glomper_stomper posted:

The sentence i've waited my whole life for

tpaine posted:

who is thatg

whoever he is, let's hope he ends up in a worse situation than Vilerat

karphead posted:

so tell us, swampxhing, what the purpose was in posting a Blood Lies thread in D&D in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 2016

There are legitimately good posts in that thread, including some perspective from an actual acquaintance of Furr, so I think it was the right choice, in the end.

swampman posted:

karphead posted:

so tell us, swampxhing, what the purpose was in posting a Blood Lies thread in D&D in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ 2016

There are legitimately good posts in that thread, including some perspective from an actual acquaintance of Furr, so I think it was the right choice, in the end.

i agree but i thought your motives might have been multi-faceted and that one of the facets was trolling

chickeon posted:

any chance we can get some c&p's or screenshots or anything for the folks who banned their own asses years ago?

I have met Furr several times, and am also on a few listservs with him. I think I can contribute a few contextualizing tidbits that may help the conversation (if this can even be called a conversation at this point). His character is beside the point, but I will say that he's a likable and earnest guy.

First, as has been pointed out, he is trained as a literary medievalist. This is usually evoked to discredit him: to say that he has no right to speak on matters of history and historiography. Even today, though, the scholarship on Medieval literature is profoundly caught up in the problems of historiography -- how the hell anyone today can know with any certainty what was happening in 12th century Flanders, or whatever. The historical character of medievalist scholarship was even deeper when Furr was a graduate student, before "theory" became a thing. My point isn't that Furr thus qualifies as a 'trained historian,' but that the leap from Medievalism to straight-up history writing isn't as far as some suggest. This has not been a major point of contention in this thread, but it has come up. For what it's worth, I've never heard Furr say anything about medieval literature with the exception of one Chaucer excerpt in an email.

Second is the nature of Furr's project as he has described it to me -- to me personally and to groups of people I was in, at conferences -- on more than one occasion: his argument is not that Stalin did nothing wrong, or that no mistakes were made in the USSR under Stalin.His argument is that the state of historical discourse on communist nations is such that we cannot really say anything about that history with any certainty: that standards of evidence are noticeably lower than for other subjects, and sometimes evidence is lacking altogether. Furr is (obviously) a committed communist, and the relevance of Soviet history for him is that current Marxist movements can learn something from that history, which means knowing as reliably as possible what was successful and what was a failure. The moral evaluation of historical figures is pointless, and even worse is the desire to vindicate or condemn certain figures, for whatever reason.

I am in no position to evaluate this argument, but it is also the case that this thread (which seems to have people capable of doing so) has not evaluated the argument on its own terms, usually overconstruing his position in bad faith as "Stalin did nothing wrong" (he did, admittedly, in that famous youtube, say he has seen no evidence of "crimes" committed by Stalin, but a. I have never heard or read him say that anywhere else, and b. I am not sure what is meant by "crimes" that would have relevance for the way in which Stalin is usually condemned, or, in other words, why exactly this is construed in terms of legality and illegality -- I say that very earnestly, and if anyone can expand on this for me I'd be happy to read it). Swampman and others have tried to steer the argument back toward historiographical bias in the last few pages without much success. I would add, though, that if this bias needs to be explained causally (rather than described), we don't really need recourse to a cabalistic CIA conspiracy that grants the government the near-omnipotence necessary to intentionally shape academic discourse for political reasons, even if it's clear and indisputable that the impulse to do so was there. I don't think it's all that farfetched to say that anti-communism was not only a function of capitalist state apparatuses, but also took hold of the citizens of those states such that they "did the right thing" all of their own.

But even that is beside the point, because, again, the argument is only that this bias exists in academia, over and above how it came to be. My only wish would be for this thread to take this argument in good faith, because I can only think about it anecdotally at best. In short: the argument is about the writing of history, and not the actual historical events themselves, and this thread is wayyyy caught up in the latter.

Lastly, I would say that academic Marxists (this is the circle I'm in) tend to keep Furr's scholarship at arm's length. As a person he is well-loved and a welcome presence at conferences, and generally folks take his line on the relevance of Soviet history for contemporary communists. But, for any number of reasons, "the anti-Stalin paradigm" (Furr's phrase) has not really entered circulation, even among the radical left in academia (lol at the idea of such people). The most tangible effect of Furr's discourse in this circle is more sustained attention to "anti-communism," which absorbs the historiographical point without wading too deep into the Stalin question.

Constantignoble posted:

speaking of stalin-related scholarship, the new issue of crisis & critique is entirely dedicated to koba, featuring articles by lih, losurdo, boer, et al (and here's the all-in-one)

Yeah.... that's Slavoj Zizek's journal....... so..... let's not.

MarianneSadd posted:

Yeah.... that's Slavoj Zizek's journal....... so..... let's not.

Dear diary,
My life reminds me of a joke from the old times,

MarianneSadd posted:

Constantignoble posted:

speaking of stalin-related scholarship, the new issue of crisis & critique is entirely dedicated to koba, featuring articles by lih, losurdo, boer, et al (and here's the all-in-one)

Yeah.... that's Slavoj Zizek's journal....... so..... let's not.

The losurdo article is good tho (excerpt earlier in the thread)

gyrofry posted:

I have met Furr several times, and am also on a few listservs with him. I think I can contribute a few contextualizing tidbits that may help the conversation (if this can even be called a conversation at this point)

This is an excellent post and the author should post here more often

I will add that the more I read Furr, and his responses to his critics, the more I love his work. The biggest flaw he has imo has nothing to do with the quality of his research or his arguments, it's all about style. This is obviously an emotionally charged topic for him, and fair enough too, but he lets that come through a little too much in his writing, and it just makes it that much easier for the casual observer to dismiss, having already had it beaten into them by the academic freikorps that Furr is not a 'real historian' etc. When you're trying to wage an uphill battle from the start - countering decades of anticommunist propaganda and compromise of academia - it pays to keep a cool head.

Anyway, I commend Comrade Furr on all his great work, I look forward to reading his book on Trotsky when I eventually get hold of a copy, and I hope all his work reaches many more sympathetic eyes and ears because it is inspiring

CharlesFomsky posted:

Happy to answer any questions about Grover for y'all

what username would he like?