History, politics have given Stalin a bad rap
From The Left
by Joseph Waldman
12 December 2001
It's that time of the year again, the time for us all to take a step back and reflect for a few days on the commemoration of the birth of one of the greatest men of any age, by whose words and actions the world was undeniably saved from damnation, and who, despite crucifixion at the hands of his enemies, still endeavoring to stifle his legacy, continues to be an inspiration to the great common masses the world over.
No, not that one. Not Jesus O'Nazareth. A good person in his time, perhaps, but just one of a number of itinerant desert prophets crowding Roman Judea, with a vague and vapid message of pseudoredemption and a disturbing sense of self-glorification. These do not a savior make. Nor do two thousand years of reaction and repression--good artwork and a geopolitically crucial sense of missionaryism, perhaps, but still an incredible amount of time wasted. There being no gods, there is no such thing as a heaven-sent savior. But human beings can make their own saviors; we all can become gods, and we all can be heroes, if just for one day.
Joseph Stalin is, for me, one of those heroes. I ought to emphasize once again that I am not a Communist. I am a Democrat, and an American, and incalculably proud of both.
I also am a historian, and I have to say with all due respect that historiography in America is more incestuous than the selection process for Welch Hall. If you were to go solely by the publications readily available in the United States, you would believe that Stalin was a beastly, corrupt, horribly destructive dictator; that his actions did absolutely no good for anyone in Russia or the world; and that anyway he was so mediocre that he merits barely a passing mention in general world histories.
Lies, damned lies, and illogic. Not even any statistics--all pure slander and destructive falsehoods. The propagation of these myths has beclouded millions of minds about what actually happened--and has done so in a way that seems to reflect the dictatorial mind control so many of Stalin's critics accuse him of.
If you know anything about Stalin, it probably was what your eleventh-grade history teacher told you when he made you read Orwell's Animal Farm, a piece of fiction--Orwell even called it a "fairy story"--that somehow has made its way into the official historical record. That, if nothing else, should show how weak in substance the anti-Stalin brigades are.
Paradoxically, those brigades include a great number of leftists. It is one thing for there to be factional fights within a particular political wing, but more often than not these people are appallingly ill-informed. They think that Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung are sexy because they've got their pictures on T-shirts and posters, and because they have that vaguely exotic mystique.
As if Stalin wasn't just as mysterious and sexy in his day. In fact, and this is the pseudoleftists' and others' greatest oversight, Stalin was the originator of all the "third-world liberation" ideologies that have been so important over the last half century or so. While in 1903 Lenin and Trotsky and all the others playing at being tormented coffeehouse-types were gathering around their studio flats in Petersburg and trying to sound lofty, Stalin--the bearded romantic revolutionary and the only one among this early group of Russian revolutionaries who came from an authentically "proletarian" background--was out in the farthest reaches of the Russian empire, slowly but surely working out the admixture of Marxism and national-minorities theory that would be so crucial to the century ahead.
Yes, the Soviet government under Stalin's leadership killed people. But here's the historical catch: every Russian leader, from the earliest tsars through Boris Yeltsin, killed people. It's an unfortunate but deeply ingrained part of the Russian governmental mindset: swift, heavy-handed, and far-reaching punishment. Is this necessarily good? No. But shouldn't one allow leeway for a nation's cultural peculiarities, and not single out any one Russian leader? Most emphatically, yes.
And it is a crime against humanity and history for anyone to trumpet the tired and completely absurd notion that Hitler and Stalin were somehow ideological twins. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler's National Socialism was pure negativism--a sadomasochistic demonism that never claimed to desire anything but death and destruction for the world. Stalin's theory and practice were based around a peaceful, historically necessary and advancing social policy.
The great question of the twentieth century was whether the world would choose Stalinism or Hitlerism. There are times when I wonder if perhaps it chose the latter.
But then I look back at the history of the Second World War--the Russian Great Patriotic War--and then I realize that, no matter how events may have turned out since then, Stalin's victory over Nazism was the greatest, noblest, most crucial act in all human history. Forget everything you've heard about how Britain under Churchill (now, there's a twin for Hitler) was the bravest nation of all, or the Speilberg-Bruckheimer falsifications about how the American forces--led of course by Tom Hanks and Ben Affleck--singlehandedly won the war.
Thirty million Russians died fighting the Nazis. And Joseph Stalin himself--battered and bruised by the rigors of the war and the about-face inflicted on him by the United States and Britain, his former allies--died not many years after that.
Stalin's birthday is Dec. 21, four days before the charlatanical excuse for junk sales and church revenues. Let's take some time this year to better reflect on just who we are and to whom the world owes greater thanks. In the practical, grand scheme of world history, Jesus was a nobody. But Joseph Stalin, without any doubt, saved the world.
Merry Waldmas to all, and to all a good night.