>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 01/18/00 01:59PM >>>If I were really a Stalinist, I'd be shooting people. As the man
said, for some people, four walls are three too many.
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CB: No, "Stalinist" gets used to refer to places where people were not being shot. For example, the CPUSA never shot anybody, but all the anti-CP left loves to refer to it as "Stalinist". ( Also, the U.S. is never called Stalinist for shooting MLK, JFK, RFK, et al. which is sort of the point of why it is important to keep raising that the U.S. is "Stalinist" by your shooting standard. i.e. the U.S. system is anti-democratic in profound ways, and these instances are important for demonstrating that, because everybody knows about them, they aren't obscure; they are some of the best examples we have to demonstrate it).
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It's not so much the content of these topics that's so objectionable, it's the intense tedium of the discussion. Like I said before, volleys are exchanged from fixed positions - the intellectual equivalent of trench warfare. No minds are changed, no progress is made. The dialectic is about motion, no?
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CB: I'm not trying to censor other threads, but by the standard you ennunciate here, we would have to cut out a lot of the other exchanges. Gee, will the stockmarket crash ? zzzzzzzzzzz. How tedious ? How many minds have been changed on that one ? For that matter , how many minds have been changed on any one of the topics that recur here frequently. Mind you, _I_ am not proposing stopping the discussion of them. I just don't find some of my favorite subjects to be anymore trench warfare than a lot of other people's favorite subjects. Is Judith Butler a bad writer. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz ?
And the dispute itself on the importance of raising government dirty tricks is something relatively new. It is just dawning on me that a whole bunch of people disagree or have lost the standard state of mind of the left from the 60's and 70's : "In the government and official versions of things do not trust". That change in the left is genuinely disturbing to me. I'm not even a conspiracy theorist. But low and behold these anti-"conspiracy theorists" seem to think I am. They've gone hog wild and are disdaining the standard leftwing obligation to demonstrate the that "conspiracies" , i.e. secret dirty tricks are standard operating procedure. You have some people posting arguing against my posts, and they don't even realize that that is my post. The JFK, RFK, MLK murders are important because they demonstrate that this IS standard operating procedure. If they could and would and did kill the president they could and would and have killed anybody. That IS the point. Everybody!
took this for granted in the 60's/70's. I wouldn't have to explain it. Why do I have to even clarify that that's what I mean ? That I do have to clarify it is telling about the degeneration of the consciousness on the left.
Furthermore, it has not been a flaming. Between tedium and flaming is a pretty narrow, disciplined band of discussion.
I haven't even brought up that tedium is not a very objective thing. But anyway, the number of responses in the several times this has come up does not square with everybody being bored by it.
CB