I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
You are surely well aware of the nefarious propaganda the west did against Stalin.
Imagine it was true and you have the perfect depiction on how such corruption would potentially look like.
Another simple example? Stalin could have promised an administraive role to a person in exchange for sexual favors.
I’m not saying he did, but, under Communism, or rather under the trasition toward communism, that would have been a possible abuse of [not power].
Nice thought experiment, but in most cases we have the declassified documents from the CIA and other such organizations who originated the accusations showing that in their internal communications and records that were not public facing that they knowingly and intentionally lied to the public as part of their campaign of information warfare.
The inherent problem is that skepticism is an inexhaustible well. If the only principle guiding your analysis is skepticism, you will inevitably end up stuck in a perpetual and ultimately unproductive cycle doing little more than tilting at windmills.
This is why theory is important to study. You need to have a framework for understanding the world to build off of if you want to have any analysis that’s more insightful than “what if we imagine that he had bad thoughts? Pretty scary, huh?”
What if we imagine a purple elephant? What if we imagine flying sharks? Makes you think, doesn’t it??
I’m not using speculation reaching for impossible scenarios.
I’m questioning the degree of freedom that anybody could have taken advantage of if they wanted to. The fact that this happened or not is irrelevant.
Given that, I also make another separate point about how greed can have many faces, even outside Capitalism.
Combining those two I question the amount of self reflection Stalin subjected himself and his role to through his life.
Propaganda isn’t bounded by material reality, though, surely you can see how simply saying something is true doesn’t mean it is. All of these ideas of what could have happened ignore the mechanical foundations of democracy and economic planning. Sure, Stalin could have sexually assaulted someone, but to our knowledge he didn’t, and moreover such a reason does not imply there is a desire for power in Socialist systems to get away with sexual assault. You’re making a confused argument here.
I used propaganda as an easy, inaccurate answer to your request for a potential scenario.
Of couse the obvious limits of propaganta (primarily, being lies) is not what I was focusing on.
If we agree Stalin could have sexually assaulted someone and get away with it, we cycle back to the messianic property of Stalin to be better than most other people in a similar position through history. Or to not be affected by dementia, to not grow complacent, to not hold grudges, to be permanently unbiased and pure.
We don’t, actually. Your conclusion doesn’t follow. Stalin was not a perfect and untainted figure. The point is that Socialism does not mechanically support corruption in the same way Capitalism does out of necessity, and you seem to be ignoring that at every turn.
But he never stepped down or reformed the system to account for these issues. Hence my opinion of him.