What is fascism?

[rmgill]

 

6 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

People voting with their feet is, surely, better than just dead, but still hardly good.

Oh well, then that's like saying that the Holocaust was the same as the Soviets evacuating the the towns around Chernobyl. 

Jeezus, it's not even comparable. Are you shooting for a Duranty award or something? 

6 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

I do not know why you mention Gorbachev – as the laws aiming to prevent parents from killing their kids in “hunger years” were invented back in Tsars time (now mostly portrayed as “golden age” by liberals), last one by Nikolay II in 1902.

I was pointing out that the scale of mass murder was less as your nation came forwards in the 20th century. 

6 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

If you would like some reading about what was peasant life in mid-XIX century, here is Leskov’s novel for you https://scisne.net/a-646 I think that after it you will not be surprised by brutality of Civil War in Russia.

No, not really. I refer to the warnings about cannibalism during the Holodomor. 

[Stuart Galbraith]

By the time the Soviets got to the 1960's and the Khrushchev reforms (such as they were) kicked in, the Soviet Union was a very different place. I dont think we ever quite gave them the credit at the time for how much they had changed at that point. Mass murder largely went away, other than that brief period during the fragmentation of the Union.

OTOH, Khrushchev was still quite ok with sending assassins out to kill political opponents like Stepan Bandera. There was the Novocherkassk massacre in 1962 which resulted in the summary shooting of 26 people, and the execution of 7 others. They were still killing forest brothers in the Baltic states as late as the 1980's. There are still people in Russia  who think when KAL007 was shot down, they shot down an empty airliner. They were seemingly on the brink of a preemptive strike in October 1983 because they complete convinced themselves we were going to attack them first. So we probably shouldnt get carried away and believe they had suddenly turned into yet another European state, even if they had drastically reformed over the hellhole it was in the 30's.

Edited March 10, 2021 by Stuart Galbraith

[Rick]

On 3/8/2021 at 8:03 AM, Roman Alymov said:

It is MISattributed to Stalin:

“The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic

 This phrase is often used as an illustration of the bloodthirstiness of I. V. Stalin. But this is not the case. Neither by the origin of the phrase, nor by the circumstances of its use.

This phrase gained popularity because of Remarque's novel "The Black Obelisk", written in 1956: "But, apparently, it always happens: the death of one person is death, and the death of two million is only statistics." However, Remarque, most likely, is not its author, but most likely borrowed it from the publicist of the Weimar Republic Tucholsky. In the essay "Franz;sischer Witz" he wrote:

«Der Krieg? Ich kann das nicht so schrecklich finden! Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!»

War? I don't find it very terrible! The death of one person: it's a disaster. A hundred thousand dead: this is a statistic!

And yet, Stalin did utter this phrase. But in the conditions and intonations that radically change the attitude towards her, and the moral image of Stalin.

This happened in the first days of the Great Patriotic War, when the reasons for such terrible losses of the Red Army and the lightning advance of the Wehrmacht deep into the USSR were being analyzed. The question arose of punishing the guilty. Among them was the commander of the troops of the Western District, General Pavlov, and a number of other commanders of the highest command staff. Stalin believed that these people were responsible for the losses. Some, especially fanatical, Bolsheviks were even inclined to think that there was a fact of treachery. However, the version of betrayal did not receive support and was not seriously considered in the future. The conclusion in relation to the command staff was that they showed criminal carelessness and negligence.”

Re “excessive government control over your life”  - of course it is nothing good, but still much better to situation when you and your family live under constant danger of  nomad gang killing you or taking you to slave market (as it was on most of  territory of central Russia prior to more or less central Gov established)  or your landlord treating you as property. While in Russia serfdom was relatively soft (since both landlords and peasants were officially servants of Tsar, and landlord killing peasant was treated as damage of valuable property given to him in temporary use to support his ability to serve in cavalry, not mentioning Rus Orthodox church considering it as sin), in places like Poland it was especially bad

“Serfdom in Europe was introduced and abolished, and in some countries this happened several times. The personal dependence of the peasants on the lords has existed since the early Middle Ages, although many farmers still retained their freedom. In some countries, dependent peasants were called serfs, that is, slaves, and there was every reason for this. The power of the landowner over the serfs was absolute: often the peasant could not marry without the permission of the owner. The serfs cultivated the land of the lord, paid their dues, and performed many different duties, from repairs to the farm buildings to military service under the banner of the seigneur.

 

It was profitable for the knights to have their own land, as long as there were many serfs, and their labor was completely free. But in the middle of the XIV century, a huge plague epidemic broke out, which wiped out about half of the population of Europe. There were fewer peasants, and their labor began to be valued quite highly. The feudal lords began to actively entice other people's serfs, which led to the emergence of a real labor market. The farmers now tried to escape from the harsh lords and cling to the owners, who gave them more freedom. As a result, by the fifteenth century, in France, England, western Germany, and many other areas, peasants had almost ceased to be driven to serfdom — work for the master. In France, for example, the corvee was gradually reduced to ten days a year. The farmers were now cultivating their allotments and paying their dues to their masters. The peasants were not yet free, but they were no longer slaves. So in Europe, for the first time, the abolition of serfdom took place, and it was abolished by the plague, the Black Death, equally terrible for peasants and nobles. Since then, it has been the case: the abolition of serfdom was always accompanied by shocks and catastrophes, from which all classes suffered.

 

In the XVI century in Western Europe, the personal dependence of the peasants noticeably weakened, and the most radical way was taken by England. On the continent, the demand for wool increased, and English landowners began to actively drive farmers from their lands to turn arable land into sheep pastures. According to Thomas More's apt remark, "the sheep ate the people," and the peasants who were left without allotments gradually turned into farmhands, vagabonds, or took the land themselves on lease and turned into well-to-do farmers. The wool trade brought considerable income to the English nobles, but grain production in the country fell sharply. The English were now forced to import bread, and more had to be imported every year. The landowners of Eastern Europe were willing to supply grain to the Foggy Albion, but the level of agricultural culture on their estates was quite low. As a result, the German, Danish, Polish and Austrian nobles had only one way to earn more money: to increase the master's arable land and force the peasants to work on it day and night. As a result, half-forgotten serfdom was revived in the eastern part of Europe, and in such forms that the new serfs could envy the medieval serfs.

One of the first to take the path of the "second edition of serfdom" was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish magnates had a lot of land, and there were enough people, because the Black Death bypassed the Vistula basin. The gentry gradually curtailed the rights of the peasants, until in 1503 the peasants were forbidden to pass from one lord to another. By the middle of the XVI century, the Polish peasant spent five or six days a week in the corvee, and many were completely deprived of their allotments and lived off rations issued by the owner. The lords had the right to punish, deprive of property, and even kill their serfs. The Imperial diplomat Herberstein noted that in Poland " the people are pitiful and oppressed by heavy slavery, because if someone, accompanied by a crowd of servants, enters the dwelling of a villager, he can do anything with impunity, rob and beat." The sixteenth-century Polish intellectual Andrzej Modrzewski agreed.: "If a nobleman kills a clap, he says that he killed a dog, because the nobleman considers kmetov (peasants) for dogs." The royal power in the noble republic was nominal, so it was impossible to find a ruling on the loose feudal lords.

Similar practices soon spread to the German lands east of the Elbe. Prussia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg and Holstein, like Poland, had access to the Baltic Sea and could supply grain to England, Holland and France, which meant that the local peasants were doomed to serfdom. In particular, the situation of German farmers deteriorated after the Thirty Years ' War, which raged from 1618 to 1648. Many areas of Germany were depopulated, and landowners ' farms began to experience an acute shortage of workers. If at the time of the Black Death, depopulation led to a weakening of serfdom, then in the XVII century, the nobles, on the contrary, tightened the screws. The peasants were deprived of allotments, and they were turned into disenfranchised half-slaves. In Mecklenburg and some other areas, the lords had the right to sell their peasants without land, which reduced the farmers to the level of movable property.

The reason is obvious: the noble farms of the XVII century were oriented to the external market, while the internal market of the German states was narrow and undeveloped. The peasants could not sell their products expensively, which means that the monetary tax would be small. It was much more profitable to deprive the peasants of allotments and rights and force them to work in the master's field, then to sell the grown grain to Holland or England.”

First, thank you for the Eastern Europe history lesson, much appreciated. 

Second,' “excessive government control over your life” '  - of course it is nothing good, but still much better to situation when you and your family live under constant danger of  nomad gang killing you or taking you to slave market (as it was on most of  territory of central Russia prior to more or less central Gov established)  or your landlord treating you as property. While in Russia serfdom was relatively soft (since both landlords and peasants were officially servants of Tsar, and landlord killing peasant was treated as damage of valuable property given to him in temporary use to support his ability to serve in cavalry, not mentioning Rus Orthodox church considering it as sin), in places like Poland it was especially bad."  

I think the difference in your above quote between your country and mine is that the U.S had only one country as a major antagonist for a historically short time and was established after our Founding Fathers were able to establish what they observed in Europe at that time and before. 

Just my opinion of course, but I would say the serf, landlord, and government interplay in Eastern Europe was handled via the U.S. way in business and labor unions. 

Grossly unfortunately for the U.S., the secular degradation of what in the U.S. is liberalism -- and its inbred evil of fascism, communism, etc. -- was horribly accelerated under President Franklin Roosevelt -- and has continued this immorality ever since then. There were sparks of governmental morality and freedom under Reagan -- obviously the greatest President of the 20th Century -- and most recently under, so far, the greatest President of this century -- Trump. Having said that government is not the savior for society, only Christ is.