Thursday, September 10, 2009

The shorter Seumas Milne

I love Stalin.

5 comments:

Tim (Kalyr) said...

My thoughts exactly on reading that piece.

Apologists for Stalin really ought to be cast into the same outer darkness as the pro-Nazi historical revisionists he attacks in that article.

Frugal Dougal said...

minimalist?

Stephen W said...

I can barely believe my eyes. A supposedly respectable, liberal, british broadsheet newspaper is carrying an article defending Stalinism.

It's like the show trials, the great purges, the deportations, the gulag archipelgio, the rape of millions of german women, the enslavement of the countries of eastern europe, the invasion of poland and the baltic states, the Ukrainian famine, the betrayal of the polish resistance, the murder of raoul wallenberg, the doctor's plot, the anti-semitism and the general all round, all consuming evil never occurred.

It's frankly incredible. This guy should be considered on a level with holocaust deniers, he should be shunned by polite society, he should never work for a respectable newspaper again.

He's just managed to trivialise the deaths of tens of millions of people within the last century with a single article, all the while pretending moral outrage. It's just incredible.

Brit.in.Aussie said...

I can hardly believe my eyes as commenters on a liberal blog obviously can't read.

Mr Time said...

I don't believe he was defending Stalinism, or trivialising the deaths that occurred within the USSR in the early 20th century. He was attempting to re-straighten the record of what actually happened around the M-R pact, i.e. what the USSR's intentions were. They certainly weren't trying to cosy up to the fascists, since fascism is clearly a class based society.

Also, calling the USSR is pure ignorance. Since the state ideology was nominally based on Marxism, who was himself a Jew at birth, it would have required a propaganda machine beyond the capabilities of the state in order to twist the truth that much. In fact, one of the very first actions the revolution took was to criminalise hate speech, particularly anti-semitism. The White Brigade, who were the Western backed aggressors during the civil war, were at the time notoriously anti-semitic, and part of their terror strategy was to go on pogroms.