Thread by @rosendo_joe

Russell was my 1rst intellectual hero many decades ago, but today I see a western imperial bias in him that I didn't back then. For example, in his summary of Hegel, Russell caually asserts that the USA was a "society without extreme poverty"
Say what?
www2.census.gov/programs-surve…

Not clear if Russell referred only to 1946 (when History of Western Philosophy came out, but it was an absurd thing to say even if referring only to that year, never mind any period before that in US history. And he says this as he bashes Hegel (justly) forGerman state worship

That said, I believe Russell saying that the theoretical underpinnings of Hegel's philosophy - as far as nature of truth/reality go - was based on faulty logic. But that's not same thing as Hegel's theory of history, which cld be useful even if theoretical foundations were shaky

Russell spent much of his life tormented by his realization that the theoretical foundations of mathematics were shaky. His Principia Matematica was attenmpt to put himself at ease, but he admitted to have failed in his ultimate goal even if he was proud of soem of its findings

And in Engineering I was taught Newtonian physics, cuz it works well enough, without worrying about it being superceded by Theory of Relativity. So Russell says of Hegel that his theory of history was "interesting" BUT

"...it required, if it was to be made plausible, some distortion of facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Marx and Spengler after him, possessed both these qualifications" But nobody knows all history, & all of us have blind spots about histories we shld know, as BR did

Marx's theory of history (historical materiaism) differed from Hegel in substituting states with classes: "a blend of Hegel and British economists" said BR in the same book, and also conceded that "it contains very important elements of truth" though he still did not accept it

I addition to Russell's book I also consulted my friend @frederickbmills about Hegel. This essay of Fred's has the following passage that refers to Hegel (screenshot below)
orinocotribune.com/dussel-now-the…

So with that disgresson about Hegel out of the way, Lasurdo cites Hegel's general observations about various revolutions in history (as Lenin did) remarking on the tension between "univeraslist" aspirations they generate & atttion to the everyday "particular" after the suceed

"Stalin, thanks also to his concrete experience in government, seriously committed himself to the learning process through which, according to Hegel’s teachings, the leadership group of a grand revolution is forced
to pass through"

Stalin saw "emptiness of the millenarian expectations for the disappearance of the state, nations, markets, and money" and in some quarters even the sruvival of the family is a sign of "contamination" of Marxist ideals

Chapter 4. The Complex and Contradictory Course of the Stalin Era

Lasurdo: "It seems evident that, at least starting from 1937, and starting with the outbreak of the Great Terror, the dictatorship of the party gives way to autocracy [of Stalin]"

in mid-1920s”having survived the severe crisis represented by foreign intervention and civil war, NEP has achieved significant results: not only is there no autocracy, but despite the communist party’s continued dictatorship, ...power tends to become more ‘liberal.’ “

“The centrality of economic development, and therefore of competence, makes the party monopoly less rigid:”

“...November 1925, the treaty of Locarno ...Drawing France and Germany closer together…thus formalizing the USSR’s isolation...Months later, the coup d’état in Poland marks Pilsudski's rise…hopes to take Ukraine from the USSR in order to make it a subaltern and loyal ally”

“The following year…Great Britain cuts off commercial and diplomatic relations with the USSR…in Warsaw the Soviet ambassador is assassinated by a white Russian émigré…in Leningrad there’s an explosion at the headquarters of the communist party.”

“At this point, ... chief of staff of the armed forces, …demands a rapid modernization of the military…presses for similar measures in agriculture...guaranteeing a regular food supply for the frontline…the policy shift in 1929 isn’t the result of Stalin’s impulsiveness,...”

“Having survived the 'Saint Bartholomew’s night' that was the forced collectivization of agriculture, with the terrible social and human costs that come with it, the political relaxation that we previously encountered appears to reemerge”

And it "…provokes a fierce polemic by Trotsky, who identifies in it 'Stalin’s liberalism',…” But Lasurdo notes that Stalin has defeated the threat to food supply posed by Kulak resistance & "has no interest in further exacerbating the political and social conflict"

“It’s the drive to rapidly industrialize which compels him to seek the promotion of 'non-party' elements to management posts...not possible to promote industrial and technological development without... material incentives for the training of workers and specialized technicians"

THUS "conditions mature for the outbreak of the third civil war, the one that will decimate the very ranks of the Bolsheviks. “

Trotsky denounces “concessions to the peasantry, to their interests and their petty-bourgeois tendencies." & a alleges “new processes of class stratification"

& calls USSR entry into League of Nations as yet another betrayal.

"In the three decades of Soviet history led by Stalin, the principal aspect is not the transition from dictatorship of the party to autocracy, but more precisely the repeated attempts to transition from the state of emergency to a state of relative normality”

“…this series of failures [to achieve normality] finally results in the arrival of autocracy, exercised by a leader who’s the object of a genuine cult of personality…”

Lasurdo reminds us that with strife & repression under Stalin there were also huge gains unattainable before 1917. In 1932 "a young American diplomat, destined later to become famous as the advocate for soviet containment, namely George Kennan, sends a cable to Washington..."

Kennan's cable, sent from Riga, speaks of "certain part of the youth” "“extremely enthusiastic and happy, as can only occur among human beings completely dedicated to tasks that have no relation to their personal lives” "an unlimited selfconfidence"

Lasurdo adds "Of course, here Kennan is more familiar with the reality in the cities (where, despite the
contradictions, the changes had, in fact, aroused the enthusiasm of a large part of the youth,
intellectuals, and industrial workers)"

Losurdo then get’s into a long discussion/refutation of exaggerations re. prison conditions under Stalin and does so quoting extensively from fanatical anti-communist & warmonger Anne Applebaum

“…1937 witnesses a brutal turn [in prison conditions]. While the third civil war rages and increasingly ominous clouds gather on the international horizon, the fifth column, real or assumed, becomes the objective of an increasingly obsessive hunt”

"...the detainee is no longer a potential 'comrade', it’s then prohibited to refer to them as such; they are now called 'citizen'...potentially an enemy of the people. Is it from this moment on that the Soviet concentration camp is driven by homicidal intent?"

"That is how the American researcher repeatedly cited here [Applebaum] thinks, but yet again her research refutes her: “In the 1940s, in theory the KVC of each camp had an instructor, a small library, and a ‘circular’ where theatrical performances and concerts were organized, .."

'as well as political conferences and debates.' "There’s more. While Hitler’s war of annihilation rages on ...'time and money' are generously invested to strengthen and improve 'the propaganda, manifestos, and the political indoctrination meetings' for the prisoners:"

"Within the records of the Gulag administration alone, there are hundreds and hundreds of documents testifying to the intensive work of the Cultural-Educational Department."

"In the first quarter of 1943, for example, at the height of the war, frantic telegrams were sent back and forth from the camps to Moscow, as camp commanders desperately tried to procure musical instruments for their prisoners"

“Certainly, with the start of Hitler’s invasion, the detainees experience the dramatic consequences of the shortages, but that has nothing to do with the emergence of homicidal intention”

ASIDE
[Compare COVID death rate in USA inside & outside prisons]
publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/covid-19-…

Impressive how much Lasurdo cites Anne Applebaum and uses her own research against her.

Anyway, onto a sub section of chpt4 entitled "Tsarist Siberia, Liberal Britain’s 'Siberia', and the Soviet Gulag"

“ Should we compare, or directly associate, the Soviet Gulag with the Nazi Konzentrationslager? It’s a question that could be answered with another: why limit the comparison between just these two realities? "

"...With respect to the 'Irish dissidents', ...'between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they had their official Siberia in Australia',..." which at least up until 1868 consumed 'representatives of nearly all the existing radical movements in Great-Britain.' "

"That’s in relation to repression. But ...necessary not to lose sight of the economic function of liberal Britain’s 'Siberia.'...diminished to the degree that labor came in, first with black slaves, ...the Chinese and Indian coolies, as well as other colonial peoples"

"The British 'Siberia' is no less cruel than the Tsarist one. On this 'totalitarian society', which is built in Australia while at the same time an extermination of the Aborigines is carried out, ..."

"On the other side of the Atlantic, Franklin D. Roosevelt orders citizens of Japanese origin, including women and children, to be interned in concentration camps. However, the United States is clearly in a more favorable geopolitical situation than the Soviet Union"

"...after the battle of Midway, no longer could one speak of military and security concerns. Yet the Americans of Japanese origin continued to be confined...freedom is only completely obtained in the middle of 1946, nearly a year after the end of the war"

"Even slower is the return home of Latin American citizens of Japanese origin deported to the United States from thirteen Latin American countries. Only in 1948 were the last ones freed from the “internment camp”―or concentration camp―in Crystal City, Texas"

"Even if one sought to start from the basis of the exceptional scale and severity of the Soviet Gulag, the principal problem still remains unresolved: It’s always necessary to distinguish the role of ideology from the role of the objective conditions..."

" ...(the exceptional gravity of the threat and the general hardship that characterized the USSR)"

From 1918 – 1934 “Soviet power is confronted by terrorism (a phenomenon with a long history in Russia) and it fears the infiltration of the state apparatus at all levels by an opposition determined to topple from power the 'usurpers' and 'traitors.' "

"In other words, only with the arrival of autocracy does Soviet power achieve full control over its territory and the state apparatus; and the terror is, firstly, a response to an unprecedented, acute and long lasting crisis…”

"The awareness of the growing threat of the war, and the obsessive hunt of a fifth column that’s broadly spread out and well hidden, this generalized fear and hysteria transform the assemblies in the factories, labor unions and party into a 'war of all against all.' "

"Sometimes, it’s Stalin and his closest collaborators who see themselves forced to intervene to contain and concentrate this rage, warning against the tendency to find traitors and saboteurs everywhere, and thus destroying party and labor union organizations"

"...the Second World War...threatens to inflict on the country and nation as a whole an even more gigantic catastrophe: the annihilation and enslavement clearly described in Mein Kampf"

"And the terror arises during an industrialization in forced stages that aims to save the country and the nation, during which the large scale and ferocious repression combines with real processes of emancipation..."

"(the massive expansion of education and culture, the remarkable upward social mobility, the emergence of the welfare state, the tumultuous and contradictory protagonism of social classes until that time condemned to a completely subaltern status)"

"Hitler comes to power with an explicit program of war and territorial expansion...Nazi Germany’s expansionism also aims at reasserting across the globe the supremacy of the white and Aryan race, and to take up and radicalize the colonial tradition, applying it to Eastern Europe"

"... the path is laid to treat the inferior races of Eastern Europe following the example of what happened to the Native Americans, that they must be exterminated to make room for the German settlers, and also to be slaves in the service of the white and Aryan master race"

"The war unleashed by Hitler in Eastern Europe represents the new and even more brutal form of the slave trade. Captured and exploited in masse, the enslaved Untermenschen …conditions similar to those of blacks (in the Caribbean) to whom...the Führer explicitly compares them"

"...prisoner in the Gulag is a potential “comrade” obligated to participate in particularly hard conditions in the strengthening of production inside the country
...prisoner in the Nazi Lager is firstly an Untermensch, forever marked by their nationality or racial degeneration"

"...to find a precise analogy for the Konzentrationslager, it’s necessary to bring in the concentrationary universe that profoundly marked the colonial tradition (in whose wake Hitler explicitly intended to place himself) "

"We are also forced to think of Nazism when we read the forms in which the 'Canadian Holocaust' (or the 'final solution to our indigenous question') was perpetrated. The 'Commission for the Truth about the Canadian Genocide' speaks of 'death camps'..."

"...of 'men, women and children' who are 'deliberately exterminated', of a 'system whose objective is to destroy the greatest part possible of the native people through sickness, deportation, and murder itself.' "

"To achieve this, the champions of white supremacy don’t hesitate in hurting 'innocent children', who die 'from beatings and torture, or after having been deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and other illnesses'; others go on to suffer forced sterilization..."

"In this case as well, one may assume that righteous indignation may have overstated the case; yet it remains evident that we are faced with practices identical or similar to those in force in the Third Reich"

"Let’s move on now to the Southern United States….Between 1877 and 1880, during the construction of the railroads of Greenwood and Augusta, 'nearly 45%' of the forced laborers die there, 'and they were youths in the prime of their lives.' "

"Another statistic can be cited from the same time period: 'In the first two years in which Alabama rented out its prisoners, nearly 20% died. In the following year the mortality rate jumped to 35%. In the fourth year nearly 45% died….' "

"even substantially inflating the official numbers, it seems difficult to approach the mortality rate [in Gulags at start of 1930s] we’ve just seen among African American inmates…"

"...one essential point: in the Southern United States, black prisoners suffer horrible living and working conditions and die en masse during peacetime; the state of emergency doesn’t play any role, and concern with production is also either marginal or totally absent..."

"...eminent American historians who compare the prison system we just saw with the 'prison camps of Nazi Germany.' And it’s no coincidence that the medical experiments―done to Untermenschen in Nazi Germany―in the United States have been carried out using blacks as guinea pigs"

"...imperialist and colonialist Germany conducted their medical experiments in Africa at the expense of Africans; during this activity two doctors distinguish themselves and later become the teachers of Joseph Mengele"

Note how Losurdo doesn't downplay what the Nazi's were BUT clearly links them to lonstanding western imperial practices & assumptions. He does not caricature Nazis as one-time freaks who appeared out of nowhere

For more of that kind of analysis , see @RodericDay 's "Really Existing Fascism" essay
redsails.org/really-existin…

"[The Nazi] project would have yet devoured an infinite number of more victims, if it had not been defeated by an opposing project, based on the recognition not only of existential rights, but also the cultural and national rights of the natives"

"the Bolshevik party as a whole, and especially Stalin, commit themselves to a “new and fascinating experiment in governing a multiethnic State”

"...January of 1952...Truman entertains a radical idea which he records in his diary: they could deliver an ultimatum to the USSR and... China, clarifying in advance that failure to comply 'means ...all the industrial centers of China and the Soviet Union
would be eliminated"

Last sub section of Chpt 4 "Totalitarianism or Developmentalist Dictatorship?"

"We are now able to understand the insufficient or deceptive character of the category of totalitarianism, widely invoked to establish the association between Stalin’s USSR to Hitler's Germany"

"...a Soviet factory, or one of the many construction sites ...promoted by Stalin...far from being uniformly determined from above, its location is decided after a complex decision making process made up of passionate and frequently fiery discussions…"

"Particularly strong is the power of those regions that, precisely due to their underdevelopment, pressure the regime to maintain its promises to end the inequalities and the 'injustices of tsarist imperialism' "

"Upon entering the production site...there’s no lack of unrest or heated disputes…large fluctuations in the labor force won’t go unnoticed. Stalin is forced to tenaciously struggle against that phenomenon... by 1936 'more than 87% of industrial workers leave their job post.' "

"...They’re encouraged by a policy of full employment and by the real possibility of upward social mobility, a counterweight to the power wielded by authorities in the factory or at the construction site"

" 'Totalitarianism' was much more evident in the factory of Tsarist Russia, where an unmistakable rule was enforced: 'the owner of the industrial establishment is sovereign and the absolute legislator who is bound by no legal limits' "

"...remember that for African Americans of the south [at the time] the charge of 'vagrancy' was enough for them to be arrested, condemned, and to be rented out to businessmen who were determined to get rich"

" in the Soviet factory we see dynamics and relations at work that would be considered an intolerable lack of discipline in the capitalist factory found in the democratic countries"

"In the USSR, ...in China, the more or less radical dismantlement of the 'totalitarian' system takes place alongside a drastic strengthening of discipline in the workplace; to give one example: only in 1993 does China approve a law that allows layoffs due to absenteeism"

"No doubt, especially in situations of acute crisis, workplaces are certainly not exempt from the terror in the USSR or in Maoist China; however, what characterizes daily life is a regime that’s far from totalitarianism..."

"doesn’t make much sense to associate that tragic and contradictory experience to that of the Nazis, which is explicitly established for the purpose of war, colonial conquest and the reaffirmation of racial hierarchies, that from its beginning can make use of a state apparatus"

Chapter 5: The Distortion of History and the Construction of a Mythology: Stalin and Hitler as Twin Monsters

BTW, before diving into CHPT 5, let me belatedly explain why I woud do such a monstrously long thread quoting from a book

https://twitter.com/RodericDay/status/1392469881413570562

"In the race to reach an agreement or understanding with the newly installed regime in Berlin, Stalin clearly comes last. The Concordat between Germany and the Holy See happens on July 20th, 1933, and it guarantees the loyalty of German Catholics"

"..1935 is also the year in which the naval agreement between Great Britain and the Third Reich is signed. Occurring after the start of feverish rearmament and the reintroduction of the draft, the agreement raises Hitler's hopes that they could reach a strategic understanding.."

"... with the recognition of Great Britain’s naval superiority and mutual respect between the two great 'Germanic' empires…unrestrained joy from Hitler, who then celebrates this as his 'happiest day.' "

"Even more disturbing is Poland’s role. As has been observed, it becomes “totally subordinated to German policy” starting from the signing of the ten-year non-aggression pact with Germany ...1934. [a historian Losurdo cites says Poland was Germany’s “attack dog” by 1935]"

"During the crisis caused by the Munich Conference, the USSR was the only country challenging the Third Reich and confirmed its support for the Prague government, putting more than seventy divisions on a high state of alert"

"Later on, after the Third Reich’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939, Moscow delivers a strongly worded message of protest to Berlin. The reaction from other capitals was much more 'restrained.' "

"the Nazi-fascist aggressors had successively devoured Ethiopia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Albania and China thanks to the direct or passive complicity of the Western powers, inclined to direct the Third Reich’s sights and ambitions against the homeland of the October Revolution"

"the Soviet Union sees the pressure applied by Japan on its eastern borders...the danger of an invasion and war on two fronts: It’s only at this moment that Moscow begins moving toward a pact of non-aggression with Germany, noting the failure of the popular front strategy"

"popular front strategy had its costs...strengthened the opposition and Trotskyite agitation, especially in the colonies: what credibility could an anti-colonialism have which spared―so the argument went―the leading colonial powers at that time, concentrating instead on[Germany]"

"For the colonized peoples themselves it was especially difficult to accept that adjustment. Britain was widely discredited….Gandhi asserts that 'in India we have Hitlerian rule, however disguised it may be in softer terms' "

“Gandhi will go as far as paying tribute to Subhas Chandra Bose, who to achieve independence had fought alongside the Axis"

"For countries like Britain and France, the popular front strategy brought very little costs, yet they still sabotaged it. At this point, the USSR had no other choice but to reach an understanding with Germany"

"Mao Zedong expresses his satisfaction: [the pact] 'more easily allows the Soviet Union' to support 'China’s resistance against Japan.' It’s precisely for this reason that the Japanese consider Germany’s behavior to be 'treacherous and unforgivable.' "

"Hitler...'Everything I do is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and blind to understand it, I’ll be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians and then defeat the West, so that after its defeat I can concentrate all possible forces on the Soviet Union "

"Did Stalin count on the long or eternal duration of the pact? In truth, from the start he is aware of the inevitability of the clash with Nazi Germany: 'we will be spared from the war for a little while longer.' "

"May 5th, 1941, Stalin observes: 'is the German army invincible, perhaps? No, it’s not invincible [...]. Germany now wages a war in the name of the enslavement and subjugation of other nations, in the name of hegemony. This is a great disadvantage for the German army.' "

"...rapprochement between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union had provoked notable discomfort within the Nazi ranks...Operation Barbarossa [invasion of the USSR] brings about a sense of relief: 'the stain to our honor' has been wiped away, Goebbels writes in his diary "

"[Stalin] on March 10th, 1939, in warning the Western powers that their 'dangerous political game' of redirecting the Third Reich’s expansionist drive 'to the East, against the Soviet Union', could end in 'serious failure' (...a non-aggression pact between Moscow and Berlin)"

Losurdo then takes shots at Hannah Arendt for pushing the lie that Stalin trusted and had a stong "affinity" to Hitler

Hitler's hope "annihilation of Asiatic and Eastern Bolshevism ...restoration of unity within the West ...in particular reaching a permanent agreement with the 'British Empire', that for the Führer continued being the 'supreme model of domination and exploitation' "

Sub-section "The Ukrainian Holocaust as an Equivalent to the Jewish Holocaust"

"Robert Conquest ...particularly distinguished himself in spreading this thesis" one that his admireres say "powerfully influenced the radicalization of separatist ambitions in Ukraine"

I’ll try to sum up Losurdo’s points against the deliberate “terror famine” thesis without over-quoting as I have in this thread.
1)Robert Conquest, 1 of the main guys behind the terror famine thesis was a Cold Warrior who also said that Gorbachev’s USSR might invade the US.

Losurodo concedes that alone doesn’t disprove anything about the terror famine thesis, but it should be noted.

2)In 1934, French prime minister returns from Ukraine & denies the extent of famine & that it was deliberate
3)Reports by diplomats with fascist Italy tell of Soviet soldiers being sent to work with farmers, repair equipment, efforts to promote Ukrainian language culture,

& seek unity with Ukrainians in Poland. All of this while repression was at its “cruelest” [Lasurdo’s word]

4) Trotsky was Ukrainian, pro-independence in his last years but never made the deliberate terror famine allegation against Stalin who he despise & accused of a lot

5)The “Holodomor” [famine] was in the early 30s but Trotsky, a Ukrainian, after taking up cause of Ukrainian independence, alleges targeting of Ukrainians was at its worst in 1939 & never spoke of genocide.

6)Nazis had long openly advocated extermination of Jews & Ukrainians & stressed importance of erasing their culture & historical memory & limiting their education as part of turning them into salves to the master race.

Losurdo notes “It would be useless to search for similar declarations by Soviet leaders with regards to the Ukrainian people (or Jewish people).
7)In fact, Stalin advocated & pursued affirmative action policies which provoked resistance from Russians

8)“Ukrainian nationalist circles played an important role in the ... promotion of the Holodomor thesis, after having carried out ‘many pogroms’ against Jews during the years of the civil war, often times collaborating with the Nazi invaders … convenient self-absolution”

9)Illustrating how political “genocide” allegations or denials can get, in 1941 Herbert Hoover denounced as a “holocaust” the blockade Britain imposed on German-occupied territory but said nothing of the Nazi invasion of USSR.

10)Robert Conquest also evades famines whose deliberate nature were much better comparison to the Nazis – like in India where it was “stubbornly denied by Churchill, that from 1943-1944 caused three million deaths in Bengal”, AND...

but Losurdo mentions several examples of hunger used by the West as collective punishment up to & including Iraq in 1990s.

"...1918, the British forces that land in Northern Russia distributed antisemitic flyers by air on a massive scale….the Whites are defeated by the Bolsheviks and emigrate to the West, bringing with them the denunciation of the October Revolution as a JudeoBolshevik conspiracy.."

"Winston Churchill is no stranger, who takes part in denouncing the role of Judaism not only in Russia, but in the whole cycle of subversion that, starting in the eighteenth century, had shaken the West"

Screenshot of Churchil quote

"On the other side of the Atlantic, It’s Henry Ford who encourages the promotion of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ford declares: 'The Russian Revolution has a racial origin, not a political one',..."

What follows is Losurdo's very detailed rebuttal of Stalin's alleged antisemitism. Won't gp into much detail, but Losurdo does an excellent job. I'm tempted to say he wrote too much, but those who followed the antisemitism campaign against Corbyn shou;d understand why.

One criticism I have is that I think Lorsurdo wrote too little criticizing the USSR's intial support for Zionism. Lorsudo wrote: "The support given by him [Stalin] to the foundation and consolidation of the Jewish State is at the same time a contribution given to the Nakbah,..."

"that is the national 'catastrophe' for the Palestinian people, who for decades continue to languish in refugee camps and in the territories subjected to a ruthless military occupation and a rampant process of colonization"

"One historian (Conquest), despite being determined to reduce Bolshevism and communism to a criminal phenomenon, recognizes that in the Soviet Union 'antisemitism as such was never an official doctrine', that 'the open persecution of Jews as Jews was prohibited' ..."

Losurdo goes into a very long discussion proving how ridiculous allegation that Stalin’s criticismof “Comopolitanism” was coded antisemitism. It was infact part of polemic that had raged for decades cuz Trots & others who demanded global revolution

"...a journalist and researcher of Trotskyist orientation who, as a 'witness of those years'...'no country had anything comparable to the Red Army, with Jews in the highest military positions.' That’s not all: “One of Stalin’s sons marries a Jew, and his daughter does the same.'"

"To remain standing, however weak and staggered, the theory of Stalin’s 'antisemitism' requires the dejudification of the Jews who work closely with him."

Again - calls to mind how jews who defended Corbyn against antisemetism smears were singled out for expulsion from Labour

So ome anticommunists took a this apprach to pin the antisemtism lable on Stalin and the USSR: "...the Judeo-Bolshevik plot that the Nazis speak of is here understood as the unrest or plot orchestrated by Jews, yes, but by anti-Semitic Jews! "

Losurdo "...the accusation of antisemitism ends up reproducing, with some modest variations, the Nazi philosophy of history!"

Losurdo might put it this way on Twitter:

Nazis: “The USSR was the product of a jewish conspiracy”

Anticommunists: ”The USSR was the largely the creation of antisemitic jews”

CHPT 6
6. Psychopathology, Morality, and History in the Reading of the Stalin Era

"According to Arendt, the obsession with the “objective enemy” had driven Stalinist totalitarianism (as well as Hitlerism)… To comprehend the futility of this formula, all that’s required is to reflect ...that it could easily be applied to the history of the United States"

"Unfortunately, Arendt operates on a purely ideological level, without even raising the problem of a comparative analysis of the policies pursued by the leadership groups of different countries in situations of severe crisis. It would be beneficial to fill this gap. "

Lasurdo goes over wartime paranoia in US & UK: "The president reveals to the press that pro-German elements have infiltrated “the Army and Navy” and have organized or tried to organize sabotage operations at “forty or fifty factories across the country."

"...elements of the Terror that takes hold in Russia. Without a doubt, the phenomenon analyzed with regards to Britain and the United States appears in a monstrously enlarged form in Russia; but do ideology, paranoia and the objective situation play a decisive role?"

"One can ridicule Stalin’s “paranoia”, but we have seen Goebbels speak of the great success of German espionage in France and its total failure in the USSR. "

"Reinhard Gehlen...immediately after the defeat of Hitler's Germany, Allen Dulles demonstrates 'vision' in putting at the service of the recently created CIA the very man who 'had played a great role in the German attack on Russia in 1941' "

"...it’s enough to read any history of the Cold War to understand that the birthplace of the October Revolution was especially exposed to the danger not just of military invasion, but also infiltration and espionage"

" In the 1920s, thanks to the collaboration of Russian exiles, Britain was able to decode the Soviet Union’s encrypted messages, which remains the principal target of their intelligence services even “in the middle of the 1930s"

"...1918, [Woodrow] Wilson authorizes the publication of documents that contain sensational revelations: not only was the October Revolution nothing more than a German conspiracy; Lenin, Trotsky... Bolshevik leaders continued to be at the (paid) service of Imperial Germany"

"After Hitler’s rise to power, the London government seeks by all means to redirect the Third Reich’s expansionist drive to the East, and primarily against the Soviet Union. Regarding this, two Canadian historians arrive at a conclusion that gives cause for consideration: "

[quotng Canadian historians] “The responsibility for the tragedy of World War II, the Holocaust included, must fall in part on Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, and their closest allies."

"...in Mein Kampf, Hitler clearly described his program for the construction of a continental German empire to be built primarily over the ruins of the Soviet Union. "

"It’s not hard to identify the line that leads from Brest-Litovsk to Operation Barbarossa, and that’s enough to explain Stalin’s concerns."

"without the abandonment of the NEP, without the collectivization of agriculture (with the steady flow of food products from the countryside to the city and the front) and the rushed industrialization (with the development of the arms industry..."

"... and with the rise of new industrial centers in the eastern regions, at a safe distance from the invading army), it would have been impossible to successfully oppose Hitler’s aggression: "

And throughout his chapter Losurdo also discusses the imminent & gruesome fate USSR faced if it did not defeat Hitler with the massive toll on civilians in Germany & Japan horrific inflicted on civilians by UK and US in order to defeat them which nobody condemns

"Can the 'supreme emergency' really justify that which is described in written accounts? [Losurdo referring to Dresden] “The first round of bombs fell at nine in the morning on streets full of people lined up to shop, ..."

"...and it killed seven hundred people, nearly all of them women and children. Later the warplanes pursued and struck the citizens fleeing to the east, to the forest."

"In any case, criminal at a time when the defeat of the Third Reich was already becoming evident, are these actions justified while the supreme emergency is in effect? "

"A successful historian and journalist, whose articles are also found in the New York Times, and who has very little doubts “about the timing and moral righteousness” of the use of the atomic bomb against Japan..."

"...goes as far as stating that to not use it 'would have been illogical and completely irresponsible.' "

"Making clear his intention of not putting the communist party’s monopoly on power up for discussion, Stalin repeatedly seeks to move on from the state of emergency to a state of relative normality, with the realization of a 'Soviet democracy', of a 'socialist democratism',.."

"...and a society 'without the dictatorship of the proletariat.' But those attempts failed. It’s significant how the question of succession is 'handled' soon after Stalin’s death: the elimination of Beria is a type of mafia style settling of accounts, ..."

"it’s a personal violence that doesn’t make reference to any state or juridical order, nor to party statutes."

"One could say that the Second Time of Troubles ends, in fact, with the overthrow of the USSR. Like the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks are unable to adjust to the disappearance ...of the state of emergency, ...end up seeming obsolete and superficial to the majority of the population"

"It’s at the international level, however, that the influence of the October Revolution, and the man who led Soviet Russia for three decades, prove to be more solid. "

"We can fall back in horror at a scenario that sees democracy (with the collapse of racist and colonialist despotism ...), and especially social democracy, advance in the wake of the challenge being offered by a dictatorial regime prone to using terror; ..."

"...but to give in to that sort of reaction means ...escaping from the complexity...Those who would prefer to have before them a simpler scenario would do well to reflect on an observation by Marx: 'It's the bad side that produces the movement that makes history.' "