Stalingrad, Democide, and Maybe The Government Isn’t Here To Help You?

“What does a Nietzschean mother hope for her son when she names him Genghis Stalin?” – Andromeda

Actual Joke From the USSR (via Wikipedia©):  Stalin reads his report to the Party Congress. Suddenly someone sneezes. “Who sneezed?” Silence. “First row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot, and he asks again, “Who sneezed, Comrades?” No answer. “Second row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot too. “Well, who sneezed?” At last a sobbing cry resounds in the Congress Hall, “It was me! Me!” Stalin says, “Bless you, Comrade!” and resumes his speech.

In August of 1942, the civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad probably totaled about a million people.  That number included the normal residents, but also a huge influx of Soviet refugees caused by the Axis push through the Ukraine.  However, the German Army Group: South was on the attack, and had been pushing toward Stalingrad for weeks.

According to Google Maps™ at the end of July, 1942, Stalingrad was less than a nine hour stroll from the German position.  I assume that includes a lunch and bathroom break and maybe a juice box at halftime, but you never can tell since those Germans were sticklers for keeping to the schedule.  Besides, I’m not sure that the Germans had good cell reception at that point, so they might have had to ask for directions.

Stalin decided that the Soviet soldiers would fight best if they had their backs to a city filled with innocent civilians, so he had absolutely forbidden any evacuation of Stalingrad.  At least, any evacuation of people.  The Soviets did take the time to get the grain, cattle, and railway cars out of Stalingrad.  At least Stalin had his priorities straight, right?  I mean, railway cars don’t eat and don’t complain.

Popular German Joke During Stalingrad:  Our troops have captured a two-room apartment with kitchen, toilet and bathroom, and managed to hold two-thirds of the apartment, despite heavy enemy counterattack.

Not evacuating the inhabitants of Stalingrad was entirely consistent with Stalin’s fun loving and carefree personality.  Stalin insisted that his own firstborn son become a Soviet artillery officer.  When Stalin’s boy was captured by the Germans in the first few days after Operation Barbarossa kicked off and then rolled over Soviet troops like the media over inconvenient stories about Joe Biden, Stalin was upset.

Why?

Stalin was upset that his son hadn’t killed himself rather than be captured.  So, yeah, Stalin wasn’t exactly a sentimental guy, but at least he was consistent.  And he was consistent throughout decades.  Between 1917 and 1987, the Soviet Union was responsible for (roughly) 62 million deaths of their own people.  All but 6 million of those deaths occurred while Stalin was in some position of high leadership.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Kulaks, right? (Stalin’s Cannibal Island and Distracted Driving)

Sadly, Stalin’s line of Stalin-themed lingerie was less than successful, probably because it was made of unwashed wool and aluminum shavings.

I think I first understood the joke, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” when I was about 10 years old.  It displays a pretty simple sentiment that was common in the rural area where I grew up:  government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem.  Reagan used both of those phrases during his campaign and inaugural address, but he could have been speaking for most of the farmers who had coffee in the local café.

Now, sure, those farmers were fine taking the government’s money, but what they didn’t like was when government told them what to do.  From the farmers’ perspective, government was out of control even back in Reagan’s 1980.  Those farmers had grown up in a different world:  when they were young, say 12, they could have saved up enough money from their paper route or whatever Pa paid them to milk the cows, and marched down to the local hardware store and purchased a .22 rifle of their very own along with a box of ammo to go shooting with their friends.

Not at their friends, with their friends.  City folks in the current year still can’t seem to figure that one out.

I tried to look up “ATF jokes” on Google®, but all Google™ would do was show me pictures of the ATF agents who planned the Waco operation.

The dads of those kids could go into the hardware store and purchase dynamite, without a license or even a reason.  Want to build a dam on your own property?  Go for it, though the states might have a rule or two if they ever caught you, which they probably wouldn’t.  Want to build a combination strip club and church on your own land?  It’s a free country, ain’t no one stopping you.  Endangered species?  Well, there was probably a reason for that – if it were tough enough or not so darn tasty, they would be fine.

In 1952, there were roughly 20,000 pages of Federal regulations in the “Code of Federal Regulations” – the big book that has all of the rules.  In 2020?  There are roughly 180,000 pages.  Of rules.  That’s (using my estimates) nearly two words of regulation for every person in the United States.  My two are promulgate and trout.  And you can go to jail for violating many of the regulations on those 180,000 pages.  Why do we need 160,000 more pages of regulations than in 1950?

Control.

How are you supposed to keep track of that many rules?  I’ve heard that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” so I’m thinking that the people in America must be psychic, because there’s no way that any single person could know what they’re either:

• required to do or
• prohibited from doing or
• free to do.

It’s actually the preferred end state of government:  everything is either prohibited or mandatory, and thus you can selectively prosecute anyone for anything at any time.  Everyone is guilty, and like Stalin’s buddy and head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, said:  “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”  Everyone’s guilty – it’s just a matter of picking the person you want to prosecute.

But one man at a time?  That’s how amateurs operate.

Government regulations:  keeping you safe from trucks that might be slightly taller than a number written in a book by a regulator who has never seen a truck.

When I spent time last year researching the causes of death between 1900 and 2000 (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!), one statistic popped out: 262 million people were killed by their own government.  That’s more that every murder in the twentieth century, and more than every person killed in every war during that same period.  More people were killed by their own government than were killed in every natural disaster during that century.  It’s almost governments could use a warning label.  Oh, wait, government regulations are what mandate the warning labels.

I’d post this warning, but the font is probably not legally the right size.

Thankfully, the decline in deaths caused by government decreased when communism ceased to be an active ideology.  The end of the Soviet empire was one event, and the death of Mao and the adoption of a capitalist incentives in a still authoritarian China was another that made the citizens of the world their own nations safer.

But what led to those ideologies taking over in the first place?  Generally, four things.

• An Economic Crisis
• A Governmental Power Vacuum
• A Civil War
• The Idea That Equality of Outcome Is More Important Than Equality of Opportunity

It’s ironic that the two countries both at the forefront of killing their own citizens advertised themselves as the most equal in human history, but not surprising.  Stalin and Mao did their part to create an equal society – one where anyone could be killed at any time for any reason.  They were also the reason a word was invented:  Democide.

Well, they all look equal to me.

Democide means, in a really short definition, your government deciding you’re wasting too much of your country’s valuable oxygen.  It doesn’t matter why.  It’s that your government decides that’ it’s not them, it’s you.  It doesn’t mean the Russians killing German soldiers.  It doesn’t include the Germans bombing the Russians, soldiers or not.  It includes the Russians killing Russian civilians.  It also includes the Russians killing German civilians after they take over the places where the Germans were living, and vice-versa.  So, Stalin didn’t kill only Russians, but that was who he was most fond of killing.  And Mao?  Mao pretty much exclusively killed Chinese during his bouts of democide, perhaps because take-out had yet to be invented.

If you want to look more into it, here’s a website devoted to it (LINK).  It has the look of a Geocities website circa 1996, and some of the links that the site points to have been Clintoned:  abandoned like Bill’s ex-girlfriends and eliminated like Hillary’s enemies.  The site, however does lays out the numbers of dead for governments that decide that there are just too damn many of their own people hanging around.  Did I say hanging?  Sorry, poor choice of words.

Reprinted with permission.

Stalingrad’s number of civilians dead “officially” was 40,000.  But it’s thought that 40,000 died just on the first day of German bombing back in August of 1942.  A more credible estimate is that up to half a million civilians died during the six month battle.  These citizens aren’t even listed in Stalin’s total above – these are “just” war dead, and not attributed to the Soviets.

Whew.  I bet Stalin would be pretty embarrassed if it took the Soviet total up to 62.5 million instead of just 62 million.

Why do I bring this up now?  Hmm.  No reason.

None at all.