Apr 8, 2022 05:45 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 8, 2022 11:31 PM by C C.)
Such political opportunism -- of exploiting both real oppression and invented conspiratorial conceptions of it, continues to this day after the original socioeconomic fixations expanded to include the whole array of social justice issues that leftangelical academicians could similarly manipulate -- playing the role of wise, missionary saviors striving to rehabilitate humankind. Though pseudoscience it may be, it molds the policies of today's administrative and journal departments of the social sciences, the latter rewarding researchers for bending over and catering to the ideological thrusts. (The earlier transition to a cultural version of crypto-Marxism, back in the '60s and '70s.)
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The cult of Stalin the intellectual
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/boo...tellectual
A valuable study of the dictator’s reading habits is absurdly revisionist about his capacity for cruelty.
EXCERPTS: There is a sense in which the former Soviet Union was ruled by books. Stalin read avidly to learn how to apply the ideas that underpinned the new state, and protect it from danger. Here he followed the lead of the founder. Like Lenin, Stalin was an intellectual in power.
When some are comparing him with Vladimir Putin, Geoffrey Roberts’ summary view may be apposite:
“Stalin was no psychopath but an emotionally intelligent and feeling intellectual. Indeed, it was the power of his emotional attachment to deeply held beliefs that enabled him to sustain decades of brutal rule… Stalin’s unremitting pursuit of socialism and communism enabled his greatest achievements but at the cost of equally great misdeeds. Had he been more intellectual and less Bolshevik, he might have moderated his actions and achieved more at less cost to humanity.”
This distinction between Bolsheviks and intellectuals is interesting, and questionable. Lenin and Stalin were both of them prototypical intellectuals – ardent readers who looked to books to show how how society can be transformed...
[...] For Stalin as for Lenin, Bolshevism was the practical application of science – the opposite of religion, in their view.
Since Marxism-Leninism was a pseudo-science[1] whose basic tenets Stalin treated as articles of faith, this was a misleading dichotomy. But it is true that he rejected any link between religion and the Bolshevik cause. It is inconceivable that he could have approved Alexander Blok’s celebrated verse drama The Twelve, composed in January 1918, in which the symbolist poet pictured Jesus leading 12 Bolshevik apostles through revolutionary Petrograd. The absence in Stalin of an apocalyptic Russian sensibility may be important, for it suggests a possible contrast with Putin.
Stalin’s Library is an account of the dictator’s intellectual and political development, but the core of the book is a long chapter detailing his pometki – the markings he made in the volumes he read. Quite often these were expletives. “Piss off”, “scumbag” and “ha ha” were some of his favourites. The significance of these markings – and the chief value of Roberts’ book – is in what they tell us of the workings of Stalin’s mind.
[...] Roberts says nothing regarding the scale of Stalin’s terror. He mentions the so-called Kremlin affair in 1935, in which 110 Kremlin staff, including cleaners, tea ladies and librarians were arrested, two of them shot and 108 imprisoned or exiled for “spreading slander about the state”. He passes over the hundreds of thousands who perished in the Great Terror. There is nothing in the book regarding the scale of the Soviet camp system and the huge numbers who spent time or died in it. Nor is there any mention in his discussion of Lysenko of the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932-33. One might think millions of deaths merited a line or two, if only because they were partly the result of Stalin promoting a charlatan whose theories he privately derided.
In its examination of Stalin’s debts to the books he read, this is a pioneering work of scholarship. As an assessment of the dictator, it is tendentiously and at times absurdly revisionist. Stalin’s Library is a sequel to Roberts’ Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War (2006), where he described the dictator – “a quietly charismatic figure”– as one of the 20th century’s greatest war leaders, who later tried to avoid the Cold War and hoped for peaceful coexistence with the West. Roberts denies wanting to rehabilitate Stalin, but that is, in effect, what he is trying to do.
Aspects of Stalin’s personality that were observed by his contemporaries are edited out from the self-effacing, book-loving figure Roberts presents. Stalin’s contemporaries were familiar with his taste for cruelty. His taunting of guests at late-night drinking sessions is well attested, as is his prolonging standing ovations to the point where his terrified audiences were sore-handed, exhausted and fainting. The manner in which he orchestrated the execution of Nikolai Bukharin is revealing. Before his show trial, in which he was accused of plotting to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, Bukharin wrote to Stalin begging to be executed by poison rather than by a bullet in the back of the head. In response, according to a report by a former secret service officer cited by one of Bukharin’s biographers, he was given a chair so he could sit and watch as 17 of his co-defendants were shot, one by one, until his time came. Bukharin’s fear and horror were multiplied many times over. There can be no doubt that the proceedings were scripted by Stalin. This was not the instrumental savagery of a Machiavellian despot aiming to terrify the population into obedience. A gruesome performance enacted in secret, it was calculated cruelty for its own sake.
Roberts is not alone in passing over blemishes in Stalin’s character, or in implying that what he sees as his great achievements somehow compensate for his great crimes. Like many others he gives Stalin the credit for helping defeat Nazism, though that belonged to more than 25 million Soviet citizens who died fighting it, the Russian winter and Hitler in launching the two-front war against which Bismarck had warned.
Why so many intellectuals glorified Stalin is a nice question. Part of the reason must be that Stalin was himself an intellectual... (MORE - missing details)
Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books, Geoffrey Roberts ... Yale University Press, 272pp
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[1] George Bernard Shaw: I am a Socialist and a Democrat myself, the hero of a hundred platforms, one of the leaders of the most notable Socialist organizations in England. I am as conspicuous in English Socialism as Bebel is in German Socialism; but do you suppose that the German Social-Democrats tolerate me? Not a bit of it.
I have begged again and again to be taken to the bosom of my German comrades...
[...] All they want to know is; Am I orthodox? Am I correct in my revolutionary views? Am I reverent to the revolutionary authorities? Because I am a genuine free-thinker they look at me as a policeman looks at a midnight prowler or as a Berlin bourgeois looks at a suspicious foreigner. They ask "Do you believe that Marx was omniscient and infallible; that Engels was his prophet; that Bebel and Singer are his inspired apostles; and that Das Kapital is the Bible?"
[...] I assure them earnestly [...] that I read Das Kapital in the year 1882 or thereabouts, and still consider it one of the most important books of the nineteenth century because of its power of changing the minds of those who read it, in spite of ... its general attempt to disguise a masterpiece of propagandist journalism and prophetic invective as a drily scientific treatise of the sort that used to impose on people in 1860, when any book that pretended to be scientific was accepted as a Bible. In those days Darwin and Helmholtz were the real fathers of the Church; and nobody would listen to religion, poetry or rhetoric; so that even Socialism had to call itself "scientific," and predict the date of the revolution, as if it were a comet, by calculations founded on "historic laws."
To my amazement these reasonable remarks were received as hideous blasphemies; none of the party papers were allowed to print any word of mine; the very Revisionists themselves found that the scandal of my heresy damaged them more than my support aided them...
Thus you may see that when a German, by becoming a Social-Democrat, throws off all the bonds of convention, and stands free from all allegiance to established religion, law, order, patriotism, and learning, he promptly uses his freedom to put on a headier set of chains...
--The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring