There is something incredibly, bizarrely surreal about these discussions, and I am beginning to think that by engaging in them, as if there was a serious, thoughtful position (in defense of Slobbo, in excuse of Rwandan genocide, and so on) we are debating, we give them a credence we should not.
We have just passed a century in which the name of socialism has been utterly debased and disgraced, put in worldwide disrepute, by its connection to the likes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, just to name some of the more notorious. But the notion that some folks have to reconstruct a movement of the left is to connect it to the defense not only of a war criminal and mass murderer, but to break a new frontier, and link to an open racist and practitioner of ethnic cleansing, a 'hygienic' name for genocide.
If I had to write a script for a more perverse, insane position, for a better way to completely bury any notion of socialism among people of genuinely progressive convictions and open minds, I couldn't have done any better. The Stalinists used to say that "Trotskyists support revolution ... everywhere but where it exists." Now that Stalinists have fallen from power, left, right and center, the remnants of the remnants of Trotskyism have embraced them. They now support revolution ... everywhere but where it overthrows bloody, racist dictators.
Is there no end to this parody? What is the repetition of history the fourth, and fifth, and sixth time? Farce seems so inadequate a term.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --