[lit-ideas] Re: Barnett's Blueprint for Action
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:50:44 -0400
Not true, or not a blanket truth. Not everybody here loves Bush either,
but a lot do, and when there's a war, when you're attacked, you rally round
your leader. Most people had no idea what was going on politically.
Stalin sent people to the Gulags and they would write him pleading letters
thinking, convinced, that if Stalin knew their plight he would save them.
People literally were trampled to death there were so many of them in Red
Square after Stalin died, just to see the body. The country was in
mourning. That's why it was such a big deal when Khrushev began to
denounce Stalin. Politicians, men, in his audience literally cried. The
country was such a cult of personality.
My parents were rabidly anti-Communist, but that's because my grandfather
was in the White Army and, of course, they lost. They were quite
persecuted by the Reds. My family actually escaped shipment to a
concentration camp for execution by literally escaping I believe on the eve
of their being taken away after the war (they wound up in South American
smack into the middle of a revolution). It's like out of a novel. I keep
telling my mother to get a ghost writer and write it up, but she won't do
it. I think the train they were told not to take exploded. My father was
also swept up by the Nazis (he was too young to be in the army) and put
into a DP camp. To the day he died my father hated the Communists so much
that he would never even vote Democrat. Anyway, the general population
was pretty apolitical, like most people. They didn't know what was going
on, same as here. The propaganda was effective, and they fought for their
country. And yes, the paranoiac Stalin did execute most of his generals,
and he deliberately kept the people off balance. He, Stalin, then
proceeded to botch management of the war big time. It's one of the reasons
it cost so many lives, because of no leadership, and because the Germans
were a fighting machine, you have to hand that to them. Zhukov was about
the only general left and he pulled it out. Coercion was not a driving
force behind motivation even if your friends remembered it that way.
> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 9/11/2006 12:12:57 AM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Barnett's Blueprint for Action
>
> >>The Russians fought for their country. They did it
> willingly. They, stupidly, loved Stalin and loved their
> homeland, like anyone.
>
>
> I'm telling you what the Russians told me. They were there.
> Nobody loved Stalin. Josef Vassarionovich was a likely to
> kill them as the Nazis were; after all, the inane Georgian
> had already executed most of the Russians' best officers.
> After the '37 purges, Stalin was widely if secretly loathed.
> Stalin knew this, so all the wartime propaganda was about
> the motherland.
>
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