Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
You are talking like you are part of the deluded left that at first embraced Stalin and then when they realized how horrible things went you tried to argue that what happaned was because Stalin was insane and deluded and what happened was not the logical extension of the communist philosophy.
Someone like Stalin does not stay in power for as long as he did without a signficant portion of the people underneath him believing in the philosophy of what he is doing. Everything he did could be justified as part of his communist philosophy.
Stalin took a backward rural national and turned it into an industrial power house. His country was wiped out during WWII and yet he turned it into one the most advanced and industrialized economies in the world.
He just had to slaughter twenty percent of the population to do it. But the other eighty percent ended up with a much higher standard of living.
The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few.
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You are talking like a member of the indoctrinated right that first believed Stalin was the embodiment of Capital C Communism that had to be defeated as an all-encompassing ideology and to be justified required subservience by the masses to the works of Karl Marx but also ignores the possibility that much of the people's subservience was possibly obtained not so much by ideology as by the crushing rule of a totalitarian regime focused on preserving its existence, which may be analogous in some ways to Baathist rule, which we'll leave aside for the moment because of potentially uncomfortable parallells to finding yourself arguing that some Iraqis actually bought in to Baathist ideology, such as it was, and didn't actually starve from the thirst for freedom that they would've seized years ago but for the iron hand of the Evil Fucker Saddam.
