ITT: Porky historians and "intellectuals" that should never be taken seriously.
I got memed into reading Anthony Sutton because he wrote a book called Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler but as soon as I open the book he starts talking about how General Electric and JP Morgan are run by socialists who funded the nazis because they hate the free market. He also argued that Wall Street socialists funded FDR and the Bolsheviks for the same reason.
ITT: Porky historians and "intellectuals" that should never be taken seriously
Jaxson Ortiz
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Bentley Price
That man is a meme, I like how all the people shill him don't talk about how he worked for the Hoover Institute
Grayson Flores
Niall. Fucking. Ferguson.
Xavier Murphy
Robert Service, Tom Rockmore, etc.
There are a lot of professional anti-marxist academics out there and nowhere is the bar set lower.
Samuel Scott
I think we should have assembled a list of left's historians and the reasons why each one can and can't be trusted.
Most notorious is probably Robert Conquest, a man who was literally paid by the British government to create propaganda, somehow not only not being laughed out of academia but in fact being propped up as the top Soviet historian by 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧parties unknown🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧. This is the sort of taint that spreads to absolutely everything he might have written, rendering him a worthless source.
Service and Pipes (what the fuck is with these shills and common noun for surnames?) are painfully, obviously biased, but I'm not aware of any particularly damning incident. Tho apparently some of Service's jewish colleagues went all OY VEY over him using some anti-semitic quotes by Stalin in order to smear Trotsky kek. Not the best sources, but acceptable I suppose.
I partially read Figes' A People's Tragedy (boy totally unbiased name there). As I recall, it uses the old trump card of humanizing a historical event by inserting whatever personal drama the author could wring the most tears with. He also had a particularly obvious hateboner for Lenin, almost made him look like a Bond villain. I also remember that, for God knows what reason, Figes was utterly obsessed with leather jackets, constantly bringing them up and their supposed predilection by Bolsheviks as proof of their violent, authoritarian machismo. Seriously. IIRC all he had to offer for proof is a couple of pics of the same guy in one such jacket. But perhaps the best thing about him is that he got caught using sockpuppets to increase the rating of his books on Amazon, while shitting on those by Service and one Rachel Polonsky. First he denied and threatened to sue for libel, then blamed his own wife (WEW) then finally copped to it. Needless to say, a source to be avoided.
Moshe Lewin is a good one. Lost his parents to the Nazis, fled to the USSR, working as a honest prole before enlisting to kill fascists. Not perfectly impartial, but unlike the shitters above, he actually uses arguments and actual Marxist theory in his criticisms. Trustworhy historian, smart theory critic and a bonafide hero of the people O7.
Anyone else? Or anything to the ones I already mentioned?
Kayden Cook
Arch Getty. I have never read him but I've never read anything damning about him either. What about him?
Jonathan Moore
Got nothing on him, sorry. It's weird, I never heard about him until a year or two ago, then saw his Wikipedo page and he wrote several books the past couple of decades, it's like he was written into existence. Anyway, Wikipedo now says he stepped up to Conquest so my first impression is good.
Jeremiah Cook
Yes. What makes him more attractive is that he doesn't seem to engage in the very easy and trite thing many historians do with throwing everything that ever happened during Stalin's time as being his responsibility.
Hudson Davis
Getty is good imo. He doesn't support the USSR but he's able to make criticisms of it that are more nuanced than "Stalin was beaten as a child so that's why he murdered everyone in Ukraine with his bare hands."
Isaac Reyes
Found some interesting details in pic related and this link: reddit.com
Of note is that Conquest claimed the peak gulag population at whopping 12 million (!) in 1952, which would be a whole 15% of the national population, childen included (!!!). A modern, sane number is a peak of 2m in 1953.
Also of interest is this recent post on LSC, altho it reaches other results. Nonetheless, compiling all the various sources and comparing the pirson rates of the USSR and modern USA is a task still to be comprehesively done I think, but it seems like their numbers are about on par, with America barely lagging behind. Which doesn't even include other factors, such as America's notoriously long prison terms.
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Charles Rodriguez
The second part of that quote isn't too bad though. Sounds like something Stirner would say.
Isaiah Bell
/r/communism has a historian list
Oliver Kelly
>Eisenhower was the president of the United States Government, and because governments are an inherently Socialist enterprise, that makes Eisenhower as big a Communist as Stalin
there are people that actually think this
Easton Martin
Adam Tooze wrote a good book on the rise of Hitler and also the interwar period, can reccommend.
Hudson Davis
The first part is pretty good too. Fiat money is literally nothing, and it's given value as long as people are literally willing to kill or die for it.
Mason Gomez
Stéphane Courtois
Anne Applebaum
Timothy Snyder
Robert Conquest
Robert Service
Hannah Arendt
Leszek Kołakowski
Arthur Koestler
Ernst Nolte
Andreas Hillgruber
Michael Ignatieff
Klaus Hildebrand
Karl Popper
Michael Stürmer
And of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Adam Watson
Gulag Archipelago was changed from History to Fiction in the library I go to.
Bentley White
Did a cheeky fucker just physically move it or was it reclassified?
Michael James
Okay, I grossly miscalculated, the 12 million supposed peak gulag population would be 6.5% of total population, not 15%. Still absurdly unrealistic tho.
Elijah Rodriguez
IT BEGINS
Elijah Russell
I only found this on Stalin, is this it?
reddit.com
Got anything to say about them?
Jaxon Robinson
name a better historian
pro tip: can't be done
Robert White
Probably the main figure responsible for spreading ludicrous death tolls under socialist systems.
A very influential spreader of horseshoe theory today.
Basically believes in "Judeo-Bolshevism", thinks the anti-German partisans were bad because partisan warfare is illegal, thinks the NKVD was worse than the SS and that it planned to exterminate Jews.
Made a living from anti-communist tripe written for the British and American governments.
Anti-communist who smears Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin with gusto.
Came up with the bullshit idea of totalitarianism to equate "Stalinism" to Nazism
The Jordan Peterson of the Cold War, dedicated his life to attacking Marxism after his quaint academic notions of socialism were shattered. Helped toppled the Polish People's Republic.
Bitter anti-communist exile who, like Orwell, wrote bullshit fiction about the USSR.
Pretty much a Neo-Nazi who thought the Holocaust was a defensive action.
Spread lies about the clean Wehrmacht and thinks the Red Army were Asiatic barbarians.
A pretty generic anti-communist, not much to say.
One of Nolte's fanboys, blames Hitler for everything to absolve Germany and Germans.
Unbearably influential liberal.
Far right, loves Nolte.
A raging antisemite, Tsarist, Franco-admirer, anti-communist and Christian crusader who helped spread literal fiction about the USSR and got the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
All of them are dedicated anti-communists
Elijah Gomez
Parenti
Parker Stewart
Can I got a non meme rundown of Grover Furr?
Daniel Johnson
Well damn, all to be avoided then.
I think I remember something about Koestler, about how he was a Marxist who turned coat during the show trials.
Furr is a special case. He seems to be the last of a dying breed, unironic and sincere Stalin apologists. On the one hand, it is nice to have such a dissenting voice, seeing as everyone attribute all the ills of the world to Stalin these days. On the other, well, his bias is obvious. He does seem to rely extensively on real, primary sources for his claims. The issue is, Stalin-era government documents aren't exactly trustworthy to begin with. I mean, using show trial confessions as a source? Seriously?
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And while I'm at it, a couple of other interesting thread:
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Oliver Mitchell
so he thinks that the USSR was run by jews but also that the USSR wanted to kill all the jews?
How exactly is that supposed to work?
Owen Davis
nigga it's reactionarism
I ain't gotta explain shit
Leo Jones
...
Carson Ortiz
This is how he justified the May Days repression in Catalonia, 1937.
Literal cop apologist.
Ryan Hernandez
This. Funny to see him try slip them in there though.
Elijah Garcia
just to know why is popper unreliable? I just know my sister studied him in uni for a philosophy of science course
Christopher Smith
ah fuck seen now guess it answers my
Jayden Cook
Antony Beevor, copypasta incoming
In the "Berlin: The Downfall 1945" book he referenced a Russian historian Elena Senyavskaya (her 2000 book titled "Psychology of war in the 20th century: The historical experience of Russia"), for example. When she read Beevor's book, she fired a complaint - he misquoted her. In the "Downfall 1945", Beevor referenced her book in the context that the Russian researchers find the facts about the Soviet troops committing mass rapes terrifying. Her book doesn't contain anything like that. On the pages Beevor cited she talked about Stalin wanting to maintain the discipline in the Red Army to create the image of a highly moral "liberation army", so he initiated four highly publicised cases against accused rapists in the Soviet Army (oh, by the way, here we can see that Stalin did, in fact, care about such matters and tried to prevent and minimise the cases of rapes against European women). She didn't actually say anything about the "facts" Beevor refers to. Beevor simply lied about the content of his sources. And that's only one example (he provides over 1000 references in his"Downfall 1945" book, doesn't he? shall we go over each one of them and see whether all those documentations he examined actually support his statements?). We can also go to his sources on "Soviets raped 1 400 000 women in East Prussia" and see that this is a mere estimate that is based on deeply, deeply flawed methodology that used birth record data from ONE hospital in the period of 1945-1946. This data was then extrapolated to the entire region and then the entire country, with multiple methodological and logical mistakes being made along the way. If you apply the same methodology to Allies, you'll get approximately 50 000 women raped by American and British servicemen in Berlin (which is absurd, considering that the Allied forces weren't there at the time), pretty cool, eh? So you can make your own conclusions about Beevor's scientific integrity. Most Russian historians say that he simply recycles Goebbels propaganda about the Soviet Army.
Isaiah Campbell
porkies can be socialists
difference is they will probably conquer and divide everyone with idpol
and then screw you over in the process
tyranny of the ones that run the place
company will be the only victim you always cave to
Justin Cox
Many of those people are shit, but your verminous tankie bias is showing.
Joshua Campbell
Is this seriously an argument Sutton makes?
Samuel Wilson
not sure but at one point in his book he claims that US industrialists conspired to undermine the US by selling the USSR steel which was later used to build weapons for the Vietnamese.
He also thinks that there is no such thing as soviet innovation and technology because it was all ripped off from Americans.
Owen Walker
I mean, western industrialists did openly do business with the Soviets before the Cold War and certainly played an important role in developing its infrastructure prior to WWII, but that's not at all a secret like Sutton seems to portray it as.
Ryan James
he thinks they were committing treason and intentionally trying to promote global communism.
Jackson Scott
Guess he didn't like the free-market as much as he claimed to.
Aaron Cooper
Leo Mitchell
Fucking Hayek.
Evan Kelly
I started reading this as I've been reading stuff by Kaczynski and other works critical of the way technology influences people. It immediately launched into characterizing socialist/communism as crass/vulgar materialism with no end goal. Then some mumbo jumbo about how there are herbivore and carnivore ethics, and humans are inherently carnivore, the two frontal eyes making the world the prey, etc. Basically a bunch of feels > reals bullshit. Might finish reading it tomorrow but so far it hasn't set my expectations particularly high.
Jose Young
Stephen Kotkin
Owen Butler
Thomas Sowell
Charles Murray
Ludwig von Mises
Thomas DiLorenzo
Andrew Cooper
...
Jace Jackson
everything is pretty good if you twist the meaning from the original to something that makes sense.
Bentley King
Snyder is Jewish himself, isn't he? I get that he is an irredeemable liberal but can't really see the 'Judeo-Bolshevism'. Then again all I've read of him is "Thinking the 20th Century" which is more Tony Judt anyway.
Jose Fisher
No one cares about Murray anymore though after Richard Nisbett him blew him the fuck out