Posted on 03/18/2011 7:33:50 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Well said. And the most dangerous people on the planet are the Utopians whose foolish vanity that they can perfect society allows monsters like Hitler and Stalin to gain power.
Because of the fact that Soviet was on the winners side at the end of WWII, their crimes against the Human race prior, during and after the war never got scrutinized by Western media and intellectuals.
Russia still is a mess not wishing to become a part of Western Civilization.
We Swedes have fought them for ages. The people are all right, their leaders are not.
Hitler killed you for what ypur birth certificate recorded for ethnicity or religion. Stalin killed you for what your W-2 recorded as occupation or profession.
Make no mistake, he also killed for ethnicity, although he was Georgian by birth, he believed Russians were superior to the other races in the Soviet Union.
Actually some of his poses, especially the jutting chin shots, bring Mussolini to mind. Hence the sobriquet, “Il Douche”.
I think “genocide” has the specific meaning that it’s an attempt to wipe out an entire people. It is mass murder, but with an identified demographic target. It’s not saying anything about being a lesser or greater offense, but merely describing the nature of the objectives.
In my opinion, a particular problem with understanding the breadth and scope of Stalin’s mass murders, is the fact that he didn’t allow photographs to be taken, it was a punishable by death offense.
We have those horrible photographs of the German prisoner of war camps, and the crematoriums, and piles of bones, but Stalin did his murdering in secret. In fact, in the many instances where he actually had the soldiers kill whole groups of people (and pay them extra wages for doing so), he would then have those soldiers who had performed his killings then killed by others, and then those killed; and on and on it went. It’s actually pretty amazing we know what we do about those horrible times/crimes.
And then the fact of the Gulags located in the frozen tundra. There will come a day when that land finally unfreezes, when the bones of the millions who suffered and died there may finally be uncovered (what with global warming and all /s ) and the world will be amazed.
Stalin let Hitler do his dirty work for him.
I believe that once Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and Stalin decided which areas he would defend, he intentionally allowed Hitler to have the areas where the most Jews lived, knowing Hitler would take care of Stalin’s “Jewish Problem” for him.
False utopias always end up with, “Up against the wall, mo’fo!”
Oddly enough, I do not equate what Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Japanese militarists did; with what Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco did.
The difference is that of “the European way” vs. “the Asiatic way”. Two very different philosophies of life and even reality.
The European way emphasizes the importance of the individual, for in that philosophy, the individual retains all authority and responsibility. It is a hallmark of our civilization, and our society is imbued with the idea.
But it is not a universal idea. In Asia, the individual is less important than his family, and his family is less important than his extended family or clan, his village, his region, and his nation.
A rough way of describing this in practice would be that if a man were to offend the king or emperor in the West, he might be killed; but were he to do so in Asia, his entire village might be put to the sword.
Westerners tend to look at things with the perspective of individualism. As an American, if you look at the history of the US Civil War, what leaps out at you is that it is an event of individuals, hundreds of names that define the events.
But on the far side of the world, at about that same time, and much more horrific and destructive, was what was likely the *second* bloodiest conflict in human history after World War II. And most Americans haven’t even heard of it.
The Taiping Rebellion. 20-30 million killed, tremendously eclipsing the perhaps 700,000 dead of the American Civil War. Yet even in China, except by a few scholars perhaps, only a few individual names of top leaders are remembered, because it was not a “war of individuals”.
But back to more modern times. What so horrifies us all about Hitler’s genocide is, first of all, that it was an educated and “industrial genocide.” We are shocked that “civilized” people with university liberal arts educations, would turn into such barbaric and murderous, hate filled monsters.
And it is the individuals who were destroyed that also impact our imaginations. Real people with real names, many of whom were also highly educated and civilized.
Yet who did Stalin kill? Perhaps the only reason we are concerned is because Russia is half European and half Asiatic, which gives it a split personality. We care about those peoples West of the Urals, because they are more like us. We see in them some of the appreciation of individuality that we cherish.
But the nameless “mujiks?” The mostly uneducated Russian peasants who a mere generation before had been slaves to the great landholders? Their only hint of individuality was recognition from the Russian Orthodox church that they had souls. But little else.
Genocide is the destruction of a people, as a people. An effort to wipe out an entire breed or culture of people.
The European Jews were up to their eyebrows in culture and individuality. Thus the effort to exterminate them was openly and clearly one of genocide, that the Nazis had mulled over at length during the Wannsee conference and later.
Stalin’s orders, according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were vague and based on quotas. Directions to his secret police just to round up and kill a given number of a group of people, indifferent to any individual trait.
While utterly inhuman, this is an effort at control, not extermination. Humans exist only in the generic, in such schemes.
An odd example was Stalin’s obsession with building immense water dams. For this he ordered his secret police to just round up a given number of university students, not out of hatred or punishment, but just because they were a group. They were sent out to the hinterland to build dams, where countless numbers of them perished due to starvation, overwork, and disease.
Mass murderous in the extreme, but not genocidal.
Likewise, one of the most restive peoples during Stalin’s reign were the (surprise) Chechens. And though the Soviet army punished them hard and a lot, though they very well could have, there was never any intention to eradicate them as a people.
Well then I guess the lesson we’ve learned is, “You can kill as many people as you want, but just make sure they’re the same race as you.”
An omelette?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,753448-1,00.html
“RUSSIA: Stalin’s Omelette”, TIME, Oct. 24, 1932.
Hope and Change?
“In the spring of 1933 they died at the rate of more than ten thousand a day. “The only meat was human.” That fall the United States extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.”
Let’s see ... what change in US politics would have led to diplomatic recognition of the USSR in 1933?
Google “Road of bones”
The media would call what Stalin did "breaking a few eggs" and they would excuse it. He may have murdered 20-30 million of his own people, but none of the dead are complaining about it, so why should we worry? The media treat ObamaCare exactly the same and for the same reason. What matters to the far left is progress toward a communist utopia, not the suffering along that path (or once we get there).
Nowadays we call it “Progressivism”
Communists call it a small price to promote the glories of mother Russia and Communism. Ptui..........
Whereas Hitler's Nazism is dead, Communism is alive and well, not only in mother Russia but in the Halls of US Congress and the Oval Office as well!!!
Trotsky wrote an entire book on the topic: Their Morals and Ours, available online. Its bottom line:
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified, From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.
Saul Alinsky, the intellectual mentor of Obama and Clinton, saw things from the same perspective. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes:
That perennial question, “Does the end justify the means?” is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, “Does this particular end justify this particular means?…The end is what you want, and the means is how you get it…The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.
The differences in morality arise from religion. Traditional European notions of morality arise of the Judeo-Christian religions. The morality of Marxism arises from a different source, perhaps most explicitly identified in Marx's own poetry:
“Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:-- Karl Marx, The FiddlerWith Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.
The history of Marxism could well be described as a death march led by the Lord of the Flies.
Democide. Thanks Professor Rummel.
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