Forming the Stalin Battalion!
Some instances we federate with have free account creation and some people use that to instantly post on Lemmygrad (like 2 days old accounts with comments only on Lemmygrad type of stuff)
I give you my blessing to dunk on those people when you see them, go as hard as you need (within reason).
But remember: people that are reasonable should receive the same too. I’m talking about pure trolls who know what they’re doing.
Then don’t forget to report them and we’ll ban them.
If we mobilise a front to counter trolls, I assure you they will stop soon enough because we take the fun out of it.
I could answer by mentioning lack of democratic process and about self-proliferating structures of power that held him, as well as atrocities of GULAG (and the point wasn’t the sentence duration, but conditions in the camps), but that misses my core point.
The point is - endless praising of Stalin as some sort of superhero is basically a prerequisite for personality cult - something that Lenin has openly warned us from (and ironically got an even bigger cult himself).
Stalin is a leader, and in many ways, an excellent one. But turning him into a flawless genius of socialism and barking at any attempt to mention any flaws in his policies doesn’t promote a healthy discussion and turns otherwise reasonable left movement into a self-contained cult.
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Bold of you to assume they have a source.
Nobody is doing that. You’re setting up a straw person. How many times do people have to say ‘“critical” support’?But take away the loaded adjective and I admit the majority of us here agree that Stalin was a genius of socialism. Including me. Because it’s true. But only because he worked within a socialist structure, supported by other geniuses and the working class in general. How many times do Marxists have to say they reject the great man of history thesis?
Again, we have criticisms. But it’s impossible to talk about them in healthy discussion with liberals, fascists, anarchists, Trotskyists, and ultras, to name a few. Because they refuse to talk on good faith.
All they do is repeat ad nauseum tired old tropes about gulags and authoritarianism. Never do they explain these terms or concepts. Never do they bother to understand the facts. They fall for CIA and fascist propaganda like a drunkard falls to the pavement. Believing literal fairy tales (Orwell) literary experiments (Solzhenitsyn), contemporary shit stirring from arch enemies (Trotsky), revisionist and opportunist lies (Kruschev), and propaganda (almost every other source of ‘research’).
Your comment proves the point. You’re pretending to be reasonable while twisting what we’re saying and refusing to engage in the facts. Then you’re using our response to that to claim that we’re being unreasonable! Can you see why we challenge people who do that?
If there’s a cult, it’s the anti-Stalinist one. And I’ll finish by observing that millions and millions of people outside the west praise Stalin. It’s mainly brainwashed westerners who can’t summon the intellectual willpower to care or work out why.
As your comment is more recent than mine, above, you probably read mine first and chose to ignore it. So here it is again, with added emphasis:
(And yet, here we are, the personality cult of Stalin patiently providing sources and explaining the misunderstanding, trying to engage in good faith…)
I recommend, the Stalinist cliché that I am, Grover Furr’s work. Notably Khruschev Lied, where many of the popular myths proliferated about Stalin are systematically debunked.
I would recommend, above Furr even, Ludo Martens’ Another View of Stalin alongside Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Both well-sourced critiques of Stalin and the USSR he helped lead that deliver a balanced, humanizing view.
From my own perspective, I would firstly feel inclined to address what I see as your hypocricy in calling for a balanced, non-Great Manish view, while still placing the blame for systemic failures that resulted from the actions of many squarely onto Stalin.
He was, of course, a man. A great man, in my view - I believe it is possible at once to admire an individual without lionizing them beyond historical recognition - but still just a man. I recommend the works for more balanced histories.
Great suggestions.
Reading the intro to each of these should be the bare minimum for people who want to talk about Stalin. I wouldn’t even mind if critics found a rigorous way of challenging these sources. But they have nothing.
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Gulag death rate was much much lower under socialism than under feudalism
Especially under capitalism.