"As Matt Christman points out" makes him sound like a legit historian. Made me wonder how many people I've assumed are more credible than :matt-jokerfied: just because they were presented to me that way.
In another world Matt is a professor and instead of doing cushvlogs he just gives rambling lectures for two hours
I mean fair. I also am kinda shit at remembering names, and that tracks with philosophy for me. I'm better at ideas than names, so I could probably recall the basics of intro philosophy, but not who wrote what.
I know people think that university is "pointless" but for fields like history, you absolutely do need the degree, if not the PhD, just to open the doors that will allow you to study the primary sources.
Also checking if they are fluent in the language of the place they're writing about is useful. You wouldn't trust a historian of Elizabethan England who couldn't read any English, after all.
No, sorry, it still cannot be classified as genocide.
“I’ve done more research than these historians”
Forget the Bengal Famine, during the exact same period as the famine in the USSR, French West Africa, a much smaller area than the affected areas of the USSR, with a smaller population, lost proportionally more to famine. Why? Because the French colonial authorities refused to lower taxes during drought, and refused grain aid to affected farmers.
Why therefore the USSR is so demonised, and the French West African famine is completely forgotten, should be pretty telling of the ideology at play here.
Had no idea about this. It's like every few weeks I find out about some past atrocity that the "civilized blue eyes blond hair" societies have committed
I don't know the exact dates, but didn't agriculture on the southern plains of the United States collapse at the same time. We talk about the dust bowl, but wasn't there a famine that accompanied it?
Edit: The Grapes of Wrath is about a famine, right?
Dustbowl caused a lot of crop failure. I've never seen a number that died because of it.
Wonder if they actually had breadlines or not and if there's pics of it to use to screw with people who think it's in Soviet Union.
I've never seen any mention of a real famine being associated with the dust bowl. I think it mostly just caused a migration from where those crop failures occurred. I'd have to imagine the deaths would be comparatively way lower than actual famines
Somehow, despite being the 2nd most upvoted comment it appears 5th as you scroll
:thinkin-lenin: :fedposting:
This basically is how I describe it to people. I personally do think the Bolshevik's did fuck up a lot in this time (denomadization wasn't the best idea and was very Euro-centric), but it wasn't a genocide.
Yep, dark/questionable events in Soviet history are always presented in the media without context & in the least charitable framing possible.
It's a very dark period in Soviet history, without having to resort to any weird "soviets were trying to genociding Ukrainians" weirdness. I've never heard any explanation of why they would want to do that. Especially when a more normal explanation could still be used as a "communiam bad" argument.
Yeah I mean I'm not shocked that a Cato Institute historian has no interest in defending the Bolsheviks; however, it's definitely effective in dispelling a piece of Nazi propaganda that's been repeated for the last 80 years.
Kotkin is like the only major historian that actually read the archives so he's all we got for now.
Why is that the case? Do other historians not have access to the archives?
Certainly, I'm as red as it gets and I still cringe when I read people blaming the famine on "kulaks" who owned something like ~2 acres of farmland & a cow.
This book is very much raw history. It is not pop history. If you are up for that, then read it. I don't really know any other sympathetic biographies
You aren't going to find any serious history or pop history sympathetic to Stalin. It's something you have to just deal with it.
I dunno, I still think it is wild they expect a country with essentially renaissance agricultural science to handle anything well.
