Charles Andrews wrote: > Actually, JG does not look backward. He repeats current verdicts by > imperialist-serving historians: ignoring the timing of the Soviet > agreement with Germany after incessant Anglo-French attempts to launch > Hitler against the Soviet Union, accepting the fakery around Katyn, > demanding that the Soviets hand over all of postwar Europe to the > imperialists right up to the Soviet border, etc. There is no point here > in arguing this stuff again. >
I'm not surprised that Charles Andrews sees no point in remembering the deportation of the entire Chechen population from Chechnya in 1944 or the deportation of all the Crimean Tatars from Crimea in 1944 or the various other mass deportations carried out under Stalin's leadership. This raises an important point. Is there to be a serious study of history or not? Is there to be a condemnation of all imperialism, Western or Stalinist, or not? Charles resorts to accusing me of repeating "imperialist-serving historians". This is how the Soviet government from the 1930s on treated any critic: they are all supposedly thugs or hooligans or imperialist agents of some sort or other . I think Charles should be ashamed to follow the same practice. In fact, the trend I have supported for decades arose in the 1960s in the struggle against the US imperialist war in Vietnam and other struggles of the time. We supported national liberation movements of the time and opposed Western imperialism. And we have continued to oppose imperialism of all types to this day. But in doing so, we came up against harmful theories and practices in the left-wing movement that had to be opposed, whether "three worlds" theory or Soviet revisionism or other harmful trends. For example, just as today there are those who wash their hands of support for the Syrian struggle against the Assad dictatorship, pro-Soviet movements wrote off various peoples back several decades ago. For example, they supported the chauvinist war of the pro-Soviet Ethiopian Dergue against the Eritrean people, a war which continued the oppression of the Eritrean people carried out under Haile Selassie. With regard to the Katyn massacre , there is no longer a serious question about whether it was committed by the Soviet government. The same holds for a number of other atrocities of the Soviet government. If we are to ensure that such things never happen again, we have to ask seriously why they occurred and what should be learned from them. We also need a proletarian internationalist stand towards the Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Syrians, and other people whom the revisionists of today continue to write off. We need to deal seriously with the theoretical crisis in the left and also with solidarity with the working people of the world; the two tasks are closely related. -- Joseph Green _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
