have many things in common: paranoia and socialism for example. Stalin was left to die in his own rooms because no one had the courage to enter (beforehand Stalin accused his medicines of conspiracy so no medicine was eager to see Stalin.)
Gadafi with his preference for conspiracy theories and his delusional speeches on TV clearly shows symptoms of paranoia, too. This hasn’t escaped other commentators yet the conclusion has not been made clear enough: psychically ill leaders are the most violent when it comes to political opposition. You can be sure that right now there are people who are tortured to death in Libya.
Paranoiacs are also overly attracted to the secret service and we had several leaders who came from the secret service including Ahmadinejad.
So why do so many people prefer to be ruled by paranoiacs? The only thing paranoiacs are good in, is inventing conspirational theory s. As it takes some intelligence to uncover a true conspirational theory, followers of this leaders might believe themselves to be especially smart, now that they have uncovered one?
Even if traditional political roads are closed for libertarians I feel that they should react somehow. It is easier to find solutions here than for the people who are already confined to a torture prison.
Stalin’s paranoia may have gotten worse as his health declined, but it was really a curtain for cold, calculated suppression of all internal dissent and a cheap excuse when things did not go his own way. Did Stalin really believe the heroes of the October Revolution and the Civil War like Bucharin were really foreign agents bent on destroying the Soviet Union? Of course not. But he knew they enjoyed widespread popularity: many of them were in thick of the fighting while he was skulking behind the lines in Moscow and incarnated the most romantic ideals behind the Revolution while Stalin was little more than an opportunist. We’ll never know for sure if the whole “foreign agent” story was invented by Stalin himslef or by his sinister right hand man, Lavrentii Beria. But it worked. The Heroes of the Revolution were taken completely by surprise and offered little resistance. It was a criminal masterplan: get rid of the hated enemy and smear him at the same time. Ironically Krushev and Zhukov had Beria (who at the time was plotting to take over Stalin’s position) arrested on charges of being a British agent himself with Zhukov himself leading the Red Army officers who took him into custody during a high profile Party summit.
Blaming “saboteurs” for the failures of the famous Five Years Plans is a time honored tradition. We are seeing it today as politicians blame rising prices and social unrest on “speculators”. Mao Tse Tung did the same when his Great Leap Forward killed millions: he even went as far as blaming sparrows for eating seeds in the fields. It’s page one of the politician’s handbook: never accept responsibility for anything, always find a convenient scapegoat.
Gaddafi is doing exactly the same. It’s not my fault if people are rioting in the streets: blame a ghost on top of a mountain in the Hindu Kush. Blame drugs. He isn’t insane: he knows perfectly what’s going on. But like any good politican he’s unwilling to take blame. We see it every day. Dictators only take it to the next level.
A fitting end. It is hard to believe but the USSR in the 1920s was in certain ways a very open country. It encouraged members of the exiled non-Russian national inteligentsias to return and gave them jobs in its buerocracy. It encouraged immigration and received tens of thousands of immigrants. Most numerous among them were Koreans - at a time when Korea was occupied by Japan. Stalin and his henchmen ended up transforming it into the epitome of xenophobia where every traitor had a connection to the outside world, and everyone who had such a connection was suspect.
I don’t really buy the ‘scheming cynical Stalin’. Yeah, he would lie and kill to protect his position but that was because he was a TRUE REVOLUTIONARY. The guy was a fanatical Marxist-Lenninist, and if he happened to be ideological in his own self-interest, well that’s how human beings work: they believe whatever front gets them to the top of the ladder. Government is a priesthood, and the priests almost always believe their mystical nonsense and think they are protecting the people from the true evils of sin, be it whiskey or capitalism.
“Blaming “saboteurs” for the failures of the famous Five Years Plans is a time honored tradition. We are seeing it today as politicians blame rising prices and social unrest on “speculators”.”
This is called manhunt or scapegoating and a very succesfull strategy indeed. Remember that in most ancient (pre-jewish) cultures the goats to be sacrificed where humans. So if the rain is not coming we might have to burn (sacrifice) some more bank-employees soon (like in Athen).
I dont mean employees of the Fed. I mean the three bank-employees which where already killed in Greek, when Demonstrators set fire to their bank. This kind of sacrifices will surely help to set the economy back on track and most importantly, calm the mob.