Was Stalin wrong?

So, based on your logic, would that mean that the CPC in China is exactly the same as what you said?
You are completely wrong about the reason.
You such inferior white-skinned brutes haven't even learned dialectical materialism. The problems of the Trotskyist faction do not negate the significance of communism as a whole.
According to your logic, if there was a great famine in Ireland, should I kill all the people in the entire capitalist society?
You, this inferior white-skinned pig, can't even speak a word of human language.

Replies: @Sew Crates Hymerschniffen

Collectivisation was not confiscation - peasants united into a collective farms. It was necessary in order to feed the country, as individual small peasants could not. Workers had to be fed. And the alternative was to allow squires to hold big land plots. Communists never wanted that.

Replies: @Karl Nemmersdorf, @Kurt Knispel, @Dimitrie

Of course:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
― Theodore Dalrymple in an interview with Jamie Glazov for Frontpage Magazine on 31 Aug. 2005.

How do you explain that the Communists are the only party in Israel standing for equality and against genocide and apartheid? How do you explain that the Nazi parties of today in Europe all support Israel and Jews?

Replies: @Karl Nemmersdorf, @Annacath

As I already noted, her role in the 1881 assassination was done posing as Nikolai Sablin's wife. Everything which she did, they did together. Sablin was Russian.

One of the main weaknesses of Saadam Hussein's forces in the First Gulf war was that he had to keep some of the best troops in the rear to shoot deserters.

Replies: @the shadow

Your rebuttal that relying on the good work of historians and archival material is the best way of assessing such historical questioins (presumably referring to my point about ising terror to compel soldiers to fight) reveals you are thoroughly intellectually challenged about these matters. Nor do you have the slightest idea about what I know about these matters, having thoroughly delved into especially the subject of the Russian front.

Col. General Balck is one of the best examples of someone who explains in his book "Order in Chaos" what it takes to get soldiers to fight and what doesn't work. You are obviously clueless about the issue if you imagine that blocking units were what kept the Red Army fighting when they would obviously have been most needed in 1941 and early 42 when millions of Russians surrendered. Where were these blocking units then and how effective could they have been given those mass surrenders.

Clear thinking should tell you that soldiers who lack the will to fight can never be compelled to do so by terrorizing them with force because first, the soldiers themselves are armed and could destroy the puny blocking forces and two, they could simply choose to surrender. It's the simple unwillingness of soldiers to continue fighting plus political agitation by the Bolsheviks that brought about the collapse of the Russian army in WWI. The scene in Dr. Zhivago where the troops leaving the front shoot officers of fresh recruits headed to the front perfectly illustrates this phenomenon that does not, however account for it.

Yes, tell me about all the good historians and their works. The fact is that the most revered and cited are court historians who are nothing more than propagandists for the history the ruling elite want told that enable them to gain and maintain their grip on power. It is these court historians who selectively use records and document that support their predetermined points of view of how history is to be told and what is to be buried.

Indeed, the only real sources for those "blocking unit" stories are Germans who failed to comprehend how the Red Army could be offering the such determined resistance after they had inflicted massive losses on them, and anti-Soviet Russians who relied on it to account for why their fellow Russians were fighting so hard for a system they detested. I can certainly understand why he Germans felt that way. What accounts for Russians who do the same? Their refugee from Communism status accounts for most of it.

The fact is that during the Vietnam war the Viet Cong determination to fight the invaders was explained as drug induced fanaticism. Explain how well that worked to promote the drug induced soldiers in Vietnam to fight hard against the Viet Cong. They however certainty turned to fragging their officers.

Oh, and by the way, do you realize that Herbert Hoover, in the guise of engaging in relief work after WWI went around securing the documents of the foreign offices of the major warring powers and relocated them to his institute where they have remained under lock and key for over a century, available if at all only to a select few. How is that for an effective way to bury the truth.

If you doubt it, look it up in "Hidden History" by Dockerty and Macgregor who do document that the court historian account of Germany starting the war is complete hokum. And then read all about it in the books by court historians who used reams of document crammed into the Warren Report to insist it was Oswald with an unaligned scope who fired a magic bullet that went through two bodies, struck 2 ribs and a wrist bone and landed on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital in practically pristine condition.

I knew it was nonsense the moment they said it. But I bet you still believe it because it is historians using those methods that tell you so.

Replies: @Karl Nemmersdorf

There are lots of historians that publish contradictory accounts of pretty much every event. So, one has to select what appears more plausible. That’s exactly what I do. Every “historian”, just like every “political scientist”, only cites what agrees with his/her preconceived ideas, and ignores everything that contradicts them. Objective historian is a contradiction in terms. As the joke puts it, if you have two witnesses, you get three versions of what happened.

professional historians
 

The problem with relying on the tools historian use for writing and documenting history is not a very sound basis for assessing the credibility of issues like whether a military used terror to compel its soldiers to fight against their will such as by using so called blocking units. For one thing, its unlikely such orders would ever be written down so actual participants in combat would most likely be the only real source of such information.

The real reason for doubting that any military organization relied on, and effectively used terror to instill compliance on a large scale is that it wouldn't and didn't work, neither in the Red nor the German army during the opposite periods in the war when each side tried on a limited scale to do so.

The reason such efforrts would not work on a significant scale is that were the soldiers ordered to attack or defend and did so only because of the fear of blocking units shooting them from behind were they to refuse, their easiest recourse for avoiding that fate was surrendering to the enemy and avoid entiely the blocking units behind them that were allegedly forcing them to fight.

That even if they had tried it, that it didn't work for the Soviets in 1941 and 1942 is evidenced by the millions of the Red Army who then surrendered to the Germans. The Germans ran into the same problem in late 44 and 45 when Germans oftent surrendered by the thousands, especially on the Western front. The Germans were more likely to fight to the end on the Eastern front not because being terrorized by the threat of being hanged as also happened, but because they feared reprisal from the Soviets.

By the same token, relatively few German soldiers surrendered while the war was going favorbale for them, just as relatively few Russian soldiers surendered once the war was going in their favor after 1942. Thus it was really the military conditions the armies faced that was most telling about whether the combatants were prepared to fight or not, rather than their side obtaining compliance by terror blocking units generated.

The situation in which executing or simply shooting soldiers on the spot for failing to or for unwillingness to fight can work is stopping sudden panic or temporary demoralization that may be induced by significant but apparently temporary setbacks that could be turned around by renewing the determination of the soldiers to fight by ferreting out defeatists from the ranks. Thus when Zhukhov acknowledged that 13,000 had been executed by the Soviets during the battle of Stalingrad, that was a paltry number compared to the hundreds of thousands who did their duty and were killed in action. There is simply no way that "blocking units" would have generated that kind of determination no matter how many were lurking in the rear to mete out summary punishment to alleged shirkers.

The claim that this is how the other side got their soldiers to fight is almost always made by their actual opponents or by their ideological opposition who cannot imagine why their opponents could be so determined to fight them when they know that God is on their own side that convinces them they are in the right and their opponents must obviously be in the wrong and could not therefore be as determined as they are to fight them.

Replies: @Karl Nemmersdorf

As far as “blocking units” go, I believe what I’ve heard from people who actually fought Nazis in 1941-45. None of the ones you mentioned belongs to this category. As you should be aware, hearsay is not admissible in the court of law. For a good reason, if you ask me.

Replies: @Dannyboy, @John Regan, @Kali

You should be in politics. You ignored every point I have made and switched the conversation to entirely different things. That’s what politicians usually do.

I do not argue against the brutality of Bolsheviks. BTW, it helps to know history, but I guess true Westerners want to live in the post-truth world and resist being dragged into the real one. Even before Kronstand rebellion, Bolsheviks brutally suppressed the strike of railway workers organized by their trade union, executing practically all leaders. In Petersburg Cheka daily took hostages after every anti-government act demanding that the perpetrators surrender, and as it never happened, it daily executed dozens of totally innocent hostages. One can continue in this vain for a long time.

The Whites were exactly as brutal, robbing, raping, and summarily executing thousands of people. So, the civil war was not a competition in brutality: on this score the opposing forces were equal. Whites lost on two things: they proclaimed as their goal the restoration of monarchy and the return of the land to its “rightful owners”. That swayed the popular support to the forces opposing them, Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries. They did win hearts and minds, although in hindsight we can say that they achieved that by cheating: they established a dictatorship pretty much as insulated from the common people as the monarchy and they expropriated all land that was given to peasants at the beginning, forcibly creating “collective farms”.

In WWII, very small fraction of the people who happened to be on the occupied territory collaborated with the occupiers. The majority did not. Many hated occupiers’ guts. Germans achieved that by being even more brutal than Bolsheviks. BTW, Germans preserved those “collective farms”, as a handy mechanism of robbing peasants. Conquest was a paid stooge of the anti-communist fat cats. His job was made easier by the fact that he had no first-hand knowledge of the Soviet reality. He probably could not even know that he was lying, which spared him and his ilk any pangs of conscience. The story of “blocking units” is repeated ad nauseam by those who never were in the USSR or never were at the war front. Nobody who served in the Red Army during the war has ever witnessed them. My nephew, when he was something like 10-12 years old, having watched a movie where the “blocking units” were alleged, asked a simple question: and who was behind those “blocking units”? I’ve never heard anyone promoting the story of "blocking units" answer this simple question.

As for vast resources, they are useful only when you have huge number of people willingly using them. That’s what the USSR had. You can argue that in and of itself this does not mean that the populace supports the government. You’d be correct in that: after all, millions of peasants, who wanted to be free but weren’t, participated in the defeat of Napoleon armies in the early nineteenth century. Russians historically see foreign invaders as worse enemies than domestic thieves. But if the mindless brutality of the government approached the proportions your narrative alleges, Germans would be seen as a lesser evil. They weren’t.

So, you are welcome to believe your narrative. After all, people believed all sorts of preposterous things for millennia. But beliefs do not change the reality. Just ask any lunatic asylum inmate.

Replies: @Karl Nemmersdorf, @Vaterland, @ivan, @Miro23

> "The Russians used massed formations of men to clear MINE FIELDS. Zhukov admitted to this. 13,000 Russian soldiers were executed just during the Battle of Stalingrad."

The Western Empires marched rows and rows of soldiers to certain death in the Third Battle of Ypres in World War One, 200k corpses, 400k corpses, 800k corpses from both sides. But the normie masses of the fat post-1945 world consider the Soviets as ants disregarding their men's lives! Learn some perspective, bucko.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Passchendaele

Replies: @Karl Nemmersdorf, @Pandour