Part II
1. Read Jams' next installment of the Red Cushing story, with Red's role in the death of Stalin's son! Part I, part II. (And there's more to come, check here regularly.)
2. I think I wrote my Solzhenitsyn post too hastily. Noga's comments and Sultan Knish's excellent post are spot on. You don't have to be a Stalinist or apologist for Stalinism to attack Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. But there is a certain relish with which apologists for Stalinism seize on Solzhenitsyn's flaws, as if that validates the system he criticised - even if he could have criticised it more sharply!
I have to say too that there is one thing I agree with in the evil Lenny's post: "Yet, those leftists who had been acquainted with the texts circulated by David Rousset, Ante Ciliga and Victor Serge, all from the anti-Stalinist left, could hardly pretend to be shocked by revelations of the barbarism of Stalinism." People like Rousset, Ciliga and Serge - and CLR James, Boris Souvarine, Voline and countless others - had been telling the truth about the gulag for years, but their criticisms did not fit so well into the conservative worldview as Solzhenitsyn's would.
3. This is another recommendation for Sultan Knish's piece on Gandhi and non-violence, as I think it was a little buried in the post I mentioned it in, and it's really worth a read.
2. I think I wrote my Solzhenitsyn post too hastily. Noga's comments and Sultan Knish's excellent post are spot on. You don't have to be a Stalinist or apologist for Stalinism to attack Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. But there is a certain relish with which apologists for Stalinism seize on Solzhenitsyn's flaws, as if that validates the system he criticised - even if he could have criticised it more sharply!
I have to say too that there is one thing I agree with in the evil Lenny's post: "Yet, those leftists who had been acquainted with the texts circulated by David Rousset, Ante Ciliga and Victor Serge, all from the anti-Stalinist left, could hardly pretend to be shocked by revelations of the barbarism of Stalinism." People like Rousset, Ciliga and Serge - and CLR James, Boris Souvarine, Voline and countless others - had been telling the truth about the gulag for years, but their criticisms did not fit so well into the conservative worldview as Solzhenitsyn's would.
3. This is another recommendation for Sultan Knish's piece on Gandhi and non-violence, as I think it was a little buried in the post I mentioned it in, and it's really worth a read.
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