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1aa33a8
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Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.
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totalitarianism
stalinism
society
communism
evil
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Slavoj Žižek |
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56088a6
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"I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst--those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though...."
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religion
stalinism
nationalism
skepticism
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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6408119
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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest--fractionally more brave, one might say--about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.
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prejudice
racism
history
bravery
honesty
accuracy
belarus
berlin-wall
operation-reinhard
polish-jews
slavic-peoples
timothy-d-snyder
yale-university
national-socialism
massacre
historians
ukraine
poland
holocaust
nazism
stalinism
antisemitism
jews
russia
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Christopher Hitchens |
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e24bd1c
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It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms--like 'Stalinism,' say--just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.
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history
religion
cults-of-personality
death-of-osama-bin-laden
napoleon
adolf-hitler
theocracy
osama-bin-laden
september-11-attacks
jihad
terrorism
stalinism
liberty
islam
islamism
evil
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Christopher Hitchens |
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4dcb552
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So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being 'nationalized,' had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad. (Post-Kuwait inspections by the United Nations had uncovered a huge nuclear-reactor site that had not even been known about by the international community.) I had seen with my own eyes the evidence of a serious breach of the Genocide Convention on Iraqi soil, and I had also seen with my own eyes the evidence that it had been carried out in part with the use of weapons of mass destruction. I was, if you like, the prisoner of this knowledge. I certainly did not have the option of un-knowing it.
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ba-athist-iraq
crime-family
genocide-convention
nationalisation
nuclear-reactor-technology
privatisation
wmd
national-socialism
militarism
psychopaths
serial-killers
genocide
oil
bill-clinton
ba-ath-party
invasion-of-kuwait
iraq
kuwait
united-nations
iraq-war
stalinism
fascism
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Christopher Hitchens |
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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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d3240bd
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"In
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george-orwell
spain
spanish-civil-war
stalinism
soviet-union
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Christopher Hitchens |