How Would You Feel if Stalin Said That about YOU?

by Grover Furr

We need to talk.

I know you’ve got a lot going on right now, in your personal life and on the job front and all, but that’s no excuse to be uncivil. Stalin was a person too, or at least took the form of a person in service of history. Stalin has feelings. And you’ve hurt them.

Imagine if Stalin were to call you those names that you called Stalin? “Brutal dictator”, “gravedigger of the revolution”, “statist”… these are hurtful words and it hurts to hear them, especially from someone you care about. And Stalin cares about you, Twitter user @bookchinchillin.

Just think how much pain it would cause you to wake up and find that Joseph Stalin had been posting publicly on social media that you were “directly responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people”. What would you say if that happened? You’d probably say that it’s not true, right? Well that’s just what Stalin would say, and that’s just how Stalin feels.

Beyond Stalin’s personal feelings, it hurts the entire discourse and benefits the worst sort of people to discuss people’s politics in terms of entirely unfounded rumours. Think of Stalin as Zoë Quinn and all these “sources” from the 80s and later and all the Trotskyite newspapers citing them to drag Stalin’s name through the muck as #GamerGate blogs.

Ethics in video game journalism, indeed.

It saddens me, and it saddens Stalin, that you don’t see how toxic referring to yourself as an “anti-Stalinist” is. Imagine if Stalin referred to himself as being anti-YOU-ist. Feels accusatory doesn’t it? Feels like harassment? Well take a good look in the mirror, because that’s how you’ve made Stalin feel.

Stalin would never do any of these things to you, so why are you doing them to Stalin?

Just say no to cyber-bullying Stalin.

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