I like the fact there’s a book titled “total propaganda”
Fucking, Gulag Archipelago, even Solzhenitsyn admitted most of what he wrote was entirely guesswork.
Guesswork I might add that was contradicted by evidence uncovered when soviet archives were unsealed during glasnost.
I don't know why these people have to keep bringing up outdated Cold War theories when there's so many things the USSR actually did that they can be critiqued on.
Solzhenitsyn's Ex‐Wife Says ‘Gulag’ Is ‘Folklore’, 1974:
PARIS, Feb. 5 (Reuters)—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's controversial new book on Soviet prison‐camps was described as “folklore” by his former wife in an interview published here today.
Natelya Reshetovskaya told the conservative newspaper Le Figaro that the book, “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956,” was based on unreliable information:
She also told the newspaper's Moscow correspondent that she was still living with Mr. Soizhenitsyn when he wrote the book and that she had typed part of it. They parted in 1970 and were subsequently divorced.
She said: “The subject of ‘Gulag Archipelago,’ as I felt at the moment when he was writing it, is not in fact the life of the country and not even the life of the camps but the folklore of the camps.”
In her 1974 memoir, ''Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn'' (Bobbs-Merrill), she wrote that she was ''perplexed'' that the West had accepted ''The Gulag Archipelago'' as ''the solemn, ultimate truth,'' saying its significance had been ''overestimated and wrongly appraised.''
Pointing out that the book's subtitle is ''An Experiment in Literary Investigation,'' she said that her husband did not regard the work as ''historical research, or scientific research.'' She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ''camp folklore,'' containing ''raw material'' which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.
best Internet comment award, 2008:
Solzhenitsyn was a Nazi propagandist in the 1940's and affirmed that the war against Nazism was avoidable and a compromise with Hitler possible. That was why he was sent to a labor camp, for being a traitor.
His hatred for Jews that became public knowledge in recent years may explain his Nazi sympathies. Predictably, he was also a great fan of the Spanish fascist dictator Franco, whom he went to support when his regime began to totter. He appeared on Spanish TV to plead with Spaniards to remember the "freedom" they enjoyed under Franco while Soviet citizens were "enslaved" by socialism.
Solzhenitsyn was never a dissident but enjoyed the full support of Nikita Khruschev when he wrote the Gulag Archipelago, which Khrushchev used as propaganda material during his purge of Stalinists.
Nazi lover, Jew hater, monarchist: No wonder he became the darling of the West.
I've heard "campfire stories" to be a pretty good (if generous) description of that book.
Part of it is just the accumulation of priors. So much easier to say the trigger words that cause Americans to :frothingfash: than to discuss the more complex and nuanced geopolitical maneuvers or economic planning mistakes. When speaking to a population that believes Everything the Soviets Did Was Evil and Command Economies Don't Work, none of that mean anything.
I think she and Kotkin got into a beef due to the famine issue (Kotkin doesn't think it was manmade)
Soak it with piss
As a representative of and advocate for leftist bookstores, check your local bookstores' history and philosophy sections. If they are filled with books like this in the former and Joel Osteen and Peterson in the latter, wage war and soak the entire shelf in your piss. Let the gold flow.
Fun fact: CPUSA used to own bookstores across the country during the Gus Hall years.
They and many other brick and mortar assets the old party had were liquidated by the social fascists that make up the party leadership from Sam Webb to today.
Look we can move everything online, it's totally a good system, it's not as if we could use them for other things rather than just have to rent all our spaces.
Think about it like this. If the feds can remove something like tik tok because they think teens talking about how liking certain gems means you have an alien soul from aquarius or some shit, just imagine how easily all the collected works on marxists.org can go poof.
There's a good reason to have physical copies in the digital age more than ever
My city had one of those, albeit it was shut down and raided before Hall was in charge. I think it was in Dennis' time
The race to save the romanovs lol
Tell me why they needed to be saved
No you see the romanovs were innocent smol beans as evidenced the documentary anastasia (1997) made by disney
Total Propaganda is good actually, it's basically Marxism 101 for baby leftists — full title is Total Propaganda: Marxist Brainwashing for the Young and Angry. I give it to friends sometimes, def moved one of them all the way left
Kind of hysterical that they'd shelve it with all of this reactionary garbage lol, im sure it was titled like that to get chuds to buy it by mistake
Seconding your recommendation, Total Propaganda is well produced agitprop.
Mentioned this in a top-level comment but that book is actually based, it's basically Marxism 101 written in conversational Aussie English with modern examples to help illustrate concepts like TRPF
The full title is tongue-and-cheek "Total Propaganda: Marxist Brainwashing for the Young and Angry"
Lmao Gorbachev is the only one they give a nice normal cover to.
Rasputin's picture looks like I'm about to hear some opinions about the age of consent
barnes and noble is good for graphic novels and smut manga, and stealing moleskine notebooks.
moleskine notebooks
Look, it's one thing if you're going to cut it off, but this is too far
All brick-and-mortar chain bookstores are like this, their bread and butter for all nin-fiction stuff is pop history, campaign books, memoirs of famous people, etc. Though they do have a couple serious authors like Kotkin mixed in there.
I really try to not be a history snob but it's hard when the only history I can get people to care about is US/European military history and biographies of well-known people.
It's about as bad as it sounds literally just trying to blame WW2 and by extension the holocaust on the USSR, our favorite type of fascist hitorical revisionism: just conveniently overlooking Hitler and ignoring that the fucking Nazi's are kicking around so we can blame all the troubles of the world on le ebil commies.
When you're reading the names of the authors of Russian histories and they're all :cracker:
Not a single Zemskov, Yanin, or Volkogonov among them.
Volkogonov
Looking up those names and OMG that guy became such a fucking wretched liberal. Like holy shit he sounds based when he was young and then just the biggest ideologue for fascists
The folks you'll hear about inevitably went that direction after glasnost, because they were willing to trade on existing credibility. The folks who didn't just disappear into obscurity. Digging up old forgotten scholars and piecing together a better picture of history makes for exciting grad school work, but fails to pay the bills at the corporate level.
he seems to have played the convert very well. Lot of pageantry. Who are some good russian historians? I know Alexander Dyukov
Meh. He at least has the credentials of "being there". Anne Applebaum spent her entire life inside the DC Beltway, save for a summer sabbatical in St. Petersburg 40 years ago.
You can shit on him for being a revisionist rather than some Thomas Friedman tier "I heard this from a taxi driver on the way to the airport" bullshit.
And disappeared from 1955-2005.
I'd be interesting as shit to read more about Imperial Russian colonization of Siberia and its early contacts with Imperial China, but nooooooooo...
Kotkin while he is a capitalist, is very good I've found just because it is very extensive at going through the Soviet archives and translating them. I do wish there was another historian who did that level of work on Stalin, but doesn't have brainworms. I'm more than fine with critiques of Stalin, just no brainworms.
J Arch Getty? Still a bourgeois historian but much less of an axe to grind against communism than Kotkin.
“Waiting for Hitler,” the worst of the Ryan Reynolds “Waiting” franchise. Shenanigans opens a branch in Buenos Aries, and guess who shows up for the grand opening?
Deadpool and I murder Hitler together and then have a pansexual communist orgy on a pile of nazi bodies in a state of frenzied antifa bloodlust.
Great movie. Freakishly high production values. Shot in imax 3D, even.
:stalin-approval:
I’m more than fine with critiques of Stalin, just no brainworms.
wait so you don't like applebaum?
