Sunday, July 1, 2012

Quit Stalin

Quit Stalin

It's the first of July. That means we'll be blowing shit up starting from a few days ago till the fourth circle jerking this great country. Maybe we should take a hot moment to think about the communist option..



For those of you who know nothing about Stalin and would really like to learn some history that isn't full of western propaganda, this blog post is directly for you! First off;

Stalin was from Georgia. So it's easy to assume that he liked white suits, bulldogs, and pecan pie. Which is a good explanation as to why there were so few black people in Russia.

So the question remains - was Stalin a good or bad person? The verdict isn't in on that. You'll find just as many Marxists who find Stalin abhorrent and vile as those who find his actions may be excessive, but his actions justified and necessary. Also, there's ironic Stalinism.

Cause really, on one hand he murdered a lot of people who didn't agree with him. On the other hand he faced off against one of the worst invasions in the 20th century.

*waves hands up and down to imitate a scale*

To get into more detail, the bad parts were something like he oversaw the deaths of a few million people and the imprisonment of a few hundred thousand. But the good part was that he basically saved the Soviet Union from genocide and collapse by the Germans and oversaw massive increases in life expectancy, technological advancement, and general quality of living in the country.

Mainly, his name serves as a metonym for Soviet policy during his tenure but that is sometimes a problematic usage because there is some evidence here and there that he had to go along with a lot of stuff he didn't agree with to get things done without antagonizing the bureaucracy. Broadly speaking, most of the canonical horrors of Soviet Communism happened because the CPSU applied heavy-handed methods to deal with legitimate problems and didn't really have appropriate internal or public processes for fixing the methods or addressing the consequences..

So shit spiraled out of control and at some point they figured it'd just be easier to kill various people involved than to clean up messes properly. For example, the Great Purge started as a convenient way to simultaneously get disloyal elements out of the government and military, let common people vent frustrations with the bureaucracy, and maybe improve personal power politics, but wound up producing a few thousand corpses, many of whom were probably not even guilty of whatever they were accused of.

On account of the whole torture thing, still, the worst of Soviet atrocities were comparable to colonial atrocities, and the soviet victory over the Nazi invaders basically changed the game with what the imperialist power could get away with forever. Personally, I'm grateful that people were willing to take moral risk to fight the nightmares that capitalist-imperialist hegemony imposed on humanity, but I also understand people who aren't as okay with it.

If anything, after Stalin, we had Nikita Khruschev, who was just the fucking worst. Though you can't get any worse than Gorby. But man, Kruschev was bad, but he was like the Soviet equivalent of Joe Arpaio becoming head of a conglomerate Republican-Democratic Party and was the President of the USA.

It's as if an old racist and kinda stupid Grandpa used back country wisdom and a few old tips from Grandma to lead Soviet Union into.... increasing liberalization and derailment from revolutionary plans.

Besides, Stalin may have ordered some shitty things. But it seems a lot of things got pinned on him that the party was responsible for. As well as a lot of other things that were completely and almost entirely made up by western propaganda.

The death toll - Robert conquest's numbers - which were the basis for almost all reports of Stalin's death toll are fucked and include non-births from urbanization and Nazi's and civilians killed in WW2. I'm not saying Stalin didn't have people killed and stuff, I'm just saying that the numbers for it are inflated due to the ideology of the people reporting it.

They also include numbers from the famines that occurred regularly at the time in the same count than the engineered cotton production famines. What it boils down to is that the great dilemma of communism is that in order to thoroughly abolish capitalism, capitalism must first be thoroughly abolished.

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