Stalin,

[Deamon]

I was bored today so I decided to look up about my favorite communist and then got bored again and so decided to bring it up here. There is no question that Stalin was brutal, but did his bad outweigh his good? I don't think so, if you consider what he did to help the world, he saved europe from the nazi's (I don't care what you say, the Americans couldn't have won if Stalin hadn't wiped out half of the German army and then wiped them out again in the 2nd winter campaign. He kept a good deal of the german army busy during the allied invasion, and probably enabled its success. What do you think of him? Just a violent dictator, or misunderstood and misguided champion of the people.

[wrecker05]

Okay Deamon, first of all Stalin signed a treaty with your man Hitler. Surprise Surprise your man Hitler (you seem to vary from being pro-Hitler(not fascist) to being pro communist) attacked. Duh.
Stalin dead and forgotten.

[Eddy's Geist]

Didn't he also sign a treaty with us and Churchill too?

[Deamon]

http://www.marx2mao.org/Stalin/S12(241x302).GIF

Young Stalin http://bushwhacked.net/ubb/smile.gif

[lucie]

Actually, Russia's geography and weather kept the German army occupied far more than did the Soviet army (see Napoleon)

Stalin was responsible for the deaths of far more Soviet civilians than German soldiers. There is no indication at all that that he would have done squat about Germany if Hitler hadn't shown up on Stalin's doorstep.

Just because his atrocities were largely kept within the Soviet borders (wherever they happened to be at any particular time) doesn't mean they were any less horrendous.

[Deamon]

Alot of these 'atrocities' were nazi propaganda, and many done by the nazi's, stalin, the russian army caused many more causilties than the winter

[shotglass]

Being a good tactician in a war does not make you good for anything else. Unless I am mistaken, Stalin killed more of his countrymen than any other dictator/ruler in history.

Sounds like a real nice guy. I'll stick with calling him a worse monster than Hitler, Vlad the Impaler, and the Village People all rolled into one.

[Kimmy]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Deamon:
[B]I was bored today so I decided to look up about my favorite communist

Deamon.. this isn't natural for a young man... http://bushwhacked.net/ubb/wink.gif

[Deamon]

If you don't read anything else, read the quote at the bottom.

"So that prisons should vanish forever, we built new prisons. So that all frontiers should fall, we surrounded ourselves with a Chinese Wall. So that work should become a rest and a pleasure, we introduced forced labor. So that not one drop of blood should be shed any more, we killed and killed and killed."
(Andrei Sinyavsky, "On Socialist Realism,"

Thats what anti-stalin people, like trostkyites said

Can we hold a set of morals up to politics, though? Ever since Machiavelli, there is a strong feeling that the just and moral will fail in politics; that somehow, effective political leaders must play by different rules. When applied to whole countries, where often the question is the struggle for survival of an entire people (either real or imagined), the morality issue again takes on different meanings. It is not for nothing, that for the past two centuries Poland has been called "The Christ Among Nations," often because it put principles before reality, and was thereby divided, conquered, engulfed, and "crucified" by its powerful neighbors decade after decade. Stalin recognized that survival and greatness among nations has little to do with conventional morality. In a famous speech in 1931 Stalin stated bluntly:


To slacken the tempo [of radical measures] would mean falling behind... One feature of the history of Old Russia was the continual beatings by other nations. She suffered for falling behind..., for military, cultural, political, industrial, and agricultural backwardness.... Such is the law of exploiters to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism.... Do you want our Socialist fatherland to be beaten and lose its independence? If you do not want this you must put an end to backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up.... There is no other way. We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.
(Speech delivered at the 18th Party Congress, 1931).
Exactly ten years after this speech, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, but was not able to defeat it in large part because the Stalinist plan had indeed overcome Russia's backwardness; they were able to field and equip a huge armed force that ultimately drove the Germans out of Russia and out of eastern Europe.

Stalin also:
ended capitalism in the Soviet Union (whether good or bad depends on other kinds of judgments)
built the world's first and largest collectivized farming system
made the Soviet Union a great industrial power, bringing the country from "backward" status to the top-ranked of world industrial nations
built the world's first state socialist system, with benefits such as no unemployment, social services for all citizens, and elimination of mass illiteracy
led the country to victory in World War II
built an Eastern European Empire
held the "encircling capitalist countries" at bay


George Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union in the mid-thirties, he observed "splendidly illustrated magazines, crowds of brightly dressed people, well-fed happy looking workers...; no one seeing these people will ever believe tales of a half-starved population dwelling under the lash of a ruthless tyrant in labor camps."

[Deamon]

Oh! btw, info from
http://library.thinkquest.org/17120/data/bios/users/stalin/page_1.html

[lucie]

Actually, Deamon, I was refering to pre-and post-WWII atrocities, in particular the 1934-38 period often referred to as the "Great Terror", when he killed, imprisioned, or tortured as many as 7 million Soviet citizens, and the early period of agricultural collectivism when millions of farmers were starved to death, some due to famine, others due to the deliberate withholding of food supplies by the Soviet government under Stalin.

For a brief description, see this site:
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/stalin.htm

It is short and concise, and includes some excellent bibliographical links. I verified the statements against a number of sources, and all are in general agreement regarding statistics and Stalin's intentions.

You might note the bit about how Stalin's non-agression pact with Hitler helped pave the way for WWII, by the way.

[This message has been edited by lucie (edited 01-28-2002).]

[Deamon]

Hitler offered many peace treaties to the allies, they declared war on him, poland didn't have paticularly strong ties with any country, Britian, and france were just looking for reasons to go at the germans again.

[GrantMan]

My favorite treaty that Hitler offered to any country was the one he offered Austria. How did that one go? Something to the effect of join our cause or die... I'm not sure exactly how it went but it's probably somehow Bush's fault or the fault of the USA in general.

Of course the Germans had to arrest some 30,000+ Jews at the time but it was all for peace, right? it was probably the USA's fault as well. Aren't we to blame for everything that's ever happened in the world?

[This message has been edited by GrantMan (edited 01-29-2002).]

[Rek]

I'm amazed at how so many people can "think" and come up with so many different perspectives.

[GrantMan]

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Deamon:
the russian army caused many more causilties than the winter</font>

Of course they did. Especially once they got their Soviet Engineers behind enemy lines and were able to take the Allie's Weather Control Device. Once the Russians were able to snag this bit of technology all hell broke loose over Germany. However, the Russians weren't paying much attention and were annialated by the Allied Prizm Tank forces that were able to make quick and relentless sneak attacks thanks to Einstein's Chronosphere technology.

Okay... So I've been playing Red Alert 2 a bit much lately...

[jhans]

I’m convinced that Deamon hardly believes any of the stuff he writes. He just enjoys watching all of us chase our tails. Think about it. Does he ever write something that makes you think *hmmm… good point, I hadn’t thought of that before*? I can’t ever remember something that he has written that makes me feel as though he is making a real attempt to adequately defend his stated belief. Usually Eddy has to swoop in and bring the conversation back to reality. When I read Eddy’s posts I am compelled to defend or back off my position. When I read Deamon’s posts I’m almost always struck by the fact that his position is indefensible. However, we all get sucked into pointing out the infinite weakness to his belief s and high-five ourselves for destroying what was essentially set up as a straw man argument. Sure, Deamon responds back to us with some equally indefensible statement which makes us feel like we really have him on the run but I think he is just throwing us some table scraps to get us chasing our tails again. I guess he makes this place entertaining but if we are going to be his tail chasing bitches we should at least demand some better cuts of meat.

[Laurie]

Rek....generalizing is a prerequisite to being here. LOL

Communism stinks...YEAH YEAH YEAH
It's not right....NO NO NO

I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me.

[shotglass]

Hey, I got an idea for you, Demon.

Go live in China for 3 years. If you don't starve to death or get run over by a tank, come back and tell us how it was and how happy you are to be able to eat something other than fried rat with rice.

Oh, I forgot, you would not do that because you enjoy freedom and we all know there is no freedom in commieville except for the political class. With your limited capability of discerning thought, you would not qualify.

------------------
St. Louis Rams...the greatest show on turf.

[Eddy's Geist]

Screw China, Deamon. Go to the fricken Ukraine and open up a strip club! Hell Yeah! You're going to run in to a bit of problems from the various mafias but if you can just BS them in to thinking that you can actually get student visa's for their little brothers and sisters then they'll become your new best friend. If any of the gangsta's continue to trouble you then have them liquidated by your gangster friends. This has the added bonus of opening up new turf for you and your friends as well. Anyhow, I degress. Back to the strippers. The strip clubs will serve as the facade to a multi-tiered criminal cabal where you'll be able to sell heroin and balls of opium to all kinds of devients. The club is also a perfect temp agency to find all those cute russian girls who want to marry dorky software engineers from Palo Alto and like to make Bukkake videos on the side. We're talking serious Marc Rich size money bags here. So screw the rat meat and screw China. Can I be your stage manager at the club?

[lucie]

Fried rat!?! Fried rat!?! Hell, when I was in the Ukraine back in the '30's we would have loved a hot, filling dish of fried rat! Damn Chinese peasants really know how to live.

I'm with jhansb - he's trolling. If I'd been around lately I probably would have known that and simply not bothered to reply in the first place.

[Deamon]

Yes, but they do get alot of responses eh?
And things are sidetracked so easily that it shouldn't matter, it goes from stalin, to me and my posts, to me moving to china, then the ukraine.. so don't just blame me for lack of focus and putting up straw defense.. To be honest I simply like to choose the hardest positions to defend, the most unpopular, because its harder!

[Deamon]

Damn, I didn't mean to hit reply yet

[Eddy's Geist]

Fried rat with a bit o' soy sauce probably tastes better than the cans of dog food that a lot of senior citizens have to eat here in the US.

[Spaz59]

Stalin was a stupid ----weed who ruined the reputation of communism with his brutal repression and complete distorting of communist values.