Prof Grover Furr: anti-communist academia is ‘propaganda with footnotes’
Methodical research into the descriptions of Soviet 'terror' routinely cited by bourgeois academics leads to the conclusion that they are all lies.
The technique of dressing up anti-communist propaganda as ‘objective truth’ is the stock-in-trade of all academic departments and professors of ‘Soviet studies’. Grover Furr incisively refers to this work as “propaganda with footnotes”.
From George Orwell to Robert Conquest to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, very few people have bothered to check the sources on which they base their sweeping anti-communist ‘conclusions’.
Professor Grover Furr, a talented linguist and historian, with an interest in the USSR, Stalin and the communist movement, has done just that, and it is his evaluation of all the sources and all the footnotes that allows him to reach an authoritative opinion on the true value of these ‘bibles of anti-communism’.
It turns out that the overwhelmingly reactionary Polish and Ukrainian sources are all biased, or outright fabrications.
Professor Furr has evaluated the most prominent sources of the bourgeois anti-communist myths: The Great Terror by Conquest and Bloodlands by Timothy Snider.
What’s more, he has dissected the most prominent ‘socialist’ sources of anti-communist and anti-Stalin myths – those put forward by Khrushchev in his ‘secret speech’ (secret as far as the citizens of the USSR were concerned, but broadcast widely to the imperialists as a symbol of surrender, and to the international communist movement, demoralising and disorganising it most profoundly to this day), which marked the beginning of the revisionist counter-revolution in the USSR, and the ultimate dissolution of Soviet socialism into ‘market socialism’ and then outright counter-revolutionary gangster capitalism.
He has also broken down the anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin lies of Trotsky and the Trotskyites.
In this short interview, filmed in 2014, Professor Furr talks about the evidence, his research method, and how he came to focus on these most profound areas of human history, which still offer rich sources of revolutionary experience and inspiration to the proletariat and toiling masses, struggling as they are under the yoke of oppressive finance capital and its web of world domination and political and military suppression.
In the words of Stalin: “I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.” (Spoken to Molotov in 1943, and reported to Felix Chuev in Molotov Remembers, 1991.)
Prof Furr has made a valuable contribution. We must pick up the political tasks, learn the lessons of the Bolshevik revolutionary movement and experience and build a revolutionary party capable of destroying exploitation of man by man and nation by nation; wiping away the historical crimes of this decadent era and building a bright and optimistic future for humanity.
