Korean Job Discussion Forums

[thepeel]

[Ya-ta Boy]

Yawn. This one again? You musta gone to the same dips**t school Stevie M. went to.

[thepeel]

[Mosley]

No real surprise there...many scholars have long debunked the myth that Stalinism was a bizarre divergence from Leninism rather than the truth: Stalin, with the exception of the Cult of Personality, was very much a product of Leninism.

Slight disagreement about the issue of "purges." I might agree that ongoing purges were not institutionalized in the Third Reich to the extent they were in the USSR but Nazi Germany was not devoid of them. "Night of Long Knives", anyone?

[Kuros]

This information was only really radical before 1994, after the Soviet archives had been opened up and Volkogonov had published his own book on Lenin.

There are some significant differences between Lenin and Stalin. Lenin did actually lean more towards actually Marxism, which is why he embraced international revolution and Stalin did not. But as has been seen in France in the 18th Century, China in the last century, and in Russia under Lenin's rule, the push for distributive equality has always been accompanied by force and tyranny. This is because the ideal of distributive equality comes to odds with equality under the law, also known as liberty.

Most people who lean Left in the West, and on this board, would not choose distributive equality at the expense of equality under the law, if for no other reason than the Left has social values that are highly compatable with liberty. For example, it was the Left, not the Right, that pushed for Civil Rights in America in the 60s. The so-called Left also tends to be proponents of the right to choose for women in America, and are more often than not willing to grant homosexuals equality under the law. In terms of economic remedies, the Left tends to content itself with ideas like progressive taxation and increased social welfare spending rather than full-out control of levelling by the state. There are exceptions to this, to be sure, and there were no doubt a few Leftists who were really slow to recognize Hugo Chavez's own disdain for the ideal of equality under the law. Nevertheless, when it became obvious that Chavez was turning into the kind of old school authoritarian leftist that Castro was, many people on the Left abandoned defending him.

[Mosley]

Kuros: Lenin might've believed in Marxian international revolution but I do believe that he realized the futility of it before his death.

I don't agree that Western socialist "progressives" have by & large rejected revolution and totalitarianism. Quite the contrary. They play the "let's legislate more social welfare" game at home but have, for much of the last century, supported socialist tyrants abroad(Stalin, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Chavez, etc., etc.).

[twg]