The Death of Staliln

Apparently the death of Stalin was not entirely as in the film. He lingered for three days, drifting in and out of consciousness. And his daughter, who was present, says that at the last moment, he lifted his fist toward the ceiling, fell back and died.

Somehow, I expected him to show fear.

As Joan Crawford, lay dying, her housekeeper tried to pray in her behalf; and she objected: “Damn it! Don’t you dare ask God to help me.”

Hitler seems to have been unrepentant too. He cursed the German people for having let him down.

There seems something troublingly admirable in this holding out defiant and unrepentant to the end. One thinks of Jacob wrestling with the angel. God gave us free will; should we surrender it so easily?

There is obviously a conflict in our consciences.

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage, at the dying of the light.

And aren’t these ends more admirable, at least, than Judas’s reported end, hanging himself from a tree in his remorse? That seems, by comparison, rather more despicable. It feels like an attempt to get out of making amends. As Saul did. As Peter did.

Judas is, by tradition, the one person we know with certainty to be in Hell.

Catholic teaching is that God sends nobody to Hell. We decide to go ourselves. Is this what we see here? In their defiance, are Stalin or Hitler or Crawford choosing Hell?

Milton has Satan justify his rebellion against God with the famous phrase, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

This sounds plausibly like the rationale here: a proud refusal to submit your own will to another.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

And yet, again, many or most of us find the sentiment in that famous poem admirable.

Stalin or Crawford or Hitler are, in the end, taking full responsibility for their actions, and in doing so, are also implicitly accepting punishment for their actions.

Perhaps they merit an incalculably long period in purgatory, rather than Hell. Or perhaps at least the lower circles of Hell are reserved for those who, like Judas, do their evil in secret and sly ways, pretend to piety, do harm while feigning affection, and then deny they did it.

The Secret History of Crimea

The Jewish Khazar Empire

As the Ukraine spirals further into chaos, and the Mideast crises drag on without sign of resolution, it is interesting to ponder what might have been.

In the years just after World War II, Molotov was largely in control of the Soviet Union, and the expected successor to Stalin. He had a plan, ultimately vetoed by Stalin, to make the Crimea a Jewish homeland.

There was a lot of sense to the idea. Unlike Palestine, the Crimea had recently been depopulated. Stalin had deported the Crimean Tatars for collaboration with the Germans. So the land was up for grabs. Moreover, it had a history of Jewishness. The local Jewish population was significant, and it had been part of the Medieval Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. If Arthur Koestler is right, modern Askenazi Jews are actually mostly Khazar by blood.

Molotov's wife was Jewish

The Zionists, for their part, were not terribly picky at this point as to where their homeland was to be, so long as they were given one.

Had the plan gone through, we might have avoided most or all of the ongoing strife in the Middle East, and certainly several wars. We might also have avoided the recent troubles over Crimea. From the standpoint of the Jews, the Crimea is more defensible over the long term than Palestine, and more fertile. Moreover, it is European, as were most of the Jews who colonized Israel. It would have looked far less like the last colony of imperial Europe.

The Princess and the Pea

In the official version of Stalin’s life story, his father was a drunkard who beat him regularly. In fact, according to Simon Rees, writing in Military History (“Historians are still trying to sort out the dark private life and strange death of Josef Stalin,” October, 2003, p. 18), “his home life as no worse than that of the other poor people of Gori.”

In the official version of Hitler’s life story, his father was a drunkard who beat him regularly. In fact, according to Karl Dietrich Bracher, in his detailed study The German Dictatorship (NY: Praeger, 1970, p. 58), “The father was not a chronic alcoholic, but, rather, a comparatively progressive man with a good job.”

Rather, there is reason to suppose that both Hitler and Stalin were pampered by their mothers. Stalin was an only child, his three older siblings all having died in infancy. One might expect he was especially valued by his mother for this reason. His father was largely absent during his childhood, having moved to another city for better work—leaving little counterbalance to an over-indulgent mother.

Hitler was supported by his mother throughout his early adulthood, with apparently no need to work for a living. “After the death of his father,” Bracher writes, “his mother afforded [him] … two-and-a-half years of idleness.” (p. 59). Bracher refers to her as “over-indulgent.”

Of course, no one can know for certain; but this may shed some light on the current naïve faith among social workers that the abused go on to abuse, and the bullied go on to bully. For such claims are always based on asking questions of current abusers, or of current bullies. If one has a fixed habit of blaming others for everything, and pushing one’s bad feelings off onto others, isn’t one likely to do exactly the same thing here? Isn’t a bully or a psychopath automatically going to claim to have been bullied or abused themselves?

Yet the truth is likely to be the opposite—when one is accustomed to being treated very well, one expects it. Receive anything less, and one is liable to consider oneself hard done by. The traditional fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea contains a great deal of folk wisdom. When one is pampered for long enough, any inevitable ill feeling is liable to be interpreted as oppression. The truly oppressed, on the other hand, are more likely to remain silent—through long habit.

This also explains feminism. Women have traditionally been pampered, not oppressed. Men have traditionally been told to buck up and shut up.