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Russia’s Creeping Rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin
The Messenger ^ | 15 JAN 2024 | Alexander Motyl

Posted on 01/17/2024 2:50:36 PM PST by Rummyfan

Joseph Stalin is roaring back to life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Monuments are being built, “Stalin centers” are being constructed, and Putin’s war against Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Ukraine is being compared to Stalin’s victory over Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Given the fascist nature of Putin’s regime and the imperialist, genocidal war he’s conducting in Ukraine, Stalin’s rehabilitation makes perfect sense. More important than the political rationale behind Stalin’s “return” to Russia, however, are the moral implications of such a move.

Back in 2011, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder asked, “Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?” His answer implied that both men were equally horrid genocidal monsters worthy of equal condemnation: “Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people — tens of millions, it was often claimed — in the endless wastes of the Gulag.”

If we accept Snyder’s logic — both the numbers of dead and the moral equivalence of all lost lives argue for accepting it — we should be as outraged by Russia’s full-scale rehabilitation of Stalin as we are by some isolated instance of Hitler’s white-washing. But, in general, we’re not. We condemn Hitler and Nazism in whichever form they might appear or be depicted, but respond only with criticism, and sometimes with humor, to justifications of Stalin and Stalinism.

Why this moral ambivalence in the presence of equivalent evils?

(Excerpt) Read more at themessenger.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bloggers; communism; fascism; massmurder; ruzzia; ruzzians; socialism; sovietunion; stalin; stalinism; ussr
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Stalin, Hitler.. choose your devil (not to omit Mao Tse Tung). But Stalin and Beria and the Soviets always get a pass. I cringe when I see some idiot sporting old Soviet regalia as a form of campy nostalgia, or even people who say 'I miss the Soviet Union'. The same useful idiots would never ever wear old SS regalia or opine about how the world needs the Third Reich again, when the two regimes were really just flip sides of the same coin.
1 posted on 01/17/2024 2:50:36 PM PST by Rummyfan
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To: Rummyfan
Russia Moscovia’s Creeping Rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin
2 posted on 01/17/2024 2:52:13 PM PST by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now its your turn)
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To: PIF

Ironic, since Stalin was Georgian.


3 posted on 01/17/2024 2:53:53 PM PST by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: Rummyfan

Add Putin to the fascist, dictatorial, murderer, authoritarian, anti-[personal] liberty, Rooskie Pantheon.


4 posted on 01/17/2024 2:54:39 PM PST by Paladin2
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To: Rummyfan

War, War, War How Do You Like It, How Do You Like It?


5 posted on 01/17/2024 3:01:24 PM PST by Nextrush (FREEDOM IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS-REMEMBER REV. NIEMOLLER)
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To: Rummyfan

The essay puts forward a reasonably fair assessment of reality.


6 posted on 01/17/2024 3:02:22 PM PST by marktwain
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To: Rummyfan

Prezactly.


7 posted on 01/17/2024 3:02:32 PM PST by RushIsMyTeddyBear ("Equity" = "All animals are equal. Some animals are more equal than others.")
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To: Rummyfan

Where, other than in Hillary’s Russia, Russia, Russia deliriums, is all of this pro Stalin mania happening? What you’re seeing in Ukraine with such things as “postponed” elections, outlawing and persecuting Christians, a criminally suicidal Uke Volkssturm, the brutal, unaccountable secret police are pure Stalinist. The western press masters certainly don’t your help in spreading their disinfo.


8 posted on 01/17/2024 3:02:47 PM PST by hardspunned (Former DC GOP globalist stooge)
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To: hardspunned

The Soviets won World War II. So they never said that Stalin was a bad guy. Although, they stopped “honoring” him after he died.


9 posted on 01/17/2024 3:05:37 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
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To: Rummyfan

Not one single instance to back up this crap is mentioned in your post. You are asked to “accept some guys premise” and it’s off to the made up disinfo races. What stoogery.


10 posted on 01/17/2024 3:06:23 PM PST by hardspunned (Former DC GOP globalist stooge)
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To: dfwgator

None of them were Russian.

Kruschev grew up in the Donbas. Brehznev was Ukrainian, Chernyenko’s family was Ukrainian living in Siberia.

Andropov was born in the north Caucasus.

Gorbachev was also born in the North Caucasus. His mother and his wife was Ukrainian.


11 posted on 01/17/2024 3:06:43 PM PST by Reverend Wright ( Everything touched by progressives, dies !)
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To: Reverend Wright

At least they were Slavs though. Georgians are not Slavs.


12 posted on 01/17/2024 3:07:28 PM PST by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: Rummyfan

Who writes this crap?


13 posted on 01/17/2024 3:08:28 PM PST by GrumpyOldGuy
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To: hardspunned

They tried “Putin is the next Hitler”.

But that doesn’t seem to be working.

So now they try “Putin is Stalin”.

So instead of Putler, we will have Putlin ?


14 posted on 01/17/2024 3:09:05 PM PST by Reverend Wright ( Everything touched by progressives, dies !)
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To: dfwgator

And then you have (((Lenin))) himself.


15 posted on 01/17/2024 3:10:28 PM PST by Reverend Wright ( Everything touched by progressives, dies !)
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To: Rummyfan

The Left’s creeping attempt in this country at making pedophilia normal.


16 posted on 01/17/2024 3:10:51 PM PST by mass55th (“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” ― John Wayne)
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To: Reverend Wright

If there’s one person who should be happy Putin invaded, it’s Adolf Trump. Putin has replaced Trump as the west’s #1 worldwide pariah.


17 posted on 01/17/2024 3:11:47 PM PST by hardspunned (Former DC GOP globalist stooge)
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To: Reverend Wright

Didn’t K. Marx [of Jewish background] live and prosper in Germany?

The specific geography of birth is not all that important in developing the despot.

The “peasants” of Russia have been ill served for centuries.

[Blame it on the Vikings...]


18 posted on 01/17/2024 3:13:27 PM PST by Paladin2
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To: GrumpyOldGuy

“Who writes this crap?”

It’s at listed the top and at the source - Alexander John Motyl

Alexander John Motyl (Ukrainian: Олександр Мотиль; born October 21, 1953) is an American historian, political scientist, poet, writer, translator and artist-painter. He is a resident of New York City. He is professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey and a specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the Soviet Union.

Motyl’s parents emigrated as refugees from Western Ukraine after World War II, when the region was occupied by the Soviet Union.[1] He was born in New York City on October 21, 1953. He graduated from Regis High School in New York City in 1971. He studied at Columbia University, graduating with a BA in History in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Political Science in 1984.[2] Motyl has taught at Columbia University, Lehigh University, the Ukrainian Free University, the Kyiv-Mohyla University, and Harvard University and is currently[when?] professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark.[3] Aside from academic work, he also writes opinion columns in publications such as Foreign Policy,[4] 19FortyFive, and the Kyiv Post.[5]


19 posted on 01/17/2024 3:13:49 PM PST by Justa (If where you came from is so great then why aren't Floridians moving there?)
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To: dfwgator
Ironic, since Stalin was Georgian.

Those of us who bother to READ ACTUAL HISTORY know that he grew up in an entirely Moscovite enclave, considered himself a Muscovite, and hated Georgians.

And I'll just reiterate what I've posted many times already:

Just after the WW2 Tehran Conference, Stalin said to a journalist, (roughly translated):

"It's high time the Slavic race was in charge of Europe.".

Never forget that modern-day Muskovite political culture is in part derived from the Mongol hordes who over-ran the region in the 13th century.

20 posted on 01/17/2024 3:15:26 PM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
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