Good reading, with good insights into the dangers of seeing issues in black and white. Khruschev’s speech, the writer claims, helped lead to the collapse of the USSR and was a turning point in world history.
February 11, 2006
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1
By Ivan
He’s partly right, but he irritates me with some of his typical myopia of (as he admits he is one) the “British Communist” world, to which his family used to belong.
Among his narrow, typically self-absorbed (as so many British “socialists” were and are) mistakes are:
1. There was never any “world socialist” movement. Until Russia’s victory in the war in 1945, NO European country ever became Communist except for Russia. (And except for a few aborted attempts in Poland and Hungary after WW I, which died in the cradle.) Eastern Europe was never part of any “world socialist movement” – it was conquered by force of arms, and FORCED to become Communist.
2. 1956 was not the beginning of the end of Communism. 1917 was. Communism died in its infancy. But Western “socialists” like this guy cannot see that, because they have always witnessed Communism from afar. And so:
3. The peoples of Eastern Europe knew Communism was evil and stupid, LONG BEFORE English socialists like this guy found out.
And the Russians knew about the evils of Communism long before Kruschev gave his “secret speech.”
February 11, 2006 @ 10:07 pm | Comment
2
By Keir
My favourite anecdote about the speech was after Khruschev’s railing against his old boss for whom he did anything andd everything, calling him a ‘murderer and a tyrant’ a voice cries out in the audience “Where were you you?”. “WHO SAID THAT?!?!” he cried out to abject silence.
“THAT’S where I was.”
February 11, 2006 @ 11:11 pm | Comment
3
By Ivan
Keir,
HA! That’s good. And even to this day, there’s a joke going around Russia:
“Down in Hell, why is Hitler buried up to his eyebrows in shit, while Stalin is only buried up to his waist in shit?
Because: Stalin sits on Lenin’s shoulders.”
February 11, 2006 @ 11:47 pm | Comment
4
By Ivan
Also, there WERE some honest Western journalists who tried to tell the truth about Communist Russia in the 1930s, but they were drowned out by the fashionable “intellectuals”, especially in England. (I have a deep, DEEP loathing for English socialists, the most despicable and intellectually dishonest band of creeps in the world in the last 100 years.)
Go and look up the biography of Gareth Jones (Welsh journalist, active 1930s) – just google his name and do some reading. He told the truth about Stalin’s Russia – where he actually went DEEP into the countryside, instead of to the Potemkin village shows like so many other Western Intellectual whores like the Webbs. But Gareth Jones’ voice was drowned out by the intellectual whores like the Webbs and other English socialists – liars, liars, filthy liars. And then Gareth Jones was murdered in Manchuria, and his murder is still a mystery.
Anyway, as Gareth Jones (and a few others like him) DID try to tell the truth about Communist Russia as early as 1930, I have very little sympathy for Western intellectual whores who took ages to wake up and face what they COULD AND SHOULD have been willing to acknowledge decades ago.
February 11, 2006 @ 11:55 pm | Comment
5
By richard
Poor George Bernard Shaw. He’d have some credibility had he not jumped on the socialist bandwagon like he did.
February 12, 2006 @ 6:11 am | Comment
6
By Ivan
That’s a good point about Shaw.
Although, I DO like Oscar Wilde (for many reasons), and his essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” But Wilde was nothing like the majority of typical English socialists. He had a mind of his own…
February 12, 2006 @ 6:52 pm | Comment