When Dick Cheney and his minions defend torture saying, “it worked,” they are channeling Joseph Stalin, according to Andrew Brown in the American Conservative. “One of the first disconcerting things to discover when you inquire into the interrogation habits of the KGB” Brown writes, “is that their practices weren’t defined as torture at all.” Leaving aside the infamous waterboarding, practices like sleep deprivation and stress positions were cornerstones of both the KGB’s terror and that of Bush and Cheney.

Of course torture “works” in getting information, Brown concedes, but that information is inherently unreliable. The confessions extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other targets of U.S. torture have the same evidentiary value as confessions that Trotskyists were responsible for sabotaging the Soviet economy in the 1930s. Brown writes, “Torture is a means of forcing people to lie to us, under circumstances that compel us to believe them, because otherwise we would have to face the truth about ourselves.”

The arguments made for torture, including the ones made to the continuation of torture policies under President Obama, are couched in the language of pragmatism. “Pragmatism is not a substitute for philosophical rigor, however,” David Schimke wrote for the latest issue of Utne Reader, “and it cannot be used as an excuse to ignore the past.” In this case, an absolute abolition of torture is both pragmatic and moral, since torture cannot reliably deliver the truth and undoubtedly serves to hurt the U.S. moral standing in the world.

Sources: American Conservative (subscription required), Utne Reader 

Joseph Stalin, one of the biggest mass murderers in human history, is cool again in Russia. In a recent poll to decide who was Russia’s greatest historical figure, Stalin came in third, behind medieval prince Alexander Nevsky and former prime minister Pyotr Stolypin. Stalin led the tally for months, according to the BBC, “until the show's producer appealed to viewers to vote for someone else.”

Some believe that Russia’s leaders under despotic Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are pushing for Stalin’s resurgent popularity. In December, the BBC reports that police raided the offices of the human rights organization Memorial and seized a digital archive of Stalin’s atrocities. Irina Flige, office director of the organization, believes the raid was politically motivated. Flige told the BBC, “if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims.”

“Since the 1990s those in political power have been looking to the past to justify their own legitimacy,” Arseny Roginsky writes for Open Democracy. Roginsky writes that Russians have trouble reconciling the atrocities that took place under Stalin with the glory that came after defeating the Nazis in World War II. Though Stalinism can be defined as “terror as a universal instrument for solving any political and social tasks,” the memory of that terror has largely receded in modern Russia.

The absurdity of naming Stalin one of the most beloved Russians left comedian John Oliver nearly speechless. On his podcast with Andy Zaltzman, the Bugle, Oliver quipped, “This would be the perfect time for a simile, ‘Voting for Stalin is like voting for…’ but there isn’t one. Because remember, he’s the biggest mass murderer in human history.” Oliver continued, “As he was sending people to gulags, signing death warrants, and forcing the collectivization of farms, I wonder if he was thinking, ‘This could be a real vote getter in 60 years. I’m going to be captain popular.’”