It's literally just a "Jews are the devil"/"have horns" thing. I'm no scholar but it looks like the horn thing has been around for at least a millennium
Which is also just ridiculous because we do know the names of a few african slave trade survivors for exactly the same reason
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0881339482/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_96JTSRGQB8EN120DFZNT
Unfortunately, the only sources I can find are within print books. Here are two that reportedly document the affair with a 14-year-old named "Lidia Pereprygia".
For book 2, you can see the affair discussed in the free preview if you search for "Lidia" within the book. Unfortunately, the page numbers are messed up, so I can't give an exact number. Here is a quote from the book, although it is a bit too dramatized for my liking:
"We know no details of how this developed. But some time in early 1914 Stalin, now thirty-four, embarked on an affair with Lidia, aged thirteen... The memoirs of Stalin's thirteen-year-old mistress were recorded twenty years later at the height of his dictatorship while she remained a Siberian housewife... 'He often liked to drop in on some people,' says Lidia, meaning herself. 'And he also drank.'"
There is more relating to how she remembered which underwear he wore and how she became pregnant with his child.
> > ...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
- John Maynard Keynes
"Practical men" like Lenin and Stalin, both of whom considered themselves humble and faithful followers of Marx.
the same way gullible religious people can rationalize all kinds of "miracles" ;) Frankly, Marx should have founded a religious cult given his natural talents instead of trying to hoodwink people as a "man of science" who had discovered--howsoever weasely a way he phrased it--"laws of history"...
There's a great book by Alvin Gouldner on how "theory" is just a placeholder for words of "Great leader/thinker of genius" (i.e. just like a religious cult whose members hang on to every word--and punctuation--of their venerated guru).
Here is an article Gouldner wrote on how despite Marx's rhetoric he hated the guts of both "worker intellectuals" as well as academic "bourgeois" intellectuals with the upshot that he was somehow magically the only thinker who could pronounce on events objectively ;)
The Years of Hunger is a pretty well researched external account of the famine by Davies and Wheatcroft. This is a quote from the book about its provisional conclusions:
"Although Stalin intentionally let starving people die, it is unlikely that he intentionally caused the famine to kill millions of people. It is also unlikely that Stalin used famine as a cheap alternative to deportation. True, the famine affected Ukraine severely; true, too, that Stalin distrusted the Ukrainian peasants and Ukrainian nationalists. Yet not enough evidence exists to show that Stalin engineered the famine to punish specifically the ethnic Ukrainians. The famine did not take place in an international political vacuum. The sharp rise in the foreign threat was likely to have been an important aggravating factor."
Lenin was a politico (his "philosophical" writings a la his diatribe against Mach is too absurd to even consider). Marx gave the gravitas to the bogosity that inspired Lenin. It is this incapacity to treat that original "intellectual swindler"--in fact, I would put the biggest share of blame on Hegel--as the con artist that leads to these troubles. Keep in mind, Marx would have decidedly fallen into the dustbin of history had it not been for Lenin who "revivified" his reputation, a nightmare we're still suffering through, i.e. a world in which legacy of the Left is mud to so many by association with these jokers.
yes, but Lenin thought he was a faithful follower of Marx, as did Stalin. Just, as all the factions fighting wars of religion thought they had the "correct" interpretation...perhaps, we can send Marx to the graveyard of "living thought" just as we don't get hot under the collar about religious schisms in our times, but that would not go down well with those who have "invested" a lot of time in their beloved ~~theology~~ "theory", I guess...
Part of the reason is they hate their own greatest president of modern times, FDR (role model of most presidents who followed him, even if they were ideologically on a different track, i.e. Reagan). This means lionizing that arch-imperialist and Nazi-adjacent racist, Churchill, who was also not coincidentally, a terrible wartime leader (apart from making a few rousing speeches at the start, his later "brainwaves"--universally panned by his own Generals--would have delayed victory and cost a lot more Allied lives):
https://www.amazon.com/Commander-Chief-FDRs-Battle-Churchill-ebook/dp/B011H55OG6
> > my parents lived through yugoslavia and my mom remembers tito fondly
There's a huge amount of yugo nostalgia among those whose memories of that era are carefree holidays in some beautiful seaside resort, guaranteed low-stress jobs their parents had, foreign currency remittances from relatives in Germany, etc. That's perfectly normal and understandable, but folks looking for something more meaty for guidance for future would do better to look at sober retrospectives from those who had an inside view of the rather ramshackle, ad-hoc, and ego inflating/prestige seeking that was endemic to Titoism, people like Stevan Pavlowitch and Milovan_Djilas to name two such observers.
Experts from a short article Mark Fisher wrote are... tldr? Well. Alright.
I guess I won't recommend his book.
... I'm still gonna recommend his book.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008H3WB36/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Anyway, so, something more digestible, lessee... Eh, this works.
yeah, "Engel and Lenin", just the (idiot) savants I reach for when trying to figure out whether something is empirical:
https://www.amazon.com/Materialism-Empirio-criticism-V-I-Lenin/dp/1913026205
P.S. I challenge anyone to read this drivel and not come out of the experience doubting the mental health of Lenin ;)
Naah, MLs have a somewhat unique take on the matter ;)
Basically, actual workers can only advance to "trade union mentality", i.e. not the messianic vision of a new world--and "New Man"--that only those up on their Hegelian Philosophy could envisage (i.e. Plato's Philosopher Kings who constitute the "Real Working Class"). After they took power, Bolsheviks even contemplated abolishing unions as they had become superfluous in a "workers' state"(!), but Lenin in a gesture of magnanimity resisted the temptation and kept them around in a totally neutered form as "avenues of discussion" (letting workers do some venting if that will make them feel better).
Trotsky had predicted this two decades earlier, even though he became a diehard Lenin apologist later: > > Quite early in his political activity, when only 24 years old, Trotsky prophesied that Lenin's conception of party organization must lead to a situation in which the party would "substitute itself for the working classes", act as proxy in their name and on their behalf, regardless of what the workers thought or wanted. > > Lenin's conception would lead to a state of affairs in which "the organization of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally the 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee".
British Intelligence is overrated. This is one of the myths fostered by Churchill--very adept at "spinning" a narrative--and other British PR efforts (the one thing Hitler truly admired about the British, their powers of propaganda, aimed from even before WWI squarely at US in particular). In fact, Churchill was so good at wordplay that he managed to even convince quite a plurality of Americans--aided by US Conservatives who never forgave FDR for New Deal--that he was more important than their own leader whose role never got the credit it deserved:
https://www.amazon.com/Commander-Chief-FDRs-Battle-Churchill-ebook/dp/B011H55OG6
The reasons are above all, his untimely death, his own secretiveness and compartmentalized way of operating (nobody including Truman knew what to make of his strategy and its difficult to figure out his game plan at the level he operated at--its lonely at the very top; generals' memoirs are of no help as they were just carrying out orders in their own theaters, etc.). Anyways, just remember that everybody had their own intelligence and subterfuge (look at 'Operation Bagration' for how devastating Russians could be, also they had all kinds of spies from Tokyo to New Mexico; US had all kinds of operations working out of Switzerland that were in contact with German senior officers, also technical intelligence esp. related to German atomic research was outstanding, etc.; even the Poles made major contributions to deciphering German coded traffic) and don't fall for this guff that without British intelligence the Germans wouldn't have been defeated.
P.S. There's a steady dribble of stories about British propaganda efforts, like this one from a few days ago:
Not really, Mussolini was an ex-Socialist--as were perhaps half of his fellow "Marchers on Rome"--and you might be surprised by how similar some of their rhetoric and ideological "motivating passions" were (tldr; Mussolini substituted the "proletarian nations", i.e. Italy for the "proletarian classes" struggling against the Capitalist financier nations, etc.)
You need to learn more about "Zionist left semi-fascist statism" and "Nationalist Socialism".
Interesting thing is that for 3 decades "almost the entire Western left lived with illusions about Zionism" when even the word "Palestine" was unutterable and "Nationalist Socialist" ethnic cleansing of Palestinians--"backward peoples"--was taken as just the way the cookie crumbles.
What the fuck is a Catholic theocrat doing with tankies?
Isn't CPI really new? And its already falling apart?
Why is a Catholic theocrat working with Iran's PressTV? https://www.instagram.com/p/CYKAmHFoFE4/
Lol https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Socialist-Caleb-Maupin/dp/B09GJF6ZTV
> > whatever language is popular at the time
"Scavenger Ideology" as George Mosse termed it.
yeah, like Hitler's "Table Talk" is a source of inspiration for some with similar personality traits.
Sweden does have a murky past, one that some Swedish non-fiction authors have probably shone the brightest light on, and there are definitely a few communitarian aspects to that culture that can come as a surprise to Anglo-Americans, but blithely labeling it as fascist is something only particularly tendentious and pedantic ideologues would do.
Marx summarily dismissed--with heaping doses of scorn--all that bourgeois idealistic philosophy!
Lenin was even more brusque in dispatching millennia of philosophizing to the dustbin of history (in his own mind at least ;)
Why Zionist? I thought early Zionists were largely Socialist: the Labour Party ruled Israel for its first 3 decades and carried out comprehensive ethnic cleansing and paved over hundreds of villages for building a thoroughly modern "Nationalist Socialist" society--for the right people, of course: > > After the war, I went back to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to continue my studies. I remember being in a student hall one day when someone burst into it saying that Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People's Republic of China. We were cheering and clapping at the news, while at the same time a military government was being imposed on the Palestinians who remained after the 1948 War under Israeli rule and their lands and property were being confiscated. At the same time those who were expelled and attempted to cross the border back to their homes were shot by the Israeli security forces.
Gabriel Kolko also made this point in his last book on how Marx and his followers--other than the reflexive mantras like "no war but class war"--were blindsided by so many events that couldn't be shoehorned into their 2-dimensional model:
http://www.lausti.com/articles/books/kolko3.html
https://www.amazon.com/After-Socialism-Reconstructing-Critical-Thought-ebook/dp/B001R05HDM
It's funny that I'm watching a doco based on The Shock Doctrine right now and that it quite explicitly point out the fact that, despite the neoliberal claim that capitalism and freedom go hand-in-hand, those who embrace Milton Friedman's economic policy tend to be brutal authoritarian regime with abysmal human rights records.
And I've thus far found no compelling reason to object to putting the PRC in that bucket.
Oh boy there's more and it's worse:
> Grace There are only 24 capitalits in the Chinese congress or whatever it's called. There's a good graph but I cant find it at this time.
There are 136 billionaires in the Chinese government, I don't have numbers on billionaires but it's probably really high too. The Chinese government is chock full of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. It doesn't even take too much searching to find this out, it's literally available on official Chinese government websites. You have to be deliberately ignorant in order to think there are only 24 capitalists in the entire Chinese government.
This person is literally just doing politics as aesthetics, Jesus Christ.
Dimbleby seems better than Grover Furr yet I can't find any history related qualifications either. Then again, Anthony Beevor is a joke despite having qualifications. Dimbleby's main background is BBC, so I suspect he is a familiar face on a work of propaganda.
Trading with the Nazis, invasion of poland & various other things were realpolitik of the day. It would have been better for the UK & French to join with the USSR & Poland to stop the Nazis.
Any book on ww2 that uses "turning point" should be taken with a pinch of salt. It's a lazy cliche publishers are very eager to use. https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Barbarossa-Cataclysm-Jonathan-Dimbleby/dp/0197547214
>It's OK with hierarchy. Therefore, it's not leftist. That seems simple enough, and it is criticism.
That's not criticism unless you say we should attempt to abolish all hierarchy immediately. Can you give me an actual criticism of his work as opposed to anarchist nonsense.
>https://www.amazon.com/Capitalist-Realism-There-No-Alternative/dp/1846943175
>
>Read theory.
Bit ironic. Please can you explain how the collapse of capitalism isn't inevitable instead of just linking a book.
> you have failed to provide any criticism of Marx's work apart from the fact that it was written a long time ago.
It's OK with hierarchy. Therefore, it's not leftist. That seems simple enough, and it is criticism.
>Do you not believe that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable because of the irreconcilable contradictions within it?
https://www.amazon.com/Capitalist-Realism-There-No-Alternative/dp/1846943175
Read theory.