Bijou Drains
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“I think I’m right in saying that Douglas Home was never a member of the Conservative Party and was the last non-Tory Labour Prime Minister.”
What I should have said was the last Non Conservative Party or Labour Party Prime Minister.
Douglas Home was a member of The Unionist Party
The thing about the Labour Representation Committee is that it was a committee of Labourist MPs. It became the Labour Party in 1906 but the only members were Labour MPs, which included ILP, Fabian Society Members, etc. Individuals could not join that Labour Party as such and the separate groups maintained completely independent organisational structures. In that sense it was similar to some electoral pacts that occur in other countries with some joining and leaving, or a bit like the groupings that occur in the European Parliament.
It was only in 1919 that the Labour Party effectively became the recognised political entity that is known today.
The whigs and Liberals had similar development into political parties and their is an argument that the Tories didn’t become the Conservative and Unionist Party only formed in the 1960s, as until that point the Conservative Party (England and Wales) was separate to the Unionist Party (Scotland). I think I’m right in saying that Douglas Home was never a member of the Conservative Party and was the last non-Tory Labour Prime Minister. A good trivia question that I’ve used before.
Regarding Grover Furr a little bit of research tells us that by his own admission “My first field of specialization is medieval studies. I don’t have any formal certificate that would qualify me to do research on the history of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time.”
What he actually means by Medieval Studies is Medieval literature studies.
Just to clarify from an Academic pint of view, there is a difference between the academic standing between UK University granting Professorship and the US system. Traditionally in the UK, a professor has an endowed chair whereas in the US a professor is usually a senior lecturer. The university which Professor Furr teaches Medieval English Literature (Montclair State) is not in the top 100 US University rankings and is ranked between 400-500 in terms of one US ranking system.
That is not an attempt to decry Professor Furr, but to contextualise his work, much like in the way Furr encourages his readers on his web pages.
I haven’t had a great deal of time to run through Furr’s work (my own need to earn a crust being a pressing concern today). However reading through a few of his articles and on line postings. His main thrust seems to be no that there was mass repression and political murders, but that he was not aware of this, following on the view of J. Arch Getty that the disputed the idea that the repressions of the 1930s had been actions planned in advance by Stalin. Similarly he puts forward that the Ukrainian 1932-33 famine was a man made famine. Stalin, he puts forward was the arch democrat, it was he who discovered the crimes of Yezhov and when he found out Yezhov was executed and that he replaced Yezhov with Beria in all good faith.
There is more but I have ordered some of Furr’s books and I will try to get through them and offer a degree of critique.
With regards to Khruschev, his aim was to hobble the democratic reforms that Stalin was planning to implement and that Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, etc. “accepted, even if unwillingly, the secret subtext of the “Secret Speech” and assented to it.” (Furr’s own words).
My first response to this is that it bears a bit of a resemblance to the arguments put forward by Hitler apologists, i.e. that Hitler didn’t know about the holocaust. Now before TS blows a gasket, I am not saying that it is the same thing, I am saying that the apologists for Hitler used a similar argument about the events.
What is interesting that Furr does not deny the mass repression, or that there was a famine in Ukraine, but rather that it wasn’t Stalin’s fault.
So taking up the example of the great purges, Furr acknowledges that there was great terror and that unjustified state killings took place (let’s face it, if that wasn’t the case, why did he have Yezhov shot). He was hoodwinked by Yezhov, that Yezhov over reached his powers and Stalin did not know about this. This begs the question, if Stalin was this great leader, why did he not know about it. If a modern day political leader was unaware of the fact that 100s of thousands of his citizens had been assassinated, saying “Sorry but I didn’t know it was happening” would not really be considered as a good excuse for the failing.
Similarly if Stalin the leader of the great Soviet state capitalist system didn’t “deliberately plan” the Ukrainian famine, but rather it occurred either by mistake or natural circumstances. It begs the question why did Stalin not avoid the mistake in the first place or if it was a natural disaster why did he not plan a contingency. It is also interesting (and I have looked through the data) that no famine took place in any of the similar geographic areas, Rumania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Hungary, etc. Was the Ukrainian famine such an improbably localised natural disaster?
Let’s take this a bit further, take for instance The Trial of Twenty the Twenty one, which is well known of and was fully reported in the USSR press (we have copies of it in our HO library and archive no doubt). In that trial the following people were found guilty and were all proclaimed members of the Right – Trotskyist bloc that supposedly intended to overthrow socialism and restore capitalism in Russia,
1. Nikolai Bukharin – Marxist theoretician, former head of the Communist International and member of the Politburo
2. Alexei Rykov – former premier and member of the Politburo
3. Nikolai Krestinsky – former member of the Politburo and ambassador to Germany
4. Christian Rakovsky – former ambassador to Great Britain and France
5. Genrikh Yagoda – former head of the NKVD
6. Arkady Rosengoltz – former People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade
7. Vladimir Ivanov – former People’s Commissar for the Timber Industry
8. Mikhail Chernov – former People’s Commissar for Agriculture
9. Grigori Grinko – former People’s Commissar for Finance
10. Isaak Zelensky – former Secretary of the Central Committee
11. Sergei Bessonov
12. Akmal Ikramov – Uzbek leader
13. Faizulla Khodjayev – Uzbek leader
14. Vasily Sharangovich – former first secretary in Byelorussia
15. Prokopy Zubarev
16. Pavel Bulanov – NKVD officer
17. Lev Levin – Kremlin doctor
18. Dmitry Pletnyov – Kremlin doctor
19. Ignaty Kazakov (ru) – Kremlin doctor
20. Venyamin Maximov-Dikovsky (ru)
21. Pyotr Kryuchkov – secretary of Maxim Gorky
This begs the question, if this was genuinely the case, and if Yezhov was as culpable as Furr claims and if Khruschev, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, etc. did plan to subvert democracy for their own personal gain, who was the person who appointed them?
It’s a bit like a football manager saying it wasn’t his fault that the team was rubbish. Who bought the players.
Yezhov was appointed to replace Yagoda (no 5 on the list). So in terms of appointing Yogoda (according to Furr’s already admitted take on things) Stalin had messed up (that’s why he was executed), but Stalin compounded his incompetence by appointing Yezhov! and I didn’t even mention Beria.
It has an echo of Donald Trump explaining that the top people he had appointed turned out to be idiots, well who appointed them Donald? If all of these corrupt and venal bureaucrats existed in the Stalin era, then who appointed them?Hi Alan,
I appreciate the hard work you put in and the difficulty in moderating what can be a very lively forum. A bit like being a ref in a local league, without the ref you can’t have a game.
In the spirit of cooperation and harmony therefore I will refrain from calling True Scotsman a Smeggy Bell End, I will simply allow his postings to reinforce my viewpoint.
Jason Unrube, That’s the fella. I’m sure he used to sometimes have a kind of comic opera uniform he used to wear. I wonder if him and TS are one and the same person?
Thinking about the Democratic Workers Party, I was wondering if any one can remember that American clown who used to wear an odd kind of North Korean uniform and posted pro North Korean propaganda videos on youtube.
I have been racking my mind to remember his name, he was a complete spud, but I cannot for the life of me remember his name and his “party”. I used to really enjoy his videos, they were so funny, he put me in mind of TS.
Aye AJ, if you were going to get the malky off of Stalin if you didn’t do what you were told, you’d write shite like that!
TM – FYI
The straw man fallacy occurs in the following pattern of argument:
Person 1 asserts proposition X.
Person 2 argues against a superficially similar proposition Y, falsely, as if an argument against Y were an argument against X.This reasoning is a fallacy of relevance: it fails to address the proposition in question by misrepresenting the opposing position.
So for example
I ask ”Do you approve of Putin’s discriminatory stance towards non heterosexual people or not?”
You respond by saying “there are no laws against no laws against homosexuality in the RF”.
Can you see what you did there, you changed discriminitory stance, to laws. Classic straw man.
Watch and learn wee man.
TM – “I should think TS is one of those who rolls about in the street brawling with members of the EDL or BNP.”
I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think TS would be much use in a ruck. I’ve met his type before on lots picket lines and protests, full of rhetoric and venom, but when it all kick’s off he’d be on his toes on a flash.
I think TS is more likely to prefer spending time sitting with a portrait of Deirdre Grsowold, mumbling about the fickle nature of unrequited love.
““I’ve got to say with your misleading responses, I am even starting to even wonder whether or not you are really even a Scotsman!”
My Lord, you aren’t the sharpest tool in the toolbox are you? The True Scotsman is a kind of logical fallacy.”
🙂 🙂 It is clear you also don’t understand the concept of Irony!
What a bell end!
Well done TS, you win the 2022 Boris Johnson award for avoiding the question!!
I’ll go through your “responses” one by one, and perhaps (I’m ever the optimist) you might actually give a clear and unequivocal response.
I said – “they sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature. This is not going to happen.” Do you, TS, believe that homosexuality is contrary to human nature and that it leads to degradation and degeneration?”
You said – “I didn’t ask you about Putin’s beliefs on the subject. I asked you what specific laws you were alluding to.”
I agree I did not ask about a specific law, that is because my original posting asked ”do you approve of Putin’s discriminatory stance towards non heterosexual people or not?” It will be noted that you have attempted first to move from my original question “Putin’s stance” to “Putin’s Policy” and then on to illegality. It might be an idea to answer the questions put in from of you. A clearer example of the straw man fallacy would be difficult to devise.
So for the sake of clarity I am now asking you if you concur with Putin’s views, as stated regarding degradation and degeneration quoted above?I wrote “in 2013 The Russian state passed a “gay propaganda” (Their quote) ban arguing that promotion of LGBT rights was harmful to children. (Do you think that the promotion of LGBT rights is harmful to children?)”
You wrote – “So you are opposed to a law preventing the teaching of gay rights in schools? There was no teaching of gay rights when I went to school. I guess I was unaware that I was actually being oppressed. Were you taught “gay rights” when you were in school?”
My response – I was taught in the 1960s and 70s in a Catholic Grammar School, I wasn’t even taught about the reproductive system other than being told that contraception was wrong. I do know that lack of teaching during childhood of the fact that homosexuality was part of the normal range of human experiences was detrimental to the long term mental health of people who grew up either confused about their sexuality or for those people who knew that they were LGBTQ. So I will ask you directly do you think that the promotion of LBGT rights is harmful to children and if so do you agree with the legal ban on this put in place by the Putin Government?
I wrote -“Do you agree with Putin that children can be “taught that a boy can become a girl and vice versa” is monstrous and “on the verge of a crime against humanity.” Quoted and backed up with video footage by the FT.”
Your response is “His views are his own”
My response – The are indeed his own; however the question was about your views. What are your views about this matter?
I wrote “in 2015 Russia also introduced a driving ban prohibiting people with “sexual disorders” including people who were transsexual or transgender. Do you approve those bans TS?”Your response was “ICD-10 especially stresses that sexual orientation by itself isn’t considered a personality disorder.” “It sounds like there’s an awful lot of leeway regarding the decree. Again, homosexuality is not criminalised in RF.”
My response is to repeat the question, do you agree with driving bans being put in place for people who are transsexual or transgendered? Again ignoring your straw man argument, my original question was not about homosexuality being banned in Russia, it was asking you if you agreed with “Putin’s discriminatory stance towards non heterosexual people or not?” it is possible to be discriminatory without putting in place a full ban. The Apartheid regime did not ban people from being black, but it was discriminatory. As to ICD-10 and personality disorder, I did not say that the particular ban stated that “sexual disorder” and personality disorder were equivalences. They are not, either by ICD-10 or DSM-5 definitions, DSM-5 moved Gender Dysphoria outside of the categorisation of sexual disorders all together.
I wrote “Do you, TS, agree with the statement of Yelena Mizulina Chairman of The Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children, that “Traditional sexual relations are relations between a man and a woman. These relations need special protection”.”
Your response – “What matters are the laws. Homosexuality is not illegal in RF.”
My response is again restating that you have put forward a straw man argument. I asked about Putin’s “discriminatory stance”. Stating that traditional sexual relationships require special protection makes a discrimination between same sex relationships and relationships between men and women, do you agree with this discriminatory stance?
I finally wrote – “Perhaps you also agree with her stance on decriminalising Domestic Violence categorised as “first assaults which cause less serious injuries””
Your response “Do stay on topic.”
My response – I wrote “perhaps you also agree” that was an attempt to expand rather than change the topic, however just to be clear, I would appreciate (and I am sure other readers will equally be interested in seeing) your response to this topic as well.It sounds like there’s an awful lot of leeway regarding the decree. Again, homosexuality is not criminalised in RF.
My response is to repeat the question, do you agree with driving bans being put in place for people who are transesual or trnasgendered? To clarify your responses further, my original question was not about homosexuality being banned in Russia, it was asking you if you agreed with “Putin’s discriminatory stance towards non heterosexual people or not?” it is possible to be discriminatory without putting in place a full ban. The Apartheid regime did not ban pepople from being black, but it was discriminatory.
You also have moved from my original question “Putin’s stance” to policy and finally on to illegality, your difficulty in answering these questions is clear to anyone reading.
I’ve got to say with your misleading responses, I am even starting to even wonder whether or not you are really even a Scotsman!
TS, well just for starters there is the speech Putin made in February 2022:
“they sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature. This is not going to happen.” Do you, TS, believe that homosexuality is contrary to human nature and that it leads to degradation and degeneration?
in 2013 The Russian state passed a “gay propaganda” (Their quote) ban arguing that promotion of LGBT rights was harmful to children. (Do you think that the promotion of LGBT rights is harmful to children?)
The Russian Justice Ministry retorted that the “anti-gay propaganda” laws “have the sole purpose of protecting morals and health of children.” Cleary this conflates homosexuality with child abuse.
Do you agree with Putin that children can be “taught that a boy can become a girl and vice versa” is monstrous and “on the verge of a crime against humanity.” Quoted and backed up with video footage by the FT.
in 2015 Russia also introduced a driving ban prohibiting people with “sexual disorders” including people who were transexual or transgender. Do you approve those bans TS?
Do you, TS, agree with the statement of Yelena Mizulina Chairman of The Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children, that “Traditional sexual relations are relations between a man and a woman. These relations need special protection”.
Perhaps you also agree with her stance on decriminalising Domestic Violence catagorised as “first assaults which cause less serious injuries”
