No madness, only method. And in a way, that's far more scary and bodes ill for the creation of future Stalins.
Understanding Stalin: Russian archives reveal that he was no madman, but a very smart and implacably rational ideologue.
In the contemporary West, we often assume that perpetrators of mass violence must be insane or irrational, but as Kotkin tells the story, Stalin was neither. And in its way, the idea of Stalin as a rational and extremely intelligent man, bolstered by an ideology sufficiently powerful to justify the deaths of many millions of people, is even more terrifying. It means we might want to take more seriously the pronouncements of the Russian politicians who have lately argued for the use of nuclear weapons against the Baltic states, or of the ISIS leaders who call for the deaths of all Christians and Jews. Just because their language sounds strange to us doesn’t mean that they, and those who follow them, don’t find it compelling, or that they won’t pursue their logic to its ultimate conclusion.
4 comments:
A vast difference between madness and pure deliberate evil ...
Neither Stalin nor Hitler were classically 'mad' as each knew exactl what they were doing and planned to do it.
We are fortunate that the deliberately evil we see today are somewhat lesser or have fewer oppoutunities.
Eternal vigilance!
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He thought he had a rational plan for gaining and holding power. He took control of the Soviet state in 1922, and retained that control until his death in 1953.
I'd say his plan worked, therefore its implementation was probably a rational decision.
Madmen might be born to power, but they rarely attain it through their own efforts.
Being "rational" and rationalizing are not the same thing. Using Stalin and rational in the same sentence is like using Piers Morgan and rational in the same sentence.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by the word "insane". Did Stalin follow the norms? No. That sounds like insane to me. Not all manifestations of insanity look like people singing "la-la" and drooling and crapping their pants.
There are people in Washington DC like this too. In fact there are many who would kill those who oppose them, but few who have the means to accomplish mass murder.
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