Grover Furr: Stalin was demonized

I'm always open to changing my mind. From everything I know about Stalin, I'm pretty sure he was a complete psychopath and I think that the historical records that support that are pretty common knowledge.
I would be curious to hear what counter arguments you have for those records.
Psychos do not ‘upgrade’ the country from peasants to one of the top country of the world in 20 years through the most terrible worldwar, where basically the whole developed/western world was against it. So that after 70+ years the whole anglosax and even our capitalist governments are still afraid of the dead man.
 
Psychos do not ‘upgrade’ the country from peasants to one of the top country of the world in 20 years through the most terrible worldwar, where basically the whole developed/western world was against it. So that after 70+ years the whole anglosax and even our capitalist governments are still afraid of the dead man.
I’m not sure that Stalin’s years would be considered an “upgrade”. Did some advancements happen? Yes, but there was a horrible dark side to him that was brutal. So brutal that it’s hard to estimate the death toll. Gulags and bread lines aren’t exactly a walk in the park. He was tremendously paranoid and if he wasn’t a full on psychopath, he was certainly very mentally sick.
I’m open to other ideas but I don’t think history got this one backwards or anything.
 
Psychos do not ‘upgrade’ the country from peasants to one of the top country of the world in 20 years through the most terrible worldwar, where basically the whole developed/western world was against it. So that after 70+ years the whole anglosax and even our capitalist governments are still afraid of the dead man.
Why not? If it's for their own benefit.
Psychos aren't necessarily stupid or pointlessly destructive.
You still did not address any of the known facts about his ruthlessnes. I'm really interested in that. Not saying I might not be wrong about him, but the guy was personally responsible for the deaths of god knows how many innocent people. The system that he built was quite clearly a pathocracy.
The only two leaders up there with him, IMO, are Pol Pot and Mao.
 
Would like to add. A person/real leader (who was poisoned), recognized by the top western leaders (still and later), who saved basically the world from the trial run of 4 d sts scenario, deserves more deeper understanding.
I think you need to read Political Ponerology. Stalin was a demented, character-disturbed narcissist with pedophiliac tendencies. Russia survived not because of Stalin, but despite him.
 
Communism was one of the darkest moments of history. Stalin was one sick puppy. Stalin didn't win the war, it was the regular people.
Yes. Good time for a reminder that Political Ponerology was written with the Soviet Union as its exemplar of pathocracy.
That’s a very shallow and western propaganda based approach...
It's also true.
recommend you dig a little of historical literature/facts.
There are plenty. You can go the revisionist approach and either ignore or rationalize all the evil, or you can look at both and see that Stalin's era (following on Lenin) was one of Russia's darkest. So dark that many would prefer to pretend it couldn't have been that bad. I don't mean to invoke Godwin's law here, but this is exactly what revisionists of a certain other 20th-century pathocracy tend to do: focus on all the great things that guy did for his country, and paint over all the evil as either non-existent, necessary, or not really his fault. There comes a time when you just have to call a spade a spade. Stalin may not have been the worst guy ever, but he was pretty darn bad.
There is a saying - A herd of rams led by a lion will always triumph over a herd of lions led by a ram.
No offense of course to soviet people. But the concept.
I've heard that kind of sentiment a lot in defense of Stalin: he may have been a hard man, but he's what Russia needed to 'advance'. In any other context, a person of Stalin's character would be called: a tyrant of a boss, a slave-driving, abusive father, or a ruthless capitalist (if he used the same tactics in a corporate environment). To think that Russians couldn't advance without a leader like Stalin is to think fairly poorly of Russians, IMO. One could say, better to be ruled by a ruthless characteropath than a weakling. Maybe. Doesn't change the fact that the person in question is a ruthless characteropath.
Would like to add. A person/real leader (who was poisoned), recognized by the top western leaders (still and later), who saved basically the world from the trial run of 4 d sts scenario, deserves more deeper understanding.
Have you considered that the USSR was perhaps just as much of a trial run? They were far more successful in implementing a long-lasting pathocracy based on an anti-human ideology.
Psychos do not ‘upgrade’ the country from peasants to one of the top country of the world in 20 years through the most terrible worldwar, where basically the whole developed/western world was against it. So that after 70+ years the whole anglosax and even our capitalist governments are still afraid of the dead man.
I’m not sure that Stalin’s years would be considered an “upgrade”. Did some advancements happen? Yes, but there was a horrible dark side to him that was brutal. So brutal that it’s hard to estimate the death toll. Gulags and bread lines aren’t exactly a walk in the park. He was tremendously paranoid and if he wasn’t a full on psychopath, he was certainly very mentally sick.
I’m open to other ideas but I don’t think history got this one backwards or anything.
Yep. As an example of the mental gymnastics some defenders of Stalin go through, see this:

Why not? If it's for their own benefit.
Psychos aren't necessarily stupid or pointlessly destructive.
You still did not address any of the known facts about his ruthlessnes. I'm really interested in that. Not saying I might not be wrong about him, but the guy was personally responsible for the deaths of god knows how many innocent people. The system that he built was quite clearly a pathocracy.
The only two leaders up there with him, IMO, are Pol Pot and Mao.
I'd just add that I don't think Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao were psychopaths, technically. Lobaczewski would say "frontal characteropathy", which nowadays would be referred to as right-prefrontal dysfunction, a borderline personality feature. Barb Oakley has a good term for it: borderpathy.
I think you need to read Political Ponerology. Stalin was a demented, character-disturbed narcissist with pedophiliac tendencies. Russia survived not because of Stalin, but despite him.
The one advantage he has was that he probably wasn't a total psychopath. But tell that to a child of a borderline parent - it's small comfort.

Some further reading:

'Top Down vs. Bottom-up: Regarding the Potential of Contemporary “Revisionism”'

"Once More About ‘Putin’s Rehabilitation of Stalin'"
 
I'd like to add to the discussion about Stalin and Soviet Union that we need to remember there's a lot of evidence that the whole Bolshevik Revolution was founded by Wall Street bankers and was part of a plan of those in power. The owners of factories in US and bankers were later cooperating during cold war with soviets. It turns out that it's not like Soviet Union was the real enemy of the States... Maybe it was all just an act to create an enemy for people to live in fear? To accelerate the technology development? And Stalin as well as other leaders were not Russians and they didn't serve the Russian nation.

Those books I think describe this issue quite well:

I wonder if anyone read them and what's your opinion.
 
What happened here at night?
Who brought Stalin here and why?
What destructive forces have infected the branch?
Look at yourself in the mirror after all those statements that you make about Stalin and ask yourself why.
We need to build the future, not destroy ourselves with the past.
None of you present here have the competence to discuss historical figures, such as Stalin.
And if you are discussing Stalin and his motives, then include here the historical figures of the same time, for example, Hitler.
Which of them realized the goals and what resources they used, including human resources.
To accuse Stalin that he was a pedophile at that historical moment - what is that? What kind of books do you read and why?
Madness.
 
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I'd like to add to the discussion about Stalin and Soviet Union that we need to remember there's a lot of evidence that the whole Bolshevik Revolution was founded by Wall Street bankers and was part of a plan of those in power. The owners of factories in US and bankers were later cooperating during cold war with soviets. It turns out that it's not like Soviet Union was the real enemy of the States... Maybe it was all just an act to create an enemy for people to live in fear? To accelerate the technology development? And Stalin as well as other leaders were not Russians and they didn't serve the Russian nation.

Those books I think describe this issue quite well:

I wonder if anyone read them and what's your opinion.
I have long had this thought, but it is incorrect to generalize about the whole Soviet period. Yes certainly the USSR was not an enemy of the USA and only played this role, but it began only with the murder of Stalin by British secret services, confirmed by Cs, Khrushchev Brezhnev and others (thanks to their sabotage management any libertarian can now pompously say that the planned economy does not work in the USSR, although modern transnational corporations are essentially the same, and the USSR is a state-corporation). Stalin may be an unempathic charateropath, but he is a sovereign charateropath smart and powerful enough not to submit to the PTB otherwise all the western bankers would not have had to nurture the Nazi project in Germany to overthrow their allegedly own Soviet project.
Even take a look at this article
Even in this article talking about communist power most of the narrative is about Trotsky his connections with western structures, his influence on western neocons and neo-Marxists and it was because Stalin won the internal party power struggle against the PTB loyalist Trotsky that the Nazi Germany project was created against the USSR.
 
What has always amazed me about him, and about the Russian government in general, is that they publicly make heroes out of some of the most high-profile and brutal traitors, liars, and executioners of their own Russian people. Putin has repeatedly quoted Solzhenitsyn and unveiled monuments to him. They put up monuments and plaques to the Finnish Nazi collaborator Mannerheim, who helped Hitler exterminate the inhabitants of the Siege of Leningrad. And it is in this city that they honor his memory and "merits". This is simply unthinkable.

They made heroes of white terrorists and butchers, such as Kolchak and others, who exterminated huge numbers of civilians in Russia during the civil war in the most brutal ways.
There is a "wall of mourning" for "victims of Communist repression" and similar memorials in Moscow.

And every year on May 9, Russia's greatest and most important holiday, they retouch Red Square and Lenin's mausoleum, hiding the red banners of victory and Soviet symbols behind the decorations. Is this Ukraine or Russia? When Ukraine does it, Russia condemns it. When Russia does the same, it's OK.
And at Red Square parades, troops and equipment march under the tricolor, which begs the question: was it Russia or the Soviet Union that won the Great Patriotic War? Have you appropriated this victory for yourselves? And what about all the other peoples of the USSR, most of whom were Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kazakhs? Even Mongolia contributed to the defeat of that brown plague.

By the way, Lenin's monuments in Russia began to be torn down even before Ukraine had its coup d'état in 2013. And that was okay, too. But this started in Ukraine, and it immediately became unacceptable. Curious.

You guys claim repeatedly that you won't let anyone rewrite your history, yet you do it perfectly yourself. And above all through your own movies, which make you want to erase your memory and leave this planet. Films made with the direct participation and money of the Ministry of Culture, the Cinema Fund, and the Russian Historical Society.

I have only one idea to explain it all: for capitalism, all this Soviet past is the same as holy water for devils. After the collapse of the Soviet Union there is no state ideology in Russia, its place has been taken by the church, reaching the point of complete absurdity and idiocy. This is despite the fact that the Russian Federation is a secular state, according to the constitution.
And in this way, the capitalist elite shows their nature. That they hate socialism and erase the memory of it and all that was there. After all, in their opinion, the "bloody communists" destroyed their "beautiful" Russian empire, where they all saw themselves as noblemen and denied themselves nothing. And socialism and communism disrupted their self-centered "idyll" and prevented them from making money by robbing their own country. That is why they all hate Stalin and the USSR in general. That is why their heroes are the executioners of their own people and the greatest liars and traitors.
I can find no other explanation. This theme has always occupied my mind.
Are you speaking from 2005?
Who are "THEY", who erects monuments to traitors?
Open the topic, who are the officials who erect monuments to the Mannerheims?
Do you accuse Putin of this, at a time when, in early 2000, Russia was just beginning to emerge from the superpower of the United States without having full sovereignty?
How do you imagine it in general, that Russia was supposed to immediately become someone - a country of pious angels, at once?
Even now Russia does not have full sovereignty, even now there are officials in the Kremlin podpindosnik and that is why I have one hope that Putin will stand otherwise Russia will be cut into pieces. Will you be happy then?

Further, when you remember Solzhinitsyn, remember Viktor Suvorov (real name - Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun). This is your homework.

Further, you again brought this nonsense from the past, but now in Russia no one in the mass media even remembers or discusses what is interesting to you.

You are interested in the destructive past - please, deal with it, let it drag you down.
I'm interested in a creative future, which is why you and I don't get along.

Not a friend.
 
Are you speaking from 2005?
Who are "THEY", who erects monuments to traitors?
Open the topic, who are the officials who erect monuments to the Mannerheims?
Do you accuse Putin of this, at a time when, in early 2000, Russia was just beginning to emerge from the superpower of the United States without having full sovereignty?
How do you imagine it in general, that Russia was supposed to immediately become someone - a country of pious angels, at once?
Even now Russia does not have full sovereignty, even now there are officials in the Kremlin podpindosnik and that is why I have one hope that Putin will stand otherwise Russia will be cut into pieces. Will you be happy then?

Further, when you remember Solzhinitsyn, remember Viktor Suvorov (real name - Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun). This is your homework.

Further, you again brought this nonsense from the past, but now in Russia no one in the mass media even remembers or discusses what is interesting to you.

You are interested in the destructive past - please, deal with it, let it drag you down.
I'm interested in a creative future, which is why you and I don't get along.

Not a friend.
Please don't fight here. We can exchange arguments but don't be passive-agressive.
I guess it's essential to understand the past if we want to understand the present. We in here of all places should be well aware of that. And I think in yours as well as @Lumiere_du_Code's posts is a lot of truth and a lot of guesses but it's still important to exchange information and learn from each other. Not fight nor throw someone out of one's friends list.
 
None of you present here have the competence to discuss historical figures, such as Stalin.
And if you are discussing Stalin and his motives, then include here the historical figures of the same time, for example, Hitler.
Which of them realized the goals and what resources they used, including human resources.
To accuse Stalin that he was a pedophile at that historical moment - what is that? What kind of books do you read and why?
You seem to be reacting emotionally to my statements. I was not referring to one historical moment, such as the fall of Berlin. Stalin's pathological behaviour both preceded and continued well past the neutralisation of Nazi Germany. I also did not say Stalin was a pedophile; I said he had pedophiliac tendencies. How else would you explain the desire of a 37-year-old man to seduce a 14-year-old girl? A man who acts upon such desires is not a man; he is rather an animal, given to the basest of urges. Surely you are aware of the matter of which I speak, yes?

I do agree however that Stalin is somewhat of a diversion, and focus in this thread should remain on Putin and Russia's important and ongoing accomplishments.
 
Please don't fight here. We can exchange arguments but don't be passive-agressive.
I guess it's essential to understand the past if we want to understand the present. We in here of all places should be well aware of that. And I think in yours as well as @Lumiere_du_Code's posts is a lot of truth and a lot of guesses but it's still important to exchange information and learn from each other. Not fight nor throw someone out of one's friends list.
I am not going to quarrel with anyone, I do not need it and I will not waste my time on quarrels.
It's just that I'm fed up in the Russian Internet community with the liberal narratives that this character carries. And now it has come here.
My acquaintance with Cassiopeia begins back in 2009, moreover, on the Ukrainian resource. Then I came here and not so long ago I connected with only one purpose - to find out the opinion of adequate residents of Western countries and share my opinion, as well as facts, mostly facts.
Whining about how bad everything is in Russia right now just pisses me off and you know why?
Because in the 90s I was a teenager in a small town in the Kuzbass, where they moved from Kazakhstan after the collapse of the USSR.
The times were very difficult, we ate potatoes and what the garden gave. Times are very different now in Russia, Putin has changed our country, he is doing everything so that the Russians live with dignity. It is a fact.
Therefore, the whining of an incomprehensible character that everything is bad in Russia, I just do not want to listen - it is simply destructive.
Or is he a capitalist who thinks my rose-colored glasses are bad and wants to sell me other, correct glasses?
I just say no. Only facts and a modest opinion about the future.
 
You seem to be reacting emotionally to my statements. I was not referring to one historical moment, such as the fall of Berlin. Stalin's pathological behaviour both preceded and continued well past the neutralisation of Nazi Germany. I also did not say Stalin was a pedophile; I said he had pedophiliac tendencies. How else would you explain the desire of a 37-year-old man to seduce a 14-year-old girl? A man who acts upon such desires is not a man; he is rather an animal, given to the basest of urges. Surely you are aware of the matter of which I speak, yes?

I do agree however that Stalin is somewhat of a diversion, and focus in this thread should remain on Putin and Russia's important and ongoing accomplishments.
I also did not mean to offend you personally or that you would think that I am criticizing you.
It's one thing when you talk about pedophilia, it's another thing when you talk about a 14 year old girl. Listen, we are now again sliding into the abyss in this discussion, but I want to tell you that it is one thing when a maniac rapes and kills small children, and another when in Russia the church allowed girls to be married from 12–13 years old, and boys from 14– 15 years. In Russia, even now there are cases when 14-year-old girls get pregnant, how do we feel about this? Well, you know, if it was mutual, then thank God, and if it was rape, then the criminal prosecution of the rapist.
What else can be said and done here?
I sincerely do not understand those people who care about the past instead of thinking about the future.
 
Yes. Good time for a reminder that Political Ponerology was written with the Soviet Union as its exemplar of pathocracy.

It's also true.

There are plenty. You can go the revisionist approach and either ignore or rationalize all the evil, or you can look at both and see that Stalin's era (following on Lenin) was one of Russia's darkest. So dark that many would prefer to pretend it couldn't have been that bad. I don't mean to invoke Godwin's law here, but this is exactly what revisionists of a certain other 20th-century pathocracy tend to do: focus on all the great things that guy did for his country, and paint over all the evil as either non-existent, necessary, or not really his fault. There comes a time when you just have to call a spade a spade. Stalin may not have been the worst guy ever, but he was pretty darn bad.

I've heard that kind of sentiment a lot in defense of Stalin: he may have been a hard man, but he's what Russia needed to 'advance'. In any other context, a person of Stalin's character would be called: a tyrant of a boss, a slave-driving, abusive father, or a ruthless capitalist (if he used the same tactics in a corporate environment). To think that Russians couldn't advance without a leader like Stalin is to think fairly poorly of Russians, IMO. One could say, better to be ruled by a ruthless characteropath than a weakling. Maybe. Doesn't change the fact that the person in question is a ruthless characteropath.

Have you considered that the USSR was perhaps just as much of a trial run? They were far more successful in implementing a long-lasting pathocracy based on an anti-human ideology.


Yep. As an example of the mental gymnastics some defenders of Stalin go through, see this:


I'd just add that I don't think Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao were psychopaths, technically. Lobaczewski would say "frontal characteropathy", which nowadays would be referred to as right-prefrontal dysfunction, a borderline personality feature. Barb Oakley has a good term for it: borderpathy.

The one advantage he has was that he probably wasn't a total psychopath. But tell that to a child of a borderline parent - it's small comfort.

Some further reading:

'Top Down vs. Bottom-up: Regarding the Potential of Contemporary “Revisionism”'

"Once More About ‘Putin’s Rehabilitation of Stalin'"
Yes. Good time for a reminder that Political Ponerology was written with the Soviet Union as its exemplar of pathocracy.
It's also true.

There are plenty. You can go the revisionist approach and either ignore or rationalize all the evil, or you can look at both and see that Stalin's era (following on Lenin) was one of Russia's darkest. So dark that many would prefer to pretend it couldn't have been that bad. I don't mean to invoke Godwin's law here, but this is exactly what revisionists of a certain other 20th-century pathocracy tend to do: focus on all the great things that guy did for his country, and paint over all the evil as either non-existent, necessary, or not really his fault. There comes a time when you just have to call a spade a spade. Stalin may not have been the worst guy ever, but he was pretty darn bad.

I've heard that kind of sentiment a lot in defense of Stalin: he may have been a hard man, but he's what Russia needed to 'advance'. In any other context, a person of Stalin's character would be called: a tyrant of a boss, a slave-driving, abusive father, or a ruthless capitalist (if he used the same tactics in a corporate environment). To think that Russians couldn't advance without a leader like Stalin is to think fairly poorly of Russians, IMO. One could say, better to be ruled by a ruthless characteropath than a weakling. Maybe. Doesn't change the fact that the person in question is a ruthless characteropath.

Have you considered that the USSR was perhaps just as much of a trial run? They were far more successful in implementing a long-lasting pathocracy based on an anti-human ideology.


Yep. As an example of the mental gymnastics some defenders of Stalin go through, see this:


I'd just add that I don't think Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao were psychopaths, technically. Lobaczewski would say "frontal characteropathy", which nowadays would be referred to as right-prefrontal dysfunction, a borderline personality feature. Barb Oakley has a good term for it: borderpathy.

The one advantage he has was that he probably wasn't a total psychopath. But tell that to a child of a borderline parent - it's small comfort.

Some further reading:

'Top Down vs. Bottom-up: Regarding the Potential of Contemporary “Revisionism”'

"Once More About ‘Putin’s Rehabilitation of Stalin'"

Approaching Infinity, Ryan and Revolucionar and forumites.

Yep, i started Ponerology book, after i finish will write a conscience feedback.

The point is, as i observe on the forum, a lot of members concerning Soviet period and in particular Stalin refer only to this book. That is not, imo, exhaustively approach. The Cass Community always stimulate members for deep and objective research on each topic. HomeWork so to say. There are a lot of books, memoirs of top generals, politicians and even ordinary people who happened to encounter him in life. You would be surprised how attentive, caring, rightful, empathetic etc. he was. The system had of course drawbacks. (Gulag narrative-please research declassified official documents -not traitor Solzenitsin). He gave such a leap forward to the country even after his death (his funeral - was something of a record. Millions people came and all crying-or may be they were doing it at gunpoint?? My grandmother 90 years old now-their generation still highly admire him and ‘demand such a ruler now’. According to social research- in 2000 - 50% of the whole population admired him and strangely enough in 2021 - 80%. May be you have a rational explanation for that phenomenon? Considering official zionist mass media antiStalin’s propaganda all those 30 years) which became a top state in all spheres. We are still leaving thankfully on that capacity and USSR. Just one example— If him with Beria and Co did not invent nuclear weapons, west would have destroyed us then and more actually-now.

And now we came to turning point. SO after 7 months of ‘brave reports’ how we beat the ukrnazis came to a halt (basically declaring a mobilization we stated, that professional super duper high tech army - suffered defeat) , while the glorious concert was conducted on Red Square, our guys were surrounded in Red Liman and now Ukr flag is there waiving. Another brilliant realignment as Konashenkov would BS?

Objectivity and open mindedness - are required to see the whole mosaic.
 

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