about ironicwarcriminal is his trepidation towards irony, like, it's so . . . ironic 
gyrofry posted:(mao and hitler and stalin being murderbros)
weird
Ironicwarcriminal posted:i will check that all out and reply mr Crow, although the holmodor is notable by it's absense
crow just put himself out there (i guess he got trolled) and this is your response? enjoy your ban
Crow posted:tpaine posted:he's Russian so he's probably just like "Famines never happen. Camps never happen. Everyone treated well. Vodka is colored orange. *drinks patently clear vodka* Is orange."
and my father's georgian, from an aristocrat family of a land colonized by Russia, a family who lost their fortune and standing in the revolution. so i can always play that card for sympathy with yanks. Yanks like a particular fucker didnt ever taste colours.
hahaha same, and all i ever heard about russia was how horribly dystopian communism was and that Stalin committed genocide against my people lol
Ironicwarcriminal posted:To put it a more constructive and less combative way then, and i'll receive your answer with an open mind: How did you personally...let's say, overcome such a historiography, and how do you rationalize (defend, synthesize, contextualize, whatever) such things as the famines in the Ukraine, the population transfers, the Gulag, the extraction economies set up in the Soviet periphery?
Britain has invaded all but 22 countries in the world in its long and colourful history, new research has found.
He believes the actual figure may well be higher and is inviting the public to get in touch to provide evidence of other invasions.
In the case of Mongolia, for instance – one of the 22 nations "not invaded", according to the book – he believes it possible that there could have been a British invasion, but could find no direct proof.
The country was caught up in the turmoil following the Russian Revolution, in which the British and other powers intervened. Mr Laycock found evidence of a British military mission in Russia approximately 50 miles from the Mongolian border, but could not establish whether it got any closer.
Mr Laycock added: "One one level, for the British, it is quite amazing and quite humbling, that this is all part of our history, but clearly there are parts of our history that we are less proud of. The book is not intended as any kind of moral judgment on our history or our empire. It is meant as a light-hearted bit of fun."
getfiscal posted:i thought one of the attractions of socialism was supposed to be that it was better than capitalism and didn't need to brutally repress people.
yeah i thought so too
babyhueypnewton posted:great post
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
i will check that all out and reply mr Crow, although the holmodor is notable by it's absense
crow just put himself out there (i guess he got trolled) and this is your response? enjoy your ban
it was 1 am in the morning when i wrote that, gimme a break, i'll reply
burritonegro posted:you say, "I know very little, i know what makes sense in this context, i know what happened to my family and what they saw". so where do you turn someone without that background? i'm trying to figure out if there are books that substantiate what you're saying or if they are just the same "stupid shit" you just read differently...
substantiate what i'm saying? where? the Littlepage book i just cited to you? the figures i cited about the GULAG? that's from the ~9,000 page study of Soviet archives carried out from 1990-1993 by A. N. Dougin, V. N. Zemskov, and O. V. Xlevjnik. summaries were published in French and American historical journals, the one from The American Historical Review by J. Arch Getty is available here: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2166597?uid=3739920&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101246061363
or do you want me to recommend the biographies of Dzerzhinsky or something?
this is why i don't really care about goin through with all this, it's like trying to argue god with a stubborn skeptic. i am expected to refute all the most conniving, silly bullshit arguments with mountains of "objective" evidence in your language and at your leisure. Gag me with a spoon. Ew.
- Albert Szymanski who was a sociologist, has one book in particular thats an interesting analysis of the structure of the Soviet Union:
Is the Red Flag Flying?: The Political Economy of the Soviet Union. outlines the rights of citizens in the political economy of the Soviet Union in the 70s. Szymanski basically was a Maoist in the 70s, but after studying the Soviet Union became more forgiving of the structure of the USSR. it also analyzes the economic relations of the Soviet Union with other socialist and Third World countries, and its contributions to national liberation movements. Apparently, his Human Rights in the Soviet Union is also pretty good, and has extensive sourcing. You can probably find these online (at least Is the Red Flag Flying)
- Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny is perhaps a rather contentious, but interesting look at the Soviet collapse, primarily in trying to understand what caused its economic unraveling. There is a ugly version available on scribd
- Farm to Factory by Robert C. Allen is a much more academic look (from the Princeton Economic History of the Western World series). reappraises the era of collectivization and grand industrial projects, very well-researched and cited, and demonstrates the stunning success of industrialization and the meteoric rise of living standards. Kinda hard to find online, still havent found it. Probably worth it to find at your local giant library.
some of McCaine's recommendations:
- Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s by Sheila Fitzpatrick
- Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) John Archibald Getty. Note this is the same J. Arch. Getty that published the findings of the 9,000 page report of the opened archives in American Historical Review
- Stalin: Revolutionary in an Era of War (European History in Perspective) Kevin McDermott
I also hear this is good:
- Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 by Robert W. Thurston
Phew! That's quite a thing I wrote out that is really easy to ignore! I'm sure yall got quite the reading list! *low whistle*
but let me know if ya want some suggestions on China, i got those too!
getfiscal posted:i thought one of the attractions of socialism was supposed to be that it was better than capitalism and didn't need to brutally repress people.
You really shouldn't be worrying yourself about big picture morality. Just be honest, peaceful, and fuck along, commoner
However, the specific things i mentioned were
such things as the famines in the Ukraine, the population transfers, the Gulag, the extraction economies set up in the Soviet periphery?
And you only addressed one of them. I don't want to be throwing these on you as if all the mistakes of the Soviet state have been dumped on your head, I just find those things remarkably troubling.
I'm not interested in fudging and scribbling to get another million more famine victims in the little black book of communism. I'm wondering what those people died for, or were uprooted from their lands and communities for.
Lykourgos posted:getfiscal posted:
i thought one of the attractions of socialism was supposed to be that it was better than capitalism and didn't need to brutally repress people.
You really shouldn't be worrying yourself about big picture morality. Just be honest, peaceful, and fuck along, commoner
I just realized who you remind me of grumblefish, and it’s the tsarist prisoner in the cell next to the protagonist in darkness at noon.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:I just realized who you remind me of grumblefish, and it’s the tsarist prisoner in the cell next to the protagonist in darkness at noon.
wait what, wikipedia says "No. 402 is not an intellectual; he just wants to hear the details of Rubashov's latest sexual encounter." I'm supposed to be that bloke?
Lykourgos posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
I just realized who you remind me of grumblefish, and it’s the tsarist prisoner in the cell next to the protagonist in darkness at noon.
wait what, wikipedia says "No. 402 is not an intellectual; he just wants to hear the details of Rubashov's latest sexual encounter." I'm supposed to be that bloke?
You peruse, ponder and conclude based upon the frivolities of wikipedia? That’s the most Common behaviour I’ve heard of in months.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:Ironicwarcriminal posted:
You peruse, ponder and conclude based upon the frivolities of wikipedia? That’s the most Common behaviour I’ve heard of in months.
I gave the matter the effort it was worth