AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
This guy gets it.
Communists are driven by, drive with, and drive to the Devil’s ideals.
First Fascism, then Communism. Fascism is the means, Communism the goal. Crony capitalism is the necessary first step, global governance is the wonderful last step, into glorious everything.
Not power, not money, not even sex motivates these dirty hearts. Ideals do, the Devil’s ideals, but ideals nonetheless, making them palatable to otherwise apparently normal personalities.
Maryanne Williamson.
Stephen Kotkin:
[Countering the thesis that Stalin was moved along by historical forces that would have produced the same result without his presence:]
. . . sketch in the structural landscape [relying on primary sources] . . .
The structural landscape doesn’t move itself. It has to be moved by agency, by men and women driven by various skills, etc., by actors, small people and great people who have ability to shift the structural landscape to find levers on socio-economic engineering and geo-politics that very few people are going to find.
Stalin was not about power. He was about Communism. In private, he and his minions talked the same way they talked in public. They were Communists, they talked Communism.
[By many historians], Stalin’s battlefield contribution is exaggerated. His economic contribution is hard to measure. His political contribution was overwhelming because his minions knew they had no one to replace him. His authority was total. He built the system. Stalin was the regime. He was the leader. He was the world’s most experienced leader. He managed with charm and viciousness, with skill and incompetence, with perspicacity and hyper-suspiciousness, with geo-political shrewdness and stupid, blinkered ideology.
[Stalin] was destroyed physically by the war. While [Stalin and minions] are winning [WWII], they are losing. While they are losing, they are winning. This is the story.
Stalin wins the war and loses the peace. It takes a long time, but [in 1994] the troops leave Eastern Europe on the same roads Napoleon used to get out of Russia. [Stalin] lost, and deservedly so.
Update 1: Nick Skildum: A Veteran in College: The Problem With Identity Theories
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