Trotsky per Hitchens and Service

[Guest]

This is an interesting program I watched the other night with CH and RS musing about possible alternative histories if 1) Trotsky takes over instead of Stalin at Lenin's death and 2) If the White's had won the civil war. It gets interesting about the 10 min mark.


[YOUTUBE]cuzXR-5w4Qk[/YOUTUBE]

[Guest]

This is an interesting program I watched the other night with CH and RS musing about possible alternative histories if 1) Trotsky takes over instead of Stalin at Lenin's death and 2) If the White's had won the civil war. It gets interesting about the 10 min mark.

faster streams...

P1
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommo...ZhY2RkMmZmMTM=

P2
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommo...c3MzNmNWU5YjA=

P3
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommo...YwYTE3N2ZkMDQ=

p4
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommo...UyMjgxYjA3MjI=

p5
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommo...M0Zjg2MDc4NTE=

[landpoke]

I tried to watch that, but my daughter is watching Ni Hao Kai Lan in the same room so all I got was Hitchens (Kai Lan) trying to convince Service (Tolee, a Koala bear who is, for some reason, hanging out in China) to go to the ladybug festival with him/her.

I may need to rewatch after I put her to bed.

[Katy Lied]

Christopher Hitchens is the male Camille Paglia. On any given issue, half the people love her and half of them hate her. On the very next issue, the half who loved her now hate her and vice versa. So now, no one trusts her and she's just dragged out to make outrageous statements on chat shows.

But, lured in by his exquisite elocution, I listened to all 35 minutes. It must have been torture for Hitch, bouncing around wanting to commit lightning quick acts of exposition on everything from Churchill to the lost Minnesotan Snow Brigade, and being dragged back down to the ground by the staidly plodding Service.

In fact, Hitchens IS Trotsky and Service IS Stalin.

(And BTW, I buy Service's explanation more than Hitchens. Service is play-by-play, Hitch is for color).

[Babs]

Christopher Hitchens is the male Camille Paglia. On any given issue, half the people love her and half of them hate her. On the very next issue, the half who loved her now hate her and vice versa. So now, no one trusts her and she's just dragged out to make outrageous statements on chat shows.

Hitchens and his friends are little more than professional trolls. Their works are entertaining when you realize what they're doing, but they are rarely very insightful.

[SeattleUte]

Hitchens and his friends are little more than professional trolls. Their works are entertaining when you realize what they're doing, but they are rarely very insightful.

Agree.

If Trotsky had succeeded Lenin (this is about as hard to fathom as if the South had won the Civil war) a lot (really a lot, like millions) of Russian lives may have been saved. But more American lives may have been lost. I doubt Trotsky would have been as effective against Hitler as Stalin. Stalin was so successful against the Nazis to a large extent because he didn't care how many Russians were killed in the process.

[Guest]

In fact, Hitchens IS Trotsky and Service IS Stalin.

That is terrific.

[Guest]

Stalin was so successful against the Nazis to a large extent because he didn't care how many Russians were killed in the process.

Well said.

[statman]

Stalin was so successful against the Nazis to a large extent because he didn't care how many Russians were killed in the process.

Absolutely true - and not just to a large extent. He didn't care how many Soviets had to die.

Wave after wave of soviet troops crossed the Volga without weapons, only to be mowed down by the Germans. They Soviet troops were told to rush up the other bank of the river, engage the Germans in hand to hand combat and take their weapons.

And that's not even mentioning Stalin's purges prior to the Great Patriotic War. He killed virtually anyone who could potentially be a threat to him, whose loyalty he did not feel 100%. That included just about all the officers and non-coms in the military, much of the Intelligencia, religious leaders, and anyone else he felt like having killed that day.

IMO, Stalin was a much more evil man than Hitler. Hitler's antisemitism was totally crazy, but within the fever-swamp of his deranged mind, he thought he was doing good things for Deutschland. Stalin simply didn't care about how horribly his purges hurt the USSR. If you posed a threat to him, you died. Period. All told, he killed several times as many people as Hitler - upwards of 30 million by some estimates...

[SeattleUte]

Absolutely true - and not just to a large extent. He didn't care how many Soviets had to die.

Wave after wave of soviet troops crossed the Volga without weapons, only to be mowed down by the Germans. They Soviet troops were told to rush up the other bank of the river, engage the Germans in hand to hand combat and take their weapons.

And that's not even mentioning Stalin's purges prior to the Great Patriotic War. He killed virtually anyone who could potentially be a threat to him, whose loyalty he did not feel 100%. That included just about all the officers and non-coms in the military, much of the Intelligencia, religious leaders, and anyone else he felt like having killed that day.

IMO, Stalin was a much more evil man than Hitler. Hitler's antisemitism was totally crazy, but within the fever-swamp of his deranged mind, he thought he was doing good things for Deutschland. Stalin simply didn't care about how horribly his purges hurt the USSR. If you posed a threat to him, you died. Period...

Hitler is more terrifying because while Stalin was an authoritarian beast, and we've seen many of them before, Germany was arguably the most civilized country in the world. It gave us Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Hegel, Nietzche, superb science, etc. The rationale for the Holocaust was largely metaphysical; it wasn't just a battle of attrition or a purging of perceived internal threats for practical reasons as with the Russians. But it wasn't just crazy hatred for the Jews. Hitler murdered millions of non-Jews including elderly, children, women, poor, gays, gypsies, etc. in an effort to remake a racially and genetically pure world. They killed Jews by the millions even as it was draining resources from the war effort and destroying human capital that could have been deployed toward winning the war. Eichmann was murdering Jews by the hundreds of thousands in Hungary as D-Day was occurring and the war was effectivley lost.

There was a systematic, ideological, even religious flavor to Naziism that collectively warped a nation of brilliant promise. The brightest star fallen into an abyss of hate. It may be the most interesting story ever told.

One of the best scenes in cinema occurs in the movie Downfall, where Germans are hearing Russian spoken by "Asiatic hordes" through the smoke and the dust in Berlin, seeing the horror on German faces, confronting the "barbarians."