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On 3/1/14 11:09 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Louis Proyect wrote:
Once again with the god-damned geopolitical chess games.
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Do you deny that such games are being played?
No, I do not but my main interest is in what ordinary people are about.
Ever since the USSR was created in 1917, imperialism has sought to
exploit discontent among the masses chafing under Stalinist rule for
counter-revolutionary purposes. What I find interesting in the chess
game set now is how they rally around the Kremlin as if Putin was Stalin.
The chess game left has a litmus test apparently. Unless Maidan was
organized under the banner of the hammer and sickle, it was objectively
pro-imperialist. But when the banner is some version of the swastika,
that is even more reason for them to back Putin and Yanukovych (whether
or not the reality maps to their perception.)
Even when the USSR existed, I didn't apply such a litmus test. Take the
case of the Crimean Tatars. You find the same tendency to smear them as
Nazi stooges as you do with the Ukrainians. Phillip Knightley wrote an
excellent book titled "The First Casualty" that dealt with the
performance of the media during imperialist war. But that did not
prevent him from writing:
"But the real story of Sevastopol was of how the Soviet authorities
treated collaborators. The Crimean Tartars had welcomed the arrival of
the Germans. They had hunted down Russian soldiers in disguise, had
formed a police force under German control, had been active in the
Gestapo, and had supplied the Wehrmacht with soldiers. Now the moment of
reckoning had arrived. The whole Crimean tartar community of something
between 300,000 and 500,000 men, women, and children was rounded up and
sent into exile in Central Asia, and they have never been allowed to
return."
Absolutely clueless.
For me the oddest thing about the chess game left is its tendency to
adopt the arguments I encountered when I first joined the SWP. My
relatives, including my father and uncles who fought in WWII, always
said "My country, right or wrong". Over the years I discovered that
radicals would begin to think in the same terms, except "their" country
was the USSR. Just like the newscasters who wear an American flag pin on
their lapel, they wore hammers and sickles. I guess there is very strong
impetus toward an authoritarian mindset on the Leninist left. That is
one reason I find anarchism more and more appealing nowadays not that I
would ever trade in my Marx for Bakunin or stop going nuts when the
black bloc stages one of its provocations.
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