PATRICE GREANVILLE | SIMULPOST WITH RUSSIA INSIDER
“It’s time to recover the truth about Stalin and the USSR from a cesspool of hostile propaganda”
The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin share a joke in the Kremlin, Moscow, in 1942. (MOI) FLM 1117 Part of MINISTRY OF INFORMATION FILM STILLS COLLECTION
Patrice Greanville (The Greanville Post)
Churchill murdered 100s of 1000s of defenseless German women and children in fire bombing raids when Germany had already lost the war. He was a monster.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e have long maintained that the truth about the USSR, in general, and particularly the Stalin period, has long been the object of the most cynical, mean-spirited, and comprehensive propaganda effort ever seen in the annals of history.
For reasons of sheer class interest among the plutocrats of the West, the business elites that still rule most of the so-called “capitalist democracies,” the demonization of Stalin was a necessity, a campaign only briefly interrupted by World War Two and quickly resumed literally a few hours after its ending.
Russian tanker crews parade in victory celebration over fascism (2013). Note that Russian armed forces still honor Communist icons. After all, it was the Communists who created the Red Army.
The Western elites —with the Anglo-American ruling circles in the lead—correctly saw an enemy in Stalin. They could not bribe him and they could not intimidate him. Nor could they easily topple him, as they had done (and still do) countless times with weaker, “inconvenient leaders.” What’s more, Stalin was at the helm of a powerful nation and titular leader of an ideology directly opposed to their indispensable economic system. Occasional diplomacy aside, they hated him. He and his nation stood in the way of their plans for global hegemony. So the the venom had to flow and did—abundantly. And in that sordid enterprise the capitalist elites found countless allies, not to mention the usual battalions of ignorant, useful idiots.
As any propaganda student will attest, when vilifying a nation’s policies and social values, it’s far easier (and effective) if the propagandist aims the Big Lie machine at its leader. As we have seen in recent times with Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Fidel Castro, Iran and North Korea’s leaders, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and finally Putin—among many others (the empire is never lacking in “dangerous enemies”)—the character assassination of a leader is an old tactic to prepare the perennially benighted home population for an attack on the targeted nation.
From this perspective it’s not difficult to see that if the Ministry of Truth could swiftly complete the total demonization of Vladimir Putin—a figure in good standing merely 3 years ago—and not even an avowed socialist, one can only imagine what outrageous fabrications they could have concocted (and did) to cordon off the image of Stalin, an outspoken communist, over several decades. This made eminent sense to the West’s doctrinal gatekeepers. Given the identification of Stalin’s long rule with the Soviet Union at its most embattled, the blackening of Stalin’s name served an important purpose: it provided the Western propagandists an invaluable shorthand—an “irrefutable symbol” of communism’s putative evil—to block the very idea of genuine socialism as an option for humanity.
Soviet morale poster.
The preceding is obviously not to argue that Stalin was a flawless leader, or a saint who just happened to have a powerful army, or that he didn’t make some serious mistakes. He did. However, the most elementary fairness demands that we ask, which world historical figure confronted with enormously difficult choices emerges today (barring self-serving ideological propaganda) unscathed from close and impartial examination?
Judging Stalin by the context in which he had to act, and even more important, the purposes he served, he was arguably no worse, morally, than most Western leaders, and by any rational measure, probably a damn sight better. For who are these distinguished gentlemen who have led the West for over a century now?
Contrary to perceptions in the West, many Russians hold a positive view of Stalin
Churchill, the most revered member in the club, was an unapologetic racist and imperialist who in the 1920s endorsed the policy of RAF bombing and gassing Iraqi villages (Mesopotamia) into submission, for failure to pay their assigned tribute. JFK, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon pursued an illegitimate, barbaric, genocidal war in Vietnam that remains one of the horrors of modern imperialism. Truman dropped the bomb on the Japanese as a way to keep the Soviets “in line,” making America so far the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on a civilian population. And during the postwar, the US tentacles, chiefly acting through the CIA and its clients, have managed to murder and repress tens of millions of people around the globe—in all latitudes and scores of nations, from the Philippines, to Indonesia to Chile, to Nicaragua, to Iran, the Congo, Korea, the entire Middle East, literally bathed in blood—always in pursuit of geostrategic advantage, and the suppression of popular democracy in order to better permit the continuation and maximization of corporate profit. So much for the inherent perfidy of communism and angelic innocence of capitalism.
The record is by now so huge and consistent, the hypocrisy so staggering, that we can state categorically there is not a single case in which America has used its immense diplomatic and military power to back a genuine democratic leader (such people are immediately branded “communists” and dealt accordingly) or assisted people struggling for freedom from class oppression. It’s a vile and hypocritical record that continues to this day, thanks to the complete brainwash to which the American population has been subjected as a measure of pre-emptive pacification. The whole thing is amply documented so there’s no point in even trying to refute it.
It's reasonable to assume that, if it had not been for the Soviet Union, whose maturation into a world power Stalin oversaw, Russia would have lacked today the foundation to defend itself from the West's all out attack to destroy its sovereignty and even physical integrity as a free and cohesive political entity...
In any case, recovering the truth about Stalin and the USSR from the cesspool of hostile propaganda in which the enemies of socialism situated it, assisted by the perennially misguided and often fanatical anti-communist and especially anti-Stalinist leftists, is no task for the weakhearted.
That’s why we salute our colleagues at Russia Insider, and its editor, Charlie Bausman, in particular, for their decision to publish Grover Furr. Letting this scholar speak to a larger audience is a badly needed blow for truth —especially in the current context of reckless warmongering on Russia’s and China’s doorstep. The Big Lie must be defeated if a lasting peace is ever to be attained by humanity.
[box type="bio"] Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post's founding editor. [/box]
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Remember: All captions and pullquotes are furnished by the editors, NOT the author(s).
14 comments
It’s about time that someone on the left had the guts to say the truth and confront the pink elephant in the middle of the living room!
Bravo Patrice Greanville!!!
Regardless of Stalin’s crimes, the crimes of the leaders of U.S. and British imperialism have been far worse. In fact, the body count of combined U.S./UK imperial plunder and mass mayhem is far higher, in the hundreds of millions, than that of Stalin, even with the most inflated figures.
I hear people calling the United States fascist, and I say, no, there’s nothing fascist about the United States, it is pure liberal plutocracy and that’s far worse than Hitler ever was! Hitler’s body count was in the millions. The U.S. plutocratic imperialist police state’s total body count has been in the hundreds of millions just since World War Two, and that doesn’t count the U.S. genocide on Native Americans, the genocide and enslavement of Africans, the theft of most of the islands in the Pacific including Hawaii, and the century and a half of colonization of Latin America.
Patrice also points to the real reason for the imperialist demonization of the Soviet Union, socialism! The crimes of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba, not to mention China, are all the same: they adopted some element of the socialist program, and that’s the ultimate sin in the eyes of the billionaires of the U.S. ruling class.
This is easily one of the most formidable editorials I have read in a long time. Kudos to the author for saying what needs to be said. For far too long the West has cynically used Stalin as the perfect bogeyman to inject fear and revulsion and block any consideration of socialism by humanity, or anything imaginable that is not more and more oligarchic capitalism. Again, a wonderful job.
Mu Ta 1 July 17:22
all these years this truth was never verbilised or written…
1 July 13:56
Russians just understand better what is bad and what is good, and accept Russian History as is. And by respect to WWII heroes who lost their lives in attacks with slogan “For Motherland, for Stalin!”, I will never swear on his name.
Not sure why Putin, who is the best buddy of Obama, Hollande and Merkel, is mentioned here next to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro (for some reason, the names of the “leaders of Iran and North Korea” aren’t spelled out. What, couldn’t be bothered to Google them or something?). In what way is Putin the “enemy of the west”? He’s a partner — politically, he does everything they tell him. Sure, the western media pokes fun at him from time to time and throw tantrums about how homophobic he is, but strangely enough, EVERY ACTION that Putin’s ever done, EVERY SPEECH and EVERY PHRASE he’s ever uttered has been anti-Russian, anti-democratic, bigoted and pro-Imperialist. He has made racist comments about Africans, sexist comments about women and marriage, threats to honest Russian journalists and downright insults to countries that used to be allied with Russia. Where was Putin when Bislan was attacked? He ordered that the soldiers should make no attempt to save any children, and then he promptly left Kremlin to watch some kind of sport games (the Olympic games, if I recall correctly), where he ordered himself a nice seat right next to his best friend, George Dubya Bush. Hundreds of children as well as teachers died in that attack, while Putin was having a ball at the ball games. The combined forces of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo couldn’t have captured a more chilling, heartless scene.
Putin is another Tsar Nicholas II. While the western media were slamming Nick, he was wining and dining with his best friend and cousin, the German Kaiser, and carousing with other European and American politicians. I don’t care about the other things you write in your article if your sole purpose was to create a cult of personality for Putin.
You have a reading of history that is peculiar, to say the least. If Putin is “anti-Russian”, then Obama and the neocons and Zionists that dominate US foreign policy, must be all unconditional lovers of Mother Russia. Maybe that’s why they keep sicking their rabid dog, NATO, and the presstitutes, to slander Russia and Putin continually. Come back to Earth when you get a chance. —P. Greanville
Ken • a day ago
This article is pure blithering idiocy.
I am willing to stipulate that some of the Western leaders mentioned (Churchill and FDR) were sociopaths, and none of them are amongst my favorite people, but comparing them (disfavorably) to Stalin is an exercise in blind insanity.
A common thug and criminal before his gig with the Bolsheviks, Stalin was a murderer on a scale never before seen in the world. He deliberately starved to death millions Soviet citizens and created a police state that made NAZI Germany look like a benighted republic.
Perhaps the greatest irony is thinking that these Western “leaders” were somehow opposed to Stalin, when in reality the US and Britain both help prop up and supply the Soviet Union before, during, and after the Second World War.
The Carnegie Foundation, working with American communist (in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations), in helped transfer technology to the Soviet Union, including nuclear weapons technology.
In fact, a lot of the antagonism between the West and the Soviet Union was contrived. The Western “democracies” have been set up by a cabal of communist in the West, run out of the various “Foundations” in order to communize us.
That is the biggest criticism that I can give for the likes of FDR, LBJ, et al. Either they were willing participants in this scheme, or the were at least willing pawns.
But as bad as they were, none of them come close to the pure evil that was Joseph Stalin.
-Ken
LaserGuidedLoogie.com
P. Greanville Ken • 22 minutes ago (Also submitted to Russia Insider.)
KEN DECLARES, “This article is blithering idiocy.” Really? I think he sounds like a blithering idiot, like a classical follower of the most rancid anticommunist sect, the John Birch society, that has long proclaimed that Lenin and the Communists came to power with the generous help of the world’s richest plutocrats, the Rockefellers, Carnegies, etc. He also repeats standard inane anti-Soviet/anti-Stalin propaganda, like the “fact” he starved million on purpose (!), and so on and so forth.
The sheer quantity of lies and malicious slanders heaped on the Soviet Union, and Stalin, the longest occupant of the Kremlin in that embattled nation, is almost incalculable. What’s more, following the old recipe that the bigger the lie the greater the chance it will be believed, a very large number of simply colossal and carefully nurtured misunderstandings, have been circulating for generations, practically unchallenged, at least throughout the West, where US-led and manufactured propaganda reigns supreme. Even when the USSR imploded, in a comparatively bloodless way, unheard of in the annals of system change, the voices who had been warning of inevitable bloodbaths, unspeakable evil, and so on, never stopped. The hatred and vendetta against socialism has never stopped and will never stop as long as the ultra-rich, the global “1%” (which is really more like 0.0002%) dominate world affairs, and count on legions of fools and low-info types to do their bidding. Incidentally, while on this topic, spend a few minutes with the peerless radical educator Michael Parenti, and listen to his eye-opening assessment of “the overthrow of communism.”
https://www.greanvillepost.com/…
The lecture packs a lot of important insights into this complicated phase for humanity—the attempted birth and liquidation by interested parties of a new conception of society.
So, friends at RI and TGP, if this article or my arguments are “blithering idiocy”, allow me to differ. Let me momentarily explain a few things why I think this way, mostly for the benefit of other readers more inclined to see what makes history tick, and how deep and filthy propaganda can get.
But first, you can well spare the insults, pal. You obviously cannot understand history if you fail the most elementary test: to put yourself in the context in which the main actors lived and operated. Your big charge against Stalin’s character (besides making him a monster who killed millions) is petty, and frankly obtuse. You call Stalin “a thug” and “a criminal” (hmm, where have I heard that before..?) What is your charge? That he robbed banks in Czarist times to finance the revolutionary bands he was associated with? What would you rather he do——ask for a loan at a bank? Obviously you think like a liberal, a comfortable liberal, that would like to make revolution against an entrenched and barbarous enemy as if he were attending some tea and biscuits with the Queen.
Second, you again don’t understand that the relations of nations, especially superpowers, are often highly complex and contradictory. nations, as a rule, reflect class interests in their policies toward each other or internal subjects. The leadership is also often compelled to make choices that do not fit the morality of a single, ordinary person. Let us say they use a “supra morality.” That said, world leaders can still make choices that, (a) show the ultimate purpose of their actions as moral or immoral, benign or criminal, and (b) exhibit a methodology usually bounded by their political options.
Leaders of powerful, rich nations, with well established, mature industry, with large, advanced militaries, such as Western leaders, have long enjoyed a plethora of policy options at home and abroad. Conversely, leaders of poor nations, still suffering from the ravages of poverty and underdevelopment, face far fewer options, a fact aggravated when they get entangled in a life and death struggle with richer, more powerful opponents.
From the above we can then deduce that, just as a rich person has many options, and a poorer one just a few, and usually all bad, so do the leaders of nations when setting the course of their nations. In this context, it’s well to recall the British adage, “necessity knows no manners.”
Do the Jean Valjeans of the world steal out of necessity or out of perversity? The answer has to be situational.
Now, back to Stalin and the Western leaders. Here’s a leader with a nation devastated by a ferocious civil war, aggravated by foreign invasion designed to restore the rule of the regime the new government has just deposed, at great cost. The intrigues and sabotage never stop, creating a feeling of anxiety in the highest spheres of the young government, even what some would call paranoia. The world, led by the capitalist powers, continues to try one trick after another to strangle the new nation, to defeat its plans, to make its model of social organization look like a failure, like insanity, something no one in his right mind would choose. The new government sees one policy after another attacked from within and without. There’s blockades, cordon sanitaires, proxy little wars. The pressure rises to outright major war, via the encouraging by the Western powers of an invasion of Russia by the Nazis, who many western leaders saw as the perfect solution to the “Bolshevik problem.” Churchill was well known to endorse this notion. (They would not reconsider that approach until much later, when national—read: ruling class interests—gained the upper hand, and Britain and the US began to see Germany and Herr Hitler as an even more dangerous competitor for world dominance than semi-crippled Russia. The Nazi invasion and war effort would cost the Soviet Union almost 27 million people—the total population at the time of California, Texas and New York. Can anyone in the West, especially the US, obsessed about 9/11 and “retail” acts of terror, begin to understand that magnitude of national tragedy?
In any case, the above is to remind people that the circumstances confronting leaders in Russia and those in the West were sharply different. The West, as mentioned earlier, had ample choices. Still has.) The Russians far fewer, and mostly imperfect. But there’s more to consider to judge leaders actions: what is and was the ultimate purpose of Western leadership? To maintain the existence of a puny power elite at the head of deeply class divided, obscenely unequal societies, and the runaway exploitation of “colonial subjects”, later “underdeveloped societies” in the so-called third and fourth worlds. This situation continues. And what was the purpose and intent of leaders like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh and so on? Precisely the opposite: to liberate humanity from man-made poverty and inequality, from the scourge of constant anxiety of economic security. You can say all you want about how these people botched the job (if so, not surprising, given the huge obstacles put in their path by the capitalist camp), but that was indeed their intent. In the final analysis, that counts. Ask anyone who has been poor, powerless, ruthlessly exploited, and we’ll see what they say.
Well, I’ll stop at this point. Long ago I realized that you can’t put reason or fact where they are not welcome, let alone where elementary sensibility and a political imagination are missing. Others here will think about these things and reach more salutary conclusions. I certainly hope so.—
PATRICE GREANVILLE
I think those making wild claims about Stalin are reading too much Wikipedia — or is it Robert Conquest or Timothy Snyder? Or the “Memorial” organization in Russia?
I’ve seen nothing cited by these folks that makes me think they have gone beyond the “everybody knows” standard of evidence.
Much of this “everybody knows” propaganda can be traced back to the fascist/Nazi Ukrainian diaspora that fled to Canada after the Red Army cleaned Banderaite Nazi clocks in Ukraine on the way to Berlin. Funny how Most Russia Insider readers identify with Novorossiyans and against their Kiev junta Nazi persecutors — except when when it comes to their sources about Stalin and the Soviet Union. For sources about Stalin and the Soviet Union, apparently the Nazi diaspora is to be believed.
But beliefs are not what is relevant. What is relevant is PRIMARY SOURCE EVIDENCE. Most of what has been written about Stalin is unreliable or overt falsification in the service of anti-communist, anti-Soviet and Russophobic propaganda. The level of historical certainty which is justified in any given situation is fundamentally dependent on primary source evidence. Most of the “common knowledge” about Stalin is rotten with unreliable secondary and tertiary source “evidence” and falsifications, many of them intentional lies.
Thus, just to cite one example, the “Holodomor” (intentional famine supposedly perpetrated by Stalin) is a myth perpetrated by Ukrainian anticommunists and eagerly taken up by intellectually dishonest academics such as Timothy Snyder (“Bloodlands”). Because that’s how you get ahead in Ivy League academic institutions.
Intellectually honest historians rely on primary source evidence, and intellectually honest readers of history rely on historians who strictly rely on primary source evidence. Intellectually honest historians concentrating on the Soviet Union or Stalin are rare. Grover Furr, the author of many books and articles, including “Blood Lies” is one such historian.
I have found, however, that the vast majority of those making wild, false claims about Stalin are ignorant about the importance of primary source evidence in historical analysis. Nor are they willing to consider the evidence, even when someone like Furr has done the heavy lifting and untangled the web and thoroughly debunked the falsifications of people like Timothy Snyder. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. These people just continue burbling the propaganda that has been crafted for them by the likes of creepy Ukrainian Nazis, disinformation organizations such as “Memorial”, and Ivy League falsifiers. Even though Furr has done the heavy lifting, it still takes work to follow the evidence, work they are unwilling or unable to do.
The purpose in rectifying the mass of lies about Stalin is not to present him as a flawless hero or whitewash his record; as a master of realpolitik, the man had his weaknesses, and he made errors, some of which cost the USSR dearly. BUT he never deviated from his perceived mission, to advance socialism at any rational cost, and his choices were made in the most excruciatingly difficult contexts. The dissolving of the Stalin-the-demon myth is a big blow against the general propaganda of the capitalists against socialism and the role and impact of the Soviet Union in modern times. Of course, this is why the propagandists are so heavily invested in making sure you believe the lies.
Is not Comrade Stalin comparable to Monsieur de Robespierre ? Both emerged as leaders from a revolution started by others and both thought their Real Politik would cleanse all sins committed in reaching a revolutionary goal, in other words that the end justifies the means. Now one can quibble about the Nietzschean conundrum of Beyond Good and Evil, but if one must have a leader then it may not be a bad idea to have an indigenous woman for once as a leader instead of those ubiquitous white alpha males…
Those who keep thinking that women or blacks make per se better leaders are liberals. And liberals, as bourgeois are wont to do, dream on, never learning from history—a long history of betrayals, the most recent, Obama, and the most immanent, Hillary’s. Not to mention the semi-leaderless “left” movements like Syriza, Podemos, etc., all of which represent the non-left left, as Petras so insightfully warns. (See article elsewhere).
March on Giovanotti with a strident redundant history of temporis actis and follow the leader. More to the point would be to celebrate the extraordinary courage and resilience of the Russian people themselves who fought off the invading Huns with a casualty list numbering in the millions. As for any indigenous women, they are hardly damaged black Harvard law professors nor opportunistic female Harvard law graduates and the betrayals in Greece by Tsipras and in Spain by Carmena cum suis only demonstrate that belief in bourgeois leaders is dangerously retrograde but in this chaotic world which is now slowly trying to disengage itself from all previous held beliefs, they are only a phase that will dissipate soon. The trust in white men and their abstract theories is also waning fast and though it erroneously would seem that the world could be far more rational along their philosophies, one should rather honor strong women such as Rosa Parks who not only broke through the white/black prison but by her deed demolished all respect for white male hierarchies and their ardent adherents. Never before have we witnessed a world that promises huge changes on its own terms with the very violent reactions from established beliefs that will not surrender their preconceptions. These are now wondrous times during which we should not look back and quibble about what was and could have been, but despite the horrors and lapses into retrograde behavior, which accompany basic human
evolutions like during the so-called dark ages, the human animal will re-invent itself, by what route nobody can predict. To think that one can direct these chaotic movements is in itself absurd and in fact elitist.