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157aeaa
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"Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve." --
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socialism
equality
inquisition
stalin
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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8044e49
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In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.
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humanity
love
moral-meaning
followers
mass-murder
impotence
stalin
hitler
power
sin
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Timothy B. Tyson |
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d9ccefd
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And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.
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revenge
history
czechoslovakia
david-szmulevski
east-germany
hungary
jewish-diaspora
red-army
secret-police
nazis
germans
poland
stalin
camus
eastern-europe
israel
jews
ideology
communism
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Christopher Hitchens |
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7af4135
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Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.
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purge
stalin
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Martha Gellhorn |
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702b062
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What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so . I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.
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war
revenge
genocide
eastern-european
ernest-gellner
germans
poland
stalin
holocaust
nazism
stalinism
world-war-ii
ethnic-cleansing
jews
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Christopher Hitchens |
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afeb739
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"Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow," began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. "Wants to see how they're getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. 'Tell me, comrade,' he asks one farmer. 'How did the potatoes do this year?' 'Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.' 'But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.' 'Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin."
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stalin
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David Benioff |
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273002a
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But the powerful and respected party right, particularly Stalin, went so far in the direction of moderation as to support a merger of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks - the proposal of Irakli Tsereteli, the outstanding Menshevik intellect and orator, recently returned from Siberian exile and now in charge of the Petrograd Soviet.
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tsereteli
stalin
russia
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China Miéville |
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8a35bcc
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...The strange thing, you know, is that Stalin openly admired Ivan the Terrible. Two leaders who were willing to crush and kill their own people-to do anything necessary- in order to consolidate their power...Can you imagine a world in which Stalin could live for five hundred years...or perhaps forever?
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ivan-the-terrible
vlad-the-impaler
political-power
stalin
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Elizabeth Kostova |