Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >>So, Yoshie, can Stalinist be criticized and excoriatedwithout
> >>commiting the horrible vice of red-baiting?
> >
> >Nope. Stalinism can't be criticized without it turning into
> >red-baiting.
It really is not hard to avoid red-baiting. Criticize/attack *positions* without resorting to the lazy habit of replacing argument with labels. There is even a label for this practice: it's called principled criticism.
And you certainly can't label defense of Stalin as Stalinist -- any more than you can label defense of Julius Caesar as Caesarism. On the part of leftists most forms of red-baiting seem to boil down to pure intellectual laziness.
And even when people apply a label to themselves it is in the long run plain stupid to let oneself criticize the (supposed) content of the label rather than the concrete political positions the person upholds. This is glaringly true in the case of "Trotskyism" and "Trotskyist," but it is equally clear in the case of "Stalinist," "Social Democrat," "Leninist," "Marxist," etc. All of those labels can be convenient shorthand at times ( and usually only when used among political friends), but to base a debate on them simply deserves a C- as a grade in freshman comp.
Carrol