When arresting political opposition during the Great Purge...

When arresting political opposition during the Great Purge, why did Stalin require his opponents to 'confess' to crimes they either did/did not do, as if they had the illusion of choice? They were fucked either way, seems bizarre considering.

It gives "legitimacy".

By confessing guilt, the death becomes a punishment instead of an assassination.

Most people willingly confessed crimes they didn't commit because they thought they were advancing the cause of communism.

Yes, commies are this retarded.

>citation needed

>Arguing this position with that trip.

It's like you want the world to know that criminal trade unions are paying you off

Isn't it because they were basically tortured? I mean, Commies are retarded as fuck, but they also aren't that selfless.

this
politicians always trump up reasons for war and purges. been that way forever

I brought up this post because I was reading something Zizek said in an interview, found it interesting at least.

>"...for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that’s it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

>Why this strange need to make them confess? And why the total absence of this in Fascism? In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. The very fact that you had to confess makes Stalinism paradoxical and perverse. The idea is that, in a strange way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are guilty, you have to confess. This does not make Stalinism cause any less suffering; nonetheless, this pure quarrel of radical objectivization, “You are a Jew, you are guilty for who you are,” was absent in Stalinism. In a totally perverted, thwarted, and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin. So the result is that in Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

Legitimacy, and also Stalin enjoyed the process.

Trying to remember if he had a secret room to watch the Show Trials, or a secret room to watch executions.

Have you read Djilas and Fitzpatrick? No? Go read them.

>>citation needed
(Fitzpatrick) (Djilas) (Bukharin)

Elaborate on what I will learn from these guys?

Can you include Žižek's sniffs in your future transcripts as they are essentially a kind of punctuation and essential for truly understanding Žižek. Thanks.

This.

Modern Leftist do the same thing in any case, demands for apology for an imagined slight save no one, they are just treated as a proof of guilt and the grounds for demands of removal of the victim.

Because "useful idiots" like Grover Furr still take the confessions at 100% face value and claim that Stalin committed no crimes. It's purely propaganda.

I don't find it that strange.

Communism espouses the freedom of the people, the right to speech, freedom of movement, freedom of experession etc ideologically, so if you want to shoot these people in the head and not look like you are betraying your values, you have to make them enemies of the people and have them confess in a court of law.

Fascism doesn't, Fascists are open they don't give a shit about human rights or freedom.

>“You are a Jew, you are guilty for who you are,” was absent in Stalinism.

The various "national operations" of the NKWD as well as the mass deportation of a number of peoples with very high death rates during WWII come pretty close though

Djilas has a general theory of the social development of new class societies. The purge is a required phase to keep the party together during the crisis of initial development and when there is a diversity of opinion within the party. Confession reinforces the party line.

Fitzpatrick studied the detailed function of the great purge at a local level. Local initiative by ex-worker "new" party members played a large role in the purge. They purged old party members and specialists, to take their positions. Confession legitimised the purge politically. A large number of party members believed the confessions. A larger number believed the confessions indicated the necessity of the purge in general terms (ie: that while there were innocents, the problem of saboteurs and spies was real).

>Communism espouses the freedom of the people, the right to speech, freedom of movement, freedom of experession etc ideologically, so if you want to shoot these people in the head and not look like you are betraying your values, you have to make them enemies of the people and have them confess in a court of law.
Except that was considered burgeois morality.

Yes, the communist content of "freedom" transcends the bourgeois one by being freedom for not freedom from.

Well, if you've gone that far, why not give it that extra push and get a confession out of the torturing while you're at it.