Einstein: Verdades e Mentiras

 

            Waldon Volpicelli Alves (Editora Novo Século, 2015) escreveu esse ótimo livro sobre o grande sábio Einstein (fala-se “Einxtein”). A ele cabia resumir para a revista Annalen der Physik os resumos mais interessantes, entre estes os resumos da Academia de Ciências de Paris.

            No famoso artigo de Einstein de 1905, no entanto, não havia referências a Poincaré e a outros estudiosos. Nesse artigo datado desse ano, Einstein reafirmou o princípio da relatividade e acrescentou o postulado de que a velocidade da luz é independente da velocidade de sua fonte. Os einsteinianos insistem que é o relógio que inventa o tempo, as hastes de medição que criam espaço, isso é controverso.

            O problema no século passado era: o que é a luz? Luz é partícula ou onda (simplificando). A teoria de Einstein é apenas uma interpretação melhorada da teoria de Lorentz. Poincaré foi o primeiro entender a sincronia entre a hora local de Lorentz e a questão de sincronia do relógio.

            Poincaré não só formulou o princípio, mas também descobriu no trabalho de Lorenz a formulação matemática necessária do princípio. E tudo antes do artigo de Einstein aparecer. Uma parte da teoria, a teoria espacial da relatividade, era conhecida 27 anos antes de Einstein escrever o seu trabalho.

            Poincaré estaria mais próximo da Matemática, enquanto Einstein da Física (na visão de Hawking). Einstein foi mais longe que Poincaré ao debater o significado operacional da dilatação do tempo, o francês nunca debateu isso. Ele resolveu a questão dos paradoxos de radiação poderiam ser resolvidos assumindo a inércia da energia, nisso também foi além de Poincaré. Einstein apenas soube interpretar o que os outros tinham visto antes.

 

 

Resenha de O Homem que Nasceu Póstumo

 

Resenha de O Homem que Nasceu Póstumo

 

            Mário Ferreira dos Santos foi um filósofo, tradutor e jornalista brasileiro (1907-1968). Mário traduziu do alemão o livro A Vontade de Potência, de Nietzsche, livro posteriormente tirado das obras completas e, segundo Foucault e alguns outros. Posteriormente, esse livro foi transformado em Nachlass, Fragmentos Póstumos. Esse livro de Mário Ferreira dos Santos me foi apresentado por um rapaz do submundo intelectual como um livro que possibilita a leitura de Nietzsche como um cristão.

Em O Homem que Nasceu Póstumo, Mário cria uma “sombra” de Nietzsche que fala com sua linguagem, suas imagens e seus conceitos e assume o papel do nietzschiano, de um discípulo que diz as palavras que agradam o gosto do filósofo. É, então, o diálogo entre um Nietzsche imaginário, tão personagem conceitual como Zaratustra e um nietzschiano que é o próprio Mário, que coloca-se na posição de um interlocutor de Sócrates, interlocutor doce, manso.

Cristo era o único homem sem ressentimentos. Só o Deus moral foi refutado, então o Deus imoral não foi refutado. Nietzsche sempre se volta para o único, para o todo, para Deus.

            Mário parece acreditar muito nesse último livro e em Ecce Uomo, autobiografia totalmente exagerada de Nietzsche. Embora desprezando o estado e as massas, Nietzsche dizia: “chegará o tempo em que surgirão institutos nos quais se viverá e se ensinará o que entendo por viver e ensinar”. Como obter isso sem ser de certa forma ser de certa forma santificado junto ao estado e ser popular entre as massas?

            Essa discussão é importantíssima, uma vez que o eixo desse ensaio é afastar a relação entre Nietzsche e a sua leitura ocorrida na Alemanha nazista. Só que ele não tem uma boa teoria do projeto político de Nietzsche, uma vez que esse nunca existiu de forma clara, bem como não tem uma teoria e um sentido histórico tanto do nazismo quanto do conceito de totalitarismo.

O foco é que Nietzsche opõe estado e cultura. Chegar ao poder embrutece e custa caro. As grandes épocas da cultura são muitas vezes épocas da decadência política. O estado aparece como um novo deus, cultuado pelo homem bovino. Nietzsche queria escrever Vontade de Potência em francês, para evitar a palavra “macht” e não associar-se ao império alemão. Mas ao mesmo tempo, Mário apresenta o socialismo de Nietzsche como sendo o socialismo individualista. Como socialismo sem estado e sem massas? Não era melhor abandonar a idéia de “socialismo”?

Nietzsche exaltava o guerreiro, o filósofo, o herói, o santo. Figuras como São Vicente de Paula e São Francisco de Assis seriam o melhor que a humanidade tinha, o melhor exemplo.

            Querendo afastar Nietzsche do fascismo, ele fala em homem que une a objetividade e a subjetividade, as duas dimensões humanas, o homem integral, mas aí isso evoca o integralismo. A metade subjetiva é que está escondida e que tem de aparecer. Ele é contra a ciência, na medida em que ela padroniza, cria standards, ou seja, Nietzsche é contra o totalitarismo. A totalização gera divisão, pois a diferença fica escondida.

            Mário também busca tentar consertar, dizendo que não queria exterminar os fracos e sim a fraqueza.  Força não seria força física.  Mas ao mesmo tempo, embora “socialista”, recusa a idéia de elevar os fracos dos socialistas, pois elevar os fracos como totalidade seria utopia e indignidade.

            Nietzsche negou, ao mesmo tempo, o racionalismo e a metafísica, a ciência e a religiosidade ao mesmo tempo. Fala também da técnica e da mágica, caos e vontade criadora. Mas lá para adiante, resgata Nietzsche enquanto místico, assim como considera Cristo um avanço e Sócrates uma regressão. Quando fala isso, resgata Pascal. Cristo morre na cruz, mas o socratismo não morre na cicuta.

            Nascimento da Tragédia tem misticismo, sentir-se parte do uno, do todo indistinto, ou seja, em Deus. Nicolau de Cusa associa-se a ele

Então, não existe verdade e sim verdade-mentira, essa inseparabilidade traz justiça. E as mentiras/verdades dos nazistas sobre Nietzsche, como combater??.

Para o nietzschiano Mário, a filosofia de Nietzsche seria uma filosofia da heroicidade. Ele não desenvolveu melhor essa teoria nesse livro ficcional que, não obstante, é fascinante.

 

Grover Furr Responde a Sean Purdy

 

GROVER FURR criticas sent by Lucio 02.13.21.docx

 

Since /u/kieslowskifan gave you the short answer (and he is absolutely correct), I'll give you the "long answer." I do this because often the relative terseness of dismissals of Furr is incorrectly taken to mean that no one has any specific arguments against him, and this allows his fans to continue circulating his stuff in all apparent seriousness.

 

First of all, to directly answer your question: Furr's positions are not supported whatsoever. Literally no major historians of the Purges -- Getty, Fitzpatrick, Khlevniuk, etc. -- believe that the Moscow Trials were fair or accurate. A quick search on JSTOR will reveal that Furr is neither published nor cited in any peer-reviewed Russian history journal in English, save for a single book review in the Russian History Review. So, not only do professional historians disagree with Furr, they almost universally ignore him as well.

This is an ignorant comment.

*It is the logical fallacy of ‘argument to authority,’ often called ‘appeal to authority.’

* The fact that mainstream historians do not agree with me is not evidence that my research is in error. Nor is the fact that I do not agree with them evidence that they are wrong.

* Only evidence is evidence.

In fact the only relevant place he does appear is in a footnote in a paper by J. Arch Getty thanking him for certain information. This is important because Furr relies heavily on Getty and often insinuates that he and Getty have identical views. This, however, is false.

* This is a lie.

I never, ever suggest that Getty and I have identical views.

For instance: through archival research in the Trotsky papers at Harvard, Getty discovered that Trotsky had connections with a "bloc" in 1932 but concludes that "Trotsky envisioned no 'terrorist' role for the bloc."1 Furr, on the other hand, proclaims that "Getty's discovery in the Trotsky archive corroborates the testimony of the Moscow Trial defendants."2

What I state is correct. The discovery of the ‘bloc’ corroborates testimony of Moscow Trials defendants, who also state that there was a ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites.’

He further argues that evidence of this bloc's existence past 1932 and its terrorist activities in Trotsky's correspondence have, quite simply, been scrubbed or hidden from the archives.3

* This is a lie. There is a great deal of evidence of this bloc in the Soviet archives. I have published a lot of it, and there is a lot more in collections of Soviet documents.

There is no further evidence of this bloc in the Harvard Trotsky Archive. But Mr Purdy says “archives.”

This brings us to our second point. Why is Grover Furr not taken seriously in academic Russian history? The answer that there is a concerted effort by professional historians and academic institutions to suppress the truth by falsifying evidence and marginalizing Furr is about as plausible as the claim Big Pharma is suppressing studies that prove herbal remedies cure cancer. The reason is much simpler: quite frankly, Furr's work is amateur and wouldn't even get a passing grade in a decently rigorous undergraduate course. It's laden with dubious argumentation and poor source evaluation.

This is two statements. The first is false; the second is a lie.

 It is true that mainstream professional historians falsify evidence about Stalin, and I have demonstrated this in my books.

I have never said that there is a “concerted effort … to marginalize” me. This statement is a lie.

To give a specific example, let’s look at Furr’s approach to the lack of non-Soviet sources corroborating or confirming the central charges of the Moscow Trials (since /u/kieslowskifan brought it up), which pretty much all revolve around collaboration with foreign powers. Furr begins by noting that

 

In countries still extant it is normal to keep intelligence archives secret indefinitely. This is certainly the case in the USA. We suggest it is logical to suspect the same thing in the case of Germany and Japan.4

 

This rather conveniently ignores that not only is Nazi Germany no longer extant, but that many of the important government archives in Berlin were under the Soviet occupation zone in Berlin, and neither East German nor Soviet scholars who had access to such documents were known for their fondness for Trotskyists.5

* I did not say that evidence exists in the German and/or Japanese archives of Trotsky’s collaboration. I said it might exist there.

He then goes on to note that there is a "great deal of evidence" that Tukhachevsky with collaborated the Germans -- and, in the next sentence, admits that "we have only indirect confirmation of this from German archives" and only "somewhat more direct" from the Czech archives.6 He provides citations for neither "confirmation," nor is it clear what a "somewhat more direct" confirmation is compared to an "indirect" one.

* This article from 2010 is already over 100 pages long. I simply could not make it any longer by including this evidence.

I do include it in my latest book:

Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy: Soviet and Non-Soviet Evidence; with the Complete Transcript of the “Tukhachevsky Affair” Trial - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0578816032

 

In another smoking gun, he brings up that "[r]umor, at least, of [the Moscow Trial defendants'] collaboration [with German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord] evidently survived in Hammerstein's family."7

Yes, and I give the citation to this book.

He follows up on all this by saying that the lack of evidence doesn't matter anyway, because "no one should expect a conspiracy like this be documented anywhere, ever, much less in 'in archives.'"8

Correct! No one should. Conspiracies like this are not put in writing. I cite two quotations: one from the CIA, one from the Communist International, to support this point.

He cites in his favor the lack of documentation for "the successful conspiracy against Lavrentii Beria," which "must have involved at least half a dozen men." This explanation rather conveniently elides the fact that the coup against Beria involved a handful of people over the course of a couple months at most, as opposed to an alleged clandestine terrorist organization involving thousands of people that operated over years and collaborated with state-level actors.

The Germans and Japanese would not document conspiracies with “thousands of people.”

Given the fact we do in fact have documentation for clandestine terrorist organizations at this scale in other instances, it is a bit implausible that no documents exist for this particular case.

It is illogical to suggest that no conspiracy existed because the evidence for that conspiracy does not exist in one specific place. There is plenty of evidence of the conspiracy elsewhere.

Furr, of course, then quickly says there are non-Soviet documents that confirm or corroborate the Moscow Trials charges! He cites four documents:

 

An admission by the Japanese Minister of War that they were collaborating with "oppositionists," cited in "Soviet Links Tokyo With 'Trotskyism'" in the New York Times, March 2 1937.9 A quick look at this article from the NYT archives reveals it is a dispatch from Vladivostok from the Tass News Agency made by Walter Duranty. Furr either didn't read this carefully or he's deliberately lying about its "non-Soviet" nature.

It is Japanese evidence. I cite the NYTimes article, which is taken from TASS, which took it from the Japanese press. I have the article from the Japanese press, in prewar Japanese, of course, and I have the TASS material, in Russian, on which the Times story was based. Neither the Japanese nor the Russian text can be understood by the readers of this 2010 article – which was already far too long.

An "Arao telegram," which was "extant at least in 1962-1963 though never heard from since."10 Generally speaking it's considered bad form to cite texts whose existence is uncertain and whose contents unverifiable -- not that he actually reproduces the text of the "telegram" anyway.

* See my latest book for a full discussion of the Arao telegram, including the test. No one denies that it is cited and discussed in the Shvernik Report, presented to Khrushchev in the 1960s.

A document "in the Czech national archives," "corroborated by correspondence found in German archives."11 In the footnote he notes that "these documents have long been acknowledged by Western and Russian scholars" but neglects to actually tell us which documents these are. Once again, no text is reproduced.

* See my latest book for an entire chapter on this Czech document, including a translation and the reproduction of the first page, plus a thorough discussion of how anticommunist and anti-Stalin researchers have tried to deny it.

A private admission by NKVD general Lyushkov that there were conspirators working with Tukhachevsky to collaborate with the Japanese military to "inflict defeat upon the Soviet military."12 He cites Alvin D. Coox's two-part article "The Lesser of Two Hells: NKVD General G.S. Lyushkov's Defection to Japan, 1938-1945" but fails to provide a page number (joy!). Nevertheless it appears to be based on a passage from the second part where Lyushkov lists Tukhachevsky as part of a faction in the Red Army which "favored a military putsch."13 Furr, however, neglects to note Coox himself is rather skeptical of taking Lyushov's statements at face value, noting they "reflect[ed] to a degree what his hosts must have wanted to hear."14 In effect, he's cherry-picked a statement from a very long article, much of which does not really support Furr's argument at all.

Coox cites this Japanese evidence at length. It is very damning.

Coox then attempts to “explain it away,” because it is taboo in mainstream Soviet history to suggest that Tukhacheveky & Co. may have been guilty, that Stalin et al. may have been correct, that the Rights really had been conspiring with them, etc.

But the evidence Coox has uncovered proves just that.

Again: the fact that Coox does not agree with my conclusions does not mean that my conclusions are incorrect, any more than the fact that I do not agree with his conclusions means that he is incorrect.

Only evidence is important.

I could go on, but the whole book is like this -- in fact, all his books are like this.

This is a lie and, I suspect, a bluff. Mr Purdy has not studied my books. And his criticisms of this article from 2010 are invalid.

 He is sloppy with "citations"

Nonsense! This is a lie.

and cherrypicks constantly.

I doubt Mr Purdy knows what “cherrypicking” is. In any case, I do not do it, ever.

 He exhibits classic denialist and conspiracy theory tropes: all the real evidence is purged or missing and all the evidence to the contrary is forged or irrelevant.

This is a lie. I cite a great deal of evidence. Mr Purdy just ignores it.

 Lack of evidence is explained away as being part of the conspiracy. He relies on a sympathetic ear and an unwillingness to actually follow up on sources to be taken seriously by anybody.

Mr Purdy relies on lying, logical fallacies, and his own ignorance of how to do historical research. See above.

J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 121

 

Grover Furr, Evidence of Leon Trotsky's Collaboration With Germany and Japan, 32

 

ibid, 38-39

 

ibid, 30

 

Although rather amusingly he suggests on the same page that Khrushchev possibly had the Soviet archives purged of references to Trotsky's guilt. Although in the mind of an unreconstructed Stalinist Khrushchev might be a Trotskyite, it is worth noting Trotsky was never rehabilitated by the Soviet government and that his literature remained banned until glasnost.

 

Furr, 30

 

ibid

 

ibid, 31

 

ibid, 32-33

 

ibid, 33

 

ibid

 

ibid

 

Alvin B Coox, "The Lesser of Two Hells: NKVD General G.S. Lyushov's Defection to Japan, 1938-1945, Part II," The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 11, no. 4 (1998), 85

 

Alvin B Coox, "The Lesser of Two Hells: NKVD General G.S. Lyushov's Defection to Japan, 1938-1945, Part I," The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 11, no. 3 (1998), 149

 

 

 

level 2

kieslowskifan

Top Quality Contributor

9 points

·

3 years ago

Well done! One of the annoying things about Furr's partisans is that they argue that mainstream Soviet/Russian historians are the second coming of Robert Conquest when they are not cherry-picking them. This misses that Conquest is not really all that important to the direction of Soviet studies these days either outside of a few circles. Much of this scholarship is more sophisticated than reciting a litany of sins of the Soviet government. There are plenty of historians that tackle the early Soviet state and the Stalin turn with a degree of nuance as well as sympathy for both the ideals of the Soviet experiment as well as for its people. One does not have to be a kneejerk anticommunist to be outraged by show trials, mass executions, a growing police state, and indifference to mass starvation. Many of Furr's partisans miss this and transform the rather rich historiography on the interwar USSR into undifferentiated mass of counterrevolutionary anticommunists.

 

Continue this thread

 

 

 

level 2

commiespaceinvader

Moderator | Holocaust | Nazi Germany | Wehrmacht War Crimes

8 points

·

3 years ago

This rather conveniently ignores that not only is Nazi Germany no longer extant, but that many of the important government archives in Berlin were under the Soviet occupation zone in Berlin, and neither East German nor Soviet scholars who had access to such documents were known for their fondness for Trotskyists.

 

To further add on why Furr is talking bullshit here: While it is true that the Soviets carted German documents by the train load to Moscow where they only became available in the 1990s (and now aren't so available anymore due to government policy in Russia at the moment), the files of the German intelligence agency most likely responsible for an operation such as Furr alleges are the files of the Amt Ausland Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency of the Wehrmacht. These files did notably not fall into the hands of the Soviets but rather of the Western Allies and have been available at the Berlin Document Center, the National Archives in Washington and since the hand over of the BDC in Berlin's Bundesarchiv under the signature RW 5 Amt Ausland / Abwehr. None of these files such as they exist contain information on what Furr alleges and have been available to scholars and the public since the late 1940s.

 

The reason he never mentions the concrete correspondence in German archives as well as the Czech documents allegedly confirming the German documents is that either don't exist or if they exist at all, they are seriously misread and misinterpreted by him and he knows it.

 

Additionally, even Soviet and Eastern German scholars did usually not have access to the full extent of captured Soviet documents kept in the special archives of the NKVD/KGB during the time of Soviet rule, which is evident by the fact that the GDR archives are full of microfilms of bought and copied documents from other archives. Given this extremely close vetting process of access and documents, it can only be assumed that if there was any document that gave off a whiff of Trotskite conspiracy, it would have been made accessible to a variety of scholars to prove the danger of the fascists to the USSR.

 

Basically, as you and /u/kieslowskifan have already demonstrated: Furr is talking BS.

 

Continue this thread

 

 

 

level 2

vris92

2 points

·

3 years ago

Excellent answer, will refer to this in the future. You guys are great.

 

 

 

level 1

kieslowskifan

Top Quality Contributor

17 points

·

3 years ago

How reliable is Grover Furr? The short answer is not at all. Furr is a rank Stalinist apologist and not a professional historian. While the latter is not an automatic disqualification, his books and articles twists evidence and interpretations to suit an agenda of rehabilitating Stalin, much as David Irving selectively read archival evidence to rehabilitate Hitler. As such, he is usually banded about by the folks over a r/Communism as proof that the glorious Soviet experiment was never tainted by such sundry details like Gulags, mass murder, political purges, or invasions of neutral territory. /u/International_KB went into a delicious takedown of Furr here and of the wider attempt to rehabilitate Stalin on badhistory here. Furr's evidence for the Trials pretty much argues for the guilt of the accused on account of their confessions. Not only is there no evidence from either Japanese, Polish, or German archives that they were agents of this government (and such a wide-ranging conspiracy was most unlikely at the time but fit within established propaganda narratives set up in the USSR since the 1920s), but these confessions were obtained in a system that regularly used torture. As for the Kirov murder, which was one of the main charges of the Moscow Trials, Matthew Lenoe's massive doorstopper of a The Kirov Murder and Soviet History has concluded that the bulk of the evidence suggests this was the work of a "lone wolf" and not a conspiracy by either Stalin or those purged.

Resposta de Grover Furr a Críticas Enviadas por Sean Purdy

 

 

Against Grover Furr, Against Stalinism, John

 

 John 1 year ago

 

A short piece written against the Stalinist historian Grover Furr.

 

The main source for most of the Stalinist falsification of history (for example with the unapologetically Stalinist CPGB-ML) is the so-called ‘historian’ Grover Furr.

 

Dishonest. Any person who writes works of history is a “historian.”

 

I only have one of his books, the infamous ‘Khrushchev Lied’, and as a history student I feel compelled to take apart this travesty of scholarship

 

As you’ll see, the “travesty” is this dishonest and incompetent “criticism.”

 

and therefore hopefully do my bit to counter Stalinist lies.

 

This is the logical fallacy of name-calling. I am not a Stalinist. And if I were, that would not disprove what I write.

 

 For context, this book is meant to be a systematic debunking of every claim made by Nikita Khrushchev during the ‘Secret Speech’ at which he denounced Stalin in 1956.

 

Firstly, I want to point out the general flaws in Furr’s historical method, and then I will go into more specific examples. The first and most egregious flaw in his method, is that he takes confessions made under torture to be accurate.

 

This is a lie. I do not do this. Notice that ‘John’ does not quote any passage where I do it.

 

What’s more, ‘John’ does not give any examples of “confessions made under torture” that I analyze, much less that I “take … to be accurate.”

 

 The absurdity of this should be immediately apparent. He himself argues that the mere fact one has been tortured does not establish innocence. This is of course true, but it is not justification to take confessions made under torture seriously.

 

This is false. All evidence must be “taken seriously.” That does not mean that it is true, or false, but that it must be analyzed – studied – carefully, not dismissed.

 

 In the case of torture, a good historian would consider it neither an implication of guilt or innocence, and weigh up the other evidence available to us to decide the truth of the matter. Furr, of course, does not do this.

 

Lie. This is exactly what I do.

 

 This fact alone should be enough to discredit him. The second great flaw in his method, is that he never considers the evidence presented by other historians that runs counter to his narrative.

 

This is a lie. I study other historians’ works carefully.

 

More serious historians (i.e. historians who are actually professors of history, which Furr is not) of course have over the decades compiled veritable mountains of archival evidence which support the accepted historical narrative – that Stalin ran the USSR as a personal dictator, that the charges during the Show Trials were fabricated, that the Katyn Massacre happened, and so on.

 

This is a lie. There is no such evidence! ‘John’ is lying here.

(omitting Katyn, which I do not discuss in _Khrushchev Lied_, since Khrushchev never raised the subject.)

 

Furr does not even consider this evidence. Therefore, we are forced to choose between the minute amount of evidence compiled by a fringe, politically motivated amateur historian, and the enormous amount of evidence compiled by hundreds of professional historians, dozens of whom are famous and well respected within the scholarly community, and who are not politically motivated anti-communists in most cases –

 

This is a lie. There is no such evidence, either an ‘enormous amount,” or – in fact – any evidence at all!

 

In addition, the scholarly community is indeed strongly anticommunist and anti-Stalin.

 

Stalinists often claim that all opposing historians are ‘anti-communists’, which is nothing short of a joke, and was only ever really true during the height of the Cold War. The final major issue with Furr is that the evidence he compiles very often does not actually even prove what he is trying to argue.

 

This is a lie. ‘John’ does not give EVEN ONE example of this.

 

Sometimes it is almost completely unrelated, or on other occasions is heavily open to interpretation, and is not the ‘case closed’ he presents it to be in his populist introductions: “every revelation of Stalin’s crimes… is provably false” or “virtually everything we thought we knew about the Stalin years turns out to be wrong”. Such is the style of this ‘serious academic’.

 

Now, I will give some examples of the flaws in his method. This is not intended to be a complete debunking of every claim Furr makes, but simply a representative sample. After all, unfortunately it takes a lot more time refuting bullshit than it does inventing it. So then, let us look at some examples of Furr using the laughable tactic of assuming confessions given under torture to be true. When discussing the shootings of the Old Bolsheviks Kamenev and Zinoviev, he states “no evidence has ever emerged to suggest [their] confessions were…[not] genuine”.

 

That is true.

 

And his evidence that they were guilty? A letter written by Stalin, the transcript of their interrogations, and their appeals to the courts for clemency. What marvellous sources!

 

‘John’s’ criticism is nonsense. When ALL the evidence we have – including the appeals for clemency, published only in 1992 and never intended to be made public – point towards guilt, there is NO basis to conclude they were innocent.

 

 I suppose that if we consulted the letters of Hitler, and Gestapo interrogations, we would also find ‘irrefutable proof’ of a Judeo-Bolshevik plot to undermine Germany… So then, if we take his (dubious) word that there is no direct proof they were innocent, and also that the only sources suggesting their guilt are somewhat unreliable, we need to look at the other evidence available to us. Taking Zinoviev, he had been a member of the RSDLP since 1901, and had sided with Lenin in the 1903 Bolshevik/Menshevik split. He had been a member of the Politiburo from its formation, although he fell out with Lenin in October 1917. He was quickly rehabilitated and became chair of the Petrograd Soviet and of the Third International. Does this sound like a man who would lead a ‘terrorist bloc’ to overthrow the Soviet Union? No, clearly not. So the balance of probability is firmly against Furr.

 

False and incompetent. A recitation of someone’s past is not evidence that this person did not commit some crime or other.

In addition, these conspirators did not consider their conspiracy against the Stalin leadership to be a crime.

 

Of course, no consideration is taken of these facts. A similar example is Furr’s assertion that Trotsky was a Nazi collaborator,

 

We have plenty of evidence that Trotsky was a Nazi collaborator. But it is not in Khrushchev Lied, the book that ‘John’ claims to be studying here.

 

his so-called ‘evidence’ being the memoirs of Sudoplatov (the NKVD leader responsible for Trotsky’s assassination and later found guilty of crimes against humanity for testing poisons on human beings), and a Gestapo document that does not, in fact, even mention Trotsky or his allies – more on this later.

 

The next major issue with Furr is his lack of consideration of opposing evidence.

 

This is a lie. There is NO ‘opposing evidence.’ There are claims that these men were innocent, but no evidence that they were.

 

 A classic example of this is when Furr gives some anecdotes from various memoirs that say Stalin was receptive to alternative opinions (these anecdotes are then of course extrapolated to prove that he was always like this). The mass of evidence compiled by other historians which runs directly counter to this narrative is never mentioned.

 

This is a lie. There IS no such evidence, much less a “mass” of it. ‘John’ does not identify EVEN ONE example of such evidence!

 

 The most absurd instance of this is when Furr claims quite categorically (it is in boldface in my copy of the book) that “there is not one single example, during Stalin’s whole life, of his ‘removing’ someone from the collective leadership because that person disagreed with Stalin[!]”

 

This is true – see below.

 

 I would think that Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Rykov etc would have something to say to that!

 

Not one of these men was removed from the leadership because he disagreed with Stalin.

 

 Pretty much every claim Furr makes is brought down by the fact that he ignores the overwhelming weight of opposing evidence

 

This is a lie. There is NO opposing evidence. No wonder ‘John’ does not cite any!

 

, and so I do not have to go into more detail here.

 

Finally, there are the issues with Furr’s evidence not actually even proving his point, at all. As mentioned earlier, an example of this is his assertion that Trotsky was a Nazi collaborator. So, let me reproduce the text of his evidence (which is apparently so weighty that no other evidence is needed). It is taken from a Nazi military court, apparently: “at the beginning of 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, the accused learned in his official capacity that a rebellion against the local red government in the territory of Barcelona was being prepared with the co-operation of the German secret service. This information, together with that of Pöllnitz, was transmitted by him to the Soviet Russian embassy in Paris”. For context, Pöllnitz was a Russian spy. Let us analyse this evidence. Firstly, at no point in the text is it confirmed that the ‘information’ was true – it merely states that this information was relayed by a spy. Considering I have read books on the Spanish Civil War and have never heard mention of such a plot, I am doubtful as to whether this ‘information’ was accurate.

 

This logical fallacy is called the argument from ignorance.

 

It is a shame Furr does not provide any further material.

 

I have done so. See my article "Leon Trotsky and the Barcelona 'May Days' of 1937." Journal of Labor and Society, 2019; 1-20.At https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/gf_trotsky_maydays_0519.pdf

 

 However, more importantly, at no point in the text is Trotsky, or his allies, implicated in any way. He does not even get a mention. I believe Furr is probably implying here that the Nazis were behind the clashes between the POUM/CNT and the Stalinist PCE in that year. Yet if so, he betrays shocking historical illiteracy. Not only were the POUM and CNT anti-fascist militias who fought against the Nazis, but neither of these groups was under the control of Trotsky anyway!

 

‘John’ is ignorant again. See the article of mine above. Trotskyists were the leading force in the POUM, according to Erwin Wolf, Trotsky’s emissary in Spain.

 

Sometimes, Furr takes this even further. For example, in ‘proving’ that Stalin did not order mass repressions (something which we have overwhelming evidence for),

 

This is a lie. We do not have “overwhelming evidence” that Stalin ordered ‘mass repressions.’

 

the best he can muster is evidence proving Khrushchev to have been a hypocrite on this issue. I fail to see how Khrushchev condoning mass repressions means that Stalin didn’t order them – this is a logical fallacy par excellence.

 

In conclusion, Furr’s historical method is so badly compromised that essentially everything he says can be doubted. In this essay I have only picked out particular instances, yet every single controversial claim Furr makes in this book can be easily picked apart by even the dullest of readers.

 

This is a lie. ‘John’ has not successfully criticized even one statement I have made.

 

 I will finish by paraphrasing Bordiga – “if the flamethrower in the archives isn’t halted, not even Stalin’s moustache is going to be spared.”

 

‘John’ is relying on the fact that his readers (a) are already biased against Stalin; (b) have not studied Khrushchev Lied or any of my other works; and (c) do not know how to evaluate evidence.

 

Grover Furr

February 16, 2021