The Russian Revolution and the Destruction of (a Large Part) of the World.
I just finished reading Stalin: The Career Of A Fanatic by Essad Bey. A real page turner written while Stalin turned out to be in the early stages of his depredations. The book was written while Stalin's reign as Soviet dictator was still young. Russia and the rest of the world blew many chances to dispatch this man. Basically, his stock in trade was first brutality and then Communism. He frankly had little idea, even after seven years as unquestioned rule, what Communism was about. To be fair, the book states that he was avidly reading to learn about the subject. This was a doctrine that caused a lot of needless human misery.
I came to read this book via a very interesting route. Previously, I read and enjoyed The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss quite a bit. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life was about Lev Nussenbaum, a Jewish author from Baku, Azerbeijan. The Orientalist had a large section on the needless destruction of Azerbaijan by the rampaging, post-Revolution Soviets. The severely damaged what had been an easy-going veritable melting pot of Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish life, where East met West harmoniously.
I conclude that the Russian Revolution, along with Hitler's accession to his role as Chancellor and Fuehrer were among the world's great tragedies. Europe,far from being a birther of culture, was a charnel house. I'm glad that we, as Americans, are here and they are there. Particularly since I am a Jew of largely Middle and Eastern European extraction.
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The discrediting of anti-Stalinist writers such as Essad Bey goes to the very heart of how writers and thinkers are credited or discredited in mass media and the academic world.
Marxism was in many ways a utopian vision of a perfect world. "From each according to the ability, to each according to his needs" sounds like a great idea, and the way the world should be. The problem is that it doesn't represent human psychology. When implementing that was attempted, in Russia of the 1920s and early 1930s and in Cambodia a/k/a Democratic Kampuchea in the late 1970's, the results were beyond tragic. Ditto China's "Great Leap Forward" in the 1960s. In all cases starvation, accompanied by massacres to cajole the unwilling people to do with they are not willing to do, i.e. produce for no reward occurred.
Writers, thinkers and speakers who try to buck this trend are ridiculed at best. This is also true of "climate deniers"; anyone opposing any redistributionist scheme is pilloried as being ignorant, stupid, mean or in today's parlance "not woke." Essad Bey is, posthumously, a victim of this discreditation.
I came to read this book via a very interesting route. Previously, I read and enjoyed The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss quite a bit. The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life was about Lev Nussenbaum, a Jewish author from Baku, Azerbeijan. The Orientalist had a large section on the needless destruction of Azerbaijan by the rampaging, post-Revolution Soviets. The severely damaged what had been an easy-going veritable melting pot of Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish life, where East met West harmoniously.
I conclude that the Russian Revolution, along with Hitler's accession to his role as Chancellor and Fuehrer were among the world's great tragedies. Europe,far from being a birther of culture, was a charnel house. I'm glad that we, as Americans, are here and they are there. Particularly since I am a Jew of largely Middle and Eastern European extraction.
================================================== ======================================
The discrediting of anti-Stalinist writers such as Essad Bey goes to the very heart of how writers and thinkers are credited or discredited in mass media and the academic world.
Marxism was in many ways a utopian vision of a perfect world. "From each according to the ability, to each according to his needs" sounds like a great idea, and the way the world should be. The problem is that it doesn't represent human psychology. When implementing that was attempted, in Russia of the 1920s and early 1930s and in Cambodia a/k/a Democratic Kampuchea in the late 1970's, the results were beyond tragic. Ditto China's "Great Leap Forward" in the 1960s. In all cases starvation, accompanied by massacres to cajole the unwilling people to do with they are not willing to do, i.e. produce for no reward occurred.
Writers, thinkers and speakers who try to buck this trend are ridiculed at best. This is also true of "climate deniers"; anyone opposing any redistributionist scheme is pilloried as being ignorant, stupid, mean or in today's parlance "not woke." Essad Bey is, posthumously, a victim of this discreditation.
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