POLITICAL LETHARGY
TONY LEON: ANC faithful loath to find fault with Zuma despite SA’s downward spiral
Party members, like victims of Stalin who believed in the system, cannot accept movement has lost the plot
In his final tour de force before his death in 2010, the great modern historian Tony Judt described how key victims of Stalin remained — to the bitter end, often unto death — true believers in the system that sent them to Siberia and worse. The memoirs of Evegniia Ginzburg, gifted Judt in his book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, with one profound believer in this self-immolating belief. He wrote: "She is swept into the Gulag, passing through all the worst prisons of Moscow, dispatched by train to Siberia. Not only does she encounter fellow victims, women who are still great believers and who are convinced that there must be logic and justice behind their suffering; she herself remains committed to a certain communist ideal. The system, she insists, may have gone badly astray: but it could still be fixed." As Judt notes, wryly: "This capacity — this profound need — to believe well of the Soviet project was so firmly embedded by 1936 that even its victims did not lose faith."I will r...
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