Tuesday, November 7, 2017
LET'S JUST PUT IT THIS WAY STALIN PUTIN VERDICT OF HISTORY
Weimar German leftists in the 1930s were as much the tools of Stalin as American rightists now are of Putin, for similar Russian reasons, and nevertheless with similar dangers for Russia itself.
Stalin's promotion of the German left against Weimar proved disastrous for Russia because it brought Hitler to power.
Cf. Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Kennan.
If you say it wasn't disastrous for Russia because it won the war, I would rejoin that although Russia won, it might have achieved more in better ways had it kept the Weimar government in power as long as possible, rather than allowing Hitler to come to power and then being forced to risk everything in a truly life and death gargantuan struggle on the Russian Front.
If you say something like, say, Russia winning WWII and winning Eastern Europe from Western Europe, Germany was on the wrong side of history, Russia on the right, and it was all merely the just verdict of history, I would say that that is no less ridiculous than saying that The South losing and the North winning the Civil War, the South thus being on the wrong side of history, was the just verdict of history.
One might also ponder on which side of history these facts fall:
Our so called Russian ally, in Europe, at the same time, with the Russo Japanese Non Aggression Pact, made possible Japan's simultaneous war in the Pacific against us, starting with Pearl Harbor.
Under the terms of the pact, Russia refrained from lifting a finger against Japan until it was time to divide the spoils, from whose ravening jowls they were barely kept.
Communist China, funnily enough, of course, suddenly immediately reared its ugly head. Ever wonder why?
"It is the natural result of the whig historian's habits of mind and his attitude to history -- though it is not a necessary consequence of his actual method -- that he should be interested in the promulgation of moral judgments and should count this as an important part of his office. His preoccupation is not difficult to understand when it is remembered that he regards himself as something more than the enquirer. By the very finality and absoluteness with which he has endowed the present he has heightened his own position. For him the voice of posterity is the voice of God and the historian is the voice of posterity. And it is typical of him that he tends to regard himself as the judge when by his methods and his equipment he is fitted only to be the detective. His concern with the sphere of morality forms in fact, the extreme point in his desire to make judgments of value, and to count them as the verdict of history. By a curious example of the transference of ideas he, like many other people has come to confuse the importance which courts of legal justice must hold, and the finality they must have for practical reasons in society, with the most useless and unproductive of all forms of reflection-- the dispensing of moral judgments upon people or upon actions in retrospect....." Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, VI. "Moral Judgments in History".
"...(a point historians repeatedly ignore, often operating with an ethics of success which blames losers for their failure)..." Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, p 741.
Cf. Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, Kennan.
If you say it wasn't disastrous for Russia because it won the war, I would rejoin that although Russia won, it might have achieved more in better ways had it kept the Weimar government in power as long as possible, rather than allowing Hitler to come to power and then being forced to risk everything in a truly life and death gargantuan struggle on the Russian Front.
If you say something like, say, Russia winning WWII and winning Eastern Europe from Western Europe, Germany was on the wrong side of history, Russia on the right, and it was all merely the just verdict of history, I would say that that is no less ridiculous than saying that The South losing and the North winning the Civil War, the South thus being on the wrong side of history, was the just verdict of history.
One might also ponder on which side of history these facts fall:
Our so called Russian ally, in Europe, at the same time, with the Russo Japanese Non Aggression Pact, made possible Japan's simultaneous war in the Pacific against us, starting with Pearl Harbor.
Under the terms of the pact, Russia refrained from lifting a finger against Japan until it was time to divide the spoils, from whose ravening jowls they were barely kept.
Communist China, funnily enough, of course, suddenly immediately reared its ugly head. Ever wonder why?
"It is the natural result of the whig historian's habits of mind and his attitude to history -- though it is not a necessary consequence of his actual method -- that he should be interested in the promulgation of moral judgments and should count this as an important part of his office. His preoccupation is not difficult to understand when it is remembered that he regards himself as something more than the enquirer. By the very finality and absoluteness with which he has endowed the present he has heightened his own position. For him the voice of posterity is the voice of God and the historian is the voice of posterity. And it is typical of him that he tends to regard himself as the judge when by his methods and his equipment he is fitted only to be the detective. His concern with the sphere of morality forms in fact, the extreme point in his desire to make judgments of value, and to count them as the verdict of history. By a curious example of the transference of ideas he, like many other people has come to confuse the importance which courts of legal justice must hold, and the finality they must have for practical reasons in society, with the most useless and unproductive of all forms of reflection-- the dispensing of moral judgments upon people or upon actions in retrospect....." Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, VI. "Moral Judgments in History".
"...(a point historians repeatedly ignore, often operating with an ethics of success which blames losers for their failure)..." Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, p 741.
Professor Kaiser also praised, and occasionally quoted, Kennan. Here was his Eulogy to Kennan:
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