Word: stalins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great tradition of Stalin andJoseph McCarthy when he says that writing a parodyis an act of terrorism," Dershowitz said. "I'mopposed to ... faculty members who use theirstatus as faculty members to terrorize studentsand to frighten them away from exercising theirfree speech...
Historian Alan Bullock compares the evils of Hitler and Stalin...
Hitler had nothing like the domestic program of development and collectivization Stalin rammed through at the cost of millions of lives. He was really interested only in foreign conquests, and one in particular: an Aryan empire in Eastern Europe. Hitler was driven by a slogan-ridden ideology that he formed as a youth, reading cheap pamphlets in Vienna, and never changed. He had, Bullock finds, no capacity whatever for critical thinking. He believed the German "master race" had three enemies: Slavs, Marxists and Jews...
...deported or kept as slaves, educated only enough "to understand our highway signs." In 1941 Hitler actually began to carry out that program and in going to war with the Soviet Union also put into effect his "final solution to the Jewish problem," the extermination of European Jewry. While Stalin had more people put to death than Hitler did, Bullock maintains the Nazi Holocaust is unique because "mass murder became not an instrument but an end in itself...
Russia, under Stalin's direction, was Hitler's nemesis in World War II. But while that war freed most of Germany from despotism, the shackles of Stalinism stayed in place in the Soviet Union for another 40 years. Russia is still trying to find its way toward democracy. Bullock maintains that only a confluence of violent upheavals and unusual leaders can produce a Hitler or a Stalin, and "such occasions are not common." But it has happened within living memory, and Bullock's monumental history reminds us how unwise it would be to conclude it cannot happen again...