Bobby Fischer

Reb wrote: History tells me that the communist regimes have been just as murderous as the nazis were but communists do not receive near the same condemnation as nazis do.

PR, for one thing. The USSR committed all sorts of atrocities within its own borders, but tried to keep them quiet to the extent that government officials who had been "purged" were systematically airbrushed out of archival photos. There was a whole governmental culture built around secrecy, and by the time many of the issues became better known they were relatively distant. It also didn't help that they fought with the Allies in WWII and then became a superpower, thus giving the world two reasons not to piss them off.

The Nazis, on the other hand, made only token efforts to hide their crimes even as they were happening. One of the most amazing things about worldwide refusal to acknowledge the then-ongoing murder of Jews and others was that Hitler wrote a book all about doing just that, and made sure that everyone in Germany had a copy. Also important was that when Germany lost the war, soldiers from both the Soviet Union and the west found concentration camps that were either still in operation or had just recently been deserted. The USSR's image might have been quite different had a foreign army ever marched into Siberia.

The Nazis murdered about 15 million in 12 years. The Communists murdered some 105 million since 1917. The job of students of history (or any subject) is to surpass their teachers. The writers and teachers of history, news, movies, etc. do not have to be the winners of wars. They are those who made the Long March through the institutions of the winning nations. Many of these who lived in the West were on the Soviet side in the Cold War. Obituaries of western communists in the West often leave out that information and use a term like activist. The internationalism of communism is in theory. In practice, communist bureaucrats in each communist nation had their own national interests. They also had their own personal interests (see The New Class by Milovan Djilas). Communists in the West would serve the Soviet Union or other single communist nation which had different interests.

If stalin was anti-semitic why did the soviet union fight for the allies in ww2?he would have fought with the nazis if he was truly anti semitic despite communist nazi tensions

Two quick answers:

1. Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression treaty in 1939. It held until 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR. The war with Nazi Germany was forced on Stalin, not something he decided would be a good idea.

2. Jews were not a top priority for Stalin the way they were for Hitler. Even when Hitler was losing the war, he diverted important materials from the front to keep the concentration camps in operation. Stalin, whatever we may think of him, placed more weight on the security of the Soviet Union and its economic base than on any personal bigotry.

You may or may not know this, but Bobby Fischer actually had a losing record against one GM by the name of Efim Geller, a Russian GM.  The caveat here being that they only played a few games.  As far as Bobby being the greatest ever, I'm sure Bobby believed that, but personally, and based on his own statements about too much theory being known, I think Capablanca was the greatest natural talent to this day and if he had known all the theory that Bobby knew, he would have held an edge against Bobby or any other GM today.  Also, Akiba Rubenstein was known to be a fantastic player with near perfect games and just look at all the opening theory named after him!  Just my two cents.

I have a question from Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. Would someone please explain frame 213 on page 258? What happens after White's Rook checks?

I read in one of the biographies (either Endgame, Bobby Fischer Goes To War, or Profile of a Prodigy), that during his period of obscurity in Japan, a master became friendly with him, and used to discuss chess with him. That master supposedly told later how Bobby was obsessed with a certain specific move. Does anyone know who this master was, and is it known what that chess position was?

bobby fischer drew a game with the white pieces where he tried the fried liver attack and black responded with Bc5, Bxf2+ sacking a pawn, and then Nxe4+. It was mentioned in an article titled 'a rook is a rook.' can someone tell me where I can find a transcript of this game?

NYT Obituary at Bobby Fischer's death.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/obituaries/18cnd-fischer.html

nice

Batboy ?....u may wanna get off the deeply personal obsession w/ BF.   ::/

Now in algebraic notation . . .

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/bought-my-60-memorable-games

Either one is good! . . . Thriftybooks.com . . .

DENVER

While politics is badly off-topic, I notice that one answer to your question was missed.

Communism pretends to be about helping the poor people and the working class, while Nazism was about glorifying one race of people. Thus, Communism is more likely to fool people into thinking it is good.

And then there's McCarthyism in the United States - nobody went on a rampage persecuting innocent people based on false accusations of being Nazis.

Also, the Nazis were social conservatives, but they weren't free-enterprisers. Nazi ideology was more like Populism gone wild than either liberalism or conservatism gone wild. So they had "socialism" in their name while being the opposite of the Communists in many ways.

Had Stalin not died when he did, he was on the verge of starting a violent persecution of Jews in Russia. The propaganda preparation was beginning, referring to Jews, unlike ethnic Russians, as "rootless cosmopolites"; also there was the matter of the "Doctors' Plot".

Bobby Fischer is a tragedy. I don't know if his decision to play the rematch against Spassky, and then become virulently anti-American, was due to a bitterness festering ever since he had to play games in a tournament held in Cuba over the teletypewriter, or due to him desperately needing money, and finding the Serbian match as his only way out, and being angry that the government was standing in his way for escaping from poverty.

He had so many other ways to make money, like writing books about Chess. But his paranoia about everyone trying to cheat him stood in the way of any normal business activities. So a Hungarian girl reached him, but pointed him in the wrong direction, towards Serbia.

😮

He didn't have dementia. He died of kidney failure because he refused to seek conventional medical treatment.

I think he died quiet recently. Maybe not before 2010.