Stalin

On honesty, Stalin’s killings, and Western intellectuals (anecdote)

1 Comment / History /

Hollywood screenwriter Anna Louise Strong was basically a Communist propagandist. When in 1956 Khrushchev “revealed” Stalin’s crimes, Strong suffered a mental breakdown over the “betrayal.” Later she confessed: “We knew all these things for twenty-five years, and I kept silent for the cause of socialism. What am I supposed to say?” (Which I connect to […]

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Marxists and violence

12 Comments / Politics /

Following up on a series of recent posts on Marxism and its fellow travelers (Engels, Mao, Guzmán, Hobsbawm), a question about whether Marxism’s brutal history is a built-in consequence of its principles or an accidental by-product of well-intentioned theory. So a series of quotations from some principal figures: Marx in 1848: “there is only one

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