I’ve seen this technicality before, but it always feels hollow to me.
Like yeah, hitler changed the world, but he was an opportunist at the right place at the right time when his style of rhetoric and politics appealed to a country going through the aftermath of a world war and the Great Depression.
He didn’t change the world because of something clever or intrinsically special about him. He wasn’t special at all. That’s what makes fascism so dangerous.
To describe him as a supernatural outlier of a person builds a myth that the things he did could only happen under the influence of a single charismatic person.
Putting him on the list and the cover gives him credit he doesn’t deserve.
Synthesis: 1930s’ Soviet Union had a ton of great men, but the material conditions lead to one of them, who was the most fitting for the situation, becoming the general secretary.
1920s you mean. By the 30s I think the only other old bolshevik leaders still around were Lazar Kaganovich and Kalinin. Maybe Molotov if you count him.
Edit: I tell a lie. Bubov was still in government until 36
Synthesis: 1930s’ Soviet Union had a ton of great men, but the material conditions lead to one of them, who was the most fitting for the situation, becoming the general secretary.
I dunno this still smells like idealist thinking to me, it implies the material conditions have some metaphysical power to guide the right people to the right place. Considering how chaotic internal party politics were at the time Lenin could have easily been replaced by Trotsky or some other dildo like that. There could have also been a better person than Stalin for the job we can’t really know for sure. Also I’d wager the USSR would maybe still be standing today if Lenin had lived longer than he had and planned the transition of power better.
Just the other day I had been looking for an excuse to complain about this:
This is offtopic, but the way that people whitewash the Weimar Republic by talking about Hitler like he was a wizard who cast a spell on Germany doesn’t just have the effect of obscuring the political-economic conditions of fascism and its connection to long-standing European society, but further feeds into a fetishistic reverence for Hitler that encourages modern readers to hang off his every word to try to understand how the magic works, effectively working to spread his speeches even further than they would otherwise spread and lending a gravity to everything he says because, as far as many liberal histories were concerned, what he said was literally magic. It seems like a choice of characterization deliberately made so that the sins of the past can happen all the more easily for having already happened once, rather than protecting society from it using our past experience with it.
Coverage like this rag provides is functionally carrying water for fascism by mystifying its causes
I’ve seen this technicality before, but it always feels hollow to me.
Like yeah, hitler changed the world, but he was an opportunist at the right place at the right time when his style of rhetoric and politics appealed to a country going through the aftermath of a world war and the Great Depression.
He didn’t change the world because of something clever or intrinsically special about him. He wasn’t special at all. That’s what makes fascism so dangerous.
To describe him as a supernatural outlier of a person builds a myth that the things he did could only happen under the influence of a single charismatic person.
Putting him on the list and the cover gives him credit he doesn’t deserve.
No one is. Like the OP said. Great man theory, the magazine.
deleted by creator
Synthesis: 1930s’ Soviet Union had a ton of great men, but the material conditions lead to one of them, who was the most fitting for the situation, becoming the general secretary.
1920s you mean. By the 30s I think the only other old bolshevik leaders still around were Lazar Kaganovich and Kalinin. Maybe Molotov if you count him.
Edit: I tell a lie. Bubov was still in government until 36
I dunno this still smells like idealist thinking to me, it implies the material conditions have some metaphysical power to guide the right people to the right place. Considering how chaotic internal party politics were at the time Lenin could have easily been replaced by Trotsky or some other dildo like that. There could have also been a better person than Stalin for the job we can’t really know for sure. Also I’d wager the USSR would maybe still be standing today if Lenin had lived longer than he had and planned the transition of power better.
Just the other day I had been looking for an excuse to complain about this:
Coverage like this rag provides is functionally carrying water for fascism by mystifying its causes