Josef Stalin: Most Prolific Mass Murderer In History

[TruthSeeker]

Here is a very interesting article, written back in 1998 by a Canadian journalist, which I have partially included below. I have included the entire link and some other links about Stalin.

He was quite a guy. I'm sure "our" Stalin in this forum must be beaming with pride.


The Century's Worst Crimes

An enigma, wrapped up in a mystery, as Churchill observed of Russia. Spasms of violent, irrational behavior, and bloody purges, are Russian traditions. Ivan the Terrible had his dreaded secret police - the `opritchniki'- cut off the heads of plotting boyars(nobles). Peter the Great tortured his boyars. When the party bureaucracy frustrated Stalin's commands, he had 2 million communist cadres shot. Response, thereafter, was eager and rapid.

It's high time for `new' Russia to face up to Stalin's crimes. Germany fully confessed to Hitler's crimes. Japan grudgingly concedes `regret' for some wartime crimes. But the greatest crimes of all - Stalin's Red Terror - have never been adequately investigated or denounced by Russia.

We have been thoroughly conditioned by wartime propaganda and subsequent relentless rehashing on TV of Nazi themes (including, even, Space Nazis!) to believe Hitler and his Nazis were the century's worst criminals. This is one of the biggest lies of our time.

Hitler killed about 12 million people, half of them Jews. According to the lowest current estimates by reputable Russian historians, Stalin was directly responsible for murdering 20 million of his own people, including 8 million Ukrainians in the 1930's. Other Russian and foreign scholars, like the noted Robert Conquest, assert the true number of Stalin's victims was 30 million, or even 40! These figures do not include Russia's 18 million war dead.

Opening secret Soviet archives will, I believe, point to the 30 million figure. The full story of the Ukrainian Holocaust and NKVD's savagery in the Baltic states is murky, even today. Stalin's exile of entire Muslim peoples, such as Chechen, Ingush, Cherkass, Dhagestanis, and Tatars, remains almost unknown. Three million Muslims may have died in Stalin's Arctic camps where extreme cold proved an even cheaper and more efficient mass killer than poison gas.

While Hitler's worst crimes occurred from 1942 onward, and were masked by world war, Stalin's mass murder of 8 million Ukrainians happened in the 1930's, before the world's gaze. Hitler did not start World War II alone: he began it jointly with ally Stalin, when Germany and the USSR invaded and carved up Poland - after Russia invaded Finland.

As we watch world Jewish groups lambaste Switzerland for aiding Nazi Germany, we should ask: what about the US and Britain allying themselves with Stalin's USSR, a far bloodier, more dangerous tyranny than Nazi Germany? President Roosevelt shamefully called Stalin, who had recently murdered tens of millions, `our Uncle Joe.' President Clinton should have added the US alliance with Stalin to his orgy of historical contrition during his African trip.

Hitler was inflated as a villain, and Stalin downplayed, by the victorious Americans and British, who, of course, did not want to be seen cynically using a greater monster to defeat a lesser one - or `liberating' Europe from the Nazis by handing half of it to communism.

The Stalinists and fellow travelers who infested Hollywood from 1930-1950, hid Stalin's crimes while trumpeting Hitler's. Their liberal heirs today continue this love affair with the left; as well as a policy of ensuring the terrible suffering of Hitler's victims is not diluted by revelations of the equally terrible sufferings of other peoples.

Russia has hidden the full story of Stalin's crimes out of national shame and amnesia induced by national agony. European and American socialists/leftists don't want to be reminded their roots are entwined with Stalin's and Lenin's tyranny.

The Left wants to keep hiding the truth that Stalin was history's single greatest murderer. And that communist regimes killed more people- close to 100 million - this century, than all its wars combined.

[Eric Margolis is a syndicated foreign affairs columnist and broadcaster based in Toronto, Canada.]

Here are just a few of many links about Stalin's crimes:

http://www.twf.org/News/Y1998/WorstCrimes.html

http://www.massviolence.org/Mass-crimes-under-Stalin-1930-1953

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7119887.ece

http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/stalin-joseph

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...al-war-crime-Russia-Germany-tried-ignore.html

 

[Stalin]

Well, if you run with the hare you cannot be one of the hounds.

Let us take your references one by one.

The first is Eric Margolis of whom it has been written

".."Americans did not `liberate’ Iraq, but they certainly liberated their own nation last week by sweeping the Republican Party from power. One prays America’s long nightmare of foreign aggressions, fear, religious extremism, and flirting with neo-fascism is finally at an end."

,,,

Margolis declares "we still do not know the real story about 9/11." Margolis' arguments include, the Osama Bin Laden tapes are fakes, questioning why the Air Force didn't shoot down the planes, asserting a lack of plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and repeating the theory that 9/11 was "staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of right-wing US Air Force generals” without criticizing the theory. While saying there is no "hard evidence" that Americans were behind 9/11, he adds “What, in the end, can we conclude? … The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry, boosted pro-Israel neo-conservatives destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies."

...

Margolis called the Gaza War a "final solution campaign" on the part of Israel, and called Hamas a popular revolutionary movement that had stood up for the rights of Palestinians “ethnically cleansed” in 1948.

..

In a November 2008 book review entitled "Deflating the Churchill Myth", Margolis in the Toronto Sun endorsed Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War as a "powerful new book". Margolis stated:

"Buchanan’s heretical view, and mine, is that the Western democracies should have let Hitler expand his Reich eastward until it inevitably went to war with the even more dangerous Soviet Union. Once these despotisms had exhausted themselves, the Western democracies would have been left dominating Europe. The lives of millions of Western civilians and soldiers would have been spared".

In a 2009 essay entitled "Don’t Blame Hitler Alone For World War II", Margolis endorsed the claims of Viktor Suvorov that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler by alleged impending Soviet attack, and that it is wrong to give Hitler "total blame" for World War II.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Margolis

So what do you think of these positions ?

Comrade Stalin

 

[TruthSeeker]

Well, if you run with the hare you cannot be one of the hounds.

Let us take your references one by one.

The first is Eric Margolis of whom it has been written

".."Americans did not `liberate’ Iraq, but they certainly liberated their own nation last week by sweeping the Republican Party from power. One prays America’s long nightmare of foreign aggressions, fear, religious extremism, and flirting with neo-fascism is finally at an end."

,,,

Margolis declares "we still do not know the real story about 9/11." Margolis' arguments include, the Osama Bin Laden tapes are fakes, questioning why the Air Force didn't shoot down the planes, asserting a lack of plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and repeating the theory that 9/11 was "staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of right-wing US Air Force generals” without criticizing the theory. While saying there is no "hard evidence" that Americans were behind 9/11, he adds “What, in the end, can we conclude? … The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry, boosted pro-Israel neo-conservatives destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies."

...

Margolis called the Gaza War a "final solution campaign" on the part of Israel, and called Hamas a popular revolutionary movement that had stood up for the rights of Palestinians “ethnically cleansed” in 1948.

..

In a November 2008 book review entitled "Deflating the Churchill Myth", Margolis in the Toronto Sun endorsed Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War as a "powerful new book". Margolis stated:

"Buchanan’s heretical view, and mine, is that the Western democracies should have let Hitler expand his Reich eastward until it inevitably went to war with the even more dangerous Soviet Union. Once these despotisms had exhausted themselves, the Western democracies would have been left dominating Europe. The lives of millions of Western civilians and soldiers would have been spared".

In a 2009 essay entitled "Don’t Blame Hitler Alone For World War II", Margolis endorsed the claims of Viktor Suvorov that Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war" forced on Hitler by alleged impending Soviet attack, and that it is wrong to give Hitler "total blame" for World War II.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Margolis

So what do you think of these positions ?

Comrade Stalin

All you did was further validate that Josef Stalin is not somebody that a "sane" person would emulate.

So Margolis is anti-American. Big deal. He has a bad case of "Canuck Penis Envy". Canucks tend to be that way about the United States.

I fail to see any relevence with what Margolis wrote about Stalin and what Margolis believes about Americans and Jews.

I expected more from you, "Stalin". Your response so far has consisted of singling out ONE source of information about Josef Stalin and weakly trying to discredit the source, while ignoring all of the other links to the different sources that I provided.

Checkmate, "Komrade".

 

[Stalin]

I struggled to construct some coherence from your rambling irrelevant reply and turned my attention to the next reference you quote, that of the extravagantly ambitious "online encyclopeadia of mass violence".

Staggeringly, for North American there were NO contributions. Obviously no mass violence occurs in this sub-continent.

I was most curious to find out what they had to say about the US death and destruction in Vietnam. What do we find.

ONE article not on carpet bombing but on the isolated My Lai incident.

Pathetic.

Obviously these learned scholars need a viewing of Apocalypse now.

Is it worth checking the rest out ?

Comrade Stalin

 

[Stalin]

What is the point of being on a forum, posting masses of links, and when soemone actually follows the links and points out certain..er..biases and inconsistencies, throw the toys out of cot and and claim that I am not interested ?

What do you do outside of this forum ?

Comrade Stalin

 

[Stalin]

the noted Robert Conquest..

this Robert Conquest ?

"..In the last few years Conquest has also begun acknowledging to R. W. Davies that the famine of 1932-3 was not intentionally created by the Soviet government and was in fact related to real crop failure. The leading authority on the topic of the 1932 famine is Mark Tauger however. Tauger has done the fullest job of establishing the role of natural disaster, and plant rust in particular, in creating a crop failure which no one understood at the time and so reacted to very badly. But that topic isn't directly a part of this book, which is focused on the purges of 1934-8.

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Terror-...iewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

You know the story..once the cracks start appearing, sooner or later the building starts to fall.

Comrade Stalin

 

[steveox]

What about Mao Zedong? he done worse than Stalin

 

[Rick]

this Robert Conquest ?

"..In the last few years Conquest has also begun acknowledging to R. W. Davies that the famine of 1932-3 was not intentionally created by the Soviet government and was in fact related to real crop failure. The leading authority on the topic of the 1932 famine is Mark Tauger however. Tauger has done the fullest job of establishing the role of natural disaster, and plant rust in particular, in creating a crop failure which no one understood at the time and so reacted to very badly. But that topic isn't directly a part of this book, which is focused on the purges of 1934-8.

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Terror-...iewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

You know the story..once the cracks start appearing, sooner or later the building starts to fall.

Comrade Stalin

Tauger's view on the Holodomor is supported by almost no other historian. Current views of it by historians:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question

Yaroslav Bilinsky, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware:
My argument, however, is that both logic and political usage in Ukraine point in one direction, that of the terror-famine being genocidal.

James E. Mace, a Ukrainian historian of American-Irish origin:
For the Ukrainians the famine must be understood as...designed as part of a campaign to destroy them as a political factor and as a social organism.

Ukrainian historian Stanislav Kulchytsky:
[T]he way Stalin dealt with the Ukrainian countryside lifted the events out of the category of merely a famine and into the realm of genocide.

Norman Naimark, Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University:
"the Ukrainian killer famine should be considered an act of genocide."

Historian James Mace:
Mark Tauger's argument "is not taken seriously by either Russians or Ukrainians who have studied the topic."

Professor Steven Rosefielde:
Grain supplies were sufficient enough to sustain everyone if properly distributed. People died mostly from terror-starvation (excess grain exports, seizure of edibles from the starving, state refusal to provide emergency relief, bans on outmigration, and forced deportation to food-deficit locales), not poor harvests and routine administrative bungling.

Professor Michael Ellman of the University of Amsterdam:
the actions of the Stalinist regime from 1930–34, from the standpoint of international criminal law, "clearly constitutes . . . a series of crimes against humanity."

 

[TruthSeeker]

Stalin, you are a piece of work. First you tell everybody that you are going to "take on" my references "one-by-one", but you don't. You single out Eric Margolis and that's it.

Then you come up with the name "Robert Conquest", which you falsely attributed to me, and you go off on some tangent about "Robert Conquest" and "Mark Tauger".

Then, in your final act of desperation, you get personal and ask "what do you do outside of this forum?"

Stalin, you are like a dog turd stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I can get rid of you by scraping you off, but the stink still hangs around for awhile.

Once again, I implore you to STAY IN YOUR OWN LANE. It would be the SLOW one, in case you are lost.

 

[Stalin]

Then you come up with the name "Robert Conquest", which you falsely attributed to me, and you go off on some tangent about "Robert Conquest" and "Mark Tauger".

You can't even read your own posts.

Go back and read your opening effort.

At least I stay in a lane instead of mixing inappropriate similes with logical fallacies.

You do know what a logical fallacy is, do you not ?

After all, you use enough of them

Comrade Stalin

 

[Stalin]

Tauger's view on the Holodomor is supported by almost no other historian. Current views of it by historians:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor_genocide_question

Here our esteemed comrade has posted a link and extracted those quotes which suit his posture.

Missed for the choice cuts were

"..According to West Virginia University professor Dr Mark Tauger, to assert that the famine was a political measure intentionally imposed through excessive procurements is to take an uncritical approach to the official sources.[63] Tauger writes that he is skeptical of Conquest's claims about the famine and of the accuracy of Conquest's book on the subject.[64] He has argued that the 1932 harvest was smaller than the official estimate, and smaller than the harvest of 1933, which would suggest the famine was not "man-made."

Tauger's evidence, methodologies and conclusions in regard to the famine were criticized by Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft in their book The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33, published in 2004.[65] Wheatcroft additionally claims Tauger's view represents the opposite extreme in arguing the famine was totally accidental.[66] Tauger, however, maintains that his harvest estimates are supported by evidence, and his conclusions are shared by a number of other scholars.[65] In reply, Wheatcroft continues to maintain Tauger's use of the evidence is oversimplified, that his methodology is faulty, and that his conclusions overall are wrong.[67] Tauger replied in kind, defending his work against Wheatcroft's criticisms.[68]

Historian James Mace wrote that Mark Tauger's argument "is not taken seriously by either Russians or Ukrainians who have studied the topic."[69] However, Robert Conquest himself admitted that "Mark B. Tauger has produced some interesting material on the 1932 which will doubtless contribute to debate among economists.".[70] John-Paul Himka, professor at University of Alberta, wrote that "Tauger’s substantive argument, that the famine was in part generated by a change in the way Soviet authorities estimated harvest size, has not been confronted by diaspora scholars or publicists."[71] But Dr. David Marples, professor of history at the University of Alberta, is critical of Tauger's claims, stating "Dr. Tauger and other scholars fail to distinguish between shortages, droughts and outright famine. There is no such thing as a "natural" famine, no matter the size of the harvest. A famine requires some form of state or human input."

Comrade Stalin

 

[Stalin]

The treatment meted out to Tauger is typical of the massive propaganda campaign that has been, and still is, aligned against working people's movements.

What has Dr Mark Tauger to say about all this ?

"..This article by Professor Mark B. Tauger (mark.tauger@mail.wvu.edu), Ph.D., associate professor at West Virginia University, responds to the article by Dr. Taras Kuzio in "RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report" of 12 June 2002.)



Dr. Kuzio's article concerns a discussion on H-Net Russia, which began when in response to a question, I sent in a list of my recent publications (listed below) and summarized their main points. These points were that the 1933 famine was not limited to Ukraine and resulted from a shortage due to natural disasters that no other scholars have investigated. Dr. Kuzio's article distorts this discussion and misrepresents Western scholarship and my works in particular, which were the main ones at issue but which apparently almost none of my detractors had read.

Dr. Kuzio claims that Western scholars refuse to compare Soviet and Nazi crimes, and are Russia-centric. On the first point, he quotes other scholars' statements that any questioning of the Ukrainian genocide argument is "immoral and absurd." On the second point, he cites my doubts concerning Ukrainian memoirs and asserts that no one questions similar accounts of the Holocaust. He refers to my criticism of Robert Conquest's work and cites James Mace's dismissal of my work as "baseless statistical circumlocutions" and "garbage." He asserts that Western scholars ignore Ukrainian sources and publications, and that the famine left no "memory" in the Russian consciousness. Here I will briefly respond to these claims.

With respect to memory of the famine in Russia, Dr. Kuzio seems unaware of such publications as "Tragediya sovetskoi derevni," a massive five-volume collection of documents published in Russia with the support of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, which evidences the severity of the famine in Russia as well as Ukraine, and the imprint of the famine on the consciousness of all the Soviet peoples. Dr. Kuzio's point is also problematic because Ukraine is a multinational state, all of whose citizens -- Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Poles, Tatars, and others -- were victims of the famine, as documented in recent Ukrainian publications.

Dr. Kuzio is wrong to characterize me as a Russia-centered Western scholar. I use Ukrainian sources, I have worked in Ukrainian archives, and I have published a study of the Ukrainian famine of 1928-1929 that the Ukrainian scholar S.V. Kulchytskyy described as one of the "blank spots" to which Dr. Kuzio refers. I published this in a collection of articles on Soviet history in the national republics ("Provincial Landscapes," listed below) by a group of scholars, and this publication is not unique. Dr. Kuzio's criticism of U.S. scholarship, therefore, at least as it refers to me, my associates, and many other Western scholars, is unjustified.

On the question of statistics, James Mace and other advocates of the genocide argument insist that the famine was "man-made" on the basis of Soviet official statistics that the total grain harvest in 1932 was 68.9 million tons and testimonies and memoirs from decades after the event that the harvest was excellent. Their argument therefore rests on the statistical claim that no genuine food shortage prevailed in the USSR in 1932. If it can be shown that such a shortage prevailed, this argument has to be rejected.

The official statistics, however, show that the procurements taken from the 1932 harvest were less than the procurements in any other year in the 1930s (and archival documents show that the data actually overstate the amount procured). In other words, the rural remainder for the whole USSR in that year appears larger than any other year in the early 1930s, so there should not have been a famine by those statistics. Several other scholars noted this before me, including the Ukrainian emigre scholar Dmytro Solovey. These are not "baseless statistical circumlocutions" but a fundamental problem in the evidence, which Conquest, Mace, and other recent Ukrainian scholarship never mention.

Yet there was a famine, and as the archives document exhaustively, people were dying of starvation all over the country (see the article by Wheatcroft in Getty and Manning, "Stalinist Terror," Cambridge University Press 1997). So that harvest statistic is wrong. As I show, the harvest figure that Mace and others rely on was a biological yield projection, not harvest data, and was imposed on Soviet statistics by Stalin in 1933.

I obtained the archival annual reports from the collective farms themselves, including those from more than 40 percent of the collective farms in Ukraine (the remainder of the farms did not complete and submit annual reports, apparently because of the crisis). These data show that the 1932 harvest was at least one-third below the official figures. These are data from the farms, including Ukrainian farms, data gathered and prepared by Ukrainian peasants and other villagers at the time that the famine took place.

I also show that even these data, which imply in Ukraine a harvest of less than 5 million tons instead of the 8 million-ton official figure, overstate what must have been a famine harvest. I show that these annual-report data are the only reliable data on Soviet grain production in the 1930s, and that peasants used them to resist outside officials' demanding high procurements based on Soviet biological yields.

So while Mace stands by Stalin's false statistics, backed up with memoirs written decades later, to argue that a small harvest did not occur, my evidence (which Mace calls "garbage") -- desperately put forward by Ukrainians and other peasants themselves, which Soviet leaders received and rejected -- documents incontrovertibly that the country had a famine harvest. This is why I question Ukrainian memoir accounts. Their insistence on the false assertion that the harvest was good undermines their credibility.

It is also a general principle of evidence that contemporaneous evidence concerning an event is considerably more reliable than reports decades after the event: The memoir and testimony sources on the famine date from the 1950s to the 1980s and later. Substantial critical literatures in history and psychology have demonstrated the problems of memoirs and oral history, which contrary to Dr. Kuzio's claim have been applied extensively to the literature of Holocaust memoirs and testimonies.

The evidence that I have published and other evidence, including recent Ukrainian document collections, show that the famine developed out of a shortage and pervaded the Soviet Union, and that the regime organized a massive program of rationing and relief in towns and in villages, including in Ukraine, but simply did not have enough food. This is why the Soviet famine, an immense crisis and tragedy of the Soviet economy, was not in the same category as the Nazis' mass murders, which had no agricultural or other economic basis.

This evidence also explains why it is false to describe me and other Western scholars as "deniers" of the famine. There is nothing "immoral" or "absurd" about this evidence, which comes directly from Ukrainians and other villagers at the time, and it is in no way comparable to a denial of the Holocaust.

Mace, Krawchenko, and Kuzio responded to careful research that tests received interpretations, certainly accepted scholarly practice, with derogatory comments, misrepresentations, and moral condemnations, without apparently having read all of the publications they attacked. Perhaps this is why they have encountered some opposition to their views in the United States. This kind of ad hominem attack only makes it more difficult to get at the truth behind the tragedies in Soviet history.

Mark B. Tauger, "The 1932 Harvest and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933," Slavic Review v. 50 No. 1, Spring 1991; Tauger, R.W. Davies, and S. G. Wheatcroft, "Stalin, Grain Stocks, and the Famine of 1932-1933," Slavic Review v. 54 No. 3, Fall 1995; Tauger, "Natural Disaster and Human Action in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933," The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, No. 1506, 2001 (65pp); (412) 648 9881 Tauger, "Statistical Falsification in the Soviet Union: A Comparative Case Study of Projections, Biases, and Trust," The Donald Treadgold Papers in Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington, No. 34, 2001 (82pp); (206) 221 6348 Tauger, "Grain Crisis or Famine? The Ukrainian State Commission for Aid to Crop Failure Victims and the Ukrainian Famine of 1928-1929," in Donald Raleigh, ed., "Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power," 1917-1953, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.

http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/tauger.htm

Comrade Stalin

 

[TruthSeeker]

You can't even read your own posts.

Go back and read your opening effort.

At least I stay in a lane instead of mixing inappropriate similes with logical fallacies.

You do know what a logical fallacy is, do you not ?

After all, you use enough of them

Comrade Stalin

Once again, you are stuck on my initial "Eric Margolis" piece. First you discount Margolis, then you discount "Robert Conquest" (who, by the way, was mentioned by Eric Margolis, not by me.......try to keep up, ok?), then you bring "Mark Tauger" into the whole fray, who was immediately discounted by Rick.

You STILL haven't addressed ANY of the other links I provided. In your feeble attempts at defending your namesake, you have only been successful at providing overwhelming proof that you CAN'T.

 

[Stalin]

Once again, you are stuck on my initial "Eric Margolis" piece. First you discount Margolis, then you discount "Robert Conquest" (who, by the way, was mentioned by Eric Margolis, not by me.......try to keep up, ok?), then you bring "Mark Tauger" into the whole fray, who was immediately discounted by Rick.

You STILL haven't addressed ANY of the other links I provided. In your feeble attempts at defending your namesake, you have only been successful at providing overwhelming proof that you CAN'T.

Rick has contibuted nothing to the debate.

Tauger relies on the Ukrainian data of the ime, not hearsay and speculation.

You didn't read what Tauger had to say.

Basically you have to rely on Stalin's figures to support your case.

You are, as the Brits say, batting on a sticky wicket.

Comrade Stalin

 

[Stalin]

Once again, you are stuck on my initial "Eric Margolis" piece. First you discount Margolis, then you discount "Robert Conquest" (who, by the way, was mentioned by Eric Margolis, not by me.......try to keep up, ok?), /QUOTE]

You keep up.

You posted Conquest's name.

You stand by it.

I didn't discount Margolis

I posted what he had written and asked if you still stood by him.

We are still debating the second reference.

I have plenty of time.

None of this is new to me.

I had to debate agianst falsehoods and lies in school.

Comrade Stalin