Sunday 28 March 2010

He's not just bonkers

My OU course has moved on from impressionism to political history with a particular case study of Joseph Stalin. By crikey, he were a right bastard and no mistake. But it's amazing how often in politics people will go along with what some nutter at the top insists on even though they must know there's something not right about it. In Stalin's case there's the 'Red Terror' and the 'Great Purge' (amongst others). Millions denied justice and executed as a result of Stalin's paranoia but all these flunkeys went along with it. We can explain Stalin's behaviour by saying he was a sociopath who although he knew that what he was doing was wrong, he didn't care. But all the people who actually did the killing can't all have been sociopaths can they?
PS. Only one occurence of clichespeak to report from this week's tutorial : thinking outside the box.

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