benevolent stalinism and re-education
anecdote · personal/Žižek persona ·
retold in 3 talks
Closes by telling the host that beneath her liberal appearance her stalinist self should come up; in his stalinism Facebook and Instagram would be prohibited, and mistakes earn only a year or two of re-education, no hard labor.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“beneath your beautiful liberal appearance now your stalinist self should come up.”
“The only thing that Stalin said was the problem with Kulaks as class should be solved... Nobody knew how to interpret this.”
“this your decency is the greatest temptation to evil if you're a true bolshevik you go on killing and this horrible ethics is returning to today trump”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Ambrose Bierce1Karl Kraus1Eve Ensler1Éric Rohmer1Joe Ashkenazi1Mark (host)1Sergey Lavrov1J. Arch Getty1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Closes by telling the host that beneath her liberal appearance her stalinist self should come up; in his stalinism Facebook and Instagram would be prohibited, and mistakes earn only a year or two of re-education, no hard labor., illustrating self-ironic stalinism,Žižek persona
Stalin announced only that the 'Kulak problem as a class should be solved' without specifying how; local cadres, terrified of being accused of leniency, escalated to maximum violence, while Stalin's interventions were always ones of moderation., illustrating totalitarianism,big Other,ambiguous injunction
Soviet propaganda argued that true Bolshevik decency requires overcoming the 'temptation of evil' (starving peasants) to achieve historical necessity, a logic Žižek sees returning in Trump's rhetoric., illustrating communism-socialism,ideology