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View Full Version : Soviet resurgance or just nostagia?



Okla-homey
5/29/2006, 03:53 PM
If you take a good look at the history of Russia you’ll see that they’ve always been arseholes.

Just because they change the name of their country doesn’t change that.


MINSK, Belarus - A monument to Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was unveiled Friday in the Belarusian capital Minsk, provoking protests from human rights defenders and opposition politicians.

Dzerzhinsky, reviled by critics of the Soviet era, helped establish the first Soviet secret service, called the Cheka, in 1917 under Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. The Cheka, a forerunner of the KGB, was responsible for mass arrests and executions.

The towering 10-foot bronze figure, a copy of the statue of Dzerzhinsky that pro-democracy crowds tore down in front of KGB headquarters in Moscow in 1991, occupies a spot inside the grounds of the Military Academy. Dzerzhinksky was known as 'Iron Felix." He was born in modern-day Belarus.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, an open admirer of the Soviet Union and a pariah to the West because of his government's crackdown on dissent and the media, has kept the Soviet-era acronym KGB for Belarus' security service.

Stepan Sukhorenko, head of the Belarus' KGB, attended the ceremony unveiling the stature.

Oleg Gulak of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee rights group condemned the move as "an insult to the memory of the millions of victims of the repressive machine founded by Iron Felix."

The leader of the Social-Democratic Party, Nikolai Statkevich, insisted that Dzerzhinsky was not "a figure of Belarusian history we should be proud of."

The head of the Belarusian border guard service, Gen. Alexander Pavlosvsky, defended the decision to erect a statue of Dzerzhinsky next to the faculty for frontier guard officers.

"We shouldn't be afraid of our history and people who gave birth to a new state, fought for it and were heroes," he said. "Dzerzhinsky was not an odious figure, he is someone who merits respect."

RUSH LIMBAUGH is my clone!
5/29/2006, 05:04 PM
Without the precepts of religion, or the rule of law based on fairness and allowing basic freedoms, we shouldn't expect otherwise, eh?

Scott D
5/29/2006, 05:12 PM
they had religion, it was kept on a very tight leash..unless you were Jewish, then it was out of the question.

Jerk
5/29/2006, 07:26 PM
they had religion,

Of course they did! The State was God. And their god did...well...look at my second signiture.

Okla-homey
5/29/2006, 07:30 PM
Without the precepts of religion, or the rule of law based on fairness and allowing basic freedoms, we shouldn't expect otherwise, eh?

One of those noted Reds (Marx I believe) said religion was the opiate of the masses. As far as the rule of law goes, lawyers were licensed to practice by the party just as they were in Nazi Germany.

Bunch of arseholes I say. Good riddance.

Jerk
5/29/2006, 07:44 PM
One of those noted Reds (Marx I believe) said religion was the opiate of the masses. As far as the rule of law goes, lawyers were licensed to practice by the party just as they were in Nazi Germany.

Bunch of arseholes I say. Good riddance.

I think William means to say that we have the rule of law which protects the rights of indivuals...as opposed the 'the rule of law' which protects the collective and the state.

RUSH LIMBAUGH is my clone!
5/29/2006, 07:51 PM
I think William means to say that we have the rule of law which protects the rights of indivuals...as opposed the 'the rule of law' which protects the collective and the state.Yes, I could have said it better, as you did.

jeremy885
5/29/2006, 07:52 PM
If you take a good look at the history of Russia you’ll see that they’ve always been arseholes.

Just because they change the name of their country doesn’t change that.

You do know that Belrus and Russia are two seperate countries, right?

Scott D
5/29/2006, 08:48 PM
Of course they did! The State was God. And their god did...well...look at my second signiture.

No, I mean the Orthodox Church was still in effect and people still attended on Sat/Sun. However, priests were very limited in regards to what they were and were not allowed to do. So in essence, it did become state sponsored/controlled religion. However, Christianity was practiced...it was Judiaism that was an automatic trip to the Gulags for life. The state did confiscate any and all of The Church's wealth before any particular parish was allowed to remain open.

IronHorseSooner
5/29/2006, 08:58 PM
This was actually a topic in a class on Russian/ Soviet history. The Russian people historically have not wanted freedom. They have wanted their lives dictated to them. Be it the Tzarist system, or the Bolsheviks, they just don't like be accountable for their own prosperity.

Jerk
5/29/2006, 08:59 PM
No, I mean the Orthodox Church was still in effect and people still attended on Sat/Sun. However, priests were very limited in regards to what they were and were not allowed to do. So in essence, it did become state sponsored/controlled religion. However, Christianity was practiced...it was Judiaism that was an automatic trip to the Gulags for life. The state did confiscate any and all of The Church's wealth before any particular parish was allowed to remain open.

Never knew that. thanks/.

IronHorseSooner
5/29/2006, 09:02 PM
One of things unique about extremism (be it Communism, Nazism, the Klan, Muslim Extremists, etc.) is that they all hate the Jews.

Scott D
5/29/2006, 09:04 PM
I should add that among the restrictiveness were things such as you couldn't have 'shrines' in your home. If you wore a cross, it had to be hidden by clothing. You could only worship on the State dictated days at the State dictated time.

So realistically, it wouldn't really be worship that would be very recognizable here. And it wasn't unheard of for Priests/Chaplains to go to Gulags either...usually it was because they were refusing to give up items of the Church.

Octavian
5/29/2006, 09:10 PM
One of things unique about extremism (be it Communism, Nazism, the Klan, Muslim Extremists, etc.) is that they all hate the Jews.

yep.

Post WWI Fascists blamed Jews for insighting radical Communist revolutions in the East (Marx, after all, was Jewish) and manipulating international systems of banking and finance (capitalism) in the West....intentionally pitting the world against itself for the Jewish elites to control after an epic confrontation.

Communist leaders also bought into the Jewish Capitalism conspiracy....the origins of this nonsense can be traced to a publication called "The Protocols" (written and first printed in Russia in 1905 IIRC)....the work was later a cornerstone of Joseph Goerbel's Nazi propoganda machine.

The Klan and the Muslin extremists were/are more or less uneducated morons who really weren't motivated by anything greater than fear and ignorance.

lefty
5/29/2006, 09:34 PM
One of those noted Reds (Marx I believe) said religion was the opiate of the masses. As far as the rule of law goes, lawyers were licensed to practice by the party just as they were in Nazi Germany.

Bunch of arseholes I say. Good riddance.

Yes, Marx did say that religion was the opiate of the masses. However, he was referring to the power that religion had during feudalism when most everything was owned by the church. He had little to say about the role that religion might play under socialisim or communism. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find anything that Marx wrote that would give you a clue as to what he thought socialism or communism would look like. The closest one could come would be the Communist Manifesto. This work is a political statement intended to influence the French in their revolution in 1848. Perhaps one of the most interesting pronouncements of Marx was that "I'm not a Marxist."

Okla-homey
5/30/2006, 04:53 AM
You do know that Belrus and Russia are two seperate countries, right?
Yes, now they are. Before the break-up, they were part of the USSR of course.

Okla-homey
5/30/2006, 05:14 AM
I think William means to say that we have the rule of law which protects the rights of indivuals...as opposed the 'the rule of law' which protects the collective and the state.

To me, the notion of the "rule of law" simply means that the law itself, objectively applied by the court, will be the basis for legal decisions. Contrast that notion with the situation in much of the world to this day (and the old USSR and Third Reich) where in civil matters victory in court is determined by whoever is the most politically powerful among the litigants. In criminal cases, the rule of law is absent when the defendant is found guilty based on the state's charges instead of the evidence put to the trier of fact for a verdict.

crawfish
5/30/2006, 08:34 AM
One of things unique about extremism (be it Communism, Nazism, the Klan, Muslim Extremists, etc.) is that they all hate the Jews.

Well...perhaps not the Zionists. :D