To begin in a way most comrades of a Trotskyist background will recognize: "It
is amazing to discover how significant can be the loss generated by a fever you
caught while hunting geese in the swamps!"
I- SOME ATONEMENT
I guess it will not be breach of confidence to comment onlist that yesterday,
very late in the night, I looked into my mailbox and discovered
(a) the dimensions of the flame war that was raging in L-I, and
(b) two letters, one by Macdonald and the other one by Johannes, asking me for
advice or help on the situation that had developed.
I also hope I am not breaching anyone's confidence by stating that Johannes's
letter expressed a honest bewilderment at what he considered an outright and
unjustified attack by Mark Jones to him.
Though I am clearly aware of the importance of the events that have taken place
here, in my condition of previous co-moderator with Mac, Yoshie and Johannes I
thought it was my duty to give them sound advice, and some confort also, and I
also thought (and informed both of them) that in the condition I was yesterday
night I thought it was better to delay the answers until today.
Today has finally arrived and I open up my mailbox. What I find out is that
Macdonald has decided to pull the reins, bring the flame to a stop, expel some
members of the list who had become a serious problem, and that (as a result of
these decissions) Johannes has left L-I, which I greatly deplore..
I can't help feeling that if yesterday night I had sent the couple of notes Mac
and Johannes were asking for, the outcome would have been a better one. Call it
Jewish sense of guilt, if you want. But having left moderation by the force of
circumstances, I can't but feel distressed to realize that, this time, I
arrived a minute too late with my bucket of water.
II- SOME FACTS
Well, that's enough for atonement. Now, on to facts.
I am afraid that Johannes has made a mistaken political reading of Mac's
decission. I would really like him to reconsider his own decission to quit L-I
(this is why I am sending this both to L-I and to him, in the case he has
actually unsubbed; if not, sorry for double posting, Johannes). Although I
have had many differences with him in the past, and I will certainly have
others in the future, I have learnt to respect his personal honesty and his
dedication to the build up of a sane (I mean mentally sane) environment in L-I.
I feel that Johannes's is an important contribution to the list, a dedicated
participant in debates, holds a "dissonant" point of view that is worth
listening to (particularly when articulated by him), and a valuable source of
informations, resources and links.
Johannes became a co-moderator precisely because of his dedication (in fact, I
must do a little correction to Mark Jones here: he did not begin his duties as
moderator, but as webmaster -and a very good webmaster he was). It is to his
praise that he helped moderating the list with nobody asking him to take the
burden, he simply considered that helping the moderators (by those times, Mark,
a Russian cde. who never took charge, and me) was one of his duties as
webmaster, and it was thus on the battlefield, so to say, that he earned the
right to moderate. Not bad a record, not bad at all.
This said, I do also believe he made a wrong -and, sharing Mac's evaluation,
hotheaded- decission in leaving the list. Can't judge on his resignation as
moderator, and probably no one can: he took to the task out of his own
decission, and nobody can claim any right to criticize him if, on the same
personal decission, he decides to quit the task. As for me, I can only say that
our period as co-moderators was as stormy as instructive, and that many of the
good decissions I made when on that duty were the result of the difference in
opinion and outlook between Johannes and yours truly.
Now, back to the flame war itself. Unless you are a Sado-masochist, it is not
funny to lead a mailing list under these storms, nor is it funny to have to
unsub people who are _bona fide_ respondents to a debate but have become a
danger for the debate itself; one must carefully assess whether their strong
manners are just a trifling and passing matter of circumstance or they have
become a toxic substance. And, in the end, you will never know for sure (save
in crystal clear cases such as people who championed the NATO in Yugoslavia,
for example, but reality is impure, thank God).
III- WHY MAC'S DECISSION WAS A SOUND ONE: RUSSIAN JEWS TODAY
This said, however, I can't but give my support, for what it is worth, to Mac.
The whole thing began when Owen Jones (I must say that I got fed up with him)
blamed the KPRF for antisemitism. I am a Jew, and my grandparents came to
Argentina from Russia, so that I believe that I can have a saying on these
things (I have already sent some posting that gives some background, which I
suppose is available in the list's archives). The issue of antisemitism in
Russia is not a minor one, but not in the sense that Johannes has raised.
Russia is a society that (against all odds) has dragged itself from feudalism
and agrarian torpor to socialism and space flight, only to fall down into
massive murder through famine, impoverished health, and neocolonization. And
all this in less than a century and a half, two murderous world wars included
(the second one being to a great deal directed against Russia and the USSR). In
this context, I agree with Mark that the extent of antisemitism in current
Russia is nothing to blame Russians for, but on the contrary, it is all to
their praise.
Much weaker reasons gave way to persecution of the Jews in the most civilized
countries of the West, and of course the West is not innocent in this specific
Russian case either: as I commented on a previous mail, Russia's Jews were too
near to their past as interlopers and middlemen not to grab the opportunity to
become rich through contacts with the West at the precise moment when, together
with the Soviet Union itself, the defensive measures that had saved the SU from
becoming still another colony were elliminated. Most of them remained loyal to
their own people (partly, this is a good inheritance handed down from the days
of Lenin and Trotsky), but the propension to become a part of the Maffia was,
alas, probably higher among Jews than among non-Jews in Russia.
Their links with Israel and the USA must have been of the greatest importance
here. So that, when you are starving, when your future is darker each day, when
your elder relatives simply are left dying, when the world around you becomes a
dirty sluice for the worst tendencies of capitalism, when all this happens, and
you see that there is an unusually high proportion of Jews among the ones who
benefit from this situation, some degree of hatred against _all Jews_ can
appear. It is to the honor of the Russian people, I insist, that this hatred
has not arrived at more dangerous peaks.
We should tell those in the West who bring our heads to look at antisemitism in
the KPRF or in Russia in general that they are proposing us to pay attention to
a red herring, take the bull by the horns, and put the blame of any eventual
outburst in Russia at the doorsteps of the actual culprits, the Western
bourgeoisies and most particularly the American and Israeli bourgeoisies.
In this sense, I believe that Macdonald did exactly what he had to do, since
all the contributors who blamed the KPRF for antisemitism were unable (Johannes
included) to step further from a declaration by a non-KPRF member which was
disowned by the KPRF leadership and which won this man no votes at all. What we
should be debating, instead, is the kind of society that Russia has been turned
into, the conditions of concrete political action there, and the class
character of the KPRF. It is not by throwing compost on those who are still
trying to defend what little remains of the glorious past that these debates
are nurtured. Compost is OK in the countryside. But our grapes require better
environments.
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
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