Posted on 11/04/2007 12:41:09 PM PST by Clintonfatigued
check out the vossler books too.
So how far from the Kremlin do you have to go until you find Russians?
“Your description of Ivan IV is simplistic and therefore false”
BS - Ivan was a scumbag and he established the Russian disdain for human life.
“In a dispute with the wealthy city of Novgorod, Ivan ordered the Oprichniks to murder inhabitants of this city, which was never to regain its former prosperity. His followers burned and pillaged the city and villages.[3] As many as 60,000 might have been killed during the infamous Massacre of Novgorod in 1570....
In 1581, Ivan beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing, which may have caused a miscarriage. His son, also named Ivan, upon learning of this, engaged in a heated argument with his father, which resulted in Ivan striking his son in the head with his pointed staff, causing his son’s (accidental) death.
Copying from other simplistic websites is simple.
Do you deny he killed his own son in a maniacal rage?
I see, so Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev et al were either:
“Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Jews, and nauseum)”????
Or are we talking about some other Soviet system?
It’s gratifying to see that you are emerging from the dark depths of russophobia.
The Russian government refuses to admit the government role in the famine and Putin has recrated the cult of Stalin. This is a big issue.
Sure. Stalin was a Georgian, Lenin was of mixed ethnicity. Kruschev was a Russian, but he was a pussycat comparing to them both with regard to crimes against humanity. Dzerginsky, Kamenev, Zinovyev, Trotskiy and many other revolutionary leaders were not Russians. Of cause, there were lots of ethnically Russian communists as well.
Communism was not a Russian national idea - it was absolutely INTERNATIONAL by nature. That's its major difference from German ethnocentric National-Socialism.
“Communism was not a Russian national idea - it was absolutely INTERNATIONAL by nature. That’s its major difference from German ethnocentric National-Socialism...”
I would agree with that, in part, for it seems, in how Marxist history has played out, that “Communism”, specifically “Soviet Communism” (what is commonly spoken of as Soviet Communism), was actually, and merely, one form of international socialism - an international socialism whose collective, and collectivist, project remains alive (and well connected - without central direction - to all its branches) in the variants of the American left and Europe’s socialist and “democratic” socialist parties.
As an anecdotal point of how deep and uniform the thinking on the left is: It was interesting how a family friend of mine (who is very leftist) did not waste breath, bat an eyelash or hesitate a second before responding with: “Well at least he’s a socialist”, when I said I thought Chavez was on his way to having more political prisoners than Musharraf and more likely than Musharraf to make himself President for life.
If Europeans (mostly socialists) have some chagrin for Putin, it is likely not his internal socialism or level of state control, of the economy or anything else; it’s that he’s not one of them, and not participating in their international socialist project - their attempt to subsume everything into global, international regulation by supra-national international institutions that are dominated by socialist dominated governments. The translation of their public policy prescriptions for the people - penetrating like a mantra through the media - is: “we will all be better off when we all do everything the same way under the same standards and values” (determined by them of course).
Can I agree with Putin for shying away from that project? Yes. Americans would do well to have a good dose of Russian skepticism.
Yet, realistic for Putin or not, one has to appreciate that he may not be solving problems for Russia in the long run, because the mantle of respect for a “Czarist” like power, that he continues, will fall, after his dynasty (including after whomever, and however many, succeed him and follow in his mold), may in fact be a “democratic” re-incarnation of the Marxists that built the Soviet System, and ready for complete socialist integration of continent-wide Europe. I would prefer any form of Russian nationalism that would not be favorable to that.
If the U.S. has a long range “Russian project”, it should in fact NOT be antagonistic to Russian nationalism, but, yes, it should want to help “democratize” it, hoping to gain room for more moderate forces in Russia.
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