5 ms·

H. G. Wells interviewing J. V. Stalin (1934)

77 points by RedCondor 3y ago

orsenthil 3y ago
> Take old Morgan for example. He only thought about profit; he was a parasite on society, simply, he merely accumulated wealth. Who is he referring to?
- jeeyoungk 3y ago
  JP Morgan
qikInNdOutReply 3y ago
To place this interview in context, this is right at the time of the holdomor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
- RedCondor 3y ago
  [dead]
  - Claude_Shannon 3y ago
    I had never expected a tankie on HN, truth be told. And I guess Katyń never happened too, or we deserved it? Mass deportations were also a myth, right?
    - RedCondor 3y ago
      The pro-Soviet view is that Katyn was done by the Nazis and blamed on the Soviets after the fact. I've never cared to investigate it in depth. Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/7069/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.
      - scp_not_gpt 3y ago
        > Holodomor was invented to make a boogeyman of USSR > Katyn was done by Nazis > Gulags were not that bad > Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok > Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense] > The rape of Berlin never happened Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
        RedCondor 3y ago
        This is just bargain-bin "spraying shit and seeing what sticks." Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 Seek truth from facts, brother.
        dang 3y ago
        Please edit out swipes and avoid flamewar as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.
        dang 3y ago
        You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - lp0_on_fire 3y ago
      Thankfully, tankies are easy to spot. "Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
      - RedCondor 3y ago
        Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore," a set of horror stories for Westerners compiled out of the worst hearsay he ever heard about a poor country's prison system: >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.” https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex... There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today. >Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 (Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
        scp_not_gpt 3y ago
        The second source is a blue-ribbon journal grade, truly.
    - dang 3y ago
      Please don't post ideological flamewar to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. We've had to ask you this before. Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - userforcomment 3y ago
    Not sure about Holodomor, but famine in Kazakhstan which killed almost half of population was real. Third of population fled to China during the 1929-1933 and still remain there. To be honest though while Stalin is cruel, he is more comparable to Kim Jong Un than Hitler.
    - RedCondor 3y ago
      It's unquestionably an enormous tragedy, but it's necessarily to reject attempts to turn it into a cheap ideological talking point, for the sake of the people of Kazakhstan and everywhere else. Dealing with a famine against deliberate sabotage is very tough: >[The kulak’s] fellows in the villages had no leadership, but decided as one man, with the unanimity and stubbornness of wronged farmers the world over, to oppose their oppressors. Their opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941. (Frederick L. Schuman, Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp.151, 152.) Cannot be compared to e.g. Winston Churchill 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70 https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... Or 1947: >“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.” https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,203199... There's no point in conjuring up boogeymen, or to go "East" to find people to compare Stalin to, when Churchill would be a much fairer comparison, and Stalin comes out far ahead of him.
- bilqis 3y ago
  Although it should be said, thay holodomor’s nature is still disputed by historians. Some people, especially politically or nationally biased, claim that that was deliberate genocide of specifically Ukrainians. While it serves specific purpose as a narrative, more historians agree that a) famine affected not only Ukrainians, but all people living in a wide region, including not only what’s considered to be Ukraine today, but millions of other, b) there are no direct evidences supporting the genocide claim, no evidence supporting any deliberation. Much more probable explanation is combination of poor organisation of food collection from the villages and bad weather conditions for multiple seasons (that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there).
  - scp_not_gpt 3y ago
    Not really. The nature of Holodomor is only disputed by the historians who care to push a specific agenda - be it politically or ideologically motivated. USSR is also did a fine job to whitewash any of its past crimes. > "that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there" - care to elaborate on this?
    - RedCondor 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - scp_not_gpt 3y ago
        This not "evidence"; this is your (failed) attempts to build an F-tier argument by "spraying and praying" a bunch of rambling, unrelated sources. Anyway, I'm done wasting my braincells. Good luck in rebuilding communism for the umpteenth time (all previous attempts somehow resulted in deaths of millions and a totalitarian cult of personality springing up). You do you, comrade, I'm sure on n+1th time it will be different
        3y ago
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  A year after more precisely, but I'm not sure Wells would have been aware of it at the time.
EarthIsHome 3y ago
> The Americans want to rid themselves of the crisis on the basis of private capitalist activity, without changing the economic basis. Here, Stalin is alluding to the idea of the "Base and Superstructure" of a society [0], where the superstructures of a society are built on top of the base over time. They are borne out of the base of a society. The superstructures naturally re-enforce the base. He's essentially saying that you cannot re-organize society at the superstructure levels, it must be re-organized at the base. This also indicates that superstructures lag the base. (i.e. the idea lags the material.) This is the opposite of western thought, which emphasizes that the material lags the idea. (e.g. Plato's idea of a tree, or that "history is made by great men") [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure#/media/File:Base-superstructure_Dialectic.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure#/media...
pierrebai 3y ago
It is interesting to remind ourselves how intellectual were disconnected with the reality of their time. All theoretical debates without ground in how political, economic power really worked.
- crop_rotation 3y ago
  This is very common. The thing is that the reality only becomes apparent when it is beyond questioning. A lot of economists (e.g Samuelson) for example were bullish on the soviet style of centrally planned economics (which looks a very bad idea in hindsight). Lots of historically celebrated people look very very clueless when seen with the benefit of hindsight.
kosolam 3y ago
Well, it was a complete disaster, by all means and measures. A good thing to remember while reading the rubbish flowing out of these intellectual idiots. Proven to be idiots by history - a title that should be written beside their name.
- akomtu 3y ago
  What Stalin said is one thing, what he did is another. When he talked about a socialist utopia, he created an appealing facade for his slaughterhouse.
- MichaelRo 3y ago
  I dunno, "idiot" is such a harmless label. "Mass murderer", "genocidal psychopath", someone who makes a cartoon villain like Joker from Batman look like a ... joke.
  - medo-bear 3y ago
    he also gave hitler the boot and waved the red flag on top of the nazi reichstag ... not even batman did that :)
huijzer 3y ago
In hindsight, the first quote already perfectly summarises what happens next: "Important public men like yourself are not 'common men.'" This binary thinking makes it a lot easier to throw people into the front line. According to Garry Kasparov, Putin thinks the same. Common people are not worth much and can be thrown at any task if the elite thinks that is necessary.
eternalban 3y ago
Likely it isn't necessary to remind that H. G. Wells was something of a genius, but possibly necessary to note that Stalin held his own in this dialogue and in fact comes across as a more mature political mind. There are caricatures of Stalin as being merely a thug but a reminder that he held his own also with Lenin and Trotsky and other very sharp minds (and came on top!) "things would be different if it were possible, at one stroke, spiritually to tear the technical intelligentsia away from the capitalist world. But that is utopia. Are there many of the technical intelligentsia who would dare break away from the bourgeois world and set to work reconstructing society?" Stalin's remarks on the "technical intelligentsia" and its inability to be the leader of socialist change is interesting in context of the past 20 years and the FAANGs. The entire thrust of his argument (now proven to be true) throws cold water on the fire of the techno-utopia promised to us. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo377360...
- Bewelge 3y ago
  I also thought about FAANGs at that point but in a different way: I understood the technical intelligentsia to be the actual engineers - the people working at FAANGs. FAANG itself are the capitalist class. Thought this paragraph by Wells was also relevant in that regard: "I remember the situation with regard to the technical intelligentsia several decades ago. At that time the technical intelligentsia was numerically small, but there was much to do and every engineer, technician and intellectual found his opportunity. That is why the technical intelligentsia was the least revolutionary class. Now, however, there is a superabundance of technical intellectuals, and their mentality has changed very sharply. The skilled man, who would formerly never listen to revolutionary talk, is now greatly interested in it. " The past 20 years were a period of economic growth. By Well's logic you wouldn't expect the technical intelligentsia to have many revolutionary thoughts during that period anyway.
  - eternalban 3y ago
    Here something for you to consider (and my apolgies to EB for singling him out here): in 1997: https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf later (working under Eric "if you want something private don't do it on the internet" Schmidt?): https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-brewer-1031254 https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-brewer-1031254 So a few points: The leading "technical intelligentsia" were not kids who just entered into the labor market in 2000. Many of them spent the previous decade_s either pushing techno-utopia, or in Brewer and friends case in 1997, actually raising red flags. Most of the tech-utopia ideology came out of 60s and 70s anyway. Technology was supposed to finally solve some long standing issues. Wells doesn't address the fact that "superabundance" of geeks means nothing if these same geeks need access to facilities for their technical-intellectual pursuits that only Capital provides. This very moment I am sure, n AI geeks are internally having a debate over their ideological convictions vs working for one of the AI giants who do not share these convictions (in context of AI, minimally). I do not blame those who don't walk away from their careers and intellectual pursuits. Its a social structure issue that places difficult delimas. Your big brain can only insure your survival if it is working for pay. The entire "do no evil" and primary color theme of Google was imo further signaling (falsely) that "here is a company that is on board with our utopian program". They actually played to that role until it could no longer be taken seriously. Now it would be laughable. I mentioned the "last 20 years" as the QED period, not the actual formation of ideas, promotion of ideas, and finally leading "the common man" down the path of e.g. surveillance capitalism while pretending to those ideas. That process took decades and started in 60s.
femiagbabiaka 3y ago
It seems pretty unlikely that this audience will actually read this, which is a bit unfortunate as Stalin correctly describes the next 100 years of American politics and economics, even down to our current situation with the Fed and the labor market. Wells comes off as being completely naive. I think Bush and Kissinger were beasts as well, but there are still things that can be learned from reading about how they perceived the world.
deafpolygon 3y ago
On the site's mission page: > The second objective is to develop a correct theoretical line in particular. At the moment this line is best defined in terms of the concrete stances we take in response to various ongoing debates in our shared context. In short: pro-Stalin (against historical nihilism, anarchism, etc.), pro-China (for their chosen road of Reform and Opening Up and against “Maoism” and Sinophobia), and pro-“identity politics” (for a broad understanding of class and against the idealization of “patriotic white workers” as the revolutionary subject, etc.). https://redsails.org/mission/ https://redsails.org/mission/ Not sure what to make of that.

77 points by RedCondor 3y ago

> Take old Morgan for example. He only thought about profit; he was a parasite on society, simply, he merely accumulated wealth. Who is he referring to?

jeeyoungk 3y ago
JP Morgan

qikInNdOutReply 3y ago

To place this interview in context, this is right at the time of the holdomor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

RedCondor 3y ago
[dead]
- Claude_Shannon 3y ago
  I had never expected a tankie on HN, truth be told. And I guess Katyń never happened too, or we deserved it? Mass deportations were also a myth, right?
  - RedCondor 3y ago
    The pro-Soviet view is that Katyn was done by the Nazis and blamed on the Soviets after the fact. I've never cared to investigate it in depth. Mass deportations were a sad but not uncommon operation at the time, as seen for example by this Churchill speech from 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/7069/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... The absurdity comes when they're used to try to conjure up a boogeyman.
    - scp_not_gpt 3y ago
      > Holodomor was invented to make a boogeyman of USSR > Katyn was done by Nazis > Gulags were not that bad > Deportations were unfortunate, but look, someone did it too, therefore it's ok > Molotov-Ribbentrop was a fake, whatabout [insert some unrelated nonsense] > The rape of Berlin never happened Nothing like the whiff of braindead and morally bankrupt ideology in the morning
      - RedCondor 3y ago
        This is just bargain-bin "spraying shit and seeing what sticks." Some falsehoods, some distorsions, most of which are handled superbly by this book chapter on the Khrushchev Report: https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-the-secret-report/ Beevor is particularly vile with his rape-storytelling, and his stuff does not check out. See, "Hordes of Rapists: The Instrumentalization of Sexual Violence in German Cold War Anti-Communist Discourses": https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/476 Seek truth from facts, brother.
        dang 3y ago
        Please edit out swipes and avoid flamewar as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have to ban accounts that keep breaking the rules.
      - dang 3y ago
        You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - lp0_on_fire 3y ago
    Thankfully, tankies are easy to spot. "Solzhenitsyn was just a fiction writer and totally made it all up" "The purges in the Red Army and of political dissidents were just western propaganda" "Trotsky shot himself in the back of the head" etc.
    - RedCondor 3y ago
      Solzhenitsin's own wife said his book was "folklore," a set of horror stories for Westerners compiled out of the worst hearsay he ever heard about a poor country's prison system: >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.” https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex... There were about as many people in Gulags at peak, war-with-Nazis paranoia than in America today. >Yes. The overall numbers at present are broadly similar (2.2 million prisoners in the US at present, compared to 2.6 million at the peak of GULAG, though that was drawn from a smaller population), but US prisons have much lower death rates (especially compared to WWII-era GULAG — hopefully there will be no similar invasion of the US and so we will not have the opportunity to see if a wartime US massacres its prisoners in a similar fashion), and a smaller fraction of the prisoners are slave laborers (in GULAG it was nearly 100%). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532353 (Notice the second post is informed by the first--100% slave, etc. Ample evidence contradicts that.)
      - scp_not_gpt 3y ago
        The second source is a blue-ribbon journal grade, truly.
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't post ideological flamewar to HN, regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are. We've had to ask you this before. Two acceptable options are (1) engage by posting substantively and thoughtfully; or (2) just walk away and remember the internet is already wrong about nearly everything. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- userforcomment 3y ago
  Not sure about Holodomor, but famine in Kazakhstan which killed almost half of population was real. Third of population fled to China during the 1929-1933 and still remain there. To be honest though while Stalin is cruel, he is more comparable to Kim Jong Un than Hitler.
  - RedCondor 3y ago
    It's unquestionably an enormous tragedy, but it's necessarily to reject attempts to turn it into a cheap ideological talking point, for the sake of the people of Kazakhstan and everywhere else. Dealing with a famine against deliberate sabotage is very tough: >[The kulak’s] fellows in the villages had no leadership, but decided as one man, with the unanimity and stubbornness of wronged farmers the world over, to oppose their oppressors. Their opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941. (Frederick L. Schuman, Russia Since 1917: Four Decades of Soviet Politics, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, pp.151, 152.) Cannot be compared to e.g. Winston Churchill 1937: >I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right, nor had they the power. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil5pt3chur/ Or this one from 1944: >Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before. https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70 https://archive.org/details/winstonschurchil0007unse/page/70... Or 1947: >“I hate Indians,” he told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for “breeding like rabbits.” https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,203199... There's no point in conjuring up boogeymen, or to go "East" to find people to compare Stalin to, when Churchill would be a much fairer comparison, and Stalin comes out far ahead of him.
bilqis 3y ago
Although it should be said, thay holodomor’s nature is still disputed by historians. Some people, especially politically or nationally biased, claim that that was deliberate genocide of specifically Ukrainians. While it serves specific purpose as a narrative, more historians agree that a) famine affected not only Ukrainians, but all people living in a wide region, including not only what’s considered to be Ukraine today, but millions of other, b) there are no direct evidences supporting the genocide claim, no evidence supporting any deliberation. Much more probable explanation is combination of poor organisation of food collection from the villages and bad weather conditions for multiple seasons (that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there).
- scp_not_gpt 3y ago
  Not really. The nature of Holodomor is only disputed by the historians who care to push a specific agenda - be it politically or ideologically motivated. USSR is also did a fine job to whitewash any of its past crimes. > "that region had regular famines and dry seasons in the past, before USSR too, and it only stopped after 40s, when various actions were taken to improve agricultural stability there" - care to elaborate on this?
  - RedCondor 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - scp_not_gpt 3y ago
      This not "evidence"; this is your (failed) attempts to build an F-tier argument by "spraying and praying" a bunch of rambling, unrelated sources. Anyway, I'm done wasting my braincells. Good luck in rebuilding communism for the umpteenth time (all previous attempts somehow resulted in deaths of millions and a totalitarian cult of personality springing up). You do you, comrade, I'm sure on n+1th time it will be different
      - 3y ago
littlestymaar 3y ago
A year after more precisely, but I'm not sure Wells would have been aware of it at the time.

EarthIsHome 3y ago

> The Americans want to rid themselves of the crisis on the basis of private capitalist activity, without changing the economic basis. Here, Stalin is alluding to the idea of the "Base and Superstructure" of a society [0], where the superstructures of a society are built on top of the base over time. They are borne out of the base of a society. The superstructures naturally re-enforce the base. He's essentially saying that you cannot re-organize society at the superstructure levels, it must be re-organized at the base. This also indicates that superstructures lag the base. (i.e. the idea lags the material.) This is the opposite of western thought, which emphasizes that the material lags the idea. (e.g. Plato's idea of a tree, or that "history is made by great men") [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure#/media/File:Base-superstructure_Dialectic.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure#/media...

pierrebai 3y ago

It is interesting to remind ourselves how intellectual were disconnected with the reality of their time. All theoretical debates without ground in how political, economic power really worked.

crop_rotation 3y ago
This is very common. The thing is that the reality only becomes apparent when it is beyond questioning. A lot of economists (e.g Samuelson) for example were bullish on the soviet style of centrally planned economics (which looks a very bad idea in hindsight). Lots of historically celebrated people look very very clueless when seen with the benefit of hindsight.

kosolam 3y ago

Well, it was a complete disaster, by all means and measures. A good thing to remember while reading the rubbish flowing out of these intellectual idiots. Proven to be idiots by history - a title that should be written beside their name.

akomtu 3y ago
What Stalin said is one thing, what he did is another. When he talked about a socialist utopia, he created an appealing facade for his slaughterhouse.
MichaelRo 3y ago
I dunno, "idiot" is such a harmless label. "Mass murderer", "genocidal psychopath", someone who makes a cartoon villain like Joker from Batman look like a ... joke.
- medo-bear 3y ago
  he also gave hitler the boot and waved the red flag on top of the nazi reichstag ... not even batman did that :)

huijzer 3y ago

In hindsight, the first quote already perfectly summarises what happens next: "Important public men like yourself are not 'common men.'" This binary thinking makes it a lot easier to throw people into the front line. According to Garry Kasparov, Putin thinks the same. Common people are not worth much and can be thrown at any task if the elite thinks that is necessary.

eternalban 3y ago

Likely it isn't necessary to remind that H. G. Wells was something of a genius, but possibly necessary to note that Stalin held his own in this dialogue and in fact comes across as a more mature political mind. There are caricatures of Stalin as being merely a thug but a reminder that he held his own also with Lenin and Trotsky and other very sharp minds (and came on top!) "things would be different if it were possible, at one stroke, spiritually to tear the technical intelligentsia away from the capitalist world. But that is utopia. Are there many of the technical intelligentsia who would dare break away from the bourgeois world and set to work reconstructing society?" Stalin's remarks on the "technical intelligentsia" and its inability to be the leader of socialist change is interesting in context of the past 20 years and the FAANGs. The entire thrust of his argument (now proven to be true) throws cold water on the fire of the techno-utopia promised to us. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo377360...

Bewelge 3y ago
I also thought about FAANGs at that point but in a different way: I understood the technical intelligentsia to be the actual engineers - the people working at FAANGs. FAANG itself are the capitalist class. Thought this paragraph by Wells was also relevant in that regard: "I remember the situation with regard to the technical intelligentsia several decades ago. At that time the technical intelligentsia was numerically small, but there was much to do and every engineer, technician and intellectual found his opportunity. That is why the technical intelligentsia was the least revolutionary class. Now, however, there is a superabundance of technical intellectuals, and their mentality has changed very sharply. The skilled man, who would formerly never listen to revolutionary talk, is now greatly interested in it. " The past 20 years were a period of economic growth. By Well's logic you wouldn't expect the technical intelligentsia to have many revolutionary thoughts during that period anyway.
- eternalban 3y ago
  Here something for you to consider (and my apolgies to EB for singling him out here): in 1997: https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/privacy-compcon97.pdf later (working under Eric "if you want something private don't do it on the internet" Schmidt?): https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-brewer-1031254 https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-brewer-1031254 So a few points: The leading "technical intelligentsia" were not kids who just entered into the labor market in 2000. Many of them spent the previous decade_s either pushing techno-utopia, or in Brewer and friends case in 1997, actually raising red flags. Most of the tech-utopia ideology came out of 60s and 70s anyway. Technology was supposed to finally solve some long standing issues. Wells doesn't address the fact that "superabundance" of geeks means nothing if these same geeks need access to facilities for their technical-intellectual pursuits that only Capital provides. This very moment I am sure, n AI geeks are internally having a debate over their ideological convictions vs working for one of the AI giants who do not share these convictions (in context of AI, minimally). I do not blame those who don't walk away from their careers and intellectual pursuits. Its a social structure issue that places difficult delimas. Your big brain can only insure your survival if it is working for pay. The entire "do no evil" and primary color theme of Google was imo further signaling (falsely) that "here is a company that is on board with our utopian program". They actually played to that role until it could no longer be taken seriously. Now it would be laughable. I mentioned the "last 20 years" as the QED period, not the actual formation of ideas, promotion of ideas, and finally leading "the common man" down the path of e.g. surveillance capitalism while pretending to those ideas. That process took decades and started in 60s.

femiagbabiaka 3y ago

It seems pretty unlikely that this audience will actually read this, which is a bit unfortunate as Stalin correctly describes the next 100 years of American politics and economics, even down to our current situation with the Fed and the labor market. Wells comes off as being completely naive. I think Bush and Kissinger were beasts as well, but there are still things that can be learned from reading about how they perceived the world.

deafpolygon 3y ago

On the site's mission page: > The second objective is to develop a correct theoretical line in particular. At the moment this line is best defined in terms of the concrete stances we take in response to various ongoing debates in our shared context. In short: pro-Stalin (against historical nihilism, anarchism, etc.), pro-China (for their chosen road of Reform and Opening Up and against “Maoism” and Sinophobia), and pro-“identity politics” (for a broad understanding of class and against the idealization of “patriotic white workers” as the revolutionary subject, etc.). https://redsails.org/mission/ https://redsails.org/mission/ Not sure what to make of that.