More misinformation from the Boston globe ping.
Gulag denial is just as bad as Holocaust denial....we must keep reminding the left of that fact.
This'll make the leftist, socialist, commie, fascist lib-dem trash here, happy, as he's one of their icons.
Dead wrong. Nazism was in a sense an aberration in German identity and history. That's why it has been possible to repudiate it - it does not go to the roots of "Germanity". Stalinism, OTOH, was not an aberration but an adequate and direct manifestation of a pretty long and sordid historical identity. That's why there are such difficulties with its repudiation.
Who said the atheists don't beleive in God?
At least Stalin made the trains to Siberia run on time!
Oh, I just ... love ... this gem.
Tell that to the Crimean Tatars, the entire race of whom were deported to Siberia by the Stalin regime
Tell that to the "kulaks": the successful small-holder farmers who were slaughtered because they were successful
Tell that to the millions of Ukrainians who were systematically starved in the 1930s because some of them resisted collectivization
Tell that to the Russian survivors of German POW camps, who were sent off to Stalin's gulags as soon as they were liberated from the Nazis
Tell that to the millions who were worked to death in 50 below zero temperatures in the gulag hellholes of Kolyma and other places
Tell that to the families of people jailed under Article 58 because an informant accused them of anti-Soviet thoughts
Stalin was FAR WORSE than Hitler. Hitler was the wolf, where Stalin was the wolf in the sheep's clothing sewn for him by leftist "useful idiots" worldwide. IMHO, it's a crime that this historical fact continues to be shoved down the memory hole.
Refrain: Yes, old Joe's dead and gone,
He stayed around too long,
And nobody now can save his hide,
'Cause old Joe laid right down and died.
Old Joe won't worry us no more;
He killed the helpless by the score;
Now I hope he's satisfied,
Since old Joe's taken his last ride
Refrain
While near the end, he couldn't talk,
He's paralyzed and he couldn't walk.
He died with a hemorrhage in the brain.
They have a new fireman on the devil's train.
Refrain
Although he was a man of power,
He was scared of Eisenhower.
So now the devil can retire,
'Cause old Joe Stalin will keep the fire.
Refrain
Ray Anderson [Kentucky Records #573, 1953]
This record is a cool, gone, solid platter, although it's hard to find.
You can deny the Moons' existance all you want, but not while it continues to show up at night.
Suppression of speech is a sign of weakness except when it is intended to prevent violence. Does Austria fear a resurgence of Nazism? One way to make sure a man is believed rather than merely heard is to cover his mouth after he speaks. Thank God for America where Speech Police have no authority.
As for Russia I keep in mind that not all that long ago they were subject to the barbarity of the Mongols. It will take time for that poison to wash from their psyche. Let the Chinese boohoo about their poor "Century of Shame" all their nasty selves like - the Russians are the way they are because of the lessons they learned from Chinese occupation. Thanks, Chinese Idiots.
Abraham Lincoln was a wartime dictator too, and we have monuments galore to him - but he was not a peactime dictator like Stalin. If the resurgence of Stalin worship is for his deeds in peacetime, then the Russians need to work on cleansing themselves of the poison the Chinese pumped up their butts.
Russia no longer has the buffer states it relied on as advance defenses, and even in those days they lacked the power to be more than a bad influence - and they knew it. They may have a bad attitude, but they aren't total idiots - they know that their only hope lies with the West. Especially in light of the reality that the only "liebensram" open to China is in Russia.
Much ado about Nada - keep your eye on China.
Sad and distressing.
I agree with his mother.
At some point when Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union, and his mother was quite aged, she asked him exactly what it was that he did. He is reported to have offered some explanation, of which only "something like the Tsar" sank in.
"Too bad," his mother is reported to have replied, "It would have been better if you had become a priest."
Various estimated of Soviet deaths under Stalin:
Soviet Union, Stalin's regime (1924-53): 20 000 000
There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to the number who died at Stalin's hands. There's the "Why doesn't anyone realize that communism is the absolutely worst thing ever to hit the human race, without exception, even worse than both world wars, the slave trade and bubonic plague all put together?" school, and there's the "Come on, stop exaggerating.
The truth is horrifying enough without you pulling numbers out of thin air" school. The two schools are generally associated with the right and left wings of the political spectrum, and they often accuse each other of being blinded by prejudice, stubbornly refusing to admit the truth, and maybe even having a hidden agenda. Also, both sides claim that recent access to former Soviet archives has proven that their side is right.
Here are a few illustrative estimates from the Big Numbers school:
Adler, N., Victims of Soviet Terror, 1993 cites these:
Rummel, 1990: 61,911,000 democides in the USSR 1917-87, of which 51,755,000 occurred during the Stalin years.
Chistyakovoy, V. (Neva, no.10): 20 million killed during the 1930s.
Dyadkin, I.G. (Demograficheskaya statistika neyestestvennoy smertnosti v SSSR 1918-1956 ): 56 to 62 million "unnatural deaths" for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49 million under Stalin.
Gold, John.: 50-60 million.
Davies, Norman (Europe A History, 1998): c. 50 million killed 1924-53, excluding WW2 war losses. This would divide (more or less) into 33M pre-war and 17M after 1939.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm
Forgot to thank YOU for this good thread.
Special Force for a Special Branch
From time to time, I’ll ping on noteworthy articles about politics, foreign and military affairs. FReepmail me if you want on or off my list. Check out the link in comment 58 of this Reason thread.
Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm
PING
Russian communists pay their respects at the grave of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin
at the Red Square in Moscow during a rally devoted to 53rd anniversary of the
death of the former Soviet leader, Saturday, March 4, 2006. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)