ajva | (no subject)

Gosh! Not often I have cause to think at work...

I think it's down to the way the cold war ended. Never mind Stalin's massacres, 46 years of the threat of MAD or the invasion of the BRD, or whatever. The war ending with the USSR deciding to collapse rather than being defeated by force of arms makes it seem almost comical in hindsight. So it can't have been that bad really. Can it?

Well I think he's mistaken to equate Stalin at his worst to the whole of "the great doomed Soviet experiment of 1917-90", and I don't think this has anything to do with what Labour is getting away with, which is more about what governments in general get away with, especially since Thatcher.

And as far as our reaction to repressive history goes, the Nazis are the exception not the rule, and I don't necessarily agree with that. The reaction to the death of Melita Norwood reminds me more of the death of Nixon. Anyone can be forgiven by politicians, except Nazis, because politicians don't want us to learn from history, except about the Nazis; and what they want us to learn about the Nazis is that the Nazis were unique...

Word.

Mod parent up, as they say on Slashdot.

I agree with bits of it, but I think equating the concept of Communism with the actions of Stalin is a touch disingenuous.

I do see left-wing policies as more morally sound, and therefore am more likely to forgive mistakes in left-wing governments, but I don't really see that as a problem.

I could understand that if the current Government was leftwing, but it really isn't - as far as I can see, it's now distinctly to the right of Thatcher, and pressing ahead without any signs of a slowdown. It really does baffle me why it isn't yet as unpopular as Thatcher was in 1991.

Perhaps because a lot of Thatcher's unpopularity wasn't related to infringements of personal freedoms and privacy, which people are notoriously blase about, but was more related to cutbacks and unemployment, which this government have a much better record on.

You may be right. Unemployment in Leytonstone is amongst the very worst in the country, so I tend to forget that it's improved elsewhere.

Having been Latvia at the beginning of the year, I do agree with Boris that there doesn't seem to be nearly so much challenging of communism's atrocities as fascism's.

Of the small amount of political writing that I have read, George Orwell's essays are my favourite, particularly his reporting on how British communists supported fascism when the Soviets were allied to the Nazis and then tried to claim they never had done.

I think my own differing reactions to Stalinism and Fascism are partially down to a mistrust of western reporting of the the USSR during the cold war, partially down to my family history and partially down to having less moral revulsion to the intellectual ideals of marxism than to those of fascism while still condemning particular implementations of marxism.

I'm pretty ignorant of left / right politics; I could be more informed, but I find much of it too boring.

Also we've had over 50 years of knowing practically all the details of the Nazi regime, with photos of the death camps being liberated, survivors to tell tales, trials, etc.
In comparison, a lot of the details of Stalin's atrocities became known in the West more recently. I remember reading in the Sunday Times when I was about 7 about the Katyn massacre, which had just been discovered (a few locals who knew about it had kept their mouths shut for years).
There's also been many more people in the West working to ensure the world is aware of the Nazi holocaust, whereas people aware of Stalin's victims were either dead or stuck behind the Iron Curtain. With the result that not much of communism atrocities gets taught in schools (I actually had a term on Russia 1930-53, but most didn't), compared to assemblies and years of lessons on fascist Germany. Eastern Europe was a mystery - the most we knew about it was that there was this wall you couldn't escape over, from the children's game 'Berlin Wall'.