Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well. |
I’m scheduled to do a podcast interview of a new book author who did a translation of an Italian author’s scholarly text on Stalin which in itself causes controversy since even mentioning “Uncle Joe” makes some people “reach for their pistols”.
The primary issues arise on this book because there remains a normative anti-Stalin(ist) position in political discourse, especially after the Khrushchev Secret Speech of 1956 denouncing Stalin. For various leftists there are so many triggering responses, especially for those who may subscribe to cults of personality that reflect the ideological positions of Leon Trotsky among others. Sadly, there are left and right versions of anti-communism that make the ideological discourse more troubled.
In the example below an opinion writer for The Seattle Times got fired because he made a comparison of Lenin to Hitler, despite the private land on which the statue sat. I promise to do a thorough book review for the AntiCapitalist Chat/MeetUp group, but thought I’d mention it in the US context of artistic censorship and the hard-learned experience of Twitter/X argumentation.
The speech, replete with lengthy quotations from correspondence and memoranda, gave details about the unwarranted arrest and execution of high-ranking loyal party members during the Terror of the late 1930s; the unpreparedness of the country at the time of the Nazi invasion in June 1941; numerous wartime blunders; the deportation of various nationalities in 1943 and 1944 and the banishing of Tito’s Yugoslavia from the Soviet bloc after the war. Absolving the party itself of these grave actions, Khrushchev attributed them to the “cult of personality” that Stalin allegedly encouraged and his “violations of socialist legality,” code words for dictatorship and terror. Noticeably absent from this indictment were the collectivization drive that was accompanied by massive state violence and famine, the repression of intellectuals, and any implication that other party leaders — himself included — shared responsibility for the crimes that Khrushchev mentioned.
The speech sent shock waves throughout the Communist world and caused many western Communists to abandon the movement. In Tbilisi, students demonstrated against the removal of a monument to Stalin, Georgia’s native son. In Poland, demonstrations by workers in Poznan over declining wages and deep divisions between recalcitrant Stalinists and anti-Stalinists within the Polish Workers’ Party threatened to engulf the country in crisis, and in Hungary mass demonstrations led to a popular uprising in October 1956. The prime minister, Imre Nagy, sought to regain control through concessions that included abolishing the one-party system and freeing from prison the virulently anticommunist Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, but as the insurgency expanded, the Soviet Presidium decided to send in troops. The Hungarian uprising, which occurred simultaneously with the Anglo-French intervention against Egypt over its claims to the Suez Canal, was the most serious crisis in the Soviet bloc until the Prague Spring of 1968. It temporarily weakened Khrushchev in his struggle against the Stalinist stalwarts in the Presidium who conspired, but failed, to oust him in June 1957.
soviethistory.msu.edu/...
David J. Volodsko got fired from the newspaper because he didn’t truly understand the history of that statue or how to use Twitter/X, but also chose to make a problematic comparison on Twitter, no less. Who’s less evil, Lenin or Hitler? What would Mike Godwin do?
The Seattle Times has fired recently-hired columnist David Volodzko after he wrote one piece for the paper. Volodzko was a member of the Times' editorial board -- briefly -- and was let go on Thursday, a day after he tried to "well, actually" Adolf Hitler's track record of evil.
The paper's newest scribe wrote a column about the famous statue of Vladimir Lenin in Seattle and why it should be removed (it's on private property, FYI). After the column was published, he took to Twitter and claimed Hitler was less-evil than Lenin because, according to Volodzko,
Hitler only targeted people he believed were harmful to society, while Lenin even targeted people he believed were not.
What's funny is that the column itself is banal; it's basically: "a statue of Lenin just doesn't feel right" — which you could say about a lot of historical figures. That Volodzko feels compelled to tweet himself into a "Hitler >>> Lenin" debate is a major red flag
Some advice for all of our readers who plan to engage polite society, Rule No. 1: Never defend Hitler or attempt to minimize his level of evil.
www.thebiglead.com/...
Alt-right media have held up the example of the Fremont Lenin statue to protest the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials in the US.[25] On August 16, 2017, in the wake of the Charlottesville, Virginia Unite the Right rally, pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec led a gathering of several protesters at the statue to demand its removal.[25] The same day, Mayor Ed Murray said his office contacted Lake View Cemetery to "express our concerns" about the United Confederate Veterans Memorial there, and ask for its removal.[26] On August 17, Murray added that he believed the Lenin statue should go as well, because we should "not idolize figures who have committed violent atrocities and sought to divide us", though he was aware the Lenin statue was also on private property.[27] In the following days, a city staffer told The Washington Post off the record that the Seattle City Council was considering debating a symbolic resolution on removing the Lenin statue and the Confederate memorial, though the city government has no power to remove either against the wishes of the owners, since neither monument, nor the properties they are on, are city-owned.[28] In an article discussing Confederate monuments in USA Today, Allen Guelzo said that there should be a movement of protesters asking that the statue be removed, as Lenin's "murderous ideas and deeds dwarf any of [the] sins" of Robert E. Lee.[29]
en.wikipedia.org/...
Some Western communists deny that Joseph Stalin was the murderous dictator he is extensively documented[2] as having been.
Their motivation stems from standard "my enemy's enemy" logic, combined with the idea that The Revolution required and requires a strong leader, and Stalin fits that bill. Therefore, his flaws must be papered over, for the good of all.
Stalinists, and similarly authoritarian communists, are often referred to with the derogatory epithet tankies.[3]
Stalin apologists call people who disagree with them "revisionist" — particularly their mortal enemies, the Trots — while calling themselves "anti-revisionist", much like how TERFs call themselves (and insist on being called) "gender critical", or how white supremacists call themselves "race realists". If talking about non-communists, Stalin apologists will often use the curious phrase "right-wing liberal".[note 1]
In Russia, a worryingly large percentage of the modern-day population think highly of Stalin (although a rather lesser proportion would want to live in a country actually ruled by Stalin).[5] He is also quite popular in his native Georgia. This is best understood as a form of nationalism distinct from Western communist apologism, or perhaps a legacy of his unfathomably massive personality cult rivaling that that of Adolf Hitler's.
rationalwiki.org/...
“Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.” -Michael Parenti
In the 90s an article written by political scientist Michael Parenti was circulated. This article was an attempt to show that that the non-Stalinist left (Anarchists, Trotskyists, and pretty much any leftist critical of the Soviet Union) were essentially for a left wing version of anti-communism. This anti-communism was like right wing anti-communism in that it supposedly opposed the communist project and sought to prevent it from being realized. Unlike right wing anti-communism so called “Left Anti-Communism” cloaked its opposition to communism in a leftist ideological veil. An example of this Michael Parenti gives is professor Noam Chomsky who despite giving very open and cutting critiques of US empire and propaganda, none the less says that the fall of the Soviet Union was actually “the best thing that ever could have happened for socialism”. In his essay “The Soviet Union vs Socialism” Chomsky argues that the Soviet Union was an authoritarian regime that used the word “socialism” and the imagery associated with it to garner support from socialists and revolutionaries and thus to hide the fact that in actuality (according to Chomsky) it was really a repressive capitalist state that exploited workers through wage labor in place of private capitalists. Anarchists, since the Bolsheviks consolidated their rule after the Russian Revolution, have argued that the state socialist regime in Russia lacked the direct control of society by freely associated self-managing producers required for genuine socialism. Parenti attacks this view as left anti-communist as well.
[...]
Michael Parenti argues that opponents of state socialism are really just opponents of communism. I counter argue that proponents of state socialism are proponents of an anti-communist ideology which dolls itself up in red flags and socialist realist art. State socialism was not communism, or socialism put into action. It was counter-revolution that used words like socialism, Marxism, Leninism, communism, and anti-imperialism to ideologically mask societies that differed from the west only in their political form. “Marxism-Leninism”, the ideology of state socialism, is the ideology of developing state capitalist societies. Like all other capitalist societies their rulers have a fundamental interest in masking their rule and repressing efforts at creating a free society which meets human needs. G.P. Maximoff called this “power communism”. Today’s state socialists, when they complain about “left anti-communism” are really just pushing an anti-communist agenda, attacking the actual communist project in the favor of a red liberalism. Will the real communists please stand up!?
libcom.org/...
Godwin's law, short for Godwin's law (or rule) of Nazi analogies,[1] is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.[2]
Promulgated by the American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990,[1] Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions.[3] He stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics.[1] Later it was applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric[4][5] where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs.
In 2012, Godwin's law became an entry in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.[6] In 2021, Harvard researchers published an article showing the phenomenon does not occur with statistically meaningful frequency in Reddit discussions.[7][8]
There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself)[2] than others. For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that, when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress.[9] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law.[10]
Godwin's law itself can be applied mistakenly or abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, when fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparison made by the argument is appropriate.[11] Godwin himself has also criticized the overapplication of the law, claiming that it does not articulate a fallacy, but rather is intended to reduce the frequency of inappropriate and hyperbolic comparisons. Godwin wrote that "Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust."[12]
Vladimir Lenin was politically savvy, but a complete amateur in the kitchen. In her memoirs, his wife and comrade-in-arms Nadezhda Krupskaya almost never described family meals as "lunch" or "dinner," but usually used the Russian pitaniye that is more commonly associated with hospital food and diets, or even kormezhka, which is usually used when speaking about pets.
"Lenin not only didn't notice what he ate, but even when he was asked directly whether he liked something, he just couldn't give an intelligible answer," writes Russian culinary historian Vilyam Pokhlebkin in his article "What Did Lenin Eat?"
Lenin's contemporaries noted that his only culinary passion was a mug of good beer. The great Bolshevik was born and raised on the Volga where they still brew Zhigulyovskoe beer, which is famous throughout Russia, and he spent many years in exile in Germany, as well as spells in Britain and Switzerland, so he knew a good beer.
www.rbth.com/...
It’s a Saturday morning in autumn when I sit down with the Soviet Book of Tasty and Healthy Food to decide what dishes to make for a feast that evening. Based on the day and the season, the iconic cookbook makes several suggestions for a three-course dinner. I do as it advises and choose a menu composed of both meat and vegetable dishes. It’s also crucial, I note, for the menu to have variety: “Oftentimes, this is overlooked. Not all housewives take the time and effort to make a plan for food preparation in advance. Mostly they only have around ten or 12 dishes that they alternate throughout the years, and the family receives monotonous meals.”
Keen to excel in my role as a good Soviet housewife, I take on board both pieces of counsel. I settle on a herring salad and mushrooms in sour cream to start with, followed by pumpkin soup and kharcho, a Georgian broth flavoured with beef and sour plums. For our main course I opt for the fried duck with apples and a Ukranian dish, holubtsi, vegetable-stuffed cabbage leaves. We’ll end on a sweet note: apple kissel (think puree), sour cream mousse and syrniki, or curd fritters. Each dish will chased by shots of vodka and washed down with Soviet champagne, a somewhat embroidered term for sparkling wine from the Black Sea region.
As a vegetarian, I enlist the help of two comrades for the meat-based dishes. We travel to five different supermarkets, including a specialist Russian one, in search of ingredients. It takes us a few hours to gather the necessary constituents, a fairly easy task given we’re in London. As I nose through the aisles packed with food, I consider how this would not have been the case when the book was first published in 1939 or even in the decades that followed.
www.new-east-archive.org/...
www.youtube.com/...