>>> debsian at pacbell.net 07/31/01 06:28PM >>>
CB>Of course, your anti-Sovietism...
I support Soviets, the Bolsheviks destroyed them quite early on, Charles! ;-) Like 1920 or so, no?
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CB: This thread is about Zionism and Israel. The Soviet Union played an important , critical even, supportive role in the origin of Israel. Because you are anti-Soviet, you don't want to admit that by its concrete acts, the Soviet Union was not anti-Jewish, or anti-Zionist , but in fact the exact opposite compared to the other major powers in the world at the time of the origin of Israel. You don't want admit that because it conflicts with your idea that the Soviet Union was an unmitigated evil.
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Your origins in Gus Hall Thought are showing. Anti-Soviet agitation was the catch all along charge (#175, if memory serves from the GULAG Archipeligo) with, "hooliganism, " in the fSU for making a joke about JVS. For more on Soviets see, Maurice Brinton pamphlet, "The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, " or Carmen Sirianni book from Verso on The Bolshies and Workers Control.
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CB: Your origins in Solzenytzn ( spelling) Thought are showing.
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CB: Your commentary on this point too is an attempt to twist the basic pro-Jewish act of establishing a Jewish Autonomous Region in the SU, something that no other country did, into an anti-Jewish act. Your anti-Sovietism makes you try desparately to twist facts into their opposites.
Tell us more, if you know more than I, which is cursory as I said, about The Jewish Autonomus Zone. Was it part of Stalinist nationalities policies aimed at breaking up, for example, the territorial integrity of the restive, Chechen Republic?
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CB: Do you still beat your wife ?
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>I say because of your anti-communism...
Anti-Stalinism, not anti-communism. I'd have fit in quite well into the PCI in the 70's or Rifoundiza Communista or Il Manifesto grouping. More I read you and your ilk, no matter how nice, in particlular compared to Lou or Carrol, the more I see self-deception and wishful thinking.
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CB: The more I read you, the less I think of your ability to assess my thinking. Your mind seems to be in chaos.
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Noam Chomsky blurbed a book you should read, "States of Denial, " by S. Cohen. On why, people of all political pesuasions, find it hard to admit that political regimes they identify with may find it impossible to see them as, like any human phenomenom, as full of contradiction, good and evil. As CLR James says below, the repression in the fSU I harp on to you and others that stubbornly keep on whingeing about "CIA provocations" is the other side of the outpouring of revolutionary, democratic energy unleashed in 1917, and smashed in the 30's by the Stalinist apparatus. And, not just against anti-Stalinists in the Party, but, alot of Stalinists too in the madness. ("Thus the Russian revolution, as it developed and declined, showed us the two most violent extremes that we have known in history. . .The creative power, the democratic desires, the expansion of human personality. . .called forth the violence, the atrocities, the state organised as Murder Incorporated. Only such violence could have repressed such democracy."
- CLR James)
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CB: Consider that I grew up in the U.S., and therefore I was exposed to the normal avalanche of anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda, and no pro-Soviet propaganda. Therefore, I have heard every last thing bad there is to hear about Stalin and the Soviet Union. It is symptomatic of your confused argumentation that you think I haven't heard everything you write here and elsewhere on Stalin, and have the arrogance to suggest some tracts that you recommend to "clue me in" that Stalin was bad.
In other words, I have heard both sides of this argument, and I have heard the anti-Soviet side of the argument in spades, dummy. Common sense should tell you that. Not only that, but for the first 30 years of my life , I ,naturally, like just about everybody else in the U.S. was anti-Soviet. I was friendly to communist ideals, but anti-Soviet.
That makes my opinion now, prima facie , more objective than yours. In other words, having heard all the anti-Soviet arguments, having been anti-Soviet, upon hearing the other side of the argument, I concluded that , on balance, though the Soviet Union was of course not perfect, its reality was not what you and all the other American forms of anti-communism/ anti-Sovietism claim it to have been. If you have any sense of the process of weighing evidence and determining the truth in a disputed question, you would realize that because my position is against my obvious self-interests, since anti-Sovietism and anti-communism are rife in the location of my life events, my position has greater indicia of validity than yours. All you are doing is asserting what most people who are overwhelmingly exposed to only one side of an argument would assert. You are like a parrot repeating the same thing you have heard your whole life, like most other Americans.
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Now, if you could get in touch again with the feelings that originally radicalized you and I and everyone else here, you might begin to see how much the official Communist movement, along with all the more than obvious CIA and Pentagon hot and cold and psywars against it, was fatally, destroyed from within, by the development, of what Polish and Serbian workers (or Maoists) called, the Red Bourgeoisie.
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CB: You don't know what "originally" radicalized me, and you don't know that I am not in touch with it.
Your flaky and anti-communist discussion does not make me sanguine about your assessment of the cause of the fall of the SU.
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What Shactman called, "bureaucratic collectivism, " Djilas and Max Nomad called, The New Class."
Final comment to my previous on this thread, was there in all this on Zionism, some poster on Harry Truman and the recognition of Israel which made parenthetical comments on teir perception of what Soviet motives in recognizing Israel were? Given, the anti-semitism, still quite virulent in the US then, and the undeniable, anti-semitism of Stalin, I can't see that fSU recognition was motivated by solicitude towards Jews esp. after the Holocaust. Real-politik, nothing more, nothing less, on both sides.
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CB: Exactly, because your anti-Sovietism prevents you from looking at the facts without prejudice, you must interpret the eminently pro-Jewish act of the Soviet Union in leading in establishing Israel as not what it seems. You have to search for a bad motive. You have your conclusion before you even consider the facts. If the Soviet Union does something undeniably pro-Jewish, that cannot be evidence for you of pro-Jewish motives, because your mind is made up before you consider the facts. In other words, you are close mindedly prejudice against the Soviet Union.
I have to thank you for blabbering it out so much . At least your method makes it clear to anyone who wants to look at your posts objectively. You are just more obvious than most people.
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When it comes down to it, Jews aren't very much liked by either the Soviets or the US...Used at times, as various here say as tools in US Power Projection, and most of the time, more headache than they are worth for all the moola and weaponry they get. Kinda like Cuban-Americans! Heh, cut off US AID To MIAMI! Michael Pugliese, now I'm really gonna get it!
Time to get a 40 ouncer at the corner store!
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CB: You are ignoring all the evidence of very critical support for the Jewish people by the Soviet Union which I have adduced on this thread, in order that you can conclude as you started. Your method is blatantly prejudicial.
You sound like a little kid who knows he's wrong, knows he has bad "ethical foundations for his 'left" thinking . Only I am not your Daddy, and it is up to you to change your own evil ways. Like Justin said, people don't usually change by arguments with others.