This is part of my so-called "Scripted Review" series, in which I make a Youtube video based on an old blogpost. For more information on what this is and why I'm doing it, see HERE:
In this case, the old blog post is here: https://joelswagman.blogspot.com/2013/12/young-stalin-by-simon-sebag-montefiore.html
Links to stuff mentioned:
Related Playlists:
Scripted Reviews Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x5BKcEIufNKlS58JHU_glyL&si=Pje0KQqIqOgWGGUI
Scripted Book Reviews Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x53WSp_2mGcDRHBR7ubQkDa&si=T_0QPBDOZqhqN-oa
History Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x52uI39vSXVrJvUFjdN9QkL&si=IkwsRH5HTXptL1kk
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3 comments:
Don't have anything meaningful to say, other than how my thoughts just went from "true Marxist believer or not again" => "perhaps Marxism made contextual sense back then" => "ultimately none of this matters since Marxism is too vague to mean anything" => "same can be said about other system of thoughts" => "brutes don't care much about what work for everybody, they just do what they like and what work for them" => "if you already have to criticize the rights and wrongs of something, say a philosophical system or religious/cultural doctrine, then it means you are stuck with it rather than your criticisms matter or mean anything at all" <=> "people who find it unreasonable don't criticize it, they may just ignore or oblivious to it" => "whatever led to Stalin is the same as what led to mob-lynching in any place at all: it's just a bunch of brutes who think they are right (and never wrong) and force their way through it".
Which is to say I suspect Stalin just happens to be one of those people who think they are good human beings - and Marxism was just something that made sense to him (in the same way people called themselves fans of Japanese culture despite having watched only several shounen anime). People don't tend to worry about what they do when they are always and already right.
I could link (stretch) this to how anime communities are so toxic. But I had better digress here 🌏.
The point of the comment is to say... perhaps Soviet stuff like this one has never deserved being studied, in the first place to begin with. Western scholars love to debate questions about Soviet Marxism and whether somebody happens to be true to the revolutionary principles, as well as many other things... which may just happen to be off the mark, if the actors themselves (Lenin, Stalin, etc.) may not even see the relevance or meaningfulness of those questions.
It's crass or anti-intellectual when somebody only has the answer of the kind "they did it because they were stupid, backward, hopeless". But sometimes, things are just not deeper than what they are. I think maybe Western scholars just had expectations for the Soviet Union to have something... more than the negative images their own countries happen to have of it. Like a tendency, a reaction against the bigoted, superficial view of their own countries. They study these things because they want to show to people or themselves that there's more to the other side. And it's true that there are nuances, but then again some of those nuances may not even matter in the big picture. Reality doesn't care about the brilliance of humanities scholars, it just is.
This reminds me of when I was trying to find Hitler's biographies. Once I got to read those books (none of which I have finished more than 2-3 chapters), it slowly seeped to me that there's nothing particularly special about the life of the guy, other than the somewhat popular tales about him (failing art school and what else). If it wasn't Hitler it could be very well some other German.
Huge digression maybe, but perhaps still relevant as it may involve commie-bashing (or any culture that loves to tout single-mindedly anything at all): I was raised being told constantly about the importance and values of reading books. "Oh my god! Why do children these days never read at all?!", "You are supposed to cultivate some reading hobby, hence today we (the school) are providing you plenty of trashes-nobody-reads on this table". Well, Lenin himself even said "Study, study more, study endlessly so I can have some drones to build socialism you stoopid mtherfckers!". Under such a culture, I had the impression that books were supposed to always be filled with marveling insights. Thus makes a bad non-fiction book seems to be an oxymoron. I had never thought then that there was such a thing as a book whose insights are meaningless and may not even matter. Couldn't have fathomed anything remote to the fact that I of these days find more values out of reading exclusively hntai comics more so than any of the typical books at all. If anything, (these days) having to buy a book to study for anything (instead of reading online materials or even pirate online textbooks) tends to be a red flag that you are not gonna be able to study it well.
Thanks for reading my yap, whoever did that just wasted maybe 2 minutes of their life!
Seem like I'm just writing meaninglessly about meaninglessness, but I also felt like groaning about mob culture (something I think maybe Stalin belong to). Although, linking him to that could be a stretch.
Still, always lovely to see backward people act like they got the final answer, and try to force their way through with their own crudeness, to make everybody else do it and force people to recognize that they are right. All the meanwhile the issues are resolved by the sheer act of dismissing.
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