(April 23, 2015 at 4:08 am)robvalue Wrote: ...The concept of God is not well defined...
I'll buy that. Every time we use that word we have no idea what we really mean by it.
(April 23, 2015 at 9:43 am)Red Economist Wrote: ...being a Stalinist has the advantage of sticking with more orthodox ideas and learning the history and also having be honest enough about the mistakes that were made...that people are inherently selfish and therefore...political corruption in a communist society...explaining communism's capacity for violence, irrationality and corruption.
So that Khruschev and his successors remained Stalinists after the 20th Party Congress. But I wonder if they got over Russia's propensity for violence and corruption, much less communism's? Somehow I don't feel they were ever able to solve the problem of establishing a governance tradition for that country. Selfishness and its irrational sequelae of course occur everywhere but it seems that the Soviet Union was overly dependent on personal relationships for getting things done, as Russia still is now. The worst thing about Stalin is they had no way of curbing this guy or showing him the door before he could do his dirty deeds. Stalin outmaneuvered rivals and built a patronage network around himself that became impenetrable.
Nixon tried to a lesser extent to do that here, but was doomed from the start. Even without Watergate, he would have been gone in 1977 anyway. That 8-year time limit, plus the fact that all the U.S. power players support and enforce it, is important. We could have a Bush/Gore thing but we didn't have a Bush-for-life. Often I think the communist way might have succeeded if they had been able to introduce effective limits on personal power and patronage, a goal they were starting to push toward at the end but when it was already too late for them.
