• edric@lemm.ee
    382·
    1 year ago

    To be fair, just because somebody said something good/reasonable, it doesn’t necessarily mean they walked the talk. You can probably find a good quote from any evil dictator.

    • Jamie@jamie.moe
      201·
      1 year ago

      There are a fair amount of Hitler quotes that sound reasonable. Until you zoom out and look at the everything else, anyway.

        • Bipta@kbin.social
          6·
          1 year ago

          Nixon did a lot for improving environmental protections while also believing himself to be above the law in a way verging towards, “I am the state.”

        • TheFriar@lemm.ee
          21·
          1 year ago

          I feel like this is a big thing modern communists have the biggest problem with. I mean, it’s a problem that spans most of the political spectrum, but communists have he biggest problem because it leads to them defending the ccp and denying history to prove that communism is good. Because political affiliation is team sports now, so it’s all about staking your ground and defending everything on your side, no matter how insane it makes you. Stalin did terrible things. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t right about some things. But e-communists just can’t seem to separate the two.

          • Zyratoxx@lemm.ee
            2·
            1 year ago

            Yeah, and the absolute worst thing is, they’re gatekeeping harder than the Linux community.

            So you’re apparently “Liberal” if you don’t think that Stalin was a G?

            It’s not as if Stalin was beloved by his fellow party members either.

            Lenin once said: "Stalin is too crude, and this defect which is entirely acceptable in our milieu and in relationships among us as communists, becomes unacceptable in the position of General Secretary. I therefore propose to comrades that they should devise a means of removing him from this job and should appoint to this job someone else who is distinguished from comrade Stalin in all other respects only by the single superior aspect that he should be more tolerant, more polite and more attentive towards comrades, less capricious, etc. "

            Trotsky actively opposed Stalin and got the ice pick in return and last but not least Tito distanced Yugoslavia from the USSR after he fell out with Stalin.

            Ofc Cyber Ghost doesn’t directly say that every opposition to Stalin is liberal but I do think he does heavily imply not simping for Stalin makes you a liberal (which would technically make Tito, Trotsky and even Lenin liberal and imo shows the absurdity of their thinking).

        • aport@programming.dev
          92·
          1 year ago

          Dude Stalin helped the nazis take Poland, then when Hitler turned on the USSR, he threw 20 million soviets into the meat grinder. All to have Eisenhower coax a Nazi surrender, which made Stalin super butthurt and demand a new surrender the next day.

          The soviets were responsible for 3/4 German military deaths. They kicked ass. Stalin did not.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    234·
    1 year ago

    “But he was an evil dictator!”

    Setting aside the fact this is obviously wrong as there were 5 members of the central committee, all with equal powers… 4 times Stalin attempted to resign. The party consistently voted against his resignation and would not allow it. Even Trotsky rejected his first attempt in May 1924 to resign from his positions at the 13th party congress.

    1927 speech referencing it:

    It is said that in that “will” Comrade Lenin suggested to the congress that in view of Stalin’s “rudeness” it should consider the question of putting another comrade in Stalin’s place as General Secretary. That is quite true.

    Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who grossly and perfidiously wreck and split the Party. I have never concealed this and do not conceal it now. Perhaps some mildness is needed in the treatment of splitters, but I am a bad hand at that.

    At the very first meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee after the Thirteenth Congress I asked the plenum of the Central Committee to release me from my duties as General Secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. It was discussed by each delegation separately, and all the delegations unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at his post.

    What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature; I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so, for that would be desertion. As I have already said before, I am not a free agent, and when the Party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey.

    A year later I again put in a request to the plenum to release me, but I was again obliged to remain at my post. What else could I do?

    Here is his second attempt August 19, 1924 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

    To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] RCP [Russian Communist Party]

    One and a half years of working in the Politburo with comrades Zinoviev and Kamanev after the retirement and then the death of Lenin have made perfectly clear to me the impossibility of honest, sincere political work with these comrades within the framework of one small collective. In view of which, I request to be considered as having resigned from the Pol[itcal] Buro of the CC.

    I request a medical leave for about two months.

    At the expiration of this period I request to be sent to Turukhansk region or to the Iakutsk oblast’, or to somewhere abroad in any kind of work that will attract little attention.

    I would ask the Plenum to decide all these questions in my absence and without explanations from my side, because I consider it harmful for our work to give explanations aside from those remarks that I have already made in the first paragraph of this letter.

    I would ask comrade Kuibyshev to distribute copies of this letter to the members of the CC.

    With com[munist] greet[ings], J. Stalin.

    Third attempt December 27, 1926 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

    To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] (to comrade Rykov). I ask that I be relieved of the post of GenSec [General Secretary] of the CC. I declare that I can work no longer in this position, I do not have the strength to work any more in this position. J. Stalin.

    In his fourth attempt, upon rejection of the resignation by the party he attempts instead to abolish the role of General Secretary of the party altogether:

    Stalin: Comrades! For three years [Suggesting there could be more resignation attempts unbeknownst to me - ZB] I have been asking the CC [Central Committee] to free me from the obligations of General Secretary of the CC. Each time the Plenum has refused me. I admit that until recently conditions did not exist such that the Party had need of me in this post as a person more or less severe, one who acted as a certain kind of antidote to the dangers posed by the Opposition. I admit that this necessity existed, despite comrade Lenin’s well-known letter [Lenin’s Testament - ZB], to keep me at the post of General Secretary. But these conditions exist no longer. They have vanished, since the Opposition is now smashed. It seems that the Opposition has never before suffered such a defeat since they have not only been smashed, but have been expelled from the Party. It follows that now no bases exist any longer that could be considered correct when the Plenum refused to honor my request and free me of the duties of General Secretary. Meanwhile you have comrade Lenin’s directive which we are obliged to consider and which, in my opinion, it is necessary to put into effect. I admit that the Party was compelled to disregard this directive until recently, compelled by well-known conditions of inter-Party development. But I repeat that these conditions have now vanished and it is time, in my view, to take comrade Lenin’s directive to the leadership. Therefore I request the Plenum to free me of the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee. I assure you, comrades, that the Party can only gain from doing this.

    Dogadov: Vote without discussion.

    Vorshilov: I propose we reject the announcement we just heard.

    Rykov: We will vote without discsussion…We vote now on Stalin’s proposal that he be freed from the General Secretaryship. Who is for this proposal? Who is against? Who abstains? One.

    The proposal of comrade Stalin is rejected with one abstention.

    Stalin: Then I introduce another proposal. Perhaps the CC [Central Committee] will consider it expedient to abolish the position of General Secretary. In our Party’s history there have been times when no such post existed.

    Voroshilov: We had Lenin with us then.

    Stalin: We had no post of General Secretary before the 10th Congress.

    Voice: Until the 11th Congress.

    Stalin: Yes, it seems that until the 11th Congress we did not have this position. That was before Lenin stopped working. If Lenin concluded that it was necessary to put forward the question of founding the position of General Secretary, then I assume he was prompted by the special circumstances that appeared with us before the 10th Congress, when a more or less strong, well-organized Opposition within the Party was founded. But now we proceed to the abolition of this position. Many people associate a conception of some kind of special rights of the General Secretary with this position. I must say from my experience, and comrades will confirm this, that there ought not to be any special rights distinguishing the General Secretary from the rights of other members of the Secretariat.

    Voice: And the duties?

    Stalin: And there are no more duties than other members of the Secretariat have. I see it this way; There’s the Politburo, the highest organ of the CC; there’s the Secretariat, the executive organ consisting of five persons, and all these five members of the Secretariat are equal. That’s the way the work has been carried out in practice, and the General Secretary has not had any special rights or obligations. The result, therefore, is that the position of General Secretary, in the sense of special rights, has never existed with us in practice, there has been only a collegium called the Secretariat of the CC. I do not know why we need to keep this dead position any longer. I don’t even mention the fact that this position, called General Secretary, has occasioned in some places a series of distortions. At the same time that at the top no special rights or duties are associated with the position of General Secretary, in some places there have been some distortions, and in all the oblasts there is now a struggle over that position among comrades who call themselves secretaries, for example, in the national CCs. Quite a few General Secretaries have developed, and with them in the localities special rights have been associated. Why is this necessary?

    Shmidt: We can dismiss them in the localities.

    Stalin: I think the Party would benefit if we did away with the post of General Secretary, and that would give me the chance to be free from this post. This would be all the easier to do since according to the Party’s constitution there is no post of General Secretary.

    Rykov: I propose not to give comrade Stalin the possibility of being free from this position. As concerns the General Secretaries in the oblast and local organs, that should be changed, but without changing the situation in the CC. The position of General Secretary was created by the proposal of Vladimir Il’ich. In all the time since, during Vladimir Il’ich’s life and since, this position has justified itself politically and completely in both the organizational and political sense. In the creation of this organ and in naming comrade Stalin to the post of General Secretary the whole Opposition also took part, all those whom we have now expelled from the Party. That is how completely without doubt it was for everyone in the Party (whether the position of General Secretary was needed and who should be the General Secretary). By which has been exhausted, in my opinion, both the question of the “testament” (for that point has been decided) and exhausted by the Opposition at the same time just as it has been decided by us as well. The whole Party knows this. What has changed now after the 15th Congress and why is it necessary to set aside the position of General Secretary.

    Stalin: The Opposition has been smashed.

    (A long discussion followed, after which:)

    Voices: Correct! Vote!

    Rykov: There is a proposal to vote.

    Voices: Yes, yes!

    Rykov: We are voting. Who is for comrade Stalin’s proposal to abolish the post of General Secretary? Who is opposed? Who abstains? Noone.

    • aport@programming.dev
      41·
      1 year ago

      It’s astounding you put so much effort into defending your position against an argument nobody made.

      edit: oh, people did compare him to an evil dictator. I’ll revise my comment then

      Stalin wasn’t an evil dictator! I’ll prove it, look at all this evidence showing Stalin was not a dictator.

  • Sem@lemmy.mlEnglish
    14·
    1 year ago

    To be honest, I do not understand, why people try to judge quotes by its authors. If Adolf Hitler once said that Erarth is round, the authorship doesn’t make this quote automatically false. Even bloody dictators can say sometimes something truly, whats the problem here?

    • skulblaka@kbin.social
      63·
      1 year ago

      The problem is that people take quotes like this as an excuse to slippery-slope into loving everything else Stalin did too. Why, I couldn’t say. It’s pretty fucking obvious that Stalin and Mao and Mussolini and etc. were horrible people but yet we still have people in the modern day tripping over themselves to suck off dictators that died a century ago.

  • FARTYSHARTBLAST@kbin.social
    105·
    1 year ago

    Shitty people can say reasonable things lol, doesn’t mean they practice what they preach.

    edit: Holy fuck, you tankies are fucking unreal. Stalin was a god damn monster lol.

  • juliebean@lemm.ee
    51·
    1 year ago

    tbf, acting like everyone having employment is a prerequisite for freedom is a pretty damn liberal attitude.