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On 4/8/11 9:24 PM, Lou Paulsen wrote:
Well, Libya is not the whole Arab world. We have made our views clear about opposing abuses particularly in those parts of the Arab world where the oppressors have been the proxies of US imperialism.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I was referring strictly to the "axis of good" countries like Libya and Syria. We must assume that in those places torture, etc. is okay because the State Department has opposed the heads of state.
That may not strike you as an adequate argument, so let me go farther. The founders of our party came out of a setting where it was commonplace to set aside big chunks of the newspaper to condemn abuses in the "Stalinist" countries in such language that would never give anyone the impression that there was any content there to defend. We have been distinguishing ourselves from that tradition for sixty years now.
Yes, you are the mirror image of the bourgeois press. They leave out all the positive gains of North Korean society while you leave out all the bad things (family dynasty, cult of the leader, police state, etc.) If that's your thing...
The purpose of our newspaper and website is primarily to educate and arouse the workers and oppressed in the US about the crimes of the US ruling class. It is not to publish everything we care about in the world and call upon the workers in every particular country to rise up and deal with their situation according to our expertise.
Of course that is your primary aim but is the coverage of other countries like Zimbabwe that is so problematic. It smacks of the CPUSA and the old Soviet Union.
I don't think this is outside the Leninist tradition. I would bet that you could find a whole host of abuses by governments, capitalists, rulers and tyrants around the world in the period, say, of 1903-1917, which never got any mention in the Bolshevik press, not because they didn't care about them, but because they were writing mainly about Russia and its empire.
That's because they came before the crimes committed in the name of Bolshevism, and before the crimes committed by oppressive governments paying homage in one way or another to socialism (Baathism, etc.)
Until we turn our own situation around here, innumerable deaths and unmeasurable crimes are going to take place. So how are we actually going to most effectively use our resources to bring more freedom to the Arab world?
I believe the revolutionary movement has to engage in ruthless criticism of every police state in the world, as well as bourgeois democracies. If I was editor of Workers World newspaper, I would have be exposing the ANC government early on. How in the world do you find a way to never say word one about Thabo Mbeki's misrule? The only thing you write is fluff about Chavez or Morales meeting him, as if you were a government-run newspaper. This is not what Lenin had in mind when he proposed Iskra, I am sure.
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