However, I think there also probably were some real (dare I say it) t's in the Soviet Union. It's just common sense.
I have relayed your criticisms to the author of the formulation which mentions "traitors".
Here's something Comrade X says in response to someone else on "traitors".
"One other point concerning the substance of your argument. It is not true that somebody who advances an anti-communist ideology is a traitor. Ideology is a structure, and people are socialized into ideological structures in a way that hides from them their objective mental position against the social groups they consciously maintain their allegiance to. Giving up anti-communism is a process of becoming conscious of the true structure of reality and ideology and your consciousness. A traitor is somebody who actively and consciously struggles against a state. Western Marxists opposed Stalinism, for example, but were not traitors."
_______ On the Comrade X, I am causing upset to someone by keeping him anonymous . It was my idea not to give his name, not his idea. He pointed out that leaving out his name leaves out some of the contextualization of his argument.
I think the arguments are good, but they are controversial, and he is not on this list to defend them, so I left out the name.
Anyway, he said give his name. It is Andy Austin.
Charles Brown
Detroit
Charles Brown:
>If things were so horrible under
>Stalin, how come nobody ever
>betrayed the Soviet Union and
>worked for imperialism inside
>the country ?
The problem is that the Soviet government lied about the connections between political dissidents and foreign governments. In Vishinsky's summary speech to the 1936 Moscow Trials, he said, "Terror was the basis of all their activities, it was the basis of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite union. This was quite unanimously testified to by people who were not directly connected with each other in their underground work. This was not only admitted here by Zinoviev and Kamenev, Smirnov and Ter-Vaganyan, Reingold and Pickel; it was stated also by Berman-Yurin, Fritz David and Valentine Olberg, that peculiar citizen of the Republic of Honduras, paid agent of Trotsky and simultaneously of the German secret police - the Gestapo."
Now the notion of any of these people being on the payroll of the Gestapo is just a sick, insane lie. In truth Trotsky was one of the leading opponents of Nazism in the world. Three years after Vishinsky stated these lies, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a non-aggression pact, which is not an unprincipled thing to do. What was unprincipled was Stalin's instructions to Communist Parties to mute anti-fascist agitation. That was a crime.