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Once secret but now available documents show that people like Anne Applebaum are intellectual hacks of the worst kind

It seems the sole purpose of people like Anne Applebaum is to warn educated and engaged liberals (you know, the kind that read "The Atlantic" and 'The New Yorker") about allowing their ideology to stray too far from bourgeois comfort zones. Make your home in identity politics, vague and self-righteous notions of human rights, hell, maybe even support a national health service, but by god make sure you don't start talking about property relations because then before you know it you'll wake up, look in the mirror, and you'll have a big bushy mustache and be starving Ukrainian peasants!

Of course, some new found information (you always find it in the last place you look! Doh!) always will pop up to ensure you that Stalinism was indeed purely ideological and there is, of course, a straight line from Marx's "workers of the world unite" to Stalin's "socialism in one country." No pragmatism there. No, none whatsoever. The Communist International notoriously switching from promotion of world revolution to suppression of it? Yes, well that was well understood to be a purely ideological move, based on Marx's (although probably largely ghostwritten by Engels) polemic "How to Keep Some Guy Who Hasn't Been Born Yet Named Stalin in Total and Complete Power."

You know, in order to understand societies based on classical liberalism, nuance is ok. Yes, our development was based on genocide and slavery, but freedom of speech and Iphones and stuff. Yes, they went from a backwards peasant society to first in space in a couple generations but everything about it was BAD. BAD. BAD. BAD. And that was because of IDEOLOGY. Get it yet? Even with lots of the same people running things the same way in the post-Soviet states, the people are much better off because they lost the ideology.

Thanks Anne, because of you I can't have a decent conversation, with proper historical context, without a liberal (or anarchist for that matter) feeling it necessary to drown the baby in the bathwater violently in front of me. Yes, fuck Stalin, I'm with you, but if you can still pull some feelings of hope out of the glimmer in lady liberty's eyes (I'm with you on that too) let's talk about ideology, history, and politics like well-rounded adults that understand life is full of contradictions. That's why anything about everything is fucking complicated. Reductionist punditry of this sort is taken serious by powerful people, and therefore far more reactionary than what comes from punching bag buffoons like Bill O'Reilly. So let's stop thinking these people are fucking geniuses because they write in the New York Review of Books and can find other countries on a map. 

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