Great Quotes II: Source and Context are Key
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Guardian comments:
I appreciate there are technical issues at play here (as mentioned in the article), but surely watching real breasts in motion would solve many problems of this type?
Fun and functional.
Indeed.I appreciate there are technical issues at play here (as mentioned in the article), but surely watching real breasts in motion would solve many problems of this type?
Fun and functional.
Borachio
Way past lunacy
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ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
"Hodor, Hodor Hodor!" -Hodor
ReindeerThistle
Zimmerwald Left
"Fishdog food shack!" - Grunt again
Oh no, I shot my eye out!
You guys effing made my Sunday!
Thanks!
"Ever seen a krogan drink so much that they get sick on your floor? I'm here to make sure that dream comes true!""Fishdog food shack!" - Grunt again
"I can stop bullets with my mind! Yeeaahhh!"
"Are you a wizard?"
"...SHARKS!"
"Gimme more..."
"What's that, Grunt?"
"Gimme more, gimme more...Fishdog Food Shack!"
"Who's a space cowboy? Me!"
"I'm a pretty bird." [But not, apparently, a duck.]
"Are you talkin' to me?"
"Yes, I am."
"You must be talkin' to me."
"Duct tape."
"They don't look like birds. They look like cats."
"I am the law!"
"See? Four. Pay up!"
"I'm sad hanar can't wear sweaters."
"What are clowns hiding?"
ArneHD
Just a little bit mad
"Endure. In enduring grow strong."
- Dak'kon from Planescape: Torment
- Dak'kon from Planescape: Torment
Thorvald of Lym
A Little Sketchy
"It's the most snobbish looking creature besides Berlusconi."
- The Internet on the Tibetan sand fox
- The Internet on the Tibetan sand fox
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
"Many soviet institutions work badly. Officials are ignoring practical questions of daily life important to ordinary citizens. Universal, equal, direct, and secret elections in the USSR will be a whip in the hands of the population against officials in the organs of power who work badly."
"They say this is dangerous, that enemy elements such as white guards, kulaks, priests, and so forth can sneak into the higher organs of Soviet power. But what are they actually afraid of? If they are afraid of wolves, don't go into the forest. In the first place, not all former kulaks, white guards, or priests are dangerous to Soviet power. In the second place, if the people do elect dangerous elements, then it would be a sign that our agitation work went badly and we would fully deserve the disgrace."
"They say this is dangerous, that enemy elements such as white guards, kulaks, priests, and so forth can sneak into the higher organs of Soviet power. But what are they actually afraid of? If they are afraid of wolves, don't go into the forest. In the first place, not all former kulaks, white guards, or priests are dangerous to Soviet power. In the second place, if the people do elect dangerous elements, then it would be a sign that our agitation work went badly and we would fully deserve the disgrace."
Spoiler :
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
His change of heart happened later that year, when the national gear-up to the elections prompted a chorus of panic from local and provincial authorities about rebellious groups taking advantage of the political campaigning season to proselytize about rebellion and destroying the socialist state and its symbols (tractor stations, collective farms, cooperatives, etc). Stalin was actually rather incredulous to their clamoring for a while, because the cadres were in danger of losing their positions in the upcoming elections, and the police had a reputation for exaggerating these reports to justify increased budgets. But something changed his mind, perhaps the sheer volume of the reports. Either way, he gave in, and that was the beginning of the purges. The elections that year (1937) were quietly returned to single-candidates vetted by the party.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I think he slowly came around to the idea that he was wrong. I think he genuinely believed what communists had been saying would be the path of the revolution after capitalism. There would be a necessary period of repression of the capitalists and enemies of socialism, but that would be followed by the dramatic expansion of democracy and freedom. This was in 1936, so near the end of the second Five Year Plan. They had constructed a proletarian class and were clearly moving toward a socialist society. I think Stalin honestly believed that it was now safe to have elections, and that the enemies of the state were either incapable or did not desire to organize effectively against them. Sort of like how communists are regarded in western democracies today: we're such a non-force, we aren't even thought of as a threat to the regime even though we denounce it furiously. Yet when I think about, for example, Jack London's book The Iron Heel, I find that western "democracies" are likely to do similar things for similar reasons. Doesn't make it right, of course. But to be honest I have no idea how true the reports in 1936-7 were, either.
The problem with Stalin and his era is that revisionist scholarship on him fights an uphill battle against the early work done on him as well as Western propaganda at the time, even though the work now has much more documentation to work with, and sees a clearer picture than was possible during the Cold War or even during the 1930s and 40s. But the old prejudices remain about who he was, what his motives were, and how he thought. But scholarship like this always moves slowly in the popular sphere. Around 100 years behind, I believe either Plotinus or Dachs said (might have been PKH), is where pop understanding of history, philosophy, and science is.
Borachio
Way past lunacy
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Are you saying he wasn't really the paranoid megalomaniac that his behaviour would suggest?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I think he became more paranoid as the 30s wore on. If not paranoid, deeply and suspicious, and increasingly so close to his death. The purges had a great effect on his views. Before them he certainly knew of the resistance by the periphery to central rule (by which I mean regional and local party cadres), and was suspicious of their independence. This was part of the reason for the specificity of the elections in the new constitution, which was ratified in 1936: he wanted to put pressure on these careerist cadres who behaved like barons, authorities unto themselves. But as I said, he also genuinely believed that the time for the opening of freedoms had come: the new constitution also spelled out what we would call in America "First Amendment" freedoms, and the big gear-up to the elections included campaigns to liberalize publications and ease the tension still surrounding the now-obsolete restrictive laws. I think this is why he didn't believe the incoming reports of arrests for a while, and then quietly swept the shutdown of the free elections under the rug (although it did get a front-page Pravda treatment, but only long after the decision had taken place, and well into the purges by that point). He was certainly suspicious enough in the first year to place very strict upper limits upon arrests per region, and when pressed for more room on the subject, he widened the categories of potential targets, but lowered the limit still further, before finally giving in and releasing the limits altogether. But when he did this, he also sent the NKVD after the regional cadres, too, sensing that they were still behind all these exaggerated reports. He also resisted the imposition of troikas for the first year, telling the NKVD to deal with things by purely normal and legal means. Although I think it should be mentioned that while the NKVD was authorized to use lethal force on certain categories, like white guards and kulaks, the actual "purges" were vetting trials of Party members to determine their communist credentials, in order to weed out the careerists who had joined in order to advance themselves, and not to advance communism. It's almost a pity that the two coincided, since discreditation in a purge also meant it became easier to be slandered as one of the groups which the NKVD had authorization to kill or imprison. Many purges had happened before, it's a regular party practice, and no one ever died in them. And finally, it should be mentioned that while the conflict between the periphery and center was played out in the arena of "advancing/resisting communism," it was also very much part of Stalin's desire to centralize power and keep the independent-minded regionals subordinate to Moscow, and him. Even the part about having to consult the center before dispatching NKVD to a province, or before a list of arrested could be tried or executed, he wanted them to always know that the center, and he, was in charge, and not them. This is also an understandable concern of his, since during the Civil War the Cheka had to be disbanded and reformed for doing precisely that: it behaved completely independent of the Center, ignored orders even from Lenin, and generally did whatever it wanted and arrested whomever it wanted. So then there's that. Maybe he thought he was the only one who could genuinely keep ahold of things? It would fit in with his personality as a micromanaging leader, what Jim Collins would call a Level 4 Leader.
So yeah, I think that once he realized the gravity of the situation, he let the dogs loose, and his willingness to do so certainly does say something about his character, but I don't think it was some mass-coordinated event like Oprichina to spread general terror throughout the land. A lot of bad things had to coincide in order to create what we call The Great Terror, and it wasn't all Stalin's insane bloodlust.
But he still doesn't get off the hook with me for trying and executing the Old Bolsheviks. It's the greatest of crimes, in my opinion, to betray one's friends and comrades.
EDIT: Don't link me to Wikipedia like I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm doing my Masters on this sort of crap. I didn't just mine those quotes from some collection of pithy pro-Stalin sayings, they came out of a book I'm using for my research.
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