Reflections of a stormy petrel

One hopes that this time the self-righteous kook may have kooked his own goose, even though the reactions to his most recent statements may be as ignorant as they are. The trouble with what Stone says is not that such figures as Hitler or Stalin should not be seen in the context of their times, or that some kind of challenge to orthodoxies should not be encouraged; the trouble is that Stone himself seems to want to resurrect once again all the old, dead, disproved orthodoxies largely encouraged by those very characters. So he says that Hitler must be seen in the context of the fall-out of World War One; by which I fear he must mean the old, discredited and fraudulent excuse about the Versailles Treaty being too harsh on Germany (it was, to the contrary, extraordinarily mild and far less brutal than the peace treaty imposed by Germany on Lenin's Russia) and Hitler being a by-product of German "humiliation". So he repeats the old Stalinist canard that nobody did more than Stalin to try and stop the Nazi war machine - which is, to say the least, dubious, and which was Stalin's own excuse before Western public opinion even as he carried out the great purges and persecuted anti-Fascists of every stripe. The trouble with Stone's mind is not that it is rebellious, it is that it is conventional; full of half-remembered, age-old lies that people once took seriously, but which serious people laugh at now.