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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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You know who this Moulay Ismail reminds me of? Joseph Stalin. Your apology reads exactly like Stalinist apology. Order and security, relative stability, building monumental structures all over the country, being respected by the leaders of other superpowers... Did Moroccan peasants actually enjoy his rule, or did his tight control over the country result in their successful overexploitation to fuel his war or construction efforts?

The difference is that Russia under Stalin was still so poor that by the early 50s East Germany, which had been totally destroyed by the war and had its most valuable surviving industrial equipment shipped wholesale to Russia as war loot, was already the richest country in the Eastern Bloc merely because of the legacy of industrial capitalism from the pre-communist era. Stalin oversaw famines and starvation, threw mountains of men at Hitler in a series of severe strategic blunders, and failed by 1953 to ensure a standard of living even close to a western capitalist country, or indeed what a Russia that had remained capitalist after 1917 might have reasonably achieved.

If Stalin’s Russia in 1953 was as wealthy as France (by median household income, say), very few in history would consider him a bad leader and - of course - the trajectory of socialist economics would likely be very different.

threw mountains of men at Hitler

That's a generic boo outgrop. Stalin had just about 2x more men at his disposal, overall losses are about 1.5 Soviet soldier of 1 killed German soldier.

Perhaps the difference is that Stalin acted in a technological society (in relation to the 18th century), in which much was invested in the capital and human development, because they are the main determinants of economic fortune; wars are destructive in this environment, even for the winner. Moulay Ismail, on the other hand, acted in pre-modern agarian society, where the land is a key economic contribution, and the war of conquest is quickly profitable, even if the peasants are killed - it has not undergone a demographic transformation, so the population is quickly recovering.

If you or others are interested, the blogger Nintil did a cool deep dive into the claims for vs against economic growth under Stalin. The tl;dr is that Stalin probably achieved more industrialization than Czarist Russia would have if it continued on its present path (which it's worth remembering was basically Import Substitute Industrialization and probably would have pewtered out). Stalinism still achieved less than a counterfactual Czarist Russia likely could have achieved if they had genuinely liberalized, but who knows if they would have done that.

This is leaving aside of course the cost of human suffering, which would have made the system not worth it either way.