The Black Book of Communism

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Lard Tunderin Jeezus Lard Tunderin Jeezus's picture

Evening Star wrote:

Tbf, India was basically a democratic [i]socialist[/i] country until the 90s.

Amazing.

Of all the stupid shit in this thread, this one's the prize-winning poop.

Cueball Cueball's picture

ygtbk wrote:

Cueball wrote:

Now in the period between 1925 and 1937 there is no consistent decline in the deaths per thousand per year, as can be seen in the data of the chart you provided. Based on the 10 year period following we would expect a consistent decline in the rate of deaths per thousand of at least 1 per thousand per year. Such is not evident during the depression.

Therefore, it seems logical to assert that there is at least 0.1% increase in unwarranted deaths in the United States over the depression years, each and every year. This means, that between 1929 and 1937, a period of 8 years, 0.8% more Americans died than should have. Based on a population base of 130 million, I think its safe to say that at least a million Americans died prematurely during the Great Depression.

This is considerably closer to my estimate than 12 million was. Changing "died of starvation" to "died prematurely compared with what would have happened if the trend of the 20's had continued" is of course changing what we're talking about, but the second one is hard to disagree with.

Isn't studying the numbers of people who "died prematurely compared with what would have happened if the trend of the 20's had continued" precisely what we are talking about when we are analyzing census data, comparing population growth trends in the pre-Communist era in Russia with those in the Soviet Union, and then following that through until the 1940's?

We certainly are not looking at a precise data set, such as the state records regarding trials and incarcerations, executions and so on.

A lot of people seem to put a lot of stock into the exact terminology you use. For example, Above the USNews seems to think its merely "ironic" that food supplies were being deliberately destroyed in order to keep the market value high in the middle of the Great Depression while people were starving in the streets. I imagine if this was a policy enacted by Stalin, the same news source would call it a crime, possibly even paying lip service to the idea that it was a deliberate attempt to starve black people in Harlem.

I guess it will be ok as long as I don't use any emotionally charged terminology.

Speaking of which, can any one find any specific analysis of the impact of the depression on racial minorities in the states? It stands to reason that they were more impacted by the event than other segments of society. Lo! Has anyone carted out the genocide word, yet?

Evening Star

Lard Tunderin Jeezus wrote:

Evening Star wrote:

Tbf, India was basically a democratic [i]socialist[/i] country until the 90s.

Amazing.

Of all the stupid shit in this thread, this one's the prize-winning poop.

 

How so?  I was referring strictly to post-independence India.

http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/coifiles/preamble.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru#Economic_policies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indira_Gandhi#Domestic_policy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_India#Nationalisation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_media#Audio-Visual_media

I realize that India was never so extremely socialistic as to outlaw private investment via stock markets but I think it's safe to say that it came closer to public control of the economy than, say, anything the NDP advocates.  (I identify as a social democrat myself btw.)  I just think that it's a bit dubious to claim that India's failures vis-a-vis China in any field prior to the 90s are proof of a failure of capitalism per se.

Also, to be honest, I find your comment rather rude and uncalled-for.

jrootham

It's not obvious that blacks were hit harder in health terms.  There had been a migration north, but it wasn't as big as later, so many would still be in agriculture in the south.  Certainly they would be economically hit, but they may have had access to their own cropland to eat.  They were not in the dustbowl, but insect borne diseases would be a problem.  All in all, not clear.  Data would be useful.

 

Cueball Cueball's picture

Huh? The small farmers were the ones most likely to be driven out of business and bought out by larger farmers. In the south, a great number of the smallest and poorest farmers were black farmers who were just beginning to enter into the normal economic life of the country, after the end of slavery.

Here is more on that: Black Americans 1929-1941

jrootham

When did that process take place?

My understanding (I sit to be corrected) is that sharecropping was a dominant form of farming for blacks before 1940.  Large farms are a 1950's and later phenomenon.

My point was that if you are a poor farmer, an economic collapse would be less damaging than if you were a poor factory worker.

 

Fidel

jrootham wrote:
Large farms are a 1950's and later phenomenon.

Perhaps you're referring to big agribiz and industrial-mechanized farming?

Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath described collective farms in California during the 1930s. Many were still using horses and plowing manually in the late 1920's and into the 30s. Some were privately owned and some were run by the government. The Soviets weren't the only ones looking for a better way. Ever since the collapse of laissez-faire capitalism around the western world in the 30's, agriculture in most rich countries has been heavily subsidized by federal governments.

jrootham wrote:
My point was that if you are a poor farmer, an economic collapse would be less damaging than if you were a poor factory worker.

Hundreds of thousands of American families or about a third of American farmers lost their farms to banks in the 1930's. Many of them became migrant farm workers and moved to California to find work. The lucky ones made it across the state line. In Canada in the prairies, Ernest Manning promised farmers in financial trouble that they would be helped out by the banks if Manning's party was elected. They won and then forgot all about their election promises to Alberta's farmers. It was the same in the US until FDR's New Deal socialists stepped in with interventionist policies.

jrootham

My understanding is that those farms were largely in the dust bowl.  Blacks would be in hock to the buyer, not the bank, and they didn't own the land.

It's a little perverse, but to some extent I would expect that because blacks were worse off before the depression, and less connected to the money economy, they would be less damaged by it.

From Wikipedia, sharecropping increased during the depression and collapsed afterwards due to mechanization.

 

Edited to add reference and details.

 

Fidel

That's news to me that they were mainly black Americans. That almost sounds like today's blame game surrounding the real estate crash and any scapegoat will do so long as the ideology itself isn't put under the microscope.  The problems were much deeper after 1929 than the dust bowl. They were playing at free and unregulated market capitalism then, and interventionist policies actually began under Hoover. The problems with deregulated banking and farming on credit from smaller unregulated banks were magnified by the collapse of the financial end of the economy in general. Real estate and farm prices dropped below what farmers originally paid for them, and very many couldn't access loans to upgrade farm equipment or pay their day labourers.  And today even big agri-business is heavily subsidized. They still don't trust the ideology enough to leave food production to market forces.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_Security_Administration#Relief_work]Ho... Communities[/url] (That's American for Stalinization of farm collectives and relief camps)

wiki wrote:
One of the activities performed by the RA and FSA was the buying out of small farms that were not economically viable, and the setting up of 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers would live together under the guidance of government experts and work a common area. They were not allowed to purchase their farms for fear that they would fall back into inefficient practices not guided by RA and FSA experts.[1]

The Dust Bowl in the Great Plains displaced thousands of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and laborers, many of whom (known as "Okies" or "Arkies") moved on to California. The FSA operated camps for them, such as Weedpatch Camp as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath.

Inefficient practices was code for, Don't let them fall into the clutches of the banksters and other loan sharks. Californians still don't like to mention the 'Little Oklahomas' and collectives populated by out of state migrant farm workers and that sprouted up in and around Salinas up to Santa Cruz and Cupertino etc and who stuck it out and made their way to staying in California long term. They are still paranoid of economic refugees flocking to their fine state even today.

Lard Tunderin Jeezus Lard Tunderin Jeezus's picture

Evening Star wrote:

I realize that India was never so extremely socialistic as to outlaw private investment via stock markets but I think it's safe to say that it came closer to public control of the economy than, say, anything the NDP advocates.  (I identify as a social democrat myself btw.)  I just think that it's a bit dubious to claim that India's failures vis-a-vis China in any field prior to the 90s are proof of a failure of capitalism per se.

Also, to be honest, I find your comment rather rude and uncalled-for.

Perhaps you should also realize that just because they on-occasion elected a party that called itself 'socialist' don't make it so. My tolerance for such stupidity has been worn out over the years by arguments about the infamous german party that once included 'socialist' in its name.

Here's a hint for you: If they can't manage to feed their people and provide healthcare for them, they ain't all that 'socialist' - particularly when their well-fed capitalist elites enjoy the finest of private healthcare.

Evening Star

Congress wasn't elected 'on occasion'.  They have dominated Indian politics throughout its history, probably to a greater extent than our Liberals have dominated Canadian politics.  And they weren't just socialist in name.  They nationalized the banks and the audio-visual media, pursued land redistribution programmes, planned industrial and agricultural development with five-year plans (combining public and private investment), and severely restricted the investment of foreign capital.  It was a long way from the level of private control of the economy that we've every seen in this, and most Western, countries.  I'm not saying it was the greatest or most successful example of democratic socialism but it's hard to refer to as an example of failed capitalism.  I doubt that any political/economic system could have kept the Indian population fed in the 60s.

Evening Star

"ever seen"

Evening Star

Actually, that should probably be "always seen".:P

kropotkin1951

The Japanese and Korean economies post war were the model for tightly controlled "capitalist" growth, then the Asian tigers went to the Wall Street economic model. Has any country every made substantial economic gains once the American financiers take over their economies? 

Fidel

kropotkin1951 wrote:

The Japanese and Korean economies post war were the model for tightly controlled "capitalist" growth, then the Asian tigers went to the Wall Street economic model. Has any country every made substantial economic gains once the American financiers take over their economies?

Exactly. Tightly controlled but not models for liberalization. Those economies were anything but showcases for Washington consensus capitalism after the wars. They practiced protectionism in order to nurture their mainly agricultural economies at the time. It allowed peasants to focus on earning a living by selling produce locally and earning a living. It allowed them to raise small families and educate their children so that they would leap frog their parents' standard of living. Those countries invested in public education programs and health care. But they didn't follow US or British prescriptions for neoliberal capitalism.

Think of Thailand and Argentina and Chile and Pakistan and even Haiti as model countries for the new liberal capitalism.

Evening Star

I just realized which German party you were referring to.  No, the Indian National Congress (who don't have the word "socialist" in their name btw) are not at all comparable.  Nehru was a true believer in Fabian-style democratic socialism if there ever was one.

Lard Tunderin Jeezus wrote:

Evening Star wrote:

I realize that India was never so extremely socialistic as to outlaw private investment via stock markets but I think it's safe to say that it came closer to public control of the economy than, say, anything the NDP advocates.  (I identify as a social democrat myself btw.)  I just think that it's a bit dubious to claim that India's failures vis-a-vis China in any field prior to the 90s are proof of a failure of capitalism per se.

Also, to be honest, I find your comment rather rude and uncalled-for.

Perhaps you should also realize that just because they on-occasion elected a party that called itself 'socialist' don't make it so. My tolerance for such stupidity has been worn out over the years by arguments about the infamous german party that once included 'socialist' in its name.

Here's a hint for you: If they can't manage to feed their people and provide healthcare for them, they ain't all that 'socialist' - particularly when their well-fed capitalist elites enjoy the finest of private healthcare.

Fidel

Gandhi was a socialist. They murdered him so they could pursue unfettered capitalism. Democratic capitalist India has been under tutelage of western world capitalism for too long. Capitalism has been a conveyor belt of death and misery for many millions of human beings in that country. Cash crop capitalism by WTO diktats has been a colossal failure for more than 100 million formerly alive people in that country who were made into skeletons as a direct result of capitalist ideology.

Evening Star

FDR's Keynesian reforms in the most capitalist country on earth are "socialist" (post #57) but self-identified Fabian socialists implementing [i]actual public control of financial capital and central planning of the means of production[/i] is "unfettered capitalism"?  (And on what grounds?  Because they didn't manage to provide universal health care and abolish hunger in an overpopulated, disease-stricken country that had been ravaged by at least a century of colonialism?  Hint:  It's harder to do in India than in Canada.  And Indira Gandhi's [i]government-planned[/i] agricultural reforms did achieve self-sufficiency in the area of food and an end to famine.)  And it's amazingly stupid of me to describe pre-1990 independent India as basically democratically socialist?  For serious?  They have a stock market in the US too, you know.

As for Gandhi, you're kidding, right?  I assume you're referring to Mohandas and not Indira or Rajiv.  (All three were important leaders.  The first two were pretty clearly socialist.  All were assissinated.  [i]None[/i] of the assassins were motivated by economic policy.)

Evening Star

(I guess I was replying to both Fidel and LTJ there.)

kropotkin1951

So what was the British system before Independence? Does that misery not count?

Evening Star

It counts and I referred to it.  However, that was never the topic of discussion here.

Fidel

Evening Star wrote:
Hint: It's harder to do in India than in Canada.

Compare World Bank statistics for just infant mortality for India and China. China was a fourth world basket case in 1949 and behind India WRT just about every social statistic. By 1976, the year of Mao's death, infant mortality in China was better than India's rate at the start of the 2000s. Life expectancy in China was doubled in Mao's time. Improvements in Chinese mortality rates actually levelled off and stalled after Deng Xiaoping. And it looks like China will achieve socialized medicine before either democratic capitalist India or even the USA. Lowering mortality rates and raising life expectancy in such a large population is difficult but not impossible as the Chinese have demonstrated. In democratic capitalist India, there is no health care for the poor and no guarantees for very many desperately poor people. There are no social programs from millions of India's widows and for those whose families don't want them anymore. This is the largest example of neoliberal flexible labour market in the world.

Evening Star wrote:
And Indira Gandhi's government-planned agricultural reforms did achieve self-sufficiency in the area of food and an end to famine.) And it's amazingly stupid of me to describe pre-1990 independent India as basically democratically socialist? For serious? They have a stock market in the US too, you know.

The US began investing money in public education and all manner of social welfare programs since the 1930s. They realized that if they continued to practice laissez-faire capitalism through central planning, the rest of the world would overtake them technologically and economically. It was either that or European fascism would overtake Europe and Asia.

During the cold war, western world governments changed  curriculum in higher education as a response to Sputnik and the Soviet space program. American began investing in all kinds of public programs which had little or nothing to do with market capitalism. The US still does have much public sector spending driving the economy and mainly why Americans are not suffering the same economically as they did in the 1930s. There is quite a lot of socialism in the US still today actually. The Americans tend not to refer to their Soviet style soft budget constraint spending as socialist though. They tend not to refer to a lot of public sector spending in that country as socialist. A lot of Americans and other nationals don't really understand the American economy. But it's never been a purely capitalist economysince about 1933 or so. Americans could no longer tolerate pure capitalism by then and rejected it in elections.

India does invest in public education today. India does have some socialist ideas still working for that country, like its government-owned central bank. India's banks were largely immune to the financial meltdown emanating from the privatized and deregulated banking mess here in the west. But there are many aspects of India's economy that are capitalist and leftovers from the caste system dragging the country down socially and economically.

Evening Star

Thanks, that at least fleshed out your side of it a little more.  You know, I did always wonder when I was younger why to my family in India, 'socialism' seemed to mean government-owned dams or TV networks while over here, it usually seemed to refer to universal health coverage or other social programmes.

Lard Tunderin Jeezus Lard Tunderin Jeezus's picture

I had thought that the Congress Socialist Party was the predecessor of the INC prior to independence, but I see now that it was only a caucus within the INC. But the INC under Nehru rejected the CSI, and they separated. For the most part, Nehru only paid lip-service to socialist ideals.

Quote:
Nehru did not join the CSP, which created some rancour among CSP members who saw Nehru as unwilling to put his socialist slogans into action. After independence, the CSP broke away from the Indian_National_Congress, under the influence of JP Narayan and Basawon Singh (Sinha), to form the Socialist Party of India.

Fidel

Evening Star wrote:

Thanks, that at least fleshed out your side of it a little more.  You know, I did always wonder when I was younger why to my family in India, 'socialism' seemed to mean government-owned dams or TV networks while over here, it usually seemed to refer to universal health coverage or other social programmes.

Your family was right, And so are they correct here about social programs.

A good example of how your family knows the truth is there in the neoliberal genesis fable of Pinochet's Chile, from 1973 to 1989. CHile is upheld by capitalists today as a model and miracle for free market capitalism. But General Pinochet never privatized all of the copper mines in that country, which were nationalised by the previous socialist government under Allende. Copper exports accounted for a significantly large percentage of Chile's export earnings and responsible for building much of the prosperity that exists in that country during those years through today. And yet they still refer to it as a free market model for the new liberal capitalism. It's all about perception and much of what capitalists project onto the public is illusion designed to confuse people.

 

Cueball Cueball's picture

There were many factions within the INC. For example  Chandra Bose, was a noted socialist leaning leader, who was ousted from leadership of the INC before the war, even though he won the position of presidency of the party in a free vote, went on to raise an army to fight with the Japanese against the British during the second world war.

clandestiny

Cueball wrote:

Stalin didn't care about the revolution. That is why his chief political victims were the revolutionaries themselves.

Problem is, how do we know what Stalin was being told? how do we know that the pig wasn't spiking everything the Cheka, NKVD(?) KGB was learning ...how many AGENTS did the pig have in USSR from tsar times? I realize Stalin win no nice guy awards, but...if we wanted to remove effective rightwing from north Amer. society today, we basically destroy the entire population! You should read 'Siber' by Farley Mowatt (1972) and 'the Myth Of The good war' By Jacques Pauvells (james Lorimer, publisher)..not to mention 'lies my teacher told me'  to get slightly different perspective... item: 911 was an inside job, and the investment in keeping the myth going is SO VASTLY INSANE that eve news actually LEADS with news of parcel bombs found in Yemen! The pig NEEDS terrorists so badly he actually paying toronto 18 to plead guilty (and promising them get pardoned later)...how do you guys TRUST the pig? Stalin made USSR a nuclear power  to pig's utter shock and assured that Soviets put men into space in early 60's- the pig HATED Stalin! and lies about him all/time!

 FACT- during the so called 'reign of terror' during French Revolution 2500 persons were killed! That's less then mr pig killed at WTC on sept 11th!

Cueball Cueball's picture

Because I have read a lot about Stalin, and my summation of his career is that he did not really care about the "revolution", as it was envisaged as a humanist answer to capitalism or feudalism. There is actually quite a lot of material on Stalin. Personal conversations, anecdotes, historical records. I think he had a very limited understanding of Leninism, Marx, or any of that.

His own writing doesn't even really reveal any kind of deeper understanding the politics of the movement he became the leader of.

Fidel

They could have fended off the fascist invaders with sweeping social programs and by handing things over to socially responsible economic planning committees with Trotsky leading the way. The NEP for capitalism might have worked eventually. Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Evening Star

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Fidel]</p> <p>[quote=Evening Star wrote:

It's all about perception and much of what capitalists project onto the public is illusion designed to confuse people.

 

Even after acknolwedging this, btw, I still think it's questionable to refer to FDR's reforms as socialism but to deny that there was anything socialistic about Nehru's/I. Gandhi's India.  (If anything, I would have thought that nationalized finance and centrally planned industry and agriculture come closer to any classical definition of socialism than welfare state social programmes do [although the latter seem more effective overall].)  Perhaps it's most reasonable to just acknowledge that most economies consist of some sort of mixture of capitalistic and socialistic ideas and to recognize the different degrees of mixture?

 

Evening Star

Oh weird.  That quote was from Fidel not from me.

Fidel

I understand what you're saying. It's hard to gauge capitalism in one country against another since the 1930s or so when Keynesians began shaping many of the largest western world economies. Then things began to swing to the political right by the mid 1970s. Capitalists were no longer satisfied sharing national incomes with workers.

It really looked as if the new liberal capitalism was singing a swan song by the late 1990s as profits soared and unemployment sank like a stone. However, it wasn't only the newly liberalized economies with "flexible labour markets" that were booming. OECD and Harvard economists have since admitted. although just barely, that there is a valid alternative to Margaret Thatchers neoliberalism. And it has a lot to do with social democracy as a driver of some of the world's most competitive economies.

I think that the way we do things in our economies is about to undergo sweeping changes over the next 50 to 100 years. Whatever kind of economy we pursue in future has to be far more efficient and far less energy intensive due to depleted fossil fuel reserves around the world. President George W. Bush said a few years ago that the American way of life is not open to negotiation. And whether or not that's true, I really don't believe that capitalism based on consumption of world resources at current levels is the future for any country in the world let alone Americans. Canada will not be able to supply half of our current natural gas production to the US so that they can be greener for very much longer. Some say Saudi Arabia's oil production has peaked and indicating that world supplies in general have peaked. What's left in the ground is going to be a lot more expensive to produce in the very near future. The changes required will be a shock to many in North America. But capitalism as it stands now will become economically and politically unsustainable within our life times.

clandestiny

It seems STUPENDOUS to realize that a simple, easily understood detail of geopolitics can be still a misunderstanding of history-namely that Stalin and USSR did NOT want to keep troops in a divided europe, DID NOT want the 'cold war' or NEED the 'iron curtain', but Churchilll and truman and the western elites DID WANT TO BURDEN THE USSR with those costs and deny USSR reparations from a united Germany! They always wanted to destroy the revolution. And very easily they BLAMED EVERYTHING post war on poor old USSR. I understand anyone hating/fearing Stalin-i also growied up assumed the history books were right, and he was nuttin but a crude, remorseless self seeking thug with nada on his mind but power and paranoia! Wrong. Stalin was one of most extraordinary men in modern history; and humanity is in BIG TROUBLE today for not even getting THAT simple detail right!  William Shirer blamed EVERYTHING on germanic racial characteristics; never mind the out and out fascism/racism common to educated and wealthy white folkies! What did Gandhi think of Uncle Joe?

jrootham

If the USSR didn't need to keep troops in Europe, they could have left.

I don't see how being revisionist with respect to Stalin is currently useful or intellectually honest.

 

Fidel

jrootham wrote:

If the USSR didn't need to keep troops in Europe, they could have left.

And, in fact, they have done just that.

You've just lost tens of millions of your countrymen to western aggression against the revolution part two. Do you sit back and wait for it to happen again, or do you move the line of defence westward by the same layer of countries you've just liberated from the Nazis? Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt argued with Stalin a great deal on the matter.

The Reaganauts promised Gorbachev and the Soviets that NATO would not be expanding Eastward if Germany was re-united. And guess what's happened ever since? The "North Atlantic" Treaty Org is continuing to push Eastward since 1991. It's bullshit. Chalmers Johnson wrote that the fall of the Berlin wall resulted in a total lack of imagination among western leaders regarding the possibilities for unprecedented global prosperity and world peace. Since 1991 the US Military has attacked and invaded two countries illegally and marauding over sovereign borders of Pakistan. The US Military has threatened a number of countries with nuclear weapons and contrary to Nuremberg code since 1945. War and economic sabotage reign merrily.

clandestiny

In Farley Mowat's 'Siber' (1972) he mentions how the Soviets in a far north autonaumaus(?) Republic, they built a humungous dam with turbine elec generation and all the fixings, out of ICE! I had never heard of such a thing before' An ICE dam. And it was 10 years old when Mowat visited it! Mowat also recounted the story about the USSR reindeer herd (19 million deer at time of his visit)...the reindeer provided huge $$ income for the north locals and side industries of leather, shoes ivory etc were fully operational- yet we never hear of it. Mowat mentions the 'DeFranco' brothers who started a reindeer herd in Alaska arouund 1950, based on Soviet expertise...the herd reached a million animals before US beef industry had sale of 'wild' meat BANNED, thus destroying one chance for the North (as far as our Canadian reindeer (caribou) the herd has shrunk yearly since records kept!) The USSR also opened the 'North East Passage' for up to 700 vessels a year by '72, and the weather is AS COLD in Russian Arctic as Canada!

I recall in the 'detente' times seeing a Time mag piece involving a Soviet General feeding a squirrel- the story said the general had been captured by nazis and spent the war in POW camps- yet even as late as last year i still read that Stalin ordered all Soviet pows sent to gulags (ie because Stalin was a MEAN mean MEAN person, with cruelty his main/ONLY trait!)

After 911 (which necessitated creating ISLAM as the west's greatest military enemy (and Islam having worlds largest army, navy, air force etc... so much so that if ANYONE dare question Islamic military threat to poor lil west, such as on Foxnews' recent Juan Williams spectacle, then they MUST BE SHUTTUP or entire houseacards maybe fall down!)) ...after 911, when an obvious fraud was foisted easily and seamlessly upon 6 billion sentient human beings, then ANYTHING can be passed off as truth!  JR. Bush's crazy war against innocent Iraq (with Saddam demonised to extent he was said to be admirer of STALIN) was provably a fraud- and 10 million people, the largest crowd in British history, protested the war, but SO WHAT! The pig pretends the war was...oh, a mistake ok, but really ISLAM HATES US and you fukking hippies can go to hell etc!

So let's just say Stalin might be one of history's most lied about leaders- precisely because he was successful in keeping the USSR going for much longer then it should or would have been had Stalin been less capable at getting things done in defiance of fascism!

And really, no one is amazed at the 2500 dead in the 'Reign of Terror'?  Robert Conquest claimed Stalin and the revolution 'radically altered the genetic code of Russia intelligensia' by killing millions- yet it's a known fact Stalin SIGNED EVERY SINGLE DEATH SENTENCE of his victims! The pig wins because veritable tranport trucks can be driven through the holes in the pig's 'hushtory of hummmanity'- 911 being just latest blatant example. ISLAM is a religion, not a country! And it's less a threat to anyone then xianity, which has thousands of nukes and trillions of dollars and no limits to the lies it pretends EVERYBODY accepts as truth, reagardless of what the 90 percent who don't matter, think.

ygtbk

This is undoubtedly a silly question, but has anyone actually read the book that this thread is ostensibly about?

Fidel

One of the authors of the book has been denounced as anti-semitic for comparing race genocide of the Nazis to class genocide of the Stalinists.

I recommend Chomsky's essay entitled, 'Counting the bodies' linked to above.

Lard Tunderin Jeezus Lard Tunderin Jeezus's picture

ygtbk wrote:

This is undoubtedly a silly question, but has anyone actually read the book that this thread is ostensibly about?

Not all of it, perhaps 40 or 50 pages. More than enough for me. Why?

ygtbk

Lard Tunderin Jeezus wrote:

ygtbk wrote:

This is undoubtedly a silly question, but has anyone actually read the book that this thread is ostensibly about?

Not all of it, perhaps 40 or 50 pages. More than enough for me. Why?

I haven't read it and I'm trying to figure out if I should.

Cueball Cueball's picture

Why not?

fooz33

Maysie wrote:

*face palm*

For the love of cats.

Bye sergio.

Kev55. I mean, really? I don't know what you're on about and since you've already been sternly warned I think this isn't the place for you. See ya.

But for the purpose of fixing the lies in the OP, I'm not going to close this.

If you actually read scientific literature on why men commit suicide you'd find that what he says has a scientific basis in reality, I swear the left is so fucking uneducated it's no wonder it collapsed.  Just as many morons inhabit the left as the right.

Lard Tunderin Jeezus Lard Tunderin Jeezus's picture

Clearly I didn't think it was worth any more of my time, so I'm not recommending it.

ygtbk

Cueball wrote:

Why not?

So little time, so many books...

Merowe

ygtbk wrote:

This is undoubtedly a silly question, but has anyone actually read the book that this thread is ostensibly about?

I'll get to it, just as soon as I finish the current project - Jack in the Beanstalk.

Lard Tunderin Jeezus Lard Tunderin Jeezus's picture

Merowe's got the right idea - read the classics first.

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