Pro-Soviet Lefties
Yep, as I've said before, they still exist.
Imagine: a righty academic type posts a Nazi poster and sighs about the glorious Third Reich...and about the inevitability of a fourth one...
Special bonus: a commenter points out what really shouldn't have to be pointed out: that the Third Reich was shit. Blogger responds that yeah, well America is shit too!
These cases are (a) comparable/relevantly similar or (b) not?
Gotta love that comparison of the US to the USSR. The US intermittently sucks, and sucks pretty bad at times (but is also pretty damn good much of the time and in many ways by the standards of history). Ergo the USSR--which sucked in almost all ways, at all times, and sucked almost off the end of the sucking scale--didn't really suck so bad at all!
(The fact that the post discussed above came right after a long, meandering, semi-coherent po-mo-y post about how bad England sucks, pop music and the badness of liberalsssesss should (a) surprise me or (b) not surprise me?)
Yep, as I've said before, they still exist.
Imagine: a righty academic type posts a Nazi poster and sighs about the glorious Third Reich...and about the inevitability of a fourth one...
Special bonus: a commenter points out what really shouldn't have to be pointed out: that the Third Reich was shit. Blogger responds that yeah, well America is shit too!
These cases are (a) comparable/relevantly similar or (b) not?
Gotta love that comparison of the US to the USSR. The US intermittently sucks, and sucks pretty bad at times (but is also pretty damn good much of the time and in many ways by the standards of history). Ergo the USSR--which sucked in almost all ways, at all times, and sucked almost off the end of the sucking scale--didn't really suck so bad at all!
(The fact that the post discussed above came right after a long, meandering, semi-coherent po-mo-y post about how bad England sucks, pop music and the badness of liberalsssesss should (a) surprise me or (b) not surprise me?)
posted by Winston Smith at
8:14 AM
16 Comments:
It's my current theory that "liberal" in some sense defines the center. New Labour right now is this weird concoction combining the worst features of authoritarianism [right] and collectivism/post-nationalism [left].
The "Conservatives" in the UK seem to be making headway as what we might call liberal, sort of combining the classical and modern varieties.
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2219036,00.html
As for the USSR, it had its own funky combination of right and left as defined above. [So did National Socialism.]
New Labour ain't Stalin or Hitler, mind you, but the utilitarian/utopian impulse leads to a strange and dangerous beast that cannot help but ending eating its own. It takes a tremendous amount of education, like that found in university faculties, to learn to ignore that fact.
I don't understand a couple things about this post:
1) Why you were wasting your time reading some random blog with clearly nothing/little to offer.
2) Why you gave it ANY recognition with a link to it in your blog.
3) Why it even matters that there's one loser out there who seemed to be pro-Soviet Union, but now is apparently claiming to only have been supporting the Soviet revolution and not the Soviet Union.
a. That's why you don't read random losery blogs - no clarity in authorship, meaning that his defense is just as plausible as your accusation.
But, since we're here, these are some things I'd like to point out, which I feel I ALWAYS have to point out when any discussion about Communism/Russia comes up:
1) Communism does not entail that a democratic process cannot occur within it.
2) The USSR was more an example of the failure of extremely corrupt totalitarianism than Communism.
3) Democracies fail too, ya know, when they become corrupt. Everyone always talks about how the USSR is why Communism is doomed to failure no matter what, but no one thinks that the election of Bush/Cheney proves that Democracy will always fail no matter what.
Actually, many who are influenced by classical philosophy are skeptical of democracy.
Including the Founders.
The question about communism is that because it depends on unanimity, what to do with those who aren't with the plan?
Some sort of authoritarianism seems structurally inevitable. When Gorbachev tried to mix in liberalism (liberality?), it all fell apart of its own anti-human weight. "Humanism" that ignores human nature and the primacy of the individual ain't very human after all.
what to do with those who aren't with the plan?
That question was answered over 2,000 years ago:
In Acts 5:2, Ananias presents his donation to Peter, who replies, "Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?" Peter points out that Ananias had every right not to sell the land at all or to do what he wanted to with the profits, but by telling a lie—by saying that he was donating the entire amount—he had lied to God.
Ananias then falls to the ground dead and is carried out. Three hours later, his wife enters and tells the same lie, suffering the same fate.
Tom: I guess it depends on what sort of dissent you're talking about. Unanimity is not required in all aspects of life in order for Communism to work. I doubt that's what you were claiming, but without you being more specific about it, I don't know what to say. I don't see it hypothetically requiring much more unanimity than is required by our democratic republic, if any.
Mystic: Dissent in the form of the black market, the true friend of liberty and scourge of collectivism.
Professor: Stalin struck people dead too, in his fashion. He'd have given Ananias the same treatment, or all would be lost.
Here's a 21st Century warrior for you, TVD
4 1/2 million dead. Is the Gulag funny? I don't get it.
The attempt to use the Gulag as a political football is what's risible, TVD.
I guess you'd have advised Mel Brooks to cut the "Springtime for Hitler" number from "The Producers" as well.............
Is the Gulag a political football? We see the Che Guevera chic and people kissing Castro's ass and are forced to suspect some people still don't get it.
Let me see if I have the IOKIYAR rules right: It's o.k. for TVD to call liberals Castro-ass-kissing, Gulag-excusing Stalinists but it would be uncivil for liberals to call him a Nazi (not that I am, mind you - Bushist sure, but not Nazi)? Is that how it's supposed to work?
Don't the Gulags count against communism to at least some extent? Even though there's never been a perfect instantiation of communism, doesn't it matter that every instantiation there HAS been has sucked monstrously?
Why liberals have *any* inclination to defend communism beats the hell out of me.
Exactamundo. It's leftists who are Castro-ass-kissing, Gulag-excusing Stalinists, and Hugo Chavez makes one more ass.
I could be a liberal myself, if they weren't aligned with the leftists. I'm not happy about Pat Robertson as my own bedfellow, but I prefer him to the alternative.
Yeah, but the leftists aren't really much of a power in the Democratic party. The hard-core right *might* not be quite as crazy as the hard-core left...though that's a call too close to make, IMHO...but they have actual power in the GOP, whereas the hard-core left is just a yapping, yammering annoyance on the liberal side.
And, incidentally, I've known conservatives who would defend Hitler in about the same way that some lefties will defend communism. Furthermore, lefties usually won't defend Stalin or Mao, but, rather, some abstract idea of communism. Though one does run into the occasional brain-dead Maoist...
Of course, the gulags count against communism. That's totally obvious. But they don't count against the New Deal, the Great Society, or national health care.
Similarly, the death camps count against the Nazis, including the skinheads who follow them but not against the Republicans, not even those who advocated the Iraq invasion.
This is true even though the Bushists sold the war using some of the same generic propaganda techniques the Josef Goebbels used. Using propaganda techniques doesn't actually narrow the field that much. Kim Jong Il is clearly not a Nazi, for example.
Oh my. Godwin's law invoked. Goebbels indeed.
Yeah, but the leftists aren't really much of a power in the Democratic party. The hard-core right *might* not be quite as crazy as the hard-core left...though that's a call too close to make, IMHO...but they have actual power in the GOP, whereas the hard-core left is just a yapping, yammering annoyance on the liberal side.
I don't think this is so, mainly because the Dem presidential candidates embraced the Kos convo and ditched the DLC.
We'll see. I perceive a sea-change in the Democratic Party, but perhaps my alarm is premature. Hillary and Evan Bayh are as center-left as they come.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home