see this watch? i got it by Crying. my car? crying. my beautiful wife? Crying. My perfect teeth? Crying. now get the fuck out of my office
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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God damn, this guy sucks though. I knew Verso had some of these types based on the stuff they put out, but didn't know annoying-types like this were so high up in it.
Edit: Also, it's not as if Furr hasn't responded to the stupid Greene critique.
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/gfgreenecrit0125.html
Actually reading Furr, and more importantly understanding who Furr is, really wiped a lot of my illusions about dipshit western leftists and anti-Stalinism. Their actual criticisms almost always amount to cherrypicking his claims to discount all of them atop very obviously bad arguments like saying the only people who can write about history are people holding phd's in history when the guy's a medieval literature professor, he's taken history courses as well as his writing is based on looking at and presenting documents in keeping with writing standards on history.
You can tell it touches a nerve because of all the fucking r/badhistory, r/askhistorians, etc. dogshit threads by liberal types who are fucking pissed anyone would even attempt to look at a lot of the claims made about the USSR and Stalin and run to find some authority to coo them back to complacency.
I think Furr makes good arguments in some cases and he obviously has a massive amount of knowledge about the Soviet archives and the like, but I think that he does also make some silly arguments, like what he says about Katyn.
Edit: Also, Jesus fucking Christ, why are his webpages so unreadable that they can't even display an apostrophe?
What do you mean? Furr is wrong to say the Nazis did the massacre?
Right, the Soviets did the massacre (though perhaps the number is slightly inflated for various reasons). The people massacred were military officers, members of the Polish upper class who the Soviets identified as a serious hazard, because they were very liable to side with the Nazis over the communists, and after interrogating many of them and separating out the ones they identified as not being hazards, they killed the remainder, which was several thousand people.
I am inclined to say that there were better solutions, that the officers could surely have been sent to Siberia or something, but that it wasn't just the Soviets killing for fun or for a punitive purpose, much less some of the other ridiculous motivations sometimes ascribed to the event (like "attacking Polish culture" because the officers were upper class and therefore disproportionately academics, etc. outside of their military careers).
Just a classist chump who thinks the peasantry ain't shit even though the peasantry has a much better track record than the proletariat in overthrowing their oppressors.
I actually do not know what that meant at all
Can someone please explain for those of us less steeped in hyper-sectarian online discourse what on earth the deal is with this Rockhill controversy?
I’m probably missing some bit but from what I gather Gabriel Rockhill wrote a book titled “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?” that is about how Marxism in the west has been co-opted on purpose and distorted, specifically focusing on how anti-imperialism has been stripped from the discourse to defang theory in the west. This is probably a much better summary from the publisher, the book is high on my reading list but I haven’t got to it yet.
Now on to this Sebastian Budgen fellow. As if on queue he starts posting incoherent tirades calling Gabriel Rockhill a Stalinist specifically because of Gabriel’s examination of the lack of anti-imperialism in western Marxist thought in his book. Sebastian is a senior editor at Verso Books, a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism, and a contributing editor to Jacobin. All three publications have a noticeable tendency to do exactly what Gabriel Rockhill’s book is about, remove the anti-imperialist elements of Marxist theory. I find it particularly amusing and not surprising in the slightest that at the slightest hint of criticism Sebastian throws an incoherent tantrum, on Facebook of all places, calling Gabriel an evil Stalinist. Oh and Sebastian bragged that he helped prevent the publication of Gabriel Rockhill’s book in France by using his connections to get a French publisher to stop their publishing deal with Gabriel.
senior editor at Verso Books, a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism, and a contributing editor to Jacobin
