Hello Rob,
>>> Rob Schaap <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 06/02/99 11:39AM >>>
G'day Chas,
It must seem like I follow you from list to list just to disagree with you
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Charles: Well, no progress without struggle.
....
Rob:
Conditions can be such, and usually have been just after insurrections, that
an ordinary man can become a'great' one in the historically influential
sense. Stalin, whom Zinoviev and Kamenev helped put in the chair at Leon's
expense, had it available to him to become what he was to become (and he was
already an experienced killer) - and he duly became an experienced killer
with Tsar-like powers. He became a mass murderer. Appeals to the murderous
excesses of the west and the tendentious exaggerations of western historians
don't cut it.
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Charles: Wrong. They cut a lot in this debate, because part of this classic debate is
whether Western democracy and its leaders are world historic criminals on the scale
that Brad D. and others accuse the communists and non-westerners of. Just because he
doesn't mention that , doesn't mean it is not important to get it in here in this
discussion. It's sort of a lie of omission on the part of anti-communist
propagandists, like Wm. F. Buckley, jr. and the like. They are always impliedly
comparing communist/totalitarians to the big lie of capitalists as democrats and
humanitarians. It is not at all inappropriate rhetoric for me in response to include
summary descriptions of the world historic criminality of Clemenceau or Wilson.
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People died, in their hundreds of thousands, who neither
needed nor deserved to die - not by accident, not as the collateral damage
('premature deaths') of imperfect policy, but as the victims of a 'great'
man - made 'great' by a system capable of making, indeed likely to make,
just such a man. They died because Stalin sat atop a totalitarian system.
*He* killed 'em, because a system many of his victims helped put there
(yeah, yeah, within particular historical constraints, an' all that) allowed
him to.
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Charles: You are asserting as a conclusion, what is in dispute. The fact that you have
to put "He" in quotes demonstrates your uncertainty with your own assertion. Stalin
did not launch a war as Hitler did.
Again, I bet you don't name a particular Governor of Austalia as "the" murderer of
many,many indigenous people. Who was your named villian for WWI ? The fact that there
is no name that jumps to mind like Stalin is proof of the double standard which is
used in analyzing Western and non-Western mass deaths.
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Never mind WW1 and imperialist conflicts between competing powers
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Charles: Nope. Can't let you get away with putting this out of your mind. It is the
contradiction in your position that refutes your whole line of argument. That fact
that you don't name the criminals who sat atop the totalitarian system of capitalism
that perpetrated WWI on the working masses is the telling flaw and bias in your
position. The totalitarian, mass murdering of the Western democracies (Britain, U.S.,
France, Australia) is invisible to most who want to portray socialism as worse than
capitalism.
Your use of "powers" above is inconsistent with your lack of focus on the "class
forces" in Stalin's period. You neglect the big men criminals of WWI and other western
mass murderers.
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never
mind that the bolsheviks under Lenin were constantly faced with ugly choices
that led to a political system amenable to gross and obscene distortions -
never mind S&K's pro-Stalin machinations - mind only that socialists today
have to reckon with the history of socialist revolutions. It's a history
that teaches anything is possible - that the people can make anything happen
in the most inhospitable of circumstances - that socialism has proven itself
a cause that has moved and transformed people just as Marx said it would -
*and that hitherto it has evinced fundamental and tragic flaws that
absolutely must be reckoned with here and now*.
I don't know enough about China to say a dickie-bird on that (but I'm with
Lord Acton on absolute power and the individual), but I reckon we gotta look
at the future without (as Marx has it in the 18th Brumaire) 'the tradition
of all the dead generations weigh[ing] like a nightmare on the brain of the
living'. We're not in the business of defending Stalin, we're in the
business of promoting socialism - which, as Zinoviev realised too late,
ain't anywhere near the same thing. To think otherwise is to put all of us
back - again and #!* again.
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Charles: Stalin committed crimes, but not on the scale that the anti-communist
propagandists declare. Since Stalin did commit serious crimes, it becomes easy to
exaggerate them, especially given the overwhelming dominance of anti-communists over
the mass media. It is not an issue of defending Stalin as a person, but having a
more objective and accurate description of the real history and process of the
socio-economic transformation which is the struggle between capitalism and socialism
SO FAR. In this struggle, the big leaders of socialism have not been as big in mass
murder as the big leaders of capitalism. Many of the deaths within the socialist
countries must go on the body count ledger of the capitalist leaders (contra the
counting methods of Brad D and others) because of the incredible military assaults and
economic blockades from the Cordon Sanitaire to Containment , that capitalism put on
the USSR. In other words, without these attacks the internal social conflicts w!
hich led to many premature deaths would have been much less.
