Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On July 11 2018 03:46 GreenHorizons wrote: I have to presume this is an exclusively domestically focused position. Surely she would do little to nothing to slow (would have probably increased) the civilian casualties around the world from explosive ordinance to say nothing of the cost of life resulting from capitalism concentrating wealth to such degrees people have yachts with boats and helicopters on them while people working 40 hours a week are still under the poverty line.
So the argument is that brutal treatment of the bourgeoisie would be worse than the type of bombing that leads to 9 out of 10 of the people you kill not being the target or whatever other atrocities you want to pick from the Obama administration and amplify (no doubt she was more hawkish than Obama) then?
I want to make sure I understand it before I go into detail about why I disagree
EDIT: I should add P6's point about "the wrong people" being lumped in with the bourgeoisie
Okay, so basically you believe that Lenin only ordered the massacre of rich people.
And absolve him of any WW2 and Cold War atrocities by virtue of him losing the power struggle to Stalin.
GH has never said a bad thing about Stalin, it is pretty obvious that he thinks he was a great leader he just won't post it directly because he knows the back lash.
It is also very telling that he thinks it killing a bunch of rich people (including all their relatives and children) is an ok thing to do.
GH if everything we have been told is a lie, and any time we bring up historical references you say they are lies. Where are you getting your information from and how can we read it. You keep saying prove Lenin/Stalin is bad we try and you say its misinformation.
Please show us where he is good, and not just what he said. Lots of evil people have said wonderful things.
lol. I see you didn't come up with those examples.
How about you just use the search feature and link me some of the things I've said about Stalin?
I've asked you 15 times about Stalin, which you have clearly read since you have answered other parts. I got sick of asking and said if you don't respond I'll just assume. So that is what I have done. Am I wrong do you think he was a pure evil dictator? I see a lot of you saying you didn't say that, I don't see you saying it is not true.
Also, are you so sure that Lenin wouldn't see you in your personal situation as bourgeoisie? Are you sure you would avoid the bullet to the back of the head and your wealth redistributed?
Yes I remember your obnoxious fixation on my opinions on Stalin.
I'm 100% sure I would not be bourgeoisie
I have bad news for you:
You will not get to decide if you are an enemy of the people. The man with the gun from the People’s Government will decide because of his own reasons. He is part of the people’s police force, which has less accountability and oversight than ICE.
I wouldn't be bourgeoisie though or perceived as their ally, nor would I have tried to kill him so I think I would have been a welcome comrade particularly in my community, though maybe a too Stalinesque in my rhetoric for Lenin lol.
I'm fond of living and don't really give a shit about property though so I'd have to get caught up in some paranoid fear play, which spoiler alert, already something I have to live with being black in the US.
This is why its impossible to talk to you about these authoritarian regimes, you don’t engage with the most nefarious aspect of these governments, that their own rules didn’t matter. That is the most sinister part of these sorts of governments, that they claim you will be fine if you play by the rules they set forth, only to find out that the person in charge does not care. The rules only exist to further those in power and can be ignored when those in power see fit.
So when I say you don’t get to pick, I mean that the person who decides if you are an enemy of the people, he might do it because you did something he didn’t like. Or you dated a girl he likes and she isn’t happy with you. Or he wants your apartment. Or he is having a bad day and you exist in his space talking about something that displeases him.
You think that's not the case now 100 years later in the free and fair US of A?
On July 11 2018 04:08 WolfintheSheep wrote: [quote] Okay, so basically you believe that Lenin only ordered the massacre of rich people.
And absolve him of any WW2 and Cold War atrocities by virtue of him losing the power struggle to Stalin.
GH has never said a bad thing about Stalin, it is pretty obvious that he thinks he was a great leader he just won't post it directly because he knows the back lash.
It is also very telling that he thinks it killing a bunch of rich people (including all their relatives and children) is an ok thing to do.
GH if everything we have been told is a lie, and any time we bring up historical references you say they are lies. Where are you getting your information from and how can we read it. You keep saying prove Lenin/Stalin is bad we try and you say its misinformation.
Please show us where he is good, and not just what he said. Lots of evil people have said wonderful things.
lol. I see you didn't come up with those examples.
How about you just use the search feature and link me some of the things I've said about Stalin?
I've asked you 15 times about Stalin, which you have clearly read since you have answered other parts. I got sick of asking and said if you don't respond I'll just assume. So that is what I have done. Am I wrong do you think he was a pure evil dictator? I see a lot of you saying you didn't say that, I don't see you saying it is not true.
Also, are you so sure that Lenin wouldn't see you in your personal situation as bourgeoisie? Are you sure you would avoid the bullet to the back of the head and your wealth redistributed?
Yes I remember your obnoxious fixation on my opinions on Stalin.
I'm 100% sure I would not be bourgeoisie
I have bad news for you:
You will not get to decide if you are an enemy of the people. The man with the gun from the People’s Government will decide because of his own reasons. He is part of the people’s police force, which has less accountability and oversight than ICE.
I wouldn't be bourgeoisie though or perceived as their ally, nor would I have tried to kill him so I think I would have been a welcome comrade particularly in my community, though maybe a too Stalinesque in my rhetoric for Lenin lol.
I'm fond of living and don't really give a shit about property though so I'd have to get caught up in some paranoid fear play, which spoiler alert, already something I have to live with being black in the US.
This is why its impossible to talk to you about these authoritarian regimes, you don’t engage with the most nefarious aspect of these governments, that their own rules didn’t matter. That is the most sinister part of these sorts of governments, that they claim you will be fine if you play by the rules they set forth, only to find out that the person in charge does not care. The rules only exist to further those in power and can be ignored when those in power see fit.
So when I say you don’t get to pick, I mean that the person who decides if you are an enemy of the people, he might do it because you did something he didn’t like. Or you dated a girl he likes and she isn’t happy with you. Or he wants your apartment. Or he is having a bad day and you exist in his space talking about something that displeases him.
You think that's not the case now 100 years later in the free and fair US of A?
In what aspect?
I mentioned Tulsa OK as an example of the US at right about the same time
But what about what you said in that post doesn't apply to the US even still in 2018? (besides the part criticizing me)
On July 11 2018 05:08 WolfintheSheep wrote: If you protested the Bolsheviks half as much as you do your current government, you definitely would have been executed.
It would be you guys protesting the Bolsheviks though?
So you think you'd be above being a starving peasant or industrial worker?
Or just that you'd be cool with that?
GH has a rather twisted sense of fairness. Most members of this forum would get a bullet to the head or if lucky be in a gulag as enemies of the state who benefited from capitalism, but he seems ok with that. Because he'd probably be safe. And things would be better, somehow, for some people.
On July 11 2018 05:08 WolfintheSheep wrote: If you protested the Bolsheviks half as much as you do your current government, you definitely would have been executed.
It would be you guys protesting the Bolsheviks though?
So you think you'd be above being a starving peasant or industrial worker?
Or just that you'd be cool with that?
GH has a rather twisted sense of fairness. Most members of this forum would get a bullet to the head or if lucky be in a gulag as enemies of the state who benefited from capitalism, but he seems ok with that. Because he'd probably be safe.
I'm as fine with it as you guys seem to be with the inverse.
On July 11 2018 03:54 Plansix wrote: Lenin’s charisma is undeniable, but being driven and power hungry are not mutually exclusive. Once Lenin obtained power he fervently advocated for the systematic execution or elimination of the bourgeoisie, which quickly shifted from a set group of monied people to anyone the government saw as a threat. He also refused to allow a coalition government with the non communist, advociting for their elimination.
Lenin is not Stalin in his scope or damage, but he laid the ground work for Stalin to kill 12 million people before WW2 even started.
I suppose you think that the bourgeoisie wasn't advocating for the "systematic execution or elimination" of Lenin and the bolsheviks? Regardless of what you think of Lenin, you must consider what forces were arrayed against him and his comrades and what the counter-revolutionaries, also, wanted to do.
Here is Lenin's last testament:
“Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a minor detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.”
And in response to that threat of violence, Lenin created a system of government with due process, trials or any ability for anyone, including Lenin, to stop the violence he willingly unleashed. And resisted all efforts to reign them in or make peace with the people he opposed.
On July 11 2018 03:11 Plansix wrote: [quote] It is a combination of overwhelming confidence in his positions and a lackluster understanding of world history. It is both impressive and unassailable.
Surely, you could point out an example of this lackluster understanding of world history rather than just assert it with overwhelming confidence?
I don’t think I’m going to be teaching you a 200 level 20th century Russian history courses for free just to prove that you would really not prefer Lenin over Clinton. Not really sure what I get out of it given your general attitude during this entire discussion.
It appears you wont be teaching anyone anything and merely relying on your declaration of Lenin being one of the worst people of the 20th century along with all of his contemporary peers and the presumption of the ongoing theme that Hillary is less bad, which we would disagree on, even ignoring that Lenin lived in a different time and place.
I'm trying to figure out if your value system is skewed by ignorance of Lenin, or extreme worship of anyone connected to socialist beliefs.
So where does Stalin fit on you Trump/Clinton/Lenin scale?
Why don't we establish what about Lenin makes it so obvious that president Hillary would be demonstrably better, and for whom?
I think President Lenin would use executive orders to kill off some capitalist big wigs if he were truly as idealistic as described; however, this would erode the reputation of the American left to the point where it would put the country on an ultra-libertarian trajectory for the foreseeable future. Hillary would just delay the reform that is hopefully coming to the Democratic party soon though people like OC and the like, so I would say that Lenin putting leftist progress in reverse would be worse for you than Hillary.
However, he might be able to do something about giant corporations like Amazon and Alphabet and Facebook that increasingly claw away at our right to privacy.
The problem with advocating for Lenin as preferable is that the concepts of the “bourgeoisie” was mercurial and shifted to meet the needs of person enforcing the executions. There were no specific rules for who was or was not executed. So I, being the son of a small business owner, could be part of that ever shifting class. Or any of us. The man laid the foundation for one of the most largest and most harmful authoritarian regimes in human history through his use of excessive violence as a political tool for change.
Get your parents to give their business to it's workers (doesn't mean they couldn't still work there playing an important role) and you'd be a champion of the revolution. Crisis averted.
There is a fundamental part you don’t understand about the systems we are talking about. All the stuff you said doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what my parents or I do. Or anyone does. If the person in power(aka, the uniform and gun), whoever that maybe, wants them dead, then they die. This system was not fair and did not have rules, just like the Nazis and their “racial purity”. It had the illusion of rules and order, but the reality never reflected it. All the rules, classes and systems were just an excuse to kill people for whatever reason the Officer of the People or SS Officer wanted at the time. It is a system that empowered sociopaths to kill whoever with the blessing over the people in power, and make up reasons why later.
You are missing the point. The people did not want to make peace with him.
On July 11 2018 05:08 WolfintheSheep wrote: If you protested the Bolsheviks half as much as you do your current government, you definitely would have been executed.
It would be you guys protesting the Bolsheviks though?
So you think you'd be above being a starving peasant or industrial worker?
Or just that you'd be cool with that?
GH has a rather twisted sense of fairness. Most members of this forum would get a bullet to the head or if lucky be in a gulag as enemies of the state who benefited from capitalism, but he seems ok with that. Because he'd probably be safe.
I'm still trying to figure out if he thinks his life would be better off under the Bolsheviks, or that he'd be okay being worse off because everyone better off than him is dead (or the Bolsheviks).
On July 11 2018 01:48 xDaunt wrote: [quote] Yes, please tell us about how Chavez treated his people equitably and with dignity. You apparently like him quite a bit. Or maybe you can elaborate on other socialist institutions like China or the USSR.
Only if you tell use the story of the robber barons, Pinkertons, union busters, the imperial supreme court of the 1930, the great depressions and the prosperity gospel. We don’t even need to leave the US to see the worst of capitalism. We took it as far as it could go without destroying the country.
This isn't an argument about how Capitalism is bad its an argument about how capitalism is white supremacist and socialism isn't. You don't get points by pointing out how admittedly capitalism has had its faults. You lose points by admitting that socialism has had the same faults.
Nothing is more disingenuous then advocating for failed government types based on theoretical "but I'm sure we'll make it work this time" appeals. Socialism in its complete form doesn't work and its never worked. Capitalism doesn't work in its complete form either. But capitalism can be compromised and keep much of its benefits while socialism can't.
You are right, that was not my argument. It is a response to bringing up the worst of socialism and communism as an argument against the merits of those systems. Don't bring up Chavez, the USSR or communist China if you don't want the Pinkertons and Union busters thrown back at you in response.
For the record I bring them up not to say that socialism itself is bad. But to show that in practice it has had a lot of warts as well. Democratic Socialism has a ton of strengths. However that is not far enough for GH he wants the USSR and seems to believe that everything bad about it was either caused by the west or not bad and just western propaganda.
I'd take Lenin over Trump or Clinton 100 out of 100 times.
Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police, the Cheka had conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people".[96][97][98][99] Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[100] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[101] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[102][103]
The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth.[104] In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[105][106] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[107] According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".[108]
I'm not a Trump or Clinton person myself either but I do prefer a system of government that keeps people from rounding up people and executing them based on anything.
lol...
You remember how that all started?
No I don't I was not born yet, nor am I from Russia. But I have read about it yes. And I don't think that going in, rounding up the people doing shitty stuff and killing them all is justified. Like right now I wouldn't want some group to go into Venezuela round up all of Maduro's friends, family, their families and murder them all.
I meant remember as in you didn't just google that and copy paste it. Like you actually studied that history at some point before this conversation.
Because it doesn't seem like you did. It seems like you're oblivious that you're talking about a civil war or are completely unaware of how warfare was executed in the early 1900's.
GH, I have read a lot about Russian history. From the Kievan Rus and the Rurikovich dynasty who ruled Muscovy right up until the Time of Troubles, to the Romanov dynasty and its two standouts, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the February Revolution, the October Revolution and Lenin's seizure of power.
Lenin came to power in October of 1917. Lenin immediately established the Cheka on December 20, 1917. Cheka was the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, and it was led by the very weird Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was very open about what Cheka did, stating,
"We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence."
Cheka's name was changed a lot in the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming the NKVD and then finally the KGB. But the organization never changed from being a bunch of fanatics and alcoholics in a chamber of horrors. Here are just some of the atrocities carried out by the organization that Lenin created immediately following his rise to power.
"The methods included:[36] being skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. The Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat in the tube closed off with wire netting, while the tube was held over a flame until the rat began gnawing through the victim's guts in an effort to escape.[36] Anton Denikin's investigation discovered corpses whose lungs, throats, and mouths had been packed with earth.[36][37]
Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror. Women would sometimes be tortured and raped before being shot. Children between the ages of 8 and 13 were imprisoned and occasionally executed.[38]"
And yet you have the gall to claim that Lenin would have been better than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? In fact, you double down on praising Lenin when other people started to call you out on your ridiculous assertions.
On July 11 2018 03:06 xDaunt wrote: When I was talking about enjoying the exposure of GH's Bolshevism a few days ago, I thought I was just joking. I didn't realize it was quite literal.
It is a combination of overwhelming confidence in his positions and a lackluster understanding of world history. It is both impressive and unassailable.
On July 11 2018 05:08 WolfintheSheep wrote: If you protested the Bolsheviks half as much as you do your current government, you definitely would have been executed.
It would be you guys protesting the Bolsheviks though?
So you think you'd be above being a starving peasant or industrial worker?
Or just that you'd be cool with that?
GH has a rather twisted sense of fairness. Most members of this forum would get a bullet to the head or if lucky be in a gulag as enemies of the state who benefited from capitalism, but he seems ok with that. Because he'd probably be safe.
I'm still trying to figure out if he thinks his life would be better off under the Bolsheviks, or that he'd be okay being worse off because everyone better off than him is dead (or the Bolsheviks).
Well relatively it would be, but Russia wouldn't be my top pick for countries that underwent socialist revolutions. I'm more of a Cuba fan myself. Plus how do you not respect a guy who had the entirety of the US government trying to kill you for decades with dozens of documented attempts on his life. I mean he's far from perfect but the guy has to be a hero to people who oppose US imperialism and colonization.
And before anyone asks, of course plight in Cuba is related to the fall of the Soviet Union and US sanctions issued in retaliation to taking back their shit from US capitalist exploiters, namely one of the most evil of corporations, Chiquita.
On July 11 2018 03:54 Plansix wrote: Lenin’s charisma is undeniable, but being driven and power hungry are not mutually exclusive. Once Lenin obtained power he fervently advocated for the systematic execution or elimination of the bourgeoisie, which quickly shifted from a set group of monied people to anyone the government saw as a threat. He also refused to allow a coalition government with the non communist, advociting for their elimination.
Lenin is not Stalin in his scope or damage, but he laid the ground work for Stalin to kill 12 million people before WW2 even started.
I suppose you think that the bourgeoisie wasn't advocating for the "systematic execution or elimination" of Lenin and the bolsheviks? Regardless of what you think of Lenin, you must consider what forces were arrayed against him and his comrades and what the counter-revolutionaries, also, wanted to do.
Here is Lenin's last testament:
“Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a minor detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.”
And in response to that threat of violence, Lenin created a system of government with due process, trials or any ability for anyone, including Lenin, to stop the violence he willingly unleashed. And resisted all efforts to reign them in or make peace with the people he opposed.
On July 11 2018 04:16 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 04:08 Plansix wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:57 Howie_Dewitt wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:46 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:42 WolfintheSheep wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:21 Plansix wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:15 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
Surely, you could point out an example of this lackluster understanding of world history rather than just assert it with overwhelming confidence?
I don’t think I’m going to be teaching you a 200 level 20th century Russian history courses for free just to prove that you would really not prefer Lenin over Clinton. Not really sure what I get out of it given your general attitude during this entire discussion.
It appears you wont be teaching anyone anything and merely relying on your declaration of Lenin being one of the worst people of the 20th century along with all of his contemporary peers and the presumption of the ongoing theme that Hillary is less bad, which we would disagree on, even ignoring that Lenin lived in a different time and place.
I'm trying to figure out if your value system is skewed by ignorance of Lenin, or extreme worship of anyone connected to socialist beliefs.
So where does Stalin fit on you Trump/Clinton/Lenin scale?
Why don't we establish what about Lenin makes it so obvious that president Hillary would be demonstrably better, and for whom?
I think President Lenin would use executive orders to kill off some capitalist big wigs if he were truly as idealistic as described; however, this would erode the reputation of the American left to the point where it would put the country on an ultra-libertarian trajectory for the foreseeable future. Hillary would just delay the reform that is hopefully coming to the Democratic party soon though people like OC and the like, so I would say that Lenin putting leftist progress in reverse would be worse for you than Hillary.
However, he might be able to do something about giant corporations like Amazon and Alphabet and Facebook that increasingly claw away at our right to privacy.
The problem with advocating for Lenin as preferable is that the concepts of the “bourgeoisie” was mercurial and shifted to meet the needs of person enforcing the executions. There were no specific rules for who was or was not executed. So I, being the son of a small business owner, could be part of that ever shifting class. Or any of us. The man laid the foundation for one of the most largest and most harmful authoritarian regimes in human history through his use of excessive violence as a political tool for change.
Get your parents to give their business to it's workers (doesn't mean they couldn't still work there playing an important role) and you'd be a champion of the revolution. Crisis averted.
There is a fundamental part you don’t understand about the systems we are talking about. All the stuff you said doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what my parents or I do. Or anyone does. If the person in power(aka, the uniform and gun), whoever that maybe, wants them dead, then they die. This system was not fair and did not have rules, just like the Nazis and their “racial purity”. It had the illusion of rules and order, but the reality never reflected it. All the rules, classes and systems were just an excuse to kill people for whatever reason the Officer of the People or SS Officer wanted at the time. It is a system that empowered sociopaths to kill whoever with the blessing over the people in power, and make up reasons why later.
You are missing the point. The people did not want to make peace with him.
I understand that, but I fail to see how that justifies him establishing an essentially authoritarian government with no due process, rights for people and creating an unchecked government agency to eliminate enemies of the state.
On July 11 2018 03:54 Plansix wrote: Lenin’s charisma is undeniable, but being driven and power hungry are not mutually exclusive. Once Lenin obtained power he fervently advocated for the systematic execution or elimination of the bourgeoisie, which quickly shifted from a set group of monied people to anyone the government saw as a threat. He also refused to allow a coalition government with the non communist, advociting for their elimination.
Lenin is not Stalin in his scope or damage, but he laid the ground work for Stalin to kill 12 million people before WW2 even started.
I suppose you think that the bourgeoisie wasn't advocating for the "systematic execution or elimination" of Lenin and the bolsheviks? Regardless of what you think of Lenin, you must consider what forces were arrayed against him and his comrades and what the counter-revolutionaries, also, wanted to do.
Here is Lenin's last testament:
“Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a minor detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.”
And in response to that threat of violence, Lenin created a system of government with due process, trials or any ability for anyone, including Lenin, to stop the violence he willingly unleashed. And resisted all efforts to reign them in or make peace with the people he opposed.
On July 11 2018 04:16 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 04:08 Plansix wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:57 Howie_Dewitt wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:46 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:42 WolfintheSheep wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:28 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:21 Plansix wrote: [quote] I don’t think I’m going to be teaching you a 200 level 20th century Russian history courses for free just to prove that you would really not prefer Lenin over Clinton. Not really sure what I get out of it given your general attitude during this entire discussion.
It appears you wont be teaching anyone anything and merely relying on your declaration of Lenin being one of the worst people of the 20th century along with all of his contemporary peers and the presumption of the ongoing theme that Hillary is less bad, which we would disagree on, even ignoring that Lenin lived in a different time and place.
I'm trying to figure out if your value system is skewed by ignorance of Lenin, or extreme worship of anyone connected to socialist beliefs.
So where does Stalin fit on you Trump/Clinton/Lenin scale?
Why don't we establish what about Lenin makes it so obvious that president Hillary would be demonstrably better, and for whom?
I think President Lenin would use executive orders to kill off some capitalist big wigs if he were truly as idealistic as described; however, this would erode the reputation of the American left to the point where it would put the country on an ultra-libertarian trajectory for the foreseeable future. Hillary would just delay the reform that is hopefully coming to the Democratic party soon though people like OC and the like, so I would say that Lenin putting leftist progress in reverse would be worse for you than Hillary.
However, he might be able to do something about giant corporations like Amazon and Alphabet and Facebook that increasingly claw away at our right to privacy.
The problem with advocating for Lenin as preferable is that the concepts of the “bourgeoisie” was mercurial and shifted to meet the needs of person enforcing the executions. There were no specific rules for who was or was not executed. So I, being the son of a small business owner, could be part of that ever shifting class. Or any of us. The man laid the foundation for one of the most largest and most harmful authoritarian regimes in human history through his use of excessive violence as a political tool for change.
Get your parents to give their business to it's workers (doesn't mean they couldn't still work there playing an important role) and you'd be a champion of the revolution. Crisis averted.
There is a fundamental part you don’t understand about the systems we are talking about. All the stuff you said doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what my parents or I do. Or anyone does. If the person in power(aka, the uniform and gun), whoever that maybe, wants them dead, then they die. This system was not fair and did not have rules, just like the Nazis and their “racial purity”. It had the illusion of rules and order, but the reality never reflected it. All the rules, classes and systems were just an excuse to kill people for whatever reason the Officer of the People or SS Officer wanted at the time. It is a system that empowered sociopaths to kill whoever with the blessing over the people in power, and make up reasons why later.
You are missing the point. The people did not want to make peace with him.
I understand that, but I fail to see how that justifies him establishing an essentially authoritarian government with no due process, rights for people and creating an unchecked government agency to eliminate enemies of the state.
I tried to allude to this earlier, but the problem is that he's doing it to citizens, not that it's happening right, because that's definitely still happening for US interests.
Man, I thought I was far-left. I might as well apply for that job at the American oil company based in Houston at this rate. You're hardcore GreenHorizons. I just think full-blown (and I would demand it to be democratic rather than authoritarian) communism is simply impossible without proper accountability, transparency, and more or less perfect planning. I also just see too much value in the concepts of supply and demand, meritocracy and competition. People just need to get the same chances.
On July 11 2018 01:52 Plansix wrote: [quote] Only if you tell use the story of the robber barons, Pinkertons, union busters, the imperial supreme court of the 1930, the great depressions and the prosperity gospel. We don’t even need to leave the US to see the worst of capitalism. We took it as far as it could go without destroying the country.
This isn't an argument about how Capitalism is bad its an argument about how capitalism is white supremacist and socialism isn't. You don't get points by pointing out how admittedly capitalism has had its faults. You lose points by admitting that socialism has had the same faults.
Nothing is more disingenuous then advocating for failed government types based on theoretical "but I'm sure we'll make it work this time" appeals. Socialism in its complete form doesn't work and its never worked. Capitalism doesn't work in its complete form either. But capitalism can be compromised and keep much of its benefits while socialism can't.
You are right, that was not my argument. It is a response to bringing up the worst of socialism and communism as an argument against the merits of those systems. Don't bring up Chavez, the USSR or communist China if you don't want the Pinkertons and Union busters thrown back at you in response.
For the record I bring them up not to say that socialism itself is bad. But to show that in practice it has had a lot of warts as well. Democratic Socialism has a ton of strengths. However that is not far enough for GH he wants the USSR and seems to believe that everything bad about it was either caused by the west or not bad and just western propaganda.
I'd take Lenin over Trump or Clinton 100 out of 100 times.
Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police, the Cheka had conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people".[96][97][98][99] Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[100] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[101] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[102][103]
The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth.[104] In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[105][106] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[107] According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".[108]
I'm not a Trump or Clinton person myself either but I do prefer a system of government that keeps people from rounding up people and executing them based on anything.
lol...
You remember how that all started?
No I don't I was not born yet, nor am I from Russia. But I have read about it yes. And I don't think that going in, rounding up the people doing shitty stuff and killing them all is justified. Like right now I wouldn't want some group to go into Venezuela round up all of Maduro's friends, family, their families and murder them all.
I meant remember as in you didn't just google that and copy paste it. Like you actually studied that history at some point before this conversation.
Because it doesn't seem like you did. It seems like you're oblivious that you're talking about a civil war or are completely unaware of how warfare was executed in the early 1900's.
GH, I have read a lot about Russian history. From the Kievan Rus and the Rurikovich dynasty who ruled Muscovy right up until the Time of Troubles, to the Romanov dynasty and its two standouts, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the February Revolution, the October Revolution and Lenin's seizure of power.
Lenin came to power in October of 1917. Lenin immediately established the Cheka on December 20, 1917. Cheka was the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, and it was led by the very weird Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was very open about what Cheka did, stating,
"We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence."
Cheka's name was changed a lot in the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming the NKVD and then finally the KGB. But the organization never changed from being a bunch of fanatics and alcoholics in a chamber of horrors. Here are just some of the atrocities carried out by the organization that Lenin created immediately following his rise to power.
"The methods included:[36] being skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. The Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat in the tube closed off with wire netting, while the tube was held over a flame until the rat began gnawing through the victim's guts in an effort to escape.[36] Anton Denikin's investigation discovered corpses whose lungs, throats, and mouths had been packed with earth.[36][37]
Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror. Women would sometimes be tortured and raped before being shot. Children between the ages of 8 and 13 were imprisoned and occasionally executed.[38]"
This illustrates a point about authoritarian people like Lenin. They are not the problem and do not directly commit the atrocities that we associate with the governments they create. The real terror of authoritarian governments comes the people they end up empowering. Like the man described above, who Lenin gave power.
It is one of the things I love about the movie Rogue One. The villain in that isn’t some evil lord, but some talentless, bootlicking middle manager forcing someone smarter than him to build a war machine that will kill billions. All to get a tiny promotion and a little more power. These are the types of people that dominate these types of government, talentless bootlickers without a scrap of empathy.
I think this video describes what is happening in the US elections pretty well. It is a presentation where he discusses why fascism works, it makes you more important and feel better about yourself. It doesn't care if things are true or not, the US isn't there but slowly trending towards it.
He also goes into the discussion about emotion manipulation and how that is one of the biggest risks of the future. Which touches on the discussion about foreign powers influencing elections.
Ending with a point regarding how data is the new thing people fight over, not machines or land as it used to be. Which I don't fully agree with since it is easier to translate that data into emotional impact and gains if you also have machines and the things to effect people.
On July 11 2018 02:00 Sermokala wrote: [quote] This isn't an argument about how Capitalism is bad its an argument about how capitalism is white supremacist and socialism isn't. You don't get points by pointing out how admittedly capitalism has had its faults. You lose points by admitting that socialism has had the same faults.
Nothing is more disingenuous then advocating for failed government types based on theoretical "but I'm sure we'll make it work this time" appeals. Socialism in its complete form doesn't work and its never worked. Capitalism doesn't work in its complete form either. But capitalism can be compromised and keep much of its benefits while socialism can't.
You are right, that was not my argument. It is a response to bringing up the worst of socialism and communism as an argument against the merits of those systems. Don't bring up Chavez, the USSR or communist China if you don't want the Pinkertons and Union busters thrown back at you in response.
For the record I bring them up not to say that socialism itself is bad. But to show that in practice it has had a lot of warts as well. Democratic Socialism has a ton of strengths. However that is not far enough for GH he wants the USSR and seems to believe that everything bad about it was either caused by the west or not bad and just western propaganda.
I'd take Lenin over Trump or Clinton 100 out of 100 times.
Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police, the Cheka had conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people".[96][97][98][99] Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[100] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[101] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[102][103]
The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth.[104] In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[105][106] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[107] According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".[108]
I'm not a Trump or Clinton person myself either but I do prefer a system of government that keeps people from rounding up people and executing them based on anything.
lol...
You remember how that all started?
No I don't I was not born yet, nor am I from Russia. But I have read about it yes. And I don't think that going in, rounding up the people doing shitty stuff and killing them all is justified. Like right now I wouldn't want some group to go into Venezuela round up all of Maduro's friends, family, their families and murder them all.
I meant remember as in you didn't just google that and copy paste it. Like you actually studied that history at some point before this conversation.
Because it doesn't seem like you did. It seems like you're oblivious that you're talking about a civil war or are completely unaware of how warfare was executed in the early 1900's.
GH, I have read a lot about Russian history. From the Kievan Rus and the Rurikovich dynasty who ruled Muscovy right up until the Time of Troubles, to the Romanov dynasty and its two standouts, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the February Revolution, the October Revolution and Lenin's seizure of power.
Lenin came to power in October of 1917. Lenin immediately established the Cheka on December 20, 1917. Cheka was the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, and it was led by the very weird Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was very open about what Cheka did, stating,
"We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence."
Cheka's name was changed a lot in the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming the NKVD and then finally the KGB. But the organization never changed from being a bunch of fanatics and alcoholics in a chamber of horrors. Here are just some of the atrocities carried out by the organization that Lenin created immediately following his rise to power.
"The methods included:[36] being skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. The Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat in the tube closed off with wire netting, while the tube was held over a flame until the rat began gnawing through the victim's guts in an effort to escape.[36] Anton Denikin's investigation discovered corpses whose lungs, throats, and mouths had been packed with earth.[36][37]
Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror. Women would sometimes be tortured and raped before being shot. Children between the ages of 8 and 13 were imprisoned and occasionally executed.[38]"
This illustrates a point about authoritarian people like Lenin. They are not the problem and do not directly commit the atrocities that we associate with the governments they create. The real terror of authoritarian governments comes the people they end up empowering. Like the man described above, who Lenin gave power.
It is one of the things I love about the movie Rogue One. The villain in that isn’t some evil lord, but some talentless, bootlicking middle manager forcing someone smarter than him to build a war machine that will kill billions. All to get a tiny promotion and a little more power. These are the types of people that dominate these types of government, talentless bootlickers without a scrap of empathy.
Yeah, you need serious and rigorous control systems to force transparency and accountability if you centralize power in the way that it would be centralized under communism in our current-day distributions of keeping power in places like Moscow, Brussels, Washington and Beijing. Even within smaller nations this is problematic. You'd need a far more even distribution of power across the world so that poor people in far-off places don't rely on their day-to-day well-being on decisions being made in those places.
Have I told you about a digital democracy where every citizen would be a journalist with the capability of holding their peers who represent them accountable in a highly communicative, responsive and sustainable world where production cycles can be cut short within self-sustainable municipalities? Solar power for energy, electronic transport, vertical farming in greenhouses with all sorts of genetically engineered produces -- from meat to textile to fruits and vegetables -- along with on-demand 3d printing production for common goods, and so forth.
I mean... there's a lot of things possible once the goal of society's collective production becomes intensely focused on stopping world-wide exploitation for sake of consumerism and greed.
On July 11 2018 03:54 Plansix wrote: Lenin’s charisma is undeniable, but being driven and power hungry are not mutually exclusive. Once Lenin obtained power he fervently advocated for the systematic execution or elimination of the bourgeoisie, which quickly shifted from a set group of monied people to anyone the government saw as a threat. He also refused to allow a coalition government with the non communist, advociting for their elimination.
Lenin is not Stalin in his scope or damage, but he laid the ground work for Stalin to kill 12 million people before WW2 even started.
I suppose you think that the bourgeoisie wasn't advocating for the "systematic execution or elimination" of Lenin and the bolsheviks? Regardless of what you think of Lenin, you must consider what forces were arrayed against him and his comrades and what the counter-revolutionaries, also, wanted to do.
Here is Lenin's last testament:
“Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a minor detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.”
And in response to that threat of violence, Lenin created a system of government with due process, trials or any ability for anyone, including Lenin, to stop the violence he willingly unleashed. And resisted all efforts to reign them in or make peace with the people he opposed.
On July 11 2018 04:16 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 04:08 Plansix wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:57 Howie_Dewitt wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:46 GreenHorizons wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:42 WolfintheSheep wrote:
On July 11 2018 03:28 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
It appears you wont be teaching anyone anything and merely relying on your declaration of Lenin being one of the worst people of the 20th century along with all of his contemporary peers and the presumption of the ongoing theme that Hillary is less bad, which we would disagree on, even ignoring that Lenin lived in a different time and place.
I'm trying to figure out if your value system is skewed by ignorance of Lenin, or extreme worship of anyone connected to socialist beliefs.
So where does Stalin fit on you Trump/Clinton/Lenin scale?
Why don't we establish what about Lenin makes it so obvious that president Hillary would be demonstrably better, and for whom?
I think President Lenin would use executive orders to kill off some capitalist big wigs if he were truly as idealistic as described; however, this would erode the reputation of the American left to the point where it would put the country on an ultra-libertarian trajectory for the foreseeable future. Hillary would just delay the reform that is hopefully coming to the Democratic party soon though people like OC and the like, so I would say that Lenin putting leftist progress in reverse would be worse for you than Hillary.
However, he might be able to do something about giant corporations like Amazon and Alphabet and Facebook that increasingly claw away at our right to privacy.
The problem with advocating for Lenin as preferable is that the concepts of the “bourgeoisie” was mercurial and shifted to meet the needs of person enforcing the executions. There were no specific rules for who was or was not executed. So I, being the son of a small business owner, could be part of that ever shifting class. Or any of us. The man laid the foundation for one of the most largest and most harmful authoritarian regimes in human history through his use of excessive violence as a political tool for change.
Get your parents to give their business to it's workers (doesn't mean they couldn't still work there playing an important role) and you'd be a champion of the revolution. Crisis averted.
There is a fundamental part you don’t understand about the systems we are talking about. All the stuff you said doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what my parents or I do. Or anyone does. If the person in power(aka, the uniform and gun), whoever that maybe, wants them dead, then they die. This system was not fair and did not have rules, just like the Nazis and their “racial purity”. It had the illusion of rules and order, but the reality never reflected it. All the rules, classes and systems were just an excuse to kill people for whatever reason the Officer of the People or SS Officer wanted at the time. It is a system that empowered sociopaths to kill whoever with the blessing over the people in power, and make up reasons why later.
You are missing the point. The people did not want to make peace with him.
I understand that, but I fail to see how that justifies him establishing an essentially authoritarian government with no due process, rights for people and creating an unchecked government agency to eliminate enemies of the state.
I tried to allude to this earlier, but the problem is that he's doing it to citizens, not that it's happening right, because that's definitely still happening for US interests.
"Also bad" is not the same as "just as bad". As much as you like to comment on Obama's drone strikes, you should probably stop and think about those are even controversial, and why things like the Geneva Conventions were even established.
On July 11 2018 02:00 Sermokala wrote: [quote] This isn't an argument about how Capitalism is bad its an argument about how capitalism is white supremacist and socialism isn't. You don't get points by pointing out how admittedly capitalism has had its faults. You lose points by admitting that socialism has had the same faults.
Nothing is more disingenuous then advocating for failed government types based on theoretical "but I'm sure we'll make it work this time" appeals. Socialism in its complete form doesn't work and its never worked. Capitalism doesn't work in its complete form either. But capitalism can be compromised and keep much of its benefits while socialism can't.
You are right, that was not my argument. It is a response to bringing up the worst of socialism and communism as an argument against the merits of those systems. Don't bring up Chavez, the USSR or communist China if you don't want the Pinkertons and Union busters thrown back at you in response.
For the record I bring them up not to say that socialism itself is bad. But to show that in practice it has had a lot of warts as well. Democratic Socialism has a ton of strengths. However that is not far enough for GH he wants the USSR and seems to believe that everything bad about it was either caused by the west or not bad and just western propaganda.
I'd take Lenin over Trump or Clinton 100 out of 100 times.
Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police, the Cheka had conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people".[96][97][98][99] Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[100] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[101] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[102][103]
The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth.[104] In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[105][106] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[107] According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".[108]
I'm not a Trump or Clinton person myself either but I do prefer a system of government that keeps people from rounding up people and executing them based on anything.
lol...
You remember how that all started?
No I don't I was not born yet, nor am I from Russia. But I have read about it yes. And I don't think that going in, rounding up the people doing shitty stuff and killing them all is justified. Like right now I wouldn't want some group to go into Venezuela round up all of Maduro's friends, family, their families and murder them all.
I meant remember as in you didn't just google that and copy paste it. Like you actually studied that history at some point before this conversation.
Because it doesn't seem like you did. It seems like you're oblivious that you're talking about a civil war or are completely unaware of how warfare was executed in the early 1900's.
GH, I have read a lot about Russian history. From the Kievan Rus and the Rurikovich dynasty who ruled Muscovy right up until the Time of Troubles, to the Romanov dynasty and its two standouts, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the February Revolution, the October Revolution and Lenin's seizure of power.
Lenin came to power in October of 1917. Lenin immediately established the Cheka on December 20, 1917. Cheka was the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, and it was led by the very weird Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was very open about what Cheka did, stating,
"We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence."
Cheka's name was changed a lot in the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming the NKVD and then finally the KGB. But the organization never changed from being a bunch of fanatics and alcoholics in a chamber of horrors. Here are just some of the atrocities carried out by the organization that Lenin created immediately following his rise to power.
"The methods included:[36] being skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. The Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat in the tube closed off with wire netting, while the tube was held over a flame until the rat began gnawing through the victim's guts in an effort to escape.[36] Anton Denikin's investigation discovered corpses whose lungs, throats, and mouths had been packed with earth.[36][37]
Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror. Women would sometimes be tortured and raped before being shot. Children between the ages of 8 and 13 were imprisoned and occasionally executed.[38]"
This illustrates a point about authoritarian people like Lenin. They are not the problem and do not directly commit the atrocities that we associate with the governments they create. The real terror of authoritarian governments comes the people they end up empowering. Like the man described above, who Lenin gave power.
It is one of the things I love about the movie Rogue One. The villain in that isn’t some evil lord, but some talentless, bootlicking middle manager forcing someone smarter than him to build a war machine that will kill billions. All to get a tiny promotion and a little more power. These are the types of people that dominate these types of government, talentless bootlickers without a scrap of empathy.
Lenin knew exactly what Iron Felix was doing and had zero problem with any of it. I don't think you intended to sound this way, but it seems a bit like you are trying to excuse Lenin's actions by placing all the "real" blame on Felix Dzerzhinsky. Lenin was pretty evil all on his lonesome, without any help from guys like Felix.
I forgot to mention in my previous post that Lenin also invaded Poland in 1920, resulting in over 100,000 combat deaths and many more crippled or forced to flee.
On July 11 2018 02:04 Plansix wrote: [quote] You are right, that was not my argument. It is a response to bringing up the worst of socialism and communism as an argument against the merits of those systems. Don't bring up Chavez, the USSR or communist China if you don't want the Pinkertons and Union busters thrown back at you in response.
For the record I bring them up not to say that socialism itself is bad. But to show that in practice it has had a lot of warts as well. Democratic Socialism has a ton of strengths. However that is not far enough for GH he wants the USSR and seems to believe that everything bad about it was either caused by the west or not bad and just western propaganda.
I'd take Lenin over Trump or Clinton 100 out of 100 times.
Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police, the Cheka had conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people".[96][97][98][99] Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[100] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[101] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[102][103]
The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth.[104] In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[105][106] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[107] According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".[108]
I'm not a Trump or Clinton person myself either but I do prefer a system of government that keeps people from rounding up people and executing them based on anything.
lol...
You remember how that all started?
No I don't I was not born yet, nor am I from Russia. But I have read about it yes. And I don't think that going in, rounding up the people doing shitty stuff and killing them all is justified. Like right now I wouldn't want some group to go into Venezuela round up all of Maduro's friends, family, their families and murder them all.
I meant remember as in you didn't just google that and copy paste it. Like you actually studied that history at some point before this conversation.
Because it doesn't seem like you did. It seems like you're oblivious that you're talking about a civil war or are completely unaware of how warfare was executed in the early 1900's.
GH, I have read a lot about Russian history. From the Kievan Rus and the Rurikovich dynasty who ruled Muscovy right up until the Time of Troubles, to the Romanov dynasty and its two standouts, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the February Revolution, the October Revolution and Lenin's seizure of power.
Lenin came to power in October of 1917. Lenin immediately established the Cheka on December 20, 1917. Cheka was the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, and it was led by the very weird Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was very open about what Cheka did, stating,
"We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence."
Cheka's name was changed a lot in the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming the NKVD and then finally the KGB. But the organization never changed from being a bunch of fanatics and alcoholics in a chamber of horrors. Here are just some of the atrocities carried out by the organization that Lenin created immediately following his rise to power.
"The methods included:[36] being skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. The Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat in the tube closed off with wire netting, while the tube was held over a flame until the rat began gnawing through the victim's guts in an effort to escape.[36] Anton Denikin's investigation discovered corpses whose lungs, throats, and mouths had been packed with earth.[36][37]
Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror. Women would sometimes be tortured and raped before being shot. Children between the ages of 8 and 13 were imprisoned and occasionally executed.[38]"
This illustrates a point about authoritarian people like Lenin. They are not the problem and do not directly commit the atrocities that we associate with the governments they create. The real terror of authoritarian governments comes the people they end up empowering. Like the man described above, who Lenin gave power.
It is one of the things I love about the movie Rogue One. The villain in that isn’t some evil lord, but some talentless, bootlicking middle manager forcing someone smarter than him to build a war machine that will kill billions. All to get a tiny promotion and a little more power. These are the types of people that dominate these types of government, talentless bootlickers without a scrap of empathy.
Lenin knew exactly what Iron Felix was doing and had zero problem with any of it. I don't think you intended to sound this way, but it seems a bit like you are trying to excuse Lenin's actions by placing all the "real" blame on Felix Dzerzhinsky. Lenin was pretty evil all on his lonesome, without any help from guys like Felix.
I forgot to mention in my previous post that Lenin also invaded Poland in 1920, resulting in over 100,000 combat deaths and many more crippled or forced to flee.
I was not making excuses at all, just pointing out that the true horrors committed during Lenin’s government were not committed by Lenin himself, but by people he put in powerful places. People who were often failures in the previous system or who’s only talent is ingratiating themselves with powerful people at any cost. The same can be applied to Nazi Germany and many other dictatorships. A cavalcade of incompetent, but ruthless yes-men willing to do anything to gain the favor of those in power.
On July 11 2018 02:09 JimmiC wrote: [quote] For the record I bring them up not to say that socialism itself is bad. But to show that in practice it has had a lot of warts as well. Democratic Socialism has a ton of strengths. However that is not far enough for GH he wants the USSR and seems to believe that everything bad about it was either caused by the west or not bad and just western propaganda.
I'd take Lenin over Trump or Clinton 100 out of 100 times.
Red Terror was a period of political repression and executions carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. During this period, the political police, the Cheka had conducted summary executions of tens of thousands of "enemies of the people".[96][97][98][99] Many victims were 'bourgeois hostages' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary provocation.[100] Many were put to death during and after the suppression of revolts, such as the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tambov Rebellion. Professor Donald Rayfield claims that "the repression that followed the rebellions in Kronstadt and Tambov alone resulted in tens of thousands of executions."[101] A large number of Orthodox clergymen were also killed.[102][103]
The policy of decossackization amounted to an attempt by Soviet leaders to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory," according to Nicolas Werth.[104] In the early months of 1919, some 10,000 to 12,000 Cossacks were executed[105][106] and many more deported after their villages were razed to the ground.[107] According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".[108]
I'm not a Trump or Clinton person myself either but I do prefer a system of government that keeps people from rounding up people and executing them based on anything.
lol...
You remember how that all started?
No I don't I was not born yet, nor am I from Russia. But I have read about it yes. And I don't think that going in, rounding up the people doing shitty stuff and killing them all is justified. Like right now I wouldn't want some group to go into Venezuela round up all of Maduro's friends, family, their families and murder them all.
I meant remember as in you didn't just google that and copy paste it. Like you actually studied that history at some point before this conversation.
Because it doesn't seem like you did. It seems like you're oblivious that you're talking about a civil war or are completely unaware of how warfare was executed in the early 1900's.
GH, I have read a lot about Russian history. From the Kievan Rus and the Rurikovich dynasty who ruled Muscovy right up until the Time of Troubles, to the Romanov dynasty and its two standouts, Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, to the February Revolution, the October Revolution and Lenin's seizure of power.
Lenin came to power in October of 1917. Lenin immediately established the Cheka on December 20, 1917. Cheka was the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, and it was led by the very weird Polish aristocrat Felix Dzerzhinsky. Dzerzhinsky was very open about what Cheka did, stating,
"We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence."
Cheka's name was changed a lot in the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming the NKVD and then finally the KGB. But the organization never changed from being a bunch of fanatics and alcoholics in a chamber of horrors. Here are just some of the atrocities carried out by the organization that Lenin created immediately following his rise to power.
"The methods included:[36] being skinned alive, scalped, "crowned" with barbed wire, impaled, crucified, hanged, stoned to death, tied to planks and pushed slowly into furnaces or tanks of boiling water, or rolled around naked in internally nail-studded barrels. Chekists reportedly poured water on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living ice statues. Others reportedly beheaded their victims by twisting their necks until their heads could be torn off. The Cheka detachments stationed in Kiev reportedly would attach an iron tube to the torso of a bound victim and insert a rat in the tube closed off with wire netting, while the tube was held over a flame until the rat began gnawing through the victim's guts in an effort to escape.[36] Anton Denikin's investigation discovered corpses whose lungs, throats, and mouths had been packed with earth.[36][37]
Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror. Women would sometimes be tortured and raped before being shot. Children between the ages of 8 and 13 were imprisoned and occasionally executed.[38]"
This illustrates a point about authoritarian people like Lenin. They are not the problem and do not directly commit the atrocities that we associate with the governments they create. The real terror of authoritarian governments comes the people they end up empowering. Like the man described above, who Lenin gave power.
It is one of the things I love about the movie Rogue One. The villain in that isn’t some evil lord, but some talentless, bootlicking middle manager forcing someone smarter than him to build a war machine that will kill billions. All to get a tiny promotion and a little more power. These are the types of people that dominate these types of government, talentless bootlickers without a scrap of empathy.
Lenin knew exactly what Iron Felix was doing and had zero problem with any of it. I don't think you intended to sound this way, but it seems a bit like you are trying to excuse Lenin's actions by placing all the "real" blame on Felix Dzerzhinsky. Lenin was pretty evil all on his lonesome, without any help from guys like Felix.
I forgot to mention in my previous post that Lenin also invaded Poland in 1920, resulting in over 100,000 combat deaths and many more crippled or forced to flee.
I was not making excuses at all, just pointing out that the true horrors committed during Lenin’s government were not committed by Lenin himself, but by people he put in powerful places. People who were often failures in the previous system or who’s only talent is ingratiating themselves with powerful people at any cost. The same can be applied to Nazi Germany and many other dictatorships. A cavalcade of incompetent, but ruthless yes-men willing to do anything to gain the favor of those in power.
Wouldn't say that. There are plenty of direct quotes of Lenin ordering his people to start wiping people out. He was a direct advocate for terrorism of the population and killing off the opposition.
EPT
