Making history

The education system has done an effective job of making the discipline of history dry and boring. Sarcasm aside, in the right hands, history podcasts can be both informative and entertaining. All it takes is good writing and production, and a trained actor, in this case Paul McGann, to provide narration. Recently, I have been listening to Real Dictators, a podcast series that chronicles the lives of the likes of North Korea's ruling Kim dynasty, Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, and Francois Duvalier of Haiti.

Here's some of my impressions on the series so far. Life in North Korea sounds horrible on every measure. The average citizen subsists on meagre food rations, under heavy state oppression. Kim Jong-il, son of Kim il-Sung, was a film buff who liked movies from the capitalist world. He fancied himself as a movie mogul, and oversaw the production of Bulgasari, a Godzilla knockoff monster movie. 

Joseph Stalin was an unusually cruel man, unmoved by ordering the deaths of real and imagined opponents, or millions of innocent Soviet citizens who died as a result of his actions. His second wife committed suicide. His son, Yakov, fought with the Red Army in the Second World War. After he was captured by the Germans, he let his son die rather than negotiate his release. This was partially out of coldness, but also reflective of the Georgian culture Stalin was brought up in. 

Through interviews with historians and first hand accounts, the producers have done an excellent job of fleshing out these evil men. I commend this series to your subscription list. 

By Image:Hitlermusso2 edit.jpg, Link

https://www.noiser.com/realdictators

100 million people served

If you live in Melbourne, Australia, and are at a loose end over the Easter break, you might consider attending Marxism 2020, Australia's biggest socialist conference. As you can see from the screen grab, the conference theme is "A world to win." Marxist evangelists seek to win the world to the hammer and sickle, just like Christian evangelists. Indeed, a cursory search of library union catalogues shows that it is also the title of several books on Christian evangelism and missions, as well as about socialism and communism. Does this mean that conference delegates dream of enacting a worldwide Marxist utopia?

The other day, one of the conference organisers did a radio interview. When asked to do so, she was unable to name one country where Marxism has worked. The interviewer said that he visited Russia in 1987, only 4 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and saw first hand the dire situation the country was in as a result of 70 years of Communist rule. She responded by saying that she was a Trotskyist, and that Trotskyists were persecuted by other Communists. This is true, but doesn't really answer the question.

Leon Trotsky was Stalin's rival after the death of Lenin in 1924. Trotsky was eventually forced into exile in 1928, and was assassinated in 1940 by a Spanish agent with links to Stalin at his home in Mexico. There was not enough time for a more comprehensive interview, but I would have liked to hear her opinions on whether or not Soviet Communism would have turned out differently under Trotsky's leadership instead of Stalin's. It is almost as though he was a political Messiah, a benign and compassionate revolutionary.

This is not the case at all. The late Richard Pipes, a well known historian who specialised in Russian history, notes that Trotsky was in favour of forced labor, terror, and concentration camps, all of which were key features of the Stalinist dictatorship. In view of these sentiments, "it is likely that if he had succeeded Lenin, we would have witnessed in the Soviet Union much the same oppression of labor as he did under Stalin."

It is significant to note that Trotsky, not Stalin, introduced concentration camps to deal with the enemies of the new regime. It was Stalin who developed the gulag system by building upon Trotsky's work. As Pipes also notes:

"Though the fact is little-known, it was Trotsky, not Stalin, who introduced into Soviet Russia the concentration camp, an institution that under Stalin developed into the monstrous Gulag empire...Trotsky ordered a network of concentration camps to be constructed to isolate “sinister agitators, counterrevolutionary officers, saboteurs, parasites, and speculators” who were not executed or subjected to other penalties...By 1919, concentration camps were established in every provincial capital. In 1923, Russia had 315 concentration camps with 70,000 inmates."

Elsewhere, Andrew Stuttaford calls Trotsky a "mass murderer." In Trotsky's worldview, murder was permissible if the ends justified the means, the means being the consolidation of Bolshevik power. He was the commissar of the Red Army during the brutal Russian Civil War (1918-1921). As such, he must take some of the responsibility for the deaths of 8 million people during the war.

Conference delegates such as this interview participant would do well to take off their historiographical blinkers, develop some critical thinking skills, and not see Trotsky as a revolutionary hero to be looked up to.

https://fee.org/articles/why-trotsky-believed-it-was-moral-to-kill-the-tsars-children/

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/trotsky-angel-enlightenment-or-frustrated-dictator

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/communism-memory-and-forgetting/

https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/crimes-and-mass-violence-russian-civil-wars-1918-1921.html

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/04/don-t-idealize-leon-trotsky.html

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/80739/trotsky-the-jew

Dva Sapaga Para

I would hate to think how the average Russian feel these days. Communism fell in 1991. They perhaps over optimistically looked forward to democratic government, with free and fair elections, free speech, freedom of the press, and other basic freedoms. These hopes were dashed when the autocratic Vladimir Putin assumed the Presidency in 1999.

Putin has attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of Joseph Stalin, portraying him as a strong leader who led his nation to victory in the Second World War, and built it into a superpower. Fortunately, enough Russians can see through this attempt at historical revisionism. Never mind the millions of people he ruthlessly killed then.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/10/vladimir-putin-russia-rehabilitating-stalin-soviet-past?fbclid=IwAR3cG-iQiszNDHVdJK6SiebfeYUA6cpM6FBDrtpOpo_U9Nbd9omVRLQagsA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT254smRufA

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic

More convenient historical amnesia. According to some people, you'd be forgiven that Stalin was infallible.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/nyt_reports_russian_ceremony_for_stalins_victims_forgets_to_mention_s_word_or_walter_duranty.html

Don't bother me with the facts

The Easter long weekend is a time for reflecting on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, spending time with family and friends, or heading out of the city for a short break. 

If none of those things tickle your fancy, and you live in Melbourne, or have the means to get there, you might care to attend the Marxism 18 conference. 

I glanced over the conference program, and was surprised to see that some of the speakers are smiling in their photographs. Maybe I should go, just for the rare opportunity to meet an actual happy Marxist. I didn't know they existed. 

Presumably this conference is not just theoretical, and attendees (or comrades) will come away with renewed zeal to implement Marxism in Australia, but which version of it? Is it Lenin's? Trotsky's? Stalin's? Mao's? Ceaucescu's? The Kim dynasty's? Pol Pot's? 

My brow furrows as I write this. History clearly and consistently shows that their ideology has failed, so they choose to ignore it. Presumably, the deaths of as many as 100 million people at the hands of communist regimes is not important to them. That old saying, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results," applies to them. 

No elephant stamp for you

Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584)

This is one of the most poorly written internet articles I've read in some time. It looks like the work of a primary school student. The grammar makes no sense at all, not to mention the sloppy research. I never knew that Ivan the Terrible was the Grand Prince of Moscow in the 1950s.

That would have come as a surprise to Joseph Stalin, or Nikita Khruschev, or any of the surviving revolutionaries who forced the Romanov dynasty from power in the 1917 revolution. One would hope that any student would know better than to use this site as a reference for academic work.

By Viktor Vasnetsov - This file has been extracted from another file: Vasnetsov Ioann 4.jpg Scanned from A. K. Lazuko Victor Vasnetsov, Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1990, ISBN 5-7370-0107-5, Public Domain, Link

Act your age, not your shoe size

Triple J is moving its Hottest 100 countdown from Australia Day to January 27. The radio station said it moved the countdown in recognition of “increasing debate” surrounding and the day’s meaning for indigenous people. In response, Senator Cory Bernardi, leader of the Australian Conservatives Party, decided to compile his own alternative list of 100 Australian songs on Spotify. The created controversy, when many of the artists on the list demanded they be removed from it.

To paraphrase, "You and your party are against everything I stand for. I refuse to let you use my music for your political purposes," they said.

Bernardi also invited suggestions from Twitter users. Leftist keyboard warriors couldn't resist the opportunity to smear and mock him by suggesting songs like Mummy Doesn't Know You're a Nazi, by Frenzal Rhomb, and Christian songs with titles such as Jesus Use Me, He Touched Me, and Hallelujah, The Lord's Coming Again. Well, tee hee, and chortle. What shining wits these people are. 

Two can play at that game. Here's some of my song suggestions for the other side, some of whom stubbornly cling to socialist ideology, despite ample historical evidence that it doesn't work. 

Dahp Prampi Mesa Moha Chokchey (National anthem of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge)

The East is Red by Li Youyan

The Internationale (Traditional)

Haste Siempre, Comandante by Carlos Puebla

Onwards Toward the Final Victory by Kim Moon Hyuk and Yoon De Geun

Solidarity Forever (Traditional)
The Stalin Album by the Red Army Choir

State Anthem of the Soviet Union (1944 version) by Alexander Alexandrov 

Here ends today's history lesson. 

Extreme bafflement

Stalinist propaganda 

To most of the democratically governed world, former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was a despot and mass murderer. To others, he is a beloved figure. The city of his birth, Gori in Georgia, is home to the Stalin Museum and birthplace. Adjoining buildings house artifacts from his life, and for all intents and purposes, are virtual shrines that serve the cult of personality that surrounds him to this day.

Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, it is one of the unfathomable mysteries of history that a such an evil man could be so loved and admired. After he assumed and consolidated his power, it is believed that with the purges of his enemies, forced famines of the Soviet populace, state terrorism, incarcerations in labour camps, and forced migrations, Stalin was responsible for the death of as many as 40 million people within the borders of the Soviet Union.

So cold and evil was he, and completely unmoved by this massive death toll, that he is believed to have said that, "One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic." 

By the time of his death in 1953, he was a sick and paranoid man, believing that his cronies were plotting to kill him.

He suffered a stroke on March 1, 1953, and died 4 days later. 

In his seminal 1992 work, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, British historian Alan Bullock (1914-2004) narrates Stalin's slow, agonising death as follows, as recounted by his daughter, Svetlana:

"The death agony was terrible. God grants an easy death only to the just. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of fear of death...Then something incomprehensible and terrible happened that to this day I can't forget...He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace..The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh."

It must have been terrible to die with the blood of millions of innocent people on one's hands, and as a former Orthodox seminarian who died having made an enemy of God. There is nothing here to indicate that Stalin felt any remorse over his crimes. It gets you thinking; it's certainly not the way I would want to die. God doesn't want anyone to die estranged from Him (2 Peter 3:9). Only God knows what is in a person's heart, and I'm not so presumptuous and arrogant as to judge who is and isn't worthy of salvation, because only God can judge. If Stalin had repented of his sins and sought God's forgiveness late in life, accepting the gift of salvation, he would have received it. Some people are so hardened against God that they are beyond help, and Stalin was one of them.