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I'm long said that you should read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, for the villains. The psychology of the bad guys in real life is puzzling. Why did Robert Mugabe destroy the Rhodesian economy? Why did Chavez and Maduro destroy the Venezuelan economy? They made rookie errors that made it harder for them to hold onto power. Did they get bored of life on easy mode and deliberately make bad decisions to make it harder, for the white knuckle ride? Probably not, and Ayn Rand has a more subtle and reasonable depiction of the psychology of the bad guys.
There is evidence that Yagoda was instrumental in engineering in 1934 the assassination of Sergey Mironovich Kirov, Leningrad party secretary and a member of the Politburo, whom Stalin perceived as a potential rival.
When Stalin ordered that the Soviet Union's entire rural population were to be forced onto collective farms, Yagoda is reputed to have sympathised with Bukharin and Rykov, his opponents on the right of the communist party. Nikolai Bukharin claimed in a leaked private conversation in July 1928 that "Yagoda and Trilisser are with us", but once it became apparent that the right was losing the power struggle, Yagoda switched allegiance. In the contemptuous opinion of Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, Yagoda "traded his personal views for the sake of his career" and degenerated into a "criminal" and a "miserable coward".[8]
Actually, it gets worse
Yagoda had founded a secret poison laboratory of OGPU that was at disposal of Stalin. One of the victims became his own NKVD boss, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky. He was slowly poisoned during two weeks by two assistants of Yagoda.
So now I'm having to revise my opinion of Ayn Rand. She got out of Russia in 1926, before things got really bad. Consequently, her villains are recognizably human, unlike the over-the-top cartoon villainy of real life.
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[–] feral-toes 2 points 2 points 4 points (+4|-2) ago
I'm long said that you should read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, for the villains. The psychology of the bad guys in real life is puzzling. Why did Robert Mugabe destroy the Rhodesian economy? Why did Chavez and Maduro destroy the Venezuelan economy? They made rookie errors that made it harder for them to hold onto power. Did they get bored of life on easy mode and deliberately make bad decisions to make it harder, for the white knuckle ride? Probably not, and Ayn Rand has a more subtle and reasonable depiction of the psychology of the bad guys.
From the Britannica article
From Wikipedia
Actually, it gets worse
So now I'm having to revise my opinion of Ayn Rand. She got out of Russia in 1926, before things got really bad. Consequently, her villains are recognizably human, unlike the over-the-top cartoon villainy of real life.
[–] PacifistRacist [S] 2 points -1 points 1 point (+1|-2) ago
stop wasting my time, faggot