Imagine Joseph Stalin signing the Seven Noahide laws. Impossible. There was an Eddie Murphy movie where he was unable to spend anywhere near a fraction of the money he had, try as hard as he might. The same way, it is hard to believe one man, Stalin could be responsible for so many deaths, not counting the ruined and wasted lives of many of the living.
( see link at end)…A Soviet weekly newspaper today published the most detailed accounting of Stalin’s victims yet presented to a mass audience here, indicating that about 20 million died in labor camps, forced collectivization, famine and executions.The estimates, by the historian Roy Medvedev, were printed in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti, which has a circulation of more than 20 million….
—(Roses For Stalin. A perfect example of Socialist Realism in both its obvious use as political propaganda as well as its traditional, anti-symbolist conventions).—Read More:http://uttaps.wordpress.com/actor-prepares/stanislavski-stalin-meyerhold-a-tale-of-two-or-three-russians/stalin-socialist-realism-and-heart-attack/
The estimated number of deaths is about equal to the number of Soviet soldiers and civilians believed killed in World War II. Mr. Medvedev’s grim arithmetic was reported in a less detailed version last November in Moscow News, a limited-circulation weekly, which sells about 200,000 copies in Russian, but today’s article marked the first time the numbers have been disclosed to a nationwide audience….
—But Joseph Stalin seems to have had possibly the worst taste in history, if his hate-list of artistic endeavours is anything to go by. The list includes works by Shostakovich, Eisenstein, Bulgakov, Akhmatova and Erdman. Really, it’s quite astounding that one man should have had such unerringly poor cultural judgment.
Fair enough: this is somewhat disingenuous. Stalin didn’t ban these works because he didn’t like them, or didn’t get them, but precisely because he did: they were independent, subversive pieces of work forming a perceived threat to the Soviet system. Happily, however, we are lucky enough to have them, and I was glad to see one of them the other day.
Nikolai Erdman wrote his play The Suicide in 1928 and it took Stalin just one performance to understand what it advocated and ban it. —Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2007/apr/30/takingtheatretipsfromjosep
…In all, Mr. Medvedev calculated about 40 million victims of Stalin’s repressions, including those arrested, driven from their land or blacklisted….Mr. Medvedev acknowledged in Argumenti i Fakti, and repeated tonight, that many periods of repression will never be fully measured because records have been lost or never existed. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/04/world/major-soviet-paper-says-20-million-died-as-victims-of-stalin.html
It is equally appalling to believe that there are intellectuals on the far Left that can equate America with Soviet Russia, or even so-called modern Russia for that matter. Its like comparing a chronic catch-and-release prisoner, a repeat offender with with a one-time vandal. Typical is the comparison of American forces in WWII with the Soviet Union and their trans-European rape and loot tour. American “incidents” are the exception not the rule, sometimes shocking, but overall, the U.S. occupation of Japan and Germany was benign, permitting those societies to enjoy some stability and put in the mechanisms to rebuild and get on.
By comparison, literally millions of German women were raped by Soviets including those liberated from camps. The value of human life was lowly regarded at best, still shocking to read about today, and again, all linked to ideology divorced from any spiritual element. The complete triumph of nihilism. There was no moral parity whatsoever between Soviets and Americans despite what we may regard as extreme inequality in America and its seemingly innate racism, violence and excessiveness, it is still at bottom, a society that abhors atrocities and massacres. Manifest destiny or not, the Leftists who bite the hand that feeds them are barking up the wrong trees…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people, tens of millions it was often claimed, in the endless wastes of the Gulag. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of
Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one….…Beyond the numbers killed remains the question of intent. Most of the Soviet killing took place in times of peace, and was related more or less distantly to an ideologically informed vision of modernization. Germany bears the chief responsibility for the war, and killed civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism. Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot, deported, enslaved, or assimilated….Read More:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/?pagination=false
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