guy who learns about abu ghraib and thinks it’s good
“my professor made me learn about my own country’s barbarism!”
“He was anti American during the class about the time we tried to exterminate the brutes in Vietnam!”
" He said we could read Hansel and Gretel and have warm milk and cookies but tricked us and forced us to read Heart of Darkness!"
these are deeply unserious people and I wish the bottom left one in particular a very join the Marines and drown in the red sea
Edit :just saw that one was in 2007 but my sentiments still stand.
if it’s not “plain text” he will send your essay back
Anti-Formatting Aktion
you can format .txt files pretty nicely if you’re not a dweeb, skill issue imo
There are genuine academic critiques to be made of some of Furr’s work. “He made me learn America bad” and “he made me learn about pirates and communism” aren’t them.
Yes. J Arch Getty - a legit Soviet historian who is a lib but is still very fair to Stalin IMO and generally very USSR-friendly - once said that Furr understands the material in the archives, but he just comes to really weird conclusions.
I think Furr is fine as long as you know you’re getting an apologist more than a historian. There’s a place for that. Furr himself admittedly (on the Proles pod) he thinks Stalin did nothing wrong. If you approach history from that angle you’re going to have blind spots. IMO skip Furr and go to Losurdo.
He actually does go off topic quite a bit. But it’s 100% worth going down whatever rabbithole he goes on an adventure on.
10/10, if you get a chance to talk with him and pick his brain on random early soviet history topics, you should.
I had an Anatomy and Physiology teacher for a night class many years ago. He’d go off on tangents talking about demonic possesion, his homophobic tendencies, and adrenochrome, It made his lectures like reading through Pale Fire on drugs. He was one of the the best teachers I ever had, his shaky manic rants basically ensuring that I was transfixed and able to write down every single (relevant) word despite my severe unmedicated ADHD and chronic sleep deprivation.
He sounds certainly like a real character one would find interesting to listen to. Sadly Furr’s a bit more on the pedantic side in his speaking since he’s spent quite literally years putting up with anti-communist a-historical ‘historian’ bullshit, so if you’re not exactly a stick-in-the-mud you may end up bored and tallying up how many times he says “Anti-Stalin paradigm” during one of his lectures.
