Criticism of Maoist Rebel News: “Faggot” isn’t Okay

Introduction

Recently, there has been a conflict among socialists over the use of the word “faggot” which emerged after Maoist Rebel News made a Facebook status as the following, where he defends his casual use of the word:

“Getting real sick and tired of internet kids complaining about shit. Remember the porn purge from two weeks ago? Time for another. Let’s get something straight, you don’t tell me what I can say. I use the word faggot. I use it a lot on friends and to describe things I don’t like. If you don’t like this, unfriend me now. No one, absolutely no one tells me what words I can and can’t use. I just had kid tell me I can’t use it. When I dismissed her argument that I can’t use it because I don’t care what she thinks, she went and cried sexism rising the shield of feminism to protect herself. It’s disgusting to use the plight of women as a shield against criticism. I am not anyone’s leader and I am not in anyone’s party. I don’t care if you don’t like what I say, there is no democratic centralism because this is not an organization. I do not conform to anyone’s party line. Don’t whine to me because I use the word faggot and retard or that I support the DPRK. Unfriend me and don’t watch my channel if you don’t like it.”

He then proceeded to make the following video where he accuses a fellow communist of “feminism shielding” and defends his use of the word “faggot”.

Immediately after, he denounced prominent Marxist-Leninist site owner , the Espresso Stalinist, for making the same criticism of his use of the word “faggot”. He used a similar aggressive and emotional attack but due to the fact he has blocked my Facebook account at the time of writing this criticism, I cannot accurately quote what was said.

image from the espresso stalinist
whom Jason termed a ‘coffee shop
revolutionary’ and ‘control nazi’

I have been in many private Skype calls with Jason and other communists over the last year, so this situation was particularly frustrating.

Rather than write him off then and there, I wanted to at least try and talk it out personally. The key to proper Marxist solidarity is treating criticism professionally but appropriately.

Our Conversation

Here is the conversation we had, unedited, except for removing personal information; his profile picture appears generic as he blocked me shortly before writing this. As the image will indicate, he did indeed consent to making this conversation public.

Click on the image below and use your browser’s zoom utility to read.

As one can see, when I tried to approach him as a comrade, I was told to “fuck off”. But before that, I was informed that I was a “nazi”. Who knew?

Analysis

Where Jason first went wrong was when he decided to incorporate homophobic and ableist language into his vocabulary.

Let me make this clear. It is never okay to casually throw around words like “faggot”, “retard”, or “nigger”. We are socialists and communists. We are supposed to be standing up for the oppressed peoples of the world and fighting to liberate them, not express our own privilege in a way that offends those very same peoples.

Besides the homophobia, ableism, and subtle acceptance of racism, Jason also has expressed a bit of patronizing sexism. In private confrontations with a female communist, he often dismissed her, as he does in the video, as a “child”, “kid”, and accused her of using feminism as a shield; despite the fact she is indeed a divorced survivor of domestic abuse. The complete nature of this episode cannot be known for certain, but such language is no doubt patronizing to an adult.

As for how Marx and Engels used this language, so what? Does the fact that we have had racist and homophobic revolutionaries before us justify perpetuating heternormative and ableist socio-dialogue? Marxism is constantly reevaluating, reassessing, and purifying itself along the dialectical method and there is definitely a consensus that racism and homophobia are unacceptable. My point being, if you are afraid to say it publicly, do not say it privately. We must be prepared to make our conversations public as they should reflect a character that is not hypocritical and backstabbing to the revolutionary movements against oppression.

With that said, we all make mistakes. Each and everyone of us has used such language before, either by slip or intentionally. The key is to recognize what we have done is wrong, correct that, and move forward.

Jason’s biggest blunder, one that will surely hurt him in the near future, was that he chose to dig his heels in like a bourgeois individualist under fire. On the first day of Maoism 101 you should learn the importance of criticism, and self-criticism. This is done purely in a political matter, as a form of reaffirming our dedication to revolutionary principles, and should be received appropriately.

What we saw from Jason was the equivalent of a childish meltdown(ragequit); where he accused anyone and everyone who had criticized him of “censorship” and trying to “police” his private conversations. If not mildly offensive this is at the very least completely false. No one is advocating to march into his house and arrest him for using homophobic language. We are rightfully criticizing him for being such an apparently strong Maoist yet continuing to perpetuate these oppressive dispositions.

He claims to represent no one, but stands in front of flags representing the DPRK, PRC, and USSR. He claims to conform to no one, but proudly calls himself the Maoist Rebel. Maoism, like any strain of revolutionary socialism, is not a weekend bowling league. Sometimes you need to swallow your pride and admit your mistakes to make yourself a stronger and more dedicated individual.

Conclusion

I am not interested in people so enveloped with self-importance that they refuse to even apologize for the most offensive of actions.

“To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.” Mao Tse-Tung, Combat Liberalism

For the most part, I really liked Jason. He was a pretty down-to-earth fellow who gave a face to solid Marxism on the internet. As he cited in his recent video, he made many tough decisions. One of them was his harsh stance against pornography, which I agreed with. I defended him from criticism then, as his position was rightful. I defended him even more before that and always thought of him as a comrade.

Yet, when this all came about, it was impossible for me to defend his actions and rhetoric any longer.

As for the whole “I can say what I want” self-worship, it’s true. He has the freedom of speech. But his freedom of speech does not override our freedom to criticism and association; and as long as he calls himself a Maoist, he can expect to be criticized accordingly.

No one is above the principles of our movement. Jason needed to be reminded of this.

Source

Left Anticommunism: the Unkindest Cut

BY MICHAEL PARENTI

Despite a lifetime of “shaming” the system, NOAM CHOMSKY, America’s foremost “engagé” intellectual, remains an unrepentant left anticommunist.

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Genuflection to Orthodoxy

Many on the U.S. Left have exhibited a Soviet bashing and Red baiting that matches anything on the Right in its enmity and crudity. Listen to Noam Chomsky holding forth about “left intellectuals” who try to “rise to power on the backs of mass popular movements” and “then beat the people into submission. . . . You start off as basically a Leninist who is going to be part of the Red bureaucracy. You see later that power doesn’t lie that way, and you very quickly become an ideologist of the right. . . . We’re seeing it right now in the [former] Soviet Union. The same guys who were communist thugs two years back, are now running banks and [are] enthusiastic free marketeers and praising Americans” (Z Magazine, 10/95).

Chomsky’s imagery is heavily indebted to the same U.S. corporate political culture he so frequently criticizes on other issues. In his mind, the revolution was betrayed by a coterie of “communist thugs” who merely hunger for power rather than wanting the power to end hunger. In fact, the communists did not “very quickly” switch to the Right but struggled in the face of a momentous onslaught to keep Soviet socialism alive for more than seventy years. To be sure, in the Soviet Union’s waning days some, like Boris Yeltsin, crossed over to capitalist ranks, but others continued to resist free-market incursions at great cost to themselves, many meeting their deaths during Yeltsin’s violent repression of the Russian parliament in 1993.

Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power’s sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.

For decades, many left-leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-Red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist-Leninist Left.

Adam Hochschild: Keeping his distance from the “Stalinist Left” and recommending same posture to fellow progressives.

Adam Hochschild, a liberal writer and publisher, warned those on the Left who might be lackadaisical about condemning existing communist societies that they “weaken their credibility” (Guardian, 5/23/84). In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in the Cold-War condemnations of communist societies. Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters. Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.

The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.

Even when attacking the Right, the left critics cannot pass up an opportunity to flash their anticommunist credentials. So Mark Green writes in a criticism of President Ronald Reagan that “when presented with a situation that challenges his conservative catechism, like an unyielding Marxist-Leninist, [Reagan] will change not his mind but the facts.” While professing a dedication to fighting dogmatism “both of the Right and Left,” individuals who perform such de rigueur genuflections reinforce the anticommunist dogma. Red-baiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell. In the middle of World War II, as the Soviet Union was fighting for its life against the Nazi invaders at Stalingrad, Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83). Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance. Today, his ideological progeny are still at it, offering themselves as intrepid left critics of the Left, waging a valiant struggle against imaginary Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist hordes.
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Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish–while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.

Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words).

Slinging Labels

Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as “Soviet apologists” and “Stalinists,” even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did.

Saturated by anticommunist orthodoxy, most U.S. leftists have practiced a left McCarthyism against people who did have something positive to say about existing communism, excluding them from participation in conferences, advisory boards, political endorsements, and left publications. Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.

That many U.S. leftists have scant familiarity with Lenin’s writings and political work does not prevent them from slinging the “Leninist” label. Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: “Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.” Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power’s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right.

At the time of the 1996 terror bombing in Oklahoma City, I heard a radio commentator announce: “Lenin said that the purpose of terror is to terrorize.” U.S. media commentators have repeatedly quoted Lenin in that misleading manner. In fact, his statement was disapproving of terrorism. He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses. Far from being the totalitarian, tight-circled conspirator, Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development. He advocated whatever diverse means were needed to advance the class struggle, including participation in parliamentary elections and existing trade unions. To be sure, the working class, like any mass group, needed organization and leadership to wage a successful revolutionary struggle, which was the role of a vanguard party, but that did not mean the proletarian revolution could be fought and won by putschists or terrorists.

Lenin constantly dealt with the problem of avoiding the two extremes of liberal bourgeois opportunism and ultra-left adventurism. Yet he himself is repeatedly identified as an ultra-left putschist by mainstream journalists and some on the Left. Whether Lenin’s approach to revolution is desirable or even relevant today is a question that warrants critical examination. But a useful evaluation is not likely to come from people who misrepresent his theory and practice.

Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations to be morally unacceptable because of the “crimes of communism.” Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic Party in this country, either as voters or members, seemingly unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist Party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic Party protected racial segregation and stymied all anti-lynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic Party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism

The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party “state capitalism” or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries “socialist” is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world–as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.

First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West [even more so when compared with today's grotesque compensation packages to the executive and financial elites.—Eds], as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess.

The “lavish life” enjoyed by East Germany’s party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the “lavish” consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.

Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.

Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.

Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.

All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundamentals as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism–not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience–could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? . . . Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life. (Carl Shames, correspondence to me, 1/15/92.)

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.

Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe–and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them–all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. . . .

These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make]. (Guardian, 11/13/91)

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

Decentralization vs. Survival

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872-73 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta),” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party. “The time has come,” he told an enthusiastically concurring Tenth Party Congress, “to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition.” Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.

Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party’s Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution–like every other–that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way.

By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more political diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organizations, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small businesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base.

The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more comfortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only problem is that the country would have risked being incapable of withstanding the Nazi onslaught. Instead, the Soviet Union embarked upon a rigorous, forced industrialization. This policy has often been mentioned as one of the wrongs perpetrated by Stalin upon his people. It consisted mostly of building, within a decade, an entirely new, huge industrial base east of the Urals in the middle of the barren steppes, the biggest steel complex in Europe, in anticipation of an invasion from the West. “Money was spent like water, men froze, hungered and suffered but the construction went on with a disregard for individuals and a mass heroism seldom paralleled in history.”

Stalin’s prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide. The cost of this survival included 22 million Soviets who perished in the war and immeasurable devastation and suffering, the effects of which would distort Soviet society for decades afterward.

All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not “make inevitable” the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of “suspect” nationalities.

The transforming effects of counterrevolutionary attack have been felt in other countries. A Sandinista military officer I met in Vienna in 1986 noted that Nicaraguans were “not a warrior people” but they had to learn to fight because they faced a destructive, U.S.-sponsored mercenary war. She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda. As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands–the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the suppression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society.

The overthrow of Eastern European and Soviet communist governments was cheered by many left intellectuals. Now democracy would have its day. The people would be free from the yoke of communism and the U.S. Left would be free from the albatross of existing communism, or as left theorist Richard Lichtman put it, “liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China.”

In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.

In addition, the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. “Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.” As Richard Levins put it, “So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay” (Monthly Review, 9/96).

Having never understood the role that existing communist powers played in tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism, and having perceived communism as nothing but an unmitigated evil, the left anticommunists did not anticipate the losses that were to come. Some of them still don’t get it.

Tears Behind the Mask

Ending all religions
Changes yet to come
Whole new situation
Fear became too strong
Send a spark of hatred
To where I cannot rest
My fate’s depending on me
Pushed to the test
Depression unrest
As I watch the sky

 - Krayzie Bone, “Depression Unrest”

Marxism & Bourgeois Nationalism

As always, a re-posting of articles does not necessarily imply an absolute endorsement of the entirety of its content. However, this well-written article does make a good point about the duality of the bourgeois class, particularly in the Third World and oppressed countries.

– Espresso Stalinist.

Tripoli is burning. Thousands of black Libyans and African immigrants are rounded up by the NATO-backed rebels and thrown into prisons. Supporters of the ousted nationalist government wait with baited breath for the inevitable and bloody purge by the new rebel government. Libyan oil gushes out of Benghazi into the pipelines of Western energy companies. And militia groups, deputized by Interpol and the now-victorious National Transitional Council (NTC) government, hunt for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his family across the Libyan desert.

Now that NATO has won this asymmetrical imperialist war, at least in the short term, no one can reasonably say that the Libyan people are better off with the rebel government in power. For all of the flaws of Qaddafi’s government – and other nationalist governments like his – the Libyan people enjoyed the highest standard of living on the African continent, rising from the lowest standard of living in the world as of 1951. (1) The national and tribal governments had an amicable working relationship that allowed for decentralized planning and local decision-making. Moreover, Libya’s natural resources were controlled by a national government at-odds with Western energy corporations, and the wealth they generated was publicly owned and shared. (1) In other words, the Libyan nation exercised its inherent right to self-determination.

Qaddafi’s government wasn’t socialist; it was nationalist. The relations of production in Libya were capitalist in nature, but to deny that Qaddafi’s government was more progressive and objectively anti-imperialist ignores the brutal material reality that millions of Libyans are facing because of the NTC government.

As the West begins to re-calibrate its war machine and set its crosshairs on President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, Marxist-Leninists need to understand their relationship with nationalist bourgeois states, like Qaddafi’s Libya. History has objectively proven those “leftists” who were cheerleaders for the fall of Qaddafi’s government in Libya or Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq wrong.

At the same time, every bourgeois state operates fundamentally in the interest of some sector of the capitalist ruling class, whether national or international, and in time the proletariat will replace that old machinery with socialism through revolution.

I posit these theses:

Because of their relation to imperialism after the fall of the socialist bloc, the objective historical position of nationalist states in the Third World is progressive.

Marxist-Leninists must uphold the right of nations to self-determination, which in the present is principally characterized by freedom from imperialist subjugation.

Where it arises, Marxist-Leninists must support genuine revolutionary proletarian struggles for socialism against bourgeois nationalist governments.

Josef Stalin, author of Marxism & the National Question

What is nationalism?

To understand when and why Marxist-Leninists should support nationalism, it’s important to examine the material conditions from which nationalism arises.

As a starting point, it’s important to distinguish a nation from other units of social or geographical organization, like a tribe or country. Historically speaking, national identity is a relatively recent development in class society. In his seminal 1913 work, Marxism and the National Question, Josef Stalin outlines the characteristics of a nation as “a historically evolved, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” (2)

Two important characteristics to note about Stalin’s definition. First, while territory and geography is a defining feature of a nation, it is not its sole determining characteristic, meaning that within the existential boundaries of a country–itself a recent social development–many nations may exist. Second, while a common economic life is also a defining characteristic, nations are not formed on the basis of class unity. In other words, there is no proletarian nation or bourgeois nation, but rather these two classes are both part and parcel of their respective nations.

In its inception, nationalism arises as an ideology of the bourgeoisie. From Marxism and the National Question:

The chief problem for the young bourgeoisie is the problem of the market. Its aim is to sell its goods and to emerge victorious from competition with the bourgeoisie of another nationality. Hence its desire to secure its “own,” its “home” market. The market is the first school in which the bourgeoisie learns its nationalism. (2)

Though all classes in a given nation are capable of embracing nationalism, Stalin argues that its historical basis lies in the bourgeoisie and its need for capital accumulation as a class. While other classes can appropriate and have transformed this concept, the demand for national self-determination begins as a bourgeois demand for exclusive access and control of its own national markets and resources.

European and American nationalism, for instance, arose from the break-up of feudal empires and the fledgling bourgeoisie’s struggle to establish itself as a class via primitive accumulation. American merchants, traders, shopkeepers, and speculators, denied full access to the readily available land and resources in North America by British mercantilism, led revolution of 1776 on the basis of American national unity. Though the American revolution of 1776 was waged in the interests of the fledgling bourgeoisie, the working masses rallied to the banner of American nationalism and led a successful struggle against British colonialism. Stalin notes that the “strength of the national movement is determined by the degree to which the wide strata of the nation, the proletariat and peasantry, participate in it.” (2)

Though the role of American nationalism in 1776 was historically progressive, the triumph of the American national movement was fueled by and resulted in the further subjugation of the African masses kidnapped and violently lashed into slave labor, along with the indigenous tribes ruthlessly slaughtered in the expansion of the American empire. Dialectically, American nationalism’s progressive features became the basis for the rise of the most oppressive imperialist power in the history of the world.

Without the subjugation of the African masses as a slave labor force, the Western bourgeoisie could never have established itself as an independent ruling class. Indeed, the same American nationalism that united the colonists against British mercantilism would unite the country in waging genocidal wars for land against indigenous people and Mexicans. After the series of successful European bourgeois revolutions, all ideologically fueled through nationalism, colonialism in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Pacific Islands became central to acquiring the cheap labor and resources necessary to generating extreme national wealth.

Because of the cheap labor and resources acquired through ruthless expansion, American capitalism transformed into imperialism, in which developed countries use force and comparative advantages in trade to violently extract resources and exploit the labor force of other colonies. Central to maintaining the colonial apparatus was the denial of equal rights and the cultivation of racist myths about colonized people, which materially manifested itself in slave labor, apartheid, and denial of access to the liberal democratic institutions established by the colonial bourgeoisie in imperialist countries.

Inevitably, the placement of capital in colonial countries allowed some small fraction of the colonized population to gain access to limited amounts of their own capital, albeit usually dependent on the colonial power. In other words, this small class of propertied yet colonized people constituted a bourgeoisie. Of this bourgeoisie, Stalin writes:

The bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation, repressed on every hand, is naturally stirred into movement. It appeals to its “native folk” and begins to shout about the “fatherland,” claiming that its own cause is the cause of the nation as a whole. It recruits itself an army from among its “countrymen” in the interests of… the “fatherland.” Nor do the “folk” always remain unresponsive to its appeals, they rally around its banner: the repression from above affects them too and provokes their discontent. (2)

The bourgeoisie of oppressed nations has the same basic features as the American and European bourgeoisie, in that both classes sought greater access to their own markets, resources, and labor. However, the conditions around the oppressed national bourgeoisie are qualitatively different than those around the Western bourgeoisie; they cannot seize control of their own national resources because of the fetters of colonialism.

Unquestionably the type of colonial oppression faced by the oppressed national bourgeoisie was different than that felt by the colonized proletariat and peasantry, who faced more brutal repression from the state and worse terms of labor. However, these colonized classes all had something to gain by overthrowing colonial and imperialist rule and achieving self-determination for their nation.

Nationalism becomes vital to the colonized bourgeoisie because it unites themselves and the colonized laboring masses in the struggle for national liberation. At the point where the laboring masses embrace nationalism, “the national movement begins.” (2)

National liberation struggles are not exclusively led by the nationalist bourgeoisie, and historically the bourgeoisie in colonial or semi-colonial nations is often too weak or too connected to the colonizing nation to exert itself independently as a class. Numerous examples of successful revolutionary proletarian national liberation movements exist, including the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). These successful communist movements, like the MPLA, also made use of nationalism to unite the country around the central task of expelling the colonizers. In essence, although nationalism is originally a bourgeois ideology, other revolutionary classes can appropriate it during the national liberation struggle phase.

Saddam Hussein, with an AK-47

Bourgeois nationalist states in the Third World

Because the nationalist bourgeoisie finds itself opposed to imperialism in the Third World, they can function as a tactical ally for the proletariat and peasantry in these same oppressed nations. Marxist-Leninists should never accept this alliance as permanent, however, and must carefully evaluate the place of the national bourgeoisie in relation to imperialism and the vast laboring masses.

Iraq provides one of the most potent examples of the fickle and unreliable nature of the nationalist bourgeoisie. The Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, for instance, was primarily bourgeois in its orientation and leadership, but it also attracted a mass following in the wake of the Iraq’s independence from British colonialism in 1958. (3)

Ba’ath was not committed to socialist revolution in Iraq, but they did preside over an aggressive nationalization program in 1972, which seized oil refineries from British and American companies and allowed them to diversify Iraq’s economy. Though these nationalizations were motivated by the access considerations of the national bourgeoisie, they also allowed the Ba’ath state to redirect revenues into public works projects that lifted nearly half the country out of poverty. In a 2006 profile piece on Saddam, PBS News writes of Ba’ath’s accomplishments:

As vice chairman, he oversaw the nationalization of the oil industry and advocated a national infrastructure campaign that built roads, schools and hospitals. The once illiterate Saddam, ordered a mandatory literacy program. Those who did not participate risked three years in jail, but hundreds of thousands learned to read. Iraq, at this time, created one of the best public-health systems in the Middle East — a feat that earned Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (4)

True to form, Saddam and Ba’ath rose to power in direct response to British colonialism. Acting in the interests of the Iraqi national bourgeoisie, they ‘took back’ the resources monopolized by the West’s colonial subjugation and used the revenues to rapidly construct a modern Iraq, which required an educated populace, secular government, a functional road system, and social infrastructure like hospitals. One can question the sincerity of Ba’ath’s actions towards the masses, but one cannot dispute the profoundly positive effect these nationalist policies had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

However, the social accomplishments of bourgeois nationalist regimes should never obscure their reactionary character. With both Ba’ath and the Communist Party of Iraq (ICP) vying for supremacy after the 1958 revolution, hostile confrontations between the parties continued until 1963, when Ba’ath launched a coup d’etat against Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qasim. (5) During the coup, communists organized massive militant resistance to Ba’ath, and over the course of the three days in Baghdad, “5,000 Iraqi citizens were apparently killed, including 80 Ba’th Party activists and 340 Iraqi communist activists.” (6)

Following the consolidation of Ba’ath rule in Iraq, the ICP experienced two separate waves of repression: one in 1963 following the coup and the subsequent unrest, and the other in 1977, led by Saddam. (5) Historian Bob Feldman writes in a February 2006 piece on Iraq that “By March 1963, an estimated 10,000 Communist Party of Iraq members had been arrested by the Ba’th regime and many imprisoned Iraqi leftist activists were not treated gently.” (6) Quoting Said Aburish’s book, “A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite”, Feldman continues:

The number of people eliminated remains confused and estimates range from 700 to 30,000. Putting various statements by Iraqi exiles together, in all likelihood the figure was nearer five thousand…. There were many ordinary people who were eliminated because they continued to resist after the coup became an accomplished fact, but there were also senior army officers, lawyers, professors, teachers, doctors and others. (6)

The CPI was correct to resist the 1963 Ba’ath coup and oppose the consolidation of a bourgeois nationalist regime. Iraq’s independence in 1958 had shifted their primary adversary from British colonialism to the Iraqi bourgeoisie, seeing as no colonial entity to struggle against still existed. Saddam’s case reminds Marxist-Leninists that it’s strategic to enter into a popular front with bourgeois nationalists against imperialism, but after the national liberation struggle is complete, they constitute a vicious and dangerous foe.

Palestinian women wave PFLP flags

Nationalist governments support revolutionary people’s struggles in the Third World.

Failure to conform to imperialist foreign policy is the most common wedge issue between bourgeois nationalists and the West. Often driven by pan-national ideological unity, bourgeois nationalist countries objectively support revolutionary people’s struggles and national liberation movements abroad, placing them at odds with imperialism.

Finding common ground with the Shi’a-led Iraqi resistance to US occupation, Iran has provided weapons to Iraqi insurgents, as well as training for assembling their own weapons. (7) While many allegations about Iranian aid to the Iraqi resistance are exaggerated by Western capitalist media to ratchet up tensions, journalist Michael Perry describes Iran’s rationale in a February 2007 article:

But let’s go even further and say, for the sake of argument, that the Iraqi insurgents are receiving officially authorized aid from the Iranian state. It is true that having a neighboring nation in chaos does not generally benefit any country, but the Iranians have been under the gun from the U.S. for a very long time –decades in fact. The recent threats and provocations from the Bush administration make it clear that Iran is an imminent target. I’m quite sure the Iranians realize that the quagmire in Iraq is the primary impediment to an American invasion of Iran. Troubles for U.S. forces in Iraq may buy the Iranians more time. Could the Iranians be so blind to their own self-interests? (8)

At odds with Saddam’s secular Sunni government for decades, the Iranian bourgeoisie would relish the opportunity to have an oil-rich Shi’a-dominated Iraq to its west. More pressing, however, is the collective national fear of having another US-client state in the region. There’s a reason that Tehran, and not Qatar, the UAE, or Saudi Arabia, is actively subverting US occupation by materially supporting the Iraqi resistance. That reason, of course, is because the Iran’s ruling nationalist bourgeoisie has a material class interest in anti-imperialism.

The best evidence for the progressive quality of the Iranian nationalist bourgeoisie, embodied in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is the attempted color revolution in 2009 by the US-backed Mir-Hossein Mousavi. This so-called ‘Green revolution’ was financially supported by both the West and the wealthy neo-liberal bourgeoisie, represented by multi-millionaire former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. (9) In the 2005 Presidential elections, Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani largely on the basis of the latter’s gaudy neo-liberal orientation. A 2005 article in GreenLeft by Doug Lorimer highlights the divergent class interests represented by Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. While both accept the fundamental tenents of the Iranian capitalist state:

In the same TV interview [Ahmadinejad] claimed the country’s vast oil wealth was controlled by one powerful family — a reference to Rafsanjani, who is alleged to have enriched himself through his son’s management of the country’s nationalised oil industry. The Rafsanjanis also have investments worth US1 billion in pistachio farming, real estate, automobile manufacture and a private airline.

“The whole Iranian economy is set up to benefit the privileged few”, Ray Takeyh, a professor and director of studies at the US National Defense University’s Near East and South Asia Center in Washington, told the Bloomberg news agency last December. “Rafsanjani is the most adept, the most notorious and the most privileged.” (10)

Rafsanjani, and his running dog Mousavi, hoped to rise to power via a US-supported color revolution and open Iran to Western markets; in other words, they represent the comprador Iranian bourgeoisie. Despite the best efforts of the imperialist powers to oust Ahmadinejad–who by every objective measure legitimately won the 2009 election–the Iranian people resisted these attacks on their national sovereignty. (11) Even as he nears the end of his two terms as President, Ahmadinejad remains popular with the Iranian masses because of his consistent anti-imperialism on the world stage, along with the social programs he has championed at home despite Western sanctions.

Pivoting to another nationalist state, Syria has consistently functioned as the most progressive of the multitude of Middle Eastern countries by substantially supporting the major national liberation movements in the region. Trinity University professor of history David Lesch writes in his fantastic book, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria that:

Syria does not deny claims of support for Hizbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, viewing that such operations constitute legitimate resistance and not terrorism; indeed, Damascus often views Israeli activities vis-a-vis the Palestinians and its actions in Lebanon as terrorism. (12)

Since the Syrian Ba’ath party took power in 1963, the state has always supported the Palestinian and Lebanese liberation struggles and sought to keep Israeli imperialism in-check. (13) Sharing the common trait of secularism, Syria allows the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the largest Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement in Palestine, to operate comfortably out of Damascus and materially supports their struggle with supplies and resources. (14) Because of the Syrian bourgeoisie’s desire for regional secular pan-Arab unity–rooted in the Alawi faith of President Bashar al-Assad and others–and the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, Assad’s government is objectively anti-imperialist.

Similarly, Saddam’s Ba’ath state in Iraq financially supported and championed the cause of Palestinian national liberation, which was played up by the West in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion. On March 13, 2003–just six days before the invasion–the BBC reported, “Saddam Hussein has paid out thousands of dollars to families of Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel. Relatives of at least one suicide attacker as well as other militants and civilians gathered in a hall in Gaza City to receive cheques.” (15) Later, the same article estimates that the Iraqi government had paid out nearly $35 million to Palestinian families since 2000.

In hindsight, the timing and purpose of this BBC article is obvious, but that Saddam’s support for ‘terrorist groups’ was one of the reasons for the 2003 invasion demonstrates the extreme degree to which his support for the Palestinians offended and scared the West. Startlingly few people remember that Israel invaded Syrian airspace and bombed a peaceful nuclear power plant in September 2007 for many of the same reasons. When a bourgeois state in the Third World becomes nationalist in its orientation, as opposed to comprador bourgeois states, it demands a response from the West.

Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia

Never confuse your primary and secondary contradictions!

Although a multitude of contradictions exist in class societies, at any given time, one of these contradictions is principal in comparison to the others. If a person goes for a walk, decides s/he wants a cigarette, and then gets bitten by a rattlesnake, the order of the day is to call a doctor and receive medical attention immediately for the venom. As much as that person might have wanted–or even needed–a cigarette, only a great fool would tell this person that s/he should prioritize smoking over seeking medical attention.

Primary and secondary contradictions seem like common sense, but a multitude of so-called ‘leftists’ and revolutionaries confuse them when analyzing imperialism. Ultimately, the approach that Marxist-Leninists ought to take to bourgeois nationalist governments is tied up in correctly identifying and acting on primary and secondary contradictions.

Though largely ignored in Marxist-Leninist writings, the experience of the Ethiopian revolution offers valuable insight as to how communists ought to struggle against bourgeois nationalist governments. Having played an instrumental role in repelling the Italian fascist occupation of Ethiopia, Emperor Haile Selassie I began as an archetype bourgeois nationalist. He encouraged pan-African unity, promoted decolonization, and began an aggressive process of modernizing Ethiopia.

That said, Selassie’s government became firmly aligned with the West after World War II and opened the country up to an influx of foreign capital. Presiding over and encouraging severely unequal land distribution, Selassie’s government was also responsible for a series of famines and foot shortages, the worst of which claimed an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 victims. (16) Ahmed Khan of the Communist Workers and Peasants Party in Pakistan writes this of Selassie’s government:

During the monarchical period, life expectancy was a mere 38 years and 90% of the people were illiterate. Only a tiny handful of feudal landowners and royal sycophants controlled the entire wealth of the country.

…

Severe drought and famine engulfed Ethiopia which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants, and led to widespread hunger and food crises in the urban areas. (16)

Even bourgeois sources regard these famines as the product of Selassie’s destructive policies. A 1997 report by Human Rights Watch called “Rebellion and Famine in the North under Haile Selassie” indicted the nationalist government for its culpability in this famine, saying:

The Wollo famine was popularly blamed on drought, a backward and impoverishedsocial system, and the cover-up attempted by the imperial government. These factors were all-important — though it must be remembered that specific actions by the government, especiallyafter the Ras Gugsa and Weyane revolts, were instrumental in creating the absence of development. (17)

By 1974, Selassie’s bourgeois government lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. Because of the widespread crises brought on by Selassie’s selective industrial development and close trade relations with the West, Ethiopian workers and peasants began to mobilize against the government. Khan writes, “The inability of the monarchy to deal with the crisis and the propensity of the feudalists to bleed the peasantry dry led to increasing hatred for the monarchy on part of the oppressed peasants, workers and a section of the emergent urban middle class.” (16)

Although no Marxist-Leninist vanguard party existed in Ethiopia at this time, a communist council of military officers known as the Derg organized alongside labor leaders in the urban centers and peasant communities in the countryside to produce the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. (18)

The revolutionary experience of the Ethiopian people in overthrowing Selassie’s government and establishing the People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia–firmly committed to socialist construction–has tremendous lessons for Marxist-Leninists about their relation to bourgeois nationalists. Objectively, Selassie’s government was essential to the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle waged against fascist Italy in 1935. The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) went so far as to launch a “Hands off Ethiopia” campaign in the same year, which included substantial demonstrations supporting Ethiopia’s right to self-determination (19).

However, classes do not exist in a vacuum. While one class may play a historically progressive role at one time, a change in the material conditions–like increased trade relations with the West following World War II–may render that same class reactionary. For as important as nationalism was to Ethiopia repelling fascist Italy in 1941, the same nationalist government’s reactionary policies reached a boiling point in 1974, resulting in a popular socialist revolution.

The lesson from Ethiopia is clear: Marxist-Leninists in nationalist states must organize with a keen awareness of primary and secondary contradictions. For a moment, let’s assume that an organization like the Derg existed in Ethiopia circa-1935. Said organization would commit a grave error in throwing in with the fascists in hopes of toppling an admittedly reactionary monarchy. First, the organization would undeniably alienate the Ethiopian masses, who despite their poverty and poor military training, flocked to defend their homeland, the only African state never colonized by the West, from fascist occupation. (20) Second, although Selassie’s bourgeois government was at-odds with the interests of Ethiopian workers and peasants, that contradiction receded into the background the moment that fascist Italy began poison gassing entire villages of Ethiopians.

When Mussolini’s forces invaded Ethiopia in 1935, there was only one organized military force capable of mounting a resistance: Selassie’s nationalist government. Unsuccessful at first, Ethiopian patriots of all classes, albeit predominantly workers and peasants, struggled onward to victory and liberation in 1941. That this liberation struggle took place across class lines on a nationalist basis is no small detail. It’s paramount that Marxist-Leninists, in light of Iraq, Libya, and increasing aggression towards Syria, comfortably identify anti-imperialism as the primary contradiction facing the international proletarian revolution today.

Proletarian internationalism is superior in every way to bourgeois nationalism, but so long as neo-colonialism and imperialism exist, communists must unite all who can be united in the anti-imperialist struggle. Simultaneously, though, communists must remember the other side of the dialectic: When bourgeois nationalists become complicit partners in Western imperialism and alienate themselves from the masses, communists must never hesitate to overthrow that state with extreme prejudice and on its ruins erect revolutionary socialism.

The irrelevance and obscurity of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) following the toppling of Saddam’s Ba’ath regime demonstrates the devastating effects of incorrectly identifying primary and secondary contradictions.

Saddam was by no means a consistent anti-imperialist throughout his reign. Though Ba’athist Iraq established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and China, it still retained casual relations with the West; relations that were strengthened following Saddam’s condemnation of Soviet intervention in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, as well as the Iranian Revolution in 1979. (21) Between the overthrow of the US-backed Shah, the establishment of a militant Islamic republic, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Iraq began to work closely with the West to curb Tehran’s influence in the Middle East. Though the Reagan Administration would notoriously fund the Iranians also, the US comfortably placed their initial bets behind Saddam in the devastating Iran-Iraq war of 1983-1988.

Even though the imperialists used Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war to sow chaos in the Middle East, the Ba’ath state remained largely at odds with Western interests because of its nationalist orientation. Refusing to privatize its oil industry and allow Western capital to fully penetrate its national markets, the West increasingly saw Saddam as a danger to imperialist interests in the Middle East. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait over territorial disputes, the subsequent Gulf War, and Saddam’s unabashed support for the Palestinian liberation struggle cemented Iraq’s status as a pariah state in the eyes of the West by the early 1990s.

In an effort to eliminate an unfriendly pro-Palestinian government perched atop massive oil reserves, the US and UK fabricated the now-infamous falsehood that Saddam’s government had weapons of mass destruction. While communists around the world uniformly condemned the imperialist invasion of Iraq, “the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) welcomed Saddam Hussein’s removal and is happy that the ousted president is to be put on trial.” (22) Exhausted and furious from decades of repression by Ba’ath, the ICP’s position is understandable on a purely visceral and emotional level. However, Marxist-Leninists must remain level-headed during periods of crisis and correctly identify primary and secondary contradictions; a task at which the ICP uniformally failed.

In the coming years, the ICP would come to participate in the puppet state erected by the West–most recently in the liberalizing ‘Political Reconciliation’ movement–and integrate themselves into this comprador government imposed from without. (23) Despite comprising the strongest opposition to the Ba’ath government during the 1960s, the ICP has descended into relative obscurity, having lost any credibility with the masses for their blunder. Instead, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other religious sects comprised the mass base of resistance after Saddam was captured, though their bourgeois and petty-bourgeois class character has led them to also participate in Maliki’s bogus government.

One would think that the international ‘left’ would have learned about correctly handling primary and secondary contradictions after witnessing the failure of the ICP to lead a mass revolutionary resistance to imperialist occupation. Instead, the same ‘leftists’ who witnessed the invasion of Iraq cheerled a racist, imperialist-backed ‘rebel movement’ in Libya, and many made the full leap into supporting NATO’s invasion to oust Qaddafi.

When a nation achieves self-determination, the secondary contradiction between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie will ascend to the forefront as the new primary contradiction. Before that time, however, the primary contradiction facing the masses in oppressed nations is between imperialism and national liberation. In bourgeois nationalist states, this contradiction can and must draw in all who can be united to strike a blow against imperialism.

Countries want independence.

Nations want liberation.

People want revolution.

—-

(1) Gerald A. Perreira, “Libya Getting it Right: A Revolutionary Pan-African Perspective,” March 4, 2011, Dissent Voice, http://bit.ly/mQT4iz

(2) Josef Stalin, Marxism & the National Question, March-May 1913, http://bit.ly/cwOCSQ

(3) Said K. Aburish, “How Saddam Hussein Came to Power,” 2002, From Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Published in The Saddam Hussein Reader, pg. 41-42

(4) Jessica Moore, “Saddam Hussein’s Rise to Power,” 2003, PBS News, http://to.pbs.org/65tro

(5) Turi Munthe (Editor), The Saddam Hussein Reader, 2002, pg. xv-xviii

(6) Bob Feldman, “A People’s History of Iraq: 1950 to November 1963,” February 2, 2006, Toward Freedom, http://bit.ly/qwCar2

(7) CNN, “Iraqi insurgents being trained in Iran, US says,” April 11, 2007, http://bit.ly/nHra0S

(8) Michael Perry, “So what if Iran is Interfering in Iraq?,” February 21, 2007, AntiWar.com, http://bit.ly/ogwqxd

(9) Paul Craig Roberts, “Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated ‘Color Revolution’?,” June 20-21, 2009, CounterPunch, http://bit.ly/pmXj7w

(10) Doug Lorimer, “IRAN: A vote against neoliberalism,” July 6, 2005, Green Left, http://bit.ly/nYcOll

(11) Terror Free America, New America Foundation, “Ahmadinejad Front Runner in Upcoming Elections,” June 12, 2009, http://bit.ly/k8x0w

(12) David W. Lesch, The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria, 2005, pg. 102

(13) Reuters, “Syrian President Vows to Keep Supporting Hezbollah, Hamas,” August 2, 2007, http://bit.ly/qex219

(14) Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, “PFLP condemns attack on Syria,” November 3, 2008, Fight Back! News, http://bit.ly/qWDlmo

(15) BBC News, “Palestinians get Saddam funds,” March 13, 2008, http://bbc.in/9BWsXr

(16) Ahmed Khan, “Defend Comrade Mengistu! On the struggle of our Ethiopian brothers,” November 19, 2008, Red Diary, http://bit.ly/jbYhks

(17) Human Rights Watch, “3. Rebellion and Famine in the North Under Haile Selassie,” 1997, http://bit.ly/pzy53w

(18) Christopher Clapham, Transformation and Continuity in Revolutionary Ethiopia, 1988, Cambridge University Press.

(19) Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, 1990, pg. 123.

(20) A.J. Barker, The Rape of Ethiopia, 1936, 1971.

(21) Said K. Aburish, “How Saddam Hussein Came to Power,” 2002, From Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Published in The Saddam Hussein Reader, pg. 44

(22) Shaheen Chughtai, “Iraqi communists celebrate change,” June 1, 2004, http://aje.me/qp5rVW

(23) Talal Alrubaie, “The Iraqi Communist Party and Hegel’s Owl of Minerva,” February 2, 2010, http://bit.ly/rqF6fr

Source

Comments on Meles Zenawi’s Death

DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 26JAN12 – Meles Zenawi, Prime Minister of Ethiopia speaks during the session ‘Africa — From Transition to Transformationy’ at the Annual Meeting 2012 of the World Economic Forum at the congress centre in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.

8 May 1955 – 20 August 2012

U.S. Neocolonial Ruler Dies; Question arise about alleged communist “Marxist-Leninist” past

Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi is dead. Wiki defines him as “one of Africa’s strongmen, he was also an ally of the United States’ War on Terror.”

A little-known fact about the pro-Western neocolonial dictator is that he once claimed to be Marxist-Leninist. Although his ruling coalition is the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, which is mainly made up of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, a guerrilla group fighting the Ethiopian Civil War, a group of which Meles was also a member, Meles Zenawi was also one of the founders and leaders of the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray, which was apparently pro-Albania.

Wiki says,

“He graduated from the General Wingate High school in Addis Ababa, then studied medicine at Addis Ababa University (at the time known as Haile Selassie University) for two years before interrupting his studies in 1975 to join the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Aregawi Berhe, a former member of the TPLF, notes that in their histories of the TPLF both John young and Jenny Hammond “vaguely indicate” that Meles was one of the founders of the TPLF. Aregawi insists that both he and Sibhat Nega joined the Front “months” after it was founded. While a member of the TPLF, Zenawi founded the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray. His first name at birth was “Legesse” (thus Legesse Zenawi, Ge’ez: ለገሰ ዜናዊ legesse zēnāwī). However, he eventually became better known by his nom de guerre Meles, which he later adopted in honour of university student and fellow Tigray Meles Tekle who was executed by Mengistu’s government in 1975.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meles_Zenawi

About the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT), Wiki says,

“The Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray (MLLT) was a semi-clandestine Hoxhaist Communist party that held a leading role in the Tigrayan Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF) in the 1980s. The majority of the TPLF leadership held dual membership in the MLLT, including the current Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi.

[....]

Posing as orthodox defenders of Marxism-Leninism and allying itself with the communist current associated with the hard-line Enver Hoxha regime in Albania, the MLLT saw its goals as spreading Marxism-Leninism throughout the world and “engaging in a bitter struggle against all brands of revisionism,” which they defined using the parlance of the Albanian ruling Communist Party of Labor, as including “Khrushchevism, Titoism, Trotskyism, Euro-Communism and Maoism.”

Zenawi fought against the Soviet-backed Derg military regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. His group eventually overthrew him. But Ethiopia is far from socialist. Ethiopia is ruled by capitalists and big landowners, and Zenawi became a Western ally, supporting the War on Terror and helping to send U.S. troops into Somalia.

What explains this change of character from an apparent Marxist-Leninist to a Western ally and puppet?

Here’s one explanation:

“After the defeat at Shire, the Derg abandoned all of Tigray to the rebels, and the EPRDF’s expanding guerrilla alliance started the military and political manoeuvres that would end in the takeover of Addis Ababa two years later. The Soviet bloc was close to casting Mengistu adrift. No belated acts of liberalization would save him. For his part Meles Zenawi, barely known outside Tigray, began introducing himself to a wider world.

An early encounter with the western press led to an observation that has dogged him ever since. He told an interviewer at the end of 1989 that the Soviet Union and other eastern bloc countries had never been truly socialist and added, ‘The neatest any country comes to being socialist as far as we are concerned is Albania.’ As Meles set off in 1990 on his first venture to the United States, his aspiration to the mantle of Enver Hoxha and to run Ethiopia on Albanian lines did not inspire much confidence.

In Washington he met the veteran Ethiopia-watcher Paul Henze. Henze was as impressed by Meles as many foreigners have been in the years since, and he made detailed notes after two long conversations. Meles had to deal first with the Albanian connection. ‘I have never been to Albania,’ Meles told Henze. ‘We do not have any Albanian contacts. We are not trying to imitate in Tigray anything the Albanians have done.’

Meles was equally keen to reject the Marxist tag. ‘We are not a Marxist-Leninist movement,’ he said. ‘We do have Marxists in our movement. I acknowledge that. I myself was a convinced Marxist when I was a student at [Addis Ababa University] in the early 1970s, and our movement was inspired by Marxism. But we learned that Marxism was not a good formula for resistance to the Derg and our fight for the future of Ethiopia.’

As the EPRDF moved out of the countryside to take over the towns and the cities, it emerged into a post-communist world, and a rapid political make-over was needed. ‘When we entered Addis Ababa, the whole Marxist-Leninist structure was being disgraced,’ said General Tsadkan. ‘We had to rationalize in terms of the existing political order . . . capitalism had become the order of the day. If we continued with our socialist ideas, we could only continue to breed poverty.’”

(Peter Gill. Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid. New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. pp. 74-75.)

The sides of the Ethiopian Civil War were very opportunist. In the book “Talk of the Devil,” a series of interviews of former leaders by Riccardo Orizio, Mengistu admitted that he would have been either pro-U.S., pro-Chinese, or pro-Soviet; whoever gave more aid.

Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union

From Hitler to Hearst, from Conquest to Solzhenitsyn: the history of the millions of people who allegedly were incarcerated and died in the labour camps of the Soviet Union and as a result of starvation during Stalin’s time.

Speech by Mario Sousa, KPML (r) Sweden

Translated and presented to the Stalin Society by Ella Rule March 1999.

The Ukraine as a German territory

William Hearst – Friend of Hitler
The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine
The Hearst mass media empire in 1998
52 years before the truth emerges
Robert Conquest at the heart of the myths
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Support for Franco’s fascism
Nazis, the police and the fascists
The archives demonstrate the propaganda lies
Fraudulent methods give rise to millions of dead
Gorbachev opens the archives
What the Russian research shows
Labour camps in the penal system
How many political prisoners there were, and how many common criminals
The internal and external threat
More prisoners in the US
How many people died in the labour camps?
How many people were sentenced to death prior to 1953, especially during the purges of 1937-38?
How long was the average prison sentence?
A brief discussion as to the research reports
The kulaks and the counter-revolution
The purges of 1937
Industrial sabotage
Theft and corruption
Plans for a coup
More numerous liars
Let us learn from history
Table of data

In this world we live in, who can avoid hearing the terrible stories of suspected death and murders in the gulag labour camps of the Soviet Union? Who can avoid the stories of the millions who starved to death and the millions of oppositionists executed in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time? In the capitalist world these stories are repeated over and over again in books, newspapers, on the radio and television, and in films, and the mythical numbers of millions of victims of socialism have increased by leaps and bounds in the last 50 years.

But where in fact do these stories, and these figures, come from? Who is behind all this?

And another question: what truth is there in these stories? And what information is lying in the archives of the Soviet Union, formerly secret but opened up to historical research by Gorbachev in 1989? The authors of the myths always said that all their tales of millions having died in Stalin’s Soviet Union would be confirmed the day the archives were opened up. Is that what happened? Were they confirmed in fact?

The following article shows us where these stories of millions of deaths through hunger and in labour camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union originated and who is behind them.

The present author, after studying the reports of the research which has been done in the archives of the Soviet Union, is able to provide information in the form of concrete data about the real number of prisoners, the years they spent in prison and the real number of those who died and of those who were condemned to death in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The truth is quite different from the myth.

There is a direct historical link running from: Hitler to Hearst, to Conquest, to Solzhenitsyn. In 1933 political changes took place in Germany that were to leave their mark on world history for decades to come. On 30 January Hitler became prime minister and a new form of government, involving violence and disregard of the law, began to take shape. In order to consolidate their grip on power the Nazis called fresh elections for the 5th of March, using all propaganda means within their grasp to secure victory. A week before the elections, on 27 February, the Nazis set fire to parliament and accused the communists of being responsible. In the elections that followed, the Nazis secured 17.3 million votes and 288 deputies, about 48% of the electorate (in November they had secured 11.7 million votes and 196 deputies). Once the Communist Party was banned, the Nazis began to persecute the Social Democrats and the trade-union movement, and the first concentration camps began to fill up with all those left-wing men and women. In the meantime, Hitler’s power in parliament continued to grow, with the help of the right wing. On 24 March, Hitler caused a law to be passed by parliament which conferred on him absolute power to rule the country for 4 years without consulting parliament. From then on began the open persecution of the Jews, the first of whom began to enter the concentration camps where communists and left social-democrats were already being held. Hitler pressed ahead with his bid for absolute power, renouncing the 1918 international accords that had imposed restrictions on the arming and militarisation of Germany. Germany’s re-armament took place at great speed. This was the situation in the international political arena when the myths concerning those dying in the Soviet Union began to be put together.

The Ukraine as a German territory

At Hitler’s side in the German leadership was Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, the man in charge of inculcating the Nazi dream into the German people. This was a dream of a racially pure people living in a Greater Germany, a country with broad lebensraum, a wide space in which to live. One part of this lebensraum, an area to the east of Germany which was, indeed, far larger than Germany itself, had yet to be conquered and incorporated into the German nation. In 1925, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had already pointed to the Ukraine as an essential part of this German living space. The Ukraine and other regions of Eastern Europe needed to belong to the German nation so that they could be utilised in a `proper’ manner. According to Nazi propaganda, the Nazi sword would liberate this territory in order to make space for the German race. With German technology and German enterprise, the Ukraine would be transformed into an area producing cereals for Germany. But first the Germans had to liberate the Ukraine of its population of `inferior beings’ who, according to Nazi propaganda, would be put to work as a slave labour force in German homes, factories and fields – anywhere they were needed by the German economy.

The conquest of the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union would necessitate war against the Soviet Union, and this war had to be prepared well in advance. To this end the Nazi propaganda ministry, headed by Goebbels, began a campaign around a supposed genocide committed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, a dreadful period of catastrophic famine it claimed was deliberately provoked by Stalin in order to force the peasantry to accept socialist policy. The purpose of the Nazi campaign was to prepare world public opinion for the `liberation’ of the Ukraine by German troops. Despite huge efforts and in spite of the fact that some of the German propaganda texts were published in the English press, the Nazi campaign around the supposed `genocide’ in the Ukraine was not very successful at the world level. It was clear that Hitler and Goebbels needed help in spreading their libellous rumours about the Soviet Union. That help they found in the USA.

William Hearst – Friend of Hitler

William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the `father’ of the so-called `yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to `arrange’ matters. It is this which in fact characterises the `yellow press’: lies and `arranged’ atrocities served up as truth.

These lies of Hearst’s made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US’s first TV stations, BWAL – TV in Baltimore. Hearst’s newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years – on issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.

After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with `revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union – murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!

The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine

One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 18 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American `6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union’. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathiser, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine. The truth of the matter was altogether different. In fact what took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a major class struggle in which poor landless peasants had risen up against the rich landowners, the kulaks, and had begun a struggle for collectivisation, a struggle to form kolkhozes.

This great class struggle, involving directly or indirectly some 120 million peasants, certainly gave rise to instability in agricultural production and food shortages in some regions. Lack of food did weaken people, which in turn led to an increase in the number falling victim to epidemic diseases. These diseases were at that time regrettably common throughout the world. Between 1918 and 1920 an epidemic of Spanish flu caused the death of 20 million people in the US and Europe, but nobody accused the governments of these countries of killing their own citizens. The fact is that there was nothing these government could do in the face of epidemics of this kind. It was only with the development of penicillin during the second world war, that it became possible for such epidemics to be effectively contained. This did not become generally available until towards the end of the 1940s.

The Hearst press articles, asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine – a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists, went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union. In the wave of protests against the supposedly communist-provoked famine which the Western press unleashed, nobody was interested in listening to the Soviet Union’s denials and complete exposure of the Hearst press lies, a situation which prevailed from 1934 until 1987! For more than 50 years several generations of people the world over were brought up on a diet of these slanders to harbour a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union.

The Hearst mass media empire in 1998

William Hearst died in 1951 at his house in Beverley Hills, California. Hearst left behind him a mass-media empire which to this day continues to spread his reactionary message throughout the world. The Hearst Corporation is one of the largest enterprises in the world, incorporating more than 100 companies and employing 15,000 people. The Hearst empire today comprises newspapers, magazines, books, radio, TV, cable TV, news agencies and multimedia.

52 years before the truth emerges

The Nazi disinformation campaign about the Ukraine did not die with the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The Nazi lies were taken over by the CIA and MI5, and were always guaranteed a prominent place in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union. The McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts after the Second World War also thrived on the tales of the millions who died of starvation in the Ukraine. In 1953 a book on this subject was published in the US. This book was entitled `Black Deeds of the Kremlin’. Its publication was financed by Ukrainian refugees in the US, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War and to whom the American government gave political asylum, presenting them to the world as `democrats’.

When Reagan was elected to the US Presidency and began his 1980s anti-communist crusade, propaganda about the millions who died in the Ukraine was again revived. In 1984 a Harvard professor published a book called ‘Human Life in Russia’ which repeated all the false information produced by the Hearst press in 1934. In 1984, then, we found Nazi lies and falsifications dating from the 1930s being revived, but this time under the `respectable’ cloak of an American university. But this was not the end of it. In 1986 yet another book appeared on the subject, entitled `Harvest of Sorrow’, written by a former member of the British secret service, Robert Conquest, now a professor at Stamford University in California. For his `work’ on the book, Conquest received $80,000 from the Ukraine National Organisation. This same organisation also paid for a film made in 1986 called `Harvest of Despair’, in which, inter alia, material from Conquest’s book was used. By this time the number of people it was being alleged in the US had lost their lives in the Ukraine through starvation had been upped to 15 million!

Nevertheless the millions said to have died of starvation in the Ukraine according to the Hearst press in America, parroted in books and films, was completely false information. The Canadian journalist, Douglas Tottle, meticulously exposed the falsifications in his book `Fraud, famine and fascism – the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard’, published in Toronto in 1987. Among other things, Tottle proved that the photographic material used, horrifying photographs of starving children, had been taken from 1922 publications at a time when millions of people did die from hunger and war conditions because eight foreign armies had invaded the Soviet Union during the Civil War of 1918-1921. Douglas Tottle gives the facts surrounding the reporting of the famine of 1934 and exposes the assorted lies published in the Hearst press. One journalist who had over a long period of time sent reports and photographs from supposed famine areas was Thomas Walter, a man who never set foot in the Ukraine and even in Moscow had spent but a bare five days. This fact was revealed by the journalist Louis Fisher, Moscow Correspondent of The Nation, an American newspaper. Fisher also revealed that the journalist M Parrott, the real Hearst press correspondent in Moscow, had sent Hearst reports that were never published concerning the excellent harvest achieved by the Soviet Union in 1933 and on the Ukraine’s advancement. Tottle proves as well that the journalist who wrote the reports on the alleged Ukrainian famine, `Thomas Walker’, was really called Robert Green and was a convict who had escaped from a state prison in Colorado! This Walker, or Green, was arrested when he returned to the US and when he appeared in court, he admitted that he had never been to the Ukraine. All the lies concerning the millions of dead due to starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s, in a famine supposedly engineered by Stalin only came to be unmasked in 1987! Hearst, the Nazi, the police agent Conquest and others had conned millions of people with their lies and fake reports. Even today the Nazi Hearst’s stories are still being repeated in newly-published books written by authors in the pay of right-wing interests.

The Hearst press, having a monopolist position in many States of the US, and having news agencies all over the world, was the great megaphone of the Gestapo. In a world dominated by monopoly capital, it was possible for the Hearst press to transform Gestapo lies into `truths’ emitted from dozens of newspapers, radio stations and, later on, TV channels, the world over. When the Gestapo disappeared, this dirty propaganda war against socialism in the Soviet Union carried on regardless, albeit with the CIA as its new patron. The anti-communist campaigns of the American press were not scaled down in the slightest. Business continued as usual, first at the bidding of the Gestapo and then at the bidding of the CIA.

Robert Conquest at the heart of the myths

This man, who is so widely quoted in the bourgeois press, this veritable oracle of the bourgeoisie, deserves some specific attention at this point. Robert Conquest is one of the two authors who has most written on the millions dying in the Soviet Union. He is in truth the creator of all the myths and lies concerning the Soviet Union that have been spread since the Second World War. Conquest is primarily known for his books The Great Terror (1969) and Harvest of Sorrow (1986). Conquest writes of millions dying of starvation in the Ukraine, in the gulag labour camps and during the Trials of 1936-38, using as his sources of information exiled Ukrainians living in the US and belonging to rightist parties, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War. Many of Conquest’s heroes were known to have been war criminals who led and participated in the genocide of the Ukraine’s Jewish population in 1942. One of these people was Mykola Lebed, convicted as a war criminal after the Second World War. Lebed had been security chief in Lvov during the Nazi occupation and presided over the terrible persecutions of the Jews which took place in 1942. In 1949 the CIA took Lebed off to the United States where he worked as a source of disinformation.

The style of Conquest’s books is one of violent and fanatical anti-communism. In his 1969 book, Conquest tells us that those who died of starvation in the Soviet Union between 1932-1933 amounted to between 5 million and 6 million people, half of them in the Ukraine. But in 1983, during Reagan’s anti-communist crusade, Conquest had extended the famine into 1937 and increased the number of victims to 14 million! Such assertions turned out to be well rewarded: in 1986 he was signed up by Reagan to write material for his presidential campaign aimed at preparing the American people for a Soviet invasion, The text in question was called `What to do when the Russians come – a survivalists’ handbook’! Strange words coming from a Professor of History!

The fact is that there is nothing strange in it at all, coming as it does from a man who has spent his entire life living off lies and fabrications about the Soviet Union and Stalin – first as a secret service agent and then as a writer and professor at Stamford University in California. Conquest’s past was exposed by the Guardian of 27 January 1978 in an article which identified him as a former agent in the disinformation department of the British Secret Service, i.e., the Information Research Department (IRD). The IRD was a section set up in 1947 (originally called the Communist Information Bureau) whose main task was to combat communist influence throughout the world by planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to influence public opinion. The activities of the IRD were very wide-ranging, as much in Britain as abroad. When the IRD had to be formally disbanded in 1977, as a result of the exposure of its involvement with the far right, it was discovered that in Britain alone more than 100 of the best-known journalists had an IRD contact who regularly supplied them with material for articles. This was routine in several major British newspapers, such as the Financial Times, The Times, Economist, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Express, The Guardian and others. The facts exposed by the Guardian therefore give us an indication as to how the secret services were able to manipulate the news reaching the public at large.

Robert Conquest worked for the IRD from when it was set up until 1956. Conquest’s `work’ there was to contribute to the so-called `black history’ of the Soviet Union – fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion. After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with secret service support. His book `The Great Terror’, a basic right-wing text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services. The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources. Conquest’s book was intended for presentation to `useful fools’, such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV, to ensure that the lies of Conquest and the extreme right continued to be spread throughout large swathes of the population. Conquest to this day remains, for right-wing historians, one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Another person who is always associated with books and articles on the supposed millions who lost their lives or liberty in the Soviet Union is the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn became famous throughout the capitalist world towards the end of 1960 with his book, The Gulag Archipelago. He himself had been sentenced in 1946 to 8 years in a labour camp for counter-revolutionary activity in the form of distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda. According to Solzhenitsyn, the fight against Nazi Germany in the Second World War could have been avoided if the Soviet government had reached a compromise with Hitler. Solzhenitsyn also accused the Soviet government and Stalin of being even worse than Hitler from the point of view, according to him, of the dreadful effects of the war on the people of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn did not hide his Nazi sympathies. He was condemned as a traitor.

Solzhenitsyn began in 1962 to publish books in the Soviet Union with the consent and help of Nikita Khrushchev. The first book he published was A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, concerning the life of a prisoner. Khrushchev used Solzhenitsyn’s texts to combat Stalin’s socialist heritage. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature with his book The Gulag Archipelago. His books then began to be published in large quantities in capitalist countries, their author having become one of the most valuable instruments of imperialism in combating the socialism of the Soviet Union. His texts on the labour camps were added to the propaganda on the millions who were supposed to have died in the Soviet Union and were presented by the capitalist mass media as though they were true. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn renounced his Soviet citizenship and emigrated to Switzerland and then the US. At that time he was considered by the capitalist press to be the greatest fighter for freedom and democracy. His Nazi sympathies were buried so as not to interfere with the propaganda war against socialism.

In the US, Solzhenitsyn was frequently invited to speak at important meetings. He was, for example, the main speaker at the AFL-CIO union congress in 1975, and on 15 July 1975 he was invited to give a lecture on the world situation to the US Senate! His lectures amount to violent and provocative agitation, arguing and propagandising for the most reactionary positions. Among other things he agitated for Vietnam to be attacked again after its victory over the US. And more: after 40 years of fascism in Portugal, when left-wing army officers took power in the people’s revolution of 1974, Solzhenitsyn began to propagandise in favour of US military intervention in Portugal which, according to him, would join the Warsaw Pact if the US did not intervene! In his lectures, Solzhenitsyn always bemoaned the liberation of Portugal’s African colonies.

But it is clear that the main thrust of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches was always the dirty war against socialism – from the alleged execution of several million people in the Soviet Union to the tens of thousands of Americans supposedly imprisoned and enslaved, according to Solzhenitsyn, in North Vietnam! This idea of Solzhenitsyn’s of Americans being used as slave labour in North Vietnam gave rise to the Rambo films on the Vietnam war. American journalists who dared write in favour of peace between the US and the Soviet Union were accused by Solzhenitsyn in his speeches of being potential traitors. Solzhenitsyn also propagandised in favour of increasing US military capacity against the Soviet Union, which he claimed was more powerful in `tanks and aeroplanes, by five to seven times, than the US’ as well as in atomic weapons which `in short’ he alleged were `two, three or even five times’ more powerful in the Soviet Union than those held by the US. Solzhenitsyn’s lectures on the Soviet Union represented the voice of the extreme right. But he himself went even further to the right in his public support of fascism.

Support for Franco’s fascism

After Franco died in 1975, the Spanish fascist regime began to lose control of the political situation and at the beginning of 1976, events in Spain captured world public opinion. There were strikes and demonstrations to demand democracy and freedom, and Franco’s heir, King Juan Carlos, was obliged very cautiously to introduce some liberalisation in order to calm down the social agitation.

At this most important moment in Spanish political history, Alexander Solzhenitsyn appeared in Madrid and gave an interview to the programme Directísimo one Saturday night, the 20th of March, at peak viewing time (see the Spanish newspapers, ABC and Ya of 21 March 1976). Solzhenitsyn, who had been provided with the questions in advance, used the occasion to make all kinds of reactionary statements. His intention was not to support the King’s so-called liberalisation measures. On the contrary, Solzhenitsyn warned against democratic reform. In his television interview he declared that 110 million Russians had died the victims of socialism, and he compared `the slavery to which Soviet people were subjected to the freedom enjoyed in Spain’. Solzhenitsyn also accused `progressive circles’ of `Utopians’ of considering Spain to be a dictatorship. By `progressive’, he meant anyone in the democratic opposition – were they liberals, social-democrats or communists. ‘Last autumn,’ said Solzhenitsyn, `world public opinion was worried about the fate of Spanish terrorists [i.e., Spanish anti-fascists sentenced to death by the Franco regime]. All the time progressive public opinion demands democratic political reform while supporting acts of terrorism’. `Those who seek rapid democratic reform, do they realise what will happen tomorrow or the day after? In Spain there may be democracy tomorrow, but after tomorrow will it be able to avoid falling from democracy into totalitarianism?’ To cautious inquiries by the journalists as to whether such statements could not be seen as support for regimes in countries where there was no liberty, Solzhenitsyn replied: `I only know one place where there is no liberty and that is Russia.’ Solzhenitsyn’s statements on Spanish television were a direct support to Spanish fascism, an ideology he supports to this day.

This is one of the reasons why Solzhenitsyn began to disappear from public view in his 18 years of exile in the US, and one of the reasons he began to get less than total support from capitalist governments. For the capitalists it was a gift from Heaven to be able to use a man like Solzhenitsyn in their dirty war against socialism, but everything has its limits. In the new capitalist Russia, what determines the support of the west for political groups is purely and simply the ability of doing good business with high profits under the wing of such groups. Fascism as an alternative political regime for Russia is not considered to be good for business. For this reason Solzhenitsyn’s political plans for Russia are a dead letter as far as Western support is concerned. What Solzhenitsyn wants for Russia’s political future is a return to the authoritarian regime of the Tsars, hand-in-hand with the traditional Russian Orthodox Church! Even the most arrogant imperialists are not interested in supporting political stupidity of this magnitude. To find anyone who supports Solzhenitsyn in the West one has to search among the dumbheads of the extreme right.

Nazis, the police and the fascists

So these are the most worthy purveyors of the bourgeois myths concerning the millions who are supposed to have died and been imprisoned in the Soviet Union: the Nazi William Hearst, the secret agent Robert Conquest and the fascist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Conquest played the leading role, since it was his information that was used by the capitalist mass media the world over, and was even the basis for setting up whole schools in certain universities. Conquest’s work is without a doubt a first-class piece of police disinformation. In the 1970s, Conquest received a great deal of help from Solzhenitsyn and a series of secondary characters like Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev. In addition there appeared here and there all over the world a number of people who dedicated themselves to speculating about the number of dead and incarcerated and were always paid in gold by the bourgeois press. But the truth was finally exposed and revealed the true face of these falsifiers of history. Gorbachev’s orders to open the party’s secret archives to historical investigation had consequences nobody could have foreseen.

The archives demonstrate the propaganda lies

The speculation about the millions who died in the Soviet Union is part of the dirty propaganda war against the Soviet Union and for this very reason the denials and explanations given by the Society were never taken seriously and never found any space in the capitalist press. They were, on the contrary, ignored, while the `specialists’ bought by capital were given as much space as they wanted in order to spread their fictions. And what fictions they were! What the millions of dead and imprisoned claimed by Conquest and other `critics’ had in common was that they were the result of false statistical approximations and evaluation methods lacking any scientific basis.

Fraudulent methods give rise to millions of dead

Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and others used statistics published by the Soviet Union, for instance, national population censuses, to which they added a supposed population increase without taking account of the situation in the country. In this way they reached their conclusions as to how many people there ought to have been in the country at the end of given years. The people who were missing were claimed to have died or been incarcerated because of socialism. The method is simple but also completely fraudulent. This type of `revelation’ of such important political events would never have been accepted if the `revelation’ in question concerned the western world. In such a case it is certain that professors and historians would have protested against such fabrications. But since it was the Soviet Union that was the object of the fabrications, they were acceptable. One of the reasons is certainly that professors and historians place their professional advancement well ahead of their professional integrity.

In numbers, what were the final conclusions of the `critics’? According to Robert Conquest (in an estimate he made in 1961) 6 million people died of starvation in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. This number Conquest increased to 14 million in 1986. As regards what he says about the gulag labour camps, there were detained there, according to Conquest, 5 million prisoners in 1937 before the purges of the party, the army and the state apparatus began. After the start of the purges then, according to Conquest, during 1937-38, there would have been an additional 7 million prisoners, making the total 12 million prisoners in the labour camps in 1939! And these 12 million of Conquest’s would only have been the political prisoners! In the labour camps there were also common criminals, who, according to Conquest, would have far outnumbered the political prisoners. This means, according to Conquest, that there would have been 25-30 million prisoners in the labour camps of the Soviet Union.

Again according to Conquest, a million political prisoners were executed between 1937 and 1939, and another 2 million died of hunger. The final tally resulting from the purges of 1937-39, then, according to Conquest, was 9 million, of whom 3 million would have died in prison. These figures were immediately subjected to `statistical adjustment’ by Conquest to enable him to reach the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had killed no fewer than 12 million political prisoners between 1930 and 1953. Adding these figures to the numbers said to have died in the famine of the 1930s, Conquest arrived at the conclusion that the Bolsheviks killed 26 million people. In one of his last statistical manipulations, Conquest claimed that in 1950 there had been 12 million political prisoners in the Soviet Union.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn used more or less the same statistical methods as Conquest. But by using these pseudo-scientific methods on the basis of different premises, he arrived at even more extreme conclusions. Solzhenitsyn accepted Conquest’s estimate of 6 million deaths arising from the famine of 1932-33. Nevertheless, as far as the purges of 1936-39 were concerned, he believed that at least 1 million people died each year. Solzhenitsyn sums up by telling us that from the collectivisation of agriculture to the death of Stalin in 1953, the communists killed 66 million people in the Soviet Union. On top of that he holds the Soviet government responsible for the death of the 44 million Russians he claims were killed in the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn’s conclusion is that `110 million Russians fell, victims of socialism’. As far as prisoners were concerned, Solzhenitsyn tells us that the number of people in labour camps in 1953 was 25 million.

Gorbachev opens the archives

The collection of fantasy figures set out above, the product of extremely well paid fabrication, appeared in the bourgeois press in the 1960s, always presented as true facts ascertained through the application of scientific method.

Behind these fabrications lurked the western secret services, mainly the CIA and MI5. The impact of the mass media on public opinion is so great that the figures are even today believed to be true by large sections of the population of Western countries.

This shameful situation has worsened. In the Soviet Union itself, where Solzhenitsyn and other well-known `critics’ such as Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev could find nobody to support their many fantasies, a significant change took place in 1990. In the new `free press’ opened up under Gorbachev, everything opposed to socialism was hailed as positive, with disastrous results. Unprecedented speculative inflation began to take place in the numbers of those who were alleged to have died or been imprisoned under socialism, now all mixed up into a single group of tens of millions of `victims’ of the communists.

The hysteria of Gorbachev’s new free press brought to the fore the lies of Conquest and Solzhenitsyn. At the same time Gorbachev opened up the archives of the Central Committee to historical research, a demand of the free press. The opening up of the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party is really the central issue in this tangled tale, this for two reasons: partly because in the archives can be found the facts that can shed light on the truth. But even more important is the fact that those speculating wildly on the number of people killed and imprisoned in the Soviet Union had all been claiming for years that the day the archives were opened up the figures they were citing would be confirmed. Every one of these speculators on the dead and incarcerated claimed that this would be the case: Conquest, Sakharov, Medvedev, and all the rest. But when the archives were opened up and research reports based on the actual documents began to be published a very strange thing happened. Suddenly both Gorbachev’s free press and the speculators on the dead and incarcerated completely lost interest in the archives.

The results of the research carried out on the archives of the Central Committee by Russian historians Zemskov, Dougin and Xlevnjuk, which began to appear in scientific journals as from 1990, went entirely unremarked. The reports containing the results of this historical research went completely against the inflationary current as regards the numbers who were being claimed by the `free press’ to have died or been incarcerated. Therefore their contents remained unpublicised. The reports were published in low-circulation scientific journals practically unknown to the public at large. Reports of the results of scientific research could hardly compete with the press hysteria, so the lies of Conquest and Solzhenitsyn continued to gain the support of many sectors of the former Soviet Union’s population. In the West also, the reports of the Russian researchers on the penal system under Stalin were totally ignored on the front pages of newspapers, and by TV news broadcasts. Why?

What the Russian research shows

The research on the Soviet penal system is set out in a report nearly 9,000 pages long. The authors of this report are many, but the best-known of them are the Russian historians V N Zemskov, A N Dougin and O V Xlevjnik. Their work began to be published in 1990 and by 1993 had nearly been finished and published almost in its entirety. The reports came to the knowledge of the West as a result of collaboration between researchers of different Western countries. The two works with which the present author is familiar are: the one which appeared in the French journal l’Histoire in September 1993, written by Nicholas Werth, the chief researcher of the French scientific research centre, CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), and the work published in the US journal American Historical Review by J Arch Getty, a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, in collaboration with G T Rettersporn, a CRNS researcher, and the Russian researcher, V AN Zemskov, from the Institute of Russian History (part of the Russian Academy of Science). Today books have appeared on the matter written by the above-named researchers or by others from the same research team. Before going any further, I want to make clear, so that no confusion arises in the future, that none of the scientists involved in this research has a socialist world outlook. On the contrary their outlook is bourgeois and anti-socialist. Indeed many of them are quite reactionary. This is said so that the reader should not imagine that what is to be set out below is the product of some `communist conspiracy’. What has happened is that the above-named researchers have thoroughly exposed the lies of Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and others, which they have done purely by reason of the fact that they place their professional integrity in first place and will not allow themselves to be bought for propaganda purposes.

The results of the Russian research answer a very large number of questions about the Soviet penal system. For us it is the Stalin era that is of greatest interest, and it is there we find cause for debate. We will pose a number of very specific questions and we will seek out our replies in the journals l’Histoire and the American Historical Review. This will be the best way of bringing into the debate some of the most important aspects of the Soviet penal system. The questions are the following:

1.What did the Soviet penal system consist of?

2.How many prisoners were there – both political and non-political?

3.How many people died in the labour camps?

4.How many people were condemned to death in the years before 1953, especially in the purges of 1937-38?

5.How long, on average, were the prison sentences?

After answering these five questions, we will discuss the punishments imposed on the two groups which are most frequently mentioned in connection with prisoners and deaths in the Soviet Union, namely the kulaks convicted in 1930 and the counter-revolutionaries convicted in 1936-38.

1. Labour camps in the penal system

Let us start with the question of the nature of the Soviet penal system.

After 1930 the Soviet penal system included prisons, labour camps, the labour colonies of the gulag, special open zones and obligation to pay fines. Whoever was remanded into custody was generally sent to a normal prison while investigations took place to establish whether he might be innocent, and could thus be set free, or whether he should go on trial. An accused person on trial could either be found innocent (and set free) or guilty. If found guilty he could be sentenced to pay a fine, to a term of imprisonment or, more unusually, to face execution. A fine could be a given percentage of his wages for a given period of time. Those sentenced to prison terms could be put in different kinds of prison depending on the type of offence involved.

To the gulag labour camps were sent those who had committed serious offences (homicide, robbery, rape, economic crimes, etc.) as well as a large proportion of those convicted of counter-revolutionary activities. Other criminals sentenced to terms longer than 3 years could also be sent to labour camps. After spending some time in a labour camp, a prisoner might be moved to a labour colony or to a special open zone.

The labour camps were very large areas where the prisoners lived and worked under close supervision. For them to work and not to be a burden on society was obviously necessary. No healthy person got by without working. It is possible that these days people may think this was a terrible thing, but this is the way it was. The number of labour camps in existence in 1940 was 53.

There were 425 gulag labour colonies. These were much smaller units than the labour camps, with a freer regime and less supervision. To these were sent prisoners with shorter prison terms – people who had committed less serious criminal or political offences. They worked in freedom in factories or on the land and formed part of civil society. In most cases the whole of the wages earned from his labour belonged to the prisoner, who in this respect was treated the same as any other worker.

The special open zones were generally agricultural areas for those who had been exiled, such as the kulaks who had been expropriated during collectivisation. Other people found guilty of minor criminal or political offences might also serve their terms in these areas.

454,000 is not 9 million

2. The second question concerned how many political prisoners there were, and how many common criminals.

This question includes those imprisoned in labour camps, gulag colonies and the prisons (though it should be remembered that in the labour colonies there was, in the majority of cases, only partial loss of liberty). The Table in the Appendix shows the data which appeared in the American Historical Review, data which encompasses a period of 20 years beginning in 1934, when the penal system was unified under a central administration, until 1953, the year Stalin died.

From the Table, there are a series of conclusions which need to be drawn. To start with we can compare its data to those given by Robert Conquest. The latter claims that in 1939 there were 9 million political prisoners in the labour camps and that 3 million others had died in the period 1937-1939. Let the reader not forget that Conquest is here talking only about political prisoners! Apart from these, says Conquest, there were also common criminals who, according to him, were much greater in number than the political prisoners! In 1950 there were, according to Conquest, 12 million political prisoners! Armed with the true facts, we can readily see what a fraudster Conquest really is. Not one of his figures corresponds even remotely to the truth. In 1939 there was a total in all the camps, colonies and prisons of close to 2 million prisoners. Of these 454,000 had committed political crimes, not 9 million as Conquest asserts. Those who died in labour camps between 1937 and 1939 numbered about 160,000, not 3 million as Conquest asserts. In 1950 there were 578,000 political prisoners in labour camps, not 12 million. Let the reader not forget that Robert Conquest to this day remains one of the major sources for right-wing propaganda against communism. Among right-wing pseudo-intellectuals, Robert Conquest is a godlike figure. As for the figures cited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn – 60 million alleged to have died in labour camps – there is no need for comment. The absurdity of such an allegation is manifest. Only a sick mind could promote such delusions.

Let us now leave these fraudsters in order that we may ourselves concretely analyse the statistics relating to the gulag. The first question to be asked is what view we should take about the sheer quantity of people caught up in the penal system? What is the meaning of the figure of 2.5 million? Every person that is put in prison is living proof that society was still insufficiently developed to give every citizen everything he needed for a full life. From this point of view, the 2.5 million do represent a criticism of the society.

The internal and external threat

The number of people caught up in the penal system requires to be properly explained. The Soviet Union was a country which had only recently overthrown feudalism, and its social heritage in matters of human rights was often a burden on society. In an antiquated system like tsardom, workers were condemned to live in deep poverty, and human life had little value. Robbery and violent crime was punished by unrestrained violence. Revolts against the monarchy usually ended in massacres, death sentences and extremely long prison sentences. These social relations, and the habits of mind associated with them, take a long time to change, a fact which influenced the development of society in the Soviet Union as well as attitudes towards criminals.

Another factor to be taken into account is that the Soviet Union, a country which in the 1930s had close to 160-170 million inhabitants, was seriously threatened by foreign powers. As a result of the great political changes which took place in Europe in the 1930s, there was a major threat of war from the direction of Nazi German, a threat to the survival of the Slav people, and the western bloc also harbouring interventionist ambitions. This situation was summed up by Stalin in 1931 in the following words:“We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We have to close that gap in 10 years. Either we do it or we will be wiped out.” Ten years later, on 22 June 1941, the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany and its allies. Soviet society was forced to make great efforts in the decade from 1930-1940, when the major part of its resources was dedicated to its defence preparations for the forthcoming war against the Nazis. Because of this, people worked hard while producing little by way of personal benefits. The introduction of the 7-hour day was withdrawn in 1937, and in 1939 practically every Sunday was a work day. In a difficult period such as this, with a great war hanging over the development of society for two decades (the 1930s and 1940s), a war which was to cost the Soviet Union 25 million deaths with half the country burnt to a cinder, crime did tend to increase as people tried to help themselves to what life could not otherwise offer them.

During this very difficult time, the Soviet Union held a maximum number of 2.5 million people in its prison system, i.e., 2.4% of the adult population. How can we evaluate this figure? Is it a lot or a little? Let us compare.

More prisoners in the US

In the United States of America, for example, a country of 252 million inhabitants (in 1996), the richest country in the world, which consumes 60% of the world resources, how many people are in prison? What is the situation in the US, a country not threatened by any war and where there are no deep social changes affecting economic stability?

In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,0000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8%, and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.

As far as the Soviet labour camps were concerned, it is true that the regime was harsh and difficult for the prisoners, but what is the situation today in the prisons of the US, which are rife with violence, drugs, prostitution, sexual slavery (290,000 rapes a year in US prisons). Nobody feels safe in US prisons! And this today, and in a society richer than ever before!

An important factor – the lack of medicines

3. Let us now respond to the third question posed. How many people died in the labour camps?

The number varied from year to year, from 5.2% in 1934 to 0.3% in 1953. Deaths in the labour camps were caused by the general shortage of resources in society as a whole, in particular the medicines necessary to fight epidemics. This problem was not confined to labour camps but was present throughout society, as well as in the great majority of countries of the world. Once antibiotics had been discovered and put into general use after the Second World War, the situation changed radically. In fact, the worst years were the war years when the Nazi barbarians imposed very harsh living conditions on all Soviet citizens. During those 4 years, more than half a million people died in the labour camps – half the total number dying throughout the 20-year period in question. Let us not forget that in the same period, the war years, 25 million people died among those who were free. In 1950, when conditions in the Soviet Union had improved and antibiotics had been introduced, the number of people dying while in prison fell to 0.3%.

4. Let us turn now to the fourth question posed. How many people were sentenced to death prior to 1953, especially during the purges of 1937-38?

We have already noted Robert Conquest’s claim that the Bolsheviks killed 12 million political prisoners in the labour camps between 1930 and 1953. Of these 1 million are supposed to have been killed between 1937 and 1938. Solzhenitsyn’s figures run to tens of millions who are supposed to have died in the labour camps – 3 million in 1937-38 alone. Even higher figures have been quoted in the course of the dirty propaganda war against the Soviet Union. The Russian, Olga Shatunovskaya, for example, cites a figure of 7 million dead in the purges of 1937-38.

The documents now emerging from the Soviet archives, however, tell a different story. It is necessary to mention here at the start that the number of those sentenced to death has to be gleaned from different archives and that the researchers, in order to arrive at an approximate figure, have had to gather data from these various archives in a way which gives rise to a risk of double counting and thus of producing estimates higher than the reality. According to Dimitri Volkogonov, the person appointed by Yeltsin to take charge of the old Soviet archives, there were 30,514 persons condemned to death by military tribunals between 1 October 1936 and 30 September 1938. Another piece of information comes from the KGB: according to information released to the press in February 1990, there were 786,098 people condemned to death for crimes against the revolution during the 23 years from 1930-1953. Of those condemned, according to the KGB, 681,692 were condemned between 1937 and 1938. It is not possible to double check the KGB’s figures but this last piece of information is open to doubt. It would be very odd for so many people to have been sentenced to death in only two years. Is it possible that the present-day pro-capitalist KGB would give us correct information from the pro-socialist KGB? Be that as it may, it remains to be verified whether the statistics which underlie the KGB information include among those said to have been condemned to death during the 23 years in question common criminals as well as counter-revolutionaries, rather than counter-revolutionaries alone as the pro-capitalist KGB has alleged in a press release of February 1990. The archives also tend to the conclusion that the number of common criminals and the number of counter revolutionaries condemned to death was approximately equal.

The conclusion we can draw from this is that the number of those condemned to death in 1937-38 was close to 100,000, and not several million as has been claimed by Western propaganda.

It is also necessary to bear in mind that not all those sentenced to death in the Soviet Union were actually executed. A large proportion of death penalties were commuted to terms in labour camps. It is also important to distinguish between common criminals and counter revolutionaries. Many of those sentenced to death had committed violent crimes such as murder or rape. 60 years ago this type of crime was punishable by death in a large number of countries.

Question 5: How long was the average prison sentence?

The length of prison sentences has been the subject of the most scurrilous rumour-mongering in Western propaganda. The usual insinuation is that to be a convict in the Soviet Union involved endless years in prison – whoever went in never came out. This is completely untrue. The vast majority of those who went to prison in Stalin’s time were in fact convicted for a term of 5 years at most.

The statistics reproduced in the American Historical Review show the actual facts. Common criminals in the Russian Federation in 1936 received the following sentences: up to 5 years: 82.4%; between 5-10 years: 17.6%. 10 years was the maximum possible prison term before 1937. Political prisoners convicted in the Soviet Union’s civilian courts in 1936 received sentences as follows: up to 5 years: 44.2%; between 5-10 years 50.7%. As for those sentenced to terms in the gulag labour camps, where the longer sentences were served, the 1940 statistics show that those serving up to 5 years were 56.8% and those between 5-10 years 42.2%. Only 1% were sentenced to over 10 years.

For 1939 we have the statistics produced by Soviet courts. The distribution of prison terms is as follows: up to 5 years: 95.9%; from 5-10 years: 4%; over 10 years: 0.1%.

As we can see, the supposed eternity of prison sentences in the Soviet Union is another myth spread in the West to combat socialism.

The lies about the Soviet Union: A brief discussion as to the research reports.

The research conducted by the Russian historians shows a reality totally different to that taught in the schools and universities of the capitalist world over the last 50 years. During these 50 years of the cold war, several generations have learnt only lies about the Soviet Union, which have left a deep impression on many people. This fact is also substantiated in the reports made of the French and American research. In these reports are reproduced data, figures and tables enumerating those convicted and those who died, these figures being the subject of intense discussion. But the most important thing to note is that the crimes committed by the people who had been convicted is never a matter of any interest. Capitalist political propaganda has always presented Soviet prisoners as innocent victims and the researchers have taken up this assumption without questioning it. When the researchers go over from their columns of statistics to their commentaries on the events, their bourgeois ideology comes to fore – with sometimes macabre results. Those who were convicted under the Soviet penal system are treated as innocent victims, but the fact of the matter is that most of them were thieves, murderers, rapists, etc. Criminals of this kind would never be considered to be innocent victims by the press if their crimes were committed in Europe or the US. But since the crimes were committed in the Soviet Union, it is different. To call a murderer, or a person who has raped more than once, an innocent victim is a very dirty game. Some common sense at least needs to be shown when commenting on Soviet justice, at least in relation to criminals convicted of violent crimes, even if it cannot be managed in relation to the nature of the punishment, then at least as regards the propriety of convicting people who have committed crimes of this kind.

The kulaks and the counter-revolution

In the case of the counter-revolutionaries, it is also necessary to consider the crimes of which they were accused. Let us give two examples to show the importance of this question: the first is the kulaks sentenced at the beginning of the 1930s, and the second is the conspirators and counter-revolutionaries convicted in 1936-38.

According to the research reports insofar as they deal with the kulaks, the rich peasants, there were 381,000 families, i.e., about 1.8 million people sent into exile. A small number of these people were sentenced to serve terms in labour camps or colonies. But what gave rise to these punishments?

The rich Russian peasant, the kulak, had subjected poor peasants for hundreds of years to boundless oppression and unbridled exploitation. Of the 120 million peasants in 1927, the 10 million kulaks lived in luxury while the remaining 110 million lived in poverty. Before the revolution they had lived in the most abject poverty. The wealth of the kulaks was based on the badly-paid labour of the poor peasants. When the poor peasants began to join together in collective farms, the main source of kulak wealth disappeared. But the kulaks did not give up. They tried to restore exploitation by use of famine. Groups of armed kulaks attacked collective farms, killed poor peasants and party workers, set fire to the fields and killed working animals. By provoking starvation among poor peasants, the kulaks were trying to secure the perpetuation of poverty and their own positions of power. The events which ensued were not those expected by these murderers. This time the poor peasants had the support of the revolution and proved to be stronger than the kulaks, who were defeated, imprisoned and sent into exile or sentenced to terms in labour camps.

Of the 10 million kulaks, 1.8 million were exiled or convicted. There may have been injustices perpetrated in the course of this massive class struggle in the Soviet countryside, a struggle involving 120 million people. But can we blame the poor and the oppressed, in their struggle for a life worth living, in their struggle to ensure their children would not be starving illiterates, for not being sufficiently `civilised’ or showing enough `mercy’ in their courts? Can one point the finger at people who for hundreds of years had no access to the advances made by civilisation for not being civilised? And tell us, when was the kulak exploiter civilised or merciful in his dealings with poor peasants during the years and years of endless exploitation.

The purges of 1937

Our second example, that of the counter-revolutionaries convicted in the 1936-38 Trials which followed the purges of party, army and state apparatus, has its roots in the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Millions of people participated in the victorious struggle against the Tsar and the Russian bourgeoisie, and many of these joined the Russian Communist Party. Among all these people there were, unfortunately, some who entered the party for reasons other than fighting for the proletariat and for socialism. But the class struggle was such that often there was neither the time nor the opportunity to put new party militants to the test. Even militants from other parties who called themselves socialists and who had fought the Bolshevik party were admitted to the Communist Party. A number of these new activists were given important positions in the Bolshevik Party, the state and the armed forces, depending on their individual ability to conduct class struggle. These were very difficult times for the young Soviet state, and the great shortage of cadres – or even of people who could read – forced the party to make few demands as regards the quality of new activists and cadres. Because of these problems, there arose in time a contradiction which split the party into two camps – on the one hand those who wanted to press forward in the struggle to build a socialist society, and on the other hand those who thought that the conditions were not yet ripe for building socialism and who promoted social-democracy. The origin of these ideas lay in Trotsky, who had joined the party in July 1917. Trotsky was able over time to secure the support of some of the best known Bolsheviks. This opposition, united against the original Bolshevik plan, provided one of the policy options which were the subject of a vote on 27 December 1927. Before this vote was taken, there had been a great party debate going on over many years and the result left nobody in any doubt. Of the 725,000 votes cast, the opposition secured 6,000 – i.e., less than 1% of party activists supported the united opposition.

As a consequence of the vote, and once the opposition started working for a policy opposed to that of the party, the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided to expel from the party the principal leaders of the united opposition. The central opposition figure, Trotsky, was expelled from the Soviet Union. But the story of this opposition did not end there. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Zvdokine afterwards made self-criticisms, as did several leading Trotskyists, such as Pyatakov, Radek, Preobrazhinsky and Smirnov. All of them were once again accepted into the party as activists and took up once more their party and state posts. In time it became clear that the self-criticisms made by the opposition had not been genuine, since the oppositionist leaders were united on the side of the counter revolution every time that class struggle sharpened in the Soviet Union. The majority of the oppositionists were expelled and re-admitted another couple of times before the situation clarified itself completely in 1937-38.

Industrial sabotage

The murder in December 1934 of Kirov, the chairman of the Leningrad party and one of the most important people in the Central Committee, sparked off the investigation that was to lead to the discovery of a secret organisation engaged in preparing a conspiracy to take over the leadership of the party and the government of the country by means of violence. The opposition, having lost the political struggle in 1927, now hoped to win by means of organised violence against the state. Their main weapons were industrial sabotage, terrorism and corruption. Trotsky, the main inspiration for the opposition, directed their activities from abroad. Industrial sabotage caused terrible losses to the Soviet state, at enormous cost, for example, important machines were damaged beyond possibility of repair, and there was an enormous fall in production in mines and factories.

One of the people who in 1934 described the problem was the American engineer John Littlepage, one of the foreign specialists contracted to work in the Soviet Union. Littlepage spent 10 years working in the Soviet mining industry – from 1927-37, mainly in the gold mines. In his book, In search of Soviet gold, he writes: “I never took any interest in the subtleties of political manoeuvring in Russia so long as I could avoid them; but I had to study what was happening in Soviet industry in order to do my work. And I am firmly convinced that Stalin and his collaborators took a long time to discover that discontented revolutionary communists were his worst enemies.”

Littlepage also wrote that his personal experience confirmed the official statement to the effect that a great conspiracy directed from abroad was using major industrial sabotage as part of its plans to force the government to fall. In 1931 Littlepage had already felt obliged to take note of this, while working in the copper and bronze mines of the Urals and Kazakhstan. The mines were part of a large copper/bronze complex under the overall direction of Pyatakov, the people’s Vice Commissar for heavy industry. The mines were in a catastrophic state as far as production and the well-being of their workers was concerned. Littlepage reached the conclusion that there was organised sabotage going on which came from the top management of the copper/bronze complex.

Littlepage’s book also tells us from where the Trotskyite opposition obtained the money that was necessary to pay for this counter-revolutionary activity. Many members of the secret opposition used their positions to approve the purchase of machines from certain factories abroad. The products approved were of much lower quality than those the Soviet government actually paid for. The foreign producers gave Trotsky’s organisation the surplus from such transactions, as a result of which Trotsky and his co-conspirators in the Soviet Union continued to order from these manufacturers.

Theft and corruption

This procedure was observed by Littlepage in Berlin in the spring of 1931 when buying industrial lifts for mines. The Soviet delegation was headed by Pyatakov, with Littlepage as the specialist in charge of verifying the quality of the lifts and of approving the purchase. Littlepage discovered a fraud involving low quality lifts, useless for Soviet purposes, but when he informed Pyatakov and the other members of the Soviet delegation of this fact, he met with a cold reception, as if they wanted to overlook these facts and insist he should approve the purchase of the lifts. Littlepage would not do so. At the time he thought that what was happening involved personal corruption and that the members of the delegation had been bribed by the lift manufacturers. But after Pyatakov, in the 1937 Trial, confessed his links with the Trotskyist opposition, Littlepage was driven to the conclusion that what he had witnessed in Berlin was much more than corruption at a personal level. The money involved was intended to pay for the activities of the secret opposition in the Soviet Union, activities which included sabotage, terrorism, bribery and propaganda.

Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, Radek, Tomsky, Bukharin and others much loved by the Western bourgeois press used the positions entrusted to them by the Soviet people and party to steal money from the state, in order to enable enemies of socialism to use that money for the purposes of sabotage and in their fight against socialist society in the Soviet Union.

Plans for a coup

Theft, sabotage and corruption are serious crimes in themselves, but the opposition’s activities went much further. A counter-revolutionary conspiracy was being prepared with the aim of taking over state power by means of a coup in which the whole Soviet leadership would be eliminated, starting with the assassination of the most important members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The military side of the coup would be carried out by a group of generals headed by Marshal Tukhachevsky.

According to Isaac Deutscher, himself a Trotskyite, who wrote several books against Stalin and the Soviet Union, the coup was to have been initiated by a military operation against the Kremlin and the most important troops in the big cities, such as Moscow and Leningrad. The conspiracy was, according to Deutscher, headed by Tukhachevsky together with Gamarnik, the head of the army political commissariat, General Yakir, the Commander of Leningrad, General Uborevich, the commander of the Moscow military academy, and General Primakov, a cavalry commander.

Marshal Tukhachevsky had been an officer in the former Tsarist army who, after the revolution, went over to the Red Army. In 1930 nearly 10% of officers (close to 4,500) were former Tsarist officers. Many of them never abandoned their bourgeois outlook and were just waiting for an opportunity to fight for it. This opportunity arose when the opposition was preparing its coup.

The Bolsheviks were strong, but the civilian and military conspirators endeavoured to muster strong friends. According to Bukharin’s confession in his public trial in 1938, an agreement was reached between the Trotskyite opposition and Nazi Germany, in which large territories, including the Ukraine, would be ceded to Nazi Germany following the counter-revolutionary coup in the Soviet Union. This was the price demanded by Nazi Germany for its promise of support for the counter-revolutionaries. Bukharin had been informed about this agreement by Radek, who had received an order from Trotsky about the matter. All these conspirators who had been chosen for high positions to lead, administer and defend socialist society were in reality working to destroy socialism. Above all it is necessary to remember that all this was happening in the 1930s, when the Nazi danger was growing all the time and the Nazi armies were setting Europe alight and preparing to invade the Soviet Union.

The conspirators were sentenced to death as traitors after a public trial. Those found guilty of sabotage, terrorism, corruption, attempted murder and who had wanted to hand over part of the country to the Nazis, could expect nothing else. To call them innocent victims is completely mistaken.

More numerous liars

It is interesting to see how Western propaganda, via Robert Conquest, has lied about the purges of the Red Army. Conquest says in his book The Great Terror that in 1937 there were 70,000 officers and political commissars in the Red Army and that 50% of them (i.e., 15,000 officers and 20,000 commissars) were arrested by the political police and were either executed or imprisoned for life in labour camps. In this allegation of Conquest’s, as in his whole book, there is not one word of truth. The historian Roger Reese, in his work The Red Army and the Great Purges, gives the facts which show the real significance of the 1937-38 purges for the army. The number of people in the leadership of the Red Army and air force, i.e., officers and political commissars, was 144,300 in 1937, increasing to 282,300 by 1939. During the 1937-38 purges, 34,300 officers and political commissars were expelled for political reasons. By May 1940, however, 11,596 had already been rehabilitated and restored to their posts. This meant that during the 1937-38 purges, 22,705 officers and political commissars were dismissed (close to 13,000 army officers, 4,700 air force officers and 5,000 political commissars), which amounts to 7.7% of all officers and commissars – not 50% as Conquest alleges. Of this 7.7%, some were convicted as traitors, but the great majority of them, it would appear from historical material available, simply returned to civilian life.

One last question. Were the 1937-38 Trials fair to the accused? Let us examine, for example, the trial of Bukharin, the highest party functionary to work for the secret opposition. According to the American ambassador in Moscow at the time, a well-known lawyer called Joseph Davies, who attended the whole trial, Bukharin was permitted to speak freely throughout the trial and put forward his case without impediment of any kind. Joseph Davies wrote to Washington that during the Trial it was proved that the accused were guilty of the crimes of which they were charged and that the general opinion among diplomats attending the trial was that the existence of a very serious conspiracy had been proved.

Let us learn from history

The discussion of the Soviet penal system during Stalin’s time, on which thousands of lying articles and books have been written, and hundreds of films have been made conveying false impressions, leads to important lessons. The facts prove yet again that the stories published about socialism in the bourgeois press are mostly false. The right wing can, through the press, radio and TV that it dominates, cause confusion, distort the truth and cause very many people to believe lies to be the truth. This is especially true when it comes to historical questions. Any new stories from the right should be assumed to be false unless the contrary can be proved. This cautious approach is justified. The fact is that even knowing about the Russian research reports, the right is continuing to reproduce the lies taught for the last 50 years, even though they have now been completely exposed. The right continues its historical heritage: a lie repeated over and over again ends up being accepted as true. After the Russian research reports were published in the west, a number of books began to appear in different countries aimed solely at calling into question the Russian research and enabling the old lies to be brought to public attention as new truths. These are well-presented books, stuffed from cover to cover with lies about communism and socialism.

The right-wing lies are repeated in order to fight today’s communists. They are repeated so that workers will find no alternative to capitalism and neo-liberalism. They are part of the dirty war against communists who alone have an alternative to offer for the future, i.e., socialist society. This is the reason for the appearance of all these new books containing old lies.

All this places an obligation on everybody with a socialist world outlook on history. We must take on the responsibility of working to turn communist newspapers into authentic newspapers of the working class to combat bourgeois lies! This is without doubt an important mission in today’s class struggle, which in the near future will arise again with renewed force.

APPENDIX:

From The American Historical Review

Year Prisoners in gulag labour camps Of whom the number of counter-revolutionaries Number dying each year Number released each year Number escaped each year Prisoners held in gulag labour colonies Prisoners held in prisons Total number on January 1st each year
Number % Number %
1934 510,307 135,190 26.5 26,295 5.2 147,272 83,490 510,307
1935 725,438 118,256 16.3 28,328 3.9 211.035 67,493 240,259 965,697
1936 839,406 105,849 12.6 20,595 2.5 369,544 58,313 457,088 1,298,494
1937 820,881 104,826 12.8 25,378 3.1 364,437 58,264 375,488 1,196,369
1938 996,367 185,324 18.6 90,546 9.1 279.966 32,033 885,203 1,881,570
1939 1,317,195 454,432 34.5 50,502 3.8 223,622 12,333 355,243 350,538 2,022,976
1940 1,344,408 444,999 33.1 46,665 3.5 316,825 11,813 315,584 190,266 1,850,258
1941 1,500,524 420,293 28.7 100,997 6.7 624,275 10,592 429,205 487,739 2,417.468
1942 1,415,596 407,988 29.8 248,877 17.6 509,538 11,822 360,447 277,992 2,054,035
1943 983,974 345,397 35.6 166,967 17.0 336,135 6,242 500,208 235,313 1,719,495
1944 663,594 268,861 40.7 60,948 9.2 152,113 3,586 516,225 155,213 1,335,032
1945 715,506 283,351 41.2 43,848 8.1 336,750 2,196 745,171 279,969 1,740,646
1946 600,897 333,833 59.2 18,154 3.0 115,700 2,642 956,224 261,500 1,818,621
1947 808,839 427,653 54.3 35,668 4.4 194,886 3,779 912,794 306,163 2,027,796
1948 1,108,057 416,156 38.0 27,605 2.5 261,148 4,261 1,091,478 275,850 2,475,385
1949 1,216,361 420,696 34.9 15,739 1.3 178,449 2,583 1,140,324 2,356,685
1950 1,416,300 578,912 22.7 14,703 1.0 216,210 2,577 1,145,051 2,561,351
1951 1,533,767 475,976 31.0 15,587 1.0 254,269 2,318 994,379 2,528,146
1952 1,711,202 480,766 28.1 10,604 0.6 329,446 1,253 793,312 2,504,514
1953 1,727,970 465,256 26.9 5,825 0.3 937,352 785 740,554 2,468,524

Hath not a Palestinian eyes?

I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

Rant & Personal Account: A Disturbing Revelation

By the Espresso Stalinist

As a kid, one of my favorite games was Contra for the original Nintendo NES. As an adult, I now know this game was a propaganda effort to raise support for the reactionary Contras in Nicaragua fighting against the Sandinista government.

• The ending theme of the original game was titled “Sandinista” (サンディニスタ^?).
• You’re known as a “Contra” and you fight against evil aliens called “Red Falcon.”
• The two main characters were modeled after reactionary action actors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
• They are on a mission from the U.S. imperialists to kill all Red Falcons that are planning “an invasion” of Earth (the U.S.).
• To make matters worse, in the Japanese version you fight on the fictional Oceania archipelago of “Galuga.”
• The American NES version takes place in the present (1980′s at the release of the game), in South America. Yes, they were that ballsy.

History

“Contra” literally meant counterrevolutionary for those in Nicaragua. They were fighting against the democratic socialist Sandinistas with help from Ronald Reagan’s cronies. Congress was so horrified by the Contras they even cut off funding in 1985, which led Reagan and the CIA to start covert illegal funding, ergo, the Iran-Contra Affair.

The Contras committed atrocities:

“But despite the efforts of the White House PR machine, the Contras increasingly appeared to be a particularly ruthless and bloodthirsty bunch. Stories of atrocities against civilian noncombatants certainly didn’t help. In the words of human rights group Americas Watch, ‘the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses … so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war.’ Another NGO compiled a year’s worth of Contra atrocities, which included murder, rape, torture, maiming children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, and amputating genitals.”

Good stuff, eh?

Imagine all the people who donated 53¢ to see people…kill people. For democracy.

President Ronald Reagan explains who is fighting to overthrow the current Nicaraguan regime:

“Thousands who fought with the Sandinistas have taken up arms against them and are now called the Contras. They are freedom fighters.”

President Ronald Reagan attempts to drum up public support for the Contras:

“They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help. I’ve spoken recently of the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth about them. You know who they’re fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.”

Try saying video games are “class neutral” now, liberals.

CIA Report on Smurf Communism

Isolated Utopian Village said to be model for Communist society

By Christian Bladt

I think we all recognize this evil salute.

Earlier this month, the CIA recently de-classified thousands of pages of documents from the Cold War era pertaining to what was referred to as “The Blue Menace”. For decades, the US government has kept a watchful eye on a small village of mushroom-shaped homes nestled deep inside an enchanted forest that is touted as a Socialist Utopia. Now, for the first time we take an exclusive look at “The Smurf Files”:

This village's blind faith in their leader is of great concern to us.

“The Smurf society is an unspoiled socialist utopia, and they are quite intent on preserving the utmost secrecy with regards to the location of their home. Smurfs never worry about their own safety and well-being, but, instead about how their actions directly affect the residents of the Smurf Village. They all work together, knowing that their position within this society directly corresponds to the amount of effort they put forth for the betterment of the society as a whole.

For the better part of the past century, Smurf society has been run by a hard-line Marxist known as Papa Smurf. Papa Smurf is the only Smurf in a red uniform, clearly distinguishing him as the cult of personality. Even though his patriarchal title seems to show that the Smurf Village is truly a family, it is really a patriarchal dictatorship, with the figurehead of this puppet government being Papa himself. He cares about them. He is the father. Everyone knows he is in charge, and will handle disputes and make decisions for the good of the society. His rule began by ousting the previous ruler, Grandpa Smurf, who spent decades banished to the wastelands of the forest. Recently, Papa Smurf allowed Grandpa to return to the society to live out his final years, under his late-1980s social reform policies of “smurf-nost” and “peri-smurf-a”.

A great deal of Smurf ideology is instilled in this blue army through chants and songs that are recited whenever they are together in a group. The village holds regular events, in which all 100 Smurf citizens are required to dance exactly the same. Although they are billed as “fun” and “celebrations”, these events are seen as more of an organized rally reinforcing Smurf way of life. When the Smurfs march by, everyone takes notice. Although it has been years since the Smurfs have faced any kind of armed conflict, their reputation precedes them as ruthless military masterminds.

Today, the Smurf village has no needs for a police state, and even the Elite Military Operations Unit’s only assignments seem to be rescuing fellow citizens from being eaten. The only real threat that the Smurfs face is from Gargamel, an evil wizard whose preoccupation with turning them into gold repeatedly reinforces to all of the Smurfs the failure of, and the evils associated with Capitalist Society.

A rare image of Nicholas Smurfanoff (left), the last czar in the Smurfanoff dynasty. He was forced from power under Papa Smurf’s socialist revolution.

For the Smurfs, there is no King, no queen, no heaven, no hell. Religion has no place in Smurf Society, instead they know that they are at the mercy of Mother Nature and Father Time, both of whom the Smurfs have had numerous run-ins with, always meeting with results beneficial to their society.

This society is totally self-reliant. The Smurfs use no form of hard currency, and there is rarely even the need to trade goods or services, because as they are taught to say from infancy: “Papa Smurf always says: share and share a like”. As a classless society, the division of labor in Smurf Village is designed without the possibility for surplus of production, ensuring that no one class will benefit by taking advantage of the others.

While there are definitely members of society whose designation might be more high profile than others, the good of the Smurfs is put before all else. One way the Smurfs are continually conditioned to this idea is by the usage of the word “smurf” itself. Conversationally, it can be substituted for any part of speech.

Under Smurfy Socialism, everyone finds equal means for the development of their respective faculties and utilization of their labour. Each Smurf is assigned a specific role, or a place in the society. Handy Smurf is in charge of any repairs necessary. Hefty Smurf performs the bulk of the manual labor. Farmer Smurf does the hard work of harvesting their food, and Greedy Smurf prepares it for all to enjoy.

Other Smurfs abilities are not as immediately clear. Poet Smurf is a tool Papa Smurf’s propaganda machine. Jokey Smurf’s exploding presents serve to provide a lighthearted respite in what could easily prove to be a dreary existence. (Also, his proficiency with explosives makes him a valuable tool should Papa Smurf ever desire the formation of a “Blue Ops” assassination team.)

Some Smurfs’ roles are to set an example of what good little Smurfs should strive not to be. Vanity Smurf illustrates how pre-occupation with one’s self can be bad for the society as a whole. Lazy Smurf’s lackadaisical lifestyle shows what can happen if everyone decided that they were too tired to do their required tasks. Nosey Smurf, by asking bothersome questions and continually investigating the unknown, demonstrates the perils of troubling your mind with things that do not concern you.

Papa Smurf's words are with the Smurfs at all times.

Interestingly enough, there is only one female member of the Smurf society. She is referred to as “Smurfette”, a very demoralizing title, in order to immediately place her into a secondary and subservient role. For, as the only female, Smurfette definitely would have the means to pose a real threat to Papa Smurf’s rule. However, she is not viewed as dangerous, as she spends all of her free time working on her garden.

The only real threat may be Brainy Smurf. Every one of these recently released files concludes with Brainy Smurf being forcibly ejected from the Smurf Village. He clearly represents the contempt for intellectualism this type of society has. His intellect rivals that of Papa Smurf, who realizes that Brainy Smurf could very easily start a revolution against him. Brainy Smurf knows that he is capable of running things in the Smurf village, but he lacks the maturity to take charge and the support of the other Smurfs.

Brainy’s isolation is part of Papa Smurf’s plan for keeping himself at the top of the food chain. Brainy’s volumes of “Quotations of Brainy Smurf” are often referred to, and yet, none of the other Smurfs ever reads them. The possibility of all the Smurfs being capable of the same intellect of Brainy, or even Papa Smurf himself, is a very real threat. As such, Brainy is sought after only whenever completely necessary, but banished outside of the Smurf village whenever it seems likely that he would get any of the other Smurfs to question the structure of their society.

Brainy Smurf’s subjugation to a tertiary role and the potential threat it poses to Papa Smurf’s leadership makes the Smurf Village a potential hotbed of military activity, one which will need to be continually monitored for the foreseeable future. If Brainy Smurf were to make any inroads amongst the other Smurfs, it is our belief that the United States would benefit greatly from Brainy Smurf’s rule. As such, it is the Central Intelligence Agency’s proposal that an exploratory commission be set up to see what steps could be taken now, to put the U.S. in the best position if and when an uprising occurs.”

Sources: The above works have been adapted from the following articles.
All credit where credit due.

The Smurfs Were Communists!
By Dave Morgan, Published on his Home Page February 14, 1996
http://www.iamlost.com/features/smurfs/commies.shtml
http://www.mushroomvillage.com/smurfs-article035.html

Better Dead Than Blue – Are the Smurfs Closet Communists?
by Kristen M. Sonntag, Esq.
http://www.birdhouse.org/words/misc/commie.html

S.M.U.R.F – Socialist Men Under a Red Father
Author unknown

S.M.U.R.F
Author unknown but posted on
http://www.angelfire.com/nj/skagrrl/smurf.html

The Theory of Smurfian Communism
by Andrew Dougherty
http://www.angelfire.com/mo/potatofarm/smurf.html

Isolated Utopian Village said to be model for Communist society
By Christian Bladt

The Smurfs as a Paradigm for Communist Society
Written by Eric Lott in Spring, 1995 and published on his personal web page September 27, 1997

Socio-Political Themes in The Smurfs
by J Marc Schmidt, author of Egg Story

Smurfy Sexism: Drawn with a Biased Hand
By Mariruth Graham
http://www.iamlost.com/features/smurfs/documents.shtml

Source

Thoughts on Titoism & its Revisionist Implications for the Future of Marxism-Leninism

“The Yugoslav communists and the Yugoslav people must attend to that matter; it is up to them to solve the problems of the present and the future of their country. It is in this context, also, that I see the problem of Kosova and the Albanian population living in other parts of Yugoslavia. We must not leave any way for the Titoite enemy to accuse us later of allegedly waging our fight to break up the Yugoslav Federation. This is a delicate moment and needs very careful handling, because by saying, ‘See, they want to break up Yugoslavia,’ Tito not only gathers reaction around him, but also tries to win the patriotic elements over to his side.”

– Joseph Stalin

The “comrade” Broz led the anti-Nazi guerrilla campaign in the 40′s. No one will take away from his leadership, but on one occasion he promised British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that he had no interest in implementing socialism in Yugoslavia, and swore that he would not.

Once the Second World War was won, Titoite policy was nationalist deviation, and from 1948, his policy was a program of economic liberalization, in which, among other gems, commodity prices were allowed to be set by the market, a characteristic of classical liberal economics.

Private investment and foreign investment in factories did not stop, and the factories could produce as they deemed necessary, without undergoing any rigorous economic planning by the state. To include kulak elements within the economy and the government without waging the class struggle was deemed necessary by the Titoite administration.

The Yugoslav Communist Party had a complete lack of proletarian democracy and popular participation. This party was warned by the Cominform in 1948, to denounce Tito’s abandonment of the socialist bloc and his collaboration with the capitalist powers.

The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform resulted in a massive anti-communist purge within the PCY that was reflected in the overwhelming number of arrests: between 100,000 and 200,000. Most of these were tortured and killed as “Stalinists.”

Tito helped the imperialists in the Korean War, and was always a dividing element in Europe, where the Yankees relied on Yugoslavia to implode neighboring socialist governments. As for the promise he made​to Churchill, if we consider the “market socialist” economy and the capitalist “workers’ self-administration” program that characterized the Yugoslav model, then Tito fulfilled his promise.

Particularly in favoring the capitalist model of uneven development even within the confines of Yugoslavia, developing states like Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro while leaving such states as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo as backwater neo-colonies exploited and oppressed by the more developed states, we can see the Titoite policy’s responsibility for the violent events of the collapse of Yugoslavia as a country in the 1990′s.

Yugoslavia and its leader Tito was (and still is) the darling of all mushy “socialists” opposed to Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union. Tito brought “market socialism,” subsequently adopted by the revisionists in China and the Soviet Union. In Tito’s version of “market socialism” there was also “local control” and “workers self-administration,” thus he gained the support of various half-baked “anarchists” as well. 

Many of the “left” looked on in admiration at Yugoslavia’s standard of living and this furthered the pro-Tito and pro-U.S. illusions propped up with billions upon billions in Western loans.

Today, all the petty-bourgeois advocates of the Yugoslavian model are nowhere to be found, except in total stupor in younger generations. There is no Titoite International, no ruling Titoite party nor any Titoite parties active in any country except the countries that constituted the former Yugoslavia.

There are no mea culpas coming forward from any of the people who found Tito preferable to Stalin. However, there is a new danger, in that potential advocates of “workers self-administration” are so lacking in theoretical seriousness that they do not know if Yugoslavia was a model of socialism or not. In this way there is another generation of unconscious Titoites rising.

In the present time we can see clearly where “workers self-administration” of the economy leads. Each ethnicity retained its own economic interests and never learned what centralized cooperation should be. Workers of each ethnicity never understood concretely how they were damaging each others’ interests. In fact, in Yugoslavia’s case, the lack of socialism bred suspicions and illusions about other ethnicities. In reality, it was imperialism robbing Yugoslavia, with Tito’s blessings.

Without centrally-planned economic production among workers, conflicts occur in relations among nations. Not surprisingly, when Western liberalism swept eastern Europe, Yugoslavia had the biggest explosion of ugly ethnic violence, right out of Hitler’s game plan from World War II. Russian revisionism played a scandalous role in ex-Yugoslavia. It was Khrushchev who abandoned Stalin and a principled position on the national question. It was also Khrushchev who looked to nothing more than the size and economic strength of Yugoslavia as a reason to abandon principled relations with Albania and cozy up to Tito.

When we see extreme actions of ethnic cleansing or rioting, as in ex-Yugoslavia, we can be sure that small nations are writhing in pain from the punishment of bigger nations. Once Khrushchev abandoned Stalin on the national question and allowed for corruption to enter the party in the name of opposing the dictatorship of the proletariat, all the nations smaller than Russia knew that bourgeois self-interest was the new watchword of the day. Instead of viewing imperialism as the source of economic problems, all ex-Soviet people since Khrushchev have increasingly looked at their neighbors as the source of economic problems. Thus, revisionists of a feather…

On Lavrenty Beria: One Criticism on Marten’s “Another View of Stalin.”

From Red Comrades:

This (ON BERIA) is related to Ludo Martens’ book “Another View of Stalin.” It is a critique of his assessment of Beria. The rest of the Martens’ book relies on facts. However oddly, in stark contrast to the rest of the book, the analysis of Lavrenty Beria does NOT show facts at all. Martins has only theories and/or rumor or gossip, which is what Kremlinologists used to create the totalitarian paradigm against all of Soviet society! Why would he believe this or believe Khrushchev?

This is like the Forward to “The Beria Affair,” where the author goes into all the things THE WEST “knew” about what “power” Beria had – and then states that even 4 months after Stalin died, Beria did not make a grab for ultimate power. Yes, Beria did NOT make any such grab and it is evident that had he wanted to make that grab for power, he could have easily done it. So the Western anti-Soviet writers are left to invent a “reason” that this was so. So then, they conclude that Beria didn’t make a grab because he was arrogant. (!?)

Nonsense! This only makes sense if you abide by the totalitarian paradigm of Soviet society, which is blatantly false.

A more logical deduction would be that Beria never considered there to be ANY power grab and was not at odds with his Comrades, at least not at odds in such a big way that he’d grab power and use it against them.

Consider it: Beria had BOTH the NKGB and NKVD under him. With all the rumors and suspicions about Stalin’s death, he could easily have gotten his “rivals” arrested and shot. Therefore, one must also wonder IF THERE WERE ANY rumors or suspicions immediately after Stalin’s death! Surely, if there were, they’d have made their way to the NKVD and the NKVD would have acted on it; at least they’d have arrested the people who found Stalin on the floor.

But WAS Stalin found laying on the floor? Or is that more “after the fact” rumor? And why didn’t Beria do away with his rivals even 4 months after Stalin’s death? Apparently they were NOT his rivals, as the totalitarian paradigmists suggest.

I can’t agree with Martens’ arguments against Beria at all. Anyone investigating a crime would have problems with the way the entire affair was handled.

It was enemies that considered Beria an enemy, enemies that were in fact capitalists, never communists, and who proved this of themselves later on by wrecking collectives that worked well!. There were only THEORIES or ACCUSATIONS against Beria to that effect, primarily based on his desire to return to a NEP-type system for awhile after WWII . Well, Lenin did it after the Civil War for the same reasons Beria wanted to do it after World War II. Accusations are insinuated due to Beria’s desire to keep friendly with the West – who, after all, were ALLIES in WWII. Why not be friendly with allies?

In going along with the idea of Beria that Martens presents, Martens is falling INTO the same totalitarian paradigm that his entire book seeks to dismantle.

Beria did a good job for Stalin, in fact, an EXCELLENT, SUPERB job. Far from wanting to kill Stalin, Beria did everything in his power AGAINST STALIN’S ORDERS to try to prevent Stalin from wandering into mined areas of land during the time Stalin insisted on staying in Moscow in the war. Stalin could have been easily killed: Beria was trying to prevent this. Beria also had MANY occasions to kill Stalin AND get away with it!

Martens cites Thaddeus Wittlin on Beria, but does Martens know to what extent Wittlen INVENTED whole scenes in his book? I do: right out of pornographic books. It’s so lurid that it’s funny to bump into it in the middle of his huge book. PURE, graphic, lurid invention, pure pornography. Fantasy! If Martens is going to believe Wittlin on Beria, why not just believe Robert Conquest on Stalin? Conquest is kinder to Stalin than Wittlin is to Beria!

The data Martens has on Abakumov and Beria is not correct here. Since the creation of two groups, the MGB and the MVD, the MVD being the former NKVD, there was hostility. Ignatiev and Ryumen were Khrushchev’s men. It is possible, as Martens and everyone else seems to believe, that Beria was “the only person” capable of eliminating Stalin’s personal security, but others could have also done it. It is also possible that the personal security was no longer trusted and Stalin ordered it changed. That would go along with the “orders from the top” school of thought. But in this case, they WERE STALIN’S OWN guards and he’d have every right to have them removed. It is NOT possible to believe that Stalin didn’t know they were no longer his security guards! Stalin had good eye-sight!

The totalitarian paradigm presents a dualist image of Stalin: he’s either a diabolical genius or he’s a dull-witted idiot. People who write with a STRONG desire (emotion) to defend Stalin and trash the totalitarian paradigm, often fall right back into the paradigm when they attempt to present Stalin as either a Saint and Genius or a Duped Victim who’s not to blame for anything. And these are the types of people that DO NOT want to make a “cult of personality” out of Stalin? They are doing exactly that with this attitude.

I don’t think we can really know what happened in the end. It ispossible to believe that Stalin’s closest people thought he was sleeping when he lay there sick or unconscious. (Personal proof that this could have happened: I was in a coma, or unconscious at least, unable to be awakened on several attempts, and my dearest friend, someone closer to me than anyone was close to Stalin, thought I was ‘SLEEPING and didn’t want to be disturbed’: yet this was the day after I was smacked by a car going 30 mph as I sat at a stop light in my car and was knocked out cold! He thought I was sleeping! He tried to wake me up only a few times and then let me continue “sleeping.”) – So it IS POSSIBLE people thought Stalin was sleeping. Was Stalin really found laying on the floor? Or, as said above, is that just more after-the-fact rumor designed to make something look suspicious? Did he look as sickly as we are told? Or did he look as if he were asleep?

But herein is the puzzle that it seems NO scholar out there can see through: they don’t WANT to see it clearly. The picture presented by ALL sources, pro and con, shows Stalin’s closest, long-time, trusted employees afraid to go into his room!! WHY?? Rybin’s account is no better (“Next to Stalin”) as he’d have Stalin as Saint Josef, while not grasping that his inferences lead one to think that his personal staff were so terrified that they would not even knock on Stalin’s door if they had to. They waited hours, yet they all thought something was wrong when Stalin didn’t come out of his room on time? Or is it that they “remember” thinking something was wrong AFTER they really KNEW something WAS wrong and after they all got it into their heads to get suspicious?

Why didn’t they knock or go in his room? No one has seemed to grab hold of THIS INITIAL data on the fatal day. Long BEFORE Beria was around to see Stalin sleeping ON A COUCH, WHY didn’t anyone ELSE call the damned doctor? THEY found him on the floor! Beria DID NOT SEE Stalin laying on a floor, he saw him on a couch! He looked asleep. This, in any kind of U.S. investigation, even by small-town cops, would incriminate those people RIGHT THERE AT THE TIME long BEFORE Beria or the others were called, if any suspicions were held at all!

I don’t like, and therefore have real criticism for, the tendency of people to trash their own appointed police chiefs, (even if they trash J. E. Hoover* for “doing a good job” against Communists – he was appointed TO DO this! So why blame him?) This smacks of shifting blame, scapegoatism and “the one who appointed him can do no wrong” mentality, it’s the same old cult of personality exculpation rubbish that they claim doesn’t exist! That the people right there that knew Stalin’s habits did NOT go into his room when (IF!) they thought something “was wrong,” is highly suspicious. Stalin was not known to fly off the handle at his maid or anything of that sort! (He welcomed visits from friends and relatives, as many accounts show, or as Svetlana would back up.) The maid couldn’t knock on his door? WHY NOT?

IF there is something fishy about how Stalin died, I doubt the answer will be found by looking at the “obvious suspects” by hashing out theories that make them INTO “obvious suspects” AFTER THE FACT, especially by using the same old totalitarian paradigm! Everyone seems, on this subject, to have a political agenda so they invent suspects when the REAL SUSPECTS are right there, WERE there the whole while, and NEGLECTED to do a damned thing, like call a doctor when THEY found Stalin on the floor! In ANY court of law in the USA, the maid and those right there at the time would have been charged at least with negligence leading to death or “murderous indifference” in Stalin’s death. (By U.S. law, if I find a person I live with laying on a bed apparently not breathing and am unable to wake that person up – if I have a REASONABLE SUSPICION that the person is in need of medical attention and I DO NOTHING – I can be charged with a crime.)

*Re J. E. Hoover. Does anyone doubt there WERE Communists in the USA at the time of the McCarthy witch hunt? EH? SURE there were Reds here. SURE there were atomic spies, too. There even were “Communist Parties” here right out in the open!

From the literature, and here I strongly feel Martens fails too, it is made to sound like NO ONE EVER died in U.S.S.R. except by some political intrigue. Smearing Beria in this manner, after years of loyal service, is no different from what Trotsky said against Stalin, spreading a rumor that Stalin poisoned Lenin! I don’t think this belongs in the book; it’s not political analysis, it’s theory and almost slander. It is also possible that Stalin would have died no matter what was done for him. Cerebral hemorrhage is not a common cold!

With people coming here from the Soviet Union, what would one EXPECT them to say if they ended up here? GOOD NEWS? All one ever gets to read about it are things written either by enemies or defecting spies (some of whom are double agents, to boot). The fact is that Khrushchev was a dictator, things went awful for the economy after he got into power. Whereas people (who do not write books about it) known to me personally that LIVED/WORKED in 1930′s USSR under Stalin and then ended up in the U. S. A. living/working here in the post Roosevelt 1950′s said it FELT the same to be there as it did to be here, with a few minor details about how economic matters are transacted.

The TOTALITARIAN MODEL of Stalin’s Soviet years is permeating. Even revisionists use it, BOTH SIDES use it, and don’t even REALIZE they use it: the example is like how the maid is somehow “too scared” to knock on Stalin’s door even though Stalin was such a friendly guy, or how Beria is “obviously” out to take over the country, but he fails to do this when he certainly could have – but does not do it for some unexplained, mysterious reason – that’s all still totalitarian paradigm.

Check Amy Knight, Beria’s biographer, for an objective view written by a capitalist.

NEW INFO: A must read: “Beria Inside Stalin’s Kremlin” by Sergo Beria. Eye opening and mind blowing information there.

Source

Merry Stalinsmas, one and all!

December 21st, 2011

This is the Espresso Stalinist, wishing you all a wonderful Stalinsmas. May we all show each other the comradely love and exhibit revolutionary fervor. This is the true meaning of Stalinsmas.

Keep Stalinsmas a time of celebration, love, revolution and socialism!

Merry Stalinsmas, one and all!

Junk food as ‘Addictive as Drugs’ – Why Junk Food is Addictive

“When researchers electronically stimulated the part of the brain that feels pleasure, they found that the rats on unlimited junk food needed more and more stimulation to register the same level of pleasure as the animals on healthier diets.”

Junk food is almost as addictive as heroin, scientists have found.

A diet of burgers, chips, sausages and cake will programme your brain into craving even more foods that are high in sugar, salt and fat, according to new research.

Over the years these junk foods can become a substitute for happiness and will lead bingers to become addicted.

Dr Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist, carried out the research which shows how dangerous high fat and high sugar foods can be to our health .

“You lose control. It’s the hallmark of addiction,” he said.

The researchers believe it is one of the first studies to suggest brains may react in the same way to junk food as they do to drugs.

“This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neuro-biological foundations,” said Paul Johnson, Dr Kenny’s work colleague.

Dr Kenny, who began his research at Guy’s Hospital, London, but now works at Florida’s Scripps Research Institute, divided rats into three groups for his research, due to be published in teh US soon.

One got normal amounts of healthy food to eat. Another lot was given restricted amounts of junk food and the third group was given unlimited amounts of junk, including cheesecake, fatty meat products, and cheap sponge cakes and chocolate snacks.

There were no adverse effects on the first two groups, but the rats who ate as much junk food as they wanted quickly became very fat and started bingeing.

When researchers electronically stimulated the part of the brain that feels pleasure, they found that the rats on unlimited junk food needed more and more stimulation to register the same level of pleasure as the animals on healthier diets.

28 Oct 2009

Source

“The right combination of tastes triggers a greater number of neurons, getting them to fire more. … The message to eat becomes stronger, motivating the eater to look for even more food. … “

Why junk food really is addictive

Ice cream and chocolate bars are addictive because the mix of ingredients in them activates our “bliss point”, according to Professor David Kessler, a leading scientist.

By Ben Leach
Telegraph
29 Jun 2009

Snacks, cereals and ready meals can trigger the brain in the same way as tobacco, according to the former head of America’s food standards watchdog.

Professor Kessler, ex-commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), claims that manufacturers have created combinations of fat, sugar and salt that are so tasty many people cannot stop eating them even when full.

Living near fast food restaurants ‘increases obesity risk’ He argues that manufacturers are seeking to trigger a “bliss point” when people eat certain products, leaving them hungry for more.

“It is time to stop blaming individuals for being overweight or obese,” he said. “The real problem is we have created a world where food is always available and where that food is designed to make you want to eat more of it. For millions of people, modern food is simply impossible to resist.”

While at the FDA, Prof Kessler was well known for his criticism of the tobacco industry, which he accused of manipulating cigarettes to make them even more addictive.

In a new book, The End of Overeating, he suggests precise combinations of fat, sugar, salt and texture have been used by foods manufacturers to make products “hyper-palatable”.

Heinz tomato ketchup and Starbucks white chocolate mocha Frappuccino are cited as examples of the thousands of modern foods that have been engineered to stimulate feelings of pleasure.

“The right combination of tastes triggers a greater number of neurons, getting them to fire more,” he said. “The message to eat becomes stronger, motivating the eater to look for even more food.”

“Many of us have what’s called a ‘bliss point’ – the point at which we get the greatest pleasure from sugar, fat or salt. As more sugar [and fat or salt] is added, food becomes more pleasurable until we reach the bliss point, after which it becomes too sweet and the pleasure drops off.”

Prof Kessler, who ran the FDA from 1990 to 1997 and is now professor of paediatrics, epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, added that at the optimum point, food stimulates many people’s appetites instead of suppressing it.

Source

The Fascist Hungarian Counterrevolution of 1956

Western liberal states often use anti-communism as a means of keeping the people in line. Most of the time they don’t dare openly support any fascist movement, but many times they do so covertly. Such is the case with the fascist rebellion of 1956 in Hungary.

In making their analysis of the events in Hungary, we cannot neglect the reactionary, fascist and anti-Semitic nature of the revolts, nor can we neglect to mention the opportunist policy of the leadership of the Soviet Union in betraying socialism. The “anti-Stalinism” of the 20th Congress of the CPSU emboldened fascists everywhere. The bourgeois forces which gained power in 1990 now consider 1956 their historical ideal. This ideal is now the basis for the whole political and ideological system of capitalist Hungary. It also constitutes the main means of the present-day anti-communist propaganda.

One of the main tendencies of the anti-communist propaganda is an attempt to prove that communism was alien to the nature of the Hungarian people and that the Eastern Bloc period could come only because it was imposed upon Hungary from outside.

From the above follows one of the most widespread directions of the anti-communist attack – they try to prove that in the 1956-58 years, the “communist regime” implemented savage reprisal against the heroes of the “revolution and war for independence” and even against ordinary Hungarian people. According to the propaganda, 400 people were executed, 21 668 were sentenced to imprisonment, 16-18 000 were interned for participating in the revolution. In reality there can be no doubt that it was a counter-revolution aimed against socialism. The aim was to overthrow the system and restore the bourgeois system which existed before 1945.

President Bush issued a proclamation honoring the 1956 Hungarian Revolution:

“The story of Hungarian democracy represents the triumph of liberty over tyranny. In the fall of 1956, the Hungarian people demanded change, and tens of thousands of students, workers, and other citizens bravely marched through the streets to call for freedom. Though Soviet tanks brutally crushed the Hungarian uprising, the thirst for freedom lived on, and in 1989 Hungary became the first communist nation in Europe to make the transition to democracy.”

Events in Hungary made it clear that, with the assistance of the United States, a reactionary underground movement had been organized in Hungary which had exploited the difficulties and shortcomings in the work of state organs in Hungary in order to mislead certain sections of the people.

In response to an appeal by the Hungarian Government, Soviet military units located in Hungary in conformity with the Warsaw Treaty, had gone to the help of the Hungarian forces and the Hungarian workers. The Nagy Government collapsed, and a revolutionary Workers and Peasants Government had been formed, including several Ministers of the Nagy Government. The Government declared that all communiations from Nagy were invalid and had reiterated the Hungarian Government’s objections to discussion of the situation in the UN.

The anniversary of the rebellion and became a national holiday celebrations are funded by the Hungarian state. All the heinous crimes committed by the fascists are now completely forgiven and forgotten. Participants (all war criminals, murderers, torturers and thugs) are now being deified.

Examples include Bela Kiraly

A supporter of the pro-Nazi Hungarian regime before liberation by the Soviets, and of course fought alongside Hitler in the war. After the victory, he received a pardon from Stalin and was even allowed to enter the Communist Party of the country. Comrade Stalin even gave him a post in the army. But this worm Nazi pretty soon prove their ingratitude. In 1956, betrayed their values​again. But, again had to suffer the bitter taste of defeat. Humiliated and hated, he fled westward, where, for the third consecutive time, betrays its values.

The former Nazi, a former Communist and ex-fascist became a supporter of Western regimes. After 1991, this coward, Nazi turncoat, hypocrite and a traitor, returns to Hungary, where the new system allows you the greatest rewards. He was proclaimed a”hero”and was appointed the leader of the rebellion of the celebration committee.

And while the fascist thugs been immersed in the privileges and luxuries of the new Nazi era, we see the people suffer renazistificação. People were being persecuted by the color of their clothes (to wear a red star is enough to send someone to prison) while the local CP suffers persecution and threats of being banned. All communists are suffering a series of attacks.

The major culprit of the rebellion?

The traitor Imre Nagy. The man who decided to lead the rebellion. And what is worse, said he was doing in the name of socialism. This man is treated as a hero today by the new Hungarian regime. They even built a statue for him. Why would a regime that openly opposes communism would support a “communist” as he?

However, the ferocity of the regime does not end here. They took a further step with a direct attack on historical truth. The fascist rebellion was called ”democratic.” The events that prove their fascist nature were silenced. As for the Nazis who led the rebellion, they were all supporters of the Hungarian regime that led the country into World War II. They are the ones who fled to the West for fear of being humiliated by the communists. They are the rich, bourgeois and landowners who financed Hitler’s rise and provided everything necessary for German imperialism.

They are the ones who made anti-Semitic pogroms that led to the Holocaust.

Imre Nagy did everything by fascism in the name of socialism (obviously he lied). He allowed communist statues to be vandalized, communist symbols were desecrated, Soviet flags were burned, and even said he was doing in the name of socialism.

The fascists massacred all they could be a possible threat to a Hungary based on the values​of “God, country, family.” During the cold war, the fascists claimed that the Soviets killed 30,000. Later it was discovered that only 4,000 died. Once again, the fascists were lying.

The rebellion, however, has endurance. While the fascists bound, tortured and executed those who wanted, who had decided to resist? Many farmers – nearly 40% of the population – have decided not to support the rebellion. The result: a bloodbath. These events are, however, silenced. The fascists managed to hide much of the evidence, just a few pictures were saved to remind us of their crimes.

The legendary Ivan Konev

Ivan Konev, Marshal who marched from Russia to Berlin to Budapest and from Russia – is now considered a villain. While the fascists were called “liberators” and fascist rebellion was called REVOLUTION!

It’s time to unmask this”revolution”- still used today as an example to Trotskyists as resistance to Stalinism”and”rednecks”as an example of fighting communism”

Source

More on Right-Wing Hedonism

Postmodernists chafe against all forms of what they call “the norm” except moral equivalences. Postmodernists may rebel against this or that societal expectation, but no matter what they rebel against, they never cease to compare things that aren’t comparable and insist that everything is relative. One example is their perception of violence as being “all bad,” and thus magically a slave rebellion becomes “just as bad” as John McCain dropping bombs on Vietnamese. Oddly, this “moral equivalency” argument is one of the top weapons of the US ruling class, but the postmodernists use it nonetheless. This leads to pacifism, of course. They would make a world entirely out of things being all the same, all people having “rights” and being “equal,” even while they insist Postmodernism sometimes leads to pacifism (fascifism), but sometimes it also leads to right-wing hedonism.

The bedrock of the right-wing hedonist worldview is that people are too stiff, too shallow and too uptight to be damned properly, and perhaps if a human soul can muster some eye-catching depravity, they can be an exceptionally interesting being and leave a mark behind. Good, it announces, is easy while evil is unique. For a few particular souls, the path of debauchery and drinking deep the bitter dregs of human experience becomes as saintly as your typical crucifixion, in a different way of course. This isn’t even some sort of wallowing in degradation to pass through it like a baptism by fire, or some plucky fantasy about walking through hell in order to deepen existence. Rather, it is a seeking of one’s own ruin in order to obtain the “ultimate” carnal knowledge, indifferent to such concepts as good and evil in the first place.

Obviously it’s a mistake to believe that any sort of authority, regulation or limitation is restrictive. In fact such delusion should have died with the crass Romanticist era. Anyone who feels “oppressed” by a healthy bureaucracy in the form of an organization must be terribly insecure, or at least oversensitive. Right-wing hedonism is the chief sign of a petty-bourgeois intellectual who has overdosed on reality and is now dumb enough, hopefully temporarily, to believe that whatever breaks a norm is politically radical.

Right-Wing Hedonism

What hedonists and postmodernists revived and kept alive in the deeply conservative and libertarian writings of Anton LaVey and the Marquis De Sade probably like about perverted, forbidden things is their hostility to the commonplace.

To Ayn Rand life is selfish, rational egoism. People who are steeped in the orthodox myths of religion naturally find their fascination in the conception of outlawed horror. Such people take the idea of “sin” seriously and of course, drink in the dark allurement.

People like myself, with a materialist view of history, see little charm in things banned by religiousity. We recognize the primitiveness of religious attitude and thus find no element of attractive devil’s dance in the wholesale violation of its morality insofar as the action does not inherently cause fun within itself outside of such “sin.”

Meanwhile, the filth and perversion to which De Sade and LaVey’s obscenely orthodox minds visit upon their own universes seems like nothing more than a profound maladjustment, no more enlightening or interesting than a bout of fever.

Now that the veil of hocus-pocus mystery has been ripped away from such carnal things by science, they are no longer sufficient distraction for the human being as a producer. We seek to produce new things outside of the carnal, which is merely a side-dish as of now. We must be obliged to hunt settings and constructions beyond the new designs for Caligula’s bedroom.

TDKP: On September 11 and a new wave of attacks by reactionary forces

The 11 September attack on the USA caused the death of thousands of innocent people. There is no doubt that this attack is indefensible as far as the peoples of the world are concerned. However, equally clear is the fact that this attack is the fruit of the situation which has been imposed by the US-led imperialism onto the peoples of the world, a situation characterised by hunger, poverty, degrading and inhuman conditions. It is not surprising to see such actions being reaped by imperialist aggression which has been shedding the blood and getting the “curse” of millions of oppressed people. The US imperialism is harvesting what it had sown. Therefore, the people of America must question the reasons why they had to go through all this, and surely they will.

With a mind of an ambitious merchant, the US-led imperialist states are trying to use terror and sorrow for their own purpose. They considered the 11 September attack as an opportunity and launched a campaign of a broad offensive and expansion in the name of “fight against terrorism”. Yet, it is imperialism itself that feeds terrorism, in such an ironic way that it becomes self-destructing.

In the aftermath of a short-lived shock and panic, US imperialists first declared war against an unknown enemy, then launched an investigation to “identify” it. For the time being, American reactionary forces are using Osama Bin Laden in order to divide the groupings that had been formed against itself in Asia, thus have greater influence in the region. The US is trying to take Afghanistan into its sphere of influence since it is a country which borders the region of a rich source of energy. It is doing this with the excuse of getting Bin Laden whom it now holds responsible for the 11 September attack. However, it is a well-known fact that the US once supported him against Russia, but ironically he got out of hand later. It seems that Afghanistan on its own does not satisfy the American reactionary forces, as they make a list of the countries which “harbour terrorism” in order to attack them.

Although it may seem that an “international coalition against terrorism” is being formed through a spinning “diplomatic traffic”, what is in fact taking place is negotiations with an agenda for redivision. Furthermore, in a matter of a week, the so-called “fight against the war that had been launched against the civilised world” has also begun to have an element of the “fight” among the “civilised world” itself. In this respect “international coalition against terrorism” is nothing more than a lie. The only “coalition” one can talk of is the agreement of big imperialist powers on the necessity to intimidate the oppressed peoples.

The reactionary forces of Turkey, an American ally and a member of NATO, have hastily declared their “support” for US imperialism. Turkey can easily be dragged into the war, not only because of the American base in Incirlik but also because of it being America’s “trusted friend”, the closest one to possible “American targets”. The collaborators in our country see the war as a medicine for their incurable illnesses. However, it is obvious that such an adventure would only bring suffering to the peoples of Turkey and of the region. Although a war adventure may seem as a “way out” to the troubled ruling classes, it would probably worsen their problems, up to the point of their overthrow. However, it would also help, even if temporarily, to distance the working masses, who have been suffering in the hands of poverty and unemployment, from their demands.

Some of the consequences of the 11 September attack have already shown themselves in the rising wave of reactionary forces. With their attempts to pass “anti-terror laws” and restrictions on bourgeois democracy, reactionary forces, especially in advanced capitalist countries, are trying to gain new positions.

On the other side of the coin, however, we see a process of rising sensitivity and awakening on the part of the workers and labourers of the advanced capitalist countries. This is a process that they have been pushed into with the events of 11 September. In these countries what is rising is not only the demand for peace but also the tendency among the progressive forces and intellectuals to question, in a self-critical manner, their lives and the relations of their countries with other parts of the world, how they had become accustomed to injustice, inequality and oppression in the world, and why they had kept silent.

There is no doubt that the events of 11 September have marked a turning point in terms of political relations in the world. Although this turning point is clearly reflected on the concrete forms that domestic policies of advanced capitalist countries are taking, its reflection on foreign policy is not as yet clear. What is also obvious even today is the fact that imperialist aggression will create its opposite, which will be embodied in the anger and struggle of the peoples.

The workers and working people of Turkey must intensify their struggle against the politics of imperialists and their collaborators. This is necessary to win their demands against imperialist globalisation and to keep away from the calamities of a war.

40 Helpful Tips for Becoming a Successful Anti-Communist

by J. Slavyanski of the APL

1. Constantly insist that Marxism is discredited, outdated, and totally dead and buried. Then proceed to build a lucrative career on beating that supposedly ‘dead’ horse for the rest of your working life.

2. Remember, any unnatural death that occurs under a ‘Communist’ regime is not only attributable to the leaders of the state, but also Marxism as an ideology. Ignore deaths that occur for the same reason in non-Communist states.

3. Communism or Marxism is whatever you want it to be. Feel free to label countries, movements, and regimes as ‘Communist’ regardless of things like actual goals, stated ideology, diplomatic relations, economic policy, or property relations.

4. If there was a conflict involving Communists, the conflict and all ensuing deaths can be laid at the feet of Communism. Be careful when applying this to WWII. Fascist movements who fought against the Soviets or Communist partisans are fine, but try not to openly praise Nazi Germany. Save that for private conversations if you must do so.

5. You decide what Marxism “really means”, and who the rightful representatives of Communism were. Feign interest that Trotsky was somehow robbed of power by Stalin, despite the fact that you hate him as well.

6. Constantly talk about George Orwell. Quote from Animal Farm or 1984. Do not worry about the fact that Orwell never set foot in the Soviet Union and both of those books are novels.

7. Quote massive death tolls without regards to demographics or consistency. 3 million famine deaths? 7 million? 10 million? 100 million deaths total? You need not worry about anyone checking your work, which is good for you seeing that you probably haven’t done any.

8. Everyone ever arrested under a Communist regime was most likely innocent of any crime. Communists only arrested harmless poets and political prophets who had a beautiful message to share with the world.

9. Everything Stalin did or didn’t do had some sinister ulterior motive. Everything.

10. Keeping with the spirit of #9, remember that Stalin was an omnipotent being, perhaps an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu, who had full awareness of everything going on in the Soviet Union and total control over every occurrence which took place between 1924 and 1953. Everything that occurred during that time was the will of Stalin. Stalin knew the exact details of every criminal case that took place during that era and out of his boundless cruelty, had tons of innocent people shot for no reason regardless of where they were or their position in life. Being omnipotent, he was not dependent on information passed up from tens of thousands of subordinates.

11. Constantly attack ‘Communist’ regimes for actions that occur in capitalist regimes up to this very day.

12. Claim that Marxism is utopian because of its description of a possible future society. Alternately claim that Marxism failed because it never gave a detailed description of how a Communist society would look. Do not pay attention to the massive contradiction here.

13. Start referring to Marxism as being some kind of religious faith, Messianic, or whatever other spiritualist bullshit you can come up with. When people point out that you can draw similarities between virtually any political ideology and other religions, ignore them.

14. Remember the one-two anti-Communist attack: Attack the post-Stalin system on economic grounds, and claim it just doesn’t work. Since an informed opponent will most likely point out that actual socialist economics did indeed work during the Stalin era, and in fact worked very well, attack that era on human rights grounds.

15. Two words – Human nature. What is human nature? For your purposes, human nature is a quick explanation why political ideas or systems you don’t like are wrong.

16. Bolshevik revolutions were carried out with violence and bloodshed. Bourgeois revolutions were all carried out by democratic referendums, and there was no violence whatsoever.

17. Use words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ constantly. Do not accept any challenge to define these terms.

18. Communists can be for or against whatever is popular in your particular area. If you are preaching to a right-wing crowd, Communists are for degeneration and homosexuality. If you are preaching to a more mainstream audience, Communists were homophobic. Essentially, Communists are for moral degeneration and puritanical prudery at the same time. Again, do not notice the contradiction.

19. Constantly flog Stalin over the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, while totally ignoring massive support and collaboration with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan on the part of America, Britain, and France, long before the war and even after in some ways. As usual, do not allow your opponent to examine the context of the non-aggression pact.

20. Praise the newfound “freedom” of Eastern Europe. Ignore the massive depopulation via migration, plunging birthrates, huge alcohol and drug problems, political instability, civil wars, ethnic cleansing, sex trafficking and child prostitution, organized crime, high suicide rates, unemployment, disease, etc. Who cares about all that when you have freedom of speech?!

21. Constantly talk about the culture of fear in Communist nations, about that ‘knock on the door’ in the middle of the night. Ignore the ‘kick in your door in the middle of the night, stick a shotgun in your back, and haul your ass out of bed etc. because you are suspected of dealing,’ a normal occurrence in the American War on Drugs.

22. Attack Communists for suppression of religion. Attack Islamic fundamentalists for not being secular. What contradiction?!

23. Do not notice the irony that the US is currently fighting an incredibly expensive, losing war against an opponent which it funded, supported, and even handed its first victory in Afghanistan.

24. What should you say when confronted with all the continuing and often worsening problems in the world today, and asked for a solution? FREEDOM!! (Repeat as necessary until your opponent goes away)

25. Nothing from “Communists” can be trusted. Unless it somehow works in your favor, ala Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ from 1956, or anything Trotsky wrote.

26. Communist leaders were ‘paranoid’ for devoting so much time to security against counter-revolution. Ignore the mountains of evidence, including the restoration of capitalism in the East Bloc, that this threat was indeed real.

27. Communist regimes were never popular. If proof is presented in various cases to show otherwise, claim that the people were brainwashed. Make no effort to consider the budgetary and logistic constraints on such an undertaking.

28. Communist propaganda is crude and primitive. If someone mentions Red Dawn or worse, mentions the J. Edgar Hoover-endorsed comic book series known as The Godless Communists, run away.

29. Praise secularism in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘pluralism’ until faced with a Communist. Then play the religion card.

30. Atrocities and other bad things that happen under non-Communist regimes are the fault of individual ‘bad people’. Anything bad that happens under a ‘Communist’ regime is the fault of the ideology and system. And Stalin.

31. Being an anti-Communist means not having to have any sort of ideological consistency whatsoever. Preach populist left-wing pseudo-socialism 90% of the time, and then compare the capitalist system to “Stalin’s Russia”(if you never really studied the subject, just read 1984 and Animal Farm). Bitch about capitalism 99% of the time, but balk when someone suggests Communism as an alternative. Far right wing Fascist? Constantly bitch about cultural degeneracy under capitalism, while remaining fanatically opposed to Marxism for no discernable reason save for your affinity for historic nationalism.

32. If you’re an anarchist, keep pointing out the ‘failure’ of Marxism while ignoring the fact that your ideology has a 100% failure rate throughout its entire history. Blame those failures on Communists, or stronger military powers. Ignore the fact that the most wonderful society is worthless if it can’t defend itself from reaction.

33. Neo-Nazi? Communism is Jewish!! Debate over.

34. Neo-Hippy? Tibet!

35. Constantly condemn the genocide that allegedly occurred under Mao, while ignoring the US’ relations with China established by Nixon, and the massive role capitalist China has played in the modern US economy. When you want to talk positively about China, it’s a capitalist country. If you need to criticize it, it’s still ‘Communist’.

36. Claim Marxism is not empirical. Neither are neo-liberalism, ‘democracy’, or ‘freedom’, but don’t worry about that.

37. Always insist that despite the location, country, historical era, past experience, and all other factors, Communists must want to recreate a modern-day copy of Stalin’s Russia, and all that entails according to you. Do not notice the inherent idiocy in this concept, such as your particular country being already industrialized, and not having a historical problem of severe backwardness.

38. Learn to use the magic word ‘totalitarian’. This word allows you to link two ideological opposites, Communism and Fascism.

39. Ignore the fact that socialist states experienced more economic problems parallel to the number of market reforms they made.

40. When challenged about numbers or historical context, resort to labels like “ruthless tyrant”, “cruel murderer”, and such. Remember, people like Stalin were mass-murderers because of all the people they killed, and we know they killed all those people because they were mass-murderers. It totally tracks!

Feudalism and Hollywood

As with all things, art and class struggle are related. As far as revolutionary content, television is absolutely the worst, because it is entirely state and monopoly controlled. Even in liberal Hollywood, which romanticizes the bloodthirsty limb-chopping feudalism of the Russian Czar and the Dalai Lama, filmmakers still have more autonomy than those who produce TV shows. The main television channels in the imperialist countries are the worst purveyors of reactionary drivel. Television offers no audience interaction with the directors, only the final products.

Hollywood loves feudalism, whether it’s “Anastasia,” “Seven Years in Tibet,” “The Last Samurai” or every Disney flick ever made. Psychology is a social product, and under a system which teaches you to think of yourself as a king, standing alone and “getting yours,” what more can be expected but a romanticizing of the period of “rule by divine right,” no matter how many eyes and limbs might fly by?

Review of Less Than Zero

Less Than Zero is a novel, or perhaps a very short semi-autobiography, about rich young Americans in college, in Los Angeles. In a word, it’s a much less innocent Catcher In the Rye.

Reading this 22,000-word novel (barely longer than a short story) is as easy and as inexplicable as the feeling of gazing out a sunny window for a long period of time.

As the reader may or not may not know, your author is a near life-long fan of Mr. Ellis’s work, even though I am quick to label it reactionary. As I’ve mentioned before in my essay on postmodernism, his documentary-like style does an excellent job of examining the emptiness of life under bourgeois capitalism while at the same time doing all it can to romanticize the basis of it.

Ellis sneers at the age’s excesses while at the same time flaunting its greatest achievements. The good news is, that is barely pronounced here at all, and not nearly to the extent it would be in his second book, The Rules of Attraction.

Most of the focus is on the main character Clay, who narrates the story alone, but Ellis has masterfully made it feel as though it is third-person rather than first. This is because Clay is a passive narrator; he makes no harsh judgments. He does not limit our vision to his own. Clay has no investment in the world around him —- he merely watches and observes, opportunistically waiting for a chance for personal gain.

He is as confused and as hesitant as a youth with no identity to go with his lines of cocaine would be. In effect, this means there is never any overbearing “voice” or narrator in the story to impose a definite moral compass. Hence the reader will join Clay in his amoral, directionless carnality and in his careful disconnection.

There is much that is remarkable about Less Than Zero, for example the fact that it has virtually no plot (which is very much a good thing, there are far too few stories without plots these days; it only makes it more life-like), but more than anything what stands out is something Ellis is known for —- his descriptions of sexual encounters.

These are far less frequent here than say, in his magnum opus novel American Psycho, but they are his typical fare in that they have no pornographic appeal (quite the opposite), and are narrated with an emotionless, callous tedium and arrogant boredom which is fairly common in modern fiction, but never done quite this well. In fact, these sex scenes are only concentrated versions of the attitude of which the rest of the novel is made.

A book like this, which deals with the deepening disconnections between people under the alienation of capitalism by brutally insisting on the facts, is common, but Ellis has a voice of his own that is refreshing and pure.

Two of the consequences of the breakdown of religious belief under today’s imperialism (polls today show today that less people are religious than ever before) are

1) an increase in social awareness, and, paradoxically,

2) an increase in the focus on individualism and the physical side of life.

For if there is no higher plane beyond the grave, then surely the sole purpose of life, the highest goal any being can dedicate himself to (or so the capitalist logic goes), is to expanding and enhancing himself, to improving oneself by amorally experiencing every sensation in this world.

Taken as a whole, Ellis’s books are moralistic vilifications of human nature as selfish, bratty and excessively hedonistic, all the time not realizing that these are merely symptoms of a larger disease: the alienation felt by all, especially the youth he seems so disgusted with, under capitalism. As brilliantly honest and taboo-bashing as his stories are on the surface, and as hilariously dead-on his parodies of the so-called “American dream” may be, deep down his purposes are undeniably conservative.

Mr. Ellis would not answer to someone calling him a pessimist, though all his books are about angsty, egoistic and childish characters dealing with loneliness and drug addiction. What makes him unique is that he avoids the trap that his fellow postmodernist writers, such as the infamous Chuck Palahniuk, so often run into. Ellis refuses to say that by desensitizing oneself to the ugliness of the world, one will end up finding life more worth living, nor does he repeat the older-than-dirt cliché that “ugliness and violence can be beautiful in a way.”

No, Ellis is far too royalist for that. He has cultivated the image of the California Bohemian, the libertine, eccentric and educated “artist” who while stressing fulfillment, also stresses ethics. He sees no “better” possible relations for mankind, he sees only the avoidance of “excessive” excesses. In his mind’s eye, he sees himself as the post-beatnik, clean-cut rebel, while at the same time the lone guardian of a feudal code of honor, a pair of hands holding back the deluge of a thousand spoiled young Marquis De Sades.

To add a personal touch to this review, I read this marvelously short book that says so much in one day, in perhaps two sittings. There are no chapters to speak of, merely sections of perhaps a few paragraphs each, separated by spaces. It makes the work gently episodic but never choppy. There is nothing here as outwardly violent and raw as the sex-and-murder scenes from his later American Psycho – there is nothing here that seeks to “grab the reader by the throat” or make him experience challenging slices of animal emotion.

Less Than Zero flows so smoothly and so straightly that it can only be compared to a modern, R-rated Catcher In the Rye. Never have I read a book that so beautifully captures the lost, barren irreverence of youth while doing it in such a streetwise manner. There is never any attempt to impose an intensity or a purpose to the narrative; it merely exists. As such, it is intensely relaxing even as it is profound and fleeting.

Here, Ellis does something that so few authors can do gracefully: he relaxes his grip, and he lets the story flow.

Jello Biafra Cancels Israel Show, Attacks Boycotters

Jello Biafra, "Democratic Socialist," tool of apartheid

The former lead singer of the Dead Kennedys has pulled out of a planned concert in Tel Aviv this weekend, but says he will still go to Israel.

Jello Biafra, who was set to play in Tel Aviv for the first time on July 2 with his band the Guantanamo School of Medicine, said the cancellation absolutely did not mean he or his band were endorsing or joining a boycott of Israel.

Instead he delivered a blistering attack on the boycott, divestment and sanctions groups, including one called “Punks Against Apartheid”, who campaigned for him to cancel.

He also said he refused to be “a poodle for Hasbara, Peace Now, BDS or anyone else”

Mr Biafra said he would still go to Israel and Palestine “to check things out myself” and may yet change his mind about his decision.

He said his only intention in going to Israel had been to do some good, and criticised those who attempted to stop him.

“What about the people on the same side of the human rights fence we are, who now don’t get to see us play?” asked the punk star. “Should they be boycotted too?

“I’ve been doing this long enough to know better than buy into hardline absolutes such as playing in Israel automatically supports apartheid or Israel’s government. That threat is ridiculous.”

Palestinian victims of Israeli white phosphorus - less important than Jello Biafra's pocketbook.

He condemned the way in which discussion about playing in Israel had descended into a “childish bickerfest” from both Palestinian and Israeli groups, and noted that many of the “Punks Against Apartheid” petition signatories had no idea who he was.

He added: “I can’t back anyone whose real goal or fantasy is a country ethnically cleansed of Jews or anyone else, where people who think for themselves or talk to the wrong person are automatically a sellout.”

“Speaking personally, I currently favour two democratic states in the admittedly naive hope that in our lifetime they can somehow evolve into one.”

Boycott poster from the era of South African apartheid.

Coleridge

Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is a conversational poem that communicates the key concerns of Romantic period poetry while at the same time reinforcing idealized family relationships as a solution to the alienation of man from his own work in the capitalist social order. Continuing the general style of the other “Conversation” poems, it immerses the reader in a cold, dark-gray world of isolation which is then stirred by meditative thought and finally colored by emerging friendships and societal relations. In the beginning of “Frost at Midnight” as well as “Dejection: An Ode” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” the narrator is alone after having been recently abandoned by family or friends and left to his own solitude. As in “Dejection,” where he exclaims: “Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind / Reality’s dark dream!” or in “This Lime-Tree,” where he says “Well, they are gone / and here must I remain,” in “Frosts at Midnight” he is portrayed as alone in a cabin by the fire (except for his infant son), lost inside his own mind.

Like his contemporary Wordsworth, Coleridge seems to have an eye for natural forces at work around him that are independent of his will, such as the “frost” performing its “secret ministry.” We see how the pains of alienation from his own work as a poet (not being able to control the production of his body of work) have brought Coleridge to see history and reality as completely outside of his control—as much out of his hands as the forces of nature itself. His separation from human connection compels him to wish that his newborn child, the “babe” beside him in the cradle, will live an ideal childhood in the countryside away from industrial capitalism. Remembering his own traumatic experiences trapped in a schoolhouse, Coleridge espouses a libertarian education method by which his son would learn from his environment according to his own creative urges. Coleridge, like Wordsworth, sees the country as a liberating force from the industrial city setting.

The contemplative mood is totalizing to the point of being suffocating: whereas “Dejection” at least expressed playfulness (if hidden nihilistic meaninglessness) in form, “Frost at Midnight” feels intense in its sheer calm, its words warded by blank verse formed in iambic parameter. More than this, its very structure and plot is intensely subjective, a living, breathing example of the creativity of the human imagination that Coleridge speaks of in the poem. As in the other works contained within “Fears in Solitude” however, it finds itself completely dependant on isolation and individual consciousness. Coleridge weaves his own world, generated by nothing more than his brainstorming unconscious and imagination.

Coleridge, like T.S. Eliot, was one of the leading purveyors of Romantic humanist subjectivity which sees the human subject as a free-floating social agent transcending the limitations of history. Emotions become absolute to Coleridge—he values human feelings over philosophical reason. His alienated struggles to overcome family rifts caused by his addiction are combined with poetic candor about the general functioning of the human imagination to wander to the future, present and past alike in a formless tapestry of thought.

The role of the individual in Coleridge is an attempt to resolve the crises of the subject during the industrial and monopoly phases of capitalism. This is not to say that the entirety of the poem amounts to nothing more than “bourgeois individualism,” but to show that the foundations of this psychology is designed to heal social conflicts but ends up perpetuating them. His emphasis on societal roles and evocation of domestic affections shows a split with the radical movement and a leaning towards more conservative beliefs. As such, Coleridge’s portrait of himself as a domestic family man may have been meant to answer criticisms of his so-called “radical” character by the press and the government.

There is no parody or mocking here: Coleridge is clearly endorsing bourgeois family values and must have been aware of the political meaning behind such terms. He ends up endorsing, of course, an institution that cannot be separated from its ideological values, or what is known as the “culture and society” tradition. Does the love of nature and the English landscape in the poem endorse nationalism, or perhaps some form of romantic humanism, the popular Romantic organicist philosophy of loving all of humanity? Such things are frustratingly ambiguous, though the lines “From east to west / A groan of accusation pierces heaven!” certainly seem to suggest that chaos is just outside the window. Here he is no longer predicting the destruction of England as a result of colonialism, slavery and imperialist war, but rather portraying himself as a humble family man, lover of peace and a believer in political liberty.

Most interestingly, there exists a “bell-curve” in “Frost at Midnight” in which the gloomy interaction between the speaker and his subjective reality begins troublingly, reaches a dramatic, climatic peak of emotion and eventually falls under the spell of the sheer wonder of the mysterious and unknowable world. Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” marks fading moments of radical thought which are afterwards called back to reality by want of a sense of order through socially acceptable norms. He offers an idealist criticism of his own society’s social relations oddly coupled with an individualist streak that defends the rights of capital, making himself instrumental for the creation of the new conservatism.

The end result of this, unlike in “Dejection: An Ode” where the speaker’s grim numbness strips him of his creative energies and leaves him in the dark of the night, is that a healing process is started where the traditional family unit attains a sense of normalcy despite the complex pressures of an industrialized society. What “Frost” shares with the other poems is the starting point of the poet’s self and the gripping feelings of loneliness. What differentiates it from “Dejection: An Ode” is that a solution is found, and what differentiates it from “Lime-Tree Bower” is that a solution to the contradiction is found outside the author’s own mind.

“Frost at Midnight,” like the other two poems, is essentially preoccupied with the contradictions and alienation rife within Coleridge’s position as a literary producer, and specifically contradictions inseparable from his relations with a cosmopolitan audience who rejected his more radical political work. In response, Coleridge has penned his most conservative work, a classic tragedy turned on its head. His mental assault against the world in all three poems is filled with distrust of the city, of bourgeois commercialism, of colonialism and of his fellow man. He is torn between the traditional family as a desirable organic unit, his repressed radical beliefs, his addictions and personal vices, the fear of industrial setting as well as his own Romantic-era nationalism. His loss of control over his own artistic capabilities is less a “natural” or “inspirational” crisis than an escapist method from European political turbulence.

About A Certain Newspaper

Newsweek is a weekly newspaper. It has achieved something amazing in its years of existence, in that is has managed to be one of the most widely read and cited papers in the country while undoubtedly being one of the least deserving of such an honor. The substance of the paper is, in form, quite up to the American “standard,” with news, articles and cartoons dripping with nationalist propaganda and imperialist slant, but in content astoundingly and insultingly simplified even by US media standards. It is the only mainstream newspaper that has the reputation of being written on a second-grade level. Many times its articles pander to eclectic, preachy “both sides are right” politics (the kind we’ve learned to expect from such imperialist trash like South Park), while at the same time remaining firmly planted in the camp of the bloodthirsty bourgeoisie, and of course reading as if it was written by lobotomized monkeys.

As an example, one if its most famous and popular issues, after 9/11, whined from the cover “Why Do They Hate Us So Much?”

One would regard such an idiotic publication with nothing more than scoffs and dismissal if it were not so widely read and available, and if its headlines and so-called “opinions” were not do die-hard reactionary and anti-socialist, not to mention anti-leftist. Yes, we have here a center-right paper with a sneering and smug “left” and “moderate” veneer of the goodwill-towards-your-slaveowners-and-executioners and –shake-hands-and-make-up type. How typical.

Thoughts on Postmodernist Attitudes

Kipling, Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson all address the colonial experience through a hermetically sealed bubble of subjective, individual unreality. Alex Garland in The Beach, Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club and Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho all explore the emptiness of bourgeois ideology in modern urban man within this same bubble, frequently arriving at the most reactionary and hedonistic of places. Why are they reactionary?

Let’s take a novel as an example. Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction consists entirely of stream-of-consciousness rantings from a revolving door of different narrators. As might be expected, each narrator has his/her own voice and subjective take on things.

The characters themselves are all incredibly empty and tainted by what can only be called “selfishness,” and they all find solace in hedonism through drug abuse and promiscuous sex. Do I even need to say all of them are secretly depressed and feel hollow, corrupted and lost?

What does this plot mean? Either this is supposed to be a representation of the state humanity under bourgeois ideology finds itself in (which would be a progressive work), or, more likely, it is meant to be a moralistic social critique of the state of young people today with the idea that they should “correct themselves” by falling back into the places alloted for them by the dominant social order.

Fight Club fares even worse. It starts off as an idealist “liberal” critique of consumerism, which then evolves into a promotion of primitivism and secular humanism, and then of course takes its petty-bourgeois ideas to their logical conclusion at the end, where it becomes an essentially fascist and militarist work.

Most entertainment today does this sort of thing — showing a world that has no meaning with all the class interests and prejudices that entails.

Never have intellectuals and artists displayed the hubris they show here, attributing to themselves the power to arbitrate all meaning. In the postmodernist movement, their celebration of complexity and ambiguity becomes a form of boundless egoism. Richness of meaning, which sounds good to most of us, cannot take the form of no limits on meaning, which would amount to meaninglessness.

For more information, see: Samuel Beckett. (Yes, ANY of his works.)

As Marx said, the dominant ideas of any era are the ideas of its ruling class. What does this culture say about the class nature of our society and what class interests does this movement represent? It is a petty-bourgeois, or small landowner or producer, way of thinking.

Why is this? Generally speaking, the petty-bourgeoisie, when tackling a problem, thinks in a subjective and one-sided way.

He does not practice Marxist dialectics, which analyzes things concretely and rationally from every possible angle in order to get an objective and complete picture of reality, but instead starts from his own wishes, preconceived notions and subjective desires about how actual conditions should be.

People who live in imperialist countries, intellectuals or more privileged strata of society (wealthier people, whites, petty-bourgeois) who are detached from the concrete conditions of reality often think in this way, because they have only book smarts and lack practical knowledge.

What the idealists, the postmodernists and the “free speech” advocates fail to understand is that a man’s mind is not his own. Who would deny that in each society throughout history man has operated in personal relations independent of their own will?

One of the chief discoveries of the science of Marxism, and materialism in general, is: it is not consciousness that determines reality, it is reality that determines consciousness. To imagine that the mind alone, in this case the individual mind, and the will, in this case that treasured idealist concept of the “free will,” can change reality based only on its own individual wishes is the most vulgar form of bourgeois and capitalist ideology.

How is this inherently capitalist ideology? Since subjectivism and relativism (“nothing is true, it’s all just in your mind”) is the logical ideology of late industrial capitalism, where individualism has taken its toll and everything becomes dependent on what you think, rather than what exists. This sort of thinking is also beneficial to capitalism, since it fuels the “I can make the world my own” attitude of the small producer.

This is reflected especially in the idea that scientific and materialist minds are somehow “intolerant” or “imposing” by subjecting others’ beliefs to the scientific method. This view ignores the fact that it doesn’t matter at all what one thinks of reality; what matters is what is objectively true and what is not.

The argument is frequently made that if the individual believes it hard enough or passionately enough, then it must be true. Hence, “religion is objectively true for religious people.”

Putting aside the fact that this so-called “objective truth” is therefore neither objective nor truth, this whole capitalist and postmodernist way of thinking digs its own grave.

To expand on this, here are a few key points to consider, that MUST be conceded:

1. Reality functions and exists outside man’s own individual mind. This must be a given, since if one individual dies, reality does not cease to exist. Therefore reality is separate from the individual.

2. Reality is not changed by the individual mind alone. If someone is falling from a cliff, wishing it is not so does not make it stop. Similarly, no matter how hard you wish it, you cannot push your hand through a solid wood table. You can imagine it, but the fact remains that your molecules repel the molecules of the wood. Even if you got two people together, one who admitted he could not pass through walls, and one who was absolutely convinced he could, the fact could still be shown objectively that both of them were incapable of it. The man who believed he could pass through walls would not be able, materially, to cross into the next room.

3. If reality is separate from the individual mind, and is not affected by it, we must then admit that the two can disagree and be completely parallel.

4. If we admit that the two can disagree, then there must be such a thing as concrete objective truth and mere fantasy. If the desires of the mind were the same as reality, then they could never be separate.

5. Therefore, what is true and existing can only be measured not in wishes, but in matter.

6. Finally, if all of the above is true, then we must say that not everything the individual mind believes is true, and that in order to be proved true it must pass the scientific method.

From these points, we can see that there are perceptions that are correct, right and actually existing, and there are those that are incorrect and not actually existing.

Logically, if something cannot be weighed or measured, it does not exist. Otherwise the very concept of “not existing” becomes moot, since the sole definition of “not existing” hinges on not being able to prove that it DOES exist.

Why? Because it is impossible to prove a negative. It is impossible for me to prove that something can’t be done.

Likewise, it is impossible to prove that something does not exist. So the only definition that there can be for not existing is the absence of proof that it does exist.

For example, it would be impossible for me to prove that there are not pink dragons flying everywhere, except for me to point out the absence of material evidence: no sight of them, no feeling of wind from their wings.

Conclusion: the capitalist ideas of relativism and postmodernism are bankrupt. Reality exists outside the individual mind, and there are right ideas and wrong ideas, as well as true and false ideas.

America’s Laziest Fascist

May 20, 2004 | Michael Savage doesn’t get out much. The hardcore conservative radio host of “The Savage Nation” has always been a relatively reclusive figure. He doesn’t do book tours or publicity stunts. He’s not exactly approachable either: He claims to carry a gun with him at all times, and he doesn’t like nosy journalists asking for interviews.

Not that he’s the shy, retiring type. Lately, as the Iraq torture scandal has dominated the headlines, he has taken to calling Arabs “non-humans” and has called for the U.S. to kill “thousands” of Iraqi prisoners and nuke a random Arab capital. Deciding whether to pay attention to Savage has always been tricky, though. It’s never clear whether he really believes what he says in his tirades or if they are simply ploys for public outcry. His is currently the third-most-popular radio program in the nation. Nonetheless, it may be hard for Savage to sit by and watch the FCC’s crackdown against fellow jock Howard Stern effectively lift Stern’s profile even higher into the stratosphere. But Savage’s outbursts are often so unhinged, so vicious, that ignoring them seems irresponsible, especially when so many Americans apparently are nodding in agreement. So when I learned that Savage would be making his first public appearance in three years Saturday night, it seemed worth checking out, if only to see who was paying attention to him and why.

“Savage Uncensored,” as the event was called, marked the end of what’s been a crummy year for the once-hot Savage. Last March, MSNBC gave him a weekly program only to cancel it after four months when he labeled a caller a “sodomite” and told him to “get AIDS and die.” Then the San Francisco radio station that gave him his first big break dumped him and rubbed salt into the wound with billboards that depicted Savage morphing into Sean Hannity, beneath the slogan “Out With the Old, In with the New.” When a couple of anti-Savage Web sites started a boycott of his advertisers, his syndicator, Talk Radio Network, tried to revoke their domain names. When that failed, it tried to sue them for $1 million. That failed too.

Savage’s star may have faded, but it’s still too early to write him off, with “The Savage Nation” pulling in 6 million listeners a week. His latest screed against fifth columnists such as liberals, gays and atheists, “The Enemy Within,” debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times nonfiction list. But when it comes to the true measure of a talker’s cachet — buzz — Savage has slipped several notches in the past year. The anti-Savage sites are now dormant, their owners apparently satisfied that he would never make it back on TV. Fans and foes who once duked it out in Internet chat rooms appear to have moved on. These days, it seems the only people paying attention to Savage are diehard fans and perhaps a few incorrigible rubber-necking journalists.

Savage was scheduled to appear at the Concord Pavilion, an outdoor amphitheater in the suburban hills east of San Francisco. As a Metallica cover band called Creeping Death wailed, 5,000 or so people filed in to see him in the flesh. A quick look around made the demographics of the Savage Nation quickly apparent: Ninety percent were men and a good 95 percent were white. During the next three-and-a-half hours, there would be clear affirmation that they like gay jokes, Arab bashing and mass displays of patriotism. They will offer to share their freedom fries with a complete stranger. And when that stranger fails to boo liberals, holler the phrase “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance or show sufficient enthusiasm for torturing Iraqis, they are polite enough not to drag him out to the parking lot and pummel him.

The crowd at Concord had paid as much as $100 for an evening of rhetorical red meat for the right-wing faithful. At first, we weren’t disappointed. But by the end of the night, I wasn’t the only one checking my watch.

Savage’s son, Russ Weiner, kicked off the show. With his spiky, dyed-orange hair and calculated scruffiness, he was reminiscent of Dr. Evil’s son Scott from the Austin Powers movies. The resemblance was confirmed when Weiner proclaimed, “I’m proud to be the son of Savage!” The 30-something Weiner is the founder of RockStar, an energy drink that he developed with his dad, drawing on Savage’s previous career as a Marin County herbalist and ethnobotanist named Michael Weiner. RockStar’s herbal liver-cleansing formula is supposed to enable drinkers to “party like a rock star,” which presumably means drinking and doping. Generous free samples had been passed out to the crowd on the way in. It lived up to its hype: The antifreeze-colored, cough-syrup-flavored beverage can only be enjoyed if you’re taking drugs.

But while Weiner has cashed in on other people’s bad behavior, he made it clear that he’s a family-values kind of guy. “Who’s heterosexual and proud?” he asked, prompting manly cheers. “If you’re not, hopefully you will be soon!” Before handing the stage over to the man he called “our leader,” he advised the audience how to handle his hot-tempered dad: “Let him know you love him!”

Love — or an acceptably heterosexual version of it — filled the air as Savage drove onto the stage in a classic red Cadillac convertible. He warmed up the audience by riffing on the day’s news, joking that “Shiite” should be spelled with one “I” and calling Muqtada al-Sadr “a fat bastard in a burka.” Dressed in a calfskin jacket, slouch hat and blue jeans, Savage was at ease, swearing freely and peppering his speech with “Hey, mans” that evoked his days as a North Beach beatnik wannabe. Whatever was in his coffee cup was certainly helping. When it ran dry, he called out, “I need a drink!” and a young woman sauntered over and poured champagne into the mug.

Like everyone else these days, Savage was fixated on Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. He managed to combine the two dominant conservative takes: The first being Rush Limbaugh’s insistence that what happened in Abu Ghraib was a harmless prank; the other being Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe’s assertion that the prisoners got what they deserved.

“These are tough interrogations?” Savage asked. “My father put me through tougher interrogations when I was 16!” He portrayed now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison guard Lynndie England as a poster girl for the war on terrorism — an embodiment of the idea that kicking Muslim ass can be fun. “Let’s hear it for Laurie [sic] England!” he cheered. “The leash chick! Hey man, she had a great time over there!” He couldn’t understand why liberals were so outraged. After all, he said, the acts of sexual humiliation and degradation that took place in Abu Ghraib were no more perverted than typical homosexual behavior. Try to follow his tortured logic: Savage was saying he didn’t mind the Abu Ghraib abuses because they were good clean fun, like gay sex, which he openly abhors.

Savage moved on to another of his favorite topics: bombing the bejeezus out of Iraq. Just a few days before the Uncensored event, he’d been ranting on the radio about dropping fiery death on civilians throughout Iraq and the Middle East. “I don’t give a damn if they hide behind their women’s skirts,” he foamed. “Wipe the women out with them! Because it’s our women who got killed on 9/11! And it’s our women who are gonna get killed tomorrow unless we get rid of the bugs who are destroying us!” Tonight, Savage continued to elaborate on this disturbing vision of how to win the war in Iraq. He said he fantasized of being woken up by the sound of B-1 and B-52 bombers flying over his house on their way to the Middle East. Imagining bombers overhead at 4 a.m., he gushed about these nocturnal missions, “It’s better than an orgasm — it is an orgasm!”

Savage continued the psychological striptease, peeling off more layers of mainstream conservatism to expose his raging right-wing id. Though he has long billed himself as the original “compassionate conservative,” his brand of conservatism does not share George W. Bush’s pretense of caring about Muslim hearts and minds, much less lives. It appears that for Savage, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with spreading democracy or respecting human rights. It is about asserting American power by any means necessary, and screw what anyone else thinks. Predictably, and sadly, this notion went over well with the audience. When Savage blurted out, “Does anyone in this crowd give a shit about the Iraqis?” he was answered with a deafening “NO!”

But if the first half of the event showcased Savage’s ability to stir the faithful, the second half was an object lesson in how a performer can take his audience — and his talent — for granted. Basically, he bombed. He spent nearly 20 minutes sitting in a stuffed chair in front of a television set, free-associating as he channel surfed. Seeing footage of Jordan’s King Abdullah, he screamed, “Kiss my ass! Shut the hell up!” To a soccer match in Spanish, he quipped, “Reminds me of my gardener.” It was about as entertaining as watching a middle-aged man yelling at his living room TV. Savage eventually realized things weren’t going well. “You don’t like this shit,” he said. “It’s a bad act.“

Some fans — mostly older people and parents with small children — started to leave. If this were radio, they would probably already have changed stations. Most of the audience stuck around as Savage went into freefall, flailing wildly for something to catch his fans’ attention. He read from the Bible, played with his new puppy, moaned about his “mother issues” and asked for more booze. The evening’s low point came when he played the audiotape of Nicholas Berg’s beheading over the P.A. system. Berg’s pitiful, frenzied screaming filled the amphitheater. Having not heard or seen the gruesome tape before, I covered my ears in shock. I was not alone. If Savage was trying to incite the audience, it didn’t work. Playing the tape only revealed his desperation for a reaction, any reaction.

“What made you come out on this night?” he asked. “You see the vultures circling this great nation. We feel the vultures flying over the Concord Pavilion.” And perhaps they could smell Savage dying on the stage below.

In a last-ditch attempt to rouse the listless crowd, Savage tried to root out some closet liberals. “Is there any asshole here who hates me, who’s gonna try and rush the stage?” he asked. It was a long way between the cheap seats and the stage, but I was getting tired and bored. Rushing the stage might have prolonged the evening by a few more minutes, so I stayed put. Hurrying off stage, Savage promised, “Wait till you see the close.”

Luckily, the finale lasted all of 15 seconds. From the wings, Savage, obviously thinking he was off-mic, barked, “Play the Arab music!” A Middle Eastern tune blared as his red Cadillac lurched onto the stage. Savage was perched on the back seat, dressed in white robes and sunglasses, looking like a costume-party sheik. As the car disappeared off stage, he waved to the crowd, “Goodbye, infidels! I’ll see you in hell!” And with that, “Savage Uncensored” slouched to its perplexing though somehow fitting conclusion.

The house lights came on, revealing a few thousand blinking and bewildered fans — Savage had just resoundingly bombed on his home turf. “That’s it?” wondered one woman behind me, with real disappointment in her voice. “He said he was going to do Dr. UnSavage,” she said, referring to one of the jock’s longtime on-air characters. A couple of young guys shook their heads. “He misread his audience,” one said. His friend added, “He got into the champagne too much.” Maybe some RockStar would have helped.

His poor performance was not entirely surprising. Unlike his compatriots Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura, Savage often comes off as a remarkably amateurish and lazy showman. None of his colleagues — no matter how big their egos — would dare adlib their way through a two-hour live performance.

Savage’s unprofessionalism makes it easy for liberals to dismiss him as a crank. But that’s an easy way to overlook his ever-more xenophobic, homophobic and authoritarian political message. Ultimately, his invective may be what keeps his listeners coming back for more. Savage says what many mainstream conservatives can’t or won’t. As frustration with the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq adventure and the war on terror grows, his message holds appeal for those who believe nothing but desperate measures will work against an increasingly hostile world. And so, Savage will keep calling for Iraqi prisoners to be sodomized with dynamite. If he’s lucky, such antics may score him a public showdown with the FCC. Or perhaps he will finally rant his way into oblivion. Considering the recent developments in Iraq, even if Savage waits another three years to emerge from his veil of heavily armed privacy, there may be no shortage of fodder for his bizarre stage spectacle and the audience it attracts.

Source

“Unity & Struggle” No. 22 Released

Issue #22 of “Unity and Struggle” has been released. Unity & Struggle (Unidad y Lucha in Spanish) is the theoretical organ of the ICMLPO, or the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties & Organizations.

The 22nd edition numbers 166 pages in the Spanish version and has been published in Spanish, English, French, Turkish, Portuguese and Arabic.

Download this issue (in Spanish)

TABLE OF CONTENTS OF ISSUE 22:

Brazil
Long live 140 years since the Paris Commune!
Revolutionary Communist Party of Brazil (PCR)

Burkina Faso
Questions regarding the situation in South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire
Revolutionary Communist Party of Upper Volta (PCRV)

Chile
The potential for confusion is constantly narrowing
Communist Party of Chile (Proletarian Action) PC (AP)

Denmark
Greetings from Copenhagen, Denmark at the World Conference on Women’s Day in Caracas, Venezuela
Communist Workers’ Party of Denmark (APK)

Ecuador
The responsibility for organizing and carrying out the revolution is the work and the main objective of PCMLE
Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador (PCMLE)

Spain
The popular front: A tool for the current situation
Spanish Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) PCE (ml)

France
The peoples of the Maghreb and the Middle East
Communist Workers’ Party of France (PCOF)

Greece
Unilaterally stop payment of the entire debt outside Greece by Euro-EMU-EU
Movement for the Reorganization of the Communist Party 1918-55

Italy
Today, like yesterday, break with reformism and opportunism to set up a real Communist Party
Communist Platform

Mexico
The Soviets (workers councils), their role and their contribution to the proletarian revolution
Mexican Communist Party (Marxist Leninist)

Norway
The popular uprising for a living, democracy and national self-determination in Arabia is problematic to the imperialists and their stooges
Marxist-Leninist Organization “Revolution”

Dominican Republic
The Left is a minority
Communist Party of Labour of the Dominican Republic (PCT)

Tunisia
Interview with Hamma Hammami, spokesperson and member of the Workers Communist Party of Tunisia
Communist Party of Tunisian Workers (PCOT)

Turkey
Turkish Foreign Policy: Illusions and Reality
Revolutionary Communist Party of Turkey (PCRT)

Venezuela
Amid the crisis, spread our theory, a project of great importance
Marxist Leninist Communist Party of Venezuela (PCMLV)

Abolitionist Poetry

The 1807 abolition of slave relations of production within the British Empire may have been very progressive for its time, but one wonders if these same authors would have been so jovial if they could see the way leading capitalists have lined up to contrast the modern marvel of “free trade and labor” with slavery.

The collection of essays I had the opportunity to read accurately reflects the trends of the British abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century (with all the trappings one would assume), particularly their eloquent use of parody to convey the sufferings of slaves to the public. William Cowper’s Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce is a prime example of this method, whereby a narrator talks to the reader in darkly sarcastic tones. The poem itself comes in a form similar to a bar song, though it graphically discusses torture, whippings and mutilation of “negroes,” each stanza ending with the unsettling refrain, “which nobody can deny,” a line that begins to take on the double meaning—the ‘undeniability’ of the agony of slavery. Meanwhile, Robert Southey’s epic The Sailor, Who Had Served in the Slave Trade keeps to the visceral and rapturous in terms of feeling, but ends up being more ironic than the author perhaps intended. At the end, the narrator (a preacher) tells him that God will forgive his sins if only he prays and asks, in the process giving the sailor a convenient vehicle with which to cope with the continuance of his trade.

The poem hereby implies that the sailor’s religion will be used to encourage, not stop the sailor’s behavior, while at the same time it may be said that the narrator is showing the sailor a new (abolitionist) way free of the sin of slave trading. This odd duality certainly leaves the work open to debate, and shines a light on how traditional doctrines of morality, such as Christianity, can be used to justify both progressive and reactionary forces. Hannah More, on the other hand, throws subtlety to the wind with her work Slavery, a Poem, in which she seems to shout in thunderous language at the very heavens, crying for any force of justice to rain fire down upon this wicked world. Much of the same can be said about Cowper’s other major work in this section, On Slavery. Both simply state in powerful yet plain language the experiences of the abducted and colonized races. In my opinion, by far the most disturbing of the bunch is The Sailor, not only because of its abrupt twist ending but because of its outrageous uncertainty.

Ann Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade not only far surpasses its simple title in rich content, but also manages to carve out effective imagery in the text in order to force the reader into the place of an individual slave, making it a personal favorite. Hardly anything is said about the character of Luco as an individual, but the scenes of the mourning of his family at his abduction and his heroism in the face of the horrendous tortures he endures develop his character far more than simple dialogue ever could. When Luco is enraged at being blinded by a whip and kills his master with his hoe—a symbol of his oppression—the reader is made to feel his wrath. When afterwards he faces the fate of burning alive rather than live as an animal or beast, the reader himself is filled with righteous anger. The poem shows above all the millions of individual dramas that lay behind hollow statistics such as tallies of slave figures.

Written in a different style but showcasing the same sort of detached and analytical cynicism, Anna Barbauld’s On the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade is written almost like a letter to William Wilberforce, shows how the ruling class lackeys and the clergy have given the black man false hope that he might be free through peaceful, parliamentary means. Without knowing it, the text reinforces the belief in the utter futility of ruling class politics and implies the only way an enslaved people will be, or has ever been, freed is through armed struggle, such as the slave uprisings that were happening in the British colonies at the time. It also exposes (perhaps meant in a mocking manner) the worship of Wilberforce as the “great man of history,” the white liberal at the head of the abolitionist movement. Throughout, her account of his exploits and ideological fights read like propaganda. One can only hope she meant to display the hypocrisy in placing a white reformist writer (who foolishly sought peaceful means to emancipation) on the grand pedestal of admiration instead of the black slave organizers of revolts themselves, who risked their lives to gain freedom.

Wordsworth’s sonnet To Toussaint Louverture does not have the same intention as Anna Barbauld’s poem—to criticize a figurehead of the abolitionist movement and to undermine his cult of personality or taking of excessive credit—but rather gives focus to a genuine revolutionary hero who was instrumental in a slave uprising. Wordsworth clearly had an admiration for the man, though the poem itself goes into no great detail about why Louverture should be so revered. This is most likely to avoid charges of sedition or treason by the British government, since Louverture was the leader of the Haitian slave uprisings that uprooted the colonialists. Ultimately Wordsworth says that his story will be heard around the globe to inspire other oppressed peoples, though he fails to mention if too much focus on reformism of the Wilberforce type will be promoted by the ruling classes.

The Little Black Boy seems to be one of William Blake’s more “innocent” poems in the Songs of Innocence, disturbingly so. The narrator, the little black boy in question, seems to unhesitatingly absorb what is told to him by the dark figures of authority in the poem, such as his mother or God. It demonstrates the role of the church in the creation of the slave trade by implying that the Jesus figure favors the little white boy. Even his mother seems complicit in the boy’s ultimate fate in becoming a slave, since he is completely dependent on her for information regarding the world. The last stanza is obviously meant to be sarcastic, showing the tendency in society for the lower classes to aspire to and imitate the habits of the higher ones, no matter how reprehensible.

Disturbing Revelation

As a kid, one of my favorite games was Contra for the original Nintendo NES. As an adult, I now know this game was a propaganda effort to raise support for the reactionary Contras in Nicaragua fighting against the Sandinista government.

• The ending theme of the original game was titled “Sandinista” (サンディニスタ^?).
• You’re known as a “Contra” and you fight against evil aliens called “Red Falcon.”
• The two main characters were modeled after reactionary action actors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
• They are on a mission from the U.S. imperialists to kill all Red Falcons that are planning “an invasion” of Earth (the U.S.).
• To make matters worse, in the Japanese version you fight on the fictional Oceania archipelago of “Galuga.”
• The American NES version takes place in the present (1980′s at the release of the game), in South America. Yes, they were that ballsy.

History

“Contra” literally meant counterrevolutionary for those in Nicaragua. They were fighting against the democratic socialist Sandinistas with help from Ronald Reagan’s cronies. Congress was so horrified by the Contras they even cut off funding in 1985, which led Reagan and the CIA to start covert illegal funding, ergo, the Iran-Contra Affair.

The Contras committed atrocities:

“But despite the efforts of the White House PR machine, the Contras increasingly appeared to be a particularly ruthless and bloodthirsty bunch. Stories of atrocities against civilian noncombatants certainly didn’t help. In the words of human rights group Americas Watch, ‘the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses … so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war.’ Another NGO compiled a year’s worth of Contra atrocities, which included murder, rape, torture, maiming children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, and amputating genitals.”

Good stuff, eh?

Imagine all the people who donated 53¢ to see people…kill people. For democracy.

President Ronald Reagan explains who is fighting to overthrow the current Nicaraguan regime:

“Thousands who fought with the Sandinistas have taken up arms against them and are now called the Contras. They are freedom fighters.”

President Ronald Reagan attempts to drum up public support for the Contras:

“They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help. I’ve spoken recently of the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth about them. You know who they’re fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.”

Try saying video games are “class neutral” now, liberals.

Something to Remember when Analyzing Bandera Roja

Alejandro Silva front of Bandera Roja

Bandera Roja is considered a disgrace, a stain on history that is used to attack Marxist-Leninists or to attack the legacy of Enver Hoxha. Bandera Roja openly supported right-wing opponents of Chavez in their native Venezuela (including Manuel Rosales in 2006) and have since lost much political credibility and most of their members, some of whom formed the new ICMLPO party, the PCMLV or Marxist–Leninist Communist Party of Venezuela.

Even though BR does deserve strong criticism for their treacherous actions, it is important to realize that not all blame rests with them in this equation, particularly given the group’s personal history with Hugo Chavez.

Here is a little-talked-about incident in which Hugo Chavez’s first assignment in the army was a counter-insurgency force against leftist guerrillas from BR ala “Plan Columbia.”

Read an external article from a few years ago here:

Bandera Roja, La Masacre de Cantaura and last Sunday’s Elections in Venezuela

Explaining what has happened in Venezuela in the last decade can sometimes be quite a task. People talk about the “opposition” as if it were a homogeneous group with a common ideology. Besides the social-democrats, social christians and socialists, people always stare at me when I describe Bandera Roja, a Marxist/socialist organization that is part of Venezuela’s opposition and a member of the Mesa de Unidad (MUD) which fielded unified candidates in Sunday’s election.

Bandera Roja began as a Maoist guerrilla group. They were in fact, the last guerrilla group to abandon the armed fight and become a political party in 1992, to become the extreme far left [sic] in Venezuela. Despite this, Bandera Roja never backed Hugo Chavez, arguing he was no socialist or marxist, but an opportunist whose only project is his own self-promotion.

In 1982, what was then the Alejandro Silva front of Bandera Roja (picture above), held a meeting in a farm in Cantaura, inviting students that were simpathetic to the movement, many of whom were unarmed. The military somehow found out about it and started a military operation which began by bombing from airplanes in order to disperse those on the ground. As they dispersed, they were met by military ground forces which proceeded to capture many of those present. Reportedly, most were originally captured alive, but were later found dead.

The case was revived during the last few years, as Venezuela’s General Prosecutor’s office exhumed the bodies and began an investigation of the massacre in which a total of 23 people died. In early September, Human Rights organization Provea, denounced the fact that one of those being investigated, was retired General Roger Cordero Lara, one of the leaders of the massacre, who piloted one of the Broncos that led the attack. Provea asked Chavez’ party PSUV to withdraw the candidacy in order to stop the impunity on these cases.

Last Sunday, Roger Cordero Lara was elected as a Deputy for Circuit 2 of Guarico State under the PSUV party and now has immunity from Prosecution, unless the National Assembly and the Venezuelan Supreme Court removes it. This led Proeva to send this letter to Hugo Chavez and his party, noting the incoherence of backing Cordero Lara, as well as the precedent of impunity that this constitutes. Chavista groups have also raised their voices to protest, to no avail.

In the case of the Cantaura massacre, much like in other similar cases, military courts exonerated those involved, including General Cordero Lara in the Cantaura case, but the General Prosecutor has reopened the cases with the Cantaura case, being opened at the request of Hugo Chavez, but has yet to rule on any of them, which Provea suggests is due to the fact that many of those exonerated are pro-Chavez retired high ranking military like Cordero Lara. So much for the caring revolution!

But given that Chavez and PSUV did nothing when they could remove him as a candidate, it is highly unlikely that they would go through the complicated process of removing Cordero Lara’s immunity and impunity on the case will continue to prevail.

So much for the revolution…

Article on “Bandera Roja” translated into English:

Bandera Roja (BR) was a guerrilla group and later a political party in Venezuela. Was led by Gabriel Puerta Aponte. Initially known as Red Flag Movement (MBR), in later years was known as “Red Flag – Front Américo Silva (BR-FAS).” In its early was a Maoist guerrilla movement farmer of revolutionary violence, the main range were among public universities and high schools (secondary education centers) Venezuela.

Red Flag was formed on January 20, 1970 by a breakaway group of anti-revisionist wing of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), which in turn was a splinter of the Democratic Action party (AD). The latter was the biggest game in votes, which along with COPEI, formed a bipartisan pact of institutional form created through the so-called Pact of Punto Fijo, and the PCV with the MIR were first outlawed and firmly pursued, then the Rafael Caldera’s government were allowed to participate in elections.

In the ideological red flag represents, in its origins, the strongest line of Marxism-Leninism, initially with a common ideology with the Albanian Party of Labor of Enver Hoxha, close to the policies of the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. His theories and practices after they were placed closer to other groups of extreme left residual Venezuelan armed struggle, as Revolutionary Organization (OR) led by Jorge Rodríguez, Julio Escalona and Marcos Gómez and legal front: the Socialist League and others .

Early career as a guerrilla organization

Red Flag starred in several guerrilla actions against the Army in the East of the country by Guerrilla Front “Antonio José de Sucre” which was a group of about 60 men and women under arms in the mountains and plains of eastern Venezuela (states Monagas and Anzoategui). Its top leaders were Carlos Betancourt, Tito Heredia González, Américo Silva and Gabriel Puerta Aponte.

On January 18, 1975 took place near the PRV-FALN an operation in which through a tunnel of 70 meters and 60 centimeters wide, 23 prisoners escaped politicians from both guerrilla groups that were held at the San Carlos in North Caracas. These accounts included: William José Álvarez Blanco (FALN) Leonardo Araque Carlos Carcamo (BR); Betancourt, Argenis (BR), Carlos Efrain Betancourt (BR), Vicente Antonio Contreras Duque (BR), Marco Tulio Croquer Horace ( BR), Antonio López Chang (BR), Jose Asdrubal Guzman Cordero (BR), Marco Antonio Ludeña Arocha (BR), Jesus Arnaldo Romero Marrero (BR), Ramon Morales Elías Rossi (FALN), Quentin Ramón Sánchez Moya (FALN); among others.

First Division

The Organization had a first division in March 1976 and losing the Guerrilla Front Command was divided leaving Puerta Aponte and Tito Gonzalez with the game itself and the neighborhood and labor fronts and Carlos Betancourt exclusively with the armed wing and created a parallel movement called Red Flag – Marxist-Leninist “whose initials were BR-ML and was short-lived as it dissolved itself following the partial dismantling suffered by Venezuela’s intelligence police, DISIP.

BR rebuilt the military and founded the guerrilla “Americo Silva” whose first operation was the release of several military cadres prisoners in the jail of La Pica in August 1977.

Slaughter of Cantaura

In early 1982, the Guerrilla Front was in a state of euphoria, came to get several military victories, including the taking of San Antonio de Maturin, San Félix de Caicara, the Excise of Santa Maria de Ipire (January 1982). At that time, FAS, he gave to the armed struggle eminently violent. For example, in dealing with barbecues where it caused several casualties to the army killed and wounded and a DISIP agent who was captured and later released. Making the people of Santa Ines and Brig sample was available for the control of that group.

By the end of September 1982, the guerrillas set out in the camp where the confrontation occurred later, was the same site used years ago as a refuge for escapees from the San Carlos headquarters.

The action began at 5:45 am on October 4, 1982. The State Security Forces were operating a classic purse in action combined land and air. Once located the guerrillas placed in strategic sites around, ambushes distributed in a semi-moon, forming several rings, then began the attack with the air force with planes bombing and strafing with Canberra aircraft OV-10 Bronco observation intensively. In this first assault, suffered six wounded face death without any fighter.

During two days of fighting guerrilla ambushes in ten falls, leaving 23 dead and several minor injuries and is permanently divided into three groups, each of which tries to break the siege by different routes. The group that breaks the siege led by Alirio Quintero Paredes and another group led by Alejandro Velasquez Guerra succeed.

Escaped nearly a dozen guerrillas, of which very few wanted to rebuild the Guerrilla Front later. All the bulk of the Front Command was killed in the clash. The commanders and fighters were killed in Cantaura: Roberto Antonio Rincon Cabrera (aka Sergio and The Catire, first commander), Enrique Jose Marquez Velasquez (aka Florencio, Deputy Commander); Empress Cordero Guzman (alias Sonia, or hump, Third Commander) ; Sister Fanny Alfonzo Salazar (aka Patricia and Pat, a member of the Command), Carlos Jesus Arzola Hernández, José Miguel Nunez (aka Rivas and Spaniard), Mauricio Tejada Carmen Rosa Garcia, (aka Rosie); Ildemar Lawrence Morillo, Carlos Sambrano Alberto Mira, María Luisa Arranz Estevez (aka Natalia) Antonio Maria Echegarreta Hernandez, Beatriz del Carmen Jimenez (alias Maira); Baudilio Veracierto Valdemar Herrera, Jorge Luis Becerra Navarro (aka Gilbert); Eumennedis Ysoida Gutiérrez Rojas (alias Heydy), Diego Alfredo Alfonso Carrasquel, José Luis Gómez, Eusebio Martel Daza (aka Sunday), Ruben Castro Alfredo Batista, Nelson Antonio Pacin Collaso, Julio César Farías Zerpa Ysidro Mejias and José Colina.

Recent years as a guerrilla

In the years after Red Flag was a self-truce, its existence being limited to universities and colleges of Education Media, rebuilding the Front “Americo Silva” only to provide training to its members, no other post operative function, and concentrating pro organizations forces the freedom of political prisoners, legal and facades dissolve the Committees of Popular Struggle (CLP) and professional bodies such as the Regional Federation of Secondary Education (FREM) from Caracas.

Finally in May 1994, the National Red Flag decided to disband the guerrilla fronts and a score of former guerrillas came down from the mountain as a symbolic surrender their weapons and pacified despite not having carried out armed actions in more than ten years . At this time, Red Flag emphasizes its political work in its two legal fronts, which used to attract cadres and members, were these the Revolutionary Youth Union (UJR) and the Movement for Popular Democracy (MDP). Of these walls came the second division of Red Flag 1992 when a lot of his paintings defected to the Revolutionary National Coordinator (CNR), whose student wing, the Youth Movement Ezequiel Zamora (MJEZ) Red Flag came to represent the high schools middle school and was totally lost. The people who comprise this division are the principal subsequently joined the Movimiento V Republica (MVR) and support the government of Hugo Chávez, unlike the Red Flag which is opposite to that government.

Red Flag supported both coups occurred in 1992 against then President Carlos Andrés Pérez and the coup of 11 April 2002 against President Hugo Chávez.

Conformation as a legal political party

His first record as a legal party is its emergence as Democratic Movement in the 1993 presidential election, when the candidacy of Gabriel Puerta Aponte by MDP card received 3,746 votes (0.07%).

In the 1989 election takes the form of legal political group and decide to participate with your card supporting the candidate Gabriel Puerta Aponte. Red flag while maintaining its socialist ideology, opposed from the outset the Chavez government (which has consistently held to be socialist), joined the opposition coalition called the Democratic Coordinator, participating in political actions opposing the party of Hugo Chávez. In this sense, the organization said that the drive to social sectors is due to consider Chavez a communist false and misleading the people of Venezuela.

In August 2006, the organization announced for the presidential elections on 3 December his apoyo1 Manuel Rosales (Social Democratic Party leader Un Nuevo Tiempo, and Zulia state governor) who was the candidate for much of the opposition parties, but not could prevent the reelection of Chávez.

Most of the historical ex-members organized around a new organization called the Popular Vanguard detached from the Venezuelan opposition trying to recover political presence in the capital and the east.

In the last parliamentary elections, held in September 2010, Red Flag, won 67,563 votes, representing 0.60% of the vote and it the fifteenth most votes Venezuelan party, yet it the eleventh game of the MUD opposition coalition, to grab the 1.26% of the votes of misma.

Bandera Roja says Chavez Frias has dragged left-wing banners into the mire

Celebrating 34 years of existence, Bandera Roja (BR) leader, Gabriel Puerta Aponte comments that Venezuela’s last guerrilla group is fighting the damage and mud-raking that the Chavez Frias administration has thrown over the traditional banners of the Left through the President’s demagogy … “what’s required now is not a left-wing, radical or revolutionary government ( that will come later) but a government that can get us out the crisis as soon as possible.”

In the company of BR general secretariat members, Armando Diaz, Rafael Venegas and Pedro Veliz Acuna, Puerta rejects accusations that BR is sharing policies with its traditional adversaries: Accion Democratica (AD) and the Christian Socialists (COPEI) as a compliment and says it shows political maturity … “if we speak about reconciliation, this is the best way to show that BR is not full of hatred … if we don’t show our sincerity, we would be like those taking about plurality, integration, unity but who want to hog everything when it comes to electoral processes.”

BR considers the unity factor as the Coordinadora Democratica’s biggest challenge and calls on would-be breakaway parties, Primero Justicia (PJ), Proyecto Venezuela (PV) and Causa R to sit down and discuss matters inside CD with transparency and responsibility.

There can be no return to the past, Puerto points out … ” the past is represented by a practice and conduct vis-a-vis power … before it was AD and COPEI … now it’s Movimiento Quinta Republica (MVR) and allies … Chavez Frias represents the past and continues the old practices of political cronyism, corruption, political segregation and treating the country like a feudal lord.”

“Chavez Frias has not approved a single measure that has annoyed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and foreign capital has been the greatest beneficiary with this government.”

BR now sees itself as attempting to consolidate a center-left tendency in Venezuela along with other parties, preparing for any pendulum political movement that could produce a right-wing government, unwilling to facilitate change in Venezuela.

Provide the PSUV and the slaughter of Cantaura

The NGO reports that an official candidate to the NA is one of the perpetrators of the deadly incident in 1982

The NGO Venezuelan Program of Action and Education (Give), reported on Thursday Queuña National Assembly candidate for the State of Guarico, Lara Roger Lamb is an author known for the slaughter of Cantaura. Here Provide the full statement:

One of the authors recognized the Slaughter of Cantaura today is PSUV candidate for Guarico. His name is Roger Cordero Lara. It will be recalled 28 years ago was an attack by armed forces against a concentration of guerrillas of Americo Silva, armed against the Red Flag Party, which was planning a military operation Cantaura policy, Anzoátegui state. Such an event happened to the pages of the Venezuelan political history as “The Slaughter of Cantaura.” 23 guerrillas were killed, 14 of them captured alive and finished by officials of the DISIP, the DIM and the elite troops of the battalions of hunters, constituting a severe violation of human rights at the time.

The then Lieutenant Roger Cordero Lara piloting one of the Broncos who bombed in Cantaura, as websites even claim near the Venezuelan government (http://www.revolucionbolivariana.es.tl/REVOLUCION-AL-DIA/index-1. htm). 24 years later became Major General and Commander in Chief of Aviation of the Bolivarian government, praised by President Chavez as a “true revolutionary general.” The day of his nomination as candidate for the State of Guarico, which was held on 03.05.1910, Cordero Lara said: “I constituted loyal supporter of the National Simon Bolivar Project. All must be loyal to this project that is beneficial to the group, which is why I show my full willingness and I become the basis for instrument approaches lead to the National Assembly. ” The nomination was accepted by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), so that the perpetrator of the Slaughter of Cantaura is running for circuit 2 of the entity, with Altuve Lidice, Oscar Figuera, General Secretary of Communist Party Venezuela-Jesus Cepeda and Alfredo Ureña.

Cordero Lara’s bid for the PSUV is inconsistent with the Government’s words against impunity in the so-called massacres of the Fourth Republic. ” The tolerance in this situation is an incentive to abuse of power and in fact dismisses the plight of the family to achieve justice in the case, and is an example of the inefficiency of the Attorney General’s Office, Luisa Ortega Diaz, who on October 27, 2009 reaffirmed its “commitment to solving the case”

Slice-of-Life, “Self-Indulgence” & Reaction

Amateur chauvinist critics nowadays label entertainment without plot to be “self-indulgent.” What they are referring to here is the “slice of life” story, universally met with knee-jerk attacks from our young, impatient reviewers. It is hardly ever analyzed by these people whether or not the lack of plot is due to a lack of talent on behalf of the writer, or a tremendous swelling of talent in his or her endeavors to make the story as mundane and everyday as possible. They are too busy foaming at the mouth with hatred.

Instead, there is merely a smug assumption that no plot equals incompetence or metaphysical forgetfulness, as if the author merely “forgot” to include one in his/her eternally befuddled manner, the silly and stupid befuddled manner which critics frequently assume writers must all posses by nature of seeking the approval of magazines which advertise for phone sex lines.

If these critics had not had their eyes cursed by the sight of such a “boring” and “plotless” work, or better yet been gifted with a better writer to formulate said work, surely then, a plot would have manifested, since as we all know, a lack of plot can by no means be included as part of the overall experience of the work—such a thing is not humanly possible or imaginable.

In between advocating the abortion known as modern art and taking a defibrillator to reactionary art movements such as Surrealism and Cubism (both of which plotted a decades-long coup d’état against Realism for being too proletarian), our young critics managed to skip a generation and “no plot” became a synonym for “bad” in precisely 100% of known cases of the phrase appearing.

The Japanese mastered the “slice of life” story, so did the Irish, but we Americans refused because of these chattering parrots of the free press who were too busy labeling art that the masses do not care for as “abstract” and abducting it for the urban students and petty-bourgeoisie. Realism is too “dirty,” too “low class and depressing” and too “everyday” for the petty-bourgeoisie, after all. So is the “slice of life,” albeit in the opposite form, being described as “too boring” and (irony of all ironies coming from students and petty-bourgeoisie) “self-indulgent!”

Apparently, this is meant to be a criticism of writers.

J.D. Salinger comes to mind as the “original” man who wrote a book with no plot—“Catcher in the Rye”—although that book still has too far much plot for your author’s tastes. For once, the critical reception was good for the work, although his later works such as “Franny and Zooey” were met with public outrage.

An example of this American disdain for story-less stories is The Wall Street Journal’s article by Adam Kirsch, which claims that Salinger’s later work seemed “to become not a way of exploring reality, but a substitute for it” and even worse “more like the gratuitous, self-delighting detail children use when inventing fantasy worlds.”

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703389004575033192658885922.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_5

This is an odd accusation. If Kirsch finds the less-than-heavily-plotted works of Salinger so objectionable, wouldn’t it be a positive turn in his opinion to have him “invent fantasy worlds?” The natural conclusion of this statement is that invention of a world, otherwise known as writing [!] is shallow imitation.

In other words, Kirsch finds imagination to be intolerable and more than that, impossible, and therefore declares war on those on daring to create it—quite a sad and stuffy conclusion. I can only guess that Kirsch’s own life is not filled with imagination or “self-indulgence” and has a definite scope and shape (plot), so he doesn’t desire to be bothered by directionless stories, else I risk accusing Kirsch of having a postmodern existential crisis in the process of his reading (dear lord, would I do that?!).

Since that surely cannot be the case, on the flip side maybe his life is filled with universe-destroying adventures that make his life less “self-indulgent.” He is more than free to write an autobiography that might not be as “gratuitous” as Salinger’s work, although in reality he would be hard-pressed to finish a product not identical to Salinger’s, at least if he is honest.

The real source of this is that “slice of life” is fresh and enchanting with no sense of duty, and views life the way a child might, for lack of a better phrase; precisely what they actually find objectionable. Randomness and rambling musings—the sheer effrontery boggles the mind. The idea of the everyday as marvelous is threatening to reactionaries. Unable to shake off some onion layers, I reckon.