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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (14636)	9/17/2002 12:48:28 PM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93284

Stalin was rational enough. I suppose I wasn't using "rational" in that way. And probably not the best choice of words. I was trying to get to the point of finding some plausible justification of aspects of their behavior that might be generally viewed as moral. Or at least not as brutal. Troop motivation for example. Three cases: The Germans, the Russians, and the Romans. The Romans had a motivation technique when the army performed poorly to line up the officers and kill every tenth officer. If the German army peformed poorly the commanding officer, was history. For the Russians, you had the state security officers stand behind them with pistol in hand as a motivator. The Russians lost huge numbers of troops in battle with that technique. Well, he may have been an honest fanatic, and thought that the pursuit of socialism by the vanguard party would eventually usher in the Golden Age of Communism. You can make a similar argument for Hitler. But I would be using the word logical rather than rational. Merely a semantics issue. I think we understand each other. jttmab