“At the risk of striking a hyperbolic note, I think American liberals evince a similar psychopathology, namely, the desire to seek self-validation through coercing others to do as they (the liberals) think they should do. ”

I agree. Sometimes someone comes along and argues that the problem that keeps the left / pc program from working is that it is based on lies. The goal is to force everyone to believe in the lies but since they are lies… the end results can not come about. 2 + 2 still equals 4.

(all times EDT)

7-8 pm Sixty Minutes – interviews with Romney and Ryan

9-10 pm Criminal Minds

Indeed. That is what liberal political correctness is all about. It’s why the liberals who enforce political correctness are so arbitrary and dishonest and cruel in their accusations. They don’t really care if people see that their claimed justifications are BS, because their purpose is not to make the world a kinder, more just place, it is to increase their power. By destroying even the most innocent, they demonstrate their power and thus terrorize the populace.

Which was most important to the perpetrators, the terror or the supposed goals behind the terror? I do not know, but my gut tells me it was the terror itself and the feeling of power it gave the perpetrators.

Amis came to a similar conclusion, in discussing an abusive conversation that Stalin had with Krupskaya, Leniin’s wife, because she had “supposedly breached Lenin’s medical regimen.” In Krupskaya’s words:

Stalin subjected me to a storm of the coarsest abuse yesterday about a brief note Lenin dictated to me with the permission of the doctors. I didn’t join the party yesterday. In the whole of the last thirty years I have never heard a coarse word from a comrade.

But why such a response to the wife of Lenin? Amis compared this to Dzerzhinsky’s response to being criticized for a harsh purge in Georgia. While Dzerzhinsky admitted he had gone too far in Georgia, he added,”But we couldn’t help ourselves.”

We can well believe that the accession to and then the practice of power had that compulsive quality. One must feel one’s way into it by imagining Bolshevik coercive force and the adjectives associated with it- naked, raw, brutal, merciless, absolute. On May 25,1922 Stalin had experienced a runaway power-surge, on the occasion of Lenin’s first stroke (with the massive booster of December 13: strokes two and three.) When it came to confronting Krupskaya, Stalin was all caught up in the thrills and heaves of the prospect of prepotence. He couldn’t help himself.

Several days before this conversation, the Central Committee had entrusted Lenin’s medical care to Stalin, which could only increase his feeling powerful.
Amis comes with at least two explanations for why Stalin instigated the great Terror in the 1930s. The 1934 Party Congress- the “Congress of Victors”- had a secret ballot on the composition of the Central Committee. About a tenth of the voters crossed out Stalin’s name. Amis speculates that the one of the reasons for the Great Terror was to collectively punish the Congress for the tenth who crossed out Stalin’s name. Of the 1,996 delegates to the “Congress of Victors,” 1,108 lost their lives during the Great Terror.

Another reason Amis gives for the Great Terror was to eliminate the Old Bolsheviks who could contradict Stalin’s rewriting of history to show him taking a significant role in the 1917 Revolution. Those who survived would have been too afraid to speak out.

While many books have been written on Stalin, Amis’s book is not a superfluous addition. I bought the book at a used book store for $1 about a year ago. Well worth the purchase price. 🙂

I think this is one of the drivers behind the AGW nonsense. “We have to be careful, because we are so powerful, so important, that we could inadvertently destroy the earth.” Notice their reaction to assertions that mankind – much less a subset of it – is way too insignificant to affect the planet, that we are less significant than the bacteria on a billiard ball. They splutter with rage at the very suggestion. Their rage does not arise from rejection of their beliefs, but rather from affirmation of their fears.

the purpose of terror was to freeze and separate people. to create a state in which you did only what you needed to do, say what you needed to say, and froze. this caused horrible drinking with the men who found it safer to sit around and kill time, and prostitution with women, as gifts were an exception to the issue of no trade. you would not know if a friend or your own child would give you up to the state for something, besides the state potentially picking you almost at random.

Pavlik Morosov would be a name to look up