“Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” Reading up on the GULAG.
Annie Clark aka St. Vincent - She actually did an interview where she talked about Stalin and it’s as bad as you’d think.
How much podcast and audiobook listening do you typically do?
I’m obsessed with podcasts and audiobooks. I probably listen to more audiobooks than I do music. I mean, I certainly listen to music — for enjoyment, for research, for just making sure I know what is happening. Luckily, maybe because I’m a musician, I can retain a lot of information that comes through on the auditory side. I mean, I’ve really been brushing up on my Stalin.
You’ve brushed up on your Stalin?
It makes me feel much better about where we are today. Because they had it bad.
It’s pretty bad now.
It’s really bad now. But it was worse. I’ll go ahead and say it was worse in Stalin’s Russia. So there we are. That makes me feel bright and sunny. I’ve been on a real Stasi Gulag Stalin kick for the past many months. Cold war, espionage — all of it.
https://archive.vn/Ci86Z
I’ll go ahead and say it was worse in Stalin’s Russia
wow so brave. It was worse to live in a unindustrialized backwater that was recovering from invasion and civil war than it is to live 100 years later in a modern western service economy where your every want is catered to. Thank you liberalism for your insightful conclusions.
How brave for her to realize this injustice (90 years after it ended), absorb these dangerous ideas (that will never apply to her life or surroundings) and speak out against evil! (from the comfort of her million-dollar home) Take out the parentheses and you get what the average Authoritarianism-mongerer hears
been reading through the comments and trying to give st. vincent a break because i like her music.
your comment broke me. she's legit fucking clueless and has no critical thought
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:doomer: if it make you feel any better, one of my favorite bands did a promotional collaboration with :billionaire-tears: years ago
Yes I am really into history so I am reading a book by a pop journalist who likes to pretend she's a historian. Applebaum sucks so much, when anti-communist Stephen fucking Kotkin is dunking on you maybe you should rethink your career.
Anyways if this person has actually read any real history about communism I'll eat my hat.
Honestly a lot of bourgeoisie historians of Communism "know a lot" in a basic sense it's just the rail guards within academia when it comes to the Soviet Union in particular(but all communist states) keeps them from correcting even the most glaring lies, omissions and obfuscations that are largely taken as a given in the field . That with a ton of false consciousness. No amount of corrections and counter history will change some of these people's minds, they've made their bed. Ann Applebum is straight up in the orbit of NATO with her husband and is clearly an outright propagandist of empire . I don't feel like going into it but her book Red Famine is a joke . Mark Tauger easily poked holes in it like swiss cheese :
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169438I actually think about this alot. The reality is that academic historians of the Soviet Union do generally disregard the Holodomor narrative as well as the pinball scores from The Black Book of Communism. But they don't really talk about it much, I think for a couple reasons:
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They don't want to be see as "communism apologists". So I'm doing this from memory, but in The Soviet Century, Moshe Lewin talks about how for the period from like 1959-1985, the average number of either arrest or convictions (don't remember which) per year in the USSR for political crimes was between 300-400. Not 300,000-400,000; 300-400. And that's not executions, that's just arrests/convictions (again, don't remember which). This is so dramatically counter to popular narratives. But even when talking about this, Lewin has to say "but this doesn't excuse the horrors of living in the USSR!". They always feel the need to add these qualifiers. Being seen as a Soviet "apologist" is worse than actually promoting the truth.
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I think a lot of academics - in many fields - just don't concern themselves with popular misconceptions in their fields. A different example... I love talking to geologists, because I was raised to believe the earth is 6,000 years old and there was a real, global flood like 4,000 years ago. So whenever I read a geologist talking about the age of rocks and stuff, it blows my mind. I can't get enough of it, and I haven't been a Christian for like a decade. But I also find that a lot of geologists don't like "debunking" Young Earth Creationist myths. Because to them, it's so obviously bullshit, it almost feels embarrassing to explain why it's wrong. And I get that. But the reality is something like 40% of the US population thinks the earth is less than 10,000 years old. These anti-science or anti-history popular narratives really do cause significant societal damage and hinder our progress as humans. But in regards to communism, I don't think any academic Sovietologist takes the 100 million number seriously at all. It's so far from reality they see it as waste of their time to address, in addition to the point I made above.
Definitely, Albert Sysmanski does this for the post WW2 Soviet Union even with comparisons to the United States in his wonderful book Human Rights In The Soviet Union . From what I've read though many academics do in fact frame the Ukrainian famine largely under the Holdamor narrative(or just Ukrainian nationalist perspective in general) , i.e. it was a deliberate starvation to subdue Ukraine . Anyways though "Being seen as a Soviet “apologist” is worse than actually promoting the truth." Man hit the nail on the fucking head, totally .
Indeed anti science narratives and general reactionary delusions and conspiracies permeate this country, where the conspiratorial "Anti mason" party was huge in the 19th century. It's to be expected in a white settler nation dominated by Christianity . But I wouldn't really compare anti Soviet mythology to creationism, I think anti Soviet myths are easily translated into liberal or conservative circles and so permeate this country and it's culture on nearly all levels while creationism is easily outright laughed at by most in elite circles.
I think conspiracy's like flat earth and Qanon and so on have as much to do with modern media , cell phones and psy ops as the idiocy of a large sections of this country and our reactionary history .
And no most academics don't take The Black Book Of Communism seriously I was being partially sarcastic with "gulag 20 million dead" but most are basically a step behind and do inflate Gulag deaths .Human Rights in the Soviet Union
Ooooh.... that sounds like a great read, heading over to libgen now!
many academics do in fact frame the Ukrainian famine largely under the Holdamor narrative
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case now, but literally less than a year ago the overwhelming majority of academic historians were in agreement that the famine wasn't a genocide or intentional and avoided the politicized term "Holodomor".
I simply do not see the evidence to believe that the "overwhelming majority" of academic historians agreed that the Famine in Ukraine during the Soviet Famine 31-34 wasn't a deliberate act to punish land holding peasents and Ukrainian nationalism/separatism . Because many mainstream historians from Applebum to Figes(and now dead popular historians like Richard Pipes) hold that view and held that before a year ago to say the least.
There's even an Encyclopedia Britannica entry for the Holodomor written by the author OP is reading . I don't think that's just or even mostly all recent in the academic field although with the wider imagination that's probably true to an extent.
One can reject the exact term "Holodomor" and then churn around and basically recite it's narrative as well .There are Some like Tauger and J Arch Getty but for instance your assertion that Robert Conquest doesn't assert the Famine in parts of Ukraine wasn't a deliberate act(Holodomor) isn't remotely true . He in fact wrote a whole Book on it arguing just that titled The Harvest Of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n02/j.-arch-getty/starving-the-ukraine Applebaum is from Yale and Conquest is also very important for the general view of Americans. Kotkin on other hand yes mostly blames the famine on Collectivization in particular but doesn't think it was was deliberate let alone a genocide. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/11/08/studying-stalin/ and is an effective anti communist historian although i haven't read his tombs on Stalin yet. .
Yes years later he would back peddle but basically argue the same thing.
"Stalin purposely inflicted the 1933 famine. No. What I argue is that with resulting famine imminent, he could have prevented it, but put “Soviet interest” other than feeding the starving first – thus consciously abetting it "
That is the Consensus among many is true and also wrong and flawed imo and not much different from the Holodomor narrative which is also a popular view among historians and the wider public.
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I’ve been on a real Stasi Gulag Stalin kick
The Stasi were East Germany you fake fucking tool.
The East Germany Ministry of State Security wasn't even formed until 1950 and Stalin died in 1953.
When people say these scareword salads they reveal they haven't actually learned anything.
I’m obsessed with podcasts
This is how you know she has nothing of value to say :very-smart:
Why do these liberals think the gulags existed? One day there was a mean communism man who had brainwashed soldiers do his every whim? I genuinely don't know what liberals think communism is a response to, or how it forms. They think of it like a sudden brainwashing virus from some smug lying man giving false promises.
There was a shining light (America) in a world of darkness. It was taming the chaos of an unordered world that was ruled by tribalism and despots. America just wanted prosperity for all and sought to bring it to as many places as possible. There were a few mistakes along the way, but everything that happened was ultimately the best possible outcome because it led to a liberal democratic world order.
This made some people very mad because they were greedy and power-hungry. They didn't have democratic values. There was even some biological basis for this, as the despots seemed to always be in the global south, the place that America was pushing into to help everyone. Even when they weren't, they were descendant of some long blood line tied to ancient war tribes of conquerors.
The bad people who hated democracy took advantage of their people and brainwashed them into believing in lies about what America could offer them. Most people just wanted to live their lives but were forced or persuaded into helping the bad people.
Luckily America prevailed and stopped the bad people from winning. Now everyone's lives are much better with their liberal democracies and free markets. Though the specter of authoritarianism persists from troubled people within those places, extremists who are just bad people.
That is literally what they think. Not even a single word of what you said is exaggerated.
Liberals also believe certain ethnic groups are predisposed to falling for tricky communist lies. Unlike big brain white people who have a freedom-based skull shape or something.
You're telling me this rich person who doesn't actually work for a living and has no personal stakes in anything believes self-serving bullshit?
doesn’t actually work for a living
I'm not gonna say touring and playing music isn't work, and isn't rough, but she's got road crews/drivers/techs/etc so....
:gulag:
No one named after a saint can be trustworthy,
even if she is hot and absurdly talented and maybe I want to be her oh god I want to be a womanAt least open the book in the middle when taking a photo like this so you don't look like you are bragging about reading halfway through the forewords
stares directly into the camera while trying to convince people you had a candid photo taken while reading a book
Reminds me of when I real Orlando Figes lib ass "The Russian Revolution" book which trys to blitz itself through basically the entirety of 20th century Russian history 1905-1991. Every trope you could imagine was in it, except he does have this interesting bit about Nazi Germany explicitly having a genocidal plan for ethnic Slavs not dissimilar to the Holocaust of Jews . Which most liberal authors like Snyder obfuscate. About all I remember from that crap book though, still on the shelf lol.
Tropes in the popular imagination about Soviet history especially in the US are just so predictable, Stalin was a Tsar, Russia is eternally backwards and the Soviet Union was just Russian Empire 2.0, Those social democrats in Russia totally would've succeeded the dang Bolsheviks -05 rev good 1917 bad- , Gulag 20 million dead, Holdamor, Soviets started the Cold War, Molotov pact happened but British US appeasement and collaboration with Fascist Germany and Italy didn't -was actually bad for the Soviets to occupy parts of Poland rather then Nazi Germany occupying all!- , Trotsky was never a usurper and was such a bright little fella, Cuban Missile crisis wasn't the US fault , Soviet democracy was actually totalitarianism, and so on and so fourth
Nazi Germany explicitly having a genocidal plan for ethnic Slavs not dissimilar to the Holocaust of Jews
Generalplan Ost! One of the main reasons that the Soviets had 27M deaths in WW2 was that the German military was literally told to execute millions of civilians on the eastern front because it was taken as a given that after the war the Nazis would be able to annex a bunch of now-depopulated territory and give it to Germans.
This being absent from most pop historians' accounts of WW2 is a part of the reason why the myths of the Soviets gunning down their own troops and using human wave tactics is so pervasive.
I should have had Trotsky killed sooner. He should have never made it out of the USSR.
[The Anna-Louise Strong chapter is continued in the comments below]
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I just uploaded the pages to imgur sorry it's a bit out of order
Is the whole book called This Soviet World? and is the whole book written by Anna-Louise Strong?
...and is the whole book available for download anywhere? Libgen and Z-library come up blank for that title.
Anna Louise Strong seems to be an incredible person. Writing books from location in USSR, Laos, China, interviewing Mao, covering communist activities as they happened in the world.
She wrote a pamphlet in 1931 promoting Soviet Collectivization - I would love to read it if you know where it could be found
Yeah she's an amazing journalist, like she deserves to be treated if not equal to John Reed then on a greater level than him.
I'll check my books for her writings on the collectivization project, and dig around for a copy of that '31 pamphlet
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Guess i dont need to feel bad now for saying that her output since S/T has sucked balls
I was like "aw shiet" and then i remembered all of her stuff after strange mercy has been increasingly lame.
Really the only song I could name off the top of my head is Digital Witness which, to be fair, gets stuck in my head alot.
Yeah I think that's the only song I remember from any album after Strange Mercy and I've listened to all of em. Fond memories of hearing Cheerleader the first time I did whippets. Also the first time I'd heard of her. Great crunchy textures :whip-it-woman:
